42 World at War 27 | dEC 2012 – JaN 2013 World at War 27 | dEC 2012 – JaN 2013 43

Big War—Big Debate

I f , as Pieter Geyl, an eminent Dutch historian, said at about the middle of the 20th century, “History

is an argument without end,” then few historical arguments have taken as many twists or turns, or been as heated, as those concerning the German inva-sion of the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa. That’s shouldn’t be surprising, as Barbarossa involved two of the most secretive and dishonest regimes in history fighting the most titanic and violent battles of all time. In the summer of 1941 most of the world expected a quick German victory; when the Nazi tide receded before Moscow in December it was a surprise to both outside observers and the combatants themselves. Despite further German successes in 1942-43, the failure of Barbarossa arguably marked the moment Hitler lost the war, and the hows, whys and what-ifs have been debated ever since.

The initial Western view of Barbarossa came largely from British military historian and armored warfare theorist Basil Liddell-Hart. Immediately after the war he interviewed a number of German generals, many of whom had commanded on the eastern front. The result of those interviews was the book

The Other Side of the Hill (marketed in the US as The German Generals Speak).

Hart was mostly interested in using the generals to validate his prewar theorizing on mechanized warfare, and the generals—at the time prisoners of war—were happy to exaggerate the influence of his writings on the doctrines developed by German tank specialists such as Heinz Guderian. (Even as Guderian himself was eager to downplay the significance of the other generals who had leading roles in the development of the panzer arm.)

In Hart’s narrative the generals’ military brilliance was undone by Hitler’s amateurish interference. It was a theme that would be elaborated in numerous German memoirs, most notably Guderian’s Panzer Leader and Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Lost Victories.

Generals’ memoirs are traditionally self-serving, and historians make allow-ances for that when evaluating them, but the generals of the Third Reich are particularly hard to stomach in that regard. By the late 1960s historians had made clear the involvement of those officers in the massive and horrific war crimes that took place on the eastern front (including the holocaust), all of which their memoirs had skipped over in silence.

Knowledge of the German armed force’s complicity in those war crimes was widespread in the West by the early 1970s. If every German soldier on the Russian front wasn’t a war criminal, to at least some degree every German general was. At the same time, histori-ans also noted Guderian and Manstein had been happy to accept large cash bounties as gifts from the Fuehrer. Given their involvement in war crimes, their attempt to cover up Hitler’s economic patronage while then also using him as an all-purpose scapegoat, and their less than candid recounting of their own errors, it’s not surprising there’s been a revisionist backlash against their version of Barbarossa.

While early histories of Barbarossa suffered from the self-justifications of German commanders, there was also the problem of limited sources dealing with their opponents. The Stalin cult in the Soviet Union, and the effects of increasingly fraught Cold War relations between Russia and the West, reinforced the narrative of events seen mostly from the point of view of Hitler’s generals. Though that obviously biased and incomplete view became the target of revisionist historians, the lack of access to Soviet sources continued to keep the emphasis on the German side of the war.

The Barbarossa DebateBy Ted S. Raicer

Only after the coming of glasnost in the late 1980s, and then the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, did Western historians get real (if still not unlimited) access to Soviet sources. That allowed for the publica-tion of a range of histories from the Soviet point of view, many of the most prominent by David Glantz.

Surprisingly, there have still been only limited attempts to synthesize full two-sided histories of the eastern front. Instead, the history of Barbarossa large-ly remains divided between German and Soviet specialists, and the ongoing arguments often still seem to echo the Cold War clash of East and West.

Beyond the dueling German-centered and Soviet-centered histories (and historians), lies the question of whether historical

Wrecked Soviet aircraft at a Byelorussian aerodrome during the summer of 1941.

Some of the first of the Soviets taken prisoner by the Germans as the operation began.

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revisionism has reached the point of the proverbial baby being thrown out with the bathwater. Arguably, the combination of the increased avail-ability of Soviet-era sources and the ethical revulsion against the German generals has simply caused one set of myths to be replaced by another.

