Midsummer Heat
TO MUCH OF THE WORLD, Germany’s latest victory in Crete, especially when the British defenders appeared to hold all the aces, merely added to the sense of military invincibility. German propaganda made sure that the modern mechanized juggernaut was on full display: Die Deutsche Wochenschau newsreels showed diving Stukas, columns of panzers and armoured cars, and troops firing powerful machine guns. Guns pounded enemy positions, just as viewers were pounded with im-agery of military might. Suddenly, the failure of the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain was a distant memory. Nazi Germany was back on form doing what it did best: smashing one country after another with overwhelming air and land power.
There was, however, less footage of the all-important war at sea, where Germany was not faring anything like so well, and nor was anyone questioning whether charging into the Balkans and on to Crete made good strategic sense. Nor would they when BARBAROSSA remained a secret.
Yet the fact remained that with the exception of the astonishing victory against France, crushing a string of weaker opponents masked the huge challenges still facing Germany. The British had been defeated in Flanders, in Greece and on Crete, and been given a bloody nose in Libya, but as convoys and supplies continued to stream across the oceans, so its Army was growing with every passing day, and so too were its air forces. Britain was not only still very much in the war, but as a threat its power was increasing, not falling away.
In fact, the blitzkriegs hid from the world the very brittle foundations on which those German victories were based. Because of the chronic shortages of resources, and because Britain was still in the war, invasion of the Soviet Union was the only chance of remedying the situation. And nothing less than total victory would suffice. Yet despite German confidence, that was a very tall order because the German way of war was based on a comparatively small operational reach – one that worked very effectively in countries such as Norway, Greece or even France but would be tested more fully in the vast expanses of the Soviet Union.
In the Balkans, the Wehrmacht had demonstrated a more refined version of the Bewegungskrieg tactics employed in France, and it was certainly the case that 12. Armee, used in Yugoslavia and Greece, was more proportionally mechanized than any German army of 1940. Yet, for BARBAROSSA, the number of fully mechanized divisions remained alarmingly low: panzer divisions had more than doubled to twenty-one, and motorized divisions to thirteen, but that still made only thirty-three in all out of an expanded army of over 200 divisions.
Nor were all these divisions available for BARBAROSSA. Despite Mussolini’s and Ciano’s fears, it was agreed that occupation of Greece would largely be in the hands of the Italians (although German forces would remain on Crete), but elsewhere Germany had to maintain occupation forces: in the occupied zone in France, in the Low Countries, in Denmark and Norway, as well as the Greater Reich. There were also the increasing demands of the North African theatre, which most certainly did require motorization and was a further drain on General Adolf von Schell’s motor pool. It meant that instead of twenty-one panzer divisions being available for the Soviet Union, there were only seventeen – i.e. seven more than had been used in France for a country that was thirty-seven times the size.
Key to the success of Bewegungskrieg was overwhelming force at the main points of attack combined with speed of operations. The trouble was, this combined weight of force and speed could only be maintained so far – in fact, a distance of around between 300 miles and 500 miles at the absolute most.
Overseeing the operational plan for BARBAROSSA was General Halder, the army’s Chief of Staff, who was well aware of the German operational reach and so was basing the plan of attack on smashing Soviet resistance very quickly and on the assumption that the Red Army would crumble under the weight of the initial blow. A number of premises were assumed, including, perhaps most importantly, that the Red Army could be crushed close to its western borders – that is, along the line of the Dnieper and Dvina rivers, which ran north–south for some 500 kilometres, or 300 miles, from the German–Polish border, and was thus within the German operational reach. As it was, Adolf von Schell was forced to create a complicated system of dumps and motor pools in order to supply fuel to panzer and motorized divisions that far forward. The danger, as Halder was keenly aware, was of hold-ups for lack of supplies; it was no good cutting a swathe and then being forced to halt, because then the Red Army would be able to retreat and reorganize; unlike the French Army, it had thousands of miles to play with. And unlike its counterpart in France, it had effectively a limitless source of manpower. The latest German intelligence suggested that the Red Army had more than 170 divisions and a large arsenal of weapons and tanks. Their intelligence, as usual, was wrong: the Russians had even more than that, some 303 divisions, over 4.7 million men in uniform, and more waiting in the wings.
The key was to destroy as much of the Red Army as quickly as possible, to the point where it would be incapable of further resistance. ‘Speed! No stops!’ Halder noted in his diary, echoing Guderian’s mantra from the previous May. ‘The continuous operation depends on motor transport.’ A few days later, he added, ‘Motor vehicle must accomplish everything.’
