Stalin

CHAPTER 14 FEAR

It would be incorrect to say that [Stalin] underestimated him. He saw that Hitler had organized Germany in a short period of time. There had been a huge [German] Communist party and it had disappeared, wiped out!

VYACHESLAV MOLOTOV¹

Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture.

ADOLF HITLER, Table Talk, 1941²

MOLOTOV, BACK FROM BERLIN, sacked the former textile manager serving as Soviet ambassador there in favor of his own deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov, the Beria minion who had briefly headed NKVD intelligence. Even Molotov did not know him well, thinking him an Armenian who pretended to be a Georgian.³ He seems to have been of mixed Russian (father) and German Jewish (mother) heritage, and had been born Ivan Protopopov in Estonia. Blond and blue-eyed, barely five feet tall, imperious and foul-mouthed with underlings, the forty-one-year-old was the youngest ambassador in the Nazi capital.⁴ He retained his status as a deputy foreign affairs commissar but could not manage to present his credentials to Hitler. On December 5, 1940, still awaiting an audience, Dekanozov received an anonymous German-language letter in the mail. “Hitler intends to attack the USSR next spring,” it read. “The Red Army will be destroyed by numerous powerful encirclements.” The details of pending bellicose actions impressed the thirty-four-year-old Soviet military intelligence station chief, Nikolai Skornyakov, and Dekanozov sent the letter to Molotov, who forwarded it: “Comrade Stalin—for your information.”⁵

Everyone was talking. They had “heard” that Hitler would attack. It would happen this way. It would happen that way. It would occur on this date. It would occur on that date. The encrypted reports flowed over the wires from Belgrade, Sofia, Prague, Bucharest, Budapest, and Warsaw; London, Paris, Geneva, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Rome; Tokyo, Washington, and Berlin. The noise was shattering. Observers reported rail lines, aerodromes, and weapons depots being laid, troops being massed on the frontier, Russian-language courses being taken. Hitler would seize Ukraine.⁶ Or he would demand that Stalin just hand Ukraine over. The Führer was going to invade. Unless he wasn’t. Amayak Kobulov, relying on his personal spy, the ethnic Latvian Berlings—code-named “Lycée-ist” by the Soviets, but a plant for the Nazis—reported through NKVD channels (December 14) that Hitler had declared Britain to be Germany’s “sole enemy,” and that Germany would do everything possible “to avoid a war on two fronts.”⁷

The Führer himself had become nearly inaccessible. On the afternoon of December 19, Dekanozov was finally able to present his credentials, in the same Chancellery room where Molotov had been received, but Hitler politely deflected the envoy’s effort to discuss Soviet conditions for joining the four-power pact. After a curt half an hour, two giant Nazi protocol officers bundled the diminutive Dekanozov out.⁸ Unbeknownst to the Soviet envoy, the previous day Hitler had signed the supersecret Directive No. 21, which ordered that “even before the end of the war with England, the German Armed Forces must be prepared to annihilate Soviet Russia in a swift campaign (Operation Barbarossa).” The target date was provisionally set for May 15, 1941.⁹

Nazi Germany was master of the European continent, stalemated with island Britain and economically enmeshed with the Soviet Union. Nazi ideologues railed at the “military buildup” of “Judeo-Bolshevism” on Germany’s new borders in the east. Most top Nazis, however, scorned the Red Army’s performance against Finland and, more broadly, the inferior Slavic race. SS Chief Heinrich Himmler had told Nazi party functionaries in fall 1940 that the USSR “cannot pose any danger to us at all.” Hitler himself had stated that the Soviet Union “will nevertheless make no effort to enter the war against Germany of her own accord” and took its expansive territorial appetites from the Baltic to the Black Sea as indicative of weakness.¹⁰ But in the aftermath of his November 1940 confrontation with Molotov, the Führer had taken to calling the Soviet Union a gathering threat that had to be preempted. That view had been Germany’s motivation for the Great War in 1914: its giant eastern neighbor had to be attacked before it got strong.¹¹ Hitler added the proposition that now Britain was not capitulating because it was counting on eventual help from the USSR. Thus did it transpire for the second time in the twentieth century that the road to German triumph over the world’s greatest power, Britain, was deemed to go through the east.

Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa—meaning “Red Beard,” the nickname of the Holy Roman emperor Frederick I—consisted of an eight-page typescript dated December 18, 1940, and initialed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (head of the Wehrmacht high command), General Alfred Jodl (head of the high command’s operations staff), Major General Walter Warlimont (Jodl’s top aide, who had prepared the document’s first draft), and one other person (illegible).¹² Hitler had a mere eight copies prepared, of which four, along with the original, went into the safe. One copy each went to the army commander and the air force commander, and two to the general staff. A mere ten days later, Soviet military intelligence in Berlin delivered word of the existence of the supersecret signed directive.¹³

IDÉES FIXES

On December 23, 1940, Stalin had one of the largest groups ever in his office, more than thirty military-industrial functionaries. “We were all captivated at how simply, amiably, and with such deep knowledge Stalin conducted the meeting,” recalled Akaki Mgeladze (b. 1910), who at age twenty-eight, after being released from house arrest, had been named head of Georgia’s oil trust. “We were elated and felt such a rush of creative power and energy that we were ready to move mountains.”¹⁴ Besides ramping up oil supplies, discussion ensued about the M-105 airplane engine, which had 1,000 horsepower. “If we had a plethora of engines like the M-105,” Stalin instructed those gathered in his Little Corner, “we could talk to that scumbag differently.”¹⁵

That same day, the upper ranks of the Soviet army, air force, and navy gathered for a large-scale conference that lasted until December 31. For a modern army, doctrine was as important as size and technological base. A “defense in depth” assumed that the invader would inexorably breach the front lines, so it sacrificed territory, erecting defenses back from the front, aiming to contain the blow by wearing the enemy down. A further option, “mobile defense,” involved counterattacks from depth before the enemy’s advance had been fully contained, in order to cut off the enemy’s frontline tank divisions from its second- and third-line infantry. Such operations required tremendous skill and speed, real-time battlefield intelligence, and sophisticated use of armored divisions to pierce the enemy assault.¹⁶ “Forward defense” meant massing units on the frontier in fortified regions, absorbing and halting the initial blow, then taking the fight to enemy territory.

Soviet military doctrine had long been predicated on forward defense, and assumed that there would be about two weeks between an outbreak of hostilities, characterized by limited skirmishes, and any German ability to engage with the massive force of a full mobilization. During this interval, the Red Army would absorb the charge, then seize the initiative in a quick counteroffensive, inflicting several rapid defeats and thereby disrupting the enemy’s mobilization.¹⁷ But the USSR had some 2,500 miles of borders to defend against Germany and its Axis partners from the White Sea to the Black. The Red Army had forward-deployed some of its very best forces—20 of its 29 mechanized corps, almost 80 percent of its newest tanks, and more than half of its most advanced aircraft. This could leave them dangerously exposed if, as had happened to France, the Germans punched through in numbers and carried out an encirclement behind the penetrated lines.¹⁸ The Soviets had ample reserves in the rear that could be brought into battle quickly, but the Germans were preconcentrating truly massive forces on the frontier.

Some sharp critiques of the Soviet military doctrine had been buried in the terror.¹⁹ Stalin forbade consideration of anything other than an attack. Soviet theorists who had warned of the superiority of defense in depth—such as Alexander Verkhovsky, the former war minister in the Provisional Government who had joined the Reds—had exposed themselves to charges of treason for advocating the sacrifice of territory (even Minsk and Kiev).²⁰ Tukhachevsky had leveled precisely these charges against his intellectual nemesis, the strategist Alexander Svechin, in 1930–31, when Svechin was eventually arrested in the so-called Springtime Operation.²¹ The survivor Shaposhnikov, too, firmly, albeit less stridently than Tukhachevsky, advocated for the offensive posture of forward defense.

The December 1940 military conference took place at the defense commissariat’s new building, completed two years earlier, which jumbled modernist, neoclassical, and kitsch motifs, including stylized tank bas-reliefs and a central tower topped by a red star. Stalin did not attend. Voroshilov was absent as well. Timoshenko, presiding over his first such meeting as defense commissar, opened with a greeting to the 270 attendees. Next came chief of staff Meretskov’s report, which gently took up Red Army shortcomings but reveled in how the imperialists were fighting a war among themselves, and how the USSR had managed to steer clear even as it had been able to “march westward” into new territories. Zhukov, commander of the Kiev military district, got the spotlight for a report accentuating the USSR’s commitment to offense. He argued for combining mechanized forces, close air support, and tactical surprise and flanking maneuvers to smash through an enemy’s frontline defenses and create havoc in its rear—the old concept of deep operations, a stirring of Tukhachevsky’s ashes.²²

Zhukov’s hymn to spirited offense glossed over the critical period right after the launch of the enemy attack. Precisely the period of the onset of hostilities had been analyzed in a penetrating book by the Soviet theorist Georgy Isserson about Spain’s civil war and Germany’s Polish campaign, New Forms of Combat (1940), which argued that enemy forces mobilized and deployed secretly would conduct operations far exceeding mere frontier skirmishes or spoiling attacks, and that these troops would not be vulnerable to a counteroffensive.²³ At the conference, General Pyotr Klenov, commander of the Baltic military district, mentioned having read Isserson’s book. “It offers hasty conclusions based upon the war between the Germans and Poland to the effect that there will be no start period for a war, that war today is decided simply—an invasion by readied forces, as was done by the Germans in Poland, deploying a million and a half men,” Klenov stated. He dismissed Poland as not analogous to the USSR, calling it a weak country that, moreover, had lost its vigilance, so that it had “absolutely no foreign intelligence as the Germans were undertaking a many-month concentration of forces.”

