Chapter Seventeen
In the early hours of Sunday, 22 June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The forces engaged on both sides were larger than in any previous campaign; the distances and areas involved were vaster; and the stake was nothing less than the existence of the two greatest European powers of the time. Alongside Germany fought her east European allies and satellites, Finland, Rumania, Hungary, and Slovakia, soon to be joined by three Italian divisions and the Spanish Blue Division. Hitler had said that when he attacked the USSR the world would hold its breath. It did. The climax of the long movement towards total European war had come.
These events obviously had the most profound effects upon the course and outcome of the Second World War. It is equally true, though rather less obvious, that they also have a fundamental bearing on the question of the origins of the war. Why did Hitler attack the Soviet Union? If it was the fulfilment of all his dreams and thoughts from at least the composition of Mein Kampf onwards, then all the events of the previous years must be seen in this perspective. The annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, the offers of alliance to Poland and then the attack upon her, appear as preparations to open the way to the ultimate goal. The offensive in the west and the defeat of France removed the threat to Germany's rear and allowed a concentration of forces in the east. All was part of a grand design, with improvisations and uncertainties here and there, but moving always in the same direction. If, on the other hand, the attack on the Soviet Union was largely a response to the pressures of war — an indirect means of defeating the British, or a response to Soviet obduracy in eastern Europe — then our perspective on the origins of the war is quite different. The grand design becomes less obvious or less influential, and may even be relegated to the status of mere talk.
Most of the questions raised in the different interpretations of the origins of the war — war by accident or war premeditated, an ideological war or war over power, Hitler's war or the continuation of the First World War — reach their logical conclusion in the events of 1941, which represent the final question mark over the origins and nature of the war. It is true that the questions involved cannot be answered with complete certainty or finality, turning as they do on interpretations of motive where we can only assess degrees of probability. But equally the bearing of the events of June 1941 on the origins of the war is such that to ignore them is to leave a whole area of explanation unexplored.
A long-formed intention: Hitler and the Soviet Union
The military preparations for the offensive against the Soviet Union were lengthy. As early as 3 July 1940 General Halder set his staff to work on a plan for an attack on the Baltic states and the Ukraine. On 31 July Hitler told a meeting of senior commanders that he intended to smash the Soviet Union with one blow in Spring 1941. Operational plans in different forms were prepared in September and November. The movement of troops to the east, and the preparation of supply depots and training camps, began that autumn. General Halder presented a completed plan to Hitler on 5 December 1940, and Hitler signed Directive No. 21 for Operation Barbarossa on 18 December: ‘The German Armed Forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign even before the end of the war against England.’ Preparations were to be completed by 15 May 1941.1
Not all plans are carried out — the directive of November 1940 for an attack on Gibraltar, for example, came to nothing. The absolute certainty of an attack on the Soviet Union cannot, therefore, be assumed on the basis of the military plans alone. But the scale of the military preparations, and the time and energy devoted to them, put the planning for Barbarossa in quite a different category from that for Gibraltar. Certainly from December 1940 onwards it was clear that this was no mere contingency plan, but, short of something extraordinary, would be put into effect. The question is why?
One answer is that it was the fulfilment of a long-formed intention. Alan Bullock concluded firmly in his biography of Hitler, published in 1952, that: ‘Hitler invaded Russia for the simple but sufficient reason that he had always meant to establish the foundation of his thousand-year Reich by the annexation of the territory between the Vistula and the Urals.’2 Some forty years later, a German historian, drawing on a vast body of evidence which had become available in the meantime, reached essentially the same conclusion. ‘Operation Barbarossa was not a campaign like those that preceded it, but a carefully prepared war of annihilation’, whose origins lay in Hitler's world view and political aims: living space, race, economic autarky and world power.3 This interpretation has been generally accepted, and the evidence for it may be found throughout Hitler's writings and talks to Nazi and service leaders over a long period. His mind appeared to be firmly set in this mould by the 1920s, and the longer his dictatorship lasted the less open he was to new ways of thought.
