BARBAROSSA- HITLER'S MISCONCEPTION CONQUERING RUSSIA PROLOGUE PART1

BARBAROSSA- 

HITLER'S MISCONCEPTION 

CONQUERING RUSSIA PROLOGUE

PART1

There is a curios notation in Halder's diary for the first day of the attack on Russia. After mentioning that at noon the Russian radio stations, which the the Germans were monitoring, had come back on the air, he writes: "They have asked Japan to mediate the political and economic differences between Russia and Germany, and remain in serious contact with the German Foreign Office". Did Stalin believe, nine hours after the attack, that he somehow might it called off?.
By the beginning of autumn 1941,  Hitler believed that Russia was finished. Within three weeks of the opening of the campaign, Field Marshal von Bock's Army Group Centre, with thirty infantry divisions and fifteen panzer or motorized divisions, had pushed 450 miles from Bialistock to Smolensk. Moscow lay about 200 miles further east along the high road which Napoleon had taken 1812. To the north Field Marshal von Lebb's army group, twenty-one infantry and six armoured division strong, was moving rapidly up through the Baltic States toward Leningrad. To the south Field Marshal von Rundstedt's army group of twenty-five infantry, four motorised, four mountain and five panzer divisions was advancing toward the Dnieper River and Kiew, the capital of the fertile Ukraine, which Hitler coveted.
So planmäßig (according to plan), as the OKW puts it, was the German progress along a thousand mile front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and so confident was the Nazi dictator that it would continue at an accelerated pace as one Soviet army after another was surrounded or dispersed, that on July 14, a bare three weeks after the invasion had begun, he issued a directive advising that the strength of the Army could be 'considerably reduced in the near future' and that armament production would be concentrated on naval ships and Luftwaffe planes, especially the latter, for the conduct of the war against the last remaining enemy, Britain, and, he added, 'against America should the case  arise'. BY the end of September he instructed the high Command to prepare to disband forty divisions so that this additional manpower could be utilized by industry.

 Ruins of Minsk - July 1941 'The Soviet troops trapped in the gigantic pockets continued fighting, and concluding operations resulted in high German casualties. Many Soviet troops escaped due to the lack of German infantry troops' motor transport that slowed the encirclement process.The Polish institute of National remembrance claims that withdrawing Soviet troops committed regular crimes against the inhabitants of Białystok and its areas, including cases of whole families being executed by firing squads.On conclusion, 290,000 Soviet soldiers were captured, and 1,500 guns along with 2,500 tanks were destroyed, but 250,000 Soviet troops managed to escape (most of the prisoners would be dead within a few months because of inhumane conditions at the POW enclosures).

The quick advance East created the possibility for the Wehrmacht to advance rapidly towards the land bridge of Smolensk, from which an attack on Moscow could be planned. It also created the impression in the OKW that the war against the Soviet Union was already won, within days of its start.

Russia's two greatest cities, Leningrad, which Peter the Great had built as the capital on the Baltic and Moscow, the ancient and now Bolshevik capital, seemed to Hitler about to fall. On September 18 he issued strict orders: 'A capitulation of Leningrad or Moscow is not to be accepted, even when offered'. What was to happen to them he made clear to his commanders in a directive of September 29:
"the Führer has decided to have St. Petersburg (Leningrad) wiped off the face of the earth. The further existence of this large city is of no interest once Soviet Russia is overthrown...The intention is to close in on the city and raze it to the ground by artillery and continuous attack...Requests that the city be taken over will be turned down, for the problem of the survival of the population and of supplying it with food is one which cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for existence we have no interest in keeping even part of this great city population. [A few weeks later Göring told Ciano. 'This year between twenty and thirty million persons will die of hunger in Russia. But even if it were not, nothing can be done, certain nations must be decimated.  It is obvious that humanity is condemned to die of hunger, the last to die will be our two peoples...In the camps for Russian prisoners they have begun to eat each other".(Ciano's Diplomatic Papers pp 464-65), sic]

This photo, taken in the winter months of 1942, shows citizens of Leningrad as they dip for water from a broken main, during the nearly 900-day siege of the Russian city by German invaders. Unable to capture the Leningrad (today known as Saint Petersburg), the Germans cut it off from the world, disrupting utilities and shelling the city heavily for more than two years.

HITLER OVERCONFIDENT
That same week, on October 3, Hitler returned to Berlin and in an address to the German people proclaimed the collapse of the Soviet Union. 'I declare today, and I declare it without any reservation'. he said, ' that the enemy in the East has been struck down and will never rise again...Behind our troops there already lies a territory twice the size of the German Reich when I came to power in 1933'. When on October 8, Orel, a key city south of Moscow fell, Hitler sent his press chief, Otto Dietrich, flying back to Berlin, to tell the correspondents of the world's leading newspapers there the next day that the last intact Soviet armies, those of Marshal Timoshenko, defending Moscow, were locked in two steel German pockets before the capital, that the southern army of Marshal Budenmy were routed and dispersed, and that sixty to seventy divisions of Marshal Voroshilov's army were surrounded in Leningrad.  For all military purposes', Dietrich concluded smugly, 'Soviet Russia is done with. The British dream of a two-front war was dead'. These public boasts of Hitler and Dietrich were, to say the least, premature. In reality the Russians, despite the surprise with which they were taken on June 22, their subsequent heavy losses in men and equipment, their rapid withdrawal and the entrapment of some of their best armies, had begun in July to put up a mounting resistance such as the Wehrmacht had never encountered before. Halder' diary and the reports of such front line commanders as General Guderian, who led a large panzer group on he central front, began to be peppered, and then laden, with accounts of server fighting, desperate Russian stands and counter-attacks and heavy casualties to German as well as Soviet troops.

December 1941. Soviet troops in winter gear, supported by tanks, counter-attack German forces.

'The conduct of the Russian troops', General Blumentritt wrote later, 'even in the first battle (for MInsk) was in striking contrast to the behaviour of the Poles and the Western Allies in defeat. Even when encircled the Russians stood their ground and fought'. And there proved to be more of them, and with better equipment, than Adolf Hitler had dreamed was possible. Fresh Soviet divisions which the German intelligence had no inkling of were continually being thrown into battle.  'It's becoming ever clearer', Halder wrote in his diary on August 11, that we underestimated the strength of the Russian colossus not only in the economic and transportation sphere but above all in the military. At the beginning we reckoned with some 200 enemy divisions and we have already identified 360. When a dozen of them are destroyed the Russians throw in another dozen. On this broad expanse our front is too thin. It has no depth. As a result , the repeated enemy attacks often met with some success'. Rundstedt put it bluntly to Allied interrogators after the war. 'I realized', he said, 'soon after the attack began that everything that had been written about Russia was nonsense'.
Seveal generals, Guderian, Blumentritt and Sepp Dietrich among them, have left reports expressing astonishment at their first encounter with the Russian T-34 tank, of which they had not previously heard and which was so heavily armoured that the shells from German anti-tank guns bounced harmlessly off it. The appearance of this panzer, Blumentritt said later, marked the beginning of what came to be called the 'tank terror'. Also for the first time in the war, the Germans did not have the benefit of overwhelming superiority in he air to protect their ground troops and scout ahead. Despite the heavy losses on the ground in the first day of the campaign and in early combat, Soviet fighter planes kept appearing, like he fresh divisions, out of nowhere. Moreover, the swiftness of the German advance and the lack of suitable airfields in Russia left the German fighter base too far back to provide effective cover at the front. "At several stages in the advance", General von Kleist later reported, "my panzer forces were handicapped through lack of cover overhead". There was another German miscalculation about the Russians which Kleist mentioned to Liddell Hart which, of course, was shared by most of the other peoples of the West that summer: "Hopes of victory", Kleist said, "were largely built on the prospect that the invasion would produce a political upheaval in Russia... Too high hopes were built on the belief that Stalin would be overthrown by his own people if he suffered heavy defeats. The belief was fostered by the Führer's political advisers.
Indeed Hitler told Jodl. "We have only to kick in  the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down".

T-34 Russian Tank'. The USSR was able to produce T-34s in a seemingly endless stream. Between 1940 and 1945 some 40,000 T-34 tanks were manufactured.

The opportunity to kick in the door seemed to the Führer to be at hand halfway through July when there occurred the first great controversy over strategy in the German High Command and led to a decision by the Führer, over the protests of most of the top generals, which Halder thought proved to be " the greatest strategic blunder of the Eastern campaign". The issue was simple but fundamental. Should Beck's Army Group Center, the most powerful and so far the most successful of the three main German Armies, push on the two hundred miles to Moscow from Smolensk, which it ha reached on July 16? Or should the original plan, which Hitler laid down in December 18 directive, and which called for the main thrust on the north and south flanks, be adhered to? In other words, was Moscow the prize goal, or Leningrad and the Ukraine? The Army High Command, led by Brauchitsch and Halder and supported by Bock, whose central Army group was moving up the main highway to Moscow, and by Guderian, whose panzer forces were leading it, insisted on an all-out drive for the Soviet capital. There was much more to their argument that merely stressing the psychological value of capturing the enemy capital. Moscow they pointed out to Hitler, was a vital source of armament production and communication system. Take it, and the Soviets would not only be deprived of an essential source of arms but would be unable to move troops and supplies to the distant fronts, which thereafter would weaken, wither and collapse.
But there was a final conclusive argument which the Generals advanced to the former corporal who was now their Supreme Commander. All their intelligence reports showed that the main Russian forces were now being concentrated before Moscow for an all-out defence of the capital. Just east of Smolensk a Soviet army of half a million men, which had extricated itself from Bock's double envelopment, was digging in to bar further German progress toward the capital.

