Chapter 49 Chapter Forty-Nine

March on Moscow (from "The Lost Empire of the World") The Geographical Situation of the "Barbarossa" Plan to Invade the Soviet Union In war, winning or losing is everything, and Germany lost.The defeat eclipsed all its victories on the battlefield.Its enemies were not as victorious as it was, but in the end overwhelmed it by superiority in numbers and machinery. Defeated battles also naturally make the defeated ones doubt their own military actions.Therefore, our military historians, unfortunately including the famous German generals Guderian, Manstein, Vallimont, etc., generally believe that our plan to invade Russia is "vague" and "cobbled together". ” or “without strategic purpose”.This kind of historical family ugliness, apart from losing the dignity of a soldier to justify itself, what else can it do?We have had enough of our sad lapses, of our lost battles, of our world empire, and there is no reason to paint the best efforts of our nation as an act of incompetent folly.Such flattering writing caters to the prejudices of the victors, disgraces everyone, and distorts history.

I myself was temporarily assigned to General Max's staff, which in the autumn and winter of 1940 made the initial military plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union and later drafted the operational plan.So I was the one who was involved in it from the beginning.This plan is a bold idea regardless of the scope of time and space, the amount of manpower and material resources used, and the huge political stakes.In detail, Barbarossa is extremely complicated, almost beyond the grasp of any individual's intelligence, but in terms of overall outline, it is a very simple plan.Its virtue and power lie here.It has reliable geographical, economic and military basis, and any war inevitably entails certain risks.Given that premise, it's a solid plan.

The reader is invited to take a moment to study the very simple map I have drawn.In the future, when I describe the combat process, I will also provide more than forty military situation maps found in the archives.Now for a brief description of the elements of Barbarossa's attack plan. The first line is where we mainly work hard, the starting line in Poland.The whole line is from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains, from north to south, a total length of about 500 miles (in addition, defensive measures were taken from Romania to protect the Ploiesti oil fields). The third line is our goal.From Archangel on the White Sea to Kazan in the south, and then along the Volga to the Caspian Sea, the total length is almost two thousand miles.Its farthest target is about 1,200 miles from the starting point.

The second line was the furthest we reached in December 1941.This line runs from Leningrad on the Gulf of Finland via Moscow to Crimea on the Black Sea, and barely reaches Rostov on the Don.The whole line is nearly 1,200 miles long, and it is more than 600 miles away from the starting point.So it appeared that we were stopped halfway by the Russians, but we were not, and we fought until the last minute. offensive concept In the spring of 1941 our intelligence reported that the Red Army was massing in the west near the line dividing Poland in two.The menacing build-up of the Slavic armies warns us of the danger of Bolshevism sweeping across Europe.This was the main rationale for the Führer's decision to launch a preventive war, and it justified the plans we had put forward earlier.

But the threatening deployment of Stalin's troops still pleases us, because In order for him to give up his extremely favorable conditions for mobilizing troops in Russia's vast upper land, and concentrate the Red Army in two small pieces of land where we can quickly deal a crushing blow.At that time, Stalin had the advantage both in numbers and equipment.According to our reliable information at the time, our march may require 150 divisions to deal with 200 divisions, 3,200 tanks to deal with 10,000 tanks, and the balance of air force is not favorable to us. place, the situation is unclear.It is evident, therefore, that our hopes rest on our superior qualities in training, command, fighters and equipment, and on the unexpected and decisive lightning strikes.After the Battle of Finland, such a risk seemed reasonable.

Barbarossa's strategic aim was to deliver a crushing blow to the Soviet state in the summer, turning the crushed Soviet Union into unarmed socialist provinces, garrisoned and ruled by the Germans from the Polish border to the Volga.The pristine lands east of the Volga, the frozen desolate regions of Siberia, and the open forests outside the Urals can be surrounded and occupied later.An important consideration was that from these outlying areas, none of the existing bombers could fly to Germany. Operationally, we hope to launch three massive lightning raids simultaneously, two north of the swamp and one south of it, to break through the defenses in depth on the western frontier, and then, over a period of several weeks, encircle and clear the broken army.In this way, a large number of the main forces of the Red Army will be wiped out almost immediately.