Klenov omitted mention of the German campaign in France. Zhukov did acknowledge Germany’s blitz in the west, but he characterized France as a weak state as well, whose experience was therefore supposedly inapplicable to the USSR.²⁴ Isserson excepted, the Soviets spent less time studying Germany’s new style of warfare than they did Anglo-American theories about wars of attrition, in which the USSR feared becoming bogged down.²⁵

The deputy general inspector of the air force, Major General Timofei Khryunkin, offered cautionary remarks from his experiences in the trenches of the Soviet-Polish campaign. He noted that air support had arrived too late, when the ground forces had already finished their task (or failed to do so). “We have the experience of the German command in coordinating with armored units,” he explained. “I studied it, and it is as follows: After armored units break through to the rear, 70–80 km, and perhaps 100 km, aviation gets its orders not from an aerodrome, but in the air; that is, the commander who directs the tank units that broke through and the aviation commander specify the target to air power by radio. Aviation the whole time is above its troops, and, through radio communication, it destroys pockets of resistance in front of the tanks.” Khryunkin added that radio “is the most important thing.” Barely thirty years old, not even supposed to have been present (his invited superior could not, or chose not to, attend), Khryunkin, in his incisive remarks—among the briefest of anyone—also managed to underscore the importance of having limited types of planes for efficiency (spare parts, training), which was what the Germans did, as opposed to the French, and the need for higher-caliber guns on Soviet aircraft in order to take out enemy tanks.²⁶

Timoshenko closed with a summation. “In terms of the strategic art, the experience of the war in Europe has perhaps brought nothing new,” he asserted. “But in the sphere of the operational arts, in the sphere of frontline and army operations, there have been immense changes.” He singled out the value of tank armies and motorized divisions coordinated with aviation, noting that whereas offensives in the First World War had been stymied by defense in depth and the employment of reserves, “German tank divisions in 1939–1940 forestalled calling up these reserves.” The Germans just “pushed forward,” having “rightly taken into account that the force and success of the contemporary offensive consists in its great speed and uninterruptedness.” He contrasted the German experience in just bypassing the Maginot Line with the Soviet Winter War, wherein a bypass proved impossible, and accentuated being expert at both wars of maneuver and of heavy concentration, in order to achieve that early breakthrough. He also noted that German success had depended upon preparation, laying railroads, building roads, readying aerodromes, and using agents on enemy territory to sow panic. In conclusion, he said that “the decisive effect of air power is achieved not via long-range raids in an enemy’s rear but coordination with infantry in the field of battle, in the location of divisions, the army.”²⁷

As Timoshenko knew well, however, the Red Army’s existing organization, officer skill set, and rank-and-file training did not correspond to this incisive blueprint. How much, if anything, the absent Stalin absorbed of the revelatory discussions of the new German way of war and its implications for Soviet military doctrine remains uncertain. Timoshenko had submitted a draft of his summation to the despot, who inserted several lines: “One organizes defense in order to prepare an offensive.” “Defense is especially advantageous only when it is understood as a means to organize an offensive.”²⁸

SEEKING CLARIFICATION

Also on December 28, Sorge in Tokyo drafted a radio message, the first of many he would send warning of possible war. He had developed a close relationship with the German military attaché Colonel Alfred Kretschmer and was able to meet the many high-level military visitors from Berlin on assignment to Japan. “Every new person arriving in Japan from Germany talks about how the Germans have around 80 divisions on the eastern border, including Romania, with the aim of exerting pressure on the policy of the USSR,” his message stated. “In the event that the USSR starts to actively oppose the interests of Germany, as happened in the Baltics, the Germans could occupy territory on a line Kharkov, Moscow, Leningrad. The Germans do not want to do this, but are assembling the means, should they be compelled to do so by the behavior of the USSR.” But Sorge added that “the Germans know well that the USSR cannot risk this, because, after the Finnish war debacle, Moscow needs at least twenty years to become a modern army on a par with Germany’s.”²⁹

