Hitlers 1941 Invasion of Russia | Part 1: A Great Gamble

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Hello and welcome to Season 6 of Anthology of Heroes.
Well, five seasons and what, 80 episodes now?
Man, time flies.
For anyone tuning in for the first time, this show explores the most pivotal moments of
history through the eyes of those who lived it.
Each episode we share stories of heroism and defiance throughout world history.
On average, our episodes run for about 45 minutes and are blended with sound effects
and music to help immerse you in the story.
I'm your host, Elliot Gates, and today's episode marks the beginning of our four-part
series on Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi codename for the invasion of Russia in 1941.
The invasion is very important and very interesting for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it was, and still remains, the largest land invasion in world history.
Four million men, 3,000 tanks and 2,500 planes.
Now, putting together an operation of that scale is an achievement in itself.
The logistics, the planning, it's a feat that only the elite German army could have
pulled off.
But what makes it even more unbelievable is that this was planned and executed in complete
secrecy.
Up until the tanks were literally rolling through Russian cities, Stalin, the leader of the
USSR, never saw it coming.
He was completely blindsided.
His spies told him it was coming, captured German soldiers told him it was coming, Winston
Churchill told him it was coming, his generals told him it was coming, even reports from
as far away as Portugal told him it was coming.
Over 80 warnings in total, and Stalin ignored them all, didn't believe them.
British propaganda, he called it.
The desperate means England would go to to drag them into the war.
In this episode, we delve into the backstory behind Operation Barbarossa.
From the perspective of the two most callous mass murderers in human history, Joseph Stalin
and Adolf Hitler.
In the West, it's well understood that the USA joining the Allies in World War II was
a turning point.
But we often forget that Hitler's decision to launch Operation Barbarossa was just as
decisive.
In this episode, we're going to try and understand what made the dictator open another front
when the German army was already stretched across so many others.
We're going to learn why Stalin, who was famous for his paranoia, trusted the one man
everyone told him not to trust.
As we probe this unique relationship the two dictators had, we'll explore the dire situation
Europe found itself in in 1940.
Faced against the unstoppable might of the Wehrmacht Nazi army, Poland had fallen in
26 days, Belgium in 18.
Even France, Europe's mightiest power, capitulated in just six weeks.
Now ruling almost all of Europe, Hitler looked east at what he saw as a feudal wasteland
populated by slavs.
In this episode, I've gathered up several first-hand accounts through their own words
will hear how ethnic Russians, Ukrainians or Germans felt about the invasion.
We'll dive deep into the twisted Nazi worldview and learn about Hitler's genocidal plans
for the Slavic people.
We'll learn about some of the ethnic tensions that's simmered within the USSR, Ukrainians
and Poles who welcomed the Nazis with open arms.
And we'll follow the Einsatzgruppen, the Wehrmacht death squad tasked with murdering
Jews and civil leaders in Nazi occupied villages.
In part two, we're going to watch Stalin try and pick up the pieces of his broken empire
and himself.
Pulling himself from his stupa, we'll watch as a dictator hangs portraits of famous Russian
generals on his wall to inspire him.
In part three, the Russian Colossus awakens.
In this episode, oil is the word of the day.
With the horrific winter of 1941 behind them, the Wehrmacht will come out swinging.
Hitler announces Operation Case Blue, a speedy southern march to the Caucasus.
In this little pocket were some of the richest oil fields in the world.
If the Wehrmacht could take them, it solved their fuel shortage and created one for Stalin.
And finally, in part four, we're going to zoom in on Stalin grad itself.
Stalin grad, an industrial city of minor strategic importance, would become an obsession for
both Hitler and Stalin.
No matter the cost, no matter the consequences, both dictators refused to let the other man
have it.
Shoveling their men into the inferno like coal into a furnace, the fight for the city
would turn into the most costly battle in human history.
Understanding Operation Barbarossa and especially the battle of Stalin grad are essential to
understanding the Russian psyche.
It is a hugely important theatre of war, and one that tends to get sidelined when we
think of World War II.
We'll soon see that the scale of death and suffering on the East Front, or Ost Front,
was like nothing in Western Europe.
As Hitler himself announced prior to the invasion, the war, quote, cannot be conducted in a nightly
fashion.
On a quick note, just a warning that this episode contains brief descriptions of violence,
including sexual violence, with occasional cussing included from quotes.
So, here we go.
Hitler's Folly Operation Barbarossa Part 1.
A Great Gamble
It's the 22nd of June 1941.
The Kremlin, the command centre of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, also known
as the USSR, is in hysterics.