German sources described the gloomy looking officer at the right as a captured Russian colonel who is being interrogated by Nazi officers on October 24, 1941'

The centre of gravity of Russian strength (Halder wrote in a report prepared for the Allies immediately after the war) was therefore in front of Army Group Centre... The General Staff had been brought up with the idea that it must be the aim of an operation to defeat the military power of the enemy, and it therefore considered the next and most pressing task to be to defeat the forces of Timoshenko by concentrating all available forces at Army Group Centre, to advance on Moscow, to take this nerve centre of enemy resistance and to destroy the new enemy formations. The assembly for this attack had to be carried out as soon as possible because the season was advanced. Army Group North was in the meantime to fulfil its original mission and try to contact the Finns. Army Group South was to advance farther East to tie down the strongest possible enemy force.... After oral  discussion the General Staff of the Supreme Command (OKW) had failed, the Commander in Chief of the Army (Brauchitsch) submitted a memorandum of the General Staff to Hitler. This was done on August 18. "The effect", says Halder. "was explosive". Hitler had is hungry eyes on the food belt and industrial areas of the Ukraine and on the Russian oil fields just beyond the Caucasus. Besides he thought he saw the golden opportunity to entrap Budenmy's armies east of the Dnieper beyond Kiew, which still held out. He also wanted to capture Leningrad and join up with the Finns in the north. To accomplish these twin aims, several infantry, and several infantry and panzer divisions from Army Group Centre would have to be detached and seer north and especially south. Moscow could wait. On August 21, Hitler hurled a new directive at his rebellious General Staff. Halder copied it out word for word in his diary the next day.
'The proposals of the Army for the continuation of the operation in the East do not accord with my intentions. The most important objective to attain before the onset of winter is not the capture of Moscow but taking the Crimea, the industrial and coal-mining areas of the Donets basin and cutting off of Russian oil supplies from the Caucasus. In he north it is the locking up of Leningrad and the union with the Finns'.

Adolf Hitler, centre, studies a Russian war map with General Field Marshal Walter Von Brauchitsch, left, German commander in chief, and Chief of Staff Col. General Franz Halder, on August 7, 1941'

The Soviet Fifth Army on the Dnieper in the south, whose stubborn resistance had annoyed Hitler for several days, must, he laid down, be utterly destroyed, the Ukraine and Crimea occupied, Leningrad surrounded and a junction with the Finns achieved. "only then", he concluded, "will the conditions created whereby Timoshenko's Army can be attacked and successfully defeated". Thus (commented Halder bitterly) the aim of defeating decisively the Russian armies in front of Moscow was subordinated to the desire to obtain a valuable industrial area and to advance in the direction of Russian oil... Hitler now became obsessed with the idea of capturing both Leningrad and Stalingrad, for he persuaded himself that these two 'holy cities of Communism' were to fall, Russia would collapse. To add insult to injury to the field marshals and the generals who did not appreciate his strategic genius, Hitler sent what Halder called a "counter-memorandum" (To that of the Army of the eighteenth), which the General Staff Chief as "full of insults', such as stating that the Army High Command was full of "minds fossilized in out-of-date theories".
"Unbearable! Unheard of! The limit!' Halder snorted in his diary the next day. He conferred all afternoon ans evining with Field Marshall von Brauchitsch about the Führer's "inadmissible" mixing into the business of the Army High Command and General Staff, finally proposing that the head of the Army and he himself resign their posts.  "Brauchitsch refused", Halder noted, "because it wouldn't be practical and change nothing". The gutless Field Marshall had already, as  on so many other occasions, capitulated to the one-time corporal. When General Guderian arrived at the Führer's headquarters the next day, August 23, and was egged on by Halder to try to talk Hitler out of this disastrous decision, though the hard bitten panzer leader needed no urging, he was met by Brauchitsch. "I forbid you", the Army Commander in Chief said, "to mention the question of Moscow to the Führer. The operation south has been ordered. The problem now simply how it is carried out. Discussion is pointless".
Hitler let me speak to the end (Guderian later wrote). He then described in detail the considerations which had led him to make a different decision. He said that the raw materials and agriculture of the Ukraine were vitally necessary for the future prosecution of the war. He spoke of the need of neutralizing the Crimea, "the Soviet aircraft carrier for attacking the Rumanian oil fields". For the first time I heard him use the phrase: "My generals know nothing about the economic aspects of war"...He had given strict orders that the attack on Kiew was to be the immediate strategic objective and all actions were to be carried out with that in mind. I here saw for the first time a spectacle with which I was later to become very familiar: all those present, Keitel, Jodl and others, nodded in agreement with every sentence that Hitler uttered, while I was left alone with my point of view....

With a burning bridge across the Dnieper river in the background, a German sentry keeps watch in the recently-captured city of Kiev, in 1941

But Halder at no point in the previous discussions nodded his agreement. When Guderian saw him the next day and reported his failure to get Hitler to change hiss mind, he says the General Staff Chief "to my amazement suffered a complete nervous collapse, which led him to make accusations and imputations which wee utterly unjustified". [Halder, in his diary of August 24, gives quite a different version. He accuses Guderian of "irresponsibly" changing his mind after seeing Hitler and muses how useless it is to try to change a man's character. If he suffered, as Guderian alleged, " a complete nervous breakdown,' his pedantic notes indicate that he quickly recovered.sic]

German mechanized troops rest at Stariza, Russia on November 21, 1941, only just evacuated by the Russians, before continuing the fight for Kiev. The gutted buildings in the background testify to the thoroughness of the Russians "scorched earth" policy.

This was the most severe crisis in the German Military Command since the beginning of the war. Worse were to follow, with adversity. In itself Rundstedt's offensive in the south, made possible by the reinforcement of Guderian's panzer forces and infantry divisions withdrawn from the central front, was, as Guderian put it, a great tactical victory. Kiev itself fell on September 19, German units had already penetrated 150 miles beyond it, and on the twenty-sixth the battle of Kiev ended with the encirclement and surrender of 665,000 Russian prisoners, according to German claims. To Hitler it was "the greatest battle in the history of the world", but though it was a singular achievement some of his Generals were sceptical of its strategic significance. Bock's armour-less army group in the centre had been forced to cool its heels for two months along the Desna River just beyond Smolensk. The autumn rains, which would turn the Russian roads into quagmires, were drawing near. And after them, the winter, the cold and the snow.

                                                                                                                Continued under Part 2

BARBAROSSA-HITLERS PLAN TO INVADE RUSSIA PART 4

BARBAROSSA-HITLERS PLAN TO INVADE RUSSIA

PART 4

THE KREMLIN
Despite all he evidence of Hitler's intentions, the build-up of German forces in eastern Poland, the presence of million of German troops in the nearby Balkans, the Wehrmacht's conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece and its occupation of Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary, the men in the Kremlin, Stalin above all, stark realists though they were reputed to be and had been, blindly hoped that Russia somehow would still escape the Nazi tyrant's wrath. Their natural suspicions, of course, could not help but feed on the bare facts, nor could their growing resentment at Hitler's moves in south-eastern Europe be suppressed. There is, however, something unreal, almost unbelievable , quite grotesque, in the diplomatic exchanges between Moscow and Berlin in these spring weeks, in which the Germans clumsily to deceive the Kremlin to the last and the soviet leaders seemed unable to fully grasp reality and at in time.Though they several times protested to the entry of German troops into Rumania and Bulgaria and then the attack on Yugoslavia and Greece as a violation of the German-Soviet Pact and a threat to Russian "security interest", the Soviets went out of their way to appease Berlin as the date for the German attack approached. Stalin personally took the lead in this. On April 13, 1941, Ambassador von der Schulenburg telegraphed an interesting dispatch to Berlin recounting how on the departure of the Japanese Foreign Minister, Ysuke Matsuoka, that evening from Moscow,, Stalin had shown "a remarkable friendly manner" not only to the Japanese but to the Germans. At the railway station:

Kremlin and Red Square, Moscow

"Stalin publicly asked for me (Schulenburg wired)... and threw his arm around my shoulders: 'We must remain friends and you must now do everything to that end'! Somewhat later Stalin turned to the acting German Military Attaché, Colonel Krebs, first made sure that he was a German, and then said to him: 'We will remain friends with you,through thick and thin'!
Three days later the German chargé in Moscow, Tippelskirch, wired Berlin stressing that the demonstration at the station showed Stalin's friendliness toward Germany and this was especially important 'in view of the persistently circulation rumours of an imminent conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union'. The day before, Tippelskirch had informed Berlin that the Kremlin had accepted 'unconditionally', after months of wrangling, the German proposals for the settlement of the border between the two counties from the Igorka River to the Baltic Sea. 'The compliant attitude of the Soviet Government', he said, 'seems very remarkable.' In view of what was brewing in Berlin, it surely was.
In supplying blockaded Germany with important raw materials, the Soviet Government continued to be equally compliant. On April 5, 1941, Schnurre, in charge of trade negotiations with Moscow, reported jubilantly to his German masters that after the slowdown in Russian deliveries in January and February 1941, due to a 'cooling off of political relations', they had risen  'by leaps and bounds in March, especially in grains, petroleum, manganese ore and the non-ferrous and precious metals'. Transit traffic through Siberia, he added is proceeding favourable as usual. At our request the Soviet Government even put a special freight train for rubber at our disposal at the Manchurian border. Six weeks later, on May 15, Schnurre was reporting that the obliging Russians had put on special freight trains so that 4,000 tons of badly needed raw rubber could be delivered to Germany over the Siberian railway.

