182. Operation Barbarossa

An autocrat full of self-confidence following earlier military successes and convinced that a neighbouring country has no right to exist draws up plans to invade it. In making these plans, the autocrat has no hesitation in overruling his generals. The generals knowing what's best for them accommodate themselves to their masters' rulings. The invasion is launched. It is conducted on a wide front with multiple targets. No effort is made to win the hearts and minds of those whose lands are being occupied. Logistical planning proves terribly flawed. Equipment proves inadequate. Initial successes prove illusory. The invasion grinds to a halt in front of the capital city of the invaded country. The operation has not gone well. Dominic, that is a tried and tested technique. Is it not of historians writing articles in these papers and so on where you get two distinct, two separate events and you kind of rubble them up. What I always go with never you myself Tom. So you're talking about, so this is what Tony Blair 2003, is it? So what was I talking about there? Was I talking about Putin's invasion of Ukraine? Or was I talking about Hitler's invasion of Russia? Would you say that the parallels there, I mean there are parallels aren't there? Or are am I, am I being glib in drawing? Well, I'm not sure. You said to me, you were absolutely desperate to do this podcast because you thought there were tremendous, using all your knowledge of military history. You thought there were tremendously compelling parallels. And I think you'd been fed that line by a member of your own family. Tom, yes. Am I right? Yes. So yeah, so podcasting novice clearly desperate to appear on the show. So yeah, so fans of our sister podcast, we have ways of making you talk. We'll know that my brother James Holland and his partner Al Murray on the show did two brilliant episodes on Hitler's planning for Operation Barbarossa in which certain parallels were drawn out between Hitler and his preparations for invading Russia and Putin and his preparations for invading Ukraine. We don't want to major on them, but James, bro, you're out there. I thought that was, I thought that was brilliant. You did mention, did you not, when we met a few days ago that there were certain parallels. And I was absolutely so excited about them that I rushed back and persuaded Dominic that we should do this straight away. Hitler and Putin, before we come to that, can I just open with a question? So we put out questions saying we're doing Operation Barbarossa. And without a doubt, the best question was asked by Chris who asked how close did Frederick Barbarossa come to establishing interior control over the papacy? I didn't see that. Which is an excellent question. No. James no one should answer that question. Well, no, my brother want to answer him. No, all about that. So Frederick Barbarossa, the 12th century emperor who ended up drowning while going on the third crusade. And I'm guessing the reason that he gives his name to the to Hitler's invasion of Russia is because he's kind of like the German king Arthur. He's supposed to have to be in a cave in a mountain range in Thuringia. The untusburg. No, he's also supposed to be in the untusburg, which is the view that Hitler had from his house, the berkoff in the southspurge. Okay. So is that why they, is that why they call it Operation Barbarossa? Well, they're kind of thinking of sort of groovy names, it's exciting, potentially war-winning operations. And you know, Barbarossa is a bit of a kind of folk hero. And you know, the Germans are constantly sort of harking, but not these rather sort of harking back to this sort weird sort of mythological period, about which they don't know very much. And they sort of mix it all up into this sort of, you know, world ice theory mixed with Arthurian myths mixed with Barbarossa. And it all sort of goes into a kind of a sort of melting pot of nonsense. And is that melting pot of nonsense, part of what persuade Hitler to launch his invasion? No, no, it's not. While the major melting pot of nonsense in so much that they absolutely believe in their anti-periority, and believe that the Soviets are an Ethiopians, the Slavs and Untimension, all that stuff is absolutely the case. And you see this right from the very top, right down to the very bottom of people recording in their diaries, whether they be senior generals or whether they be, you know, ordinary dancers, they sort of go, you know, I look at this person, and then I just realize sort of how primitive they were and how poorly they were and all that comes. Okay. So James, let's do a bit of context and then we'll do a bit of chronology. So we are in, I mean, the operation begins on Sunday, the 22nd of June, 1941. It's one of these extraordinary set pieces in the history, you know, this colossal invasion force crossing the frontiers into the Soviet Union. It's a turning point in the Second World War. It's one of the great moments in the Second World War. So at that point, to external observers, you know, Hitler has had his tremendous successes in the West, the low countries, France, Scandinavia and so on. Britain has been resisting alone. We talked about that with you before when we were talking about the summer of 1990. Alone, along with the empire and dominion. Yeah. Alone. Okay. Alone in Europe, shall we say? And 85% of the world's merchant shipping itself. Oh god. But yes. So we've got to stop having these woke guests on the show. So, okay. So, so Britain has used just rightly said, James, for standing alone. And at what point? So, so Hitler has as many listeners will know, the prolly to the Second World War was that the Nazis and the Soviet Union had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrov pact. So the non-aggression pact, and they basically divided, you know, Poland between them, the Soviet Union had taken the Baltic states. And now we had a question from Jorge Layton. Was there any chance of Hitler honoring the ribbon drop Molotov pact? So, 1940 going into 1941, is Hitler already planning the attack on the Soviet Union? Has he been planning it all along? Or is there a kind of contingency that explains why this happens? I think that the moment Hitler takes power in January 1933, I think the one thing that is absolutely guaranteed that there is going to be a clash of arms at some point between Nazi German and the USSR. When that happens and what form it takes is obviously completely up for grabs at that point. Hitler is originally sort of thinking he doesn't think of the Second World War as the Second World War. He thinks it is a series of limited operations. So the first limiting of operation is against Poland, and you know, that's sort of done in dust in the matter of weeks, pretty much on schedule. Then the second one is obviously going into Scandinavia. That's another limited operation, which sees Denmark and Norway fall under the Nazi yoke. Then the third one, of course, is the invasion of the West, KCLO, which is the low countries in France. In France, is a big one, you know, by today's standards. France is super power in 1940 and crushed in six weeks. So these are all limited operations. As far as he's concerned, you know, with Britain's lost its army, which is the sort of biggest humiliation of all, because he's a land lover and a continentalist. So that's how he, you know, that's what he views is the most important thing. So he's expecting Britain to sue for