Dan Snow's History Hit - Operation Barbarossa

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

On 22 June 1941 Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa the biggest military operation in human history. More than 3 million men of the Axis poured into the Soviet Union beginning a conflict, that even within the context of the Second World War, was unprecedented in both its scale and savagery. Operation Barbarossa began with unparalleled success for the Wehrmacht and its allies with millions of Soviet soldiers killed and captured in the opening months of this titanic struggle. But by the winter of 1941 and against all the odds the German war machine had been halted outside the gates of Moscow marking the beginning of the end for the Nazi regime. To better understand this enormous operation Dan is joined by the author and broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby who has written a new book Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost the War. They discuss why Barbarossa was launched, the inhuman nature of the fighting and the horrific treatment of civilians and particularly the Jews, whether Barbarossa could have ever been successful and looking at the more human side behind the almost unbelievable scale of the fighting.

Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hello everyone. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This episode is first broadcast on the 22nd of June 2021, which makes it 80 years to the day since Adolf Hitler unleashed the largest single military offensive in the history of the world to that point. Operation Barbarossa, the German and Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. The fighting on the so-called Eastern Front was of course a component part of the Second World War,

but even in its own terms, it was the biggest, bloodiest, and probably the most savage conflict in the whole of military history. We run out of superlatives to describe the horrors of what happened over the next six months in which millions and millions of people were killed, wounded, brutalized, displaced. But of course, over the next four years, which is the time it would take for the Soviet Union to regroup, advance, and eventually capture Berlin, bringing the Second World War in Europe to an end. It's a story of a military invasion, but it's also a much bigger story than that, because in the wake of the German invaders came teams of genocidal murderers, whose targets included but were not

restricted to anyone involved in the Soviet Communist Party and the huge Jewish populations of the new occupied territories. If you have tears, as Richard II said in Shakespeare, if you have tears, prepare to shed them now. It's a pretty tough story, this one. It's a tough listen. On this podcast, I've got Jonathan Dimbleby. He's one of the UK's best-known broadcasters. He's written several books about the Second World War. They're fantastic.

And he brings both a kind of journalistic nose for the story and great writing ability to his new book about Operation Barbarossa. You'll also be hearing on this podcast, a clip from History Hit TV's new documentary about Operation Barbarossa, which is not quite ready to be broadcast yet. We're just polishing it slightly. One of our great collaborators on history, you'll have heard him many times in this podcast, is one of our great friends, Robin Schaefer. He managed to get hold of the secret journals of Leutnant Friedrich Sander, a German tank commander who fought through long years on the Eastern Front. He left behind private secret diaries,

tens of thousands of words long, going into extraordinary detail about the war on the Eastern Front. They begin with the patriotic enthusiasm of a young German officer. They end very, very differently. History Hit is partnering up with Rob Schaefer to bring those diaries for the first time to the public. It's a huge honor to be working with Rob on this. I think we're going to tell the story of the war on the Eastern Front in a new and very different way, a way that puts the individuals back into what is otherwise a gigantic drama too enormous to comprehend. You'll hear from Leutnant Sander, his words read by an actor, at the end of this interview with Jonathan Dimbleby. And you can expect to hear a lot more about this big new History Hit TV project

over the weeks and months ahead. If you want to watch the historical output of History Hit TV, it's like Netflix for history, but it's also a place where we put all of these back episodes of the podcast, not just this podcast, all of the podcasts of the history hit family they all go there without any ads on of course they can all be accessed at historyhit.tv we've reached the point on history hit tv which i once dreamed we'd be at but i'm still so surprised we've reached which is wonderful historians wonderful collaborators like robin schaefer but also archaeologists and academic departments at universities, coming to us looking to co-produce material with them.

And that's a heck of a journey we've been on, because as little as 10 years ago, there were only big established TV channels and the odd newspaper that could be collaborators for this kind of thing. Now, thanks to all of you subscribing, History Hits here, working with great historians, bringing you new and fascinating stories like that of leutnant frederick sanders secret diary so head over to history.tv please subscribe in the

meantime listen to jonathan dimbleby talking about the titanic events that were unleashed 80 years ago today, Operation Barbarossa. Jonathan, thank you for coming on the pod. This is a mighty, mighty undertaking, isn't it? It is a very big undertaking. It's a slightly bigger undertaking than when you start to take it on, because you start and think, yes, that is very important, Barbarossa. You know that quite a lot of your peers know the name, but not much more than that.

