Operation Barbarossa: War Against the USSR | Part 1: The Invasion | Free Documentary History

In the early morning hours of the historic 22nd of June, on a front width of 2,400 kilometers, the largest march that history has ever seen takes place. Operation Barbarossa had actually failed even before it was launched, because with the possibilities open to Germany's political and military leaders in 1941, in the absence of a clear strategic objective, a war against the Soviet Union could never have been won. It was the great conflict between two major ideologies of the time, fascism and communism. They clashed head-on with all the manpower and material the two sides could mobilize. It was a war of conquest, a war of aggression in violation of international law, and a war of annihilation waged against the backdrop of national socialist racial ideology. People in the Soviet Union thought, the Nazi regime has begun a war of annihilation, so there is no question of me ever being ready to compromise, because that compromise will cost me my life. Right from the start, it was an operation in which criminal behavior played a central role. The unusual, indeed specific, characteristic of this operation is that law and morality were totally disregarded. There wasn't really a plan, apart from, we are going to attack the Soviet Union and take Moscow, and, ideally, by then we'll have won. That was so detached from reality. They left too hastily to change the sign. Along the cold stretches of the road back, the retreating supermen left the marks of their bestiality. At midday on August 23rd, 1939, a German delegation landed at Moscow airport. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had sent his personal limousine to collect Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 was, of course, a sensation. Just imagine, the two biggest ideological movements of the Bolshevism and National Socialism suddenly enter into a pact after laying into each other for years in their propaganda. In fact, that propaganda really was the worst kind of agitation. Not only from the Nazis, but also from the Soviets, through the Comintern. This rabble-rousing had been spread throughout Europe. Then, suddenly, the two were standing shoulder to shoulder. The German-Soviet non-aggression pact declared that neither government would ally itself to or aid an enemy of the other. In a secret protocol, it was agreed that borders in Eastern Europe would be redefined. The Hitler-Stalin pact came as a major surprise. Basically, though, it was an incredibly clever tactical move by both sides, because, initially, each had managed to isolate itself from the other, so to speak, and each now had the backing of a treaty. The decisive factor, however, was that both parties had one time. Hitler had one time to wage his war in the West, and the Soviet Union had one time to rearm. That was actually a mutual promise. The other promise was the division of Eastern Europe. First of all, the pact smoothed the way for Hitler to invade Poland. Even before that campaign was over, Soviet troops marched into the eastern part of the country. The German Wehrmacht and the Soviet Red Army met in Brest-Litovsk. Nazi Germany could now obtain food products and all strategically important raw materials from the Soviet Union. In May 1940, the Wehrmacht felt powerful enough to confront the Allies in the West. After only a few weeks, France was forced to seek an armistice. Hitler saw himself confirmed in his self-chosen role as a brilliant commander. The legend of the Blitzkrieg was born. Hitler was certainly no idiot. He came from the very bottom, but had battled his way to the top. And, of course, in doing so, he had experienced a great deal. So he perhaps understood more than someone from a humanist grammar school background. He had been able to study people, the masses, and also socio-psychological mechanisms very closely. And what is interesting is that in doing so, he had formed an ideology which had nothing to do with reality, of course. However, he toned down this ideology somewhat and tried to use it tactically. He also made concessions to reality. And up until 1940, it had brought him great success. On July 6, 1940, the dictator made a triumphant return to Berlin. He had decided that his next step would be to conquer the British Isles and then, at last, wage war on the Soviet Union. That day, Colonel General Franz Halder noted in his war journal that it is now time to seek a politico-military basis for the future work of the General Staff. But in July 1940, Hitler himself had stated unequivocally that it was now time to act. Living space in the East and war in Eastern Europe, that was all quite clear. It had already been announced. On Hitler's orders, detailed planning really did get underway in July 1940. Various sections of the Armed Forces High Command had already begun thinking about how to approach the campaign, and so had upper echelons in the Navy. In principle, General