The Moscow office is packed with people.
Secretaries race across the floor with armfuls of paper and phones ring off the hook.
Generals and party members answer the calls as quickly as they can.
All the calls are coming from the front, and the messages are always the same.
German soldiers, millions of them, are overrunning the border.
Snatching a phone from a clerk, Colonel General Pavlov puts a receiver to his ear and barks
down the line,
I know, it has already been reported, those at the top know better than we, slamming the
phone down only to have it start ringing again.
The air is thick with cigarette smoke and body odor.
Panic is written on the face of every official.
Each man tries to defer any decisions to their commanding officer, better their superior
be blamed rather than they for whatever was about to occur.
All knew that Joseph Stalin's memory was eternal and his vengeance, legendary.
The doors of the office burst open, and Chief of Staff, Giyogi Zhukov pushes through the
crowd, beelining towards the door at the end, Stalin's office.
Early that morning, Zhukov had telephoned Joseph Stalin to inform him of reports of
German bombings on the border.
Roused from his slumber, Stalin answered the phone, Zhukov frantically gave him the report
and requested the dictator's permission to return fire against the invaders.
All he heard was heavy breathing.
Now as he pushed through the door to Stalin's office, Zhukov learned his reports were not
isolated.
He had never seen so many members of the top brass gathered in at one place, almost every
member of the high command of the Russian army was there.
Minister Molotov gesticulated wildly as Marshal Shaposhnikov listened with crossed arms.
A monochrome TV blared as groups of men pressed their ears against radio units, listening
for hints of what was happening from foreign news channels.
Blame was the word of the day.
No one wanted to be left holding the bucket when Stalin's goons came knocking on their
door in the middle of the night.
At the end of the office, in a haze of cigarette smoke, sat Joseph Stalin, General Secretary
to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
As his frenzied ministers desperately searched for what to do next, the man himself said nothing.
A lit cigar perhaps burning out in his ashtray, the five-foot-three dictator looked as if he
was melting.
Hunched forward in his leather desk chair, the expression on his face was one of vacant
bewilderment.
The man was catatonic, in the early stages of a mental breakdown.
For once, Stalin had no one to blame but himself for the situation he found himself in.
In the past month alone there had been over eighty warnings of an imminent German invasion
and he'd ignored every one of them, convinced that they were the work of the dastardly English
Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Stalin, one of the most paranoid dictators to ever exist, had put his trust in Adolf
Hitler, a man who had flouted international diplomacy at every opportunity, and now his
chickens had come home to roost.
Outside the Kremlin, the streets of Moscow were calm.
The day was beginning like any other.
In the warm summer morning, early rises were queuing up for their bread ration and the
first factory workers had begun walking to work.
The state radio warbled as the newsreader announced another superb season of crop yields.
Every man, woman and child of Moscow was completely oblivious to the fact that, a few hundred
miles away, the largest invasion force in world history was blaring towards them.
Almost four million soldiers marched, biked, or galloped east.
Operation Barbarossa had begun.
For Adolf Hitler, the initiation of the invasion had been sublime.
Stalin had been completely blindsided.
Even now, as his air force, the Luftwaffe, bombed the last few Russian hangars still
standing, Stalin desperately phoned Berlin, hoping, praying, that this invasion was the
act of a rebellious general and not sanctioned by Adolf Hitler himself.
After all, how could Hitler betray him?
They had a deal.
For Hitler, the invasion had confirmed the naivety and stupidity of the Slavic race,
and Joseph Stalin, the schmuck that had led them, was the biggest fool of them all.
It hadn't always been this way.
Barely a year back, Stalin had felt more confident about peace with Nazi Germany than he had
in years.
As the German army, the Wehrmacht, mopped up the last of Western Europe resistance,
and made the most of it, gobbling up most of the little Baltic states and pushing the
borders of the mighty USSR closer to Central Europe.
He knew the world was too preoccupied to protest.
Ideologically, communism and fascism were at opposite sides of the political spectrum.
Communism and Stalin's specific brand of it, Bolshevism, was a revolution of the working
man, a classless utopia where the government distributed goods evenly regardless of religion,
race, or creed.
That was the idea anyway.
Hitler's fascism was an authoritarian hierarchical society where classes were tiered based on
race, a society where the strong dominated the weak, and those of impure blood were pushed
out of the gene pool through government intervention.
Despite these glaring differences, throughout the 1930s the dictators had been cozying up
to each other.
Numerous non-aggression packs and trade deals had worked their way through the embassies,
and by 1940 Stalin was actively intervening in Red Army propaganda, commanding his officers
to tone down the anti-Nazi rhetoric that was drilled into the troops.
