Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the leader of Nazi Germany, was intent on attacking the USSR in the summer of 1941. With Western Europe subdued in 1940, Hitler could finally pursue his dream of territorial expansion in the East, destroy Bolshevism, the ideological enemy of Nazism, and grab a vast array of resources ranging from wheat to oil.
Hitler directed his generals to launch Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. The leader of the USSR, Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), overcame a series of gigantic defeats and ensured his Red Army was continually replenished and resupplied so that the Axis invaders gained vast swathes of territory but no strategic victory. The German-Soviet war dragged on until 1945 and ended in Germany's total defeat as the Second World War (1939-45) came to a close in May 1945. Although often dismissed as Hitler's great folly, the reasons why he attacked the USSR are many and varied, ranging from suspect ideological motives to practical economic necessity.
Motives to Attack the Soviet Union
The reasons Hitler attacked the USSR in 1941 include:
- The identification of communism as a long-standing ideological enemy of Nazism and the Germanic people.
- The realisation that Germany's massive rearmament had exhausted and indebted the economy, which now needed an external boost of wealth.
- The belief that the USSR might soon stop shipping raw materials to Germany, as it was obliged to do by the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
- The belief that the USSR intended to take over the oil fields in Romania, which were vital to Germany's economy.
- The desire for Lebensraum ('living space') for the German people, that is, new lands in the east where they could find resources and prosper.
- The desire for the resources of Ukraine and the oil fields of the Caucasus.
- The belief that Slavic people were racially inferior to Germanic people and so were 'ripe for conquest'.
- The belief that Stalin's purges had seriously weakened the fighting capabilities of the Soviet Red Army.
- The consideration that the Red Army had failed to subdue Finland in the Winter War of 1939-40.
- The belief that the USSR was amassing troops to attack the Third Reich.
- The hope that eliminating the USSR from WWII would oblige Britain to seek peace terms, removing the threat of an invasion of the Continent.
- The belief that the USSR must be attacked and conquered before the United States entered WWII.
Hitler's Ideology of War
Nazism called for an international struggle where Germanic people could achieve their destiny and prove themselves the 'master race' (Herrenrasse). Such ideas were not new, but they meant that war was regarded as an inevitable part of international relations. Hitler promised that through conflict, what he called the Third Reich, would last for 1,000 years.
Hitler regarded Slavic people, who made up the majority of the population in the lands to the east of Germany, as being racially inferior to Germanic people, and this, in his view, not only justified but necessitated their subjugation as part of the Nazi view of the perpetual struggle between nations and races. Communists were seen in the same light as Slavs and Jews, all out to conspire against the Third Reich and all determined to crush it either from within or without. In Hitler's non-sensical racial beliefs and half-cooked conspiracy theories, Jewish people, Communists, and Bolsheviks were essentially all the same thing, and so Moscow was described by him as being the capital of the "Judaeo-Bolshevist world conspiracy" against Germany (Rees, 14). This belief was repeated many times, notably at the annual Nuremberg rally for the Nazi Party faithful. In Nuremberg in 1937, for example, Hitler called the leaders of the USSR "an uncivilized Jewish-Bolshevik international guild of criminals" (ibid, 15), which worked tirelessly to undermine not only Germany's economic prosperity but also the good morals of its people.
One week before the invasion of the USSR, Hitler repeated the anti-communism message to his generals in a speech on 14 June: "Every soldier must know what it is we are fighting for. It is not the territory we want, but rather that Bolshevism is destroyed" (Dimbleby, 127). This was to be a crusade. Indeed, the operation was named after Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1155-90), the man who had led the Third Crusade (1189-92) but drowned in Turkey en route. Legend has it that Barbarossa did not die but only sleeps until the right moment arrives when he will return to ensure Germany is made great again. Hitler told his ally Benito Mussolini (1945), after his own crusade had begun and any pretence at comradeship with the Soviets was over, that he felt, at last, "spiritually free" (Rees, 29).
Hitler presented the idea to the people of the Third Reich that war was not only essential for their prosperity but also for their very survival. The USSR had to be cut down before it did the same to Germany, he argued. This was despite the lack of any evidence Stalin had any such plans. Hitler gathered his generals in March 1941 for a meeting regarding the forthcoming campaign against the USSR, as recorded by Franz Hadler, chief of staff of the German Army at the post-war Nuremberg trials:
Hitler said as follows: 'The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is a struggle of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness.'
(McDonough, 87)
Orders were given to shoot political officers of the Red Army and Jewish people. The rest of the population in the newly occupied territories could either move to Siberia or be left to starve so that Germanic people could move in and start to benefit from their Lebensraum. As the historian J. Dimbleby notes, "Mass extermination was not an accidental by-product of the invasion but an essential component of it" (207).
The Quest for Resources
Thanks to rearmament through the 1930s, Germany had achieved near-full employment by 1938, something Hitler had promised the electorate he would do since the late 1920s. Germany's new war machine came at a cost, though. Rearming necessitated huge imports of raw materials, and these could not be bought for much longer as Germany's balance of payments went into tilt from 1939. Occupying territories where these resources could be found seemed a simple solution to the problem.
Hitler had written about his ambitions for empire in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf ('My Struggle'), where he described the need for Lebensraum:
…when we speak of new territory in Europe today, we must think principally of Russia and her border states. Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way to us here…This colossal empire in the East is ripe for dissolution, and the end of the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.
