The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

When the German troops first entered Russia they were in many places hailed as liberators by a population long ground down and terrorized by Stalin’s tyranny. There were, in the beginning, wholesale desertions among the Russian soldiers. Especially in the Baltic, which had been under Soviet occupation but a short time, and in the Ukraine, where an incipient independence movement had never been quite stamped out, many were happy to be freed from the Soviet yoke—even by the Germans. There were a few in Berlin who believed that if Hitler played his cards shrewdly, treating the population with consideration and promising relief from Bolshevik practices (by granting religious and economic freedom and making true co-operatives out of the collectivized farms) and eventual self-government, the Russian people could be won over.