Miracle at the Litza: Hitler’s First Defeat on the Eastern Front.

As a German historian recently remarked, for Germany Adolf Hitler was the “off-spring,” the outstanding legacy, of World War I, and no one doubts that.1 He himself started his political career in 1919 in the wake of a lost war and the crushing peace of Versailles. That treaty reduced Germany’s territory by 14 percent and its population by 6.5 million citizens. It created for Germany large minorities outside its new borders and for the time being an unlimited reparations liability.2 Hitler’s rise to dictatorship is unthinkable without the humiliation and misery that resulted for the German people out of their defeat. And still: was he bound to become the war’s nemesis in destroying the Weimar Republic? This article thus asks the question whether Hitler’s rise to power from Germany’s defeat to the proclamation of the Third Reich was inevitable. For that purpose the ways in which Germans tried to come to terms with their defeat and the war’s legacies will be discussed. As an illustration the article focuses on two highly popular political doctrines, both legacies of the war of its own—both in different ways denying the hopelessness of Germany’s military situation at the end of the war. These were: (1) the doctrine of the so-called “stab-in-the-back” (Dolchstoss); and (2) the doctrine of the so-called “war guilt lie” (Kriegsschuldlüge). At its conclusion, this analysis will raise the question as to whether Hitler’s exploitation of these two doctrines immediately led to his dictatorship. (1) The stab-in-the-back doctrine first was foreshadowed, when, on October 3, 1918, the German government requested an armistice with the Allies and peace negotiations on the basis of the peace program that President Woodrow Wilson had propagated. To the German public this move was an absolutely shattering surprise. Until then the German High Command had failed to admit the increasing seriousness of Germany’s military position resulting from strategic overstretch and military exhaustion.3 Instead, all the public had perceived was that the German troops fighting in France had protected them against the direct experience of war and that in the East Germany's predominance extended as far as the Caucasus Mountains. How then could Germany’s bid be explained?4 Could it be that the million-fold sacrifice of lives had been in vain? The gap that throughout the war had yawned between far-flung popular hopes and the grim military reality thus deepened even further. Other, non military reasons, it was believed, must have been behind Germany’s sudden giving up. The German military command concealed what it had confessed to the political leadership in Berlin—that it feared German troops in France were on the verge of being routed. To avoid a public loss of face, it claimed that nonmilitary reasons lay behind Germany’s critical military situation. Ludendorff, the de facto highest commander of Germany’s troops, concocted an explanation by inventing the stab-in-the-back doctrine. Germany had sued for an armistice, he asserted in a confidential talk with his officers, because it had become impossible to continue the war. This was due to the “poison” of Marxist–Socialist propaganda that had undermined the soldiers’ resolution to go on fighting and made them “unreliable,” although the chances of a successful defense, if not victory, continued to be good.5 Ludendorff’s statement initiated a lengthy process of political onus shifting between military and civil authorities, between the Right and the Left, regarding the responsibility for the military disaster that was threatening their country.6 Actually, the antecedents of this doctrine went further back—well into the fall of 1916. At that point, under the impression of a precarious military situation during the battle of the Somme, the first doubts arose in Germany regarding the prospects of a victory. A heated controversy about the war’s purpose and Germany’s war aims broke out. The military leadership and the exponents of the nationalist right kept insisting that a total victory was indispensable that would ensure sizable annexations, improve Germany’s geopolitical position, and entail a reward for the sacrifices the German people had made. Significantly, it was also held that only the perspective of a total victory would maintain morale at home and at the front.7 The forces of the German Center and Left, not least Labor, on the other hand, pressed for a peace of accommodation based on a military tie as the only realistic way out of a war that Germany apparently could not win. The real reward of the war seemed to be liberal reforms in Prussia and the Empire.8 On July 19, 1917, a majority of the German Reichstag passed a resolution demanding just that.9 To the rightist die-hards this amounted to outright treason subverting the public morale. According to the Right, internal reforms could not be a substitute for military victory.10

Cambridge History of the Second World War, 2015

In a conflict as massive as the Second World War, no theatre can claim absolute centrality to the war’s outcome. If any campaign comes close, however, it is the Soviet-German struggle on the Eastern Front. From the time German troops crossed the Soviet border on 22 June 1941 in Operation BARBAROSSA, until Adolf Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin bunker, the Eastern Front consumed the bulk of German manpower and resources. More German soldiers died on the Eastern Front than on all other fronts com- bined – though precise figures are still in dispute and will never be satisfa- ctorily reconciled, a figure of 3 million German soldiers killed, missing or dying in captivity on the Eastern Front seems approximately correct. Soviet military losses were far greater: 9 million soldiers killed, missing or dead in prisoner-of-war camps.1 These figures, in turn, are dwarfed by Soviet civilian dead: an additional 20 million. In addition to its incalculable impact on human lives, the outcome of the Soviet-German war shaped the destinies of the eastern half of Europe for fifty years to come, and was fundamental to Soviet politics and society until and beyond the end of the Soviet Union itself.

