Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

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

In February 1941, Pavlov, commander of the frontline Western military district (Belorussia), asked Stalin for nearly 1 billion rubles for radio work, and another 650 million for rails and for mobilization of high school and college students to replace the republic’s dirt roads. Timoshenko answered that Stalin said, “We are not in a position to meet his fantastic proposals.” Zhukov, the new chief of staff, had been summoned to Stalin’s dacha on a Saturday evening to deliver a brief report, arranged by Timoshenko. In the company of the cronies, Zhukov and Timoshenko dined on thick borscht, stewed meats with buckwheat kasha, fruit, and compote, the kind of simple meal Stalin liked. As the conversation ranged over military needs, the despot relaxed, drinking Khvanchkara, a Georgian wine, joking, and exhibiting the cheerful mood that company often brought him. “Stalin said that we should think and work on the priority issues and bring them to the government for decisions,” Zhukov recalled. “But in this connection we need to work from our real possibilities and not fantasize about what we cannot produce in material terms.”⁸²

Even while constraining the military’s limitless demands, Stalin had his secretariat on the special Kremlin phone system, driving factories beyond their limit. Where were the chassis, the motors, the trucks, the tires for the Soviet Union’s mechanized divisions? The despot, meanwhile, also summoned aviation industry bosses to the Imperial Senate’s Sverdlov Hall, the venue for Central Committee plenums, to hash out the issues with the newest aircraft. He paced, gripping his pipe, listening, waiting for the experts to finish before taking the floor to note that the old planes were easier to fly but easier to knock out. “Then Stalin went through the main military aircraft of the air forces of Germany, England, France, and the United States,” aviation commissar Shakhurin recalled. “He spoke about their weaponry, carrying capacities, rate of climb, maximum altitude. He did all this from memory, without any notes, which surprised the specialists and aviators present.” Stalin instructed them to “study the new planes. Learn to perfection how to fly them, to use in war their advantages over the old planes in speed and weaponry. That’s the only way.”⁸³

From February 15 to 20, 1941, Stalin convoked the 18th party conference, where he got behind a further force-march of production, especially of MiG-3 aircraft, as well as the T-34 and KV tanks. A party conference involved less rigmarole than a party congress, but it afforded him a semblance of legitimacy to make changes to the Central Committee that only a congress could authorize. He also inserted several army officers into that body, characterizing them as “modern military personnel, with an understanding of the nature of modern warfare, not old-fashioned,” a reference to Timoshenko and Zhukov, in words recorded by the Comintern’s Dimitrov. “Stalin: ‘It is a shame we failed to single out such people before. We did not know our cadres well.’” The despot also “said of Golikov that as an intelligence agent, he is inexperienced, naïve. An intelligence officer ought to be like the devil: believing no one, not even himself.”⁸⁴

Stalin added three new candidate members to the politburo: Malenkov and two Zhdanov protégés, Nikolai Voznesensky, deputy head of state planning, who had a doctorate in economics, and Alexander Shcherbakov, who, while remaining party boss of Moscow province and city, was promoted to a Central Committee secretary and handed Zhdanov’s portfolio as chief of the agitation-and-propaganda directorate.⁸⁵ Stalin also removed the state security directorate from the NKVD and made it a self-standing commissariat (NKGB). Beria’s literate minion Merkulov remained in charge, now as a full-fledged commissar, and among Merkulov’s subordinates were mostly other Beria minions, starting with NKGB deputy commissar Bogdan “Bakhcho” Kobulov, whose brother Amayak remained in Berlin as the NKGB’s intelligence chief there.⁸⁶

The intelligence kept pouring in.⁸⁷ On February 28, 1941, the Berlin military intelligence station reported that “Alta” had learned from “Aryan,” who had spoken to a person in Reich marshal Göring’s inner circle, that German military officials were cocksure a war against the USSR would be launched in 1941. “Aryan” had been the one to deliver early word of Barbarossa’s existence, and the details he now supplied were as accurate as any that would emerge about the German plan: three army groups for attacks on the axes of Leningrad (under the command of Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb), Minsk-Smolensk-Moscow (Field Marshal Fedor von Bock), and Kiev (Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt). Russian-speaking officers had been deployed to the general staff of each group. Armored trains of special gauge, capable of using Soviet rail lines, were under construction. “Hitler intends to export from Russia about 3 million slaves, in order to bring his productivity capacities to full tilt,” “Alta” further relayed from “Aryan” and “he supposedly intends to divide the Russian colossus into 20–30 different states, without concern for the retention of all the economic links within the country.” The likely invasion date was given as May 20.⁸⁸

That was not the only kind of report Stalin was receiving, however. On March 1, 1941, Nikolai Lyakhterov (“Mars”), in Budapest, reported to Moscow that “everyone considers an attack by the Germans against the USSR at the present time unimaginable before the destruction of England. The military attachés of America, Turkey, and Yugoslavia emphasize that the German army in Romania is in the first instance directed against an English invasion of the Balkans and as a countermeasure, if Turkey or the USSR moves.” He added, “After the destruction of England the Germans will attack the USSR.”⁸⁹ That same evening, Colonel Grigory Yeremin (“Yeshenko”), the peasant-born (1904) military intelligence station chief in Bucharest under cover of embassy third secretary, reported to Moscow about a recent trip to Berlin by the Soviet agent Kurt Welkisch (“ABC”), now serving as press attaché of the German legation in Romania.⁹⁰ “In foreign ministry circles and the headquarters of the German command, where he had the opportunity to speak to some people, uncertainty prevails in the political and military position of Germany, just as lack of information does in Germany’s future intentions in the political and military spheres,” “Yeshenko” noted. “Everyone with whom [ABC] spoke expressed a different view on the plans and future course of developments in the present war.”⁹¹

All serious intelligence work involves sifting through an overwhelming flood of noise; almost never is anything “clean.” Rumormongering aims to amplify the cacophony; disinformation, to establish a false certainty. Stalin had no filter to wring out the hearsay and scrutinize the patterns of disinformation. Nor were the voluminous Soviet intelligence reports systematized anywhere. The NKGB did not even have an analytical department; military intelligence had had its department for analysis restored, but Stalin insisted on receiving the intelligence more or less directly, leaving the analytical work to himself.⁹² He obviously suspected that his adversaries were engaged in disinformation, but that suspicion, too, failed him. One of the core planks of the German whispering campaign was that Britain was trying to escape the war by provoking an armed German-Soviet clash. Stalin had assumed that for years, but now it colored his perception of all the intelligence suggesting that Hitler would attack.⁹³

To be sure, Stalin’s intelligence service was playing its own games, exaggerating American preparations for war against Germany and British strength in the Balkans.⁹⁴ But whereas Soviet deception efforts reflected Stalin’s thinking, not his adversary’s, Hitler’s disinformation caught Stalin’s thinking to a tee. Mostly, however, Soviet intelligence was spreading genuine arguments for Germany to abide by the 1939 bilateral nonaggression pact. Indeed, Stalin had little need for his own disinformation campaign. Just as in the case of Finland, only with infinitely more at stake, he was not trying to deceive. He was not seeking to cut a deal behind Hitler’s back with Churchill. He was trying to avoid war and attain a new deal with Hitler. In that context, Germany’s instigated chatter stressed that Germany’s top leadership was divided over whether to attack the USSR, and that any provocative acts by the Soviets could play into the hands of the “militarists.”

On March 6, 1941, the NKGB in Berlin reported that German economic functionaries were calculating the mother lode of raw materials and foodstuffs that could be expected from an occupation of the European part of the USSR, while the Wehrmacht was optimistic about seizing Ukraine in two to three weeks, thanks to the rail network there, and seizing Baku oil quickly as well. “Chief of staff Halder thinks that the Red Army is in no condition to mount the requisite opposition to the German forces’ lightning attack.”⁹⁵ On March 9, Samokhin, of military intelligence, reported out of Belgrade that, based on conversations with the minister of the court and the owner of Yugoslavia’s most widely read newspaper, Politika, “the German general staff has abandoned an attack on the British Isles, and been given as its next immediate task the seizure of Ukraine and Baku, which it is supposed to carry out in April or May,” and that “Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria are now preparing for this.”⁹⁶ On March 13, “Yeshenko” reported out of Bucharest that Germany intended to attack the USSR before defeating Britain. An SS officer who had arrived in Romania was heard to have boasted, “We’ll continue the battle against England with airplanes and submarines. But we have 10 million lads who are itching to fight and are bored. They are thirsting for a serious foe. Our military machine cannot be unoccupied.”⁹⁷ But on March 14, “Mars” reported, also out of Budapest, that a Hungarian official had summoned him to remonstrate that the rumors of pending war between Germany, Hungary, and Romania against the USSR were lies. “This is English propaganda. . . . Hungary wants to live in peace with the USSR. Germany has enough with the war with England, and is economically interested in peace with the USSR.”⁹⁸

Who had it right—before or after defeating Britain?

Hitler, through March 1941, had told only a few hundred people of Barbarossa. Germany’s formula for talks with Romania, Hungary, and Finland was not pending invasion but how the “protection of the East” was essential in order to “provide against surprises.”⁹⁹ Personnel in Göring’s air ministry were among the closest to the circles in the know, while Ribbentrop and the foreign ministry had not been directly apprised. But in early March 1941, Scheliha, the foreign ministry official with excellent military contacts, provided further information to “Alta,” who reported to Moscow that “there is a basis that speaks to an attack against Russia taking place in the nearest term (dates are named of May 15 to June 15). People are talking about a concentration of 120 divisions in Poland, about the placing of bombers at previously unoccupied aerodromes in East Prussia, intensive establishment of antiaircraft defenses in the eastern cities of Germany, all of which testifies to the preparation of some sort of extraordinary events.” She wrote that “Aryan” insisted that “exceptionally well-informed circles of the leading political and military officialdom report unanimously that an attack on the USSR will happen this year, namely before June.”

“Aryan” had added the most crucial detail: “the concentration of Soviet forces at the frontiers arouses here a certain disquiet. People are asking, are the Russians not noticing that something is getting ready against them, and do they not plan to preempt the German strike? Some express satisfaction at this concentration, since they think that the Russian army will not be in a condition to retreat quickly.”¹⁰⁰

RESPONDING TO THE GERMAN BUILDUP

On March 10, amid all the contradictory warnings, Stalin created a new body, the “bureau” of the Council of People’s Commissars. It consisted of the chairman, Molotov, and his deputies and could make decisions in the name of the full council (a prerogative Stalin himself had inserted in the decree).¹⁰¹ The despot also assigned Molotov a new first deputy chairman, Voznesensky, a member of the next generation whom Stalin advanced above Mikoyan and Kaganovich. “What shocked us about the composition of the bureau leadership was that Voznesensky became first deputy,” Mikoyan would recall later in life. “Stalin’s motives in this leapfrogging were incomprehensible. But Voznesensky in his naïveté was very pleased about his appointment.”¹⁰²

The next day, Roosevelt’s latest brainstorm to help Britain was signed into American law. Unlike Nazi Germany, the UK was not de facto bankrupt and had been buying American supplies and war matériel under a program known as cash and carry (paying up front and assuming responsibility for transportation). But Britain had begun to run low on cash, and Roosevelt introduced the idea of Lend-Lease (“An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States”), which allowed him to “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of, to any such government [whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States] any defense article.” The law soon would be applied to China, too. Hitler ordered stronger efforts “to bring Japan into active operations in the Far East as soon as possible,” so that “the focal point of the interests of the United States will be diverted to the Pacific.”¹⁰³

Also on March 11, 1941, a long-gestating refinement of the Soviet war plan was submitted. A month before, Zhukov, following his replacement of Meretskov as chief of staff, had ordered the chief of the operations directorate, Major General Alexander Vasilevsky, to revise the main mobilization orders (which dated to November 1937) that accompanied the war plan. Known as the Mobilization Plan for 1941 (MP-41), it was based upon a wartime strength of 300 fully equipped divisions, including 60 tank divisions, and 8.7 million troops—a doubling of the already recently doubled Red Army—which were to come into existence by January 1942.¹⁰⁴ Tactically, this mobilization plan for an army that did not yet exist in this size was based upon extreme forward defense and a quick Soviet counteroffensive (approximately two thirds of the divisions were to be stationed in the western military districts). MP-41 reflected Stalin’s vision of a possible war: all offense and all in, with wishful-thinking production targets for tanks and aircraft, little allotment for second- and third-echelon strategic reserves for a protracted battle, and the war not commencing this year.

