designs), over 34,000 artillery pieces, and 8–9,000 fighter-planes.2 The scale of the titanic clash now beginning, which would chiefly determine the outcome of the Second World War and, beyond that, the shape of Europe for nearly half a century, almost defies the imagination.
I
Despite the numerical advantage in weaponry of the defending Soviet armies, the early stages of the attack appeared to endorse all the optimism of Hitler and his General Staff about the inferiority of their Bolshevik enemies and the speed with which complete victory could be attained. The three-pronged attack led by Field Marshals Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb in the north, Fedor von Bock in the centre, and Gerd von Rundstedt in the south initially made astonishing advances. By the end of the first week of July Lithuania and Latvia were in German hands. Leeb’s advance in the north, with Leningrad as the target, had reached as far as Ostrov. Army Group Centre had pushed even farther. Much of White Russia had been taken. Minsk was encircled. Bock’s advancing armies already had the city of Smolensk in their sights. Further south, by mid-July Rundstedt’s troops had captured Zitomir and Berdicev.3
The Soviet calamity was immense — and avoidable. Even as the German tanks were rolling forwards, Stalin still thought Hitler was bluffing, that he would not dare attack the Soviet Union until he had finished with Britain. Stalin had been well informed on the German military build-up and the growing menace of invasion. He had anticipated some German territorial demands but was confident that, if necessary, negotiations could stave off an attack in 1941 at least. By the following year, the Soviet Union would be more prepared. Though two of the top- ranking Soviet generals, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and General Georgi Zhukov, had put forward a plan on 15 May for a pre-emptive strike against Germany, Stalin had dismissed such a notion out of hand, fearing it would provoke the attack he wanted to avoid. There were no plans to invade Germany. A preventive war against an imminent Soviet invasion of the Reich was a Nazi propaganda legend.4 So convinced was Stalin of the correctness of his own diagnosis of the situation that he had chosen to ignore a veritable flood of intelligence reports warning of the imminent danger, some even predicting the precise date of the invasion.5 Once the attack took place, Stalin fell for days into a state of near mental collapse and deep depression. Amid violent mood-swings, one of his first actions was to hurl abuse at his military leaders and sack some of his top commanders.6
Stalin’s bungling interference and military incompetence had combined with the fear and servility of his generals and the limitations of the inflexible Soviet strategic concept to rule out undertaking the necessary precautions to create defensive dispositions and fight a rearguard action. Instead, whole armies were left in exposed positions, easy prey for the pincer movements of the rapidly advancing panzer armies.7 In a whole series of huge encirclements, the Red Army suffered staggering losses of men and equipment. By the autumn, some 3 million soldiers had trudged in long, dismal columns into German captivity. A high proportion would suffer terrible inhumanity in the hands of their captors, and not return.8 Roughly the same number had by then been wounded or killed.9 The barbaric character of the conflict, evident from its first day, had been determined, as we have seen, by the German plans for a ‘war of annihilation’ that had taken shape since March. Soviet captives were not be treated as soldierly comrades, Geneva conventions were regarded as non- applicable, political commissars — a category interpreted in the widest sense — were peremptorily shot, the civilian population subjected to the cruellest reprisals.10 Atrocities were not confined to the actions of the Wehrmacht. On the Soviet side, Stalin recovered sufficiently from his trauma at the invasion to proclaim that the conflict was no ordinary war, but a ‘great patriotic war’ against the invaders. It was necessary, he declared, to form partisan groups to organize ‘merciless battle’.11 Mutual fear of capture fed rapidly and directly into the spiralling barbarization on the eastern front. But it did not cause the barbarization in the first place. The driving-force was the Nazi ideological drive to extirpate ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. Hitler’s response in private to Stalin’s speech was revealing. The declaration of partisan war, he remarked, had the advantage of allowing the extermination of anyone who got in the way.12 The wide interpretation of ‘partisans’ by the Security Police ensured that Jews were particularly prominent among the increasing numbers liquidated.
