The Rest Is History - 182. Operation Barbarossa

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

What military parallels does Putin's invasion of Ukraine have with Hitler's attempt to invade the Soviet Union? On today's pod Tom and Dominic are joined by historian - and brother of Tom - James Holland to discuss Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi invasion of 1941, whether it was doomed to fail, and the role it played in the escalation of the Holocaust. If you enjoy this episode, be sure to listen to our sister podcast, We Have Ways Of Making You Talk, and check out their Second World War festival that's taking place in July by going to wehavewaysfest.co.uk Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. An autocrat full of self-confidence following earlier military successes and convinced that a neighbouring country has no right to exist draws up plans to invade it. In making these plans, the autocrat has no hesitation in overruling his generals. The generals, knowing what's best for them, accommodate themselves to their master's rulings. The invasion is launched. It is conducted on a wide front with multiple targets. No effort is made to win the hearts and minds of those whose lands are being occupied.

Logistical planning proves terribly flawed. Equipment proves inadequate. Initial successes prove illusory. The invasion grinds to a halt in front of the capital city of the invaded country. The operation has not gone well. Dominic, that is a tried and tested technique, is it not, of historians writing articles in newspapers and so on, where you get two distinct, two separate events and you kind of muddle them up. Well, of course, I would never use myself, Tom. So you you're talking about so this is what tony blair 2003 is it so uh was i what was i talking about there was i talking about putin's invasion of ukraine or was i talking about hitler's invasion of russia would you say that the parallels there i mean there are parallels aren't there or are there am i am i being glib in drawing i'm not sure you said to me to me you were absolutely desperate to do this podcast because you thought there were tremendous, using all your knowledge of military history, you thought there were tremendously compelling parallels.

And I think you'd been fed that line by a member of your own family, Tom. Yes. Am I right? Yes. So, yes. A podcasting novice, clearly desperate to appear on the show. So, yeah. So fans of our sister podcast, We Have Ways of Making You Talk, will know that my brother, James Holland, and his partner, Al Murray, on the show did two brilliant episodes on Hitler's planning for Operation Barbarossa, in which certain parallels were drawn out between Hitler and his preparations for invading Russia and Putin and his preparations for invading Ukraine. Now, we don't want to major on them, but James, bro, you're out there. I thought that was brilliant.

You did mention, did you not, when we met a few days ago that there were certain parallels, and I was absolutely so excited about them that i rushed back and persuaded dominic that we should do this straight away hitler and putin before we come to that can i just open with a question so we put out questions saying we're doing uh operation barbarossa and without a doubt the best question was asked by chris who asked how close did frederick barbarossa come to establishing imperial control over the papacy? I did see that. Which is an excellent question. James, no one should have to answer that question.

Well, no, but my brave old one will answer. He'll know all about that. So Frederick Barbarossa was a 12th century emperor who ended up drowning while going on the Third Crusade. And I'm guessing the reason that he gives his name to Hitler's invasion of Russia's invasion of russia is because he's kind of like the german king arthur he's supposed to have um to be in a cave in a mountain range in thuringia the untersberg no he's also supposed to be in the untersberg which is the view that hitler had from his house the burkhoff in salzburg okay so is that why they is that why they call it operation barbarossa well they're kind of thinking sort of groovy names are cool exciting potentially war-winning um operations and you know barbarossa is a bit of a kind of folk hero and you know the Germans are constantly sort of harking back with Nazis rather sort of harking

back to this sort of weird sort of mythological period about which they don't know very much and they sort of mix it all up into this sort of you know world ice theory mixed with Arthurian myths mixed with Barbarossa and it all sort of goes into a kind of a sort of melting you know, world ice theory mixed with Arthurian myths, mixed with Barbarossa. And it all sort of goes into a kind of, a sort of melting pot of nonsense. And is that melting pot of nonsense part of what persuades Hitler to launch his invasion? No, no, it's not.

Well, the melting pot of nonsense in so much that they absolutely believe in their own superiority and believe that the Soviets are, and East Europeans are Slavs and Untermenschen, all that stuff is absolutely the case. And you see this right from the very top, right down to the very bottom of people recording in their diaries, whether they be senior generals or whether they be, you know, ordinary lancers, they sort of go, you know, I looked at this person and I just realised sort of how primitive they were and how appalling they were and all that kind of stuff. Okay.

So James, let's do a bit of context and then we'll do a bit of chronology. So we are in, I mean, the operation begins on Sunday, the 22nd of June, 1941. It's one of these extraordinary set pieces in the history, you know, this colossal invasion force crossing the frontiers into the Soviet Union. It's a turning point in the Second World War. It's one of the great moments in the Second World War. So at one of the great moments in the Second World War. So at that point, to external observers, Hitler has had his tremendous successes in the West, the low countries, France, Scandinavia, and so on.

Britain has been resisting alone. We talked about that with you before when we were talking about the summer of 1940. Alone along with the Empire and Dominions. Yeah, alone. Okay, alone in Europe, shall we say. And 85% of the world's merchant shipping. Oh, God, but yes.

Tom, we've got to stop having these woke guests on the show. So, okay. So Britain, as you just rightly said, James, was standing alone. And at what point – so Hitler has, as many listeners will know, the prelude to the second world war was that um the nazis and the soviet union signed the molotov-ribbentrop pact so the non-aggression pact and they basically divided you know poland between them the soviet union had taken the baltic states and now we had a question from jorge layton uh was there any chance of Hitler honoring the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact? So 1940 going into 1941, is Hitler already planning the attack on the Soviet Union? Has he been planning it all along? Or to be a clash of arms at some point between Nazi Germany and the USSR.