Map of the Trans-siberian railway (red)'

German deliveries of Machinery to Russia were falling behind, Schnurre observed, but he did not seem to mind if the Russians didn't. However, he was disturbed on May 15 by another factor. 'Great difficulties are created', he complained, 'by the countless rumours of an imminent German-Russian conflict', for which he blamed German official sources. Amazingly, the "difficulties", Schnurre explained in a lengthy memorandum to the Foreign Office, did not come from Russia but from German industrial firms, which, he said, were trying "to withdraw" from their contracts with the Russians.
Hitler, was doing his best to contradict the rumours, but at the same time he was busy trying to convince his generals and top officials that Germany was in growing danger of being attacked by Russia Though the generals, from their own military intelligence, knew better, so hypnotic was Hitler's spell over them that even after the war Halder Brauchitsch, Mannstein, and others (although not Paulus, who seems to have been more honest) contended that a Soviet military build-up on the Polish frontier had become very threatening by the beginning of the summer. Count von der Schulenburg, who had come home from Moscow on a brief leave, saw Hitler in Berlin on April 28 and tried to convince him of Russia's peaceful intentions. 'Russia", he attempted to explain, 'is very apprehensive at the rumours predicting a German attack on Russia. I cannot believe', he added, 'that Russia will ever attack Germany... If Stalin was unable to go with England and France in 1939 when both were still strong, he will certainly not make such a decision today, when France is destroyed and England badly battered. On the contrary, I am convinced that Stalin is prepared to make even further concessions to us'.
The Führer feigned scepticism. He had been 'forewarned', he said, 'by events in Serbia...What devil had possessed the Russians', he asked, 'to conclude the friendship pact with Yugoslavia?' He did not believe, it was true, he said, that 'Russia could be brought to attack Germany'. Nevertheless, he concluded, he was obliged 'to be careful'. Hitler did not tell the ambassador to the Soviet Union what plans he had in store for that country, and Schulenburg, an honest, decent German of the old school, remained ignorant of them to the last.

German Plane over Russia' (date unknown)

Stalin, too, but not of the signs, or of the warnings, of what Hitler was up to. On April 22 the Soviet Government formerly protested eighty instances of border violations by German planes which it said had taken place between March 27 and April 18, providing accounts of each. In one case, it said, in a German reconnaissance plane which landed near Rovno on April 15 there was found a camera, rolls of exposed film and a torn topographical map of western districts of the U.S.S.R., 'all of which give evidence of the purpose of the crew of this airplane'. Even in protesting the Russians were conciliatory. They had given the border troops, the note said, 'the order not to fire on German planes flying over Soviet territory so long as such flights do not occur frequently. Stalin made further conciliatory moves in May. To please Hitler he expelled the diplomatic representatives in Moscow of Belgium, Norway, Greece and even Yugoslavia and closed their legations. He recognized the pro-Nazi government  of Rashid Ali in Iraq. He kept the Soviet press under strictest restraint in order to avoid provoking Germany.
'These manifestations, Schulenburg wired to Berlin on May 12, of the intention of the Stalin Government are calculated... to relieve the tension between the Soviet Union and Germany and to create a better atmosphere for the future. We must bear in mind that Stalin personally has always advocated a friendship between Germany and the Soviet Union'.
Though Stalin had long been absolute dictator of the Soviet Union this was the first mention by Schulenburg in his dispatches of the term "Stalin Government". There was good reason. On May 6 Stalin had personally taken over as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, or Prime Minister, replacing Molotov, who remained as Foreign Commissar. This was the first time the all-powerful secretary of the Communist Party had taken government office and the general world reaction was that it meant the situation had become so serious for the Soviet Union, especially in its relation with Germany, that only Stalin could deal with it as the nominal as well as the actual head of government.  This interpretation was obvious, but there was another which was not so clear but which the astute German ambassador in Moscow promptly pointed out to Berlin. Stalin, he reported, was displeased with the deterioration of German- Soviet relations and blamed Molotov's clumsy diplomacy for much of it.
'In my opinion, schulenburg said, it may be assumed with certainty that Stalin has set himself a foreign-policy goal of overwhelming importance...which he hopes to attain by his personal efforts. I firmly believe that in an international situation which he considers serious, Stalin has set himself the goal of preserving the Soviet Union from a conflict with Germany'.

Stalin at the Tehran Conference in 1943

Did the crafty Soviet dictator not realize by now, the middle of May 1941, that this was an impossible goal, that there was nothing, short of an an abject surrender to Hitler, that he could do to attain it? He surely knew the significance of Hitler's conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece, of the presence of large masses of German troops in Rumania and Hungary on his southwest borders, of the Wehrmacht build-up on his western frontier in Poland. The persistent runors in Moscow itself surely reached him. By the beginning of May what Schulenburg called in a dispatch on the second dau of that month 'rumours of an imminent German-Russian military show-down" were so rife in the Soviet capital that he and his officials in the German Embassy were having difficulty in combating them.
'Please bear in mind, he advised Berlin, that attempts to counteract these rumours here in Moscow must necessarily remain ineffectual if such rumours incessantly reach here from Germany, and if every traveller who comes to Moscow, or travels through Moscow, not only brings these rumours along, but can even confirm them by citing facts'.
The veteran ambassador was getting suspicious himself. He was instructed by Berlin to continue to deny the rumours, and to spread it about that not only was there no concentration of German troops on Russia's frontiers but that actually considerable forces (eight divisions, he was told for his 'personal information') were being transferred from 'east to west'. Perhaps these instructions only confirmed the ambassador's uneasiness, since by this time the press throughout the world was beginning to trumpet the German build-up along the Soviet borders. But before this, Stalin had received specific warnings of Hitler's plans, and apparently paid no attention to them. The most serious one come from the government of the United States. Early in January 1941, the U.S. commercial attaché in Berlin Sam E. Woods, had sent a confidential report to the State Department stating that he had learned from trustworthy German sources that Hitler was making plans to attack Russia in the spring. It was a long and detailed message, outlining the General Staff plan of attack (which proved to be quite accurate) and preparations being made for the economic exploitation of the Soviet Union, once it was conquered.

German infantrymen watch enemy movements from their trenches shortly before an advance inside Soviet territory, on July 10, 1941

Secretary of State Cordell Hull thought at first that Woods had been victim of a German 'plant'. He called in J. Edgar Hoover. The F.B.I. had read the report and judged it authentic. Woods had named some of his sources, both in various ministries in Berlin and in the German General Staff, and on being checked they were adjudged  in Washington to be men who ought to know what was  up and anti-Nazi enough to tattle. Despite the strained relations then existing between the American and Soviet governments Hull decided to inform the Russians, requesting Under-secretary of State Summer Welles to communicate the substance of the report to Ambassador Constantine Oumansky. This was done on March 20.
Mr. Oumansky turned very white , Welles later wrote. He was silent for a moment and then merely said: "I fully realise the gravity of the message you have given me. My government will be grateful for your confidence and I will inform it immediately of our conversation. [The American consul in Königsberg (East Prussia), Koykendall, relayed a report specifying correctly the exact day the attack would begin. sic] If it was grateful, indeed if it ever believed this timely intelligence, it never communicates any inkling to the American government. In fact, as Secretary Hull related in his memoirs, Moscow grow more hostile and truculent because America's support of Briton made it impossible to supply Russia with all the materials it demanded. Nevertheless, according to Hull, the State Department, having received dispatches from its legations in Bucharest and Stockholm the first week in June stating Germany would invade Russia within a fortnight, forwarded copies of them to Ambassador Steinhardt in Moscow, who turned them over to Molotov. Churchill too sought to warn Stalin. On April 3 he asked his ambassador in Moscow, Sir Clifford Cripps, to deliver a personal note to the dictator pointing out the significance to Russia of German troop movements in southern Poland which he had learned through a British agent.  Cripps' delay in delivering the message still vexed Churchill when he wrote about the incident later in his memoirs. Before the end of April, Cripps knew the date for the German attack, and the Germans knew he knew it. On April 24, the German naval attaché in Moscow sent a curt message to the Navy High Command in Berlin: 'The British Ambassador predicts June 22 the day of the outbreak of the war'. This message, which is among the captured German papers, was recorded in the German Naval Diary on the same day, with an exclamation point added at the end. The Admirals were surprised at the accuracy of the British Envoy's prediction. The poor naval attaché, who like the ambassador in Moscow had not been let in on the secret, added in his dispatch that it was 'manifestly absurd.' Molotov must have thought so too. A month later, on May 22, he received Schulenburg to discuss various matters. 'He wa as amiable, self assured and well informed as ever', the ambassador reported to Berlin, and again emphasized that Stalin and Molotov, 'the two strongest men in the Soviet Union', were striving above all to avoid conflict with Germany.

