In the summer of 1941 Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his long-awaited invasion
of the Soviet Union.
Often described as an epic strategic blunder, the invasion was supposed to reach Moscow
in weeks.
Instead, four years later, Soviet troops would take Berlin and destroy Nazi Germany.
But was the move really a mistake?
In this video we’ll examine why, in the mind of Hitler at least, Germany had to invade
the USSR.
And how Hitler’s genocidal enterprise in the east might have claimed the lives of many
millions more.
This is an official copy of Hitler’s `Führer Directive Number 21’, ordering preparations
to be made for Operation Barbarossa.
It was submitted as evidence for the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and it is one of the most
important and momentous documents of the Second World War.
Conquest of the USSR was Hitler’s main war objective right from the start.
Understanding why will take us deep into the mind of one of history’s most murderous
dictators.
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Now on with the video.
This chart shows the total GDP of the six major powers of the Second World War.
This line is Germany.
And these lines are the two world superpowers, Britain and the United States.
After their defeat in the First World War, many Germans believed they belonged in this
top group, the question was how to get there.
One answer came from Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister in the fledgeling Weimar Republic.
He decided to co-operate with the United States, remaining subordinate in an attempt to boost
German fortunes.
It worked until 1929, when Stresemann died, and the world economy collapsed into the great
depression.
As the US pulled back from the world stage, nationalists like Adolf Hitler took power
and sketched another answer to Germany’s situation.
Hitler believed that human history was a perpetual struggle for survival and the dominance of
the `superior’ over the `inferior’ in humankind.
This world view was reinforced by the concept of the `Jewish world conspiracy’.
All of these ideas were set out in his autobiography, `Mein Kampf’ (My Struggle).
The book sets out Hitler's belief that Germany’s defeat in the First World War had robbed her
of her rightful `place in the sun’ as he put it.
This needed to be avenged, and it was incumbent on Germany to lead the fight against the `Judeo-Bolshevik’
onslaught on Western, `Aryan’ civilisation.
Hitler had huge ambitions.
But the Germany he controlled had limited means.
In the early 20th century, Germany was not the economic powerhouse that we know today.
It had strong industries equal to that of Britain.
But a huge proportion of Germany’s work force still remained in agriculture.
Around 30% compared to less than 10% in Britain.
Furthermore, the farms they worked on were small, peasant farms, the kind that Britain
and the US had done away with.
As such German farms were half as productive as British ones.
Hitler was all too aware of this economic weakness, he believed that without swift action
the world Jewish conspiracy would take advantage and destroy Germany.
Hitler saw threats everywhere.
He also imbibed anti-Slav sentiment and developed a hatred of communism – which he viewed
as a product of `the East’.
But as Hitler outlines in his unpublished second book, Jews were more than a menace
from the east.
They sat at the levers of political, financial and cultural power almost everywhere, particularly
in the United States and Britain.
In Hitler’s view, Germany was essentially encircled by political, ideological and racial
enemies from east and west.
Unless Germany became stronger, she would be destroyed.
Bizarrely though, Hitler’s inspiration for this strength came from the United States.
His view of the US was contradictory.
On the one hand he saw it as being in thrall to international Jewry, which pulled the strings
on access to finance and raw materials and could thus limit Germany’s aspirations.
On the other hand he was fascinated by the conditions of America.
Hitler's unpublished Second Book reveals the `Wild West’ as a model for what he dreamed
of achieving for Germany in the `Wild East’ of the Soviet Union.
Visions of the endless grain fields, spouting oil wells and vast natural resources that
had made the US so rich, presented themselves to him as the solution to Germany’s cramped
situation in `Middle Europe’.
Just as the US had inexorably expanded its `civilising mission’ westwards, Germany’s
manifest destiny was fated to play out eastwards at the expense of the supposedly inferior
peoples who resided there.
This is the idea of Lebensraum or 'living space'.
German population density was a crowded 146 per square kilometre, compared to a generous
16 per square kilometre in the United States.
Securing Lebensraum of this kind in the east would not only improve the efficiency of Germany's
ailing farms.
It would deliver the raw materials that Germany was severely lacking.
These ideas were not new, in fact, Germany had tried them before during the First World
War.
On the Eastern Front, Germany had had great success and conquered vast amounts of territory
in Poland, the Baltic and western Russia.
The area, controlled by the `Ober Ost’ military and administrative command under Hindenburg
and Ludendorff, became a colonial possession in the classic mould, to be economically exploited
and its ethnicities `Germanised’.
These grand plans were only partially realised before Germany’s defeat in 1918, but the
ideas behind them lived on.
Here we have popular illustrated history of so-called Racial Science that was published
in Germany in the 1930s.
So we have the 'pure' Germanic youth as opposed to the 'degenate' Jewish youth.
On the right hand side here is a rather crude world map purporting to show revolutions that
were insitgated by Jews and their associate Freemasons.
So we have here in fact a perfect illustration of Hitler's view of the 'Untermensch', the
sub human.
A conflation of the Jew, the Slav and the Communist.