Now, the new war plan itself, occupying some fifteen pages on defense commissariat stationery, in exquisite penmanship, was marked, as per custom, “Top Secret. Very Urgent. Exclusively Personal. The Only Copy.” Following the experience of the January war games, it reconfirmed Kiev as the main axis of hostilities, making explicit, unlike previous war plans, that “Germany will most likely deploy its main forces in the southeast, from Siedlce [in eastern Poland] to Hungary, in order to seize the Ukraine by means of a blow to Berdichev and Kiev.” This conclusion reflected the accumulating Soviet intelligence reports. But the southern axis was definitively assumed to be the main thrust of the German attack because the anticipated quick Soviet counteroffensive would have a far easier time navigating enemy territory below the Pripet Marshes. It traced the Soviets’ long-standing favored strike line, the so-called Lvov protrusion, on the Kraków-Katowice salient, where German defense lines were not as formidable as in East Prussia and where the terrain was conducive to tank armies.¹⁰⁵ Massed in Ukraine, Red Army forces, after blasting through, were to encircle, from behind, the German armies concentrated farther north, while severing links with Germany’s Balkan allies, oil, and foodstuffs farther south. The text, however, admitted that “the general staff of the Red Army does not possess documentary data on the plans of likely adversaries either in the West or in the East.”¹⁰⁶

Timoshenko and Zhukov discussed the draft at length in the Little Corner on March 17, with a large number of military and industrial officials, and again on the 18th in a narrower group. They had already beseeched Stalin for authorization to summon Soviet reservists immediately, to fill out the existing divisions in frontier districts. A decree approved the call-up of 975,870 reservists during the course of 1941, in phases, through the fall, but the despot insisted it be done quietly, under the pretext of training exercises. Troops were shipped in trains boarded up with plywood, and even the commanders did not know their points of disembarkation.¹⁰⁷ Beyond wanting to deny warmongers on the German side any excuse to attack, Stalin continued to adhere to the widespread belief that even though, in summer 1914, imperial Russia’s mobilization had been defensive and precautionary, it had inexorably led the country to war.¹⁰⁸

INHIBITIONS

Stalin was the only one in the Soviet regime to receive the full gamut of intelligence reports, but even he did not see everything. In the first half of 1941, Soviet military intelligence would receive 267 reports from its agents abroad and convey 129 of these to the military and political leadership.¹⁰⁹ (Beria at civilian intelligence might have been an even more consequential filter.) Functionaries in despotic systems often shrink from supplying the despot with information they know he will not welcome.¹¹⁰ After the terror, it took special courage or naïveté to bring Stalin news he did not want to hear.¹¹¹ On March 20, 1941, Golikov sent him one of the first systematic summaries by Soviet intelligence, this one concerning German forces and their dislocation. Tupikov, in Berlin, had produced a 100-page overview of Germany’s military.¹¹² Golikov’s summary conveyed Tupikov’s analysis of a large concentration of German forces near the frontier and concluded that, “according to the report of our military attaché in Berlin, we can expect the onset of military action against the USSR between May 15 and June 15.”

Knowing the despot’s beliefs firsthand, Golikov walked a fine line, writing that an attack would likely come “after victory over England or after the conclusion with her of an honorable peace for Germany.” He also wrote that “the majority of the espionage material concerning the possibilities of war with the USSR in the spring of 1941 emanates from Anglo-American sources whose aim today is doubtless to endeavor to worsen relations between the USSR and Germany.” Nonetheless, Golikov added, “considering the origins and development of fascism, and its aims—implementing the plans of Hitler that were laid out in full and flowery [exposition] in his book Mein Kampf—a short outline of all agent material in hand for the period July 1940–March 1941 to a degree deserves serious attention.” He sketched a simultaneous assault by three German army groups along three axes: north (Leningrad), center (Moscow), and south (Kiev). Here was the accurate picture of Barbarossa that had been reported by “Aryan.”¹¹³

While Pavel Fitin, of NKGB civilian intelligence, had no access to Stalin, reporting instead to Beria and Merkulov, Golikov did have to face the despot occasionally.¹¹⁴ All five of Golikov’s immediate predecessors had been executed. His March 20, 1941, summary, mangled with caveats, nonetheless constituted a bold step. But then, in his conclusion, Golikov repudiated his report’s vital content: “The rumors and documents attesting to the inevitability of war against the USSR this spring need to be assessed as disinformation coming from English and even perhaps German intelligence.”¹¹⁵

German planes were crossing Soviet frontiers at altitudes of seven miles, out of artillery range but perfect for photographing Soviet military installations and deployments. When confronted about their violations of Soviet airspace, the Germans would point to their military schools near the border and assert that trainee pilots were losing their way. “Elder,” in Göring’s air ministry, provided unique information, however, which the Berlin NKGB (March 24) reported to Moscow, about intensive compilations of Soviet targets, including bridges to cut the movement of reserves. “Photographs of Soviet cities and other objects are regularly coming into aviation HQ,” the report stated, and the German military attaché in Moscow was traveling around by car to verify the locations of Soviet electrical stations for bombing. “Officers at HQ have formed the opinion that military action against the USSR has been set for the end of April or early May. These dates are connected to a German intention to secure the harvest for themselves, calculating that Soviet forces under retreat will not be able to burn the green wheat.”¹¹⁶

Around this time, a German printer evidently provided the Soviet embassy in Berlin with a book, scheduled for a massive print run, with Latin transliterations of Russian phrases: “Where is the chairman of the collective farm?” “Are you a Communist?” “Hands up!”¹¹⁷

On March 28, at 5:00 p.m. Berlin time, Dekanozov’s secretary at the embassy received an anonymous tip: “Around May a war will begin against Russia,” the caller, speaking in German, stated, then hung up.¹¹⁸ In Moscow that same day, Stalin sought to squeeze ever more blood from a stone, convening the chemical industry bosses—the commissar, his deputies, factory directors—in the Little Corner. The Soviet Union had still not fully mastered production of tires from synthetic rubber, even though it had invented the latter.¹¹⁹ Stalin laced into Nikolai Patolichev, a peasant’s son (b. 1908) who had been orphaned at twelve, then started working at a factory and, following the terror, in 1939, became party boss of Yaroslavl province, site of the rubber industry. Patolichev, one of Stalin’s “new people,” had just become a full member of the Central Committee. “Stalin used sharp expressions and I honestly did not know how this conversation was going to end for me,” Patolichev would recall. “Stalin paced in silence, thinking. The minutes seemed incredibly long.” Finally the despot, smiling, announced the formation of a commission of Patolichev, Khrushchev, and Nikolai Bulganin to get the chemical commissariat to ramp up production.¹²⁰

BALKAN TREACHERY

Under very intense German pressure, Bulgaria had joined the Axis, alongside Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. This left just two nonaligned states in southeastern Europe: Greece, which was under military assault by Italy, and Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav regent, the Oxford-educated Prince Paul, who ruled for the seventeen-year-old King Petar II, was pressured into signing on to the Axis on March 25. Almost immediately thereafter, at 2:15 a.m. on March 27, 1941, Serbian air force officers overthrew him. Eden telegrammed “provisional authority” to the British envoy in Belgrade “to do what he thought fit to further a change of Government, even at the risk of precipitating a German attack.”¹²¹ But although Britain intelligence supported the coup, it was a Yugoslav initiative.¹²² A delighted Churchill, content to see the Serbs do the fighting, wrote that “Hitler had been stung to the quick.”¹²³ Golikov sent Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and Timoshenko a detailed report on March 28, 1940, claiming that “German circles were dumbfounded.”¹²⁴

Hitler fulminated against the British for pulling the strings, and in his fury, on that very day (March 27), he issued Directive No. 25, “to destroy Yugoslavia militarily and as a state.”¹²⁵ On March 30, some 250 field marshals, generals, admirals, and staff officers, seated by rank and seniority, secretly gathered for breakfast in the Great Hall of the New Reich Chancellery, where Hitler delivered a two-hour harangue laying out his case for an invasion of the USSR. “The Russian is inferior,” he stated. “The army is without leadership,” while “armament capacities [are] not very good.” Stalin, Hitler allowed, was “clever,” but the Soviet leader “had gambled on Germany’s bleeding to death in the autumn of 1939.” He emphasized that “this is a war of annihilation. If we do not grasp this, we shall still beat the enemy, but thirty years later we shall again have to fight the Communist enemy.” Captured commissars were to be “eliminated immediately by the troops.” Indeed, “one of the sacrifices which commanders have to make is to overcome any scruples they might have.”¹²⁶

German embassy staff in Belgrade were ordered to leave on April 2 (the ambassador had been recalled for consultations) and to warn “friendly” embassies to do likewise.¹²⁷ The Yugoslav minister in Moscow, Milan Gavrilović, effectively a Soviet agent, was instructed by Molotov to have a delegation come to Moscow immediately to conduct secret negotiations for a “military and political pact.”¹²⁸ Schulenburg, summoned to the Kremlin on April 4, warned Molotov that “the moment chosen by the Soviet Union for negotiation of such a treaty had been very unfortunate.” Molotov replied that Yugoslav accession to the Tripartite Pact with Germany could remain in force.¹²⁹ On April 4, “Sophocles” reported out of Belgrade on German troops massing on the border with Yugoslavia, and conversations to the effect of “Keep in mind that in May we’ll start a war against the USSR, and within seven days we’ll be in Moscow; while it is not too late, join us.”¹³⁰ Stalin knew what was coming: on April 5, “Alta” learned from “Aryan” of Germany’s imminent invasion of Yugoslavia and summoned her handler, Zaitsev (“Bine”), to a Berlin cinema; “Bine” hurried to the Soviet embassy to inform Tupikov (“Arnold”), who reported to Moscow that a German invasion of Yugoslavia would take place the next morning, April 6, and that Berlin was reckoning on the destruction of Yugoslavia in fourteen days.¹³¹

Molotov, Gavrilović, and two other members of the Yugoslav delegation, with Stalin present, signed a “treaty of friendship and non-aggression” (though not an alliance) in Molotov’s Kremlin office at around 3:00 a.m. on April 6.¹³² At the improvised banquet, which lasted until 7:00 a.m., Molotov promised armaments, munitions, and planes. When Gavrilović asked Stalin if he had heard the rumors of a pending invasion of the USSR, the despot put on a show of confidence. “Let them come,” he said. “We have strong nerves.”¹³³

Soviet radio announced the treaty that morning, and Izvestiya published it later that day, with oversized photographs. But before dawn, the Luftwaffe had already begun bombing Yugoslavia (between 3,000 and 4,000 civilians would be incinerated), and Wehrmacht ground forces—retrieved from the border with the Soviet Union—had burst across the Yugoslav frontier. At 4:00 p.m. Moscow time on the 6th, a Sunday, Schulenburg finally was able to read out to Molotov an official note regarding the German military action. “It was extremely deplorable that an expansion of the war turned out to be inevitable after all,” Molotov repeated several times, according to the German account.¹³⁴ When, a bit later that night, Gavrilović called on the foreign affairs commissar to discuss the promised war matériel—including antitank guns and aircraft—Molotov observed that there “would be a considerable delay in such deliveries as the Soviet Union might agree to make, and that there were serious transport problems.”¹³⁵

Stalin had evidently expected that a Balkan war in the rough mountainous terrain, against valiant Serbs, would last several months, bogging the Germans down long enough to render impossible a spring–summer invasion of the USSR and gifting him another year to prepare Soviet defenses.¹³⁶ By April 13, however, Wehrmacht troops had already seized Belgrade.¹³⁷ The Wehrmacht, while losing fewer than 200 dead, took more than 300,000 Yugoslav soldiers and officers prisoner. The Soviets effectively abandoned Yugoslavia’s Communists, the most powerful pro-Soviet movement remaining in Europe, to their own devices.

On April 12, the dramatist Vishnevsky was at the Kremlin in a small group to see Voroshilov for a discussion of a film based on one of his plays. Voroshilov observed that “Stalin said of the war, ‘The Germans are seizing the Balkans. They act boldly. The English send forces to the Balkans as if teasing the Yugoslavs and Greeks.’” Vishnevsky recounted, “We moved on to the Hitler theme: the guy turned out to be far smarter and more serious than we supposed. A great mind, strength. Let them fault him: a maniac, a ruffian, expansionist, and so on, but in fact, a genius, strength. We listened attentively. A sober assessment of the potential enemy.” Voroshilov continued: “There are rumors, indirect so far, that Hitler will move in the direction of Ukraine and the Caucasus. Either they are trying to intimidate or, perhaps”—here Vishnevsky noted that Voroshilov took a moment to reflect—“it is a fact. But the Red Army will present difficulties for him.” Vishnevsky concluded: “Voroshilov does not doubt our strength. But once more he underscored the complete unreliability of the English.”¹³⁸

Germany had also declared war on Greece on April 6, to rescue Mussolini’s failed invasion (launched back on October 28, 1940). German troops, pouring in via Bulgaria, halted a Greek offensive, and by April 27 the swastika rose over the Acropolis. Mussolini’s army had suffered 154,172 dead, wounded, and sick, and the Greek army about 90,000 casualties. German losses for Yugoslavia and Greece combined were 2,559 killed, 5,820 wounded, and 3,169 missing. While Italy occupied the Greek mainland and the Bulgarians hastily went into Thrace, German forces occupied Athens, Thessaloniki, central Macedonia, Crete, and other Aegean islands, taking 218,000 Greek and 9,000 British prisoners.¹³⁹ In both Greece and Yugoslavia, Hitler significantly overcommitted the forces needed to secure his right flank, adding to the impression that the German campaigns could be construed as part of a still operative “peripheral strategy” against Britain in the Mediterranean. The British position was certainly further imperiled by the Balkan conquests.¹⁴⁰ But the Soviet Union’s was even more so.