peace, and the war is won. And then at some point, few years down the line, when he sort of built up some more stocks and built up some more strength and kind of, you know, got an even bigger army, then he'll invade the Soviet Union, perhaps 1943, perhaps 1944, something like that. But it's a battle of Britain that forces his hand, because he doesn't win Britain, it's still in the fight, America's hovering in the background, sort of fighting a proxy war, delivering arms to Britain, etc, etc. And so he realizes that actually he needs to regain strength and particularly resources of food, especially agricultural Germany. Because there are maybe a throttling. Yes, because from the 1st of September 1939, there is an economic blockade. And if you look at your geography and look at the map, you'll see that Germany's got a sort of very complicated little bit of sort of bullsick coast at the top, which sort of get out into the world, you know, to go out into the North Sea, you've got to sort of get through lots of narrow channels and through islands and things. Then it's got a little strip of the North Sea coast, and that's it. And even with France of Jude, you know, the blockade is still extant. And the Royal Navy is the world's largest at the time. So it's pretty effective at blockading. And they don't have enough fuel, they don't have enough food. And going into all those occupied territories in 1940, an early part of 1941, they've been a bit like sort of children and a sweet shop, and they've just, you know, the company's bare, very, very quick order. And I'll give you an example of this. So in January 1940, France is the most automotive country in Europe. And there are eight people in France for every motorised vehicle, whereas that figure is 47 in Germany and 106 in Italy. And by the 31st of December 1940, France has 8% left of the vehicles that it had on the 1st of January. Wow. Because the Germans have just knicked it all. They just knicked it all. And they've knicked everything and they've taken all the coal and they've taken that. So suddenly all those factories don't work anymore. Right. So this factories don't work either. And that's the key thing. Well, no, because, you know, but so France is suffering from, from the economic blockade, as is Denmark, as is Norway, as is everyone, within Nazi Germany's, you know, greater Reich, because the blockade exists for all of them. I mean, you know, it's stopping all of them. So France is suffering from that, but it's also suffering from the fact that their industrial complexes don't work very efficiently anymore, because all the things that make an industrial complex work, coal, workforce, food for the workforce, fuel oil, cars to get people to the workforce, to move things out of the workforce, trains, locomotives, all the rest of it, although it has been stolen by the Germans, so it doesn't function. So at what point, James, do you think, well, do we know from the sort of archival sources, do we know the point at which Hitler said to his generals, okay, we're going to go into the Soviet Union now? Yes. So, so the first decision is mooted in July 1940, when Britain was released. That's early. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So he's not convinced about it. He's not absolutely, yeah, we're definitely going to go, but it's sort of built and it becomes, and you can see him becoming as it's absolutely clear that the Luftwaffe is not going to subdue the RAF, and it's going to be completely impossible to do a cross-channel invasion. I mean, even Hitler, who is a sort of military nincompoop, even he can see that the conditions have not been met by September 1940. Therefore, we know what do you do? You've got to have a problem because Britain's still in the still got skin in the game. So what are you going to do? Well, okay, here's a plan. We know that the slavs are undimensioned. We know that they were completely useless in the finished, finished war of late 1939, free to the beginning of 1940. We know they've had the purges and have killed sort of executed four of their six marshals, 23,000 officers, etc, etc. So how how can it be, especially since we've just won in France, which is a kind of superpower and had, you know, is a modern functioning northern European state for the most part. So, you know, how how can it be? And that's where the thinking starts to come in. And suddenly, it's the only solution, in fact, actually, by the spring of 1941, there is only, there are only two viable options left to hit there. And the Nazi regime, one is to go into the USSR and hope it works, or super peace, and obviously he's not going to do the latter. You've said that he'd been, essentially, the moment he came to power, it was inevitable that Nazi Germany would go to war with the Soviet Union. Oh, the Soviet Union would go to war with Nazi Germany. But from the from the Nazi point of view, why is that? Is that because the slavs are living in Lebensraum that the Germans should claim? Or is it because they're communist? What is it? The racial or is it the ideological aspects of the Soviet Union that are most offensive to Hitler? It's both. It's this idea that the world is threatened from a takeover of communism orchestrated by global jury. Yeah, they're surely interwoven, Tom. So the, completely, so the Soviet Union are communists because they are under mention. Yes. Communisms are really, really hated by the Germans because for those who want, those Germans who aren't communist, I should say, because communists are seen for the, is one of the main causes of the end of the First World War because the communist mutiny and the German navy that sort of kickstarted the whole sort of, you know, show down to the end. And if you're a Nazi, your worst enemy is a communist. And one of the reasons so many people back the Nazis and indeed so many people in France, for example, side with Nazi Germany rather than, you know, the Allies and the free French and all the rest of it is because of that fear of the westward spread of communism. I mean, that is as clear and present a danger as is the westward spread of Nazism to those in Britain for example. So James, if that's, I mean, Hitler has never hidden his, his anti-communism or his loathing for Slavs and so on. And given all that, and given that he is talking to his generals or he's talking in private about attacking the Soviet Union as early as the summer of 1940, why is it that the Soviet Union, the Soviet leadership are blind to this? Because they are kind of blind to it, aren't they? Yes, because, because firstly, it doesn't make a huge amount of military sense on one level because the Soviet Union is so vast and the manpower reserves of the Soviet Union are just absolutely enormous. And also because, to a very large extent, actually, the Soviet Union is already feeding Nazi Germany in terms of resources and central resources. And of course, the moment you invade, they just get cut off until you've completely won. And they just horses are included oil and gas? Yes, and food and all that book site and food from, you know, Ukraine, the bread basket and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, all that stuff. But the point is they want it for themselves. You know, they don't want to share it with any slaves and intervention. So that's their thinking. So what, Stalin thinks we're giving Hitler all this stuff anyway, it's just simply not in his interest to invade us. Is that what Stalin