Hitler’s great goal since the 1920s had now become the sole means of extricating Germany from its deadlock. The alternative was no longer, if it had ever been, either a Mediterranean or a continental bloc strategy; the choice now was between destruction of the Soviet Union and Germany’s ruin. With time running against him and the Mediterranean strategy dependent on the cooperation of unwilling or unable allies, Hitler decided to go it alone. The attack on the Soviet Union was the only practical alternative left—and one, moreover, that not only accorded with his long-term goals but also seemed the less risky option. On 18 December 1940, therefore, he signed Directive No. 21 (Operation Barbarossa), which demanded that the Wehrmacht should “crush the Soviet Union in a rapid campaign.” On 9 January 1941, he told his generals, “The enormous Russian space holds immeasurable riches. Germany must control it economically and politically…. In that way it would have at its disposal the means by which in the future to fight a war of continents: it could no longer be beaten by anyone.” This operation, he boasted, would “make the world hold its breath.”40
In a bitter irony, the victories of 1940 had not brought Germany relief from its strategic and economic problems, nor had they resulted in a swift end to the war. As a result, Hitler saw the way out of the German dilemma not through negotiation but by expanding the war. He most likely decided for war against Russia in late July 1940 but in characteristic fashion proved willing to keep his options open and explore alternatives. If they served to knock Great Britain out of the war and cleared Germany’s rear for the showdown in the east, fine; if not, he could do nothing in the east until spring 1941 anyway. None of the alternatives proved successful, which simply reinforced his conviction that he had been correct in opting to invade Russia. Germany could not afford to wait since from 1942 on the German position was bound to deteriorate while a successful operation promised to remove the Soviet threat, drive Britain from the war, forestall any American intervention, and win living space necessary for German security. In the end, Hitler believed that the only way to get out of his dilemma and to retain the initiative was to expand the violence. Given the geographic and economic constraints on Germany, the success of blitzkrieg in 1940 offered the means by which to escape this straitjacket. From Hitler’s perspective, then, a compelling logic—a combination of strategic, economic, political, ideological, and time pressures—had driven him in the direction he wanted to go in any case. The logic of escalatory violence, however, also meant that the resulting war in the Soviet Union would be pitiless and harsh.41
With his decision for war with the Soviet Union, Hitler had closed off other strategic options. The Soviet Union, he stressed, posed a long-term threat to Germany that had to be eliminated, and, in any case, the time was right as at the moment the Red Army was poorly trained, inadequately led, and badly equipped. Besides, as Halder recorded his revealing admission, “Once England is finished, he would not be able to rouse the German people to a fight against Russia; consequently, Russia would have to be disposed of first.” The Wehrmacht would launch a mighty blow that would catch the Red Army by surprise and force it to fight as far to the west as possible, thus exposing it to annihilating encirclement battles. After this initial sledgehammer blow, Hitler simply expected the Soviet state, a colossus of clay, to collapse. The resulting operation would merely be to follow up and destroy the broken remnants of the Red Army, a “railroad advance” reminiscent of 1918.42
Between July and December 1940, the OKH, and principally General Erich Marcks, had developed a series of ideas on how to conduct a campaign against the Soviet Union. Marcks assumed that the Red Army would have to stand and fight west of the rivers Prut, Dniester, Dnieper, and Dvina in order to defend their main economic and industrial areas as well as the key cities of the western Soviet Union. Since the capture of Moscow, which was seen as the political, economic, and spiritual heart of the Soviet Union, would eliminate a major part of the armaments industry as well as shatter the Soviet command and control system, Marcks made it his main operational goal. The sheer size of the front, however, and the presence of the Pripet Marshes in the middle dictated a second offensive directed toward Kiev, which would then link up with the right flank of the northern force east of the marshes for a joint thrust on Moscow. While agreeing in principle with the Marcks Plan, Hitler also stressed the economic importance of seizing the Baltic states. General Friedrich Paulus, the newly appointed deputy chief of the General Staff, resolved the conflicting visions by distributing much of the army’s reserve units among three army groups, North, Center, and South, each of which would now fight its own separate envelopment battle. What had begun as a single main thrust with a central focus had, by the autumn of 1940, evolved into a three-pronged attack with no clear Schwerpunkt and insufficient forces for any of the three army groups to accomplish their tasks.43
During this period, in fact, German planning reflected an odd combination of hubris and wishful thinking as the hope that the enemy would act in the desired manner replaced rational assessment of relevant factors. OKH planners, for example, simply assumed that the Red Army would stand and fight in order to safeguard the principal Soviet economic and industrial centers, thus allowing the Wehrmacht to encircle and destroy it. The General Staff was also aware that the Soviets had built new industrial centers in the Urals that could be strengthened and reinforced by an evacuation of machines and equipment from the western borderlands but never pursued this consideration further. The German military leadership, in fact, displayed a woeful lack of understanding of economic factors. By training and tradition focused almost exclusively on the operational-tactical aspects of planning, the OKH designed a plan based on the lessons of the 1940 French campaign that emphasized a swift, decisive, concentric thrust toward the enemy capital, unconcerned by the fact that the economically vital regions lay in the south.44
They thus chose to launch a blitzkrieg not over ground favorable for mobile tank warfare, the rolling countryside of Ukraine, and toward the vital oil supplies of the Caucasus, but through the endless expanse of forest and marsh in central Russia, an area of few roads and unsuitable for motorized warfare. The OKH also defined an operational plan that ignored the fact that it would be impossible to supply the army with the necessary rations, munitions, spare parts, and material for an extended period over long distances and the fact that there was insufficient manpower to safeguard these long, exposed supply lines. Shortages of oil, gasoline, and vehicles, German planners realized, would of necessity reduce German striking power in Russia while demands elsewhere would drain troop strength even as, virtually all the prime manpower having already been conscripted, no large available reserves remained. As a result, the relative punch of German formations available for the Russian campaign would in some respects be lesser than the previous year in the west, even though the army had embarked on a crash program to increase offensive firepower. Moreover, because of production bottlenecks, a large percentage of the troops assembling in the east suffered from noticeable deficiencies in armaments and equipment. Only about a fifth of the available forces possessed capabilities suitable for the envisioned rapid, wide-ranging war of movement. Because of the lack of vehicles, over half the units entered Russia the way Napoléon’s Grand Army did, on foot with horse-drawn supply wagons. The traditional German bias against the intelligence function, as well as the generally poor quality of information coming out of the Soviet Union, also posed a problem. German planners consistently underestimated Soviet strength, Stalin’s ability to maintain control after the initial German blows, the problems of space, terrain, and climate, the difficulties of supply and logistics, and the problems of waging a blitzkrieg in a vast area with few good roads.45