These are what we expect to be able to achieve, but also know that the matter is not over.We are well aware that the enemy will keep a large reserve between Moscow and the frontier, and that they will dig trenches in certain places and hold them.We also know that the tenacious Slavs fought best when defending their homeland.Therefore, we expect and plan to launch a second major battle in the center in the first ten days of July, perhaps outside the Dnieper-Dvina line, to encircle and eliminate these reserve forces.Finally, after reaching the Leningrad-Moscow-Sevastopol line, we were prepared to meet the last Russian resistance, including the spontaneous mass self-defense of the capital and other large industrial cities in this spine of the Soviet Union (later also did encounter this resistance).As far as we can judge, once we have broken this vertebra, there will be no resistance to our final goal, the Arkhangel-Volga line, other than a mopping up of the terrified population and perhaps some small-scale guerrilla warfare. up.

Of course it was a difficult task, a risky gamble.The battlefield was the mainland of the Soviet Union, a large funnel-shaped land five hundred miles long on one end and seventeen hundred miles long on the other.The northern slope of the funnel is from the Baltic Sea to the White Sea, and the southern slope is from the Carpathian Mountains to the Black Sea.Our forces had to fan out across the monotonous and boundless Russian plain, the further we advanced the longer the lines of communication and the thinner the front lines.This is what we estimated, but it is surprising that the desolation of the Russian countryside and the poor roads are not suitable for blitzkrieg.Failure to estimate this is the fault of our intelligence work.In fact, the extremely low standards and inefficiencies of Communist Russia served as a formidable defensive force.No effort has been made to build decent roads, and the railroads are poorly built, and the width of the tracks is clearly not the same as ours.

Translator's Note: According to Long, the plans of the German General Staff to attack other countries are always defensive and hypothetical; but they are always caused by the stupid or malicious actions of others to act according to the plan.Historians still debate Stalin's motives in 1941, but it appears he had no plans of attack.The Soviets were terribly afraid of the Germans, and until the last minute they did everything possible to appease the Germans and prevent them from attacking. Cutting the Pie Despite all its problems, Project Barbarossa hit the ground running.Across the front we had the effect of a surprise attack.These achievements will leave a great miracle in the history of war.Guderian's book records how the German artillery around Brest-Litovsk waited quietly for the pre-dawn heavy bombardment of the unsuspecting Bolsheviks, watching the last Russian supply The train faithfully left the territory of the USSR and entered our occupied part of Poland.Nothing illustrates more clearly how Stalin and his loyal followers were duped by the Führer's astute policy.Western writers now refer to this surprise attack as a "perfidious attack." It seems that at the beginning of the life-and-death struggle, Germany can still care about observing the rules and regulations of parlor games.

After one step ahead, Barbarossa continued as planned.The Luftwaffe spotted the huge Soviet front-line air force on the ground and wiped it out within hours.With the support of the infantry advance, the pincer offensive of our armored forces proceeded as planned on the central and northern roads.Six days later we had reached Minsk and the banks of the Dvina and captured nearly half a million enemy troops and thousands of guns and tanks.It was only on the southern front that Runstead encountered some real resistance.In the rest of the country, the Red Army is like a giant that has lost its head but is still struggling.Stalin was neither seen nor heard, paralyzed with melancholy and pain.

