2012-13
Mitra FAMILY GRANT Recipient
Turning Tables: Key Interactions Between Hitler and Stalin that Ended the Possibility of a Nazi Reich and Brought the USSR to the Forefront of European Politics
Apurva Tandon, Class of 2013
Turning Tables: Key Interactions Between Hitler and Stalin that Ended the Possibility of a Nazi Reich and Brought the USSR to the Forefront of European Politics
Mitra Scholar Paper
Ms. Zink, Mentor
April 12, 2013
Apurva TandonHitler’s military interactions with Stalin through the course of World War II were centered largely on the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 and the subsequent German invasion of the USSR in the summer of 1941. These gave him several key opportunities that, had he taken advantage of them, might have won him not only the war, but all of Eastern Europe and the realization of his dream of a 1000-year Nazi Reich. It was an unfortunate irony for him that, in his myopic focus on this “dream,” he consistently made strategic decisions that pulled it further and further out of his reach. Stalin, meanwhile, systematically worked the USSR’s economic situation and as effectively as possible allocated his remaining (post-purge) military resources, all the while negotiating with his end political goal in mind, rather than any ideological fantasies or visions of grandeur. What ultimately lost Hitler the war and his dream was the poor military execution of his already flawed ideology, coupled with Germany’s heavy economic dependence on Russia; while on the contrary Stalin’s economic prowess and political savvy—and considerable luck, notwithstanding—placed the USSR in a political position to dominate European politics as a superpower for a significant period of time afterward.
Hitler’s Flawed Ideology
Hitler’s strict adherence to his Holocaust-driven ideology was responsible for many of his misguided actions. He was deeply set on his objectives, in faith that they all furthered the Holocaust or his intentions of acquiring lebensraum for his “superior race.”
In Mein Kampf itself, he outlined the extent of his loathing of the Jews, deeming them the political force to blame for the start of World War I, the German loss in World War I, and the “ruin” of Russia.1 He argued that the “Jew…[was] the great agitator for the complete
destruction of Germany” and that “the next great war aim of Bolshevism” was the “annihilation of Germany.”2 With these beliefs and his own mental association between the Jews and Bolsheviks—his concept of “Judeo-Bolshevism”3—Hitler found himself on a self-created quest to defeat the Jews in an all-or-nothing racial conflict, where he believed himself to be the champion of the entire western lifestyle the way it was known.
For Hitler, the only real war in World War II was that of race and of “natural order” against the Soviet Union; scholars have gone so far as to argue that Great Britain, France, Poland, and even the U.S. were all simply a “sideshow.”4 In his eyes, the practical approach that would best serve his ideological purpose was the acquisition of lebensraum This route had advantages in addition to Germany’s gaining the land and resources Hitler desired—it would also position Germany to overthrow Judeo-Bolshevism,5 and according to Hitler, the “whole rotten structure” of Russia, already corrupted by the Jews’ politics, would fall apart and lie open for “Aryanization” as soon as the Germans could “kick in the door.”6
His narrow-minded focus on this goal did much to cloud his military judgment. Stalingrad, for example, was pursued for little military benefit beyond serving as fodder for Hitler’s ego. What Hitler’s ideology necessitated with regards to resources was hardly conducive to his focusing sufficient energy on the actual war at hand. A large chunk of his limited resources was diverted to solving the “Jewish question” rather than defending and conquering—the building and maintaining of concentration camps were an absolute resource drain, and his myopic focus on fighting the Soviets for racial domination caused him to rashly open up a new front which, in combination with all his other military
blunders, lost him the war, ended the possibility of his dream of a Nazi Reich, and rendered Germany utterly helpless, well into postwar negotiations.
Why Hitler Signed the Pact
Signing the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) of 1939 was part of Hitler’s overall strategy of the so-called “double-destruction” of Eastern European states—first by the Soviet Union’s action on the German behalf as a proxy, and then by German invasion.7 Germany began its invasion of the Soviet Union through pogroms in the very same territories that the Soviet Union itself had already once subdued and annexed—the Kaunas pogrom in Lithuania, the Riga pogrom and others in Latvia, and the Harku pogrom in Estonia.8 The pact itself ensured that the Baltic States would remain under Soviet sovereignty until Hitler could invade and take over the control of them. In essence, Hitler strategized to have the Soviet Union do most of the initial work of destroying the Baltic states’ political structure, and then invade the region himself to fight a racial war and further his Holocaust.9 The signing of the Pact was not a display of any loyalty to the USSR, but simply another step in the Holocaust, since crushing these Eastern European states would demolish their Jewish populations—as well as another step toward the acquisition of lebensraum, since a Jewish purge in these states would leave plenty of room for Germans to settle and assimilate them into Hitler’s Reich.
