17.3: The War in the East

World War II seemed like it was over within a year: Germany controlled Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, and Belgium, and was making headway in the Balkans and North Africa. Hitler had originally wanted to war against USSR after the rest of Europe was defeated. 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. According to his own racial ideology, the Slavs of Eastern Europe (most obviously the Russians) 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.

While we now know that he was completely wrong about Hitler’s intentions, Stalin had good reason for thinking that Germany would not dare attack. The USSR had one-sixth of the land surface of the earth, with a population of about 170,000,000. As of 1941, its standing army was 5.5 million strong, with 12 million in reserve, and a vast superiority in quantity (albeit not quality) of equipment. Indeed, by the end of the war, the Soviets had mobilized 30.6 million soldiers (of whom 800,000 were women: the USSR was the only nation to rely on women in front-line combat roles, at which they equaled their male countrymen in effectiveness). Given that vast strength, Stalin was astonished when the Germans attacked, reportedly spending hours in a daze before ordering an armed response.

Codenamed Operation Barbarossa, in June of 1941, Germany invaded the USSR. 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, and hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner. (During the 1930s, Josef Stalin had "purged" the army, killing almost all of the experienced commanders.) In many areas, the locals actually welcomed the Germans as a better controlling force than the Bolsheviks had been, putting up no resistance at all. Even though Hitler himself 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, the German advance halted by winter. The initial welcome of German soldiers quickly vanished, when the locals learned that the German army and the Nazi SS were pressing people into work gangs, murdering resisters, and shipping everything that could possibly be 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 and engaged in guerrilla warfare that cost the Germans men and resources. Likewise, German forces had advanced so quickly that they were often bogged down in transit, with their supply lines stretched to the breaking point.

Figure 10.3.1: The German advance between June and December 1941 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. Mud initially slowed the German advance in autumn, 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, the German army, while still huge and powerful, 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. Whole factories, particularly in Ukraine, were stripped of motors, turbines, and any other useful equipment that could be moved, and sent hundreds of miles outside of the range of the German bombers. There, they were rebuilt and put back to work. By 1943, the Soviets were producing more military hardware than were the Germans. Likewise, Germany lost over 1.4 million men as casualties in the first year.