William Tyler
The Invasion of Russia

William Tyler - The Invasion of Russia

- [Judi] Well, welcome, everybody. Hi, William.

• Hi.

• [Judi] It’s just gone the hour, so I’ll hand over, I’ll hand over to you.

• Thanks very much indeed, thanks. And welcome everybody to this talk about Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. The date is the 22nd of June 1941, the place, Coventry in England. That evening, a Coventry housewife, Clara Milburn, who’s been keeping and is to keep a diary throughout the war, wrote in her diary the following entry. 22nd of June 1941. “So now Russia will get a bit of what she gave Finland and perhaps a lot more. Mr. Churchill broadcast tonight and said, ‘We must stand by Russia.’ I suppose we must, as she’s now against the enemy of mankind, but I wish we need not. When I think of her ways, which are not our ways,” and certainly it was a difficult, not a difficult decision, but a difficult position to be in that we found ourselves on the 22nd of June 1941, having been without allies outside of the Empire and Commonwealth since the surrender of France, precisely 12 months previously on the 22nd of June 1940, we now have an ally.

On that day, Nazi Germany abandoned their pact, which had been signed in August ‘39, abandoned their pact with the Soviet Union and launched their invasion of Russia, code-named Operation Barbarossa. Why Barbarossa? Well, it was named after the 12th-century holy Roman emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, who had sought to establish German dominion across Europe. So it’s very clear what the Germans in 1941 were about. This was an operation, Operation Barbarossa, which was to witness untold brutality for both on and off the battlefield by both sides. Millions dead, a horrendous moment in history. The second date I want to offer you is a little bit like a week or so later, on Tuesday the 1st of July 1941. And the place this time is neither Coventry nor the Russian border, but rather Bucharest.

That evening, another diarist, Mihail Sebastian, whom I mentioned in my last talk, I think, recalled an event in his diary that had happened the day before. “Yesterday, a tram car driver saw me with a newspaper in my hand. 'Had they entered Moscow?’ he said. ‘Not yet,’ I replied, ‘but they will for sure today or tomorrow.’ ‘Well, let them,’ he said. ‘Then we can make mince meat of the Yids.’” And he didn’t realise that he was talking, in Mihail Sebastian, to a Jew. The Nazi invasion of Russia, the Soviet Union, on the 22nd of June ‘41 was rooted in Nazi racist ideology that the Slavs, of whom the Russians were the largest population, were racially inferior to themselves, the Teuton or Germans. As early as 1925, in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler had written the racial policy of Nazi Germany, portrayed the Soviet Union as, “populated by non-Aryan,” said someone commenting on Hitler’s reference to subhumans. On the 10th of February 1939, Hitler told his army commanders that the next war would be purely a war of worldview, “totally a people’s war, a racial war,” he said.

And when war broke out in 1939, Hitler said, “Racial war has broken out, and this war shall determine who shall govern Europe and with it the world.” It’s very clear, it’s very clear what Hitler is about. Moreover, since the publication of “Mein Kampf,” Hitler had been claiming that Germany required, you remember, living space, lebensraum, and Russia could provide that living space. An interesting briefing by a German general, Hoepner, H-O-E-P-N-E-R, emphasised the racial nature of this invasion of Russia in 1941. He said to his troops, the 4th Panzer Group, “The war against the Soviet Union is an essential part of the German people’s struggle for existence.” The general also referred to the old struggle of Germans against Slavs and said, “The struggle must aim at the annihilation of today’s Russia and must therefore be waived with unparalleled harshness.”

He added, “That the Germans were fighting for the defence of European culture against Muscovite Asiatic inundation and the repulsion of Jewish bolshevism. No adherence to the present Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared,” he said. So interestingly, it isn’t an ideological clash that the Nazis emphasised first, it is the ethnic clash between Teuton and Slav, Teuton and Jew. And then, secondly, the clash of ideologies between Nazism and Marxist-Leninism, or, as they called it, Bolshevism. So what was Hitler narrower objectives? Well, his objective was to use the Russian population as slaves. Interesting, the etymology of the word slave in English comes from the word Slav. He was going to use the Russian population as slaves, but he also wanted oil, oil from the Russian Caucasus, and he also wanted the agricultural produce of Russia for the German people during the course of the war. His ultimate aim included the extermination of Soviet Jews, that ramped up from a beginning where they were taking Jews in positions of authority within the Bolshevik regime to, in the end, all Jews. And he was keen to clear Western Russia of everyone, Slav and Jew alike, and send the Russian Slavs to Siberia so that the German population could expand into this new, quote, “living space” unquote, of Western Russia.

And then the odd thing happened. Before the war in the West even began, let alone the war in the East against Russia, Hitler did a deal with Stalin, the so-called Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, named after the German and Russian foreign ministers, respectively, signed in Moscow in August 1939. Everyone around the world was amazed at this pact. I mean, there had been propaganda from both sides against the other. You couldn’t find a more different set of beliefs politically, except, of course, both are totalitarian regimes. Churchill here was absolutely amazed at this pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. And Churchill commented in this way, “The sinister news broke upon the world like an explosion.” “The sinister news,” 1939, August, Churchill wrote that. And then, in June 1941, Churchill has to swallow those words and enter into an alliance with Russia against Germany. My enemy’s enemy is my friend. Although Churchill was under no illusion that both were enemies of liberal democracy that Britain stood for, stood for alone in Europe in 1941. In his book on Russia, Martin Sixsmith wrote the following.