When that happens and what form it takes is obviously completely up for grabs at that point. Hitler is originally sort of thinking he doesn't think of the Second World War as the Second World War. He thinks it is a series of of limited operations. So the first limiting operation is against Poland. And, you know, that's sort of done and dusted in a matter of weeks, pretty much on schedule. Then the second one is obviously going into Scandinavia. That's another limited operation which sees Denmark and Norway fall under the Nazi yoke. Then the third one, of course, is the invasion of the West, Casey Yellow, which is the low countries in France.

And France is a big one, you know, by today's standards. France is a superpower in 1940 and crushed in six weeks so these are all limited operations as far as he's concerned you know with britain britain's lost its army which is the sort of biggest humiliation of all um because he's a landlubber and a continentalist so that's how he you know that's what he views is the most important thing um so he's expecting britain to sue for peace um and the war is won and then at some point a few years down the line when he sort of you of built up some more stocks and built up some more strength

and kind of got an even bigger army, then he'll invade the Soviet Union, perhaps 1943, perhaps 1944, something like that. But it's the Battle of Britain that forces his hand because he doesn't win. Britain is still in the fight. America's hovering in the background, sort of fighting a proxy war,

delivering arms to Britain, et cetera, et cetera. And so he realizes that actually he needs to regain strength and particularly resources of food, especially agriculturally. Because the Royal Navy are throttling the conflict. Yes, because from the 1st of September 1939, there is an economic blockade. And if you look at your geography and look at the map, you see that Germany's got a sort of very complicated little bit of sort of Baltic coast at the top, which is sort of get out into the world,

you know, to get out into the North Sea, you've got to sort of get through lots of narrow channels and through islands and things. Then there's a little strip of the North Sea coast, and that's it. And even with France subdued, you know, the blockade is still extant. And the Royal Navy is the world's largest at the time.

So it's pretty effective at blockading. And they don't have enough fuel. They don't have enough food. And going into all those occupied territories in 1940 and early part of 1941, they've been a bit like sort of children in a sweet shop. And they've just, you know, the cupboard is bare very, very quick order.

And I'll give you an example of this. So in January 1940, France is the most automotive country in Europe. And there are eight people in France for every motorized vehicle, whereas that figure is 47 in Germany and 106 in Italy. And by the 31st of December 1940, France has 8% left of the vehicles that it had on the 1st of January. Goodness. Wow.

Because the Germans have just nicked it all. They've just nicked it all. And they've nicked everything and they've taken all the coal and they've taken that. So suddenly all those factories don't work anymore. Right. So those factories don't work either. And that's the key thing.

Well, no, because, you know, but France is suffering from the economic blockade, as is Denmark, as is Norway, as is everyone within Nazi Germany's, you know, Greater Reich, because the blockade exists for all of them. I mean, you know, it's stopping all of them. So France is suffering from that. But it's also suffering from the fact that their industrial complexes don't work very efficiently anymore, because all the things that make an industrial complex work, coal, workforce, food for the workforce, fuel, oil, cars to get people to the workforce to move things out of the workforce, workforce, food for the workforce, fuel, oil, cars to get people to the workforce,

to move things out of the workforce, trains, locomotives, all the rest of it. All that has been stolen by the Germans, so it doesn't function anymore. So at what point, James, do you think, well, do we know from the sort of archival sources, do we know the point at which Hitler said to his generals, OK, we're going to go into the Soviet Union now? Yes. So the first decision is mooted in July 1940, when Britain doesn't come to the peace zone. Yeah, yeah. He's not convinced about it.

He's not absolutely, yeah, we're definitely going to go. But it sort of builds, and you can see him becoming, as it's absolutely clear that the Luftwaffe is not going to subdue the RAF, and it's going to be completely impossible to do a cross-channel invasion. I mean, even Hitler, who's a sort of military nincompoop, even he can see that the conditions have not been met by September 1940. And therefore, you know, what do you do? You've got to have a problem because Britain's still in the,

it's still got skin in the game. So what are you going to do? Well, okay, here's a plan. We know that the Slavs are are under mention we know that they were completely useless in the finished finished war um of late 1939 through to the beginning of 1940 um we know they've had the purges and have killed sort of you know executed four of their six marshals 23,000 officers etc etc so how hard can it be especially since we've just won in France which is a kind of superpower and had you know is a modern functioning northern European state for the most part so you know how hard can

it be and that's that's where the thinking starts to starts to come in and suddenly it's the only solution in fact actually by the spring of 1941 there is only there are only two viable options left to Hitler and the Nazi regime one is to go into the USSR and hope it works or sue for peace and obviously he's not going to do the latter. You said that he'd been, essentially the moment he came to power, it was inevitable that Nazi Germany would go to war with the Soviet Union. Or the Soviet Union would go to war with Nazi Germany. But from the Nazi point of view, why is that?

Is that because the Slavs are living in Lebensraum that the Germans should claim? Or is it because they're communist? Is it the racial or is it the ideological aspects of the Soviet Union that are most offensive to Hitler? It's both. It's the idea that the world is threatened from a takeover of communism orchestrated by global Jewry. Yeah, they're surely interwoven, Tom.

Completely. So the Soviet Union are communists because they are, unto mention. Yes, and communisms are really, really hated by the Germans because, for those Germans

who aren't communists, I should say, because communists are seen as one of the main causes of the end of the First World War because it was a communist mutiny in the German Navy that sort of kick-started the whole showdown to the end of the First World War, because it was a communist mutiny in the German Navy that sort of kickstarted the whole sort of, you know, showdown to the end. And if you're a Nazi, your worst enemy is a communist.