Hitler's detailed plan of Action "Barbarossa". Hitler signed (Anhang No. 21) War Directive No. 21 to the German High Command for an operation now codenamed "Operation Barbarossa" stating: "The German Wehrmacht must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign. The operation was named after Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of the Holy Roman Empire, a leader of the Third Crusade in the 12th century. The invasion was set for 15 May 1941. The plan for Barbarossa assumed that the Wehrmacht would emerge victorious if it could destroy the bulk of the Red Army west of the Western Dvina and Dnieper Rivers. This assumption would be proven fatally wrong less than a month into the invasion.

On one point the usually perspicacious ambassador couldn't have been more wrong. Molotov, at this juncture, was certainly not 'well informed'. But neither was the ambassador.
The extent to which the Russian Foreign Commissar was ill-informed was given public expression on June 14, 1941, just a week before the German blow fell. Molotov called Schulenburg that evining and handed him the text of a Tass statement which, he said, was being broadcast that very night and published in the newspapers the next morning. Blaming Cripps personally for the widespread rumours of 'an impending war between the U.S.S.R. and Germany' in the English press", this official statement of the Soviet government branded them as an 'obvious absurdity...a clumsy propaganda maneuver of the forces arrayed against the Soviet Union and Germany".
Even the recent German troop movements from the Balkans to the Soviet frontiers were explained in the communique as 'having no connection with Soviet-German relations'. As for the rumours saying that Russia would attack Germany, they were 'false and provocative'. The irony of the Tass communique on behalf of the Soviet government is enhanced by two German moves, one on the day of its publication, June 15, the other on the next day.
From Venice, where he was conferring with Ciano, Ribbentrop sent a secret message on June 15 to Budapest warning the Hungarian government 'to take steps to secure its frontiers'. The Germans were tipping off the Hungarians, but not their principal ally. When Ciano the next day, during a gondola ride on the canals of Venice, asked Ribbentrop about the rumours of a German attack on Russia, the German Foreign Minister replied:
'Dear Ciano, I cannot tell you anything as yet because every decision is locked in the impenetrable bosom of the Führer. However, one thing is certain: if we attack them, the Russia of Stalin will be erased from the map within eight weeks'.[This is from the last diary entry of Ciano, made on December 23, 1943, in Cell 27 of the Verona jail, a few days before he was executed. He added that the Italian government learned of the German invasion of Russia a half hour after it began. (Ciano Diaries, p 583),sic]

On the afternoon of 24 July 1943, Mussolini summoned the Fascist Grand Council to its first meeting since 1939. At that meeting, Mussolini announced that the Germans were thinking of evacuating the south. This led Count Dino Grandi to launch a blistering attack on his long-time comrade. Grandi put on the table a resolution asking the king to resume his full constitutional powers—in effect, a vote leading to Mussolini's total ousting from leadership. The motion won by an unexpectedly large margin, 19-7, with Ciano voting in favour.
Mussolini did not think the vote had any substantive value, and showed up at work the next morning like any other day. That afternoon, Victor Emmanuel III, the King, summoned him to Villa Savoia and dismissed him from office. Upon leaving the Villa, Mussolini was arrested. For the next two months he was moved from place to place to hide him and prevent his rescue by the Germans.
Ultimately Mussolini was sent to Gran Sasso, a mountain resort in central Italy (Abruzzo). He was kept there in complete isolation until rescued by the Germans. Mussolini then set up a puppet government in the area of northern Italy still under German occupation and called  it the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (R.S.I.).
Ciano, having been dismissed from his post by the new government, attempted to find shelter in Germany, alongside Edda and their three children, but the Germans returned him to R.S.I. agents and he was then formally arrested for treason. Under German and Fascist pressure, Mussolini had Ciano tried [Who was his son in law, sic]. After the Verona trial sentence, a Fascist firing squad, at a shooting range in Verona on 11 January 1944, executed Ciano and others (including Emilio De Bono and Giovanni Marinelli) who had voted for Mussolini's ousting. The executed Italians were tied to chairs and shot in the back as a further humiliation. Ciano was effectively executed for dissenting against Il Duce's will. His last words were "Long live Italy!"

The Lend-Lease Memorial in Fairbanks, Alaska commemorates the shipment of U.S. aircraft to the Soviet Union along the Northwest Staging Route

 [There was no charge for the Lend Lease aid delivered during the war, but the Americans did expect the return of some durable goods such as ships. Congress had not authorized the gift of supplies after the war, so the administration charged for them, usually at a 90% discount. Large quantities of undelivered goods were in Britain or in transit when Lend-Lease terminated on 2 September 1945. Britain wished to retain some of this equipment in the immediate post war period. In 1946, the post-war Anglo-American loan further indebted Britain to the U.S. Lend-lease items retained were sold to Britain at 10% of nominal value, giving an initial loan value of £1.075 billion for the Lend Lease portion of the post-war loans. Payment was to be stretched out over 50 annual payments, starting in 1951 and with five years of deferred payments, at 2% interest. The final payment of $83.3 million (£42.5 million), due on 31 December 2006 (repayment having been deferred in the allowed five years), was made on 29 December 2006 (the last working day of the year). After this final payment Britain's Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Ed Balls, formally thanked the U.S. for its wartime support.sic]

Outdated, but serviceable U.S. destroyers sit in the Back Bay at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, on Aug. 28, 1940. Plans were well underway to bring these ships up to date and transfer them to Allied countries to aid their defence. These programs would be signed into law as the Lend-Lease program in March of 1941, and would result in billions of dollars worth of war material being shipped overseas.

HITLER ORDERS THE INVASION
While the Kremlin was smugly preparing to broadcast to the world on June 14, 1941, that the rumours of a German attack on Russia were an 'obvious absurdity', Adolf Hitler that very day was having his final big war conference on Barbarossa with leading officers of the Wehrmacht. The timetable for the massing of troops in the East and their deployment to the jumping-off positions had been in operation on May 22. A revised version of the timetable was issued a few days later. It is a long and detailed document and shows that by the beginning of June not only were all plans for the onslaught on Russia complete but the vast and complicated movement of troops, artillery , armour, planes, ships and supplies was well under way and on schedule. A brief item in the Naval War Diary for May 29 states: 'The preparatory movements of warships for Barbarossa has began'. Talks with the General Staff of Rumania, Hungary and Finland, the last country anxious now to win back what had been taken from her by the Russians in the winter war, were completed. On June 9 from Berchtesgaden Hitler sent out an order convoking the commanders in chief of the three Armed Services and top Field Generals for a final all-day meeting on Barbarossa in Berlin on June 14.
Despite the enormity of the task, not only Hitler but his Generals wee in a confident mood as they went over last-minute details of the most gigantic military operation in history, an all-out attack on a front stretching some 1,500 miles from the Arctic Ocean at Petsamo to the Black Sea. The night before , Brauchitsch had returned to Berlin from an inspection of the build-up in the East. Halder noted in his diary that the Army Commander in Chief was highly pleased. Officers and men. he said, were in top shape and ready.
This last military powwow on June 14 lasted from 11 A.M. until 6.30 P.M. It was broken by lunch at 2 P.M., at which Hitler gave his Generals yet another of his fiery,eve-of-the-battle pep talks. According to Halder, it was 'a comprehensive political speech', with Hitler stressing that he had to attack Russia because her fall would force England to 'give up'. But he bloodthirsty Führer must have emphasised something else even more. Keitel told abut it during direct examination on the stand at Nürnberg: "The main theme was that this was the decisive battle between two ideologies and that the practices which we knew as soldiers, the only correct ones under international law, had to be measured by completely different standards". Hitler thereupon, said Keitel, gave various orders for carrying out an unprecedented terror in Russia by "brutal means". 'Did you, or did any other Generals, raise objections to these orders?' asked Keitel's own attorney. "No. I personally made no remonstrances", the General replied. Nor did any of the other Generals, he added.
It is almost inconceivable but nevertheless true that the men in the Kremlin, for all their reputation they had of being suspicious, crafty hard-headed, and despite all the evidence and all the warnings that stared them in the face, did not realize right up to the last moment that they were to be hit, and with a force which would almost destroy their nation. At 9.30 on the pleasant summer evening of June 21, 1941, nine hours before the German attack was scheduled to begin, Molotov received the German ambassador at his office in the Kremlin and delivered his 'final fatuity'. [Churchill's expression, sic] After mentioning further border violations by German aircraft, which he said he had instructed the Soviet ambassador in Berlin to bring to the attention of Ribbentrop, Molotov turned to another subject, which Schulenburg described in an urgent telegram to the Wilhelmstrasse that same night:
'There were a number of indications, Molotov had told him, that the German Government was dissatisfied with the Soviet Government. Rumours were even current that a war was impending between Germany and the Soviet Union... The Soviet Government was unable to understand the reason for Germany's dissatisfaction... He would appreciate it if I could tell him what had brought about the present situation in German-Soviet relations. I replied, Schulenburg added, that that I could not answer his questions, as I lacked pertinent information.'
He was soon to get it. For on its way to him over the air waves between Berlin and Moscow was a long coded radio message from Ribbentrop, dated June 21, 1941, marked "Very Urgent, State Secret, For the Ambassador Personally", which began: "Upon receipt of this telegram, all of the cipher material still there is to be destroyed. The radio set is to be put out of commission. Please inform Herr Molotov at once that you have an urgent communiction to make to him... Then please make the following declaration to him".