Hitler’s Military Errors in the USSR
In accordance with his previously outlined strategy, two years after signing the Pact, on June 6, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the fateful invasion of the Soviet Union. The time had come, he thought, for him to lay claim to his and Germany’s promised land. This was a terrible mistake that cost Hitler dearly in a number of aspects.
He lost the economic support of the Soviets, on which he relied; he lost any possibility of military support from them. This first of critical military and strategic errors left Hitler with limited military resources; the inflow of raw materials from Russia was abruptly cut off. In addition, Italy simply ended up posing distraction after distraction for Hitler and German resources by creating problems in France, Greece, and the Mediterranean. Japan was hardly endowed with sufficient resources to play a major role in helping Hitler. The most obvious consequence of this blunder, the opening of an Eastern front, now forced Hitler to further divide his already finite resources to fight on two sides. From a strategic point of view, rather than reneging on the Pact, Hitler should have immediately made attempts to secure the USSR’s support while it was still considering joining the Axis, with so many advantages to gain from an alliance. Yet it is doubtful such an alliance even crossed his mind, with such laser focus on wiping out what he imagined to be “JudeoBolshevism” in the USSR.
A possible explanation for the surprising timing of Hitler’s abandonment of this beloved Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact—his purposeful opening of an eastern front while the western front was still fully engaged—might have related more to Britain than to the Soviet Union. Hitler’s seeming haste in attacking the Soviet Union could have stemmed from insecurities about defeating England. During the Blitz, Hitler was unsure of his ability to completely subdue England from the air, and, understanding that Soviet participation in the war was England’s biggest bet, simply decided to turn on the Soviet Union and attempt to finish her off immediately—he believed “a campaign against Russia would be like a child’s game in a sandbox”10 in order to eradicate that possibility.11 This would also serve his overarching purpose of gaining lebensraum and
eradicating entire racial groups that he considered inferior. Yet he underestimated the USSR’s potential and tenacity. Of course, the overconfident move backfired in several ways: Hitler himself drew the Soviet Union into the war against him, lost the economic support he had, opened a new front that made it ever so much more difficult for him to win the war at all, and fueled the Soviets to come after him with a vengeance later on.
The invasion dragged Hitler into a domino effect of further errors. Firstly, he ignored an opportunity that, despite all his military blunders, still might have helped him accomplish his objective and bring down the Soviet Union entirely—Moscow. In a previous directive, Hitler had drawn out plans to attack from the north and south (Leningrad and the Ukraine) after taking Smolensk.12 Three weeks into Operation Barbarossa, the German Army had blazed through the Soviet Union and by July 16, had reached Smolensk and succeeded there. The German Army High Command recognized the value in continuing two hundred miles to Moscow, which lay open at the time, while the Soviets were still trying to assemble their forces to defend it.13 The High Command saw that taking the capital would do much more than crack Russian morale—Moscow was the Communist stronghold, as well as the industrial, railroad transportation, and communication hub of the entire Soviet Union.14 Taking Moscow meant halting the distribution of arms and the movement of Soviet troops and supplies—this would have effectively broken the Soviet cause.15 Hitler refused to realize this; he wanted the industry and natural resources of the Ukraine and the oil of the Caucasus, and he wanted Leningrad badly.16 It was painfully ironic that in his quest to conquer the USSR, he sent his army groups their separate ways south and north to try to gain parts of it, giving up
his only real chance at a feasible capture of the Soviet capital and with it a complete breakdown of the Soviet Union as well.