And one of the reasons so many people back the Nazis, and indeed so many people in France, for example, side with Nazi Germany rather than, you know, the Allies and the Free French and all the rest of it, is because of that fear of the westward spread of communism. I mean, that is as clear and present a danger as is the westward spread of Nazism to those in Britain, for example. So, James, if that's... I mean, Hitler has never hidden his anti-communism or his loathing for Slavs and so on.

And given all that, and given that he is talking to his generals or he's talking in private about attacking the Soviet Union as early as the summer of 1940, why is it that the Soviet Union, the Soviet leadership union is so vast and the manpower reserves of the soviet union are just absolutely enormous um and also because to a certain to a very large extent actually the soviet union is already feeding nazi germany in terms of resources essential resources and of course the moment you invade these get cut off until you've completely won and you can take those resources are include oil and gas Yes, and food and bauxite and tungsten. So food from Ukraine, the breadbasket and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, all that sort of stuff.

But the point is they want it for themselves. They don't want to share it with any Slavs and intermentals. So that's their thinking. So what, Stalin thinks we're giving Hitler all this stuff anyway, it's just simply not in his interest to invade us. Is that what Stalin thinks? Well, it's partly that not in his interest to invade us. Is that what Stalin thinks? Well, it's partly that, but it's also partly Stalin being naive. I mean, Stalin's gone through these purges of the late 1930s,

and the armed forces, the Red Army, is in disarray, but they are preparing and doing an awful lot of work and building, you know, they've got double the number of artillery pieces that Germany has by the summer of 1941. They've got something like got double the number of artillery pieces that Germany has by the summer of 1941. They've got something like six times the number of aircraft. Now, a lot of those are obsolescent and no longer kind of fit for purpose, but it's still aircraft. Ditto with tanks, you know, the new tanks are coming in. So they are gearing up as well. And there's no question about it that they are preparing for a showdown with Nazi Germany and that they're thinking about invading first.

I mean, you know, it is going to happen because Stalin sees, you know, in the same way that the Nazis fear the Western threat of spread of communism, the communists fear the Eastern spread of Nazism. So as well, they might as well. They might. It's just that despite huge amounts of evidence that this is going to happen, Stalin refuses to accept it. And it's one of those weird, inexplicable things

where he just completely loses the plot for a bit. And very quickly, for a moment, he's absolutely that rabbit in the headlights. And very, very quickly, he gets a grip. So there's all that, everyone's sort of going you know start um you know comrade i'm you know i think there's quite a few signs that the germans are kind of up to something no nonsense nonsense so let's talk about that we're getting to 1941 but hitler's initial plan is not to invade when he does invade so the invasion is put off isn't it so he's forced into he's hustled into it doing it much early

parachute mafia do you think the outcome would have been different if the offensive was launched in May as originally planned? And that's because Mussolini has got embroiled in the Balkans and Greece. Yeah, no, it wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever because the fundamental problems... Just tell us about why Hitler has to delay it first and then tell us why it doesn't actually make any difference.

So the whole point of that... So the Pact of Steel, which is signed between Italy and Germany, is really an alliance of convenience. So the idea is that Mussolini doesn't have to worry about his northern flank and he can just concentrate on creating a new Roman empire,

you know, the Mari Nostrum and all the rest of it, the Mediterranean, and stretching all the way down into East Africa and North Africa and so on and the whole of the Aegean. That's his ambition, to have an empire which is sort of,

you know, sort of old Roman in kind of sort of scope in many ways, apart from the Europe bit. And Hitler doesn't want to have to worry about his southern flank at all. You know, because of Germany's central position in Europe, it's quite vulnerable, and he wants to be able to just sort of concentrate on attacking the West and attacking the East whenever he wants to without having to worry about his southern flank. But unfortunately, Mussolini is also a military nincompoop and even worse equipped and he goes

into Greece first of all and makes a complete hash of it and the Greeks fight back and then he goes invades Egypt which is a British protectorate and the British fight back and makes a complete hash of that as well so Hitler has to come to his rescue or risk lose his southern flank and make his southern flank vulnerable and his southern flank vulnerable. And his southern flank is particularly precious because Romania is the only source of German oil, of which is of vital importance to his war machine. And so he just cannot risk it. So he has to go and shore things up and help out his ally, Italy. And that involves going into the Balkans, it involves sending troops to North Africa and it also involves invading Greece. I think you can argue very strongly that it doesn't involve

going into Crete but be that as it may they do, they lose 50% of their most well-trained infantry troops, the paratroopers, the Fallschirmjäger and they also lose a further 250 transport aircraft which certainly would have been incredibly useful in Operation Barbarossa but they're not the reason why they lose. But it delays the start. It delays the start by a month, yeah. So why is that not significant? Because lots and lots of people say, yes, that was hugely significant. Well, this is really the crux of the entire podcast, because I don't think they ever had much chance of winning because the scale of what they had to achieve was so enormous and they were tragically um for them um massively under-resourced for the tasks that they'd given

themselves and that was down to just a misappreciation hubris um total lack of of self-awareness um and of underestimating the enemy and underestimating the challenges and there were lots and lots of warnings, and they just ignored them all. Well, first of all, I mean, they do have nevertheless colossal numbers, don't they? I'm just reading here. They have thousands of tanks, 4,000 aircraft. How many divisions? 153 divisions.

I mean, that's... Anyway, they build all that up. And the delay presumably gives is one reason why there are so many rumors i mean there's always these famous stories about sort of people slipping across frontiers and swimming rivers or whatever and pitching up and saying to the to the red army i have information yeah you know and then being shot as their as their kind of reward or being thrown into prison or something why is it so at this at this point, so we're sort of May, June. Do – as this huge military buildup, do some people in the Soviet kind of hierarchy,

do they know it's happening but Stalin's refusing to listen? Or are they all deluding themselves that these are just Nazi exercises? Well, if you remember the last few months before the Russian attack on Ukraine, there were troop build-ups, troop build-ups all along, weren't there? And everyone's going, no, it's not going to happen. He's not really going to do it. Or he might do it, but it might just be kind of...