He wrote this. “Hitler had spent the preceding years denouncing Stalin regime as, quote, 'a band of international criminals,’ and Soviet propaganda been preparing the way for confrontation with the, quote, ‘Nazi menace.’ So deep had the enmity between them that they had fought what was in effect of proxy war, supporting opposite sides during the Spanish Civil War.” That’s why people, even like Churchill, were amazed at this. But it’s not long before they realised that there was a secret clause to this pact. And that clause was the division of Poland, the division of Poland between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, as I mentioned in an earlier talk. And both sides gained from that. It’s interesting to think about what they gained because there is a slight distinction here in terms of both Hitler and Stalin. This is Sixsmith. “Hitler now had the green light to invade the western part of Poland. Stalin was being given a free hand to annex the rest of Poland, all the territory east of the River Vistula. To Stalin’s delight, Moscow would be regaining the land it had lost in the Russo-Polish War of 1919 and ‘21.” All those civil wars in Russia that took place after the First World War ended.

You remember that Poland was part, part of the Russian empire prior to the war, and Russia wanted to maintain it within the empire. And so there’s a war between Russia and the emerging independent Poland in 1919 and '21. And Sixsmith said, “As with the partitions of Poland in earlier centuries, the state of Poland was again destined to be wiped off the map.” So Stalin had gained quite a lot. Stalin was interested, like Putin today, of restoring the greatness of Russia and expanding Russia’s greatness territorially. And this was an opportunity he couldn’t miss. Hitler, on the other hand, saw this as a pact of convenience. He never had any intention of not invading Russia, although Stalin believed that maybe they had bought him off, at least for a substantial amount of time, and maybe for more than that. They had both thought they’d won. But it was Stalin that had, in the end, lost. Well, in the end, in terms of 1941 at least, certainly not in 1945. That Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact therefore lasted only between August 1939, when it was signed, and June 1941, when the Wehrmacht marched into Russia.

In the intervening period, that in between time, August '39 to June '41, there is some irony in what is going on. And Sixsmith tells us what this irony was. He writes in this way, he’s talking about what happened in terms of what the Russians did. “In this period,” he tells us, “they actually supplied, they actually supplied war material to the German war machine that subsequently is going to be used by the Germans in the invasion of Russia.” But Stalin was always concerned about foreign money. And so he sold war material. Really was not a sensible move. In Berlin, as early as July 1940, that’s just under a year before the actual invasion, the German high command began planning the invasion of Russia. And on the 18th of December 1940, Hitler authorised its implementation. So less than a year after they’d signed the pact, the Germans were planning the invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa. And the attack began in 22nd of June '41. It had been delayed because the Germans got wrapped up in Greece. But I don’t think the delay really made much difference, most historians think it didn’t. Except it brought the Russian winter one month closer, if you like, in terms of the invasion timeline. So the invasion came in the summer of the 22nd of June '41, 3 million German troops, 650,000 German allied troops, Finns, and Romanians, crossed the Russian border on a 1,800-mile front.

A front that many German generals in the high command had advised Hitler was far too wide, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Their advice was to aim only for Moscow and worry about other parts of the plan at a later date. But Hitler wasn’t in a mood to wait. He needed that Caucasus’s oil. And so he’s committed the German army to a 1,800-mile front. They deployed 600,000 vehicles, and additionally, they had 600,000 horses. We often forget there were so many horses, even in World War II, but pause to think, 600,000 horses that have to be fed daily. 3 million troops, well 3.5 million in round figures, troops who have to be fed, who have to be rearmed, and resupplied. And the Germans believed they could live off the land. Now, what is very strange about this is that the German high command had actually studied the failure of Napoleon’s campaign in 1812 and failed to take into account that the Russians burned the crops in the fields, slaughtered their animals. It was not possible to live off the land in the way that the Germans had expected to. Their whole strategy was based on the fact that the Russians would collapse instantly. And, of course, they had some evidence of that because, in the Winter War in Finland, the Russians had behaved militarily very badly.

They really felt that they would simply cut through Russia like a knife through butter, as they cut through northern France like a knife through butter. This was going to be easy. They didn’t even worry about still not taking Britain out of the war. Hitler’s belief being that once he had reached Moscow and the Russians had surrendered, then Britain would surrender too. The miscalculations of Hitler personally, added to the miscalculations of the German high command, are, in retrospect, quite staggering. On the other hand, some of the decisions made by the British high command were equally lacking, when we look back with hindsight. Not least the amphibious assault in Norway, not least the sinking in 1941 of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. There are many occasions, and maybe all wars are similar, but if you were going to deploy so many troops against Russia and you actually had, from 130 years before, evidence of what had happened to the French, you would’ve thought they would’ve paused more. But in the end, people would not defy Hitler.