(Quoted in Shirer, 796)
Ukraine and the Caucasus region had oil, minerals, and wheat as well as developed industries like oil refineries and hydroelectric plants. As far as Hitler was concerned, these resources belonged to anyone powerful enough to take them. In Mein Kampf he noted, "right lies in strength alone" (McDonough, 83).
Now or Never
Stalin had conducted severe purges of the Red Army through the 1930s, removing significant numbers of officers of all ranks. Hitler believed this would seriously limit the Red Army's ability to wage war. Stalin had removed some 25,000 officers but did reinstate around 4,000 prior to the summer of 1940. Another serious problem was the Red Army's lack of modern equipment. The Soviet Union had spent big in the early 1930s on such areas as tanks and aircraft, but by the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the outbreak of WWII, the majority of these were obsolete. New and formidable weapons were being rolled out like the T34 and KV tanks, but not nearly in enough numbers. The Winter War between the USSR and Finland in the winter of 1939/40 also seemed to show that the Red Army was relatively weak. 15 Finnish divisions had held back, thanks to guerrilla tactics and the harsh conditions, 45 Soviet divisions. Hitler confidently promised his generals that when the Third Reich attacked the USSR, "We'll kick the door in and the house will fall down" (Stone, 138) in a matter of weeks. Both UK and US military intelligence agreed with this view, believing that the USSR would collapse in 6 or, at the most, 12 weeks. Hitler thought Stalin himself would soon succumb to ill health, telling his generals in August 1939, "After Stalin's death – he is a very sick man – we will break the Soviet Union" (McDonough, 86).
Hitler was not ignoring the western side of his Third Reich. He stated in January 1941 that by knocking the USSR out of the war, Britain, left without allies on the Continent, might then be persuaded to sue for peace, and so a costly invasion of that country could be avoided and, by the same token, no invasion would be launched on Continental Europe by Britain and its allies. The United States might also be kept out of the war, at least in Europe, since if the USSR fell, then Japan would have free rein in Asia and so become a serious threat to US interests there.
The USA was already selling military equipment to both Britain and the USSR, but if that country's vast reserves were to be used to put armed forces in Europe, then Hitler could not afford to fight on two fronts at once. If the USSR were to be attacked, it would have to be done as soon as possible while the Third Reich still had an arms advantage over its Continental enemies. Hitler reassured his generals that Operation Barbarossa would be a "demonstration of our military might" and that "after Russia's destruction Germany would be unassailable" (quoted in Kirchubel, 9).
The German-Soviet War
Hitler and Stalin had signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939. The agreement included a non-aggression clause that neither state would attack the other, and it divided Eastern and Central Europe into spheres of influence. The agreement included trade, with the USSR providing wheat and raw materials in exchange for Nazi gold and industrial goods. Despite these pleasantries, both dictators were fully aware that, sooner or later, they would be fighting each other.
By the early summer of 1940, Hitler had occupied western Poland, the Low Countries, and France. There was then a serious deterioration in German-Soviet relations in November 1940. The Soviets were, at least in terms of their diplomacy, dragging their heels about sending raw materials to Germany now that it seemed an Eastern Front would open up in WWII (although, in the end, Stalin was curiously correct in sending promised shipments right up to the invasion). Many of these materials were essential for the machines of war. Hitler was concerned, too, that the USSR was planning to attack the Ploiești oil field in Romania (an Axis ally state), which was Germany's single most important source of crude oil, providing up to 60% of the Third Reich's needs. Stalin's ambitions for Romania had already been made clear when he annexed two of the country's border regions: Bukovina and Bessarabia. In addition, the USSR's control of the Baltic states threatened vital supplies to Germany of iron ore from Scandinavia.
In short, it may have seemed to Hitler that the materials necessary for his war effort were about to be curtailed in some way. Further, even if the supplies continued as they were, they were no longer sufficient for the Third Reich's needs. Specifically, more oil was required than ever, more than the Ploiești fields could supply, as here explained by the historian D. Stahel:
Germany's limited access to basic raw materials essential to the war economy formed a growing component of the economic quandary consuming Germany by the spring of 1941, and driving Hitler's conception of the forthcoming campaign. Foremost among these was the supply of Romanian oil which proved insufficient to the demands of occupied Europe and the German war economy, prompting Hitler in May to slash domestic consumption and foreign exports to Axis allies….The crippling shortages convinced Hitler to seek his remedy through direct control over the Caucasian oil fields.
(103)
On 22 June 1941, the order was given to attack the USSR. The official justification for the invasion was that the USSR had broken the spirit of the Nazi-Soviet Pact through acts of sabotage in German territory and was amassing troops to directly threaten the Third Reich. This campaign would involve the largest troop movements, sieges, and battles ever seen.
The Axis armies, using Blitzkrieg ('lightning war') tactics of fast-moving armoured divisions with massive air and infantry support, enjoyed significant early successes such as the Battle of Smolensk in 1941 and the Battle of Kiev in 1941. However, the vastness of the USSR, the poor transport networks, the lack of adequate reserves, and the inadequacy of the Third Reich's industry for making war compared to the enemy's all meant that Hitler's gamble on a quick knock-out blow failed by the winter of 1941/2. This was now a long war that Hitler could never win. The Red Army remained resilient and, beginning with victory at the Battle for Moscow in January 1942, showed that Hitler's so far invincible armies could be defeated.
The German-Soviet War accounted for at least 25 million military and civilian deaths, perhaps half of the overall WWII death toll. Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, and Germany surrendered shortly after. Many historians have identified Operation Barbarossa as the point where Hitler lost the war.