In one instance, after flipping through the state-run newspaper and seeing a negative
article written about Adolf Hitler, Stalin penned a letter to the editor that said,
quote,
Don't irritate the Germans.
Krasnaya Zvazda, the name of the paper, is always writing about fascists and fascism.
Stop it.
Hitler shouldn't get the idea that all we're doing is preparing for war with him.
Later that year the dictator stunned his ministers by personally seeing the German ambassador
off at the train station.
With a big smile that must have looked out of place on the face of the dictator, he walked
beside the ambassador, put his arm around him, and told him, quote,
We must remain friends, and you must do everything to that end, before waving him off as his
train departed.
But Hitler's heartfelt letters to Stalin indicated the feeling was mutual, even wished
him a happy birthday, very sweet.
But behind closed doors, Adolf Hitler despised the pockmarked Georgian dictator.
Two decades prior, Hitler had penned Mein Kampf, My Struggle, an autobiographical kind
of manifesto where he laid out his worldview, and on Russia he said, quote,
This colossal empire in the east is ripe for dissolution, and the end of the Jewish domination
of Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.
As for Bolshevism, he regarded it as a cancer of the mind, quote,
Bolshevism is a doctrine of people who are lowest in the scale of civilization.
So why the niceness?
Well as we'll soon see, Adolf Hitler was no mere wartime commander.
He saw himself as the builder of a new world order.
A thousand year rike was the term he coined.
A world where pure-blooded Aryan Germans stood at the top of the podium while all other
races teared somewhere below.
All the wars, policies and decisions his government made were helping to set up a framework for
a society that would long outlive them all.
Hitler's diplomacy with Stalin was an attempt to reorientate the USSR's political interests,
to turn government policy away from Europe, where Germany reigned supreme, over to the
Far East into China.
This thousand year rike had no interest in that part of the world, so if Stalin could
be convinced to keep his nose out of Europe, then perhaps war could be avoided.
But this was a pipe dream.
You only need to look at the buildup of Russian industry on Europe's border to see where
their national interests lay.
Once it became clear that Russia could not be coaxed into a complete reversal of their
politics, Hitler decided that war was not a matter of if, but when.
But there was a problem.
Europe wasn't completely subdued.
Great Britain had refused to be cowed.
In the 1930s it seemed that British Republic opinion was shifting towards a peace deal
with Germany, but in 1940 a squat man with a sharp tongue and a quick wit was elected
prime minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill.
Churchill had read Mein Kampf and closely followed the increasingly barbaric laws Hitler had
imposed on German Jews.
Churchill categorically refused a peace deal with Hitler, who he saw as a madman who would
stop at nothing in pursuit of his fanatical New World Order.
If Britain made peace, Europe would be ushered into a dark future, where Hitler's twisted
ideologies would become government policy.
Through pithy, raw speeches that seemed ooze, valour and glory, Churchill galvanised British
public opinion against any ideas of peace with Hitler.
When his bombs rained down on London, Britain's will to resist remained strong.
With a glass of sherry in one hand, a cigar in his mouth and a top hat on his head, Churchill,
a man so quintessentially British, became a reoccurring subject in Nazi propaganda.
In early 1941, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels told the German public exactly what
to think of him.
One has to see a current photograph of his face to grasp the true depravity of plutocracy.
His face has not a single good characteristic.
It is marked by cynicism.
The ice cold eyes are free of any emotion.
This man strides over corpses to feed his blind and limitless personal egotism.
The cigar butt in his mouth is the last sign of a lifestyle that has outlived its time.
England will one day pay a heavy price for this man.
Hitler found himself at crossroads.
With Churchill at his helm, England would not come to the negotiation table.
And this was problematic because, despite its small size, Britannia punched well above
its weight.
The last successful invasion of the British Isles was almost a thousand years ago during
the Norman invasion.
The British Empire spans most of the world.
Her colonies gave her vast reserves of manpower and raw materials, and a trading network
reached into every corner of the globe.
Knowing this, Hitler decided that if an invasion of the British Isles did have to take place,
then he would much rather it happen last.
Perhaps by then public opinion would have turned against Churchill.
Which meant all that was left was Russia, the USSR.
In 1939, the Fuhrer had watched gleefully as the Red Army struggled to subdue its tiny
neighbour, Finland, in a conflict known as the Winter War.
We covered that war in our episode on Simmelhauer.
Make sure you check that one out after this.
