Jonathan Dimbleby discusses OReTatKQP $aTDaTQssa, Hitler’s failed attempt to destroy the USSR
hONArHAN DgMBLEBw speaks to Rob Attar about his new account of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s brutal, but ultimately doomed, campaign to destroy the Soviet Union in 1941
ROB ArrAR: The subtitle of your book is How Hitler Lost the War. Is it fair to say that these six months were the decisive episode of the entire conflict? hONArHAN DgMBLEBw: When you look at what happened in Barbarossa and see how the situation was by the end of the year, it is inconceivable that Hitler could have prevailed against the Soviet Union. The Wehrmacht was very effective and efficient but it did not have sustainable resources to last a long struggle. Conversely, the Red Army was very weak at the start – not in terms of numbers but in terms of efficiency, readiness and capability. But by the end of the year, although it had suffered hugely and disproportionately, the Soviet Union was relatively stronger. And that gap was going to grow. Hitler, in my view – and I am not alone in this – lost the war in 1941.
How far back does the story begin? Can we see the origins of Barbarossa in the 1920s when Hitler was writing Mein Kampf?
I started the book thinking that I might be able to just go back a little way, to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. But then I found myself going back further and further out of curiosity, to understand it better. And I think that you have to start with the First World War in terms of the German situation and the rise of Hitler.
Mein Kampf made Hitler’s views very clear: “I want Lebensraum,
I want to destroy Judeo-Bolshevism, I want to eliminate the Jews from Europe by whatever means is most practical.” Then in the case of the Soviet Union, you had a revolutionary state in the biggest country in Europe. These are the two great powers of Europe, and they either had to get on with one another or they were going to come into conflict, because of the ideological convictions of Hitler and the Soviet Union’s need to preserve its identity, and secure itself from the multiple threats it saw all around.
So was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact only a temporary reprieve?
I don’t think there was any chance that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact could have lasted. Though both sides pretended in public that they would have everlasting amity, the truth is Hitler had already decided that he was going to invade. Stalin could not bear the prospect and wanted to postpone the conflict, while suspecting that it would be inevitable. It was only a matter of time and just needed a trigger for conflict to break out.
Was there anything Britain could have done to forestall Barbarossa? It is the great historical conundrum. Britain went through the motions of trying to forge an alliance or partnership of some kind with the Soviet Union in the run-up to the Second World War. Indeed, in the summer of 1939, British negotiators were in Moscow at the same time as the Germans and Russians were in discussions. There was a bizarre set of dual negotiations going on, conducted on all sides in bad faith.
The British loathed the Bolsheviks, for very good reason. The Bolsheviks, Stalin specifically, had murderous characteristics and communism posed a threat to western capitalism. Neville Chamberlain, and most of those around him, thought – putting it crudely – “If we can get the Soviets into conflict with the Germans, we will be spared having to fight quite so hard to protect our interests in the world.”
Had there been a greater readiness to yield to some of the Soviet demands that ultimately Stalin achieved, then there might have been a deal. The Soviet Union would, I think, have been ready. But the distrust on both sides was huge.
Barbarossa was launched on 22 June 1941. Was it a mistake not to have begun the invasion earlier?
The trigger for the breakdown in the Nazi-Soviet pact was the Balkans. The one thing that the Soviet Union would not give up was access to the Black Sea. But for the Nazis, the territory was crucial to possess and Hitler was not going to yield that. There was an extraordinarily ill-humoured meeting in December 1940 between Molotov and Hitler, at which the impasse became clear. Then the British became involved because they wanted to protect their Mediterranean and Middle Eastern interests. So in the early spring of 1941, Hitler sent troops, which had secretly been lining up to invade the Soviet Union, to the Balkans instead. He decided to destroy Yugoslavia, and drive the British out of Greece because he feared that the British would use that as a launchpad for an attack on the underbelly of the Third Reich.
The original plan had been to launch Barbarossa in May, but it was delayed by a month. There’s much debate about how crucial that was. According to the Germans’ timetable, even with that month’s delay it should still have been possible to take Moscow before winter arrived. However, the timetable was itself wildly over-optimistic, as it hugely underestimated the strength of the Red Army.
