Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (48 page)

They also prove that military criminality was premeditated. The predetermined ideological character of the war and the creeping conversion of the military into political soldiers resulted not just in the systematic mass murder of 2.2 million Jewish people in the areas behind German lines, but also in the slaughter of ‘gypsies’, people in psychiatric asylums and, because of a latitudinarian use of concepts such as ‘agents’, ‘bandits’, ‘partisans’, ‘saboteurs’, ‘spies’ or ‘resisters’, the entire populations of villages, who were shot, hanged from telegraph poles or incinerated in barns and churches. Hitler’s observation that the activities of partisans ’gives us the chance to exterminate whoever turns against us’ was a characteristic half-truth: the victims could easily be people who had ‘turned against’ no one. As SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski subsequently acknowledged:

When one militiaman was shot in Pinsk, 4,500 Jews were murdered in line with the formula: ‘where there are partisans, the Jew is there too, and where there is the Jew, there are also partisans’.
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The more reflective German officers began to worry about what one dubbed ‘the 6,000/480 problem’ - that is, the mystery of why only 480 rifles had been recovered from 6,000 dead ‘partisans’.
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That there were partisans at all was as much the product of heavy-handed German occupation policies as of Stalin’s belated attempts to maintain a presence in areas overrun by the enemy. For most of the partisans, beyond a small dedicated core, remaining a ‘volunteer’ (the preferred euphemism for draftees whose families were often murdered in the event of desertion) was a marginally lesser evil than living under German occupation.

‘What if’ scenarios for the ‘thousand-year Reich’ have fitfully excited writers of popular fiction, military history buffs and a few professional historians. Writers such as Len Deighton, Robert Harris and most recently the American politician Newt Gingrich have (with varying degrees of historical accuracy) used the Third Reich as a backdrop for popular thrillers.
¹⁹
Others, most recently Ralph Giordano, offer less speculative accounts of what would have happened ‘if Hitler had won the war’. However, such writers invariably overlook the fact that in a system of competing Nazi agencies, representing a plurality of ideological tendencies, there could have been more than one possible outcome.
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Moreover, much of this work reflects latent (Anglo-American or German) anxieties about the economic and political power of the recently unified Federal Republic, where its implications are deeply resented. By contrast, the military historians, most of whose contributions to this field are severely ‘operational’, merely shuffle armies around in the comfort of their studies.
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In a qualitatively different class, professional historians such as Jochen Thies have concentrated upon the symbolic expressions of Nazi megalomania, deducing plans for ‘world domination’ from the architectural plans for the postwar period, or have explored the Nazis’ plans for a pseudo-European union or a single currency.
²²

In the case of the Eastern Front, however, the vast quantity of surviving documentation relating to the immediate and long-term future makes it otiose to imagine hypothetical scenarios. For over three years the Germans fought over and occupied vast areas of the Soviet Union behind a front that at some points was 2,000 kilometres deep. We can thus see very clearly how a victorious Germany would have dealt with the territories of a dismembered Soviet Union. Plans survive in profusion. All we need to imagine to construct a credible counterfactual is a military victory.

How would matters have been if, following the advice of his generals, Hitler had managed to capture Moscow before the onset of winter in 1941 in the manner imagined - Operation Wotan - by the military historian James Lucas?
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Let us suppose, in a single venture into the fantastic, that some accident befell Stalin and the Stavka leadership before or during their flight from the beleaguered capital, and that this resulted in the collapse of the Red Army’s will to offer organised resistance. Reading between the lines of the brief account above of what actually happened, one can easily perceive some of the alternative strategies for domination that could have been pursued in the occupied Soviet Union, if the combination of crude Nazi racial dogmas as espoused by Hitler and military-economic necessity had not been the order of the day. The occupiers could have exploited separatist sentiments, installing a series of puppet regimes (under the control of German governors) in the Baltic, Belorussia, the Caucasus and the Ukraine. The Bolshevik edifice could have been undermined by decollectivisation and the reprivatisation of property, the restoration of religious freedom and so forth. It is unlikely, given the terrain and the existence of trans-Urals weapons plants, that resistance would have ceased, but this would have been counterbalanced by large numbers of collaborators who would have decided that the Bolshevik game was up.

That such a strategy might have worked is clear. In L‘vov, western Ukrainian nationalists under Bandera staged an anti-Soviet revolt (and pogroms) before the German invaders arrived. Throughout the occupied territories, there was significant collaboration by the indigenous populations. About one million Russians had varying degrees of involvement with the German armed forces, the majority being unarmed auxiliaries or ‘Hiwis’ after their German acronym, but there were also more than a quarter of a million armed military collaborators including the Kaminski Brigade, which helped suppress the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army, and various Cossack, Kalmyk or Tatar formations who are less well known today than their Baltic or Ukrainian SS equivalents. Some nationalities were better represented in the Wehrmacht than in the Red Army.
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As post-Soviet Russian historians are now revealing, former Communists, as amoral adepts at control, police work and terror, were not absent from the ranks of those who assisted the occupier.