thinks? Well, it's partly that, but it's also partly partly Stalin being naive. I mean, Stalin's gone through these purges of the late 1930s. And, you know, the army, the armed forces, the Red Army is in disarray, but they're also, they are preparing and doing an awful lot of work and building, you know, they've got double the number of artillery pieces that Germany has by the summer of 1941. They've got something like six times the number of aircraft. Now, a lot of those are obsolescent and no longer kind of fit for purpose, but they're still aircraft. Ditto with tanks, you know, the new tanks are coming in, so they are gearing up as well. And there's no question about it that they are preparing for a showdown with Nazi Germany and they're thinking about invading first. I mean, you know, it is going to happen because Stalin sees, you know, in the same way that the Nazis fear the western threat of spread of communism, the communists fear the eastern spread of Nazism. So as well they might. As well they might. It's just that despite huge amounts of evidence to the that this is going to happen, Stalin refuses to accept it. And it's one of those weird inexplicable things where he just completely loses the plot for a bit. And very quickly, you know, for a moment, he's absolutely that rabbit in the headlights. And very, very quickly he gets a grip. So there's all that, you know, everyone's sort of going, you know, start, you know, comrade, I think there's quite a few signs that the Germans kind of know. No, no, no, no. So let's talk about that. We're getting to 1941, but Hitler's initial plan is not to invade when he doesn't invade. So the invasion has put off his net. So he's forced into, he's hustled into it doing it much early. Parachute mafia. Do you think the outcome would have been different if the offensive was launched in May as originally planned? And that's because Mussolini has got embroiled in the Balkans and Greece. Yeah, no, wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever because the fun. Okay, we'll just just just tell us just tell us about what how why Hitler has to delay it first and then and then tell us why it doesn't actually make any difference. So the whole point of them. So the pack of still, which is signed between Italy and Germany, is really a, it's an alliance of convenience. So the idea is, is that Mussolini doesn't have to worry about his northern flank. And he can just concentrate on, on creating a new Roman empire, you know, the Maury Nostrum and all the rest of it, the Mediterranean and stretching all the way down into East Africa and North Africa and so on and the whole of the year. And that's his, that's his ambition to have an empire which is sort of, you know, sort of old Roman in kind of sort of scope in many ways, apart from the Europe bit. And, and, and, and Hitler doesn't want to have to worry about his southern flank at all, you know, because of Germany's central position in Europe, it's quite vulnerable. And he wants to be able to just sort of concentrate on attacking the West and attacking the East, whenever he wants to, if I have to worry about southern flank. But, unfortunately, Mussolini is also a military, Ninkampope, and even worse equipped. And he goes into Greece, first of all, and makes a complete hash of it and the Greeks fight back. And then he goes and invades Egypt, which is a British protectorate and the British fight back and makes a complete hash of that as well. So Hitler has to come to his rescue or, or risk, lose his southern flank, and make his southern flank vulnerable. And his southern flank is particularly precious because Romania is the only source of German oil, of which is of vital importance to his war machine. And so he just cannot risk it. So he has to go and shore things up and, and help out his ally, Italy. And that involves going into the Balkans, it involves sending troops to North Africa, and it also involves invading Greece. I think you can argue very strongly that it doesn't involve going into Crete. But be that as it may, they do, they lose 50% of their most well-trained infantry troops, the Power Troopers, the Falsamega, and they also lose a further 250 transport aircraft, which certainly would have been incredibly useful in Operation Barbarossa, but they're not the reason why they lose them. I mean, I can start. So it delays the start by a month, yeah. So why is that not significant? Because lots of people say yes, that was hugely significant. Well, this is really the crux of the entire podcast, because I don't think they were ever going to, they ever had much chance of winning, because the scale of what they had to achieve was so enormous, and they were tragically for them massively under-resourced for the tasks that they're given themselves. And that was down to just a misappreciation, hubris, total lack of self-awareness, and of underestimating the enemy and underestimating the challenges. And there were lots and lots of warnings, and they just ignored them all. Well, first of all, on the, I mean, they do have nevertheless colossal numbers down there. I'm just reading here, they have thousands of tanks, 4,000 aircraft, how many divisions, 153 divisions? I mean, that's, anyway, they build all that up, and the delay presumably gives is one reason why there are so many rumors. I mean, there's always these famous stories about sort of people slipping across frontiers and swimming rivers or whatever, and pitching up and saying to the, to the Red Army, I have information, you know, and then being shot as they're kind of reward or being thrown into prison or something. Why is it? So at this point, so we're sort of May June, do, as this huge military builder, do some people in the Soviet kind of hierarchy, do they know it's happening, but Stalin's refusing to listen, or they're all deluding themselves? That these are just Nazi exorcisms. Well, if you remember the last few, few months before the Russian, the Russian attack on Ukraine, there were troop build-ups, troop build-ups all along, weren't they? Yes, yeah. It's going to happen, he's not really going to do it, or we might do it, but it might just be kind of, it's just a tactic, yeah, just a physical game. So it's the same sort of thing. The key point about it is, yes, they're attacking with 3.6 million men. It is the largest clash of arms in terms of scale that the world has ever seen, but it is simply not enough, because 3.6 million sounds a huge number, because it's a vast number, but that needs contextualising, because 90% of the hard yards has to be done by a quarter to a third of the troops involved. So the absolute key, because Germany is so under-mechanized, the lion's share of the work, the absolute spearhead is carried out by these four Panzer groups, and the Panzer groups are effectively groups of mechanised armies. They're groups of all arms units, of motorised infantry, motorised artillery, TAN, of course, tanks, and, yeah, and, you know, cool BMW, motorbikes for side cars, and all the rest of it, and path tracks, and armour cars, and, you know, when you think, when you think Blitzkrieg, Nazis on the march, that's what you're thinking about. But that accounts for only 39 divisions, and all of those only 17 are Panzer divisions, and the Panzer divisions are the Kremlin, the Kremlin, you know, these are the all arms, and one of those 39 divisions is the first cavalry division, which is horses. Yeah. It's horses, the Germans, you know, the modern