Suicide of a Nation - Germany's Ride to Destruction: Russia 1941

by Gary Komar

The Russian-German war is still largely ignored, hardly understood, and even with the mass of records now available, is continually misinterpreted. The reunification of Germany in the last decade and the breakup of the Soviet Union have brought historians no closer to a more objective assessment of "the greatest and longest land battle which mankind has ever fought." And the West still gives only grudging recognition to Russia's wartime contribution despite the loss of some 30 million Soviet citizens.

The new books that inundate the markets are misleading or incomplete. Many scholars still view the war and Germany's defeat in terms of isolated components. They ignore the relationship between military, political, economic, bureaucratic, cultural and social factors. Virtually no comprehensive account exists to show how all these elements impacted detrimentally on German military operations in Russia between June 22 and the end of September 1941.

Germany's defeat has not been examined in terms of its national character or suicidal predisposition. J.P. Stern, a former Visiting Professor at the Universities of California and Virginia wrote in 1975 in Hitler, The Fuehrer and the People "that to designate Hitler as the central agent of a policy of destruction on a European scale is very far from absolving the German society of his time from its responsibility to that policy." According to Stern, Hitler appealed "not only to the destructive instincts of a vanquished nation but also to certain personal values" and "in the long run, this society could not have preserved itself from self destruction." In Face to Face with Kaiserism (1918), James W. Gerrard, the former U.S. Ambassador to Germany during the First World War, noted that "There is a suicide point in the German character" and a duality in the German soul.

These "personal values" included paranoia over the real or imaginary threats of attack by France and Russia. With no natural frontiers of its own, the German Army prepared for and carried out aggressive war by rationalizing its defensive nature. And despite claims after World War II of being apolitical, the Army General Staff in particular held de facto political power from 1871 and moved the new nation inexorably toward self-destruction.

Rooted in a martial Prussian past, the German military establishment functioned as a state within a state, controlled compliant emperors and republican officials alike, and mirrored its society's principles of discipline, obedience and good order. According to historian Albert Seaton (The German Army 1933-45) (1982), the army was an overwhelming political force which had significant influence over Kaisers and dictator alike. In 1918, James Gerrard wrote "The one force in Germany which ultimately decides every great question, except the fate of its own head is the Great General Staff."

In his 1977 book, A Genius for War - The German Army and The German General Staff, 1807-1945, Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy noted that the reformation of the German military early in the 19th century emphasized "drastic politico-military and socio-military objectives" which realigned "the relationships of the Army to the State, to the people, and to the King." It was only when these objectives were threatened by radical change - when traditional military conservatism clashed with revolutionary Nazi politics - that events went awry.

Germany's national character, combined with National Socialism and military ineptitude, met disastrous results on the battlefields of the Soviet Union in 1941. The administrative result was "an assortment of personal empires . . . engaged in personal and institutional rivalries." Ongoing conspiracies, narrow self-interests, insufficient resources, industrial inefficiency and an ignorance of the Soviet Union - as well as Germany's predisposition to self-destruction - made the Soviet adventure a suicidal gamble. As the 1986 edition of The Makers of Modern Strategy points out, Germany's poorly planned campaign was "doomed to failure."

The elite of Germany's troops entered the Soviet Union unprepared and unsupported by a nation operating at peacetime industrial capacity. German mobile divisions, essential for ensuring a quick campaign, constantly broke down on poor roads or ran out of fuel and, as they distanced themselves from the supporting infantry, were spread out and isolated over hundreds of square miles of countryside. "The issue in Russia depended less on strategy and tactics than on space, logistics and mechanics," B.H. Liddell Hart wrote in his History of the Second World War (1970), and "the cumulative delay was a serious handicap on the strategic plan."

The polyglot transportation system could not keep the troops supplied. According to Barry A. Leach (German Strategy Against Russia, 1939-1941) (1973), the Germans relied extensively on the two-wheeled Russian panje wagons pulled by light, agile Russian horses. One transport officer was to remark bitterly that "the panje cart was the only standardized transport we had, and that was not even an official issue." (James Lucas, War on the Eastern Front, 1941-1945, The German Soldier in Russia )(1982).