An Sd.Kfz-250 half-track in front of German tank units, as they prepare for an attack, on July 21, 1941, somewhere along the Russian war-front, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union'

                                             
THE FINAL BREAK
It was a familiar declaration, strewn with all the shop-worn lies and fabrications at which Hitler and Ribbentrop had become expert and winch had concocted so often before to justify each fresh act of unprovoked aggression. Perhaps it somewhat topped all the previous ones for sheer effrontery and deceit. While Germany had loyally abided by the German-Soviet Pact, it said, Russia repeatedly broken it. The USSR had practised 'sabotage, terrorism and espionage' against Germany. It had 'combated the German attempt to set up a stable order in Europe'. It had conspired with Britain 'for an attack against German troops in Rumania and Bulgaria'. By concentrating 'all availavle Russian forces on a long front from the Baltic to the Black Sea', it has 'menaced' the Reich. Reports received the last few days, it went on, eliminate the last remaining doubts as to the aggressive character of this Russian concentration... In addition, there are reports from England regarding the negotiation of Ambassador Cripps for closer political collaboration between England and the Soviet Union.
To sum up, the Government of the Reich declares, that the Soviet Government, contrary to the obligations it assumed,
1. has not only continued, but even intensified its attempts to undermine Germany and Europe.
2.has adopted a more and more anti-German foreign policy.
3.has concentrated all its forces in readiness at the German border. Thereby the Soviet Government has broken its treaty with Germany and is about to attack Germany from the rear in its struggle for life. The Führer has therefore ordered the German Armed Forces to oppose this threat with all the means to their disposal'.
"Please do not enter in any discussion of this communication", RIbbentrop advised his ambassador at the end. What could the shaken and disillusioned Schulenburg, who had devoted the best years of his life to improving German-Russian relations and who knew that the attack on the Soviet Union was unprovoked and without justification, say? Arriving back at the Kremlin just as dawn was breaking, he contended himself with reading the German declaration. Molotov, stunned at last,  had listened in silence to the end and then said:
"it is war. Do you believe we deserve that?"
[Thus ended he veteran ambassadors diplomatic career. Returning to Germany and forced to retire, he joined the Opposition circle led by General Beck, Gördeler, Hassel and others and for a time was marked to become Foreign Minister. of an anti-Hitler Regime. Hassel reported Schulenburg in 1943 as being willing to cross the Russian lines in order to talk with Stalin about a negotiated peace with an anti-Nazi government in Germany. Schulenburg was arrested and imprisoned after the July 1944 plot against Hitler and hanged.sic]
At the same hour of daybreak a similar scene was taking place in the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. All afternoon on une 21, the Soviet Ambassador, Vladinimr Dekanozov, had been telephoning the Foreign Office asking for an appointment with Ribbentrop so that he could deliver his little protest against further border violations by German planes. He was told that the German Foreign Minister was 'out of town'. Then at 2 A.M. on the 22nd he was informed that Ribbentrop would receive him at 4 A.M. at the Foreign Office. The envoy, who had been a deputy foreign commissar, a hatch-man for Stalin and the troubleshooter who had arranged the taking over of Lithuania, received, like Molotov in Moscow, the shock of his life. Dr Schmidt was present, has described the scene.:
'I had never seen Ribbentrop so exited as he was in the five minutes before Dekanozov's arrival.. He walked up and down his room like a caged animal...Dekanozov was shown in and, obviously no guessing anything was amiss, held out his hand to Ribbentrop. We sat down and... Dekanozov proceeded to put on behalf of his Government questions that need clarification. But he had hardly began before Ribbentrop, with a stony expression, interrupted, saying: 'That's not the question now'...

Vladimir Georgievich Dekanozov

Soviet statesman and one of the leaders of the Soviet State Security (GB) in the 1930s. Dekanozov was head of the NKVD foreign intelligence from December 2, 1938 to May 13, 1939, and then, from May 1939 to 1947, was assistant head of the People’s Commissariat (later Ministry) of Foreign Affairs.In late November 1940, Dekanozov was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Berlin (while remaining the Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs) – remaining in that position until the Nazi attack against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. During 1941, he became a full member of the party’s Central Committee. It is a common wisdom in Russia that as an ambassador, Dekanozov proved unable to appraise the situation and evaluate the Nazi plans against the Soviet Union. In fact, according to recently published documents, Dekanozov DID appraise the situation and warned his immediate boss, Molotov, of the Nazi plans to attack the Soviet Union. He died 1953.

German troops in Russia, 1941"

The arrogant German Foreign Minister thereupon explained that the question was, gave the ambassador a copy of the memorandom which Schulenburg at that moment was reading out to Molotov, and informed him that German troops were at this instant taking 'military countermeasures' on the Soviet frontier. The startled Soviet envoy, says Schmidt, 'recovered his composure quickly and expressed his 'deep regret' at the developments, for which he blamed Germany. 'He rose, bowed perfunctorily and left the room without shaking hands. The Nazi-Soviet honeymoon was over. At 3:30 A.M.on June 22, 1941, a half hour before the closing diplomatic formalities in the Kremlin and the Wilhelmstrasse, the roar of Hitler's guns along hundreds of miles of front had blasted it forever.
Thee was one other diplomatic prelude to the cannonade. On the afternoon of June 21, Hitler sat down at his desk in his new underground headquarters, WolFsschanze (Wolf's Liar), near Rastenburg in a gloomy forest of East Prussia, and dictated a long letter to Mussolini . As in the preparation of all his other aggression he had not trusted his good friend and chief ally enough to let him in on his secret until the last moment. Now, at the eleventh hour, he did. His letter is the most revealing and authentic evidence we have of the reasons for his taking this fatal step, which for so long puzzled the outside world and which was to pave the way for his end and that of the third Reich. The letter, to be sure, is full of Hitler's customary lies and evasions which he tried to fob off even on his friends. But beneath them, there emerges his fundamental reasoning and his true, if mistaken, estimate of the world situation as the summer of 1941, the second of the war, officially began.
DUCE!
I am writing this letter to you at a moment when months of anxious deliberation and continuous nerve-wrecking waiting are ending in the hardest decision of my life. The situation: England has lost the war. Like a drowning person, she grasps at every straw. Nevertheless, some of her hopes are naturally not without a certain logic... The destruction of France ... has directed the glances of the British warmongers continually to the place from which they tried to start the war: to  Soviet Russia. Both countries, Soviet Russia and England, are equally interested in a Europe...rendered prostrate by a long war. Behind these two countries stands the North American Union goading them on...
Hitler next explained that with large Soviet military forces in his rear he could never assemble the strength,"particularly in the air", to make the all-out  attack on Britain which would bring her down. 'Really, all available Russian forces are at our border... If circumstances should give me cause to employ the German Air Force against England, there is danger that Russia will then begin its strategy of extortion, to which I would have to yield in silence simply from a feeling of air inferiority........'
Germany, Hitler said, would not need any Italian troops in Russia. (he was not going to share the glory of conquering Russia any more than he had shared the conquest of France). But Italy he declared, could 'give decisive aid' by strengthening its forces in North Africa and by preparing 'to march into France in case of a French violation of the treaty'. This was a fine bait for the land-hungry Duce. As for the war in the East, Duce, it will surely be difficult, But I do not entertain a second's doubt as to its great success. I hope above all, that it will then be possible for us to secure a common food-supply base in the Ukraine which will furnish us such supplied as we may need in future. [The secret buildup of the infrastructure in the Generalgouvernement (the occupied part of Poland) to support Operation Barbarossa. sic]
Then came the excuse for not tipping off his partner earlier. 'If I waited until this moment Duce, to send you this information, it is because the final decision itself will not be made until 7 o'clock tonight...Whatever may come, Duce, our situation cannot become worse as a result of this step, it can only improve... Should England nevertheless not draw any conclusion from the hard facts, then we can, with our rear secured, apply ourselves with increased strength to dispatching of our enemy.
Finally Hitler described his great feeling of relief at having finally made up is mind.....With hearty and comradely greetings, Your ADOLF HITLER' [The letter has been abbreviated and is not the entire text, sic]

'The German Axis'

         Hitler forced countries to become allies with Germany during Operation Barbarossa. When Romania and Hungary joined Germany’s list of allies, Russians accused Berlin of violating the spirit of the 1939 pact.  Hitler also was able to strengthened his allies by signing a new military alliance with Italy and Japan called the Tripartite Pact. Hitler used his allies for resources as well. Poland was used for supplies of iron, nickel, and other agronomies. Finland wanted revenge against Russia after the Red Army defeated them in 1939, so they too became allies with Germany.

