[The diversion not only cost the Wehrmacht in vital strength; it also cost time, for reorganization and resupply.] When Hitler ordered the resumption of the concentrated attack on Moscow it was nearly mid-September, and it was too late. Napoleon had reached Moscow on September 14 but the Russian winter had defeated him; Hitler had not learned from history.
There had not yet been a single successful Russian counter-offensive. In late September Kiev and Vyazma fell to the Germans; von Rundestedt and von Bock took 1,200,000 prisoners. North of them, Army Group Center pressed toward Moscow in October and captured another 600,000 men. At this point in history the majority of Russia’s soldiers had been taken prisoner by the Germans.*
Red reinforcements moved in from the Far East but not nearly fast enough to keep up with the attrition. By November Moscow was under fire, Leningrad under siege, and the entire Ukraine was in German hands.
On November 10, 1941, in his underground command bunker at the Kremlin, Stalin held a conference to analyze the state of the war. It was bleak. The Germans were within twenty-five miles of the Kremlin and a German tank unit had penetrated the outskirts of the city itself on the north; only one railway—to the east—was left uncut.
The war looked just about lost, on all fronts.
The reasons for the staggering German victories of 1941 were varied and numerous but one significant factor was the Russian unwillingness to fight.
Stalin’s terrors had created in the population an unparalleled hatred and fear toward the regime. The collectivization of agriculture under the forced programs of commissars and Soviets had cost the lives of millions of farmers and had “relocated” forty million others to Siberian kolkhozi and forced labor camps. The purges by the GPU and Beria’s secret police had created still more fear and fury.
By October even Stalin had to acknowledge for the record that many Russians at the front were throwing down their arms and welcoming the Germans. So unreliable did Stalin deem his own population that he pleaded with Roosevelt and Churchill to send their troops to fight on Russian soil.*
“Treason? † Perhaps it was. You recall Talleyrand’s definition—treason is a question of dates. A charge leveled by winners against losers. I think to the Russian people it was not a question of treason but of patriotism. The strength of a nation in the long run is no greater than the people’s measure of themselves, and the Russian people were ashamed, you know. Ashamed they had let Stalin do these things to them. At least that is my estimation, but remember, it comes from a Jew; it is biased.
“I was not in Russia at this time; I was there later of course, more than once. What I tell you about these times is what I have learned from many people.
“In my brother’s village no one had been informed of the Final Solution at that time. In fact the German frontline soldiers had not been informed of it. To the Russians of nineteen-forty and forty-one the Germans were a trustworthy people—reliable and civilized. It had always been so, had it not? German civilization was the model upon which the Czars had based Russian society.
“One Ukrainian told me that when the Germans arrived in his district they were courteous—almost gallant—and some of the villagers came out with flowers to meet them, and the Germans cursed the inefficient Russians for not having built railroads and roads enough to support the blitzkrieg’s supply lines, but they were laughing while they cursed.
“At first the rumors of mass brutality were met with disbelief. No one thinks himself a poor judge of human nature, and the first Germans into Russia were simple soldiers for the most part—not SS, not Gestapo. That all came later.
“My brother lived in a village east of Kotelnikovsky. Not the Ukraine, really—southern Russia, near the Caucasus. The Germans didn’t get that far at first. Not for nearly a year, in fact. But in the meantime the refugees who managed to flee without being caught by the Germans brought the news with them.”
[The news was of incredible bestialities.]
3.
SEBASTOPOL* AND THE LARGER WAR
In October 1941 the Germans overran the whole of the Crimean peninsula, isolating Sebastopol against the sea.
The Wehrmacht (the Eleventh Army under von Manstein) made repeated efforts right up to year-end to broach the city’s defenses and succeeded in pushing the defense lines closer to the populated center but each German assault broke against the fervor of Russian resistance and when the winter rains stalled further German attempts the city was still holding out.
For months the suburbs burned. The pungent stench was nauseating—a clinging acridity of burning wood and flesh—but a good part of the time it was driven back across the German lines by prevailing winds.
Then, in May 1942, the Russian counteroffensive at Kerch collapsed and the German forces there were freed to wheel toward Sebastopol. The population moved into caves and bunkers; the ordeal of German shelling became uninterrupted. Early in June the Luftwaffe assembled a force of several hundred bombers and the Wehrmacht brought up a mammoth railroad gun, the siege cannon “Dora,” designed to smash the Maginot Line. The German 105s, the German bombs, the German siege-gun shells destroyed Sebastopol’s airfields and cut off the sea-lanes of supply. The rest was obvious.
[The Germans took ninety thousand prisoners and called it a great victory; but Stalin was not dissatisfied since the siege had tied down von Manstein’s three hundred thousand men for two hundred and fifty days during which they might have made a decisive difference on the center fronts.]
[Perhaps the turning point had come as early as December 4, 1941, when Zhukov and Vlasov at Moscow blunted the German drive. Vlasov’s daring counterattack broke through the German lines and halted the advance; then it snowed; Stalin’s fresh Siberian units had time to reach the front and the Germans fell back from Moscow’s suburbs under their attack.
[For the most part the war was stalled in its tracks by the severity of that winter. Casualties were high, the fighting savage, but the Germans were no longer in motion; Stalin had time to build new armies and train them and—with the aid of lend-lease—equip them.]
Nevertheless after the spring thaw the relentless Teutonic march resumed. Russian resistance was heavier, better organized, and the news of SS atrocities had firmed up Russia’s will to fight; but German air and armor kept the invasion alive and in the summer of 1942 the German hordes smashed through to Stalingrad.
Krupp shells destroyed the city but not its inhabitants; the defenders held. And in November 1942 the Red Army counterattacked: surrounded the Germans and obliterated half a million of Hitler’s soldiers at Stalingrad.
It was on November 19, 1942 that the German advance became a retreat. From that date on, there was no further possibility of a Nazi conquest. By 1945 the Reds would push the Wehrmacht all the way back to Berlin.
4.
KRAUSSER AND VON GEYR:
THE HUNT FOR TREASURE
Gruppenführer Otto von Geyr arrived at Tempelhof on November 8, 1942, and was collected by a command car which took him silently through the blacked-out streets to the Chancellery where he met for nearly an hour with Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, in a conference that also included SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. No minutes of this meeting were kept. But later that night, von Geyr and Himmler went together to Himmler’s office in Prinz Albrecht Strasse and Himmler’s staff notes, dated November 9, indicate that the subject of discussion was Standartenführer Heinz Krausser’s dispatch of September 13 concerning the possible whereabouts of the five-hundred-ton Czarist gold bullion treasury. The phrase “Siberian iron-mine shaft” appears in the staff notes.