Thus those with a more reflective understanding of political warfare, for example in the Wehrmacht Propaganda branch, cautioned against alienating the Great Russian population through flirtations with excitable émigré separatists. Rather, the object should be to drive a wedge between the Kremlin and the Russian population with the slogan ‘Liberation, not Conquest’.
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From a different perspective, Hitler’s Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, shared his Führer’s rampant Russo-phobia, but combined this with an appreciation of the differences between, and the strategic utility of, other national groups. He envisaged a protectorate over Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Belorussia; an expanded Ukraine; a Caucasian federation; and - surrounded by this
cordon sanitaire
- a revived, and greatly reduced, ‘Muscovy’ whose dynamics would be redirected towards Asia. Plans for Reichskommissariats in the Caucasus or Muscovy were drafted. Rosenberg and his circle of Eastern experts even had fitful fantasies about a Crimean Muftiate or a vast ‘pan-Turanic’ bloc carved out of former Soviet Central Asia with appropriate adjustments to the depiction of Tatars and Turks (the classic ‘Untermenschen’) of German propaganda.

It was in this part of the former Soviet Union - to be precise, in the Northern Caucasus - that German occupation policy most successfully sought to reap dividends of concessions to the indigenous population. The non-Slavic character of the people; the fact that Chechens and Karachai threw off the Soviet yoke before the Germans came; the need to make a favourable impression on neighbouring Turkey; and the fact that the army remained in control - all this resulted in a distinctly conciliatory approach, as the tone of the following military directives makes clear:

The German authorities recognised a Karachai National Committee and entrusted it with former Soviet state enterprises and forests. The Muslim Balkars welcomed German visitors to the Kurman ceremonies, presenting them with horses in return for Korans and weapons. When the SD geared themselves up to murder the Tats, or Mountain Jews, the local committee interceded with the military, who told the SD to desist. Herds were reprivatised and the conscription of labour was minimal. In return, large numbers of the inhabitants fought on the German side, with Hitler declaring ‘I consider only the Muslims to be reliable.’ Along with an estimated three and a half million other people whom the Soviets deported to Kazakhstan and Central Asia, they would pay a terrible price for this during and after the war.
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The problem was that these suggestions for a strategy of cooperation with national minorities came from quarters that lacked political weight. By contrast, it is clear from statements made by Hitler himself that this was in fact
politically
the least likely of all the possible outcomes of a German military victory. Judging from his
Table Talk
, the record of his idiosyncratic observations on an Aryan Jesus, the vegetarianism of Caesar’s legions, prehistoric dogs and such
obiter dicta
as ‘Tarts adore poachers’, Hitler was simultaneously attracted and repelled by ‘the East’. Impervious to the ironies involved, he called Russia a ‘desert’; his own battles would supply the country with a past.
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Vast roads built on ridges so that the wind would sweep them clear of snow would pass through German towns and settlements.
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The Crimea would become a German Riviera.

Characteristically, he was much clearer about the negative sides of his vision, namely the desire to subject the ‘natives’ to a particularly barbaric and crude version of colonial rule, so inhumane that it seems like something he had read in a rather lurid book. His preferred, and egregious, analogy was with British rule in India: ‘Our role in Russia will be analogous to that of England in India ... The Russian space is our India. Like the English, we shall rule this empire with a handful of men.‘
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He envisaged settling ‘the space’ with German peasant-soldiers, that is, veterans of twelve years’ military service, although there was room too in the Baltic for Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish settlers - the latter, in a characteristically irrelevant and quirky qualification, ‘by special arrangement’. The German colonists would enjoy large farms, officialdom handsome quarters and the regional governors ‘palaces’. German colonial society would be a literal and metaphorical ‘fortress’, closed to outsiders, since ‘the least of our stable-lads must be superior to any native’. The latter were ‘a mass of born slaves, who feel the need of a master’. Outsiders (that is, Germans) had introduced the notion of organised society to peoples who would otherwise behave in the antisocial manner of ‘rabbits’.
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Health and hygiene were to be things of the past: ‘No vaccination for the Russians, and no soap to get the dirt off them.... But let them have all the spirits and tobacco they want.’
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With characteristic callousness, he said on 17 October 1941:

If the Russians rebelled, ‘we shall only have to drop a few bombs on their cities, and the affair will be liquidated’.
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Economic intercourse was to be of the most exploitative kind:

The Ukrainians were to be tantalised with scarves, beads ‘and everything that colonial peoples like’.
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Sentiments like these - mostly shared by his generals - set the tone of German occupation policy in Russia, thwarting any prospect of capitalising on the widespread unpopularity of the Bolshevik regime, particularly in areas seized by Stalin under the terms of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, or of exploiting the deep ethnic and religious fissures latent within the Soviet empire. Hitler was simply unwilling to set aside their ideological imperatives in the interests of winning local support. His sense of German racial superiority effectively precluded any concessions to national autonomy - except in areas which the Nazis did not wish to settle or where policy was pitched at a wider Muslim or Turkic audience.