It's just a tactic. Yeah, just a political game. So it's the same sort of thing. The key point about it is, yes, they're attacking with 3.6 million men. It is the largest clash of arms in terms of scale that the world has ever seen. But it is simply not enough because 3.6 million sounds a huge number. Of course, it is a vast number. But that needs contextualising because 90% of the hard yards has to be done by a quarter to a third of the troops involved. So the absolute key,

because Germany is so under-mechanised, the lion's share of the work, the absolute spearhead, is carried out by these four panzer groups. And the panzer groups are effectively groups of mechanised armies. They're groups of all-arms units, of motorised infantry, motorised artillery, and of course tanks, bmw motorbikes with sidecars and all the rest of it and half tracks and armor cars and you know when you when you think when you think blitzkrieg nazis on the march that's what you're thinking about but that accounts for only 39 divisions and of those only 17 are panzer divisions and the panzer divisions are the creme de la creme you know these are the all arms and one of those 39 divisions is the first cavalry division which

is horses yeah it's horses the germans you know the modern germans the the conquerors of europe they are going into the biggest clash of arms with a horsed mounted cavalry division in their spearhead so once you sort of break that down, you know, 39 divisions, each division is 15,000 men, of which only about, you know, 9 to 10,000 are actually fighting troops. So that's only about, you know, 400,000 men are doing 90% of the work. And 400,000 is a lot less than 3.6 million. So there is a kind of obvious parallel with what's been happening in in ukraine that actually the huge size of the russian army it's actually people say it's not big enough and and you could say the same about the germans well because you need guys to you need guys to drive

the wholesome wagons and supply chains and all the rest of it so the question is are there people in the in the german army who are pointing this out who are worrying about this who are drawing up yeah and this is what's really interesting. So in the planning of Barbarossa, so one of the people who's been told to do sort of war game it, sort of sand table it, so do a sort of you know, a theoretical planning.

Not an actual war game, but kind of, you know, on paper, what have we got? Where does this work? How are you going to set it? How's it going to go? And appreciation. Is General Friedrich Paulus, who later... Oh, the irony. The irony. So, commander in Stalingrad. Yeah, but in 1940, he is on the OKW,

which is the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, which is the German combined staff, combined forces general staff, and basically Hitler's mouthpiece. And he does this study, and he sort of goes oh i'm not quite sure this is going to work actually um you know it's just not stacking up you know the distance to do great the logistic chains of this huge huge huge logistic problems and everyone goes let's not worry about it you know we've got the triumph of the will triumph

of the will it'll be fine you know we're there to mention their selves it'll be fine let's just forget about it and everyone sort of goes okay fine then then there is a kind of sort of okay so what's the economic appreciation of this you know how can we function you know have we got enough oil have we got enough rubber have we got have we got enough food you know the supply lines we've got enough trucks to kind of do it you know to maintain the effort because the whole point about the german way of war is is the schwerpunkt to kind of you know hit them hard at the main point do a huge great kettleettleschlacht and envelopment war, annihilate your enemy very quickly.

It's all going to be wham, bam, bam, bam, bam, you know, three weeks, six weeks, five days, whatever. And the whole point about Barbarossa is that this is supposed to be a war of annihilation in three months max. You know, if it hasn't done it in three months, it's game over, you know, it hasn't worked. So General George Thomas, or Yorkorg Thomas, if you like,

he is the head of the OKW, the German General Staff's Economic Division, War Economic Vision, the Wirtschafts- und Rüstungsamt, as it was called. And he is asked by Keitel, who is the chief of staff. So he's the absolute top military guy under Hitler. And he's asked to do an economic appreciation on the 22nd of January. And he files his report with Keitel on the 8th of February 1941. And the report is quite damning. It says, well, you're going to run out of fuel in two months. We'll run out of rubber in six. We haven't got

enough to sustain it. We can't rely on the ukrainians because probably the germans will do a scorched earth policy blah blah blah and kaito just goes oh no no no no this won't do a go at all go away and rewrite it so he goes okay uh and he comes back on the 13th of february five days later going well it's gonna be fantastic yeah this is gonna be a piece of piss and everyone goes great let's go i mean seriously it's it's insane it's absolutely insane and on top of that i mean you know they're also all the because hitler's way is to have this sort of divide and rule so there's lots of these sort of parallel command structures so you have you have the the war economy office under under york thomas at the okw which is to do with military financing but that's also tied in with Goering's four-year plan.

And Goering now owns most of, personally owns, most of German industry, a heavy industry. Then you've got Walter Funk's Ministry of Economics as well. And then under that, you've also got 27 further national finance offices, all of which who are kind of sort of not remotely joined up in any way whatsoever. And you've got lots and lots of sort of small industries. So you haven't got any kind of nationalised sort of British Rail equivalent or anything like that. So consequently, when they invade, it's true, they've got, you know, zillions of vehicles for their four panzer groups and

others. But they've also got 2000 different types of vehicle now i'm trusting that neither of you are particularly mechanical i know you're not at all bro but but tom i know the discussion of historical trucks is very dear to your heart well this is what i'm excited about well the point about this is is that of course if you're if you're an independent truck manufacturer it's a bit like you know in the old days being an independent horse and cart manufacturer. You know, you just do your own thing. And they all have certain principles. They've got a bit of suspension and they've got wheels and, you know,

they've got wooden bits and all the rest of it. But they're all different. And this is the problem with having 2,000 different vehicles, many of which are British, many of which are French. Because you don't have the bits to repair them. Because your distributor cap and your coil and your spark plugs and your

gasket, you know, that's a word that you must have heard of. They're all different. Tom, you assured me before your brother came on this podcast that it would not, absolutely not degenerate into a discussion of World War II trucks, but it clearly has. No, I said that it would. It's a principle.

