The Left’s Love Affair With the Bolshevik Revolution --From “Reds” to “American Reds”

The Left’s Love Affair With the Bolshevik Revolution

From “Reds” to “American Reds. ”

By Alexander Riley • August 10, 2017

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-lefts-love-affair-with-the-bolshevik-revolution/

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Exactly a century ago, the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia and began a reign of terror unprecedented in human history. What is the place of the Soviet Revolution and the communist ideology that inspired it in the American cultural imagination in 2017? 

American Reds, a 2016 documentary film about the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and its relationship to the Russian Revolution, offers a poignant example of the way in which the American left’s vision of the Bolsheviks and their revolution has been lightly repackaged while remaining true to the roots of classic communist romanticism and deception. The film’s website claims it eschews both demonization and sentimentality, offering a balanced account of the events, but the discerning viewer cannot miss the myriad ways in which this work of cinematic ‘non-fiction’ tells the same factually challenged, emotionally hyperbolic story of another film, of a generation earlier with a similar title: Warren Beatty’s Reds (1980). 

Beatty’s story is a self-conscious romance, the tale of the relationship of radical writers John Reed and Louise Bryant, with the Bolshevik Revolution as its canvas. The feminist Bryant’s commitment to the communist utopian ideal seems driven entirely by the magnetic repulsion of her hatred of conventional religious views on marital fidelity and gender roles. But Beatty’s Reed is an evangelical convert and street corner preacher of communism, with all the brutal passion and readiness to contemptuously dismiss any evidence contrary to the faith that this entails. In a stunning discussion between Reed and Emma Goldman, in which the latter expresses concern that the Revolution is starving, massacring, and jailing many of its citizens, Reed offers a naked, blanket apology for atrocity in the name of utopianism: “Did you expect social transformation to be anything other than a murderous process? It’s a war. We gotta fight it like we fight a war, with discipline, with terror, with firing squads.” Goldman has no response. 

The Revolution is true, in Beatty’s vision, in the way that a love affair is true, far beyond rigorous analysis of the possible, the consequences, and the costs. The scenes in which Reed and Bryant dance and play in the Russian snow as the Bolsheviks take power, in which they and other revolutionaries enter the Winter Palace as polite concert-goers might enter the hall, in which we are treated to cuts from a deified Lenin exhorting the crowd to roars of approval, and then to Bryant and Reed beatifically kissing, all this would be laughable if only one could manage to forget the monstrous realities of those early days of the Revolution.

One could say Beatty’s excuse was the dearth of evidence of the extent of Bolshevik crimes before the Russian archives had opened to the outside world. But Richard Wormser, the filmmaker responsible for the love letter to the CPUSA that is American Reds, has no such explanation for these omnipresent absences in his film. Wormser uses one of the same key narrative techniques Beatty employed, i.e., an ongoing commentary from a host of eyewitnesses, typically in the form of wistful nostalgia and an unrepentant refusal to acknowledge the failings of the belief system that drove their lives. In Reds, they sing “The Internationale,” and talk in bright-eyed naiveté of the Revolution’s poetry. 

In American Reds, the stories are similarly aesthetically polished, brimming with passionate if vacuous declamations, and ultimately indicative of the same deep level of self-deception and moral nihilism. One of American Reds’ claims is that American communists were important players in the movement to win and assure the civil rights of minorities.  Party members tell us that their inspiration was the Soviet Union’s attitude on the rights of minorities, and the film weaves a heartwarming tale of the USSR welcoming American blacks who fled the U.S. to escape the racist corruption of capitalist social order. But even with the advantage of historical hindsight, those interviewed in the film still believe the mere fact that the Soviets embraced the propaganda value of parading around expatriate American blacks constituted evidence that they had eliminated prejudice in their own country. Can they, or Wormser, be unaware of the Soviet population transfers of ethnic Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, and Chechens that resulted in millions of deaths by disease and starvation? Have they managed to believe the incredible idea that the post-Civil War caste system in the American South was worse than this systematic deportation and extermination of millions of ethnic Others by the Bolsheviks?

The most incriminating of the film’s deceptions has to do with the role of CPUSA members in Soviet-directed espionage. When Reds was made, the Venona project, a 40-year American counterintelligence effort to gather encrypted communications between Soviet intelligence forces and their American spies, was still unknown to the public. There is now an extensive literature demonstrating just how expansive and destructive this infiltration was. Yet American Reds contents itself with the tired myth of a paranoid America hysterically denouncing an invented communist menace. One sequence alludes ominously to the anti-communist propaganda of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels, suggesting it legitimated violent animus toward peaceful leftists. The truth is there were hundreds of CPUSA members actively engaged in Soviet spying inside the federal government and among the ranks of scientists involved in military research. They helped the Soviet Union acquire atomic bomb technology years before they otherwise would have been expected to, and this tactical fact girded the Soviets for a military showdown in Korea that cost some 37,000 American lives. These appalling costs of communist infiltration are entirely absent in American Reds’ romantic tale of heroic, righteous radicals.

For a more accurate account of the human consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, we might well turn to a third film, earlier than either of these, dramatized from the account of a Soviet dissident who saw communism in practice up close. Though it has been criticized for superficially depicting the historical landscape within which the love story at its core took place, Doctor Zhivago nonetheless tells profound truths about these events omitted in Reds and American Reds.

Among the film’s characters is Pasha Antipov, an idealistic radical who is converted by the Revolution’s victory into the merciless apparatchik Strelnikov. In one of the film’s signature moments, he addresses the poet-physician Yuri: “I used to admire your poetry…Feelings inside, affections, it’s suddenly trivial now. You don’t agree. You’re wrong. The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it…The private life is dead for a man with any manhood.” Yuri responds that he has witnessed Strelnikov’s manhood on display in the wake of the Bolshevik massacre of a nearby village. Strelnikov’s answer to this charge is terrifying: “What does it matter? The village betrays us, the village is burned. The point is made.” Yuri replies: “Your point; their village.”

This is a painfully simple truth about the impossibility of justification of Bolshevik crimes, in poetic or any other terms, which makes it all the more astounding that efforts such as Reds and now American Reds work so hard not to see it.

Alexander Riley is the author of Angel Patriots: The Crash of United Flight 93 and the Myth of America.

Daniel W. Michaels : Examining Stalin's 1941 Plan to Attack Germany

INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW

Book Review
Examining Stalin's 1941 Plan to Attack Germany

• Unternehmen Barbarossa und der russische Historikerstreit ("Operation Barbarossa and the Russian Historians' Dispute"), by Wolfgang Strauss. Munich: Herbig, 1998. Hardcover. 199 pages. Illustrations. Source references. Bibliography. Index.

Reviewed by Daniel W. Michaels


No two peoples suffered more during the Second World War than the Russians and the Germans. In the carnage of that great global conflict, nothing matched the massive destruction of life and property wrought on the Eastern front by Russian and German forces fanatically driven by irreconcilable ideologies.
Now, more than 50 years after the end of the "clash of the titans," free Russian and German historians are collaborating to ascertain the historical decisions and actions that led to that bloodiest of all conflicts. Wolfgang Strauss, a respected German Slavicist and political analyst, explains this clarifying historical process in "Operation Barbarossa and the Russian Historians' Dispute," his most recent work.[note 1] He examines here the research of revisionist scholars in Russia and Germany on Stalin's role in igniting the German-Russian conflict and his efforts to expand the Soviet empire across Europe. Perhaps most importantly, he also shows how a shared understanding of the war is contributing to reconciliation between these two great European peoples.
Strauss affirms the view of German historian Ernst Nolte that Hitler's militant anti-Communism was an understandable reaction to the looming Soviet threat to Europe and humanity. Put another way, the militancy of the "fascist" movements that arose in Germany, Spain, Italy and other European countries in the 1920s and 1930s was, in essence, a response to the undisguised Bolshevik goal of dominating Europe.[note 2] This view, Strauss contends, has now largely been embraced by Russian revisionists and the French historian François Furet.[note 3] It is basically irrelevant whether one regards the war that broke out in June 1941 between Germany and Soviet Russia as a war of aggression, a preventive war or a counterattack. For each side, Nolte and others contend, this was a life or death struggle to decide which world view and way of life would prevail in Europe -- atheistic, internationalist Communism or the bourgeois Christian civilization of the West.

The Black Book

In no way does Strauss dismiss or whitewash Hitler's brutal excesses. He also holds that Hitler's racist concept of the inferiority of the Slavic peoples and his attempt to colonize their lands was not only wrong but doomed his military campaign, and ultimately the Third Reich, to failure. At the same time, Strauss stresses the monumental brutality of Soviet and international Communism. In this regard he cites The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror and Repression, a recent 860-page work by French scholar Stéphane Courtois and others.[note 4]
As Courtois stresses, many American and European scholars have upheld a morally peculiar view of history that fervently condemns National Socialist Germany while maintaining a meretriciously non-judgmental "objectivity" toward Soviet Russia. But there is no hierarchy of death and suffering. As Courtois writes: "The death of a Ukrainian peasant child, deliberately exposed to starvation by the Stalinist regime, is just as important as the starvation of a child in the Warsaw Ghetto."
As Strauss relates, Courtois finds that 1) some 100 million human beings lost their lives as a result of Communist policies in the Soviet Union, Red China and other Communist states 2) The Communists made mass criminality an integral part of their governmental system; 3) Terror was part of the Soviet regime from the outset, beginning with Lenin; 4) Class and ethnic genocide, begun by Lenin and systematized by Stalin, preceded Hitler's dictatorship by years; 5) Stalin was unquestionably a greater criminal than Hitler; and 6) Stalin's joint, if not primary, responsibility for the outbreak of Russo-German War is undeniable.[note 5]
It is often forgotten that the Russian people were the first victims of Communism. Citing evidence from British, Russian and other sources, Strauss shows that those who imposed Communist despotism on the Russians were primarily non-Russian and non-Christian aliens -- above all, Jews.[note 6] Their goal was nothing short of eradicating Christianity and European civilization, at whatever the human cost. Many Russians place the primary responsibility for the crimes of Communism, particularly in the first ten years of Soviet rule, on the Bolshevik party's non-Russian elements. For example, Strauss notes, the Russian press has referred to the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family as a "Jewish ritualistic murder."[note 7] In a similar context, Strauss cites from Solzhenitsyn the names of the ruthless Soviet secret police (NKVD) chiefs -- all of them Jews -- who put tens of thousands of slave laborers to death under appallingly inhumane conditions in building the White Sea Canal.[note 8]
One should not, however, get the impression that Slavs were the exclusive victims of Stalin's terror, or that the murderers were all non-Russians.[note 9] During the Great Purge of 1937-39, Strauss points out, Stalin executed many Jews who had played a prominent role in the early Soviet regime. In 1940 Stalin succeeded in killing his greatest rival, Lev Trotsky (Bronstein), who had once been the second most powerful figure in the Soviet state. And when Stalin installed the Russian Nikolai Yezhov as head of the NKVD, replacing the Jewish Genrikh Yagoda, thousands of Yagoda's followers and their families, mostly Jews, were murdered or committed suicide.

Pioneering Russian Revisionists

One of the earliest Russian revisionists of World War II history was Pyotr Grigorenko, a Soviet Army Major General and highly decorated war veteran who taught at the Frunze Military Academy. Already in the early 1960s, during the Khrushchev era, he was a "dissident," publicly supporting civil rights for oppressed ethnic minorities. (Authorities committed him to a mental asylum.) In 1967, Strauss relates, he was the first leading Soviet figure to advance the revisionist arguments, which became well known during the 1980s and 1990s, on Stalin's preparations for aggressive war against Germany. In an article submitted to a major Soviet journal (but rejected, and later published abroad), Grigorenko pointed out that Soviet military forces vastly outnumbered German forces in 1941. Just prior to the German attack on June 22, 1941, more than half of the Soviet forces were in the area near and west of Bialystok, that is, in an area deep in Polish occupied territory. "This deployment could only be justified" wrote Grigorenko, "if these troops were deploying for a surprise offensive. In the event of an enemy attack these troops would soon be encircled."[note 10]
The best known Russian historian to advance revisionist arguments on Stalin's preparations for a first-strike against Germany has been Viktor Suvorov (pen name of Vladimir Rezun). Strauss recapitulates his main arguments (which have been treated in detail in the pages of this Journal).[note 11]
Strauss examines three significant speeches by Stalin (which have also been dealt with by Suvorov, as well as in the pages of this Journal):[note 12] 1. In his address of August 19, 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, Stalin explained why a temporary alliance with Germany was more beneficial to Soviet interests than an alliance with Britain and France. 2. In his speech of May 5, 1941, Stalin explained to graduate officers of military academies that the impending war would be fought offensively by Soviet forces, and that it would nonetheless be a just war because it would advance world socialism. 3. In the speech of November 6, 1941, some four months after the outbreak of the "Barbarossa" campaign, Stalin stressed the importance of killing Germans. (This speech helped to "inspire" the Soviet Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg to make his notorious contribution to the war effort in the form of murderously anti-German propaganda.)

