Hitler, Stalin and the Origins of War on the Eastern Front
Teddy J. Uldricks
University of North Carolina at Asheville
At 3:30 on the morning of 22 June 1941 the spearheads of 146 German divisions (comprising 3.2 million troops and supported by 3,350 tanks and over 2,000 aircraft) smashed across the Soviet border. Massed in three powerful strike groups, Hitler’s legions enjoyed overwhelming numerical superiority at the three points of attack. They also achieved virtually complete strategic surprise. The largest battle in history, Operation Barbarossa, had begun.
The results of that operation are well known. The Red Army, stunned and inadequately prepared, was routed all along the Soviet frontier. On the first day of the war, the Luftwaffe destroyed much of the Soviet air force before it ever left the ground. German Army Group North quickly overran the Baltic States and, by September, had surrounded Leningrad. Army Group South plunged through the Ukraine and stormed Kiev in September. Army Group Center roared toward Moscow. By early December its lead elements could see the spires of the Kremlin through their field glasses. Between June and the end of the year, the USSR had lost 2.7 million troops killed, another 3.3 million captured, and over half of its industrial capacity destroyed or in enemy hands. Some historians believe that only a combination of bad weather, bad roads, troop exhaustion, equipment fatigue, and command arrogance prevented a complete Nazi victory before Operation Barbarossa ground to a halt in the suburbs of Moscow.[1]
Historians have had difficulty explaining how so paranoid a leader as Joseph Stalin, supported by the world’s largest intelligence network, could have been so completely surprised by the German assault. After all, it was not possible for Hitler to conceal the marshaling along the borders of the USSR of over three million troops, with all their armor and other heavy equipment. Moreover, Soviet intelligence, including the now famous Red Orchestra in Berlin and Richard Sorge in Tokyo, supplied literally hundreds of reports suggesting the likelihood of a Nazi attack. Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and other foreign sources provided additional warnings.[2]
Most explanations of the Barbarossa debacle have emphasized such factors as Stalin’s misunderstanding of Hitler’s intentions or the deficiencies of Soviet military doctrine or the disastrously incomplete renovation of the Red Army and its equipment or the tendency of such sycophantic intelligence chiefs as General Filip Golikov (GRU) and Lavrenti Beriia (KGB) to shape incoming intelligence data to fit Stalin’s mistaken assumptions. Such explanations, though probably accurate, leave the reader uneasy. The human and material cost of being unprepared for the Barbarossa onslaught was so enormous that any national leader, not just a man so hyper-suspicious as Stalin, should have been on guard against such a disaster.
Not surprisingly, then, an alternative explanation of the Barbarossa debacle, which purported to reveal a previously hidden factor, might find ready acceptance among many readers. If the new interpretation also appealed to long-standing, deeply held western anti-communist and anti-Soviet prejudices, it would seem even more plausible. Just such an explanation was put forward in 1985 and subsequently by a writer calling himself Viktor Suvarov.[3] This author is actually Vladimir Razun, a former Soviet military officer who had defected to Great Britain in 1978.
Suvorov argues that Soviet forces were caught so unprepared and were routed because the German assault found them concentrated in vulnerable forward deployments for their own attack on the Third Reich. This invasion, Suvarov contends, was intended by Stalin not only to conquer Germany, but also to carry communist revolution throughout central and western Europe. Thus, Suvarov titled his first book on this topic, The Icebreaker, because this alleged Soviet attack was supposed to break the ice which had prevented the spread of revolution since the Bolshevik victory in Russia during the First World War. He even suggests that Stalin had sought to instigate a new world war since 1922 in order to rekindle the fires of revolution. Suvorov also pictures the Soviet armed forces as a virtually invincible Juggernaut in 1941. He imagines hordes of crack paratroops, ready to darken the skies over Germany; he fantasizes squadrons of winged tanks able to jettison their avionics as they move into battle, as well as additional Panzer formations equipped with rubber wheels rather than tank tracks to let them race down the Autobahn. So, in this view, Barbarossa is not an act of aggression, but a preemptive strike launched by the Germans after they discovered Stalin’s supposed plan to attack them.