By 1940 it is probable that the mould was unbreakable. Hitler took up other ideas — an invasion of Britain, a move through Spain, a Mediterranean campaign, a grand alliance to include the USSR — but he dropped them again. To an attack on the Soviet Union he constantly returned. Even when things went wrong, as in Mussolini's ill-judged and unsuccessful attack on Greece at the end of October 1940, Hitler's plans to cope with the problem went ahead alongside the plans for the USSR — his directive for the invasion of Greece, Operation Marita, was signed on 13 December 1940, and that for Barbarossa on the 18th. When other opportunities appeared, glittering and apparently within easy reach — as they did in the Middle East in February 1941, when the capture of the Suez Canal and an Arab revolt against the British were in the offing — Hitler was not interested in pursuing them. He insisted that there must be no large-scale operations in the Mediterranean until the USSR had been defeated. Hitler was often an opportunist, but he was only interested in certain opportunities, and a campaign in the Middle East was not among them.
German objectives in eastern Europe had obvious links with the victories of 1918, when the German armies had defeated Russia and occupied the Ukraine and the Caucasus. This continuity was not repudiated by the Nazis, who were happy to share the mantle of Ludendorff. But by 1941 the impulse inherited from imperial Germany was far outweighed by current ideological concerns, to the grave detriment of German policy. During the First World War the Germans had made skilful and successful use of the grievances of the non-Russian nationalities, encouraging separatist movements and working closely with the government of a newly declared Ukrainian state. In 1941 the same opportunity was present, and was partially recognised. In western Europe in 1940–41 the Germans sought contacts with Flemish and Breton separatists. In the east, the Abwehr had long supported Ukrainian nationalists, and at least one staff paper during the planning for the attack on the USSR envisaged setting up a puppet government in the Ukraine. The extent of the opportunity was shown by the welcome frequently received by the German forces as they advanced into the Ukraine in the summer of 1941. But the Germans this time made no claims to come as liberators. When Ukrainian nationalists set up a provisional government in Lwow at the end of June 1941, the Germans at once suppressed it. They came as the master race, and in so doing they threw away a political weapon of the highest value.
Hitler insisted that the war with the Soviet Union would be one of ideology and race. He rejected the army's proposals for the military administration of conquered territory, laying down instead in a directive of 13 March 1941 that Himmler as head of the SS was to be responsible for ‘special tasks’ in the occupied zone. The SS, prosecuting the struggle between opposing systems of government and belief, were to liquidate the Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia and the Bolshevik commissars. On 31 March 1941 Hitler gave verbal orders that persons in these categories were to be placed outside the normal rules of war and shot on capture. On 6 June the so-called ‘commissar order’, that all Soviet military commissars captured on the eastern front were to be killed as soon as taken, was actually put in writing. It was freely accepted that millions of the people of the conquered territories would suffer the same fate as the commissars, by the more indirect means of famine. At a meeting of State Secretaries on 2 May 1941 it was agreed that all the German forces must be fed from the USSR by the third year of the war, and that the consequence of this was that millions of Russians would have to starve. A directive by Goering's economic staff on 23 May confirmed this: the food-producing areas of the USSR were to supply German needs, which would unavoidably mean famine for the urban populations normally fed from these sources.4
When the campaign began, Hitler's absorption in it speedily became complete, and its visionary aims dominated his talk, in which he pictured a Soviet Union colonised with German towns, linked by great roads and separated from the native population, who would be kept in outer darkness. He hardly left his specially constructed headquarters in East Prussia, except to make forays to a command post in the Soviet Union itself. Germany, and even his old haunts in Bavaria, were rarely visited. It was the final sign of his obsession with the east.
