‘Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans ... As for the rest ... the fate of Russia will be exactly the same.’
ADOLF HITLER
For many German families the Second World War is synonymous with the Russian front. It was where the overwhelming majority of German servicemen fought, and where more than three-quarters of their 3.9 million dead lie buried.1 In 1945 the Russian front came to Germany. It engulfed East Prussia and Saxony, and surged all the way to the Elbe, while two million Soviet soldiers stormed Berlin, the would-be capital of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’.
The Second World War is known in Russia as ‘The Great Patriotic War’. If the war only became truly ‘patriotic’ after the invaders were exposed as genocidal enslavers and not the liberators many people had hoped them to be, there was no doubting its great scale. Hitler’s invasion pitted the largest national armies ever assembled against each other. The front stretched from the Arctic Circle to the shores of the Black Sea. Operations took place over unprecedented distances. German forces advanced more than 1,000 miles into the Soviet Union; at its greatest extent, their operational front stretched to nearly 2,000 miles. Individual campaigns took place over greater areas than previous wars. The gap smashed in the German lines by the Soviet winter offensive in December 1942 was wider than the entire Western Front in the First World War.
It is salutary to compare the scale of operations on the Russian front with those in western Europe. In August 1944, 38 Allied divisions fighting on a 75-mile front in France encircled 20 German divisions; after 27 days’ combat, they destroyed the German forces in Normandy and took 90,000 prisoners. At the same time the Soviet forces mounted three offensives. Along the borders of Romania 92 Soviet divisions and 6 tank/mechanized corps attacked 47 German and Romanian divisions on a frontage of 450 miles; they encircled 18 German divisions and took 100,000 prisoners in a week. Meanwhile, 86 Soviet divisions and 10 tank/mechanized corps attacked across southern Poland and destroyed nearly 40 German divisions in the process. The third Soviet offensive, which had been under way since 22 June, involved 172 divisions and 12 tank/mechanized corps in an advance of 400 miles along a 600-mile front; it overwhelmed 67 German divisions, of which 17 were never to reappear on the German order of battle.
By late 1944 there were 91 Allied divisions in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, facing 65 German divisions across a 250-mile front. In the east, 560 Soviet divisions were fighting 235 German divisions across a 2,000-mile front, driving them rapidly westwards. So there is a strong argument that the Soviet Union had already won the war by 1944, whether the western Allies finally opened a second front or not.2
The human cost of the war is so beyond the experience of western Europeans or Americans that it is hard to imagine. To compare the scale of casualties, about 2.5 per cent of the British population was killed or injured during the Second World War; American casualties were 0.6 per cent. In the USSR, the death toll is currently estimated at ten million military and 17 million civilian deaths, representing nearly 20 per cent of the pre-war population. Every three months, the Russians lost more men than America lost in the whole war. Another statistic gives pause for thought. Twice as many soldiers were killed on the Eastern Front in 1941–45 than in all the theatres of war of 1914–18 put together. By mid-1943 the German High Command calculated it was losing 3,000 men per day, every day, most of them in Russia.
Neither side limited its killing to military personnel. The War in the East was a biblical war of conquest conducted with 20th-century technology. As it was Hitler’s war, there was never any prospect of it ending in a conventional peace treaty. The German dictator intended far more than just moving a border here and annexing a province there. He was not going to accept reparation payments or negotiate a treaty in the wake of military victory. Hitler planned nothing less than a war of extermination, eliminating the Communist regime, the Jews, and indeed most of the population of eastern Europe. He and his followers regarded the Slavic peoples as sub-humans, to be enslaved or exterminated by the superior, Aryan race: the Germans. The conquered territories would become German colonies, with new German cities linked to the Reich by Autobahn and railroad. The Russian steppe was to be dotted with German soldier-colonists establishing what the Nazis regarded as brave outposts of civilization in a barbarous land. This was total war, in its purest and most horrific form. One side or the other would be annihilated.