Staffs plan within the political climate in their country, going through possible conflict constellations. And in this respect, the Third Reich was no different from other countries. Consequently, there were even considerations in the 1930s as to how a war in the East should be approached. On July 31, 1940, in the presence of German military leaders, Hitler announced his decision to invade the Soviet Union the following spring. By now, the authority of the Commander-in-Chief was sacrosanct, even for sceptical military figures. The head of the Army General Staff, Franz Halder, was to coordinate plans for the Wehrmacht. Responsibility for a detailed elaboration of the operation against the Soviet Union was given to Major General Friedrich Paulus. Franz Halder and Friedrich Paulus were the implementing bodies of Hitler's ideological concept, or rather of his delusions. They were the ones who had to make these fantasies feasible. That was actually their crucial role. And the sad and terrible thing is that for professional military reasons, they did not understand this. Paulus was one of the leading General Staff officers who were involved in planning this operation, which at that time had not yet been given the name Barbarossa. Many areas of the military drew up their plans independently. Army High Command was only one of them. The Navy prepared its own plans, as did the Armed Forces High Command. These plans were then put together and presented to Hitler on December 5, 1940. The week before, Paulus had played through an initial plan for an attack on the Soviet Union. He wanted to convince the dictator of the need for a swift advance with armoured units to prevent battle-worthy units of the Red Army withdrawing into the vast expanses behind them. Initially, that was one of many options. And at least Germany's military elite was set on ending the war with Great Britain and its empire. So there were three issues. The war in the air against the British Isles, the war in the Atlantic and the war in the Mediterranean. Plus Barbarossa, which sort of ran alongside. After six months, Hitler noticed that Barbarossa was stagnating. So he stepped on the gas, so to speak. And from December 1940 on, concrete plans for the invasion were forged. Prior to that, it had merely been an option, and Hitler himself had long hesitated. That was because he had stated how proud he was that Germany, in contrast to the First World War, was not involved in a war on two fronts. We won't make the same mistake this time, he had said. But now, with eyes wide open, he was heading into precisely the same situation. The policy behind Hitler's Directive No. 21, Operation Barbarossa, was clearly the destruction of the Soviet Union and the conquest of territory, up to a line stretching roughly from Arkhangelsk, east of Moscow, down to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. After the Red Army had been defeated, everything else was to be pushed back behind the Urals and the space thus created made available to German settlers. That basically was Hitler's plan, and it was on this plan that Wehrmacht leaders structured operations. An invasion of the Soviet Union seemed reckless. But the Wehrmacht saw the Soviet Union, militarily, as a behemoth with feet of clay that would quickly collapse after the first few reverses. The operation is only meaningful, Halder said, if we crush the state in one go. Our goal is to destroy Russia's life force. German military leaders like to plan a battle of annihilation. Ideally, this means engaging the enemy frontally, outflanking him on one or both sides, then encircling him and thus forcing him to surrender. With the fighting power of the enemy thus eliminated, the deployment of Red Army forces on the country's western border was evaluated on the same basis, and that assessment suited German plans perfectly. Once again, success was to be achieved with a blitzkrieg. German strategists knew that following Germany's invasion of Poland, the Soviet armed forces had re-armed extensively. By rights, they should have known that German soldiers would be facing one of the most powerful armies in the world. But they made a serious mistake. They underestimated the Red Army. We should certainly try to imagine the situation back then. The pitiful showing by the Red Army in the Finno-Soviet Winter War played a decisive role. It led German military leaders to think that the Red Army was not an adversary to be taken seriously. In November 1939, the Soviet Union had attacked Finland without any declaration of war. The aim was to force the country into the Soviet sphere of influence. The Red Army fought valiantly, but suffered heavy losses. Its troops had too few automatic weapons and no winter clothing, and the conflict claimed 120,000 Russian lives. Wehrmacht leaders saw this as confirmation of their assessment of the Red Army. There were definitely military figures who had long been molded by German military doctrine, including the