Germans, the conquerors of Europe, they are going into the biggest cache of arms with a horse mounted cavalry division in their spearhead. So once you sort of break that down, you know, 39 divisions, each vision is 15,000 men of which only about, you know, 9 to 10,000 are actually fighting troops. So that's only about, you know, 400,000 men are doing 90% of the work, and 400,000 is a lot less than 3.6 million. So there is a kind of obvious parallel with what's been happening in Ukraine, that actually the very huge size of the Russian army. So actually, people say it's not big enough, and you could say the same about the Germans. Well, because you need guys to, you need guys to drive the horse and wagons and supply chains and all the rest of it. So the question is, are there people in the German army who are pointing this out, who are wearing this, who are drawing up reports? Yeah, and this is what's really interesting. So in the planning of Barbarossa, so one of the people who's been told to do sort of war game, it's sort of sand table it. So do a sort of, you know, a theoretical planning, not an actual war game, but kind of, you know, on paper, what have we got? Where does this work? How are you going to go? How's it going to go? How's it going to go, honestly? An appreciation is General Friedrich Paulus, who later-- No, the irony. The irony. The irony. So Commander in Stalingrad. Yeah, but in 1940, he is on the, of the OKW, which is the Oberkommando Devarmatt, which is the German combined staff, combined forces, General Staff, and basically, Hitler's mouthpiece. And he does this study, and he sort of goes, "Oh, I'm not quite sure this is going to work, actually." You know, it's just not stacking up, you know, the distance to grey, the logistic chains, of these huge, huge logistic problems. And everyone goes, "Oh, I just want to worry about it." You know, we've got the triumph of the will. Triumph of the will. It will be fine. We're, they're going to mention their slums. It'll be fine. Let's just forget about it. And everyone sort of goes, "Well, OK, fine." Then there is a kind of sort of-- OK, what's the economic appreciation of this? You know, how can we function? You know, have we got enough oil? Have we got enough rubber? Have we got -- have we got enough food? You know, the supply lines get-- have we got enough trucks to kind of do-- To maintain-- Yeah, but because the whole point about the German way of war is the spare pump that kind of, you know, hit them hard. At the main point, do a huge, great kettle shlack to an environment war and annihilate your enemy very quickly. It's all got to be one, bam, bam, bam, bam. You know, three weeks, six weeks, five days, whatever. And the whole point about Barbarossa is that this is supposed to be a war of annihilation in three months max. You know, if it hasn't done it in three months, it's game over. It's, you know, it hasn't worked. So general George Thomas or Yorg Thomas, if you like, he is the head of the OKW, the German General Staff's Economic Division, war economic vision, the Berkshafts und Rundstund-- Rund Rundstund's Amt, as it was called. And he is asked by Kytel, who is the chief of staff. So he's the absolute top military guy under Hitler. And he's asked to do an economic appreciation on the 22nd of January. And he files his report with Kytel on the 8th of February 1941. And the report is quite damning. You know, it says, well, you know, get a run out of fuel in two months. We run out of rubber in six. We haven't got enough to sustain it. We can't rely on the Ukrainians because probably the Germans will do a scorched-up policy, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Kytel just goes, no, no, no, no, no. This won't do it again. At all. Go away and rewrite it. So he goes, OK. And he comes back on the 13th of February, five days later, going, well, it's going to be fantastic. Yeah, this is going to be a piece of piss. And everyone goes, great, let's go. I mean, seriously, it's insane. It's absolutely insane. And on top of that, I mean, you know, there are also all the-- because Hitler's way is to have this sort of divide and rule. So there's lots of these sort of parallel command structures. So you have you have the war economy office under under York Thomas at the OKW, which is to do with military financing. But that's also tied in with Göring's four-year plan. And Göring now owns most of personally owns most of German industry, a heavy industry. Then you've got Walter Funke's Ministry of Economics as well. And then under that, you've also got 27th further national finance offices, all of which who are kind of sort of not remotely joined up in any way whatsoever. And you've got lots and lots of sort of small industries. So you haven't got any kind of nationalized sort of British rail equivalent or anything like that. So consequently, when they invade, it's true, they've got, you know, zillions of vehicles for their four panzer groups and others. But they've also got 2,000 different types of vehicle. Now, I'm trusting that neither of you are particularly mechanical. And I know you are not at all broke. But Tom, I know the discussion of historical trucks is very dear to your heart. Well, this is what I'm pointing about. Well, the point about this is that of course, if you're an independent truck manufacturer, it's a bit like, you know, the old days being an independent horse and car manufacturer, you know, you just do your own thing and they'll have certain principles. I've got a bit of suspension and they've got wheels and, you know, they've got wooden bits and all the rest of it. But they're all different. And this is the problem with having 2,000 different vehicles, many of which are British, many of which are French. Because you don't have the bits to repair them. That's because because because you're distributed to cap and your coil and your spark plugs and your and your your gasket, you know, that's a word that you must have heard of. They're all different. Tom, you assured me before your brother came on this podcast that it was not absolutely not degenerate into a discussion of World War II trucks, but it clearly has. No, I said that it was a principle. So, so, so, so, so. Before we, in the second half, we will, we should talk about violence, about the sheer violence of the German attack. And we should also talk about Ukraine, specifically, because that was obviously the peg for doing it. But before we do that, one last question before the break, it's about war aims. So, the Nazis dream scenario, James, you said you know, they want to do it in two or three months. The Nazis dream scenario, where do they stop and what has happened and what does that involve? Does it involve the extermination of all the population? Does it involve massive slave camps? The implanting of of settlements. I mean, what do they think is going to happen? They haven't really fought it through at all. So, so, the idea is that they encircle the entire Red Army, who when they invade will come forward to meet them. They'll then encircle them in a massive giant circle encirclement or series of encirclements and destroy them. We'll be in 500 kilometers of where they start, which is sort of, you know, from the central point, is abreast in what is now Belarus. Belarus, yeah, was Poland at the time. And that's the that's the assumption. And almost every bit of that doesn't happen. And then what they think they will happen, then they'll turn