And Hitler is obsessed, remember, with the racial issue, Teuton against Slav, Teuton against Jew. And secondly, as I said before, against Bolshevism. So he’s not really interested in what isn’t really a nuance, I was going to say nuance of the military situation, but from his point of view, it’s entirely politically driven. Ideologically driven is maybe a better word. And to begin with, of course, the Germans achieved a great deal. By the end of 1941, the Germans had advanced just under a thousand miles into Russia and were on the outskirts of Moscow. But Napoleon actually got inside Moscow. And yet, look what happened to him. Getting to Moscow wasn’t really, either militarily or politically, going to be the final destination. Before I take the story further on, we now have to take into account a horrendous story. The German advance took with them mobile killing groups, the Einsatzgruppen. Beginning in late July 1941, some of Himmler’s lieutenants appeared, reinforced the SS and the police, who were embedded within the German advancing army. They recruited locally, auxiliaries, Russian anti-Semitics, and they began physically to annihilate entire Jewish communities that the Germans had advanced through.

So successful with this advance on Moscow initially and so successful was this appalling action of these mobile killing groups, that Hitler decided to deport all German Jews, the occupied Soviet Union, beginning on the 15th of October 1941, and initiates the Final Solution. The mobile killing units. What a terrible phrase. A terrible phrase. And often with terrible things, when you talk about, and the phrase slips off the tongue, and we shouldn’t let it just slip off the tongue. Mobile killing units often arrived taking Jewish populations by surprise. They entered a town or a city, or a village and rounded up all the Jewish men, women, and children. They were then forced to surrender any valuables, remove their clothing, which were sent to Germany to be reused or distributed to local Russian collaborators. And then the members of the killing squads marched the victims’ to open fields, to forest, to ravines on the outskirts of towns and cities and then shot them or gassed them in special gas mobile vans, and dump the bodies into mass graves. These killing squads are estimated to have killed more than a million Jews and tens of thousands of non-Jews as well. Romanis, high-ranking Bolshevik officials.

The worst, of course, as many of you know, was near Kiev, at Babi Yar, where roughly 34,000 Jews were murdered in two days of shooting. We should also note that very few people in the general Russian or Ukrainian population ever came to the help of the Jews who were being marched away. And the reason is clear, that they were frightened for their own lives were they to be caught helping a Jewish neighbour. Well, not just frightened for their own lives, their own lives were forfeit at the point that they were caught. Babi Yar was awful because the Jews were told to assemble at a particular point near the railway station, and they made the assumption that they were being deported by train. And they turned up laden with possessions for the journey and food for the journey. Then they were marched two miles northwest of the city, and there they encountered a barbed wire fence, Ukrainian police, German troops, the Wehrmacht. And then, in groups of 30 to 40, they were told to leave their possessions on the ground, were escorted through a narrow gap in the barbed wire. Anyone who tried to escape was beaten with a club. The German soldiers had clubs.

And then very soon they reached an open area where they were forced to strip, and pushed towards a ravine, and forced to lie down on the dead bodies of former victims for themselves to be shot in the back. Two days, nearly 34,000 victims. Sand was shovelled and bulldozed over the bodies. The sides of the ravine were dynamited to bring down the sides on top of the bodies. A German present later testified after the war’s end that after three days after this, there were still people alive amongst the corpses. And he and other German soldiers spent the days afterwards smoothing out the bank notes that had been taken from the Jews. It was an appalling act of horror. One historian has said, “The Einsatzgruppen and related German agencies with foreign auxiliary help,” Russians and Ukrainians, “killed more than 2 million people, including 1.3 million of the 5.5 to 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.” One of the things that struck me when I went to Auschwitz were the books on show, which were so methodical in preparation, which listed the number of Jews in every country. And then you saw the horror of Auschwitz and the mechanised murder, all done in a dreadfully efficient administrative way, not done in the heat battle, but done with a massive amount of forethought. And you kept thinking, I kept thinking, “How could people do this?” Many of the people involved were, before the war you would’ve described as ordinary Germans, and yet ordinary people who did the most extraordinary, horrific things to fellow humans.

And one of the things that’s awful about these killing units in Russia, that many of the leaders of them were highly educated. Nine of the 17 leaders deployed with these killing units in Russia had doctorates. Three had two doctorates. This is not an underclass, an uneducated underclass following orders, not understanding what the hell they’re doing. These are educated Germans, and one thinks of the pre-Nazi German education system, under Weimar and before, and it was one of the leading education systems, if not the leading, in the whole of Europe. And here are men with doctorates, double doctorates, acting as they did at places like Babi Yar. It is almost, as they say, unbelievable. So we’ve got two things going on at once. The German advance towards, in this case, I’m talking about Moscow, ‘cause that’s the key to the war, and also this terrible genocide that’s going on alongside it. It is true that the initial German advance met little opposition. This is a book, it’s a new book, that’s only recently come out by Laurence Rees called “Hitler and Stalin.” I put a blog up earlier today with some books on it, and Laurence Rees’s “Hitler and Stalin” is on that, as indeed are some of the other books. And I wanted to read you this little piece, if I may. “A week into the invasion, and still before he had talked to the general public, Stalin learned that Minsk, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Belorussia, was in imminent danger of capture.