Two weeks later, along two-thirds of the way along the main road to Moscow, a second huge armored encirclement was closed near Smolensk; Domestic Lake and continue quickly through wilderness areas to near Lenin-Lore.Rundstedt accelerated and approached Kyiv.We captured hundreds of thousands more.The Russians continued to fight tenaciously and courageously in some small pockets, but as a whole we no longer encountered organized resistance from a national army.We have won another war, or rather, according to reports from the various fields and a picture that was shown before the High Command.It was a huge police operation completed in three weeks.The task now is to clean up the remnants.In this way, after Poland and France, the Soviet Union was added. Of course, such a large-scale march will inevitably lead to casualties and loss of supplies and weapons, so the truce followed until August.Some writers claim that the break was "indecisive and jeopardized," but apparently they know nothing about the logistics.The rest was part of our original plan.Not at all indecisive, the German army, which had fought victorious battles from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, rejoiced in the excitement of victory, regrouped, and re-equipped. This scene, the veteran soldiers at that time still feel very excited when they think about it. As a member of Frederick Barbarossa's staff who knew the smallest details, I was also present at the famous meeting at Wolf's Lair headquarters on July 16, when Hitler swung his hands over the map on the tabletop and smugly greeted Goh. Ling, Rosenberg, Bowman, and other senior party officials said: "The task now is, roughly speaking, to cut this huge pie into the pieces we need to be able to: first, control it; Second, govern it; third, exploit it!" Hitler counted his fingers, the smile of joy on his bloated, unhealthy face, his pale cheeks flushed a little with victory, all this vividly in his mind.After the meeting, he spoke informally of forty divisions being abolished in September so that manpower could be brought back to the factories.In order to finally crush Britain and end the war, he was to scale back tank and gun production in favor of a program of accelerated naval and air buildup.These seemed to be very natural things, and no one raised any objections at the time.Judging from the obvious facts on the battlefield, the battle on the Eastern Front had been won. Comment It's easy to talk strategy from an armchair, it's second-guessing and irresponsible, but no one really pays any attention to what these strategists think.The war is over, and there is nothing to be decided by their opinions. They just consume some worthless paper and ink.But before the outcome is finalized, every war decision involves the lives of countless soldiers, and may even affect the survival of the country.After a long period of time, it is very unwise to write off the judgment of the military personnel who participated in the actual work at that time without thinking.But in comments about Barbarossa's plans, few have expressed this caution. Three false criticisms of our war are recurring and contradictory, but this does not prevent critics from using one, two, or all three.The arguments they put forward are: First, no matter how many military victories we have won, our invasion of the Soviet Union is doomed to failure, because Germany, which is only a small piece of land in Europe and has a population of only 80 million, wants to subdue Germany, which has a population of nearly 200 million and a vast territory. Russia is hopeless; Second, Hitler was stupid for brutalizing the Russian population, otherwise they might have welcomed us with both hands and helped to overthrow the communist rule they loathed.Then there must be the old story of how the country women greeted the German invaders with flowers or bread and salt; Third, this plan has committed a common military problem, which is to pursue territorial and economic interests instead of concentrating on destroying the enemy's armed forces. Ok.My answer to the first point is: If you look at the world map, a small island like Britain with a population of only 30 to 40 million cannot rule South Africa, India, Canada and Australia, which have a population of nearly 500 million.But in any case, the British ruled these areas for a long time.Not only that, these territories are thousands of miles away, do not border on the United Kingdom, and are only connected by sea shipping.The Soviet Union, by contrast, was linked to German land transport and was directly within range of our artillery. These commentators forget that the Soviet Union was built by a small extremist Bolshevik party who overthrew the old regime and ruled over 10,000 times more inhabitants than themselves, many different peoples.They also forgot that one of the few brutal Mongolian invaders, the so-called "Golden Horde", once ruled the Slavs for more than a century.In a word, these critics know nothing about the history of the conquest of alien races, about the techniques of military domination, especially with modern transportation and military equipment.If we conquered the Soviet Union, we would govern it. We occupied some provinces for several years and managed them well. The second argument is of course contradictory to the first.If we can't overwhelm the Russians anyway, what do we gain by detente from them?can only hasten our demise.These remarks are based on their erroneous views on the whole character of the German-Soviet war.You should know