And your own knowledge, although it's been assisted by earlier books that you've written, is limited. And then you see the scale of it, and then you want to try and make sense of it. So yeah, it's a very big, exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting undertaking. Do you know what? My heart actually went out to you when I was reading it, and I noticed that you go, and the first chapter is about 1922. Oh, here we go. Poor Jonathan. He thought, I cannot tell this story without the rapprochement between Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union. I mean, oh my goodness. Well, my editor felt the same way

when I told him that that's what I was doing to start with, although I think he was very happy once he got to the end of the 50,000 words that the first quarter of the book, which take you up to 1941. It was for my own sake, as often is the case when you're writing. If you need the clarification, then you can be jolly sure

that your readers may want that clarification. So I worked backwards from the event itself. If you're a journalist, reporter, you constantly are taking snapshots. And you say, well, how did it happen? How did it get to this point? And that's the joy, as well as the demand of history. You can go right the way back. You could go back into the Middle Ages, in fact, in the case of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the West. But I thought 1922, the Treaty of Rapallo, which had a secret codicil, which allowed the Russians and the Germans to use each other's strengths and exploit each other's weaknesses as a consequence of reestablishing diplomatic relationships that had been destroyed. They were fighting each other up until 1917 very viciously. And they'd both been treated as pariahs by the powerful states of Europe, Britain and

France. And they had, however, been invited to the Genoa Conference by Britain. And for some reason or another, neither of the parties were put up in the main centre. They were put up in Rapallo, where they signed and sealed a treaty which had been in negotiation for some time, which established, for me, the importance of the relationship between these two continental behemoths, which particularly from a British and American perspective, I think, has often not been fully recognised. Talking about their relationship, in your research, where do you come down?

In the summer of 1940, Hitler looked like he was making convincing preparations to invade Britain. He then abandons those after the Battle of Britain. Was invading the Soviet Union always on the agenda for Hitler? Or are there events in the autumn and winter of 1940 that we should pay more attention to? Was he really making up his mind? I think he indicated preparations in the summer of 1940 that Barbarossa was on the agenda, the invasion of Soviet Union was on the agenda. If you go back to Mein Kampf, the demand for Lebensraum, which of course was there strongly

in the German psyche in any case, after they had had limbs severed as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, when I say limbs, I mean the borders, and the resentment and the feeling of humiliation that he fueled by demanding space to the east, along with regarding the Bolsheviks, the Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy as the principal enemy. So I do think that that was his intention when it would happen was always in question. Early on in the war, he hoped he could cut a deal with the British. After all, they were Anglo-Saxons. They were very like the German Aryans. They could kind of come to terms. British wanted a global empire.

We wanted Europe. Surely they would do a deal. And there was always a chance that that might happen, incidentally, until Churchill became prime minister. When that was clearly not going to work, and when the combination of defeat in the Battle of Britain alongside the clear evidence that he could not invade successfully across the Channel, then he turned his attention to the Soviet Union. And he was in a hurry. He was in weakening powerful state. And he had to move. And I think in 1940, he made the early noises about it, but there were a whole series of triggers which led to him making the final decision towards the end of 1940. Is this fascinating question,

obviously, given what then occurred, the monumental scale of that warfare, the eventual destruction of the Third Reich, actually, in 1940, was it as terrible an idea? If you make the basic assumption, of course, which puts it wrong, but if you make the basic assumption that war is inevitable against the Soviet Union, therefore, wasn't Hitler right that he wanted to fight it sooner rather than later? As you say, the economic balance was in his favor still. The military balance, the Soviet regime had knackered its own Red Army. It was in a terrible condition, but their equipment was improving. Officers were being rehabilitated. Given his mad assumption, did he then make the right decision, do you think? Yeah, but you have to accept, as you described, the mad assumption. You have to believe that it was an achievable objective that to invade the Soviet Union and to hold the Soviet Union with the resources that the Soviet Union had, not least in manpower, was, to put it mildly, an extraordinarily bold decision. But yes, if you accept the assumption that it had to be invaded,