Finland, a minor local power, had rebuffed the enormous Russian army for many months,
and though Stalin eventually gained some territory, the war was an embarrassment that highlighted
the many shortcomings of the Russian military structure.
As pens went to paper and Operation Barbarossa began to take shape, Hitler insisted to his
war cabinet that the invasion of Russia would be a simple affair, that they, quote,
need only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure would collapse.
His generals, though, were not so sure.
The USSR was big.
I mean really big, it was about one-sixth of the Earth's surface.
It was a totally different battlefield to what the Wehrmacht were used to working with.
The key to the German army's success in Western Europe had been speed.
They pioneered a new type of warfare, the Blitzkrieg.
A quick, heavy punch to the jugular designed to disable the enemy before he could hit back.
Blitzkrieg had taken Poland in 26 days, Belgium in 18, and even the mighty French Republic
had collapsed in just six weeks.
In Western Europe, this tactic had been so successful because of the short distances
between countries.
As the crow flies, Berlin to Paris was only 545 miles, 878 kilometers.
That meant securing fuel and ammunition were not as important.
And the country was rich, food was everywhere.
But as his generals pointed out, Russia was a different story.
Huge distances between villages meant logistical challenges with supplies, and the roads, I
mean, what roads?
Germany and France had highways, Russia had dirt tracks, that would slow things down.
And then there was the elephant in the room, Napoleon's Curse.
Adolf Hitler and every one of his field marshals were all aware that an ill-fated invasion
of Russia had been the downfall of the French general.
Napoleon had underestimated the scale of Russia and the bone-chilling freeze its winters bought.
Through blizzards and snowdrifts, Napoleon's army had limped back to France, his men freezing
by the thousands, their corpses left on the side of the road with no one to bury them.
The experience had ruined the French general, but the Fuhrer promised that his invasion
would not follow the same course.
Hitler assured his generals that the war would be over in a few weeks or two months tops.
He told them that the crumbling Bolshevik state would topple long before winter arrived,
and he was so sure of this that he made no provisions for winter uniforms.
And finally the day came.
Just before sunrise on Sunday the 22nd of June 1941, Operation Barbarossa, the largest
invasion in world history, began.
The world will hold its breath, Hitler declared to his field marshals.
While Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels justified the invasion to the German public
as a pre-emptive strike, a kind of get them before they get us situation, quote.
Human imagination is insufficient to picture what would have happened if their animal hordes
had flooded into Germany in the west.
The Fuhrer's order to the army on the night of the 22nd of June was an act of historic
magnitude.
It will probably prove the critical decision of the war.
The soldiers obeying his orders are the saviours of European culture and civilization.
As we get through this series you'll start to notice that the language used by Nazis
when describing this war is evocative of a crusade.
And that was intentional.
Hitler believed that this was a crusade, but not against religion against something much
more insidious, Bolshevism.
Even the name Barbarossa was picked with purpose.
It came from Frederick Barbarossa, a famous German crusader.
Hitler saw Bolshevism in the same way that a 12th century crusader saw Islam, a cancer
that needed to be eradicated for the good of mankind.
And so in the early morning hours, 3 million German soldiers and 1 million Romanian or
Finnish soldiers stormed across the border that separated the territory of Germany and
the USSR.
The objective was pretty straightforward.
A lightning fast Blitzkrieg sucker punch to take out the most important cities in Russia,
killing the big red giant before it could get to its feet.
Three separate army groups would be aligned to the most important cities in the USSR.
One would head to Leningrad in the north, a second would make for Kiev in the south,
and the third and largest group would make for Moscow.
After the loss of these three cities, Hitler reasoned that the Soviet government would
collapse and Russia would be theirs.
The objectives might have been straightforward and the tactics similar to what was used in
Western Europe, but the optics were very different.
In his biography, Mein Kampf, Hitler declares that the Slavic people were incapable of self-governance.
They were and had always been an inferior race destined only for hard labour.
And since the Bolshevik revolution had replaced the old Russian government, it was now, you
guessed it, Jews who were the sneaky puppet masters controlling the USSR behind the scenes.
Because of this, they had to go.
In the Führer's New World Order, the most fertile lands in western Russia would be re-inhabited
by German settlers who would, over generations, Germanise the region.
But what did that mean for the people that live there now?
Hitler's solution for them was listed in the Hunger Plan.
As the German army advanced, it would steal all the grain and livestock and send it back
to Germany on railway.
The millions of slavs living in those regions would starve to death, the land would be depopulated
and once the war was over, German settlers would recultivate it, creating his so-called
Liebensraum, or Greater German Reich.
