[b]23: BARBAROSSA: THE TURN OF RUSSIA[/b]

 

 

WHILE HITLER WAS BUSY that summer of 1940 directing the conquest of the West, Stalin was taking advantage of the Fuehrer's preoccupations by moving into the Baltic States and reaching down into the Balkans. On the surface all was friendly between the two great dictatorships. Molotov, acting for Stalin, lost no opportunity to praise and flatter the Germans on every occasion of a new act of aggression or a fresh conquest. When Germany invaded Norway and Denmark on April 9, 1940, the Soviet Foreign Commissar hastened to tell Ambassador von der Schulenburg in Moscow that very morning that "the Soviet Government understood the measures which were forced on Germany." "We wish Germany," said Molotov, "complete success in her defensive measures." [1]

 

A month later, when the German ambassador called on Molotov to inform him officially of the Wehrmacht's attack in the West, which Ribbentrop had instructed his envoy to explain "was forced upon Germany by the impending Anglo-French push on the Ruhr by way of Belgium and Holland," the Soviet statesman again expressed his pleasure. "Molotov received the communication in an understanding spirit," Schulenburg wired Berlin, "and added that he realized that Germany must protect herself against Anglo-French attack. He had no doubt of our success." [2]

 

On June 17, the day France asked for an armistice, Molotov summoned Schulenburg to his office "and expressed the warmest congratulations of the Soviet Government on the splendid success of the German Wehrmacht."

 

The Foreign Commissar had something else to say, and this did not sound quite so pleasant in German ears. He informed the German envoy, as the latter wired Berlin "most urgent," of "the Soviet action against the Baltic States," adding -- and one can almost see the gleam in Molotov's eyes -- "that it had become necessary to put an end to all the intrigues by which England and France had tried to sow discord and mistrust between Germany and the Soviet Union in the Baltic States." [3] To put an end to such "discord" the Soviet government, Molotov added, had dispatched "special emissaries" to the three Baltic countries. They were, in fact, three of Stalin's best hatchetmen: Dekanozov, who was sent to Lithuania; Vishinsky, to Latvia; Zhdanov, to Estonia.

 

They carried out their assignments with the thoroughness which one would expect from this trio, especially the latter two individuals. Already on June 14, the day German troops entered Paris, the Soviet government had sent a nine-hour ultimatum to Lithuania demanding the resignation of its government, the arrest of some of its key officials and the right to send in as many Red Army troops as it pleased. Though the Lithuanian government accepted the ultimatum, Moscow deemed its acceptance "unsatisfactory," and the next day, June 15, Soviet troops occupied the country, the only one of the Baltic States to border on Germany. During the next couple of days similar Soviet ultimatums were dispatched to Latvia and Estonia, after which they were similarly overrun by the Red Army.

 

Stalin could be as crude and as ruthless in these matters as Hitler -- and even more cynical. The press having been suppressed, the political leaders arrested and all parties but the Communist declared illegal, "elections" were staged by the Russians in all three countries on July 14, and after the respective parliaments thus "elected" had voted for the incorporation of their lands into the Soviet Union, the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) of Russia "admitted" them into the motherland: Lithuania on August 3, Latvia on August 5, Estonia on August 6.

 

Adolf Hitler was humiliated, but, busy as he was trying to organize the invasion of Britain, could do nothing about it. The letters from the envoys of the three Baltic States in Berlin protesting Russian aggression were returned to them by order of Ribbentrop. To further humble the Germans Molotov brusquely told them on August 11 to "liquidate" their legations in Kaunas, Riga and Tallinn within a fortnight and close down their Baltic consulates by September 1.

 

The seizure of the Baltic States did not satisfy Stalin's appetite. The surprisingly quick collapse of the Anglo-French armies spurred him on to get as much as he could while the getting was good. He obviously thought there was little time to lose. On June 23, the day after the French formally capitulated and signed the armistice at Compiegne, Molotov again called in the Nazi ambassador in Moscow and told him that "the solution of the Bessarabian question brooked no further delay. The Soviet government was determined to use force, should the Rumanian government decline a peaceful agreement." It expected Germany, Molotov added, "not to hinder but to support the Soviets in their action." Moreover, "the Soviet claim likewise extended to Bucovina."4 Bessarabia had been taken by Rumania from Russia at the end of the First World War, but Bucovina had never belonged to it, having been under Austria until Rumania grabbed it in 1919. At the negotiations in Moscow for the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Ribbentrop, as he now reminded Hitler, who had questioned him about it, had been forced to give Bessarabia to the Russian sphere of interest. But he had never given away Bucovina.

 

There was some alarm in Berlin, which spread to OKW headquarters in the West. The Wehrmacht was desperately dependent on Rumanian oil and Germany needed the foodstuffs and fodder it also got from this Balkan country. These would be lost if the Red Army occupied Rumania. Some time back, on May 23, at the height of the Battle of France, the Rumanian General Staff had sent an S.O.S. to OKW informing it that Soviet troops were concentrating on the border. J adl summed up the reaction at Hitler's headquarters in his diary the next day: "Situation in East becomes threatening because of Russian concentration of force against Bessarabia."

 

On the night of June 26 Russia delivered an ultimatum to Rumania demanding the ceding to it of Bessarabia and northern Bucovina and insisting on a reply the next day. Ribbentrop, in panic, dashed off instructions from his special train to his minister in Bucharest telling him to advise the Rumanian government to yield, which it did on June 27. Soviet troops marched into the newly acquired territories the next day and Berlin breathed a sigh of relief that at least the rich sources of oil and food had not been cut off by Russia's grabbing the whole of Rumania.

 

It is clear from his acts and from the secret German papers that though Stalin was out to get all he could in Eastern Europe while the Germans were tied down in the West, he did not wish or contemplate a break with Hitler.

 

Toward the end of June Churchill had tried to warn Stalin in a personal letter of the danger of the German conquests to Russia as well as to Britain. [5] The Soviet dictator did not bother to answer; probably, like almost everyone else, he thought Britain was finished. So he tattled to the Germans what the British government was up to. Sir Stafford Cripps, a left-wing Labor Party leader, whom the Prime Minister had rushed to Moscow as the new British ambassador in the hope of striking a more responsive chord among the Bolsheviks -- a forlorn hope, as he later ruefully admitted -- was received by Stalin early in July in an interview that Churchill described as "formal and frigid." On July 13 Molotov, on Stalin's instructions, handed the German ambassador a written memorandum of this confidential conversation.

 

It is an interesting document. It reveals, as no other source does, the severe limitations of the Soviet dictator in his cold calculations of foreign affairs. Schulenburg sped it to Berlin "most urgent" and, of course, "secret," and Ribbentrop was so grateful for its contents that he told the Soviet government he "greatly appreciated this information." Cripps had pressed Stalin, the memorandum said, for his attitude on this principal question, among others:

 

[quote]The British Government was convinced that Germany was striving for hegemony in Europe ... This was dangerous to the Soviet Union as well as England. Therefore both countries ought to agree on a common policy of self-protection against Germany and on the re-establishment of the European balance of power ...[/quote]

 

Stalin's answers are given as follows:

 

[quote]He did not see any danger of the hegemony of anyone country in Europe and still less any danger that Europe might be engulfed by Germany. Stalin observed the policy of Germany, and knew several leading German statesmen well. He had not discovered any desire on their part to engulf European countries. Stalin was not of the opinion that German military successes menaced the Soviet Union and her friendly relations with Germany ... [6][/quote]

 

Such staggering smugness, such abysmal ignorance leave one breathless. The Russian tyrant did not know, of course, the secrets of Hitler's turgid mind, but the Fuehrer's past behavior, his known ambitions and the unexpectedly rapid Nazi conquests ought to have been enough to warn him of the dire danger the Soviet Union was now in. But, incomprehensibly, they were not enough.

 

From the captured Nazi documents and from the testimony of many leading German figures in the great drama that was being played over the vast expanse of Western Europe that year, it is plain that at the very moment of Stalin's monumental complacency Hitler had in fact been mulling over in his mind the idea of turning on the Soviet Union and destroying her.

 

The basic idea went back much further, at least fifteen years -- to Mein Kampf.

 

[quote]And so we National Socialists [Hitler wrote] take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement toward the south and west of Europe and turn our gaze toward the lands of the East ... When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states. Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way to us here ... This colossal empire in the East is ripe for dissolution, and the end of the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state. [7][/quote]

 

This idea lay like bedrock in Hitler's mind, and his pact with Stalin had not changed it at all, but merely postponed acting on it. And but briefly. In fact, less than two months after the deal was signed and had been utilized to destroy Poland the Fuehrer instructed the Army that the conquered Polish territory was to be regarded "as an assembly area for future German operations." The date was October 18, 1939, and Halder recorded it that day in his diary.

 

Five weeks later, on November 23, when he harangued his reluctant generals about attacking in the West, Russia was by no means out of his mind. "We can oppose Russia," he declared, "only when we are free in the West." At that time the two-front war, the nightmare of German generals for a century, was very much on Hitler's mind, and he spoke of it at length on this occasion. He would not repeat the mistake of former German rulers; he would continue to see to it that the Army had one front at a time.

 

It was only natural, then, that with the fall of France, the chasing of the British Army across the Channel and the prospects of Britain's imminent collapse, Hitler's thoughts should turn once again to Russia. For he now supposed himself to be free in the West and thereby to have achieved the one condition he had laid down in order to be in a position to "oppose Russia." The rapidity with which Stalin seized the Baltic States and the two Rumanian provinces in June spurred Hitler to a decision.

 

The moment of its making can now be traced. Jodi says that the "fundamental decision" was taken "as far back as during the Western Campaign."H Colonel Walter Warlimont, Jodi's deputy at OKW, remembers that on July 29 Jodi announced at a meeting of Operations Staff officers that "Hitler intended to attack the U.S.S.R. in the spring of 1941." Sometime previous to this meeting, Jodi related, Hitler had told Keitel "that he intended to launch the attack against the U.S.S.R. during the fall of 1940." But this was too much even for Keitel and he had argued Hitler out of it by contending that not only the bad weather in the autumn but the difficulties of transferring the bulk of the Army from the West to the East made it impossible. By the time of this conference on July 29, Warlimont relates, "the date for the intended attack [against Russia] had been moved back to the spring of 1941." [9]

 

Only a week before, we know from Halder's diary, [10] the Fuehrer had still held to a possible campaign in Russia for the autumn if Britain were not invaded. At a military conference in Berlin on July 21 he told Brauchitsch to get busy on the preparations for it. That the Army Commander in Chief and his General Staff already had given the problem some thought -- but not enough thought -- is evident from his response to Hitler. Brauchitsch told the Leader that the campaign "would last four to six weeks" and that the aim would be "to defeat the Russian Army or at least to occupy enough Russian territory so that Soviet bombers could not reach Berlin or the Silesian industrial area while, on the other hand, the Luftwaffe bombers could reach all important objectives in the Soviet Union." Brauchitsch thought that from eighty to a hundred German divisions could do the job; he assessed Russian strength as "fifty to seventy-five good divisions." Halder's notes on what Brauchitsch told him of the meeting show that Hitler had been stung by Stalin's grabs in the East, that he thought the Soviet dictator was "coquetting with England" in order to encourage her to hold out, but that he had seen no signs that Russia was preparing to enter the war against Germany.

 

At a further conference at the Berghof on the last day of July 1940, the receding prospects of an invasion of Britain prompted Hitler to announce for the first time to his Army chiefs his decision on Russia. Halder was personally present this time and jotted down his shorthand notes of exactly what the warlord said. [11] They reveal not only that Hitler had made a definite decision to attack Russia in the following spring but that he had already worked out in his mind the major strategic aims.

 

[quote]Britain's hope [Hitler said] lies in Russia and America. If that hope in Russia is destroyed then it will be destroyed for America too because elimination of Russia will enormously increase Japan's power in the Far East.[/quote]

 

The more he thought of it the more convinced he was, Hitler said, that Britain's stubborn determination to continue the war was due to its counting on the Soviet Union.

 

[quote]Something strange [he explained] has happened in Britain! The British were already completely down. [i] Now they are back on their feet. Intercepted conversations. Russia unpleasantly disturbed by the swift developments in Western Europe.

 

Russia needs only to hint to England that she does not wish to see Germany too strong and the English, like a drowning man, will regain hope that the situation in six to eight months will have completely changed.

 

But if Russia is smashed, Britain's last hope will be shattered. Then Germany will be master of Europe and the Balkans.

 

Decision: In view of these considerations Russia must be liquidated. Spring, 1941.

 

The sooner Russia is smashed, the better. [ii][/quote]

 

The Nazi warlord then elaborated on his strategic plans which, it was obvious to the generals, had been ripening in his mind for some time despite all his preoccupations with the fighting in the West. The operation, he said, would be worth carrying out only if its aim was to shatter the Soviet nation in one great blow. Conquering a lot of Russian territory would not be enough. "Wiping out of the very power to exist of Russia! That is the goal!" Hitler emphasized. There would be two initial drives: one in the south to Kiev and the Dnieper River, the second in the north up through the Baltic States and then toward Moscow. There the two armies would make a junction. After that a special operation, if necessary, to secure the Baku oil fields. The very thought of such new conquests excited Hitler; he already had in mind what he would do with them. He would annex outright, he said, the Ukraine, White Russia and the Baltic States and extend Finland's territory to the White Sea. For the whole operation he would allot 120 divisions, keeping sixty divisions for the defense of the West and Scandinavia. The attack, he laid it down, would begin in May 1941 and would take five months to carry through. It would be finished by winter. He would have preferred, he said, to do it this year but this had not proved possible.

 

The next day, August 1, Halder went to work on the plans with his General Staff. Though he would later claim to have opposed the whole idea of an attack on Russia as insane, his diary entry for this day discloses him full of enthusiasm as he applied himself to the challenging new task.

 

Planning now went ahead with typical German thoroughness on three levels: that of the Army General Staff, of Warlimont's Operations Staff at OKW, of General Thomas' Economic and Armaments Branch of OKW. Thomas was instructed on August 14 by Goering that Hitler desired deliveries of ordered goods to the Russians "only till spring of 1941." [iii] In the meantime his office was to make a detailed survey of Soviet industry, transportation and oil centers both as a guide to targets and later on as an aid for administering Russia.

 

A few days before, on August 9, Warlimont had got out his first directive for preparing the deployment areas in the East for the jump-off against the Russians. The code name for this was Aufbau Ost -- "Build-up East." On August 26, Hitler ordered ten infantry and two armored divisions to be sent from the West to Poland. The panzer units, he stipulated, were to be concentrated in southeastern Poland so that they could intervene to protect the Rumanian oil fields. [13] The transfer of large bodies of troops to the Eastt could not be done without exciting Stalin's easily aroused suspicions if he learned of it, and the Germans went to great lengths to see that he didn't. Since some movements were bound to be detected, General Ernst Koestring, the German military attache in Moscow, was instructed to inform the Soviet General Staff that it was merely a question of replacing older men, who were being released to industry, by younger men. On September 6, Jodi got out a directive outlining in considerable detail the means of camouflage and deception. "These regroupings," he laid it down, "must not create the impression in Russia that we are preparing an offensive in the East." [14]

 

So that the armed services should not rest on their laurels after the great victories of the summer, Hitler issued on November 12, 1940, a comprehensive top-secret directive outlining new military tasks all over Europe and beyond. We shall come back to some of them. What concerns us here is that portion dealing with the Soviet Union.

 

[quote]Political discussions have been initiated with the aim of clarifying Russia's attitude for the time being. Irrespective of the results of these discussions, all preparations for the East which have already been verbally ordered will be continued. Instructions on this will follow, as soon as the general outline of the Army's operational plans have been submitted to, and approved by, me. [15][/quote]

 

As a matter of fact, on that very day, November 12, Molotov arrived in Berlin to continue with Hitler himself those political discussions.

 

[b]MOLOTOV IN BERLIN[/b]

 

Relations between Berlin and Moscow had for some months been souring. It was one thing for Stalin and Hitler to double-cross third parties, but quite another when they began to double-cross each other. Hitler had been helpless to prevent the Russians from grabbing the Baltic States and the two Rumanian provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bucovina, and his frustration only added to his growing resentment. The Russian drive westward would have to be stopped and first of all in Rumania, whose oil resources were of vital importance to a Germany which, because of the British blockade, could no longer import petroleum by sea.

 

To complicate Hitler's problem, Hungary and Bulgaria too demanded slices of Rumanian territory. Hungary, in fact, as the summer of 1940 approached its end, prepared to go to war in order to win back Transylvania, which Rumania had taken from her after the First World War. Such a war, Hitler realized, would cut off Germany from her main source of crude oil and probably bring the Russians in to occupy all of Rumania and rob the Reich permanently of Rumanian oil.

 

By August 28 the situation had become so threatening that Hitler ordered five panzer and three motorized divisions plus parachute and airborne troops to make ready to seize the Rumanian oil fields on September 1. [16] That same day he conferred with Ribbentrop and Ciano at the Berghof and then dispatched them to Vienna, where they were to lay down the law to the foreign ministers of Hungary and Rumania and make them accept Axis arbitration. This mission was accomplished without much trouble after Ribbentrop had browbeaten both sides. On August 30 at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna the Hungarians and Rumanians accepted the Axis settlement. When Mihai Manoilescu, the Rumanian Foreign Minister, saw the map stipulating that about one half of Transylvania should go to Hungary, he fainted, falling across the table at which the signing of the agreement was taking place, and regaining consciousness only after physicians had worked over him with camphor. [iv] [17] Ostensibly for her reasonableness but really to give Hitler a legal excuse for his further plans, Rumania received from Germany and Italy a guarantee of what was left of her territory. [v]

 

Light on the Fuehrer's further plans came to his intimates three weeks later. On September 20, in a top-secret directive, Hitler ordered the sending of "military missions" to Rumania.

 

[quote]To the world their tasks will be to guide friendly Rumania in organizing and instructing her forces.

 

The real tasks -- which must not become apparent either to the Rumanians or to our own troops -- will be:

 

To protect the oil district ...