Recent Russian Revisionist Historiography

A radical revision of World War II history, Strauss contends, became possible only after the collapse of the multinational Soviet Union (1991), when some 14 million previously classified documents dealing with all aspects of Soviet rule were finally open to free examination. This book's greatest contribution may well be to highlight for non-Russians the research of Russian revisionists. Strauss is very familiar with this important work, which has been all but entirely ignored in the United States. The most important publications cited by Strauss in this regard are two Russian anthologies, both issued in 1995: "Did Stalin Make Preparations for an Offensive War Against Hitler?," and "September 1, 1939-May 9, 1945: 50th Anniversary of the Defeat of Fascist Germany."[note 13] The first of these contains articles by revisionist scholars as well as by critics of revisionism. (The "Russian historians' dispute" referred to in the subtitle of Strauss' book echoes the "German historians' dispute" of the 1980s, in which Ernst Nolte played a major role.)
As Strauss notes, the most prominent critic of the revisionist view of Suvorov and others has been Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky, who teaches at Tel Aviv University. (Strauss suggests that he is an long-time apologist for Stalin.) Gorodetsky is the author of a 1995 Russian-language anti-Suvorov work, "The 'Icebreaker' Myth," and a detailed 1999 study, Grand Illusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia.
In his discussion of "Did Stalin Make Preparations for an Offensive War Against Hitler," Strauss writes (pages 42-44):

Even though revisionists as well as the critics of revisionism have their say in this book, the end result is the same. The anti-Fascist attempts to justify and legitimize Stalin's war policy from 1939 do not hold up. The view that the Second World War was "a crime attributable solely to National Socialist Germany" can no longer be sustained. The historical truth as seen by Russian revisionists is documented in this collection of articles published by Bordyugov and Nevezhin as well as by the renowned war historian Mikhail Melitiukhov, academic associate of the All-Russian Research Institute for Documentation and Archives.
This most recent compendium of Russian revisionist writings deepens our understanding of Stalin's preparations for a military first-strike against Germany in the summer of 1941. The strategic deployment plan, approved by Stalin at a conference on May 15, 1941, with General Staff chief Georgi Zhukov and Defense Commissar Semen Timoshenko, called for a Blitzkrieg:
Tank divisions and mechanized corps were to launch their attack from the Brest and Lviv [Lemberg] tier accompanied by destructive air strikes. The objective was to conquer East Prussia, Poland, Silesia and the [Czech] Protectorate, and thereby cut Germany off from the Balkans and the Romanian oil fields. Lublin, Warsaw, Kattowice, Cracow, Breslau [Wroclaw] and Prague were targets to be attacked.
A second attack thrust was to be directed at Romania, with the capture of Bucharest. The successful accomplishment of the immediate aims, namely, to destroy the mass of the German Army east of the Vistula, Narev and Oder rivers, was the necessary prerequisite for the fulfillment of the main objective, which was to defeat Germany in a quick campaign. The main contingents of the German armed forces were to be encircled and destroyed by tank armies in bold rapid advances.
Three recurrent terms in the mobilization plan of May 15 confirm the aggressive character of Stalin's plan. "A sudden strike" (vnyyzapni udar), "forward deployment" (razvertyvaniye), and "offensive war" (nastupatel'naya voyna). Of the 303 [Soviet] divisions assembled on the western front, 172 were assigned to the first wave of attack. One month was allotted for the total deployment -- the period from June 15 to July 15. Mikhail Melitiukhov: "On this basis it appears that the war against Germany would have to have begun in July."
This anthology also devotes much attention to analyzing Stalin's speech of May 5, 1941, delivered to graduates of Soviet military academies. In this speech Stalin justified his change of foreign policy in connection with the now decided-upon attack against Germany. From the Communist point of view even a Soviet war of aggression is a "just war" because it serves to expand the "territory of the socialist world" and "to destroy the capitalist world." Most important in this May 5 speech was Stalin's efforts to dispel the "myth of the invincible Wehrmacht." The Red Army was strong enough to smash any enemy, even the "seemingly invincible Wehrmacht."

Strauss lists (pages 102-105) the major findings and conclusions of Russian revisionists, derived mostly from the two major works cited above:

• Stalin wanted a general European war of exhaustion in which the USSR would intervene at the politically and militarily most expedient moment. Stalin's main intention is seen in his speech to the Politburo of August 19, 1939.
• To ignite this, Stalin used the [August 1939] Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, which: a) provoked Hitler's attack against Poland, and b) evoked the declarations of war [against Germany] by Britain and France.
• In the event Germany was defeated quickly [by Britain and France], Stalin planned to "Sovietize" Germany and establish a "Communist government" there, but with the danger that the victorious capitalist powers would never permit a Communist Germany.
• In the event France was defeated quickly [by Germany], Stalin planned the "Sovietization" of France. "A Communist revolution would seem inevitable, and we could take advantage of this for our own purposes by rushing to aid France and making her our ally. As a result of this, all the nations under the 'protection' of a victorious Germany would become our allies."
• From the outset Stalin reckoned on a war with Germany, and the [Soviet] conquest of Germany. To this end, Stalin concentrated on the western border of the USSR operational offensive forces, which were five- to six-times stronger than the Wehrmacht with respect to tanks, aircraft and artillery.
• With respect to a war of aggression, on May 15, 1941, the Red Army's Main Political Directorate instructed troop commanders that every war the USSR engaged in, whether defensive or offensive, would have the character of a "just war."
• Troop contingents were to be brought up to full strength in all the western military districts; airfields and supply bases to support a forward-strategy were to be built directly behind the border; an attack force of 60 divisions was to be set up in the Ukraine and mountain divisions and a parachute corps were to be established for attack operations.
• The 16th, 19th, 21st, 22nd and 25th Soviet Armies were transferred from the interior to the western border, and deployed at take-off points for the planned offensive.
• In his speech of May 5, 1941, to graduate officers of the academies, Stalin said that war with Germany was inevitable, and characterized it as a war not only of a defensive nature but rather of an offensive nature.
• Stalin intended to attack in July 1941, although Russian historians disagree about the precise date. Suvorov cites July 6, [Valeri] Danilov [a retired Soviet Colonel] gives July 2, while Melitiukhov writes: "The Red Army could not have carried out an attack before July 15."

Hitler's Proclamation

In an appendix of documents, Strauss includes portions of Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa" directive of December 18, 1940. Also here, in facsimile, is a German press announcement of June 22, 1941, that gives Hitler's reasons for Germany's attack against the Soviet Union:

This morning the Führer, through Reich Minister Dr. Goebbels, issued a proclamation to the German people in which he explains that after months-long silence he can finally speak openly to the German people about the dangerous machinations of the Jewish-Bolshevik rulers in Soviet Russia. After the German-Russian Friendship Treaty in the Autumn of 1939, he hoped for an easing of tensions with Russia. This hope, however, was crushed by Soviet Russia's extortionist demands against both Finland and the Baltic states as well as against Romania.
After the victory in Poland the Western powers rejected the Führer's proposal for an understanding because they were hoping that Soviet Russia would attack Germany. Since the Spring of 1940 Soviet troops have been deploying in ever increasing numbers along the German border, so that since August 1940 strong German forces have been tied down in the East, making any major German effort in the West impossible.
During his [November 1940] visit to Berlin, [Soviet foreign minister] Molotov posed questions regarding Romania, Finland, Bulgaria and the Dardanelles that clearly revealed that Soviet Russia intended to create trouble in eastern Europe. To be sure, the Bolshevik coup attempt against the [Romanian] government of Antonescu failed, but, with the help of the Anglo-Saxon powers [Britain and the United States], their putsch in Yugoslavia succeeded. Serbian air force officers flew to Russia and were immediately incorporated in the Army there.
With these machinations Moscow has not just broken the so-called German-Russian Friendship Treaty, it has betrayed it. In his proclamation the Führer stressed that further silence on his part would be a crime not only against Germany, but against Europe as well. On the border now stand 160 Russian divisions,[note 14] which have repeatedly violated that frontier. On June 17-18 Soviet patrols were forced back across the border only after a lengthy exchange of fire. Meanwhile, to protect Europe and defend against further Russian provocations, the greatest build-up of forces ever has been assembled against Soviet Russia. German troops stand from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, allied in the north with Finnish troops and along the Bessarabian border with Romanian forces.
The Führer concluded his proclamation with the following sentences: "I have therefore decided to once again lay the fate and the future of the German Reich and of our people in the hands of our soldiers. May the Lord God help us especially in this struggle!"

Coming to Terms With the Past

Even though more and more independent Russian, German and other European historians support the revisionist arguments of Suvorov (and others), it still seems impossible, especially in Germany, to reapportion historical responsibility from Hitler to Stalin. In this regard, Strauss recalls (pages 45-46) a discussion in May 1993 at the Military History Research Office in Freiburg involving German historian Dr. Joachim Hoffmann, decades-long associate of the Research Office, and Russian historian Viktor Suvorov. Hoffman told of conversations on the "preventive war" issue he has had with prominent Germans, including President Richard von Weizsäcker, the influential journalist Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, and political figures Egon Bahr and Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel. In every case he was told that even if Suvorov is correct, and Hitler's attack indeed preceded Stalin's by weeks, this must not be acknowledged publicly because it would exonerate Hitler. This is typical, says Hoffmann, of the immoral attitude that prevails in Germany. In their egotism, he adds, these Germans do not realize that they are, in effect, demanding that Russians accept the propaganda lies of the Stalin era.
Strauss contrasts the very different attitudes of Germans and Russians toward 20th century history, and the role of historical revisionism. Whereas Germans are imbued with a national masochistic guilt complex about their collectively "evil" past, which was instilled during the postwar occupation as part of Allied "reeducation" campaign, and reinforced ever since in their media and by "their" political leaders, Russians are much more free and open about their Communist past, largely because they have not been occupied by foreign conquerers, and their media and educational system has not come under the control of outsiders.[note 15] Although die-hard Communists try to uphold the historiography of the Soviet era, most Russians want to know the truth about their past. After all, Strauss points out, one out of every two Russian families suffered under the Stalinist tyranny. For the time being, anyway, nothing is taboo in Russia, including the role of Jews in the Communist movement. (By contrast, Germans are forbidden by law to say anything derogatory about the political activities of Jews in the first half of the 20th century.)
The term "genocide" is used to refer particularly to the World War II treatment of Europe's Jews. Without in any way minimizing the sufferings of innocent Jews caught up in that maelstrom, one should not forget that Stalin's Soviet regime inflicted a much more ruthless and widespread genocide against the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. It is estimated that in the Soviet Union about 20 million people, the vast majority of them Slavs, lost their lives as a result of Soviet policies, either executed or otherwise perished in the Gulag prison network or as victims of imposed famine, and so forth. Millions of Germans were also victims of genocide. It is estimated that some four million Germans were killed or otherwise perished during the 1944-1948 period, victims of Allied-imposed "ethnic cleansing," starvation, slave labor in the USSR, and in inhumane POW camps administered by the victorious Allies.[note 16]
In promoting greater understanding of the calamitous German-Russian clash of 1941-1945, German and Russian revisionist scholars foster reconciliation between these two peoples. Strauss cites recent developments that attest to this process. In Volgograd, victors and vanquished have joined to erect a monument dedicated to all the victims of the Battle of Stalingrad. Its inscription, written in Russian and German, reads: "This monument commemorates the suffering of the soldiers and civilians who fell here. We ask that those who died here and in captivity will rest in eternal peace in Russian soil." On the outskirts of St. Petersburg a German soldiers' cemetery and memorial was recently dedicated. Across Russia today, it is not unusual for Russian women to tend the graves of German soldiers. (Because the Soviet government did very little to help identify and provide decent burials for their war dead, few Russian women have had any idea where their own sons, brothers, and husbands fell.)
In the book's epilogue, Strauss describes the fervent indignation and rage of Russians over the criminal capitalism that has taken hold in their country. The inequities between the nouveau riches and the mass of Russian working class people are now greater than under Soviet rule. Many Russian revisionists see an intrinsic resemblance and affinity between capitalism and Communism. Given that many former Soviet officials still hold office or otherwise wield power in the "new Russia," everyone readily sees how easy it has been for members of the old Soviet elite -- the Nomenklatura -- to reemerge in Russia's predatory capitalism as racketeers, gangsters, money speculators, bank frauders, extortionists and mafiosi. On the ruins of the Soviet system, writes Strauss, has emerged a new dictatorship of pitilessness, corruption, criminality, social division, poverty and despair. Resentment against the "reformist" policies advocated by the United States is widespread.
In this regard Strauss cites the views of Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, who asserts that if this social pathology endures in Russia, then Karl Marx's analysis will be proven correct, at least in part. While Marx was wrong about the promised virtues of Communism, writes Goytisolo, events seem to confirm his critique of capitalism, especially of unrestrained monetarism that knows only one value, namely, maximum profits regardless of human cost.[note 17]

'Strong and Free'

Whether they call themselves "Reformers" (Westernizers), Communists or nationalists ("Eurasians"), Russians today, writes Strauss, overwhelmingly reject all forms of internationalism, whether Communist or capitalist. They want a Russia that is strong and free.
Toward this goal, many look to geopolitics, an outlook built on the Eurasian "heartland" theory expounded by 20th-century British geographer Halford Mackinder and promoted in Third Reich Germany by Karl Haushofer. (According to this theory, Russia has the potential for great power and prosperity because it is the core of the vast, resource-rich Eurasian heartland.) The leading exponent in Russia today of this view is Alexander Dugin, whose book, "The Basics of Geopolitics: Russia's Geopolitical Future," has been influential with both old Communists and new nationalists in a grouping sometimes referred to as the "national Bolshevik alliance," and whose adherents are known as "Eurasianists." Dugin is a close associate of Gennady Zyuganov, head of the country's largest political party, the Russian Communist Party (which, in spite of its name, is much more nationalist than Marxist). Zyuganov himself is the author of a recent book, "The Geography of Victory: The Bases of Russian Geopolitics."
Russia's parliament, the Duma, has established a Committee of Geopolitical Affairs, chaired by Alexey Mitrofanov, a member of Vladimir Zhirinovksy's Liberal Democratic Party. (Zhirinovsky proposes the formation of a Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo axis, and has been quoted as saying: "Today, the United States of America is the major enemy of our country. All our actions and dealings with America from now on should be undertaken with this in mind.")