Just as with Leningrad, Hitler set his sights on Stalingrad with a myopic focus, rooted in the belief that both were Communist hotbeds. Yet Stalingrad did not have any real military value beyond the national pride and implications associated with its name. Stalingrad was little more than a tremendous waste of time and resources—the German forces attacked for three months while the Russians continued to build up strength. Hitler grossly underestimated the manpower Russia had and how little it meant to Stalin, whose “Not one step backwards” order thoughtlessly squandered lives in the name of the Soviet cause. 17 Meanwhile, with the Germans struggling to achieve results at Stalingrad, the Soviets had time behind the scenes to prepare and launch Operation Uranus, the November 1942 attack on the weary German Sixth Army. For the first time the Soviets used tanks, further shocking the Germans, and by February 1943, the Sixth Army was trapped between the Don and Volga Rivers, and abjectly starved into surrender.18
Now that his narrow-minded focus on Stalingrad had led Hitler to sacrifice the Sixth Army completely and had set the Soviets on a relentless offensive course against Germany, Hitler should have realized that his next strategically logical move would be to reinforce and rebuild German forces quickly enough to effectively counter the next Soviet offensive, whenever that would come. Instead, he devoted vast amounts of his remaining military resources to Operation Citadel, yet another offensive—this time, the initiation of the Battle of Kursk against the Soviets.19 The Red Army, with sufficient reserves to counter the Wehrmacht’s attack and now with American technology, devastated the Fourth Panzer Army and then proceeded to march into the Ukraine and
into Kiev in the fall of 1943.20 The USSR was rapidly gaining power on an unstoppable offensive route, and Hitler was left with no offensive power for the eastern front.
Seemingly, the dream of a Nazi Reich supported by lebensraum in the east was forever consigned to just a dream, by the very strategic decisions of Hitler himself. Losing the East cost Hitler the possibility of his ideal dream; losing the West effectively tore Germany to shreds and left it powerless at the conclusion of World War II. Hitler did have one chance in May 1940 to succeed on the Western front, but he inexplicably gave it up with his halt order at Dunkirk, a French port where British, French, and Belgian allied troops were stranded and waiting to be captured by the Germans. In the days prior, between May 10 and 20, 1940, the Germans had careened through France and demolished the French army, which was no match.21 On May 23, the German panzers were closer to Dunkirk than the British army on its way there, and had the chance to capture it and contain the British troops in France, effectively defeating both Great Britain and France.22 On May 24, however, the High Command seemingly sent orders to halt the tanks on the Aa Canal, from where the German army might taste victory, and advance no further.23 The order is thought to have been influenced by Goering, one of Hitler’s right hand men, as part of his offer to an anxious Hitler to help preserve the panzers by sending the Luftwaffe to fight at Dunkirk instead.24 The Allied forces seized their only chance to recuperate, as Hitler gave up his only one to destroy them.
Hitler’s
Military Errors Beyond the USSR/Eastern Front
But beyond even these errors, Hitler made decisions that were unwise from a strategic perspective. Both stemmed from his unnecessary loyalty to the other members
of the Axis. Firstly, his commitment to Italy forced him to clean up every mess that Mussolini made in France, Greece, and the Mediterranean, which was a waste of German resources. Second, Hitler took great stock in Japan, overestimating its value and ability as an ally, while simultaneously underestimating the military ability of the United States. On a previous whim, he had promised Japan Nazi support against the US if such a situation ever arose, and four days after Pearl Harbor, he declared war on the US as well.25 Hitler had always believed he would have to fight the US, but had always strategized to do it later, after defeating both Great Britain and the USSR, and with the support of Japan and Italy.26 The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came as a surprise to all involved, including Hitler,27 and so with the new turn in events, he believed that right then would be the best possible time to fight the US, alongside Japan. Hitler and Ribbentrop had overestimated Japan in their attempts to draw her into war against the US, publicly advocating that “the Japanese fleet would easily defeat the American fleet and the war would be brought rapidly to an end with the fall of both Britain and America”28 The trouble was that Japan could fight and win for maybe six months, while the US could produce ammunition about five times as fast as could Germany. Hitler was now essentially alone in the midst of a two-front war, with both of the world’s greatest economic powers fighting against him.
Why Stalin Signed the Pact
Stalin, meanwhile, agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in a much simpler mindset than did Hitler, only its short-term advantages. As he had hoped for, the agreement secured the USSR from a Nazi attack—the USSR was by no means prepared for one at the time—and gave Stalin a sizable sphere of influence composed of Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Bessarabia, and Lithuania.29
In the short term this deal was highly advantageous for Stalin. The USSR was safe from invasion and had a buffer zone of states as well as a sphere of influence; the west was split and Germany was now at odds with Great Britain and France.30 All this would indeed push the USSR to the political forefront.