 

To prepare for deployment from Rumanian bases of German and Rumanian forces in case a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us. [18][/quote]

 

That would take care of the southern flank of a new front he was beginning to picture in his mind.

 

The Vienna award and especially the German guarantee of Rumania's remaining territory went down badly in Moscow, which had not been consulted. When Schulenburg called on Molotov on September 1 to present a windy memorandum from Ribbentrop attempting to explain -- and justify -- what had taken place in Vienna, the Foreign Commissar, the ambassador reported, "was reserved, in contrast to his usual manner." He was not too reserved, however, to lodge a strong verbal protest. He accused the German government of violating Article III of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which called for consultation, and of presenting Russia with "accomplished facts" which conflicted with German assurances about "questions of common interests." [19] The thieves, as is almost inevitable in such cases, had begun to quarrel over the spoils.

 

Recriminations became more heated in the following days. On September 3 Ribbentrop telegraphed a long memorandum to Moscow denying that Germany had violated the Moscow Pact and accusing Russia of having done just that by gobbling up the Baltic Slates and two Rumanian provinces without consulting Berlin. The memorandum was couched in strong language and the Russians replied to it on September 21 with equally stern words -- by this time both sides were putting their cases in writing. The Soviet answer reiterated that Germany had broken the pact, warned that Russia still had many interests in Rumania and concluded with a sarcastic proposal that if the article calling for consultation involved "certain inconveniences and restrictions" for the Reich the Soviet government was ready to amend or delete this clause of the treaty. [20]

 

The Kremlin's suspicions of Hitler were further aroused by two events in September. On the sixteenth, Ribbentrop wired Schulenburg to call on Molotov and "casually" inform him that German reinforcements for northern Norway were going to be sent by way of Finland. A few days later, on September 25, the Nazi Foreign Minister got off another telegram to the embassy in Moscow, this time addressed to the charge, Schulenburg having returned to Germany on leave. It was a most confidential message, being marked "Strictly Secret-State Secret," and directing that its instructions were to be carried out only if on the next day the charge received from Berlin by wire or telephone a special code word. [21]

 

He was to inform Molotov that "in the next few days" Japan, Italy and Germany were going to sign in Berlin a military alliance. It was not to be directed against Russia -- a specific article would say that.

 

[quote]This alliance [Ribbentrop stated] is directed exclusively against American warmongers. To be sure this is, as usual, not expressly stated in the treaty, but can be unmistakably inferred from its terms ... Its exclusive purpose is to bring the elements pressing for America's entry into the war to their senses by conclusively demonstrating to them that if they enter the present struggle they will automatically have to deal with the three great powers as adversaries.  [22][/quote]

 

The chilly Soviet Foreign Commissar, whose suspicions of the Germans were now growing like flowers in June, was highly skeptical when Werner von Tippelskirch, the charge, brought him this news on the evening of September 26. He said immediately, with that pedantic attention to detail which so annoyed all with whom he negotiated, friend or foe, that according to Article IV of the Moscow Pact the Soviet government was entitled to see the text of this tripartite military alliance before it was signed, including, he added, the text of "any secret protocols."

 

Molotov also wanted to know more about the German agreement with Finland for the transport of troops through that country, which he had heard of mostly through the press, he said, including a United Press dispatch from Berlin. During the last three days, Molotov added, Moscow had received reports of the landing of German forces in at least three Finnish ports, "without having been informed thereof by Germany."

 

[quote]The Soviet Government [Molotov continued] wished to receive the text of the agreement on the passage of troops through Finland, including its secret portions ... and to be informed as to the object of the agreement, against whom it was directed, and the purposes that were being served thereby. [23][/quote]

 

The Russians had to be mollified -- even the obtuse Ribbentrop could see that -- and on October 2 he telegraphed to Moscow what he said was the text of the agreement with Finland. He also reiterated that the Tripartite Pact, which in the meantime had been signed, [vi] was not directed against the Soviet Union and solemnly declared that "there were no secret protocols nor any other secret agreements." [24] After instructing Tippelskirch on October 7 to inform Molotov "incidentally" that a German "military mission" was being sent to Rumania and after receiving Molotov's skeptical reaction to this further news ("How many troops are you sending to Rumania?" the Foreign Commissar had demanded to know),25 Ribbentrop on October 13 got off a long letter to Stalin in an attempt to quiet Soviet uneasiness about Germany. [26]

 

It is, as might be expected, a fatuous and at the same time arrogant epistle, abounding in nonsense and lies and subterfuge. England is blamed for the war and all its aftermaths thus far, but one thing is sure: "The war as such has been won by us. It is only a question of how long it will be before England ... admits to collapse." The German moves against Russia in Finland and Rumania as well as the Tripartite Pact are explained as really a boon to Russia. In the meantime British diplomacy and British secret agents are trying to stir up trouble between Russia and Germany. To frustrate them, why not send Molotov to Berlin, Ribbentrop asked Stalin, so that the Fuehrer could "explain personally his views regarding the future molding of relations between our two countries"?

 

Ribbentrop gave a sly hint what those views were: nothing less than dividing up the world among the four totalitarian powers.

 

[quote]It appears to be the mission of the Four Powers [he said] -- the Soviet Union, Italy, Japan and Germany -- to adopt a long-range policy ... by delimitation of their interests on a world-wide scale.[/quote]

 

The emphasis is Ribbentrop's.

 

There was some delay in the German Embassy in Moscow in getting this letter to its destination, which made Ribbentrop livid with rage and inspired an angry telegram from him to Schulenburg demanding to know why his letter had not been delivered until the seventeenth and why, "in keeping with the importance of its contents," it was not delivered to Stalin personally -- Schulenburg had handed it to Molotov. [27] Stalin replied on October 22, in a remarkably cordial tone. "Molotov admits," he wrote, "that he is under obligation to pay you a visit in Berlin. He hereby accepts your invitation." [28] Stalin's geniality must have been only a mask. Schulenburg wired Berlin a few days later that the Russians were protesting the refusal of Germany to deliver war material while at the same time shipping arms to Finland. "This is the first time," Schulenburg advised Berlin, "that our deliveries of arms to Finland have been mentioned by the Soviets." [29]

 

[quote]A dark, drizzling day, and Molotov arrived, his reception being extremely stiff and formal. Driving up the Linden to the Soviet Embassy, he looked to me like a plugging, provincial schoolmaster. But to have survived in the cutthroat competition of the Kremlin he must have something. The Germans talk glibly of letting Moscow have that old Russian dream, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, while they will take the rest of the Balkans: Rumania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria ...[/quote]

 

Thus began my diary entry in Berlin on November 12, 1940. The glib talk of the Germans was accurate enough, as far as it went. Today we know much more about this strange and -- as it turned out -- fateful meeting, thanks to the capture of the Foreign Office documents, in which one finds the confidential German minutes of the two-day sessions, all but one of them kept by the ubiquitous Dr. Schmidt. [vii] [30]

 

At the first meeting between the two foreign ministers, during the forenoon of November 12, Ribbentrop was in one of his most vapid and arrogant moods but Molotov quickly saw through him and sized up what the German game was. "England," Ribbentrop began, "is beaten and it is only a question of time when she will finally admit her defeat ... The beginning of the end has now arrived for the British Empire." The British, it was true, were hoping for aid from America, but "the entry of the United States into the war is of no consequence at all for Germany. Germany and Italy will never again allow an Anglo-Saxon to land on the European Continent ... This is no military problem at all ... The Axis Powers are, therefore, not considering how they can win the war, but rather how rapidly they can end the war which is already won."

 

This being so, Ribbentrop explained, the time had come for the four powers, Russia, Germany, Italy and Japan, to define their "spheres of interest." The Fuehrer, he said, had concluded that all four countries would naturally expand "in a southerly direction." Japan had already turned south, as had Italy, while Germany, after the establishment of the "New Order" in Western Europe, would find her additional Lebensraum in (of all places!) "Central Africa." Ribbentrop said he "wondered" if Russia would also not "turn to the south for the natural outlet to the open sea which was so important for her."

 

"Which sea?" Molotov interjected icily.

 

This was an awkward but crucial question, as the Germans would learn during the next thirty-six hours of ceaseless conversations with this stubborn, prosaic, precise Bolshevik. The interruption floored Ribbentrop for a moment and he could not think of an answer. Instead, he rambled on about "the great changes that would take place all over the world after the war" and gabbled that the important thing was that "both partners to the German-Russian pact had together done some good business" and "would continue to do some business." But when Molotov insisted on an answer to his simple question, Ribbentrop finally replied by suggesting that "in the long run the most advantageous access to the sea for Russia could be found in the direction of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea."

 

Molotov sat there, says Dr. Schmidt, who was present taking notes, "with an impenetrable expression." [31] He said very little, except to comment at the end that "precision and vigilance" were necessary in delimiting spheres of interest, "particularly between Germany and Russia." The wily Soviet negotiator was saving his ammunition for Hitler, whom he saw in the afternoon. For the all-powerful Nazi warlord it turned out to be quite a surprising, nerve-racking, frustrating and even unique experience.

 

Hitler was just as vague as his Foreign Minister and even more grandiose. As soon as the weather improved, he began by saying, Germany would strike "the final blow against England." There was, to be sure, "the problem of America." But the United States could not "endanger the freedom of other nations before 1970 or 1980 ... It had no business either in Europe, in Africa or in Asia" -- an assertion which Molotov broke in to say he was in agreement with. But he was not in agreement with much else that Hitler said. After the Nazi leader had finished a lengthy exposition of pleasant generalities, stressing that there were no fundamental differences between the two countries in the pursuit of their respective aspirations and in their common drive toward "access to the ocean," Molotov replied that "the statements of the Fuehrer had been of a general nature." He would now, he said, set forth the ideas of Stalin, who on his departure from Moscow had given him "exact instructions." Whereupon he hurled the book at the German dictator who, as the minutes make clear, was scarcely prepared for it.

 

"The questions hailed down upon Hitler," Schmidt afterward recalled. "No foreign visitor had ever spoken to him in this way in my presence." [32]

 

What was Germany up to in Finland? Molotov wanted to know. What was the meaning of the New Order in Europe and in Asia, and what role would the U.S.S.R. be given in it? What was the "significance" of the Tripartite Pact? "Moreover," he continued, "there are issues to be clarified regarding Russia's Balkan and Black Sea interests with respect to Bulgaria, Rumania and Turkey." He would like, he said, to hear some answers and "explanations."

 

Hitler, perhaps for the first time in his life, was too taken aback to answer. He proposed that they adjourn "in view of a possible air-raid alarm," promising to go into a detailed discussion the next day.

 

A showdown had been postponed but not prevented, and the next morning when Hitler and Molotov resumed their talks the Russian Commissar was relentless. To begin with, about Finland, over which the two men soon became embroiled in a bitter and caustic dispute. Molotov demanded that Germany get its troops out of Finland. Hitler denied that "Finland was occupied by German troops." They were merely being sent through Finland to Norway. But he wanted to know "whether Russia intended to go to war against Finland." According to the German minutes, Molotov "answered this question somewhat evasively," and Hitler was not satisfied.

 

"There must be no war in the Baltic," Hitler insisted. "It would put a heavy strain on German-Russian relations," a threat which he added to a moment later by saying that such a strain might bring "unforeseeable consequences." What more did the Soviet Union want in Finland, anyway? Hitler wanted to know, and his visitor answered that it wanted a "settlement on the same scale as in Bessarabia" -- which meant outright annexation. Hitler's reaction to this must have perturbed even the imperturbable Russian, who hastened to ask the Fuehrer's "opinion on that."

 

The dictator in turn was somewhat evasive, replying that he could only repeat that "there must be no war with Finland because such a conflict might have far-reaching repercussions."

 

"A new factor has been introduced into the discussion by this position," Molotov retorted.

 

So heated had the dispute become that Ribbentrop, who must have become thoroughly frightened by this time, broke in to say, according to the German minutes, "that there was actually no reason at all for making an issue of the Finnish question. Perhaps it was merely a misunderstanding."

 

Hitler took advantage of this timely intervention to quickly change the subject. Could not the Russians be tempted by the unlimited plunder soon to be available with the collapse of the British Empire?

 

"Let us turn to more important problems," he said.

 

[quote]After the conquest of England [he declared] the British Empire would be apportioned as a gigantic world-wide estate in bankruptcy of forty million square kilometers. In this bankrupt estate there would be for Russia access to the ice-free and really open ocean. Thus far, a minority of forty-five million Englishmen had ruled six hundred million inhabitants of the British Empire. He was about to crush this minority ... Under these circumstances there arose world-wide perspectives ... All the countries which could possibly be interested in the bankrupt estate would have to stop all controversies among themselves and concern themselves exclusively with the partition of the British Empire. This applied to Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Japan.[/quote]

 

The chilly, impassive Russian guest did not appear to be moved by such glittering "world-wide perspectives," nor was he as convinced as the Germans -- a point he later rubbed in -- that the British Empire would soon be there for the taking. He wanted, he said, to discuss problems "closer to Europe." Turkey, for instance, and Bulgaria and Rumania.

 

"The Soviet Government," he said, "is of the opinion that the German guarantee of Rumania is aimed against the interests of Soviet Russia -- if one may express oneself so bluntly." He had been expressing himself bluntly all day, to the growing annoyance of his hosts, and now he pressed on. He demanded that Germany "revoke" this guarantee. Hitler declined.

 

All right, Molotov persisted, in view of Moscow's interest in the Straits, what would Germany say "if Russia gave Bulgaria ... a guarantee under exactly the same conditions as Germany and Italy had given one to Rumania"?

 

One can almost see Hitler's dark frown. He inquired whether Bulgaria had asked for such a guarantee, as had Rumania? "He (the Fuehrer)," the German memorandum quotes him as adding, "did not know of any request by Bulgaria." At any rate, he would first have to consult Mussolini before giving the Russians a more definite answer to their question. And he added ominously that if Germany "were perchance looking for sources of friction with Russia, she would not need the Straits for that."

 

But the Fuehrer, usually so talkative, had no more stomach for talk with this impossible Russian.

 

"At this point in the conversation," say the German minutes, "the Fuehrer called attention to the late hour and stated that in view of the possibility of English air attacks it would be better to break off the talk now, since the main issues had probably been sufficiently discussed."

 

That night Molotov gave a gala banquet to his hosts at the Russian Embassy on Unter den Linden. Hitler, apparently exhausted and still irritated by the afternoon's ordeal, did not put in an appearance.

 

The British did. I had wondered why their bombers had not appeared over Berlin, as they had almost every recent night, to remind the Soviet Commissar on his first evening in the capital that, whatever the Germans told him, Britain was still in the war, and kicking. Some of us, I confess, had waited hopefully for the planes, but they had not come. Officials in the Wilhelmstrasse, who had feared the worst, were visibly relieved. But not for long.

 

On the evening of November 13, the British came over early. [viii] It gets dark in Berlin about 4 P.M. at this time of year, and shortly after 9 o'clock the air-raid sirens began to whine and then you could hear the thunder of the flak guns and, in between, the hum of the bombers overhead. According to Dr. Schmidt, who was at the banquet in the Soviet Embassy, Molotov had just proposed a friendly toast and Ribbentrop had risen to his feet to reply when the air-raid warning was sounded and the guests scattered to shelter. I remember the hurrying and scurrying down the Linden and around the corner at the Wilhelmstrasse as Germans and Russians made for the underground shelter of the Foreign Ministry. Some of the officials, Dr. Schmidt among them, ducked into the Adlon Hotel, from in front of which some of us were watching, and were unable to get to the impromptu meeting which the two foreign ministers now held in the underground depths of the Foreign Office. The minutes of this meeting were therefore taken, in the enforced absence of Dr. Schmidt, by Gustav Hilger, counselor of the German Embassy in Moscow, who had acted as one of the interpreters during the conference.

 

While the British bombers cruised overhead in the night and the antiaircraft guns fired away ineffectively at them, the slippery Nazi Foreign Minister tried one last time to take the Russians in. Out of his pocket he pulled a draft of an agreement which, in substance, transformed the Tripartite Pact into a four-power pact, with Russia as the fourth member. Molotov listened patiently while Ribbentrop read it through.

 

Article II was the core. In it Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union undertook "to respect each other's natural spheres of influence." Any disputes concerning them would be settled "in an amicable way." The two fascist countries and Japan agreed to "recognize the present extent of the possessions of the Soviet Union and will respect it." All four countries, in Article III, agreed not to join or support any combination "directed against one of the Four Powers."

 

The agreement itself, Ribbentrop proposed, would be made public, but not, of course, its secret protocols, which he next proceeded to read. The most important one defined each country's "territorial aspirations." Russia's was to "center south of the national territory of the Soviet Union in the direction of the Indian Ocean."

 

Molotov did not rise to the bait. The proposed treaty was obviously an attempt to divert Russia from its historic pressure westward, down the Baltic, into the Balkans and through the Straits to the Mediterranean, where inevitably it would clash with the greedy designs of Germany and Italy. The U.S.S.R. was not, at least at the moment, interested in the Indian Ocean, which lay far away. What it was interested in at the moment, Molotov replied, was Europe and the Turkish Straits. "Consequently," he added, "paper agreements will not suffice for the Soviet Union; she would have to insist on effective guarantees of her security."

 

[quote]The questions which interested the Soviet Union [he elaborated] concerned not only Turkey but Bulgaria ... But the fate of Rumania and Hungary was also of interest to the U.S.S.R. and could not be immaterial to her under any circumstances. It would further interest the Soviet Government to learn what the Axis contemplated with regard to Yugoslavia and Greece, and likewise, what Germany intended with regard to Poland ... The Soviet Government was also interested in the question of Swedish neutrality ... Besides, there existed the question of the passages out of the Baltic Sea ...[/quote]

 

The untiring, poker-faced Soviet Foreign Commissar left nothing out and Ribbentrop, who felt himself being buried under the avalanche of questions -- for at this point Molotov said he would "appreciate it" if his guest made answer to them -- protested that he was being "interrogated too closely."