The full extent of Hitler’s grotesque war aims was known only to the upper echelons of the Nazi hierarchy. After the war, many German generals would persuade both the Nuremberg prosecutors and western military historians that they had not known of these aims. In 1945 British and American officers found it difficult to accept that fellow officers and gentlemen – who had fought a largely ‘clean’ war in the west – could have been implicated in the horrors being reported in the east. Unfortunately, more recent investigation has exposed the disagreeable truth that the German Army was indeed deeply implicated. Heinrich Himmler, chief executor of the ‘Final Solution’, described the Holocaust as ‘a page of Glory in our history which has never been written and never is to be written’. However, the days are long past when the SS could serve as the alibi of a nation. It is now a matter of record that a disturbingly high number of German Army and police units participated in the slaughter of Jews, gypsies, Communist government officials, their families and other civilians. The Hamburg Institute for Social Research organized a controversial exhibition in 1995 that revealed the extent of army involvement. Pro-German forces raised in the Baltic States, the Ukraine, Croatia, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary took part with varying degrees of enthusiasm too.
The Wehrmacht High Command was invited to the Berghof by Hitler on the eve of the attack on Poland in 1939. The loss of so much territory to Poland under the terms of the Versailles Treaty had never been accepted by the Germans, and they would probably have gone to war to recover it even if Hitler had never come to power. But Hitler invested the campaign with far more than territorial objectives. His address to the generals anticipated both the nature of German rule in the east and the nature of his war against the USSR:
in the East I have put my death’s head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language ... Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans ... As for the rest ... the fate of Russia will be exactly the same.3
One officer recorded in his diary how Hermann Göring literally danced with glee at Hitler’s words.
The German Army treated Soviet prisoners-of-war with extraordinary and unprecedented cruelty. A Russian soldier captured by the Germans had less chance of surviving captivity than British or American servicemen captured by the Japanese, who had a 40 per cent mortality rate in the jungle prison camps. Five million Soviet servicemen were taken prisoner in the Second World War, and three million of them died: a mortality rate of 60 per cent. By contrast, the death rate of British and American soldiers captured by the Germans in the Second World War was 3.6 per cent.
At his trial at Nuremberg, SS-Obergruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewski said: ‘If, for decades, a doctrine is preached that the Slav race is an inferior race, and that the Jews are not even human at all, then such an explosion is inevitable.’ About three million Germans were captured by the Russians during the war, and a third of them died. However, this is an average that conceals the extent of Russian revenge in the early part of the war. More than half the total of German prisoners were captured in 1945, and most of them survived, even if imprisoned for ten years, as most of them were. However, only a relative handful of the men captured in 1942–43 saw Germany again: of the approximately 100,000 members of the 6th Army that surrendered at Stalingrad, only one in 20 survived to be repatriated in 1955.
If the role of Adolf Hitler is central to the nature and the course of the War in the East, that of his enemy and eventual nemesis, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili – or Stalin, as the world knew him – was hardly less important. There was considerable truth to the idea that ‘only Stalin got us into this mess, and only Stalin can get us out’, although it was not a sentiment to voice in Russia if you valued your life. Stalin bears personal responsibility for the weakness of the Soviet armed forces in 1941, and the readiness of the Russian and Ukranian peasantry to welcome a foreign invader who promised to drive out the Communists and abolish the collective farms. It was on his orders that countless soldiers were sacrificed in premature, over-ambitious offensives beyond the operational abilities of the army that Stalin had beheaded in 1937. Yet as the war progressed, Stalin learned to listen to his best generals, to rely on them rather than the Party apparatchiks whose political reliability was no substitute for military competence. Enigmatic and inhuman, the workaholic Stalin visited neither the front lines nor the factories; indeed, he seldom left the Kremlin.4 From his Spartan office there, he exerted a steadily more decisive grip on the war. The former revolutionary appointed himself Marshal of the Soviet Union, and strode about in glittering uniforms surrounded by bemedalled officers in big hats. The legend of Stalin the military chief took root and, reason notwithstanding, endures to this day in Russia. Only Stalin could have forced through the industrialization of the USSR in the 1930s with such brutal lack of concern over the human cost. If they had been aware of his methods, one suspects the Nazi leadership would have thoroughly approved. As it was, Hitler and his henchmen had no idea the Soviet Union had already won the arms race by 1939. The greatest achievement of Stalin’s regime was to win it a second time, to remove so much of Soviet heavy industry to safety in 1941 and still manage to increase output beyond that of German industry, which had most of western Europe under its control.
