new fanfares for an hour. Hitler gradually relaxed somewhat. ‘The Fuhrer is freed from a nightmare the closer the decision comes,’ noted Goebbels. ‘It’s always so with him.’ Once more Goebbels returned to the inner necessity of the coming conflict, of which Hitler had convinced himself: ‘There is nothing for it than to attack,’ he wrote, summing up Hitler’s thoughts. ‘This cancerous growth has to be burned out. Stalin will fall.’ Since July the previous year, Hitler indicated, he had worked on the preparations for what was about to take place. Now the moment had arrived. Everything had been done which could have been done. ‘The fortune of war must now decide.’ At 2.30a.m., Hitler finally decided it was time to snatch a few hours’ sleep.274 ‘Barbarossa’ was due to begin within the next hour.275
Goebbels was too nervous to follow his example. At 5.30a.m., just over two hours after the German guns had opened fire on all borders, the new Liszt fanfares sounded over German radios. Goebbels read out Hitler’s proclamation.276 It amounted to a lengthy pseudo-historical justification for German preventive action. The Jewish-Bolshevik rulers in Moscow had sought for two decades to destroy not only Germany, but the whole of Europe. Hitler had been forced, he claimed, through British encirclement policy to take the bitter step of entering the 1939 Pact.277 But since then the Soviet threat had magnified. At present there were 160 Russian divisions massed on the German borders. ‘The hour has now therefore arrived,’ Hitler declared, ‘to counter this conspiracy of the Jewish-Anglo-Saxon warmongers and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevik headquarters in Moscow.’278 A slightly amended proclamation went out to the soldiers swarming over the border and marching into Russia.279
On 21 June, Hitler had at last composed a letter to his chief ally, Benito Mussolini, belatedly explaining and justifying his reasons for attacking the Soviet Union. The letter was delivered to Ciano at 3a.m. next morning, just as the attack was about to begin. Ciano had to disturb Mussolini to convey the news to him — greatly to the annoyance of the Italian dictator, who complained that the Germans told him nothing then broke his sleep to announce a
The most destructive and barbaric war in the history of mankind was beginning. It was the war that Hitler had wanted since the 1920s — the war against Bolshevism. It was the showdown. He had come to it by a roundabout route. But, finally, Hitler’s war was there: a reality.
For almost a year this war had been consciously worked towards and prepared by the German leadership. Hitler’s inability to bring Britain to the conference table had provided the spur to contemplate the bold move of a strike in the East even while the contest in the West remained unsettled. The perceived shortage of time, given the looming threat of the USA and the near-certainty of at least indirect involvement in the war through massive supplies of material if the war dragged into a further year, was the driving-force. The need to secure unlimited sources of raw materials from Soviet territory and to ensure that there would be no interruption to oil supplies from Romania was an additional central motive. Ideological considerations — the need to eradicate Bolshevism once and for all — deeply embedded in Hitler’s psyche for almost two decades, had not been the primary determinant of the timing of the showdown. But they gave it its indelible colouring, its sense not just of war, but of crusade.
Had Britain been ready to come to terms, the war against the Soviet Union would nonetheless have still gone ahead at some point — in the conditions Hitler had always hoped for. Hitler had sought the conflict. He was the main author of a war which had been a central element in his thinking for almost two decades. But when it came actually to planning, not just imagining, the showdown, the Wehrmacht leadership, including the leaders of the army, the key branch of the armed forces as regards the war in the east, had gone along with every step. They had let Hitler dictate the course of events. At no point had they seriously attempted to discourage him. On the contrary, the combination of anti-Bolshevism and gross underestimation of Soviet military capabilities had prompted army chiefs to be no less optimistic than Hitler himself about the ease with which the USSR would be defeated.
If the initial aims had been forged by strategic consideration, the ideological input had not been long in coming. Himmler and Heydrich, rapidly spotting a chance to extend their own empire and to create an entire new vast area for their racial experiments, had no difficulty in exploiting Hitler’s long-established paranoia about ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ to advance new schemes for solving ‘the Jewish problem’. By March, Hitler had laid down the parameters of a genocidal war which willing agents in the Wehrmacht as well as the SS leadership were only too ready to translate into firm guidelines for action.
The war in the East, which would decide the future of the Continent of Europe, was indeed Hitler’s war. But it was more than that. It was not inflicted by a tyrannical dictator on an unwilling country. It was acceded to, even welcomed (if in different measure and for different reasons), by all sections of the German elite, non-Nazi as well as Nazi. Large sections of the ordinary German population, too, including the millions who would fight in lowly ranks in the army, would — once they had got over their initial shock — go along with the meaning Nazi propaganda imparted to the conflict, that of a ‘crusade against Bolshevism’. The more ideologically committed pro-Nazis would entirely swallow the interpretation of the war as a preventive one to avoid the destruction of western culture by the Bolshevik hordes. They fervently believed that Europe would never be liberated before ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was utterly and completely rooted out. The path to the Holocaust, intertwined with the showdown with Bolshevism, was prefigured in such notions. The legacy of over two decades of deeply rooted, often fanatically held, feelings of hatred towards Bolshevism, fully interlaced with antisemitism, was about to be revealed in its full ferocity.
9. SHOWDOWN
‘It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.’
‘The whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus.’
‘What India was for England, the eastern territory will be for us.’
At dawn on 22 June over 3 million German troops advanced over the borders and into Soviet territory. By a quirk of history, as Goebbels noted somewhat uneasily, it was exactly the same date on which Napoleon’s Grand Army had marched on Russia 129 years earlier.1 The modern invaders deployed over 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motorized vehicles (including armoured cars), 7,000 artillery pieces, and 2,500 aircraft. Not all their transport was mechanized; as in Napoleon’s day, they also made use of horses — 625,000 of them. Facing the invading armies, arrayed on the western frontiers of the USSR, were nearly 3 million Soviet soldiers, backed by a number of tanks now estimated to have been as many as 14–15,000 (almost 2,000 of them the most modern
