All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945. Max Hastings
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I will always remember what appeared next on the screen – a close-up of our soldiers’ faces. They were just young kids, and they looked so helpless, so utterly lost.’
The world watched the unfolding drama with fascination and profoundly confused sentiments. In America, arch-isolationist Charles Lindbergh proclaimed: ‘I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with Britain, or even with Germany with all her faults, than the cruelty, the Godlessness and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia.’ Warwickshire housewife Clara Milburn found herself prey to bewilderment, writing on 22 June: ‘So now Russia will get a bit of what she gave Finland – and perhaps a lot more. Mr. Churchill broadcast tonight and said we must stand by Russia. I suppose we must, as she is now against the enemy of mankind. But I wish we need not when I think of her ways, which are not our ways.’ On 1 July a Bucharest streetcar driver, seeing Mihail Sebastian with a newspaper in his hand, asked about the German advance. ‘Have they entered Moscow?’ ‘Not yet. But they will for sure – today or tomorrow.’ ‘Well, let them. Then we can make mincemeat of the yids.’
Euphoria overtook Berlin. Halder, the Wehrmacht’s chief of staff, declared on 3 July: ‘I think I am not exaggerating when I say that the campaign…has been won in fourteen days’; Hitler spoke of a victory parade in Moscow by the end of August. Former doubters in high places felt themselves confounded by Soviet command incompetence, the ease with which thousands of Russian aircraft had been destroyed, the effortless tactical superiority of the invaders. At the front Karl Fuchs, a tank gunner, exulted: ‘The war against these subhuman beings is almost over…We really let them have it! They are scoundrels, the mere scum of the earth – and they are no match for the German soldier.’ By 9 July Army Group Centre had completed the isolation of huge Soviet forces in Belorussia, which lost 300,000 prisoners and 2,500 tanks. Russian counterattacks delayed the capture of Smolensk until early August – a setback that afterwards proved significant, because it cost the Wehrmacht precious summer days – and the Red Army maintained strong resistance in the south. But when the forces of Bock and Rundstedt met at Lokhvitsa, east of Kiev, on 15 September, two entire Russian armies were trapped and destroyed, with the loss of half a million men. Leningrad was besieged, Moscow threatened.
The ruthlessness of the invaders was swiftly revealed. In France in 1940, more than a million French prisoners were caged and fed; in Russia, by contrast, prisoners were caged only to perish. First in hundreds of thousands, soon in millions, they starved to death in accordance with their captors’ design, and inability to cope with such numbers even had they wished to do so – the Reich’s camps had capacity for only 790,000. Some prisoners resorted to cannibalism. Many German units killed POWs merely to escape the inconvenience of supervising their more protracted end. Gen. Joachim Lemelsen protested to the high command: ‘I am repeatedly finding out about the shooting of prisoners, defectors or deserters, carried out in an irresponsible, senseless and criminal manner. This is murder. Soon the Russians will get to hear about the countless corpses lying along the routes taken by our soldiers, without weapons and with hands raised, dispatched at close range by shots to the head. The result will be that the enemy will hide in the woods and fields and continue to fight – and we shall lose countless comrades.’
Berlin was indifferent. Hitler sought to conquer as much land, and to inherit as few people, as his armies could contrive. He often cited the precedent of the nineteenth-century American frontier, where the native inhabitants were almost extinguished to make way for settlers. On 25 June Police General Walter Stahlecker led Einsatzgruppe A into the Lithuanian city of Kaunas behind the panzers. A thousand Jews were rounded up and clubbed to death by Lithuanian collaborators at Lietukis garage, less than two hundred yards from Army HQ. Stahlecker reported: ‘These self-cleansing operations went smoothly because the army authorities, who had been informed beforehand, showed understanding for this procedure.’
