21.4: The War in the East

Within one year, Germany controlled Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, and Belgium. Plus, its forces were making headway in the Balkans and North Africa. Meanwhile, the fact that Britain was not only holding out, but holding on, led to a change in German plans: the Soviet invasion would have to occur before Britain was defeated.

In the overall context of the war, by far the largest and most important target for Germany was the Soviet Union. By the spring of 1941, Hitler felt confident that an all-out attack on the USSR was certain to succeed, now that German military resources could be concentrated in the east. He was spurred on by the fact that, according to his own racial ideology, the Slavs of Eastern Europe were so inferior to the "Aryan" Germans that they would be unable to mount an effective resistance. Thus, Hitler anticipated the conquest of the Soviet Union taking about ten weeks.

Stalin did not think Hitler would be foolish enough to try to invade Soviet Union, especially before Germany had truly “won” in the west. In 1939, Stalin told his advisers “The war will be fought between two groups of capitalist states…we have nothing against it if they batter and weaken each other. It would be no bad thing if Germany were to knock the richest capitalist countries (particularly England) off their feet.” Furthermore, every European schoolchild learned about Napoleon’s disastrous attempted invasion of Russia in 1812. Thus, the sheer size of Soviet territory seemed like a logical impediment to invasion.

In hindsight, Stalin had good reason for thinking that Germany would not attack. The USSR covered one-sixth of the Earth's land surface, with a population of about 170,000,000. As of 1941, its standing army was 5.5 million strong, with 12 million in reserve. Indeed, by the end of the war, the Soviets had mobilized 30.6 million soldiers. Approximately 800,000 of these soldiers were women. Indeed, the USSR was the only nation to rely on women in front-line combat roles, at which they effectively equaled their male countrymen. Given that vast strength, Stalin was astonished when the Germans attacked, reportedly spending hours in a daze before ordering an armed response.

In June 1941, Germany invaded the USSR with over 3 million troops in Operation Barbarossa, after a medieval German king who warred with the Slavs. The first few months were a horrendous disaster for the Soviets. The Soviet air force was utterly destroyed, as were most of its armored divisions. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner. During the 1930s, Josef Stalin purged various groups within the Soviet state and the army, killing most of the experienced commanders, leaving inexperienced and sometimes inept replacements in their wake. In many areas, the locals welcomed the Germans as a better-controlling force than the Bolsheviks, putting up no resistance at all. Even though Hitler was frustrated to discover that his ten-week estimate of conquest was inaccurate, the first months of the invasion still amounted to an astonishing success for German forces.

Despite its early success, however, the German advance was halted by winter. The initial welcome German soldiers received vanished when it was revealed that the German army and the Nazi SS were pressing people into work gangs, murdering resisters, and shipping everything useful for the German war effort back to Germany, including both equipment and foodstuffs. Thus, groups of “partisans” (i.e. insurgents) mounted successful resistance movements that cost the Germans men and resources. Likewise, German forces had advanced so quickly that they were often bogged down in transit, with German supply lines stretched to the breaking point. Thus, just as had happened during Napoleon's retreat over a hundred years earlier, guerrilla fighters were able to stand and kill the foreign invaders.

Figure 21.3.1: Between June and December 1941, the German advance opened a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, representing a terrible loss of territory and life to the Soviets.

Just as it had thwarted Napoleon, the Russian winter played a key role in freezing the German invasion in its tracks. In the Autumn, mud had slowed the German advance. Then, the bitter cold of winter set in. The Germans were not equipped for winter conditions, having set out in their summer uniforms. Despite the Wehrmacht’s mechanization, German forces still used horses extensively for the transportation of supplies, with many of the horses dying from the cold. Even machines could not stand up to the conditions; it got so cold that engines broke down, and tanks and armored cars were rendered immobile. Thus, while still huge and powerful, the German army was largely frozen in place in the winter of 1941 - 1942.

Incredibly, the Soviets were able to use this breathing room to literally dismantle their factories and transport them to the east, outside of the range of the German bombers. Whole factories, particularly in the Ukraine, were stripped of motors, turbines, and other useful equipment that could be moved, and sent hundreds of miles away from the front lines. There, they were rebuilt and put back to work. By 1943, a year and a half after the initial invasion, the Soviets were producing more military hardware than the Germans. Likewise, despite the relative success of the German invasion, Germany lost over 1.4 million men as casualties in the first year.