In the second half, we should talk about violence, about the sheer violence of the German attack. Yes, where it all goes wrong. And we should also talk about Ukraine specifically, because that was obviously the peg for doing it. But before we do that, one last question before the break, and it's about war aims. So the Nazis' dream scenario, James, you said, you know,

they want to do it in two or three months. The Nazis dream scenario, where do they stop? And what has happened? And what does that involve? Does it involve the extermination of all the population? Does it involve massive slave camps, the implanting of settlements? I mean, what do they think is going to happen? They haven't really thought it through at all. So the idea is that they encircle the entire Red Army, who, when they invade, will come forward to meet them. They'll then encircle them in a massive giant encirclement or series of encirclements and destroy them within 500 kilometres of where they start,

which is sort of, you know, from the central point, is Brest in what is now Belarus, I think. Belarus, yeah, was Poland at the time. And that's the time. And that's the assumption. And almost every bit of that doesn't happen. And then what do they think will happen? Then they'll turn the whole of the Soviet Union into a Nazi empire?

They'll capture Moscow? Yeah, they'll capture Moscow. They haven't really thought about how far they'll go. So Moscow is their initial target, isn't it? I mean, and that's quite... No, their initial target is... No, their initial target is 500 kilometres to destroy the Red Army. But the German high command, their ultimate target is Moscow

rather than Leningrad or Kiev. Yes, but they can walk into Moscow once they've destroyed the Red Army within 500 kilometres. So in other words, they think it'll be a little bit like the... I mean, neither Tom nor I are military specialists, so you should correct us if we're completely out of line. But they think it'll be a little bit like the conquest of France. So they won't have to have a siege of the capital.

They'll just be able to waltz into the capital having already won the war. Exactly. Yeah, right. Exactly. That's exactly what they're thinking. And how it'll all pan out, they haven't really thought through at all. Right. And there are huge problems about going beyond the 500.

The great thing about two Hollands is they just talk over one another and it just goes on forever. So that is the plan. Come back after the ad break and find out how it actually went. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews,

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At this moment, a march is taking place that for its extent compares with the greatest the world has ever seen i have decided today to place the fate and future of the reich and our people in the hands of our soldiers may god aid us especially in this fight so that was very much not a friend of the rest of his history. Adolf Hitler making his debut on our podcast. Enough of him. So James Holland, brother of the lesser known Tom Holland. James, you're here to talk about Operation Barbarossa. And we've done all the war aims. We've done all the sort of planning and what you see as the shambolic planning.

So the day itself, I mean, the moment that it happens, it happens in the early hours of the morning as these things tend to, and it appears to be a complete triumph for the Germans. I mean, they carry on before them. The Soviet Union are completely taken by surprise. Disaster. They're entire, basically, am I right in thinking that the Soviet operational command or whatever is completely blown away in the opening hours opening hours of the war completely blown away completely blown away uh they have these series of encirclements and actually smolensk is captured on the 15th of july so you know what's that 15 plus you know eight um

in just over three weeks um which is incredible you know and smolensk is what 700 kilometers so it's it's beyond that great they've captured three quarters of a million men, so many that they don't know what to do with them. They capture so many because people are ready to surrender. It's a failure of the high command. It's not that they, no, not really. It's not that they are particularly ready to surrender. It's just that there is a failure of leadership at the very, very top for a whole host of reasons. It's too cumbersome. It's too top-heavy. It's too controlled. But within very quick order, Stalin and the senior commanders

sort of, to a very large extent, get themselves together. They create the Stavka, which is a sort of high command, which Stalin, of course, is still overseeing. But that's put in place. They start massive, massive recruitment. I mean, the interesting thing is, is on the 22nd of June 1941, there are 14 million Soviet people who have already had some form of military training who are in reserves, you know, that can be called up.

And in 1941, there are three million Soviets who are due to come of age and become 18 that year. Okay, can I ask the obvious question then, which Brian Williams poses? Was victory by Nazi Germany achievable? Or was Barbarossa always doomed to fail? It was only achievable if the Soviet leadership was even more crap than it was. Right. The Germans did not have enough, the right planning or the right thinking to achieve it without the help of the Soviet Union. So let me ask you about the Soviet Union there, because Stalin, the story goes that he gets these phone calls from Zhukov or whoever, sort of the early hours of the morning. People can't get hold of him and he's dumbstruck. Isn't this an amazing story that Zhukov rings him

and Stalin's just kind of panting, breathing very heavily on the other end of the line because he's taken so much unawares. But is this, James, an interesting difference between Stalin and Hitler? Does Stalin basically, does he sort himself out and let his generals take care of it rather than interfere? Or is he still masterminding everything after the initial shock?

No, he absolutely is not. And that is the reason for the Kursk encirclement, which is completed on the 14th of September, which is the biggest single victory of all, where some 700,000 are captured in one fell swoop. Who wins that? So this is a German victory against the Red Army, but that is the end of it. That is the last one. And that is because Stalin repeatedly ignores

the advice first of Zhukov, who warns him on the 29th of July. At the time, Zhukov is chief of staff, so he's the senior guy. He's the equivalent of Keitel or Marshall or General Brook to the British in the war. He's the top military man, and he says,

you need to abandon Kiev and get the other side of the Dnieper River. And Stalin just goes, no, there's absolutely no way we're going to abandon Kiev, which is the third largest city in the USSR. No way, Jose. And Zhukov says, in that case, I demand that you allow me to resign and give me a posting on the front. And because Stalin's Stalin, he goes, fine, I'll be going. And so he does. And then there are other repeated warners, you know, Karpinos, who is the commander of the Southwestern Front. Front is a group of armies.

