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warmonger spreading misinformation
It is impossible to escape the conclusion that the supposed arch-realist Stalin did not believe the warnings simply because he did not wish to, and the chief of military intelligence, General Filip Golikov, did not want to tell the brutal, unpredictable despot news that he did not want to hear.
ill-preparedness and bureaucracy
‘You must be insane. And why isn’t your signal in code?’
Germany also had 600,000 horses taking part.
the Luftwaffe knocked out more Russian warplanes on the first day of Barbarossa than it did British planes in the entire battle of Britain.
By the end of the first week of fighting, nine-tenths of the Red Army’s new Mechanized Corps had also been destroyed.53
Stalin’s face was white
These reserve divisions would later prove decisive.
(that is, only 6 per cent were armed, not counting grenades and Molotov cocktails).
ordinary Russian soldier
effectively became a means by which the authorities decided who lived and who died.
slowing the German advance towards Moscow as the weather was about to turn, some historians cite Smolensk as the first indication that the war might be approaching a turning point.
this amounted to a staggering 80 per cent casualty rate.
Germans could not be replaced fast enough.
The very successes of the Germans, in hugely extending their lines of communication, caused grave logistical problems for the Wehrmacht, especially once partisans began disrupting supplies in the rear.
Soviet partisans became much better equipped and more centrally directed as the war progressed.
Zoya Kosmodemy...
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‘You can’t hang all 190 million of us!’
The size of Operation Barbarossa dwarfs everything else in the history of warfare.
43,100 out of a wartime total of 88,300
Half of all Russian planes during the war, therefore, were not destroyed by bombing or shot down by the Germans, but were rather lost due to avoidable mistakes by the Soviets themselves.
T-34.
orgy of sadistic violence
‘When the prisons were opened up after the Soviet retreat there were scenes of indescribable horror,’
‘convulsed by a spasm of retributive violence induced by fear, desperation and rage’.
If the German Army had been instructed to embrace this anti-Bolshevik behaviour, and do all in its power to encourage anti-Soviet nationalism, the story of Barbarossa might have been very different.
wholesale ethnic cleansing followed,
Here was yet another crucial instance of Nazi ideology interfering with Germany’s military best interests.
Far from nurturing Slavic nationalism, therefore, Hitler merely crushed it.
Leninism, collectivization, state atheism, the Civil War, repression and the Gulag system of prisons and penal colonies had left a bitter hatred against the Bolsheviks that the Germans ought to have used to their advantage.
The Nazis ought also to have promised the peasants of southern Russia massive agrarian decollectivization,
Yet here the Nazis, whose plans were for large-scale liquidation, proved themselves incapable of even pretending to act out the role of liberators rather than genocidal conquerors.
food shortages
scorched-earth policy
58 per cent
‘The purpose of the Russian campaign is to decimate the Slavic population by thirty millions,’
In this as in so much else, the Nazi way of fighting the war triumphed over the most efficient way of finding victory.
underestimated the Russian colossus
Entscheidungsschlacht
Clausewitz’s many Cassandrine warnings about the dangers of invading Russia – he had personally witnessed Napoleon’s nemesis in the retreat from Moscow from the Russian side – went unheeded.
Thus the successful stage was not only wasted but led to disaster.
By dispersing his forces for these various tasks, he threw away his chance of taking Moscow, but he did not suspect so at the time, believing that that too was attainable before the onset of winter.
‘on orders from the Führer,
‘They apparently do not wish to exploit under any circumstances the opportunity decisively to defeat the Russians before winter!’
‘Hitler made the most important decision of his life’, writes one historian, ‘against the professional judgment of virtually every German soldier who had an opportunity to comment.’93 The Allied committee system, for all its time-consuming debates and profound disagreements, was a far superior way of arriving at grand strategy than the method by which each general scrambled for the ear of a dictator who was not always listening anyway.
Donets industrial basin.
665,000 prisoners,
despite suffering over one million deaths, or an average of more than 1,100 people a day for nearly three years. It was by far the bloodiest siege in history, and more Russians died in Leningrad alone than British and American soldiers and civilians during the whole of the Second World War.
thousands of frozen bodies were dug up from the streets before the putrefaction could start epidemics.