Children of Japan, Germany, and Italy meet in Tokyo to celebrate the signing of the Tripartite Alliance between the three nations, on December 17, 1940. Japanese education minister Kunihiko Hashida, center, holding crossed flags, and Mayor Tomejiro Okubo of Tokyo were among the sponsors.
The second member of the Axis was Japan. Th story of the relationship between Hitler's Germany and imperial Japan involved a series of up and downs. Germany sought better relations with Japan initially for economic reasons. The relationship between Germany and Japan steadily improved as both countries were drawn closer by tension with the Soviet Union. Japan, along with Italy, signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, a treaty theoretically directed against the the Soviet Union, but in reality nothing more than a symbolic gesture. In Japan's case, tensions with the Soviet Union broke out into the open warfare along he border between Soviet controlled Mongolia and Japanese dominated Manchuria. The ensuing fighting resulted in two severe dubbing's of the Japanese by the Red Army. The Japanese, however, evaded attempts by Ribbentrop to bring Japan into a formal alliance with Germany. The Germans were also annoyed by what they regarded as unwelcome attempts by Japan to mediate between Germany and Poland. The relationship improved mainly due to the opposition to communism through the Anti-Comintern Pact and secondly the military alliance through the Tripartite Pact. Both nations had been adversaries during WW I and these agreements settled previous animosity between the nations through Yosuke Matsuoka's visit to Berlin, a German delegation was sent to Tokyo to celebrate the Tripartite Pact's signing, and through the Japanese ambassador to Germany Hiroshi Oshima among other correspondences. Gemany's declaration of war further solidified German-Japanese relations and showed Germany's solidarity with Japan and encouraged Japanese cooperation against the British.

EPILOGUE
At 3 0'clock in the morning of June 22, a bare half hour before the German troops jumped off, Ambassador von Bismarck awakened Ciano in Rome to deliver Hitler's long missive, which the Italian Foreign Minister then telephoned to Mussolini, who was resting at his summer place at Riccione. It was not the first time that the Duce had been awakened from his sleep in the middle of the night by a message from his Axis partner, and he resented it. 'Not even I disturb my servants at night', Mussolini fretted to Ciano, 'but the Germans make me jump out of bed at any hour without the least consideration'. Nevertheless, as soon as Mussolini had rubbed the sleep from his eyes he gave orders for an immediate declaration of war on the Soviet Union. He was now completely a prisoner of the Germans. He knew it and resented it. 'I hope for only one thing', he told Ciano, 'that in this war in the East the Germans lose a lot of feathers'. Still, he realised that his on future now depended wholly on German arms. The Germans would win in Russia, he was sure, but he hoped that at least they would get a bloody nose. He could not know, nor did he suspect, nor did anyone else in the West, on either side, that they would get much worse. On Sunday morning, June 22, the day Napoleon crossed the Niemen in 1812 on his way to Moscow, and exactly a year after Napoleon's country France, had capitulated at Compiegne, Adolf Hitler's armoured, mechanized and hitherto invincible Army poured across the Niemen and various other rivers and penetrated swiftly into Russia. The Red Army, despite all the warnings and warning sites, was, as General Halder noted in his diary the first day, 'tactically surprised along the entire front'. All the first bridges were captured intact. In fact, says Halder, at most places along the border the Russians were not even deployed for action and were overrun before they could organize resistance. Hundreds of Soviet planes were destroyed on the flying fields. Within a few days tens of thousands of prisoners began to pour in, whole armies were quickly encircled. It seemed like the "Feldzug in Polen"all over again.
'It is hardly too much to say', the usually cautious Halder noted in his diary on July 3 after going over the latest General Staff reports, 'that the "Feldzug" against Russia has been won in fourteen days'. In a matter of weeks, he added, it would all be over.


                                                                                                            FINAL-  HKS, May 2013

Acknowledgements
Credits;
Wikipedia
W.L. Shirer
Nicole Doherty Web Site
AP Photo
WWII Data Base
J.M. Roberts
S.Courtois                                                                                                

BARBAROSSA-HITLERS PLAN TO INVADE RUSSIA - PART 3

 BARBAROSSA-HITLERS PLAN TO INVADE RUSSIA

 Part 3

RUSSIAN COUNTER PROPOSAL
From this wearing experience with Moscow's tough bargainer and from further evidence that came a fortnight later of Stalin's increasingly rapacious  appetite, Hitler drew his final conclusions. It must be set down here that the Soviet dictator, his subsequent claims to the contrary notwithstanding, now accepted Hitler's offer to join the fascist camp, though at a stiffer price than had been offered in Berlin. On November 26, scarcely two weeks after Molotov had returned from Germany, he informed the German ambassador in Moscow that Russia was prepared to join the four-power pact, subject to the following conditions:
1. That German troops are immediately withdrawn from Finland, which ...belongs to the Soviet Union's sphere of influence...
2. That within the next few months the security of the Soviet Union in the Straits is assured by the conclusion of a mutual-assistance pact between the U.S.S.R. and Bulgaria... and by this establishment of a base for land ans naval forces by the Soviet Union within range of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles by means of a long-term lease.
3. That the area south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf is recognized as the centre of the aspiration of the Soviet Union.
4. That Japan renounce her rights to concessions for coal and oil in the northern Sakhalin. [Dispatch of Schulenburg,Nov 26.1940, NSR,pp.258-59,sic]
In all Stalin asked for five, instead of two, secret protocols embodying his new proposals and, for good measure, asked, that, should Turkey prove difficult about Russian bases controlling the Straits, the four powers take military measures against her. The proposals constituted a price higher than Hitler was willing even to consider. He tried to keep Russia out of Europe, but Stalin was demanding Finland, Bulgaria, control of the Straits and, in effect, the Arabian and the Persian oil fields, which normally supplies Europe with most of its oil. The Russians did not even mention the Indian Ocean, which the Führer had tried to fob off as the centre of "aspirations" for the U.S.S.R. "Stalin is clever and cunning", Hitler told his top military chiefs. "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".
The great cold-blooded Nazi blackmailer had met his match, and the realisation infuriated him. At the beginning of December he told Halder to bring him the Army General Staff's plan for the onslaught on the Soviet Union. On December 5 Halder and Brauchitsch dutifully brought it to him, and at the end of a four-hour conference he approved  it. Both the captured OKW War Diary and Halder's own confidential journal contain a report on this crucial meeting. The Nazi war lord stressed that the Red Army must be broken through both north and south of the Pripet Marshes, surrounded and annihilated "as in Poland". Moscow, he told Halder, "was not important". The important thing was to destroy the "life force" of Russia. Rumania and Finland were to join in the attack, but not Hungary. General Dietel's mountain division at Narvik was to be transported across northern Sweden to Finland for an attackon the Soviet Arctic region. Altogether some "120 to 130 Divisions" were allotted for the big campaign. [Sweden,which refused transit to the Allies during the Russo-Finnish War,permitted this fully armed division to pass through. Hungary of course joined in the war against Russia,sic] In its report on this conference, as in previous references to the pla to attack Russia, General's diary employs the the code name "Otto". Less than a fortnight later, on December 18, 1940, the code name by which it will go down in history was substituted. On this day Hitler crossed the Rubicon. He issued Directive No 21 it was headed:
OPERATION BARBAROSSA
It began: TOP SECRET The Führer's Headquarters December 18, 1940
The German Armed Forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign before the end of the war against England. For this purpose the Army will have to employ all available units with the reservation that the occupied territories will have to safeguard against surprise attacks... Preparations... are to be completed by May 15, 1941. Great caution has to be exercised that the intention of an attack will not be recognized.
So the target date was mid-May of the following spring, The "general purpose" of Operation Barbarossa Hitler laid down as follows:
The mass of the Russian Army in western Russia is to be destroyed in daring operations by driving forward deep armoured wedges, and the retreat of intact, battle-ready troops  into the wide spaces of Russia is to be prevented.
The ultimate objective of the operation is to establish a defence line against Asiatic Russia from a line running from the Volga river to Archangel.

Opening phase of Operation Barbarossa.

Hitler's directive then went into considerable detail about the main lines of attack. The roles of Rumania and Finland were defined. They were to provide the jumping-off areas for the attacks on the extreme north and south flanks as well as troops to aid the German forced in these operations. Finland's position was especially important. Various Finnish-German Armies were to advance on Leningrad and Lake Ladoga area, cut the Murmansk rail line, secure Petsamo nickel mines and occupy the Russian ice-free ports on the Arctic Ocean. Much depended, Hitler admitted, on whether Sweden would permit the transit of German troops from Norway, but he correctly predicted that the Swedes would be accommodating in this. The main operations were to be divided, Hitler explained, by the Pripet Marshes. The major blow would be delivered north of the swamps with two whole army groups. One would advance up the Baltic States to Leningrad. The other, farther south, would drive through White Russia and then swing north to join the first group, thus trapping what was left of the Soviet forces trying to retreat from the Baltic. Only then, Hitler laid it down, must an offensive against Moscow be undertaken. The Russian capital, which a fortnight before had seemed "unimportant" to Hitler, now assumed more significance. "the capture of this city", he wrote, "means a decisive political and economic victory beyond the fall of the country's most important rail-road junction". And he pointed out that Moscow was not only the main communication centre of Russia but its principal producer of armaments.

