It was June, June 22, 1941, when Germany decided to "break" the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939, which governed its relations with the USSR, and launch an invasion of the Soviet Union.
Despite Nazi dominance in continental Europe, Hitler wanted to attack Stalin's forces for multifaceted ideological reasons.
On the one hand they were looking for "vital space" in the east, on the other hand they wanted to impose their hegemony by exterminating the Jews. More than half of European Jews lived in the USSR in 1941 and were the ultimate target of the SS.
Based on the plan, Hitler believed that he would overrun Russia with great ease before winter arrived. Their forces included 3,700,000 soldiers, 2,600 tanks, 7,000 guns and 2,700 planes.
On the other hand, Stalin believed that the Germans would increase their forces on the border, but would not attack.
The invasion took the Soviet leadership by surprise, but a month after the operation began, they realized that they had underestimated their opponent. As is well known, Hitler's Northern Army arrived in Leningrad in September 1941, deciding to besiege it, while the Southern Army occupied Kyiv, recording huge losses.
The attack on Moscow began on October 2, 1941. Stalin's 800,000 men in 83 Divisions lined up against the Nazis. On October 13, the Germans arrived 120 kilometers outside Moscow, but the Russian winter had found them.
Within three weeks 155,000 men were put out of action, most from frostbite. On December 6, 1941, Soviet General Georgy Zhukov, defending Moscow, counterattacked and pushed the Germans away from the Soviet capital during January 1942.
174,000 Germans were killed during Operation Barbarossa, while the number of Soviets is incalculable. Military operations on the Eastern Front continued until April 1945, when Zhukov's Red Army entered Berlin.
Hitler's vanity
But what were the reasons for Hitler's premature attack on the USSR? Hitler had been talking to his generals since July 1940, a year before the attack, while he still had not "cleaned up" with Britain. His Nazi ideology, his amoralism and his megalomania, made him make hasty decisions, without consulting his generals.
In fact, as noted by historian Andrew Roberts, his attack would have been to attack the USSR even earlier, but Greece "braked" him, losing six vital weeks.
Below, read the excerpt obtained by News 24/7 from Andrew Roberts' book, "Wartime Leadership:Lessons from Leaders Who Made History".
Of course, Hitler hated Churchill because he had boosted British morale by accusing him of being an alcoholic, unstable and a puppet of the Jews. “Churchill is the epitome of a corrupt journalist,” he told his followers in February 1942. “There is no worse whore in politics. He is an absolutely immoral, despicable creature. I'm sure he has a shelter ready across the Atlantic. In Canada they would beat him. He will go to his friends the Yankees." It was remarkable that a leader like Hitler had risen to power around the same time as leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, considering how completely different Hitler was from the other two. The defining element was the way in which Churchill and Roosevelt constantly tried to adhere to the best elements of human nature – honor, duty, sacrifice, brotherhood and so on.
Hitler had been talking to his generals about Operation Barbarossa as early as July 31, 1940, while the Battle of Britain was underway, and a full eleven months before he launched it. The reason for this operation was Nazi ideology and not clever military strategy, as his generals should have understood. The desire for Lebensraum (living space) for the Germans in the east was a dream of Hitler since he wrote My Struggle . As more than half of European Jews lived in the USSR in 1941, he had to invade the Soviet Union as well if he was going to completely exterminate the Jews. Also, he could have what Goebbels and other Nazis called a final showdown with the Bolsheviks. Although Hitler could have launched Operation Barbarossa in 1942 or 1943 after first driving Britain out of the Middle East (where 80 percent of its oil came from) or starving them out thanks to an upgraded campaign of U-boats, the German military submarines, Hitler's incessant ideological need encouraged him to launch the offensive too early. However, none of his generals disagreed.
Although his attack on Russia was premature, in another respect it was slightly late. Because Hitler felt the need to punish Yugoslavia and Greece for the pro-British sentiments they had displayed in the spring of 1941, he lost six crucial weeks in subduing those two countries, which would have been invaluable before winter ended the Battle of Moscow towards the end of the year. However, the early successes of Operation Barbarossa were impressive. The Wehrmacht covered three hundred and twenty kilometers in the first week of the campaign, with Field Marshal Fedor von Bock's Army Group Center capturing Minsk on 9 July. On October 3, 1941, Hitler announced the defeat of the Red Army in a speech at Berlin's Sportpalast with the words:"I can say that this enemy has already been crushed and will not recover."
