Hitler

Bolshevism.” He clarified his view as follows: “Fundamentally, therefore, what matters is conveniently dividing up the gigantic cake so that we can first control it, secondly administer it, and thirdly exploit it.” But such annexation plans were to be kept secret for the present. “Nevertheless we can and will carry out all necessary measures— shooting, resettlement, and so on.”³⁵

While the army plunged tempestuously ahead, reaching the Dnieper in two weeks and a week later thrusting to Smolensk, the Einsatzgruppen set up their reign of terror in the occupied territories. They combed cities and towns, herded together Jews, Communist functionaries, intellectuals, and in general all potential leaders of society, and liquidated them. Otto Ohlendorf, one of the task-force commanders, testified in Nuremberg that in the course of the first year his unit murdered approximately 90,000 men, women, and children. The Jewish population of western Russia was especially affected; during this same period it is conservatively estimated that about half a million Jews were killed.³⁶ Unmoved, Hitler pushed the extermination program forward. Over and beyond all the aims of conquest and exploitation, his statements of that period manifest the old, deep ideological hatred, once more as extreme as in his early years. “The Jews are the scourge of humanity,” he told Croatian Foreign Minister Kvaternik on July 21, 1941. “If the Jews were given their way, as they are in the Soviet paradise, they would carry out the maddest plans. That is how Russia has become a plague center for humanity…. If only one country for whatever reasons tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If there were no longer any Jews in Europe, the unity of the countries of Europe would no longer be disturbed.”

In spite of their rapid advance, the German armies were able to start their pincers movement only in the central sector. On the other fronts they merely managed to roll the enemy back. “No enemy in front of us and no supplies behind us”: that was the quip for the special problems of this campaign. Nevertheless, by July 11 nearly 600,000 Russian prisoners were in German hands, including more than 70,000 deserters. Both Hitler and the army High Command thought the collapse of the Red Army was near. As early as July 3 Halder had noted: “It is probably not saying too much if I assert that the campaign against Russia was won within two weeks.” But he recognized that stubborn resistance based on the vastness of the area would occupy the German forces for many weeks to come.

Hitler himself declared several days later that he did not believe resistance in European Russia would last much longer than six weeks. He did not know where the Russians would go then. “Perhaps the Urals or beyond the Urals. But we will follow them.” He would not shrink from pushing even beyond the Urals. He would pursue Stalin wherever he fled. But he did not think he would have to be fighting after the middle of September; in six weeks or so it would be pretty much all over.³⁷ In the middle of July the emphasis in the armaments program was shifted to submarines and aircraft, and planning was begun for the return march of the German divisions, since this was expected to take place in two weeks. When General Kustring, the last military attache in Moscow, appeared at the Fuhrer’s headquarters at this time to report, Hitler led him to a military map, gestured at the conquered territories, and declared: “No pig will ever eject me from here.”³⁸

The relapse into the coarseness of his early years corresponded to the satisfaction Hitler evidently felt in showing what he was capable of. He described the battles in the East to Spanish Ambassador Espinosa as sheer “massacres of human beings.” Sometimes, he said, the enemy had attacked in waves twelve or thirteen rows deep and had simply been cut down, “the people reduced to chopped meat.” The Russian soldiers, he said, were “partly in a state of torpor, partly of sighs and groans. The commissars are devils and… were being shot down.” Simultaneously, he indulged in long hate-filled fantasies. He conceived of starving out Moscow and Leningrad and thus bringing about an “ethnic catastrophe” that would “deprive not only Bolshevism of its centers, but wipe out the Moscovites.” Then he wanted to raze both cities to the ground. A gigantic reservoir would be created on the spot where Moscow had once stood, to extinguish all memory of the city and everything it had been. As a precautionary measure, he ordered that the expected offers of surrender be turned down, and justified this measure to his intimates: “Probably some people will clap their hands to their heads and ask: How can the Fuhrer destroy a city like St. Petersburg? By nature I belong to an entirely different genus. But when I see that the species is in danger, my feelings give way to ice-cold resolution.”³⁹