CHURCHILL TO STALIN

High frequencies had been introduced for wireless in the mid-1930s, and one result was that more and more ciphered diplomatic and military traffic was intercepted, albeit not always decoded. Remarkably, British intelligence, with valuable assistance from the Poles, had broken the German code machine, an upgrade in complexity to the commercially available Enigma system.¹⁴¹ Without letting on to his unique source, Churchill, on April 3, 1941, had seen fit to send a telegram to the British embassy in Moscow, instructing the ambassador, Cripps, to deliver it to Stalin personally. The context was the German pressure to force Yugoslavia to join the Axis. “I have sure information from a trusted agent,” Churchill wrote, “that when the Germans thought they had got Yugoslavia in the net, that is to say after March 20, they began to move three out of five panzer divisions from Romania to southern Poland. The moment they heard of the Serbian revolution this movement was countermanded. Your excellency will appreciate the significance of these facts.”¹⁴² Churchill, using terseness to maximize impact, meant to imply that Germany was much weaker than it seemed, as shown by its having to shift troops around, and that Stalin should take advantage of an opportunity to take on Germany while it was occupied in Yugoslavia and Greece (conveniently aiding the British position).¹⁴³

Cripps had long been convinced that the Germans would attack the Soviet Union, and that a British-Soviet alliance was necessary and possible. At a press conference for British and American journalists back on March 11, he had warned, off the record, that “Soviet-German relations are decidedly worsening. . . . A Soviet-German war is unavoidable.”¹⁴⁴ The NKGB, five days later, had reported his words.¹⁴⁵ Stalin also read the special “Red TASS” translations of the foreign press—available for the highest echelons of the party-state—and he could see how the British press openly mused about Ukraine serving as a “training ground” for German tanks, and the “inevitability” of a German-Soviet war.¹⁴⁶ For Stalin, Cripps’s statements, too, were yet another “British provocation” to instigate war. Cripps—despite his own stumbling—understood that Stalin would also see Churchill’s telegram in the same light, so he had not passed it on, advising London that Stalin was inundated with warnings and that Churchill’s too brief message, for a host of reasons, would be “not only ineffectual but a serious tactical mistake.” Churchill insisted he proceed.¹⁴⁷ Cripps had not been able to see Stalin since his first audience after being appointed ambassador; he could not even get to Molotov, so he handed the cryptic message to Vyshinsky, deputy foreign affairs commissar, on April 19, after Germany had effectively decided the fate of Yugoslavia and Greece.¹⁴⁸

Neither in the original cryptic text nor in the clumsy way it was communicated did Churchill “warn” Stalin of an impending German attack. On the contrary, the result proved worse than Cripps had feared, and he was the well-intentioned culprit. The day before, on April 18, Cripps, on his own initiative, had handed Vyshinsky a long memorandum addressed to Molotov (the only way he could communicate with him), which outlined the dilemmas facing the USSR, then issued a threat meant as an inducement toward rapprochement, to the effect that it was “not outside the bounds of possibility, if the war were protracted for a long period, that there might be a temptation for Great Britain (and especially for certain circles in Great Britain) to come to some arrangement to end the war.”¹⁴⁹

COUP DE MAIN

Yōsuke Matsuoka had embarked on the first trip outside the empire by a Japanese foreign minister since 1907, a six-week sojourn that brought him to Moscow (twice), Berlin (twice), Rome, and Vichy. Sorge, based on a conversation between Ozaki, Sorge’s informant, and Prime Minister Konoe, had delivered the inside story: Matsuoka was to determine whether Hitler intended to invade Britain or not—Konoe feared a German-British deal—and was given wide latitude to conclude a bilateral pact with the USSR.¹⁵⁰ Stalin found Japan’s authoritarianism difficult to fathom, with its myriad centers of power, ostensibly rogue military commanders, and a mystifying emperor system (a “god” who reigned but did not exactly rule). What he did know was that the Japanese foreign ministry was now the one offering the USSR a nonaggression pact, hoping to exact a Soviet promise to cease aiding Chiang Kai-shek. But the Soviets would agree to sign only if Japan returned Southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands; otherwise, they suggested a neutrality pact, provided Japan would relinquish its oil and coal leases on Soviet-controlled Northern Sakhalin. The Japanese had asked the Soviets to sell them Northern Sakhalin. “Is that a joke?” Molotov responded.

Having ascertained the Soviet bottom line, Matsuoka departed Moscow. In Berlin, Ribbentrop tried to dissuade him from signing any conclusive agreement with the USSR. Matsuoka, for his part, learned definitively that the Nazis would not be invading Britain—Japan would be on its own in taking on the Anglo-Americans—but that an invasion of the USSR was in the cards. He played a double game with the Germans regarding Japan’s intentions, payback for the 1939 surprise Hitler-Stalin Pact.¹⁵¹

On his way home, Matsuoka returned to Moscow on the day Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece. Soviet negotiators were still demanding territorial concessions. Stalin intervened, receiving the Japanese on April 12 at the Near Dacha—unprecedented for a foreigner. The two evidently shared a rant against Britain and the United States. In the Kremlin the next day, Molotov and Matsuoka signed a neutrality pact vowing “to maintain peaceful and friendly relations” and remain neutral should either of them “become the object of hostilities on the part of one or several third powers.”¹⁵² It had taken eighteen months of talks about fishing rights and territories. In a separate declaration, the USSR recognized the territorial integrity of Manchukuo; Japan, of Mongolia.¹⁵³ Stalin would continue to aid China militarily.¹⁵⁴ A lubricated feast was laid on. With the Japanese foreign minister scheduled to depart that same day (April 13), the 4:55 p.m. Trans-Siberian was held up.

After Matsuoka had arrived at Moscow’s Yaroslavl Station, Stalin, in full view of the diplomatic corps, appeared, striding down the platform in his long military-style overcoat to see him off. An evidently tipsy despot placed his arms around the German ambassador, Schulenburg, telling him, “We should remain friends, and now you need to do everything for that!” When Stalin spotted a six-foot-tall German in full dress uniform (acting military attaché Colonel Hans Krebs), he tapped him on the chest. “German?” he asked. After an affirmative reply, Stalin slapped him on the back, took Krebs’s hand in both of his, and said, “We’ll remain friends, no matter what.” Krebs answered loudly: “I am convinced of that.” The schoolmarmish Molotov, staggering a few paces behind Stalin, “kept saluting all the time, shouting the motto of the Soviet scouts: “I am a Pioneer, I am [always] ready.” Stalin, escorting Matsuoka to his carriage, was heard to say, “We shall organize Europe and Asia.”¹⁵⁵

MASTER OF CEREMONIES

On April 18, Fitin sent Merkulov a report from “Lycée-ist” out of Berlin, conveying that an inside source had told him that Göring’s inner circle “was very worried about the problem of grain reserves in Germany,” especially after supplying 2 million tons to Spain and 1.5 million to France. “On its territory Germany cannot gather the quantity of wheat necessary to meet its minimal needs in 1941–1942. . . . It must seek new sources for wheat. According to German calculations, ‘an independent Ukrainian state,’ governed by Germans, with German organization and technology, can in the next two years not only meet the needs of Germany but satisfy the needs of the European continent.”¹⁵⁶ Did this mean outright seizure of Ukraine, or a demand for a “lease”? On April 20, “Yeshenko” reported from Bucharest on the movement of German troops from Yugoslavia back toward the Soviet frontier in Romania, and Antonescu’s increasing war preparations to retrieve Bessarabia.¹⁵⁷

The next day saw the annual commemoration of Lenin’s death at the Bolshoi and the culmination of a Ten-Day festival of Tajik art (April 12–21, 1941) in Moscow, involving some 750 participants.¹⁵⁸ Stalin attended the Tajik ballet Du Gul (“Two Roses”) and the concert finale at the Bolshoi, lingering after the performance until 2:00 a.m. He hosted the Tajik delegation on April 22 at the Kremlin, regaling attendees with stories about Matsuoka and Lenin. “We are . . . the students of the great Lenin,” the despot told the Tajiks. “I, as a Bolshevik, must say it is necessary to remember this man, who trained us, forged us, led us, made us into people, taught us not to know fear in struggle.” Stalin continued: “He created a new ideology of humanity, an ideology of friendship and love among peoples, equality among races. An ideology that holds one race above others and calls for other races to be subordinated to that race is a moribund ideology; it cannot last long.” After this reference to Nazism, Stalin concluded that “the Tajik people is a distinctive one, with an old, rich culture. It stands higher than the Uzbeks and Kazakhs.”¹⁵⁹

Stalin finished with the Tajiks around midnight and proceeded to host a banquet for the winners of the new Stalin Prize. There were some seventy-five in industrial processes and design, including Alexander Yakovlev and Sergei Ilyushin (aircraft design) and Alexei Favorsky (synthetic rubber), more than forty in science, including Nikolai Burdenko (surgery), Ivan Vinogradov (mathematics), Pyotr Kapitsa (physics), and Trofim Lysenko (agricultural sciences), and more than one hundred in the arts: Grigory Alexandrov, Isaac Dunayevsky, and Lyubov Orlova (for the musicals Circus and Volga-Volga); Sergei Eisenstein (for Alexander Nevsky, which was still not being shown on screens); Mikhail Romm and his collaborators (Lenin in October); the composer Aram Khachaturyan (a violin concerto); Mark Reizen, the opera singer; Shostakovich (a piano quintet); novelist Mikhail Sholokhov; Aleksei Tolstoy for Peter the Great; Olga Lepeshinskaya, for ballet; Vera Mukhina, the hammer-and-sickle sculptor; Uzeyir Hajibeyov, for the opera Koroglu; Alla Tarasova, the theater actress; the crooner Ivan Kozlovsky (“On a Moonlit Night”); Alexander Gerasimov, for the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin; and Mikheil Gelovani, the actor who played Stalin. The cash components were enormous (up to 100,000 rubles for Stalin Prize “first class,” 50,000 for “second”).¹⁶⁰

The celebration lasted until 7:00 a.m. “The whole time Stalin was unusually animated, cheerful, hospitable,” according to the court dramaturge Nikolai Virtá (Karelsky), who won a Stalin Prize for his novel Solitude. “No one escaped his attention; he spoke with this one and that, laughing and joking, sharing his cigarettes with the smokers, praising one of the guests who declared he does not smoke.” Films were shown, including Volga-Volga, which Stalin knew by heart; he sat next to a Tajik actress. Alexandrov, the director, in answer to Stalin’s query, revealed that Orlova, his actress wife, had had her voice dubbed for the singing. “She has a remarkable voice; we need to think about how to afford her wide possibilities for the realization of her talent,” Stalin said. Virtá wrote that the leader “proposed that everyone dance; he listened to a famous singer and applauded his rumbling bass.” Stalin “spoke about Hamlet with the actors of the Moscow Art Theater, about politics and literature, about the construction of one factory, about films and songs, about international affairs.”¹⁶¹

AMERICA’S WARNINGS

The Americans, too, had learned the world’s most important secret. A high German economic official from Weimar days, Erwin Respondek, who had been tasked with preparing the currency for the occupied Soviet Union, arranged meetings with the U.S. commercial attaché in a darkened cinema and passed him word of the invasion planning. In early 1941, Respondek had prepared the first of several detailed memoranda for the United States outlining the steps being taken for the destruction of the Soviet Union and “a rigorous liquidation of Bolshevism, all its political and other institutions, and, in particular, the ‘extermination’ of its leaders by the SS.” Respondek, whose key contact was General Halder, had proved a reliable source till now, but officials in Washington were beginning to suspect that he was a plant. After internal debate, Roosevelt had undersecretary of state Sumner Welles tell Konstantin Umansky, the Soviet envoy in Washington, that the United States “has come into possession of information which it regards as authentic, clearly indicating that it is the intention of Germany to attack the Soviet Union.” Umansky blanched. He promised to convey the information to Moscow—and promptly informed the German ambassador to Washington (whether under Moscow’s instructions or in order to score points by anticipating Kremlin wishes). On March 1, 1941, after further secret reports prepared by Respondek, Welles tried once more to warn Umansky about the coming invasion. His last effort took place on March 20.¹⁶²

U.S. intelligence had been able to confirm Respondek’s tips, for they had broken Japanese codes in September 1940 and, after Major General Hiroshi Ōshima, Japan’s onetime ambassador to Berlin, had been returned to the Nazi capital, thanks to Matsuoka, the Americans gleaned a mother lode of intelligence: the staunchly pro-German Ōshima, who spoke the language nearly perfectly, was taken into the confidences of Ribbentrop and Hitler. (Ōshima had been able, in February, to present his credentials at the Berghof.) In April 1941, U.S. cryptographers finished decoding long messages sent from Matsuoka’s late-March visit with Hitler. “Göring was outlining to Ōshima Germany’s plans to attack Russia . . . , giving the number of planes and numbers and types of divisions to be used for this drive and that,” recalled one of the cryptographers. “I was too excited for sleep that night.” The United States passed additional warnings to Umansky. But he would tell the press that “information presented to the Soviet Union in London and Washington is aimed at provoking a conflict between Germany and the USSR.”¹⁶³

ATTEMPTED DETERRENCE

Dekanozov, from Berlin, sent the foreign ministry a special report in April 1941 noting that rumors and information about a pending war between the USSR and Germany “are coming to us every day from various channels” and calling the pressure a deliberate “war of nerves.” Listing a dozen or so examples, he stated that the goal of Germany was “an attack on the USSR already during the course of the current war against England.”¹⁶⁴ On April 15, in the area of Rovno, in western Ukraine, after one German reconnaissance plane performed a forced landing, the crew was found to possess “a camera, some rolls of used film, and a torn topographical map . . . of the USSR, all of which gives evidence of the crew’s aim.” The NKGB detained four officers in leather coats lacking insignias; supposedly, they had been unable to destroy their film in time. Once developed, it showed bridges and rail lines along the Kiev axis, while the map turned out to be of Ukraine’s Chernigov province. It was as if the Germans wanted the Soviets to believe that Ukraine was their main target.¹⁶⁵

On April 21, the Soviet foreign affairs commissariat protested German violations of its airspace—some eighty incidents over the preceding three weeks alone. The German chargé d’affaires, Werner von Tippelskirch, who received the diplomatic note, warned Berlin “to expect likely serious incidents if German airplanes continue to violate Soviet borders.”¹⁶⁶ He was dead wrong. Stalin had begun to unblock shipments to Germany in mid-April—Soviet oil deliveries doubled from the previous month—signaling that the Germans could get what they needed without war (or, conversely, that if Hitler attacked, he would lose the valued goods the Soviets were supplying).¹⁶⁷ Stalin also abruptly ended Soviet objections to the German position demanding small changes to their common border.¹⁶⁸ To be sure, the despot understood that too many concessions would be perceived as weakness. And so, by not interdicting German overflights, he was effectively allowing the Germans to see what they would face.¹⁶⁹

