Slaughter on the Eastern Front

Hitler and Stalin's War 1941-1945

Anthony Tucker-Jones

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780750992695
  9780750967709
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750983136
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In the summer of 1941, a collective madness overtook Adolf Hitler and his senior generals. They convinced themselves that they could take on and defeat a superpower in the making – the Soviet Union. Foolishly, they thought in a swift campaign they could smash the Red Army and force Stalin to sue for peace, despite dire warnings that Stalin was amassing a reserve army of more than 1 million men on the Volga. The end result would be such carnage that it would tear the German forces apart. In his major reassessment of the war on the Eastern Front, Anthony Tucker-Jones casts new light on the brutal fighting, including such astounding German defeats as at Stalingrad, Kursk, Minsk and, finally, Berlin. He controversially contends that from the very start intelligence officers on both sides failed to influence their leadership resulting in untold slaughter. He also reveals the shocking blunders by Hitler, Stalin and even Churchill that led to the appalling, needless destruction of Hitler's armed forces as early as the winter of 1941–42. Step by step, Tucker-Jones describes how the German war machine fought to its very last against a relentless enemy, fully aware that defeat was inevitable.

1

ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE

The Red Army did everything it could to win the Second World War, but before the conflict broke out, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin did all he could to prevent it from doing so. Representing one of the worst crimes against humanity of the twentieth century, his brutal administration of the Soviet Union during the 1930s caused up to 30 million deaths. His vindictive persecution of the Red Army inadvertently contributed to another 20 million deaths during the Great Patriotic War against Hitler. Stalin’s unbridled Terror, or Great Purge, was all encompassing within the Soviet armed forces, making the Red Army’s hard-won victory in Europe in May 1945 even more remarkable.

On the eve of war with Germany there were over 100,000 Red Army officers on active duty, but up to half of these were removed. This was the first time that the officers of a loyal and undefeated army had been so systematically decimated by their own government during peacetime.

Stalin’s paranoia was to cost him dearly. Adolf Hitler concluded that the Wehrmacht had the ability to bring the Soviet Union to its knees in the summer of 1941. This would give his rapidly expanding Third Reich the Lebensraum, or ‘living space’, and raw materials that it required to prosper and from which it could dominate Europe. It was Soviet leader Joseph Stalin himself who convinced Hitler he had the ability to crush the superficially formidable but nonetheless weakened Red Army.

The previous December, Hitler had set out his military plans for the Soviet Union in ‘Directive No. 21: Case Barbarossa’:

The Wehrmacht must be prepared, even before the conclusion of the war against England, to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign (‘Case Barbarossa’). […]

The bulk of the Russian Army stationed in western Russia will be destroyed by daring operations led by deeply penetrating armoured spearheads. Russian forces still capable of giving battle will be prevented from withdrawing into the depths of Russia.

The enemy will then be energetically pursued and a line will be reached from which the Russian Air Force can no longer attack German territory. The final objective of the operation is to erect a barrier against Asiatic Russia on the general line Volga–Archangel. The last surviving industrial area of Russia in the Urals can then, if necessary, be eliminated by the Luftwaffe.¹

While strong on general intentions, it was at best fuzzy on military and political practicalities. Fundamentally Hitler presupposed that the Soviet Union could be successfully partitioned once the Red Army had been defeated and Stalin had fallen from power. Even in 1940, to imagine that the Asian portion of the Soviet Union would leave European Russia under Nazi rule seemed a massive leap of faith. What convinced Hitler that such an outcome was possible, that the Red Army would never be able to recover sufficiently to claim it back?

Before Stalin’s purges, Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Military Council member and Politburo representative (and future Soviet premier), felt that the Red Army would have been more than a match for Hitler:

There’s no question that we would have repulsed the fascist invasion much more easily if the upper echelons of the Red Army command hadn’t been wiped out. They had been men of considerable expertise and experience. Many of them had graduated from military academies and gone through the Civil War. They were ready to discharge their soldierly duties for the sake of the Homeland, but they never had a chance.²

Meddling political control of the Red Army first appeared to ease in 1934 when dual oversight was ended. The commissars now found their role was purely to provide political advice and education rather than exercise power. This seemed to imply Stalin’s seal of approval of the professionalism and loyalty of the Red Army’s officers. Shortly after, military titles were reinstated.

The five most senior military officials were promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union. These were Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a former Guards officer; Klimet Voroshilov, Commissar of Defence, veteran of the Bolshevik’s 1st Cavalry Army and confidant of Stalin; Alexander Yegorov, chief of staff and another veteran of the 1st Cavalry Army; Semyon Budenny, another cavalryman; and Vasily Blyukher, commander of the Army of Siberia.