Stalin was seemingly caught out by Barbarossa. How did he fail to heed the warnings of a German attack?
It’s a very good question. It’s inconceivable that he wouldn’t have been aware there was a real threat. Warnings were coming to him from Japan, Germany, France and from the occupied German territories that something was afoot. And these voices got louder and louder. But he
could not bear to contemplate the thought that he would be driven into a conflict with the Nazi war machine when the Red Army was not yet ready. So he chose to blind himself to the roaring noise of evidence, with catastrophic consequences.
Does this lack of preparedness explain the disastrous performance of the Red #rmy in the rst few weeks?
It is one of the factors. The leadership was very demoralised. There had been the purges a few years earlier in which tens of thousands of senior officers were removed, meaning there was a lack of strong leadership and strategic organisation. The defences were in a weak position along the border: the troops were ill-trained and a lot of officers did not want to make decisions. Many of the weapons were in need of repairs or out of date.
So you had ill-trained, ill-prepared, demoralised troops in the wrong positions fighting a highly organised, highly-focussed three-pronged attack by 3.3 million men. And that’s why the Blitzkrieg went at such a stunning pace to start with.
#t what point did things begin to go awry for the Wehrmacht? You realise that something is wrong quite quickly. Even in early July, Franz Halder, the chief of staff of the army, was worrying about the strength of the Soviet resistance. Not their skills, not the quality of their weaponry, but their readiness to stand and fight, and not run, as the Germans had presumed would happen.
7ltimately the Wehrmacht was stopped outside /oscow Why did the Germans fail to take the city? +n your book you argue that the weather was not as important as we sometimes think
After the war, a lot of Wehrmacht commanders wanted to blame the weather – General Mud, as they called it. The weather was atrocious. There was deep, glutinous mud that meant vehicles couldn’t move. Then the cold came: -10, -20, -30 degrees centigrade, and the German soldiers were totally ill-equipped, because it had been assumed that the Soviet Union would collapse in weeks. The weather was bad but it was predictably bad. And the Red Army had to face the same conditions, although it was better equipped to do so.
At the same time, the Wehrmacht was running out of supplies and fuel. And the attack was faltering. They were also losing large numbers of lives. In that first six months of Barbarossa, the Germans lost almost as many men through death, imprisonment and wounding as the western Allies did in the whole war. Even though German losses were dwarfed by the scale of Soviet losses, this was still attrition that they couldn’t withstand. Meanwhile, General Zhukov, the general on whom Stalin called whenever there was a crisis, had commandeered forces to protect Moscow on a scale that made capturing it extraordinarily difficult.
I don’t think there was any chance that they could have taken Moscow at that time. They were broken. They were defeated as a fighting, aggressive force.
How integral was 5talin to the ultimate defeat of Barbarossa?
When the invasion took place he found it almost impossible to believe that it had happened. He became briefly catatonic, retreated to his dacha and it was as if he feared that he might be removed from power by his henchmen. But they were absolutely loyal to him and he bounced back. When he spoke publicly, Stalin rallied the nation brilliantly. He appealed not to communism, not to the party, not to any ideological vision, but to the nation that had produced Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, the nation that had great writers and poets, and it was the Russian nation. And he called people friends. It’s hard to exaggerate how powerful this was psychologically for the Soviet people – although many still thought they were going to their doom.
Stalin took command and he made dreadful errors, but the one thing he did was to pick Zhukov and one or two others and give them authority. He would sometimes dismiss them, he would sometimes contradict them, he would sometimes insist on enterprises that were self-defeating. But he was still a powerful figure in the fightback.
5omething that comes through strongly in your book is the savagery of the ghting Was that purely down to the mutual loathing of the regimes?
It was incomparably more terrible than anything that happened anywhere on the western front at any point in the war. When I was reading the detail of people’s experiences, on both sides, I recoiled in horror at it and I’ve read quite a lot, one way or another. It was as hideous, as unspeakable, as barbaric, as brutal as any conflagration between two peoples en masse in war could ever be imagined.