Even in his obsession, it seems that Hitler was visited by doubts and hesitations. When he wrote to Mussolini to announce the invasion, Hitler referred to months of anxious pondering, and of winning through to a decision. He even seems to have had some premonition of ill-fortune, and on the night before the attack he said: ‘I feel as if I am pushing open the door to a dark room never seen before, without knowing what lies behind the door.’5 But despite such signs, it seems clear that Hitler moved against the USSR under the impulse of a long-cherished idea. Richard Evans summed the matter up effectively when he concluded that the invasion of the Soviet Union ‘was from the beginning an ideologically motivated war of total subjugation and extermination’.6
This may not, however, have been his only motive, and it was certainly not the sole explanation advanced by Hitler himself. In the summer of 1940 his most common argument was that it was necessary to attack the Soviet Union in order to defeat Britain. He told his senior commanders on 31 July 1940: ‘England's hope is Russia and America. If hope on Russia is eliminated, America is also eliminated…. Russia is the factor on which England is mainly betting…. Should Russia, however, be smashed, then England's last hope is extinguished.’7 Hitler said much the same, in one form or another, to various foreign statesmen — to Teleki, the Hungarian Prime Minister, for example, on 20 November 1940. In March 1941, speaking to the commanders involved in Operation Barbarossa, he stretched the point so far as to claim the existence of a secret agreement between the USSR and Britain, which held the English back from making peace. Despite much repetition, however, the logic of the argument remained elusive. Halder in particular was uncertain as to how exactly the defeat of the Soviet Union would bring about a British surrender, writing in his diary on 28 January 1941: ‘Barbarossa: Purpose not clear. We do not hit the British that way.’8 The British had gone to war despite the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact; they had maintained their resistance in the summer of 1940 in the face of Soviet hostility; and there seemed no good reason for them to change their position. If it were the main German objective to strike at Britain, there were other more effective ways of doing so. To conquer the oil supplies of the Middle East was one way. To cut off all assistance from the USA (which meant far more to Britain than did the USSR) would have been more deadly still. But these objectives were not pursued. The argument is not decisive, for it remains possible that, however misguidedly, Hitler believed his own explanation. But it is reasonable to look elsewhere for more substantial motives.
German-Soviet relations, 1940–41: political friction and economic co-operation
In late 1940 and early 1941 there was increasing friction between Germany and the Soviet Union in eastern Europe, calling into question the working and advantages of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. In June and July 1940, in the aftermath of the fall of France, Stalin moved to secure his grip on the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, placed in the Soviet sphere of influence by the agreements of 1939. Soviet troops had been stationed on their territory since October 1939; in late June 1940 Soviet-controlled governments were imposed; and in July all three asked to be incorporated in the Soviet Union. Their request, needless to say, was granted. Hitler claimed to be shocked by this — perhaps he really was, because he did not like others to play his own game, and the Soviet move could have no adversary in view except Germany.
However, this move was not in breach of the 1939 agreements: Stalin was only annexing territory which had formerly been in his sphere of influence. But there then developed friction which directly impinged on the agreements. On 23 June, Molotov announced to the German Ambassador in Moscow that the Soviet Union proposed to occupy at once the Rumanian provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina. The USSR had declared its interest in Bessarabia during the hasty negotiations of August 1939. Bukovina had not been mentioned though Ribbentrop had made vague remarks about the lack of German political interest in the Balkans generally. This was never in fact the case: German interest in Rumanian oil was strong, and an economic agreement of 27 May 1940 brought Rumania firmly under German influence. The Germans persuaded the Soviets to limit their occupation to the northern part of Bukovina, but then advised Rumania to accept a Soviet ultimatum of 26 June. But these events rankled in Berlin, and when on 30 August Hitler delivered a ruling (the Second Vienna Award) transferring most of Transylvania from Rumania to Hungary, he accompanied this further diminution of Rumanian territory with a guarantee of what remained. This guarantee was obviously directed against the Soviet Union, and Molotov protested about it, both at the time and during his visit to Berlin in November 1940.
The position of Rumania had been left vague in the German-Soviet negotiations of 1939; but there could be no doubt that Finland was placed in the Soviet sphere of influence. During the Soviet-Finnish War of November 1939–March 1940, Germany had respected this agreement, and had done nothing to impede, and something to assist, the Soviet campaign. By the summer of 1940, Germany was no longer content with this position. German conceptions of an attack on the Soviet Union, from the end of July 1940 onwards, always included the participation of Finland on Germany's side, which meant that it was necessary to detach that country from the Soviet sphere. On 24 July a German-Finnish trade treaty was signed, and in September 1940 Germany negotiated an agreement for the passage of German troops through Finland to north Norway. The Soviets were not informed beforehand, and were understandably perturbed. Molotov pressed this matter hard on his visit to Berlin in November. Hitler agreed that Finland was the primary concern of the USSR from a political point of view, but he stressed Germany's economic interest in Finnish nickel and timber. He insisted that Finland was not occupied by German troops, who were only passing through. Molotov repeatedly pointed out that the existing German-Soviet agreements placed Finland in the Soviet sphere of influence, and remarked ominously that the Soviet government had the right to deal with the Finnish question. In the event, Finland continued to move into the German camp, and the Soviets did not make good this threat.