When he confronted Zhukov, chief of staff for the Red Army, about this calamitous situation, Zhukov, the hardest of hard men, had tears in his eyes. Stalin then stormed out of the room, uttering the words, 'Lenin founded our state, and now we fucked it up.’ Exactly what happened next is in dispute. Khrushchev alleged that Stalin was ‘completely paralysed, unable to act, and couldn’t collect his thoughts.’” He’d gone to pieces. “And that he now retreated to his Dacha, having announced, ‘I’m giving up the leadership.’ Khrushchev based this on what Beria and Malenkov subsequently told him.” You take it with salt. “But doubt has been cast on the idea that Stalin could not cope in the days immediately after the invasion. While it’s true that he were retreated to his Dacha on the 29th of June, it’s uncertain exactly why. Was it because he had emotionally collapsed or merely because he was working on a speech and taking stock of the situation?” We simply don’t know. But he left the leadership in somewhat of paralysis, at least shortly after the attack invasion came.

Laurence Rees has, well, this paragraph, I think, is an extremely interesting paragraph that Rees wrote in this new book and he talks like this. “Unfortunately, both Hitler and Stalin made the same mistake. Both fooled themselves into believing that they could think into existence what they wanted to happen.” That, of course, is a problem of an authoritarian state, one in which lieutenants don’t tell you the truth. Think how different it was in Britain with Churchill. Churchill was always under attack in the House of Commons, in the press, in his own cabinet he was questioned, let alone the generals. And here Rees is saying, “Both Hitler and Stalin fooled themselves into believing that they could think into existence what they wanted to happen. To an extent, they lived within their own universe of alternative facts.” And both, of course, both of course were in a bubble. Both were shielded from the actual events that were going on and were often provided with a far more rosy and positive story than the facts justified. Rees goes on. “In Stalin’s case, he asserted that the Germans were not planning to invade.

And so when the invasion came, it took him completely by surprise. Hitler maintained that the Soviet system would collapse under pressure, and that became his reality. Famously, the Germans were so confident they would win this war before winter, they didn’t send the troops with winter clothing.” Again, a failure to understand the Napoleonic War of 1812. How could you do something like that? Well, you could, and many armies have done that before and since. Think of the British army in Iraq, where we had lots of our weapons just sand up and become unusable. But it was all going to be over before winter came. It didn’t quite work out like that. The Germans didn’t take Moscow. Moscow is the turning point. They reached Moscow, and then the Russians pushed them slowly back until finally the Russians take Berlin as Hitler commits suicide on the 30th April 1945. Why were the Germans so wrong? Well, they underestimated, not necessarily Stalin, not necessarily the Red Army, even. They underestimated the ordinary Russian peasant and Russia’s greatest general, as ever, General Winter. They underestimated the Russian people, and they underestimated the Russian winter.

Martin Sixsmith, in his book on Russia, which I’ve already quoted, writes this. “The author, Constantine Simonoff, realised in the early days of the war that people were not fighting for Stalin, the Revolution, and the Soviet Union, but for the Russian land, the city, town, or village they regarded as home, and the people who lived there. The villages were small, with dilapidated little churches and large graveyards. And the old wooden crosses, each looking like the next. It was then that I understood how strong within me was the feeling for my motherland, how much I felt that the land itself was my own. How deeply rooted within the land were all the people who lived there, Holy Mother Russia, the land.” Interesting, isn’t it? To think that Churchill’s speech in 1940, “We shall fight on the beaches and on the landing grounds and in the streets and in the fields, and we shall never surrender.” In that speech there’s no reference to England or Britain. No reference to the King or the Constitution.

What Churchill knew better than anybody is that we would fight village by village, mile by mile, and we’d be fighting for the land for what the Saxon called Englaland, the land of the English. That’s what we were fighting for, and that’s what the Russians were fighting for, and the Germans completely misunderstood that. So one mistake is underestimating the determination of Russian people. A second mistake is underestimating the effect of General Winter. The third mistake we’ve already talked about, of attacking on too wide a front and not taking the advice of his senior military commanders. And making a mistake, which may be a more understandable mistake, that Stalin himself had weakened the Red Army by killing or sacking much of its officer corps during the appalling purges in Russia of the 1930s. One historian has written, “During Stalin’s great purge in the late 1930s, much of the officer corps of the Red Army was executed or imprisoned, and their replacements appointed by Stalin for political reasons often lack military competence. Of the five marshals of the Soviet Union appointed in 1935, only two were available in 1941. 15 of 16 army commanders, 50 of the 57 corps commanders, 154 of the 186 divisional commanders, and 401 of 450 colonels were killed in the purges.