that strictly speaking, this is a life and death struggle. History has reached a turning point, and there are only two industrial powers left in Eurasia, only two.They were pitted against each other, and they were fighting for two completely different revolutionary ideologies.If the Bolsheviks were victorious, we know that Germany must perish; if the National Socialists were victorious, there would be no room for an independent, armed, menacing Bolshevik far larger than the Reich in the center of the Continent. Greenskin Dossier The Green Paper Dossier is an instruction on the general policy of economic exploitation after the conquest of Russia drawn up by the Eastern Front Economic Staff under the leadership of Goering. There are already quite a few articles written on this dossier.At Nuremberg, I confirmed that I had no part in drafting this administrative plan, since my main responsibility was combat. Needless to say, the suggestion of the Green Paper Dossier is very vicious. It deliberately wants to starve tens of millions of Russians to death.Goering admitted this, and the papers are on the record, so it would be foolish to deny it.It is neither meaningful nor beneficial to try to prove that the Green Paper Dossier is "moral".However, it may be justified to make some observations of a military nature. The Green Paper Dossier plan is based on obvious geographical conditions.The food in the "black belt" of southern Russia supplies not only its own and the industrial needs of the region, but also the needs of the entire industrial area in the north.Northern Russia has always been a low-yielding and impoverished region, with chronic food shortages due to bad climate and poor soil.The Green Paper Dossier proposes to search grain, meat, coal, oil, fat, and industrial products from the south in order to maintain the needs of our front troops and ease domestic supply constraints.The plan is to leave the southern Slavs with a minimum heat requirement so that they can continue to be productive.However, since Germany's demand for agricultural products from Russia is so large, it will naturally cause a large-scale food shortage.The sharp decline in the population of North Russia was considered an inevitable consequence. Perhaps, our plans for Russian dominance, with the extermination of the Red Indians by the Americans It is even more immoral than taking away the most fertile land in the world from people.Perhaps we lack the noble spirit to defend religion that the Spaniards plundered Mexico and South America, destroying the fascinating Inca and Aztec cultures.It is also possible that the author himself is not very clear in some respects whether the British conquest of India, European colonialists and the United States' plunder of Chinese trade are better and more moral than the plan proposed by the Green Paper Dossier.But the impartial reader should never forget that Russia at that time was our India from the perspective of the German world philosophy. We Germans have never lacked that special talent of the Anglo-Saxons to clothe selfishness with a pious moral cloak.Our heart-to-heart astonishes emotionally fragile Western writers and politicians.Adolf Hitler was a world-historical figure, and this has now become an iron fact.He set a world-historic goal for the German state.Hegel once said that the transformation of world history is a revelation of God's will, far beyond trivial moral constraints.Perhaps in the midst of the great German effort and the great tragedy, God had a hidden design that would not be understood until generations had passed.The Green Books were an integral part of this endeavor, which, considered from the point of view of world philosophy, was nothing but the legitimate act of a people seeking to forge a new path from the Faustian infinity of mankind. In light of the above, the idea that we have to favor the Ukrainians or other Slavs so that they can help us overthrow their communist rule seems ludicrous.Germany was a powerful but poor country at the time, and it was impossible to continue the war without confiscating southern Russian grain.How can one expect the Slavs to be content with poverty and forced labor, with millions What about people dying of starvation without serious resistance?Adolf Hitler said that the only way to rule southern Russia was to shoot anyone who looked sad.He sometimes said things in harsh terms, but very little of what he said was unrealistic about such matters. Finally, it must be pointed out that since we were not able to conquer the Soviet Union, the ruling plan of the Green Paper Dossier has never become a reality. It is just a hypothetical plan that cannot be implemented.The emphasis on this issue at Nuremberg is therefore distorted and excessive. Translator's Note: Long's philosophical justification of the Green Book, perhaps the most ruthless plan of domination ever written on paper, is certainly unacceptable to the average American reader.However, after reading this passage, I made up my mind to translate "The Lost World Empire". detour south Mainly based on Guderian's materials, many authors believe that after we hit Smolensk, which is only one-third of the distance from Moscow in three weeks, Hitler did not let Guderian's armored corps continue to advance , but ordered him to go to the southern front to assist Rundstedt in completing the encirclement of Kyiv, so that Hitler's defeat was set as early as mid-July.Their argument was that we lost weeks of precious time and that the armored corps was too worn out, thus weakening