Bloodlands

letter home, described the battles around Moscow. He and his men were “fighting for our own naked lives, daily and hourly, against an enemy who in all respects is superior.” That same day, two waves of Japanese aircraft attacked the American fleet, destroying several battleships and killing two thousand servicemen. The following day the United States declared war on Japan. Three days later, on 11 December, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. This made it very easy for President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare war on Germany.⁵⁰

Stalin’s position in east Asia was now rather good. If the Japanese meant to fight the United States for control of the Pacific, it was all but inconceivable that they would confront the Soviets in Siberia. Stalin no longer had to fear a two-front war. What was more, the Japanese attack was bound to bring the United States into the war—as an ally of the Soviet Union. By early 1942 the Americans had already engaged the Japanese in the Pacific. Soon American supply ships would reach Soviet Pacific ports, unhindered by Japanese submarines—since the Japanese were neutral in the Soviet-German war. A Red Army taking American supplies from the east was an entirely different foe than a Red Army concerned about a Japanese attack from the east. Stalin just had to exploit American aid, and encourage the Americans to open a second front in Europe. Then the Germans would be encircled, and the Soviet victory certain.

Since 1933, Japan had been the great multiplier in the gambles that Hitler and Stalin took with and against each other. Both men, each for his own reasons, wished for Japan to fight its wars in the south, against China on land and the European empires and the United States at sea. Hitler welcomed the bombing of Pearl Harbor, believing that the United States would be slow to arm and would fight in the Pacific rather than in Europe. Even after the failure of Operations Barbarossa and Typhoon, Hitler wished for the Japanese to engage the United States rather than the Soviet Union. Hitler seemed to believe that he could conquer the USSR in early 1942 and then engage an America weakened by the Pacific War. Stalin, too, wished for the Japanese to move south, and had very carefully crafted foreign and military policy that had precisely this effect. His thought was in essence the same as Hitler’s: the Japanese are to stay away, because the lands of the Soviet Union are mine. Berlin and Moscow both wanted to keep Japan in east Asia and in the Pacific, and Tokyo obliged them both. Whom this would serve depended upon the outcome of the German attack on the Soviet Union.⁵¹

Had the German invasion proceeded as envisioned, as a lightning victory that leveled the great Soviet cities and yielded Ukrainian food and Caucasian oil, the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor might indeed have been good news for Berlin. In such a scenario, the attack on Pearl Harbor would have meant that the Japanese were diverting the United States as Germany consolidated a victorious position in its new colony. The Germans would have initiated Generalplan Ost or some variant, seeking to become a great land empire self-sufficient in food and oil and capable of defending themselves against a naval blockade by the United Kingdom and an amphibious assault by the United States. This had always been a fantasy scenario, but it had some light purchase upon reality so long as German troops were making for Moscow.

Since the Germans were turned back at Moscow at the very moment that the Japanese advanced, Pearl Harbor had exactly the opposite meaning. It meant that Germany was in the worst of all possible configurations: not a giant land empire intimidating Great Britain and preparing itself for a confrontation with the United States but rather a single European country at war against the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States with allies either weak (Italy, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia) or uninvolved in the crucial east European theater (Japan, Bulgaria). The Japanese seemed to understand this better than the Germans. They wanted Hitler to make a separate peace with Stalin, and then fight the British and the Americans for control of Asia and North Africa. The Japanese wished to break Britain’s naval power; the Germans tried to work within its bounds. This left Hitler with one world strategy, and he kept to it: the destruction of the Soviet Union and the creation of a land empire on its ruins.⁵²

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In December 1941, Hitler found a strange resolution to his drastic strategic predicament. He himself had told his generals that “all continental problems” had to be resolved by the end of 1941 so that Germany could prepare for a global conflict with the United Kingdom and the United States. Instead Germany found itself facing the timeless strategic nightmare, the two-front war, to be fought against three great powers. With characteristic audacity and political agility, Hitler recast the situation in terms that were consistent with Nazi anti-Semitism, if not with the original planning for the war. What besides utopian planning, inept calculation, racist arrogance, and foolish brinksmanship could have brought Germany into a war with the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union? Hitler had the answer: a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.⁵³