arrogance towards Eastern Europe. But just by looking at the map and seeing the size of the Soviet Union, they should have realized that defeating this adversary would not be easy. So basically, even in 1941, the Germans still didn't know which operational or strategic goal they had to pursue in order to win the war. When Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov visited Berlin in November 1940, relations with the Kremlin seemed to have stayed the same. Stalin thought that German-Soviet friendship was sealed in blood. But Hitler had other plans, and he knew he had the Wehrmacht's general staff behind him. At the time, they could not see the Soviet Union as a serious military opponent. Thus, its military potential was staggeringly underestimated. In January 1941, Halder wrote in his journal, they're still not clear about Barbarossa, but they're still going ahead with it. That, so to speak, was the military's traditional understanding of obedience. The political leadership set the strategic guidelines, and the military translated them operationally. And it is precisely what happened. Early June 1941. Stationed in Paderborn was a Wehrmacht supply unit under the command of Lieutenant Gerd Brügelmann. The 28-year-old officer from Cologne was a keen amateur cine-photographer. He took these pictures of his unit setting off for a criminal war, a war whose scope many of the troops could scarcely have imagined. Living space in the east for Germans had already been an issue in the days of the Kaiser. So it wasn't really anything new when the German people heard Hitler saying that this living space in the east had to be secured. But the fact that he had planned this right from the start in a criminal way was a totally new dimension. At first, for those who listened to his ideas, it was probably inconceivable. Over the course of the 1930s, however, he had repeated so often how he planned to wage the war and what his actual goal was, namely not just to secure territory but to eliminate the people living there. In 1941, it was perfectly clear how this war would be waged. The Nazis' ideological justification for their racial war was revealed by The Soviet Paradise, a propaganda film which featured in German cinemas in 1942. The final battle against the Slavic race was to cost 30 million lives. The Second World War on the Eastern Front was definitely planned as a war of annihilation. The war was a war of annihilation. It was a war of annihilation. It was specially designed to decimate the Soviet population, to subjugate it and to create living space in the East for Germans. Because the German race, the Nazis claimed, needed more living space. And this living space in Soviet Russia was regarded as highly lucrative and productive. In Nazi ideology, the Soviet people were subhuman and had no right to decide on their own life or death. Gerd Brügelmann and his unit travelled by train right across Nazi Germany to East Prussia. The invasion of the Soviet Union was scheduled for June 22, 1941. The unit's task was to help secure supplies. Everything had been meticulously planned. The Germans were to be prepared for a new Wehrmacht campaign with a cock-and-bull story. The Nazis' top propagandist insisted on announcing the conspiracy theory himself. The Führer, after months of silence, now in the twelfth hour, with the words, I have decided to put the fate and the future of the German Reich back in the hands of our soldiers. From the North Cape to the Black Sea, the German Wehrmacht is now protecting, to land, to water and in the air, side by side with the Finns and the Rumanians, Europe. Italy and Slovakia join forces spontaneously. On a front that spans 2,400 kilometres, the largest offensive that history has ever seen takes place. The Wehrmacht consisted of 153 divisions, the Red Army of 237. Operation Barbarossa could only succeed if the enemy was encircled close to the border and could be prevented from withdrawing into the vast expanses of the Russian hinterland. Originally, the Blitzkrieg was a tactic born out of need. Since the German army lacked the resources for a lengthy war, it could do little more than overcome an enemy as quickly as possible with rapid attacks by fast units, which it possessed in astonishingly small numbers. Because of the size of the territory, it was not possible to achieve a swift victory in the Soviet Union. Yet Germany's military leaders still thought that they could end the war in four to six weeks, in two months at the most. Stop the Spitze! The village is being fiercely defended by Siberian snipers. Nazi propaganda showed Wehrmacht units who had crossed the border from East Prussia into the Soviet Union and been involved in combat by the Red Army. The flow came, it was from five different directions, and from the north, one extra, just for luck. That was the big day. A storm broke nearly 200 Axis divisions, more than two million men plunged into a front 2,000 miles long, reaching from the White Sea