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

The same partial dependency ran the other way. The T-34s and KV heavy tanks that had given the Germans such a momentary fright in the summer of 1941 had rolled off production lines set up largely using imported German machinery—lathes, cranes, forges, and mills. That recent cooperation was perceptible in other aspects as well. As one historian has memorably expressed it, “German soldiers fed by Ukrainian grain, transported by Caucasus oil, and outfitted with boots made from rubber shipped via the Trans-Siberian railroad, fired their Donets-manganese-hardened steel weapons at their former allies. The Red Army hit back with artillery pieces and planes designed according to German specifications and produced by Ruhr Valley machines in factories that burned coal from the Saar.”

Some would even complain that the German-Soviet cooperation had not gone far enough. Colonel General of the Red Air Force Alexander Yakovlev would later note ruefully that his buying delegation had been offered but rejected the Ju-87 Stuka dive-bomber during one of its visits to Germany. “Why throw money down the drain?” its members had concluded. “It’s slow, obsolete.” That assessment had certainly not been wrong—after all, the Stuka had been badly mauled by the Royal Air Force the previous summer during the Battle of Britain—but it had nonetheless proved itself highly effective when enjoying air superiority, as it did over the eastern front in 1941. The irony was not lost on Yakovlev: “In the first days of the war,” he recalled, “these ‘obsolete, slow’ machines caused us incalculable calamities.”

A salient example of the interconnection between the Soviet and German military machines in that brutal summer is the ex- Lützow , now renamed the Petropavlovsk . Having languished for over a year in the shipyards of Leningrad, the unfinished German battleship was inevitably pressed into service in the battle for the Soviet Union’s second city. Although not yet seaworthy, the vessel nonetheless had four of her eight main 203-mm guns installed and so could be used as a floating battery when the Wehrmacht approached the city in late August. So it was that on September 7 the Petropavlovsk —built by German labor in Bremen—bombarded approaching German troops, firing around seven hundred German-made shells, each one weighing 122 kilograms (269 pounds). Ten days later, German artillery in turn found their range and hit the cruiser with fifty-three rounds, causing her to beach, bow first, in the coal harbor. It was a fitting end to a vessel that had become symbolic of the tortuous relations of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Such were the German successes against the Soviets that summer that they seemed to confirm Hitler’s prediction that “you only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” And in fact, in the early days of the German invasion, Soviet rule began to look distinctly fragile, both at the front and behind the lines. In those regions recently annexed by the Soviets, local populations were predictably hostile. Across all three Baltic states, popular risings against Soviet rule preceded the arrival of the Germans, who were greeted as liberators despite the fact that they were just as inimical toward the idea of national independence as the Soviets had been. As one Estonian eyewitness recalled, “The German troops were at first met with great enthusiasm. The horrors of the red regime were over now. Many men, especially those whose family members had been killed or deported, went into the German army of their free will. They wanted to take revenge on the communists.”

In Latvia, meanwhile, morale among local units incorporated into the Red Army was predictably bad; desertions were common, and some units even turned their guns on their former masters. Hostility to the Red Army was not confined to the Baltic states. As one Soviet soldier fighting in the city of L’vov recalled, the locals there “were as likely to spit in a Soviet soldier’s face as they were to offer him directions.” A Red Army general had a similar experience when his staff car broke down near Kovel in western Ukraine. A crowd of about twenty locals gathered, he wrote, but “no one was saying anything. No one offered to help,” they just “smirked maliciously at us.”

Even far behind the lines, there was disquiet. In Moscow there was a spate of panic buying and a run on the banks; a standoff at a food plant degenerated into a violent confrontation. Although many keen young men volunteered to fight and a general mood of Russian patriotism prevailed, there was nonetheless genuine discontent in evidence, with sometimes long-standing resentments against the collectivization, or the terror, finally being aired. One Muscovite claimed that it was just as well that the war had started, as life in the Soviet Union had become so unbearable that “the sooner it was all over the better.” Another said, “At last we can breathe freely. Hitler will be in Moscow in three days and the intelligentsia will be able to live properly.”

What was worse for Stalin was that some, even beyond the border areas, were actively welcoming the invaders. As one German officer noted near Vitebsk in Byelorussia, “I was astonished to detect no hatred among [the local people]. Women often came out of their houses with an icon held before their breast, crying: ‘We are still Christians. Free us from Stalin who destroyed our churches.’ Many of them offered an egg and a piece of dried bread as a ‘welcome.’ We gradually had the feeling that we really were being regarded as liberators.”

More worrying still was the apparent disintegration of Soviet forces in those opening days of the campaign. Facing the full force of the blitzkrieg, the Red Army was in disarray, with surviving troops often fleeing eastward alongside columns of similarly leaderless refugees. In some cases, officers attempting to stem the panic and restore order were shot by their own troops. One soldier recalled his experience of the constant shelling, the din of battle, and the orders that never arrived. Finally, he decided to leave his post and, taking a small group of men with him, set off eastward on foot. “There was no-one to help with advice or supplies,” he remembered. “None of the men had ever seen a map.” They would walk without a break for forty-eight hours.

Not just the ordinary soldiers were seeking a way out; Marshal Grigory Kulik was also looking to flee. After his buffoonish intervention in the High Command Conference earlier in the year, the fleshy fifty-year-old had arrived at the front on June 23 in a leather flying suit and goggles, hoping to rally what was left of the 10th Army. However, when disaster loomed, he ordered his men to follow his lead in shedding their uniforms, disposing of their documents, and adopting peasant dress. After burning both his marshal’s uniform and his flying suit, he fled east in a horse-drawn cart.

Once again, Kulik would escape with his life. But given the scale of the disaster unfolding on the western frontier, discipline clearly had to be restored swiftly. This was achieved in part via the reintroduction, in late June, of so-called blocking units: NKVD troops tasked with preventing unauthorized withdrawals from the front, with extreme force if necessary. From its role in the purges, the NKVD was already widely feared. As one Red Army colonel recalled, the mere sight of the cornflower blue cap of an NKVD man could transform the most hardened soldier into a nervous, babbling wreck, desperately protesting his innocence. Now the NKVD was given the task, as the order put it, of “leading the fight against deserters, cowards and alarmists.” Its officers had the authority to shoot suspects on the spot, and anyone behind the front lines who could not adequately explain his presence fell under immediate suspicion.