For Hitler, this was more than just an invasion, it was land clearing.
Nearly a few hours into the invasion, it was clear the Red Army had been caught completely
by surprise.
Hitler was jubilant.
Once a dictator started talking, no one could stop him.
His mind always raced ahead.
The next stage of the plan, the next step towards his thousand year Reich, gesticulating wildly,
he spoke as if Russia was already theirs, while his generals, always aware of his tendency
to dream big, had to settle him back down.
Of course, of course, he would have laughed as he shook hands and nodded rapidly.
They were right, before his thousand year Reich could take shape, the final showdown
with Bolshevism must occur.
On the morning of the 22nd of June 1941, Konstantin Maligan, chief of staff of the 41st Tank Division
was up early.
Bumping down the road in a staff car, he and a colonel were sharing a coffee as they made
their way from the Polish border town of Wielinski to their favourite fishing spot.
Today was their day off.
As they passed through the silent villages, the deep crimson sky put them in a cheery mood.
The colonel turned to Konstantin and announced that he had a good feeling about the fish
today.
Everything was still.
All of a sudden, a green solitary flare shot up from the horizon.
They both stared, wondering what it could be, before the sound of distant rumbling thunder
followed.
Then, out of nowhere, the world seemed to explode.
Police around zipped over their staff car as mortars began to plummet around them like
hail stones.
Turn back, Konstantin yelled to the driver.
As their car sped back to HQ, 400km north, Lazar Belkin, a recent graduate of the 56th
Rifle Division stationed at Grodno, woke up to the sounds of aircrafts overhead.
Unsure of what to make of it, he was calmed by his superiors who assured him it was probably
just their planes returning from a drill as they were flying east.
As he walked down the river to wash, the noise became louder.
Out of nowhere, bombs began to rain down on their base.
Their wooden barracks exploded into millions of wooden splinters.
The silence of the early morning was gone as the groans of the dead and dying echoed
through the camp.
Somewhere to the south of that, Sergeant Vladimir Usulink rushed to meet his captain and secure
a nearby bridge.
He'd spotted a group of men who seemed suspicious.
They wore uniforms that were a little too clean and rode bicycles, uncommon at this part of
the front.
These men were Brandenburgers, German saboteurs, men with a good poker face who could speak
another language, and they'd been sent behind Russian lines to shoot flares above strategic
targets and ensure bridges were not exploded.
Calling them over, Usulink's captain asked them what they were doing.
As soon as they opened their mouth, their basic wooden Russian gave them away.
As they stumbled over an explanation, the captain stepped forward and yelled at him,
What are you talking about you bastard, before pulling out his pistol and killing the saboteur
on the spot.
Most civilians remember the 22nd of June as the USSR's darkest hour, but for many
Ukrainians, Estonians, Lithuanians and Poles, they were positively thrilled.
These territories were recent additions to the USSR.
Ethnic groups were forcibly woven into the empire by Joseph Stalin when Europe was too
busy with Hitler to protest, and these people, particularly the Poles and Ukrainians, were
overjoyed at the sight of a swastika flag flying over their village.
Ukrainian babushkas cheered as German tanks rolled through the town, welcoming them with
the traditional offering of bread and salt.
Polish farmers fired potshots at passing Russian troops and laughed as they fled from the Germans.
Many ethnic Russians that lived in these places kept their heads down.
Tatyana Deliotitsky, an ethnically Russian child who lived on the borders of Poland,
found herself alone picking through the rubble of her bombed-out house looking for family
members.
When she begged her neighbours, who were ethnic Poles for help, they mocked her and told
her her family shouldn't be there to begin with.
Another Red Army recruit, fresh from training, remembers marching to the front and passing
a Polish farmer who eyed up his patched clothing and antiquated rifles and whispered to him
with a grin on his face, the Germans will annihilate you.
These weren't isolated incidents, either.
The German tank commanders blitzing through these border towns were stunned by the reception
they received.
You can see videos of this as parades and banners, women in traditional costumes performing
the Nazi salute, under tarpaulins that read,
The Liberators of Europe from Bolshevism,
Sieg Heil to Adolf Hitler and his men.
These people's hate for Joseph Stalin was so intense that German officers began to write
to their high command, recommending that the population of these border villages be allowed
to fight alongside them.
Predictably, Hitler, appalled at the idea of subhuman slavs and Poles disgracing the
Wehrmacht uniform, refused categorically.
By the second day of the invasion, Stalin had accepted that this was not just some rebel
general, he had finally come to terms that Adolf Hitler had deceived him.
But still, he was frozen.
