Hitler

dated back to what had still been the “political” phase of his life. It had been a tactically motivated act of betrayal of his own ideological principles. Consequently, since he had now gone beyond his political phase, the pact had become an anachronism. “The Pact never was honestly intended,” Hitler now confessed to one of his adjutants. “For the ideological abysses are too deep.” What counted now was the honesty of his radical philosophy.

Shortly after three o’clock in the morning of June 22, 1941, Mussolini was roused from sleep by a message from Hitler. “At night I don’t even disturb my servants, but the Germans make me jump out of bed without the slightest consideration,” he grumbled. The message began with a reference to “months of anxious pondering” and then informed Mussolini of the impending attack. “Since I have won through to this decision,” Hitler assured him, “I again feel inwardly free. Despite all the sincerity of my efforts to bring about a final detente, collaboration with the Soviet Union has nevertheless often been a heavy burden for me; for somehow it seemed to me a breach with my whole background, my views and my former obligations. I am happy to be rid of these spiritual torments.”²⁸

The feeling of relief was undoubtedly there but accompanied by a note of anxiety. Granted that the entourage, and especially the top military leaders, expressed extraordinary optimism. “For the German soldier nothing is impossible,” the Wehrmacht communique of June 11, 1941, had concluded, summing up the fighting in the Balkans and in North Africa. Only Hitler himself showed signs of depression and nervousness. But he was not the man to be deterred from realizing his life’s dream when only a few weeks’ fighting separated him from it. Then vast spaces in the East would be won, England would bow, and America yield. The world would pay homage to him. The risk increased the allure of the goal. On the night before the assault, in the midst of the bustle of preparations all around him, he said: “I feel as if I am pushing open the door to a dark room never seen before, without knowing what lies behind the door.”²⁹

The Third World War

When “Barbarossa” starts, the world will hold its breath and keep still.

Adolf Hitler

Before dawn, about 3:15 A.M. on June 22, 1941, Hitler launched the offensive against the Soviet Union with 153 divisions, 600,000 motorized vehicles, 3,580 tanks, 7,184 artillery pieces, and 2,740 airplanes. It was the mightiest military force concentrated on a single theater of war in history. Alongside the German formations there were twelve divisions and ten brigades of Rumanian troops, eighteen Finnish divisions, three Hungarian divisions, and two and one-half Slovak divisions. Later this force was joined by three Italian divisions and the Spanish “Blue Division.” True to the pattern of most of the preceding campaigns, the attack started without a declaration of war. Once again the Luftwaffe took the lead with a massed surprise assault, which at one blow wiped out half of the approximately 10,000 Soviet Russian military planes. And, as had already been done in Poland and in the West, the attackers pushed massed wedges of tanks deep into the enemy territory, then closed the pincers thus formed to yield vast battles of encirclement. In the preceding years Hitler had steadily maintained that he was not planning any “Argonauts’ expedition” to Russia;³⁰ now he set out on one.

A second wave, following hard upon the military formations, consisted of the notorious Einsatzgruppen: special squads to whom Hitler had issued the assignment—as early as March 3—to exterminate “the Jewish-Bolshevistic intelligentsia” in the field of operations.³¹ From the outset these commandos gave the conflict its frightful, totally unexampled character. And for all that the campaign was strategically linked with the war as a whole, in its nature and in its morality it signified something else entirely. It was, so to speak, the Third World War.

At any rate, it dropped out of the framework of the “normal” European war, the rules of which had hitherto governed the conflict, although in Poland there had been glimmerings of a new and more radical practice. But the SS’s reign of terror in the conquered Polish territories had evoked opposition among the local military commanders. It was his experience with this reaction on the part of the regular army that now prompted Hitler to introduce his ideologically motivated extermination campaigns in the very zone of active operations. For after so many complications, detours, and reversed fronts, this war in Russia was in every sense his war. He waged it mercilessly, obsessively, and became increasingly neglectful of all other theaters. He made no tactical concessions. In particular, he abandoned his previous practice of seeking the military decision first, with the aid of seductive slogans of liberation, only to begin the work of enslavement and destruction after the military victory had been won. Here in Russia he was seeking nothing but “final solutions.” On March 30, 1941, he had summoned to the Berlin chancellery nearly 250 high-ranking officers of all branches of the service. He lectured them for two and a half hours on the novel nature of the impending war. Halder’s diary recorded the following statements:

Our tasks in Russia: smash the armed forces, break up the State…. Struggle of two ideologies. Annihilating verdict upon Bolshevism, is equivalent to asocial criminality. Communism tremendous danger for the future. We must abandon the viewpoint of soldierly comradeship. The Communist is no comrade before and no comrade afterwards. What is involved is a struggle of annihilation….

The struggle must be waged against the poison of sedition. That is no question of courts-martial. The commanders of the troops must know what is at stake. They must lead the way into the struggle…. Commissars and GPU men are criminals and must be treated as such…. The fight will be very different from the fight in the West. In the East harshness is kindness toward the future.

The leaders must demand of themselves the sacrifice of overcoming their scruples.³²

Although none of those present took issue with what he was telling them, Hitler distrusted his generals. He thought them biased in favor of the traditional standards of their class and therefore did not content himself with mere slogans calling for harshness. Rather, his whole effort was bent toward abolishing the distinction of his special commandos; he wanted to fuse these elements into a totality that would make criminals of all by having all participate in waging his war of annihilation. In a succession of preparatory directives, administration of the rear areas was detached from the army and assigned to special Reich commissioners. Heinrich Himmler in his capacity of Reichsfuhrer-SS was assigned to take over “special tasks” in the theater of operations. He had at his disposal four Einsatzgruppen (task forces) of security police and SD men, a total strength of 3,000 men, to carry out the tasks “arising from the conflict of two opposed political systems which is to be carried out on a basis of finality.”

In May, 1941, at a meeting in Pretzsch, Reinhard Heydrich orally gave the leaders of these groups, the order to murder all Jews, “Asiatic inferiors,” Communist functionaries, and gypsies.³³ A “Fuhrer’s decree” of the same period made members of the armed forces immune to prosecution for crimes against enemy civilians. Another directive, the so-called Commissar Order of June 6, 1941, specified that the political commissars of the Red Army, being “the authors of barbarously Asiatic methods of fighting… when captured in battle or in resistance are on principle to be disposed of by gunshot immediately.” And a “guideline” of the High Command of the armed forces, which was issued to the more than 3 million soldiers of the Eastern armies immediately before the beginning of the attack, called for “ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevistic agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, Jews, and total elimination of all active and passive resistance.”³⁴ A strident campaign against the “Slavic subhumans” supplemented these measures. It conjured up images of the “Mongol onslaught” and defined Bolshevism as the contemporary form of the Asiatic scourge represented by Attila and Genghis Khan.

These elements gave the war in the East its unusual dual character. It was undoubtedly an ideological war against Communism, and the offensive was sustained by a crusading mood. But simultaneously, and to a considerably greater degree, it was a colonial war of conquest in the style of the nineteenth century, though directed against one of the old European great powers and aimed at wiping out that Power. Hitler himself exposed the lie of the ideological justifications whose strident propaganda dominated the foreground. In the middle of July, speaking to a group of the topmost leaders, he irritably rejected the formula of a “war of Europe against