The panzer and motorized units were unable to dominate and control the immense distances crossed, were too few in numbers, and faced a tenacious and determined enemy who refused to surrender. They were also coupled to an air force whose leader was more interested in looting Europe's art treasures and building his own personal empire than in replacing lost aircraft or coordinating Blitzkrieg tactics. In addition, the German Army was saddled to a political bureaucracy who wasted time, energy and scarce resources in pursuit of ethnic cleansing.

A difference of opinion still exists on the prescription for German success. Some historians continue to promote alternate victory theories proposed by Germany's defeated generals. If German strategy had been different and Hitler had not interfered, they argue, the Soviet Union would have surrendered. In 1991, Professor R.H.S. Stolfi, Professor of Modern European History at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, California wrote that had Moscow and not Kiev been the focus of attack during that first summer, "the Germans would have defeated Soviet Russia by the end of October 1941" and "won the war in Europe." (Stolfi, ix Preface, Hitler's Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted). Almost thirty years earlier in 1963 author Paul Carell in Hitler Movies East: 1941-1943 blamed Hitler for Germany's defeat. "Hitler was reluctant to proclaim Moscow as the strategic objective," he wrote. "If this heart was stabbed . . . the vast country would collapse."

Stolfi ignored the opinions of Barry Leach and Bryan I. Fugate. In 1973, Leach wrote that taking Moscow would not have led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Fugate's 1976 PhD. thesis presented to the University of Texas at Austin, Fugate said, "The best judgment, in the light of conditions existing in the summer of 1941, is that the capture of metropolitan Moscow in August or September by the Wehrmacht, would have been impossible." (Thunder on the Dnepr, The End of the Blitzkrieg Era, Summer 1941). Heinz-Dietrich Lowe of the Faculty of History at the University of Heidelberg supported the positions of Leach and Fugate in The Oxford Companion to World War II (1995).

Even with the layers of technical and planning shortfalls, an overwhelming problem lay with a chaotic and confused Army High Command (OKH) competing with "a distinct, separate, overlapping and often conflicting" Armed Forces High Command (OKW). (Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, 1995). Not only was the Army High Command intent on sabotaging Hitler's objectives, but field commanders followed their own course and direction at every opportunity. As Kenneth Macksey noted in book Guderian, Creator of the Blitzkrieg, (1965), "everyone wanted to move east - but at their own pace."

Central to this displacement of effort and largely ignored by historians who focus largely on the 1944 coup attempt on Hitler, were the efforts of the enigmatic Colonel General Franz Halder. Halder, symbolic of the contradictions inherent in the German people, played the dual role of conspirator and Chief of the German Army General Staff (OKH) between 1938 and 1942. He simultaneously prosecuted the war in the east while sabotaging Hitler's military plans. His conduct, Alan Clark wrote in 1965 in Barbarossa - The Russian-German Conflict 1941-45 had a "disastrous effect on the German campaign."

In 1938 Halder, together with the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, was prepared to remove Hitler by force. Failing this, he sabotaged Hitler's conduct of the war by other means. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, Germany's foremost strategist in World War II, wrote of Halder in Lost Victories, that "although it may be given to a politician to play the dual role of responsible adviser and conspirator, soldiers are not usually fitted for this kind of thing."

This was a general staff officer, Clark wrote, who was "at odds with his conscience and his loyalties, frustrated by the constraints of office placed on him by Hitler," and who worked "in a poisoned atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion, rivalry and jealousy which prevailed in National Socialist Germany." It "is not hard to understand how Halder and his colleagues could work themselves into a subversive and conspiratorial frame of mind against anyone . . . who dared encroach upon their own private bailiwick." Many of Halder's associates, who included high-ranking army and divisional commanders in the east, were active co-conspirators. Army Group Centre for example, which spearheaded the drive toward Moscow, was "a nest of intrigue and treason." (Alfred W. Turney, Disaster at Moscow, (1971)).