Further friction developed over Bulgaria, a country not specifically mentioned in the Nazi-Soviet agreements, though vaguely included in Ribbentrop's airy expressions of lack of interest. In November 1940 the Soviet Union proposed to issue a guarantee to Bulgaria, and warned the Bulgarian government against seeking German support. The Bulgarians refused the guarantee, only to be offered (25 November) a mutual assistance pact, which would include Bulgaria in the Soviet security zone. Again the Bulgarians refused, keeping Germany informed throughout and receiving her tacit support. On 25 November also, the Soviet note to Germany about proposed spheres of influence, following Molotov's conversations in Berlin, stipulated the establishment of a Soviet base in Bulgaria. The Soviet claims on Bulgaria were thus made absolutely clear; and yet on 28 February 1941 German troops entered the country, with the consent of the Bulgarian government. The challenge could not have been more direct.
At the same time, between November 1940 and March 1941, Germany made a series of diplomatic moves which emphasised her influence all over eastern Europe. On 20 November 1940 Hungary adhered to the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan: Rumania followed on 23 November, and Slovakia on the 24th. The Tripartite Pact was openly directed against the USA, and its fifth Article declared that it did not affect the signatories' existing relations with the Soviet Union; but whatever the wording, there was no doubt that for east European countries to join the Pact was to declare for Germany rather than the USSR. In December 1940 there were staff conversations between Germany and Finland, and on 31 December the two countries signed a treaty of friendship. Finally, on 28 February 1941, having accepted the entry of German troops, Bulgaria too joined the Tripartite Pact. Of these moves, those involving Finland, Rumania, and Bulgaria were of particular significance, and certain to be resented by the Soviet Union.
German-Soviet relations were thus under considerable strain, and it was open to question how long the pact between the two countries would survive. In these circumstances, the economic aspects of German-Soviet relations were also at risk. After a difficult start in the winter of 1939–40, when there was some very tough negotiating between the two sides, economic relations had been good, and had worked favourably for Germany. A commercial agreement signed in February 1940 provided that the Soviet Union should supply Germany during the next year with 1 million tonnes of cereals, 1 million tonnes of oil, and substantial quantities of cotton, phosphates, iron ore, and chrome ore. The Soviets also agreed to make purchases in third countries on Germany's behalf, and to transport goods from the Far East along the Trans-Siberian railway. The supplies of rubber that reached Germany by this route were particularly valuable. In return, the Soviet Union was to receive specimens of German industrial and military technology — tanks, aircraft, armour plate, mines, torpedoes, locomotives, and machinery for the oil industry. The chief German economic negotiator, Schnurre, noted that the Soviet Union had agreed to deliveries greater than were justified on economic grounds alone, and would have to provide them at the cost of her own economy.
At the beginning of April 1940 the Soviet Union suspended oil and grain deliveries, to make sure that the Germans made their own deliveries in time; which was a sharp reminder to the Germans that Stalin could turn the tap off at will. However, the flow of Soviet exports later increased, and a new agreement was signed in April 1941.9 Germany secured substantial advantages from these arrangements. She was largely freed from the pressure of the Allied naval blockade; most of her needs for raw materials and foodstuffs were met; and supplies of oil from Rumania were supplemented to an important degree. The question by early 1941 was whether to continue this arrangement, which was working well but involved the risk that at some time, if relations deteriorated too far, the Soviets could cut off supplies; or to conquer the Soviet Union and so bring the grain and raw materials of the Ukraine and the oil of the Caucasus directly under German control. If the Germans chose war, they would have to face the problem of how to prosecute it without the benefit of the supplies they were accustomed to draw from the Soviet Union; to which the only answer was to ensure that the war would be short and victory swift. General Thomas warned that the oil installations of the Caucasus would have to be seized intact. The case for going to war to gain physical control of the supplies which so far had come by agreement was significant, but by no means overwhelming.