to the Black. Their aim, the annihilation of the Red Army, and a decisive battle on the frontier. The German general staff knew full well, of course, that it had to be a short war, because Germany would not be able to sustain a lengthy conflict, even though Hitler, I think, was of a different opinion. He was convinced that sooner or later the fundamental superiority of the German Wehrmacht would see the war won. That is why German operational plans had always been based on the swiftest possible end to the war, and the operational target was Moscow. Whether its capture would have had a decisive impact on the conflict is open to question, but it was the source of a dispute between Hitler and members of his general staff, who basically thought solely along operational lines. In the early hours of the morning of June 28, German and allied troops broke through the Soviet lines in a range of almost 300 kilometers. In ten attacks, the enemy positions, to which the Bolsheviks had given over time throughout the winter, were torn up and rolled up. In his war journal, the head of the general staff, Franz Halder, wrote, it seems like the enemy has been tactically surprised all round. The attack operations take place in a wide-open, wavy battlefield, which is often penetrated by heavily accessible forests. The fierce counter-attacks are repelled with heavy losses for the enemy. The invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 was a clash between two great armies, who had been trained quite differently, and above all, whose level of field experience was also quite different. Over almost two years, and this I believe is the decisive point, the Wehrmacht had fought one campaign after another in the shortest possible time, and it had also gone through a rearmament phase, in which it had been systematically modernized. Artillery takes the first bunkers of the Stalin Line, which were used as farms, under fire. With the infantry and the pioneers, tanks advance. On the one hand, it was a huge army, but on the other, it lacked qualified leaders. In the Red Army, the Wehrmacht experience of modern warfare was largely non-existent. That's the one factor. The other is that the Red Army had stationed all its troops along the western border. Soviet military doctrine stated, that in the event of war, actual hostilities should take place on neighboring terrain, so that basically Soviet territory would not suffer from the fighting. But this, of course, presented the Wehrmacht with ideal conditions, which with its armored wedges, supported by Stukas, was able to penetrate. In reality, what was stylized in Nazi newsreels in the name of Hitler, looked quite different. Gerd Bruegelmann had his 16mm camera with him and filmed the German advance on Russian roads. As his family's sole surviving son, he was allowed to remain at a safe distance from the front. His supply unit had trouble keeping pace with the rapid advance of Army Group Center. So there was only ever a short time for break before his unit moved deeper into the Ukraine. There was no way of preparing everything that occurred inside the Russian border. If you like, and if you want to express it cynically, the annihilation concept, which Hitler had propagated right from the start, suited Germany's military leaders perfectly. It meant the Wehrmacht could feed off the land. It did not have to concern itself with the civilian population. The troops could take whatever they needed. Quite a few inhabitants of the Ukraine were far from unhappy about the defeat of communism, which, in the years after the October Revolution, had seen millions die of hunger or murdered in cold blood. But the Germans didn't behave as liberators. Instead, they robbed the inhabitants of the towns and villages of the basis of their existence. Gerd Bruegelmann's unit was no exception. Its task was to supply the 9th Armored Division with spare parts and food. Obviously, the armored units were particularly suitable for rapid movement, so they were important for encircling operations, which at the start of the campaign were successful. However, I feel that the image created by the armored units paints a totally inaccurate picture of the Wehrmacht. Because if we look at the Wehrmacht in 1941, it was largely a mounted army. It had around 600,000 vehicles of all kinds, but it also had exactly the same number of horses, which were used especially in combat territory. The artillery needed them to pull its guns. So as far as the majority of its units were concerned, the Wehrmacht was essentially a mounted army. Gerd Bruegelmann's unit is seen taking a rest near Nevel, a town in Oblast Gof with a long tradition. On July 15, 1941, only three weeks after the start of the campaign, it was occupied by the troops of Army Group Santa. The men headed east on dusty roads that were rarely paved. When the conditions proved too much for a Wehrmacht truck, the villagers had to help get it back on the road. Such scenes were important of