On the German side I think it sprang from the fact they’d been taught, in significant measure, to regard the Slavic people, as well as the Jews, as being sub-human. This had been drilled into them for a long time. And because they saw their opponents as being more like “animals”, they were perfectly happy to violate anything that would constitute rules of warfare – although there were some soldiers who were clearly appalled by it. The commanders who presided over this had belonged to the proud Prussian tradition of the German military, but even they had been infected by this virus of contempt.
On the Soviet side, there was a hatred that grew and grew, and was stoked up by articles and broadcasts about the Nazi beast, the fascist beast, the rats; they were encouraged to kill, kill and kill. And they killed and killed because there was no other option, from their point of view, if they were going to get rid of this invader. But they also committed appalling atrocities. It wasn’t on the same scale as the Nazis by any means, because they were on the retreat for most of Barbarossa. But they did do some hideous things when they got hold of German soldiers.
Stalin rallied the nation brilliantly. He appealed not to communism, not to the party, not to any ideological vision, but to the nation that had produced Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky
As you alluded to in that last answer, Barbarossa saw mass killings of Jews as the Wehrmacht advanced. How integral were these months to the development of the Holocaust?
People who haven’t followed it closely sometimes think that the only element of the Holocaust was the death camps: Chełmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau, etc. And they were obviously critically important. But the Holocaust began in 1941, before the death camps were running properly, before the gas chambers had been built. A million or more Jews were killed in 1941.
Himmler, who was in charge of the SS, working with Heydrich, established the Einsatzgruppen, whose role was to go behind the lines, as the German armies advanced, and to isolate people who were Soviet Commissars, or subversives. That very rapidly became indistinguishable from killing Jews and by August, they were openly talking – boasting – about the numbers of Jews that they had killed.
The killing was done in an increasingly organised way. There are scores and scores of examples, but the most notorious was at Babi Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev, when the Einsatzgruppen rounded up very large numbers of Jews, and herded them to the edge of a ravine. They were required – and this is all documented by the killers themselves in detail, as well as by those few victims who survived – to take off their clothes, to put their belongings in one place. They were then marched up to the edge of the ravine and shot. They fell into the ravine, and the next lot came. This happened across the front, from the Baltic to the edge of the Balkans, and the Einsatzgruppen were often helped by local people.
The Einsatzgruppen were not drunks hauled off the street or drug addicts who had no mental capacity that would allow you to judge them. These were educated people who’d been doctors, who’d been through university, who were civil servants, who volunteered for this task. The depravity was beyond imagination.
The Wehrmacht high command tried to dissociate itself from any of this. They pretended, after the war, that they did not know about it. Not only did they know about it, it would have been impossible for them not to know about it as it was on such a scale. And they were complicit, if not actually participating themselves, in the killing grounds that the Einsatzgruppen occupied.
How important was the outcome of Barbarossa to Britain? And to what extent did British aid help sway the outcome?
There was British aid and US aid on lend-lease principles, but in 1941 it was of no consequence. It had started, but there was no significant weaponry coming in. Certainly by 1943 and 1944 it was valuable, but in 1941 it was irrelevant. The role of the British was to try to keep on side with Stalin and to prevent any possibility of the Soviet Union being defeated, or getting so close to defeat that Stalin would try to create another version of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Churchill was rather reluctant for resources to go to the Soviet Union because the British were under great pressure, too. Not only to protect the United Kingdom, which they still feared would face invasion if the Nazis beat the Soviet Union, but also the imperial interests, which were of huge importance to Churchill.
Once Barbarossa was under way and the United States was coming into the war, things began to change. Even before the end of 1941, Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, went to Moscow and had a meeting with Stalin, from which he came back saying this was the time to negotiate eastern Europe’s borders. It should be done while Britain was in a position of strength, not left until eastern Europe was controlled by Stalin.
I think this was a demonstration of immense foresight because, by the time Stalin was in control of eastern Europe, the western Allies didn’t have a leg to stand on in negotiations over what kind of freedoms the people living there should have.
In the end, was Barbarossa always a fatal gamble or could Germany have defeated the Soviet Union? With the benefit of hindsight, you can say it was doomed from the beginning, but no one at the time believed that. There is no doubt, however, that by the end of 1941 it was doomed and that Hitler had been beaten and broken by the Soviet Union, while the western Allies had played a secondary, supportive role. The turning point of the war, militarily, was December 1941.