The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Moral of story: don’t invade Russia
Operation Barbarossa was Hitler’s megalomaniac undoing – can any historian do it justice?
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A whiff of megalomania must lure historians who want to understand Operation Barbarossa. In its gargantuan sweep, in its unimaginable casualties, in its gambles and its ruination, in its numbing atrocities (mostly Nazi), in its decisive part in a global war, Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 offers itself as a subject for equally sweeping assertions and atrocious tableaux. In his encyclopedic new account, Jonathan Dimbleby is duly tempted. To call his grasp of detail thorough is the faintest of compliments – obsessively attentive would not be out of place – and over 516 pages his claim is likewise large: that even though three and a half more years of bloodshed would follow, it was Barbarossa’s failed gamble, above all, that sealed Germany’s fate in the Second World War.
Is Dimbleby right? Up to a point, yes. Barbarossa was the biggest military operation in history, as his balance sheet – neglecting no figure, even down to the 600,000 horses to pull the Wehrmacht’s artillery and supply trains – attests. Launched in the early hours of a warm midsummer Sunday with 3.3million men advancing on an 1,800-mile front from Estonia to Ukraine, it sputtered to an unsalvageable, wretched, bone-frozen halt six months later, Germany’s forces having accumulated at least 800,000 casualties, the Soviets six times that number, along the way.
The seeds of Barbarossa are, as Dimbleby says, salutary: at Rapallo, over Easter 1922, Europe’s two pariah states, represented by Walther Rathenau, Germany’s foreign minister, and Georgy Chicherin, the Soviet Union’s commissar for foreign affairs, suddenly signed a treaty to renounce territorial and financial claims, to collaborate economically, and – secretly – to cooperate militarily. Their accord humiliated David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister, whose ambitious Genoa conference was being held just up the road.
Rapallo set the scene for the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact of August 1939, a deal of two devils. Only a few days before, Hitler, the most duplicitous leader of the 20th century, had written that “everything I do is directed against the Russians”. Joseph Stalin, for his part, hoped that by choosing non-aggression he could put off an invasion he privately saw as inevitable. Curiously, the more intelligence Stalin received about Hitler’s invasion plans, the more reluctant he was to believe it. Later, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn would write that the Soviet leader, “in all his long suspicion-ridden life… only trusted one man… Adolf Hitler” – presumably because, where dictators and killers are concerned, as Vladimir Putin recently jeered at Joe Biden, it takes one to know one.
Dimbleby’s description of the invasion itself is a vivid, meticulous tapestry, densely weaving the threads of German and Soviet military strategy, political calculation from Washington and London to Moscow, and war’s pitiless human cost. All the familiar elements are here: the terrifying quantities of men and material, the Blitzkrieg to crush the Red Army and take Moscow to decapitate the “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” the objectives of creating Lebensraum for the master race and capturing the granary of Ukraine and the Caucasian oilfields, all backed up by Dimbleby’s authoritative, occasionally undistilled research, which sometimes stalls the narrative.
The author gives due credit to Dr Lyuba Vinogradova, his researcher, whose knowledge provides an exemplary account of, among many things, Ukraine’s great famine plus a cache of heartbreaking personal accounts from Russian archives. These intimate records retain an extraordinary power to move. In one hurried note, a 12-year-old girl, Junita Vishnyatsky, wrote to her father before the SS took her from her home near Bialystok: “I’m saying goodbye to you before I die. I’m so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive. Farewell for ever. I kiss you. I kiss you.”
Another account published this month, Barbarossa by Stewart Binns (Wildfire, £20), contains an even wider fund of harrowing testimonies, drawn from diaries and letters in Russian archives, and sources such as Svetlana Alexievich’s superlative oral history The Unwomanly Face of War. We are always the richer for hearing ordinary voices at war, reclaiming the human from the military, the barbaric, the statistics.
Jonathan Dimbleby neglects no statistic, down to the 600,000 Wehrmacht horses
With Operation Barbarossa there is, too, always the hellish shadow of the Vernichtungskrieg (annihilation war), Hitler’s aim to rid eastern Europe and Russia of both their political and intellectual elites and their Jews. The massacres by the SS Death Squads, or Einsatzgruppen, of Himmler and Heydrich, shooting hundreds of Jews a day, do not cease to shock: already, by December 1941, a million Jews had been killed. Incontrovertible evidence of the regular army’s co-operation with the Einsatzgruppen and, on the battlefield, Hitler’s soldiery’s numberless atrocities under the cloak of the infamous “Barbarossa decree” that legitimised abuse, torture and murder of prisoners and civilians, has put paid to the postwar myth of the “clean Wehrmacht” – which
tried to paint the regular army as blameless.
In practical terms foredoomed, by poor strategy, delay and the weather, Barbarossa is above all a case study in a military establishment’s failure to rein in an overconfident dictator. By 1941 the Wehrmacht’s generals, horrified by Hitler’s previous adventurism, had become timid and supine. He micro-commanded his three army groups’ battles, changing his mind repeatedly about the main objective (Moscow, or crushing the Red Army), though never about his own genius, and even when supremely able generals, such as Fedor von Bock, commander of the central army group, and Heinz Guderian, his outstanding panzer commander, queried their orders, they were shut up by Hitler’s pusillanimous general staff. (The generals’ verbatim accounts are a fascinating and humanising inclusion).
Most of all, Hitler’s contempt for the Soviet “vermin” his soldiers were fighting meant he fatally ignored their resolve as sons, daughters, citizens, willing to defend their homeland to the death. A member of a sabotage unit, 18-year-old Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, captured by the Germans, was tortured and led to a scaffold. With the noose around her neck, she cried: “This is my death. This is my achievement! No matter how many you hang, you can’t hang us all. There are 170million of us. My comrades will take revenge.” Treat your enemy as subhuman, and you have already begun to lose.
One or two assumptions go unexamined in Dimbleby’s epic chronicle – Britain’s “indomitability” among them – but Winston Churchill’s percipience is rightly noted. At Chequers, when he heard Barbarossa had begun, he sent his valet to wake Anthony Eden, bearing a large cigar on a salver and the message: “The prime minister’s compliments and the German armies have invaded Russia.” Churchill knew the invasion was a fatal mistake. He himself had played a role in its failure, forcing the attack to be put off for four weeks by keeping his word to defend Greece and so compelling Hitler to redeploy a million troops to his southern front, crucially reducing the number of fighting weeks available to the Wehrmacht before the Russian winter set in.
Did Barbarossa lose Hitler the war? Despite its failure to destroy the Red Army or take Moscow, the Wehrmacht had taken huge tracts of Soviet lands, including Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states, and in spring 1942 enough sense of achievement remained to propel Hitler’s still-powerful forces forward to that year’s offensive drive to Stalingrad and the oilfields, and to the following year’s attack on the Kursk salient. With Barbarossa, he did not so much lose the war as start to lose it. At his headquarters at the Wolfsschanze, the Führer’s own deluded selfprojection as infallible strategist and political messiah did the rest.
Dimbleby’s Barbarossa is published to coincide with the invasion’s 80th anniversary. What is its lesson today? Chiefly, for us, a little humility: a recognition that the Western democracies’ reflex loathing of communism for too long left Hitler’s Germany looking like the lesser evil, and an admission that we owe the Soviet Union the credit for breaking “the German Army as no other nation would have done”, in Churchill’s words. That pre-war mistrust between Britain (and the US) and Russia has regrown in the last 30 years. If, when Soviet communism collapsed, the West had moved to recognise Russia as an ally, we might have contributed to a collaborative rebuilding of that country, instead of creating the isolating conditions for a new 21st-century tyranny.