World War II Tidbits
How Hitler tricked Stalin and let ideology lose the war
Stalin gets Tricked
One of history's greatest mysteries was how Stalin, a famously skeptical man, was tricked by Hitler in the spring of 1941.
To understand how this happened, we need to start in 1939, as the entire world watched to see what Russia would do in response to German expansion. Hitler had just taken Austria and Czechoslovakia, and had his sights set for Poland. Britain and France were realizing that appeasement wasn’t going to work, and finally drew a line in the sand with regards to Poland. In order to defend the relatively weak country, they naturally looked for help from Russia. But for a variety of reasons, Russia didn’t want to help them.
First, the Soviets were annoyed that they hadn’t been invited to previous appeasement talks in Munich. Second, the USSR was a communist totalitarian dictatorship, not exactly the natural ally of two liberal democracies. Third, and most importantly, Russia had historical claims over a large portion of Poland and hated the idea of an independent Polish nation. The animosity also went both ways. Poland was days away from getting steamrolled by the German military, and they still said they would not allow Russian troops to enter their country to defend it. Lesser of two evils, I guess.
This presented a challenge for Britain and France whose only offer to Stalin was that the Germans were historically aggressive and mean. Which, in hindsight, was 100% correct. The reason Russia should have defended Poland was because the Germans ended up being aggressive and mean. But Hitler made Stalin an offer he couldn’t refuse: half of Poland.
The partitioning of Poland was a secret agreement though. What the rest of the world saw was called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed in 1939. Here is a description from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer:
The published treaty carried an undertaking that neither power would attack the other. Should one of them become “the object of belligerent action” by a third power, the other party would “in no manner lend its support to this Third Power.” Nor would either Germany or Russia “join any grouping of Powers whatsoever which is aimed directly or indirectly at the other Party.”
This didn’t make them allies, but they agreed to remain neutral if the other started fighting someone else. This kicked off two mutually beneficial years for both sides, including a fair share of great historical correspondences. For example, here is Hitler’s Christmas note to Stalin:
“Best wishes [Hitler wired] for your personal well-being as well as for the prosperous future of the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union.” To which Stalin replied: “The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every reason to be lasting and firm.”
But despite the friendly words, Hitler’s true intentions were very clear - bide time with Stalin until the West was defeated, then turn around and delete Russia from the map. From a military strategy standpoint this wasn’t a novel plan, German generals since time immemorial understood that you never fight France and Russia at the same time. But why did they need to fight Russia at all?
This was one area Hitler’s ideology started getting in his way (more on this in the next section). Hitler viewed the countries in Eastern Europe as rightfully belonging to Germany, he saw Bolshevism as inherently Jewish, and he viewed Slavic people as less than dirt, better than Jews, but still less than dirt. Here is a quote from Mein Kampf:
“And so we National Socialists take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement toward the south and west of Europe and turn our gaze toward the lands of the East. When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states. Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way to us here . . . This colossal empire in the East is ripe for dissolution, and the end of the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.”
Hitler had always planned to attack Russia; the only question was when. In the meantime, as the western democracies had their hands full with Hitler, Stalin saw an opportunity to get some old Russian territory back. In 1940 the Red Army invaded the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, and launched an unsuccessful attack on Finland. Britain and France didn’t say much because they were still banking on Russia fighting Germany, who they saw as the bigger foe.
The other reason the Allies didn’t publicly denounce Stalin’s acquisitions was because they were too busy getting rolled by the Wehrmacht and its highly effective blitzkrieg strategy. 1940 was a very bad year for the allies as the British force narrowly escaped complete annihilation at Dunkirk, and the entirety of the French army was cut off and captured. Within six weeks the Battle of France was over, and Hitler strolled into Paris.
With France out and Britain bunkered up on their island, Hitler began planning his attack on Russia. In the spring of 1941, Operation Barbarossa began, and the Germans invaded Russia from three different directions.
