Adolf Hitler’s compelling voice inspired his brown-clothed followers to offer their lives in the service of the immortalizing nobility of Destiny. Hitler convinced Germany (as he had convinced himself) that he was of divine origin—that Providence rendered his pronouncements Infallible; that German honor and German glory demanded the Aryan world conquest; that the Fatherland’s insidious enemies—the Communists, the Jews, those who had heaped upon Germany the ignominious betrayal of Versailles—must be crushed.
Of course the German mind was diseased. Of course the Nazi upheaval was an aberration—mankind throwing a tantrum. Of course Hitler was mad: a man whose most intense gratification derived from the ultimate act of obeisance—kneeling before a woman so that she could defecate and urinate upon him. Of course the deranged sycophantic parasites who surrounded Hitler fed on his weaknesses and influenced his bestialities. Of course the circumstances and conditions were “unique.” Yet: of the two nations, Russia and Germany, it was not Germany in which a small minority imposed its will on an unwilling population; it was not Germany in which, by apathy or outright partisan revolt, enormous segments of the population resisted the despotism of the regime; and it was Germany—not Russia—in which the committed successful revolution arose among the workers and trade unionists. The Nazis were the revolutionaries of the 1920s and their movement was fundamentally proletarian: a blind, nonintellectual will for change. Their revolution drove to the right, not the left—a fact overlooked by those who insist that revolution is always a function of the left—but nevertheless it was a populist movement and there was never any coherent resistance movement during Hitler’s lifetime in power. Thus while Russia merely tolerated evil, Germany gave it active and undivided support—and one may argue that in the end there wasn’t a penny’s worth of difference: mere tolerance of evil is an evil in itself.*
One week after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed, German Stukas and Panzers overran Poland.
In the Katyn forest near Smolensk some five thousand ranking officers of the Polish army were slaughtered by execution squads. The Germans were blamed for this, the first mass atrocity of the war. In fact it was the Red Army which massacred the Poles at Katyn—to eliminate any possibility of a Polish military reformation around their cadre of leading officers.†
At the end of November 1939 the soviet Union invaded Finland, committing one million troops in thirty combat divisions against the Finns’ nine divisions (two hundred thousand men). To Stalin’s chagrin the Finns chopped the Red Army to ribbons. A peace was signed in March 1940 by which Finland ceded about 12 percent of her territory to Russia; but Stalin gave up his plans to occupy the country. He had lost two hundred thousand lives—nine times the number of Finnish casualties.
The Russo-Finnish War was militarily and politically indecisive. The Finns gave ground but did not give up; the Russians gained little of value. Perhaps the most significant result of that otherwise inconclusive campaign was its effect on Hitler’s appraisal of Soviet fighting strength and ability. A relative handful of plucky Finns, neither mechanized nor particularly well armed, had made mincemeat of one million crack Red Army troops.
It suggested that Moscow was highly vulnerable.
2.
OPERATION BARBAROSSA
[Preparations for the German invasion of the Soviet Union were made under the code name Plan Barbarossa. The plan had two objectives: first, to attack by surprise and destroy the Russian army at the border, so that the Russians could not retreat into the vast interior of the country to regroup; second, to drive at high speed into the populated industrial heart of European Russia and seize the major cities.
[The invasion was launched from Poland, spearheaded across north-central Russia in the direction of Moscow, then dispersed in fast-moving armies to the north (Leningrad), the center (Moscow) and the south (Stalingrad, the Ukraine, the Crimea, the Caucasus).]
Communists and Jews were two groups which rapidly merged into one in Nazi rhetoric. Bolshevism became a Jewish conspiracy (as it had been earlier to the White Russians); the Soviet government was Jewish and its leaders were Jews—Stalin, Beria, all of them.
A Jewish government obviously did not represent the Aryan people of Russia; or even the Slavs (although to the Nazi ideologists a Slav wasn’t much better than a Jew). The Jew was subhuman: he was not a human being, he was vermin—a symptom of degrading putrefaction. This pitiless racial mysticism of the Nordic Germans led at first to national policy—the clan oaths, the marriage permits, the exhaustive racial “hygiene” investigations—and then quickly to foreign policy, where it became a reconfirmation of the abiding German distrust of Russian communism.
Germans understood—and quietly approved—Hitler’s strategem of neutralizing the Reds (the real enemy) with the nonaggression pact while crushing the rest of Western Europe in 1940, to prevent a stab in the back from that direction when Germany went to war against the Soviet Union. The pact had been a mutual convenience and everyone recognized that—the Russians as well as the Germans. As a result, by the early summer of 1941 both sides were preparing for the inevitable conflict, and the German attack did not surprise anyone in the Kremlin; only its timing did.
The Luftwaffe and Hitler’s two hundred divisions attacked without warning just after midnight in the dark morning hours of June 22, 1941—a Sunday.
Within a week the Panzers had utterly destroyed fourteen entire Red divisions. German planes went over with a great abdominal rumble, dropping sticks of bombs and vomiting parachutes. The guns—both sides still used horse-drawn artillery—produced brutal casualties because neither side was entrenched. It was a war of movement with no time for fortification; where the invader met the resistance of bunkers and defensive lines of earthworks, he bypassed them and left them isolated for the second and third waves to mop up.
The Germans took the Ukraine at a rate of eleven miles a day despite fierce resistance. The retreating Russians left scorched earth.
The initial victories were easy. Hitler’s contempt for the Red Army seemed justified. The Russians were throwing Cossack cavalry divisions at him—horse against the might of German armor!
Stalin’s reaction to disaster was very nearly the same as the reaction Hitler would later display when the tables were turned. Stalin’s orders forbade retreat or withdrawal under any circumstances: retreat was treason and traitors would be shot. The result was that entire divisions stood their hopeless ground and were slaughtered or gathered into the vast bag of prisoners taken by the Germans.
[By September the Germans had taken nearly a million Russian soldiers.]
Operation Barbarossa was on schedule. But then Hitler made the crucial error.
The German generals intended to meet the Red Army at Moscow. The battle would be decisive. Everything was committed to it—until Hitler decided it was necessary to take Leningrad, the industries of the Donets, and the Crimea. To accomplish these dubious purposes he diverted hundreds of thousands of men from the center prong and sent them south.