These were the very peoples that were now ripe for subjugation and indeed extermination
in Germnay's easterward cultural mission.
This land could only be obtained through war.
From 1932, Hitler began to transform the German economy.
Between 1932 and 1938 German spending on the military rose from 0.8% of GDP to 20.5% of
GDP.
Hitler also began a foreign policy of aggression, including the remilitarisation of the Rhineland,
the Anschluss with Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland.
However, this aggression helped spark a global arms race amongst all the major powers.
Although Germany had started first, its lead was shrinking.
Hitler wanted to strike while he still had the chance and began the Second World War
in Europe in September, 1939.
The first period of the war went remarkably well.
The success of Germany’s campaigns in 1940 shocked everyone, including the Germans themselves.
The impact, however, was mixed.
On the one hand, they had successfully knocked France out of the war, and clearly possessed
a war machine to be reckoned with.
On the other hand, being responsible for so much of Western Europe did not aid Germany’s
lack of resources.
In fact, It made things worse.
German occupation, and the British blockade, left much of Europe starved of food, coal
and oil.
Also, Britain was still in the war and, crucially, backed by the huge military-economic power
of the United States.
Germany’s industrial strength could not compete.
Hitler needed to act and he needed to act fast.
Such were the shortages in Germany’s european empire that it took an alliance with the Soviet
Union to stay afloat.
As agreed in the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact.
Soviet grain, oil and raw materials flowed into Germany.
In return, however, German industrial output was delivered to the Soviet Union.
Each side was essentially preparing the other for the great battle that was to come.
But time was not on Hitler’s side in raw materials or production.
In 1941, German industry produced 11,000 aircraft, with Nazi-occupied France and the Netherlands
supplying just 78 aircraft.
Meanwhile British production reached 20,000 plus another 5,000 aircraft supplied by the
US under lend-lease.
The situation was unsustainable.
As Germanys resource situation worsened, Hitler risked becoming dependent on the Soviet Union
in a similar fashion to Britain’s dependence on the US.
This was unacceptable to leaders in Berlin, who despised their communist neighbours.
For Hitler, the clear solution was to invade the Soviet Union and take control of the resources
himself.
Thus, Hitler’s ideologically motivated colonial enterprise in the East was allied with an
urgent economic imperative arising from the war situation itself.
So finally, in December of 1940, the German military began planning a blitzkrieg campaign
against the Soviet Union.
The largest army every assembled in human history would advance on three axes to capture
the AA line from Arkhangelsk to Astrakhan.
And with it the land, resources and people that Hitler had craved for so long.
A swift victory was vital.
Germany’s economic weakness made the invasion a means to an end- to secure the material
strength it needed to take on Britain and the United States.
Racist attitudes towards the peoples of the east and overwhelming confidence from the
campaigns of the previous years made Hitler believe that it was possible.
But capturing the Lebensraum of the Soviets was no solution to Germany’s problems without
addressing the people who lived there.
Germany could barely feed itself.
To make use of these lands, millions of people would have to die.
Thus, the attack on the Soviet Union was conducted in the context of three distinct but closely
linked programs of mass murder.
A systematic killing project of almost unimaginable proportions.
Best known of the three is the so-called `Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, the extermination
of the Jews of Europe in which 6 million people were murdered.
Less well known are the other two, the `Generalplan Ost’ (Generalplan East) and the `Hunger
Plan’.
The Generalplan East, a first draft of which was prepared for SS chief Heinrich Himmler
was a demographic `masterplan’ for the occupied Eastern territories.
In essence it provided for the `removal’ of most of the conquered populations from
their homelands to create the `living space’ needed for German settlers.
It envisaged the displacement of a staggering 30 – 40 million people.
Effectively taken for granted, was the assumption that a very large proportion of this number
would perish as a direct result of the program.
The third pillar of Nazi genocidal planning in the East was the `Hunger Plan’, this
was substantially the brainchild of Herbert Backe, chief of the Reich Ministry of Food
and Agriculture.
It provided for the ruthless expropriation and exploitation of Soviet agriculture, to
feed the German Army and the German domestic population at the expense of the inhabitants
of the USSR.
Backe, Göring and other Nazi leaders talked openly of the systematic starving to death
of 20 – 30 million Soviet citizens as a result of this program.
Of the three `masterplans’ which drove Hitler’s ambitions in the East, the `Final Solution
of the Jewish Question’ was the only one which came anywhere close to being carried
out.
The difficulties of civil administration, and the failure of the campaign, meant the
others progressed very little beyond the desks of Nazi bureaucrats.
Amongst the actual victims claimed by the Hunger Plan, Soviet POWs were the main group.
They were deliberately starved and ill-treated to cause maximum deaths – over 2 million
- so that more rations could go to German soldiers.
But if Hitler’s megalomaniacal plans in the East had been even partially realised,
the victims of Nazi genocide would have numbered many millions, if not tens of millions more.
The extermination of most of the ethnic populations of the USSR was the precondition for realising
Hitler’s vision of the greatest global superpower ever seen, ready to defeat international Jewry
and the degenerate empires of the US and Britain.