Operation Barbarossa: An Ideological Imperative

German soldiers on the Eastern Front, summer 1941

The Second World War in Europe was won (and lost) on the Eastern Front. Out of the estimated 5.4 million German soldiers who were killed, three-quarters to four-fifths died while fighting on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union (emphatically not just Russia – this is a lazy conflation) suffered some 27 million deaths. It was launched by Adolf Hitler as a war of extermination against the “Judeo-Bolshevik” regime in Moscow, to secure German hegemony in Europe, and to achieve Lebensraum (living space) – these were, essentially, the three planks of his foreign policy and all were attainable, in his mind, by the toppling of the Soviet government. The paranoid, delusional fantasies that drove Hitler to invade the Soviet Union are impossible to disentangle from the same phantasms that drove him to exterminate the Jews, and the Second World War in Europe is incomprehensible without confronting and understanding them. This analysis of the reasons behind Barbarossa and the policies that the Nazis enacted will center, therefore, on an examination of the Jewish question in Nazi ideology.

Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and its allies, was the largest invasion in history. The invading force was made up of nearly four million men. This week marks the 75^th anniversary of this watershed moment. In the lead-up to the war, Hitler made clear that the Wehrmacht’s goal was not just to reach, in his mind, arbitrary lines – it was to utterly destroy the enemy. He gave instructions to army generals to cooperate with the SS, who were authorized to carry out “executive actions” (read: executions) against defined elements within the civilian population. Subsequent policies drawn up by the SS defined these as middle- and senior-ranking members of the Communist Party; middle- and senior-ranking Comintern officials; party commissars; Jews in party and state positions; extremists; saboteurs; bandits; and so on. Because of the purposeful and explicit conflation of Judaism with Bolshevism in Nazi ideology, a blanket death sentence for all Jews in party and state positions meant, in effect, the mass murder of the entire male Jewish population of the Soviet Union. The vagueness of the last three categories I’ve enumerated also contributed to such an effect, and were understood by the SS and the army to do so. In July and August 1941, these executions began to include women and children as well.

A German policeman murders a Jewish woman and child; Ivanhorod, Ukraine, 1942. 

In order to try to grapple with the pathologies that formed Adolf Hitler’s worldview, it is essential to go back in time to the end of the First World War. Hitler, recovering from a mustard gas attack at a military hospital in Pasewalk, learned of Germany’s surrender on November 11, 1918. This had a shattering effect on him. He insisted, like so many others, that the Germans had not been defeated by force of arms, but rather by a shadowy conspiracy of Marxists, traitors, and, above all, Jews. The Jews needed to pay for their “crime” of their alleged stab in the back. As Hitler’s bitterness and anger grew he began to identify the Jews as a vampiric, parasitic race that existed solely to destroy the integrity of other world races, in particular the Aryan, and collapse them from within. In order to redeem the Aryan race, and the world, the Jews needed to be destroyed. His hatred of the Jews was the alpha and omega of his worldview, and his hatred of them consumed him to the point where, at the end of the war, the achievement of having destroyed so many of them was more important than the victory, or even existence, of Germany and the German people.

Hitler’s obsessive fixation with the Jews built upon that of 19^th century writers such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Arthur de Gobineau, but was taken to a new murderous level that was attainable due to Hitler’s control not just of a pen, but of a mighty nation and army. His charisma was able to whip up large swathes of the German population, who were embittered and emasculated by the experience of their country’s defeat, hyperinflation, and depression. In their misery, they sought a messianic “great man” to lead them out of the abyss. They frantically gripped onto that man to provide some dignity and meaning to their lives, which had been shattered. And that man, Hitler, was able to either convince or to deepen the conviction in many Germans that it had been the Jews who were responsible for their defeat. It was much easier for them to accept this “explanation”; it was a soothing tonic for men who could not get work, which caused acute shame, and for women who had to watch their husbands drink themselves to sleep (or to death) and to frantically worry about where their next meal would come from. Much easier to bask in self-pity and to blame the Jews. This was not all, and perhaps not even most, of Hitler’s constituency, but it was its kernel. And although Hitler was certainly a masterful politician and rhetorician, his anti-Semitic beliefs were deeply ingrained and genuine; they were not just propaganda points.

All of this is important to understand why Hitler was intent on the destruction and conquest of the Soviet Union which he firmly believed to be in the grip of malevolent Jewish actors. The Slavs who made up the Soviet armies were mere pawns being controlled by Jewish forces. Lashing out and destroying this demonic octopus (which, obviously, existed only in the minds of paranoid anti-Semites) required a massive invasion that would dash out its brain and sever its tentacles. On the outset of the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen, mobile death squads, quietly encouraged local Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians to carry out pogroms against their Jewish neighbors on the explicit orders of their commander, Reinhard Heydrich. The myth of the "Judeo-Bolshevik" (Żydokomuna in Polish) was strong in Eastern Europe, where many identified the new, and unwelcome, Soviet power with the Jews. These locals perpetrated horrific massacres in cities such as L'viv and Kaunas. Later, the Germans took control and carried out mass executions (with local assistance in identifying, rounding up, and shooting Jewish victims) in a more systematic fashion, including the so-called Sardinenpackung (sardine-packing) method, perfected by SS general Friedrich Jeckeln, which involved laying the victims down head-to-toe at the bottom of the pit and then shooting them. This atrocious innovation on Jeckeln’s part allowed for more bodies to fit in each mass grave.

A bloodied Jewish woman being chased by a Ukrainian mob in L'viv, summer 1941.