Notes

 
1. Strauss, born in 1931, was arrested for anti-Communist activities as an Oberschuler (secondary school student) in East Germany (DDR) and imprisoned, 1950-1956. He is the author of several other notable books on Russia, including Russland wird leben: vom roten Stern zur Zarenfahne (1992), Drei Tage, die die Welt erschutterten (1992), Burgerrechtler in der UdSSR (1979), and Von der Wiedergeburt slawophiler Ideen in Russland (1977). He is also a frequent contributor to scholarly journals. He currently lives in Bavaria, where he works as a Slavic affairs specialist.
2. See: Ernst Nolte, Der Europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917-1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Munich: 1997 [5th ed.]). Nolte has strongly suggested that Hitler's wartime treatment of the Jews might legitimately be regarded as a defensive response by Hitler to the threat of Bolshevik mass murder of the Germans. In a 1980 lecture he said: "It is hard to deny that Hitler had good reason to be convinced of his enemies' determination to annihilate long before the first information about the events in Auschwitz became public." See also the interview with Nolte in the Jan.-Feb. 1994 Journal (Vol. 14, No. 1), pp. 15-22, and "Changing Perspectives on History in Germany: A Prestigious Award for Nolte: Portent of Greater Historical Objectivity?," July-August 2000 Journal, pp. 29-32.
3. François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Feindliche Nähe: Kommunismus und Faschismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein Briefwechsel (Munich: 1998).
4. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, by Stéphane Courtois and others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Original edition: Le livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression (Paris: 1997). Earlier works by Courtois include Histoire du parti communiste français (1995), L'etat du monde en 1945 (1994), Rigueur et passion (1994), 50 ans d'une passion français (1991), and Qui savait quoi? (1987).
5. Courtois has also written: "I am fighting for a reevaluation of Stalin. He was to be sure the greatest criminal of the century. But at the same time he was the greatest politician -- the most competent, the most professional. He was the one who understood most perfectly how to put his resources at the service of his goals."
6. Russian nationalists are fully aware, just as were the anti-Bolshevik "White Russians," that the leaders of Russia's Marxist movement -- Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike -- were predominantly not Russian at all. As evidence of the alien character of the Bolshevik revolution and of the early Soviet regime, Russian nationalists (along with many others) often cite The Last Days of the Romanovs, a work by British writer Robert Wilton (and now translated into Russian). In an appendix to the 1993 IHR edition of this work (pp. 184-190), Wilton also notes: "According to data furnished by the Soviet press, out of important functionaries of the Bolshevik state... in 1918-1919 there were: 17 Russians, two Ukrainians, eleven Armenians, 35 Letts [Latvians], 15 Germans, one Hungarian, ten Georgians, three Poles, three Finns, one Czech, one Karaim, and 457 Jews." See also: M. Weber, "The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Early Soviet Regime," Jan.-Feb. 1994 Journal, pp. 4-14.
7. A special 1996 edition of the Moscow newspaper Russkiy Vestnik lists the names of the executioners: Yankel Yurovsky, Anselm Fischer, Istvan Kolman, A. Chorwat, Isidor Edelstein, Imre Magy [?], Victor Grinfeld, Andreas Wergasi and S. Farkash. The article concludes: "All of this attests to the non-Russian origin of the murderers."
8. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the six directors were Semyon Firin, Matvei Berman, Naftali Frenkel, Lazar Kogan, Yakov Rappoport, Sergei Zhuk. The Head of the Military Guards was Brodsky, the Canal Curator of the Central Executive Committee was Solts, the GPU and NKVD heads were Yagoda, Pauker, Spiegelglas, Kaznelson, Sakovskiy, Sorensen, Messing and Arshakuni. As the names indicate, all were non-Russians. Stalin awarded most of these murderers the honorary title "Hero of Labor." See: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, III-IV, Book Two (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 79, 81, 82, 84, 94, etc.
9. This generalization is mostly valid for the first 20 years of Soviet rule. However, following the Great Purge (1937-1939), and except for several years after World War II in East Europe where Stalin used Jewish Communists to instal puppet regimes, the dictator until his death actively opposed elements he referred to as cosmopolitans, parasites, and so forth.
10. Grigorenko originally submitted his article to the Soviet journal Voprosy istorii KPSS, which (of course) rejected it. It was published in 1969 by Possev, a Russian emigré publishing house in Frankfurt am Main.
11. Suvorov's first three books on World War II have been reviewed in The Journal of Historical Review. The first two, Icebreaker and "M Day," were reviewed in Nov.-Dec. 1997 Journal (Vol. 16, No. 6), pp. 22-34. His third book, "The Last Republic," was reviewed in the July-August 1998 Journal (Vol. 17, No. 4), pp. 30-37.
12. See the review of Stalins Falle ("Stalin's Trap"), by Adolf von Thadden, in the May-June 1999 Journal, pp. 40-45.
13. Gotovil li Stalin nastupatel'nuyu voynu protiv Gitlera ("Did Stalin Make Preparations for an Offensive War Against Hitler?," by Grigoriy Bordyugov and Vladimir Nevezhin (Moscow: AIRO XX, 1995), and, 1 sentyabrya 1939-9 maya 1945: Pyatidesyatiletiye razgroma fashistkoy Germanii v Kontekste Nachala Vtoroy Mirovoy Voyny ("September 1, 1939-May 9, 1945: the 50th Anniversary of the Defeat of Fascist Germany in the Context of the Beginning of the War"), edited by I.V. Pavlova and V. L. Doroshenko (Novosibirsk Memorial, 1995). The latter work was briefly cited in the Nov.-Dec. 1997 Journal, pp. 32-34.
14. The German High Command greatly underestimated the number of Soviet divisions, as well as the quality and quantity of Soviet tanks. Hitler and the Wehrmacht were to find not 160 divisions on their doorstep, but more than 300. See: David Irving, Hitler's War (New York: Viking, 1977), pp. 205-206, 297. On the correlation of forces in June 1941, see also Joachim Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945 (Munich, 1995), Chapter 1, and esp. pp. 31, 66.
15. Ominously, however, the "oligarchs," most of them Jewish, exercise considerable control over the Russian media. See: Daniel W. Michaels, "Capitalism in the New Russia," May-June 1997 Journal, pp. 21-27, and, "A Jewish Appeal to Russia's Elite," Nov.-Dec. 1998 Journal, pp. 13-18.
16. See: Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), Alfred-M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans From the East (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1989 [3rd rev. ed.]), James Bacque, Other Losses (Prima, 1991), J. Bacque, Crimes and Mercies (Little, Brown, 1997), Ralph Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies' Postwar War Against the German People (IHR, 1992).
17. Juan Goytisolo, La Saga de los Marx (Barcelona: Mondadori, 1993). Although Goytisolo was undoubtedly one of Spain's foremost 20th century novelists, both his political views and private life were highly controversial. Expelled from Spain by Franco, he lived most of his life in France.
     

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From The Journal of Historical Review, November/December 2000 (Vol. 19, No. 6), page 40.
About the author
Daniel W. Michaels is a Columbia University graduate (Phi Beta Kappa, 1954), and a former Fulbright exchange student to Germany (1957). He is retired from the US Department of Defense after 40 years of service.

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Daniel Michaels : Revising the Twentieth Century's 'Perfect Storm' - Russian and German Historians Debate Barbarossa and Its Aftermath

INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW

Revising the Twentieth Century's 'Perfect Storm'
Russian and German Historians Debate Barbarossa and Its Aftermath

By Daniel Michaels

• Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia, by Gabriel Gorodetsky. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. 408 pages.
• Samoubiystvo (Suicide), by Viktor Suvorov. Moscow: AST, 2000. 380 pages. Illustrations.
• Upushchennyy shans Stalina (Stalin's Lost Opportunity), by Mikhail Meltiukhov. Moscow: Veche, 2000. 605 pages. Illustrations, maps.
• Stalin's War of Extermination, 1941-45: Planning, Realization, and Documentation, by Joachim Hoffmann. Capshaw, Ala.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2001. 415 pages. Illustrations.

Revising the history of the Second World War's crucial Russo-German campaign is very much a work in progress, nowhere more so than in Russia and Germany. Ever since Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Rezun) broke the ice a decade ago with his sensational Ledokol (published in English as Icebreaker [reviewed in the Journal of Historical Review, (Nov.-Dec. 1997)]), Russian historians have been reexamining the many myths, legends, and fantasies associated with the outbreak of the death duel between Communism and National Socialism. The role of Joseph Stalin, in particular, has aroused the most heated controversy.
In Russia, the debate has involved two major groups. The first asserts that the Soviet Union had no aggressive designs against Germany or Europe and was unprepared for war, while the second maintains that Stalin and the Red Army indeed had plans for a surprise attack against Germany and Europe, but were beaten to the punch by Hitler.

Contending Factions

To the first group have belonged such notables as the late Marshal Georgi Zhukov, journalist Lev Bezymenski (also professor at the Academy of Military Sciences), General M. A. Gareyev, V. A. Anfilov, and Yu. A. Gorkov. This group, in general, also contends that Stalin had decapitated the Red Army by purging many high-ranking officers just before the war; that he was too trusting of Hitler, wrongly believing that the Führer would never deliberately initiate a two-front war; and that Stalin was the cause of Communism's failure. These views are shared by many, regardless of political leanings.
An Israeli, Gabriel Gorodetsky, much ballyhooed in the English-speaking world, also fits in this company. Gorodetsky is a colleague of Lev Bezymenski, as he was of the late General Dmitri Volkogonov. Gorodetsky, Suvorov contends, has been granted unparalleled access to selected archives of the Russian Foreign Ministry, the General Staff, the NKVD, the GRU, and other records usually closed to researchers, above all revisionists, who might probe too deeply. For this reason Suvorov suspects Gorodetsky of being a conduit for information that the Russian government chooses to have disseminated.
To the second group belong military historians such as Viktor Suvorov, Mikhail Meltiukhov, V. A. Nevezhin, V. D. Danilov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as several Germans (Joachim Hoffmann, Wolfgang Strauss, Fritz Becker) and Austrians (Heinz Magenheimer, Ernst Topitsch). (See review of Topitsch's Stalin's War in JHR, [Summer 1988]). They argue that Stalin trusted no one, least of all Hitler; that Stalin had, together with Marshal Zhukov, devised his own plan for a surprise offensive against Germany, with the ultimate goal of establishing Communism in Europe; and that it was the USSR, not Germany, which was better prepared for war. Suvorov has also argued that Stalin's purges actually improved the Red Army, by ridding it of the heavy-handed political commissars, most of whom were Trotskyite thugs despised by the people. As is well known, many of Trotsky's followers were his fellow Jews, often foreign born rather than native to Russia.
The American historians Richard Raack and R. H. S. Stolfi (see review in JHR [Nov.-Dec. 1995]) have joined the debate, lending it a worldwide dimension. Professor Raack in particular has reinforced the arguments of the Suvorov group, writing that "in fact the discussion is now international ... the genie of truth is out of the bottle."
The first group has been taxed with harboring Stalinist apologists for the old Soviet Establishment, the second of seeking to justify Hitler's German invasion. Polemics aside, the historiographical roots of the division are manifest in the reliance of the first group on the Soviet political literature to substantiate its arguments, as opposed to the second group's reliance on historical analysis based on military science, studying and comparing troop deployments, weapons systems, and so on.
In the past few years, several major books have appeared from representatives of both sides of the dispute. Gorodetsky, supported in his research by many former Soviet Jews now residing in Israel, has recently published Grand Delusion. Widely circulated in the West, it has won the acclaim of most of its Anglo-American reviewers. The irrepressible Suvorov, who resides in England, has published his fourth major book on the war, entitled Samoubiystvo ("Suicide"), dealing with events immediately preceding the outbreak of hostilities, while Meltiukhov, currently associated with the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Documentation and Archival Science, has just published Upushchennyy shans Stalina ("Stalin's Lost Opportunity"). Regrettably, with the exception of Icebreaker, none of Suvorov's and Meltiukhov's works are currently available in English, and they have only rarely been reviewed or evaluated in the English-speaking world. Finally, an excellent translation of Stalin's War of Extermination, by Joachim Hoffmann, historian at Germany's Military History Research Office (MGFA), has now been made available to English speakers. This book has gone through several editions in Germany, and is widely read there.
Suvorov's works enjoy the greatest sales and circulation of serious Russian literature on the war. At first his opponents (almost all professional historians) tried to ignore him. Later, when compelled to recognize his work, they attempted to dismiss his theses as the product of a fantast who had had no access to official documents whatsoever. Yet, working solely from Soviet open source literature on the war, Suvorov deduced the Soviet plan to invade Germany, predicting that in time official documents would be found to substantiate his conclusions. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, such documents have surfaced with increasing frequency, and in recent years Suvorov has found a perfect partner in Meltiukhov, who, with his experience in documentation and archival science and his easier access to Soviet-era records, has provided documentation for Suvorov's theses.

Plan of Attack

The Zhukov Plan of May 15, 1941, discussed briefly in these pages last year (see JHR [Nov.-Dec. 2000]), continues to be the focus of analysis and discussion. Recently, on the fifty-ninth anniversary of the German attack, Vladimir Sergeyev described and published excerpts from the Zhukov document, which was discovered in the Archives of the President of the Russian Federation some years ago. For ultimate security, the original twelve-page text had been handwritten by then Major General, later Marshal, A. M. Vasilevski, and addressed to the chairman of the USSR Council of Peoples Commissars, Joseph Stalin. The document, marked "Top Secret! Of Great Importance! Stalin's Eyes Only! One Copy Only!," was authorized and approved by People's Defense Minister S. K. Timoshenko and Zhukov, then chief of the Red Army general staff.
A key passage in the war plan not previously cited in these pages reads:

In order to prevent a surprise German attack and to destroy the German Army, I consider it essential that under no circumstances should the initiative for freedom of action be given to the German High Command[. I consider it essential] to preempt enemy deployment, to attack the German Army when it is still in the stage of deployment and has not yet had time to organize his front and the interaction between his service arms.[The word for "preempt" was underlined twice in the original document. -- D. M.]

Thus did Zhukov propose to Stalin precisely what the German Army would do to his forces a month later.
The Suvorov school and certain German military analysts speculate that Stalin's failure to attack before the German onslaught of June 22, 1941, was probably because his own forces had not yet fully deployed for the offensive. Sergeyev, on the other hand, suggests that the attack plan prepared by Zhukov was faulty.
Upon his return from the successful blitzkrieg operation he had orchestrated in the battle of Khalkin-Gol in Mongolia (August 1939), Marshal Zhukov was put in charge of the Kiev Special Military District, where he commanded the Soviet Southwestern and Western fronts. His plan of May 15, 1941, assigned these fronts the task of destroying the Wehrmacht units before them, then advancing southwest across Poland to the German border. This operation was intended to cut German forces off from the Balkan theater of operations and from their Romanian and Hungarian allies, including their vital oil fields.
Zhukov was unaware that the main deployment of German forces was not on the Soviet left flank, but in Army Group Center, further to the north. Thus, had Soviet forces attacked toward Cracow-Lublin, as Zhukov's plan called for, Army Group Center could easily have cut through the exposed right (northern) flank of the Soviet thrust, upset the Soviet offensive, and then advanced along the Minsk-Smolensk line toward Moscow. In that event, the Red Army would have found itself in an even worse situation than after the outbreak of the actual German offensive on June 22. Zhukov admitted as much later to military historian V. A. Anfilov: "In retrospect it is good that he [Stalin] did not agree with us. Otherwise, our forces might have suffered a catastrophe."

Stalin's Aims

In a more detailed study of the May 15 document, L. A. Bezymenski notes that the plan had even more ambitious goals. After completion of the first stage of the offensive, Soviet forces were to turn north and northwest to destroy the northern wing of the German front, thereby occupying East Prussia and all of Poland. Meanwhile, to the north, the Red Army would once again invade Finland. According to Bezymenski, Zhukov's bold offensive plan had very probably been influenced by Stalin's speech of May 5 to Soviet military academy graduates, in which the Soviet leader emphasized the superiority of offensive over defensive military planning.
Soviet mobilization and deployment in the period January-June 1941 took place in three stages:

• first stage, January-March, the call-up of about a million reservists, industry ordered to step up production of T-34 and KV tanks, first echelon troops brought up to strength;
• second stage, April-June, second echelon forces moved up to the western border, Far Eastern troops moved west;
• third stage, June 1-June 22, Stalin agrees to open mobilization and to advancing second echelon armies to the front. All these operations were to be carried out in secrecy, without the enemy taking note. Once mobilized and in position, the Soviet forces were to launch a sudden, decisive offensive against Germany and her allies.

According to Meltiukhov, the correlation of forces along the front from Ostroleka (Poland) to the Carpathians at the time of the planned Zhukov offensive was as shown in the table below.

	Red Army	Wehrmacht	Ratio
Divisions	128	55	2.3:1
Troop strength	3,400,000	1,400,000	2.1:1
Field guns	38,500	16,300	2.4:1
Tanks	7,500	900	8.7:1
Aircraft	6,200	1,400	4.4:1

The attack was to begin in typical blitzkrieg fashion -- without warning, with air raids on enemy airfields, and with heavy artillery bombardment of front-line enemy forces. The USSR would thus have had the clear advantage of superior forces and the benefits of the first strike. Why Stalin did not give the order to attack is unknown.