 

[quote]He could only repeat again and again [he replied weakly] that the decisive question was whether the Soviet Union was prepared and in a position to co-operate with us in the great liquidation of the British Empire.[/quote]

 

Molotov was ready with a cutting retort. Hilger duly noted it in the minutes.

 

[quote]In his reply Molotov stated that the Germans were assuming that the war against England had already actually been won. If therefore [as Hitler had maintained] Germany was waging a life-and-death struggle against England, he could only construe this as meaning that Germany was fighting "for life" and England "for death."[/quote]

 

This sarcasm may have gone over the head of Ribbentrop, a man of monumental denseness, but Molotov took no chances. To the German's constant reiteration that Britain was finished, the Commissar finally replied, "If that is so, why are we in this shelter, and whose are these bombs which fall?" [ix]

 

From this wearing experience with Moscow's tough bargainer and from further evidence that came a fortnight later of Stalin's increasingly rapacious appetite, Hitler drew his final conclusions.

 

It must be set down here that the Soviet dictator, his subsequent claims to the contrary notwithstanding, now accepted Hitler's offer to join the fascist camp, though at a stiffer price than had been offered in Berlin. On November 26, scarcely two weeks after Molotov had returned from Germany, he informed the German ambassador in Moscow that Russia was prepared to join the four-power pact, subject to the following conditions:

 

[quote]1. That German troops are immediately withdrawn from Finland, which belongs to the Soviet Union's sphere of influence ...

 

2. That within the next few months the security of the Soviet Union in the Straits is assured by the conclusion of a mutual-assistance pact between the U.S.S.R. and Bulgaria ... and by the establishment of a base for land and naval forces by the Soviet Union within range of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles by means of a long-term lease.

 

3. That the area south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf is recognized as the center of the aspirations of the Soviet Union.

 

4. That Japan renounce her rights to concessions for coal and oil in northern Sakhalin. [33][/quote]

 

In all Stalin asked for five, instead of two, secret protocols embodying his new proposals and, for good measure, asked that, should Turkey prove difficult about Russian bases controlling the Straits, the four powers take military measures against her.

 

The proposals constituted a price higher than Hitler was willing even to consider. He had tried to keep Russia out of Europe, but now Stalin was demanding Finland, Bulgaria, control of the Straits and, in effect, the Arabian and Persian oil fields, which normally supplied Europe with most of its oil. The Russians did not even mention the Indian Ocean, which the Fuehrer had tried to fob off as the center of "aspirations" for the U.S.S.R.

 

"Stalin is clever and cunning," Hitler told his top military chiefs. "He demands more and more. He's a cold-blooded blackmailer. A German victory has become unbearable for Russia. Therefore: she must be brought to her knees as soon as possible." [34]

 

The great cold-blooded Nazi blackmailer had met his match, and the realization infuriated him. At the beginning of December he told Halder to bring him the Army General Staff's plan for the onslaught on the Soviet Union. On December 5 Halder and Brauchitsch dutifully brought it to him, and at the end of a four-hour conference he approved it. Both the captured OKW War Diary and Halder's own confidential journal contain a report on this crucial meeting. [35] The Nazi warlord stressed that the Red Army must be broken through both north and south of the Pripet Marshes, surrounded and annihilated "as in Poland." Moscow, he told Halder, "was not important." The important thing was to destroy the "life force" of Russia. Rumania and Finland were to join in the attack, but not Hungary. General Dietl's mountain division at Narvik was to be transported across northern Sweden to Finland for an attack on the Soviet arctic region. [x] Altogether some" 120 to 130 divisions" were allotted for the big campaign.

 

In its report on this conference, as in previous references to the plan to attack Russia, General Halder's diary employs the code name "Otto." Less than a fortnight later, on December 18, 1940, the code name by which it will go down in history was substituted. On this day Hitler crossed the Rubicon. He issued Directive No. 21. It was headed "Operation Barbarossa." It began:

 

[quote]TOP SECRET

 

The Fuehrer's Headquarters

 

December 18, 1940

 

The German Armed Forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign before the end of the war against England. [xi] For this purpose the Army will have to employ all available units with the reservation that the occupied territories will have to be safeguarded against surprise attacks ...

 

Preparations ... are to be completed by May 15, 1941. Great caution has to be exercised that the intention of an attack will not be recognized.[/quote]

 

So the target date was mid-May of the following spring. The "general purpose" of Operation Barbarossa Hitler laid down as follows:

 

[quote]The mass of the Russian Army in western Russia is to be destroyed in daring operations by driving forward deep armored wedges, and the retreat of intact, battle-ready troops into the wide spaces of Russia is to be prevented. The ultimate objective of the operation is to establish a defense line against Asiatic Russia from a line running from the Volga River to Archangel.[/quote]

 

Hitler's directive then went into considerable detail about the main lines of attack. [xii] The roles of Rumania and Finland were defined. They were to provide the jumping-off areas for attacks on the extreme north and south flanks as well as troops to aid the German forces in these operations. Finland's position was especially important. Various Finnish- German armies were to advance on Leningrad and the Lake Ladoga area, cut the Munnansk rail line, secure the Petsamo nickel mines and occupy the Russian ice-free ports on the Arctic Ocean. Much depended, Hitler admitted, on whether Sweden would permit the transit of German troops from Norway, but he correctly predicted that the Swedes would be accommodating in this.

 

The main operations were to be divided, Hitler explained, by the Pripet Marshes. The major blow would be delivered north of the swamps with two whole army groups. One would advance up the Baltic States to Leningrad. The other, farther south, would drive through White Russia and then swing north to join the first group, thus trapping what was left of the Soviet forces trying to retreat from the Baltic. Only then, Hitler laid it down, must an offensive against Moscow be undertaken. The Russian capital, which a fortnight before had seemed "unimportant" to Hitler, now assumed more significance. "The capture of this city," he wrote, "means a decisive political and economic victory, beyond the fall of the country's most important railroad junction." And he pointed out that Moscow was not only the main communications center of Russia but its principal producer of armaments.

 

A third army group would drive south of the marshes through the Ukraine toward Kiev, its principal objective being to roll up and destroy the Soviet forces there west of the Dnieper River. Farther south German-Rumanian troops would protect the flank of the main operation and advance toward Odessa and thence along the Black Sea. Thereafter the Donets basin, where 60 per cent of Soviet industry was concentrated, would be taken.

 

Such was Hitler's grandiose plan, completed just before the Christmas holidays of 1940, and so well prepared that no essential changes would be made in it. In order to secure secrecy, only nine copies of the directive were made, one for. each of the three armed services and the rest to be guarded at OKW headquarters. Even the top field commanders, the directive makes clear, were to be told that the plan was merely for "precaution, in case Russia should change her previous attitude toward us." And Hitler instructed that the number of officers in the secret "be kept as small as possible. Otherwise the danger exists that our preparations will become known and the gravest political and military disadvantages result."

 

There is no evidence that the generals in the Army's High Command objected to Hitler's decision to turn on the Soviet Union, whose loyal fulfillment of the pact with Germany had made possible their victories in Poland and the West. Later Halder would write derisively of "Hitler's Russian adventure" and claim the Army leaders were against it from the beginning. [37] But there is not a word in his voluminous diary entries for December 1940 which supports him in this. Indeed, he gives the impression of being full of genuine enthusiasm for the "adventure," which he himself, as Chief of the General Staff, had the main responsibility for planning.

 

At any rate, for Hitler the die was cast, and, though he did not know it, his ultimate fate sealed, by this decision of December 18, 1940. Relieved to have made up his mind at last, as he later revealed, he went off to celebrate the Christmas holidays with the troops and flyers along the English Channel -- as far as it was possible for him to get from Russia. Out of his mind too -- as far as possible -- must have been any thoughts of Charles XII of Sweden and of Napoleon Bonaparte, who after so many glorious conquests not unlike his own, had met disaster in the vast depths of the Russian steppes. How could they be much in his mind? By now, as the record shortly will show, the one-time Vienna waif regarded himself as the greatest conqueror the world had ever seen. Egomania, that fatal disease of all conquerors, was taking hold.

 

[b]SIX MONTHS OF FRUSTRATION[/b]

 

And yet, after all the tumultuous victories of the spring and early summer of 1940, there had been a frustrating six months for the Nazi conqueror. Not only the final triumph over Britain eluded him but opportunities to deal her a mortal blow in the Mediterranean had been thrown away.

 

Two days after Christmas Grand Admiral Raeder saw Hitler in Berlin, but he had little Yuletide cheer to offer. "The threat to Britain in the entire eastern Mediterranean, the Near East and in North Africa," he told the Fuehrer, "has been eliminated ... The decisive action in the Mediterranean for which we had hoped therefore is no longer possible." [38]

 

Adolf Hitler, balked by a shifty Franco, by the ineptitude of Mussolini and even by the senility of Marshal Petain, had really missed the bus in the Mediterranean. Disaster had struck the Italian ally in the Egyptian desert and now in December confronted it in the snowy mountains of Albania. These untoward happenings were also turning points in the war and in the course of history of the Third Reich. They had come about not only because of the weaknesses of Germany's friends and allies, but, in part, because of the Nazi warlord's incapacity to grasp the larger, intercontinental strategy that was called for and that Raeder and even Goering had urged upon him.

 

Twice in September 1940, on the sixth and the twenty-sixth, the Grand Admiral attempted to open up new vistas in the Fuehrer's mind now that the direct attack on England seemed out of the question. For the second conference Raeder cornered Hitler alone and, without the Army and Air Force officers to muddle the conversation, gave his chief a lengthy lecture on naval strategy and the importance of getting at Britain in other places than over the English Channel.

 

[quote]The British [Raeder said] have always considered the Mediterranean the pivot of their world Empire ... Italy, surrounded by British power, is fast becoming the main target of attack ... The Italians have not yet realized the danger when they refuse our help. Germany, however, must wage war against Great Britain with all the means at her disposal and without delay, before the United States is able to intervene effectively. For this reason the Mediterranean question must be cleared up during the winter months.[/quote]

 

Cleared up how? The Admiral then got down to brass tacks.

 

[quote]Gibraltar must be taken. The Canary Islands must be secured by the Air Force.

 

The Suez Canal must be taken.[/quote]

 

After Suez, Raeder painted a rosy picture of what then would logically ensue.

 

[quote]An advance from Suez through Palestine and Syria as far as Turkey is necessary. If we reach that point, Turkey will be in our power. The Russian problem will then appear in a different light ... It is doubtful whether an advance against Russia from the north will be necessary.[/quote]

 

Having in his mind driven the British out of the Mediterranean and put Turkey and Russia in Germany's power, Raeder went on to complete the picture. Correctly predicting that Britain, supported by the U.S.A. and the Gaullist forces, eventually would try to get a foothold on Northwest Africa as a basis for subsequent war against the Axis, the Admiral urged that Germany and Vichy France forestall this by securing this strategically important region themselves.

 

According to Raeder, Hitler agreed with his "general trend of thought" but added that he would have to talk matters over first with Mussolini, Franco and Petain. [39] This he proceeded to do, though only after much time was lost. He arranged to see the Spanish dictator on October 23, Petain, who was now the head of a collaborationist government at Vichy, the next day, and the Duce a few days thereafter.

 

Franco, who owed his triumph in the Spanish Civil War to the massive military aid of Italy and Germany, had, like all his fellow dictators, an inordinate appetite for spoils, especially if they could be gained cheaply. In June, at the moment of France's fall, he had hastily informed Hitler that Spain would enter the war in return for being given most of the vast French African empire, including Morocco and western Algeria, and provided that Germany supplied Spain liberally with arms, gasoline and foodstuffs. [40] It was to give Franco the opportunity to redeem this promise that the Fuehrer arrived in his special train at the Franco-Spanish border town of Hendaye on October 23. But much had happened in the intervening months -- Britain had stoutly held out, for one thing -- and Hitler was in for an unpleasant surprise.

 

The crafty Spaniard was not impressed by the Fuehrer's boast that "England already is decisively beaten," nor was he satisfied with Hitler's promise to give Spain territorial compensation in French North Africa "to the extent to which it would be possible to cover France's losses from British colonies." Franco wanted the French African empire, with no strings attached. Hitler's proposal was that Spain enter the war in January 1941, but Franco pointed out the dangers of such precipitate action. Hitler wanted the Spaniards to attack Gibraltar on January 10, with the help of German specialists who had taken the Belgian fort of Eben Emael from the air. Franco replied, with typical Spanish pride, that Gibraltar would have to be taken by Spaniards "alone." And so the two dictators wrangled -- for nine hours. According to Dr. Schmidt, who was present here too, Franco spoke on and on in a monotonous singsong voice and Hitler became increasingly exasperated, once springing up, as he had done with Chamberlain, to exclaim that there was no point in continuing the conversations. [41]

 

"Rather than go through that again," he later told Mussolini, in recounting his ordeal with the Caudillo, "I would prefer to have three or four teeth yanked out." [42]

 

After nine hours, with time out for dinner in Hitler's special dining car, the talks broke up late in the evening without Franco's having definitely committed himself to come into the war. Hitler left Ribbentrop behind that night to continue the parley with Serrano Suner, the Spanish Foreign Minister, and to try to get the Spaniards to sign something, at least an agreement to drive the British out of Gibraltar and close to them the western Mediterranean -- but to no avail. "That ungrateful coward!" Ribbentrop cursed to Schmidt about Franco the next morning. "He owes us everything and now won't join us!" [43]

 

Hitler's meeting with Petain at Montoire the next day went off better. But this was because the aging, defeatist Marshal, the hero of Verdun in the First World War and the perpetrator of the French surrender in the Second, agreed to France's collaboration with her conqueror in one last effort to bring Britain, the late ally, to her knees. In fact, he assented to put down in writing this odious deal.

 

[quote]The Axis Powers and France have an identical interest in seeing the defeat of England accomplished as soon as possible. Consequently, the French Government will support, within the limits of its ability, the measures which the Axis Powers may take to this end. [44][/quote]

 

In return for this treacherous act, France was to be given in the "New Europe" "the place to which she is entitled," and in Africa she was to receive from the fascist dictators compensation from the British Empire for whatever territory she was forced to cede to others. Both parties agreed to keep the pact "absolutely secret." [xiii]

 

Despite Petain's dishonorable but vital concessions, Hitler was not satisfied. According to Dr. Schmidt, he had wanted more -- nothing less than France's active participation in the war against Britain. On the long journey back to Munich the official interpreter found the Fuehrer disappointed and depressed with the results of his trip. He was to become even more so in Florence, where he arrived on the morning of October 28 to see Mussolini.

 

They had conferred but three weeks before, on October 4, at the Brenner Pass. Hitler, as usual, had done most of the talking, giving one of his dazzling tours d'horizon in which was not included any mention that he was sending troops to Rumania, which Italy also coveted. When the Duce learned of this a few days later he was indignant.

 

[quote]Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli [he fumed to Ciano]. This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece. In this way the equilibrium will be re-established. [45][/quote]

 

The Duce's ambitions in the Balkans were as rabid as Hitler's and cut across them so that as far back as the middle of August the Germans had warned Rome against any adventures in Yugoslavia and Greece. "It is a complete order to halt all along the line," Ciano noted in his diary on August 17. Mussolini scrapped, for the moment anyway, his plans for further martial glory in the Balkans and confirmed this in a humble letter to Hitler of August 27. But the prospect of a quick, easy conquest of Greece, which would compensate to some extent for his partner's glittering victories, proved too big a temptation for the strutting Fascist Caesar to resist, false though the prospect was.

 

On October 22 he set the date for a surprise Italian assault on Greece for October 28 and on the same day wrote Hitler a letter (predated October 19) alluding to his contemplated action but making it vague as to the exact nature and date. He feared, Ciano noted that day in his diary, that the Fuehrer might "order" him to halt. Hitler and Ribbentrop got wind of the Duce's plans while they were returning in their respective special trains from France, and at the Fuehrer's orders the Nazi Foreign Minister stopped at the first station in Germany to telephone Ciano in Rome and urge an immediate meeting of the Axis leaders. Mussolini suggested October 28 at Florence and, when his German visitor alighted from the train on the morning of that day, greeted him, his chin up and his eyes full of glee: "Fuehrer, we are on the march! Victorious Italian troops crossed the Greco-Albanian frontier at dawn today!" [46]

 

According to all accounts, Mussolini greatly enjoyed this revenge on his friend for all the previous occasions when the Nazi dictator had marched into a country without previously confiding to his Italian ally. Hitler was furious. This rash act against a sturdy foe at the worst possible time of year threatened to upset the applecart in the Balkans. The Fuehrer, as he wrote Mussolini a little later, had sped to Florence in the hope of preventing it, but he had arrived too late. According to Schmidt, who was present, the Nazi leader managed to control his rage.

 

[quote]Hitler went north that afternoon [Schmidt later wrote] with bitterness in his heart. He had been frustrated three times -- at Hendaye, at Montoire, and now in Italy. In the lengthy winter evenings of the next few years these long, exacting journeys were a constantly recurring theme of bitter reproaches against ungrateful and unreliable friends, Axis partners and "deceiving" Frenchmen. [47][/quote]

 

Nevertheless he had to do something to prosecute the war against the British, now that the invasion of Britain had proved impossible. Hardly had the Fuehrer returned to Berlin before the need to act was further impressed upon him by the fiasco of the Duce's armies in Greece. Within a week, the "victorious" Italian attack there had been turned into a rout. On November 4 Hitler called a war conference at the Chancellery in Berlin to which he summoned Brauchitsch and Halder from the Army and Keitel and Jodl from OKW. Thanks to Halder's diary and a captured copy of Jodl's report to the Navy on the conference, we know the warlord's decisions, which were embodied in Directive No. 18 issued by Hitler on November 12, the text of which is among the Nuremberg records. [48]

 

The German Navy's influence on Hitler's strategy became evident, as did the necessity for doing something about the faltering Italian ally. Halder noted the Fuehrer's "lack of confidence" in Italian leadership. As a result it was decided not to send any German troops to Libya until Marshal Rodolfo Graziani's army, which in September had advanced sixty miles into Egypt to Sidi Barrani, had reached Mersa Matruh, a further seventy-five miles along the coast, which was not expected before Christmas, if then. In the meantime plans were to be made to send a few dive bombers to Egypt to attack the British fleet in Alexandria and mine the Suez Canal.