It is clear that there was friction between Germany and the Soviet Union over much of eastern Europe in late 1940 and early 1941. The initiative for this lay mostly on the German side, with the encroachment of German influence in Finland, Rumania, and Bulgaria. In a phrase borrowed from another context, the German-Soviet agreements had proved to be an uneasy alliance between the sand-dune and the sea — with Germany as the sea. But was this friction, and the questions which it raised for the long-term prospects of economic co-operation, the principal cause of the great German assault of June 1941? There is a serious case to consider. From the time of Molotov's visit to Berlin in November 1940 onwards, it became clear that Stalin was not going to play the role Hitler expected of him, either in eastern Europe or in the partition of the world. In these circumstances, Hitler may well have decided on a military solution for his strategic and economic problems — this was, as Bernd Stegemann has pointed out, ‘always his first choice when policies proved unsuccessful’.10 Yet in itself the friction with the Soviet Union in eastern Europe, though serious, might well only have produced more German demands, to reinforce their strategic position and secure their supplies. As a reason for all-out war, it only carries conviction in conjunction with Hitler's ideological imperatives.
Hitler and ‘Soviet hostility'
Hitler claimed when he went to war with the Soviet Union that Stalin had been preparing to attack Germany; and sometimes he added to this the assertion that the USSR entertained secret relations with Britain. There is much evidence to contradict these claims. In the summer of 1940, though Stalin moved rapidly to establish his control over the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and northern Moldavia, his diplomatic demeanour towards Germany was impeccable. He offered his congratulations to Germany on the defeat of France, and issued an official communiqué (23 June) emphasising the good relations between the USSR and Germany. When Britain sent a new Ambassador to Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, to improve Anglo-Soviet relations, he was received only formally by Stalin, who made sure that he passed on his account of the meeting to the Germans. Stalin even told Cripps that he saw no danger of the hegemony of any one country in Europe — which on 1 July 1940 implied either blindness or untruth. For the next months, Cripps tried in vain to see even Molotov.
Later, in November 1940, Molotov's visit to Berlin was not a success from the German point of view, and he was obstinately precise and difficult in asking questions about Finland and Rumania when Hitler wanted to talk sweepingly about the partition of the world. But the visit was not a complete failure: Molotov bore away the German proposals for the arrangement of vast spheres of influence, and returned a reply within a fortnight, stating conditions which were severe, but could have been a basis for discussion. It was the Germans who then broke off the exchange, despite a number of Soviet enquiries about a reply (see above,p. 326).
As 1941 advanced, the German Ambassador in Moscow, Schulenberg, was certain that the USSR had no intention of attacking Germany, and his view was confirmed by all Stalin's actions in May and June. Deliveries of goods under the economic agreements were stepped up in the weeks before the German attack. On 8 May the Soviet news agency Tass denied stories of Russian troop concentrations on the country's western border. On 9 May the Soviet government withdrew its recognition from the governments of Norway, Belgium, and Yugoslavia, and expelled their representatives from Moscow. On 12 May they recognised the government set up by Rashid Ali, who had rebelled (with German support) against the British domination of Iraq. On 3 June Soviet recognition of the Greek government, recently defeated by Germany and now in exile, was withdrawn. Finally, on 14 June Tass put out another statement in the Soviet press, denying foreign newspaper allegations that Germany had presented territorial and economic demands to the Soviet Union. The statement went on to affirm that Germany was observing the 1939 agreement as fully as was the Soviet Union. Recent transfers of German forces to the east must be connected with other matters having nothing to do with Soviet-German relations. This was almost a plea to Germany to join in the denial, or to open negotiations if indeed there were demands to be made. Germany made no reply. All these Soviet actions, diplomatic and economic, indicated that Stalin was anxious to remain on good terms with Germany.