In "Stalin's Lost Opportunity," Meltiukhov establishes, with meticulous documentation, that in the years 1938-40 the Soviet Union had carried out a massive build-up of military muscle that made it the superpower of the day, far exceeding the might of any enemy. Meltiukhov presents the comparative strength of the major belligerents for August 1939, on the eve of Germany's invasion of Poland, as shown in the table above.

Accounting for Stalin's Delay

Meltiukhov minces no words on Stalin's intent: "The content of the Soviet operational plans, the ideological guidelines and the military propaganda, combined with information on the immediate military preparations of the Red Army for an offensive, attest unambiguously to the intention of the Soviet government to attack Germany in the summer of 1941." He concludes that at first the opening strike against Germany (Operation Groza [Thunderstorm]) was scheduled for June 12, 1941, but that the Kremlin later fatefully shifted the date to July 15. According to Meltiukhov: "Unfortunately, what we now know today was a secret in 1941. The Soviet leadership made a fateful miscalculation by not striking first."
Meltiukhov speculates that Stalin delayed the date for the attack when he learned, on May 12, of Rudolf Hess' flight to Scotland. Stalin feared that if the Hess peace mission succeeded, and the British withdrew from the war, the Red Army would be left to stand alone against the Germans. When it became clear that the Hess mission had failed, Stalin set July 15 as the date for Operation Thunderstorm -- 23 days after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. Had the Red Army attacked on the originally scheduled date, Meltiukhov believes, it would have succeeded.
Although Soviet intelligence had been informed of the precise date of the German attack by its agent Richard Sorge in Japan, and by its "Korsikanets" and "Starshina" sources in Berlin, Stalin refused to be convinced. Moreover, Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt had also warned Stalin, to no avail: Stalin knew that Britain desperately needed the USSR in the war against Germany for its own sake. By failing to strike first, as planned, the USSR lost 800,000 men (Germany, 80,000), 4,000 aircraft (Germany, 850), 21,500 field guns and 11,800 tanks (Germany, 400) during the first two and a half weeks of the war. By the end of 1941 the Soviet Union had lost three million Red Army troops.
Meltiukhov rejects the term "preventive war." For a true preventive war, it is necessary for the attacker to know definitely that his adversary is about to invade. Meltiukhov maintains that, while the each side was aware of the other's build-up and deployment of forces, neither the Germans nor the Russians knew with certainty that the other was about to attack. Stalin believed, with some logic, that Hitler would never open a second front while the Britain was still in the war, but the German leader chose not to wait until the Red Army launched its attack: he unleashed his own blitzkrieg.
The situation best resembles two cats sitting on a fence waiting to see which will jump off first. On the day before the attack, Hitler signaled his frame of mind in a letter to Mussolini: "Even if I were forced to lose 60-70 divisions in Russia by the end of the year, this would still only be a small fraction of the forces I would have to maintain constantly on the eastern border under the present conditions." In the end Germany failed, Meltiukhov states, simply because it had neither the resources nor the reserves necessary to bring a long war to a successful conclusion.

A Suicidal Invasion?

The ever controversial, iconoclastic Suvorov dedicates his new book to his adversaries. He writes, "You can't dedicate a book with this title [Ledokol, or "Suicide"] to friends, so I dedicate it to my enemies." An enemy of the Soviet regime who defected to England, Suvorov was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. Although his opponents are legion, including many in the post-Soviet as well as the Anglo-American establishments, in today's Russia he is the most popular writer on the history of the Second World War.
Suvorov joins Meltiukhov in the belief that if any side was unprepared for the war that ensued, it was the Germans. On June 22, 1941 when Germany launched its desperate attack, Stalin had some 13,000 aircraft to Hitler's 2,500. Moreover, the Red Army had an even greater advantage in numbers and quality of tanks (24,000:3,700).
In "Suicide" Suvorov analyzes secondary sources in German, just as he did in his books on Russian war plans, and concludes that Hitler had lost the war even before the first shot was fired. It is Suvorov's contention that Hitler and the Nazi leadership were irresponsible in launching a war against the much larger, better prepared, and better armed Soviet Union in the absurd belief that the USSR could be defeated in 90 days -- July-August-September. Hitler and the German high command unpardonably underestimated the strength of the Soviet armed forces, which Stalin had been building up since the mid-1920s. Germany, of course, did not begin rearming until the mid-1930s, and would delay mobilizing for total war until around 1943.
Stalin and his advisors knew that the Wehrmacht lacked all the essentials for a protracted war under conditions of extreme cold. Through their intelligence services and agents, the Soviets had learned that: German tanks were inferior to their own in both quantity and quality; Germany was critically short of oil; Germany did not manufacture cold-resistant lubricants; the German forces had not been issued winter clothing; Germany was dependent for its war effort on the import of many raw materials; and much more.
Exasperated by the short-sighted, superficial German plan for victory in three months, Suvorov asks a few rhetorical questions: Did Hitler think that May followed October in Russia? Had he learned nothing from Napoleon's campaign? Did he not know that, even if he reached Moscow, Russia would have continued the war from the Urals in the interior, far beyond the reach of German long-range bombers?
By the end of the fourth month of Barbarossa, the German economy was already groaning. Fritz Todt, chief of arms production, advised Hitler to arrange for an armistice. Large-scale German tank operations had to be curtailed for lack of fuel. The German panzer units, with their limited number of tanks, were often forced to cover long distances to quell unforeseen exigencies, thereby further exhausting fuel supplies. (Large-scale blitzkrieg operations, ensuring the greatest possible encirclement and bag of prisoners, require that the tanks moving out from one pincer proceed with minimum diversion in order to meet those jumping off from the other pincer, thereby closing the encirclement.)

Beyond the Propaganda

Suvorov's list of villains is long indeed. Hitler, Goebbels, and the subservient German generals are castigated for their recklessness. But Suvorov's venom is mostly directed at the Communist and post-Communist establishment, whose spokesmen continue to mouth the Party line. He ridicules and mocks what he considers the falsehoods, misconceptions, myths, and errors about the German-Russian war invented and circulated by the various Soviet and post-Soviet "scientific institutes," including the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and the Institute of Military History, whose researchers have tried to dismiss Suvorov's findings as "unscientific."
Suvorov dismisses typical official Soviet sources for the war as specious propaganda devoid of hard facts or figures. The main message of the original six-volume History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-45, Suvorov contends, is that Nikita Khrushchev (under whose administration the work was compiled) won the war single-handedly. Suvorov goes on to observe that when the twelve-volume revised edition of this official history was written under Leonid Brezhnev, it was revised to show that it was actually Brezhnev who had won the Great Patriotic War.
Suvorov singles out the memoirs of Marshal Zhukov for special criticism. He hazards that these were probably written by Glavpur (the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army). Thus "Zhukov" writes that on June 22, 1941, the Germans enjoyed a 5-6:1 advantage over Soviet forces in field pieces, tanks and aircraft, when in fact the ratio was to Russia's advantage.
Suvorov considers Stalin to have been Hitler's superior in cleverness, rationality, emotional stability, international politics, cruelty, and blood-letting. Stalin was much better informed about German capabilities than Hitler was of Russian. Suvorov introduces a Russian adage to demean Hitler's attempt to outwit Stalin: "Never try to trick a trickster." The only reason for Hitler's initial success, for Suvorov, was that Barbarossa was an entirely irrational decision, which the thoroughly logical Stalin could not possibly have anticipated. In the opinion of this reviewer, that was precisely why Hitler took the gamble. Suvorov's Russian nativism shines forth when he writes: "Only a fool would consider defeating Russia! Only a complete idiot would ever think of defeating it in a three-month campaign!"
As brilliant as Suvorov has been in exposing the historical lies of the corrupt Communist and post-Communist regimes, even sympathetic readers must take issue with him on certain points. As with Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy, Suvorov's findings may not satisfy the more professional historians in every detail -- and some of them will be subject to revision.

Overrating Stalin

Occasionally Suvorov contradicts himself. For example, he argues that when Hitler turned his troops southward to Kiev before Moscow was taken, he all but lost the war. But elsewhere Suvorov recognizes that in war the best strategy is to defeat the enemy's armed forces, not to take prestige cities. In fact the German forces turned south not so much to take Kiev as to destroy another Soviet army. The German generals, who after all had some experience in the conduct of war, were of course perfectly aware of the pointlessness of capturing large cities merely for trophy value. When the enemy's armed forces are destroyed, his cities will fall on their own.
Only in the case of Stalingrad did the German invaders commit all their forces and energies to take a city -- with disastrous results. The previous winter, after the failure to take Moscow, reason had prevailed and the Germans retreated to a more defensible line, where they were able to regroup and reinforce their armies. Without the help of the Finns, German forces were inadequate to take Leningrad, so they bypassed the city. But Hitler forbade any retreat from Stalingrad. Its capture had been aimed, among other things, at blocking oil shipments up the Volga north to the Soviets. The Wehrmacht was no less concerned to fuel its own war machine: it had secured the Crimea in order to protect its chief sources of petroleum, in Romania and Hungary, from Soviet air attack from that peninsula.
Suvorov's excessive regard for Stalin's leadership and his equally overdone criticism of Hitler's ignores the fact that Germany nearly did defeat the Red Army. Had the United States, Great Britain, France, and other allies not supported Stalin with arms, trucks, provisions, and other necessities of war, the outcome might have been quite different. It must also be recalled that, throughout much of the long Russian-German conflict, Germany was compelled to divert 20-30 percent of its war effort to the Western front.
Suvorov's main contention, that Stalin groomed Hitler to do his dirty work in Europe, is untenable. It gives far too much credit to the Soviet dictator. Germany never wanted a war in the west, let alone one against Britain. True, the Germans suspected France -- especially under the government of Léon Blum's popular front -- of further mischief.
It must be recalled that Germany's ill-fated attack on the Soviet Union followed several successive attempts at its encirclement by its enemies. In the 1930s British and French diplomacy had succeeded in surrounding her with hostile nations. Then came the attempted Scandinavian and Balkan encirclement, and finally that of the U.S.,UK, and USSR. With both Soviet and Western forces increasing in strength, Germany took a desperate gamble to break the ring, rather than wait until the Red Army seized the most opportune time to pounce. True, the gamble failed. Today's Germany, however, is a prosperous country, much smaller than it might have wished, but the remnant of Stalin's USSR, stripped of the Tsar's empire, is not much more than an overgrown economic basket case.
Suvorov exaggerates Stalin's "genius." While it is true that he created a police state and built up the Red Army to superpower status, his armed forces failed miserably at the time they were most needed, June 1941. It is also true that Stalin dominated Churchill and Roosevelt, above all in the several conferences that determined postwar arrangements among the "Big Three," but the Western leaders had cast themselves in the role of supplicants who needed the Red Army to contain and destroy Germany.
For all that, Suvorov has made a great contribution to correcting the history of the Second World War by dispelling, once and for all, the myth of a peace-loving Soviet Union invented by Communist propagandists and circulated in the West by their dupes and sympathizers.

Trusting Stalin

According to Gorodetsky's version of the Soviet Union, the USSR planned only counter-attacks in defense of the homeland, and its leader, Stalin, was too trusting of Adolf Hitler. Gorodetsky completely ignores the Soviet Union's military build-up from the 1930s until the outbreak of hostilities in 1941. The tens of thousands of advanced tanks and aircraft; the training of hundreds of thousands of paratroopers; the forward deployment of airfields, depots, and attack units on the eve of the attack in June 1941 are all hard evidence of Stalin's real intentions.
The Israeli researcher has limited himself almost entirely to examining statements from official Soviet sources. For the most part, he ignores military analysts (whether Russian, German, or American), who are better equipped than he to evaluate military capabilities and designs. These researchers tend increasingly to agree with Suvorov.
Gorodetsky retains the stale support of the old Soviet establishment, while Suvorov has gained many post-Soviet adherents in recent years. While Gorodetsky is read mostly in England and the United States, erstwhile allies of Stalinist Russia, Suvorov is read widely in Russia and Germany, whose peoples experienced Stalin's and Hitler's war first hand.

No Room for Chivalry

In Stalin's War of Extermination Joachim Hoffmann examines both the underlying causes and the ruthless execution of the war by Russians and Germans alike, in a thoroughly engrossing, systematic approach that is unsurpassed with respect to comprehensiveness, objectivity, and documentation. Hoffmann has made extensive use of interrogations of Soviet prisoners of war, ranging in rank from general to private, conducted by their German captors during the war. These interviews, combined with the traditional exploitation of open-source, unclassified literature and recently declassified materials, irrefutably dispel the myth of a peace-loving Soviet Union led by a trusting, pacific Joseph Stalin. Hoffmann's research confirms conclusively that the Soviet Union was making final preparations for its own preemptive attack when the Wehrmacht struck.
Besides the POW interrogations, Hoffmann cites such military authorities as Dmitri Volkogonov, to the effect that Stalin needed only a few more weeks to bring his forces into complete battle readiness; Soviet military analyst Colonel Danilov, who agrees that the "vozhd" (commander) only needed a bit more time; and Colonel Karpov, who has written:
"In the early grayness of a May or June morning, thousands of our aircraft and tens of thousands of our guns would have dealt the blow against the densely concentrated German force, whose positions were known down to battalion level -- a surprise even more inconceivable than the German attack on us."
Hoffmann contends that war between these two mutually hostile, ideologically driven nations was inevitable: it was merely a question of which side would initiate hostilities. He reminds us that the First World War had brought Communism to power over the one sixth of the Earth's surface that had been the Russian empire. A second world war, Lenin preached, would advance Communism throughout Europe. Stalin, Lenin's faithful disciple in propagating Communism, acted from the outset of his rule to increase the USSR's military might to that end. By 1941, the Red Army's aircraft, tanks, and field artillery exceeded Germany's by a factor of at least six to one in each category. In that year, the USSR's paratroops and submarines, exclusively offensive forces, exceeded those of the rest of the world combined.
The main principles of Soviet military doctrine in the spring of 1941 were: 1) the Red Army is an offensive army; 2) war must always be fought on enemy territory, with minimum friendly losses and the total destruction of the enemy; 3) the working class in the enemy's country is a potential ally and should be encouraged to rebel against its masters; and 4) war preparations must serve to ensure offensive capabilities.
So confident was Stalin of Soviet military superiority, Hoffmann asserts, that he doubted Germany would ever be foolish enough to attack, especially as long as Britain remained in the war. Dumbfounded at the German successes at the outset of Barbarossa, the Soviet dictator realized that he had underestimated Germany's chances of defeating the Red Army. Suvorov has described Stalin's probable state of mind as comparable to that of the designer of the Titanic after learning it had sunk. Nevertheless, vowing vengeance, still confident of ultimate victory, Stalin demanded the total extermination of the German invaders. On November 6, 1941, he declared:
"Well now, if the Germans want a war of extermination, they will get it. From now on it will be our task, the task of the peoples of the Soviet Union, the task of our fighters, commanders, and the political officials of our Army and Navy, to exterminate to the last man all Germans who have invaded the Homeland as occupiers. No mercy to the German occupiers! Death to the German occupiers!"
Hitler, for his part, by underestimating the military strength of the Soviet Union, led his country to a catastrophic defeat. Goebbels, in his diary, suggested that had Hitler known the actual strength of the Red Army, he might have at least paused before taking his fateful gamble. Yet, however disastrous the Axis attack finally proved for the German nation in the end, Hoffmann believes that all Europe would have suffered as grim a fate had the Red Army succeeded in striking first.
This clash to the death between two ideologically driven states, Hoffmann observes, left no room for chivalry, or for the strict observance of international conventions on land warfare. Stalin insisted that Soviet soldiers not surrender, and used maximal terror to prevent them from doing so. Soviet POWs were deemed deserters, and any Soviet soldier who surrendered was to be killed on falling into Soviet hands. (Near the end of the war German soldiers who refused to fight were shot and hanged from lamp posts for all to see.) Throughout the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets dubbed it, "Soviet patriotism" and "mass heroism" were heavily dependent on terrorism. As Hoffmann writes, the head of Red Army Political Propaganda, Commissar Lev Sakharovich Mekhlis, was empowered by Stalin to use every device of terror to keep the Red Army fighting. This Mekhlis did with relish. In consequence of the activity of this and other commissars, Stalin's terror against his own people (soldiers and civilians) during the war accounted for a substantial percentage of the estimated twenty-five million Soviet war dead. (See also Walter Sanning's essay on Soviet losses, "Soviet Scorched-Earth Warfare," in JHR [spring 1985]). Even so, more than five million Soviet soldiers managed to surrender to the invaders by the end of the war. Of those who survived the war, many had cause to wish they hadn't following their repatriation to the USSR.