So, you know, you're talking about a really seriously large amount of men. I mean, I think there's 650,000 men in the Southwestern Front. Kupanov says, you know, as September, August gives way to September, says, you know, I have to be allowed to do this. I have to be allowed to pull back. And Sartre just goes, absolutely not. No way. But by this point, but I'm sort of jumping the gun. So he is imposing himself on one of the lessons of Kiev in 1941,

the capture of Kiev, and this is huge, massive encirclement of over 700,000 Red Army troops. It's at that point Stalin does back off and start listening to his commanders and letting the better commanders go forward and go through to the front. And, you know, Zhukov is one of the beneficiaries of that, of course, and listening to them in a way that the absolute opposite happens with Hitler, that Hitler, who demands the Kiev encirclement,

diverts forces away from the strike to Moscow at huge expense, and then goes, told you so, we've had the biggest victory ever. But actually, it's a Pyrrhic victory. Okay, so one of the obvious points in comparison with the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that it was a kind of three-pronged. They didn't just target on us. They didn't have a single target. They dissipated their forces. Is that what the Nazis do? Because they're targeting Leningrad, they're targeting Moscow, and they're targeting Ukraine. Is that right? Yes. So what you've got with the German invasion, you've got

three groups of armies, three army groups, army group north, army group south, army group centre. And army group centre is the biggest. And that's got, you know, three panzer groups to start off with. And that's the one that's targeting Moscow. Yes. And that's Field Marshal Fyodor von Bock is the commander of that. And that is targeting Moscow.

It's going straight for, first of all, you know, that's from Brest in a straight line through what is now belarus to smolensk take smolensk on the 15th of july it's all looking absolutely fantastic but then thereafter it kind of the red army response starts to sort of stiffen yet more men appear and suddenly there's sort of the first of much bigger tanks i won't go go into the details, Dominic, don't worry. But they're bigger. And the Germans haven't seen anything like it. And there just seems to be, it doesn't matter how many they mow down,

more Red Army troops seem to appear. So it's a bit sort of Hydra's head-like. And while all that is happening, so there is this sort of huge stride across the map to start off with. And then it just completely slows down. And while this is happening, this is when Hitler then suddenly says, actually, let's not worry about Moscow for now. Let's go and take Leningrad in the north and let's go and take Ukraine in the

south. So I'm going to divert lots of troops from army group centre, this group of armies in the centre of the line, and divert them southwards. But you can't just sort of click your fingers and expect that to happen because there are huge supply chains involved. And the other problem is with Panzer Group 2, which is one of these spearheads that I was telling you about, they're groups of divisions. It's like a group of armies in a way of motorised troops.

To go southwards is then cutting across the flanks of the Red Army lines. So why is he doing it? Why has he suddenly changed his plans? Because it's all taking a bit longer than he thinks, and he can see that the Red Army is stiffening in Army Group Centre, and because he's suddenly thinking actually the whole point of going here was not to take Moscow,

it's to get land and territory and resources. It's also oil and stuff, isn't it? And oil, and the further south we are, the closer we are to Baku and Azerbaijan and the Caucasus, which is where all the oil is. I mean, even that is total la-la land because they haven't got any capacity to refine it or indeed transport it. So, James, let's talk about Ukraine specifically because you mentioned earlier on the battle

for what we then called and what we called until a few months ago, Kiev. Yes. what we then called and what we called until a few months ago, Kiev. So obviously a lot of the fighting, I mean, then as now, happened in Ukraine. Do the Germans think that the Ukrainians, who of course had fought for their independence, or some of them had at least after the Russian Revolution in the early years of the 1920s, do they think that they will be greeted as liberators? Or do they think, well, the Ukrainians are just yet more Slavs who should be exterminated and all this sort of stuff? I mean, because they seem to have a very confused, shall we say,

nationalities policy where they want to be greeted as liberators, but also they want to exterminate the people who greeted them. Yeah, it's exactly that. And again, you know, none of it stacks up. It's not consistent in any shape or form. But broadly speaking, they could have won over certainly the Western Ukrainians without any problem at all, I'd have thought, for the most part. And they would have had a large number of people who were prepared to fight for them against Stalin. I mean, Ukrainians are no friend of, you know, no friend of Stalin in any shape or form, you know, thanks to millions being starved in the 1930s. So they've got sort of potentially willing people, but no, they're all Slavs in dimension two, and they're impoverished and just sort of,

you know, backward peasants and deserve nothing but complete contempt. And so they go around sort of burning, torching villages and sort of anyone who looks sort of vaguely Jewish or a disruptor, they get shot. So does that mean it's not really winning hearts and minds? It's the implication of that though, that with a different, I mean, in some parallel universe where that invasion is being led, not by ideological Nazis,

but by German nationalists, sort of World War I type, if you like, Ludendorff types or something. That is the implication of that, that they could have had, the Germans could have had much more success if they had co-opted Ukrainian nationalism. I mean, for one thing...

Yes, but they're never going to because the whole war is an ideological war in the first place. So that, you know, the kind of what if just doesn't work with the Nazis. So on that topic, we've got two questions. One from Guillermo de Avaledo. Was the cruelty on the Eastern Front directly derived from Nazi ideology or was it inevitable? So in other words, is the savagery hard-baked? Is it part of the kind of, you know, it was always there?