Suvorov deploys an array of purported evidence to support the novel thesis that it was Stalin, not Hitler, who was (or at least was planning to be) the aggressor in 1941. The logic of his argument is based on his own estimation of what would have been the most effective defensive strategies and deployments for the Red Army before the war broke out. Since Soviet forces did not follow his plan, he judges that they could not possibly have been preparing to defend the USSR from an attack. If their dispositions were not defensive, they must, he thinks, betray offensive intentions. Thus, because the Soviet general staff did not prepare to meet a German attack the way he would have, this somehow proves that Stalin was planning a treacherous attack on Hitler. Throughout this analysis, Suvorov must distort or ignore prewar Soviet military doctrine, which expected to deliver a crushing counterattack within ten to fifteen days of an enemy invasion, thus carrying the fight onto the aggressor’s own territory. When he finds references in essays on strategy, in war games, and in military orders to attacking German-occupied Poland and Germany itself, he ignores the fact that all such attacks by the Red Army were projected in a context in which the Wehrmacht has already invaded the Soviet Union.[4]
To say that Icebreaker and Suvorov’s subsequent books are not works of scholarship is an understatement. The author introduces statements of purported fact, previously unknown to specialists on World War II or the Soviet military, as well as controversial, sweeping interpretive judgments without reference to any supporting documentation. Most of the evidence, he suggests, has been destroyed by the Soviets in order to cover their misdeeds after the fact. When he does cite specific details, they are often wrong. For example, Suvorov tells his readers that the underlying decision to attack Germany was made at a Politburo meeting on 19 August 1939, but evidence now available indicates that there was no such meeting on that date, nor is there evidence of such a discussion taking place at any other Politburo session.[5] His fantasies about bizarre weapons systems, the mere existence of which supposedly prove an intention to conquer Germany (the winged tanks and rubber-wheeled Panzers, etc.) seems to confuse designers’ brainstorms or, in few cases, limited prototypes, with actually operational, mass-produced weaponry. Similarly, his judgments about Stalin’s political and military plans in the 1940s are not supported by contemporary documents, but, if documented at all, are based on vague statements, taken out of context, made 15 to 20 years earlier. Stalin’s 1925 remark, for instance, that the Soviet Union would be the last, and therefore decisive participant in any future European war is taken to mean that he consistently sought another world war in order to advance his supposed revolutionary and/or imperial aims.[6] However, the connection between this statement and the decision-making process in 1941 is tenuous, at best.
It should also be noted that Suvorov’s thesis is not original. It was Hitler, himself, who first claimed that his attack on the USSR was merely a preemptive strike meant to foil an imminent Soviet attack. That is what German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop told Soviet Ambassador Vladimir Dekanozov when he handed him the German declaration of war, some hours after Barbarossa had commenced.[7] By 1941 Hitler had already established a pattern of blaming his victims for the “need” to attack them. No objective observer believed Hitler’s claim in 1941, but in recent years Suvorov has found credulous followers, both among the reading public in some countries and even among a segment of the scholarly community.
In Germany, Suvorov’s preventive war thesis became part of the Historikerstreit (or historians’ debate) which erupted in the late 1980s. Walter Post, for example, claims that Lenin and, subsequently, Stalin had conspired all along to launch a revolutionary-military crusade against Germany. Hitler prevented just such an attack by launching Operation Barbarossa.[8] Similarly, Joachim Hoffmann contends that Stalin saw the stalemated Anglo-German conflict in the West as the perfect opportunity to stab Germany in the back with a revolutionary thrust.[9] More radical still, Ernst Topisch, an Austrian scholar, argues that the Second World War, in its entirety, was manufactured by the USSR as “a Soviet attack on the capitalist world.”[10]
Some Russian scholars, too, have been drawn to the Suvorov thesis. Mikhail Mel’tiukov contends that Suvorov’s “conclusions, drawn on a solid base of historical facts, have not only not been overturned by his opponents + on the contrary, they have been confirmed by new evidence.”[11] He also uses propaganda planning documents in an attempt to show that Stalin sought to stir up a war fever among the Russian people against Germany.[12] Another Russian scholar, Vladimir Nevezhin argues that Stalin’s speech to military cadet graduates on 5 May 1941 betrayed an intention to strike aggressively against Germany.[13]
Even in the United States, Suvorov’s position has found some support, particularly in the work of Richard Raack. He attempts to buttress the preventive war hypothesis with the insider reminiscences of Lithuanian politician Vincas Kreve-Mickievicius, NKVD defector Grigorii Tokaev, and various Comintern functionaries. In Raack’s version of the facts, Viacheslav Molotov, then head of the Soviet government, and Dekanozov disclosed their secret plans for war on the West to a foreign (and bourgeois!) politician, Kreve-Mickievicus. Raack also interprets a swirling discussion of possible international scenarios at a February 1941 Comintern meeting chaired by Walter Ulbricht as sure evidence of the Kremlin’s intent to launch a revolutionary-military crusade.[14]