Unpunished Crimes, Aggressive Plans

From the onset of the war, German soldiers unfortunate enough to be taken prisoner were often mutilated and murdered. When the Soviet forces entered Germany, men and boys were murdered or drafted for forced labor; the women were often raped, sometimes murdered, and, if strong enough, dragooned for forced labor.
Although by about 1950 Stalin decided to lessen the influence of Jews in the Communist Party, Jews were very much involved in murderous assignments during the war. In addition to Mekhlis, there was Lazar Kaganovich, responsible for the deaths of millions; General Abakumov, who headed the NKVD/MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs, or secret police), and Generals Reichman and Chernyakhovski, who were especially ruthless. Hoffmann hastens to add that the criminal actions of individual Jews should no more reflect on the Jewish people as a whole than the criminal actions of individual Nazis on the German people. Yet Nazis charged with war crimes have been, and continue to be, tried and punished, while, curiously, no courts appear to be interested in bringing Communist criminals to justice.
The thoroughness and reliability of Hoffmann's work (which helpfully includes an appendix containing key original documents in Polish, Russian, English, and German) is nicely exemplified in his treatment of Zhukov's plan of May 15, 1941. While Sergeyev and Bezymenski seem to suggest that the plan was only recently discovered, Hoffmann makes manifestly clear that the plan has long been known and analyzed. Colonel Valeri Danilov and Dr. Heinz Magenheimer examined this plan and other documents that indicate Soviet preparations for attack almost ten years ago in an Austrian military journal (Österreichische Militärische Zeitschrift, nos. 5 and 6, 1991; no. 1, 1993; and no. 1, 1994). Both researchers concluded that the Zhukov plan of May 15, 1941, reflected Stalin's May 5, 1941 speech (see above) heralding the birth of the new offensive Red Army. Hoffmann reproduces an original document, referred to as "Short Notation of Comrade Stalin's Speech to the Red Army Academy on May 5, 1941," which concludes with the words:
"But now that we have reconstructed our army and abundantly saturated it with the technology to wage modern warfare, now that we have become strong -- now we are obliged to go from defense to attack. In defending our country we are obliged to act in an offensive manner. To switch over from defense to a military policy of offensive action. We must reconstruct our training, our propaganda, our agitation, and our press in the spirit of attack. The Red Army is now a modern army, and a modern army is an army of attack."
The Zhukov plan of May 15, 1941, indicates clearly that the Red Army planned a preemptive strike against the German forces across the border. Hoffmann further notes that a few days later, on May 20, 1941, Mikhail Kalinin, then chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet and nominally head of state, gave a speech in which he said:
"War is a very dangerous business, laden with sorrows, but when a time comes when it is possible to expand the realm of Communism, war should not be discounted ... and the zone of Communism must be expanded. The capitalist world can only be destroyed by the red hot glowing steel of a holy revolutionary war."
Kalinin thus strongly implied that the war the USSR was about to wage was not a preventive war forced upon it by Germany, but a war of conquest to expand the Communist empire.

The Perfect Storm

The preponderance of documents uncovered in the past decade, including further analyses of the Zhukov plan of May 15, 1941, by members of the Suvorov school, should convince the impartial reader that: Germany was woefully unprepared for a long war; that the Soviet Union was not only armed to the teeth, but poised to spring in July 1941; that Stalin was Lenin's disciple in striving to advance Communism to the rest of Europe, especially to Germany; and that the governments of Britain and France were totally oblivious of the greater danger Communism posed to them when they declared war on Germany over its border dispute with Poland.The failure of the British, French, and American leaderships to perceive that the Soviet Union was by far the deadlier threat, even in 1939, was a mistake that has taken half a century to rectify, at the cost of countless millions of lives.
Hoffmann concludes that the war between the two irreconcilable ideologies was inevitable and unavoidable. Stalin's fanatical adherence to Communism (class hatred) and Hitler's equally fanatical adherence to racial theories (Hoffmann cites Disraeli: "The race question is the key to world history") led their peoples to a catastrophe unmatched since the Thirty Years' War. Hoffmann blames the horrible excesses the Red Army inflicted on German civilians on hate-obsessed war propagandists such as Ilya Ehrenburg in Russia who deliberately exaggerated German crimes. Thus, Hoffman notes, Ehrenburg announced a death toll of four million for Auschwitz on January 4, 1945, weeks before the capture of the camp. Likewise, months before the war's end, Ehrenburg reported that six million Jews had been murdered by the Germans. Moreover, in many instances, including the infamous Katyn forest massacre of Polish prisoners, Red propagandists shamelessly tried to blame the German army for crimes committed by the Soviets.
Like his colleague Wolfgang Strauss, Hoffmann advocates reconciliation between the peoples of Germany and Russia. The policies of both Stalin's Communist regime and Hitler's National Socialist state were aberrations far removed from the traditional friendship between the two peoples as prevailed under Bismarck and before him. In that spirit Hoffmann makes special mention of Drs. Heinz Magenheimer, Werner Maser, Ernst Topitsch, Günther Gillessen, Alfred M. de Zayas, Viktor Suvorov, and also Aleksandr Moiseevich Nekrich and Lev Kopelev, two former Soviet wartime commissars of Jewish extraction, for their courageous contributions to revisionist history. (Nor has Hoffmann been less than courageous: he testified in a German court to the scholarly quality of Germar Rudolf 's Holocaust revisionist anthology, Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte, later published in English as Dissecting the Holocaust.)
The extreme economic and political conditions that afflicted much of the first half of the twentieth century devastated Germany and Russia. The slaughter of the First World War, the triumph of Communism in Russia, the treaty of Versailles, and the Great Depression combined to culminate in the political storm of the century, the Second World War, much as unique and unforeseen meteorological conditions in October 1991 -- three merging hurricanes -- combined to create what writer Sebastian Junger called "the perfect storm," a devastating "nor'easter" in the North Atlantic. In historians such as Suvorov and Hoffmann, the historical tempest of the twentieth century is, increasingly, finding able and objective chroniclers.

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About the Author
Daniel W. Michaels is a Columbia University graduate (Phi Beta Kappa, 1954) and a Fulbright exchange student to Germany (1957). Now retired after 40 years of service with the U.S. Department of Defense, he writes from his home in Washington, DC.

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http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v20/v20n6p59_Michaels.html

Walter N. Sanning : Soviet Scorched-Earth Warfare: Facts And Consequences

INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW

Soviet Scorched-Earth Warfare: Facts And Consequences

By Walter N. Sanning


The Soviet scorched-earth policy has many facets: Military, economic, and so on. In The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry I touched only on those which are of importance in connection with the demographic changes of Eastern European Jewry. Here I want to emphasize the economic side of a little-known portion of the Second World War. However, in order to present the whole picture I must refer to portions of the subject which have already been covered in The Dissolution. Space allows only the most important references to those findings, and anybody who wishes to know more about this is advised to check The Dissolution.
The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty of 23 August 1939 provided for the following territorial divisions: Estonia and Latvia would fall into the Soviet sphere of interest while Lithuania would fall into the German. From Lithuania the line of demarcation would run toward East Prussia, from there along the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers toward the Carpathian mountains (Map 1). /1 After the Polish defeat, the Soviet government immediately exerted heavy pressure on Germany for a revision of the treaty. In order to maintain peace, Hitler agreed in the second treaty, the so-called Border and Friendship Agreement of 28 September 1939, that Germany would relinquish its interest in most of Lithuania in exchange for the area between the Vistula and the Bug rivers with a population of about 3.5 million, including more than 300,000 Jews. /2 This area had been occupied by the Soviets for only a few days, but the Red Army had taken the area's food supplies and livestock with it as it departed. As a result the Germans actually had to bring in large quantities of food to forestall starvation in this agricultural area. /3 This episode should have been a lesson to Germany. It was not.
While Germany was engaged in the Western Campaign from 10 May until 24 June, 1940, the Soviet Union occupied the entirety of Lithuania between 16 and 22 June following the ultimatum of 15 June - that is, including even that portion which was to remain within the German sphere of interest according to the treaty. This occupation constituted not only a gross violation of the two Soviet-German treaties but also of the Soviet-Lithuanian Treaty of Mutual Assistance (10 October 1939). The German government was neither consulted nor informed of this Soviet action as required under the treaty provisions. /4 The northern Bukovina region of Rumania, which was outside the agreed-upon Soviet sphere of interest, was similarly appropriated by the Soviets, although in this case the Soviets pressured Germany into giving its "consent" within an ultimative time period of 24 hours before occupation (Map 2). I mention these developments only because they demonstrate the determination with which Russia removed German strategic advantages while improving her own. They also show that Germany had no definite military objectives against the Soviet Union because otherwise it is inconceivable that she would have tolerated Soviet usurpation of the strategically invaluable Lithuanian gateway to Leningrad and Moscow.

Scorched Earth

Faced with a massive build-up of Soviet military strength across the line of demarcation, concerned by the Soviet breach of the so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact and forewarned by new and enormous Soviet demands for geographic concessions in Europe, Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. The Soviets immediately began to execute German prisoners-of-war right after capture or a short interrogation. Even seriously wounded soldiers were not spared. Numerous high level orders to this effect are on record. The West German Military History Research Institute (Militaergeschichtliche Forschungsamt), which is not known for its pro-German bias, puts the percentage of captured German soldiers who died while in Soviet captivity in the years 1941-1942 at 90-95 percent. /5a Within days after hostilities began, the Kremlin's Central Committee issued orders to the effect that only scorched earth be left to the enemy. Everything of value was ordered to be destroyed, regardless of the needs of the civilian population left behind. For this purpose special demolition battalions were sent into action. The above-mentioned Military Research Institute commented further: "From the very beginning of the war Stalin and the leadership of the Soviet Union indicated through these measures that as far as they were concerned the armed conflict with Germany was of an entirely different character than the historical 'European national wars'." /5b
The measures taken by the Soviet Union between 1940 and 1942 aimed not only at furthering the Soviet war effort, but also at harming the German enemy even at the cost of huge losses of life among Soviet civilians. The Soviet scorched-earth strategy included the deportation of millions of men, women and children; the resettlement and reestablishment of thousands of factories; the withdrawal of almost the entire railway rolling stock; the-annihilation of raw material depots; the removal of most of the agricultural machinery, cattle and grain stocks; the systematic destruction, burning and blowing up of the immovable infrastructure, inventories of all kinds, factory buildings, mines, residential areas, public buildings, public records, and even cultural monuments; and the intentional starvation of the civilian population which remained behind to face German occupation. It was basically a policy which unscrupulously used the civilian population as a strategic pawn. The extent and timing of this policy action is confirmed by so many sources that no real difference of opinion exists in this regard. What is strange is how scantily it has been covered so far in the scholarly literature. Until now, this policy has not been analyzed to the extent it deserves with an eye to identifying the party responsible for the conflict, nor to appreciating the German difficulties in prosecuting a war along established civilized lines, nor to assessing the claims of German brutality in Russia, nor to sizing up the numerical potential of the alleged German genocide of Soviet Jews, or indeed, of the Soviet Slavs.
Long before the outbreak of the German-Soviet conflict, Stalin had begun to prepare for a future war in Europe when he began to develop heavy industry in the Urals and Western Siberia starting with the first Five-Year Plan which commenced in 1928. His plans were for the long run. In the early 1930s he had already announced his determination to overtake the most advanced industrialized countries with respect to industrial and military capacity not later than 1941 /6 -- the year when, according to numerous admissions of Soviet leaders, including Stalin's son, the Red Army would strike Germany late that summer. /7 With the help of thousands of engineers and experts from Europe and North America, the core of the Soviet armaments industry was established in the region where Europe meets Asia. Millions of Soviet citizens were also mercilessly sacrificed in the drive to attain Soviet military supremacy. The Ural industrial region was covered with a far-flung network of power lines and electric-power generation plants. In 1940, this rather underpopulated area, with just four percent of the Soviet population, produced 4 billion kWh of electricity, and the existing capacity allowed for a great expansion. /8 By comparison, the Soviet territory later occupied by Germany - the so-called Occupied Eastern Territories - produced no more than 10 billion kWh before the war even though it accounted for about 40 percent of the Soviet population. In other words, on a per capita basis the electric power output of the Urals region was four times larger. In preparation for the coming conflict, substitute factory building shells were raised all across the southern Urals and western Siberia for the purpose of accepting the machinery from the territory the German enemy might threaten during the anticipated hostilities. A railroad network far out of proportion to the needs of this thinly populated area was vigorously expanded right up to the outbreak of war. /9
As soon as the Germans crossed the frontier, the Soviets put their Plan of Economic Mobilization into action. This plan incorporated the possibility that the enemy might succeed in occupying large sections of the country - as had happened during the First World War. For this reason detailed plans specified the locations to which the dismantled factories should be transported and the successive steps in which the removal was to take place. The interrelationships between the individual enterprises and their dependence on one another were painstakingly taken into account. /10 The carefully executed plan included the removal and evacuation of equipment and people 8-10 days before the retreat of the Red Army, followed by 24 hours of extensive destruction by special demolition squads just prior to the retreat. If necessary, the Soviet troops would put up last-ditch resistance to provide sufficient time for their demolition squads to complete their tasks.
Destination addresses found by the surprised Germans pointed practically always in the direction of the Ural industrial region, specifically to the area encompassed by Sverdlovsk, Molotov, Ufa, Chkalov, and Magnitogorsk. This was the region where the factory shells had been built years before the war and where the equipment dismantled in the factories of the western Soviet Union was reassembled. /11
In just the first three months after the outbreak of war more than 1360 large industrial enterprises were transplanted and the movable equipment of thousands of collective farms was transported to the interior. It seems that owing to the brutal regimentation of the miserable deportees the evacuated enterprises rose in an unbelievably short time at their new locations: it took just three to four weeks to reassemble large factories and enterprises. The workers had to labor 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week. Within three to four months Soviet production had again reached prewar levels. /12
The Soviet feat was possible only because millions of trained workers, managers, engineers and specialists had been transported to those areas along with their factories. As early as February 1940, German intelligence had reported the systematic deportation of the Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish population from the western Ukraine. /13 In June 1940, up to one million Jewish refugees from German-occupied Poland along with many hundreds of thousands of Poles were deported to Siberia. Then, a few weeks before 22 June 1941, mass deportations of the civilian populations along the entire frontier with Germany, Hungary, and Rumania took place. The Soviets, informed by their own spies, Allied intelligence, and German traitors, lost no time in removing those civilians who were most critically needed in the Ural armaments centers. /14
Soviet historians admitted years ago that the Soviet Union had laid plans long before the war to put the entire Soviet railroad system on a war footing overnight. The purpose was to prevent the Germans from getting hold of the strategic rolling equipment. The Soviet success in this endeavor was almost total: Despite the huge number of rail cars, locomotives, and special transportation equipment in the frontier areas, and the deployment of troops and war materials for the gigantic Soviet military build-up in preparation for an attack on central Europe, most of the rolling stock was removed in time before the Germans struck in a lightning preventive action on 22 June 1941. During the first five weeks, when German armies pushed hundreds of miles into the Soviet interior, only 577 locomotives, 270 passenger cars and 21,947 rail freight cars were captured. In relative terms, this amounted to just 2.3. 0.8 and 2.5 percent respectively. /15
During the first few months of the war one million railroad cars loaded with industrial equipment, raw materials, and people departed from the frontline areas. /16 I won't delve into specifics of the scale of the Soviet program of deporting the civilian population. This I have done in some detail in The Dissolution. Suffice it here to note that before the war upward of 90 million people were living in the Soviet areas conquered by Germany during the Second World War. The Soviets deported anywhere between 25 and 30 million of them. They concentrated their deportation efforts on specific groups. Thus, they preferred the urban to the rural population, the skilled to the unskilled, and large educated minorities (Jews and Russians in the Ukraine, White Russia, and in the Baltic countries) to the more hostile native population. Because the Soviets had begun their deportation program long before the outbreak of the war and because the western frontier areas were generally not densely populated, the Soviet cities which fell into German hands during the first few days and weeks of the war were greatly depopulated - up to 90 percent in some cases and over 50 percent on the average. The cities tended to show greater deportation percentages if they were located in the Ukraine or White Russia, rather than in the Baltic countries; if they were located near the western frontier rather than further east; and if they had large educated minorities than if the native population predominated. /17
In summary, the scorched-earth policy was extremely well geared to Soviet objectives. A huge armaments program had been initiated 13 years before 1941 and long before Adolf Hitler was in sight as a serious contender for German leadership. Extensive investments had been made in a rather thinly populated and underdeveloped area in order to develop its transportation facilities, power stations and network, and heavy industry. Last but not least, substitute factories had been systematically erected, ready to accept the industrial equipment from the more developed Soviet areas to the west should an unfavorable course of the war necessitate their removal to safer areas. What was lacking, however, was the social infrastructure, such as housing and hospitals, to accommodate the many millions of civilians deported there between 1940 and 1941. As a result, 15-20 million civilians died of epidemics, hunger, overwork, lack of housing, lack of clothing and the brutal Siberian winter.