 

As for Greece, the Italian attack there, Hitler admitted to his generals, had been a "regrettable blunder" and unfortunately had endangered Germany's position in the Balkans. The British by occupying Crete and Lemnos had achieved air bases from which they could easily bomb the Rumanian oil fields and by sending troops to the Greek mainland threatened the whole German position in the Balkans. To counter this danger Hitler ordered the Army to prepare immediately plans to invade Greece through Bulgaria with a force of at least ten divisions which would be sent first to Rumania. "It is anticipated," he said, "that Russia will remain neutral."

 

But it was in regard to destroying Britain's position in the western Mediterranean that most of the conference of November 4 and most of the ensuing Directive No. 18 was devoted.

 

[quote]Gibraltar will be taken [said the directive] and the Straits closed.

 

The British will be prevented from gaining a foothold at another point of the Iberian peninsula or the Atlantic islands.[/quote]

 

"Felix" was to be the code name for the taking of Gibraltar and the Spanish Canary Islands and the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands. The Navy was also to study the possibility of occupying Portugal's Madeira and the Azores. Portugal itself might have to be occupied. "Operation Isabella" would be the cover name for that, and three German divisions would be assembled on the Spanish-Portuguese frontier to carry it out.

 

Finally, units of the French fleet and some troops were to be released so that France could defend her possessions in Northwest Africa against the British and De Gaulle. "From this initial task," Hitler said in his directive, "France's participation in the war against England can develop fully."

 

Hitler's new plans, as enunciated to the generals on November 4 and laid down in the directive a week later, went into considerable military detail -- especially on how Gibraltar was to be taken by a daring German stroke -- and apparently they impressed his Army chiefs as bold and shrewd. But in reality they were half measures which could not possibly achieve their objectives, and they were based partly on his deceiving his own generals. He assured them on November 4, Halder noted, that he had just received Franco's renewed promise to join Germany in the war, but this, as we have seen, was not quite true. The objectives of driving the British out of the Mediterranean were sound, but the forces allotted to the task were quite insufficient, especially in view of Italy's weaknesses.

 

The Naval War Staff pointed this out in a toughly worded memorandum which Raeder gave Hitler on November 14. [49] The Italian disaster in Greece -- Mussolini's troops had now been hurled back into Albania and were still retreating -- had not only greatly improved Britain's strategic position in the Mediterranean, the sailors pointed out, but enhanced British prestige throughout the world. As for the Italian attack on Egypt, the Navy told Hitler flatly: "Italy will never carry out the Egyptian offensive. [xiv] The Italian leadership is wretched. They have no understanding of the situation. The Italian armed forces have neither the leadership nor the military efficiency to carry the required operations in the Mediterranean area to a successful conclusion with the necessary speed and decision."

 

Therefore, the Navy concluded, this task must be carried out by Germany. The "fight for the African area," it warned Hitler, is "the foremost strategic objective of German warfare as a whole ... It is of decisive importance for the outcome of the war."

 

But the Nazi dictator was not convinced. He had never been able to envisage the war in the Mediterranean and North Africa as anything but secondary to his main objective. As Admiral Raeder elaborated to him the Navy's strategic conceptions in their meeting on November 14, Hitler retorted that he was "still inclined toward a demonstration with Russia." [50] In fact, he was more inclined than ever, for Molotov had just departed Berlin that morning after so arousing the Fuehrer's ire. When the Admiral next saw his chief a couple of days after Christmas to report on how the bus had been missed in the Mediterranean, Hitler was not unduly perturbed. To Raeder's argument that the victory of Britain over the Italians in Egypt [xv] and the increasing material aid which she was receiving from America necessitated the concentration of all German resources to bring the British down, and that Barbarossa ought to be postponed until "the overthrow of Britain," Hitler turned an almost deaf ear.

 

"In view of present political developments and especially Russia's interference in Balkan affairs," Hitler said, "it is necessary to eliminate at all costs the last enemy remaining on the Continent before coming to grips with Britain." From now on to the bitter end he would stick fanatically to this fundamental strategy.

 

As a sop to his naval chief, Hitler promised to "try once more to influence Franco" so that the attack against Gibraltar could be made and the Mediterranean closed to the British fleet. Actually, he had already dropped the whole idea. On December 11 he had quietly ordered, "Operation Felix will not be carried out as the political conditions no longer exist." Nagged by his own Navy and by the Italians to keep after Franco, Hitler made one final effort, though it was painful to him. On February 6, 1941, he addressed a long letter to the Spanish dictator.

 

[quote]... About one thing, Caudillo, there must be clarity: we are fighting a battle of life and death and cannot at this time make any gifts ...

 

The battle which Germany and Italy are fighting will determine the destiny of Spain as well. Only in the case of our victory will your present regime continue to exist. [51][/quote]

 

Unfortunately for the Axis, the letter reached the Caudillo on the very day that Marshal Graziani's last forces in Cyrenaica had been wiped out by the British south of Benghazi. Little wonder that when Franco got around to replying -- on February 26, 1941 -- though protesting his "absolute loyalty" to the Axis, he reminded the Nazi leader that recent developments had left "the circumstances of October far behind" and that their understanding of that time had become "outmoded."

 

For one of the very few times in his stormy life, Adolf Hitler conceded defeat. "The long and short of the tedious Spanish rigmarole," he wrote Mussolini, "is that Spain does not want to enter the war and will not enter it. This is extremely tiresome since it means that for the moment the possibility of striking at Britain in the simplest manner, in her Mediterranean possessions, is eliminated."

 

Italy, not Spain, however, was the key to defeating Britain in the Mediterranean, but the Duce's creaky empire was not equal to the task of doing it alone and Hitler was not wise enough to give her the means, which he had, to accomplish it. The possibility of striking at Britain either directly across the Channel or indirectly across the broader Mediterranean, he now confessed, had been eliminated "for the moment." Though this was frustrating, the acknowledgment of it brought Hitler relief. He could now turn to matters nearer his heart and mind.

 

On January 8-9, 1941, he held a council of war at the Berghof above Berchtesgaden, which now lay deep in the winter's snow. The mountain air seems to have cleared his mind, and once more, as the lengthy confidential reports of the meeting by Admiral Raeder and General Halder [52] disclose, his thoughts ranged far and wide as he outlined his grand strategy to his military chiefs. His optimism had returned.

 

[quote]The Fuehrer [Raeder noted) is firmly convinced that the situation in Europe can no longer develop unfavorably for Germany even if we should lose the whole of North Africa. Our position in Europe is so firmly established that the outcome cannot possibly be to our disadvantage ... The British can hope to win the war only by beating us on the Continent. The Fuehrer is convinced that this is impossible.[/quote]

 

It was true, he conceded, that the direct invasion of Britain was "not feasible unless she is crippled to a considerable degree and Germany has complete air superiority." The Navy and Air Force, he said, must concentrate on attacking her shipping lanes and thereby cut off her supplies. Such attacks, he thought, "might lead to victory as early as July or August." In the meantime, he said, "Germany must make herself so strong on the Continent that we can handle a further war against England (and America)." The parentheses are Halder's and their enclosure is significant. This is the first mention in the captured German records that Hitler  -- at the beginning of 1941 -- is facing up to the possibility of the entry of the United States into the war against him.

 

The Nazi warlord then took up the various strategic areas and problems and outlined what he intended to do about them.

 

[quote]The Fuehrer is of the opinion [Raeder wrote] that it is vital for the outcome of the war that Italy does not collapse ... He is determined to ... prevent Italy from losing North Africa ... It would mean a great loss of prestige to the Axis powers ... He is [therefore] determined to give them support.[/quote]

 

At this point he cautioned his military leaders about divulging German plans.

 

[quote]He does not wish to inform the Italians of our plans. There is great danger that the Royal Family is transmitting intelligence to Britain!! [xvi][/quote]

 

Support for Italy, Hitler declared, would consist of antitank formations and some Luftwaffe squadrons for Libya. More important, he would dispatch an army corps of two and a half divisions to buck up the retreating Italians in Albania -- into which the Greeks had now pushed them. In connection with this, "Operation Marita" [xvii] would be pushed. The transfer of troops from Rumania to Bulgaria, he ordered, must begin at once so that Marita could commence on March 26. Hitler also spoke at some length of the need to be ready to carry out "Operation Attila" -- the German cover names seem almost endless -- which he had outlined in a directive of December 10, 1940. This was a plan to occupy the rest of France and seize the French fleet at Toulon. He thought now it might have to be carried out soon. "If France becomes troublesome," he declared, "she will have to be crushed completely." This would have been a crude violation of the Compiegne armistice, but no general or admiral, so far as Halder and Raeder noted -- or at least recorded -- raised the question.

 

It was at this war conference that Hitler described Stalin as "a coldblooded blackmailer" and informed his commanders that Russia would have to be brought to her knees "as soon as possible."

 

[quote]If the U.S.A. and Russia should enter the war against Germany [Hitler said, and it was the second time he mentioned that possibility for America], the situation would become very complicated. Hence any possibility for such a threat to develop must be eliminated at the very beginning. If the Russian threat were removed, we could wage war on Britain indefinitely. If Russia collapsed, Japan would be greatly relieved: this in turn would mean increased danger to the U.S.A.[/quote]

 

Such were the thoughts of the German dictator on global strategy as 1941 got under way. Two days after the war council, on January 11, he embodied them in Directive No. 22. German reinforcements for Tripoli were to move under "Operation Sunflower"; those for Albania under "Operation Alpine Violets." [54]

 

[b]"THE WORLD WILL HOLD ITS BREATH!"[/b]

 

Mussolini was summoned by Hitler to the Berghof for January 19 and 20. Shaken and humiliated by the Italian debacles in Egypt and Greece, he had no stomach for this journey. Ciano found him "frowning and nervous" when he boarded his special train, fearful that Hitler, Ribbentrop and the German generals would be insultingly condescending. To make matters worse the Duce took along General Alfredo Guzzoni, Assistant Chief of Staff, whom Ciano in his diary described as a mediocre man with a big paunch and a little dyed wig and whom, he thought, it would be positively humiliating to present to the Germans.

 

To his surprise and relief, Mussolini found Hitler, who came down to the snow-covered platform of the little station at Puch to greet him, both tactful and cordial and there were no reproaches for Italy's sorry record on the battlefields. He also found his host, as Ciano noted in his diary, in a very anti-Russian mood. For more than two hours on the second day Hitler lectured his Italian guests and an assembly of generals from both countries, and a secret report on it prepared by General Jodl [55] confirms that while the Fuehrer was anxious to be helpful to the Italians in Albania and Libya, his principal thoughts were on Russia.

 

[quote]I don't see great danger coming from America [Hitler said] even if she should enter the war. The much greater danger is the gigantic block of Russia. Though we have very favorable political and economic agreements with Russia, I prefer to rely on powerful means at my disposal.[/quote]

 

Though he hinted at what he intended to do with his "powerful means," he did not disclose his plans to his partner. These, however, were sufficiently far along to enable the Chief of the Army General Staff, who was responsible for working out the details, to present them to the Supreme Commander at a meeting in Berlin a fortnight later.

 

This war conference, attended by the top generals of OKW and of the Army High Command (OKH), lasted from noon until 6 P.M. on February 3. And though General Halder, who outlined the Army General Staff's plans, contended later in his book [56] that he and Brauchitsch raised doubts about their own assessment of Soviet military strength and in general opposed Barbarossa as an "adventure," there is not a word in his own diary entry made the same evening or in the highly secret OKW memorandum of the meeting [57] that supports this contention. Indeed, they disclose Halder to have made at first a businesslike estimate of the opposing forces, calculating that while the enemy would have approximately 155 divisions, German strength would be about the same and, as Halder reported, "far superior in quality." Later, when catastrophe set in, Halder and his fellow generals realized that their intelligence on the Red Army had been fantastically faulty. But on February 3, 1941, they did not suspect that. In fact, so convincing was Halder's report on respective strengths and on the strategy to be employed to annihilate the Red armies [xviii] that Hitler at the end not only expressed agreement "on the whole" but was so excited by the prospects which the General Staff Chief had raised that he exclaimed:

 

"When Barbarossa commences, the world will hold its breath and make no comment!"

 

He could scarcely wait for it to commence. Impatiently he ordered the operation map and the plan of deployment of forces to be sent to him "as soon as possible."

 

[b]BALKAN PRELUDE[/b]

 

Before Barbarossa could get under way in the spring the southern flank, which lay in the Balkans, had to be secured and built up. By the third week in February 1941, the Germans had massed a formidable army of 680,000 troops in Rumania, which bordered the Ukraine for three hundred miles between the Polish border and the Black Sea. [58] But to the south, Greece still held the Italians at bay and Berlin had reason to believe that British troops from Libya would soon be landed there. Hitler, as the minutes of his numerous conferences at this period make clear, feared that an Allied front above Salonika might be formed which would be more troublesome to Germany than a similar one had been in the First World War, since it would give the British a base from which to bomb the Rumanian oil fields. Moreover, it would jeopardize Barbarossa. In fact, the danger had been foreseen as far back as December 1940, when the first directive for Operation Marita had been issued providing for a strong German attack on Greece through Bulgaria with troops assembled in Rumania.

 

Bulgaria, whose wrong guess as to the victors in the first war had cost her dearly, now made a similar miscalculation. Believing Hitler's assurances that he had already won the war and bedazzled by the prospect of obtaining Greek territory to the south which would give her access to the Aegean Sea, her government agreed to participate in Marita -- at least to the extent of allowing passage of German troops. An agreement to this effect was made secretly on February 8, 1941, between Field Marshal List and the Bulgarian General Staff. [59] On the night of February 28 German Army units crossed the Danube from Rumania and took up strategic positions in Bulgaria, which the next day joined the Tripartite Pact.

 

The hardier Yugoslavs were not quite so accommodating. But their stubbornness only spurred on the Germans to bring them into camp too. On March 4-5, the Regent, Prince Paul, was summoned in great secrecy to the Berghof by the Fuehrer, given the usual threats and, in addition, offered the bribe of Salonika. On March 25, the Yugoslav Premier, Dragisha Cvetkovic, and Foreign Minister Aleksander Cincar-Markovic, having slipped surreptitiously out of Belgrade the night before to avoid hostile demonstrations or even kidnaping, arrived at Vienna, where in the presence of Hitler and Ribbentrop they signed up Yugoslavia to the Tripartite Pact. Hitler was highly pleased and told Ciano that this would facilitate his attack on Greece. Before leaving Vienna the Yugoslav leaders were given two letters from Ribbentrop confirming Germany's "determination" to respect "the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia at all times" and promising that the Axis would not demand transit rights for its troops across Yugoslavia "during this war." [60] Both agreements were broken by Hitler in what even for him was record time.

 

The Yugoslav ministers had no sooner returned to Belgrade than they, the government and the Prince Regent were overthrown on the night of March 26-27, by a popular uprising led by a number of top Air Force officers and supported by most of the Army. The youthful heir to the throne, Peter, who had escaped from the surveillance of regency officials by sliding down a rain pipe, was declared King, and though the new regime of General Dusan Simovic immediately offered to sign a nonaggression pact with Germany, it was obvious in Berlin that it would not accept the puppet status for Yugoslavia which the Fuehrer had assigned. During the delirious celebrations in Belgrade, in which a crowd spat on the German minister's car, the Scrbs had shown where their sympathies lay.

 

The coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages of his entire life. He took it as a personal affront and in his fury made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the fortunes of the Third Reich.

 

He hurriedly summoned his military chieftains to the Chancellery in Berlin on March 27-the meeting was so hastily called that Brauchitsch, Halder and Ribbentrop arrived late -- and raged about the revenge he would take on the Yugoslavs. The Belgrade coup, he said, had endangered both Marita and, even more, Barbarossa. He was therefore determined, "without waiting for possible declarations of loyalty of the new government, to destroy Yugoslavia militarily and as a nation. No diplomatic inquiries will be made," he ordered, "and no ultimatums presented." Yugoslavia, he added, would be crushed with "unmerciful harshness." He ordered Goering then and there to "destroy Belgrade in attacks by waves," with bombers operating from Hungarian air bases. He issued Directive No. 25G1for the immediate invasion of Yugoslavia and told Keitel and Jodl to work out that very evening the military plans. He instructed Ribbentrop to advise Hungary, Rumania and Italy that they would all get a slice of Yugoslavia, which would be divided up among them, except for a small Croatian puppet state.  [xix]

 

And then, according to an underlined passage in the top-secret OKW notes of the meeting, [62] Hitler announced the most fateful decision of all.

 

"The beginning of the Barbarossa operation," he told his generals, "will have to be postponed up to four weeks." [63]

 

This postponement of the attack on Russia in order that the Nazi warlord might vent his personal spite against a small Balkan country which had dared to defy him was probably the most catastrophic single decision in Hitler's career. It is hardly too much to say that by making it that March afternoon in the Chancellery in Berlin during a moment of convulsive rage he tossed away his last golden opportunity to win the war and to make of the Third Reich, which he had created with such stunning if barbarous genius, the greatest empire in German history and himself the master of Europe. Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the German Army, and General Halder, the gifted Chief of the General Staff, were to recall it with deep bitterness but also with more understanding of its consequences than they showed at the moment of its making, when later the deep snow and subzero temperatures of Russia hit them three or four weeks short of what they thought they needed for final victory. For ever afterward they and their fellow generals would blame that hasty, ill-advised decision of a vain and infuriated man for all the disasters that ensued.

 

Military Directive No. 25, which the Supreme Commander issued to his generals before the meeting broke up, was a typical Hitlerian document.

 

[quote]The military putsch in Yugoslavia has altered the political situation in the Balkans. Yugoslavia, in spite of her protestations of loyalty, must be considered for the time being as an enemy and therefore crushed as speedily as possible.