the final effort to strike the capital. There are many holes in these criticisms of "detours to the south".First, the completion of the pocket siege of Kyiv east of Dnieper was the largest ground military victory in human history.In a single strike, the Germans killed or captured as many troops and equipment as almost half of the total German military strength when they began their invasion of the Soviet Union!It is of course wrong to dismiss such a huge victory as a "tactical containment attack".As a result of this victory we were firmly secured the wealth of South Russia, which enabled us to fight and almost win for years to come.We gained the granary, the industrial base and the fuel reserves, which the Germans had long sought and which were all at the heart of Adolf Hitler's policies. Indeed, Clausewitz said that the main purpose of war is to destroy the enemy's armed forces, not to win territorial or economic benefits.But the much-criticized "south detour" also achieved great success in eliminating the enemy's armed forces. What if the enemy on the southern front breaks out and attacks us on the flank?Even if we wiped out the enemy in front of Moscow and captured the capital, would we be in a better position than Napoleon?Napoleon basically adopted Guderian's strategy and captured the "center of gravity" in Moscow.The problem is that after he arrived there, the troops were short of food, and the left and right flanks were threatened again. He stayed for a period of time, had nowhere to go, and had to retreat, and finally ended in a tragic end. Those of us who created Project Barbarossa and watched its development cannot do without a copy of Clausewitz's Memoirs.If the German Army held its ground during the terrible winter of 1941, it was mainly because we did not repeat Napoleon's mistakes.At least we got the South, which backed us up and gave us hope of continuing the fight.When Guderian went to "Wolf's Lair" to protest the "south detour" plan, Hitler told him that the generals were ignorant of the economic aspects of war, and what he said was the cold truth.Like the adored athlete, they are concerned only with showing off their skills, leaving others to worry about venues, spectators, and expenses.Guderian is just such a stubborn, perhaps talented star. The argument that the Center Offensive was weakened was itself weakened by the simple fact that Guderian returned to the Northern Front after completing his mission on the Southern Front to achieve considerable victories in September and October.In this September-October campaign we did not appear particularly weakened in any way. I have pointed out unequivocally on other occasions that Hitler made mistakes because he was not a professional soldier. Some of them were disastrous, but the "detour south" was a sound, necessary and successful operation. pointing at the spire of the kremlin The remnants of the Red Army on the central and northern roads suffered another defeat and retreated in embarrassment to the endless land of Russia. They were captured in batches, and more often they discarded tanks and weapons in batches. Slip through our encirclement.On the northern road, all our objectives have been achieved, only Leningrad has not been hit.Leningrad was besieged for nine hundred days, on the verge of despair and near destruction.The Baltic coast is already ours, so we can supply the northern route by sea and keep in touch with our Finnish allies in military operations.On the southern road, we besieged Crimea and quickly advanced to the Caucasus oil fields.On the middle road, the huge pincer offensive of the armored corps has formed a siege of Moscow from the north and the south, and has actually entered the outskirts of Moscow.From Smolensk, Bock's all-conquering infantry rushed head-on to the Bolshevik capital.In Russian war literature, October 16 is still considered the day of the "Great Escape".On this day, diplomatic missions, government agencies, and a large number of Soviet leaders, together with groups of civilians, abandoned the city in a panic and retreated eastward to the safety of the Urals. Stalin remained in Moscow, delivered speeches of desperate struggle, and mobilized women and children to dig trenches on the approaching route of our army.Snow is starting to fall in the central Russian plains.The autumn mud season also begins in September.God knows how difficult it was to march under these conditions, but we went on.Never has an army shown greater strength and morale against greater odds than ours.From the highest generals to the lowest ranks of soldiers, they all glow with incomparable enthusiasm.Under the leadership of the Fuehrer, the German nation has traveled an incredible nine years, and now it is crossing the snow and muddy wilderness, and the end of the road is already on the misty Russian horizon against the low cold red sun. in sight.Our lead patrol has seen the Kremlin spire.The world empire finally appeared before the Germans, within easy reach. Translator's Note: General von Roon's lenient attitude towards the execution of Hitler's Barbarossa's overall plan is probably due to his participation in the formulation of the plan and being favored by Hitler at the time.Other historians see the troops captured in the Kyiv pocket as mere rabble, with the staunchest resistance deployed around Moscow, whose elimination in October could have ended the war.Although I was there for a while, it was beyond my competence to judge Soviet ground campaign issues.The full truth on this front may never be known.