“We must hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” Chamberlain had said of appeasement, which would have been a good idea, especially if he had done what he said and pursued both rearmament and diplomacy, but the former remained very partial.¹⁷⁰ Stalin pursued rearmament vigorously. As a result, the Soviet people stood in queues for hours upon hours to obtain necessities, and often they could still not meet their minimum needs.¹⁷¹ Germany had shown the Soviets their military production facilities, where the Soviets shopped as part of their bilateral trade agreement. Stalin, under no obligation to reciprocate, since the Germans were buying raw materials, nonetheless showed them Soviet military factories. He allowed a tour of the chief aviation factories, including the one building the Petlyakov Pe-8 bombers, which caused a sensation: it had a longer range than the German Junkers.¹⁷² In April 1941, during a visit to one such factory, the aircraft designer Artyom Mikoyan told Schulenburg—who, as expected, passed the words on to Berlin that same month—“You saw the awesome technology of the Soviet country. We will bravely repel any strike no matter where it might emanate from.”¹⁷³

Stalin was demonstrating not just his willingness to bargain, but also his possession of a mighty arsenal and weapons-manufacturing capacity.¹⁷⁴ “They let us see everything,” Krebs, the Russian-speaking German deputy military attaché in Moscow, wrote to Berlin in the middle of a tour of the five biggest Soviet aviation factories. “Clearly Russia wants to frighten possible aggressors.”¹⁷⁵ Schulze-Boysen (“Elder”), the spy in the Nazi air ministry, reported that “the Germans did not expect to encounter such well-organized and functioning industry. A number of the objects shown to them proved to be a big surprise. For example, the Germans did not know about the existence of a 1,200-horsepower plane engine. . . . A big impression was made by the mass of more than 300 I-18 planes. . . . The Germans did not suppose that in the USSR the serial production of such planes in such high numbers had been established.” Krebs concluded that the German general staff “was depressed.”¹⁷⁶ Stalin’s spies also told him that German war games had revealed to the German general staff the logistical problems of waging a prolonged war against the Soviets, and, in parallel, he ordered that Hitler’s military attaché be taken deep into the Soviet rear to be shown the mass production of T-34 tanks.¹⁷⁷

But Hitler, once apprised, was reinforced in his view that the USSR was arming on a massive scale and needed to be attacked before it was too late.¹⁷⁸ At the same time, whereas Germany’s military intelligence had had next to no useful information about the Red Army’s armaments or troop locations before it ramped up high-altitude reconnaissance flights, in January 1941, now they had it in abundance.¹⁷⁹

CACOPHONY

In Berlin, fewer and fewer German businessmen were appearing at the Soviet trade mission. The NKVD reported that over the past year and a quarter, it had captured 66 German spy handlers and 1,596 German agents, including 1,338 in western Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics, with hundreds of incidents of live fire at the border. Over the first four months of 1941, at least 17,000 trains were reported to have ferried German troops and heavy weapons to Soviet frontiers.¹⁸⁰ Was it certain war? Internally, the British had dismissed the intelligence regarding Hitler’s preparations for a war against the Soviet Union, but now, thanks to the Enigma decoding, they had discovered that Hitler was ordering more and more of the Luftwaffe transferred eastward, away from bombing sites for the UK. Still, the British attributed the eastern buildup to a “war of nerves” being waged to force concessions from Stalin.

Stalin knew that the Germans had ceased using the Trans-Siberian to transport their diplomatic pouches to and from Tokyo, and Sorge reported (April 17) that the Germans would also cease to use the Trans-Siberian for the import of critical rubber from Japan. But Sorge undercut this message, noting that “the tension in relations between Germany and the USSR was decreasing,” which meant the Germans might not follow through on their intention to cease using the Trans-Siberian. He also wrote of supposed factionalism within Nazi ruling circles and suggested that the “pro-war faction” had not gained ascendancy. Sorge added: “The German embassy [in Tokyo] received a telegram from Ribbentrop stating that Germany would not launch a war against the USSR if the latter did not provoke it. But if the war turned out to be provoked, then it would be short and end with the severe defeat of the USSR. The German general staff has completed all preparations.”¹⁸¹

On April 22, Sándor Radó (“Dora”), a Hungarian Communist and Soviet military intelligence operative, reported from Geneva a date of June 15 for an attack on Ukraine. On April 23, Stalin and Molotov decreed the formation of large numbers of new artillery and parachute units with forced production of equipment.¹⁸² The next day, Stalin phoned Ilya Ehrenburg to tell him that the second and third parts of his anti-German novel, The Fall of Paris, would now be published. Only four days earlier, Ehrenburg had been informed that the censor had rejected it.¹⁸³ Rumors spread that the despot had personally approved the antifascist book.¹⁸⁴ On April 25, Golikov estimated the presence of 100 German divisions on the USSR’s western frontiers, an increase from the previous month. On April 25–26, some three and a half months into his work, Tupikov sent a long message to Golikov on Germany’s buildup in the east, stating plainly that the Soviets were the “next enemy” in German war planning, and that “the timing for the beginning of a conflict could possibly be near and, for sure, during the course of this year.”¹⁸⁵

A worried Schulenburg, in mid-April, had engaged his staff to draft a long memorandum arguing against a titanic war and, with the facilitation of Ribbentrop and Weizsäcker, who also thought the war a mistake, had traveled to Berlin, but Hitler put off seeing him for two weeks. Finally, on April 28, the Führer granted an audience. Schulenburg’s memo was sitting on Hitler’s desk (he made no mention of it). Schulenburg evidently stated that “Stalin was prepared to make even further concessions to us,” including ramping up to 5 million tons of grain the next year. In fact, Mikoyan could barely find, let alone transport, 2.5 million tons of grain, and it was not clear how the Germans could pay for more grain without yielding vital armaments. Hitler, noncommittal and discourteous, said at parting, “Oh, one more thing: I do not intend a war against Russia!”¹⁸⁶

In London, Maisky was effectively paralyzed by Stalin’s position vis-à-vis Britain. On April 30, Churchill’s private secretary told the Soviet envoy, “In Conservative circles, one hears the following argument. If Germany attacks the Soviet Union (as many now believe will happen), the USSR will come to us of its own accord. If Germany does not attack the USSR, it will do nothing for us anyway. So is it worth courting the USSR?” Maisky burst out laughing.¹⁸⁷

That same day, “Elder” reported to Moscow, based on conversations in Göring’s air ministry with the liaison to the foreign ministry, that “the question of the German attack against the USSR has been definitively decided and its onset can be expected any day. Ribbentrop, who until now had not been a supporter of an offensive against the USSR, knowing Hitler’s firm resolve on this question, has taken the position of support for an attack on the USSR.”¹⁸⁸ “Elder” was spot-on: that very day, Hitler settled on a date fifty-three days hence—June 22.

Neither the German invasion of Greece (“Marita”) to compensate for Mussolini’s failures nor of Yugoslavia (Operation “25”) had a material effect on Barbarossa. Many of the divisions earmarked to take part in the Balkans never saw fighting; some were never even sent. Before May was over, all German units that had taken part in the Balkan campaign were back at their positions on the Soviet border.¹⁸⁹ The delay by about five weeks from the original target stemmed mostly from deficits of key equipment in what, after all, was a colossal undertaking. Indeed, “Corsican” had reported (April 28) that Germany was experiencing severe shortages—and therefore would need to expand economic relations with Japan and the Soviet Union, in the latter case “by force.” He had heard one top German official state that “the Russians must supply Germany with more raw materials and foodstuffs, without demanding that Germany had to fulfill Soviet orders exactly or by short deadlines.”¹⁹⁰ “Elder,” too, reported the possibility of Germany engaging in blackmail. The ultimatum canard—which never formed part of Hitler’s plans—had contaminated even the best-placed, most reliable Soviet spies.¹⁹¹

NO ARMY IS INVINCIBLE

On May 4, Hitler delivered a peroration to the Reichstag detailing how he had smashed Poland, Norway, Belgium, Holland, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. “The German armed forces have truly surpassed even themselves,” he bragged. “Infantry, armored, and mountain divisions, as well as SS formations, battled without rest, in bravery, endurance, and tenacity to achieve their goals. The work of the general staff has been outstanding. The air force has added new heroic deeds to its historic glory. . . . Nothing is impossible for the German soldier!” He concluded: “The German Reich and its allies constitute a power that no coalition in the world can surpass. German armed forces will unremittingly intervene in the course of events whenever and wherever it will be required.”¹⁹²

The signals were getting even more confounding.¹⁹³ In Tokyo, the day after Hitler spoke, Japanese foreign minister Matsuoka reassured German ambassador Ott that “no Japanese prime minister or foreign minister could ever be able to maintain Japan neutrality in the event of a conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union. In such an event, Japan, naturally, would be compelled to attack Russia right behind Germany.”¹⁹⁴ That would have violated the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, and it did not comport with Japan’s internal deliberations. That same day, a dispatch from “Corsican” in Berlin went to Moscow indicating that a press person from the German economics ministry had told the staff that Germany wanted peace on its eastern frontiers, for it would soon attack the British-controlled Suez Canal. Germany would demand that the USSR attack Britain on the side of the Axis, and, as a guarantee that Moscow would follow through, Germany was going to occupy Ukraine and possibly the Baltics.¹⁹⁵

Stalin decided to send some signals of his own. Also on May 5, 1941, at 6:00 p.m., Timoshenko opened the graduation ceremony in the Grand Kremlin Palace’s combined Andreyev-Alexander hall (the venue for party congresses) for sixteen military academies and nine military departments in civil institutions, with some 1,500 attendees, including professors as well as defense commissariat, government, and Comintern personnel. The graduates had entered the academies in 1937 or 1938. When Timoshenko announced that Stalin would take the dais, the eruption would not die down until the despot glanced at Timoshenko, who quieted the hall. “Comrades, permit me in the name of the Soviet government and the Communist party to congratulate you on the completion of your studies and wish you success in your work,” Stalin began, going on to underscore, over the course of forty minutes, the enormous strides in the Red Army’s material base. But he criticized the academies’ curriculum. “I have an acquaintance who studied at the Artillery Academy,” Stalin noted. “I looked over his notes and discovered that a great deal of time is being spent studying cannons that were decommissioned in 1916.” This acquaintance was his elder son, Yakov, who was in the audience. “Is it like that, comrade artillerymen?” Shockingly, Lieutenant General Arkady Sivkov, head of the Artillery Academy, shouted from one of the front rows that the school’s curriculum was based on modern weaponry. “I ask that you do not interrupt me,” Stalin answered. “I know what I am saying. I read the notes of a student of your academy.”¹⁹⁶

Stalin devoted most of his remarks to the Red Army’s technological transformation. “Now we have 300 divisions in the army,” he asserted. “Of the total number of divisions, a third are mechanized. That is not general knowledge, but you need to know it. Of the 100 [mechanized] divisions, two thirds are tank [divisions].” Someone in the hall shouted, “This is for the removal of Hitler.”¹⁹⁷ Stalin’s numbers corresponded to the wishful thinking in MP-41 (all supposed to be in place somehow by January 1942).¹⁹⁸ The despot went on to boast that the newest aircraft were faster than ever and that frontline tanks had armor three to four times thicker and could “break through the front.” He also addressed the questions on everyone’s mind. “Why was France defeated, and Germany victorious?” he asked. “Is Germany really invincible? . . . Why did Germany turn out to have a better army? This is a fact. . . . What explains it?” Germany, he answered, had rearmed with the latest technology, and studied the new methods of war and the lessons of history. “The German army, having been soundly defeated in 1918, studied up,” he explained. “The German army’s military doctrine advanced. The army rearmed with the newest technology. It studied the newest methods of conducting war.” By contrast, he said, the previously victorious French got complacent. Stalin added one revealing observation: “In 1870, the Germans smashed the French. Why? Because they fought on one front. The Germans suffered defeat in 1916–1917. Why? Because they fought on two fronts.”¹⁹⁹

Stalin insisted that the current German army was not invincible. “There are no invincible armies in the world. . . . Germany started the war and initially did so under slogans of liberation from the Versailles peace. These slogans were popular, elicited support and sympathy from all those humiliated by Versailles. . . . Now the German army has . . . altered the slogan of liberation from Versailles to conquest. The German army will not be successful under a slogan of a war of conquest and annexation. . . . While Napoleon conducted a war under slogans of liberation from serfdom, he elicited support, sympathy, had allies, success. When Napoleon switched to wars of conquest, he accumulated many enemies and suffered defeat.” Stalin added: “In military terms, there is nothing special about the German army, neither in tanks, artillery, nor aviation.” Still, he concluded, “any politician, any political figure, who allows a feeling of self-satisfaction can succumb to surprise, like the catastrophe that befell France.”²⁰⁰

“It was a fantastic speech,” the government notetaker, an attendee, wrote in his diary. “The speech radiated confidence in our military people, in our strength, and dispersed the ‘aura’ of glory that enveloped the German army.”²⁰¹

A banquet followed in the St. George’s Hall, with overflow in the Palace of Facets, the St. Vladimir Octagon, and other spaces (where the toasts, broadcast over loudspeakers, were barely audible).²⁰² Timoshenko triumphantly entered the white-columned St. George’s; then, a bit later, came Stalin, followed by his entourage, provoking thunderous hurrahs. Vodka, champagne, fish, game, and myriad delicacies were laid out. The despot assumed his customary place at the Presidium table. Timoshenko proposed a toast to him; everyone downed their glasses standing.²⁰³ Stalin, Dimitrov noted, “was in an exceptionally good mood.”²⁰⁴ The despot offered an extended toast to the graduates and their teachers, again enjoining them to teach the new technology. Those in the St. George’s Hall stepped forward to clink glasses with the inner circle and marshals at the Presidium table.²⁰⁵ Some fifteen minutes later, Timoshenko announced that Stalin would make a second toast. This one turned out to be for those in artillery, which he called “the main force in war. That’s how it was earlier, that’s how it is today. . . . Artillery is the god of war.”²⁰⁶ Stalin continued, toasting tank drivers, aviators, cavalry, communications specialists, and infantry, whom he called “the lord of the battlefield.”