 

It is my intention to force my way into Yugoslavia ... and to annihilate the Yugoslav Army ...[/quote]

 

Jodl, as Chief of the Operations Staff of OKW, was told to prepare the plans that very night. "I worked the whole night at the Reich Chancellery," Jodl later told the Nuremberg tribunal. "At four o'clock in the morning of March 28, I put an aide-memoire into the hand of General von Rintelen, our liaison officer with the Italian High Command." [63]

 

For Mussolini, whose sagging armies in Albania were in danger of being taken in the rear by the Yugoslavs, had to be told immediately of the German operational plans and asked to co-operate with them. To make sure that the Duce understood what was expected of him and without waiting for General Jodi to concoct the military plans, Hitler dashed off a letter at midnight of the twenty-seventh and ordered it wired to Rome immediately so that it would reach Mussolini that same night. [64]

 

[quote]DUCE, events force me to give you by this quickest means my estimation of the situation and the consequences which may result from it.

 

From the beginning I have regarded Yugoslavia as a dangerous factor in the controversy with Greece ... For this reason I have done everything honestly to bring Yugoslavia into our community ... Unfortunately these endeavors did not meet with success ... Today's reports leave no doubt as to the imminent turn in the foreign policy of Yugoslavia.

 

Therefore I have already arranged for all necessary measures .. with military means. Now, I would cordially request you, Duce, not to undertake any further operations in Albania in the course of the next few days. I consider it necessary that you should cover and screen the most important passes from Yugoslavia into Albania with all available forces.

 

... I also consider it necessary, Duce, that you should reinforce your forces on the Italian-Yugoslav front with all available means and with utmost speed.

 

I also consider it necessary, Duce, that everything which we do and order be shrouded in absolute secrecy ... These measures will completely lose their value should they become known ... Duce, should secrecy be observed, then I have no doubt that we will both achieve a success no less than the success in Norway a year ago. This is my unshaken conviction.

 

Accept my heartfelt and friendly greetings,

 

Yours,

 

ADOLF HITLER[/quote]

 

For this short-range objective, the Nazi warlord was again right in his prediction, but he seems to have had no inkling how costly his successful revenge on Yugoslavia would be in the long run. At dawn on April 6, his armies in overwhelming strength fell on Yugoslavia and Greece, smashing across the frontiers of Bulgaria, Hungary and Germany itself with all their armor and advancing rapidly against poorly armed defenders dazed by the usual preliminary bombing from the Luftwaffe.

 

Belgrade itself, as Hitler ordered, was razed to the ground. For three successive days and nights Goering's bombers ranged over the little capital at rooftop level -- for the city had no antiaircraft guns -- killing 17,000 civilians, wounding many more and reducing the place to a mass of smoldering rubble. "Operation Punishment," Hitler called it, and he obviously was satisfied that his commands had been so effectively carried out. The Yugoslavs, who had not had time to mobilize their tough little army and whose General Staff made the mistake of trying to defend the whole country, were overwhelmed. On April 13 German and Hungarian troops entered what was left of Belgrade and on the seventeenth the remnants of the Yugoslav Army, still twenty-eight divisions strong, surrendered at Sarajevo, the King and the Prime Minister escaping by plane to Greece.

 

The Greeks, who had humiliated the Italians in six months of fighting, could not stand up to Field Marshal List's Twelfth Army of fifteen divisions, four of which were armored. The British had hurriedly sent to Greece some four divisions from Libya -- 53,000 men in all -- but they, like the Greeks, were overwhelmed by the German panzers and by the murderous strikes of the Luftwaffe. The northern Greek armies surrendered to the Germans and -- bitter pill -- to the Italians on April 23. Four days later Nazi tanks rattled into Athens and hoisted the swastika over the Acropolis. By this time the British were desperately trying once again to evacuate their troops by sea -- a minor Dunkirk and almost as successful.

 

By the end of April -- in three weeks -- it was all over except for Crete, which was taken by the Germans from the British in an airborne assault toward the end of May. Where Mussolini had failed so miserably all winter, Hitler had succeeded in a few days in the spring. Though the Duce was relieved to be pulled off the hook, he was humiliated that it had to be done by the Germans. Nor were his feelings assuaged by Italy's disappointing share in the Yugoslav spoils, which Hitler now began to divide up. [xx]

 

The Balkans was not the only place where the Fuehrer pulled his muddling junior partner off the hook. After the annihilation of the Italian armies in Libya Hitler, although reluctantly, had finally consented to sending a light armored division and some Luftwaffe units to North Africa, where he arranged for General Erwin Rommel to be in over-all command of the Italo-German forces. Rommel, a dashing, resourceful tank officer, who had distinguished himself as commander of a panzer division in the Battle of France, was a type of general whom the British had not previously met in the North African desert and he was to prove an immense problem to them for two years. But he was not the only problem. The sizable army and air force which the British had sent to Greece from Libya had greatly weakened them in the desert. At first they were not unduly worried, not even after their intelligence reported the arrival of German armored units in Tripolitania at the end of February. But they should have been.

 

Rommel, with his German panzer division and two Italian divisions, one of which was armored, struck suddenly at Cyrenaica on the last day of March. In twelve days he recaptured the province, invested Tobruk and reached Bardia, a few miles from the Egyptian border. The entire British position in Egypt and the Suez was again threatened; in fact, with the Germans and Italians in Greece the British hold on the eastern Mediterranean had become gravely endangered.

 

Another spring, the second of the war, had brought more dazzling German victories, and the predicament of Britain, which now held out alone, battered at home by nightly Luftwaffe bombings, its armies overseas chased out of Greece and Cyrenaica, seemed darker and more hopeless than ever before. Its prestige, so important in a life-and-death struggle where propaganda was so potent a weapon, especially in influencing the United States and Russia, had sunk to a new low point.  [xxi]

 

Hitler was not slow or backward in taking advantage of this in a victory speech to the Reichstag in Berlin on May 4. It consisted mostly of a venomous and sarcastic personal attack on Churchill as the instigator (along with the Jews) of the war and as the man who was masterminding the losing of it.

 

[quote]He is the most bloodthirsty or amateurish strategist in history ... For over five years this man has been chasing around Europe like a madman in search of something that he could set on fire ... As a soldier he is a bad politician and as a politician an equally bad soldier ... The gift Mr. Churchill possesses is the gift to lie with a pious expression on his face and to distort the truth until finally glorious victories are made of the most terrible defeats ... Churchill, one of the most hopeless dabblers in strategy, thus managed [in Yugoslavia and Greece] to lose two theaters of war at one single blow. In any other country he would be court-martialed ... His abnormal state of mind can only be explained as symptomatic either of a paralytic disease or of a drunkard's ravings ...[/quote]

 

As to the Yugoslavian coup which had provoked him to such fury, Hitler made no attempt to hide his true feelings.

 

[quote]We were all stunned by that coup, carried through by a handful of bribed conspirators ... You will understand, gentlemen, that when I heard this I at once gave orders to attack Yugoslavia. To treat the German Reich in this way is impossible ...[/quote]

 

Arrogant though he was over his spring victories and especially those over the British, Hitler did not fully realize what a blow they had been to Britain nor how desperate was the predicament of the Empire. On the very day he was addressing he Reichstag, Churchill was writing President Roosevelt about the grave consequences of the loss of Egypt and the Middle East and pleading for America to enter the war. The Prime Minister was in one of the darkest moods he was to know throughout the war.

 

[quote]I adjure you, Mr. President [he wrote], not to underestimate the gravity of the consequences which may follow from a Middle-East collapse. [66][/quote]

 

The German Navy urged the Fuehrer to make the most of this situation. To further improve matters for the Axis, the newly appointed premier of Iraq, Rashid Ali, who was pro-German, had led an attack against the British airbase of Habbaniya, outside Bagdad, and appealed to Hitler for aid in driving the British out of the country. This was at the beginning of May. With Crete conquered by May 27, Admiral Raeder, who had always been lukewarm to Barbarossa, appealed to Hitler on May 30 to prepare a decisive offensive against Egypt and Suez, and Rommel, eager to continue his advance as soon as he had received reinforcements, sent similar pleas from North Africa. "This stroke," Raeder told the Fuehrer, "would be more deadly to the British Empire than the capture of London!" A week later the Admiral handed Hitler a memorandum prepared by the Operations Division of the Naval War Staff which warned that, while Barbarossa "naturally stands in the foreground of the OKW leadership, it must under no circumstances lead to the abandonment of, or to delay in, the conduct of the war in the Mediterranean." [67]

 

But the Fuehrer already had made up his mind; in fact, he had not changed it since the Christmas holidays when he had promulgated Barbarossa and told Admiral Raeder that Russia must be "eliminated first." His landlocked mind simply did not comprehend the larger strategy advocated by the Navy. Even before Raeder and the Naval Staff pleaded with him at the end of May he laid down the law in Directive No. 30 issued on May 25. [68] He ordered a military mission, a few planes and some arms to be dispatched to Bagdad to help Iraq. "I have decided," he said, "to encourage developments in the Middle East by supporting Iraq." But he saw no further than this small, inadequate step. As for the larger, bold strategy championed by the admirals and Rommel, he declared:

 

[quote]Whether -- and if so, by what means -- it would be possible afterward to launch an offensive against the Suez Canal and eventually oust the British finally from their position between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf cannot be decided until Operation Barbarossa is completed.[/quote]

 

The destruction of the Soviet Union came first; all else must wait. This, we can now see, was a staggering blunder. At this moment, the end of May 1941, Hitler, with the use of only a fraction of his forces, could have dealt the British Empire a crushing blow, perhaps a fatal one. No one realized this better than the hard-pressed Churchill. In his message to President Roosevelt on May 4, he had admitted that, were Egypt and the Middle East to be lost, the continuation of the war "would be a hard, long and bleak proposition," even if the United States entered the conflict. But Hitler did not understand this. His blindness is all the more incomprehensible because his Balkan campaign had delayed the commencement of Barbarossa by several weeks and thereby jeopardized it. The conquest of Russia would have to be accomplished in a shorter space of time than originally planned. For there was an inexorable deadline: the Russian winter, which had defeated Charles XII and Napoleon. That gave the Germans only six months to overrun, before the onset of winter, an immense country that had never been conquered from the west. And though June had arrived, the vast army which had been turned southeast into Yugoslavia and Greece had to be brought back great distances to the Soviet frontier over unpaved roads and run-down single-track railway lines that were woefully inadequate to handle so swarming a traffic.

 

The delay, as things turned out, was fatal. Defenders of Hitler's military genius have contended that the Balkan campaign did not set back the timetable for Barbarossa appreciably and that in any case the postponement was largely due to the late thaw that year which left the roads in Eastern Europe deep in mud until mid-June. But the testimony of the key German generals is otherwise. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, whose name will always be associated with Stalingrad, and who at this time was the chief planner of the Russian campaign on the Army General Staff, testified on the stand at Nuremberg that Hitler's decision to destroy Yugoslavia postponed the beginning of Barbarossa by "about five weeks." [69] The Naval War Diary gives the same length of time. [70] Field Marshal von Rundstedt, who led Army Group South in Russia, told Allied interrogators after the war that because of the Balkan campaign "we began at least four weeks late. That," he added, "was a very costly delay." [71]

 

At any rate, on April 30, when his armies had completed their conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece, Hitler set the new date for Barbarossa. It was to begin on June 22, 1941. [72]

 

[b]THE PLANNING OF THE TERROR[/b]

 

No holds were to be barred in the taking of Russia. Hitler insisted that the generals understand this very clearly. Early in March 1941, he convoked the chiefs of the three armed services and the key Army field commanders and laid down the law. Halder took down his words. [73]

 

[quote]The war against Russia [Hitler said] will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the comprehension of you generals but ... I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated. German soldiers guilty of breaking international law ... will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and therefore has no rights under it.[/quote]

 

Thus was the so-called "Commissar Order" issued; it was to be much discussed at the Nuremberg trial when the great moral question was posed to the German generals whether they should have obeyed the orders of the Fuehrer to commit war crimes or obeyed their own consciences. [xxii]

 

According to Halder, as he later remembered it, the generals were outraged at this order and, as soon as the meeting was over, protested to their Commander in Chief, Brauchitsch. This spineless Field Marshal [xxiii] promised that he would "fight against this order in the form it was given." Later, Halder swears, Brauchitsch informed OKW in writing that the officers of the Army "could never execute such orders." But did he?

 

In his testimony on direct examination at Nuremberg Brauchitsch admitted that he took no such action with Hitler "because nothing in the world could change his attitude." What the head of the Army did, he told the tribunal, was to issue a written order that "discipline in the Army was to be strictly observed along the lines and regulations that applied in the past."

 

"You did not give any order directly referring to the Commissar Order?" Lord Justice Lawrence, the peppery president of the tribunal, asked Brauchitsch.

 

"No," he replied. "I could not rescind the order directly." [75]

 

The old-line Army officers, with their Prussian traditions, were given further occasion to struggle with their consciences by subsequent directives issued in the name of the Fuehrer by General Keitel on May 13. The principal one limited the functions of German courts-martial. They were to give way to a more primitive form of law.

 

[quote]Punishable offenses committed by enemy civilians [in Russia] do not, until further notice, come any longer under the jurisdiction of the courts-martial ...

 

Persons suspected of criminal action will be brought at once before an officer. This officer will decide whether they are to be shot.

 

With regard to offenses committed against enemy civilians by members of the Wehrmacht, prosecution is not obligatory even where the deed is at the same time a military crime or offense. [xxiv][/quote]

 

The Army was told to go easy on such offenders, remembering in each case all the harm done to Germany since 1918 by the "Bolsheviki." Courts-martial of German soldiers would be justified only if "maintenance of discipline or security of the Forces call for such a measure." At any rate, the directive concluded, "only those court sentences are confirmed which are in accordance with the political intentions of the High Command."  [76] The directive was to "be treated as 'most secret.'" [xxv]

 

A second directive of the same date signed by Keitel on behalf of Hitler entrusted Himmler with "special tasks" for the preparation of the political administration in Russia -- "tasks," it said, "which result from the struggle which has to be carried out between two opposing political systems." The Nazi secret-police sadist was delegated to act "independently" of the Army, "under his own responsibility." The generals well knew what the designation of Himmler for "special tasks" meant, though they denied that they did when they took the stand at Nuremberg. Furthermore, the directive said, the occupied areas in Russia were to be sealed off while Himmler went to work. Not even the "highest personalities of the Government and Party," Hitler stipulated, were to be allowed to have a look. The same directive named Goering for the "exploitation of the country and the securing of its economic assets for use by German industry." Incidentally, Hitler also declared in this order that as soon as military operations were concluded Russia would be "divided up into individual states with governments of their own." [78]

 

Just how this would be done was to be worked out by Alfred Rosenberg, the befuddled Bait and officially the leading Nazi thinker, who had been, as we have seen, one of Hitler's early mentors in the Munich days. On April 20 the Fuehrer appointed him "Commissioner for the Central Control of Questions Connected with the East-European Region" and immediately this Nazi dolt, with a positive genius for misunderstanding history, even the history of Russia, where he was born and educated, went to work to build his castles in his once native land. Rosenberg's voluminous files were captured intact; like his books, they make dreary reading and will not be allowed to impede this narrative, though occasionally they must be referred to because they disclose some of Hitler's plans for Russia.

 

By early May, Rosenberg had drawn up his first wordy blueprint for what promised to be the greatest German conquest in history. To begin with, European Russia was to be divided up into so-called Reich Commissariats. Russian Poland would become a German protectorate called Ostland, the Ukraine "an independent state in alliance with Germany," Caucasia, with its rich oil fields, would be ruled by a German "plenipotentiary," and the three Baltic States and White Russia would form a German protectorate preparatory to being annexed outright to the Greater German Reich. This last feat, Rosenberg explained in one of the endless memoranda which he showered on Hitler and the generals in order, as he said, to elucidate "the historical and racial conditions" for his decisions, would be accomplished by Germanizing the racially assimilable Baits and "banishing the undesirable elements." In Latvia and Estonia, he cautioned, "banishment on a large scale will have to be envisaged." Those driven out would be replaced by Germans, preferably war veterans. "The Baltic Sea," he ordained, "must become a Germanic inland sea." [79]

 

Two days before the troops jumped off, Rosenberg addressed his closest collaborators who were to take over the rule of Russia.

 

[quote]The job of feeding the German people [he said] stands at the top of the list of Germany's claims on the East. The southern [Russian] territories will have to serve ... for the feeding of the German people.

 

We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of that surplus territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity, bare of any feelings ... The future will hold very hard years in store for the Russians. [80][/quote]

 

Very hard years indeed, since the Germans were deliberately planning to starve to death millions of them!

 

Goering, who had been placed in charge of the economic exploitation of the Soviet Union, made this even clearer than Rosenberg did. In a long directive of May 23, 1941, his Economic Staff, East, laid it down that the surplus food from Russia's black-earth belt in the south must not be diverted to the people in the industrial areas, where, in any case, the industries would be destroyed. The workers and their families in these regions would simply be left to starve -- or, if they could, to emigrate to Siberia. Russia's great food production must go to the Germans.

 

[quote]The German Administration in these territories [the directive declared] may well attempt to mitigate the consequences of the famine which undoubtedly will take place and to accelerate the return to primitive agricultural conditions. However, these measures will not avert famine. Any attempt to save the population there from death by starvation by importing surpluses from the black-soil zone would be at the expense of supplies to Europe. It would reduce Germany's staying power in the war, and would undermine Germany's and Europe's power to resist the blockade. This must be clearly and absolutely understood. [81][/quote]

 

How many Russian civilians would die as the result of this deliberate German policy? A meeting of state secretaries on May 2 had already given a general answer. "There is no doubt," a secret memorandum of the conference declared, "that as a result, many millions of persons will be starved to death if we take out of the country the things necessary for us." [82] And Goering had said, and Rosenberg, that they would be taken out -- that much had to be "clearly and absolutely understood."