the hold of the Soviet Union into an RCMPI, they'll capture Moscow, what they do. Yeah, they've got Moscow, they haven't really fought about how they do it. Moscow is their initial target, isn't it? I mean, that's, and that's quite true there. No, the initial target is, no, their initial target is 500 kilometers to destroy the Red Army. But, but the German high command, their, their ultimate target is Moscow. Yes, but they can get, they can mark, they can walk into Moscow once they've destroyed the Red Army within 500 kilometers. In other words, they think it'll be a little bit like the, I mean, I know, neither Tom or I am military specialist, so you should correct us if we're completely out of line. But they think it'll be a little bit like the conquest of France. So they won't have to have a siege of the capital. They'll just be able to watch, waltz into the capital, having already won the war. Exactly. Yeah, right. Exactly. That's exactly what they're thinking. And they have, and how did a little pan out? They haven't really fought through at all. Right. So, there are, there are huge problems about going beyond the capital. The great thing about two Holland's is they just talk over one another and it just goes on forever. So that is the plan. Come back after the, after the outbreak and find out how it actually went. At this moment, a march is taking place that for its extent compares with the greatest the world has ever seen. I have decided today to place the fate and future of the Reich and our people in the hands of our soldiers. May God aid us especially in this fight. So that was very much not a friend of the rest of history. Adolf Hitler, making his debut on Apocost. Enough of him. So James Holland, brother of the, of the less known Tom Holland. James, you're here to talk about Operation Barbarossa. And we've done all the war aims. We've done all the sort of planning and the, and what you see is the shambolic planning. So the day itself, I mean, the, the moment that it happens, so happens nearly as the morning as these things tend to. And it appears to be a complete triumph for the Germans. I mean, they carry all before them, the Soviet Union are completely taken by surprise, disaster, the entire, basically, am I right in thinking that the Soviet operational command or whatever is completely blown away in the, in the opening hours of the, of the war, completely blown away, completely blown away. They have these series of encircuements and actually Smolensk is captured on the 15th of July. So, you know, what's that? 15 plus, you know, eight, just over three weeks, which is incredible. You know, and Smolensk is what? 700 kilometers. So it's, it's, it's, it's beyond, they're great. So they've captured three cosmic million men. So many that they don't know what to do with them. It's, it's, they capture so many because people are ready to surrender. There's, it's, it's a failure of the high command. It's not that they, no, not really. It's not that they are particularly ready to surrender. It's just that there is a failure of leadership at the very, very top of the whole host of reasons. It's too cumbersome. It's too top heavy. It's too controlled. But we've been very, very quick order. Stalin and the senior commander sort of, to very large extent, get there, get themselves together. They create the Stavka, which is a sort of, you know, high command, which is, Stalin, of course, is still overseeing, but, but, you know, that's put in place. They start massive, massive recruitment. I mean, the interesting thing is, is on the 22nd of June, 1941, there are 14 million Soviet people who have already had some form of military training who are in reserves, you know, that can be called up. And in 1941, there are three million Soviets who are due to come of age and become 18. Okay. Can I ask you obvious question, then, which Brian Williams poses? Was victory by Nazi Germany achievable, or was Barbara always doomed to fail? It was only achievable if the Soviet leadership was even more crap than it was. Right. The Germans did not have enough, or the right planning, or the right thinking, to achieve it without the help of the Soviet Union. So let me ask you about the Soviet Union there, because Stalin, the story goes that he gets these phone calls from Zhukov for whoever, sort of the early hours of the morning, people can't get hold of him, and he's dumbstruck, he can't. Isn't this amazing story that Zhukov rings him, and Stalin's just kind of panting, breathing very heavily on the other end of the line, because he's taken so much unawares. But isn't, is this James, an interesting difference between Stalin and Hitler? Does Stalin, basically, does he sort himself out and let his generals take care of it rather than interfere, or is he still mastermining everything after the initial shock? No, he absolutely is not. And that is the reason for the the Kursk encirclement, which is completed on the 14th of September, which is the biggest single victory of all, where some 700,000 are captured in one fell swoop. Who wins that? So this is a German victory against the Red Army, and it is, but that is the end of it, you know, that is the last one. And that is because Stalin repeatedly ignores, if I first of Zhukov, he warns him on the 29th of July, the time Zhukov is chief of staff, so he's the senior guy, he's equivalent of Kitell or Marshall or General, you know, General Brook to the British and the war. He's the top military man, and he says you need to abandon Kiev and get the Kiev as it then was, and get the other side of the Dnieper River. And Stalin just goes, no, it's absolutely no way we're going to abandon Kiev, which is the third largest city in the USSR. No way has he. And Zhukov says, in that case, I demand that you allow me to resign and give me a posting on the front, because Stalin, he goes, fine, what are you going to do? And so he does. And then there are other repeated warners, you know, Kürpinos, who is the commander of the Southwestern Front. Front is a group of armies. So, you know, you're talking about a really seriously large amount of men. I mean, I think there's 650,000 men in the Southwestern Front. Kürpinos says, you know, as September, August gives way to September, says, you know, I have to be allowed to do this. I have to be allowed to pull back. And so I just just, it's absolutely not no way. But by this point, but I'm sort of jumping the gun. So he is imposing himself on one of the lessons of Kiev in 1941, the capture of Kiev, and this is huge massive encirclement of over 700,000 Red Army troops. Is it that that point Stalin does back off and start listening to his commanders and letting the better commanders go forward and go through to the front and, you know, Zukov is one of the beneficiaries of that, of course. And listening to them in a way that the absolute opposite happens with Hitler, that Hitler who demands the Kiev as a encirclement, diverse forces away from the strike to Moscow at huge expense. And then goes, told you so. We've had the biggest victory ever, but actually it's a periodic victory. Okay. So, so one of the, one of the obvious points in comparison with the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that it was a kind of three-pronged. They didn't just target on us. They didn't have a single target. They dissipated their forces. Is that what the Nazis do? Because they're targeting Lenin Grad, they're targeting Moscow, and they're targeting