Operation Barbarossa was doomed before it even began. In 1941, without a clear strategic objective, a war against the Soviet Union could never have been won. It was a head-on collision between fascism and communism, a war of conquest and annihilation waged under the banner of Nazi racial ideology. For the people of the Soviet Union, the message was clear: the Nazi regime had launched a war of extermination, so there could be no compromise, because compromise meant death.
From the very first moment, this was an operation where law and morality were thrown aside. There was no real plan beyond “we’ll attack the Soviet Union, take Moscow, and by then we’ll have won. ” That was dangerously detached from reality. On August 23rd, 1939, a German delegation landed in Moscow, and Joseph Stalin sent his personal limousine to pick up Hitler’s foreign minister.
The Hitler-Stalin pact was a sensation. Two of the largest opposing ideologies, Bolshevism and National Socialism, had spent years tearing each other apart in propaganda, then suddenly stood shoulder-to-shoulder. The non-aggression pact declared neither government would aid the other’s enemies. A secret protocol agreed to redraw the borders of Eastern Europe.
It was an incredibly clever tactical move for both sides. Hitler gained time to wage war in the West, and Stalin gained time to rearm. But the other promise was the division of Eastern Europe, and that sealed Poland’s fate. The pact paved the way for Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and soon Soviet troops marched into the eastern part of the country, meeting the German Wehrmacht in Brest-Litovsk.
Germany obtained food and strategic raw materials from the Soviet Union, and by May 1940, Hitler felt powerful enough to confront the Allies in the West. France fell in weeks, and the legend of the Blitzkrieg was born. Hitler was no fool. He had clawed his way from the bottom and understood people, masses, and psychology.
He had formed an ideology that had nothing to do with reality, but he toned it down, using it tactically, and until 1940, it brought him great success. On July 6th, 1940, he made a triumphant return to Berlin, having decided his next step was to conquer the British Isles, and then finally wage war on the Soviet Union. On July 31st, 1940, in the presence of his military leaders, Hitler announced his decision to invade the Soviet Union the following spring. The authority of the commander-in-chief was sacrosanct, even to skeptical military figures.
France Halder, head of the army general staff, coordinated plans, and Major General Friedrich Paulus was responsible for detailed elaboration. They were the ones forced to make Hitler’s fantasies feasible, and they didn’t understand the terrible nature of what they were doing. Many areas of the military drew up their own plans independently. On December 5th, 1940, the plans were presented to Hitler.
The week before, Paulus had played through an initial attack plan, wanting to convince the dictator of the need for a swift armored advance that would prevent battle-worthy units of the Red Army from withdrawing into the vast expanses behind them. Hitler had long hesitated, proud that Germany was not involved in a war on two fronts, as in the First World War. But now, with eyes wide open, he marched straight into that same situation. Hitler’s Directive 21 called for the destruction of the Soviet Union and the conquest of territory up to a line stretching from Archangel to Astrakhan.
After the Red Army was defeated, everything was to be pushed back behind the Urals, and the space created made available to German settlers. That was Hitler’s plan, and the Wehrmacht leaders structured their operations around it. The invasion of the Soviet Union seemed reckless, but the Wehrmacht saw the Red Army as a behemoth with feet of clay that would quickly collapse after the first few reverses. Halder said, “The operation is only meaningful if we crush the state in one go.
Our goal is to destroy Russia’s life force. ” German military leaders liked to plan a battle of annihilation, engaging the enemy frontally, outflanking, encircling, and forcing surrender. They had learned a fatal lesson from the Finnos-Soviet Winter War. In November 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland without a declaration of war, suffering heavy losses and 120,000 Russian dead.
The Wehrmacht leaders saw this as confirmation of their low assessment of the Red Army. Had they looked at the map and seen the size of the Soviet Union, they should have realized defeating this adversary would not be easy. But even in 1941, they still didn’t know which operational or strategic goal they had to pursue to win the war. In January 1941, Halder wrote in his journal, “They’re still not clear about Barbarossa, but they’re still going ahead with it.