Armed with heavy shovels, a hastily assembled work force of Moscow women and elderly men gouge a huge tank trap out of the earth to halt German Panzers advancing on the Russian capital. In the feverish effort to save the city, more than 100,000 citizens labored from mid-October until late November digging ditches and building other obstructions. When completed, the ditches extended more than 100 miles

A third army group would drive south of the marshes through the Ukraine toward Kiew, its principal objective being to roll up and destroy the Soviet forces there west of the Dnieper River. Farther south German-Rumanian troops would protect the flank of the main operation and advance toward Odessa and thence along the Black Sea. Thereafter the Donets basin, where 60 per cent of Soviet industry was concentrated, would be taken. Such was Hitler's grandiose plan, just before Christmas holidays of 1940, and so well prepared that no essential changes would be made in it. In order to secure secrecy, only nine copies of the directive were made, one for each of the three armed services and the rest guarded at OKW headquarters. Even the top field commanders, the directive makes clear, were to be told that the plan was merely for "precaution, in case Russia should change her previous attitude towards us". And Hitler instructed that the number of officers in the secret "be kept as small as possible. Otherwise the danger exists that our preparations will become known and the gravest political and militarily disadvantages result".
There is no evidence that the generals in the Army High Command objected to Hitler's decision to turn on the Soviet Union, whose loyal fulfilment of the pact with Germany had made possible their victories in Poland and the West. Later Halder would write derisively of "Hitler's Russian adventure" and claim the Army leaders were against it from the beginning. But there is not a word in his voluminous diary entries for December 1940 which supports him in this. Indeed, he gives the impression of being full of genuine enthusiasm for the "adventure", which he himself, as Chief of General Staff, had the main responsibility for planning. At any rate, for Hitler, the die was cast, and, though he did not know it, his ultimate fate sealed, by this decision of December 18, 1940. Relieved to haver made up his mind at last, as he later revealed, he went off to celebrate Christmas holidays with the troops and flyers along the English Channel, as far as it was possible for him to get from Russia. Out of his mind too, as far as possible, must have been any thoughts of Charles XII of Sweden and of Napoleon Bonaparte, who after so many glorious conquests not unlike his own, had met disaster in the vast depths of the Russian steppes. How could they be much on his mind? By now, as the record will shortly show, the one-time Vienna waif regarded himself as the greatest conqueror the world had ever seen. Egomania, that fatal disease of all conquerors, was taking hold.
[Although Operation Tannenbaum (English: Operation Fir Tree or Christmas Tree), known earlier as Operation Green, was a planned but cancelled invasion of Switzerland by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Even before the outbreak of war, Switzerland had every reason to expect invasion. After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he made overtures towards the various National Socialist-leaning organizations in German-speaking countries, particularly Austria and Switzerland.
For tactical reasons Hitler made repeated assurances before the outbreak of the Second World War that Germany would respect Swiss neutrality in the event of a military conflict in Europe. In February 1937 he announced that "at all times, whatever happens, we will respect the inviolability and neutrality of Switzerland" to the Swiss federal councillor Edmund Schulthess, reiterating this promise shortly before the German invasion of Poland. These were, however, purely political manoeuvres intended to guarantee Switzerland's passiveness. Germany planned to dispose of that country's independence after it had defeated its main enemies on the continent first. sic]

Hitler inspecting troops

MONTHS OF FRUSTRATION
And yet, after all the tumultuous victories of the spring and early summer 1940, there had been a frustrating six months for the Nazi conqueror. Not only the final triumph over Britain eluded him but importunities to deal her a mortal blow in the Mediterranean had been thrown away. Two days after Christmas Grand Admiral Raeder saw Hitler in Berlin but he had little Yuletide to offer. "The threat to Britain in the entire Mediterranean, the Near East and in North Africa", He told the Führer, "has been eliminated...The decisive action in the Mediterranean for which we had hoped therefore is no longer possible." Adolf Hitler baulked by the senility of Marshal Petain, had really missed the bus in the Mediterranean. Disaster had struck the Italian ally in Egyptian desert and now in December confronted it in the snowy mountains of Albania. These untoward happenings were also turning points in the war and in the course of history of the Third Reich. They had come about no only because of weaknesses of Germany's friends and allies, but, in part because of the Nazi warlord's incapacity to grasp the larger, intercontinental strategy that was called for and that Raeder and even Göring had urged upon him.
Twice in September 1940, on the sixth and twenty-sixth, the Grand Admiral attempted to open up new vistas in the Führer's mind now that the direct attack on England seemed out of question. For the second conference Raeder cornered Hitler alone and, without the Army and Air Forces to muddle the conversation, gave his chief a lengthy lecture on naval strategy and the importance of getting at Britain in other places than over the English Channel. The British, Raeder said, have always considered the Mediterranean the pivot of their world empire... Italy, surrounded by British power, is fast becoming the main target of attack...The Italians have not yet realised the danger when they refused our help. Germany, however, must wage war against Great Britain with all means at her disposal and without delay, before the United States is able to intervene effectively. For this reason the Mediterranean question must be cleared up during the winter months.
Cleared up how? The Admiral then got down to brass tacks: Gibraltar must be taken. The Canary Islands must be secured by the Air Force. The Suez Canal must be taken. After Suez, Raeder painted a rosy picture of what then would logically ensue: An advance from Suez through Palestine and Syria as far as Turkey if necessary. If we reach that point, Turkey will be in our power. The Russian problem will then appear in a different light... It is doubtful whether an advance against Russia from the north will be necessary. Having in his mind driven the British out of the Mediterranean and put Turkey and Russia in Germany's power, Raeder went on to complete the picture. Correctly predicting that Britain, supported by the U.S.A. and the Gaullist forces, eventually would try to get a foothold on Northwest Africa as a basis for subsequent war against the Axis, the Admiral urged that Germany and Vichy France forestall this by securing this strategically important region themselves. According to Raeder, Hitler agreed with this "general trend of thought" but added that would have to talk matters over first with Mussolini, Franco and  Pétain. This he proceeded to do, although only after much time was lost. He arranged to dee the Spanish dictator on October 23, Pétain, who was now the head of a collaborationist government at Vichy, the next day, and the Duce a few days thereafter.

Großadmiral Erich Raeder

'Erich Johann Albert Raeder was a naval leader in Germany before and during World War II. Raeder attained the highest possible naval rank—that of Großadmiral (Grand Admiral) — in 1939, becoming the first person to hold that rank since Alfred von Tirpitz. Raeder led the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) for the first half of the war; he resigned in 1943 [probably over naval tactics with Hitler,sic] and was replaced by Karl Dönitz. (whom he detested) Dönitz saw himself as Raeder's superior, and expected Raeder to be his subordinate.  He was sentenced to life in prison at the Nuremberg Trials, but was released early due to failing health. From the moment Raeder was convicted, a campaign to have him released was started by his wife, Erika who routinely made very exaggerated claims to the press about how harsh life was in Spandau prison for her husband In a 1950 interview, Erika Raeder claimed that her septuagenarian husband was forced to do brutal "hard labour" in Spandau when Raeder's job in Spandau was to work in the prison library. In another interview in 1951, Erika Raeder claimed that:"The treatment we Germans had to endure is worse than anything that happened to the Jews". Erika Raeder was on the whole portrayed favourably in the West German press, where she was depicted as a victim of Allied injustice while as a reporter put it "where does Raeder's guilt lie?" Erika Raeder's campaign to free her husband was joined by German veterans, who bombarded the American, British and French governments with demands that Raeder, who they claimed was an innocent man wrongly convicted at Nuremberg, be freed. Admiral Gottfried Hanson, head of the Verband deutscher Soldaten veterans' group in a letter in support of Raeder sent to the three western high commissioners' for Germany declared:
"As a friend of many years' standing, and certain that all ex-members of the Navy will agree with me, I venture to say that no military leader could had educated and influenced his subordinates from a higher moral and Christian level than did Raeder...both as a man and a Christian...How can genuine peace and real understanding among the nations of the Occident be brought about...if true right and justice is not applied to the Germans that are still be kept prisoners?"Erich Raeder died in Kiel on 6 November 1960, aged 84. He is buried in the Nordfriedhof (North Cemetery), Kiel.

Franco, who owes his triumph in the Spanish Civil War to the massive military aid of Italy and Germany, had, like all his fellow dictators, an in ordinate appetite for spoils, especially if they could be gained cheaply. In June, at the moment of France's fall, he had hastily informed Hitler that Spain would enter the war in return for being given most of the vast French African empire, including Morocco and western Algeria, and provided that Germany supplied Spain liberally with arms, gasoline and foodstuffs. It was to give Franco the opportunity to redeem this promise that the Führer arrived in his special train at the Franco-Spanish border town of Hendave on October 23.  But much had happened in the intervening months, Britain had stoutly held out, for one thing, and Hitler was in for an unpleasant surprise. The crafty Spaniard was not impressed by the Führer's boast that"England already is decisively beaten", nor was he satisfies with Hitler's promise to give Spain territorial compensation in French North Africa "to the extent to which it would be possible to cover France's losses from British colonies." Franco wanted the French African empire, with no strings attached. Hitler's proposal was that Spain enter the war in January 1941, but Franco pointed out the danger of such precipitate action. Hitler wanted the Spaniards to attack Gibraltar on January 10, with the help of German specialists who had taken fort of Eben Emael from the air. Franco replied, with typical Spanish pride, that Gibraltar would have to be taken by Spaniards "alone". Ans so the two dictators wrangled, for nine hours. According to Dr Schmidt, who was present here too, Franco spoke on and on in monotonous singing voice and Hitler became increasingly exasperated, once sprininging up, as he had done with Chamberlain, to exclaim that there was no point in continuing the conversation.