 

Did any German, even one single German, protest against this planned ruthlessness, this well-thought-out scheme to put millions of human beings to death by starvation? In all the memoranda concerning the German directives for the spoliation of Russia, there is no mention of anyone's objecting --  as at least some of the generals did in regard to the Commissar Order. These plans were not merely wild and evil fantasies of distorted minds and souls of men such as Hitler, Goering, Himmler and Rosenberg. For weeks and months, it is evident from the records, hundreds of German officials toiled away at their desks in the cheerful light of the warm spring days, adding up figures and composing memoranda which coldly calculated the massacre of millions. By starvation, in this case. Heinrich Himmler, the mild-faced ex-chicken farmer, also sat at his desk at S.S. headquarters in Berlin those days, gazing through his pince-nez at plans for the massacre of other millions in a quicker and more violent way.

 

Well pleased with the labors of his busy minions, both military and civilian, in planning the onslaught on the Soviet Union, her destruction, her exploitation and the mass murder of her citizenry, Hitler on April 30 set the date for the attack -- June 22 -- made his victory speech in the Reichstag on May 4 and then retired to his favorite haunt, the Berghof above Berchtesgaden, where he could gaze at the splendor of the Alpine mountains, their peaks still covered with spring snow, and contemplate his next conquest, the greatest of all, at which, as he had told his generals, the world would hold its breath.

 

It was here on the night of Saturday, May 10, 1941, that he received strange and unexpected news which shook him to the bone and forced him, as it did almost everyone else in the Western world, to take his mind for the moment off the war. His closest personal confidant, the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, the second in line to succeed him after Goering, the man who had been his devoted and fanatically loyal follower since 1921 and, since Roehm's murder, the nearest there was to a friend, had literally flown the coop and on his own gone to parley with the enemy!

 

[b]THE FLIGHT OF RUDOLF HESS[/b]

 

The first report late that evening of May 10 that Rudolf Hess had taken off alone for Scotland in a Messerschmitt-110 fighter plane hit Hitler, as Dr. Schmidt recalled, "as though a bomb had struck the Berghof." [83] General Keitel found the Fuehrer pacing up and down his spacious study pointing a finger at his forehead and mumbling that Hess must have been crazy. [84] "I've got to talk to Goering right away," Hitler shouted. The next morning there was an agitated powwow with Goering and all the party gauleiter as they sought to "figure out" -- the words are Keitel's -- how to present this embarrassing event to the German public and to the world. Their task was not made easier, Keitel later testified, by the British at first keeping silent about their visitor, and for a time Hitler and his conferees hoped that perhaps Hess had run out of gasoline and fallen into the chilly North Sea and drowned.

 

The Fuehrer's first information had come in a somewhat incoherent letter from Hess which was delivered by courier a few hours after he took off at 5:45 P.M. on May 10 from Augsburg. "I can't recognize Hess in it. It's a different person. Something must have happened to him -- some mental disturbance," Hitler told Keitel. But the Fuehrer was also suspicious. Messerschmitt, from whose company airfield Hess had taken off, was ordered arrested, as were dozens of men on the deputy leader's staff.

 

If Hitler was mystified by Hess's abrupt departure, so was Churchill by his unexpected arrival. [xxvi] Stalin was highly suspicious. For the duration of the war, the bizarre incident remained a mystery, and it was cleared up only at the Nuremberg trial, in which Hess was one of the defendants. The facts may be briefly set down.

 

Hess, always a muddled man though not so doltish as Rosenberg, flew on his own to Britain under the delusion that he could arrange a peace settlement. Though deluded, he was sincere -- there seems to be no reason to doubt that. He had met the Duke of Hamilton at the Olympic games in Berlin in 1936, and it was within twelve miles of the Duke's home in Scotland --  so efficient was his navigation -- that he baled out of his Messerschmitt, parachuted safely to the ground and asked a farmer to take him to the Scottish lord. As it happened, Hamilton, a wing commander in the R.A.F., was on duty that Saturday evening at a sector operations room and had spotted the Messerschmitt plane off the coast as it came in to make a landfall shortly after 10 P.M. An hour later it was reported to him that the plane had crashed in flames, that the pilot, who had baled out and who gave his name as Alfred Horn, had claimed to be on a "special mission" to see the Duke of Hamilton. This meeting was arranged by British authorities for the next morning.

 

To the Duke, Hess explained that he was on "a mission of humanity and that the Fuehrer did not want to defeat England and wished to stop the fighting." The fact, Hess said, that this was his fourth attempt to fly to Britain -- on the three other tries, he had had to turn back because of weather -- and that he was, after all, a Reich cabinet minister, showed "his sincerity and Germany's willingness for peace." In this interview, as in later ones with others, Hess was not backward in asserting that Germany would win the war and that if it continued the plight of the British would be terrible. Therefore, his hosts had better take advantage of his presence and negotiate peace. So confident was this Nazi fanatic that the British would sit down and parley with him, that he asked the Duke to request "the King to give him 'parole,' as he had come unarmed and of his own free will." [85] Later he demanded that he be treated with the respect due to a cabinet member.

 

The subsequent talks, with one exception, were conducted on the British side by Ivone Kirkpatrick, the knowing former First Secretary of the British Embassy in Berlin, whose confidential reports were later made available at Nuremberg. [86] To this sophisticated student of Nazi Germany Hess, after parroting Hitler's explanations of all the Nazi aggressions, from Austria to Scandinavia and the Lowlands, and having insisted that Britain was responsible for the war and would certainly lose it if she didn't bring a stop to it now, divulged his proposals for peace. They were none other than those which Hitler had urged on Chamberlain -- unsuccessfully -- on the eve of his attack on Poland: namely, that Britain should give Germany a free hand in Europe in return for Germany's giving Britain "a completely free hand in the Empire." The former German colonies would have to be returned and of course Britain would have to make peace with Italy.

 

[quote]Finally, as we were leaving the room [Kirkpatrick reported], Hess delivered a parting shot. He had forgotten, he declared, to emphasize that the proposal could only be considered on the understanding that it was negotiated by Germany with an English government other than the present one. Mr. Churchill, who had planned the war since 1936, and his colleagues who had lent themselves to his war policy, were not persons with whom the Fuehrer could negotiate.[/quote]

 

For a German who had got so far in the jungle warfare within the Nazi Party and then within the Third Reich, Rudolf Hess, as all who knew him could testify, was singularly naive. He had expected, it is evident from the record of these interviews, to be received immediately as a serious negotiator --  if not by Churchill, then by the "opposition party," of which he thought the Duke of Hamilton was one of the leaders. When his contacts with British officialdom continued to be restricted to Kirkpatrick, he grew bellicose and threatening. At an interview on May 14, he pictured to the skeptical diplomat the dire consequences to Britain if she continued the war. There would soon be, he said, a terrible and absolutely complete blockade of the British Isles.

 

[quote]It was fruitless [Kirkpatrick was told by Hess] for anyone here to imagine that England could capitulate and that the war could be waged from the Empire. It was Hitler's intention, in such an eventuality, to continue the blockade of England ... so that we would have to face the deliberate starvation of the population of these islands.[/quote]  

Hess urged that the conversations, which he had risked so much to bring about, get under way at once. "His own flight," as explained to Kirkpatrick, "was intended to give us a chance of opening conversations without loss of prestige. If we rejected this chance it would be clear proof that we desire no understanding with Germany, and Hitler would be entitled -- in fact, it would be his duty -- to destroy us utterly and to keep us after the war in a state of permanent subjection." Hess insisted that the number of negotiators be kept small.

 

[quote]As a Reich Minister he could not place himself in the position of being a lone individual subjected to a crossfire of comment and questions from a large number of persons.[/quote]

 

On this ridiculous note, the conversations ended, so far as Kirkpatrick was concerned. But -- surprisingly -- the British cabinet, according to Churchill, [87] "invited" Lord Simon to interview Hess on June 10. According to the Nazi deputy leader's lawyer at Nuremberg, Simon promised that he would bring Hess's peace proposals to the attention of the British government. [xxvii] [88]

 

Hess's motives are clear. He sincerely wanted peace with Britain. He had not the shadow of doubt that Germany would win the war and destroy the United Kingdom unless peace were concluded at once. There were, to be sure, other motives. The war had brought his personal eclipse. Running the Nazi Party as Hitler's deputy during the war was dull business and no longer very important. What mattered in Germany now was running the war and foreign affairs. These were the things which engaged the attention of the Fuehrer to the exclusion of almost all else, and which put the limelight on Goering, Ribbentrop, Himmler, Goebbels and the generals. Hess felt frustrated and jealous. How better restore his old position with his beloved Leader and in the country than by pulling off a brilliant and daring stroke of statesmanship such as singlehandedly arranging peace between Germany and Britain?

 

Finally, the beetle-browed deputy leader, like some of the other Nazi bigwigs -- Hitler himself and Himmler -- had come to have an abiding belief in astrology. At Nuremberg he confided to the American prison psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, that late in 1940 one of his astrologers had read in the stars that he was ordained to bring about peace. He also related how his old mentor, Professor Haushofer, the Munich Geopolitiker, had seen him in a dream striding through the tapestried halls of English castles, bringing peace between the two great "Nordic" nations. [90] For a man who had never escaped from mental adolescence, this was heady stuff and no doubt helped impel Hess to undertake his weird mission to England.

 

At Nuremberg one of the British prosecutors suggested still another reason: that Hess flew to England to try to arrange a peace settlement so that Germany would have only a one-front war to fight when she attacked the Soviet Union. The Russian prosecutor told the tribunal that he was sure of it. And so was Joseph Stalin, whose mighty suspicions at this critical time seem to have been concentrated not on Germany, as they should have been, but on Great Britain. The arrival of Hess in Scotland convinced him that there was some deep plot being hatched between Churchill and Hitler which would give Germany the same freedom to strike the Soviet Union which the Russian dictator had given her to assault Poland and the West. When three years later the British Prime Minister, then on his second visit to Moscow, tried to convince Stalin of the truth, he simply did not believe it. It is fairly clear from the interrogations conducted by Kirkpatrick, who tried to draw the Nazi leader out on Hitler's intentions regarding Russia, that either Hess did not know of Barbarossa or, if he did, did not know that it was imminent.

 

The days following Hess's sudden departure were among the most embarrassing of Hitler's life. He realized that the prestige of his regime had been severely damaged by the flight of his closest collaborator. How was it to be explained to the German people and the outside world? The questioning of the arrested members of Hess's entourage convinced the Fuehrer that there had been no disloyalty toward him and certainly no plot, and that his trusted lieutenant had simply cracked up. It was decided at the Berghof, after the British had confirmed Hess's arrival, to offer this explanation to the public. Soon the German press was dutifully publishing brief accounts that this once great star of National Socialism had become "a deluded, deranged and muddled idealist, ridden with hallucinations traceable to World War [I] injuries."

 

[quote]It seemed [said the official press communique] that Party Comrade Hess lived in a state of hallucination, as a result of which he felt he could bring about an understanding between England and Germany ... This, however, will have no effect on the continuance of the war, which has been forced on the German people.[/quote]

 

Privately, Hitler gave orders to have Hess shot at once if he returned, [xxviii] and publicly he stripped his old comrade of all his offices, replacing him as deputy leader of the party by Martin Bormann, a more sinister and conniving character. The Fuehrer hoped that the bizarre episode would be forgotten as soon as possible; his own thoughts quickly turned again to the attack on Russia, which was not far off.

 

[b]THE PLIGHT OF THE KREMLIN[/b]

 

Despite all the evidence of Hitler's intentions -- the build-up of German forces in eastern Poland, the presence of a million Nazi troops in the nearby Balkans, the Wehrmacht's conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece and its occupation of Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary -- the men in the Kremlin, Stalin above all, stark realists though they were reputed to be and had been, blindly hoped that Russia somehow would still escape the Nazi tyrant's wrath. Their natural suspicions, of course, could not help but feed on the bare facts, nor could their growing resentment at Hitler's moves in southeastern Europe be suppressed. There is, however, something unreal, almost unbelievable, quite grotesque, in the diplomatic exchanges between Moscow and Berlin in these spring weeks (exhaustively recorded in the captured Nazi documents), in which the Germans tried clumsily to deceive the Kremlin to the last and the Soviet leaders seemed unable to fully grasp reality and act on it in time.

 

Though they several times protested the entry of German troops into Rumania and Bulgaria and then the attack on Yugoslavia and Greece as a violation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and a threat to Russian "security interests," the Soviets went out of their way to appease Berlin as the date for the German attack approached. Stalin personally took the lead in this. On April 13, 1941, Ambassador von der Schulenburg telegraphed an interesting dispatch to Berlin recounting how on the departure of the Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, that evening from Moscow, Stalin had shown "a remarkably friendly manner" not only to the Japanese but to the Germans. At the railroad station

 

[quote]Stalin publicly asked for me [Schulenburg wired] ... and threw his arm around my shoulders: "We must remain friends and you must now do everything to that end!" Somewhat later Stalin turned to the acting German Military Attache, Colonel Krebs, first made sure that he was a German, and then said to him: "We will remain friends with you -- through thick and thin!" [91][/quote]

 

Three days later the German charge in Moscow, Tippelskirch, wired Berlin stressing that the demonstration at the station showed Stalin's friendliness toward Germany and that this was especially important "in view of the persistently circulating rumors of an imminent conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union." [92] The day before, Tippelskirch had informed Berlin that the Kremlin had accepted "unconditionally," after months of wrangling, the German proposals for the settlement of the border between the two countries from the Igorka River to the Baltic Sea. "The compliant attitude of the Soviet Government," he said, "seems very remarkable." [93] In view of what was brewing in Berlin, it surely was.

 

In supplying blockaded Germany with important raw materials, the Soviet government continued to be equally compliant. On April 5, 1941, Schnurre, in charge of trade negotiations with Moscow, reported jubilantly to his Nazi masters that after the slowdown in Russian deliveries in January and February 1941, due to the "cooling off of political relations," they had risen "by leaps and bounds in March, especially in grains, petroleum, manganese ore and the nonferrous and precious metals."

 

[quote]Transit traffic through Siberia [he added] is proceeding favorably as usual. At our request the Soviet Government even put a special freight train for rubber at our disposal at the Manchurian border. [94][/quote]

 

Six weeks later, on May 15, Schnurre was reporting that the obliging Russians had put on several special freight trains so that 4,000 tons of badly needed raw rubber could be delivered to Germany over the Siberian railway.

 

[quote]The quantities of raw materials contracted for are being delivered punctually by the Russians, despite the heavy burden this imposes on them ... I am under the impression that we could make economic demands on Moscow which would even go beyond the scope of the treaty of January 10, demands designed to secure German food and raw-material requirements beyond the extent now contracted for. [95][/quote]

 

German deliveries of machinery to Russia were falling behind, Schnurre observed, but he did not seem to mind, if the Russians didn't. However, he was disturbed on May 15 by another factor. "Great difficulties are created," he complained, "by the countless rumors of an imminent German-Russian conflict," for which he blamed German official sources. Amazingly, the "difficulties," Schnurre explained in a lengthy memorandum to the Foreign Office, did not come from Russia but from German industrial firms, which, he said, were trying "to withdraw" from their contracts with the Russians.

 

Hitler, it must be noted here, was doing his best to contradict the rumors, but at the same time he was busy trying to convince his generals and top officials that Germany was in growing danger of being attacked by Russia. Though the generals, from their own military intelligence, knew better, so hypnotic was Hitler's spell over them that even after the war Halder, Brauchitsch, Manstein and others (though not Paulus, who seems to have been more honest) contended that a Soviet military build-up on the Polish frontier had become very threatening by the beginning of the summer.

 

Count von der Schulenburg, who had come home from Moscow on a brief leave, saw Hitler in Berlin on April 28 and tried to convince him of Russia's peaceful intentions. "Russia," he attempted to explain, "is very apprehensive at the rumors predicting a German attack on Russia. I cannot believe," he added, "that Russia will ever attack Germany ... If Stalin was unable to go with England and France in 1939 when both were still strong, he will certainly not make such a decision today, when France is destroyed and England badly battered. On the contrary, I am convinced that Stalin is prepared to make even further concessions to us."

 

The Fuehrer feigned skepticism. He had been "forewarned," he said, "by events in Serbia ... What devil had possessed the Russians," he asked, "to conclude the friendship pact with Yugoslavia?" [xxix] He did not believe, it was true, he said, that "Russia could be brought to attack Germany." Nevertheless, he concluded, he was obliged "to be careful." Hitler did not tell his ambassador to the Soviet Union what plans he had in store for that country, and Schulenburg, an honest, decent German of the old school, remained ignorant of them to the last.

 

Stalin, too, but not of the signs, or of the warnings, of what Hitler was up to. On April 22 the Soviet government formally protested eighty instances of border violations by Nazi planes which it said had taken place between March 27 and April 18, providing detailed accounts of each. In one case, it said, in a German reconnaissance plane which landed near Rovno on April 15 there was found a camera, rolls of exposed film and a torn topographical map of the western districts of the U.S.S.R., "all of which give evidence of the purpose of the crew of this airplane." Even in protesting the Russians were conciliatory. They had given the border troops, the note said, "the order not to fire on German planes flying over Soviet territory so long as such flights do not occur frequently." [97]

 

Stalin made further conciliatory moves early in May. To please Hitler he expelled the diplomatic representatives in Moscow of Belgium, Norway, Greece and even Yugoslavia and closed their legations. He recognized the pro-Nazi government of Rashid Ali in Iraq. He kept the Soviet press under the strictest restraint in order to avoid provoking Germany.

 

[quote]These manifestations [Schulenburg wired Berlin on May 12] of the intention of the Stalin Government are calculated ... to relieve the tension between the Soviet Union and Germany and to create a better atmosphere for the future. We must bear in mind that Stalin personally has always advocated a friendly relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union. [98][/quote]

 

Though Stalin had long been the absolute dictator of the Soviet Union this was the first mention by Schulenburg in his dispatches of the term "Stalin Government." There was good reason. On May 6 Stalin had personally taken over as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, or Prime Minister, replacing Molotov, who remained as Foreign Commissar. This was the first time the all-powerful secretary of the Communist Party had taken government office and the general world reaction was that it meant the situation had become so serious for the Soviet Union, especially in its relations with Nazi Germany, that only Stalin could deal with it as the nominal as well as the actual head of government. This interpretation was obvious, but there was another which was not so clear but which the astute German ambassador in Moscow promptly pointed out to Berlin.