” That was the military’s traditional understanding of obedience: the political leadership set guidelines, and the military translated them operationally. The invasion was meticulously planned. The Wehrmacht consisted of 153 divisions, the Red Army of 237. Barbarossa could only succeed if the enemy was encircled close to the border and prevented from withdrawing into the Russian hinterland.
Blitzkrieg was a tactic born of need, since Germany lacked the resources for a lengthy war. Yet despite the territory’s size, German military leaders still thought they could end the war in four to six weeks, two months at most. On June 22nd, 1941, as dawn broke, nearly 200 Axis divisions, more than two million men, plunged into a front 2,000 miles long, stretching from the White Sea to the Black Sea. Their aim: the annihilation of the Red Army in a decisive frontier battle.
The German general staff knew it had to be a short war, but Hitler was convinced of the fundamental superiority of the Wehrmacht. The operational target was Moscow, though whether its capture would have had a decisive impact was an open question. It became a source of dispute between Hitler and his general staff, who thought solely in operational terms. Halder wrote in his war journal, “It seems like the enemy has been tactically surprised all round.
” The Wehrmacht had fought one campaign after another, systematically modernized, while the Red Army lacked qualified leaders and modern warfare experience. Soviet military doctrine held that hostilities should take place on neighboring terrain, so Soviet territory wouldn’t suffer. This presented the Wehrmacht with ideal conditions for its armored wedges, supported by Stukas, to penetrate. One soldier, Lieutenant Gat Bugelman, a 28-year-old officer from Cologne and an amateur film-maker, documented the advance with his 16mm camera.
His supply unit had trouble keeping pace with the rapid advance of Army Group Center. The Wehrmacht could feed off the land; it didn’t have to concern itself with the civilian population. The troops took whatever they needed. Some Ukrainians were far from unhappy about the defeat of communism, which had seen millions die of hunger or murdered in cold blood.
But the Germans didn’t behave as liberators. Instead, they robbed the inhabitants of the towns and villages of the basis of their existence. The Wehrmacht was largely a mounted army with around 600,000 vehicles and the same number of horses. Its units headed east on dusty, unpaved roads.
When the conditions proved too much for a truck, the villagers had to help get it back on the road. These scenes foreshadowed what lay ahead. The Barbarossa plan called for armored thrusts toward Leningrad, Smolensk, and Kiev, while the main forces of the Red Army were destroyed through vast encirclements. Days of bitter fighting at the old border fortifications meant German losses were high, but Nazi propaganda never mentioned it.
Hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops were captured through encirclement operations. There were three main reasons for this: German shock troop tactics, Soviet forces poorly led by inexperienced young commanders, and rigid Soviet tactics that forbade retreat. The order was to stand firm at the front, and standardized officers didn’t dare retreat. Eight years of Nazi propaganda had taken effect.
Most German soldiers saw their prisoners not as equal adversaries, but as low-life scum who didn’t deserve respectful treatment under the Hague Convention. Any soldier who showed sympathy was ridiculed. Soviet prisoners were moved back into the hinterland under guard, sometimes on forced marches of several hundred kilometers. Hundreds died along the way.
Those who arrived were left to the caprices of the weather, because the real aim was for them to die. Cameramen with the Nazi propaganda machine filmed what they called Judeo-Bolshevik subhumans to show cinema-goers in Germany. The treatment of Soviet prisoners of war was a crime from the very start. The High Command had made no provisions for feeding them.
It was simply assumed they would die. The plan was to decimate the Soviet forces and take as few prisoners as possible. Soviet prisoners had to dig hollows in the earth with their bare hands for protection from the weather, and German soldiers stood there, seeing confirmation of their image of a subhuman. It was disgraceful, not only that they reduced prisoners to such a state, but that they then saw their image confirmed.
As early as May 13th, 1941, Hitler stipulated that crimes committed by civilians against the Wehrmacht would not be dealt with by military courts. The Barbarossa martial law decree was a huge carte blanche. Soldiers who committed crimes no longer had to justify their actions. Soviet civilians were at the mercy of any officer who could decide their fate.