The evening’s concert commenced. Some twenty minutes later, Sivkov, evidently hoping to make amends, proposed a toast “to the Stalinist foreign policy of peace.” The despot waved his arms; the guard detail blocked Sivkin from moving forward. Then Stalin rose. As recently as the reception for the May Day parade (May 2), Timoshenko, in Stalin’s presence, had referred to the Soviet “peace policy,” a reference included in the newspaper account.²⁰⁷ But now, in his third comment of the evening, an agitated Stalin, his Georgian accent more pronounced, interjected, “Allow me to introduce a correction. A peace policy secured peace for our country. A peace policy is a good thing. For a while we conducted a defensive approach—until we rearmed our army, gave it modern means of fighting. But now that we have restructured the army, saturated it with the equipment for modern combat, now that we have become strong, now it is time to go from defense to offense. . . . We need to reconstruct our education, our propaganda, agitation, our press in an offensive spirit. The Red Army is a modern army, and a modern army is an army of offense.”²⁰⁸ Having that night accused Germany (rather than Britain and France) of starting the war, and having declared that Germany’s war of conquest would fail, Stalin, according to some witnesses, also stated—in a phrase excised from the informal transcript—that “there’s going to be war, and the enemy will be Germany.”²⁰⁹

EXCHANGE OF LETTERS?

Stalin’s last major speech on foreign policy, at the 18th Party Congress (March 1939), had been published in an enormous print run, but this time Pravda reported only that he had stressed “the profound changes in the Red Army in the past few years,” especially its rearming and reorganization “on the basis of modern war.” The brief account fanned rumors. (The German embassy failed to obtain the contents, until fed them by Soviet counterintelligence.)²¹⁰ Immediately after the evening, Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Shcherbakov oversaw meetings to introduce slogans of “offensive war” in propaganda. Red Star, the army newspaper, was to undermine the myth of German invincibility by publishing articles about German tactical and strategic shortcomings, and French weakness and mistakes.²¹¹ Stalin complemented these continued efforts to deter Nazi Germany, while also boosting Red Army morale, with an even bigger gesture: Soviet newspapers also announced his appointment as head of government.

The despot had recently sent the inner circle an angry note, complaining about a decision that Molotov had signed off on in relation to an oil pipeline for Sakhalin. Suddenly, the long-standing method of approving decisions by polling became “chancellery red tape and bungling.” Stalin complained about the absence of meetings in economic decision making, Molotov’s bailiwick (previously the despot had complained about an excess of meetings). “I think it is no longer possible to carry on ‘running things’ like this,” he wrote. “I suggest we discuss the matter at the politburo.”²¹² At the next politburo session, on May 4, Stalin had been unanimously voted to replace Molotov as head of the Council of People’s Commissars. He also remained general secretary of the party, with Zhdanov as his formal party deputy, and Molotov remained foreign affairs commissar.²¹³ But Voznesensky, the Zhdanov protégé, continued as first deputy of the government and, as a result, outranked Molotov (a mere deputy).²¹⁴ Beyond his frustrations, Stalin had signaled, in the words of Sudoplatov, that he was “ready for negotiations and that this time he would lead them directly.”²¹⁵

But how? The German press (on Goebbels’s instruction) carried no mention of the sensational news of Stalin’s assumption of the premiership.²¹⁶ Dekanozov, who had been unable to engage Hitler, was called back from Berlin to Moscow “for consultations.” During the May Day parade, Stalin had placed him front and center on the Lenin Mausoleum, a message to the Germans that Schulenburg picked up.²¹⁷ But the despot had been waiting upon Schulenburg’s return from his meeting with Hitler, expecting him to bring proposals, and although the count had conspicuously arrived (April 30) on Ribbentrop’s personal plane, he did not even call on the Kremlin. In a May 2 coded telegram from Moscow, Schulenburg complained to the German foreign ministry that he could not fulfill his assignment to tamp down the rumors about a pending war between Germany and the Soviet Union. “Everyone coming to Moscow or traveling through Moscow not only is bringing these rumors, but can confirm them by citing facts.”²¹⁸ More important was the information brought back from Moscow by acting military attaché Hans Krebs (substituting for Köstring, who had contracted severe pneumonia). Krebs, in Berlin on May 5, told chief of staff Halder that “Russia will do anything to avoid war and yield on every issue short of making territorial concessions.”²¹⁹

That same day, however, an ostensible breakthrough occurred: Schulenburg hosted Dekanozov at his single-story villa on Clean Lane for breakfast. The deputy foreign affairs commissar was accompanied by Vladimir Pavlov, the interpreter (who was now director of the German desk at the foreign affairs commissariat); also present was the Russian-speaking Hilger. The count told his Soviet interlocutors that relations needed to be improved; too many rumors were circulating about war. He discussed the May 4 speech by Hitler, mentioning that the Führer had found the Soviet-Yugoslav Pact “strange,” and noted that Hitler had pointed out that Balkan developments had compelled him to “undertake some precautionary measures on the eastern border of Germany,” because his “life experience had taught him to be extremely cautious, and the events of the past few years had made him even more cautious.” Schulenburg returned several times to the need to quell the rumors of war, but he offered no ideas about how to stop them; Hilger interceded to suggest they meet again.²²⁰

On May 7, the Soviet military intelligence agent Gerhard Kegel (“X”), deputy head of the economics section at the German embassy in Moscow, met twice with his handler, Konstantin Leontyev (“Petrov”), reporting that Germany’s “high command has given the order to complete readiness of the war theater and concentrate all forces in the East by June 2, 1941.” In one of his more than 100 communications about German war preparations, “X” gave the number of German and allied troops as 2 million in East Prussia, 3 million in former Poland, and 2 million in Hungary and the Balkans—7 million total—and insisted that the decision for war had been taken, irreversibly.²²¹

On May 9, “Elder” reported that “in the headquarters of German aviation, preparations for an operation against the USSR are being conducted at a reinforced pace. All data testify to the fact that an attack is set for the near future. In conversations among officers of the headquarters, May 20 is often mentioned as a date for the onset of war against the USSR. In these same circles they declare that initially Germany will present the USSR with an ultimatum for more expansive exports to Germany and abandonment of Communist propaganda.” To ensure fulfillment, he added, the Germans would station commissars at Ukrainian industrial and agricultural centers, and the German army would occupy some Ukrainian provinces. “The presentation of an ultimatum will be preceded by a ‘war of nerves’ aiming to demoralize the USSR.”^{222, 223}

Stalin offered another gesture toward Germany, formally breaking off diplomatic relations and ordering the embassies of the countries that had fallen under Nazi occupation—Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Norway, Yugoslavia—shuttered, and their envoys expelled. Dekanozov, meanwhile, reciprocated the breakfast at the Spiridonovka on May 9. Schulenburg urged the Soviets to take the initiative, advising Dekanozov to have Stalin send a personal letter to the Führer. Dekanozov suspected some sort of ploy, and badgered the count about whether Hitler had authorized such an exchange. Schulenburg, having placed himself, his family, and Hilger in danger with his unauthorized suggestion, backed off. Dekanozov brought the discussion back to a possible joint communiqué. Schulenburg said they needed to act with great alacrity and that if they forwarded a draft text for approval, Ribbentrop or Hitler might not be in Berlin, causing delays.²²⁴ The courtly, well-intentioned Prussian nobleman was trying to induce Stalin to launch a bold diplomatic initiative—precisely what Hitler most feared.

Also on May 9, the Council of People’s Commissars had its first meeting under the new configuration. “Stalin did not conceal his disapproval of Molotov,” according to the notetaker. “He very impatiently listened to Molotov’s rather prolix responses to critical remarks from members of the bureau. . . . It seemed as if Stalin was attacking Molotov as an adversary and that he was doing so from a position of strength. . . . Molotov’s breathing began to quicken, and at times he would let out a deep sigh. He fidgeted in his chair and murmured something to himself. By the end he could take it no longer. ‘Easier said than done,’ Molotov stated, sharply but quietly. Stalin heard him. ‘It has long been known who fears criticism,’ Stalin answered menacingly. Molotov winced but kept quiet. The others silently buried their noses in their papers. . . . At this meeting I once again saw the majesty and strength of Stalin,” the notetaker wrote. “Stalin’s companions feared him like the devil. They would agree with him on practically anything.”²²⁵

SENSATIONAL MISSION

In May 1941, Germans were hearing rumors that Stalin and Molotov had murdered each other.²²⁶ On May 10, “Alta” relayed to Moscow that the German war ministry had instructed all military attachés abroad to repudiate the rumors of imminent war with the USSR and to explain the troop concentrations in the east by a desire “to be ready to counter actions from the Russian side and exert pressure on Russia.”²²⁷ Here, finally, was an insight into the disinformation campaign.²²⁸

On May 12, a third breakfast took place, again at Schulenburg’s residence. Dekanozov immediately told him that Stalin was ready to exchange letters with Hitler and sign a joint German-Soviet communiqué. Schulenburg had tried to give himself some diplomatic cover for his initiative by telegramming Berlin with a suggestion that the German government offer congratulations to Stalin on his appointment to head the government, and a warning that the Soviet regime had likely prepared an evacuation capital farther east that would be difficult to seize (hints of Napoleon, who had captured Moscow yet still failed to win the war). But a reply from Weizsäcker, received just before Dekanozov’s arrival, indicated that Schulenburg’s proposal had not even been presented to Ribbentrop (“because this would not have been a rewarded matter”). A parallel letter from a contact in the Berlin foreign ministry warned Schulenburg that he was being closely watched. Dekanozov noted that Schulenburg was now “quite emotionless.” The count emphasized that he had acted “on his own initiative only and without authority” and implored them “several times not to reveal that he had made these proposals.”²²⁹

Schulenburg nonetheless again tried to impress upon the Soviets the gravity of the situation and the need for them to take proactive measures, urging, according to the Soviet notetaker, that “it would be good if Stalin himself on his own initiative and spontaneously were to approach Hitler with a letter.” Then, in a discussion of British bombing of Germany, he made a highly enigmatic observation: “In his opinion, the time is not far off when they (the two warring sides) must reach an agreement and then the calamity and destruction raining down on each of their cities will end.”

Stalin received Dekanozov in his office at night on both May 8 and 12, 1941, so he was apprised of the frustrating “talks.”²³⁰ Soon the despot came to see why. On May 13, although details were scarce, he learned of a sensation reported out of Berlin the previous night: Rudolf Hess, deputy to the Führer within the Nazi party, had flown to Britain.

Hess had once won an air race around Germany’s highest peak, but recently he had been forbidden to fly. Late on May 10, a date chosen on astrological grounds, in a daring, skillful maneuver, he piloted a Messerschmitt Bf-110 bomber across the North Sea toward Britain, some 900 miles, and, in the dark, parachuted into Scotland.²³¹ His pockets were filled with abundant pills and potions, including opium alkaloids, aspirin, atropine, methamphetamines, barbiturates, caffeine tablets, laxatives, and an elixir from a Tibetan lamasery (passed to him by the explorer Sven Hedin).²³² He was also said to be carrying a flight map, photos of himself with his son, and the business cards of two German acquaintances, but no identification. Initially, he gave a false name to the Scottish plowman on whose territory he had landed; soon, members of the local Home Guard appeared (with whisky on their breath). The British were not expecting Hess; no secure corridor had been set up. Those on the scene, breaching secrecy, brought in a member of the Polish consulate in nearby Glasgow to serve as interpreter; it was he who noticed that the captive was the spitting image of Hess. British air intelligence ignored the first reports of the captive’s evident importance.²³³

No one in the Nazi entourage outdid Hess for devotion. He had been in the forefront of the Beer Hall Putsch and had recorded Hitler’s prison dictations that became Mein Kampf, volunteering his own thoughts, too.²³⁴ Hess was among the small circle in the know about the firmness of Hitler’s intentions to invade the USSR.²³⁵ At the Berghof on May 11, Hitler received one of Hess’s adjutants, who delivered a sealed letter left by his boss. The Führer raged that he hoped the missing Hess had “crashed into the sea.”²³⁶ Germany disclosed his absence over the radio at 8:00 p.m. on May 12, mentioning a letter that exhibited “traces of mental derangement” and speculating that Hess had “crashed en route.”²³⁷ Finally, several hours later, the British issued a statement, with precious few details and no photographs but confirmation that Hess had landed in Scotland. The next day, Hitler summoned the sixty or so top Nazi officials to the Obersalzberg. “The Führer,” observed Hans Frank, head of the General Gouvernement (Poland), “was more completely shattered than I have ever experienced him to be.” Hitler stated that Hess had acted without his knowledge, and called him a “victim of delusions.”²³⁸ Ribbentrop was sent to assure Mussolini that there were no Anglo-German peace talks.²³⁹ “What a spectacle for the world,” Goebbels confided in his diary of the defection.²⁴⁰

