The German Question, Part One Hundred Forty-Five

"Hitler Rules Germany" Part Two/C
"Germany In World War Two" Part Two/F/2
"Germany Versus the Soviet Union" Part Two "The Attack"

With Britain still undefeated, but relatively contained, Hitler felt confident to pursue the goal of all the maneuvering in eastern Europe, the conquest of Russia, the Soviet Union. While Stalin was usually prone to paranoia, in this case, though he was given many warnings of an imminent German attack by other nations and by some in his own military, he did not take these warnings as seriously as he should have, and while not naive, he thought he still had time to prepare for any German attack, and possibly enough time to even carry out an attack of his own on Germany.* The world was dealing with two major scoundrels, Hitler and Stalin, and if you had put them in a bag and shook it up, you wouldn't have known which one would have hopped out first.

On June 22, 1941, German forces invaded the Soviet Union. From East Prussia, German armored and motorized units thrust through the Soviet annexed Baltic states toward the metropolis of Leningrad.** Simultaneously from the north, Finnish troops sought to reclaim the territory lost to the Soviets in the recent war. Further north in Finland, actually near the Arctic Circle, German troops moved to capture the Soviet port city of Murmansk. From German occupied Poland, German units attacked toward Moscow. In the south, aided by Hungarian, Slovak, and Rumanian forces,*** the Germans advanced toward the Ukrainian city of Kiev, and toward the Crimea. Huge Soviet forces found themselves surrounded by the fast moving German mechanized units, and Soviet troops surrendered by the hundreds of thousands.**** Leningrad was surrounded and much of the Soviet leadership evacuated Moscow as the Germans approached the city. The Germans and Rumanians entered the Crimea and besieged the fortress city of Sevastopol. It certainly looked as if Hitler would win a stunning victory over Stalin and the Soviet Union, but time was running out.

Winter set in, and German forces found themselves unprepared for it, as the giddiness of early victories caused many Germans to assume the fighting would be over before winter arrived. Further, while the Axis forces won many astounding victories, the Soviets inflicted severe casualties on the invaders. Their units depleted, and the cold and snow taking its toll, the German offensive ground to a halt. The Soviets, reinforced by fresh units from Siberia, launched their own massive attacks, driving the Germans back in many places, but the German retreat was not a rout, and before long, the front stabilized. Both sides were exhausted.

With his units diminished, Hitler sent some fresh troops to bolster his forces for a new offensive in 1942. Leningrad remained surrounded in the north, Murmansk was still in Soviet hands, and German forces had retreated from the outskirts of Moscow to points somewhat further away from the capital. Hitler decided to narrow his 1942 offensive to the southern areas of the Soviet Union. Sevastopol fell to the Germans and Axis forces advanced toward the Caucasus, the center of Soviet oil production.***** Hitler then divided his southern forces, sending one segment after the oil fields, and the other after the city of Stalingrad, which was located on the Volga River, the capture of which would have deprived the Soviets of using that part of the river for shipping. The German forces entered and eventually captured about 90% of Stalingrad, but the Soviets hung on. With the city so devastated by the fighting, and especially by earlier German air attacks, there was plenty of rubble to provide cover for the stubborn Soviet defenders. The Germans could never completely dislodge them, and the situation stagnated as another winter approached. This time it was Stalin who had a surprise for Hitler.

* Stalin had a major streak of paranoia, although the political system in which he had functioned for so long didn't lend itself to any leader getting too comfortable, and his paranoia may well have kept him alive and in power. In the mid to late 1930s, Stalin carried out a huge purge in the Soviet Union, including of his military leaders, ruthlessly removing and putting on trial many commanders at various levels. Hundreds in the military were imprisoned or executed, leaving the military with a leadership gap. Most historians agree that the Soviets' poor military showing against Finland in 1939-40 showed the negative effects of the military purge. By the time of the German invasion, the Soviet army was still in the midst of reorganization, and the leadership gap had not been closed significantly.

** This was the former capital of St. Petersburg, renamed by the Communists in honor of Lenin. They moved the capital to Moscow.

*** In a short time, Mussolini sent an Italian corps, later expanded to an army, to fight in Russia.

**** In and around Kiev, the Germans claimed to have captured more than 600,000 Soviets troops. and that was just one battle!

***** As I mentioned in Part 144, the fight for oil was well under way well before our own time, and Hitler made the strategic decision to go after the significant Russian oil supplies in hopes of solving his own potential oil shortage, as well as depriving the Soviets of the oil.

WORD HISTORY:
Live-This verb goes back to Indo European "leip," which had the notion of "continue (on), remain, exist further." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "libjanan," meaning "to be alive." This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "lifian," and "libban," depending upon dialect, both with the same "to be alive" meaning. Later, the two forms merged into "liven," and then the modern spelling. It is, of course, closely related to the noun "life." Common throughout the other Germanic languages: German has "leben," Dutch and Low German Saxon have "leven," Frisian has "libje," Norwegian and Danish have "leve," Swedish has "leva," and Icelandic has "lifa."