The controversy over the icebreaker thesis has lept the bounds of academic debate and captured the imagination of the general public in some counties. Particularly in Russia, Germany and Israel Suvorov’s books have become best sellers and have created something of a sensation in the mass circulation press. Although Icebreaker was originally published in 1988 by a Russian language emigré press in Paris, four years later it was reprinted in Moscow with a press run exceeding half a million copies! Suvorov’s subsequent books have also sold extremely well in Russia and have been the subject of a lively, ongoing discussion in popular magazines and newspapers there. In Germany, too, the preventive war thesis has found a significant audience. Many Germans are eager to grasp any reinterpretation of their national past, which will allow them to salvage something positive from the sacrifices of World War II. Certainly Hitler and the Holocaust were undoubted evils, but, if Suvorov is to be believed, then the German war effort (or at least the 75% of it directed at the eastern front) was a justifiable defensive war, or even a heroic struggle to save civilization itself from the horrors of Stalinist Bolshevism. Different domestic political factors + the importance of anti-communism in internal politics and the presence of so many immigrants from Russia + have made Icebreaker widely popular in Israel, as well. Finally, beyond traditional conservative circles, the preventive war thesis has been taken up by the radical right in the United States and elsewhere. The Institute for Historical Review, based in southern California and specializing in Holocaust denial, has published positive reviews of Suvorov’s works in its journal.[15] His writings have also been lauded on the neo-Nazi For Folk and Fatherland website, which announces its mission to combat all aspects of the “Master Conspiracy” (i.e., the supposed Jewish world conspiracy).
Yet, in spite of the adherence to it by a few researchers and its popularity among the general public in at least three countries, the icebreaker thesis has been rejected by the great majority of scholars.[16] Upon close examination, its trumpeted certitudes begin to fall apart. To begin with, Suvorov’s central argument welds together two very different propositions: first, that Stalin was planning an unprovoked offensive against Germany and its allies in an effort to conquer all of Europe for communism, and second, that Hitler only decided to attack the USSR preemptively after discovering Stalin’s nefarious plans. This second supposition concerning Hitler’s motivation can be easily discredited.
Destroying the Soviet experiment was not a last minute decision taken to fend off a perceived imminent attack; it was the centerpiece of the National Socialist project. For Hitler the USSR was a breading ground for the dreaded Marxist contagion, the key weapon in what he alleged to be the Jewish conspiracy to destroy Aryan civilization. Crushing Bolshevism always had been at the heart of his ideology, a goal developed more than a decade before his rise to power in Germany.[17] Moreover, all the available evidence demonstrates that the Germans did not fear a Soviet attack in 1941. Just the opposite, their racist perception of Slavic inferiority and Russian inefficiency led them badly to underestimate Soviet military capability. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ diaries show that neither Hitler or his generals feared a Soviet strike, but rather assumed that the USSR would attempt to maintain its neutrality for as long as possible.[18]
Suvorov’s other central proposition (that Stalin was preparing a revolutionary crusade against Germany and western Europe) also dissolves upon detailed examination. First, the image of countless hordes of crack Soviet troops scarcely corresponds to the reality of the Red Army in 1941. That army was large (on paper, the largest army in the world), but as careful students of the RKKA have noted, it was in a precarious state of transition in 1941.[19] Stalin certainly understood that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 has only a temporary truce, so the already existing military expansion program was further accelerated. The induction of a huge number of raw recruits brought with it enormous problems of training, equipping and integrating the new troops which had not been solved before Hitler’s attack. Also, the huge holes in the senior and mid-level command staff, caused by the Great Purges of the late 1930s, had not yet been filled adequately. Far too many recently promoted front, army and division commanders had not yet mastered the complexities of fielding such large units.[20] Demonstrating this point, Mark von Hagen highlights the poor performance of the Red Army in the Winter War with Finland and also in the occupation of the Baltic States, eastern Poland, and Bessarabia.[21] Similarly, procurement programs were in operation, which would eventually produce great quantities of superior T-34 tanks, Katusha rockets and serviceable interceptor aircraft, but in 1941 those programs were far from complete. In addition, the Red Army had lost its prepared defensive fortifications. The pre-1939 boarders had been heavily fortified with steel-reinforced concrete bunkers and gun positions with pre-sited fields of fire. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact Soviet forces had moved forward to incorporate parts of Finland, the Baltic States, eastern Poland and parts of Rumania into the USSR. The old fortified line was not only left far behind, it was largely dismantled in order to recycle building materials, and the new line was far from complete. Similarly, the Red Army’s accelerated arms modernization program meant that in the summer of 1941 many units had turned in their old weapons and either not yet received new ones, or had not had time to train with the replacement weapons. Thus, the Soviet armed forces were at this time not quite the awesome Juggernaught that Suvorov pictures.