Sorge’s dispatch was characteristic of the mountains of chatter that Stalin would receive. But the December 29 intelligence out of Berlin on the existence of Operation Barbarossa was different. It had been written by Skornyakov (“Meteor”), who worked under the cover of the aviation aide to the Soviet military attaché. “Meteor,” in turn, had gotten the information from Captain Nikolai Zaitsev (“Bine”), the intelligence operative in the Soviet trade mission. “Bine,” in freezing weather, drove around and took public transportation for up to five hours (to ensure he was not being followed by German counterintelligence) to meet with the German journalist Ilse Stöbe (“Alta”), who ran the field agents in Soviet military intelligence’s network in Berlin, including her source for this revelation, Rudolf von Scheliha (“Aryan”). The latter, returning from Warsaw, now worked in the German foreign ministry. Filipp Golikov, the head of Soviet military intelligence, forwarded the information to Stalin, as well as to Molotov, defense commissar Timoshenko, and chief of staff Meretskov (collectively known as List No. 1), writing that “from highly informed military circles, it has become known that Hitler issued an order to prepare a war against the USSR and that the war will be declared in March of the coming year.”

From time immemorial, the month of March in the eastern Slavic lands brought the spring thaw, deep mud, and impassable roads, an improbable moment for a military invasion. Still, HQ took the report seriously. On the document, Major General Mikhail Panfilov, deputy head of military intelligence, wrote, “It is necessary to clarify who are the highly informed military circles. To whom, concretely, was the directive issued.” On January 4, 1941, “Meteor” reported from Berlin that “‘Aryan’ confirmed that he obtained this information from a military man known to him, and that this was based not on rumor, but on a special directive of Hitler, which is deeply secret and about which very few people know.” “Aryan” had further stipulated that the head of the eastern department of the German foreign ministry had told him that Molotov’s visit to Berlin could be compared with Polish foreign minister Beck’s—which had been followed by a German invasion. “Aryan” added that “preparations for an offensive against the USSR had begun much earlier, but they had been halted because the Germans had miscalculated the resistance of England. The Germans had reckoned on bringing England to its knees in spring and freeing their hands in the East.” He concluded that “Hitler thinks the condition of the Red Army precisely now is so low that in spring he shall have undoubted success.”³⁰

“Aryan”’s report constituted a stunning achievement—the German officer corps did not yet know of Barbarossa.³¹ On the evening of January 7, 1941, Golikov summoned Major General Vasily Tupikov to Znamenka, 19, the three-story Chocolate House that served as military intelligence HQ. An offspring of deep Russia (Kursk province) and a graduate of the Frunze Military Academy, Tupikov (b. 1901) was the chief of staff in the Kharkov military district, though he had served abroad as a military attaché (Estonia, 1935–37). He was now appointed military attaché in Berlin, code-named “Arnold,” and tasked with ascertaining the precise location of German forces across multiple theaters. He quickly apprehended that “the sources we have in Germany for the most part do not have serious opportunities to get hold of documentary evidence regarding the armed forces of Germany.”³² Neither “Aryan” nor other Soviet spies secured a physical copy of Barbarossa. No foreign intelligence service did.³³

WAR GAMES

Following its military conference, the Red Army conducted two war games on charts at general staff headquarters. The Pact had scrambled Soviet war planning. Germany still possessed the greatest destructive potential, and remained the focus of attention, but Poland’s disappearance had rendered the entire GP series of plans moot.³⁴ Annexation of the Baltic states altered the calculation for the northwest as well. Romania remained a likely partner of Germany, to which had been added Finland, Hungary, and Slovakia. There was, however, very considerable internal dispute about whether the principal enemy thrust would come north of the impassable Pripet Marshes, toward Minsk, Smolensk, and Moscow on the central axis and Leningrad on the northernmost axis, or south of the Pripet, toward Kiev and the Caucasus. The January 1941 exercises incorporated both possibilities.³⁵

Both iterations of the games glossed over the initial period of war. (Against neither Japan at the Halha River nor Finland had the initial phase been decisive.) The games assumed, in line with Soviet military doctrine, that the enemy (“blues”) would initiate hostilities and would not be able to penetrate more than a few score miles before being driven back to prewar frontiers by the Soviet side (“reds”), setting the stage for the onset of the games, which notionally began on the fifteenth day of hostilities. No battles in the games took place on Soviet soil. Almost all the toponyms in the war games documents were Polish and Prussian settlements, rivers, hills. In the first game (January 2–6), Zhukov commanded the blues, attacking north of the Pripet. The reds, led by Pavlov, launched a counterattack into East Prussia, reaching the Neman and Narew rivers, but Zhukov’s blues in East Prussia outmaneuvered Pavlov’s attempted encirclement and won. The second game (January 8–11) shifted the fighting south of the Pripet into former southern Poland and Silesia, and this time Zhukov commanded the reds and Pavlov the blues. This version pivoted on initial blue penetration in the direction of Lvov and Ternopol and a red reversal, followed by Zhukov’s deep operation to punch through and advance beyond the Carpathian passes toward Kraków and Budapest. Pavlov failed to block Zhukov’s thrust, but the game was ended before the outcome had been fully decided.³⁶