However, Stalin’s new-found seal of approval was to be very short-lived. When Stalin’s Terror was unleashed in 1937 almost the entire Red Army High Command were accused of being part of a German military-political conspiracy. Approximately 90 per cent of the general officers and 80 per cent of the colonels disappeared; three of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union and thirteen out of fifteen senior generals were eliminated, as were seventy-five of the eighty members of the Supreme Military Council and eleven Vice Commissars of Defence. Regional commands and more junior officers were not spared either.

Command and control of the ten Soviet military districts, tasked with defending the Soviet Union’s borders, was decimated. Out of eighty-five corps commanders, fifty-seven were gone within a year, and of 406 brigade commanders, 220 were dead by the close of 1938. Some 40,000 senior and medium-grade officers were removed from post and executed, imprisoned or sent to the labour camps of the Gulag. As a result, Hitler was completely duped into believing that the Wehrmacht could crush the decapitated Red Army and so he greenlighted Operation Barbarossa.

But, what first drove Stalin to emaciate his armed forces to such an extent that Hitler felt confident enough to attack his well-armed neighbour? By 1929, in the wake of the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Stalin was firmly in control of the Soviet Union and had no intention of relinquishing it, regardless of the cost. Within two years, fearing the influence of his exiled arch-rival Leon Trotsky (the number two figure, after Lenin, during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution), he turned his attentions to the Red Army, making changes amongst the senior appointments. This was one of Stalin’s initial minor bloodless purges of the armed forces. Those involved could count themselves extremely lucky, for they were simply removed from post and in many cases simply dismissed. Relatively painlessly, Stalin promoted his own cronies. As a dress rehearsal of things to come this minor purge, conducted in 1929–30, saw just 4.7 per cent of the military membership expelled from the Communist Party; again, in 1933–34, 6.7 per cent of the military membership was excluded or demoted.

Stalin launched his first ‘five-year plan’ in 1928. Its goal was to industrialise an agricultural system that largely remained rooted in the Middle Ages. The Red Army was also to be modernised; particularly in terms of equipment and mechanisation. The second ‘five-year plan’, launched in 1932, saw Stalin turn his attention on the hapless wealthy peasants, for he wished to collectivise their farms which meant appropriating their land. The Soviet Union had some 25 million peasant farmers who worked their own land. The richest numbered some 2 million, to whom Stalin ruthlessly attached the name ‘kulak’ (‘usurer’ or crooked rural trader). There were 18 million middle peasants and some 5 million who were semi-destitute.

Stalin ordered that the kulaks be liquidated as a class, accusing them of being enemies of the state. The tragedy was that many of them were former loyal Red Army veterans who had returned to claim their land after fighting in the Civil War. In response to Stalin’s mass appropriation of their property, the kulaks slaughtered their own livestock rather than let the state take it and, in some cases, resisted. Red Army morale plummeted and in many units there was mass desertion by peasant soldiers, who hastened home to their villages, with or without rifles, to wreak vengeance on the executives of the collectives. By 1936 it has been estimated that 7 million people died in the collectivisation famine and forced deportations.

At the same time, new military vehicles began to roll out of Soviet factories at a rate previously unknown, and by the end of the year the Red Army had approximately as many tanks as France, which was at the time the pre-eminent European military power – by 1935 the Red Army had a fleet of 10,000 tanks.

Stalin, however, soon began to fear that a revived and enhanced Red Army would pose a threat to his power base. In addition, the Red Army had been divided by the wanton persecution of the kulaks. Stalin’s following actions were to have ramifications that even his warped mind could not have conceived.

First, he moved to stamp out potential political opposition in the key city of Leningrad. When Sergei Kirov, an old Stalin supporter, was assassinated (allegedly on Stalin’s orders) this unleashed a gradual purge which was to gather momentum until it became the all-encompassing Great Purge. This was to affect every element of Soviet society, including the Red Army. Stalin’s instrument of terror and destruction was to be the Peoples’ Commissariat of Internal Affairs – the dreaded NKVD – which came into being in 1934 as the forerunner of the KGB.

That year, on a December afternoon, Kirov (Leningrad Party leader for whom the ballet was named) was shot dead. It appeared the assassin acted on his own, but thirteen accomplices were killed along with him. Then, in the spring of 1935 thousands of Leningrad Party members, tainted by association with Kirov, were deported to the Gulag.

In Moscow, Stalin’s supporters moved quickly, the Central Committee of the Communist Party had 70 per cent of its 200 members liquidated. A few faced kangaroo courts, the rest just vanished from their homes. A show trial was conducted in 1937 where seventeen politicians were accused of conspiring with Leon Trotsky, the Germans and the Japanese.