It has been repeatedly argued that the postponement of BARBAROSSA was not caused by the campaigns in the Balkans, North Africa or Crete, and that, rather, the delay allowed for the further production of trucks. It has also been pointed out that the German Army benefited from the numerous British trucks captured in Greece. Be that as it may, the campaigns none the less used up a great deal of precious fuel. The campaign in the Balkans, General Georg Thomas pointed out at a meeting of the War Economy Department in April, had influenced the fuel situation ‘through the additional amounts that have to be taken from the Reich for these ventures’; these were amounts that could not then be used in the East.
Fuel, or the lack of it, was a never-ending headache that so far Germany had failed to solve. Having plundered the existing stocks of conquered territories, the only other means of getting crude oil was from the Ploești oilfields and then sending it by rail. The alternative was synthetic fuel, a process pioneered in Germany during the last war which involved gasifying coal or converting a mixture of carbon monoxide and liquid hydrocarbons. At any rate, both processes needed coal, which meant it could not be used for steelmaking and other industrial processes.
Leading the way in Germany’s synthetic fuel production was Carl Krauch, chairman of the advisory board of IG Farben, the chemical industry conglomerate, and also the Plenipotentiary of Special Issues in Chemical Production. By the end of 1940, Krauch had begun the process of dramatically increasing production particularly of synthetic aviation fuel, with the expansion of three existing plants and the creation of a fourth facility at the small town of Auschwitz in Poland, which was served by good railway connections. This latter plant, which would produce all manner of synthetic fuels, including methanol, used for aviation fuel and explosives, was mapped out over an area of eight by three kilometres, with a budget of a staggering 776 million Reichsmarks – that is, about £6 billion in today’s money. Even so, this new plant would take time to bear fruit. Factories of this size were not built overnight, and not in a matter of months either – at least, not in the Third Reich. A further alternative was using gas, and General von Schell reckoned that in May they had around 65,000 vehicles running with gas generators. The long and short of it was this: that unless the Germans defeated the Soviet Union swiftly and then were able to plunder the oilfields at Baku in the Caucasus, the oil shortage was only going to get worse, regardless of state-of-the-art new factories at Auschwitz. However, since they would have had no means of transporting the oil even if they did get there, this was all rather academic. Without pipelines and without shipping, the oil at Baku would remain tantalizingly where it was – and that was if the Red Army did not destroy it first, before the Germans could get their hands on it.
While the distractions in the Balkans, Greece and North Africa were undoubtedly using up fuel Germany could ill afford to burn, those campaigns were also a sap on another crucial supply as BARBAROSSA loomed. General von Schell had been valiantly trying to reduce the number of different types of motor vehicles, but fresh booty kept adding to the pool. The trouble was that every vehicle needed spare parts, and every vehicle variant needed different spare parts. With Halder repeatedly stressing the importance of trucks in maintaining a swift blitzkrieg in the Soviet Union, building up a stock of spares was clearly of paramount importance. ‘The Balkan campaign,’ wrote von Schell, ‘left a large hole in the stock of supplies, because the vehicles of motorized troops that had taken part in it had suffered badly in the mountainous terrain, and they had to be re-equipped for action in the East in four weeks.’
The truth was, those same old problems that had plagued Prussia and then Germany for centuries had not gone away: the lack of natural resources and the geographical isolation from the world’s sea lanes meant the Reich had to avoid long, attritional conflicts at all costs. The booty plundered from the early victories had provided a short-term fillip and not much more, so that by midsummer 1941 Germany was growing short of all manner of materiel – even manpower. There were now 7.3 million men in the Wehrmacht, including teenagers, who accounted for some 660,000 recruits a year, but that was it as far as trained young men of military age was concerned; by June 1941, the manpower barrel was beginning to be scraped, and because BARBAROSSA was yet another do-or-die, go-for-broke gamble, the best available manpower was now either committed to the initial assault or already in action elsewhere, such as North Africa and the Mediterranean. Reserves for the Army amounted to 385,000 men. Since planners were assuming casualties would be around 275,000 during the ‘frontier battles’ and possibly a further 200,000 in September, the supply of trained reserves would therefore be exhausted by October. This was fine, just so long as the battle was over every bit as quickly as hoped – and expected.