what lay only a few months ahead for the Germans. As yet, though, Hitler's military machine was still rolling forwards. The Barbarossa Plan foresaw an armored thrust towards Leningrad, Smolensk and Kiev. At the same time, the main forces of the Red Army were to be destroyed through the encirclement of vast areas. The reason why at the beginning of the war the Wehrmacht had so much success with major encirclement battles was because its troops knew exactly what they had to do. That's because fighting a battle of annihilation corresponded to the old German military doctrine of first engaging the enemy frontally, then outflanking and encircling him. And the Wehrmacht was well-equipped for this. It had fast units headed by tanks, which performed these flanking and encircling movements. The mass body of troops, who were either on foot or mounted, then moved up to complete the ring. Hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops were captured in this way. These pictures were taken after the fall of Kiev by an unknown amateur cine-film enthusiast advancing with the 6th Armoured Regiment. In my opinion, there are basically three reasons why the Germans took so many prisoners in the first months of the war. Firstly, with their shock troop tactic, the Germans were able to advance at specific points, outflank the enemy left and right, and create an encirclement area containing enormous numbers of enemy soldiers. Secondly, the Soviet forces were poorly led by young commanders, who had only been trained in the 1930s, had no front-line experience, and at times had no idea what was going on. They simply had to learn from the situation they were in. A third reason is the rigid tactics of the Soviet forces. The order would come to stand firm at the front, and the Red Army's standardized officers didn't dare to retreat. However, as a response to the actions of the Germans, from a tactical point of view, this was probably expedient. Eight years of Nazi propaganda were taking effect. Most German soldiers saw their prisoners not as equal adversaries, but as low-life scum, who did not deserve to be treated respectfully in accordance with the Hague Convention. Any German soldier who showed sympathy was ridiculed by his colleagues. Soviet soldiers were captured through encirclement operations, or directly at the front. As soon as a German unit had taken enough prisoners, they were moved back into the hinterland, under guard. Sometimes this involved forced marches of several hundred kilometers, and a large number of Soviet prisoners of war died along the way. Soviet citizens, who talk about these POW marches, often say that when the Germans and their captives had passed by, hundreds of prisoners would be left lying by the roadside. That is a striking image. And those prisoners who arrived on some plane or other were not even being fenced in, because they had no strength left to flee. They also were left to the caprices of the weather, because the real aim was for them to die. Cameramen with the Nazi propaganda machine took footage like this to show cinema-goers in Germany what Judeo-Bolshevik subhumans looked like. The way Soviet prisoners of war were dealt with was a crime right from the start. Not only because the orders to the troops had made it clear that the Soviet POW was to be treated not as a soldier, but as a subhuman. The entire litany of National Socialist racial ideology came into effect, passed on to the troops not from some Nazi party office, but from the Wehrmacht leadership, from the head of the Armed Forces High Command, Field Marshal Keitel himself. And High Command had not made any provisions for feeding Soviet prisoners of war. It was simply assumed that they would die. The plan really was to decimate the Soviet forces and take as few prisoners of war as possible, because they would also have to be fed and looked after. That was never even a consideration where Soviet POWs were concerned. The picture we often see of a huge mass of desolate Soviet prisoners on an open field, grabbing at the bits of bread that were being thrown to them, really was something that frequently took place in the first months of the war, because that's precisely what had been planned beforehand. But the reality, of course, was never shown. What was so perfidious, however, was that Soviet prisoners had to dig a hollow in the earth with their bare hands to try and get a bit of protection from the weather. German soldiers just stood there seeing confirmation of the image they had of a subhuman, someone who digs a hole for himself in the ground. It was disgraceful not only that they reduced prisoners to such a state in the first place, but also that they then saw their image of the Soviet soldier confirmed. Those who survived the horror of the death marches were sent to Germany and interned. In August 1941, propaganda minister Goebbels visited a prisoner of war camp near Riese to take a personal look at the subhumans. As early as May 13th, 