In January 1939, Hitler had made a speech threatening the Jews with extinction if they succeeded in fomenting another world war. Since summer 1941, German propaganda had played unceasingly on the theme of a tentacular Jewish plot, uniting the British, the Soviets, and ever more the Americans. On 12 December 1941, a week after the Soviet counterattack at Moscow, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and one day after the United States reciprocated the German declaration of war, Hitler returned to that speech. He referred to it as a prophecy that would have to be fulfilled. “The world war is here,” he told some fifty trusted comrades on 12 December 1941; “the annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence.” From that point forward his most important subordinates understood their task: to kill all Jews wherever possible. Hans Frank, the head of the General Government, conveyed the policy in Warsaw a few days later: “Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them, in order to maintain the structure of the Reich as a whole.”⁵⁴

Jews were now blamed for the looming disaster that could not be named. Nazis would have instantly grasped the connection between the Jewish enemy and the prospect of downfall. They all believed, if they accepted Hitler’s view, that Germany had not been defeated on the battlefield in the last world war, but instead brought down by a “stab in the back,” a conspiracy of Jews and other internal enemies. Now Jews would also take the blame for the American-British-Soviet alliance. Such a “common front” of capitalism and communism, went Hitler’s reasoning, could only have been consecrated by the Jewish cabals in London, Moscow, and Washington. Jews were the aggressors, Germans the victims. If disaster were to be averted, Jews would have to be eliminated. Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels recorded the moral reversal in his diary: “We are not here to have sympathy with the Jews, but only to have sympathy with our German nation.”⁵⁵

As the war turned Stalin’s way, Hitler recast its purpose. The plan had been to destroy the Soviet Union and then eliminate the Jews. Now, as the destruction of the Soviet Union was indefinitely delayed, the utter extermination of the Jews became a wartime policy. The menace henceforth was less the Slavic masses and their supposed Jewish overlords, and more the Jews as such. In 1942, propaganda against Slavs would ease, as more of them came to work in the Reich. Hitler’s decision to kill Jews (rather than exploit their labor) was presumably facilitated by his simultaneous decision to exploit the labor of Slavs (rather than kill them). These moves signified an abandonment of most of the initial assumptions about the course of the war, although of course Hitler would never have admitted that. But the mass killing of the Jews at least looked consistent with the initial vision of a frontier empire in the East.⁵⁶

In fact, the decision to kill the Jews contradicted that vision, since it was an implicit acceptance that the Germans would never control the vast territories that they would have needed for a Final Solution by deportation. In logistical terms, mass murder is simpler than mass deportation. At this point, killing was Hitler’s only option if he wished to fulfill his own prophecy. His was a land empire rather than a sea empire, but he controlled no wastelands into which Jews could disappear. Insofar as there had been progress in the Final Solution, it was in Himmler’s demonstration of the method that did not require deportation: murder. The killing was less a sign of than a substitute for triumph. From late July 1941 Jews had been murdered as the envisaged lightning victory failed to materialize. From December 1941, Jews as such were to be killed as the alliance against Germany grew in strength. Hitler sought and found still deeper emotions and gave voice to more vicious goals, and a German leadership aware of its predicament accepted them.⁵⁷

By defining the conflict as a “world war,” Hitler drew attention away from the lack of a lightning victory and the unwelcome lessons of history that followed from this military failure. In December 1941, German soldiers were staring straight at the fate of Napoleon, whose Grande Armee had reached the outskirts of Moscow faster in 1812 than had the Wehrmacht in 1941. Yet in the end Napoleon had retreated from winter and Russian reinforcements. As German troops held their positions, they would inevitably confront a repetition of the kinds of battles that had