The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2019

From debate over Hitler's motivation for war against the Soviet Union to questions regarding the extent to which Stalin and the Soviet military leadership were aware of the impending German onslaught, in the historical literature 22 June 1941 is both an end point for such compelling questions and the starting point for a military struggle of unprecedented scale and intensity. This first day of the war on Germany's Eastern Frontthe beginning of the Great Patriotic War for the Soviet sideunderstandably continues to fascinate historians and their readers, despite the considerable space spent on examining it in both scholarly and other works for decades. From a primarily Soviet perspective, this pivotal day was, for example, the focus of a memorable chapter in John Erickson's seminal history of the first half of the Soviet war against Nazi Germany, The Road to Stalingrad, back in 1975. More recently, it has been the subject of a popular book-length examination by Russian historians Artem Drabkin and Aleksei Isaev in 22nd June: A Black Day on the Calendar. 1 Craig Luther now provides us with a thoroughly researched, primarily German-focused analysis of this infamous Sunday in June 1941. While Luther makes it plain that in this book he would have liked to have spent more time on setting the scene prior to 22 June 1941, in doing so he is still able to provide two substantial chapters entitled 'Planning for Armageddon-Adolf Hitler and His General Staff Prepare to Unleash War on Soviet Russia' and 'On the Cusp of War-Berlin, Moscow and the Eastern Front' to provide context for the main event. The focus here, as for most of the book, is more on Germany than the Soviet Union, and there is, for example, little consideration of more-recent developments in scholarship on Soviet intentions and planning for 1940-1942 that had a significant bearing on the course of events on 22 June. The first multi-part chapter dealing specifically with Sunday 22 June-'Armageddon Unleashed'deals with Army Group North's advance, providing the sort of material one might hope would be provided for the German side: from higher-level directives down to grassroots accounts of the fighting. Here, Luther finds a very good compromise between the sort of frontline perspectives that make for particularly engaging reading alongside citation from reports and the memoirs of senior commanders. Where Luther also typically excels is in providing a sense of German successes and failures compared to prewar expectationsand in highlighting how that first day of the war started to shape the German picture of an enemy whose capacity to offer resistance at the tactical level in particular had been grossly underestimated, in particular in terms of the tenacity of at least some Soviet troops. Luther makes it plain that any euphoria regarding German military successes was increasingly tempered by the realization that the Wehrmacht was not facing a force lacking the capacity and will to fight of the inadequate prewar German intelligence picture that had been adopted by Hitler and senior German leaders. For the bulk of the book, Luther continues to detail the activities of the three army groups, following North with Center and South in multi-section chapters broken down 1

European Review of History: Revue Européene D’Histoire, 2016

Central European History, 2011

ted-complements my own study of Bock's Army Group Center in the same period (Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.). This is not to say the two studies agree on everything, which to an extent reflects the differences in using German and Soviet archival material. One example is Glantz's branding of Kuntzen's LVII Motorized Corps' withdrawal from Velikie Luki in July as "premature and ill-advised" (p. 269), a judgment which is not supported by the difficulties graphically set out in German corps and divisional files from 18-20 July. Nevertheless, quibbles aside, there can be no question Glantz is on the road to another towering achievement in the history of the German-Soviet war. I await volume two with eager anticipation.

Introduction Halting Operation Barbarossa Transnational aspects of the first six months of the Eastern Front, 2021

Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, is without a doubt one of the most momentous events of the 20th century. It marked the beginning of what in the Soviet Union would come to be known as the ‘Great Patriotic War’, and although it lies 80 years in the past, it is still extensively studied. This special issue is dedicated to the halting of the German offensive in December 1941, exactly 80 years ago this winter. A key question within the debates surrounding the conflict’s transnational nature is how to distinguish between ‘collaboration’ and ‘cooperation’ of different actors, be it local initiatives of individuals or the policies of Axis states. Even though Nazi Germany’s satellites were in theory all subject to the war aims of the Third Reich, they certainly also pursued their own goals and policies. This special issue has sought to bring together articles that reflect on the transnational dimension of Barbarossa. Moving away from the military set piece that had emerged by 22 June 1941 in favor of an examination of the months that followed allows us to tie together more closely the stories of the two opposing coalitions. The articles in this issue focus not merely on ideology but rather on lived experiences and the ways in which these shaped decisions — both at the time and in the decades that followed.

Central European History, 2008

The Journal of Military History, 2008

The Soviet war against Finland (1939-40) is generally seen as a fiasco because the U.S.S.R. failed to conquer and absorb Finland, as Joseph Stalin had planned; and the Finns inflicted losses on the Red Army that were far out of proportion to the small size of their army and their own casualties. Access to fresh sources, archival and memoir, suggest that although the Soviets fell short of their political goals and performed dismally in combat, the Red Army was far more militarily effective than was appreciated by the Soviet military and political leadership, the German armed forces high command, and contemporary observers.

Central European History, 2008

2017

My paper examines the failure of Operation Barbarossa and the Invasion of the Soviet Union from the perspective of Army Group Center in 1941. My question is “What are the variables that led to the failure of Operation Barbarossa and its pinnacle point of the Battle of Moscow?” The Nazi doctrine believed that the Russians were considered to be “sub-human,” but yet the Red Army at a heavy price won a major strategic victory. The paper investigates the effects of the weather, logistics, intelligence, Hitler’s leadership role, and the Red Army’s fanatical resistance. The work includes tactical and strategical assessments of Army Group Center towards Battles of Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, and Moscow. As well as, Soviet military tactics to stall the advance of the Wehrmacht offensive. The evidence draws on the German and Soviet memoirs, and accounts of Operation Barbarossa. The thesis of my paper is, Hitler and his generals’ tactical errors resulted in the failure of​ the conquest of the Soviet Union. The key significance of the study is understanding the failure of the invasion resulted in the downfall of the Third Reich in 1945.