Already on the first day of the invasion reports began reaching Berlin of up to 1,000 Soviet planes destroyed and Brest-Litowsk taken by the advancing troops. ‘We’ll soon pull it off,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary. He immediately added: ‘We must soon pull it off. Among the people there’s a somewhat depressed mood. The people want peace… Every new theatre of war causes concern and worry.’13
The main author of the most deadly clash of the century, which in almost four years of its duration would produce an unimaginable harvest of sorrow for families throughout central and eastern Europe and a level of destruction never experienced in human history, left Berlin around midday on 23 June. Hitler was setting out with his entourage for his new field headquarters, chosen for him the previous autumn, near Rastenburg in East Prussia.14 The presumption was, as it had been in earlier campaigns, that he would be there a few weeks, make a tour of newly conquered areas, then return to Berlin. This was only one of his miscalculations. The ‘Wolf’s Lair’
The Wolf’s Lair — another play on Hitler’s favourite pseudonym from the 1920s, when he liked to call himself ‘Wolf (allegedly the meaning of ‘Adolf’, and implying strength) — was hidden away in the gloomy Masurian woods, about eight kilometres from the small town of Rastenburg.15 Hitler and his accompaniment arrived there late in the evening of 23 June. The new surroundings were not greatly welcoming. The centre-point consisted of ten bunkers, erected over the winter, camouflaged and in parts protected against air-raids by two metres thickness of concrete. Hitler’s bunker was at the northern end of the complex. All its windows faced north so that he could avoid the sun streaming in. There were rooms big enough for military conferences in Hitler’s and Keitel’s bunkers, and a barracks with a dining-hall for around twenty people. Another complex — known as HQ Area 2 — a little distance away, surrounded by barbed wire and hardly visible from the road, housed the Wehrmacht Operations Staff under Warlimont. The army headquarters, where Brauchitsch and Halder were based, were situated a few kilometres to the north-east. Goring — designated by Hitler on 29 June to be his successor in the event of his death — and the Luftwaffe staff stayed in their special trains.16
Hitler’s part of the Fuhrer Headquarters, known as ‘Security Zone One’, swiftly developed its own daily rhythm. The central event was the ‘situation discussion’ at noon in the bunker shared by Keitel and Jodl. This frequently ran on as long as two hours. Brauchitsch, Halder, and Colonel Adolf Heusinger, chief of the army’s Operations Department, attended once or twice a week. The briefing was followed by a lengthy lunch, beginning in these days for the most part punctually at 2p.m., Hitler confining himself as always strictly to a non-meat diet. Any audiences that he had on non-military matters were arranged for the afternoons. Around 5p.m. he would call in his secretaries for coffee. A special word of praise was bestowed on the one who could eat most cakes. The second military briefing, given by Jodl, followed at 6p.m. The evening meal took place at 7.30p.m., often lasting two hours. Afterwards there were films. The final part of the routine was the gathering of secretaries, adjutants, and guests for tea, to the accompaniment of Hitler’s late-night monologues.17 Those who could snatched a nap some time during the afternoon so they could keep their eyes open in the early hours.18 Sometimes, it was daylight by the time the nocturnal discussions came to an end.19
Hitler always sat in the same place at meals, with his back to the window, flanked by Press Chief Dietrich and Jodl, with Keitel, Bormann, and Bodenschatz opposite him. Generals, staff officers, adjutants, Hitler’s doctors, and any guests visiting the Fuhrer Headquarters made up the rest of the complement.20 The atmosphere was good in these early days, and not too formal. The mood at this time was still generally optimistic.21 Life in the FHQ had not yet reached the stage where it could be described by Jodl as half-way ‘between a monastery and a concentration camp’.22
Two of Hitler’s secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, had also accompanied him to his field headquarters. Christa Schroeder described their life there to a friend, one week after arriving. Their living quarters were very simple. The sleeping section of their bunker was no larger than a compartment in a railway carriage. They had a toilet, a mirror, and a radio, but not much else. There were shower rooms, but without hot water in the early weeks. They had as good as nothing to do. Sleeping, eating, drinking, and chatting filled up most of their day. Some of the men in the otherwise entirely male company of the FHQ soon started to complain that the presence of