1941, Hitler had stipulated through the high command of the armed forces that crimes committed by civilians against the German Wehrmacht were not to be dealt with in due process by a military court. Right from the start, the martial law decree, like the commissar order, was not only something criminal, it was also the deliberate rejection of all the conventions which up to then had been observed in all wars in Europe and elsewhere in the world. And the fact that the Wehrmacht not only allowed itself to be used as a tool, but to a certain extent was also the initiator of these decrees, shows how it thought. It was all about the army having a free hand in the east and not being banned by any conventions that would have to be respected anywhere else in the world. German soldiers guilty of any wrongdoing would not have to expect being called to account by a military court. The Barbarossa martial law decree was a huge carte blanche for the Wehrmacht. And of course it was a political order and it overrode classic martial law. The decree was drawn up firstly with the troops in mind. If they had committed a crime, they no longer had to justify their actions. On the other hand, there were also Soviet civilians for whom the Wehrmacht would now assume responsibility for determining justice in the classic sense. This was of major importance, especially where partisans and such like were concerned. And these decisions could be taken by any officer. Such stipulations were criminal right from the start because every war tends towards radicalization. In particular, partisans in civilian clothing who were fighting the Germans from the forests were thus fair game. On July 27, 1941, a German soldier wrote, the Russians are tough adversaries. Now we take hardly any of them prisoner. Instead, we shoot them all. This brutality also had an effect on the civilian population of the Ukraine, which at first had been glad to see the Wehrmacht so victorious. Some of the Soviet population, at least in the western parts of the country, had even welcomed German troops as liberators from Stalinist terror. Most, however, had adopted a neutral stance and tried simply to survive the war. They were neither particularly friendly nor particularly hostile. However, the behavior of the German troops generated growing resistance. This was relatively understandable. These foreign soldiers turn up, destroy my home and deprive me of my livelihood. So, obviously, I have to take a stand. As the Wehrmacht advanced, it left behind a trail of destruction, with scant regard for the losses suffered by the civilian population. In the occupied areas, the Germans established a reign of terror. The Wehrmacht made no concessions and systematically suppressed the local inhabitants. The martial law decree stipulated that any crimes committed by the Germans or their allies would not be prosecuted. It created a state of lawlessness. Soldiers could do what they wanted. The commissar order decreed that any political commissar with the Red Army who fell into German hands had to be shot. Both orders were a license to commit murder. As early as June 6, 1941, the Wehrmacht leadership ordered that political commissars with the Red Army were not to be treated as prisoners of war. As organs of the enemy's forces, political commissars can be recognized by the special badge on their sleeves. It shows a red star with a hammer and sickle in gold. These commissars are not to be regarded as soldiers. The protection which prisoners of war enjoy under international law doesn't apply. They are to be segregated and executed. The commissar order was a direct license to kill, whether or not that person had already surrendered. In other words, martial law was suspended. Since no one had the chance to defend themselves, it was a concrete inducement to commit murder. In all the confusion of war, it is sometimes difficult to make a distinction. So often there were also situations in which a non-commissar was killed in the heat of the moment. In such cases it was then claimed that it was a commissar, that the badge with the red star denoting a commissar had simply been torn off. With that assertion, the person who had committed the murder could walk away with impunity. Some troop leaders were less than happy with the commissar order. They felt that it gave the enemy greater motivation to fight. If political commissars knew that if captured they faced death, they would of course have no interest in surrendering, but would fight on, if necessary to the death, a fate which might possibly await them anyway. It was a similar case with the martial law decree. Troop leaders believed it provoked resistance among the local population in the first place. But we have to make a distinction, because large numbers, even of this military elite, had no problem at all when communists or Jews were involved. After the Wehrmacht had taken Liepāja in Latvia, Red Army soldiers and communists were shot along with the town's 7,000 