‘Truth’, the proverb says ‘is the daughter of Time’, and only with the passage of years has a balanced account of Hitler’s War in the East become feasible. Post-war Soviet accounts were created to feed the vanity of Stalin. As soon as the tide of battle had turned, the ageing tyrant, who had never served in any army, strove to create a myth of military genius just as Hitler had done. Successive ‘histories’ sought to demonstrate Stalin’s military genius. After his death, Khruschev demanded similar treatment, necessitating a complete revision of Soviet history, and another radical overhaul was required after his overthrow. After the ‘decades of stagnation’, President Mikhail Gorbachev swept away the surviving gerontocracy and instituted reforms intended to improve the system. Unfortunately for him and his regime, they led to the disintegration of the Soviet empire that Stalin had established in eastern Europe. The Soviet Union only outlasted its former satellites by less than two years before it splintered along ancient national boundaries. The Baltic States escaped to join the west; the Ukraine is still trying to follow suit, although Belarus remains stuck in a time-warp. As the political geography of eastern Europe has been transformed, so the history of the Great Patriotic War has been liberated from the dead hands of Communist functionaries.
For the 50-year period that the Soviet history of the war was massaged to suit the ruling clique, western readers relied heavily on German accounts of the War in the East. Some are classics of war literature, and others are extremely valuable for the light they cast on German grand strategy and on the operational realities of armoured warfare across enormous battlefields. Yet, as will be seen, even a commander of indisputable brilliance like Von Manstein was capable of twisting the facts. His literary sleight of hand in Lost Victories was as hard to detect as his shift of Panzer divisions to the south of Kharkov in 1943, and no less effective. The common impression given by German accounts is that the Soviets enjoyed insurmountable numerical and material superiority, yet had it not been for Hitler’s lunatic decisions, German professionalism could have defeated the ‘Asiatic hordes’. There is a degree of truth here, but it is far from the whole story. Some of the generals who advanced this thesis had also entertained the hope, fostered by Goebbels, that the western Allies might strike a deal with Hitler and join forces with the Wehrmacht against the Communists.
This book does not attempt to cover every battle of the war in detail. Certain battles, for instance Stalingrad and Kursk, receive more extended treatment, while other major actions are relegated to a paragraph or two. However, it is important to note that in terms of combat losses, no single battle or campaign dominated the history of the Russian front. German losses mounted at a remarkably consistent rate from June 1941 until 1945; on a graph of losses against time, the greatest battles appear as small deviations in a generally smooth upward curve. The German Army in the east (the ‘Ostheer’) was depleted by month-on-month attrition that consistently exceeded the flow of replacements.5 It is in this context that the many brilliant feats of arms by generals such as Von Manstein, Guderian or Model should be seen. They won some spectacular victories against numerically superior forces, and some of their operations are still studied in military academies, and for good reason, but they did not arrest the overall progress of the war.
Nevertheless, the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk were recognized at the time as battles of special significance. The former was a defeat of unparalleled magnitude for the German Army. Germany had accelerated its call-up to provide the manpower for the 1942 offensive in Russia. The complete and utter failure of Hitler’s strategy left the Ostheer no prospect of realizing the German dictator’s boundless objectives in the east. Hitler quietly agreed to pull back his forces opposite Moscow into more defensible positions. Even he now accepted that the swastika would never fly above the Kremlin. Kursk was another disaster for the Germans. Although their casualties in the battle, especially tank losses, are wildly exaggerated in almost every English language account, its political impact is beyond dispute. For the first time in the Second World War a major strategic offensive mounted by the Wehrmacht in summer had been brought to a halt. As successive Russian offensives drove back the front line in the late summer of 1943, Germany’s allies opened negotiations with Moscow. Only inside the concrete bunkers of the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ could you fail to know which way the wind was blowing.6