Ukraine. Is that right? Yes. So, so what you've got with the German invasion, you've got three groups of armies, three army groups armed with north army group, south army group center. And our group center is the biggest. And that's got, you know, three Panzergroups to start off with. And it's the absolutely mean. And that's the one that's targeting Moscow. Yes. And that's, that's, that's, that's, that's Phil Marshall Feodor von Bock is the commander of that. And he's, he, that is targeting Moscow. It's going straight for, first of all, you know, that's the, from Brest in a straight line through what is now Belarus, two Smolensk, take Smolensk on the 15th of July. It's all looking absolutely fantastic. But then thereafter, it kind of the red army response starts to sort of stiffen, yet more men appear. And suddenly there's sort of the first of much bigger tanks. I won't go into the detail, don't worry. But, but, but they're bigger. And the Germans haven't seen anything like it. And the just seems to be, it doesn't matter how many they mow down, more red army troops seem to appear. So it's a bit sort of Hydra's head like. And while all that is happening, there's this, so, so there is this sort of huge stride across the map to start off with. And then it just completely slows down. And while this is happening, this is when Hitler then suddenly says, actually, let's don't worry about Moscow for now. Let's go and take Bleningrad in the north. And let's go and take Ukraine in the south. So I'm going to divert lots of troops from Army Group Center, this group of armies in the center of the line, and divert them southwards. But that's, you can't just sort of click your fingers and expect that to happen because there are huge supply chains involved. And the other problem is with Panzer Group 2, which is, you know, one of these spearheads that I was telling you about, this sort of group, their groups of divisions, it's like a, it's like a group of armies in a way of motorized troops. To go southwards, it's then cutting across the flanks of the red army lines. So why is he doing it? Why is he suddenly changed his plans? Because it's all taking a bit longer than he thinks, and you can see that the red army is stiffening in Army Group Center. And because he's suddenly thinking, actually, the whole point of going here was not to take Moscow. It's to get land and territory and resources. And also oil and stuff, isn't it? And oil and the further south we are, the place we are to keep in Azerbaijan and Caucasus, which is where all the oil is. I mean, even that is total law, our land, because I've got any capacity to refine it or indeed transport it. So James, let's talk about Ukraine specifically, because you mentioned earlier on the battle for what we then called them, what we called until a few months ago. Kiev. So obviously a lot of the fighting, I mean, then as now happened in Ukraine. Do the Germans think that they are the Ukrainians, who of course had fought for their independence, or some of them had at least after the Russian Revolution in the early years of the 1920s? Do they think that they will be greeted as liberators? Or do they think, well, that the Ukrainians are just yet more Slavs who should be exterminated and and all this sort of stuff? I mean, was because they seem to have a very confused, shall we say, nationalities policy, where they want to be greeted as liberators, but also they then want to exterminate the people who greeted them. Yeah, it's exactly that. And again, you know, none of it stacks up. It's not consistent in any shape of form. But probably speaking, they could have won over certainly the Western Ukrainians about any problem at all, right? I thought for the most part, and they would have had a large number of people who were prepared to fight for them against Stalin. I mean, Ukrainians are no friend of Stalin, and they shape a form, you know, thanks to kind of some millions being starved in the 1930s. So they've got sort of potentially willing people, but no, they're all Slavs and into mention too, and they're impoverished and just sort of, you know, backward peasants and deserve nothing but complete contempt. And so they go around sort of burning, torching villages and sort of, you look sort of vaguely Jewish or the disruptor, they get shot. So does that mean it's not really winning hearts of mind? It's the implication of that, though, that with a different, I mean, in some parallel universe where that invasion is being led not by ideological Nazis, but by German nationalists, it's sort of World War One type, if you like, like Ludendorff type, so something that is that is the implication of that they could have had, the Germans could have had much more success if they had co-opted Ukrainian nationalism. I mean, so for one thing, we don't do because whole war is an ideological war in the first place. So that's, you know, the kind of what if just doesn't work with the Nazis? Well, so on that top, we've got two questions, one from Guillermo T. Avaledo. What's the cruelty on the Eastern Front directly derived from Nazi ideology or was it inevitable? So in other words, is the savagery hard-baked? Is it part of the part of the kind of, you know, it was always there? Or does it arise from the kind of the horror of the fighting? And then just one other question, which is kind of hanging over this, the whole discussion we've had so far, from Dave Rich, what role did Barbarossa play in the escalation of the Holocaust? So specifically with the Jews? It absolutely does. Because it is an ideological war, there is this ideological element, which is not there in any of the operations in the West, the Blitzkrieg in the West, it's not there. Whereas it absolutely is a fundamental part of the whole thing. You know, this is, this is to rid the world of Bolshearism and, you know, which is a overseen by a cabal of, of World Jewry. So, so these guys are all awfully contemptible. I mean, you know, when they go into, when they go into Ukraine, you know, the, the same aforementioned George Thomas is putting together a plan called the Hunger Plan, where they're going to basically rape all the food of Ukraine. And they think sort of quite casually that that could probably lead to the deaths of 20 to 30 million people. You know, this is, this is not the SS, this is, this is the Vermak planning office that's coming up with this plan. I mean, as it happens, you know, Stalin insists on a kind of scorched earth policy anyway. So anything that's useful to the Germans is burned as they retreat. And anyone who gets in the way of the Germans is also sort of burnt and shot and, you know, villages torched and all the rest of it, just because they're sort of in the way and someone's sniped from them. So, you know, they're just bulldozed a whole lot. I mean, that's the, that's how it is. So it just escalates. But it escalates it very, very quickly in the USSR, and particularly in Ukraine, and particularly in the Baltic states, actually, because in March 1941 Hitler has briefed all his commanders and basically given them can't blast or do whatever they like. You know, this is a, this is an ideological war. This is a total war. It's a war of annihilation. You know, whatever you do is fine by me. And have they been briefed? Have they been briefed particularly to target the Jews? Yeah, of course. Yeah, behind such group and have been put, have been, have been created specially to follow on behind the lead troops