Hitler’s Terror Weapons: The Price of Vengeance. Richard Overy
Hitler might have noted an operation on the other side of the vast Soviet Union, in 1939. There, a border clash between satellites had drawn in Russian and Japanese forces and had escalated into a full scale battle, in which the elite Japanese Kwantung army had been heavily defeated. But the Japanese army, before its sweeping victories over western forces in 1941 and 1942, had been much underrated. The Soviet commander in that affair had been Georgi Zhukov (1896-1974), later deputy supreme commander of the Soviet forces under Stalin.
On June 22nd German forces drove headlong into Russia. After a campaign that appeared to have largely gone according to plan, Hitler announced, on October 2nd, that Russia had been defeated. Vast encirclements had been made, netting some 2.5 million prisoners. The Soviet air force had been smashed, with some 14,500 aeroplanes lost, and 18,000 tanks and 22,000 guns had been destroyed or captured. Moscow, indeed, was in a panic.20
Hitler was in a state of euphoria.21 Who could now fail to see the hand of fate in his existence? His politics had been formed in the slums of Vienna; during the Great War, fear and fervour, the exhilaration of patriotism and danger had created an almost religious rapture, and the 1918 offensive had made the ‘most tremendous impression’ of his life,22 which October and November 1918, and his own gassing and temporary blindness, had blackened into a frenzy of hatred and revenge. He had been re-born, to lead a party and a nation. He had re-occupied the Rhineland, had seized the Sudetenland, had ‘reunited’ Austria with the Reich, had absorbed Czechoslovakia, smashed Poland, humiliated France, chased Britain from Europe, and reversed Versailles. Now he had Russia under his heel, and the Jews and communists who ruled the sub-human Slavs were in his power. He was the greatest German of all time, feared from the British Isles to the Pacific Ocean. He had all Europe in his power. He numbered Italy, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Finland, Spain and the mighty and warlike military empire of Japan as his allies. The shiftless artist, who had read of Caesar in his dingy Viennese lodgings, had now become greater than Caesar. Surely some destiny had appointed him? He was finally justified in his world outlook by his tremendous success, and the adulation of millions. The Fuehrer, never noted for his openness to suggestion and argument, was now beyond all earthly advice.
Now, in the East, terrible events unfolded. The motive was neither a simple brutality nor a greed for profit, but a mixture of pseudo-science and all embracing revenge. The Russian steppes were lit ‘by the lights of perverted science’;23 millions of men and women were massacred; some were simply butchered or shot, while others were killed in a less ‘brutalising’ manner.24 The commissar was shot for what he had become; the Slav because his village resisted, or out of sheer disgust at his being a Slav. But the Jew and Jewess, (the descendant perhaps of the converted Khazars), was shot because his or her whole race was proscribed. Neither beauty nor age, nor past deeds, neither a blameless or a shameful life, neither tallness nor shortness, yellow or black hair, blue or dark eyes, could save a Jew. They had been doomed in 1918; now, after 23 years, came vengeance.
But in the dark fabric of Hitler’s and Himmler’s dreams, a tiny rent appeared, and grew in size and importance with each passing day; the Russians were still fighting. Despite huge casualties, they fought on in a bitter and savage war. They supported the communist regime which had appeared, only months before, to be a cruel slavery. They might have supported a liberator. They might have risen in revolt if the Ukraine had been promised liberty. But all were involved in the slaughter or oppression, being either communists or Jews or Slavs. All were antagonised; they were now enemies, dedicated to revenge upon vengeance. And winter approached.
Had Hitler now sought to uncover a human purpose in natural events, he might have been struck with fear. The Russian winter of 1941–2, which he had not expected his troops to have to endure, and for which they were therefore ill prepared, was at times the worst for 250 years. Not only did tanks have to have fires lit under them for two hours before they would start, but the firing pins of rifles shattered. From the beginning of December came an average of 60 degrees Fahrenheit of frost.25
Having stalled within sight of the Kremlin, Hitler’s armies were now forced on to the defensive by Russian counter attacks with fresh troops from the east, where they had successfully daunted the warlords of Japan. The Germans were ordered by Hitler to stand fast and fight rather than retreat, a decision which is approved by most military experts – a defeat would certainly have become a rout. Forming ‘hedgehogs’ around fortified centres, often supplied by air, they held firm and anxiously awaited the arrival of spring.
When spring finally came, the Germans had suffered over eleven hundred thousand casualties, most in the savage, hard fought battles of the summer and autumn.26 The Russians had suffered far more heavily; some three million had been captured in the great encirclement battles of 1941 – a million more had been killed.27 A winter offensive had moved the Germans back from Moscow. But Russia, west of a line drawn from near Leningrad in the North, through Briansk to Kharkhov and Tagranog in the Ukraine, was occupied by Germany and her Italian, Hungarian and Rumanian allies. The agricultural and industrial heart of Russia was gone. How could Stalin feed and arm his remaining soldiers? The answer was that whole factories had been uprooted and moved to the east in front of the German onrush, and the gigantic output of American industry and agriculture, supplemented by supplies from hard pressed Britain, had filled the gap. This had been made possible by the most vital of all the advantages possessed by Britain – sea power. But Hitler was not aware of the full extent of this vast movement of goods and resources, or of the survival of Russian industry. One more campaign must surely suffice to bring him victory; one more summer, and Germany would strike down the Slavs forever.
Great events had unfolded further east. On December 7th, the Japanese surprised the American fleet at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii with an attack by carrier borne aircraft, crippling the battleships which, unprepared, lay at anchor on that Sunday morning. The Japanese aimed to establish a wide defensive perimeter around the home islands which the United States, after suffering heavy losses, would eventually tire of attacking and concede to Japan. But they failed to destroy the installations at Pearl Harbour and the carriers, which had been absent, escaped. And the surprise attack ensured that the American people would be utterly determined to use their vast strength to bring Japan to utter ruin, at whatever cost.
The Japanese made vast strides across the Pacific; ill armed and demoralised British and Indian units were brushed aside, and Singapore was surrendered to inferior forces who were about to retreat for want of supplies. If the surrender had been partly intended to save the lives of Singapore’s civilians, it was ineffective, for it was followed by a precautionary massacre of 5000 Chinese.28 The Americans were driven from the Philippines by March 1942, after hard fighting at Bataan and Corregidor.
But the Japanese had the same hidden weakness as the Germans – the allies had cracked their codes. At Midway, in June 1942, this intelligence coup was put to good use. A Japanese fleet was located, and four aircraft carriers destroyed, in a desperate air battle with the always formidable navy of the United States. Japan had shot her bolt. Her industry, soon to be assailed by American bombers and starved by American submarines, could not make good the losses in ships or highly trained pilots. She would eventually be encircled and ruined by fleets that included over a hundred aircraft carriers, and devastated by a rain of fire from giant American bombers.
But all this was in the future when, on December 11th 1941, Germany declared war on the United States. She did not need to do so. The Tripartite Pact, signed on September 27th 1940, required Germany, Japan and Italy to ‘assist one another with all political, economic and military means if one of the contracting powers is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European War or in the Chinese – Japanese conflict…’29