No previous persecutions had ever reached the scale of Stalin’s. He made Ivan the Terrible’s reign of terror look tame. Under Stalin, state-authorised executions reached up to 1,000 a day. Between 1936 and 1938 approximately 500,000–1 million people were executed, with a further 8 million imprisoned.

Colonel General Andrei Trofimovich Stuchenko, who attended the prestigious MV Frunze Academy (the Soviet Union’s second highest military school) in 1936, recalled:

It was a terrifying time. People began to fear one another. Anything might serve as grounds for arrest: national origin, failure on the job, or even an incorrect interpretation of some word. It was particularly dangerous to be suspected of having connections with ‘enemies of the people’. […]

The arbitrariness and violations of socialist legality which were spawned by Stalin’s personality cult caused us to lose many experienced military comrades. The critical shortage of commanders began to be felt by the troops.³

Once Stalin’s political enemies were exterminated, the Yezhovshchina (as the Great Terror became known – named after NKVD head, Nikolai Yezhov) fell firmly upon the Red Army with a vengeance in 1937. Ironically, the year before, the US Military Attaché in Moscow had observed that the loyalty of the Red Army to the government appeared beyond doubt.

Stalin had already murdered Defence Commissar Mikhail Frunze in 1925 (he was forced to undergo a gall stone operation despite a weak heart), in order to replace him with Kliment Voroshilov. The latter was a political general rather than a professional soldier. The initial step in tightening Stalin’s grip was the reintroduction of Communist Party political deputies (military commissars) into units of divisional size or larger.

Author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, a Red Army veteran and guest of the Gulag who became the Soviet Union’s leading dissident, wrote with gallows humour of the strain these purges put on the Gulag’s metaphorical sewage system:

Although I have no statistics at hand, I am not afraid of erring when I say that the wave of 1937 and 1938 was neither the only one nor the main one, but only one, perhaps, of the three biggest waves which strained the murky, stinking pipes of our prison sewers to bursting.

Before it came the wave of 1929 and 1930 … which drove a mere fifteen million peasants … into the permafrost.

After it there was a wave of 1944 to 1946 … when they dumped whole nations down the sewer pipes, not to mention millions and millions of others who (because of us!) had been prisoners of war, or carried off to Germany and subsequently repatriated.

But the wave of 1937 swept up and carried off to the Archipelago [Gulag] people of position …⁴

One of the Yezhovshchina’s first senior military victims was General Gamarnik, head of the army’s Main Political Administration (MPA). Marshal Blyukher visited him on 31 May 1937, informing him of the spreading arrests throughout the army. That afternoon, when the NKVD came, Gamarnik either committed suicide or was killed resisting arrest.

With the head of the MPA out of the way, the NKVD had free rein. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven other senior generals were arrested without fuss and taken to the dreaded Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Amongst them were the commanders of the Soviet Union’s key western military districts (Leningrad, Byelorussia, Kiev and Volga) and the Moscow garrison. In one fell swoop Stalin compromised the whole of the western Soviet Union’s defences. Tukhachevsky’s real crime was in being everything that Stalin was not – educated, talented and very able. Also, he hated Generals Voroshilov and Budenny, which won him no friends at Stalin’s Red Court.

Tukhachevsky has been described as Stalin’s most gifted general. A former tsarist cadet, he was energetic and incisive and at 27 had commanded Soviet forces fighting against Poland. At 28, he destroyed the Kronstadt uprising with Trotsky, and at just 31 he became chief of staff. Already viewed as a rival, he had initially been removed by Stalin in 1928 and posted to the provinces. Tukhachevsky may not have known it but he was on borrowed time.

Stalin wanted Tukhachevsky arrested for treason as early as 1930, but h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Stalin’s Gathering Armies
• Introduction: Collective Madness
• 1 Enemies of the People
• 2 Zhukov Pulls No Punches
• 3 Hitler’s Will-o’-the-Wisp
• 4 Shameful Intrigue
• 5 Everything is Normal
• 6 Provoking War
• 7 Redbeard and Beyond
• 8 The Typhoon Falters
• 9 Operation Blue
• 10 Disaster on the Don
• 11 No Champagne or Cognac
• 12 Zeitzler’s Comeback Plan
• 13 Prokhorovka Bloodbath
• 14 Stalin’s D-Day
• 15 Hitler’s Last Triumph
• 16 Axis Turncoats
• 17 Final Stand
• 18 Madmen in Berlin
• 19 Hitler Youth
• 20 Stalin’s Vengeance
• 21 Slaughter on the Eastern Front
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Picture Section