The Economic Breakdown in the Occupied Eastern Territories

The picture presenting itself to the advancing German troops was one of despair. Of the railroad system only the tracks remained. The rolling stock was gone. Water works and power stations were destroyed. In order to organize the production of war-essential raw materials and mineral oil products, the Germans created the so-called Economic Staff East.
However, the Soviet strategy of scorching the earth very quickly forced the Economic Staff to reactivate all productive facilities of any kind. Even the production of consumer goods was included in its program, because domestic industry was incapable of resuming production on its own following the almost total destruction and dismantling by the Soviets and the deportation of most of the managerial personnel and technical specialists.
Of the original power generation capacity of 2.57 million kW in the Occupied Eastern Territories - which was equivalent to roughly one-fourth of total prewar Soviet generating capacity-less then one-eighth (300,000 kW) was found to be intact. Soviet demolition efforts were so thorough that until the end of March 1943, capacity could be increased to not more than 630,000 kW, which was still only one-quarter of the prewar level. /18 (See Table 1.)

Table 1 Power Generation in the Occupied Eastern Territories (1,000 kW)
	Total	RK Ukraine (incl. Military Area South)	RK Ostland	Military Area North and Center
Before the war	2570 (100%)	2200 (100%)	270 (100%)	100 (100%)
After Soviet retreat	300 (12%)	145 (7%)	135 (50%)	20 (20%)
March 1943	630 (24%)	350 (16%)	240 (90%)	40 (40%)
Source: Wirtschaftsgrößenordnungen für die besetzen Ostgebiete, 9 March 1943, Berlin: Chefgruppe W im Wirtsschaftsstab Ost (Military Archives Freiburg; Bestand RW 31/260).

And yet, regional differences were quite obvious. In the Reichskommissariat (RK) Ostland (Baltic countries and White Russia) about half of the original capacity of 270,000 kW was found to be intact and until the end of March 1943 almost 90 percent of the former capacity was returned to operation. But in the Ukraine only 7 percent (145,000 kW) of the original power-generation capacity of 2.2 million kW was still operational. The thoroughness of the Bolsheviks is shown by the fact that until the end of March 1943, not more than 350,000 kW were usable again. This was just 16 percent of prewar capacity. These figures refer only to available capacities. In practice, these were rarely operated fully because of the growing partisan menace and an almost total lack of coal supplies. Obviously, industrial production had been dealt a fatal blow. As mentioned already, electric power generation before the war amounted to 10 billion kWh annually in the Occupied Eastern Territories. The German administration succeeded in producing only 750 million kWh from the time of occupation until the end of 1942. For the year 1943 the planned increase to 1.4 billion kWh - which would still have been 86 percent below pre-war levels -was never attained as only 1 billion kWh were actually produced. /19 It is significant that the planned increases in manufacturing and mining production for the year 1943 were realized in only a few cases. Actual production of essential raw materials or energy supplies fell far short of stated goals despite the high priority attached to redeveloping the Ukrainian economy.
The effects of the systematic destruction by the Soviets on industrial production are shown in Table 2.

Table 2 Industrial Production in the Occupied Eastern Territories from theTime of Occupation until the End of 1943
Category	Unit	Production before Occupation	Production percent of until end of 1942	1941-1943 prewar pro In 1943	Induction average until year end 1943	Plan fulfillment in the year 1943
Electricity	bill. kWh	10.0	7.5%	10.0%	8.8%	71%
Coal	mill. tons	85.0 (1940)	2.1%	2.7%	2.4%	26%
Iron ore	mill. tons	16.5 (1938)		2.3%	1.2%	10%
Crude Steel	mill. tons	12.0 (1940)	0.2%	0.1%	0.1%	2%
Cement	mill. tons	2.0 (1938)	15.0%	8.2%	11.6%	31%
Lignite	mill. tons	0.5 (1938)	56.0%	90.0%	73.0%	23%
Peat	mill. tons	8.0 (1938)	56.0%	35.1%	45.6%	51%
Manganese ore	mill. tons	1.4 (1938)	45.0%	81.4%	63.6%	80%
Shale	mill. tons	1.7 (1938)	50.6%	76.2%	63.5%	68%
Shale oil	1000 tons	160.0 (1938)	33.8%	67.3%	50.5%	82%
Petroleum*	1000 tons	370.0 (1938)	67.8%	21.0%	44.7%	31%
Phosphate rock	1000 tons	175.0 (1938)	7.6%	47.9%	27.8%	98%
Mercury	tons	300.0 (1938)	7.6%	4.0%	5.5%	12%
* Inculding mineral oil production of Drohobycz (Galicia/General Government of Poland) Source: Bericht über die Tätigkeit der Chefgruppe Wirtschaft in Reichsministererium für die besetzen Ostgebiete, 20 November 1943, Berlin: Wirtschaftsstab Ost (Military Archives Freiburg; Bestand RW 31/260). Wirtschaftsgrößenordnungen für die besetzen Ostgebiete, 9 March 1943, Berlin: Chefgruppe W im Wirtsschaftsstab Ost (Military Archives Freiburg; Bestand RW 31/260).

The basic industrial structure -- coal, iron ore, crude steel, electricity, and cement -- was for all practical purposes totally destroyed. Compared with pre-war levels, coal mining averaged 2.4 percent, iron ore production 1.2 percent, crude steel production nothing, electricity 8.8 percent, and cement production 11.6 percent!
Another indication of the sorry state of the economy in German occupied Russia was the size of industrial manpower. In 1940, Soviet blue and white-collar workers numbered 31.2 million. /20 Even if their proportionate share in the regions later occupied by Germany was less than the Soviet average, it is reasonable to assume that there was a total of at least 10 million blue- and white-collar workers in these areas before the war. At the end of 1942, employment in industry (excluding the food industry) totalled only 750,000. In the purely industrial enterprises, that is, excluding the handicrafts, the number of employees was just 600,000 (Table 3)

Table 3 Number of Employees in Industry (excl. food) in the Occupied Eastern Territories - End of 1942
Area	Employees	(percent)
Baltic countries (of RK Ostland)	140,000	(24%)
White Russia (General District)	25,000
Military Area North	14,475
Military Area Center	40,000	(76%)
RK Ukraine	150,000
Military Area South	219,893
Total	600,000	(100%)
Source: Bericht über die Tätigkeit der Chefgruppe Wirtschaft in Reichsministererium für die besetzen Ostgebiete, 20 November 1944, Military Archives Freiburg; Bestand RW 31/260, p. 4.

Six hundred thousand in an area which prior to the war had a population of perhaps 75 million! Even if we add the unknown number of people employed in the food industry, it is obvious that industrial employment under German administration was equivalent to one-tenth of prewar levels at most. To make matters worse, the productivity of this remnant manpower was far below prewar standards. It is noteworthy that although the Baltic countries (the largest of which, Lithuania, had very little industry) accounted for only 8 percent of the prewar population of the Occupied Eastern Territories, they nevertheless furnished one quarter of the industrial manpower under German administration (Table 3).
Soviet deportations reduced skilled personnel to such an extent that not enough local managerial or technical experts could be found in the Occupied Eastern Territories for even the tiny number of remaining industrial employees. The Germans were forced to bring in about 10,000 civilian specialists from the Reich in order to overcome the most severe personnel shortages. /21 On the basis of available statistics I estimate that the Soviets deported at least 70 percent of the workers prior to German occupation. This means that the number of workers available to the German administration (generally lesser-skilled) was about 2 to 3 million. Inasmuch as not more than a million could be put back to work despite the enormous need for every kind of production, unemployment assumed huge proportions (50-70 percent) in the midst of a vociferous demand for goods of any kind.
According to Soviet Prof. Telpuchowski, the areas occupied by the Germans until November 1941 accounted for 63 percent of the coal, 68 percent of pig iron, 58 percent of the steel, 60 percent of the aluminum, 38 percent of grains and 84 percent of the sugar produced in the entire Soviet Union before the war. /22 The documents of the German Economic Staff East show essentially very similar magnitudes. The Soviets managed to make all this unavailable to the German enemy. The means employed were ruthless dismantling, demolition, fire, sabotage and deportation. Instead of adding to Germany's military strength, these areas became a tremendous drain on her already strained industrial capacity.

Hunger

As for the conquered raw material supplies, the following secret report of the German Economic Staff for the period 1-10 October 1941, provides a vivid description of the situation:

Few supplies of any size have been found so that care will have to be taken during the hostilities ... It appears that all raw material stocks were either systematically removed from the areas conquered so far or made unusable. Thus, the small quantities found until now are not a significant help in relieving the raw material needs of the Reich.... The factories have not been supplied with raw materials for some time. /23

The same situation applied in the case of food, especially grains. An interdepartmental proposal of the Economic Staff dated 3 October 1941 on the supplies needed for Russian cities even went so far as to suggest that the remaining larger cities not yet in German hands should be cut off and encircled, and that their capitulation should not be accepted.
This, of course, was militarily quite out of the question, but it shows the desperation with which the German authorities of the conquered areas viewed the effects of the Soviet strategy of leaving it up to the occupying armies to feed millions of starving Soviet citizens! The report continued:

It has been our experience that the Russians remove or destroy systematically all of the food supplies before retreating. The urban population of the conquered cities thus will either have to be fed by the Wehrmacht or it will have to starve. Obviously, by forcing us to provide additional food to the Russian population, the Russian leadership intends to worsen the already difficult food situation of the German Reich through a reduction of the domestic German food supply. As a matter of fact, the present food situation permits us to feed the Russian urban population from our own stocks only if we reduce the supplies to the Army or if we lower the rations at home. /24

