Murder, however, was clearly in the air as the destructive dynamism on the ground had gained momentum. Perhaps the best known of the carefully compiled statistical reports of an individual murder unit, that of Karl Jäger of Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppe A, showed a sharp increase in early August, not just in the total numbers of Jews killed, but especially in the numbers of women and children.62 The verbal transmission of orders, varying interpretations of these orders, and differences in logistic and manpower capabilities meant that the timing and the escalation of the murder operations were not uniform. By mid-August, however, it seemed to be generally known among SS officials that all Soviet Jews were to be murdered.
On 15 August, Himmler witnessed just such an execution of partisans and Jews near Minsk, at which he became nauseated. The Reichsführer-SS also found himself pressed to find an alternate method of execution. Afterward, Himmler gave a speech to SS officers that legitimized such killings as necessary for security and, according to some present, ordered the liquidation of all Jews in the east on the basis of a directive from Hitler. That afternoon he visited a hospital with mental patients and discussed the possibility of killing through methods other than shooting, such as gas vans. At roughly the same time, Himmler was pressured by several top subordinates, among them Franz Walter Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, to adopt “a radical treatment of the Jewish question now possible for the first time in the east.” By late August, then, while a decision had not been taken to kill all the Jews of Europe, the factors were in place to ensure the murder of the Jews of the Soviet Union.63 Spectacular military success had created, at least temporarily in early July, a mood of unlimited possibilities, the consequences of which reverberated throughout the Soviet Union. By late summer, even as military operations slowed and showed signs of an impending crisis, the racial war increased in tempo. Barbarossa had always assumed a war of annihilation on a number of levels, so, despite the very real problems facing the fighting forces, no slowdown was apparent in the ideological war.
Despite the impressive triumphs won by the hard-charging Wehrmacht and the sanguine assertions of top Nazi leaders, in mid-July the assured expectations of imminent success had begun to mingle with an undercurrent of doubt, not yet enough to undermine overall confidence in victory, but a nagging concern that things were not as they seemed. Both Halder and Bock, often in stunned amazement, routinely noted in their diaries instances of stubborn enemy resistance and refusal to surrender. Goebbels, too, registered the desperate Soviet resistance but hastened to emphasize that it was more “a courage of dullness than of heroism.” From the first days of the invasion, Hitler worried, as he had during the French campaign, that the deep armored thrusts had left the German flanks exposed to attack from both the north and the south. Although Halder dismissed these concerns as the “old refrain,” persistent Soviet counterattacks had, indeed, set nerves on edge and not just in the High Command.64
One Landser, surely speaking for many, noted his shock and dismay at his first experience of a Soviet attack:
I can never forget the first mass attack by Russian infantry…. The Soviet assaults… were carried out by masses of men who made no real attempt at concealment but trusted in sheer weight of numbers to overwhelm us…. The whole mass of Russian troops came tramping solidly and relentlessly forward. It was an unbelievable sight, a machine gunner’s dream…. At 600 meters we opened fire and whole sections of the first wave just vanished leaving here and there an odd survivor still walking stolidly forward. It was uncanny, unbelievable, inhuman…. Then, as if on a signal, the lines of men began running forward… [with] a low, rumbling “Hoooooraaay.”… The rush by the fourth wave came on more slowly for the men had to pick their way through a great carpet of bodies….
About an hour later a further five lines of men came on in a second attack. We smashed this and then crushed a third and fourth assault. The numbers of the enemy seemed endless and new waves of men advanced across their own dead without hesitation…. The number, duration, and fury of those attacks had exhausted and numbed us completely. Not to hide the truth, they had frightened us. Our advance had been no great strategic drive but an ordinary move… and yet they had contested it for day after day and with masses of men. If the Soviets could waste men on our small move…, how often, we asked ourselves, would they attack and in what numbers if the objective was really a supremely important one?… Some of us began to realize for the first time that the war against the Soviet Union was going to be bigger than we had thought it would be and a sense of depression, brought about by a fear of the unknown, settled upon us. That we would win, we had no doubt, but what we were now engaged in would be a long, bitter and hard fought war.65
In truth, despite Halder’s frustration at Hitler’s worries, both the Führer and the anonymous Landser had valid grounds for concern and for the same reason: it had become increasingly clear that, despite the rosy projections of the Barbarossa planners, the German army lacked the ability to accomplish all the objectives set for it. The assumption had been that the Red Army would collapse at the initial blow; if it survived, as it now showed signs of having done, the Wehrmacht had insufficient strength to finish the task. The growing tension between Hitler and the OKH reflected this problem. Hitler’s operational directive of December 1940 had stressed the importance, after the initial victories on the central front, of shifting forces to the north to seize Leningrad and the Baltic coast as well as to the south to secure the economic resources of Ukraine. Although Halder and the Army General Staff acknowledged the significance of capturing these regions, they had always favored a direct thrust on Moscow, itself an important industrial and communications center, as the best way to lure the Red Army into a destructive trap. In agreeing to the Barbarossa plan, Halder had intended from the beginning to develop an attack in the center with such momentum that Hitler would be forced to concede to OKH wishes. In the first two weeks of the campaign, then, even as Hitler expressed concern that Bock’s units were overreaching themselves and allowing the formation of loose pockets from which the enemy might escape, Halder issued orders and guidelines that ignored or undermined the Führer’s instructions. Halder’s obstructionism, however, only angered Hitler and intensified his suspicions, dating to the French campaign, of the Army General Staff.66
Since the Wehrmacht lacked the necessary resources to execute both operational conceptions, a decision had to be made, and soon, as to whether to sustain the drive of Army Group Center toward Moscow or to adhere to the original plan and turn forces to the flanks. “Turn to the north or south?” Hitler puzzled on 4 July. “It will perhaps be the most difficult decision of this war.” The next day, Hitler again grappled with the issue of the future direction of operations, recognizing not only that the moment had come to make a choice but also that it might be the most decisive of the war, indeed, “perhaps in general the only critical decision in this war.” Still, the Führer hesitated three more days, on 8 July finally picking the strategy favored by Halder: Army Group Center would press ahead toward Smolensk with the aim of destroying Red Army forces west of Moscow, while Army Group North would continue the operation toward Leningrad with its own forces. Significantly, what Hitler termed his ideal solution also entailed leveling Moscow and Leningrad to the ground and making them uninhabitable, thus relieving the Germans of the necessity of feeding the civilian populations through the winter. In this instance, the perfect military solution dovetailed nicely with the requirements of the hunger policy: “useless eaters” would be left to starve. More importantly, Hitler had, at least temporarily, also abandoned the Barbarossa plan, an implicit admission that it had failed to accomplish its original goals. Nor had he really made a decisive choice, for, in the following weeks, he and the OKH would continually reopen the festering dispute over the focal point of operations.67