Scott Smith wrote:Roberto, the notion that Hitler inevitably had to execute Barbarossa because he expressed similar geopolitical ideas in Mein Kampf is teleological at best.
Hitler himself stated the following at a meeting with his generals in 1941:
Man soll heute in der anderen Welt nicht so blöde tun. Die Herren hätten bloß einmal lesen sollen, was ich geschrieben habe, und zwar tausendmal geschrieben habe. Öfter hat kein Mensch erklärt, … was er will, als ich es getan habe.
My translation:
They shouldn’t be so dumbfounded in the other world today. The gentleman should only have read what I wrote, wrote a thousand times. No man ever declared more often … what he wanted than I did.
One of his frank statements in Mein Kampf had been:
Ein Programm, wie ich es vertrete, ist die Formulierung einer Kriegserklärung gegen eine bestehende Ordnung, gegen eine bestehende Weltauffassung überhaupt.
My translation:
A program such as I represent is the formulation of a declaration of war against an established order, against the existing world view overall.
One of the few who read
Mein Kampf throroughly was British historian E.C. Ensor. One of his conclusions in 1939 was the following:
Mr. Hitler will try to get rid of the Jews in their entirety and to conduct a war of conquest against Russia.
All citations after: Guido Knopp,
Unser Jahrhundert: Deutsche Schicksalstage. C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1998.
If Smith can show us evidence that the man who strove to carry out the ideas he had set out in
Mein Kampf eventually moved away from the one under discussion (I have shown evidence to the contrary), I may accept his above quoted statement.
So instead of giving us long and empty sermons, Smith should try to demonstrate that and when, despite his statements to the contrary that have been quoted, Hitler departed from the idea to conquer "living space" from Russia for the German people.
While he tries to do that, readers may have a look at the assessment of German historian Hermann Graml.
Operation Barbarossa
On 22 June 1941 153 divisions of the Wehrmacht of National Socialist Germany – together with units of the armies of allied states like Finland, Romania and Hungary – crossed the borders of the Soviet Union. Since the Second World War this operation, prepared under the code name “Barbarossa”, was unanimously considered by research on contemporary history as the classic example of a war of aggression. Only a secondary question was controversially discussed: Did the “Führer” of the Third Reich in his decision to attack principally intend to serve the goal contained in his ideology, i.e. the goal, insistently propagated since “Mein Kampf”, to conquer “living space in the East” for the German nation and for a German world empire? Or was the motivation stronger that resulted for him when, after the victorious campaigns in eastern, northern and western Europe, he was faced with the fact that the still unbeaten Great Britain did not think of acknowledging his domination of the European continent, and therefrom derived the conclusion that he must deprive the British government of the hope on its last “continental blessing” by conquering Russia?
Recently, however, the assertion has come up that Hitler’s attack barely anticipated a preventive war by Stalin, and some in the meantime go as far as maintaining that Hitler’s attack was a preventive strike not only objectively but also intended to be one by the “Führer”. The last to come up with this was “Victor Suvorov”. This pseudonym allegedly stands for a Soviet officer – or a group of officers – who until the beginning of the 1980s, until he (they) went over to the West, worked for the military secret service of the USSR. In his book ‘The Icebreaker. Hitler in Stalin’s Calculus’ “Suvorov” even gives the date of Stalin’s assault: 6 July 1941. The fact that reviewers in the German press manifested themselves impressed by the ‘Icebreaker’, however, has to do only with the widespread demand for apologetic literature and not at all with the quality of the writing. For a closer look reveals that “Suvorov” cannot provide plausible arguments let alone documentary evidence in support of his theses. This is not surprising given that in the encirclement battles of 1941 the German troops, although the staffs of armies and army groups fell into their hands, did not capture a single document that would indicate plans by Stalin for a preventive war, and such are lacking to this day. All that “Suvorov” does is to arbitrarily declare the dislocation of the Red Army in the spring of 1941 to have been a marching-up for a preventive strike, and the few citations from memoirs of Soviet military men that he tries to support this act of arbitrariness with are revealed by examination as shameless forgeries of the original texts. The political agenda of such pamphlets, i.e. the warning against a basic aggressiveness of Soviet foreign policy, is obvious.
In fact Hitler and the leading circles of the Third Reich grasped the idea of soon attacking Russia still during the campaign in France, as Chief of General Staff Franz Halder recorded in his diary. As long as they hoped they could count on the British giving in after the conquest of Western Europe, that “Führer” and his National Socialist minions thought of the war for “living space” required by National Socialist ideology, while for instance the military considered the march into the Baltics and the Ukraine to be tempting because their inherited German-national imperialism reawakened when they saw the triumph in the West in sight.
As early as 21 July 1940 Hitler ordered to prepare the attack on the Soviet Union, having the autumn of 1940 in mind as the time. After his military advisers had convinced him that the marching-up would take considerably longer and that additional forces were required, Hitler on 31 July gave the order to direct the planning towards an attack in the spring of 1941. On 18 December 1940 there followed Directive Number 21 with the final setting of “Operation Barbarossa”. The date was 15 May 1941, which then had to be exceeded by several weeks due to the perceived need of conquering Yugoslavia and assisting the Italian ally in Greece. Hitler’s ideological motivation was there as before, though now ever more overlaid by the argument that Great Britain must be deprived of the USSR as a potential ally. Both were independent of recognized or even suspected Soviet behavior. Not for an instant did Hitler believe that the Soviet Union – internally unstable and depending on an army without the power required for an offensive against a modern enemy, for it was equipped with qualitatively insufficient weapons and had lost a high percentage of its officer corps through Stalin’s purges of 1937-1939 – was able to carry out an attack on the German Reich, especially after the latter’s successes in Poland, Norway, Western Europe and most recently in the Balkans.
Stalin was of the same opinion, but until the spring of 1941 he convinced himself that Hitler would not be so foolish as to attack Russia, which after all was strong in the defensive, as long as Great Britain was still unbeaten. Warnings from London about the German intentions of attack he for a long time considered to be attempts to induce him to hostile actions against Germany in order to take the pressure off Great Britain. Only in April and May 1941, when the German marching-up had taken a dimension that could no longer be interpreted as a basis for political pressure maneuvers, there began unsystematic reactions including a transfer of troops from the eastern parts of the Union to the western regions, and only from mid-June onward, after Churchill had been able to provide an exact image of the German marching-up and the German planning on hand of decoded German radio messages, Stalin ordered radical defensive measures, which due to the now inevitable hectic did more harm than good, however, and contributed to the heavy Soviet defeats in the first weeks of the war.
I translated the above from an article by Hermann Graml published in Wolfgang Benz et al,
Legenden, Lügen, Vorurteile, 12th edition 2002 by dtv Munich, pages 193 and following.
