Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (5 page)

The problem of gaining any form of acceptance for these works in the west was that their interpretation fitted all too well into the familiar communist mythology of a superior socialist society, pitting the heroic Soviet people against German fascist invaders and concluding that a Soviet victory was inevitable from the very beginning.
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Not surprisingly, such an interpretation stimulated no special interest in the west and, with the end of communism in Europe, few have bothered to revisit such tainted works with any notion of uncovering historical truth. Yet judged on their intrinsic scholastic value alone, and without the heavy baggage of supporting a redundant ideology, the work of Soviet and East German historians provides an interesting starting point for a fresh discussion of the initial period of war on the eastern front.

A recently published study by Heinz Magenheimer highlights the need for a corrective approach. According to Magenheimer: ‘It is…a gross distortion of the facts to claim that the energetic Soviet defence east of Smolensk had dealt the Germans a defeat and thereby prevented their immediate further advance on Moscow.’
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However even Magenheimer had to concede: ‘Even if resistance by the Red Army had diminished after the battle of Smolensk, the German troops would have required a break of about three weeks for replenishment and supply,
particularly in order to increase the offensive power of the weakened armoured formations
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In spite of dismissing the contention of communist historians, the question of how these armoured formations became so badly weakened, and the significance of this for the continuation of the campaign, does not appear to have influenced Magenheimer's earlier assessment of the fighting around Smolensk.

So far the only western historians to present major studies challenging conventional wisdom on the subject of Barbarossa's failure in the summer of 1941 are Bryan Fugate and Russel Stolfi. Both authors have attempted
far-reaching reinterpretations of the campaign, drawing thoroughly divergent conclusions that have remained deservedly marginalised. Fugate's 1984 study
Operation Barbarossa – Strategy and Tactics on the Eastern Front, 1941
elaborated the bold thesis that the Soviet High Command successfully carried out an ambitious plan, conceived of by Marshal
Georgi Zhukov, to sacrifice its first strategic echelon in order to disrupt German concentrations and catch them unawares with a stronger second strategic echelon anchored on the Dvina–Dnepr River line. Thus, Bock's army group was being lured into a cleverly devised Soviet trap. Detractors of Fugate's theory rightly pointed to the absence of any solid archival evidence to back up this elaborate Soviet plan
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and this probably inspired Fugate's second book, co-written with Russian historian Lev Dvoretsky,
Thunder on the Dnepr. Zhukov–Stalin and the Defeat of Hitler's Blitzkrieg
, which appeared in 1997. The second book expounded the same thesis, with supposedly new evidence in the form of a February 1941 war game that allegedly confirmed Zhukov's master plan for the coming war. Yet even Fugate and Dvoretsky acknowledge that the facts surrounding the February war game are less than certain
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and they cannot hope to convince sceptical readers with scant footnotes and no bibliography.
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The redeeming feature of Fugate's first study, particularly of value when one disregards his implausibly far-fetched theory of Soviet strategic planning, is his use of German archival sources in detailing the demise of German offensive strength over the summer of 1941. Here parallels with Göpfert's work acquire significance given Fugate's accurate assessment of the effects of heavy fighting on grinding down the German panzer and motorised divisions, particularly in the
Yel'nya
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salient.

The second study by Russel Stolfi,
Hitler's Panzer East – World War II Reinterpreted
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(1991) postulates the contrasting thesis that the German strategy for the conquest of the Soviet Union represented a perfectly realisable plan which was only confounded by Hitler's ruinous insistence on halting the drive on Moscow in August 1941. In addition to
glaring factual errors,
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Stolfi's thesis is laden with contentious assertions and beset by dubious methodology, underlining the difficulty of supporting a largely untenable case. Even if Moscow could have been seized by the autumn of 1941, as Stolfi claims,
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there is no evidence to suggest that this would have precipitated the collapse of the Soviet war effort as he assumes.
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Furthermore, Stolfi's assessments of Soviet losses, materiel strengths and intentions rely often on German wartime intelligence reports, which were naturally prone to prodigious inaccuracies.
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Elements of the study are so erroneous as to make it both unhelpful in understanding the events of summer 1941 and, in many regards, actively misleading especially to readers unfamiliar with the period. A case in point is Stolfi's inexcusable omission of discussion relating to the widespread German atrocities in the east by both the SS and the German army, particularly given his repeated highlighting of war crimes committed by Soviet forces.
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Indeed the only major point on which Stolfi's thesis renders an accurate judgement is his final conclusion that the summer of 1941 represented a clear shift away from a Blitz-style campaign to one already bogged down in an unwinnable war of attrition.