Or does it arise from the kind of the horror of the fighting? And then just one other question, which is kind of hanging over this, the whole discussion we've had so far from Dave Rich. What role did Barbarossa play in the escalation of the Holocaust? So specifically with the Jews? It absolutely does, because it is an ideological war. There is this ideological element which is not there in any of the operations in the West, the Blitzkrieg in the West. It's just not there. Whereas it absolutely is a fundamental part of the whole thing you know this is this is to rid the world of bolshevism and you know which is a overseen by a cabal of of world Jewry so so these guys are all utterly contemptible I mean you know when they go into when they go into Ukraine you know the same aforementioned George Thomas is putting together a plan called the hunger plan

where they're basically going to rape um all the food of Ukraine. And they think sort of quite casually that that could probably lead to the deaths of 20 to 30 million people. You know, this is this is not the SS. This is this is the Wehrmacht planning office that's coming up with this plan. I mean, as it happens, you know, Stalin insists on a kind of scorched earth policy anyway. So anything that's useful to the Germans is burnt as they retreat. And anyone who gets in the way of the Germans is also sort of burnt and shot and villages torched and all the rest of it, just because they're sort of in the way

and someone sniped from them. So, you know, they'll just bulldoze a whole lot. I mean, that's how it is. So it just escalates. But it escalates very, very quickly in the USSR and particularly in Ukraine and particularly in the Baltic states, actually, because in March 1941,

Hitler has briefed all his commanders and basically given them carte blanche to do whatever they like you know this is a this is an ideological war this is a total war it's a war of annihilation you know whatever you do is fine by me and have they been briefed have they been briefed particularly to target the jews yeah of course yeah einsatz gruppen have been put have been have been created specially to follow on behind the lead troops to come in and round them all up and you know of course that's exactly what happens when they do take Kiev they take Kiev is captured on the 19th of September 1941 um there are then some delayed action explosions which have been left by the Red Army some depots which have been mined and booby trapped and they blow up I think

on the 22nd and 24th of September something like that um and on the 29th and so so clearly that that that must be jews um and so they're all rounded up and you know 33 771 are executed at babi yar just outside kiev on the 29th and 30th of of of september and himla witnesses this and goes oh that's disgusting it's horrible we can't have our men doing that shooting people he's in a dutch you've got to think of something else which of course leads to you know cyclone Cyclone B and the death camps. Just on a quick question about nationalities. I mean, we talked always about the Germans,

but obviously it's not just a German operation, right? There are Romanians, Finns, Italians, Hungarians, and Slovakians. Are they,

are they million adjunct or are they a key part of that? Okay. They're a million adjunct. They're in our army group South. And because they're so bad, badly trained, they're given so utter, nothing but utter contempt by the Germans, they don't really help Army South's progress.

So you've got these three prongs, these three groups of armies. You've got Army Group North, which is going into the Baltic, clearing out the Baltic, and then pushing on towards Leningrad after Hitler changes his mind. You've got Army Group Centre, which, as you remember I was saying, was the biggest, strongest one. Then you've got Army Group South, which is commanded by von Wundstedt, who's the commander of Army Group A in the Western, in the Battle of France and the Low Countries and everything in 1940.

So he's sort of a big cheese. And where Army Group South is really struggling is, first of all, their allies are useless and rubbish and ill-trained and ill-equipped and not very good. And the second problem is these huge distances. I mean, these vast, vast distances. So one of the other assumptions of Barbarossa is that what they'll do is they'll just capture Soviet rail stock, and then they'll just use it for their own purposes. But of course, the Soviets just destroy them all. Either take them back with them, or if they can't, they destroy them before the Germans can get their hands on them. There's a whole host of problems with this. The first problem is that Soviet loading gauge is wider than that of the German and European loading gauge. So the Germans then have to use their own locomotives and their own rolling stock. But as they move forward into the Soviet Union, they've then got to narrow the gauge.

So every single bit of rail has to be moved, you know, a couple of inches to the left or whatever. You imagine how long that takes and that takes? The second problem is that Soviet locomotives are bigger and they can go further with less refuelling of coal and water. So the Germans, their Kriegsloch, which is their sort of standard train, they then have to put in more coal stops and more water stops as well as narrowing the gauge to get anywhere. And you can imagine i mean this this is this is not conducive to speed and it's just a total misappreciation and it's

also a problem isn't it which i i know from listening to the um two excellent episodes you did on on the planning for barbara on we have ways that um there are no petrol stations well they're wrong i mean so in france when they invade there are no petrol stations. Well, there are. So in France, when they invade, there are petrol stations conveniently situated for all the tanks to fill up or whatever. But in Russia, there are no petrol stations. There are none. I mean, as I said,

France was the most automotive nation in Europe. So of course there's lots of petrol stations and workshops and all the rest of it. Those do not exist. Yeah. And Germany is very, very under-mechanized as well. So they've got double the problems because they don't have enough mechanics they don't have enough people in there

they just don't have enough spanners and you know all the rest of it i mean the just it's just the whole thing is this sort of spiraling the military term for this is the culmination point the culmination point is the point where you can no longer operate in the way you want to operate because your your lines of supply are just too long. And your lines of supply become so long that half your capacity is spent feeding the line of supply rather than the people at the front. And to put this just sort of where it's already going drastically wrong in July, despite Smolensk falling on the 15th of July, despite these huge, huge gains and

750,000 Soviet prisoners or whatever the figure is. One panzer division is down to 12 tanks by the 18th of July. And the whole of Panzer Group 2, which is the single largest panzer group, that is the absolute creme de la creme this is all the kind of 20 to 30 year olds this is all the fully trained people this is all your sparkly tanks and and bmw sidecars and half tracks and armor cars and all the rest of it they are down to 29 percent of the tanks that they started off with on the 22nd of june it's completely unsustainable so my point is that even if they'd gone in a month earlier, it's not the time that's the problem.