Hess jokes proliferated. (“So you’re the madman,” Churchill says to Hess. “Oh, no,” Hess replies, “only his deputy.”)²⁴¹ He had lost his role in the Nazi regime to his private secretary, Martin Bormann, and seems to have wanted to reingratiate himself with the Führer, intending to land at the hunting lodge owned by the Duke of Hamilton, a commander in the Royal Air Force whom Hess had met at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. (He missed his property by around twelve miles.) Hess imagined that negotiations could take place with pro-German members of the British establishment, who might even overthrow Churchill. The British moved Hess to a military hospital as a POW and maintained public silence about his motivations or any secret revelations (of which there were none). “He had come without the knowledge of Hitler,” the report of Hess’s first interrogation established (May 13), “in order to convince responsible persons that since England could not win the war, the wisest course was to make peace now.” Hess proffered the old deal, publicly announced by Hitler, of a free hand on the continent in exchange for preservation of the British empire, and denied that Hitler planned to attack the USSR.²⁴²

Soviet intelligence tasked its entire network with sussing out the real story of Hess’s flight, and they duly reported that Hitler had expressly sent his deputy on a peace mission.²⁴³ Stalin needed no confirmation. That a second in command could undertake such a flight without permission was, for him, implausible. Hess had to have been sent to negotiate a separate peace with Britain and a joint attack on the Soviet Union, and in a way that cleverly allowed Hitler to deny it.²⁴⁴ Molotov had met Hess in Berlin in November 1940: he was not a madman. It all seemed to add up: Schulenburg tells Dekanozov that Stalin should exchange letters with Hitler, then suddenly backs off; Hess flies to the UK. Now, the most sinister interpretation crystallized of Churchill’s cryptic message to Stalin and Cripps’s written suggestion to Molotov that the British might come to terms with Germany.²⁴⁵

On May 13, behind the scenes, Cripps pursued the same tack, writing from Moscow to the foreign office proposing that the Hess windfall be used to disrupt suspected German-Soviet alliance talks and, more ambitiously, to induce Stalin to abandon Germany altogether. The foreign office thought this would drive Stalin deeper into Hitler’s arms.²⁴⁶ But then Eden and Alexander Cadogan, the foreign office permanent undersecretary, who was charged with coordinating the Hess problem across agencies, took up Cripps’s prompt. At a press briefing and in conversations with Soviet envoy Maisky, Eden hinted that Hess was bearing peace proposals, and that his flight proved the existence of a split in the Nazi leadership over the course of the war. The whispering campaign achieved the opposite effect of its aim, however, encouraging Stalin’s view that, given the divisions in the Nazi leadership, his own negotiations with Hitler to avert war remained possible.²⁴⁷

Even Schulenburg’s utter failure ended up contributing to that unshakable belief. Foreign couriers transporting diplomatic pouches overnighted at the Metropole Hotel, awaiting their transit out the next day, and the NKGB resorted to trapping couriers in the bathroom or jamming the lift, seizing their pouches, and photographing their contents while those trapped waited to be rescued. Thus was Stalin able to see that Schulenburg, in his secret correspondence with the German foreign ministry, continued to stress Soviet conciliatory moves and readiness to bargain.²⁴⁸ Soviet ingenuity combined with Schulenburg’s good intentions amplified German intelligence’s disinformation campaign about an ultimatum.²⁴⁹

PREEMPTION DENIED

May 15, 1941—much mentioned in Stalin’s intelligence—passed without a Nazi invasion. That same day, a Junkers 52 transport, either unobserved or unobstructed by Soviet air defenses, traveled more than 650 miles over Białystok/Belostok, Minsk, and Smolensk, landing at Moscow’s central aerodrome, Tushino, a few miles from Red Square. The pilot had been able to reconnoiter the entire German path to the Soviet capital. Whispers about the incredible incident spread. The Soviets allowed the German plane to depart, even refueling it.²⁵⁰ In Berlin that same day, in an internal memorandum, the German trade official Schnurre observed that the Soviets had made concessions to resolve difficult matters in bilateral trade and that, while Germany would have trouble meeting its obligations to the USSR with regard to new armaments, the Soviets were fulfilling the existing agreement punctually, even though it was causing them great difficulties. He pointed out that Germany could advance additional economic demands beyond the existing trade agreement.²⁵¹ (A record number of goods would cross the border in both directions that month.) Also on May 15, coincidentally, the Soviet general staff completed a new aggressive offensive war plan, with Stalin’s evident involvement.²⁵²

This was the fifteenth iteration of the main war plan since 1924, although far from all were formally approved. Like its immediate predecessor, it was drafted by Vasilevsky, with cross-outs and additions in the hand of Nikolai Vatutin (b. 1901), a peasant lad (like Timoshenko and Zhukov) who had graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1937 and been vaulted to a top position in the staff. Just as in the 1940 plan, this one envisioned a massive left hook using the full strength of the Red Army to cut off German forces from Romanian oil, then wheeling north, crossing all of German-occupied Poland and capturing East Prussia (a 450-mile thrust), in a colossal encirclement. But now the southwestern strike was to occur before a German attack. “Considering that at the present time the German army is mobilized, with its rear deployed, it has the capability to beat us to the punch and deliver a surprise attack,” the war plan explained, recommending that the Soviets “not leave the initiative to the German command, but forestall the enemy in deployment and attack the German army while it is still in the deployment stage and has not yet had the time to organize the front and the coordination among the service branches.” Timoshenko and Zhukov asked Stalin for authorization for hidden general mobilization and concentration of forces close to the frontier, both under the guise of training, accelerated railway construction and weapons production, and forced erection of new frontier fortifications.²⁵³

Preemption constituted a logical extension of Soviet military doctrine: if the Red Army was going to launch a counteroffensive immediately after absorbing the enemy’s initial attack, why not prevent that attack in the first place with “a sudden blow”?

The volatile Zhukov had formed a tight duo with the ponderous Timoshenko, another veteran of the civil-war-era First Cavalry Army, in whom he could cautiously confide, provided they could get out of earshot of their bodyguards, drivers, cooks, and maids, who closely observed them, on Beria’s orders. “The idea to preempt the German attack,” Zhukov would tell an interviewer, “came to Timoshenko and me in connection with Stalin’s speech of May 5, 1941 . . . in which he spoke of the possibility of an offensive mode of action.”²⁵⁴ Zhukov would also recall that he and Timoshenko did not sign the preemptive strike plan above their printed names, preferring to report on it preliminarily to Stalin. At an hour-long meeting on May 19, as Zhukov reported, Stalin apparently knocked his pipe nervously on the felt-covered table. “When he heard about a preemptive strike against the German troops he just boiled over,” Zhukov wrote, adding that Stalin blurted out, “What, have you lost your mind? You want to provoke the Germans?”²⁵⁵ Molotov, who was present, would recall that Stalin likely feared that a Soviet attack would induce Britain and even the United States to join Germany in a war against the USSR; at a minimum, the despot anticipated that a Soviet attack on Germany would drive London to make peace with Berlin, particularly in light of the Hess mission, clearing the way for attack in the east.²⁵⁶

In the meeting, Stalin explained away his May 5 (pre-Hess) speech as an attempt “to encourage the people there, so that they would think about victory and not about the invincibility of the German army, which is what the world’s press is blaring on about,” Zhukov recalled. “So that’s how our idea about a preemptive strike was buried.”²⁵⁷ In fact, the plan did not specify a date for launching a war, and did not motivate an immediate preemption: it estimated total German strength at 284 divisions, but only 120 were said to be concentrated near the frontier, a number not appreciably different from prior estimates.²⁵⁸ The feasibility of the plan, moreover, remained highly dubious. Alexander Zaporozhets, head of the army administration of political propaganda, wrote to Stalin after an inspection tour that “the majority of troops deployed in the fortified districts on our western frontiers are not battle ready.”²⁵⁹ Timoshenko, Zhukov, Vatutin (now Zhukov’s top deputy), and Vasilevsky (operations directorate) appear to have believed they could pull off the absurdly ambitious preemptive strike after further intensive preparations, despite their own inexperience with operations of this scale and the Red Army’s low level of organizational cohesion and training and its jumble of obsolete and modern (but untested) equipment. And yet massive logistical problems and railway incapacity bedeviled even the Red Army’s more gradual deployments.²⁶⁰

To achieve anything like the attack posture in the preemptive plan, the Red Army would have needed many months of very intensive preparation from that point forward.²⁶¹ In any case, Stalin did not approve the general mobilization or force concentrations necessary for preemption. There was no aerial reconnaissance of German positions to be struck.²⁶² The despot held fast to the idea of forward defense and counterattack, but in his mind general mobilization made war unavoidable, foreclosing his diplomatic and stalling options. If Hitler was not so mad as to voluntarily open a two-front war—as Stalin said often—then the Führer would have to negotiate a separate peace with Britain to attack the USSR. That was why Stalin desperately wanted to know the details of Hess’s “peace proposals.” After all, the despot might be able to offer his own terms to Germany, and Hitler, being smart, would want to see what he could obtain from each side before making a choice. Even if the Nazis made the mistake of voluntarily opening a two-front war, Stalin assumed that any German attack would be preceded by demands for far-reaching concessions, negotiations that Stalin could drag out.

Strikingly, though, almost everything in the May 15 war plan except the preemptive strike was being implemented. Stalin had summoned Timoshenko and Zhukov to the Little Corner on May 10 and 12, and on May 13 the general staff had been able to order deployment to the western frontier of interior reserves—four armies (28 rifle divisions) from the Urals, Volga, North Caucasus, and Baikal military districts—by July 10, with more readied for future transfer.²⁶³ Stalin had also allowed Timoshenko and Zhukov to introduce “covering plans” in frontier military districts, which would enable hidden troop concentration.²⁶⁴ Stalin was enabling implementation of the approved 1940 war plan, the massive left hook below the Pripet Marshes, should the Wehrmacht attack. As a result, the Soviet Union was as vulnerable to a deep German penetration as it was incapable of launching a preemptive attack.

DISINFORMATION, CONFIRMED

On May 14, “Zeus,” out of Sofia, reported further on the concentration of German divisions. On May 17, two weeks prior to the onset of Soviet military maneuvers—which were publicly advertised—Stalin terminated the German tours of his weapons factories, and the very next day an exhibit at Moscow’s State Historical Museum cataloging Napoleon’s defeat, 1812 Fatherland War, had its grand opening. On May 19, “Dora” reported from Zurich that Nazi attack plans had been finalized. The next day, “Extern” reported from Helsinki on a pending attack. Out of Bucharest, on May 23, “Mars” reported that “the American military attaché in Romania said to the Slovak ambassador that the Germans will attack the USSR no later than June 15.”²⁶⁵

Talk of secret negotiations was rife. Dekanozov, following his third breakfast with Schulenburg, departed for Berlin (he arrived May 14), but he could not obtain an audience with Ribbentrop to follow up. The envoy appealed to the good graces of Otto Meissner, who had run the office of the president throughout the Weimar Republic, remained in that post when Hitler became head of state, and was viewed as especially close to the Führer, attending to the ceremonial side of the chancellery.²⁶⁶ The old-school Meissner happened to speak Russian, having spent considerable time in the country, and beginning in mid-May Dekanozov met with him about once a week—four times altogether. They discussed Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, as if the Wehrmacht troops deployed in Eastern Europe would be attacking the British positions in the Near East. “Otto Meissner quickly became his best friend,” recalled Berezhkov, who worked under Dekanozov at the Soviet embassy. “Meissner, also short and stocky, regularly joined the ambassador for lunch a few times a month and, slouching in a chair over cognac and coffee, would tell his host ‘in confidence’ that the chancellery was working on important proposals for the upcoming meeting between Hitler and Stalin.”²⁶⁷

Rumors spread beginning around May 25 that Germany was manufacturing Soviet flags for a state visit to Berlin. “The rumors we spread about an invasion of England are working,” Goebbels wrote in his diary that day. “Extreme nervousness reigns in England. As for Russia, we were able to organize a vast flow of false information. The newspaper ‘plants’ make it such that those abroad cannot figure out where is the truth, and where is the lie. This is the atmosphere that we need.”²⁶⁸ German intelligence reported to Ribbentrop that many in the diplomatic corps in Berlin were convinced Germany and the USSR had already reached a secret agreement, putting off the war.²⁶⁹ Pravda (May 25) published a satirical essay on the wild rumors among foreign diplomats.