In place of a campaign lost solely by Hitler’s incompetent interference, we now have books defending his consistently superior strategic insight. A German-centered narrative in which the Soviets appear mostly as targets to be destroyed has been replaced by a mirror-image, where a doomed Wehrmacht is seen only in the shadow of a Red Army foreordained to triumph.

A German military that conquered a greater European empire than Napoleon is now sometimes portrayed as having been little more than a case study in incompetence. The balanced view of Alan Clark’s Barbarossa (which remains, over 40 years on, perhaps the best single-volume on the subject) is often not reflected in the latest writings.

It should be noted, despite the division between Russian-centered and German-centered historians, there’s less disagreement over the facts of the campaign than over the interpretation of those facts. Why did Hitler launch Barbarossa? Why did Stalin ignore warnings of the German build-up on his borders? Was the decision to divert

German panzers to clear the Ukraine and reinforce the attack on Leningrad a fatal mistake or a necessary preliminary to the final assault on the Soviet capital? Was Typhoon a mistake or a last opportunity to decide the war in 1941? Did Hitler’s “no retreat” order in the face of the Soviet winter counteroffensive save the German army or merely cause additional casualties? And ultimately: why did Barbarossa fail? Or put another way: could it have succeeded?

Hitler & Stalin

First we must ask the fundamental question: why Barbarossa at all? In one school of thought Hitler outlined his

plans for a “push to the east” (Drang nach Osten) in his book Mein Kampf, which he wrote in the mid-1920s, and Barbarossa was thus nothing more than the playing out of that long-term ambi-tion. In that interpretation Hitler merely postponed his ultimate goal with the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, and the war in the west in 1940 was simply a preliminary to the main event. In support of that view, historians point to Hitler’s instructions to the general staff to draw up a plan for invading Russia in July 1940, only weeks after the fall of France and before the Battle of Britain had really begun. A typical example of that line of argument can be found in Charles D. Winchester’s Hitler’s War on Russia:

Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was not an opportunistic swipe at the last major opponent left on the board, prompted by his force’s inability to cross the English Channel. Since the First World War he had dreamed of destroying Russia, seizing the western republics of the USSR as “living space” (Lebensraum) for a new German empire. It was sketched out interminably in his book Mein Kampf.

Other writers have suggested that interpretation takes too seriously Hitler’s estimation of himself as having been only a “sleepwalker” following the preordained path of his own and Germany’s intertwined destinies. In the eyes of many historians, following the lead of Hitler’s best recent biographer, Ian Kershaw, the Fuehrer’s leadership

was anything but steady: his habit of procrastination, his bohemian lifestyle, and his distrust of alternate centers of power, kept a constant element of disorder in the heart of the Nazi war machine. Far from the propaganda image of the iron-willed leader, Hitler was a man who had trouble making up his mind, leading to impulsive commands and frequent reversals that were the bane of both military professionals and government officials.

Seen in that light, the fact Hitler brought up invading Russia in the summer of 1940 is less significant than the fact the actual “Fuehrer Order” for Barbarossa wasn’t issued until late December. In the intervening months, instead of focusing all resources on the conquest of the USSR, Hitler wavered between finishing the war with Britain (either by direct invasion, U-boat blockade, or a campaign to eject the

British from the Middle East) and taking on Stalin. Michael A. Palmer, in The German Wars: A Concise History 1859-1945, sums up that counter-argument:

Hitler’s fatal decision was not made as part of any comprehensive analy-sis of available options. The failure to identify a strategic course in July [1940], or preferably earlier, allowed German policy to drift for six crucial months. Hitler ultimately adopted an eastern strategy by default, as his other options seemed to evaporate.

The controversy over Hitler’s decision-making leading up to Barbarossa pales in comparison to the debate over Stalin’s actions and intentions in the same period. In one corner are those who accept the argument of Viktor Rezhun, a Soviet defector and former intelligence officer

The fate of a village through which a German combat spearhead has just passed.

Victorious German mechanized forces with their Soviet victims on fire around them.

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