During the very early period of the war, Soviet destruction in the agricultural sector was confined to the machine and tractor stations. As a rule, these stations were found empty and the machines and vehicles left behind had been made unusable. At first, cattle stocks were relatively intact. But this changed rapidly during the following weeks. As the war progressed from west to east, almost no cattle, grain and gasoline supplies were found. The Luftwaffe and prisoners of war reported that the Soviets busily harvested the fields as they retreated. After the Ukraine was liberated, it became obvious that the food situation would slowly but surely become catastrophic. In many cases even seed grains had to be distributed to help the starving Ukrainians. This, in turn, reduced the acreage that could be planted at a time when the lack of tractors, gasoline, and draft horses had already made its negative effects felt. It is estimated that the so-called Occupied Eastern Territories produced 43 million tons of grain under Soviet rule in 1940. Under German administration the recorded harvest in 1941 was not more than 13 million tons. One reason for this small harvest was the fact that the German drive into Russia was swiftest in the northern and center sections of the theater of war, thus enabling the Soviets to take with them or destroy considerable parts of the harvest in the Ukraine. In 1942 even less was harvested, only 11.7 million tons. According to Dallin, the German administration succeeded in seeding not more than three quarters of the prewar acreage. Fertilizer was practically unavailable and the yield per acre was correspondingly lower in 1942. Compared to the average yields per hectare of approximately 2200 pounds (14 bushels/acre) in the Ukraine in the late 1930s, the Germans managed to obtain just 1500 pounds (10 bushels/acre). /25 Furthermore, the Soviet scorched earth policy now began to show its full effects: The use of seed grains to relieve the worst hunger in the cities, the increasing partisan menace and the dearth of personnel and machinery reduced the harvest potential drastically.
German supervisory personnel in the countryside were much too thinly spread to enforce effectively a strict delivery of agricultural products. To be sure, at the expense of the goodwill and the pro-German attitude of the peasant population, it was possible to locate and requisition some additional agricultural produce for the cities, but, judging by the misery in the cities, this was by far not rigorous enough. Of course, the Germans periodically tried to "comb through" the countryside to find these hoarded stocks but their efforts were marked with little success. The retreating Red Army had removed the entire organization necessary to collect and distribute the harvest of the collectivized agriculture system, and the German administration was forced to set up its own collection and distribution system for agricultural products-not an easy task considering the harrowing wartime conditions. Not only was time much too short and wartime conditions simply too severe to organize such an administration successfully, but the brutality with which the Bolsheviks had enforced their claims on agricultural production was simply not in keeping with the German mentality or German policy which -- contrary to Allied and Soviet propaganda -- aimed at finding a basis of mutual understanding with the liberated Slavic and Baltic populations.
Far from the ruthlessness which supposedly characterized German occupation rule in Russia, the plain fact is that, as a central European nation, the Germans never came to grips with the inhumane concept of total warfare as applied by their Soviet foe. As even Jewish historian Alexander Dallin admits: "Soviet collection (of the harvest) had, in practice, been far more efficient (italics added) than the German. As a result, peasants in German-held areas were often able to hide larger stocks than before the war. In all probability concealed reserves remained substantial,..." /26 From 1941 until 1943, 15,000 rail cars loaded with agricultural equipment and machines left Germany for the Occupied Eastern Territories under the so-called Ostackerprogramm ("Eastern soil program"). This included 7,000 tractors, 20,000 generators, 250,000 steel plows, and 3,000,000 scythes. Furthermore, thousands of bulls, cows, swine, and stallions were sent to those areas for breeding purposes to raise the quality of the livestock. Available statistics indicate that German agricultural assistance between July 1941 and tune 1943 amounted to 445 million RM (Reichsmarks). /27
The net prewar Soviet harvest of 1940 yielded 82 million tons of grain, of which about 30 percent was set aside for seed and feed purposes. Theoretically, the Soviet population thus had available 57 million tons, or a little less than 800 grams daily per person. In practice, of course, it was less, because part of this volume was set aside in reserve in anticipation of the coming war with Germany. /28 Assuming that 30 percent of the recorded harvest of only 13 millions tons under German occupation in 1941 was set aside for seed and feed purposes, only 9 million tons were left for the native population. Of that amount 2 million tons were taken by the German army. The amount requisitioned by the German army was rather moderate indeed. This is shown by the fact that the Red Army used 31/4 million tons of grain in 1940, the last year of peace! While another 350,000 tons were shipped off to Germany, this was offset by the significant but unknown portion of the grain volume sequestered by the German army but used to feed the native urban civilian population. /29 In any case, the civilian population of about 50 million was thus left with only about 7 million tons. On a per capita basis this amounted to less than 400 grams daily (less than one pound) - only half as much as in 1940. Meat and fats were not available as a general rule. But this average does not mean very much. On the one hand, we noted that the harvests probably were considerably larger than German statistics indicate. This means that at least the rural population which was the majority, was able to enjoy a considerably better and more plentiful diet. Also, many urban dwellers were able to obtain food from the peasants on the illegal, but difficult to control black market. In this way the cities obtained from the peasants some of the food which German authorities were unable to trace On the other hand, transportation was often an insurmountable problem so that even the minimal supply of food arrived in the cities either late or not at all. Moreover, partisans either destroyed or confiscated large parts of the harvested grain. Finally, German authorities often tried to obtain extra rations for workers in war-essential factories. Of course, this was only possible at the expense of the rest of the population. The fact that German authorities did not even succeed in getting the special rations for the workers in war-essential industries or for those doing heavy manual labor, as they were entitled, shows how serious the situation was. /30 Those urban residents who were either unemployed or did not have anything to trade with the peasants were really in trouble: Starvation was their fate.
To show the desperate food situation in the cities of German occupied Russia, I will quote from the regular secret reports of the Economic Staff East sent to Berlin:

11 November 1941: The scarcity of food and the lack of even the most essential consumer goods are the main reason why the morale of the Russian and Ukrainian population is becoming more and more depressed ... Kiev received no grain whatever since its occupation on 19 September 1941 ... The partisans take food from the civilian population at night and force physically able men to join them. In part, food supplies are being burned down by the partisans. Especially great difficulties exist in the southern area where it is impossible to feed all of the prisoners of war because of their huge numbers.... The authorities are constantly at pains to find enough to eat for the prisoners, although gruel and buckwheat are available only in limited quantities.... We are very concerned about our ability to feed the urban population in the southern areas. /31
8 December 1941: The food situation in the city of Kharkov is extremely critical. There is almost nothing for the population to eat. Bread is not available. /32
22 January 1942: The regular distribution of food to the urban civilian population in the southern area must be restricted more and more, and this is not likelv to change in the foreseeable future. /33
23 February 1942: The supply of food to the civilian population of the larger cities is so critical that it is cause for the most serious warnings. /33
1 March 1942: The morale is low because of food problems.... In the densely populated Donets area especially no food has been distributed at all to the population. As a result, several thousand people have died of hunger so far. In some cases even highly qualified specialists and professors were among the victims. /33
5 March 1942: The food situation continues to be very serious and in some cities there is actual starvation. In Pushkin it was discovered that there was a trade in human flesh which was offered to the population as pork. /33
16 March 1942 (Report by the commander of the military rear central areas): In the large cities (the food situation) continues to be unsatisfactory and in Kharkov it is catastrophic. As time goes on it becomes ever more difficult to feed the urban population ... /33
3 June 1942: The food situation in the cities grows worse and worse because part of the food supplies collected for the population had to be used for seeding and part of the supplies were destroyed bv the partisans. /33

The unceasing efforts by the German civil and military authorities to provide a sufficient supply of food to the civilian population within their narrow means were brought to naught by the terribly poor harvests, the catastrophic transport situation, the partisan menace, the removal of the food depots by the Soviets and the impossibility of organizing a satisfactory regular exchange of goods between the large cities and the countryside. While the food supply of the rural population and the small towns was relatively secure, the civilian population of the large cities and the millions of prisoners faced naked starvation. Soviet savagery thus became a legacy of German guilt.

German Counter-Measures

If for no other reason than self-interest, the Germans tried to relieve the catastrophic economic situation and stabilize the economy by importing huge amounts of capital from Germany. Equipment worth one billion RM was imported from the Reich for the mining, energy and manufacturing sectors alone. To this must be added the considerable costs incurred for the transportation sector as well as for road-building equipment, the value of which has been estimated at more than one billion RM. After adding the considerable quantities of coal used as fuel for civilian railroad freight transport, German reconstruction aid for industry and the infrastructure may have totalled more than 2.5 billion RM. /34 This amount does not include agricultural assistance worth about a half-billion RM. The extent of German aid to the civilian sector may be better appreciated if one realizes that the gross value of industrial production in those areas (valued on the basis of domestic German prices) from the beginning of the occupation until the end of 1943 amounted to approximately 5 billion RM. (This figure includes the industrial raw materials, finished goods, and repairs furnished by that economy to the German army.) /35 Although it is not known precisely what portion of this gross value was actual value-added, comparisons with other countries would suggest that it must have been a little more than 2 billion RM./36 In other words, German non-agricultural economic aid was larger than the entire industrial output of these territories during the time of occupation! The annual net output per worker amounted to 1,000 RM per year. By comparison: The German worker attained a net production of 4,000 RM in the year 1936. /37
Naturally, a large part of the much-reduced volume of industrial production was absorbed by the German occupation army. Thus, German army requirements and, to an even greater extent, the Soviet scorched-earth strategy, reduced the supply of consumer goods for a native population of about 50 million to almost nothing. The reason for the failure of the German administration to provide sufficient food for the native urban population is best demonstrated by this dilemma. Consumer goods production was practically non-existent because of Soviet destruction and evacuation of all industrial plants and raw materials, the deportation of the trained industrial manpower, and the impossibility of quickly repairing damages. Thus, there was nothing the urban populations could offer to the peasants in exchange for their food. And since the peasant was unable to buy anything for the money he received, he was unwilling to part with his produce.
German economic aid to the occupied Soviet territories amounted to roughly one percent of German gross national product of those years. /38 Even today, this figure is not matched by the level of foreign aid of the industrial nations to developing countries. West Germany, for example, extended foreign aid amounting to about one-half of one percent of GNP since 1960, that is, at a time of relative prosperity and low defense outlays. Indeed, the economic assistance of about 3 billion RM (including both industrial and agricultural aid) furnished to the economy of the occupied Soviet area is even more remarkable when one realizes this this amount was equivalent to one-fourth of aggregate gross fixed investment in Greater Germany in the years 1942 and 1943 (12 billion RM). /39
A comparison of the straight economic tonnage exchanged between the Reich and the Occupied Eastern Territories provides additional information on non-military exchange between those two years. Unfortunately, only data for the year 1943 could be found. (Table 4)

Table 4 Non-military Transports between the German Reich and the Occupied Eastern Territories in the Year 1943 (1,000 tons)
	From the Occupied Eastern Territories into the Reich
By Rail	4,259
On waterways	536	4,795
	From the Reich into the Occupied Eastern Territories
By Rail	2,126
On waterways	1,911	4,037
Source: Reichsministererium fuer die besetzen Ostgebiete. Bericht über die Tätigkeit der Chefgruppe Wirtschaft in Reichsministererium für die besetzen Ostgebiete, 20 November 1944, Military Archives Freiburg; Bestand RW 31/260.

In terms of tonnage, about 20 percent more freight entered Germany than was delivered by the Reich. Considering that about 2 million tons of grain were furnished by the Occupied Eastern Territories to the German armies in 1943, /40 the tonnage ration of exchange of 7 to 4 was indeed favorable to Germany. However, the goods made available by those territories were mainly staples (raw materials, ores, etc.) with relatively low weight-specific values, while the products from Germany had very high weight-specific values (with the exception of coal to run the railroads, of course). Inasmuch as finished goods tend to be many times more valuable, pound for pound, than staple products, it would seem that the exchange was much more favorable for the Occupied Eastern Territories, even though this rough approximation certainly does not permit us to calculate the actual value of the trade even within a wide margin of error. On balance, the Occupied Eastern Territories delivered agricultural products worth 1.6 billion RM to the Reich and the German armies. /41 The deliveries of German machines, tractors, generators, equipment of all kinds for industry and agriculture, vehicles, railroad coal, etc., amounted to roughly 3.0 billion RM, leaving a difference of about 1.4 billion RM in favor of the Occupied Eastern Territories. From this we would have to deduct the value of captured raw material supplies, the ores and other raw materials produced during the period of occupation, as well as repair services for the German army. It is unknown what value should be applied to these items. However, in view of the very small raw material depots found and the extremely low production of the largely defunct industry (a large part of the industrial output was actually used to rebuild the factories) it must be doubted whether more than 25 percent of industry's meager output of 2 billion RM was absorbed by the occupation forces. In short, the Occupied Eastern territories as such added little in economic terms to the fight against the common Bolshevik enemy. In fact, they were the beneficiaries of an almost unbelievably generous reconstruction assistance. This aid, like all so-called foreign aid, was hardly made for purely altruistic reasons. Nevertheless, it was unique in the history of relations between an occupying power and the conquered territory of a country with which it was still locked in mortal combat.
It would be too simplistic to attribute the German economic failure in Russia simply to the Soviet success in dismantling, removing and destroying the industrial base, infrastructure and raw material supplies, to the deportation of millions of workers or to the increasing partisan threat. All of these factors were no doubt very important. Another aspect, however, was at least as significant. When Germany invaded the USSR she did so despite an almost total lack of knowledge of real Soviet military strength, of the size of Soviet arms production, of the capacity of the main centers of military industrial output, or of Soviet preparations for total war. Even worse, Germany was totally unprepared to overcome the serious transportation bottlenecks which developed almost immediately and had no plans whatever for running an economy which had depended on centralized planning directives from Moscow, where every kind of private initiative had been stifled, where the entire administrative, managerial and technical class had been deported and where public records had been largely removed. Not only did Soviet brutality and lack of any restraint differ from the practice during the historic national wars in Europe, but it soon also became apparent that the challenge of a smoking remains of an economy, run on an organizational pattern vastly different from that familiar to Europeans, posed insurmountable problems. The added liability of the disappearance of the entire organizational, administrative and technical apparatus turned a task which was almost impossible to begin with into chaos. Chaos brought starvation, and starvation brought support for the partisans. The book has not yet been written which analyses the German military defeat in Russia in terms of her failure to get the economy of the occupied territories organized effectively and producing again.
The lack of success in finding a solution to the food problem was partly due to Germany's inability to effectively revamp Soviet agriculture during the limited time available and to her scruples in burdening an already downtrodden population even further. Thus, assistance measures like the so-called Ostackerprogramm, while gigantic in terms of absolute aid to the agriculture of the Occupied Eastern Territories, were really doomed to failure from the start because they did not remove the cause of the problem. In effect, Germany tried to keep alive by artificial means the amputated trunk of a society devoid of its brains and muscles.

