Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

What was more, by that spring it was already clear among the German High Command that any coming conflict with the Soviet Union would not be fought according to the norms of warfare. In a supplement to Hitler’s earlier “Barbarossa Directive,” issued in mid-March 1941 by Chief of the General Staff Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the instructions were laid down for the expected German administration of the occupied Soviet Union. They included an outline of the “special tasks” to be assigned to Heinrich Himmler’s SS—tasks “determined by the necessity to settle the conflict between two opposing political systems.” Behind the euphemisms there lurked wholesale slaughter.

Stalin, meanwhile, preferred to err on the side of caution and, though thoroughly informed about the German threat, opted to stick to diplomatic methods, convinced that the military buildup and the rumor-mongering were little more than a Nazi negotiating tool—an attempt to exert psychological pressure as a prelude to the resumption of talks. Stalin was mistaken about much in the lead-up to the German attack, but we can no longer take seriously the idea that Hitler caught him at all unawares in the summer of 1941. He was kept informed throughout of the buildup of German forces and constantly received the very latest intelligence reports; yet he managed to convince himself that he knew better. Essentially, he shared Molotov’s outlook, demonstrated in Berlin the previous autumn, that the Soviet Union was in a position of strength in its relationship with Nazi Germany and that while engaged in the west against the British, Hitler would have to be mad to attack the USSR.

In addition, Stalin had a rather peculiar view of the German military, attributing to it far more independence of thought and action than was actually the case. In this, he was doubtless influenced by the experience of World War I, in which the German kaiser himself had been sidelined by the growing influence of the military, with the army duumvirate of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich von Ludendorff effectively running Germany as a “silent dictatorship” from 1916 onwards. Mindful of this, perhaps, Stalin appeared to trust the German generals even less than he trusted Germany’s politicians, perceiving them to be more hawkish than their political masters. This developed into an almost morbid fear, on Stalin’s part, of provoking the Wehrmacht: an obsessive unwillingness to do anything that might be construed as an aggressive or anti-German move for fear that the military might react and drag the politicians in Berlin unwillingly into war. “We must not respond to the provocations of the German military,” Stalin explained, according to his interpreter. “If we show restraint, and ignore the provocateurs, Hitler will understand that Moscow does not want any problems with Germany. He will then take his generals in hand.” In this, Stalin was thoroughly mistaken, as—if anything—the reverse was true. This misperception would have grave consequences. Zhukov would soon see evidence of this for himself. In March 1941, he submitted a revision of the MP-41 plan, which, although still essentially defensive in character, requested the call-up of Red Army reservists. Stalin regarded it as a potentially provocative gesture and refused the request.

Despite Stalin’s objections, the Soviet western military districts were not entirely silent in the spring of 1941. As early as the previous summer, Red Army reinforcements had been brought into the area, taking the total deployment to fifteen divisions in Finland, twenty in the Baltic states, twenty-two in occupied Poland, and thirty-four in Bessarabia. Further units to the immediate rear of these brought the Red Army force facing the Germans in 1940 to ninety rifle divisions, twenty-three cavalry divisions, and twenty-eight mechanized brigades. In March, Zhukov succeeded in pushing through a limited call-up of reservists, but the time frame was vague, and of the 250 Red Army divisions planned to be under arms in the western districts by the summer of 1941, many would inevitably be understrength and ill supplied.

A similar picture prevailed with the Soviet Union’s system of fortifications in the west. Since the mid-1920s, the USSR had been constructing a network of defenses along its western border: the ukreplinnye raiony , or “fortified areas,” known colloquially as the “Stalin Line.” However, with the addition of the territories gained in collaboration with the Germans in 1939 and 1940, those incomplete defenses now lay some three hundred or so kilometers east of the new Soviet frontier. Consequently, in the summer of 1940, a new network of defenses was begun further west, snaking through the newly gained territories from Telšiai in Lithuania, via eastern Poland, to the mouth of the Danube in Bessarabia. It would later be unofficially named the “Molotov Line.”

Like its predecessor, the Molotov Line was not a single complete line of fortifications; rather it was to consist of interlocking systems of earthworks, concrete bunkers, and other strongpoints, utilizing natural barriers wherever possible, to channel any invading force into areas where Red Army units could be concentrated. It was certainly ambitious, with nearly 4,500 installations planned to span the 1,200 kilometers from the Baltic to the Black Sea, requiring the work of around 140,000 laborers.

Up until the summer of 1940, however, those efforts had been very halfhearted, with the decommissioning of the older Stalin Line being carried out in a rather leisurely, piecemeal way, while work on the new Molotov Line to the west had not yet begun, despite a flurry of instructions. The fall of France in June 1940 gave some impetus to the program, but even then there were serious practical problems, due mainly to the USSR’s profound infrastructural and logistical shortcomings. Even the short-term fix of stripping out the fittings of the Stalin Line for use further west was stymied because the guns installed in the older line were often incompatible with the casemates of the new fortifications.

Despite such difficulties, there was little apparent sense of urgency until the early months of 1941. Part of that might have been tactical in origin: though the Mannerheim Line in Finland had thoroughly proved its worth in the Winter War, the Maginot Line had fared much less well in 1940 and so had done little to make the case for static fortifications. Yet by February 1941 there was a palpable shift, with various meetings, edicts, and directives ordering an acceleration of the construction on the Molotov Line, allocating 10 million rubles to the project and giving responsibility for it to former chief of staff Boris Shaposhnikov. With this prioritization, there was an upsurge in activity, and by April 1941 the number of fortified areas under construction in the western Soviet Union equaled the total number built in the decade before 1939, with a special focus on the approaches to Kiev and, tellingly, to the area between Grodno and Brest in eastern Poland—the historic road to Moscow. And still, an official report in the spring of 1941 arrived at the somber conclusion that “overwhelmingly” such defenses were “not militarily ready.”

For his part, Stalin tended to focus elsewhere in those months, preferring to concentrate on diplomatic avenues rather than the potentially provocative preparations being carried out by his military. His approach was essentially to use the economic relationship to appease Germany as far as possible, in the belief that Hitler’s saber rattling was purely a tactical ruse. In this, he was guided by his understanding of the materialist fundamentals of Marxism and the expectation that he could “buy off” Hitler’s antipathy with economic benefits. Moreover, he was already very well accustomed to using his economic connection with Germany as a bellwether of the wider relationship, smoothing matters when he wanted to court Germany, halting deliveries altogether when he wanted to show who was in charge. This pattern would become most marked in the early months of 1941.