And many other officers were dismissed. When war came, the dismissed officers had to be brought back.” It’s estimated that Stalin had killed something like 30,000 of the officer corps in the 1930s before war came. Stalin further undermined the Red Army by going back to Trotsky’s principle, which had subsequently been abandoned, of having attached to every army unit a political officer, a political commissar, who had the same rank as the military commander. So here am I, a lieutenant colonel, in charge of a large group of men, and alongside me is a political commissar with the rank of colonel. And I decide militarily that we can’t hold this position, and I’m about to give the order that we are to withdraw. Bang. I’m taken out here. The political commissar shoots me because that’s what he’s put there by Stalin to do. So the Germans were right about the quality of the Russian senior officer corps, but they didn’t get the peasants right, and they didn’t get the peasants in uniform right. Even though those were the Russians rushed into uniform in 1941, were ill-trained and badly equipped.

Max Hastings, in his book of the Second World War, “All Hell Let Loose,” writes this. He says, “Russian infantrymen, in the first months of war, were taught only how to march wearing foot cloths,” they didn’t have boots, “to compensate for the shortage of boots.” Marching in foot cloths. “They were taught to take cover on command, to dig, and to perform simple drills with wooden rifles.” They didn’t have enough rifles. “There were insufficient weapons, no barracks, or transport. Each man learned to cherish a spoon as his most useful possession. Veterans said that they might throw away their rifles, but never the spoons tucked into their boots. Only the officers had watches. In the desperate days of 1941, many recruits were herded into action within a week or two of being drafted. A regimental commissar named Nikolai Moskvin wrote, despairing in his diary on the 23rd of July 1941, quote, ‘What am I to say to my boys? We keep retreating. How can I get their approval? How? Am I to say that comrade Stalin is with us? That Napoleon was ruined, and that Hitler and his generals will find their graves with us.’” So there was some evidence the Germans had, and after they began the attack, that what they’d said about Russia was true, that the Russian army would simply collapse in front of them. What saved Russia?

The Russian winter and the sheer numbers that Russia could call upon. If I may quote a historian, “At the start of the invasion, the manpower of the Soviet military force that had been mobilised was 5.3 to 5.5 million.” That as opposed to the Germans’ 3.5. “And it was still increasing as the Soviet reserve force of,” listen, “Soviet reserve force of 14 million, who at least had basic military training, continued to mobilise.” Stalin, like the tsars before him, has no compunction of sending wave after wave of Russians in on the grounds that, in the end, numbers will win. What matters if you lose 2 million, 5 million, 8 million? There’s more coming. I read on, “While transportation remained insufficient for the Red Army, when Operation Barbarossa kicked off, they possessed some 33-pound pieces of artillery, a number far greater than the Germans had.” And I think this is one of the things that’s forgotten about this German-Russian war. The Russian’s troops were inadequately armed. The Russian higher command had been blighted by Stalin himself, but they had Zhukov. And Zhukov is one of the keys to this whole war in the East. And they had more artillery pieces than the Germans.

The Soviet Union had 23,000 tanks, although in truth, less than 15,000 which were battle-ready. But they did put 11,000 tanks in the West against the Germans. And the Russian tanks had one enormous advantage, when winter came, their tracks were better to cope with snow than the German tanks that got caught up in the snow. Hitler said at a meeting of generals later, 1942, ‘43, “If I had known about the Russian tank strength in 1941, I would not have attacked.” How the hell did they not know? One of the interesting things about World War II is how imperfect German intelligence was, not only about Britain but about Russia. It’s an appalling lack of information. But then if you are an ideologue, as Hitler is, you don’t care about the niceties of detailed information. You just want to stamp out the Slavs and the Jews. So just go hell for it. They’ll only give in. After all, they’re not real people, are they? They’re subhuman. And you convince yourself of your own ideology. So the German advance stalls by the end of December 1941 outside Moscow and then becomes the Russian pushback against it.

And the Russians now fight a war of attrition against a retreating German army, a German army whose morale is now slipping badly, and a Russian army whose morale is rising. Morale is very important, obviously, in such situations. And despite everything the Germans throw at it, it’s all over by 1943. Remember the two examples of Russia holding out in Leningrad and Stalingrad, extraordinary stories of privation and yet a determination by ordinary Russians not to defend Stalin, not to defend communism, but to defend Holy Mother Russia. In the end, the analysis has to be that Operation Barbarossa was ill-conceived on the knowledge they did have, Napoleon’s advance, and things like the lack of food, the lack of winter clothing, and the long drawn-out supply line to the German army the deeper it got into Russia. The failure to understand General Winter and the failure of German intelligence all the time, fighting with the British in North Africa as well as elsewhere around the world. And at the same time that they are pushed back from Moscow, America is bombed into the war by the Japanese, and by 1942, Operation Torch is launched in North Africa. And it marks the point at which, with hindsight, but actually probably for many people, not with hindsight at the time, the German belief that, or Hitler’s belief, that he could fulfil Barbarossa’s dream of a German Europe.