Usually measured at observant, he sat quietly as his generals discussed what to do.
With every minute of delay, their losses compounded by incredible multitudes.
In the first few days of the invasion, the reports filtering back to the Kremlin were
staggering.
The loss of men was one thing, Stalin could live with that.
But the losses in aircraft, command posts and garrisons, and above all, land, was horrifying.
Almost the entire Russian Air Force was gone, 96.4% according to one source I read.
In most cases, before Russian pilots had even woken up, their plane was gone.
The Tan Orvo aircraft hangar, which was just 12km from the border, must have seemed like
a German dive bomber's dream.
Over 100 Soviet Air Force planes, half of them new model Russian MiGs, were just sitting
on a barely covered slab of concrete.
Within seconds they were nothing but smoking scraps of debris.
And for the few planes that did make it off the ground, the gap in technology was so glaring
that a German pilot would describe shooting Russian planes out of the sky as quote, infanticide.
Russian pilots too were under no illusions of their planes' shortcomings.
One man said quote, our pilots feel they are corpses already when they take off.
Vitaly Kolomenko, a pilot who managed to survive, said that his friends referred to the I-15
biplanes as coffins.
In frustration, some brave pilots even resorted to ramming German planes as a last resort
to even the playing field.
For the Red Army, things weren't much better.
Within just five days, the Wehrmacht had pushed them back 200 miles and were closing in on
Minsk, the modern capital of Belorussia.
Soviet leadership was in freefall.
An infinite horde of badly armed, badly led soldiers flooded back.
The number of dead, missing or injured soldiers was probably nearing half a million and rising.
For the Germans in the vanguard, the first few days had reinforced everything the Fuhrer
had told them, that the slabs were stupid and cowardly.
But why was this happening?
Where were the officers relaying reports to Stalin and High Command?
Where was the leadership on the ground?
Simply put, there was none.
In the 1930s, Stalin had gutted the upper ranks of the Red Army.
Paranoid about disloyalty here purged the best and brightest from the army.
I'm not talking about a couple of generals and a few officers.
Have a listen to these numbers.
These are the amount of soldiers Stalin had executed, imprisoned or fined.
36,671 junior officers.
403 out of 706 brigade commanders, 15 out of 16 commanders, 50 out of 57 corps commanders,
158 out of 186 divisional commanders, 401 out of 456 colonels and at the highest level,
3 out of 5 marshals.
By the time Operation Barbarossa had begun, 75% of the Red Army officer corps had held
their rank for less than a year.
Stalin is an enormous brain drain and those that were still there were conditioned to
avoid responsibility at all costs, lest their name be associated with a particular link
in the rusty chain of command.
Though Hitler's racial narrative painted the failings of the Russian army as a slave
problem, it wasn't.
It was a Stalin problem.
By the time the war started, the Red Army structure of command was the foot soldier
at the bottom, Stalin at the top and nothing in the middle.
Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht couldn't be more different.
These soldiers were led by veteran Nazi officers like Erich von Manstein and legendary tank
commander Hans Guderian.
Their officers had both theoretical knowledge and practical experience in new-style mechanized
warfare and as they raced from village to village, for many of them, the greatest concern
was the lies and germs that propaganda said they could catch from slave civilians.
It was easy going, the summer weather was hot but that wasn't a problem, officers
called themselves with chilled champagne or a glass of cognac they bought from occupied
France.
If any soldiers pointed out that they'd bought no provisions for winter, their comrades
would have laughed them off.
When this invasion commenced, each soldier had been instructed to operate under a new
directive known as the Jurisdiction Order.
This order barred Soviet citizens from any legal or civil protections against German
soldiers during occupation, be that looting of property, rape or even murder.
Stalin's official justification behind this decision was that because Stalin had refused
to sign the Geneva Convention, his soldiers were not protected under it.
But this was just a technicality, even if Stalin had signed that the Fuhrer would have
found a way to legitimize his war crimes.
One German officer seeing his men descend on a helpless village like Vikings in medieval
Europe was disgusted and privately wrote in his diary, quote,
This type of thing turns the Germans into a type of being which had existed only in
enemy propaganda.
But men like this were the minority.
For the average Wehrmacht soldier, particularly the younger ones, years of Goebbels' propaganda
had anithotized them into believing the Slavic people were less worthy of life than rats.
Once a village fell to the Wehrmacht, the locals were at the mercy of the Einsatzgruppen.
The Einsatzgruppen were a rearguard that would tail the main Wehrmacht army and occupy the
villages they'd conquered.