A second problem with Suvorov’s argument is the timing it attributes to Stalin. He claims that the Soviet dictator intended to launch a revolutionary crusade in May of 1941. The difficulty here is that, far from being ravaged by war at this point, Germany was at the pinnacle of its strength, having established its hegemony from the Bay of Biscane to the Soviet border and from Norway to the sands of North Africa. Moreover, there is also no evidence that the proletariat of Nazi-occupied, bourgeois Europe were ripe for revolution at this point.[22] If Stalin had decided to attempt a pan-European revolutionary uprising in the summer of 1941, it is hard to imagine him having chosen a less opportune moment.
A third glaring error in Surovov’s analysis is his failure to see that what he takes to be evidence of the Kremlin’s aggressive intent was, in actuality, the fruits of a foolishly inappropriate defensive doctrine on the part of the Soviet general staff. For many years Red Army doctrine had held that any attack on the western frontier of the USSR would commence with two weeks of more of limited, probing attacks before the enemy could concentrate his full might for a decisive strike. Under this assumption, Soviet generals believed that their fairly light screening forces could hold off the enemy near the border while the RKKA’s main forces prepared to launch a devastating counter-attack. The fight would thus be carried quickly back onto the aggressor’s own territory. It is for this reason, rather than any aggressive intent, that so much of the Red Army was deployed in forward positions in the summer of 1941 rather than more sensibly arrayed farther in the rear for a defense in depth.[23] The Soviet generals had obviously missed the significance of the Polish defeat in 1939 and the French disaster in 1940 + namely, that the Blitzkrieg could strike with its full, devastating force on day one of the war. Suvorov misses this key point entirely.
Finally, the disaster of 1941 rests above all on Stalin’s shoulders, not because he was caught in an attempt to double-cross Hitler, but because of his astounding self-delusion. Although he certainly knew that war with the Third Reich was ultimately unavoidable, he realized better than anyone else that the propaganda picturing an invulnerable Soviet Union was a hollow lie. He knew better than anyone else how badly the Purges had hurt the Soviet armed forces, how inadequately Soviet industry was responding to the need for a crash-paced arms buildup, and how much in disarray the Red Army was in 1941. For that reason he convinced himself that the growing German troop concentrations along the Soviet border were a gambit to gain leverage for a possible renegotiation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact more in Germany’s favor.[24] Alternatively, he considered the possibility that renegade, militantly anti-communist German generals might launch an attack on the USSR without Hitler’s knowledge as a way to provoke war. For these reasons he prevented proper defensive preparations in order, he felt, not to provoke the Germans. It was a self-delusion that was nearly fatal for his country.
(Reprinted with Permission)
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[1] For detailed accounts of the Barbarossa campaign, see John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), chs. 1–7; David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), chs. 3–5; and Richard Overy, Russia’s War (New York: Penguin, 1997), chs. 2–4.
[2] Barton Whaley, Codeword BARBAROSSA (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973) and John Erickson, “Threat Identification and Strategic Appraisal by the Soviet Union, 1930–1941,” in Ernest R. May, ed., Knowing One’s Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 375–423.
[3] Viktor Suvorov, “Eshche rtaz o soobshchenii TASS,” Russkaia mysl’, 16 and 23 May 1985; Suvorov, “Who Was Planning to Attack Whom in June 1941, Hitler or Stalin?” Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, vol. 130, no. 2 (1985), pp. 50–55; and Suvorov, Ledokol: Kto nachal vtoruiu voinu? (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1988). His later books on the same theme include: Den’+M: Kogda nachalas’ vtoraia mirovaia voina? (Moscow: Vse dlia Vas, 1994; and Posledniaia respublika (Moscow: AST, 1996).