Immediately after being apprised of Zhukov’s success in effectively winning from both sides, Stalin would make him the third chief of staff in the past six months.³⁷ “I have never worked in staffs,” Zhukov recalled protesting to the despot. “I have always been a line officer. I cannot be chief of the general staff.”³⁸

Continuing in his transformation of the military, Stalin also held fast to the view that the economic relationship with Germany served as a deterrent. Many foreign observers, too, surmised that Germany had far more to gain from trade than from a costly attempt at conquest.³⁹ In December 1940 and January 1941, after the despot had applied pressure (shutting down Soviet exports to Germany in the fourth quarter), German exports to the USSR suddenly ballooned.⁴⁰ In Moscow on January 10, the parties signed a new German-Soviet Border and Commercial Agreement, which the trade official Schnurre lauded as “the greatest Germany had ever concluded.” The USSR, upping its deliveries, promised to ship 2.5 million tons of grain, some from strategic reserves, and 1 million tons of oil by August 1941, in return for machine tools and arms-manufacturing equipment, whose delivery would begin in August.⁴¹ Hitler, however, saw menace. “Stalin is intelligent, clever, and cunning,” he stated at a Führer conference of military brass during the two days before the signing of the new trade agreement. “He demands more and more. He’s a cold-blooded blackmailer. A German victory has become unbearable for Russia. Therefore: she must be brought to her knees as soon as possible.”⁴²

Also in January 1941, Wehrmacht troops entered Bulgaria, where the Germans would soon install antiaircraft weapons and shore batteries on the Black Sea.⁴³ Molotov told Dimitrov that “the Soviet government has declared to the German government that Bulgaria and the Straits belong to the security sphere of the USSR.”⁴⁴ Major General Alexander Samokhin (“Sophocles”), the Soviet military attaché and military intelligence station chief in Belgrade, reported conversations to the effect that “the Balkans are becoming the decisive center of political events, more so because here is where the direct clash of the interests of Germany and the USSR begins.”⁴⁵ As late as January 17, Molotov was still pressing Schulenburg about Germany’s silence regarding Soviet conditions for joining the Tripartite Pact: “neither an answer nor a hello.”⁴⁶

ANXIETIES

In the evening of January 17, Stalin convoked a rare formal meeting of the politburo in the Little Corner to discuss the economic plan for 1941.⁴⁷ “For four to five months we have not assembled the politburo,” he stated. “All questions are prepared by Zhdanov, Malenkov, and others in the form of smaller gatherings with comrades who have the necessary expertise, and the practice of leadership has gotten not worse but better.” He continued, “In the economic sense, our state is not a single entity but consists of a series of pieces. In order to unite these pieces into one whole, we need railroads.” Just as France or Britain had connected their empires via ships, the USSR had to expand its railroads, which “would consume a lot of metal.” He went on to criticize the economic council inside the Council of People’s Commissars. “You are busy with parliamentarism,” he charged. “You pronounce big speeches. Issues are often resolved by the principle of who convinces whom, who gives a prettier speech.”

After the admonishments, at around 1:00 a.m., they went outside to inspect a new limited-edition automobile, which Stalin deemed “successful.” Then the group of about ten repaired to his apartment, one floor below the Little Corner, for supper. They sat until 7:00 a.m. “We sang songs, talked,” Malyshev, the commissar of medium machine building and a deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, recorded in his diary. “Comrade Stalin told us at length about his life and proposed a toast ‘to the old guys, who are eagerly passing power to the youth, who are eagerly taking this power!’” Stalin was promoting a new team of younger cadres into the government, Molotov’s bailiwick, such as Malyshev, who carried responsibility for the automobile industry. When the despot observed Malyshev drinking wine “in limited edition,” he grabbed two goblets, hurried over, and poured them both full. The pair drank to the bottom. Stalin then went around the room to pour everyone a full glass, laughing and commenting of Malyshev, with evident zest, “He’s a sly type, sly!”⁴⁸

Another interlude of relaxation mixed with menace occurred on February 4: a Kremlin banquet for Voroshilov’s sixtieth jubilee. The marshals, some generals, people’s commissars, Central Committee apparatchiks, Comintern officials, and others, a few with their wives, toasted one another until 4:00 a.m. “Stalin pronounced a number of toasts,” Malyshev noted. “He, in part, again returned to the idea of the old and the young. He said that ‘the old should understand that unless the young are admitted to leadership positions, then we will perish. We Bolsheviks are strong in that we boldly promote youth. The old should eagerly yield power to the young.’”⁴⁹