 

Stalin, he reported, was displeased with the deterioration of German --  Soviet relations and blamed Molotov's clumsy diplomacy for much of it.

 

[quote]In my opinion [Schulenburg said] it may be assumed with certainty that Stalin has set himself a foreign-policy goal of overwhelming importance ... which he hopes to attain by his personal efforts. I firmly believe that in an international situation which he considers serious, Stalin has set himself the goal of preserving the Soviet Union from a conflict with Germany. [99][/quote]

 

Did the crafty Soviet dictator not realize by now -- the middle of May 1941 -- that this was an impossible goal, that there was nothing, short of an abject surrender to Hitler, that he could do to attain it? He surely knew the significance of Hitler's conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece, of the presence of large masses of German troops in Rumania and Hungary on his southwest borders, of the Wehrmacht build-up on his western frontier in Poland. The persistent rumors in Moscow itself surely reached him. By the beginning of May what Schulenburg called in a dispatch on the second day of that month "rumors of an imminent German-Russian military showdown" were so rife in the Soviet capital that he and his officials in the German Embassy were having difficulty in combating them.

 

[quote]Please bear in mind [he advised Berlin] that attempts to counteract these rumors here in Moscow must necessarily remain ineffectual if such rumors incessantly reach here from Germany, and if every traveler who comes to Moscow, or travels through Moscow, not only brings these rumors along, but can even confirm them by citing facts. [100][/quote]

 

The veteran ambassador was getting suspicious himself. He was instructed by Berlin to continue to deny the rumors, and to spread it about that not only was there no concentration of German troops on Russia's frontiers but that actually considerable forces (eight divisions, he was told for his "personal information") were being transferred from "east to west." [101] Perhaps these instructions only confirmed the ambassador's uneasiness, since by this time the press throughout the world was beginning to trumpet the German military build-up along the Soviet borders.

 

But long before this, Stalin had received specific warnings of Hitler's plans, and apparently paid no attention to them. The most serious one came from the government of the United States.

 

Early in January 1941, the U.S. commercial attache in Berlin, Sam E. Woods, had sent a confidential report to the State Department stating that he had learned from trustworthy German sources that Hitler was making plans to attack Russia in the spring. It was a long and detailed message, outlining the General Staff plan of attack (which proved to be quite accurate) and the preparations being made for the economic exploitation of the Soviet Union, once it was conquered. [xxx]

 

Secretary of State Cordell Hull thought at first that Woods had been victim of a German "plant." He called in J. Edgar Hoover. The F.B.I. head read the report and judged it authentic. Woods had named some of his sources, both in various ministries in Berlin and in the German General Staff, and on being checked they were adjudged in Washington to be men who ought to know what was up and anti-Nazi enough to tattle. Despite the strained relations then existing between the American and Soviet governments Hull decided to inform the Russians, requesting Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to communicate the substance of the report to Ambassador Constantine Oumansky. This was done on March 20.

 

[quote]Mr. Oumansky turned very white [Welles later wrote]. He was silent for a moment and then merely said: "I fully realize the gravity of the message you have given me. My government will be grateful for your confidence and I will inform it immediately of our conversation." [102]

 

If it was grateful, indeed if it ever believed this timely intelligence, it never communicated any inkling to the American government. In fact, as Secretary Hull has related in his memoirs, Moscow grew more hostile and truculent because America's support of Britain made it impossible to supply Russia with all the materials it demanded. Nevertheless, according to Hull, the State Department, having received dispatches from its legations in Bucharest and Stockholm the first week in June stating that Germany would invade Russia within a fortnight, forwarded copies of them to Ambassador Steinhardt in Moscow, who turned them over to Molotov.

 

Churchill too sought to warn Stalin. On April 3 he asked his ambassador in Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, to deliver a personal note to the dictator pointing out the significance to Russia of German troop movements in southern Poland which he had learned of through a British agent. Cripps' delay in delivering the message still vexed Churchill when he wrote about the incident years later in his memoirs. [103]

 

Before the end of April, Cripps knew the date set for the German attack, and the Germans knew he knew it. On April 24, the German naval attache in Moscow sent a curt message to the Navy High Command in Berlin:

 

[quote]The British Ambassador predicts June 22 as the day of the outbreak of the war. [104][/quote]

 

This message, which is among the captured Nazi papers, was recorded in the German Naval Diary on the same day, with an exclamation point added at the end. [105] The admirals were surprised at the accuracy of the British envoy's prediction. The poor naval attache, who, like the ambassador in Moscow, had not been let in on the secret, added in his dispatch that it was "manifestly absurd."

 

Molotov must have thought so too. A month later, on May 22, he received Schulenburg to discuss various matters. "He was as amiable, self-assured and well-informed as ever," the ambassador reported to Berlin, and again emphasized that Stalin and Molotov, "the two strongest men in the Soviet Union," were striving "above all" to avoid a conflict with Germany. [106]

 

On one point the usually perspicacious ambassador couldn't have been more wrong. Molotov, at this juncture, was certainly not "well-informed." But neither was the ambassador.

 

The extent to which the Russian Foreign Commissar was ill-informed was given public expression on June 14, 1941, just a week before the German blow fell. Molotov called in Schulenburg that evening and handed him the text of a Tass statement which, he said, was being broadcast that very night and published in the newspapers the next morning. [107] Blaming Cripps personally for the "widespread rumors of 'an impending war between the U.S.S.R. and Germany' in the English and foreign press," this official statement of the Soviet government branded them as an "obvious absurdity ... a clumsy propaganda maneuver of the forces arrayed against the Soviet Union and Germany." It added:

 

[quote]In the opinion of Soviet circles the rumors of the intention of Germany to launch an attack against the Soviet Union are completely without foundation.[/quote]

 

Even the recent German troop movements from the Balkans to the Soviet frontiers were explained in the communique as "having no connection with Soviet-German relations." As for the rumors saying that Russia would attack Germany, they were "false and provocative."

 

The irony of the Tass communique on behalf of the Soviet government is enhanced by two German moves, one on the day of its publication, June 15, the other on the next day.

 

From Venice, where he was conferring with Ciano, Ribbentrop sent a secret message on June 15 to Budapest warning the Hungarian government "to take steps to secure its frontiers."

 

[quote]In view of the heavy concentration of Russian troops at the German eastern border, the Fuehrer will probably be compelled, by the beginning of July at the latest, to clarify German-Russian relations and in this connection to make certain demands. [108][/quote]

 

The Germans were tipping off the Hungarians, but not their principal ally. When Ciano the next day, during a gondola ride on the canals of Venice, asked Ribbentrop about the rumors of a German attack on Russia, the Nazi Foreign Minister replied:

 

[quote]"Dear Ciano, I cannot tell you anything as yet because every decision is locked in the impenetrable bosom of the Fuehrer. However, one thing is certain: if we attack them, the Russia of Stalin will be erased from the map within eight weeks." [xxxi]

 

While the Kremlin was smugly preparing to broadcast to the world on June 14, 1941, that the rumors of a German attack on Russia were an "obvious absurdity," Adolf Hitler that very day was having his final big war conference on Barbarossa with the leading officers of the Wehrmacht. The timetable for the massing of troops in the East and their deployment to the jumping-off positions had been put in operation on May 22. A revised version of the timetable was issued a few days later. [109] It is a long and detailed document and shows that by the beginning of June not only were all plans for the onslaught on Russia complete but the vast and complicated movement of troops, artillery, armor, planes, ships and supplies was well under way and on schedule. A brief item in the Naval War Diary for May 29 states: "The preparatory movements of warships for Barbarossa has begun." Talks with the general staffs of Rumania, Hungary and Finland -- the last country anxious now to win back what had been taken from her by the Russians in the winter war -- were completed. On June 9 from Berchtesgaden Hitler sent out an order convoking the commanders in chief of the three Armed Services and the top field generals for a final all-day meeting on Barbarossa in Berlin on June 14.

 

Despite the enormity of the task, not only Hitler but his generals were in a confident mood as they went over last-minute details of the most gigantic military operation in history -- an all-out attack on a front stretching some 1,500 miles from the Arctic Ocean at Petsamo to the Black Sea. The night before, Brauchitsch had returned to Berlin from an inspection of the build-up in the East. Halder noted in his diary that the Army Commander in Chief was highly pleased. Officers and men, he said, were in top shape and ready.

 

This last military powwow on June 14 lasted from 11 A.M. until 6: 30 P.M. It was broken by lunch at 2 P.M., at which Hitler gave his generals yet another of his fiery, eve-of-the-battle pep talks.110 According to Halder, it was "a comprehensive political speech," with Hitler stressing that he had to attack Russia because her fall would force England to "give up." But the bloodthirsty Fuehrer must have emphasized something else even more. Keitel told about it during direct examination on the stand at Nuremberg.

 

[quote]The main theme was that this was the decisive battle between two ideologies and that the practices which we knew as soldiers -- the only correct ones under international law -- had to be measured by completely different standards.[/quote]

 

Hitler thereupon, said Keitel, gave various orders for carrying out an unprecedented terror in Russia by "brutal means."

 

"Did you, or did any other generals, raise objections to these orders?" asked Keitel's own attorney.

 

"No. I personally made no remonstrances," the General replied. Nor did any of the other generals, he added.  [xxxii]

 

It is almost inconceivable but nevertheless true that the men in the Kremlin, for all the reputation they had of being suspicious, crafty and hardheaded, and despite all the evidence and all the warnings that stared them in the face, did not realize right up to the last moment that they were to be hit, and with a force which would almost destroy their nation.

 

At 9:30 on the pleasant summer evening of June 21, 1941, nine hours before the German attack was scheduled to begin, Molotov received the German ambassador at his office in the Kremlin and delivered his "final fatuity." [xxxiii] After mentioning further border violations by German aircraft, which he said he had instructed the Soviet ambassador in Berlin to bring to the attention of Ribbentrop, Molotov turned to another subject, which Schulenburg described in an urgent telegram to the Wilhelmstrasse that same night:

 

[quote]There were a number of indications [Molotov had told him] that the German Government was dissatisfied with the Soviet Government. Rumors were even current that a war was impending between Germany and the Soviet Union ... The Soviet Government was unable to understand the reasons for Germany's dissatisfaction ... He would appreciate it if I could tell him what had brought about the present situation in German-Soviet relations.

 

I replied [Schulenburg added] that I could not answer his questions, as I lacked the pertinent information. [111][/quote]

 

He was soon to get it.

 

For on its way to him over the air waves between Berlin and Moscow was a long coded radio message. from Ribbentrop, dated June 21, 1941, marked "Very Urgent, State Secret, For the Ambassador Personally," which began:

 

[quote]Upon receipt of this telegram, all of the cipher material still there is to be destroyed. The radio set is to be put out of commission.

 

Please inform Herr Molotov at once that you have an urgent communication to make to him ... Then please make the following declaration to him.[/quote]

 

It was a familiar declaration, strewn with all the shopworn lies and fabrications at which Hitler and Ribbentrop had become so expert and which they had concocted so often before to justify each fresh act of unprovoked aggression. Perhaps -- at least such is the impression this writer gets in rereading it -- it somewhat topped all the previous ones for sheer effrontery and deceit. While Germany had loyally abided by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, it said, Russia had repeatedly broken it. The U.S.S.R. had practiced "sabotage, terrorism and espionage" against Germany. It had "combated the German attempt to set up a stable order in Europe." It had conspired with Britain "for an attack against the German troops in Rumania and Bulgaria." By concentrating "all available Russian forces on a long front from the Baltic to the Black Sea," it had "menaced" the Reich.

 

[quote]Reports received the last few days [it went on] eliminate the last remaining doubts as to the aggressive character of this Russian concentration ... In addition, there are reports from England regarding the negotiations of Ambassador Cripps for still closer political and military collaboration between England and the Soviet Union.

 

To sum up, the Government of the Reich declares, therefore, that the Soviet Government, contrary to the obligations it assumed,

 

1. has not only continued, but even intensified its attempts to undermine Germany and Europe;

 

2. has adopted a more and more anti-German foreign policy;

 

3. has concentrated all its forces in readiness at the German border.

 

Thereby the Soviet Government has broken its treaties with Germany and is about to attack Germany from the rear in its struggle for life. The Fuehrer has therefore ordered the German Armed Forces to oppose this threat with all the means at their disposal. [112][/quote]

 

"Please do not enter into any discussion of this communication," Ribbentrop advised his ambassador at the end. What could the shaken and disillusioned Schulenburg, who had devoted the best years of his life to improving German-Russian relations and who knew that the attack on the Soviet Union was unprovoked and without justification, say? Arriving back at the Kremlin just as dawn was breaking, he contented himself with reading the German declaration. [xxxiv] Molotov, stunned at last, listened in silence to the end and then said:

 

"It is war. Do you believe that we deserved that?"

 

At the same hour of daybreak a similar scene was taking place in the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. All afternoon on June 21, the Soviet ambassador, Vladimir Dekanozov, had been telephoning the Foreign Office asking for an appointment with Ribbentrop so that he could deliver his little protest against further border violations by German planes. He was told that the Nazi Foreign Minister was "out of town." Then at 2 A.M. on the twenty-second he was informed that Ribbentrop would receive him at 4 A.M. at the Foreign Office. There the envoy, who had been a deputy foreign commissar, a hatchetman for Stalin and the troubleshooter who had arranged the taking over of Lithuania, received, like Molotov in Moscow, the shock of his life. Dr. Schmidt, who was present, has described the scene.

 

[quote]I had never seen Ribbentrop so excited as he was in the five minutes before Dekanozov's arrival. He walked up and down his room like a caged animal ...

 

Dekanozov was shown in and, obviously not guessing anything was amiss, held out his hand to Ribbentrop. We sat down and ... Dekanozov proceeded to put on behalf of his Government certain questions that needed clarification. But he had hardly begun before Ribbentrop, with a stony expression, interrupted, saying: "That's not the question now" ...[/quote]

 

The arrogant Nazi Foreign Minister thereupon explained what the question was, gave the ambassador a copy of the memorandum which Schulenburg at that moment was reading out to Molotov, and informed him that German troops were at that instant taking "military countermeasures" on the Soviet frontier. The startled Soviet envoy, says Schmidt, "recovered his composure quickly and expressed his deep regret" at the developments, for which he blamed Germany. "He rose, bowed perfunctorily and left the room without shaking hands." [113]

 

The Nazi-Soviet honeymoon was over. At 3: 30 A.M. on June 22, 1941, a half hour before the closing diplomatic formalities in the Kremlin and the Wilhelmstrasse, the roar of Hitler's guns along hundreds of miles of front had blasted it forever.

 

There was one other diplomatic prelude to the cannonade. On the afternoon of June 21, Hitler sat down at his desk in his new underground headquarters, Wolfsschanze (Wolfs Lair), near Rastenburg in a gloomy forest of East Prussia, and dictated a long letter to Mussolini. As in the preparation of all his other aggressions he had not trusted his good friend and chief ally enough to let him in on his secret until the last moment. Now, at the eleventh hour, he did. His letter is the most revealing and authentic evidence we have of the reasons for his taking this fatal step, which for so long puzzled the outside world and which was to pave the way for his end and that of the Third Reich. The letter, to be sure, is full of Hitler's customary lies and evasions which he tried to fob off even on his friends. But beneath them, and between them, there emerges his fundamental reasoning and his true -- if mistaken -- estimate of the world situation as the summer of 1941, the second of the war, officially began.

 

[quote]DUCE!

 

I am writing this letter to you at a moment when months of anxious deliheration and continuous nerve-racking waiting are ending in the hardest decision of my life.

 

The situation: [xxxv] England has lost this war. Like a drowning person, she grasps at every straw. Nevertheless, some of her hopes are naturally not without a certain logic ... The destruction of France ... has directed the glances of the British warmongers continually to the place from which they tried to start the war: to Soviet Russia.

 

Both countries, Soviet Russia and England, are equally interested in a Europe rendered prostrate by a long war. Behind these two countries stands the North American Union goading them on ....[/quote]

 

Hitler next explained that with large Soviet military forces in his rear he could never assemble the strength -- "particularly in the air" -- to make the all-out attack on Britain which would bring her down.

 

[quote]Really, all available Russian forces are at our border ... If circumstances should give me cause to employ the German Air Force against England, there is danger that Russia will then begin its strategy of extortion, to which I would have to yield in silence simply from a feeling of air inferiority ... England will be all the less ready for peace for it will be able to pin its hopes on the Russian partner. Indeed this hope must naturally grow with the progress in preparedness of the Russian armed forces. And behind this is the mass delivery of war material from America which they hope to get in 1942 ...

 

I have therefore, after constantly racking my brains, finally reached the decision to cut the noose before it can be drawn tight ... My over-all view is now as follows:

 

1. France is, as ever, not to be trusted.

 

2. North Africa itself, insofar as your colonies, Duce, are concerned, is probably out of danger until fall.

 

3. Spain is irresolute and -- I am afraid -- will take sides only when the outcome of the war is decided ...

 

5. An attack on Egypt before autumn is out of the question ...

 

6. Whether or not America enters the war is a matter of indifference, inasmuch as she supports our enemy with all the power she is able to mobilize.

 

7. The situation in England itself is bad; the provision of food and raw materials is growing steadily more difficult. The martial spirit to make war, after all, lives only on hopes. These hopes are based solely on two assumptions: Russia and America. We have no chance of eliminating America. But it does lie in our power to exclude Russia. The elimination of Russia means, at the same time, a tremendous relief for Japan in East Asia, and thereby the possibility of a much stronger threat to American activities through Japanese intervention.