Their objective was to eliminate anyone who could support the old political infrastructure
– commissars, clerks, administrators, and specifically Jews.
The men of the Einsatzgruppen were gathered from intellectual backgrounds, scholars, theologians
or academics, men who were articulate enough to convince soldiers to kill unarmed civilians
in cold blood.
When they arrived, members of this death squad would take a census of the village, round
up anyone with a lick of authority and walk them out to the nearest forest.
Professors, doctors, council members, and priests were marched out and forced to dig
their own graves before being murdered en masse.
The Einsatzgruppen would also make use of local gangs.
Feeding on nationalist tendencies that were particularly strong in the Baltic countries,
they would encourage locals to lynch Jews, which gave them, Germans, plausible deniability
for the pogroms that followed.
We know this happened because there is filmed evidence of it.
Members of this squad took real delight in their work, sending home pictures of their
victims to their wives and children.
You can find a lot of this footage online and it's really twisted stuff.
I won't go into too much detail, but I mean, naked men and women in a city square being
beaten with clubs and bricks, broken hands slipping in the mud trying to get away, as
members of the Einsatzgruppen egg the crowd on.
What shocked me most about seeing this footage was how modern the cities looked and the clothes
the perpetrators wore.
You're not seeing people dressed in chain mail with a medieval castle behind them.
They're modern times and all these horrific acts that happen in streets that look just
like any European city today, by people dressed almost like us.
And that brings up the uncomfortable realisation that this wasn't that long ago.
Less than a hundred years ago, people did this.
Over in the Kremlin, the War Council decided they had to tell the public what was going
on.
By now, even citizens half a world away knew something on the front was up, a radio announcement
needed to be given, and it only made sense that Stalin should deliver it.
But the dictator categorically refused.
He could not bring himself to admit his catastrophic failure to his people, so the duty fell on
Minister Molotov, Stalin's number two.
For party announcements, the radio in the USSR was always switched on.
So all at once, almost everyone heard the wooden voice of Minister Molotov crackling
through the houses, streets, schools, and factories.
Citizens of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government and its head, Comrade Stalin, have
authorised me to make the following statement.
In a speech that was a little over three minutes long, Molotov told the Soviet public everything
that they knew, that Hitler had invaded and with the assistance of Finns and Romanians,
they marched towards Moscow.
The announcement, blunt and light on detail concluded with, our cause is just, the enemy
will be beaten.
We will be victorious.
As the clunk of the microphone marked the end of the recording, there was silence.
170 million people had just learned that they'd be conscripted into war.
Rushed as it was, the message evoked a deep sense of patriotism that thrummed in the heart
of all USSR citizens, particularly ethnic Russians, a need to protect their land, their
family, and their way of life.
This was real patriotism that went much deeper than a lip service they paid to the communist
regime.
Many of the men that began rushing to the front had family members in Stalin's political
prisons, his gulags, fathers, sisters, mothers, uncles, everyone knew someone languishing in
a gulag in Siberia for some minor offense committed against the regime.
So imagine that, volunteering to fight for the country that had imprisoned and tortured
your parents.
But it didn't matter.
Now wasn't the time to air grievances against the regime.
All throughout the urban centers, reservists made their way to mobilization offices.
Many didn't even wait for orders.
But getting the men to the front was only half the problem.
With so many conflicting reports coming in, it was near impossible to figure out where
a trip should be sent.
Oblitzkrieg wasn't just about speed, it was about manoeuvrability.
The motorized divisions would apply pressure on a particular front, and then when the Red
Army moved to reinforce that point, they'd pull back and go somewhere else.
This was a nightmare for Russian logistics, trying to coordinate millions of soldiers
across a thousand mile front that was shifting by the day.
The Russian command were at a loss on how to deal with this.
Men were now arriving at the front en masse, but they were just being thrown into the
moor.
For the average Russian recruit with virtually no combat experience, their lives were sacrificed
for absolutely no gain.
Officers would come down for a division to retake a specific village.
The officer in charge, who probably had a year of experience at best, might know that
retaking the village was impossible, but he wasn't going to be the one to tell his captain
that.
And likewise, that captain may have known that when he gave the order, the division was
full of recruits with no combat experience, but he didn't want to tell the marshal that.
So the order eventually landed on the rank and file soldier.
And these people weren't stupid, they had eyes, they could see.
They knew that what they were being asked to do was suicide, but it was also suicide
to resist an order.
So minute after minute, day after day, these hopeless suicidal tactics were forced upon
the laymen.
Then you've got to remember, a lot of these people were from regions like Kazakhstan,
or Ulan Uday, or even further east.