As for an Anglo-Soviet agreement to attack Germany, the prospect was beyond the bounds of possibility. It is true that the British tried on a number of occasions to draw Soviet attention in general terms to the German danger, and to warn Stalin specifically of an impending invasion. But Stalin dismissed these warnings, believing that the British were trying to provoke hostility, or even a war, between the Soviet Union and Germany.11 So far from co-operating with Britain, Stalin was deeply distrustful of British intentions; and in May 1941 the astonishing flight of the Nazi leader Rudolf Hess to Britain reinforced his suspicions. Of Soviet-British collaboration there was not the slightest trace.
Barbarossa as a pre-emptive strike: was Stalin planning to attack Germany in 1941?
There remains the possibility that Stalin was secretly preparing an attack on the Germans in summer 1941, which Operation Barbarossa was designed to pre-empt. This view was expounded at length by Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Rezun) in a book called Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?12 Suvorov based his argument partly on the equipment, make-up and doctrine of the Soviet armed forces, which were all offensive in nature — for example, tanks suitable for offensive operations, airborne troops trained for attack, and a military doctrine which inculcated an aggressive outlook and spirit. He also cited evidence that in spring 1941 large Soviet forces were moving into the western military districts of the country, towards the frontier areas. He finally asserted, though without precise evidence, that the date for a Soviet assault had been fixed for 6 July 1941.
Suvorov's book has been generally dismissed, often with contempt. Two expert authorities have dismissed it as ‘flimsy and fraudulent’ and ‘totally unfounded’13; but the issues involved are somewhat complicated and require examination. Evan Mawdsley's careful analysis of the evidence now available on Soviet war planning shows that three plans were prepared, in September 1940, March 1941 and May 1941 respectively. The first two envisaged an offensive into German-held Poland and into Germany itself, but only as a counter-offensive after an initial German attack on the Soviet Union. The third plan, drawn up in May 1941, envisaged a sudden surprise attack against the Germans, as a pre-emptive strike; but it gave no indication as to a date. This plan was approved in principle by Timoshenko, the Commissar for Defence, and Zhukov, the Chief of the General Staff. It is probable that it was seen by Stalin, but there is no evidence that he approved it or ordered its implementation. On the contrary, all the evidence shows that Stalin neither wanted nor expected war in 1941. He did not want it, because the Soviet forces were in the midst of a large-scale re-organisation. He did not expect it, because he simply could not believe that Germany would attack the Soviet Union before Britain was defeated or made peace. Moreover, he resolutely refused to take any action which might be construed as provocative towards the Germans — for example, when on 11–12 June 1941 Zhukov and Timoshenko asked permission to move forces into more forward positions, Stalin refused. Even the orders issued on 22 June, when the German attack was in full swing, insisted that Soviet troops should not cross the border into German-held territory.14
In sum, therefore, there was a Soviet plan in May 1941 which envisaged a pre-emptive strike against Germany; but there is no evidence that Stalin intended to put this plan into operation, and much that he did not. In any case, there is no sign at all that Hitler was afraid of such an attack. In 1940 he had confidently massed almost all the German forces in the west, leaving only a screen in the east. When he addressed senior officers on 30 March 1941 on the coming war in the east, he gave no indication that Germany was threatened by the Red Army.15 The planning for Operation Barbarossa was well under way late in 1940 and early 1941, long before the Soviet plan of May 1941 was drafted; and both Hitler and the high command displayed an immense confidence in Germany's offensive powers, rather than any fear of a Soviet attack.
The conclusion must be that, while the Soviet high command at one stage considered a pre-emptive strike, Stalin did not take this idea up, and in any case Hitler was not afraid of such an attack. The Icebreaker thesis has no substance.