Production of small arms (rifles, machine guns and so on), as well as tanks and artillery pieces, had considerably increased because due to Hitler’s major drive to increase ammunition the previous year, there was now a vast stockpile. This allowed steel allocations that had been made for ammunition to be redirected elsewhere. It was an inefficient waste of factories and machine tools, but it did allow a dramatic increase in armaments, and not least tanks. Panzer production was hardly efficient, however. There were no giant factories like that planned by IG Farben at Auschwitz; rather, they were being produced in what the British might call ‘shadow factories’ around the Reich – at Alkett and Daimler-Benz in Berlin, for example, or at MAN in Nuremberg. Dispersal was not good for economies of scale and meant materials had to be shipped all over Germany, but by using existing plants and expanding those factories, at least capacity could be swiftly increased. Also important was the increasing fear of the RAF; dispersal was seen as an important deterrent, and for all the withering criticism that has been flung at RAF Bomber Command ever since this period, their not-very-accurate bombing efforts were most definitely playing on German fears and affecting how the Reich was both defended and how it produced war materiel.
By the first half of 1941, these factories were producing some 140 Panzer Mk IIIs a month, each armed with a 50mm gun, a figure that was steadily rising, and around thirty Mk IVs with a 75mm gun. This meant, however, that although the Wehrmacht had around 3,000 tanks in June 1941, still only 1,600 of those were Panzer Mk IIIs and IVs.
A further increasingly worrying shortage was in food and animal feedstuffs. The 1940 harvest had not been good, while there was now such a shortage of manpower in the Reich itself that Polish prisoners had been brought in to help on the land. Nor had the occupied territories remotely solved the problem, for although Germany had wasted no time in demanding considerable amounts of agricultural riches, all of these countries, whether France, the Netherlands or elsewhere, were, like Germany, dependent on food imports themselves; Norway, for example, was reliant on imports for 57 per cent of its food, all of which was now cut off by the British blockade, which had been in place against all occupied countries since the previous August. By the summer of 1941, this was being felt increasingly keenly. Rationing was stringent in Germany and considerably harsher than it was in Britain, which was positively bursting with food in comparison. Nor was oil the only fuel needed for the Army; BARBAROSSA would not only involve more than three million men who all needed to be fed, but some 600,000 horses requiring fodder.
Herbert Backe’s Battle of Production had not been the hoped-for success, but the invasion of the Soviet Union was expected to solve a lot of the food shortage problems. In fact, the need for food was a driving force in Hitler’s plans for Lebensraum in the East. Yet Backe was aware that for all the vast tracts of grain that grew across the Ukraine each year, only a small surplus was exported. The rest was used to feed the urban population, which had grown by around thirty million since the revolution back in 1917. There was, however, a solution that Backe now proposed – one that would, as far as he was concerned, kill two birds with one stone. As a man imbued with the same warped racial ideology as the Führer, Backe saw the war as a struggle of race as much as a battle of resources. Quite simply, Backe was proposing to divert food away from Russian cities and straight to Germany and the Wehrmacht instead.
In a meeting called by General Georg Thomas on 2 May 1941, it was quite calmly accepted that the mass starvation of millions of Soviets was the only solution to Germany’s food shortage. ‘The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war,’ it was minuted matter-of-factly. ‘If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that many millions of people will die of starvation.’ This stunning admission suggests Thomas and his colleagues were aware there was a choice; indeed there was, and all chose to save Germany. For Thomas, it was about survival not ideology; for Backe, it was both. The SS was also making preparations to exterminate vast numbers of Jews and Untermenschen, but the Hunger Plan, which was expected to result in the deaths of ‘umpteen millions’, was being coolly endorsed by the Wehrmacht. Like the SS, its leaders too were becoming architects of genocide.
In fact, Thomas, by instinct anti-Nazi, was turning himself into something of a monster, with his ruthless pragmatism getting the better of him. Earlier in the year, he had been gloomy about the potential for exploitation in the East, which was increasingly being painted in Nazi quarters as a panacea; he was aware, for example, that when Germany had captured Ukraine in 1917, it had reaped few rewards. Yet, by May, he had completed, openly at any rate, a volte-face and began embracing the possibilities for exploitation to be found in the Soviet Union. In a private memo in June, however, he was once again more circumspect. Russia was undoubtedly rich in raw materials and foodstuffs, but, he noted, ‘as experience teaches, a really significant increase, however, can only occur over a period of several years.’ This, he added, was especially the case in the East, because of the primitive infrastructure. ‘In conclusion,’ he added, ‘the core problem of German warfare cannot be completely avoided through access to Russian territory. Relief is only in certain areas and only partially within those areas.’
In other words, Thomas suspected Germany was doomed.