Also on May 25, Stalin had in his possession an extraordinary report out of Berlin, where Berlings (“Lycée-ist”) had told Amayak Kobulov that, although there were 160 to 200 German divisions on the Soviet frontier, “war between the Soviet Union and Germany is unlikely, although it would be very popular in Germany at a time when the present war with England is not approved by the populace. Hitler cannot take such a risk as a war with the USSR, fearing a breach in the unity of the Nazi party.” “Lycée-ist” uttered the canard that “Hitler expects Stalin in connection with this to become more accommodating and end all the intrigues against Germany, and above all, to grant him more goods, especially oil.” Most remarkable of all, in connection with supposed Soviet plans to relocate the government to the interior, “Lycée-ist” issued a bizarre olive branch inside a threat: “The German war plan has been worked out in the greatest detail. The maximum duration of the war is 6 weeks. During that time Germany would conquer almost the entire European part of the USSR, but the government in Sverdlovsk would not be touched. If after that Stalin would desire to save the socialist system, Hitler would not interfere.”²⁷⁰

Even the most spectacular feats of Soviet espionage boomeranged. NKGB counterintelligence was headed by Pyotr Fedotov (b. 1900), the son of an orchestra conductor, who had acquired long experience in counterinsurgency in the North Caucasus against Chechen fighters, before transferring to Moscow in late 1937 when terror vacancies had to be filled. He targeted the German embassy, which had perhaps 200 employees, including 20 under military attaché General Ernst Köstring, who spoke nearly perfect Russian and traveled far and wide, proving to be a talented observer of the combat potential of the Red Army, Soviet military industry, and Soviet mobilization status.²⁷¹ Köstring resided in a single-story detached house at Bread Lane, 28, and appears to have assumed that it was secure (the NKGB could not employ microphones placed in adjacent apartments, as it usually did). During one of his absences, Fedotov’s team managed to tunnel a very considerable distance from a neighboring building, on the pretext of pipe reconstruction, and into the mansion’s basement, then entered Köstring’s office, opened his safe, photographed its contents, and installed listening devices, while managing to erase all traces of their penetration.²⁷² Thus could the NKGB eavesdrop on discussions among the Germans and their allies (Italians, Hungarians, Finns, Japanese, Slovaks), which went straight to Merkulov, and from him to Stalin’s desk.²⁷³ On May 31, 1941, Fedotov evidently played a recording for Stalin of Köstring’s conversation with the Slovakia ambassador: “Here what we need is to create some kind of provocation. We must arrange for some German or other to be killed and by that means bring on war.”²⁷⁴

Such chatter offered yet more substantiation for the felt imperative to avoid handing the Germans a casus belli, but despite the military attaché’s desire to ingratiate himself, Hitler needed no such provocation to invade. “The transfer of troops according to the mobilization plan is proceeding successfully,” General Halder recorded in his diary (May 30). “The Führer decided that the date for starting the operation ‘Barbarossa’ remains as set—June 22.”²⁷⁵

STREAM OF VISITORS

Richard Sorge (“Ramsay”) passed on to the Germans as well information he picked up from Japanese government circles, in line with long-ago-issued Soviet permission.²⁷⁶ He so impressed the German ambassador with his knowledge of Japan (based on his secret cabinet source, Ozaki) that Ott gave him the cipher codes for communication with Berlin, allowing Sorge to learn everything known to the embassy about Hitler’s plans.²⁷⁷ But the embassy was receiving information from Berlin late (the pouch was no longer being sent via the Trans-Siberian Railway across Soviet territory) and, even more important, it was not given firsthand information about Barbarossa. On the contrary, Ribbentrop’s foreign ministry knowingly disinformed Ott. Sorge’s dispatches, meanwhile, were transmitted via smuggled microfilms or, far faster, via wireless to Khabarovsk by the skilled shortwave operator Max Clausen, a German Communist residing in Japan, who built his transmitter from scratch. Clausen did the coding himself, using onetime pads (which worked via a secret, random key), making them effectively unbreakable but requiring a prodigious amount of time. Unbeknownst to Sorge, Clausen appears to have passed on only about half of the dispatches. On top of being busy running his own blueprint machinery and reproduction business, which Clausen made profitable, he had begun to suffer from heart trouble, doubt Marxism-Leninism, and resent Sorge’s condescension and personal cluelessness.²⁷⁸

Unlike Sorge’s reports on Japan, which were based on direct knowledge of government decisions, those on Germany were mostly gossip and speculation.²⁷⁹ In early May 1941, Clausen had sent a radiogram (coded bursts of data) with three of Sorge’s messages. They noted that “Ott declared that Hitler is full of determination to destroy the USSR and take the European part of the Soviet Union in his hands as a grain and natural resource base for German control over all of Europe.” Sorge also wrote, citing the opinions of Ott and the naval attaché, that, “after the conclusion of the sowing campaign, the war against the USSR could begin at any moment, and all the Germans will have to do will be to gather up the harvest.” The messages continued: “The possibility of an outbreak of war at any moment is very high because Hitler and his generals are sure that a war with the USSR will not in the least interfere with the conduct of war against England. German generals assess the Red Army’s fighting capacity as so low that the Red Army will be destroyed in the course of a few weeks. They consider that the defense system on the German-Soviet border is extraordinarily weak.” Much of this information came from Colonel Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer, of the high command, who had been sent to Tokyo to brief Ott, and with whom Sorge also spoke at length. Sorge further wrote that “the decision on the start of the war against the USSR will be taken only by Hitler either already in May or after the war with England.”²⁸⁰

On May 21, Clausen transmitted another Sorge message from two days earlier, stating that “new German representatives arriving here from Berlin declare that war between Germany and the USSR could begin at the end of May, since they received an order to return to Berlin by that time,” and that “Germany has 9 army corps consisting of 150 divisions against the USSR.” That was far beyond estimates at HQ, and betokened an invasion. But these visitors also said that “this year the danger might pass.” Sorge’s report added that “the strategic plan for an attack on the Soviet Union was taken from the experience of the war against Poland.”²⁸¹

Stalin continued to view Sorge as a double agent working for Germany.²⁸² Golikov forwarded the spy’s reports to the despot (who showed familiarity with them), while withholding them from his own immediate superiors, Timoshenko and Zhukov.²⁸³ There was considerable bad blood between Golikov and Zhukov, dating from the terror, when Golikov had been sent to destroy Zhukov.²⁸⁴ But Stalin’s skepticism was the key factor.

Two messages from Sorge on May 30 stated flatly that “Berlin has informed Ott that the German offensive against the USSR will begin in the second half of June. Ott 95 percent sure war will start.”²⁸⁵ The next day, a new German military visitor said that 170 to 190 German divisions were massed on the Soviet border and that war was imminent. “The expectation of the start of a German-Soviet war around June 15 is based exclusively on information which Lieutenant Colonel [Erwin] Scholl brought from Berlin,” Sorge wrote in a new message, adding, “Ott told me that he could not obtain information on this score directly from Berlin, and that he only has the information of Scholl.” Clausen transmitted both sets of dispatches on June 1, without reconciling the different dates. In the second, Sorge noted that he, too, had spoken with Scholl, an old friend, who in early May had departed Berlin to take up the post of German military attaché in Bangkok, and that Scholl told him the Soviets had committed “a great tactical mistake. . . . According to the German point of view, the fact that the USSR defense line is located, fundamentally, against the German line, without major offshoots, constitutes the greatest mistake. This will enable the smashing of the Red Army in the first big engagement.”²⁸⁶

Golikov requested clarifications, but he wrote on the document, “Add to the list of Ramsay’s dubious and disinformational communications.”²⁸⁷

PRESSURE

German intelligence picked up word that on June 1, 1941, Stalin received British and American ambassadors, returned Litvinov to the foreign affairs commissariat, reached an agreement with the United States, and was being pressured by his top brass to oppose Germany militarily. But this was disinformation spread by the Soviets. The Germans had Berlings (“Peter” to the Germans) check on rumors of Soviet-British negotiations, which he verified did not exist.²⁸⁸

As German war preparations grew ever more intense, so did the warnings from Soviet intelligence networks. Beria reported to Stalin and Molotov (June 2) that Hitler, accompanied by Göring and Grand Admiral Raeder, had observed maneuvers of the German Fleet in the Baltic Sea, near Gdynia, and traveled to Warsaw and East Prussia.²⁸⁹ That same day, Goglidze reported from Soviet Moldavia that the commander of Romanian border units had, two full weeks prior, “received an order from General Antonescu immediately to clear mines from bridges, roads, and sectors close to the border with the USSR—mines that had been laid in 1940–41. At present all the bridges have been cleared of mines and they have begun to clear them in the sector along the River Prut.” The Romanians, Goglidze concluded, were eagerly expecting to be sent into battle shortly.²⁹⁰ The next day, Golikov asked frontline NKGB stations for assistance in verifying numbers of German troops, tanks, armored vehicles, combat aircraft, transport aircraft, and explosives, and the locations of German field headquarters in East Prussia, occupied Poland, and Romania. “Try to obtain data on the plans for military operations against the USSR (in any form, documentary or oral etc.),” he wrote to the NKGB station in Berlin, as if they had not been straining every nerve to do this.²⁹¹

Germans were observed taking “samples of [Soviet] oil, motor vehicle and aviation petrol and lubricants,” presumably to determine whether they could be used with German equipment.²⁹² Military intelligence in the Western military district, in an internal memo to commander Dmitry Pavlov (June 4, 1941), noted that reliable sources on the other side of the border had observed immense increases in German artillery, tank, and armored troops, influxes of weaponry through the Warsaw train system and aerodrome, upgrading of railroad stations for nighttime unloading, the takeover by the military of all civilian medical installations, the guarding of bridges by military personnel, and mobilization of bureaucrats to govern occupied territories, and concluded that it was “not excluded” that war would commence in June.²⁹³ On June 5, Golikov reported to Stalin, the entire politburo, Timoshenko, and Zhukov that “the Romanian army is being brought to full combat readiness.” Among the details: “In May officers of the Romanian army were given topographical maps of the southern part of the USSR,” and schools had their exams early “so that their buildings could be used for military barracks and hospitals.”²⁹⁴ That same day, the NKVD established an affiliate of its central archive in the Siberian city of Omsk to prepare for a possible evacuation of files.²⁹⁵

Goebbels, in one of his regular conferences for the Nazi press on June 5, stated, “The Führer has decided that the war cannot be brought to an end without an invasion of Britain. Operations planned in the East have therefore been canceled. He cannot give any detailed dates, but one thing is certain: the invasion of Britain will start in three, or perhaps five weeks.”²⁹⁶ The next day, the British foreign office recalled Cripps to London for “consultations.”²⁹⁷ Berlin was worried that something was up; London, for its part, was still fearing a last-minute new Hitler-Stalin pact against the UK. That day, Stalin signed decrees “on measures for industry’s preparedness to switch to the mobilization plan for [producing] ammunition” and for possible wartime mobilization of all industry from July 1.²⁹⁸ Between June 6 and 10, the Wehrmacht sent its tank and motorized divisions right to the border (until then, the advanced troops were mostly infantry), kicking up prodigious earth and dust and making exceptional noise, a massive, unmistakable change in border concentrations. “Alta,” on June 7, 1941, reported, “It is a fact that the date for the start of a campaign against Russia has been moved to after June 20, which is explained by the large material losses in Yugoslavia. No one doubts from informed circles that military action against Russia will be conducted.”²⁹⁹

Also on June 7, Colonel General Grigory Stern, chief of air defenses, was arrested, one of more than 300 officers incarcerated that month, 22 of whom had earned the highest military decoration, Hero of the Soviet Union.³⁰⁰ Under torture, Stern admitted to being a German spy since 1931.³⁰¹ Stalin had been angry for some time about the loss of two to three planes daily from crashes in training.³⁰² He also scapegoated air defenses for the border violations by Germany, precipitating a frenzy of mutual denunciation. Others arrested included a deputy chief of the general staff to Zhukov, Lieutenant General Yakov Smushkevich, who was taken into custody (June 8) while in the hospital for a major operation (he was conducted to prison on crutches), and armaments commissar Boris Vannikov (his nemesis, Marshal Kulik, was soon forced to step down but not incarcerated).³⁰³ The former head of the air force, the thirty-year-old Lieutenant General Pavel Rychagov, who had been sacked at Zhukov and Timoshenko’s insistence, was also arrested (June 8). Although a flying ace who had won the Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of Lenin, and three Orders of the Red Banner, Rychagov was not fit for such a top post, but Stalin had murdered all the others. He was beaten with rubber truncheons but refused to confess to treason.³⁰⁴

Amid the arrests, Golikov (June 7) advised Stalin that, besides mobilization in Romania and the German right flank, “special attention should be given to the continuing reinforcement of German troops on the territory of Poland.”³⁰⁵ On June 8, the German foreign ministry received word that the Soviet envoy to Romania had said that there would likely be no war but instead negotiations, which could fail if the Germans put forth excessive demands.³⁰⁶

Soldiers in full combat kit and completely full fuel tanks saturated the German side of the border, as the NKGB knew.³⁰⁷ On June 9, Bogdan Kobulov forwarded to Stalin, Molotov, and Beria a memo from Fitin based on communications from “Elder” and “Corsican,” noting that the rumors about negotiations and an ultimatum “were being spread systematically by the German ministry of propaganda and the German army high command. The goal is to mask the preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union and maximize the surprise of such an attack.” This was correct. But the report also quoted the Soviet section head of the German air force staff that Hitler would present the Soviet Union “with a demand to turn over to Germany economic management of Ukraine, to increase the supplies of grain and oil, and to use the Soviet navy—above all, its submarines—against England.”³⁰⁸

That same day, Japan’s ambassador in Moscow, Lieutenant General Tatekawa, warned Tokyo in a telegram, which the Soviets intercepted and decoded, that Germany “could not conquer or crush the Soviets in 2 to 3 months,” and that “the possibility cannot be excluded that Germany would find itself stuck in a prolonged war.”³⁰⁹ In the Little Corner, also on June 9, Timoshenko and Zhukov unfolded maps of German troop concentrations and a packet of military intelligence reports predicting war, which Stalin leafed through, having already seen them and more. Trying to be droll, the despot, according to recollections by Timoshenko, alluded to a Soviet agent in Japan who was predicting a German attack—“a shit who has set himself up with some small workshops and brothels.”³¹⁰ This was Sorge, of course, who had indeed cuckolded nearly the entire German community in Tokyo (while finding comfort most often in the bosom of his Japanese consort, Hanako Ishii). But neither Timoshenko nor Zhukov knew of Sorge’s existence, let alone his hearsay reports predicting war.