rather than, if you like, in Napoleonic terms, we have to invade Russia, and he failed to learn, as we know from Napoleon's experience, then it makes some kind of sense. But it's a madness out of which that sense has to be constructed. The other thing that you point out in your book, I think it's fascinating, is just reminding us, the good old Balkans, the good old Balkans. In the famous expression of Bismarck, there'll be another war between European powers, some damn fool thing in the Balkans. We'll start it. We know about the First World War, of course. Have we overlooked the importance of the Balkans in the Second World War? Yes, absolutely. I think from a British perspective, we tend to have looked always at the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean, because that was the gateway to the British by the Russian Empire, and by the Germans. And the

core for the Russians was access to the Black Sea, the importance of the Danube, that artery that runs right through Europe mattered to all the big imperial powers. And the Balkans, in different circumstances, became the trigger. An inability to determine a short-term solution for the Balkans was the trigger that led Hitler finally to lose patience at the end of November, beginning of December 1940 and say, right, we're going to now do it. And that was because Molotov, who was known as Old Stonehouse, no one's quite clear as whether he was called Old Stonehouse because he got kicked so much by Stalin or whether he was very obstinate as he was and obdurate in negotiation. Either way, he was under writing instructions from Stalin, you do not yield on the Danube, you do not yield on the Black Sea. And Hitler was not prepared to accept that. He

wanted to control the whole Balkans. Therefore, when he realized that, he said, right, we're going for it. We're going for it in May of 1941. It got delayed, in fact, but that was the fundamental trigger for not, as it were, continuing with the conceit and the opportunistic Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1938, which both sides had constructed in absolute bad faith. And then Hitler invades the Balkans, thus delaying his invasion of the Soviet Union. Why did he feel that was a necessary precondition to invade the Soviet Union? Having made the decision, the need to invade flowed from two linked things. One, the Italian incompetence in the invasion of Greece via Albania.

And two, the British coming in to honour its deal with Greece and to say, we're going to protect you. The expeditionary force to Greece, it ended in tears. But to me, very interesting. I discovered this for the first time or came to realize how important it was for the first time, because often the war in the Middle East is regarded as sort of sideshow. It was absolutely central in the planning of Britain. And it was important in the planning of the Germans, because there was a plan which was

worked up quite seriously to go south through the Balkans towards India and into the Middle East. At the same time, Hitler feared that the British would be coming around from the Middle East and coming up through what Churchill later called the soft underbelly, although the Balkans soft underbelly rather than the Italian one. As it happened, neither side was intending aggressive moves except in principle at that stage. But with the British coming into Greece and the outrageous behavior of the Yugoslavs in failing to succumb to the Nazis, he said, right, we're going to blitz Yugoslavia. We're going to take Greece and prop up the Italian failure there. So you end up with a head-on clash between the panzers and the German air force with this weak British force, which drives the British off Greece in a humiliating fashion and to Crete, where again, they suffer a monumental defeat, not without cost to the German air force. And while this is going on, what's Stalin thinking?

I mean, you've got the biggest buildup of men and machines in the history of the world in Eastern Europe, and then this very unilateral takeover of the Balkans. What's going through Stalin's head? It is such an intriguing question, and there is no unambiguous, clear answer. My best answer is that he knew that the Soviet forces were not yet ready to confront Hitler. As a result of the purges, the leadership was still weak and disorganized. As a result of the Finnish war in 3940, there had been an urge to reconstruct the army, which wasn't yet underway effectively. He also wanted to believe that he could some way find a modus vivendi with Hitler. So he chose to interpret the unambiguous and detailed intelligence, not only from within Germany and France, but especially from Japan, not only from within Germany and France, but especially from Japan, where Victor Zors,

who's known as Starshina, was able to send exactly within a matter of days when the invasion was going to take place. And he refused to accept it. He just swore in the coarsest possible way about these figures who were either doing it because they were in ignorance and being suborned, or because they were seeking to mislead him and demanding their lives regarding their mothers as whores, etc. It was quite bizarre. This is right up until June this went on. In fact, even when the German Air Force was reconnoitering, flying over, taking photographs of the airfields, when people were coming across, defecting from the German side because they were communist sympathizers saying an invasion is about to start. The warnings he had from Churchill and others, he refused to allow the army to be put onto a war

footing because it would be a provocation that might give an excuse to headstrong generals to invade. Quite unbelievable. And talk me through the opening hours of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. I mean, it was the largest military operation in the history of the world. It was. Some 3,300,000 Axis troops, 1,000 kilometre front, and the 600,000 trucks. People think of this as a very modern war. It was in many ways because it was such a huge military use of the panzers. There were 600,000 to 700,000 horses pulling the artillery. This was still a leftover from the war that had ended only, what, 20 years ago. And the warplanes that were lined up, two and a half