The Soviets, for their part, shot many POWs as well as their own political prisoners; when their retreating forces abandoned a hospital where 160 German wounded were held, these were killed either by smashing in their heads or throwing them from windows. A German platoon which surrendered after a Soviet counterattack on the Dubysa river on 23 June was found next day when the Russians were again driven back. They were not only dead, but mutilated. ‘Eyes had been put out, genitals cut off and other cruelties inflicted,’ wrote a shocked German staff officer. ‘This was our first such experience, but not the last. On the evening [after] these first two days I said to my general, “Sir, this will be a very different war from the one in Poland and France.”’ Whether or not the Germans’ atrocity story was true, a culture of massacre would characterise the eastern struggle.
Stalin delegated to Molotov, who strove to overcome his stutter, the task of informing the Russian people that they were at war, in a national broadcast at 1215 on 22 June. In the days that followed, the Soviet warlord met repeatedly with his key commanders – there were twenty-nine sessions on the day of the invasion – and made some critical decisions, notably for an evacuation eastwards of industrial plant. The NKVD embarked on wholesale executions and deportations of ‘unreliable elements’, which included many people who merely bore German names. All privately owned radios were confiscated, so that Russians became dependent on broadcast news relayed into factories and offices ‘at strictly determined times’. For some days, Stalin clung to an absurd, self-justificatory flicker of hope that the invasion represented a misunderstanding. There is fragmentary evidence that NKVD agents in neutral countries sought to explore with German interlocutors the possibility of further negotiations, which were spurned.
By 28 June when Minsk fell, such fantasies were dispelled. Stalin suffered a collapse of nerve which caused him to retreat to his dacha in the forest outside Moscow. When a Kremlin delegation headed by Anastas Mikoyan visited him on the 30th, he greeted them with obvious unease, asking sullenly, ‘Why have you come?’ He appears to have anticipated his own overthrow by the minions whom his vast misjudgement had betrayed. Instead, those irredeemably cowed and subservient men besought their ruler to lead them. This, at last, Stalin roused himself to do; on 3 July, he broadcast to the Russian people. In a notable break with the uncompromising authoritarianism that defined his rule, he began with an emotional appeal: ‘Comrades! Brothers and sisters! Fighters of our army and fleet! I address you, my friends!’ He called for a ‘Patriotic War’, the pre-emptive destruction of everything useful in the enemy’s path, and partisan warfare behind the front. Implicitly recognising the British as allies, without irony he declared the war to be part of ‘a united front of peoples standing for freedom’. Then he threw himself into personal direction of every detail of the Soviet Union’s defence as chairman of the Stavka (Staff HQ), the State Committee for Defence, the People’s Commissariat for Defence and the Transport Commission. On 8 August, he also appointed himself Supreme Commander of the Red Army.
Stalin would ultimately prove the most successful warlord of the conflict, yet no more than Hitler, Churchill or Roosevelt was he qualified to direct vast military operations. Ignorant of the concept of defence in depth, he rejected strategic retreat. His insistence that ground should be held to the last, even when armies faced encirclement, precipitated their destruction. Following the early battles, thousands of officers and men deemed guilty of incompetence or cowardice were shot, including Western Front commander Dmitry Pavlov. Stalin responded to reports of mass surrenders and desertions with draconian sanctions. His Order 270 of 16 August 1941 called for the execution of ‘malicious deserters’, and the arrest of their families: ‘Those falling into encirclements are to fight to the last…Those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by all available means.’ Order 270 was read aloud by commissars at thousands of soldiers’ assemblies.
In the course of the war, 168,000 Soviet citizens were formally sentenced to death and executed for alleged cowardice or desertion; many more were shot out of hand, without a pretence of due process. A total of around 300,000 Russian soldiers are believed to have been killed by their own commanders – more than the entire toll of British troops who perished at enemy hands in the course of the war. Even Russians who escaped from captivity and returned to the Soviet lines were seized by the NKVD and dispatched to Siberia or to staff battalions – suicide units – which became institutionalised a few months later, in the proportion of one to each Soviet army – the equivalent of a Western Allied corps. As Hitler’s spearheads approached Moscow, more than 47,000 alleged