German leader Adolf Hitler meeting Spain's dictator General Francisco Franco on the Spanish border at Hendaye October 23,1940 to talk about Spain helping out in case of war.

Although Spanish dictator Field Marshal (Generalísimo) Francisco Franco did not enter the war on the side of Germany, he permitted volunteers to join the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) on the clear and guaranteed condition they would exclusively fight against Bolshevism (Soviet Communism) on the Eastern Front, and not against the Western Allies or any Western European occupied populations. In this manner, he could keep Spain at peace with the Western Allies whilst simultaneously repaying Hitler for his support during the Spanish Civil War (see Condor Legion). Spanish foreign minister Ramón Serrano Súñer made the suggestion to raise a volunteer corps, and at the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, Franco sent an official offer of help to Berlin.
Hitler approved the use of Spanish volunteers on June 24, 1941. Volunteers flocked to recruiting offices in all the metropolitan areas in Spain. Cadets from the officer training school in Zaragoza volunteered in particularly large numbers. Initially, the Spanish government was prepared to send about 4,000 men, but soon understood that there were more than enough volunteers to fill an entire division: 18,104 men in all, 2,612 officers and 15,492 soldiers. Fifty percent of officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) were professional soldiers, many of them veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Many others were members of the Falange (the Spanish Fascist party). Others felt pressure to join because of past ties with the Republic or — like Luis García Berlanga, who later became a well-known cinema director — to help their relatives in Franco's prisons.
General Agustín Muñoz Grandes was assigned to lead the volunteers. Because the soldiers could not use official Spanish army uniforms, they adopted a symbolic uniform comprising the red berets of the Carlists, khaki trousers used in the Spanish Legion, and the blue shirts of the Falangists - hence the nickname "Blue Division." This uniform was used only while on leave in Spain; in the field, soldiers wore the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) field gray uniform with a shield on the upper right sleeve bearing the word "España" and the Spanish national colours

Veterans on the funerals of Franco. On the flag, carried at right, says "Hermandad." (Brotherhood). Note: Spain was the only continental country that allowed veterans to wear German War Medals in public!

"Rather than go through that again", he later told Mussolini, in recounting hid ordeal with the Caudillo, "I would prefer to have three or four teeth yanked out", After nine hours, with time out for dinner in Hitler's special Dining car, the talks broke up late in the evening without Franco's having definitely committed himself to come into the war. Hitler left Ribbentrop behind that night to continue to parley with Serrano suñer, the Spanish Foreign Minister, and try to get the Spaniards to sign something, at least an agreement to drive the British out of Gibraltar and close them the western Mediterranean, but to no avail. "That ungrateful coward!' Ribbentrop cursed to Schmidt about Franco the next morning. "he owes us everything and now won't join us!" Hitler's meeting with Petain at Montoire the next day went off better. But this was because the ageing, defeatist Marshall, the hero of Verdun in the First World War and perpetrator of the French surrender in the Second, agreed to France's collaboration with her conqueror in one last effort to bring Briton, the late ally, to her knees. In fact, he assented to put down in writing this odious deal.
"The Avis Powers and France have an identical interest in seeing the defeat of England accomplished as soon as possible. Consequently, the French Government will support, within the limits of its ability, the measures which the Axis Power may take to this end".
In return for this treacherous act, France was to be given in the "New Europe" "the place to which she is entitled", and in Africa she was to receive from the fascist dictators compensation from the British Empire for whatever territoy she was forced to cede to others. Both parties agreed to keep the pact absolutely secret". [Although they did not learn the contents of the secret accord at Montoire, both Churchill and Roosevelt suspected the worst. The King of England sent through American channels a personal appeal to Petain asking him not to take sides against Britain. President Roosevelt's message to the Marshal was stern and toughly worded and warned him of the dire consequences of Vichy-France's betraying Britain. German documents have not been released by the British or American Governments.sic]
Despite Petain's dishonourable but vital concessions, Hitler was not satisfied. According to Dr. Schmidt, he had wanted more, nothing less than France's active participation in the war against Britain. On the long journey back to Munich the official interpreter  found the Führer disappointed and depressed with the results of his trip. He was even more so in Florence, where he arrived on the morning of October 28 to see Mussolini.

Before going to Hendaye to meet Franco, Hitlers Sonderzug (Special Train)stopped at the Montoire railway station to speak to Laval. On the way back from Hendaye to Aachen, Hitler met Petain at the same station'

They had conferred but three weeks before, on October 4, at the Brenner Pass. Hitler, as usual, had done most of the talking, giving one of his dazzling 'tours de horizon' in which was NOT included any mention that he was sending troops to Rumania, which Italy so coveted. When the Duce learned of this a few days later he was indignant.
'Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli, he fumed to Ciano. This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece. In this way the equilibrium will be re-established'. The Duce's ambition in the Balkans were as rabid as Hitler's and cut across them so far back as the middle of August the Germans had warned Rome against any adventures in Yugoslavia and Greece. "It is a complete order to halt all along the line", Ciano noted in his diary on August 17. Mussolini scrapped, for the moment anyway, his plans for further material glory in the Balkans and confirmed this in a humble letter to Hitler of August 27. But the conquest of a quick, easy conquest of Greece, which would compensate to some extent for his partner's glittering victories, proved too big a temptation for the strutting Fascist Caesar to resist, false though the prospect was. On October 22 he set the date for a surprise Italian assault on Greece for October 28 and on the same day wrote Hitler a letter (pre-dated October 19) alluding to his contemplated action but making it vague as to the exact nature and date. He feared Ciano noted that day in his diary, that the Führer might "order" him to halt. Hitler and Ribbentrop got wind of the Duce's plans while they were returning in their respective special trains from France, and at the Führer's orders the Nazi Foreign Minister stopped at the first station in Germany to telephone Ciano in Rome and urge an immediate meeting of the Axis leaders. Mussolini suggested October 28 at Florence and, when his German visitor alighted from the train on the morning of that day, greeted him, his chin up and his eyes full of glee: "Führer, we are on the march! Victorious Italian troops crossed the Greco-Albanian frontier at dawn today"!

28 October 1940 – 23 April 1941 (5 months, 3 weeks and 5 days) Southern Balkan Peninsula.Result; Greek tactical victory, strategic stalemate leading to German intervention'.

To all accounts, Mussolini greatly enjoyed this revenge on his friend for all the previous occasions when the Nazi dictator had marched into a country without previously confiding to his Italian ally. Hitler was furious. This rash act against a sturdy foe at the worst possible time of the year threatened to upset the applecart in the Balkans. The Führer, as he wrote Mussolini a little later, had sped to Florence in the hope of preventing it, but he had arrived too late. According to Schmidt, who was present, the Nazi leader managed to control his rage. Hitler went north that afternoon(Schmidt later wrote) with bitterness in his heart. He had been frustrated three times, at Hendaye, at Montoire, and now in Italy. In the lengthy winter evenings of the next few years these long, exacting journeys were a constantly recurring theme of bitter approaches against ungrateful and unreliable friends, Axis partners and "deceiving" Frenchmen.

An Italian soldier during the Greek campaign.

Nevertheless he had to do something to prosecute the war against the British, now that the invasion of Briton proved impossible. Hardly had the Führer returned to Berlin before the need to act was further impressed upon him by the fiasco of the Duce's armies in Greece. Within a week, the "victorious" Italian attack there had been turned into a rout, On November 4 Hitler called a war conference at the Chancellery in Berlin to which he summoned Brauchitsch and Halder from the Army and Keitel and Jodl from OKW. Thanks to Halders's diary and a captured copy of Jodl's report to the Navy on the conference, we know the warlord's decisions, the text of which is among the Nürnberg records. The German Navy's influence on Hitler's strategy became evident, as did the necessity for doing something about the faltering Italian ally. Halder noted the Führer's "lack of confidence" in Italian leadership. As a result it was decided NOT to send any German troops to Libya until Marshal Rodolfo Graziani's army, which in September had advanced sixty miles into Egypt to Sidi Barraani, had reached Mersa Matruh, a further seventy miles along the coast, which was not expected before Christmas, if then. In the meantime plans were made to send a few dive bombers to Egypt to attack the British fleet in Alexandria and mine the Suez Canal. As for Greece, the Italian attack there, Hitler admitted to his Generals, had been a "regrettable blunder" and unfortunately had endangered Germany's position in the Balkans. The British by occupying Crete and Lemnos had achieved air bases from which they could easily bomb the Rumanian oil fields and by sending troops to the Greek mainland threatened the whole German position in the Balkans. To counter this danger Hitler ordered the Army to prepare immediately plans to invade Greece through Bulgaria with a force of at least ten divisions which would be sent first to Rumania. "It is anticipated", he said, "that Russia will remain neutral". But is was in regard to destroying Briton's position in the western Mediterranean that most of the conference of November 4 and most of the ensuing Directive No.18 was devoted.
"Gibraltar will be taken (said the directive) and the Straits closed. The British will be prevented from gaining a foothold at another point of the Iberian peninsula or the Atlantic Islands.

                                                                                                 continued under Part 4