thousand warplanes, this was a scale that no other power has ever mobilized. But on the other side was an even bigger army on paper. The Red Army on paper had over 6 million men. It had more tanks, it had more artillery, but it was of inferior quality. And the men were ill-trained, ill-led, their morale was low, and most of them were on leave. And so on the early morning of the 22nd of June, when the Luftwaffe went in, it cleaned the front line of its aircraft. There was no camouflage on the Red Army planes. I mean, they were just open there, waiting to be mown down. And then when the first advance was about to take place, there was a massive artillery barrage. And then on three major fronts,

the Wehrmacht, the panzers advanced at a dramatic speed. Everyone thought it'd be all over by the shouting within six to eight, ten weeks. I say everyone, not only in Berlin and the German high command, which had deluded itself, but in London and in Washington as well. The British line was, we must do what we can to support them. The longer we keep them fighting, the more they will damage the Wehrmacht, and that will make our position under intense and huge pressure relatively stronger. The longer they can hold out, the better. But they didn't hold out much hope of the Russians holding out.

The advances were spectacular, but there were problems that were visible from the beginning. Let's talk first about the military side of it, and then we'll obviously talk about the extraordinary toll on civilians and Jewish populations and other people. There were problems for the Germans from the beginning, weren't they, around logistics, but also around the tenacity of these Soviets who, even though they'd lost, were fighting harder than the Germans might have liked. It was very early on.

Two things happened within the space of a fortnight, which summed up, I suppose, best in the diaries of the army chief of staff, who wrote, to all intents and purposes, this war is over. We've won. foreseen, which they should have done, because actually there were pre-war warnings from their own spies inside the Soviet Union, that their belief that we had to understand that they would fight to the very death to stop any invasion. But they discounted that completely. I think you have to remember in this case that from the German point of view, Hitler was unassailable. He had walked through the lowlands. He was master of Western Europe. Therefore, he was a genius and nothing would ever get in the way of what his objectives were. They fought. They were in disarray, the Russians. I mean, they were in total disarray. There was no organized defense, but they held their ground.

They waited until they were being mown down. The panzers would go over their foxholes, over their bodies. They would fight in hand-to-hand fighting. They were defeated. They were rounded up. They were encircled in huge numbers. But they resisted until the end. And there were a number of reasons for that. One of which was if they didn't resist, they would be shot as traitors by their own side under Stalin's command and at his orders.

Also, they very quickly discovered that to be taken prisoner by the Germans was a fate just as bad as being killed on the battlefield. So you might as well resist until the end for both those reasons. You might as well resist until the end for both those reasons. And add one more to that. There was, amongst overwhelming number of them, a deep sense of outrage that their lands should have been taken from them, that their families, their villages, their towns should be destroyed. Their cattle, their animals, their livestock. There's a peasant army should be taken by the fascists,

as they called them. Was there a brief moment of opportunity? Because obviously, Stalin's regime was horrific. Millions of Ukrainians, for example, had died in forced famines and savage repression. Was there a brief window of opportunity? Were some German troops greeted in some places like liberators? Or is that not what you discovered from your research? greeted in some places like liberators? Or is that not what you've discovered from your research? That's perfectly true. In Ukraine, in particular, those who had suffered as a result of the purges and the great famine of the early 30s had not forgotten. Famine in the early 30s is still only eight years ago that people have been deported en masse, that millions had died from starvation as a result of the expropriation of lands and

Stalin's economic plan. And they were greeted as liberators by some. Daftly, from that perspective, they then treated those they'd liberated as subhumans because they were regarded by the Nazis as subhumans. These were Slavs. They didn't count. They were actually called subhumans, just like the Jews. And they thought that by riding roughshod and by arresting anyone who could be described as a commissar or a sympathizer and killing them and terrorizing their families, you could somehow maintain their hearts and minds. Actually, they rapidly lost them. their hearts and minds. Actually, they rapidly lost them. But in Moscow, they were deeply worried by the thought that maybe there would not be enough rallying to the flag. There was evidence

from diaries and letters and the NKVD, the intelligence secret police, unearthed enough material to suggest that there was a real threat that some would resist. This is the nature of a totalitarian state that only ruled by the rod rather than by any attempt at achieving consent by other means. And they were alarmed. And the relief was enormous when they discovered that actually most people were ready to fight. when they discovered that actually most people were ready to fight. If you listen to Dan Snow's history,

I've got Jonathan Dimbleby on talking about Operation Barbarossa. More after this. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast, we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict. We've got the classics. Understandably when we see it from hindsight the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying yeah tell me something I don't know. The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending.