Economic Imbalance
Over the course of the Second World War, Stalin’s economics seemingly became a force that directly influenced its final outcome, for Stalin and for Hitler. After World War I, Stalin took control of the Russian economy, centrally planning its every aspect from factories to famine and forcing rapid industrialization at any cost. He intended to close the wide economic gap between backward, agricultural Russia and the heavyindustry-laden capitalist powers—working towards making Russia capable of defending itself in case of an attack by the West as well as competing economically with the capitalist powers.31 Stalin succeeded in both of these motives. With the advent of World War II, his economic setup gave him the ability to oversee a miraculous mass relocation of resources and factories eastward, separating them from the war front by miles Russian land and somewhat better protecting them from harm than might have otherwise been the case. 32 By no means was the damage done insignificant, but Stalin did take advantage of the setup of the Soviet economy as well as he could. With the war’s end, the newly industrialized USSR was able to recover relatively quickly and take on an economically powerful position to rival the capitalist countries.33 Stalin had made it feasible to impose Communism on Eastern Europe, as he had always planned. What made winning the war even possible for Stalin, however, was the fact that Germany was economically dependent on the Soviet Union. The two countries had
shared a long history of economic involvement since World War I. A secret agreement between them in the 1920s consisted of the Soviet Union assisting a post World War Ilimited Germany to develop and construct weapons and train military personnel on Russian land, as an attempt to circumvent the terms of the World War I Versailles Treaty. In February 1940, the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement entailed German imports of a number of natural resources and raw materials from the Soviet Union, including the oil, manganese, grain, and rubber Germany needed to support its military effort.34 As Hitler continued to acquire lands including France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, he began to need more resources to control them—and again the Soviet Union offered him stronger support in the January 1941 German-Soviet Border and Commercial Agreement. At a time when the USSR was considering joining the Axis, Stalin even proposed to send Germany more raw materials in exchange for Soviet control of some Bulgarian and Middle Eastern territory.35 Up until this time, the Soviet Union had been quite supportive of Germany—from a strategic perspective, Hitler should have seized the chance to establish the USSR as an ally, so that he could secure the economic support that would have carried him through till the end. Instead, he did the exact opposite—he turned on his greatest economic ally, the very provider of the resources that could have won him the war. In the short term, however, when Hitler attacked, despite any economic miracle Stalin could achieve to preserve the USSR’s resources, he would have been finished in the political and military rings had he not been very lucky with the Russian winter.
Stalin’s Luck
Stalin did indeed make certain misjudgments that might have cost him the war, but the Russian winter was on his side and was what prevented Hitler from successfully
executing Operation Barbarossa. His overestimation of Hitler’s uprightness led him to believe strongly enough that Hitler would honor the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, that he ignored his own military advisors’ warnings of the Wehrmacht’s approach. As evidenced by initial Soviet losses of Ukraine, Belarus, and Leningrad, and with the Wehrmacht within a mere eighteen miles from the Kremlin, the Red Army was far from ready to respond to a German attack, its greatest minds already having been purged in the mid-1930s and its very champion Stalin, presumably stunned with disbelief and uncharacteristically depressed, away at his dacha for several days after the launch of the attack.36 Yet just enough resources and reinforcements from the east to hold out until December, and keep both Moscow and Stalingrad, eventually gave the Soviets the upper hand. Meanwhile the Russian winter began to set in and left the German Army, lacking any reinforcements, to crumble on the Eastern Front. With the front redeemed, all Stalin had left to do was to solidify his master plan for Eastern Europe.
Throughout 1941 and 1942, Stalin had desperately hoped the Allies would open a second front against Hitler, while Churchill was more than willing to bide his time and the Allies continued to provide only weapons and food supplies. Yet in a certain sense, being forced to fight alone strengthened Stalin’s army, and as 1943 came to a close, the Red Army had become the military marvel fated to defeat the Germans.37
Characteristically duplicitous, Stalin put up an act to convince his allies that Bolshevism would remain contained within Russia, while behind closed doors he planned a Communist takeover of Eastern Europe. In 1943 Stalin disbanded the Comintern “to refute Hitler’s lie that Moscow intends to interfere in the lives of other states and to Bolshevize them,” he claimed,38 yet the members of the old Comintern indeed became
the premiers of Eastern Europe’s new Communist states.39 With the Soviet economy salvaged and the Red Army a force to reckon with, Stalin was ready to realize his dream; his final step was simply to gain control of the political “rehabilitation” of the Eastern European states—and that he did at the Tehran Conference in the final months of 1943.
