Table Of Content- was Professor of Military History at Humboldt
ROLF DIETER MÜLLER
University, Berlin until 2014. He has also been Leading Scientific Director in the
German Armed Forces Military History Research Institute in Potsdam, and
Coordinator of the ‘German Reich and the Second World War’ project. He is the
author of numerous publications on World War II, including The Unknown
Eastern Front: The Wehrmacht and Hitler’s Foreign Soldiers (I.B.Tauris).
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C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Introduction
1. Germany and Its Neighbours to the East
2. A War of Intervention against the Soviet Union?
3. The Turning Point in German–Polish Relations
4. Preparations for the War in the East
5. From the Hitler–Stalin Pact to Operation Barbarossa
Conclusion
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
L I S T O F I L L U S T R A T I O N S
1 Józef Piłsudski.
2 Jurek Bitschan.
3 Mikhail Tukhachevsky, as a Red Army officer in 1918.
4 Joseph Goebbels visits Poland’s Marshal Józef Piłsudski in Warsaw on 15
June 1934.
5 Title page of the limited ‘Marshal Edition’ of 1937.
6 Józef Beck on a visit to Hermann Göring at Carinhall, July 1935.
7 Polish officers visit the Infantry Academy in Dresden in August 1935.
8 Soviet paratroopers conduct airborne exercises, around 1935.
9 Anti-tank turrets at Panzerwerk 717, near Międzyrzecz.
10 Japanese troops before the occupation of Hankou, October 1938.
11 Józef Lipski at the diplomatic reception for the NSDAP’s party conference in
Nuremberg, 10 September 1938.
12 Józef Beck visits Hitler at the Obersalzberg on 5 January 1939.
13 Military parade in Berlin to mark Adolf Hitler’s birthday, 20 April 1939.
14 Franz Halder, around 1938.
15 Soviet offensive against Japanese forces in summer 1939.
16 After the signing of the Hitler–Stalin pact on 23 August 1939.
17 German and Soviet soldiers at the joint victory parade in Brest-Litovsk, 22
September 1939.
18 Lieutenant Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, around 1941.
19 Hitler with his personal staff, May or June 1940.
20 General Erich Marcks, around 1941.
21 Hitler in the army commander-in-chief’s headquarters after the end of the
French campaign.
22 A Russian child near Smolensk, summer 1941.
L I S T O F M A P S
Map 1: Battle of Warsaw, 1920
Map 2: East Central Europe after the peace treaties of 1919/1922
Map 3: German Operation Plan, 1940
Map 4: The East Wall, stage 1, March 1940
Map 5: The enemy situation by the Army High Command, 18 to 22 July 1940
Map 6: Draft Operational Plan East (The Marcks Plan)
Map 7: Operation Barbarossa
I N T R O D U C T I O N
On 22 June 1941, the German Wehrmacht and its allies began their assault on
the USSR. The operation was code named ‘Barbarossa’. It was the opening
move in the largest and bloodiest war in world history. In its first weeks, Hitler’s
armies marched east, confident of victory despite high losses and a gradual
slowing of their advance. But Stalin’s empire did not, as expected, collapse
under the initial onslaught. The Russian resistance stiffened amid monstrous
sacrifices by the Red Army. Although the Germans succeeded in reaching the
outskirts of Moscow within a mere five months, Stalin then struck back and
knocked the whole German eastern front off balance. It took, however, another
forty months for the Soviet armed forces to fight their way down the long road
into the west, at which point Hitler killed himself in his bunker and so opened
the door to capitulation.
The German–Soviet conflict stands at the centre of World War II history. It
was more than a duel between dictators. Hitler conceived of it as an ethnically
ideological war of annihilation. He made sure from the German side that the
campaign was fought with the utmost intensity and viciousness, and that the
occupation of the conquered territories was a criminal one. It was undoubtedly
the most extensive war of plunder and obliteration ever seen, one beside whose
powers of destruction even the terrors of a Genghis Khan were attenuated. The
defeat of Germany destroyed not only the German Reich, but also all the states
of Eastern Europe, which were annexed by the Soviet imperium for the next
forty years. This division of Europe and the ensuing Cold War between East and
West defined an era’s politics worldwide.