From Berlin on June 9, Ribbentrop telegrammed an order to the embassy in Moscow to secure its archives and organize the “inconspicuous departure of women and children.” Two days later, Bogdan Kobulov reported to Stalin, Molotov, and Beria on the evacuation directive and verified that documents were being burned.³¹¹ Also on June 11, Kobulov wrote that, based on information from “Elder,” in the air ministry, the decision to invade “has been definitively taken. Whether there will there be any prior demands to the Soviet Union is unknown, and therefore it is necessary to take into account the possibility of a surprise strike.” He further noted that “Göring’s HQ is moving from Berlin likely to Romania.” Germany’s battle plan was said to be an invasion from East Prussia in the north and Romania in the south, to create pincers to envelop the Red Army in the center.³¹² In fact, Germany’s main strike force was in the center.

DESPERATION

On June 10, Germany’s high command issued a supersecret order confirming the invasion for June 22, at 3:30 a.m. It stipulated that “June 18 is the latest for a possible delay,” and that a signal would be issued on June 21 at 13:00 hours—either “Dortmund” (attack on) or “Alton” (attack delayed).³¹³ On June 11, NKGB intelligence chief Fitin reported from a source in Helsinki to Merkulov that, at a meeting of the Finnish government two days earlier, Finnish president Risto Ryti had said that Germany was forcing him to order a partial mobilization, but that “the question of whether or not there will be a war between Germany and the USSR would be answered June 24. Maybe there will be no war, since Hitler and Ribbentrop are against a war with the USSR, but the German generals and general staff desire it.”³¹⁴ On June 12, Tupikov (“Arnold”), in Berlin, based on information from Scheliha (“Aryan”), told Moscow military intelligence that the invasion would occur “June 15–20.”³¹⁵

German mapping for the bombing campaign intensified. “Violations of Soviet borders by German planes are not accidental, as confirmed by the direction and depth of the flights above our territory,” Beria wrote to Stalin on June 12. “In a few instances they had penetrated 60 miles or more and in the direction of military installations and large troop concentrations.”³¹⁶ In parallel, the Luftwaffe began moving its attack planes to frontier aerodromes in occupied Poland, a massive concentration of fighters that could not be missed—they were jammed into a very narrow space, right up against the Soviet frontier, which would make them highly vulnerable unless they were about to go into combat.³¹⁷ That same day, Berlings (“Peter”) reported to the Ribbentrop bureau that Ivan Filippov—nominally the TASS correspondent in Berlin, and the go-between who had introduced Berlings to Amayak Kobulov—had been ordered “to clarify whether or not Germany is actively pursuing peace negotiations with England and whether or not to expect an attempt in the longer term to secure a compromise with the United States.” Filippov was also now directed to convey the impression that “we are convinced it is indeed possible to maintain our peace policy. There is still time.”^{318, 319}

Stalin tried to seize the initiative, composing a TASS bulletin, read out over Moscow radio at 6:00 p.m. on June 13 and published in Soviet newspapers the next morning. The impetus appears to have been the intensified speculation of a German-Soviet war that accompanied Cripps’s recall to London. In issuing the bulletin, Stalin was effectively following the suggestion Schulenburg had made to Dekanozov that the Soviet leader write to Hitler, but the despot decided on the form of an open letter. “Germany is also, just as consistently as the USSR, observing the terms of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact,” it stated. “In view of this, according to Soviet circles, rumors of Germany’s intent to break the Pact and to attack the USSR are utterly groundless.” Stalin aimed not only to refute the rumors of war, again blaming them on British provocations to cause that very war, but also to elicit a German denial of any intentions to attack—or, failing that, a German presentation of its anticipated demands, which the rumors said the USSR had already received and rejected, bringing the countries to imminent military confrontation. “Germany,” the bulletin noted, “has not presented any demands to the USSR and did not propose any new, even closer agreement, in view of which negotiations on this subject cannot be taking place.”³²⁰

Nazi foreign ministry officials had already instructed the management of the Schloss Bellevue, where Molotov had stayed during his Berlin visit, to prepare for Soviet dignitaries in the near future, while the Anhalter Station had been closed to the public at the beginning of June so it could be outfitted with a large electric red star and Soviet banners. Staff were told not to mention anything, prompting gossip. Rumors absolutely engulfed Berlin that Stalin would arrive at any moment by armored train, or that he and Hitler would meet at the border, or that Hitler was secretly discussing the scope of Germany’s imminent demands. One German woman recorded in her diary that her milkman had assured her that hundreds of women were sewing Soviet flags.³²¹ Some people assumed that the TASS announcement had been published with German agreement.³²²

The foreign affairs commissariat had handed the text to Schulenburg, who relayed it to Berlin.³²³ But the German press did not publish it. The press secretary of the German foreign ministry, on June 14, refused to comment on it, despite insistent questioning by foreign journalists.³²⁴

At the very moment of Stalin’s gambit, Hitler was holding a massive war conference (June 14) in the Parliament Chamber of the Old Reich Chancellery, with reports by all commanders of army, naval, and air force groups on their Barbarossa preparations. The number of invited attendees was so large that they were directed to arrive at different times and use different entrances. “After luncheon,” General Halder wrote in his diary, “the Führer delivers a lengthy political address, in which he explains the reasons for his intention to attack Russia and evolves his calculation that Russia’s collapse would induce England to give in.”³²⁵

The Germans knew, of course, that the Soviets had been calling up reserves, moving forces to the frontier, furiously building border defenses, and stepping up patriotic propaganda.³²⁶ The Wehrmacht’s main worry was that, given its absurdly dense concentration of forces and weaponry smack up against the Soviet frontier, the Red Army could inflict great damage by striking preemptively—or, what might be worse, adjust their forward defense posture and move their own extremely vulnerable troops back away from the frontier, removing the danger of being wiped out in a lightning strike and preserving themselves for the counterstrike. Back on June 13, Timoshenko, in Zhukov’s presence, had phoned Stalin to request authorization to have frontline Red Army troops brought to a war footing. The despot refused, citing the forthcoming TASS bulletin, but the text baffled many Soviet military men, especially those in the field.³²⁷ Stalin did allow the general staff to order the western military districts to begin moving divisions of the second echelon, under the pretext of military exercises, up to within twelve to fifty miles of the frontier by July 1. This was suicidal.³²⁸

“The Führer estimates that the operation will take four months. I reckon on fewer,” Goebbels wrote in his diary (June 16), after yet another audience. “Bolshevism will collapse like a house of cards. We face victories unequaled in human history. We must act. Moscow intends to keep out of the war until Europe is exhausted and bled white. Then Stalin will move in and Bolshevize Europe and impose his own rule. We shall upset his calculations with one stroke. . . . The alliance with Bolshevism was always a blemish on our honor. Now it will be washed away. . . . The TASS denial, in the Führer’s opinion, is little more than a product of Stalin’s fear. Stalin is trembling at what is to come.”³²⁹

DOOM CLOSES IN

Golikov, of Soviet military intelligence, reported the accelerated German buildup in April, May, and June, from 70 to an estimated 110-plus divisions.³³⁰ Japanese intelligence refused to believe that Hitler had the temerity to attempt to conquer the Soviet Union, an attempt that the Japanese shrank from after being defeated at the Halha River by superior Soviet weaponry and tactics.³³¹ British officials had unique, unimpeachable intelligence, yet they were exceedingly slow to understand that Hitler was planning not a campaign of intimidation and blackmail but an all-out invasion.³³² Back on May 31, 1941, the British Code and Cipher School had reviewed the data gleaned from the Enigma intercepts and—finally—concluded that the rail movements eastward involved more than a bluff. But the war office and the foreign office did not rule out a last-second, one-sided deal between Germany and the USSR (the apparent lack of German-Soviet negotiations in Moscow, they speculated, must have meant they were taking place in Berlin, so that Stalin could conceal them from his own officials). On June 7, Enigma delivered the Luftwaffe’s order of battle for the USSR: this meant war was certain, and the experts judged that Poland and East Prussia were the principal staging grounds.³³³ “From every source at my disposal, including some most trustworthy, it looks as if a vast German onslaught on Russia was imminent,” Churchill wrote to Roosevelt (June 14).³³⁴ The NKGB obtained a copy.³³⁵

British officials, however, did not relinquish the idea of an ultimatum that would allow Hitler to win without fighting, though there was debate about whether Stalin would make the necessary concessions, whatever they might be.³³⁶ The British could afford to be wrong; Stalin could not. June 15, a date for the onset of war mentioned by Scheliha (“Aryan”) from Berlin, and Sorge (“Ramsay”) from Tokyo, among others, passed without hostilities. That day, Ribbentrop instructed his ambassadors in the capitals of Germany’s allies—Rome, Budapest, Tokyo—to inform the governments there that Germany intended “to introduce complete clarity in German-Russian relations at the latest at the beginning of July and in this regard to put forth certain demands.” The directive went straight to Stalin.³³⁷ Also that day, Sorge composed a message (transmitted two days later) that “a German courier told the military attaché that he is convinced that the war against the USSR is delayed, probably, until the end of June. The military attaché does not know whether there will be war or not.”³³⁸

From Berlin on June 16, Tupikov (“Arnold”), of military intelligence, transmitted the latest message from the Soviet Union’s best spy, “Aryan,” reporting that in Germany’s high command, people were now talking of “June 22–25.”^{339, 340} Also on June 16, the NKGB’s Amayak Kobulov (“Zakhar”), in Berlin, again reported that “Elder” had relayed that “all military measures by Germany in preparation for an invasion of the USSR have been utterly completed, and that the strike can be expected at any moment.” “Elder” did not mention an ultimatum (his report five days earlier had still suggested it as a possibility).

Details on the imminent attack specified that German planes would in the first instance bomb Moscow factories producing parts for airplanes—but these, as Stalin knew, were beyond the range of German aircraft. The report added that “in air ministry circles the TASS communiqué of June 6 [sic] was being treated very ironically. They stress that the declaration can have no significance whatsoever.” And it stated that “in the economics ministry they say that at a meeting of managers designated for ‘occupied territories of the USSR,’ [Alfred] Rosenberg also spoke, and declared that ‘the concept of the “Soviet Union” should be wiped from the geographical map.’” Fitin sent a summary to Merkulov. “Late on the night of June 16–17 the commissar called me at my office,” Fitin would recall, “and said that at 1:00 p.m. he and I had been summoned to see I. V. Stalin.”

In the Little Corner, Stalin did not invite them to sit. Fitin noticed a pile of intelligence reports on the felt table, with his latest on top. As he reported, the despot paced the office. Then, complaining intemperately of disinformation in the reports of imminence of war, Stalin ordered that they go back and recheck all the messages from “Corsican” and “Elder.”³⁴¹ “Despite our deep knowledge and firm intention to defend our point of view on the material received by the intelligence directorate, we were in an agitated state,” Fitin would later recall. “This was the Leader of the party and country with unimpeachable authority. And it could happen that something did not please Stalin or he saw an oversight on our part and any one of us could end up in a very unenviable situation.”³⁴² Stalin’s displeasure was indeed severe. “To Comrade Merkulov,” he wrote in bright green pencil across the commissar’s cover note accompanying Fitin’s report, “you can send your ‘source’ from German aviation HQ to his fucking mother. This is not a ‘source’ but a disinformationist.”³⁴³

• • •

WHEN CRIPPS HAD LEFT MOSCOW FOR LONDON, Nazi officials feared the worst: a trip to finalize details of a British-Soviet agreement.³⁴⁴ Germany’s anxieties testify to the potential of this option, which Stalin never pursued. Cripps, for his part, at a June 16 British cabinet meeting, was still expecting the German ultimatum to the USSR, which had never been part of Hitler’s intent.³⁴⁵ Once apprised of the secret Enigma intelligence, however, Cripps changed his mind and lunched with the Soviet envoy. “Hitler cannot embark on the final and decisive attack against Britain before the potential threat to Germany from the East is eliminated,” Maisky wrote of their conversation in his diary (June 18). “The Red Army is a powerful force, and by 1942, when all the shortcomings revealed by the Finnish campaign have been eradicated, it will be too late for the Germans to attack the Soviet Union. . . . Cripps is certain that [Hitler] will strike. Moreover, Cripps is in possession of absolutely reliable information that these are Hitler’s plans. . . . The members of the British Government with whom Cripps has spoken think that before an attack against the USSR, Hitler would present us with an ultimatum. Cripps does not share these views. Hitler will simply fall on us without warning, because he is not interested in this or that amount of food or raw materials which he can receive from the USSR, but in the complete destruction of the country and the annihilation of the Red Army.”³⁴⁶

On June 18, General Köstring, knowing Hitler’s eagerness to learn of any Soviet general mobilization (which could serve as a convenient pretext), nonetheless reaffirmed to Berlin the truth: the Soviet Union remained calm.³⁴⁷ Stalin saw the world in the darkest hues, as shaped by unseen sinister forces, with enemies lurking everywhere and no one’s motives to be trusted. But in what was by far the grandest challenge of his life, his pathological suspiciousness undermined him. In the machinations during 1941, he perceived two games: a British effort to entangle him in a war with Hitler and a German effort to intimidate and blackmail him. Neither was the game that was actually on. Ironically, the extensive penetration of Germany by dedicated antifascist agents became another weapon in Nazi hands, thanks to astute German disinformation and Stalin’s credulousness. Of course, the despot was far from alone in his misperceptions. But here was the greatest irony of all: even if he had been able to find the signal in the noise, it might not have done him much good. Stalin had allowed the Germans to see firsthand that he had forced into existence an army of colossal size, loaded with modern weaponry. But the Red Army’s forward defense posture, the core of Soviet military doctrine, which both Stalin and the high command fully shared, meant that deep German penetration was a foregone conclusion. That deadly vulnerability would have held even in the event of a preemptive Soviet strike.³⁴⁸ For all that, however, into the third week of June, Stalin had one option left—and it worried Hitler.