The Russians were caught totally unprepared. Here is Shirer again:
Most places along the border the Russians were not even deployed for action and were overrun before they could organize resistance. Hundreds of Soviet planes were destroyed on the flying fields. Within a few days tens of thousands of prisoners began to pour in; whole armies were quickly encircled. “It is hardly too much to say,” the usually cautious Halder noted in his diary on July 3 after going over the latest General Staff reports, "that the campaign against Russia has been won in fourteen days." In a matter of weeks, he added, it would all be over.
We are now back to the question I asked at the beginning of this section: how in the world was Stalin not ready for the attack on Russia? Aside from the military buildup along the border, or the German conquest of neighboring territory, or how Germany publicly deceived Chamberlain like three times - Hitler literally said in his best-selling book: “When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states.” How in God's good name was the famous paranoid-to-the-point-of-insanity Stalin unable to see this coming?
Since Rise and Fall was published 30 years before the Soviet records were released, Shirer doesn’t have much to offer us when it comes to answering this question. Thankfully for you, dear reader, I did some supplemental research.
It appears that Stalin was no fool to the prospects that he would eventually need to fight the Germans, he just missed on the timing. Stalin figured that the Germans would not try anything until they had finished the war in the west. And by “finish” he meant ending France (check), but also getting submission from the British, whose naval blockades prevented the Germans from getting any ships out of the North Sea. With the British still kicking, he figured Hitler wouldn’t risk attacking him.
This was a miscalculation by Stalin because Hitler decided to go after Russia anyway. Despite the many warnings he received, Stalin refused to believe it. Therefore, the answer to the question is probably “ego”. Stalin was known for having unflappable confidence in his decisions, and this situation was no different. Having confidence in your decisions isn’t a bad thing if you don’t get blinded in the face of new information. I am reminded of the famous Churchill (or is it Keynes?) quote: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
Ideology lost the war
It's a widespread notion that the Nazis lost the war due to their racist ideology, a belief likely fueled by our desire for poetic justice. But is it true? Let’s look at two arguments for racist ideology influencing the results of the war.
The most common example is about Jewish scientists. Many of the leading physicists at the beginning of the 20th century lived in Germany and were Jewish. The argument goes that if the Nazi’s had not been anti-Semitic, then they would have been able to retain the talent and gotten the bomb first. In fact, it was a displaced German Jew (Einstein) that suggested that the Germans may build a bomb and proceeded to pressure Roosevelt to build one first.
While there is no question that Hitler demolished the thriving German physics community, I no longer think that antisemitism alone prevented Hitler from building the bomb. Even if the Nazis weren’t racist, they still would have failed to build the bomb.
Let's start with aggression. Physicists in general tend to be on the pacifist side of the spectrum, so even if someone says, “we need a bomb to support our invasions, but don’t worry we aren’t racist”, you are unlikely to get a chorus of support. Of course, we could further strip aggression out of Nazi ideology too, but at that point they have lost their raison d'etre, and we are looking at something else entirely.
Second, Hitler and the other Nazi leadership were not that interested in the bomb. Here is Shirer:
As for the German atom bomb project, which had given London and Washington much worry, it had made little progress due to Hitler's lack of interest in it and Himmler's practice of arresting the atom scientists for suspected disloyalty or pulling them off to work on some of his pet nonsensical "scientific experiments" which he deemed more important.
If the Nazis had been obsessed with building the bomb, then perhaps you could argue that having more scientists around would have helped, but that just wasn’t the case at all. Hitler was more focused on other military innovations - such as the world's first fighter jet - which for a variety of reasons ended up not helping him very much. Even with the limited resources and personnel dedicated to building the bomb, Nazi paranoia got in their way more than racism. If Himmler was hampering the success of the project by suspecting disloyal “Aryan” scientists, it’s hard to argue that racism exclusively prevented them from getting the bomb.
One way that the Nazi racist ideology did directly impact their ability to win the war was in how they treated Soviet POWs and the occupied populations of the western soviet states, most of which were made up of Slavs.