Halder's behaviour was indicative of deliberate nonperformance and selective performance, rather than of poor performance which Leach and other historians maintain. His actions were born out of conservative military roots, a frustrated coup attempt in 1938, and a jealous hatred of Hitler and the Nazi regime. As a participant in planning and executing "crimes against peace," an activity, for which many of his colleagues were convicted at Nuremberg in 1945, Halder was never brought to trial. Instead he was sent to the United States, where he spent fourteen years with the United States Army Historical Division, and honoured in 1961 with the Meritorious Civilian Services Award, the highest recognition that could be given to a civilian. (Time, April 1972).

The usefulness as well as the veracity of Halder's wartime diaries which, according to Leach, "constitute one of the most important documents available to historians of the Second World War" must be called into question. These entries, "abbreviated, often tantalizingly vague, and occasionally misleading," were subject to postwar modification by Halder and Hans Jacobsen to put the best light on Halder's treasonable wartime activities. As Leach notes, Halder's "volumes were not written as diaries but were books of notes summarizing each day's work and "Even when opinions of situations are recorded, it is difficult to make out whether they are those of Halder or of someone else."

Coupled to the inherent problems that plagued the invading German force, the lack of intelligence on the Soviet Union - its leadership, topography, strategy and industrial capability - only added to Germany's problems. Despite the availability of new Soviet documents, historians still claim that Stalin was unprepared for the German attack. In When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (1995), David M. Glantz (founder and former director of the U.S. Army's Foreign Military Studies Office) and Jonathan House (Associate Professor of History at Gordon College in Georgia), repeat a continuing theme that the 1941 German attack was an "overwhelming political and military surprise" since Stalin was reluctant "to believe in an immediate German offensive."

Yet the dictator's ruthless character, his exceptional administrative abilities, and his inclination toward secrecy belied this true thoughts and feelings. According to Alan Bullock in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1991), "Ruthlessness in Stalin's eyes . . . was a sovereign virtue to be curbed only for the sake of expediency." In the 1920's, he had "an instinctive grasp of how administrative power could be transmuted into political power." Even those close to him knew little of his thoughts or intentions, while he knew most everything about them.

Stalin deceptively appeased Hitler and deliberately ignored warnings of an impending German attack. He misled Germany and those around him showing others only what he wished them to see. Bullock noted that Stalin concealed his emotions and "did not confide his innermost thoughts to anybody." "One of his maxims was that in politics there is no room for trust."

Stalin had no altruistic motives: he did what was necessary to keep power. "If the redeeming quality of Soviet leadership was to make Russia - the Soviet Union - great one is hard to explain his policies in the 1930's", wrote Adam Ulan in Russia's Failed Revolutions. Ulan went on say that collectivization brought the death of millions who could have been productive workers. The purge of the party removed troublemakers. But if Stalin was so concerned with the German invasion, there was no reason for slaughtering the Red Army's officer corps between 1937 and 1939 unless, as Ulan suggests, the main rationale of Stalin's policies was "not the nation's security and strength but consideration of personal power."

Before and during the first months of the war, and well aware of the date of the German attack, the dictator raced against time to institute a series of measures to reorganize and defend his country. Brian Fugate argued in his 1984 publication Operation Barbarossa: Strategy and Tactics on the Eastern Front, 1941 that "Viewed from any standpoint, the USSR was as prepared for war in June 1941 as it possibly could have been." Stalin deliberately sacrificed his western territories and millions of his troops as "poisoned pawns" to delay the German advance, and bought time to fully mobilize his nation for total war, using the harsh Russian landscape and the weather as his allies. Given his personality, it is unlikely he would have surrendered the Soviet Union to Germany if Moscow had fallen. Taking guidance from Mao Tse-tung, Stalin would have conducted his own 'long march' east of the Urals and continued to wage war from Siberia.