Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost the War - By Jonathan Dimbleby

Notes

It was the "Great Patriotic War," not D-Day, that settled Hitler's fate. By the end of 1941, the Nazis had lost any realistic chance of winning the war.

Operation Barbarossa was the biggest, bloodiest, and most barbarous military enterprise in the history of warfare. In less than six months, six times as many men were killed, wounded, or missing as in the Battle of the Somme.

Long before 1941, the Soviet Union and Germany secretly collaborated to circumvent the Treaty of Versailles. 

German tank commanders tested the very blitzkrieg maneuvers they would later use to devastate Russia at training grounds near Kazan, deep inside the Soviet Union.

Western journalists helped cover up Soviet atrocities to maintain access. In 1933, Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that "any report of a famine in Russia is an exaggeration or malignant propaganda," while millions starved in Ukraine.

Hitler's "Hunger Plan" was a premeditated strategy to starve 30 million Soviet citizens to death to feed the Wehrmacht and secure the German food supply.

Stalin trusted Hitler more than his own intelligence. When a German deserter swam the river on the eve of the invasion to warn that the attack would begin at dawn, Stalin ordered him shot for "disinformation."

The "Final Solution" began on the Eastern Front, not in the gas chambers of Poland. By the end of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen (death squads) had shot over a million Jews into pits behind the advancing lines.

Hitler's strategic vacillation saved Moscow. In August 1941, he halted the direct advance on the capital to divert panzers south to seize Ukraine's economic resources. His generals were furious, correctly predicting this delay would leave them fighting in the winter mud.

The Russian "Rasputitsa" (the season of mud) was as deadly as the winter cold. It turned roads into canals of slime where vehicles sank and horses drowned, immobilizing the Wehrmacht long before the temperature dropped.

Most Soviet soldiers captured in 1941 did not survive. By May 1945, some 3 million Soviet POWs had died in German captivity; two-thirds of them had starved or been shot before the end of the first winter.

Stalin issued Order No. 270, declaring that any soldier who surrendered or retreated was a "malicious deserter." Their families were liable to arrest, and "blocking units" were set up behind the front lines to machine-gun retreating Soviet troops.

The Soviet evacuation of industry was a miracle of improvisation. As the Germans advanced, the Soviets dismantled 1,500 factories and moved them east of the Urals. By 1942, they were producing more tanks than Germany.

Hitler fantasized about a future Ukraine populated by German "soldier-peasants" who would breed large families and guard the Reich, while the native population would be kept uneducated, knowing only enough to read road signs.

Stalin demanded a "Second Front" in Europe immediately in 1941. Churchill and Roosevelt knew it was militarily impossible but played along to keep Russia in the war, fearing Stalin might otherwise make a separate peace with Hitler.

The German defeat was sealed by logistics, not just tactics. The Wehrmacht underestimated the Russian colossus: when they smashed a dozen divisions, the Russians simply put up another dozen. Germany was fighting a war of attrition it could not win.