As we learned above, once Western Europe had been taken over by the Nazis, Hitler’s attention turned to Russia. While in hindsight it was his biggest mistake, at the moment it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. First, the German’s knew they had the element of surprise. Second, considering the Nazi’s took France, “Europe’s greatest land power”, in 6 weeks, why would the clumsy and unorganized Russians fare any better? Lastly and most importantly, the people of the Soviet vassal states would want to join with the Germans as they got liberated from Stalin.
This last point is what I want to focus on, because it was likely the biggest factor in Hitler’s failure on the eastern front. The idea that invading the Soviet Union would cause political instability and cause the government to crumble is not without historical precedent - it’s exactly what happened 25 years prior during the First World War. Hitler’s advisors focused on this heavily:
"Hopes of victory," Kleist said, "were largely built on the prospect that the invasion would produce a political upheaval in Russia . . . Too high hopes were built on the belief that Stalin would be overthrown by his own people if he suffered heavy defeats. The belief was fostered by the Fuhrer's political advisers."
This theory wasn’t wrong per se, but the Nazi racial ideology got in the way. Just behind antisemitism, the Nazis were highly anti-Slavic. Since the western soviet states were mostly Slavic, the Germans saw the conquered people in the East as sub-human and treated them accordingly. This resulted in slave labor, direct violence, and indirect violence of the subjugated people, leading to roughly 14 million deaths. This was more than British, American, German, French, and Japanese military deaths in the war, combined. One example of “indirect violence” was the Nazi’s Hunger Plan, which took foodstuffs from the civilians to feed the German military knowing that this would result in millions starving to death. It is hard to argue that this wasn’t racially motivated once you look at the relative civility shown to the “respectable” races on the western front like the Scandinavians, British, and French.
The obvious result was they didn’t just not join with the German liberators - they fought even harder to resist them. Stalin may have been bad, but Hitler had shown that he was clearly worse. This led to something the Nazis had not yet seen so far in the war - staunch resistance.
"The conduct of the Russian troops," General Blumentritt wrote later, "even in this first battle [for Minsk] was in striking contrast to the behavior of the Poles and the Western Allies in defeat. Even when encircled the Russians stood their ground and fought."
While the Nazi front in the east eventually stalled due to the weather, if they had been picking up liberated local allies along the way, fighting through the winter would have been much easier. There is a chance Russia wouldn’t have even lasted until winter. If the Germans had been respectful of the conquered populations and given to them what they were not allowed to have in Bolshevik Russia - religious freedom, economic freedom, self-determination, etc. - Operation Barbarossa easily could have gone the way of 1917. At the very least, the Nazi’s would have faced significantly less resistance, such as what they saw on the western front. Shirer seems to agree:
Those events may now be briefly narrated, but not without first stressing one point: terrible as the Russian winter was and granted that the Soviet troops were naturally better prepared for it than the German, the main factor in what is now to be set down was not the weather but the fierce fighting of the Red Army troops and their indomitable will not to give up.
Had the Germans been able to take Russia, the rest of the war would have looked a lot different. Therefore, if there was somewhere that racial ideology impeded the Nazi’s goals, it was their atrocities during the war in the east.
Miscellaneous:
The Nazi's called themselves the Third Reich. The first Reich was created by Charlemagne in the 700s, and the second by Bismarck in 1871.
The Third Reich, which boasted it would last for a thousand years, often being called the "Thousand-Year Reich", only lasted twelve years and four months.
Hitler's last name was almost Schicklgruber. Many wonder if he would have had success rising to power with a name as silly sounding as that. Hitler rolls off the tongue so much better, whereas "Heil Schicklgruber!", does not.
Stalin’s Foreign Minister was named Vyacheslav Molotov. He is the name sake of the Molotov cocktail, coined by Finnish soldiers in 1940 as they defended themselves against the Red Army.
When the French surrendered in 1940, Hitler made sure to have them do it in the exact same train car where the Germans surrendered to the French after World War I. To do this, he had it taken out of the French Museum where it was on display. After the French surrendered, he proceeded to blow up the train car.
Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian military officer who helped Hitler and was eventually put in charge of occupied Norway. I didn’t know this word, but his name is now in the dictionary meaning “traitor”.