In the course of August the German armies, after breaking through the “Stalin Line,” succeeded after all in impressive pincers movements on all the sectors of the front. Nevertheless, it became apparent that the optimistic reckonings of the previous month had been deceptive. However great the number of prisoners, the hordes of reserves that the enemy continually brought up to the front seemed even greater. Moreover, the Russians fought far more bitterly than had the Poles or Allied troops; and their determination to resist increased, after initial crises, as they recognized the annihilating nature of the war Hitler was waging. Moreover, the attrition of materiel in the dust and mud of the Russian steppes was greater than had been expected, and every victory drew the army more deeply into the endless spaces. In addition, the German war machine for the first time seemed to be reaching the limits of its capacity. Industry, for example, was producing only a third of the required 600 tanks a month. The infantry was obviously inadequately motorized for a campaign involving distances vaster than any hitherto conceived. The Luftwaffe could not handle a two-front war. And supplies of fuel at times shrank to the demand for a single month. In the face of all this, the question of where the remaining reserves could most effectively be applied became paramount. On what sector of the front could a blow be delivered that might decide the war?

The army High Command and the commanders of the Army Group Center unanimously demanded that they be allowed to concentrate all formations for the attack on Moscow. The enemy, they assumed, would assemble all available forces outside the capital for the great decisive battle. Thus the campaign could be concluded within the schedule, and the rules of blitzkrieg could be abided by. Hitler, on the contrary, called for attacking in the north, in order to cut the Russians off from access to the Baltic. Simultaneously, he wanted an advance on a broad front in the south, with the aim of seizing the rich agricultural and industrial regions of the Ukraine and the Donetz Basin and the oil supplies of the Caucasus. This plan was a prime sample both of his arrogance and his dilemma. Although he pretended that in his certainty of victory he could afford to ignore the capital, he was actually trying to relieve the economic strain, which was becoming more and more evident. “My generals know nothing about a war economy,” he repeatedly declared. The obstinate dispute, which once again revealed the divisions between Hitler and the generals, was finally ended by a directive ordering the Army Group Center to place its motorized formations at the disposal of the commanders in the north and south. “Unacceptable,” “outrageous,” Halder noted, and proposed to Brauchitsch that they hand in a joint resignation. But the commander in chief refused.

The great victory in the Battle of Kiev, which netted the German side approximately 665,000 prisoners and enormous quantities of materiel, seemed once again to confirm Hitler’s military genius—especially since this success also ended the flank threat to the central sector and thus truly opened the way to Moscow. In fact Hitler now consented to the offensive against the capital. But blinded by the unbroken succession of triumphs, spoiled by fortune in war, he thought he could simultaneously continue to pursue his far-flung aims in the north and in the south as well: cutting the Murmansk railroad line, capturing Rostov and the oil region of Maikop, and advancing the more than 375 miles to Stalingrad. As if he had forgotten the old rule about concentrating all forces at one place at a time, he thus made his troops draw farther and farther apart. On October 2, 1941, Field Marshal von Bock, with reduced forces, at last opened the offensive against Moscow, after a delay of nearly two months. On the following day Hitler made a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, in which he surpassed himself in vulgar boasting. He described Germany’s enemies as “democratic nonentities,” “louts,” “animals and beasts,” and announced that “this enemy is already broken and will never rise again.”

Four days later the autumnal rains began. Fighting superior enemy forces, the German armies opened their offensive on a hopeful note, achieving two great encirclements near Vyasma and Bryansk. But then the deepening morass crippled all operations. The movement of supplies slowed; fuel in particular grew short; more and more vehicles and guns became stuck in the mud. The halted offensive did not begin moving forward again until the middle of November, when mild frost ensued. The tank troops assigned to complete the northern encirclement at last came within almost twenty miles of the Soviet capital near Krasnaya Polyana, while the units attacking from the west approached to within more than thirty miles of the city’s center. Then the Russian winter descended abruptly. The temperature dropped to twenty degrees below and later sometimes even to sixty below zero.

The onset of intense cold found the German armies completely unprepared. Certain that the campaign would be over in three to four months, Hitler in one of his characteristic gestures had again placed his back against the wall and ordered no winter equipment for the troops. “For there will be no winter campaign,” he had rebuked General Paulus when the commander recommended precautionary measures for the coming winter. At the front