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Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt. And avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Before we come to the Soviets and their response,

let's talk about, which you touched on there, the atrocities that went on in the wake or as the Germans were advancing in the wake of their advance. What was the plan there? Was it to create an emptiness that the German settlers could one day moved into? Was it an exercise in genocide and demographic replacement? There were a number of factors. There was, before the war broke out, the Agricultural Economics Department had come up with what was known as the Hunger Plan. and parts of Western Soviet Union, clearing it of people in order to take the land, the Lebensraum, for their own people, but more particularly also to take the food. It was thought to be a great grain basket, and parts of the Ukraine, the Black Earth territory of Russia, was indeed very, very fertile soil, but not as fertile, incidentally,

as everyone in Europe liked to believe. Europe was half-starving during this period, generally. Anyway, the hunger plan coolly envisaged the deaths of 40 million Soviet citizens. 40 million. It never came to fruition because it didn't win the war. So they wanted to clear the land. They wanted to decapitate the political head, which was in Moscow, in order to create land that could be used by a new Aryan peasantry that would be both fighter and also farmer. And they were allowed to marry local girls because they were healthy young girls. But essentially, it would be treating the residual Slav labor as a serf peasantry that would work for them and would be only educated up to the point where they could read road signs because they didn't need education. This is the insanity

of the Nazi vision. So when they advanced in there, they had no qualms about clearing land. It was part of the game plan. You clear cities, towns and villages mean nothing. And obviously, genocidal intent towards the Jewish populations they came across. Himmler had, with Hitler's approval, established Einsatzgruppen. They were called task forces. Basically, they were killer squads, four of them. Because as I mentioned earlier, the three-pronged attack, there were four of them, but they were attached basically to the north,issars, and it was assumed that all the commissars were Jews, and probably all Jews were commissars. So it swept into rounding up the Jews, and then the ideology of eliminating the Jews from Europe, which had no clear means. It had a goal, which was to clear Europe of the Jews, the basilisk, the virus, disgusting phrases that were constantly repeated again and again in publicity, on the media and radio, in Hitler's speeches. That took over and the focus became on the Jews. And the Holocaust, as it became, started in the summer of 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen went into towns and villages, into Jewish ghettos, rounded up the Jews, men and the women and their children and their babies,

marched them into the forest, generally, where there were pits that were created, lined them up, having removed their possessions, all their possessions, naked, standing alongside the pits, and then they gunned them down, shot in the back of the head or more crudely, just with machine gun fire, put them into the pits, quick line, cover the pits over and move on. The most spectacularly notorious, I suppose, was Babi Yar outside Kiev, where more than 10,000 perished. But by the end of that first year, with the first research and the first development and the first use of the gas chambers came into force, by the end of 1941, six months after the invasion, a million Jews had already been killed of the six

million who would eventually perish. And I think those who've been the most brilliant at exposing this in great detail have actually been German historians who've looked at this in the greatest possible detail. But the ideology of getting rid of the Jews morphed into we kill them as opposed to finding any other solution. They did not want them there because they regarded the Jews, both the capitalist Jews and the Bolshevik Jews, as a non-human, sub-human species that was designed, created, its task was to worm its way into the Aryan humanity, if you can call it that in that context, and destroy it. So it had to be eliminated one way or another. Didn't mind how. And Hitler was, we know, very, very skillful in

never actually openly saying, kill all the Jews. But Himmler, Heydrich, and all the others who were with them knew absolutely that that was the means to do it and that he would give a nod and a wink. And to read it in detail, which I had to do, you don't want to do it. And I brought it into the book because unlike you, Dan, I'm not at doing the picture which encompasses the politics and the social consequences of what is happening. And so I thought it was very important because some military histories, brilliant military histories of this campaign, incidentally, of which I've drawn heavily, they hardly mentioned the fact that the Einsatzgruppen were killing Jews in huge systematic ways. Although they do, particularly the most recent historians of all kinds who are writing men, do point out that the Wehrmacht generals who so carefully at Nuremberg and elsewhere said, we knew nothing about that at all. We were just obeying orders,