Such stipulations were criminal from the start, because every war tends toward radicalization. Partisans in civilian clothing were fair game. On July 27th, 1941, a German soldier wrote, “The Russians are tough adversaries. Now we take hardly any of them prisoner.
Instead, we shoot them all. ” This brutality affected the civilian population. Some had welcomed the Germans as liberators, most had adopted a neutral stance and tried to survive. But the behavior of the German troops generated growing resistance.
The Commissar Order decreed that any political commissar who fell into German hands had to be shot. They were “not to be regarded as soldiers,” and the protection of international law didn’t apply. They were to be segregated and executed. This was a direct license to kill, whether or not the person had surrendered.
In the confusion of war, non-commissars were often killed in the heat of the moment, and it was then claimed they were commissars, with the badge simply torn off. Some troop leaders were unhappy with the order, feeling it gave the enemy greater motivation to fight. But large numbers of even the military elite had no problem at all when communists or Jews were involved. After the Wehrmacht took Liepaja in Latvia, Red Army soldiers and communists were shot along with the town’s 7,000 or so Jewish inhabitants.
On August 15th, Himmler personally attended an execution near Minsk. At the sight of the bloodbath, the head of the SS turned white as a sheet, but afterwards declared the mass shootings, while revolting, were a necessary defensive measure. The advancing Wehrmacht units created the space for crimes behind the front. The death squads were accepted so that security units didn’t need to be stationed behind the lines.
Ordinary soldiers were also involved in these crimes. The idea of a “clean Wehrmacht” is a postwar myth that has been propagated in Germany for decades. At no time was the Wehrmacht clean. By mid-August, the three army groups had lost more than 200,000 men.
Yet the Nazi leadership saw no reason to tone down the euphoria of victory. After two weeks, Halder noted in his war journal, “No war has ever been won as quickly as this one. ” This shows how the highest German command structures had totally underestimated the situation. No matter how many prisoners were taken, they didn’t expect the Red Army to reorganize time and time again.
When Hitler visited his troops in the Ukraine in late August, it was dawning on Chief of General Staff Halder that taking Moscow would be no easy task. Resigned, he noted, “If we destroy a dozen divisions, the Russians will simply assemble a dozen more. ” The German troops still cheered their commander-in-chief, and Hitler boasted that the war in the east had already been won. “Moscow will be raised to the ground.
” But appearances were deceptive. The first crisis was noticeable as early as August 1941. Despite the great encirclement battles, Wehrmacht leaders realized this campaign was going to be different from the one they had planned. The Blitzkrieg was no longer an issue.
The goal now was to take Moscow, but it was still another 600 kilometers away, and the rainy Russian autumn was approaching. Operation Barbarossa had actually failed even before it was launched. In Moscow, after the invasion, people stood in line to buy the party newspaper. There was no visible panic.
Stalin himself remained silent. In December 1940, Soviet intelligence had reported an invasion was expected. Stalin ignored the warnings. He just couldn’t believe Hitler would be so stupid as to wage a war on two fronts.
He was convinced a dictator should only start wars he could win. Since 1937, Stalin had arrested around one and a half million people, virtually the entire leadership of the Red Army falling victim to the Great Terror. Now around three million soldiers listened only to orders from Joseph Stalin. Germany had a population of 90 million; the Soviet Union had 190 million.
The Soviets were proud their country covered around one-seventh of the Earth’s surface. All that counted in the Red Army was loyalty to the party line and unconditional obedience. Many commanders had been purged, and the next generation had little experience. When the Germans breached their lines, Soviet troops did not retreat, which enabled the Germans to mount and close pincer movements.
In the months before the invasion, Stalin had insisted his troops advance beyond the heavily defended Stalin line. By June 21st, these positions were only half finished. What was underestimated was the toughness of the Russian soldier and the skill of the Soviet leadership at improvisation. Stalin avoided the public for nearly two weeks, but in reality, he traveled every day to his study in the Kremlin to organize resistance.