Some barely spoke Russian, and a good majority didn't even understand why they were there
at all.
One Russian squad commander remembers his interaction with a confused Uzbek soldier who had just
arrived at the front.
Do you understand what a rifle is and what it's for?
I've never really thought it over, comrade officer.
Well, give it some thought now.
When you go into battle, shoot at the fascists, and if they come after you, you simply can't
get by without it.
The rifle is your protection.
After a brief pause, you follow it up.
Do you know what a fascist is?
The man was silent.
It's not hard to see why things were so chaotic, is it?
But en masse, these men fought, marched, and died on scales that the Germans found positively
eerie.
Wehrmacht soldiers would shoot and tell their machine gun chambers were red hot, mowing
down wave after wave of men.
As their bullets raked through the front line, the shabby masses of grey and brown would collapse.
One man next to another before they started on the next line, and they would just keep
coming.
They were killing, slaughtering on a scale that dwarfed their battles in Western Europe.
But from this en masse wasteland, more and more and more men arrived, died and were replaced.
One German soldier wrote about this almost surreal experience of just murdering so many
people with such ease.
Quote,
This is crazy.
We are firing with four machine guns and at least 80 carbines from secure covered positions
into the advancing horde.
Our machine gun bursts rip openings in their ranks, dead and wounded are hitting the ground
all the time, but more of them are coming through the haze and we can't see them clearly.
Even the veteran Nazi generals were unnerved just by how many men this nation could call
up.
In his diary, General Halder wrote quote,
We counted on about 200 enemy divisions.
Now we have already counted 360.
And this is going to be a trend, everything about Russia Hitler had underestimated.
The number, the sheer endlessness of its land, its industry and above all the commitment
of its people.
As massacres like this became the norm, Stalin's depression put his high command on edge, further
hampering any efforts to shore up the front.
When they spoke about the war to the dictator, the information just seemed to go in one ear
and out the other.
In the past, no crumb of information got past Stalin without him knowing, but now he asked
and re-asked his subordinates to repeat reports they'd just given him.
He lent on his generals to make decisions which made them anxious.
Not used to being given so much autonomy, all were cautious not to overstep the mark, wherever
that mark may be.
After a day of absent-minded nodding, Stalin would return to his little workhouse near
the Kremlin and dawdle introspectively, passing the many framed portraits of Lenin.
Before to sleep at night, he would wander the halls and brush past the telephones, half
expecting them to ring and announce more bad news.
One night, General Rumyantsev was working late and saw the door of his office creak open,
only for him to see the sad-looking dictator staring at him like a spectre in the hallway.
Rumyantsev quickly scrambled to his feet awaiting an order, but Stalin said nothing
and quietly walked away.
The next day, he summoned the war cabinet to his house.
As Minister Molotov walked there, he prepared himself for a difficult conversation.
Molotov was the closest thing Stalin had to a number two, and everyone in the war council
agreed it should be him to broach this potentially dangerous topic.
Molotov and the other members of the High Command had observed how hamstrung field officers
were from making decisions.
Almost every battlefield manoeuvre needed to be routed through Stalin, and the dictator
being in such low spirits meant that their responses were delayed, costing thousands
of lives each time.
Molotov's plan was to create a new, rapid decision-making authority.
Stalin, of course, would be the head of it, but even still, Stalin was notoriously twitchy
with power-sharing.
None had forgotten his purges the last decade.
Letting themselves in, Molotov and the others found the dictator slumped over in a small
dining room chair.
Wearing the same clothes as yesterday, his gaze firmly fixed on the floor, the dictator
barely stirred until they approached him.
Slowly, he looked up and asked, what have you come for?
It was a strange question because he had summoned them and seemingly forgot.
But even stranger was Molotov's proposal.
Once the minister had explained its function and purpose, Stalin, still looking at the
floor, just said, fine.
And that was it.
The decision-making body would come to be known as the Stavka.
At same week, Stalin received further reports of the frontlines around the Ukraine collapsing.
The Wehrmacht was now closing in on Kyiv, one of the most important cities in the USSR.
When given the news, Stalin said nothing as usual, but as he and the other Stavka members
exited the Kremlin, out of nowhere he burst out with, quote, Lenin left us a great inheritance,
and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up.
Molotov and the others were gobsmacked, but said nothing.
And that is where we pull the cord for today.
Stalin and the Red Army were at their lowest, but the worst was yet to come.
Join us on our next episode, as Stalin pulls himself from his stupor and rallies the citizens
of the USSR for what was almost Russia's last stand.
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