Stalin went on to attribute Soviet successes in foreign affairs to “two means: diplomacy and the army.” Dimitrov recorded the despot as stating that “with our foreign policy we have managed to take advantage of the goods of this world and to use those goods (we buy cheap and sell dear!). But the might of our army and navy have helped us conduct a policy of neutrality and keep the country out of war.” One of the reasons France fell, Stalin explained, was a failure to promote young cadres. “We have another approach: we promote our young cadres, sometimes even too eagerly. We promote them with pleasure, with joy. Old men cling to the old ways. The young go forward. Replacing the old with the young at the proper time is very essential. The country that fails to do that is doomed to failure.” Stalin also toasted Lenin (“We owe him everything”) and Soviet might. “We have been lucky. ‘God’ has helped us. Lots of easy victories. . . . Must not get cocky. . . . We now have an army of 4 million men on their feet and ready for anything. The tsar used to dream of a standing army of 1.2 million men.”⁵⁰

HITLER’S GRAND STRATEGY

Hitler’s radicalism confounded most contemporaries.⁵¹ Ever since his Second Book, written in 1928 but unpublished, he had exhibited envy for the unique vastness of the British empire and, ultimately, for American power. Germany under him had emerged as the world’s third-largest economy, but its overall productivity and living standards trailed those of the United States and even Britain. His acute awareness of Germany’s limitations relative to Britain’s global empire and America’s transcontinentality, not just his deeply held racist conceptions, spurred his aggressiveness. The Nazi regime proved to have an astonishing capability to marshal resources and a tremendous depth of domestic political unity, and into 1940 it was overseeing further surges of output and popular acclaim. But shortages of nearly everything, from steel to fodder, held Germany back, undermining the quality of the Wehrmacht’s armor and the Luftwaffe’s planes. Desperately seeking to break through to world-power status, in his inimical way, Hitler lacked the requisite economic and resource scaffolding.⁵² Japan suffered the same predicament: vaulting ambitions and limited raw materials or financial means to import them.⁵³ For Hitler, this was a matter of the survival of the German race. He held fast to a zero-sum calculus, believing that only one nation could dominate the world.

Hitler could be less impulsive than he seemed. He and his crude propagandists had slandered the United States at every turn for supposedly trying to interfere in European affairs, but once Hitler had precipitated the pan-European war over Poland, he had worked diligently to keep the world’s potentially most powerful country out of the hostilities. This was not rocket science: in 1918, on top of the British sea blockade that inhibited vital German imports of food and raw materials, America’s 2 million fresh troops and plentiful resources had brought the Germans to defeat. Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare, in turn, had gratuitously provoked America’s decision to take up arms, and Hitler ordered the navy not to repeat the mistake this time. Roosevelt, for his part, seemed to want just that: a Nazi-instigated confrontation. Meanwhile, many of Hitler’s efforts to bring Japan into the war centered not on opening a two-front war against the USSR but embroiling the United States in a Pacific war such that it would hesitate to get involved on a second front in Europe.⁵⁴ But Roosevelt’s reelection, by a substantial majority, to a third term on November 5, 1940, and the increasing scale of U.S. aid to Britain gave Hitler grave cause for concern. Even while still fighting Britain, he ordered continued preparations for an anticipated eventual clash with the United States.⁵⁵

In a fireside chat broadcast over the radio on December 29, 1940, Roosevelt had called upon the American people to serve as “the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.” The president explained that “if Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere.” Roosevelt vowed to supply Britain (“the spearhead of resistance to world conquest”) with weaponry against Nazi Germany while keeping America out of the fighting.⁵⁶ Even at peace, the American colossus was now manufacturing as much weaponry as either Germany or Britain, while also seeing its living standard rise. Germany’s many occupied territories could never match the United States or Britain in productivity. In 1941, America would manufacture nearly 20,000 military aircraft, of which more than 5,000 would go to Britain. Germany took deliveries of 78 aircraft from occupied France and the Netherlands.⁵⁷

Hitler was wont to expiate on American degeneracy and contamination by Jewry, but he was well aware of America’s productive power and resources, and how the United States, together with Britain, was rich in transport, too. Herein lay the strategic component of his quest for Lebensraum. For Hitler, annihilation of the Soviet Union and international Jewry was an end in itself. But he had a further aim, forced upon him, in his view, by necessity: to establish the equivalent of a British empire or U.S. transcontinentality by conquering and racializing Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It was his awe and fear of U.S. power, ultimately, that propelled him to take on what he long said needed to be done: eradicate “Judeo-Bolshevism.”⁵⁸ Hitler was caught in something of a vicious circle: all of his spectacular battlefield victories had only accelerated Anglo-American cooperation, the very phenomenon helping to drive his pursuit of these victories in the first place. To be sure, he could continue to secure crucial resources from Stalin via trade. But whenever Germany ran into difficulty meeting its contractual obligations, Stalin had shown he could turn off the spigot of grain, timber, oil, and alloys. Hitler might end up succumbing to the contemptible fate he foresaw for Britain, running the risk of abject dependency on the United States, but in his case the dependency involved the USSR. How could Germany even supply its own military if the Soviets kept demanding so many advanced machine tools? How long would it be before the USSR became too strong even to take on? How long before Stalin might launch his own war against Germany?