On July 3rd, he finally turned to his people. The Soviet air force was vastly inferior, and German armor broke through the defensive lines with ease. Red Army leaders were under double pressure: the enemy, and Stalin, who had sacked, arrested, and shot commanders in response to defeat. With courage born of desperation, Red Army units fought and inflicted heavy losses.
Soviet propaganda dropped leaflets, calling on soldiers to change sides. Very few took up the offer. Certain cities were of symbolic importance to the Nazi regime, cities of Bolshevism that had to disappear. The complete elimination of Bolshevism was the intention.
In mid-August, the Red Army repelled the first assault on Leningrad. On September 8th, 1941, a second attack was launched with massive air support. Leningrad, with its three million inhabitants, was almost completely cut off. The Germans shelled grain warehouses and bombarded anything that could feed the city.
In the beleaguered city, all possible forces were mobilized to defend it. What propaganda didn’t show were the queues outside banks and stores, as people secured their savings and food supplies. With the approval of his generals in early October, Hitler changed his plans and ordered Army Group North to head straight for Moscow. He thought economically and ideologically, wanting to head south to the industrial regions.
But his military leaders fought along classic military-political lines, wanting to make for Moscow. This resulted in a major dispute among Germany’s military leaders. After the fall of Smolensk, in late summer 1941, there was a rigid front in the central region, with trenches and devastating artillery barrages reminiscent of the First World War. Any real activity took place on the flanks.
In autumn 1941, the generals realized this change of focus was not effective, and everything was again concentrated on the center. In October, what was expected to be the final assault on Moscow began. For two months, Operation Barbarossa was characterized by German euphoria as one battle after another was won. But hundreds of thousands of German troops were also killed.
After the biggest encirclement battle in military history on September 26th, 1941, the capital of the Ukraine fell into German hands. Nearly 700,000 Red Army troops were trapped in Kiev. The German Luftwaffe had systematically reduced the city to rubble. This showed how costly fighting for towns was, especially big cities.
While Wehrmacht officers enjoyed the sight of Kiev in flames, SS Death Squad 6, together with the Sixth Army, was planning to eliminate those sections of the populace who didn’t sympathize with the invaders. The operation was disguised as a reprisal for partisan attacks. Babi Yar, a ravine on the edge of Kiev, became the site of a massacre with the active participation of Wehrmacht troops. Tens of thousands of Jews were killed, and the German army played an active role not only in the massacre itself but also in covering it up.
Wehrmacht sappers collapsed the sides of the ravine, possibly killing people who might still have been alive. After the war, in 1946, 15 Germans were charged with war crimes in a show trial, but thanks to statements by those involved, more and more details came to light. In early October 1941, Bugelman’s supply unit reached Smolensk. In July and August, British and American general staffs thought the Soviet Union might lose the war, so rapid was the German advance.
But thanks to the Lend-Lease Act, the neutral United States made economic and military aid available. In September 1941, a delegation traveled from Washington to Moscow, and when the agreement was signed, a Soviet commissar is said to have leaped from his chair, exclaiming, “Now we’ll win the war. ” The supplies were urgently needed. On October 20th, the Sixth Army reached Kharkov and captured the city within five days.
The path to the Donbas coal mining region lay open, but victory was still a long way off. The brutality shown by the Germans was the basis for the resistance shown by the Soviet people. They moved closer together, the old reflex manifest in the war against Napoleon: whenever an invader had to be driven out of Russia, people stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Moscow was preparing for a siege.
Some 300,000 volunteers worked on building fortifications. The Kremlin made provisions for the government to be taken to safety. The mummified body of Lenin, the country’s gold reserves, and the Tsarist treasure had been taken to Siberia in strict secrecy. The rainy season had come early, and logistical support had been fully underestimated.
When the campaign began, it was thought that resistance would collapse in the first week and the Urals could be reached within 25 days. No one considered the logistical dimensions. There was no plan B. Within a few days, the unpaved roads were just mud tracks.
