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Stalin and Hitler were together responsible for the leitmotiv of ruthless brutality that prevailed throughout the hostilities between Russia and Germany. His decision to stay and fight was a crucial turning point in the war.

New testimony and documentary evidence can now reveal that Stalin was seriously considering suing for peace and had even organised a 'getaway' train to take him to safety as German guns started pounding Moscow. By October 1941, three million Soviet soldiers were prisoners of war. But despite Stalin's ruthless order forbidding any city to surrender, Kiev fell and 600,000 Soviet soldiers were captured. One week into the German invasion, 150,000 Soviet soldiers were either dead or wounded - more than during the five months of the Battle of the Somme.Īs the German armies swept further into the Russian heartland, one million Soviet troops were drafted to protect Kiev. The scene was set for a war of annihilation waged by the Nazis against the Soviets with no mercy shown by either side. The German Blitzkrieg technique was as devastating in Russia as it had been in the rest of Europe. Indeed, Hitler came much closer to pulling off his grand plan than the Soviet Union was ever prepared to admit. With the benefit of hindsight, popular opinion has labelled Hitler as virtually insane for invading the Soviet Union, but at the time many people - including those influential in both Britain and America - thought his decision was a sound one. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, and looked poised to take Moscow by October that year. At the time it seemed possible.' (The above paragraphs are taken from chapter one of 'War of the Century' by Laurence Rees, published by BBC Publications, 1999.) We had to try to remove the greatest threat from the East. Hubert Menzel was a major in the General Operations Department of the OKH (the Oberkommando des Heers, the German Army headquarters), and for him the idea of invading the Soviet Union in 1941 had the smack of cold, clear logic to it: 'We knew that in two years' time, that is by the end of 1942, beginning of 1943, the English would be ready, the Americans would be ready, the Russians would be ready too, and then we would have to deal with all three of them at the same time. Both Hitler and his military planners knew that Germany's best chance of victory was for the war in Europe to be finished swiftly. (It was just ironic that he was not yet at war with this perceived enemy, since in August 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a Non-Aggression Pact.)Īll this meant that, from Hitler's point of view, there was an alternative to invading Britain: he could invade the Soviet Union. Worse, if the Germans let themselves be drawn into a risky amphibious operation against a country Hitler had never wanted as an enemy, every day the potential threat from his greatest ideological opponent would be growing stronger. And he admired the British - Hitler often remarked how much he envied their achievement in subjugating India. Britain contained neither the space, nor the raw materials, that he believed the new German Empire needed. For him, it would have been a distraction. And there was another, ideological, reason why Hitler was not fully committed to invading Britain.

Even if air superiority could be gained, there remained the powerful British Navy. Germany, unlike Britain, was not a sea power and the Channel was a formidable obstacle. Hitler did in fact order preparations to be made for an invasion of England, but he was always half-hearted in his desire to mount a large seaborne landing. Yet Hitler was frustrated by geography - in the shape of the English Channel - from following his immediate instincts and swiftly crushing the British just as he had the French. The British would not do what seemed logical and what the Führer expected - they would not make peace.

In the summer of 1940 Adolf Hitler, despite his swift and dramatic victory over France, faced a major military and political problem. But at the time of the attack there were many people - and not just Germans - who thought that the decision to invade the Soviet Union was a rational act in pursuit of German self-interest and, moreover, that this was a war the Germans would win. And in the end what did the German aggressors have to show for it?Ī broken, divided country, which had lost much of its territory, and a people burdened with the knowledge that they had launched a racist war of annihilation and, in the process, spawned the cancer of the Holocaust. In its scale of destruction, the war on the Eastern Front was unique from Leningrad to the Crimea, from Kiev to Stalingrad, the Soviet Union was devastated - at least 25 million Soviet citizens died. In the whole of history there has never been a war like it.