To Hitler, a consolidation of his gains and a defensive stance looked like a losing proposition, for time, he felt, was not on his side. American involvement with Britain would grow; the USSR would just get stronger. Thus, given the military infeasibility of a cross-Channel invasion, his options seemed to be (1) air strikes against peripheral targets of the British empire in the Near East, to raise Britain’s costs for refusing his offers of accommodation on his terms, an option that meant continued tolerance of his relationship with “Judeo-Bolshevism” and Stalin’s “blackmail”; (2) the continental bloc idea advanced by Ribbentrop, which would confront the Anglo-Americans with equivalent productive and military force but would potentially increase Hitler’s dependence on Stalin’s good graces; or (3) an unprovoked attack on a country with a massive army of 4 million men and modern weaponry, some of it German supplied. The latter was in many ways the riskiest choice but, given Hitler’s worldview, aspirations, and calculations, the one that seemed to make the most sense.⁵⁹ Understanding that from the outside required a level of insight no foreign power commanded.

On January 30, 1941, Hitler showed that he understood that the Soviet Union would not launch a preemptive strike, telling his high command behind closed doors, “As long as Stalin lives, the Russians will not attack, for Stalin is cautious and reasonable.” Nonetheless, German officialdom and propaganda emphasized the presence of Soviet troops on the common border as a direct threat to Germany. In his speech, the Führer moved the start date of Barbarossa from May 15 to June 2, evidently acknowledging the scale of the operation, and repeated his prophecy, made two years earlier, of a coming annihilation of the Jews.⁶⁰

JUDO

Reconstituted Soviet espionage networks overseas counted some 3,000 different sources, of whom perhaps 70 percent were new since 1938 (such as agents of former Czechoslovak intelligence who agreed to work against Germany).⁶¹ The NKVD also intercepted hundreds of thousands of coded telegrams, but only a small percentage (usually less than 15 percent) could be deciphered and read. Soviet intelligence lacked translators, let alone genuine cryptographers.⁶² Still, Stalin could read intercepts of deciphered communications between Japanese military attachés in Moscow and Tokyo as well as U.S. diplomatic communications with the state department from the Soviet Union, France, and Japan.⁶³ The Soviets did not, however, break British or German codes.⁶⁴

The despot had spies high up in the British establishment. These included the ideologically committed Cambridge Five: Anthony Blunt (“Tony”), in British counterintelligence (MI5); Guy Burgess (“Mädchen”), in the British secret services (MI6); Donald Maclean (“Homer”), for the foreign office in London; Kim Philby (“Söhnchen”), in the saboteur training unit known as the Special Operations Executive; and John Cairncross (“Liszt”), the personal secretary to Sir Maurice Hankey, the former cabinet secretary and now nominally Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, but really minister without portfolio. “Liszt,” for example, had evidently provided Moscow the UK’s secret September 1940 “Estimate of the Possibilities of War,” which had concluded that Hitler could not mount a successful invasion of the British Isles.⁶⁵ In 1941, Liszt would pass on 3,349 classified documents, including the telegrams out of Moscow from Ambassador Cripps to Eden at the foreign office, as well as British intelligence reports.⁶⁶ “Tony” passed British counterintelligence documents to the restored London station chief Anatoly Gorsky beginning in January 1941. “Söhnchen” informed his handlers that the British were not training any undercover agents for work in the USSR, information that in Moscow was double-underlined in red, reinforcing the suspicions that Philby was a double agent working for the British.⁶⁷ Even after he allowed Gorsky to reestablish the London station, Stalin never trusted the Cambridge Five.⁶⁸

In Germany, besides the network of Soviet military intelligence centered on Rudolf von Scheliha, who had delivered word of the existence of Barbarossa (without the name), another network of Soviet civilian intelligence centered on Arvid Harnack (b. 1901), who had studied in the United States, married an American, obtained his Ph.D. in his native Germany, traveled to the USSR on a German-government-sponsored research trip prior to the Nazi regime, passed information to the Americans, become an antifascist spy for the Soviets, and joined the Nazi party and now worked in Nazi Germany’s economics ministry. Contact with Harnack (“Corsican”) had been reestablished in 1940 by Alexander Korotkov (b. 1909), who had started at Lubyanka as an electrician and elevator operator but, unlike most post-terror recruits, was fluent in German.⁶⁹ Korotkov had been appointed deputy head of station under Amayak Kobulov, who initially was kept away from these networks.⁷⁰