This was all part and parcel of the National Socialist war on the Soviet Union: it cannot be emphasized enough that what we now know as the Holocaust was inextricably intertwined with the conquest of the Soviet Union. The Holocaust was not a sideshow, or a parallel atrocity that the Nazis committed while driving on Moscow, with the major intent of flying the swastika on the spires of the Kremlin. No: the destruction of the Jews was of central importance in German war aims. Historians disagree as to when (or even if) Adolf Hitler gave the discrete order to murder the Jews of Europe. Some suggest the summer of 1941, others autumn 1941, and yet others in December of that year upon the failure to capture Moscow. Others understand the Holocaust as local genocides that only coalesced into one centralized “production,” if you will, in the spring of 1942, when the camps of Aktion Reinhard and Auschwitz-Birkenau began to crank their death mills. Many argue about the centrality of Hitler in this process: was it local actors, like Odilo Globocnik in Lublin and Arthur Greiser in Posen, who were the initiators of genocide? Was it the sinister quadrumvirate of Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Müller, and Adolf Eichmann, operating in Berlin more or less independently? Or was Hitler the driving force behind the madness?

Based upon my analysis, I believe that Hitler was centrally involved, as he would have had to have been; the Jewish question was almost literally his raison d’etre. To think that he was centrally involved in legislation discriminating against German Jews in the 1930s and in the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, but somehow only tangentially and insignificantly involved in the launching of the genocide strikes me as absurd. This does not mean that he made every decision or was even consulted on every point, but it does mean that he was centrally important in its execution. I further believe that while the Nazis began the genocide of the Soviet Jews immediately upon the start of Barbarossa (in the summer of 1941), they did not settle on the mass murder of European Jewry until sometime later that year, perhaps in September or October 1941, when it became clear that the Blitzkrieg would not succeed. The Final Solution, hitherto, had meant the deportation of Jews somewhere to the “East, in western Siberia, for example, after the defeat of the Soviet Union and the end of the war. There they would, undoubtedly, have led a miserable existence before dying in the millions. But when the Blitzkrieg stalled, and Hitler realized that the war against the Soviet Union would be a long one, he decided in his frustration that the Jews of Poland, the Czech lands, and elsewhere needed to be killed immediately, rather than after the war, as had previously been envisaged. Because he viewed the Jews being shot in Belarusian forests and Ukrainian ditches as the same entity as the Allied governments in Moscow, Washington, and London, if he could not be successful in crushing these states militarily, at least he could destroy as much of the enemy as he could. This is a huge question that deserves its own piece: I will tackle it at length in a future post.

German soldiers surrendering to a Red Army unit on the outskirts of Moscow 

Another significant factor of the German drive to the East was the mass murder of tens of millions of Slavs to make room for 8-10 million German settlers who would take their place. Germans would till the soil and send the abundant produce of the Ukrainian black earth back home to the Reich, and Germany would never know hunger again, as it had during the First World War, when the Allied blockade of Germany starved over 400,000 people to death. Hitler believed that this was crucial in weakening the German will to fight and in creating the atmosphere that allowed for the “Jewish stab in the back” that caused the German defeat. This could not, and would not, happen again. If it meant that tens of millions of Slavic Untermenschen had to starve to death, then so be it. The remaining Slavs would be the “Germanizable” ones, who would be happy slaves for the master Aryan race until the end of time, knowing nothing of their own histories, their own languages, or their own cultures. This would have been cultural genocide on an unimaginable scale. Although the Germans did ultimately kill millions of Soviet civilians, thankfully this plan, known as Generalplan Ost, did not come to fruition.  

Ultimately, this was the German intention for what would happen to the Soviet Union. This was not to be a “civilized” war. The communist, Hitler told his generals before the invasion, is no comrade; he must be pitilessly slaughtered. This would be an ideological war of annihilation such as the world had never seen. When a few generals had questioned barbaric German methods in Poland in 1939, Hitler had angrily scoffed that war could not be won using “Salvation Army methods.” This was even more true in the case of Operation Barbarossa, which Hitler saw as being waged against the Jewish world enemy. The savagery of the war that ensued was sadly, therefore, foreseeable. The fact that Germany's opponent was an unbridled, barbaric totalitarian regime in its own right only added to the death toll, and when the German army was swept aside in 1944-45, the Red Army exacted revenge in devastating fashion, looting on an epic scale and raping German women in the hundreds of thousands.

To suggest, as some alternative historians and laymen do, that Hitler made a disastrous mistake in invading the Soviet Union, that he should have focused on defeating the British, is to miss the point. If Hitler had not done so, he would not have been Hitler. While capable of keen strategic insight, he was motivated by ideological imperatives. Hitler felt the burning need to invade the Soviet Union, always planned to do so, and everything else, including the war on the Western Front, was done to shore up this thrust to the East. While part of Hitler’s reasoning for Operation Barbarossa was to make the British realize that they stood alone against him, and therefore compel them to come to a separate peace, the overriding reason was his incalculably deep ideological pathologies, which were non-negotiable. The “Jewish Bolshevik” was the enemy of Hitler’s worldview, not the British, whom he greatly esteemed (although at times believed to be controlled by Jewish puppeteers). While true that Lebensraum in the East would, in his mind, create a bread basket for the Germans that would unite them into one happy family and make them the strongest race on the planet, his main reasons were not positive, but negative; not constructive, but destructive. Hitler, a deeply unhappy, pessimistic, and gloomy man, was driven to do what he did not out of love for his people, but out of the ferocious hatred of other peoples, the Jews above all others. It was this, and no strategic vision, that was the driving force behind his otherwise seemingly irrational decisions. The consequences – a world war that was marked by the unprecedented mass murder of civilian populations, particularly and most notoriously the Holocaust – are clear for all to see.