All this began with the German invasion on 22 June 1941. It is therefore no
surprise that this war still stands out in our collective memory and prompts our
historians to ask new questions of the past.1 Many contemporaries even during
World War II saw the decision to invade the USSR as Hitler’s greatest strategic
mistake. The victorious powers considered the planning of this war of aggression
one of the Nazi regime’s gravest crimes, especially because the German Reich
had signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union as recently as August
1939. The invasion that took place perfidiously, treacherously, deceitfully, less
than two years later, was entirely unprovoked.
In the explanation he gave the German populace and the soldiers of the
Wehrmacht, Hitler claimed that he had been forced to counter Soviet
expansionism with a preventive strike.2 Proponents of this absurd justification
can still be found today, a few even among historians and retired generals.3 To
the judges in the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, on the other hand, it was
beyond doubt that Barbarossa was a rapacious act of aggression. They did,
however, largely accept the interpretation put forward by the accused and their
lawyers, namely that Hitler had made the decision himself and, on 31 July 1940,
given the military leadership the task of carrying it out. Whether he had been
acting more from a strategic or an ideological standpoint remained an open
question. While Wilhelm Keitel, as head of the Supreme Command of the
Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW), and Alfred Jodl, as
head of the OKW’s operations staff, were sentenced to death, the High
Command of the Army itself (Oberkommando des Heeres, OKH) went
unpunished. After 1945, Hitler’s generals were able to disseminate the
uncontested impression that they, after receiving the dictator’s decision, had
drawn up and implemented an ingenious plan which had failed only because of
Hitler’s constant meddling. Their worst enemy had not been the Red Army, but
rather their own Führer. To the myth of the ‘guiltless Wehrmacht’ was thus
added the myth of its leaders’ unimpeachable professionalism.
The theory that Hitler alone was responsible for the attack on the USSR and
that he let himself be guided in it by the ideological obsessions whose origins
can be read in his early political manifesto, Mein Kampf, has become an
important pillar in the historical edifice. For decades it has been the mainstay of
a far-reaching interpretation of Hitler’s foreign policy. This assumes that, with
the taking of power, the internal consolidation of his regime and the gigantic
policy of rearmament, Hitler was consistently and purposefully moving step by
step closer to his actual goal, the war for Lebensraum (‘living space’) in the east.
After Austria and Czechoslovakia, the next victim of German expansionism had
to be Poland. These moves were necessary preliminaries for the overthrow of
France, which would secure Hitler’s rear and so allow him to turn his attention
to his real target. The conquest of the USSR would then provide the basis for a
‘war of the continents’, that is, the war for world domination.
Was Hitler really in possession of this kind of step-by-step plan, or of the
ability to carry it out consistently and with tactical nous? Could the USSR really
only be the penultimate stage in such a plan? Was Hitler then a brilliant strategist
throughout the first years of the war, one who succeeded almost wherever he
turned, and who had at his command a Wehrmacht made almost invincible by
the tactic of blitzkrieg? An older generation of historians were convinced. It was
guided by a series of groundbreaking studies written by historians who were
junior officers during the war. They garnered the highest acclaim in the 1960s
and 1970s, and to this day they still shape our understanding of what caused or
led up to Barbarossa. Andreas Hillgruber and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen are the most
prominent proponents of this view. Particularly significant for the interpretation
of Hitler’s ‘step-by-step plan’ was Klaus Hildebrand’s systematic depiction of
the Third Reich’s foreign policy. Many German and international historians have
followed this line. Even the multi-volume work produced by the Bundeswehr’s
Military History Research Office, The German Reich and the Second World War
Description:Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, led to one of the most brutal campaigns of World War II: of the estimated 70 million people who died in the war, over 30 million died on the Eastern Front. Although it has previously been argued that the campaign was a pre-emptiv