to come in and round them all up. And, you know, of course, that's exactly what happens when they do take care. They take care of his captured on the 19th of September, 1941. There are then some delayed action explosions, which have been left by the Red Army, some depots, which have been mined and booby traps, and they blow up, I think, on the 22nd and 24th of September, something like that. And on the 29th, and so, so clearly that, that, that must be Jews. And so they're all rounded up and, you know, 33,771 executed at Babiyah just outside Kiev on the 29th and 30th of September. And him, no witnesses this and goes, that's disgusting. It's horrible. We can't have our men doing that, shooting people. He's going to actually got to think of something else, which, of course, leads to, you know, cyclone B and the, and the death counts. Just on a quick question about nationalities. I mean, we talked a lot about the Germans, but obviously, it's not just a German operation, right? There were Romanians, Finns, Italians, Hungarians, and Slovakians. Are they, are they million adjunct? Or are they a key part of that? Okay, a million adjunct. There are no army groups south, and because they're so bad, badly trained, they're given so utter, nothing but utter contempt by the Germans, they don't really help army south's progress. So you've got these three problems, these three groups of armies. You've got army group north, which is going into the Baltic, clearing out the Baltic, and then pushing on towards Leningrad after Hitler changes his mind. You've got army groups center, which you remember I was saying was the biggest, strongest one. Then you've got army groups south, which is commanded by von Wunsted, who's the commander of army group A in the West and in the battle France and the low countries and everything in 1940. So he's sort of a big cheese. And where army group south is really struggling. First of all, their allies are useless and rubbish and ill trained and eloquipped and not very good. And the second problem is, is these huge distances. I mean, these vast, vast distances. So one of the other assumptions of Barbarossa is that what they'll just capture Soviet rail stock, and then they'll just use it for their own purposes. But of course, the Soviets just destroy them all. I would take them back with them or if they can't, they destroy them before the Germans can get their hands on them. There's a whole host of problems with this. The first problem is that Soviet loading gauge is wider than that of the German and European loading gauge. So the Germans then have to use their own locomotives and their own rolling stock. But as they move forward into Soviet Union, they've then got to narrow the gauge. So every single bit of rail has to be moved, you know, a couple of inches to the left or whatever. You imagine how long that takes and that distance. The second problem is that Soviet locomotives are bigger and they can go further with less refueling of coal and water. So the Germans, their Kriegslock, which is their sort of standard train, they then have to put in more coal stops and more water stops as well as narrowing the gauge to get anywhere. And you can imagine, I mean, this is this is not conducive to speed and that it's just a total misappreciation. And it's also a problem isn't it, which I know from listening to the two excellent episodes you did on the planning for barbrowser on We Have Ways, that there are no petrol stations. So in France, when they invade, there are petrol stations conveniently situated for all the tanks to fill up or whatever. But in Russia, there are no petrol stations. There are none. I mean, as I said, France was the most automotive nation in Europe. So of course, there's lots of petrol stations and workshops and all the rest of it. Those do not exist. And Germany is very, very under mechanized as well. So they've got double the problems because they don't have enough mechanics. They don't have people in there. They just don't have spanners and all the rest of it. I mean, it's just the whole thing is this sort of sparring the military term for this is the culmination point. The culmination point is the point where you can no longer operate in the way you want to operate because your lines of supply are just too long. And your lines of supply become so long that half your capacity is spent feeding the line of supply rather than the people at the front. And to put this there, just to sort of where it's already going drastically wrong in July, despite Smolensk falling on the 15th of July, despite these huge, huge gains and 750,000 Soviet prisoners or whatever the figure is, one Panzer Division is down to 12 tanks by the 18th of July. And the whole of Panzer Group 2, which is the large single largest Panzer Group, that is the absolute Kremlin, Kremlin. This is all the kind of 20 to 30-year-olds. This is all the fully trained people. This is all your sparkly tanks and BMW, Cikars and half-tracks and armour cars and all the rest of it. They are down to 29% of the tanks that they started off with on the 22nd of June. It's completely unsustainable. So my point is that even if they're gone in a month earlier, it's not the time that's the problem. It's the expanse and the Soviet response to this. The value of a German soldier is just far greater to the Germans than the value of a Soviet soldier is. It's the manpower. But James, isn't it also the case, though, that wars are one, not just by logistics, but they're also one by politics. And that one of the the Germans big mistakes is they underestimate Russian patriotism. They underestimate their will to fight. Because they think communists are wretched and deluded. They underestimate the resilience of the Soviet machine, I suppose. So even if they take it, let's say they'd encircled Moscow, you're going to probably say that was unimaginable anyway. But let's say they'd done that. Let's say they'd fought their way into the center of Moscow, as Napoleon did, of course. Would that have brought them victory or was Russia, was the Soviet Union always too resilient politically to fall? I think so. I think there are moments. There's moment in October 1941, whether it's sort of mass panic in Moscow, there was obviously moment in the opening days of Barbarossa where it's looking fair, I mean, Stalin absolutely does not help himself by insisting on keeping Kiev and keeping the southwest in front up at the Danipa when clearly it was going to be in circles. So the idea of the encirclement from the German point of view was that this, this Panzer Group 2 comes down from, you know, from the Slamensk area. Down southwards through Bella, what is now Bella roost into northern Ukraine, but east of the Danipa river. And Panzer Group 1, which is part of Army Group south, going south into south of Kiev into, you know, pulling up to the getting a bridge out of the Danipa, near the Danipa Britovsk, would then swirl northwards. And so they come down and meet each other. And there's this huge pocket of the settlement in the middle of which Kiev is caught in the middle of it. And this is a very familiar from what's going on in Ukraine at the moment that actually it's quite difficult to coordinate these kind of. It really is. And the point is that Army Group 2, Panzer Group 2, particularly, is absolutely on its knees by the time of the join up. So it looks like an amazing victory for the Germans. And it is in terms of the amount of men they captured