Implications

It is an indisputable fact that the systematic Soviet dismantling of factories and their shipment to the Urals, the carefully planned removal and destruction of raw materials stocks and food supplies, and the large-scale deportation of civilians were started long before 22 June 1941. Indeed, evidence indicated that these efforts were greatly intensified ten to fourteen days prior to that date. Now, we do not know whether Stalin believed that a German attack would come on the precise date of 22 June 1941, although Sorge and others had provided such information to him. Possibly, Stalin thought that Germany's military build-up was insufficient to allow her to strike on the day reported to him. But this is really beside the point. Both sides knew that the other would attack as soon as it was ready. This fact demolishes forever the charge of a German sneak attack on an unprepared, peace-loving Soviet Union. The initial German military successes were achieved not because of the element of surprise but despite Stalin's knowledge of German preventive action and despite a huge Soviet military build-up for an attack on central Europe, which was the reason for Germany's preventive war in the first place. Furthermore, the allegation of systematic German brutality in Russia is exposed as plain Soviet propaganda. It is true that starvation was widespread in the large cities of the German-occupied Soviet Union, that large numbers of Soviet prisoners-of-war died of hunger, that the Soviet cities were in ruins after the German armies retreated, and that the Soviet population suffered tens of millions of dead during the Second World War. However, we also know that the inhumane Soviet scorched-earth strategy was the cause of hunger in the German-occupied Soviet territories, of an orgy of destruction previously unknown in warfare, and of the death of up to 20 million Soviet civilians, many of whom had been deported to the frozen wastes of Siberia and the Urals where epidemics, lack of housing and medical care, unimaginably hard work loads, and an extreme climate allowed only the toughest to survive. Add the costly human-wave tactics of Soviet military strategy and it is evident that Soviet brutality alone was responsible for the unbelievably huge losses of life suffered by the peoples of the Soviet Union - more than 30 million dead!
The real number of Soviet war losses is not the main focus of this paper, and space does not permit a detailed examination of this subject here. However, an appendix has been added which attempts to arrive at a more realistic estimate of Soviet war casualties based on an analysis of postwar USSR census figures from 1959, 1970 and 1979 and a comparison with the Soviet census of 1939 adjusted to the extent possible for border and population changes between 1939 and 1945. Suffice it here to say that the Soviets lost more than 25 percent of their male and almost 9 percent of their female population. For the population left under Stalin's control at the height of German expansion in Russia, the equivalent losses are 33 percent and 13 percent. It is curious that contemporary standard treatments of Soviet wartime losses generally admit to just 20 million dead. Why this unusual understatement for a wartime ally? Well, to admit that the Soviets lost almost 20 million civilians rather than 6-7 million during the Second World War would place the responsibility for most of the non-military losses on the Soviets themselves.
Naturally, the alleged German rampage in Russia fits neatly into the "Holocaust" tale. After all, the area of the Soviet Union occupied by Germany had been populated by more than 3.5 million Jews before 22 June 1941. /42 If one adds the nearly one million Jewish refugees in eastern Poland in early 1940, it is obvious that to maintain the genocide charge it has been necessary to draw a curtain of silence around the Soviet long-term preparation, anticipation, thoroughness, brutality, and scale of scorching the earth during the Second World War. Since the historical framework within which the alleged German mass murder is supposed to have been perpetrated simply did not exist, it became necessary to create the myths which superficially appeared to be substantiated by what was obvious to everyone: The initial swift German advances and the horrible destruction of Soviet cities and countryside after the Germans were forced out again.
It is up to us to lift this curtain of silence and concealment and to replace the myth of Soviet unpreparedness with the horrible truth of Soviet scorched earth.

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Appendix

Soviet Casualties During the Second World War

The USSR has never published any data on Soviet war casualties. But the censuses taken in the post-war period can help give a good idea of the probable size of the Soviet losses. A distinction between military and non-military losses, however, still is not possible with any great degree of accuracy. The census of 17 January 1939 found a population of 170.56 million, of which 81.70 million (47.9%) were male. The first post-war census conducted in December 1959 counted 208.83 million inhabitants; males accounted for 94.05 million (45%) of them. A direct comparison between these two counts is not possible, though, because the Soviet Union annexed huge territories in eastern Europe in the period from September 1939 to the summer of 1940 and then again in 1945: the Baltic countries, eastern Poland, northern Bukovina, Bessarabia, and the Carpathian Ukraine. In the course of its territorial expansion in the years 1939 and 1940 the Soviet Union absorbed at least 24 million Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Jews, White Russians, Ukrainians, Poles and Rumanians, to name just the most important nationalities. Also, between January 1939 and June 1941 the natural excess of births over deaths added another 7-8 million people. Thus, at the beginning of the war with Germany in June 1941 there were about 202 million people under Soviet rule.
The sex structure of the Soviet population of 202 million (June 1941) was not affected by the incorporation of 24 million people between 1939 and 1940, because most of the absorbed territories had belonged to the Tsarist empire until 1917 and thus the enormous male casualties suffered during the First World War were reflected in the demographic structure of those areas as well. But the excess births over deaths between 1939 and 1941 did result in a very slight improvement of the male share to 48 percent. To summarize: Of the 202 million people in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the war in June 1941, 97 million were male (48%) and 105 million female (52%). A comparison of these figures with the census of 1959 is encumbered by the fact that after the war further territorial changes and forcible population exchanges with neighboring satellite countries took place. For example, the area around Bialystok, which was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, was returned to Communist post-war Poland. At the same time, the Soviets annexed the Carpathian Ukraine. Then, too, many Poles residing in eastern Poland were removed after the war to areas previously populated by Germans, while many Ukrainians living west of the line of the Bug and San rivers were transferred to Ukraine.

Development of the Soviet Population: 1939 to 1979 (millions)
	Male (percent)	Female (percent)	Total
Increase
Census of January 1939	81.70 (47.9)	88.86 (52.1)	170.56
a) Estimated resident population of eastern Poland, Baltic countries, northern Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Polish refugees from central Poland	+11.50 (47.9)	+12.50 (52.1)	+24.00
b) Estimated natural population growth until June 1941	+3.80 (51.0)	+3.64 (49.0)	+7.44
Estimate for June 1941	97.00 (48.0)	105.00 (52.0)	202.00
Soviet War Casualties*	23.87	9.00	32.87
Estimate for June 1945	73.13 (43.2)	96.00 (56.8)	169.13
Net increase 1945-1959
Births (at least)	30.10	30.10	60.2
Deaths (estimate)	9.18	11.32	20.5
Net total	20.92 (52.7)	18.78 (47.3)	39.70
Census of December 1959	94.05 (45.0)	114.78 (55.0)	208.83
Net increase 1959-1970	17.35 (52.7)	15.54 (47.3)	32.89
Census of January 1970	111.40 (46.1)	130.32 (53.9)	241.72
Net increase 1970-1979	10.90 (52.7)	9.78 (47.3)	20.68
Census of January 1979	122.30 (46.6)	140.10 (53.4)	262.40
* Difference between the 1941 and 1945 population estimates.

Whether all of these changes provided the Soviet Union with a net population gain or loss cannot be determined today with certainty. In addition, there is the well-known fact that many former Soviet citizens fled to the West when the German armies withdrew from Russia. Many of them were able to find their way to western countries despite Allied efforts to force them to return to the Soviet Union after 1945. But these lucky ones are more than matched by the millions deported by the Soviets from central and eastern Europe after the war. It is just about impossible to obtain even approximate figures for these population changes, but it can be argued (and this analysis starts from the basis) that these changes did not produce major additions or subtractions.
The total number and the sex composition of the Soviet population at the end of the war in 1945 can be estimated if we draw on the post-war censuses of December 1959, January 1970 and January 1979. The age groups of 0 to 15 years (1945-1959) accounted for 60.2 million people according to the census of December 1959. Available statistics indicate that the mortality rate averaged 0.72% between 1945 and 1959; on the basis of an average population of 190 million the total number of deaths during this period may be estimated at 20.5 million. Thus, the net population growth until 1959 was almost 40 million. Subtracting this figure from the 1959 population of about 209 million we arrive at a 1945-population of only 169 million! Finally, if we compare the 1941 figure (202 million) with the one for 1945, it is obvious that the Soviet Union's total war casualties amounted to 33 million! The distribution of this immense loss of life among both sexes can also be estimated by using the post-war censuses. Between 1959 and 1970 the net population gain was 32.89 million, and between 1970 and 1979 it was 20.68 million. Males accounted for 52.74 percent of this total increase of 53.57 million. Applying this percentage to the increase of barely 40 million between 1945 and 1959, it is obvious that males increased by almost 21 million.
The Soviet censuses of 1939, 1959, 1970 and 1979, as well as the estimates for the years 1941 and 1945, are listed above.
Despite the above-mentioned uncertainties pertaining to the various population movements, it is nevertheless possible to state with a great degree of probability that Soviet war losses during the Second World War exceeded 30 million and that only 73 million of the previous 97 million males survived the war. In short, more than 25 percent of the males had to sacrifice their lives for the Soviet cause! The female Soviet population suffered 9 million dead, or almost 9 percent. Citing official sources, the Swiss newspaper Die Tat (January 1955) reported 13.6 million Red Army deaths during the Second World War. The same figure was published by the Ploetz Publishing House in Wuerzburg/Germany, and other sources -- for example, the West German Historical Military Research Institute -- mentioned similar figures. If this huge military loss is accurate, Soviet civilian losses must have been 19.3 million, of which, in turn, 9 million were female and 10.3 million male. The terrible conditions behind Soviet lines, which included hunger, exhaustion, deaths from exposure to cold, epidemics, lack of medications and medical care, catastrophic living conditions (tents, earth huts), and the terror of an inhumane regime fighting for its survival, caused most of these deaths, as the 9 million female casualties indicate.

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Notes

1. Helmdach, Erich. Täuschungen und Versäumnisse, Berg am See: 1979, p. 155.
2. Brennecke, Gerhard. Die Nürnberger Geschichtsentstellung, Tuebingen: 1970, p. 303.
3. Fischer, Ludwig, and Friedrich Gollert. Warschau unter deutscher Herrschaft, Cracow: 1942, p. 186.
4. Brennecke, Die Nürnberger Geschichtsentstellung, pp. 303 and 322.
5. a. Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg (Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Ed.), Stuttgart: 1983, Volume 4, p. 785.
   b. ibid., p. 782.
6. Scott, John. Jenseits des Ural, Stockholm: 1944, p. 304.[English edition: Behind the Urals, Boston: 1942.]
7. Helmdach, Erich. Überfall? Der sowjetisch-deutsche Aufmarsch 1941, Neckargemuend/Germany: 1978, 4th Chapter.
8. Scott, Jenseits des Ural, p. 310.
9. ibid., pp. 303 and 310.
10. Telpuchowski, Boris Semionowitsch. Die Geschichte des Großen Vaterländischen Krieges 1941-1945, (Andreas Hillgruber and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, eds.), Frankfurt/Main: 1961, pp. 81-83, 86.
11. Wirtschaftsstab Ost. Vierzehntagesbericht Wi Stab Ost (3.8.-16.8. 1941), 30 August 1941, Military Archives Freiburg/Germany, Bestand RW 31/11.
12. Telpuchowski, Die Geschichte des Großen Vaterländischen Krieges, p. 81 and 82.
13. Aschenauer, Rudolf. Krieg ohne Grenzen, Leoni, 1982, p. 115.
14. Sanning, Walter N. The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, Torrance, Calif.: 1983, 3rd Chapter.
15. Reichswirtschaftsministerium. Die UdSSR Anfang 1941, (Date unknown), Federal Archives Koblenz/Germany, Bestand R 24/817.
16. Telpuchowski, Die Geschichte des Großen Vaterländischen Krieges, p. 84.
17. Sanning, The Dissolution, pp. 86-101.
18. Wirtschaftsstab Ost, Chefgruppe W. Wirtschaftsgrößenordnungen für die besetzten Ostgebiete, 3 March 1943, Military Archives Freiburg/Germany, Bestand RW 31/260.
19. Reichsministerium fuer die besetzten Ostgebiete. Bericht über die Tätigkeit der Chefgruppe Wirtschaft im Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete, 20 November 1944. Military Archives Freiburg/Germany, Bestand RW 31/260.
20. Telpuchowski, Die Geschichte des Großen Vaterländischen Krieges, p. 85.
21. Bericht über die Tätigkeit der Chefgruppe Wirtschaft im Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete, 20 November 1944, p. 4.
22. Telpuchowski, Die Geschichte des Großen Vaterländischen Krieges, p. 78.
23. Wirtschaftsstab Ost. Halbmonatsbericht Wi Stab Ost (1.-15.10.41), 2 November 1941, Military Archives Freiburg/Germany, Bestand RW 31/310.
24. Memorandum dated 3 October 1941, titled Die Versorgung der Städte Rußlands im noch unbesetzten Gebiet, Military Archives Freiburg/Germany, Bestand RW 31/11.
25. Dallin, Alexander. German Rule in Russia 1941-1945, London: 1957, p. 367.
26. ibid.
27. ibid., p. 368.
28. Perspektiven zur Verpflegungsversorgung der U.d.S.S.R. im Winterfeldzug 1942/43, (Date unknown), Chef d.Vers.d.200.Schtz. Div. der 5. Armee, Military Archives Freiburg/Germany, Bestand RW 31/23Z.
29. Dallin, German Rule in Russia, p. 375.
30. Letter from the Reichsminister fuer die besetzten Ostgebiete dated 5 August 1942 to Ministerialdirektor Riecke concerning the food supply of the civilian population in the Occupied Eastern Territories (Versorgung der Zivilbevölkerung in den besetzten Ostgebieten), Military Archives Freiburg/Germany, Bestand RW 31/310: contains excerpts from the secret monthly and special reports made by the Economic Staff East, the German military and the German civilian administration of the RK Ostland and the RK Ukraine.
31. Wirtschaftsstab Ost, Halbmonatsbericht Wi Stab Ost (16.-31.10.41), 27 November 1941, Military Archives Freiburg/Germany, Bestand RW 31/68.
32. Wirtschaftsstab Ost, Halbmonatsbericht Wi Stab Ost (1.-15.11.41), 8 December 1941, Military Archives Freiburg/Germany, Bestand RW 31/68.
33. Letter from the Reichsminister für die besetzten Ostgebiete dated 5 August 1942 to Ministerialdirektor Riecke.
34. Bericht über die Tätigkeit der Chefgruppe Wirtschaft im Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete, p. 5.
35. ibid.
36. Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1952 (Statistical Yearbook of the Federal Republic of Germany), Statistical Office, Wiesbaden, lists the value of production of industrial countries before the Second World War. Net production reached the following shares of gross production in the years indicated: U.S.A. (1939) 43%; United Kingdonl (1935) 42%; Canada (1937) 42%; Norway (1937) 36%; Denmark (1939) 47%; Finland (1937) 42%; South Africa (1937) 45%.
37. ibid.
38. Klein, Burton H. Germany's Economic Preparations for War, Cambridge/Mass.: 1959, p. 256. The gross national product of the German Reich for 1942 and 1943 was given as RM 143 and RM 160 billion, respectively. Relative to the entire reconstruction assistance of about RM 3 billion (incl. agricultural aid of RM 445 million) provided to the Occupied Eastern Territories this amounts to 1%.
39. ibid.
40. Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941-1945, p. 375.
41. ibid.
42. Sanning, The Dissolution, p. 52.
43. ibid., 4, Chapter.

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From The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1985 (Vol. 6, No. 1), pages 91-116. This paper was first presented at the Sixth IHR Conference, February 1985, in Anaheim, California.

About the Author

Walter N. Sanning is the pen name of a scholar and businessman who was born in 1936 into an ethnic German family in an area that for decades was a part of the former Soviet Union. After a childhood in wartime Germany, he migrated in the 1950s to the United States, where he met his wife. He graduated from a prominent Pacific Northwest university with a bachelor’s degree (high honors) in business.
With a scholarship, he was a graduate student at an East Coast Ivy League university, where he concentrated on international business, finance and economics. He then taught business, finance and economics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at a major West Coast university. The Sanning family moved to Germany in 1970, where he then worked for years for a major financial institution.
After teaching for some years at a prominent West Coast University, in the 1970s he went into private business, and assumed a leading position. He has devoted considerable time and effort to research in US and German archives. He is married, and speaks English and German. He and his wife have four children, all of them born in the United States.

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