Stalin’s Triumph at Tehran
Tehran is indeed better known for reaching the consensus to launch Operation
Overlord,40 the Allies’ opening of a second Western front against Germany by the next spring. Its proceedings were equally instrumental for Stalin postwar. Stalin now had leverage—he was coming off major victories at Stalingrad and Kursk41—the same losses that had ended Hitler’s dream for postwar Europe. It was at Tehran that Stalin pushed to have the Soviet-Polish border moved to give him a chunk of territory, and to have the Polish-German border then accordingly moved to the Curzon line at the Oder and Neisse Rivers, stifling Germany with a significant loss of land.42 Additionally, Roosevelt effectively conceded control of the establishment of new governments in Eastern Europe—in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia—to Stalin, who further tightened his grip with the mention that Eastern Europe would be restored “in accordance with the Soviet Constitution” and without Western interference in the elections.43 All these agreements were concretized shortly thereafter, at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences the following year, where the Allies established free elections in the Eastern European states as well as friendly relations between the Soviet Union and its neighbors.44 This effectively gave Stalin free reign to impose communism on these satellite states. By the end of 1945, Stalin had an impressive sphere of influence in Europe. The scene for the Cold War and for Soviet dominance as a major power during that time had been set.
The difference between the two leaders was simple. Hitler constantly regarded and fought World War II through an ideological lens; every move he made was, in his eyes, with the intention of furthering the Holocaust. This cost him in terms of military strategy and success, especially in dealing with the USSR. On the contrary, Stalin was able to lay personal beliefs aside and for the most part, approach the war from a point of view that dealt solely in politics, land, and economics—three arenas in which gaining the upper hand was vital for the subsequent control of European politics that he achieved during the Cold War era.
Notes
1 Stephen G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 5.
2 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), 907.
3 Timothy Snyder, "Why Did the Holocaust Happen?" (lecture, Rene Girard Lectures, Stanford University, Palo Alto, March 13, 2013).
4 Snyder, "Why Did the Holocaust."
5 Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination, 7.
6 Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939 - 1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 85.
7 Snyder, "Why Did the Holocaust."
8 "Extracts from a Report by Einsatzgruppe a in the Baltic Countries," Jewish Virtual Library, last modified 2013, accessed March 18, 2013, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Einsatz_Baltic.html.
9 Snyder, "Why Did the Holocaust."
10 Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 173.
11 John Lukacs, June 1941: Hitler and Stalin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 27.
12 William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 856.
13 Shirer, The Rise and Fall, 856.
14 Shirer, The Rise and Fall, 856.
15 Shirer, The Rise and Fall, 856.
16 Shirer, The Rise and Fall, 857.
17 Antony Beevor, Stalingrad, The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943, 1999 ed. (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1998), 89.
18 Beevor, Stalingrad, The Fateful Siege, 262.
19 James von Geldern, "Battle of Kursk," Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, accessed March 18, 2013,
http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&SubjectID=1943kursk&Year=194 3.
20 von Geldern, "Battle of Kursk," Seventeen Moments in Soviet History.
21 Shirer, The Rise and Fall, 731.
22 Shirer, The Rise and Fall, 731.
23 Shirer, The Rise and Fall, 731.
24 Shirer, The Rise and Fall, 733.
25 Shirer, The Rise and Fall, 871.
26 Shirer, The Rise and Fall, 871.
27 Shirer, The Rise and Fall, 893.
28 Shirer, The Rise and Fall, 872.
29 David MacKenzie and Michael W. Curran, "Soviet Foreign Relations to 1941," in A History of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Beyond, 6th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002), 532.
30 MacKenzie and Curran, "Soviet Foreign Relations to 1941," in A History of Russia, 534.
31 Internet Modern History Sourcebook, last modified July 1998, accessed April 19, 2013, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1928stalin.html.
32 Internet Modern History Sourcebook.
33 Mark Harrison, "The Soviet Union after 1945: Economic Recovery and Political Repression," Past & Present 210, no. 6 (2011): 103.
34 Edward E. Ericson, III, Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933-1941 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 65.
35 Albert Loren Weeks, Assured Victory: How "Stalin the Great" Won the War but Lost the Peace (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), [150].
36 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, September 2005 ed. (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2003), 375.
37 Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives, trans. H. T. Willetts, 1997 ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 496.
38 Radzinsky, Stalin: The First In-Depth, 496.
39 Radzinsky, Stalin: The First In-Depth, 496.
40 Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, 472.
41 Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, 472.
42 "The Potsdam Conference, 1945," Milestones, accessed March 18, 2013, http://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/PotsdamConf.
43 "The Tehran Conference, 1943," Milestones, accessed March 18, 2013, http://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/TehranConf.
44 "The Yalta Conference, 1945," Milestones, accessed April 12, 2013, http://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/YaltaConf.
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