Although major studies are lacking, a number of
West German historians have proved closer to the mark in describing the lessons of war in the early period of conflict on the eastern front. Despite failing to acknowledge the much earlier contributions of their East German counterparts, to which these works owed a degree of creative debt, during the 1980s West German historians presented the
battle of Smolensk for the first time as something other than a resounding German victory. Ernst Klink provided one of the few German operational histories of the campaign and succeeds well, in spite of relying too much on the diaries and files of the OKH and OKW, which fail to reflect the full extent of the campaign's problems clearly made evident in the reports of the combat units.
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In another study, Andreas Hillgruber argued that the second half of July 1941 was decisive for both the military developments on Bock's front and the wider implications these were having on Japan's strategic deliberations.
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John E. Tashjean's short article complemented Hillgruber's assessment by reviewing the battle of Smolensk through the useful prism of
Clausewitz's culminating point, which alludes to some of the themes subsequently confirmed in this study.
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In the same vein, Anglo-American historians researching Soviet military operations have provided an array of evidence suggesting that the battle of Smolensk played a much more important role in blunting the German offensive than previously thought.
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An attempt to understand the persistence of controversies surrounding the German–Soviet war requires a brief introduction to the difficulties confronting historians looking into the literature from and about this period. First, because of the unprecedented scale and complexity of the war in the east, the historian is confronted by a daunting array of archival material. As a result, in spite of some fine studies published over the years, many principal subjects of interest remain shrouded in mystery.
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The associated ‘holes’ in research have contributed to many
unproven conceptions about the war flourishing without basis in fact or scholarly methodology. These ideas, usually first recorded in popular post-war accounts, may fail the rigorous standards of serious examination, but have nevertheless made an indelible impact on the general understanding of events. The belief that ‘General Mud’ and ‘General Winter’ were the real culprits behind the 1941 failure of the Barbarossa campaign, is still commonly heard and even published today.
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Furthermore, there is a persistent determination in some quarters to accept the post-war fabrication of a ‘sanitised’ German army, disbelieving the incontrovertible evidence relating to crimes by the Wehrmacht. Such notions have helped mould popular knowledge of the war in competition with ‘accepted’ understandings, and demonstrate the susceptibility of history to distortion.
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Nevertheless the challenge for historians is not simply one of a misinformed mass versus learned scholars. The field, like any other academic discipline, provides ample room for disagreements regarding many elements of the war.
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The previously discussed controversies surrounding Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union (Barbarossa as a preventive war) as well as rival East/West interpretations have provided more than enough fodder for energising debate. Moreover, in the English-speaking world a further challenge has long existed because of the skewed representation of the German–Soviet war which is often subsumed within the Anglo-American war effort or largely eclipsed by it.
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For the war on Germany's eastern front, which involved literally millions of combatants
and countless battles along the Soviet steppe, including some on an extraordinary scale, typically struggle to register a mention even in the most detailed studies. By contrast much smaller battles in Northern Africa, France and Italy have been given far greater prominence and have become the subject of much research and debate. This pro-western orientation tends to take account of only the largest and best known battles on the eastern front and then frequently accords to them a prominence similar to those battles fought at the time by the western allies. Thus the Soviet offensives at Moscow and Stalingrad are commonly discussed with the same degree of detail as General Auchinleck's ‘Crusader’ offensive and General Montgomery's second battle of Alamein. The corresponding gulf in significance between these battles is too often overlooked, generating a disturbing misconception that continues to widen because of the further preoccupation with the Anglo-American bombing campaign and the battle of the Atlantic against German U-boats. Many western representations of World War II therefore offer a slanted perspective which belittles the contribution of the Soviet Union and consequently hinders our understanding of the eastern front in World War II.
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More recently, concern has also been raised about the methodology of the war's research and the dominance of German source material which, since the post-war era, has formed the backbone of many western accounts. Initially spawned by the flurry of memoirs by former German officers, who also produced many early studies for the US Army Historical Division, their groundwork was built on by the later release of German archival records, and the subsequent emergence of many proud, veteran inspired, wartime unit histories, often lacking a discerning historical objectivity. By contrast, the absence of free access to Soviet source material, and the brazen bias of official publications, largely removed a competing remedial. The result was a scripted appraisal of the Red Army laden with accounts of military ineptitude and assertions that the Red Army was saved from defeat by the huge size of the Soviet Union, the harsh climate, a pitiless disregard for human life and sheer weight of numbers. While these interpretations largely scorned Soviet combat performance, the burden of blame for German blunders and miscalculations was typically laid squarely at the feet of Adolf Hitler.
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Although such stereotypical views have been debunked, their persistence in various quarters and to varying degrees has continued to exert influence, particularly
as a popular explanation for events in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa. Consequently, secondary accounts have frequently adopted an uncritical approach presenting German successes as evidence of the lofty skill and professionalism of the Wehrmacht while, in contrast, the lamentable Red Army is seen to survive almost in spite of itself and owes its later success only to lessons learned from the Germans.

In addition to reassessing the famed German blitzkrieg on the eastern front in the summer of 1941, there is a need to review another event similarly fraught by oversight and worthy of investigation. Accurately referred to by Alan Clark as ‘the first crisis’ of the eastern front,
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the struggle for operational control of the panzer groups between Hitler and the OKH has commonly been treated in the literature as little more than a through-way station on the road to disaster at Moscow. Yet it is because of this power struggle, against a backdrop of the failing strategic plan, lagging operational timetable and the rapidly eroding strength of the all-important panzer divisions, that the crisis acquires its heated intensity. Not only did Halder believe before the invasion that Moscow represented the surest war-winning solution, but as he grasped the seriousness of the complications arising from the campaign, Moscow assumed a critical status for him upon which all hope for victory hinged. Likewise, Hitler foresaw the attainment of economic objectives as the essential element in ensuring Germany's success. Yet the crisis in command has generally attracted only passing interest among historians, while the course of operations ending in the final demise of Barbarossa at Moscow has remained the principal focus of the literature.
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A critical review of the German summer campaign tells us a great deal more about the significance of the crisis which, if anything, confirmed the defeat of Barbarossa rather than precipitated it. The campaign, which had by no means been won in the first stage of operations, now depended, with rapidly diminishing strength, upon a decisive blow in the second. The stakes for Germany could not have been higher, but even more alarming than the stark choice of options at hand was the realisation that German mobile forces, with their available strength, operating at such depth and against such large-scale ongoing resistance, could not possibly strike a war-winning blow in the remainder of 1941. Thus the vigour with which Hitler and his generals fought each other over the strategic direction of the campaign, paralleled to an extent by the vitality with which some historians have since debated the
respective alternatives, seems neglectful of the real issue at stake – that by late August 1941 Germany's defeat of the Soviet Union was doomed to fail.