This vanity led Hitler into a fundamental error, as he diverted large forces from Operation Typhoon – the capture of Moscow – south to the Ukraine. Although he eventually captured Kyiv and Kharkiv, these victories were of minor importance compared to the effect that the capture of Moscow would have had. When we add his other egregious strategic mistakes—trying to seize the Caucasus and reach the Volga at the same time; not retreating from Stalingrad when it looked likely to be encircled; ordering an attack at the Battle of Kursk too late and after the Soviets had to be fully prepared; to be led astray by the Allies during Operation Overlord and then not to react quickly enough when the truth came out; to let half a million men be killed, wounded or captured during Operation Bagration in July 1944; and so on – we understand that apart from the shocking moral issue, Hitler did not deserve to win the war due to military incompetence. Although of course his generals tried to pin the blame for Germany's defeat solely on Hitler after his death, often being his willing accomplices, it is clear from the transcripts of the Führer's meetings that Hitler was in daily and absolute control of all strategy sides of the war from the time victory began to look less certain in the late summer of 1942 until the end of the war.
However, the fact that Germany still conquered so much of Europe was a testament to the capabilities of the Wehrmacht. In less than eight weeks in the summer of 1942, he crossed more than eight hundred kilometers in southeastern Russia, reaching the Volga in August, two thousand two hundred and fifty kilometers from Berlin. "No human being can move us from this place," Hitler boasted on September 30. Again he was wrong, and in this case the human being was called Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who commanded the Soviet Southwestern Front and coordinated the encirclement of Stalingrad.
Hitler's declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941 was partly the result of his irrational underestimation of American productive capacity, which is even stranger when you consider Hitler's Second Book , the sequel to My Battle which he never published and in which he wrote extensively about the power of American industry. Furthermore, the Wehrmacht could not invade the United States. The lack of a long-term strategy alone appears to be another fundamental flaw in the worldview (Weltanschauung ) of Hitler. "Needless to say, we have nothing to do with the Japanese," Hitler said in early 1942, yet just four days after Pearl Harbor he allied with them against the world's greatest industrial power.
The Holocaust must be counted as another economic and military blunder, as well as the most heinous crime in human history. Holocaust deniers, who quite rightly point out that there is not a single document signed by Hitler authorizing the Holocaust, all too often and conveniently ignore that there are certain words from his lips that do just that, repeatedly. At noon on October 21, 1941, Hitler told his entourage about the Jews:"By exterminating these vermin, we shall render mankind a service of which our soldiers have no idea." Four days later, speaking to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and SS Obergruppenführer Reinhardt Heydrich, he said:"From the floor of the Reichstag I prophesied to the Jews that, should war prove inevitable, the Jews would disappear from Europe... It is not a bad idea, by the way, for the rumors to attribute to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Fear is a healthy thing." Likewise, on December 18, 1941, in a meeting with Himmler, he ordered the systematization of the Holocaust. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed, but after that meeting executions would be industrialized. On February 22, 1942, Hitler added:"We will only regain our health if we eliminate the Jews."
Summary
What is leadership? What are the secrets of the tactics by which one man manages to lead millions of others to salvation or destruction?
Is leadership innate or can it be learned? And most importantly, are there any common leadership techniques that can be adopted regardless of the message the leader wants to convey?
Choosing Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, two diametrically opposed leaders in what they stood for and in terms of the methods they adopted, award-winning historian Andrew Roberts examines the phenomenon of political and military leadership and is led to important conclusions.
Drawing parallels with leaders of other eras in the first and last parts of his book and exhaustively exploring the commonalities of Hitler's and Churchill's leadership, Roberts draws conclusions about the practice of leaders that apply even today. In addition, it examines the opinions and judgments of one leader about the other and the effect these opinions had on the final outcome of World War II.
In a world that seems more dependent on leadership today than ever before, Roberts raises key questions about our need to lead, forcing us to rethink how we treat those who make decisions on our behalf.
About the Author
Andrew Roberts is an internationally renowned biographer and historian. He has written several award-winning books including Salisbury:Victorian Titan (Wolfson History Award), Masters and Commanders (Emery Reves Award) and The Storm of War (British Army Book Award).
His latest book, Napoleon the Great (2014), won the Napoleon Foundation Grand Prize and the Los Angeles Times Biography Award. Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Societies of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, and a trustee of the International Churchill Society. He is a visiting professor in the Department of War Studies at King's College London and a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Foundation (Roger and Martha Mertz) at Stanford University. His website is www.andrew-roberts.net. Dioptra publishes the book War Leadership.