and the kind of disaster for the Red Army. But they are, they're so, they've been so chewed up in the whole process that they're on their knees. And at that point, you know, Hitler's also saying just a few days before the actual meet up, the join up actually happens on the evening of the 14th of September. It's about 6.20 pm, just north of a, just south of a, north of a little place called Lubny, which incidentally is, is fanatically defended by civilians and NKVD people, which are obviously former KGB, with people chucking Molotov cocktails and firing from the rooftops of these Panzers. But they still, you know, Lubny falls. And this join up actually happens just. But at the same time, Hitler's going, okay, Bob Ross hasn't completely won. So we need a new operation, which is going to be Operation Typhoon. And that is going to be back again towards Moscow. So everyone's sort of going, but we were going to Moscow and you've just diverted us all down and we haven't got Lenin grad. And okay, we have got this massive encirclement. But all the encirclement is telling a lot of the people on the ground is the absolute infinitesimal reserves of the Red Army because they're still in the game. They've still got an Air Force. They've still got guns. They've still got more men to come. You know, they've still got, they've still got 14 million people. They can call like they've still got, you know, these three million people of the 18-year-old age group, etc., etc. So it's sort of the Hitler Kiev is an endorsement of his military genius. You know, everyone, everyone thought he was wrong in 1940 and he proved him right. He, you know, proved his commanders wrong the numbscals. They're police professional eats. And everyone said, um, fear, I don't think it's a good idea to sort of, you know, divert from Moscow, you know, we're going to go into Lenin grad and Kiev. And he's like, I told you so, you know, look at that. It's the biggest victory ever in the history of the world. He still feels the need, though. He does have the sense that it hasn't gone well enough that they need a new operation. So effectively, this is also the end of Operation Barossa. Yes, and that's the point. It is that Kiev is a terrific victory on one level. But on another level, it's they're winning themselves to death. That's the point. That is before the snow falls, that is before they've got to Moscow. They're all there. But here's the question, though. So from the picture you painted, that the Germans have lost this colossal gamble within months, weeks of making it. But then the, and they're exhausted. There's some, you know, group, whatever, panzers are on their knees, all this stuff. So my question would be, well, why does it take so long then for them to be beaten? Because they're going to be in Russia for years. I mean, they're fighting in Starlingrad. They're fighting these colossal tank battles a couple of years later. How is it that they're so they are so resilient if the operation is so misconceived? Yeah, that's a really good question. So they get, you know, the Germans do press on operation typhoon, you know, it is incredible. What what they managed to amass for that attack. And it's all based around, you know, Army group center again. So replacement tanks have come up and so on. They're still a fraction of what they were on June 19th, you know, the start of Operation Barbarossa, but they do manage to have a sort of a concentration of force to a certain extent by stripping from Army group north from stripping from Army group south and putting all their eggs in one basket of Army group center to be, you know, that is how Operation Typhoon is is able to happen. And that happened that they get any success at all is largely because of the encirclement of Kiev, which is almost entirely down to the incompetence of Starling. I mean, you know, that is 700,000 people that do not need to be in the bag and are there purely because of Starling's incompetence. It's it's it's it's it's it's it's who is who is the least incompetent. Yeah, well, well, dictator here. I mean, it's well that that certainly plays a part, but but the reason it goes on. So then they get counter attack quite heavily opposite Moscow in early December 1941. But then both sides sort of run out of steam and it's winter and so there's a sort of cooling off period in the front, you know, the snow's on the ground and nothing really happens for a while. And everyone everyone's aware that, you know, what's going to happen in the following summer is going to be another renewed offensive by Germany. And of course, you know, between December and late July 1941, Germany's had a chance to build up its strength from all the rest of it. Soviet Union's had a chance to kind of get its factories that it's moved to the Ural's back into gear, more T-34 tanks and all the rest of it. And they're blocking, you know, they're making Moscow absolutely impenetrable, which they do. But case blue, which is the operation in the summer of 1942 is driven towards the Caucasus. But by this point, it's no longer Operation Barbarossa, right? No Operation Barbarossa ends or ends on the 25th of September 1941. So that being so, and this episode being about Operation Barbarossa, could I just one before we end one last question, which I think is a great question. I have always wondered and it's asked by Nick Rogers and Dominic mentioned Napoleon and Napoleon reaching Moscow. And he asked, did Hitler or his generals at any point study Napoleon's Russian campaign and attempted to draw lessons from it? They did study it, but they thought that was then and this is now and we've got lots of tanks. Okay. That's fair enough. Bro, thanks ever so much. Now, if you have listened to this and enjoyed it and want to know in absolutely microscopic detail more about Operation Barbarossa, about the Second World War, about every conceivable aspect of it, there are two episodes that you've put out about a month ago on the planning for Operation Barbarossa, which are fabulous. And if you haven't listened to them, go and check them out, or all the other episodes as well. And am I right in thinking that you also have a, we have Ways Fest coming up? You are absolutely correct, bro. 20 second to the 24th of July, it's for anyone who does listen to We Have Ways Bond, then lots of your friends of the show, lots of historians, we've got historians from coming from America, from Canada, from Germany, Austria, Poland, lots and lots of trucks and that's your summer holiday, sort it out. It's just the thing that happens in Bista. Does that happen in Bista? There's a Silverstone race circuit, it's a place called Black Pit Brewery, and it's a splendid place and it's a lot of fun. And you can find out more on wehavewaysfest.co.uk. So we have Waysfest.co.uk. And we will actually be returning Tom to this issue when we later in the summer, when we will be doing a podcast with Ian McGregor, who's got a new book coming out this summer about Stalingrad. Which is terrific, by the way, it's a very, very good book. Oh, so it's got the endorsement from a top World War II historian or Second World War historian, I should say day. If you ban the phrase World War II on We Have Ways Day, we're British aren't we, you say? Right. So on that bombshell, we will see you all for you. We will see you next time for some more trucks. Goodbye. Bye-bye, Jiro. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistrypod.com. That's restishistrypod.com.