German military leaders had always looked down on logistics; operational warfare played the decisive role. How supplies would arrive played a role at best in assessing the situation. The troops could at least live off the land, and the technology would arrive somehow. The Wehrmacht was in no way prepared for such a long war.
Only fully tracked vehicles still had mobility. Heavy equipment could only be transported by rail, but the Russian broad gauge track had to be converted, a process that was far too slow. The Wehrmacht spearheads became blunt quickly, not only in the winter, but actually in the summer and autumn of 1941. Shortages of spare parts and a growing range of captured vehicles proved to be unparalleled dilettantism.
Another problem was the dust, which exposed all the material to incredible wear and tear. Back in November 1941, Bugelman proudly noted that his unit was always on time, but the lieutenant’s unit was later completely wiped out in the major attack on Moscow. The Soviet capital was prepared for a siege, and the German advance was to be stopped by six armies. The Soviet Union had virtually inexhaustible manpower potential, and its units were supplied with material and vast quantities of ammunition.
All this the Wehrmacht no longer had at its disposal. Moscow had been conquered once before by an enemy from Western Europe. In 1812, Napoleon’s campaign had ended in bitter defeat. The Russians were never willing to give up; there was an inbred feeling that the motherland had to be defended at all costs.
Declaring a state of siege was intended to make it easier for the troops to defend Moscow. Citizens were urged to stay calm and show the soldiers they were worthy. Such exhortations were designed to stop citizens panicking in fear of a hunger blockade. German commanders still believed the Soviet Union was defeated and that it would take only one more decisive battle of annihilation.
Its expanses and climate have always been Russia’s traditional allies. The Wehrmacht advanced in exactly the same way as Napoleon’s army, on foot or with draft horses, and accordingly, the same thing happened. The army was like a big funnel that got wider and wider, gradually swallowed up by this vast country. By the time the Wehrmacht reached Moscow, its victories had taken a heavy toll.
Its units were not equipped, nor were its plans designed, for more than six months of war. The losses were so high that by December, nothing more was possible. Not that most of the tanks had been destroyed, but because of wear and tear and a shortage of spare parts, they couldn’t be serviced or repaired and were no longer operational. The German armaments industry couldn’t meet the output required by the Wehrmacht.
The German economy was not really turned into a war economy until 1941, which explained the supply problems. What made the difference was the speed with which the Russian T34 tank could be built and supplied to the front. In the second half of 1941, the Soviet armaments industry supplied nearly 5,000 tanks, and in 1942, five times as many. It must have been clear to experts that the war could no longer be won.
But Hitler prevailed and said, “We will defend every meter as well as we can. ” In the end, the Wehrmacht had to fall back, because if it hadn’t, there was a risk of the Soviets breaching the German lines. On December 5th, 1941, the Red Army launched its counteroffensive. The Wehrmacht was forced onto the defensive.
Three days later, a German soldier wrote in his diary, “Are we going to have to do a bunk? If so, may God help us. ” Halder noted, “To effect redeployment, manpower will have to be provided with all possible means. ” The vast expanses and the weather made that impossible, and the enemy had learned.
With Moscow almost within reach, the Wehrmacht was totally exhausted, having suffered around 800,000 casualties, a quarter of its entire force. Lines were overstretched, logistical planning proved worthless, and there was no winter clothing. Winter came exceptionally early, with temperatures as much as 40 degrees below zero in Berlin. The bad news from Russia came at an inauspicious time.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan was at war with the United States. Only a few days later, Hitler positioned himself alongside his Japanese ally. When things started to go wrong, the generals spoke up more, suggesting changes or a retreat. Hitler’s response was, “There will be no retreat.
” On December 13th, Soviet high command announced that “the fascist offensive against Moscow has now collapsed. ” Even if Moscow had fallen, the Soviets would have fought on, with sufficient resources through industrial capacity reestablished behind the Urals, and manpower. In 1941, 97 new divisions were formed in the Far East alone. Soviet fighting spirit and capacity to suffer would have remained unbroken.