Korotkov was one of the many new people posted abroad by the now thirty-three-year-old second-year head of NKVD foreign intelligence, Pavel Fitin, whose directorate had managed to reestablish about forty Soviet intelligence stations abroad.⁷¹ “Corsican” introduced Korotkov to his friend Harro Schulze-Boysen (“Elder”). The Nordic-looking Schulze-Boysen (b. 1909) had campaigned as a youth against the Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany but also against the larger capitalist order; in 1933, SA Brownshirts had smashed his offices and scratched swastikas on his skin. His father was a decorated naval officer (the family was related to Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz) and his mother was friends with Göring; she got him a position in the air ministry (communications).^{72, 73} “Corsican” and “Elder,” as well as “Aryan” in parallel, cultivated some threescore strategically placed contacts across a variety of ministries, German industry, the Wehrmacht, and German intelligence—a penetration beyond belief in a totalitarian regime.

German counterintelligence had little sense of the true depth and breadth of Soviet intelligence penetration. But a buildup of the scope necessary to launch a monumental war against the USSR—construction of rail lines, roads, aerodromes, barracks; movement and storage of armaments, gasoline, troops—could never be concealed in any case. The tanks and building materials had to be carried on flat cars. The key, however, was not Germany’s war preparations—which, as British intelligence noted (January 31), were almost open—but Hitler’s intentions.⁷⁴ Here, the high command and the SS’s intelligence arm, the SD, engaged in a brilliant game of judo, using the power of Communism’s nonpareil spy networks against the USSR by pumping them with disinformation.⁷⁵ Stalin did not have an agent in Hitler’s innermost circle or personal staff who could have exposed the campaign of plausible falsehoods.

The forces being stationed along the Soviet frontier could be used against not just the USSR but also British possessions and clients. Back in July 1940, Hitler had told top generals that the buildup in the east would be passed off as training for a cross-Channel invasion of Britain, a story fed to lower-level German military commanders as well as foreign embassy staff. Plans were drawn up for the rapid movement of these troops westward, with false orders to prepare plans for travel. Detailed maps of Britain were supplied to the eastern units’ commanders and intelligence officers. English interpreters were assigned to the German units on the Soviet border. The falsehoods confused Germany’s own military at various levels. Once Hitler had postponed Sea Lion, in September 1940, a second rationale was put into play: preparation for an attack on British interests in the Balkans (Greece), the Mediterranean (Cyprus, Malta, Gibraltar), and the Near East (Egypt, Iraq, Palestine). Some top British intelligence officers had interpreted Germany’s entry into Romania (October 1940) precisely along these lines. The Germans demonstrably increased their intelligence gathering in the Near East, activity that was duly picked up by the British and made its way to Moscow.⁷⁶

Just such a “peripheral” strategy against Britain, originally invented by Jodl, was actually favored by some members of the Nazi hierarchy, such as Admiral Raeder and Ribbentrop, and by Mussolini, and throughout the spring of 1941 it retained its plausibility.⁷⁷ At the same time, a third, even more plausible rationale for the massive German troop concentrations in Eastern Europe was disseminated: that Hitler was going to use the buildup to intimidate Stalin into yielding territory. Stories of German supply shortages—which were real—encouraged the view that the Führer would demand “concessions.” Stalin began to get reports that the German troop buildup was prelude to an “ultimatum.” The ruse, which appears to have entered the Soviet intelligence bloodstream from Kobulov via “Lycée-ist,” soon reached the despot from so many sources, so far and wide, that it came to seem an article of faith. After all, it comported with Hitler’s modus operandi. It did seem to explain the buildup on the Soviet border (whose exact dimensions remained a matter of guesswork and dispute).⁷⁸ And the idea of an unprovoked war against the colossal Red Army was so preposterous that a giant bluff seemed more likely.⁷⁹

To believe—as Barbarossa secretly stipulated—that the troops were being positioned to launch a surprise attack against the USSR even before Britain had been defeated meant believing that Hitler would voluntarily open a second front. But as we saw, beginning with the December 14 message from “Lycée-ist,” Germany’s disinformation operation circulated statements attributed to the high command or Hitler himself that a two-front war against Britain and the USSR was impossible, suicidal.⁸⁰ In fact, Hitler reasoned that the only way to escape a two-front war was to knock out the Soviet Union before the United States joined Britain in a genuine war in the west.⁸¹

WARNINGS INTENSIFY