 

I have decided under these circumstances to put an end to the hypocritical performance in the Kremlin.[/quote]

 

Germany, Hitler said, would not need any Italian troops in Russia. (He was not going to share the glory of conquering Russia any more than he had shared the conquest of France.) But Italy, he declared, could "give decisive aid" by strengthening its forces in North Africa and by preparing "to march into France in case of a French violation of the treaty." This was a fine bait for the land-hungry Duce.

 

[quote]So far as the air war on England is concerned, we shall, for a time, remain on the defensive ...

 

As for the war in the East, Duce, it will surely be difficult, but I do not entertain a second's doubt as to its great success. I hope, above all, that it will then be possible for us to secure a common food-supply base in the Ukraine which will furnish us such additional supplies as we may need in the future.[/quote]

 

Then came the excuse for not tipping off his partner earlier.

 

[quote]If I waited until this moment, Duce, to send you this information, it is because the final decision itself will not be made until 7 o'clock tonight ...

 

Whatever may come, Duce, our situation cannot become worse as a result of this step; it can only improve ... Should England nevertheless not draw any conclusions from the hard facts, then we can, with our rear secured, apply ourselves with increased strength to the dispatching of our enemy.[/quote]

 

Finally Hitler described his great feeling of relief at having finally made up his mind.

 

[quote]... Let me say one more thing, Duce. Since I struggled through to this decision, I again feel spiritually free. The partnership with the Soviet Union, in spite of the complete sincerity of our efforts to bring about a final conciliation, was nevertheless often very irksome to me, for in some way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts and my former obligations. I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.

 

With hearty and comradely greetings,

 

Your

 

ADOLF HITLER [114][/quote]

 

At 3 o'clock in the morning of June 22, a bare half hour before the German troops jumped off, Ambassador von Bismarck awakened Ciano in Rome to deliver Hitler's long missive, which the Italian Foreign Minister then telephoned to Mussolini, who was resting at his summer place at Riccione. It was not the first time that the Duce had been wakened from his sleep in the middle of the night by a message from his Axis partner, and he resented it. "Not even I disturb my servants at night," Mussolini fretted to Ciano, "but the Germans make me jump out of bed at any hour without the least consideration." [115] Nevertheless, as soon as Mussolini had rubbed the sleep from his eyes he gave orders for an immediate declaration of war on the Soviet Union. He was now completely a prisoner of the Germans. He knew it and resented it. "I hope for only one thing," he told Ciano, "that in this war in the East the Germans lose a lot of feathers." UG Still, he realized that his own future now depended wholly on German arms. The Germans would win in Russia, he was sure, but he hoped that at least they would get a bloody nose.

 

He could not know, nor did he suspect, nor did anyone else in the West, on either side, that they would get much worse. On Sunday morning, June 22, the day Napoleon had crossed the Niemen in 1812 on his way to Moscow, and exactly a year after Napoleon's country, France, had capitulated at Compiegne, Adolf Hitler's armored, mechanized and hitherto invincible armies poured across the Niemen and various other rivers and penetrated swiftly into Russia. The Red Army, despite all the warnings and the warning signs, was, as General Halder noted in his diary the first day, "tactically surprised along the entire front." [xxxvi] All the first bridges were captured intact. In fact, says Halder, at most places along the border the Russians were not even deployed for action and were overrun before they could organize resistance. Hundreds of Soviet planes were destroyed on the flying fields. [xxxvii] Within a few days tens of thousands of prisoners began to pour in; whole armies were quickly encircled. It seemed like the Feldzug in Polen all over again.

 

"It is hardly too much to say," the usually cautious Halder noted in his diary on July 3 after going over the latest General Staff reports, "that the Feldzug against Russia has been won in fourteen days." In a matter of weeks, he added, it would all be over.

 

_______________

 

[b]Notes:[/b]

 

 

i. Halder uses the English word "down" here in the German text.

 

ii. The emphasis in the report is Halder's.

 

iii. In his report on this Thomas stresses how punctual Soviet deliveries of goods to Germany were at this time. In fact, he says, they continued to be "right up to the start of the attack," and observes, not without amusement, that "even during the last few days, shipments of India rubber from the Far East were completed [by the Russians] over express transit trains" -- presumably over the Trans-Siberian Railway,  [12]

 

iv. The Germans had kept only seven divisions in Poland, two of which were transferred to the West during the spring campaign. The troops there, Halder cracked, were scarcely enough to maintain the customs service. If Stalin had attacked Germany in June 1940, the Red Army probably could have got to Berlin before any serious resistance was organized.

 

 

v. It cost King Carol his throne. On September 6 he abdicated in favor of his eighteen-  year-old son, Michael, and fled with his red-haired mistress, Magda Lupescu.  in a ten-car special train filled with what might be described as "loot" across Yugoslavia  to Switzerland. General Ion Antonescu, chief of the fascist "Iron Guard" and  a friend of Hitler, became dictator.

 

vi. Minus southern Dobrudja, which Rumania was forced to cede to Bulgaria.

 

vii. It was signed in Berlin on September 27, 1940, in a comic-opera setting and ceremony  which I have described elsewhere (Berlin Diary, pp. 532-37). In Articles 1  and 2, respectively, Japan recognized "the leadership of Germany and Italy in the  establishment of a new order in Europe," and the two countries recognized Japan's  leadership for the same in Greater East Asia. Article 3 provided for mutual assistance  should anyone of the powers be attacked by the United States, though America  was not specifically mentioned, only defined. To me, as I wrote in my diary that  day in Berlin, the most significant thing about the pact was that it meant that Hitler  was now reconciled to a long war. Ciano, who signed the pact for Italy, came to the  same conclusion (Ciano Diaries, p. 296). Also, despite the disclaimer, the pact was,  and was meant to be, a warning to the Soviet Union.

 

viii. Their accuracy on this occasion was later confirmed by Stalin, though not intentionally.  Churchill says he received an account of Molotov's talks in Berlin from  Stalin in August 1942 "which in no essential differs from the German record," though  it was "more pithy." (Churchill, Their Finest Hour, pp. 585-86.)

 

ix. Churchill says the air raid was timed for this occasion. "We had heard of the  conference beforehand," he later wrote, "and though not invited to join in the discussion  did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings." (Churchill, Their  Finest Hour, p. 584.)

 

x. Molotov's parting shot is given by Churchill, to whom it was related by Stalin  later in the war. (Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 586.)

 

xi. Sweden, which had refused transit to the Allies during the Russo-Finnish War, permitted this fully armed division to pass through. Hungary, of course, later joined in the war against Russia.

 

xii. The italics are Hitler's.

 

 

xiii. A good many historians have contended that Hitler in this first Barbarossa directive  did not go into detail, a misunderstanding due probably to the extremely abbreviated  version given in English translation in the NCA volumes. But the complete  German text given in TMWC, XXVI, pp: 47-52 discloses the full details, thus  revealing how far advanced the German military plans were at this early date. [36]

 

xiv. Although they did not learn the contents of the secret accord at Montoire, both  Churchill and Roosevelt suspected the worst. The King of England sent through  American channels a personal appeal to Petain asking him not to take sides against  Britain. President Roosevelt's message to the Marshal was stern and toughly worded  and warned him of the dire consequences of Vichy France's betraying Britain. (See  William L. Langer, Our Vichy Gamble, p. 97. To write this book, Professor Langer  had access to German documents that eleven years later have not been released by  the British and American governments.)

 

xv. The Navy's italics.

 

xvi. By this time a ramshackle British desert force of one armored division, an Indian infantry division, two infantry brigades and a Royal Tank regiment -- 31,000 men in all -- had driven an Italian force three times as large out of Egypt and captured 38,000 prisoners at a cost of 133 killed, 387 wounded and 8 missing. The British counteroffensive, under the over-all command of General Sir Archibald Wavell, had begun on December 7 and in four days Marshal Graziani's army was routed. What had started as a five-day limited counterattack continued until February 7, by which time the British had pushed clear across Cyrenaica, a distance of 500 miles, annihilated the entire Italian army of ten divisions in Libya, taken 130,000 prisoners, 1,240 guns and 500 tanks and lost themselves 500 killed, 1,373 wounded and 55 missing. To the skeptical British military writer General J. F. Fuller it was "one of the most audacious campaigns ever fought." (Fuller, The Second World War, p. 98.)

 

The Italian Navy had also been dealt a lethal blow. On the night of November 11-12, bombers from the British carrier Illustrious (which the Luftwaffe claimed to have sunk) attacked the Italian fleet at anchor at Taranto and put out of action for many months three battleships and two cruisers. "A black day," Ciano began his diary on November 12. "The British, without warning, have sunk the dreadnought Cavour and seriously damaged the battleships Littorio and Duilio."

 

 

xvii. The italics and double exclamation points are Raeder's.

 

xviii. Operation Marita was promulgated in Directive No. 20 on December 13, 1940. It called for an army of twenty-four divisions to be assembled in Rumania and to descend on Greece through Bulgaria as soon as favorable weather set in. It was signed by Hitler. [53]

 

 

xix. The strategy was essentially that laid down in Directive No. 21 of December 18,  1940. (See pp. 810-11.) Again in comments to Brauchitsch and Halder, Hitler  emphasized the importance of "wiping out large sections of the enemy" instead of  forcing them to retreat. And he stressed that "the [i]main aim[/i] [his emphasis] is to gain  possession of the Baltic States and Leningrad."

 

xx. "The war against Yugoslavia should be very popular in Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria," Hitler sneered. He said he would give the Banat to Hungary, Macedonia to Bulgaria and the Adriatic coast to Italy.

 

xxi. It had originally been set for May 15 in the first Barbarossa directive of December 18, 1940.

 

 

xxii. On April 12, 1941, six days after the launching of his attack, Hitler issued a secret  directive dividing up Yugoslavia among Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria.  Croatia was created as an autonomous puppet state. The Fuehrer helped himself liberally, Germany taking territory contiguous to the old Austria and keeping under its occupation all of old Serbia as well as the copper- and coal-mining districts. Italy's grab was left somewhat vague, but it did not amount to much. [65]

 

xxiii. Charles A. Lindbergh, the hero flyer, who had seemed to this writer to have fallen with startling naivete, during his visits to Germany, to Nazi propaganda boasts, was already consigning Britain to defeat in his speeches to large and enthusiastic audiences in America. On April 23, 1941, at the moment of the Nazi victories in the Balkans and North Africa, he addressed 30,000 persons in New York at the first mass meeting of the newly formed America First Committee. "The British government," he said, "has one last desperate plan: ... To persuade us to send another American Expeditionary Force to Europe and to share with England militarily, as well as financially, the fiasco of this war." He condemned England for having "encouraged the smaller nations of Europe to fight against hopeless odds." Apparently it did not occur to this man that Yugoslavia and Greece, which Hitler had just crushed, were brutally attacked without provocation, and that they had instinctively tried to defend themselves because they had a sense of honor and because they had courage even in the face of hopeless odds. On April 28 Lindbergh resigned his commission as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve after President Roosevelt on the twenty-fifth had publicly branded him as a defeatist and an appeaser. The Secretary of War accepted the resignation.

 

 

xxiv. "It was the first time I found myself involved in a conflict between my soldierly conceptions and my duty to obey," Field Marshal von Manstein declared on the stand at Nuremberg in discussing the Commissar Order. "Actually, I ought to have obeyed, but I said to myself that as a soldier I could not possibly co-operate in a thing like that. I told the Commander of the Army Group under which I served at that time ... that I would not carry out such an order, which was against the honor of a soldier." [74]

 

As a matter of record, the order, of course, was carried out on a large scale.

 

 

xxv. "A man of straw," Hitler later called him. (Hitler's Secret Conversations, p. 153.)

 

xxvi. The emphasis is in the original order.

 

xxvii. On July 27, 1941, Keitel ordered all copies of this directive of May I3 concerning courts-martial destroyed, though "the validity of the directive," he stipulated, "is not affected by the destruction of the copies." The July 27 order, he added, "would itself be destroyed." But copies of both survived and turned up at Nuremberg to haunt the High Command.

 

 

Four days before, on July 23, Keitel had issued another order marked "Top Secret":

 

[quote]On July 22, the Fuehrer after receiving the Commander of the Army [Brauchitsch I issued the following order:

 

In view of the vast size of the occupied areas in the East, the forces available for establishing security will be sufficient only if all resistance is punished not by legal prosecution of the guilty, but by the spreading of such terror by the occupying forces as is alone appropriate to eradicate every inclination to resist amongst the population. [77][/quote]

 

xviii. Churchill has graphically described how he received the news late that Saturday  night while visiting in the country and how at first he thought it too fantastic to believe.  (The Grand Alliance, pp. 50-55.)

 

xix. At Nuremberg Hess told the tribunal that Lord Simon had introduced himself to  him as "Dr. Guthrie" and had declared, "I come with the authority of the Government  and I shall be willing to discuss with you as far as seems good anything you  would wish to state for the information of the Government." [89]

 

xxx. Hess, a sorry, broken figure at Nuremberg, where for a part of the trial he faked total amnesia (his mind had certainly been shattered), outlived Hitler. He was sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Tribunal, escaping the death sentence largely due to his mental collapse. I have described his appearance there in End of a Berlin Diary.

 

The British treated him as a prisoner of war, releasing him on October 10, 1945, so that he could stand trial at Nuremberg. During his captivity in England, he complained bitterly at being denied "full diplomatic privileges," which he constantly demanded, and his none too balanced mind began to deteriorate and he had long stretches of amnesia. He told Dr. Kelley, however, that he twice tried to kill himself during his internment. He became convinced, he said, that the British were trying to poison him.

 

 

xxxi. On April 5, the day before the German attack on Yugoslavia, the Soviet government  had hastily concluded a "Treaty of Nonaggression and Friendship" with the  new Yugoslav government, apparently in a frantic attempt to head off Hitler. Molotov  had informed Schulenburg of it the night before and the ambassador had exclaimed  that "the moment was very unfortunate" and had tried, unsuccessfully, to  argue the Russians into at least postponing the signing of the treaty. [96]

 

xxxii. Sam Woods, a genial extrovert whose grasp of world politics and history was not striking, seems to those of us who knew him and liked him the last man in the American Embassy in Berlin likely to have come by such crucial intelligence. Some of his colleagues in the embassy still doubt that he did. But Cordell Hull has confirmed it in his memoirs and disclosed the details. Woods, the late Secretary of State relates, had a German friend, an anti-Nazi, who had contacts high in the ministries, the Reichsbank and the Nazi Party. As early as August 1940, this friend informed Woods of conferences taking place at Hitler's headquarters concerning preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union. From then on this informant kept the commercial attache au courant of what was transpiring both at the General Staff and among those planning the economic spoliation of Russia. To avoid detection, Woods met his informant in various movie houses in Berlin and in the darkness received scribbled notes from him. (See The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, II, pp. 967-68.)

 

I left Berlin in December 1940. George Kennan, the most brilliant Foreign Service officer at the embassy, who remained there, informs me that the embassy learned from several sources of the coming attack on Russia. Two or three weeks before the assault, he says, our consul at Koenigsberg. Kuykendall, relayed a report specifying correctly the exact day it would begin.

 

xxxiii. This is from the last diary entry of Ciano, made on December 23, 1943, in Cell 27  of the Verona jail, a few days before he was executed. He added that the Italian  government learned of the German invasion of Russia a half hour after it began.  (Ciano Diaries, p. 583.)

 

xxxiv. Hassell confirms this. Writing in his diary two days later, June 16, he remarks: "Brauchitsch and Halder have already agreed to Hitler's tactics [in Russia]. Thus the Army must assume the onus of the murders and burnings which up to now have been confined to the S.S."

 

At first the anti-Nazi "conspirators" had naively believed that Hitler's terror orders for Russia might shock the generals into joining an anti-Nazi revolt. But by June 16 Hassell himself is disillusioned. His diary entry for that date begins:

 

[quote]A series of conferences with Popitz, Goerdeler, Beck and Oster to consider whether certain orders which the Army commanders have received (but which they have not as yet issued) might suffice to open the eyes of the military leaders to the nature of the regime for which they are fighting. These orders concern brutal ... measures the troops are to take against the Bolsheviks when Russia is invaded.

 

We came to the conclusion that nothing was to be hoped for now ... They [the generals] delude themselves ... Hopeless sergeant majors! [The Von Hassell Diaries, pp. 198-99.][/quote]

 

 

xxxv. The expression is Churchill's.

 

xxxvi. Thus ended the veteran ambassador's diplomatic career. Returning to Germany  and forced to retire, he joined the opposition circle led by General Beck. Goerdeler,  Hassell and others and for a time was marked to become Foreign Minister of an  anti-Hitler regime. Hassell reported Schulenburg in 1943 as being willing to cross  the Russian lines in order to talk with Stalin about a negotiated peace with an anti-Nazi government in Germany. (The Von Hassell Diaries, pp. 321-22.) Schulenburg  was arrested and imprisoned after the July 1944 plot against Hitler and executed  by the Gestapo on November 10.

 

xxxvii. Hitler's emphasis.

xxxiii. There is a curious notation in Halder's diary that first day. After mentioning that at noon the Russian radio stations, which the Germans were monitoring, had come back on the air he writes: "They have asked Japan to mediate the political and economic differences between Russia and Germany, and remain in active contact with the German Foreign Office." Did Stalin believe -- nine hours after the attack -- that he somehow might get it called off?

 

xxxix. General Guenther Blumentritt, chief of staff of the Fourth Army, later recalled that a little after midnight on the twenty-first, when the German artillery had already zeroed on its targets, the Berlin-Moscow express train chugged through the German lines on the Bug and across the river into Brest Litovsk "without incident." It struck him as a "weird moment." Almost equally weird to him was that the Russian artillery did not respond even when the assault began. "The Russians," he subsequently wrote, "were taken entirely by surprise on our front." As dawn broke German signal stations picked up the Red Army radio networks. "We are being fired on. What shall we do?" Blumentritt quotes one Russian message as saying. Back came the answer from headquarters: "You must be insane. And why is your signal not in code?" (The Fatal Decisions, edited by Seymour Freidin and William Richardson.)

 

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