Soviet propaganda showed pictures of towns and villages liberated by the Red Army. The Wehrmacht had taken Kalinin, north of Moscow, on October 14th, 1941, but on December 16th, it was retaken. Scattered German soldiers, cut off, came out of their positions to be taken prisoner. The joy at being liberated went hand in hand with infinite pain and sadness, and the suffering would go on because the Germans had been ordered to follow a scorched earth policy as they retreated.
Compare that situation to Napoleon’s. Moscow had been evacuated, so he set fire to it, yet the Russians still fought on. In besieged Leningrad, the early onset of winter made the situation even worse. With the cold came hunger.
The young, the weak, and the old received a daily ration of three thin slices of bread and a ridiculously small quantity of meat and fat. In December 1941, the people fell into the funnel, as historian Serge Yarov put it. Corpses and coffins became part of everyday life. The siege of Leningrad was a horrific crime.
The Wehrmacht was not facing armed men, but the old, the young, women, the sick, and the disabled, who were left to their own devices and forced to do terrible things. By the end of 1941, official deaths totaled 54,000. The dead were buried in mass graves. In the winter of 1941-42, at temperatures of 38 below, homes could no longer be heated.
People slept fully dressed, and their hair froze to their blankets. For most of the Germans laying siege, the dying in the city were only subhuman Slavs. The people of Leningrad were being buried alive while the Germans calmly waited for the catastrophe they had purposely created. In 1942, deaths in January, February, and March alone totaled around 300,000.
It was not until the spring of 1942 that the first relief supplies reached the city. The blockade only ended in January 1944. The people of Leningrad suffered and died over 872 days, including 5,300 from starvation alone. By the spring of 1942, the Wehrmacht’s armies had been re-equipped, reinforcements had arrived, and munitions dumps were full in readiness for a major summer offensive.
After the failure to take Moscow, the summer offensive played a major role in boosting morale. But if the war was no longer winnable, why was no alternative considered? Shouldn’t military leaders have gone to Hitler and said, “We have to stop the war”? But in a dictatorship like the Third Reich, that was almost inconceivable.
One of the Wehrmacht’s objectives was Sevastopol, a strategically important city at the southern tip of the Crimea, which had around 100,000 defenders ordered to fight to the last man. The plan for the summer of 1942 consisted primarily of capturing the oil fields of the Caucasus. Hitler intervened actively when his military leaders drew up plans, resulting in one offensive effectively turning into two. The first objective was the oil fields in the Caucasus; the second involved blocking the Volga as the Soviet’s lifeline for supplies to Central Asia.
That hub was a Volga River port we have come to know well: Stalingrad. Hitler had ordered the Wehrmacht to reach Stalingrad or at least heavily bombard it. Instead of holding his troops together, he divided Army Group South into groups A and B, with A heading for the Caucasus and B for Stalingrad. Gaps were filled with allied troops, Hungarians, Romanians, and Italians, who constituted precisely the weak points the Soviets would attack later.
Because of huge losses in 1941, 500,000 Romanian troops were brought in as reinforcements. In early July 1942, Manstein’s forces finally took Sevastopol as well. Hitler wanted to keep attacking and focused totally on the south, knowing that access to oil was central to Germany continuing the war, and equally that without oil, the Soviets could no longer wage a modern motorized war. The Red Army launched a major offensive on a broad front in May 1942, aiming to retake Kharkov.
But the Germans were able to encircle large numbers of the enemy in a classic battle of annihilation, one of their last great victories. 240,000 Soviet troops were taken prisoner, and the Red Army’s casualties came to 277,000 dead, missing, and wounded. In addition, 652 tanks and 1,646 guns were destroyed. It was a serious blow to Soviet morale, and the Germans were exultant.
