INSIDE THE MIND OF HITLER

For the German leader, the fight against the Soviet Union was a key battle in his plan for global conquest

Shortly after completing the Nazi-soviet Nonaggression Pact on 23 August 1939, Adolf Hitler said: “My pact was only meant to stall for time… to Russia will happen just what I have practised in Poland – we will crush the Soviet Union.” Operation Barbarossa was a conflict entrenched in his perception of the Bolsheviks as a wholly Jewish enemy. “Hitler’s planning on the whole was ideologically driven, rather than based on sound military goals,” says military historian Anthony Tucker-jones. Yet Hitler’s obsession with masterminding Operation Barbarossa would prove instrumental in its failure.

Hitler gave various reasons for launching the invasion.

“His main argument for conquest was Germany needing ‘Lebensraum’, or living space,” Tucker-jones explains. “He claimed that Germany was overcrowded and starved of resources, and therefore needed to expand. The irony is that Germany was far from overcrowded and actually imported an awful lot of slave labour from the occupied territories into Germany.” Yet this was not the only reason the Führer gave his military commanders. “He claimed rather fancily to his generals that by attacking the Soviet Union it was a way of depriving Britain of a potential ally,” says Tucker-jones, the irony being that it was Barbarossa that would eventually lead the Soviet Union to join the Allies.

As both the battle on the Eastern Front, and the war in general, progressed, the German leader meddled incessantly with the planning. “Hitler micromanaged it more than ever,” says Tucker-jones. “Stalin, on the other hand, tried at the beginning, made a terrible mess of it, and then relied on his generals much more. Hitler never really did. His early victories convinced him that he knew best, and with the planning of Barbarossa he meddled endlessly.”

Perhaps Hitler’s greatest mistake came when he ordered Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre to divert towards Ukraine instead of marching on Moscow. Many historians believe that if the Germans had instead concentrated on taking Moscow, Russia could’ve been defeated. “They couldn’t work out whether they should take Moscow,” says Tucker-jones, “or if they were more interested in capturing the Donets Basin in Ukraine. Ultimately, Moscow was key.” According to Hitler’s friend Leni Riefenstahl, he blamed the loss on the Eastern Front on the failures of the Italian Army in Greece. “If the Italians had not attacked Greece and needed our help, the war would have taken a different course,” Hitler supposedly said. “We could’ve anticipated the Russian cold by weeks and conquered Leningrad and Moscow.”

Tucker-jones concludes: “If you look at Hitler’s campaigns preceding Barbarossa, those victories are quite remarkable. I think Hitler was intoxicated with his own success. He convinced himself, courtesy of Blitzkrieg, that he could achieve a swift victory and, if he hit Soviet Union hard enough, it would collapse.”