absolutely were complicit. They knew what was happening. And in some cases, they participated in it and their soldiers did as well. As did, incidentally, which should not be forgotten either, the paramilitary police forces that were set up by their allies after they had gone eastwards in the Baltics, in Ukraine, in Belarus, in Poland, where it's virtually unmentionable, that truth, and down into the Balkans as well, participated willingly and actively in the extermination, as it had become, of the Jews in 1941. I want to finish up with the Battle of Moscow in December of 1941, which is probably the great decisive battle in history that gets talked about the least. But just quickly, how were the Soviets even able to still be at the table, by the way? How did they survive? Extraordinary resilience, huge numbers of people who were corralled into defending the city, 600,000 civilians building

around the city perimeter fence effectively and wire tank traps and the rest to prevent the German armies actually reaching Moscow. From October, an unbelievable quantity of factories and workers shifted out towards the Urals. And they were up and running, some days within 14 days, entire factories. The ingenuity and the speed at which that was done allied to a ruthless imposition of order. Although for a brief spell in October, there was absolute anarchy in Moscow and a panic, but that was overcome by the imposition of martial law. The ability to call up more and more reserves. Before Moscow was under immediate pressure, division after division was brought up from Siberia, where the Japanese were being confronted

in Russia's Far East, Soviet Union's far east. And that was possible because intelligence had been gleaned in late 1941 that the Japanese were not going to invade the Soviet Union as the Germans had wanted them to do so they could meet together in the center from east and from west. But they were going to go south because they needed the oil of the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and were going to confront the Americans in the south. The Americans believed that they were going to go north, incidentally, at that stage, was finally caught by the Japanese and was executed after Stalin said, we don't know who this man is. But he had actually allowed millions of men to be transported. Sakharov does wonderful description as a student on a train. He's going eastwards because his whole university has been sent east. And the trains coming the other way are filled with these faces going to the west,

all in military uniform. And a lot of them were hardened troops because they had been in battle against the Japanese earlier in the century. They weren't new boys on what was a horrifying block to be fighting because it was very bitterly cold. The Germans, because they'd expected to win so early, had failed to provide their troops with the clothes that they needed. They were in summer wear still, and the Soviets were wrapped up against the weather. The German machines broke down much more easily. They couldn't get them started. They were short of oil. The logistics were now very difficult indeed. The partisans were doing their little bit to help, and they were short of food.

They were short of clothing. The replacement men, by the end of that year, they had 800,000 casualties, dwarfed by the scale of the Soviet casualties, 6 million or so Soviet casualties in that first six months. And they couldn't replace enough of the panzers. They were alarmed. Guderian, who was the premier tank commander, was alarmed by the quality of the Russian tanks and the fact that his panzers could only peppercorn the Russian tanks, the T-34s,

the new tanks that were coming on stream. So there was a big demoralization. The cold, I mean, the limbs that were amputated, the corpses that froze in the snow. This is a scene out of a nightmare that they had never foreseen. So they had to call it off. They had to retreat. And although, of course, the war went on and many, many millions more would be killed and there would be Stalingrad and there would be Kursk.

and there would be Stalingrad and there would be Kursk. From that point, I believe at the end of 1941, at the latest, one can safely say that Hitler could not prevail against the Soviet Union because the Soviet Union was getting stronger. The end of the war, of course, he was aided and abetted by America coming to the war, massively so as it turned out later in the war, the Germans were getting weaker. And that's why I think you can absolutely say that the war for Hitler was lost by the end of 1941. What you can't say is precisely what kind of peace there would be. That was what most of the rest of the political, diplomatic and military events of the years between the end of 1941 and May 1945 were to settle. Is what strikes you about December 41 astonished the Germans got so close to Moscow? Or are you surprised that the Soviets were able to avoid complete defeat? I can never make up my mind. Can I tell you, Dan? Nor can I. The more I

learned, the more clear. But you have to remember that I'm viewing the great benefit of hindsight. When you look at the way in which the Soviet armies resisted, the degree to which as they fell back, they didn't just retreat. They fell back, they regrouped, they fell back, they regrouped. There were great strategic errors made by Hitler and his high command. There was a whole month in the summer where Hitler couldn't make up his mind when he realized he couldn't continue to attack successfully on all three fronts at once. He couldn't make up his mind between going for Moscow or going down to the south for the riches of the Ukraine. And that delay, when he wrestled with what he should do,

gave the Soviets a chance to regroup. The combination of Soviet strength and German overreaching, the degree of hubris that had consumed the Germans at the top and was unraveling lower down, you look at that and you say, actually, it could never have been achieved. You could almost say, as I half do, that not only was it almost ordained that they couldn't do it, they were taking on an impossible task. But that is with the benefit of hindsight. As I say, at the time, most people thought it was job done after six weeks or so.

Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, Job done after six weeks or so. Land a Viking longship on island shores. scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history

and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. And There are new episodes every week. And at the end of the year, remind me the scale of the casualties that the previous six months had provoked. Unbelievable. I mean, if you think of the losses on the Western Front,

our boys, as it were, American boys, British boys, Commonwealth boys, suffered dreadfully, fought heroically, but their losses were on a minute scale by comparison with the losses in the first six months of the conflict, let alone the final death tolls and casualty tolls. 804,000 Germans killed, wounded, missing in action in the six months was the official figure at the time. Actually, later estimates put it at over a million. Soviet casualties, 4.5 million. And the Western allies in the course of the whole war, the figure was 2 million. The Soviet divisions were rising in number from 360 divisions to some 600, despite the fact that they'd lost more than 20,000 tanks, 17,000 aircraft, and 101,000,

I think, artillery, mortars, and the rest. But the Wehrmacht had lost 2,700 tanks, more than 40,000 trucks, and so on, including more than 200,000 of their horses. That was a smaller loss, but relatively, it was far more important. If you take the prisoners of war, 2 million of the 3 million Soviet military who died by the end of May 1945. Two million of those had been captured before the end of 1941. The numbers of Jews, which I touched on before the six million, 2.6 million of the Jews were not murdered in the gas chambers, but by guns. And as I say, a million of those were killed in the first six months of that war. I mean, it beggars belief, doesn't it? I mean, you just look at those figures,

they reel them off as it were, and the mind becomes numb at the scale of it because mercifully is very unlikely on that scale ever to happen again in that way. It's not said there won't be terrible death in the future. And you look at Barbarossa, and you look at the folly, and you look at the evil of Hitler's vision, and you recoil from it. And you come away thinking to yourself, or I do anyway, just hope that Europe remains aware of what can happen and acts in the overall interests of all of us in relations between East and West, between Russia and the rest of the world, that sanity continues to prevail. Was it a bit depressing writing this book?

Yes, it was. I mean, I had to wind myself up to start writing. Of course, it's intriguing, and it's absorbing, and it's fascinating. And you're aware of some wonderful people, incidentally. I mean, we've talked a lot about the horror of it. There are some wonderful individuals who behave very, very well and gallantly on both sides, who are just trapped there. The diaries are so filled with love and anguish, both the Russian diaries and the German diaries of soldiers at the front. And they remind you that this is ordinary humanity. These are ordinary men, and in some cases, women, but largely men, writing home to loved ones. The Russian diaries, particularly, which I think I had about 10 of them in one place, writing. I'm not sure when I'll be back. This is in October, November. None of those

men came back. They all died. So remarkable. Jonathan Dimbleby, thank you for giving me so much of your time. The book is called? It's called Barbarossa, How Hitler Lost the War. Thank you very much indeed. My great pleasure, Dan. On the 22nd of December, General Raus had issued an order which hinted at spending the winter here and asked for increased readiness. The snowstorm that's raging today was so bad that even the Pannier horses perished in it.

We humans could hardly survive out there. It is simply horrible. We humans could hardly survive out there. It is simply horrible. Faces frozen, hands, feet as well. In that way we are supposed to work and clear the roads, which snow covers again as soon as one is finished. There are always several men who are sick. 27th of December, 1941. During the night I had to think that we are supposed to stay here through the entire winter. Surely we'll get replacements and new vehicles.

And when new operations are possible again in the coming spring, we'll launch attacks which will destroy the Siberian army of the East. I will be there until an anti-tank gun, an aerial bomb, a shell or a mine will put a full stop behind the last sentence of my life story. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs songs this part of the history of our country all were gone and finished thanks folks you've been in the wrong episode congratulations well done you i hope you're not fast asleep if you did fancy supporting everything we do here history hit we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods give a little rating five stars or

its equivalent a review would be great. Thank you very much indeed. That really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account. So please, however, don't do that. It can seem like a small thing, but actually it's kind of a big deal for us.

So I really appreciate it. See you next time. Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy.

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