Even skeptical generals now marveled at Hitler’s perseverance. But Operation Blue was marked by German arrogance, which would soon have dire consequences. Since June 1942, the Soviets had had a rough idea of the Wehrmacht’s plans, but basic information on the next thrust literally fell into their hands when a Fieseler Storch carrying a member of the German general staff was shot down. The officer had with him a briefcase containing top secret military documents.
The Russians reacted very flexibly, retreating into the vast expanses, just as Kutuzov had done with Napoleon in 1812, waiting until the German front was so overstretched that it was relatively easy to penetrate. In the Soviet documentary “A Day in the War” by Mikluki, 160 cameramen were deployed at various sections of the front, and some scenes were staged, war as a work of art, not as a reflection of reality. At this time, three air force regiments consisting solely of women became famous, so daring that German propaganda described them as “the witches of the night. ” They would switch off their engines and lights and fly so low that they came from nowhere.
From a purely professional point of view, German military leaders should have said the war no longer seemed winnable. They didn’t. They sought and found and implemented operational solutions, but the war was continued without any recognizable strategic objective. Case Blue had been in operation since June 28th, 1942, and the first objective was the city of Voronezh on the river Don.
Only now did Stalin realize the Wehrmacht was not advancing on Moscow, and he ordered Voronezh to be held at all costs. In his diary, Halder wrote that the situation was gradually becoming grotesque, noting, “This so-called leadership is characterized by a pathological reacting to the impressions of the moment and a total lack of any understanding of the command machinery and its possibilities. ” On July 23rd, 1942, he noted this. It is now believed he provoked the dispute leading to his dismissal so he would no longer have to bear responsibility.
In the course of the war, the Red Army’s leaders learned comparatively quickly how to conduct operations. That took time, and it only really came to bear at Stalingrad and afterwards. Soviet commanders had been fighting for more than a year and were coping better and better. The Red Army was proving dogged and relentless, but time and again, troops panicked.
In an order to hold out, Stalin said that anyone who retreated would be shot. The Soviet secret service used violence to ensure discipline. Women stood the test in their first serious action, often more courageous than the men. In one story, under fire for several hours, a woman inched her way forward on her stomach for over three hours while constantly under fire to bring back a wounded comrade three times her size, even though her commander had forbidden it.
By now, tanks were also arriving from the United States. Hitler had ignored all warnings and had German armies advance south at high speed. The Soviets were now reacting a lot more flexibly, and that is the point at which German thrusts often came to nothing. Hitler said to his generals, “If we don’t take Maikop and Grozny, I will have to end the war.
” Stalin knew the Red Army didn’t have enough troops in the Caucasus, so he sent the head of his secret service to put the fear of the devil in them. Red Army leaders were under double pressure: the military foe, and Stalin, whose orders meant lives were at risk from within their own ranks. For Stalin, there was also the psychological importance of the city named after him not falling into German hands. Anyone who holds Stalingrad can blockade the Volga, one of the Soviet Union’s main supply routes.
Stalingrad was clearly a military operational objective. It was only supposed to be neutralized, but Hitler then ordered the Sixth Army to take the city at all costs. “Regardless of the cost, Stalingrad must be captured. ” Those were the orders.
Friedrich Paulus, who had helped plan Barbarossa, warned Hitler that a force of 300,000 men would not be enough to take the city. Stalingrad was a prestige object not only for the Soviets but also for the Germans. At a party celebration in November 1942, Hitler boasted Stalingrad was as good as captured. In July 1942, the notorious “Not one step back” order was issued, applying draconian measures to prevent any retreat, no matter how sensible.
When the first German units reached the outskirts of Stalingrad on September 7th, 1942, many Red Army units panicked. But Stalin’s threats had the desired effect. The Soviet defenders took up positions in buildings turned into fortresses. The Germans never had control of the city.
They were involved in bitter house-to-house fighting, with no clear front line, and both sides used snipers. Losses were high, and most of the city lay in ruins. The military situation was confusing. If the Sixth Army was to be saved, it was then at the latest that German troops should have been pulled out.