The Urals to the Pennines, or however you want to put it, it’s really over. “Who won the war?” we’re often asked. Well, wouldn’t ask any of Britain. On any high street in Britain and it’s “Britain won the war.” Well, not true, is it? Britain stayed in the war to enable others to win it. Ask an American, the Americans won the war, but ask a Russian, and it’s the Russians that won the war. It’s Russia that takes Berlin in what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War. Interesting way of describing it. It’s exactly what I’ve been saying today. These are people fighting for Mother Russia, the great patriotic, oh, and Putin, Putin still uses that politically in 2021. I’ve got to come towards an end, and I wanted to read a few things before I do. First of all, I want to read from Laurence Rees’s book, where he quotes Goebbels. And this is Goebbels on the very day of the German invasion of Russia. That is to say, on the 22nd of June 1941. And he quotes Goebbels’ diary, and Goebbels wrote, “One can hear the breath of history, a great, wonderful time in which a new Reich is born.” A German Europe. Max Hastings quotes another part of the diary, which really says something slightly different.

And here he quotes Goebbels as saying, “We must win, and win quickly. The public mood is one of slight depression. The nation wants peace, though not at the price of defeat, but every new theatre of operations brings worry and concern. And Goebbels is right. Goebbels is absolutely right. With hindsight, Hitler should have seen off Britain before launching an attack on Russia. Well, that’s not what happened. I said by 1943, well really, you can read the cards. In 1943, Admiral Donitz, Admiral Donitz, you remember, who was in the Baltic in April 1945, and in Hitler’s last will and testament was named his successor. And for just over a week, Donitz was the second and last fuhrer in what some people call the Fourth Reich. Donitz wrote his memoirs, he was imprisoned for 10 years at Nuremberg. When he came out, he wrote his memoirs. Now, of course, all memoirs of all Nazis and Germans from the war have to be taken not with a pinch of salt but with a bucket load of salt. But Donitz did write this, "As far as the war situation as a whole was concerned, by February 1943, we were already on the defensive against overwhelming Russian pressure on the eastern front and in the Tunis Bridgehead in North Africa against the Anglo-American offensive on the whole Mediterranean front,” just what I’ve said. This, now, is a story of how long it will take to end and how horrific the years ‘43 to '45 will be in those territories that are German-governed.

How long it will be before the Russians can reach Berlin and the British and Americans can launch an invasion of Europe across the channel. As regards the retreat from Russia, that takes such a long time, Mihail Sebastian describes it in a very interesting little phrase, “The elastic retreat.” Sometimes backwards, sometimes forward, always, in general, backwards, the Russians didn’t just sweep through in six months to Berlin. But with the Americans in the war, the Russians pressing on, Britain undefeated, the noose has tightened around the Nazi neck by spring '43. And for all the things I’ve said so far this afternoon, all you can say at that point is, thank God it was. But there is a horror of a further two and a half years of war before it all ends. Thank you very much for listening. We might take some comments and questions.

• [Judi] Thank you, William. Do you have time for those questions? I see there’s quite a few.

• Yes, I do. I do.

• If you can.

Q&A and Comments:

• Let’s have a look at where we are. Oh, I’ve got lots. Oh, that’s a question there. “Will a recording,” a recording has been made. You file that through Judi. Thank you very much, somebody who talked about something else like that.

Q:“Why did he take on Russia?” That’s an important question.

A: “Hitler did say he would never enter into a two-front war. Why did he take on Russia with Britain still undefeated?” Because he had such a low view of Britain that he just assumed that Britain would collapse once he’d got to Moscow. And it’s his ideology that overrules any military sense. You can argue long and hard about how much military sense Hitler ever had, but he’s driven by ideology. He’s obsessed by the destruction of the Slavs. Yeah, I think it was. I really do think they didn’t take into account Napoleon, but it’s always interesting to me how military education doesn’t take into account earlier wars. If you think about the British Army, they didn’t take into account the American Civil War prior to the First World War, when they could have looked at a whole range of lessons that could be learned. And there were British military advisors embedded with Union troops during the Civil War. They even taught the American Civil War at Sanders prior to the First World War. I often think they must have taught it on a Friday afternoon in the summer when the young officers only wanted to get out and play cricket or something, as they certainly didn’t learn the lesson. And certainly, the Germans totally misinterpreted Napoleon’s defeat.

Q: “If Hitler had written so much, why was it made the Ribbentrop Agreement?”

A: Because Ribbentrop was the man organising it. This, remember, is in August '39, before war, and Ribbentrop is the foreign minister, he does Hitler’s bidding. It’s between the two foreign ministers that make that agreement.

Q: “Why did Russia make a deal with them?”

A: Because he wanted to get hold of Poland. Think of Putin and the Crimea. The Russian leadership, the tsar to Putin, is obsessed about expanding Russia. There’s a reason also an additional reason. It’s the same reason as Putin has to effectively take East Ukraine. The basis of Russian defence policy from the tsars to Putin is there must be buffers between Russia and the West. So the Baltic States served as a buffer. They lost those in the First World War. They regained them in 1945. Poland, they want as a buffer. And so when Hitler offers it to them on a plate, they aren’t going to say no. It’s this obsession with buffer sake.

Q: Why is Putin in Ukraine?