Why did Hitler invade the Soviet Union? No final answer emerges. Too much depends upon the dubious enterprise of searching the murky depths of Hitler's mind and personality. To lay exclusive emphasis on preconceived ideas of race and living space may be to produce too rigid a theory of inevitability. On the other hand, to appeal to opportunism or to the undoubted friction in German-Soviet relations seems inadequate. ‘Opportunism’ by itself does not explain why some opportunities were taken and others were let slip; and the attack on the Soviet Union was prepared over too long a period of time to be properly described as opportunist. Friction with the Soviet Union, over Finland, Rumania, and Bulgaria, and generally over spheres of influence as defined in 1939, certainly existed, but so far Germany was having the best of it and under little pressure to take extreme action. The German sphere of influence in eastern Europe was being steadily enlarged, while the economic arrangements with the Soviet Union still held good and operated increasingly to Germany's benefit. In these circumstances, immediate self-interest would surely point to maintaining this advantageous relationship. If the war with Britain was dominant in German thinking, the economic agreement with the Soviet Union allowed Germany to nullify the effects of the British blockade, and offered more tangible advantages than the hazardous and uncertain prospects of war.
In this balance of probabilities, ideological motives and the long-established mould of Hitler's thought carry more weight than the immediate circumstances of 1940–41, which seem sufficient to confirm a mind already made up but inadequate in themselves as a basis for decision. This view is reinforced by what happened in the campaign, which was fought, in Robert Cecil's words, ‘not in the way most likely to lead to victory, but in the manner most consistent with Hitler's ideological preconceptions’.16
If this is so, then the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 stands as the culminating point of two of the underlying forces making for war in the 1930s and early 1940s: ideology and economics. The racial obsessions of Nazism, its hostility to Bolshevism, and its determination to conquer living space and sources of raw materials, were worked out over the whole period, and took final shape in the great war in the east. To these may be added the third underlying force: strategy and military thought. A misleading over-confidence in the German military machine, fed and bloated by the astonishing victories of 1940, was an important impulse behind the attack. Of course, particular decisions still had to be made at points all along the line; but the impulse of the underlying forces was such that for Germany to escape from them would have required very determined action indeed: nothing short of internal revolution and complete transformation in thought and action. This never looked like happening. The German attack on the Soviet Union was the culmination of the whole process leading the continent of Europe into war; and to understand that process properly it must be seen as a whole.
References
1. Quoted in Alan Bullock, Hitler: a study in tyranny (London 1952), p. 625.
2. Ibid., p. 651.
3. Jürgen Förster, in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. IV, The Attack on the Soviet Union (Oxford 1998), pp. 1245–1246.
4. The preparations for securing living space, and the detailed orders which were to translate Hitler's ideological intentions into practice, are set out in ibid., pp. 481–513.
5. Quoted in Joachim Fest, Hitler (London: Penguin Books 1977), p. 961.
6. Richard J. Evans, In Hitler's Shadow. West German historians and the attempt to escape from the Nazi past (London 1989), p. 58.
7. Halder's diary, in DGFP, series D, vol. X, p. 373.
8. Quoted in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. IV, p. 284.
9. Ibid., pp. 115–116, 127, 191–9; and see also Nikolai Tolstoy, Stalin's Secret War (London 1981), pp. 108–9.
10. Bernd Stegemann in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. II, Germany's Initial Conquests in Europe (Oxford 1991), p. 29.
11. See Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven 1999), pp. 155–178; cf. Geoffrey Roberts, The Unholy Alliance: Stalin's Pact with Hitler (Bloomington, Indiana 1989), p. 208.
12. Viktor Suvorov, Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? (London 1990). Suvorov was the pseudonym of Vladimir Rezun, a former officer in Soviet military intelligence.
13. Gorodetsky, Grand Illusion, p. x; David M. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (Lawrence, Kansas 1998), p. xiii.
14. Evan Mawdsley, ‘Crossing the Rubicon: Soviet Plans for Offensive War in 1940–1941’, International History Review, vol. 25, No. 4, Dec. 2003, pp. 818–865, and especially pp. 855–6, 864–5. See also Gorodesky, Grand Delusion, p. 279.
15. Jürgen Förster and Evan Mawdsley, ‘Hitler and Stalin in Perspective: Secret Speeches on the Eve of Barbarossa’, War in History, vol. 11, No. 1, 2004, pp. 65, 69.
16. Robert Cecil, Hitler's Decision to Invade Russia, 1941 (London 1975), p. 167.