But they never appeared. There were many executions, some carried out personally by the commander-in-chief, a sign to every Soviet soldier that not a single centimeter was to be yielded. On reflection, it paid off. It was the prerequisite for the success of Operation Uranus in November 1942, when the Red Army succeeded in encircling the Sixth Army.
When the Red Army launched its counteroffensive on November 19th, 1942, Stalingrad was almost completely in German hands. Operation Uranus was a bold maneuver, designed to encircle the Sixth Army within a few days. Two simultaneous attacks were launched, one from the north, one from the south. Finally, the two prongs met.
These battle-hardened soldiers greeted each other “emotional as children,” knowing this meeting meant the salvation of Stalingrad and of their country. Hitler’s risky venture had failed. More than 330,000 men were caught like rats in a trap. The house-to-house fighting continued with unremitting ferocity.
Now it was the Germans being urged to hold out and fight to the last bullet. Camaraderie is one of the pillars of every army, and wounded soldiers flown out of Stalingrad left with guilty feelings at leaving their colleagues in the lurch. On November 24th, 1942, Hitler decided the encircled troops would be supplied from the air. Because of the bitter cold and shortage of food, there was a danger of starvation and freezing.
General Paulus wanted to attempt a breakout, but Hitler wouldn’t hear of it. In planning the war against the Soviet Union, Paulus was the classic technocrat, implementing what he was ordered to. He had certain doubts, but not even promotion to field marshal was enough for him to remain loyal and hold the city come what may. Because the airbridge failed, the lack of food, fuel, ammunition, and medical material was so serious that the Sixth Army became practically immobile.
Paulus was an extremely elitist figure, but in the final analysis, a weak person used to living in a world of staff officers. He should have offered to surrender, not only to end the fighting, but because then the hatred of the Soviets would have been far less. Their readiness to treat German prisoners badly rose from day to day. In early January 1943, Hitler received the Romanian leader Antonescu, making the Romanians mainly responsible for the precarious situation.
Antonescu countered by criticizing the Wehrmacht and its commanders for errors of judgment. At Stalingrad, retreat was called for, but Hitler insisted, and the generals lacked the courage to say what he was doing was crazy. At 7:35 on January 31st, 1943, the German radio station in Stalingrad broadcast: “Capture by Russians imminent. We are preparing to destroy everything.
” On February 2nd, 1943, after 162 days of the heaviest fighting in the history of warfare, the last shot was fired. Peace came to Stalingrad. The defenders greeted the rescuing army. Stalingrad was free.
The Nazis had capitulated. Friedrich Paulus surrendered. A few days previously, Hitler had promoted him to field marshal, expecting he would commit suicide. Paulus was an opportunist commander who followed orders he knew would not be effective instead of firmly demanding they be changed.
This proved tragic for the troops under his command. Even there, he was not prepared to personally accept the consequences, expecting his soldiers to fight to the bitter end while he surrendered. On February 3rd, Greater German radio broadcast that under “the outstanding command of Field Marshal Paulus,” the Sixth Army had “fought to the last man. ” Symbolically, it was an incredibly important victory for the Red Army and a massive spur to the motivation of its soldiers.
Stalingrad gave the Red Army the certainty that the Germans could be beaten and driven out. For the Germans, it was a major defeat, a psychological turning point. A total of 91,000 German soldiers entered Soviet captivity. Against his better judgment, Goebbels spread the news that no one had survived.
At Stalingrad, the Wehrmacht lost an entire army for the first time. On the home front, the news came as a massive shock. But above all, it was a psychological turning point for people in the Soviet Union, who saw that the Red Army could stop the enemy and inflict a decisive defeat. And on a political level, it was a warning for London and Washington.
They suddenly had to plan for something they hadn’t expected: that the Red Army could well be in a position to defeat the Wehrmacht on its own and bring down the German Reich in Europe. Operation Barbarossa was intended to show the world the superiority of the German master race. But Hitler and his soldiers only succeeded in underlining their desire to destroy and the criminal nature of the National Socialist regime.