[4] Cynthia A. Roberts, “Planning for War: The Red Army and the Catastrophe of 1941,” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 47, no. 8 (1995), pp. 1293–1326; Andrei A. Kokoshin, Soviet Strategic Thought, 1917–1991 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 86–111; and M.Il Mel’tiukov, “Sovetskaia razvedka i problema vnezapnogo napadeniia,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1998, no. 3, pp. 3–20.
[5] Derek Watson, “To the Editor,” Slavic Review, vol. 59, no. 1 (2000), pp. 492–3.
[6] J.V. Stalin, Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), vol. VII, pp. 13–14.
[7] Raymond J. Sontag and James S. Beddie, eds., Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941: Documents (New York: Didier, 1948), pp. 356–57. Cf. the similar announcement by German ambassador Friedrich von der Schulenburg in Moscow, who omitted any attempt to justify the attack as preemptive. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, 1940–22 iiuniia 1941 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniia, 1998), vol. 23, bk. 2, pt. 2, pp. 753–54.
[8] Walter Post, Unternehmen Barbarossa: Die Deutsche und sowjetische Angriffspäne 1940/41 (Hamburg: E.S. Mittler, 1996).
[9] Joachim Hoffmann, “The Soviet Union’s Offensive Preparations in 1941,” in Wegner (ed.), From Peace to War (Providence: Berghan, 1997), pp. 361–80; and “Die Sowjetuniion bis zum Vorabend des deutschen Angriffs,” and “Die Kriegführung aus der Sicht der Sowjetunion,” in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg , 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1987), vol. 4, pp. 713–809.
[10] Ernst Topisch, Stalin’s War: A Radical New Theory of the Origins of the Second World War (London: Fourth Estate, 1987), p. 133.
[11] M.I. Mel’tiukov, “Spory vokrug 1941 goda: Opyt kriticheskogo osmyleniia odnoi diskussii,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1994, no. 3, p. 22.
[12] M.I. Mel’tiukov, “Ideologicheskie dokumenty maia-iiunia 1941 goda o sobytiiakh vtoroi mirovoi voiny,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1995, no. 1, p. 70–85.
[13] V.A. Nevezhin, “Rech’ Stalina 5 maia 1941 goda i apologiia nastupatel’noi voiny,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1995, no. 2, pp. 53–69.
[14] R.C. Raack, Stalin’s Drive to the West, 1939–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 24 and Raack, “Stalin’s Plans for World War Two Told by A High Comintern Source,” The Historical Journal, vol. 38, no. 4 (1995), pp. 1031–36.
[15] The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 16, no. 6 (November/December, 1996–97), p. 22 (review of Icebreaker by Joseph Bishop) and p. 28 (review of Den’+M by Daniel W. Michaels), and vol. 17, no. 4 (July/August, 1998), p 30 (review of Posledniaia respublika by Daniel W. Michaels).
[16] Suvorov’s most devastating critic has been Gabriel Gorodetsky. See Grand Delusiion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Another recent study concludes that, far from planning to attack the Third Reich, in the months leading up to June 22nd, the Soviet leaders’ “conduct grew out of the priority of dividing spheres of influence between the USSR and Germany.” Silvio Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 1936–1941 (London: Frank Cass, 2002), p. 211.
[17] Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion (New York: Norton, 1973), ch. 18; and Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. 193 and 198.
[18] Willi A Boelcke, ed., The Secret Conferences of Dr. Goebbels, October 1939–March 1943 (London: Weidenfelt & Nicolson, 1970), pp. 176–7.
[19] Yuri Y. Kirshin, “The Soviet Armed Forces on the Eve of the Great Patriotic War,” in Wegner (ed.), From Peace to War, pp. 381–394.
[20] Gorodetsky, Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia, pp. 115 and 319; and Bernd Bonwetsch, “The Purge of the Military and the Red Army’s Operational Capability during the ‘Great Patriotic War,’” in Wegner (ed.), From Peace to War, pp. 395–414.
[21] Mark von Hagen, “Soviet Soldiers and Officers on the Eve of the German Invasion,” Soviet Union/Union Sovietique, vol. 18, nos. 1–3 (1991), pp. 79–101,
[22] On the sorry state of the Comintern and most of its constituent parties in this period, see Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), pp. 191–205.
[23] Roberts, “Planning for War,” pp. 1293–1326.
[24].Valentin M. Berezhkov, At Stalin’s Side (New York: Birch Lane, 1994), p. 53.