HOW HITLER L OST THE WAR
It was the Fuhrer’s greatest gamble... and a brilliant new history reveals just how close Germany came to capturing Moscow and crushing resistance in 1941 after hurling three million men against the Soviet Union in a surprise attack on his former ally
ON JUNE 22, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. More than three million soldiers poured over the Russian border – the largest invasion force in history.The Fuhrer was confident Soviet dictator Stalin’s armies would crumble and Moscow would fall within weeks. At first, his forces advanced at a tremendous rate. By the middle of September, the Panzers of Operation Typhoon were just 250 miles from the Russian capital.
Yet Stalin had kept his people in the dark.A diet of half-truths and lies gave the impression that, though fighting was hard, the “fascist hordes” would be defeated. By October, with the Germans within 90 miles of Moscow, that lie could no longer be sustained ....
AS THE German Panzer tanks powered their way across the steppes in the autumn of 1941, most Russian soldiers at the front, not wishing to alarm their families or fearful of the censors, avoided describing the scale of the crisis.
But one could not contain himself. “Don’t believe the papers or the radio; the things they say are lies,” he wrote in a letter home. “We’ve been through it all and seen it all, the way the Germans are driving us – our own people don’t know where to run; we’ve nothing to fight with; and when the Germans catch up with us, our men have nothing to escape in.”
Gradually, the truth was becoming apparent. German forces across the Western front were advancing steadily towards Moscow, illequipped Russian forces suffering a series of disastrous defeats and retreats in their face.
Dr Peter Miller, a British historian working at the Academy of Sciences in the capital, noted on October 7: “There is a mood of catastrophe and fatalism. The shops are empty, even coffee has disappeared...”
A Communist Party functionary, Victor Kravchenko, recalled: “For the first time in 20 years
I heard cursing of officialdom.”
FEAR, deprivation, and a suppressed loathing of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, produced a pro-German backlash among some. Alexander Osmerkin, an artist, was so confident all would be well under the
Nazis that he rebuked a friend seeking to leave Moscow before the Nazis arrived. “Have you gone off your head?” he demanded. “Do you really believe our cheap propaganda?...They [the Germans] are after all the most cultured people in Europe. I’m sure they won’t persecute people like you and me.”
By the end of the first week of October, the Kremlin suddenly realised the official line that all was well at the front could no longer be held. Instead of announcements about hardfought but inevitable victories, the public was suddenly told the “very existence of the Soviet State was in danger”.
On October 9, the army newspaper Red Star instructed every citizen to “stand firm and fight to the last drop of blood” to save the nation. It came as a terrible shock to many. Suddenly, urgent measures were required. Three concentric layers of protection – tank traps, ditches and barbed wire fences – were to girdle the city in a last-ditch move to arrest the invaders.
Some 600,000 Muscovites presented themselves for the task armed with spades and, if they possessed them, axes, picks and crowbars.This ramshackle army of labourers – men and women – worked at a frantic pace with little food and in deteriorating weather. But if patriotism was not enough, they knew skiving was not permitted and miscreants would face the wrath of a punitive state.
Stalin’s favourite general, Georgy Zhukov, recalled: “I saw thousands and thousands of Moscow women, who were unused to heavy labour and who had left their city apartments lightly clad, work on those impassable roads, in that mud, digging anti-tank ditches and trenches, setting up anti-tank obstacles and barricades, and hauling sandbags.” In the meantime, the task of dismantling industrial plants to save them from the Germans had begun. They would be transported for hundreds of miles to the relative safety of the Urals, the Volga Region, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia, to be reassembled with the minimum disruption.
Within six weeks, 498 enterprises along with 210,000 workers had been removed from Moscow. By November, more than 1,500 industrial enterprises – a remarkable 1.5 million train loads – would be salvaged.
Volunteers and workers were under strict orders to erect the relocated plants rapidly enough for them to be in production within 14 days. A Pravda journalist described one scene: “Axes and pickaxes could not break the stony soil. In the light of arc lamps people hacked at the earth all night.They blew up the stones and the frozen earth, and they laid the foundations… Their feet and hands were swollen with frostbite… On the 12th day, into the new buildings with their glass roofs, the machinery, covered with hoar frost, began to arrive… And two days later, the war factory began production.”
Those plants that could not be dismantled were to be blown up if the Panzers swept into the city. Likewise food stores and refrigeration plants, railway stations, tram and trolleybus
parks, and power stations were readied for destruction. Explosive charges were placed under bridges. Nor were the Bolshoi Theatre, the Mint, the Central Telegraph Office or the telephone exchange to be spared. Every significant economic asset was to be smashed if the Germans breached the defences.