A: Because he’s petrified that NATO will accept Ukraine as a member. Had Ukraine been a member of NATO at the time that he invaded the Crimea, even though there’s a different case about the Crimea to be made, which is more pro-Russian. Nevertheless, there would’ve had to have been action taken by NATO, and certainly over East Ukraine, NATO would’ve had to act. Putin is not going to challenge NATO. If Poland wasn’t a member of NATO, then he might well have made some moves on Poland, but he couldn’t. And here in 1940 and 1939, Stalin is presented with Poland on a plate.

Q: Spain was neutral. I’m asked, “What was Spain’s position?”

A: Spain was neutral. Why? Because Franco couldn’t afford a war. He couldn’t afford it politically but more importantly he couldn’t afford it economically, financially. So Franco kept Spain out of the war and thus, of course, remained in power for decades after the war. There was not a chance of, well, they did meet on one occasion, Franco and Hitler, and Hitler thought he was a complete idiot. And he had enough problems with Mussolini without wanting Franco as well. And you can well understand that.

Q: Oh, now this is the question I alluded to, someone’s asked, for which there is no complete answer. “Had the Germans invaded Russia on, say, May 1st,” they’d intended to advance in May, got held up in Greece, “instead of the 22nd of June, thereby giving them an additional 50 days of good fighting weather, do you think that the Germans could have captured Moscow?”

A: No, I don’t. And even if they had captured Moscow, it would’ve been exactly as it was in 1812. If the Russians couldn’t have held out, they would’ve burned Moscow. There would’ve been nothing there. The winter would’ve come, and the Germans couldn’t have occupied Moscow because the Russians would’ve destroyed it, exactly as they did in 1812. If Hitler had got in 1812, I’m damn sure the Russians hadn’t. So I think that probably is a proper answer to that. No, it’s not about the population of Germany. The population of Germany is big, it’s true, but it’s the ideology that Germany needs more space is just something that’s in Hitler’s mentality. He thinks that Germany should expand eastwards. After all, there are Germans in, or had been Germans in the Baltic states. He wanting to push. It’s all about whether. It’s rather like Islam today in any country in which Muslims have lived in the past, they regard is still Islamic territory, like Spain, even if it isn’t Islamic today. And that is the same way that the Germans regarded it, regarded themselves. No, in 1939, Poland is divided into two. That’s absolutely clear between Russia and Germany. Subsequently, of course, there’s fighting because, at the end of the war, the Red Army is in occupation of Warsaw, which means that post the war, Poland becomes a satellite state of the USSR, providing them with a buffer that they’ve wanted and, of course, a bigger buffer than Hitler had given them in 1939. Oh.

Q: “Please repeat what I said about giving military armaments.”

A: They gave military armaments because he was obsessed with getting in foreign currency. He had done that in the 1930s by selling wheat to the West when his own people were starving. And he did not believe that Hitler would attack him. I’m going to be doing a talk about Hitler and Stalin at some point for you all. Stalin is, I don’t really want to say Stalin was unbalanced and mad. He was certainly unbalanced, mad is not a word one should use. Stalin was abnormal in terms of what he did in his thinking. Hitler is frighteningly normal. I mention Auschwitz. It’s the horror of that, that is, in a sense, is worse. I mean, Stalin should’ve been removed by men in white coats. Hitler is not like that. Hitler is this frightening, frightening figure of a populist with an ideology, in his case Nazism. But we’ve seen ideologues like that with a belief, which is a Christian belief, a religious belief. But Stalin is unbalanced. Let me just leave it like that, and I will talk about that more.

Q: “Is it worth me watching 'The World at War’?”

A: I don’t know that I can answer that. Marilyn’s asked that. There’s no harm in watching it, but there’s been a lot of developments in terms of how we look at the war, and there’s always new books coming out. Now, I mentioned Laurence Rees’s book. I like Laurence Rees as a historian, and his book “Hitler and Stalin” is, I think, a very good book. And although it’s a big book, it has nice, big print. And if you’re like me, you rather, at our advanced ages, or some of us, we’d rather like and favour books with big print.

Q:“Why did Hitler ignore advice?”

A: I keep coming back and saying the same thing I think, because he is no military commander, he is an ideologue. And you might say, “Yes, but Churchill intervened militarily.” Yes, but Churchill was a trained soldier. You say, “Well, yes, but Hitler fought in the First World War.” Yes, but he was a grunt. He held no position of authority. Churchill had been a colonel and had commanded on the front line in the First World War. It’s very different. One of the problems about Hitler is exactly that. That he did not have any military training, and yet the people who did were loathed to cross him. When they did, in the July plot of 1944, the general that I mentioned to you in the talk that gave the lecture to the troops about racism to the 4th Panzas as they invaded Russia, actually in 1944, was part of the Stauffenberg plot, the July 1944 Plot. And Hoepner himself, the general concerned, was actually executed by Hitler.

Q: “How did the German army manage to conquer so many, and did they have a huge army or did they recruit people?”