or so Jewish inhabitants. By chance, in the summer of 1941, Marine Richard Wiener filmed this footage of a mass execution by an SS death squad. On August 15th, Heinrich Himmler personally attended an execution near Minsk. It's said that at the site of the bloodbath, the head of the SS turned as white as a sheet. Afterwards, he said that while mass shootings were revolting, they were still a necessary defensive measure. The advancing Wehrmacht units created the space for crimes behind the front. In general, cooperation between the leadership of the Wehrmacht, the various operational headquarters, and the death squads went smoothly. To a certain extent, the death squads were accepted in order to avoid security units needing to be stationed behind the front. That job, pacifying these areas, as it was called, could be left to the death squads. In other words, they could butcher and destroy and leave other German units free for battle. On the other hand, sometimes, of course, ordinary soldiers were involved in these crimes and also committed crimes of their own. So the idea of an unsullied Wehrmacht is a post-war myth that has been propagated in Germany for decades. At no time was the Wehrmacht ever unsullied. Many German soldiers were beginning to feel oppressed by the vast size of the Soviet Union and its seemingly endless expanses. The Red Army was fighting the German military machine with a courage born of desperation, and the Wehrmacht was suffering severe losses. The German concept was based on a blitzkrieg strategy whereby fast, motorized armored units would break through enemy lines at speed and use this advantage ruthlessly, even with regard to the Wehrmacht's own troops, and then bring up other units to complete the encirclement and destroy the enemy or force it to capitulate. This was not only a tour de force. It was, of course, also an approach that was particularly aggressive and perhaps especially masculine, but it did not spare human life, not even the lives of the Wehrmacht's own troops. This explains why German losses in men and material were so high. By mid-August, the three army groups had lost more than 200,000 men. The 6th Armored Regiment also suffered huge losses. The Nazi leadership saw this as no reason to tone down the euphoria of victory. Germany's military leaders were so impressed by these initial successes that, after two weeks, Halder noted in his war journal that no war has ever been won as quickly as this one. This, I think, shows that the highest German command structures had totally underestimated the situation. No matter how many prisoners were taken, how many tanks and guns were destroyed, they simply did not expect the Red Army to reorganize time and time again. The fact that Hitler repeatedly intervened in these scenarios and that, to a certain extent, at least where operations were concerned, Wehrmacht leaders were of a totally different opinion shows quite clearly that the German leadership had absolutely no idea what the strategic goal of the war was supposed to be. When Hitler paid a visit to his troops in the Ukraine in late August 1941, it was already dawning on Chief of General Staff Hans Halder that taking Moscow would be no easy task. Feeling slightly resigned to the situation, he noted, if we destroy a dozen divisions, the Russians will simply assemble a dozen more. The story of the Second World War is, of course, also the story of Hitler's emancipation process as a quote-unquote great commander, a role he assumed for himself. Naturally, he did have a certain amount of military experience, but on the other hand, unlike all the officers on his general staff, he had never had any systematic training. And not to be too blunt about it, he was not prepared to think logically, but only within his ideological framework. It must be admitted, however, that he was a great dominator of people and he also managed to assert his dominance in these smaller meetings in a literally uncanny way. The German troops still cheered their commander-in-chief and in private the dictator still boasted that, by and large, the war in the East has already been won. Moscow will be razed to the ground. But appearances were deceptive. The first crisis in Germany's conduct of the war was already noticeable in August 1941. Despite the great encirclement battles and enormous losses in men and material, the Red Army was suffering. Wehrmacht leaders realized that this campaign was going to be different from the one they had planned. So even in August, basically the blitzkrieg was no longer an issue. The goal now was to take Moscow in order to end the war in victory. Vor uns Mogilev. Kornfeld gedeckt geht es vorwärts. Der Weg in die Stadt ist freigekämpft. Allein bei diesen Kämpfen wurden über 35.000 Gefangene gemacht. Sowjetischer Rückzug bedeutet völlige Zerstörung. Auch Mogilev ist zum größten Teil vernichtet. From Mogilev it was still another 600 kilometers to Moscow and the rainy Russian autumn was approaching.