Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

As a consequence of the shift of emphasis to the south, German Army Group South completed a colossal envelopment east of Kiev (August 24-September 21). In a great bag 200 miles wide, the Germans captured 665,000 prisoners with 3,718 cannon and 884 tanks. Hitler called this “the greatest battle in the history of the world”; his chief of staff called it “the greatest strategic blunder of the Eastern Campaign.”

At this point in the campaign a curious phenomenon appeared: large numbers of anti-Stalinist Russians began to surrender to the Nazis. Most of these were Ukrainians, and the majority were eager to fight with the Nazis against the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union. If the Nazis had been willing to cooperate with this movement, and to treat these deserters in a decent fashion, it is extremely likely that the flood of Russian deserters would have become an overwhelming torrent and the Moscow regime would have collapsed. Instead, the Nazis, led by Hitler, resolutely refused to adopt the role of “Liberator of the Slavs,” and instead insisted on playing the role of “Annihilator of the Slavs.” The arrogance, sadism, and racism of the Nazi system soon presented itself in a form as hateful to the average Slav as Stalinism itself.

As soon as the conquering German armies seized Soviet territory, various Nazi and satellite organizations of exploitation, of enslavement, and of extermination moved in, led by the SS. Prisoners of war and civilians were rounded up by the millions and deported to German slave-labor camps where they were starved, frozen, and beaten into subhuman derelicts at the very time that they were expected to work, fifteen or more hours a day, on Nazi war production. Those inhabitants of conquered areas who escaped deportation or imprisonment generally were deprived of most of their possessions, especially of their food stores and livestock. All industrial equipment which had not been removed by the retreating Soviet armies was stolen or destroyed by the Nazis. The deserters who wished to fight with the Nazis against Stalin would have been welcomed by many German Army officers, but their use in this fashion was generally discouraged and frequently forbidden by the Nazi political leaders such as Hitler or Himmler. In spite of this, some Russian units in the Nazi armies were formed, although generally they were used only for guard or garrison duties. The size of this movement of anti-Stalinist deserters can be judged from the fact that, in spite of the obstacles we have mentioned, the number of such deserters serving in the Nazi armed forces reached 900,000 in June 1944. These were nominally under the leadership of a renegade Soviet general, A. A. Vlasov, who had served as Soviet military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek in China in 1938, with the rank of major general, and had been captured by the Nazis when serving as deputy commander of the Volkhov front, in June 1942. Nothing effective could be done with “Vlasov formations” because of the opposition of Hitler and Himmler. When Germany was clearly on the road to defeat in November 1944, Himmler withdrew his opposition, and allowed Vlasov to issue a call for an anti-Stalinist liberation army of Russians. In six weeks this organization received a million applications for membership, but could obtain almost no equipment and could organize combat units of no more than 50,000 men. At the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of Vlasov’s supporters fled westward to the American and British armies for refuge from Stalin’s vengeance, but were handed over to the Soviet Union to be murdered out of hand or sent to slave-labor camps in Siberia. The dimensions of human suffering involved in this whole situation is beyond the human imagination. The number of Soviet prisoners captured by the Nazis, according to the records of the German Army, reached over 2,000,000 by November 1, 1941, and reached 3,060,000 by March 1, 1942. Over 500,000 of these died of starvation, typhus, or froze to death in prison camps in the winter of 1941-1942. In the whole Eastern campaign up to January 1944 the Nazis captured 5,553,000 prisoners.

On September 6, 1941, in Directive No. 35, Hitler suddenly accepted the suggestions of his generals, and ordered an attack on Moscow. After two weeks of reorganization of forces, this attack began. About the same time, Leningrad was encircled, thus commencing an unsuccessful siege which continued until the city was relieved twenty-eight months later.

By October 8, 1941, two great encirclements west of Moscow closed on 663,000 Soviet prisoners with 5,412 cannon and 1,242 tanks. Mopping up took two weeks. By that time, the weather had broken, and the Germans were advancing through pouring rain, sleet, and mud. They suffered their first cases of frostbite on November 7th, but, with Moscow only thirty-eight miles away, the attack continued. A week later, Siberian divisions, moved from the Far East, in consequence of the Japanese-Soviet Nonaggression Pact and Richard Sorge’s information that the Japanese had decided to attack Singapore rather than Siberia, appeared before Moscow. The first Soviet counteroffensive came on November 28th, just as the 2nd German Armored Division caught sight of the towers of the Kremlin from a distance of fourteen miles. The next night the temperature fell to 220 below zero Fahrenheit. The Germans, without any preparation for a winter campaign, began to suffer horribly. Yet when Field Marshal von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group South, allowed some of his units to withdraw, he was removed by Hitler.

On December 19th the commander in chief, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch was relieved and his post taken by Hitler himself. The Führer issued an order which said: “The army is not to withdraw a single step. Every man must fight where he stands.” A few days later, Guderian was removed for violation of this order. In spite of Hitler’s attitude, Russian pressure throughout the winter made necessary one German withdrawal after another. By the spring of 1942, many units had fallen back a hundred or more miles. During this period the Luftwaffe generally could not operate for lack of winter lubricants, and when its planes did take to the air they had to be used to carry supplies to ground forces which were cut off by Russians. Tanks could be used only after their engines had been warmed up for twelve hours. Frostbite casualties in the German Army ran about a thousand a day, and by February 28, 1942, the total German casualties in the Russian offensive reached over a million (31 percent).

We have mentioned that military assistance to the Soviet Union from the United States was held up by the slowness of American economic mobilization, the anti-Bolshevism of American public opinion, and the general lack of confidence in Soviet ability to withstand the Nazi attack. These obstacles were not decisive with Churchill or Roosevelt. On July 12, 1941, Britain signed an alliance with Russia. Four weeks later Harry Hopkins returned from a hurried visit to Moscow to report to the Atlantic Conference his conviction that the Soviet Union would be able to hold out against the Nazi attack. He also brought a completely unreasonable demand from Stalin for an immediate British invasion of western Europe to relieve the German pressure on Russia. Unable to grant any hopes of such an invasion in 1941 or even in 1942, Roosevelt and Churchill decided to send a full-scale economic mission to Moscow to determine Russia’s material needs. This mission, headed by Averell Harriman and Lord Beaverbrook, was in Moscow for three days at the end of September 1941, and signed an agreement for Soviet aid to June 30, 1942.

In the postwar period it was frequently stated that the Roosevelt Administration should have taken advantage of Stalin’s urgent need for supplies in September 1941, by forcing him to sign agreements to recognize the independence and territorial integrity of various countries in eastern Europe. Strangely enough, during the discussions in Moscow at the time, Stalin was eager to obtain a formal statement on war aims and on specific territorial boundaries, but the United States was reluctant: it objected to any “secret accords” which might hamper freedom of action later, and was unwilling either to abandon the peoples of eastern Europe to Russia or to insist on their rights vigorously enough to drive the Soviet Union to make a separate peace with Hitler. Such a separate peace was quite out of the realm of possibility, but no agreements about boundaries and governments made in 1941 could have been enforced against the Soviet Union four years later after these areas had fallen under Soviet military occupation.