A: Ah, well, that’s the story of collaboration. Think of France and the Vichy government, who would do exactly what they were ordered to do. Now the question about did they have enough troops to keep the whole of this empire together? Now, I suppose you can say the fact they lost in 1945, there’s an argument that they couldn’t, but had, in some way or other, there been peace, America had not entered the war, Russia had not entered the war. Britain was isolated. Could they have held the rest of Europe? Yes, they could. How long could they have held it? I can’t answer that. There were many pro-Nazis in all the countries. You think of a country, you think of dreadful places like Croatia, you think of places like Vichy, France, you think of other places like Romania. There’s real support for it. So that’s very difficult and would have to take a lot of arguing. It’s the sort of thing we need to meet and talk over a weekend about.

Q: “What about Danzig and Hitler’s excuse for entering Poland?”

A: Oh, well, yeah. That’s just one of these paper things. Yeah, it should be German. It isn’t. So we we want it. You won’t give it to us. So we’ll invade. It’s so much paper. I’m tempted to say something about Blair in the Iraq war, but I won’t do that. Yes, Jews served in the Red Army, true, and the Russians evacuated many. That’s true. But remember, many Jews were also Bolshevik.

I don’t know. Somebody’s asked me the name of a film. Sorry, I didn’t know anything about that.

Q: “Was the Russian evacuation a planned move?”

A: Depends what you mean by planned. They didn’t have pre-war plans, no. His plans formed during the course of the war. I don’t know if everyone can see what other people have written.

This is a very interesting comment from Jackie. “My father’s family were from the Ukraine. At the start of the German invasion, he had cousins still living there. They were scientists who must have been important to the communist government because the communists relocated them to Seymchan to be out of the way of the invasion.” Absolutely. Yes.

Q: “Did the Ukrainians not come to the aid of their Jewish neighbours, not only from fear but from greed?”

A: Yes. “To appropriate Jewish houses.” Good. Yes. Yes, that’s absolutely true. I find this very upsetting to read people’s family stories. Yeah. Oh, yes. I’m sorry, I’m not going. I find the stories that many of you put about your families very, very moving, and there’s nothing anybody can say about that.

Q: There’s a historical question here, and it’s absolutely correct. “The Soviet spies discovered that the Japanese wouldn’t attack Russia, thereby releasing the soldiers in the East to reinforce Moscow.”

A: Absolutely. That’s absolutely true. I suppose they took a risk, even so, but there was a risk they had to take. Absolutely correct. They moved troops from the east to the west. Yes, the Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis. They starved under Stalin. This was the selling of Ukrainian wheat. Yeah. People talking about their own visits to Auschwitz.

Q: “If the Germans had not invaded Russia, do you think they would’ve won the war?”

A: Only if the Americans hadn’t come in. It would’ve been longer, more difficult, more bloody, but in the end, the allies would’ve won, is my view. But you can challenge that very easily.

Q: “Do you think that the actions perpetrated are indicative of all Homo sapiens or just central Europeans?”

A: No, all of us are quite capable of doing the most hideous things. Think Cromwell in Ireland. Think of the Amritsar Massacre. There are too many stories within the British Empire for anyone to believe that our hands are clean. Think about the Japanese, for goodness sake, in Nanjing. All human beings are capable of doing the most dreadful things. How does one prevent that? Sad to say, not by religion, given the number of religious wars we’ve had. What you need are institutions, but then I’m a lawyer, and I would say that, but democracies depend upon strong infrastructure of institutions, not individuals. We saw the American state bend a little bit with Trump, but in the end it did not break. And our systems need to be robust in a democracy, and they need to be defended. The independence of the judiciary is one thing that concerns us in Britain and that must be defended. The impartiality of police forces must be sought and defended. There’s an interesting report in one of the Sunday newspapers in Britain that when Boris Johnson prorogued parliament illegally, he advised the Queen to prorogue it, and she had no choice but to accept it because she must accept the advice of her prime minister. That’s what the Constitutions say. Prince William has reported to have said that he would not allow that situation to happen in the future and he would ask for independent advice, separate from that of the Prime Minister. Independent advice would mean that the sovereign would act against the Prime Minister. The unwritten constitution says that monarch can operate in a constitutional crisis. So in Britain, if we got to a point at which a populist government began to break more laws and rode above it, because of a majority in Parliament, the monarch could intervene. It works the other way in the States, it would have to be Congress that intervened against the President. It’s a difference. We both live in different systems, but each have balances, and it’s important to maintain that balance. I’m going to run out of time. I know I am. I can’t answer everything.

• [Judi] Sorry, William, there are quite a few questions. We do have another talk starting in 45 minutes.

• Yeah, I better stop.

Q: Somebody asked, “Can I tell the story of Stalingrad?”

A: No, not in a minute. No, I can’t do that. And maybe if I’m asked, I will do it someday, but it’s a bit difficult to do it in an hour. I certainly couldn’t do it in a minute. I’m sorry.

The questions are so interesting, and thank you so much for joining me because during lockdown, I’ve certainly had to work hard to get everything prepared properly, and I should be exhausted now. So I should go and take a tablet and lie down, I think, before my dinner.

• [Judi] Right, thank you so much, William, and thank you to everybody who joined us this afternoon. And we’ll see everybody for Jeremy Rosen a little bit later today. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye.

• Bye-bye. Bye-bye, everyone. Thanks for listening.