By October 15, the tension had become palpable. The clump of artillery could be heard clearly in the distance. Enemy aircraft droned in the sky. Rumour piled upon rumour:
Stalin had either been deposed or had already left the Kremlin for an unknown destination; the city was about to fall.
In fact, the Soviet dictator had been in his Kremlin office from the early hours of that day, locked in meetings with the most senior members of the Politburo. They agreed there was no option but to evacuate the government to the city of Kuibyshev (now Samara), 875 miles to the south-east of the capital.
Already the roads leading out of the capital were jammed by slow-moving queues of cars and trucks. Refugees on foot crowded the verges, hurrying in the same direction. A
British Embassy official wrote that “we saw many fallen or falling by the wayside...”. Many of the Bolshevik elite scrambled to join the exodus. Limousines of senior officials and their families thrust through a stream of heavily laden horse-drawn carts, peasants herding cattle and sheep, and growing numbers of ordinary citizens.The composer Dmitri Shostakovich had wanted to stay in the besieged city of Leningrad where he’d been serving as a fireman but in late September had been instructed to leave for the comparative safety of Moscow. No sooner had he arrived than he was on the move again. On October 16, along with other writers, painters, musicians and artists, he found himself huddling on a slush-covered platform waiting for the Kuibyshev train. Standing with his child’s potty in one hand and a sewing machine in the other, Shostakovich was at a loss. Eventually a place was found for him. Unhappily, a little after the train had left the station, he realised he had left two suitcases on the platform. October 16 became known as the day of the “Great Panic”. The early morning broadcast bulletins advised that the “German-fascist troops” had “hurled themselves against our troops with large quantities of tanks and motorised infantry, and in one section broke through our defences”.
Overnight social anarchy had replaced communist discipline. One shocked observer, Nikolai Verzhbitsky, wrote in his diary: “There are fights in the queues, people crushing old folks, there are stampedes in the queues, young people are looting...”
It was as though a dam had been breached to release a flood of pent-up loathing. In their anger and resentment, law-abiding citizens turned to mob-violence. Some not only sought vengeance but found convenient scapegoats. There was an ugly outbreak of anti-Semitism which had long lurked beneath the surface of popular sentiment.
By now the shops were running out of basic foodstuffs and Stalin had been advised to leave the capital. Instead, he moved to the bomb proof security of a Metro station where an office and living quarters had been prepared.
On October 19, he restored discipline, placing the capital under a “state of siege”. The public was warned that “violators of order will be quickly brought to answer before the court of the military tribunal, and provocateurs, spies, and other enemy agents attempting to undermine order will be shot on the spot”.That threat was not idle.The NKVD was ordered to protect the city not only from the enemy but also from its own citizens.
Sharp-shooter Mikhail Ivanovitch, stationed on the second floor of a department store to defend the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate, did not hesitate: “It was necessary, absolutely necessary, to establish order… And, yes, we did shoot people who refused to quit shops and offices where food and other goods were stored.” It was merciless but it worked.Within days Stalinist order was restored. The city did not run out of food; shops reopened; workers were paid; trams and trains began to run and theatres and cinemas reopened.
THE Panzers had not halted. But, compared with the initial Blitzkrieg of June following Operation Barbarossa’s launch, their progress as autumn turned to winter was tortuous, gruelling and bloodsoaked. The Germans slogged forward in worsening weather. Constant rain turned roads into quagmires.When the snows arrived, the temperature fell to minus 30C. For lack of adequate clothing, thousands of German soldiers succumbed to frostbite and died.
By November, frontline German commanders faced a critical shortfall in supplies. They were also losing men – killed, wounded or taken prisoner – at an alarming rate. Hitler’s hubris had concealed a catastrophic failure of planning and logistical organisation.
Moreover, the closer the Germans got to Moscow, the more desperately the Red Army fought. Stalin’s soldiers were under no illusions; “cowards” were executed in droves, but for the most part they fought with the fanatical resolve of patriots who knew the survival of the Motherland was at stake.
It is possible a few German soldiers caught a glimpse of the Moscow skyline in the distance but the Panzers never got closer than 15 miles.
By early December, after five months, three weeks and six days, Operation Barbarossa reached its fateful terminus.
Retreat became inevitable. Moscow would never be threatened again.
The war would last for another three and a half years but, by the end of 1941, Hitler had lost whatever chance he might once have of defeating the Soviet Union and therefore winning the war.
‘Yes, we did shoot people who refused to quit shops and offices where food was stored’
●●Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost theWar by Jonathan Dimbleby (Viking, £25) is out now. For free UK delivery, call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or order on www. expressbookshop.co.uk