It's the expanse and the Soviet response to this. You know, the value of a German soldier is just far greater to the Germans than the value of a Soviet soldier is to the German. Because of the manpower. But James, isn't it also the case, though, that wars are won not just by logistics, but they're also won by politics?

And that one of the Germans' big mistakes is they underestimate Russian patriotism. They underestimate their will to fight. They underestimate the... Because they think communists are wretched and deluded. They underestimate the resilience of the of the soviet machine i suppose so even if they take and let's say they let's say they'd encircled moscow you know you're going to probably say that was on you know unimaginable anyway but let's say

they'd done that let's say they'd fought their way into the center of moscow as napoleon did of course would that have brought them victory or what was russia was the soviet union always too resilient politically to fall i think so i think there are moments there's a moment in october 1941 where there is sort of mass panic in moscow there was obviously moment in the opening days of barbara rossa where where it's looking bare-brained i mean you know stalin absolutely does not help himself by insisting on um keeping kiev and and keeping the southwestern front up at the denipa when clearly it was going to be encircled so the idea of the encirclement from the german point of view was that this this panzer group two comes down from you know from the slovensk area

down southwards through bella what is now belarus into into, but east of the Dnieper River. And Panzer Group 1, which is part of Army Group South, going south of Kiev, pulling up to getting a bridgehead over Dnieper, near Dnieper-Bretovsk, would then swirl northwards. And so they come down and meet each other. And there's this huge pocket of a circle in the middle of which Kiev is caught in the middle of it. And this is a very familiar from what's going on in Ukraine at the moment. That actually it's quite difficult to coordinate these kind of... It really is.

And the point is that Army Group 2, Panzer Group 2 particularly, is absolutely on its knees by the time of the join up. So it looks like an amazing victory for the Germans. And it is, in terms of the amount of men they captured and the kind of disaster for the Red Army. But they've been so chewed up in the whole process that they're on their knees. And at that point, Hitler's also saying just a few days

before the actual meetup the join-up actually happens on the evening of the 14th of september so about 6 20 p.m just north of a um just south of a north of a little place called lubny which incidentally is is fanatically defended by civilians and um nkvb nkvd people which are obviously former kgb um uh with people chucking molotov cocktails and firing from the rooftops at these panzers. But they still, you know, Lubny Falls, when this join-up actually happens, just. But at the same time, Hitler's going, okay,

Barbarossa hasn't completely won, so we need a new operation, which is going to be Operation Typhoon, and that is going to be back again towards Moscow. So everyone's sort of going, but we were going to Moscow and you've just diverted us all down and we haven't got Leningrad. And okay, we have got this massive encirclement, but all the encirclement is telling

a lot of the people on the ground is the absolute infinitesimal reserves of the Red Army because they're still in the game. They've still got an air force. They've still got guns. They've still got more men to come. You know, they've still got these,

they've still got 14 million people they can call up. They've still got an air force. They've still got guns. They've still got more men to come. You know, they've still got they've still got 14 million people they can call up. They've still got three million people of the 18 year old age group, et cetera, et cetera. So it's sort of for Hitler. Kiev is is an endorsement of his military genius. You know, everyone everyone thought he was wrong in 1940 and he proved them right. He proved his commanders wrong. The numbskulls, these Prussian elites. And everyone said, fear, I don't think it's a good idea to sort of divert from Moscow, go into Leningrad and Kiev. And he's like, I told you so. Look at that. It's the biggest victory ever in the history of the world. He still feels the need, though. He does have the sense that it hasn't gone well

enough, that they need a new operation. So effectively, this is also the end of Operation Barbarossa. Yes, and that's the point. It is at Kiev. Kiev is a terrific victory on one level. But on another level, they're winning themselves to death. That's the point. That is before the snow falls. That is before they've got to Moscow.

They're all there. Here's the question, though. So from the picture you painted, the Germans have lost this colossal gamble within months, weeks of making it. But then they're exhausted. There's some group, whatever, panzers are on their knees, all this stuff. So my question would be, why does it take so long then for them to be beaten? Because they're going to be in Russia for years. I mean, they're fighting in Stalingrad,

they're fighting these colossal tank battles a couple of years later. How is it that they are so resilient if the operation is so misconceived? Yeah, that's a really good question. So the Germans do press on Operation Typhoon. It is incredible what they managed to amass for that attack. And it's all based around, you know, Army Group Centre again. So replacement tanks have come up and so on. They're still a fraction of what they were on June 19, you know, the start of Operation Barbarossa.

But they do manage to have a sort of a concentration of force to a certain extent by stripping from Army Group north from stripping from army group south and putting all their eggs in one basket of army group center to be you know that is how operation typhoon is is able to to happen and and that happened that they get any success at all is largely because of the encirclement of kiev which is almost entirely down to the incompetence of stalin i mean you know that is 700,000 people that do not need to be in the bag and are there purely because of Stalin's incompetence. It's about who is the least incompetent dictator here. Well, that certainly plays a part. But the reason it goes on,

so then they get counterattacked quite heavily opposite Moscow in early December 1941. But then both sides sort of run out of steam and it's winter. And so there's a sort of cooling off period in the front. You know, the snow's on the ground and nothing really happens for a while. And everyone's aware that, you know, what's going to happen in the following summer is going to be another renewed offensive by Germany. And of course, you know, between December and late July 1941, Germany's had a chance to build up its strength and all the rest of it.

Soviet Union's had a chance to kind of get its factories that it's moved to the Urals back into gear, more T-34 tanks and all the rest of it. And they're blocking, you know, they're making Moscow absolutely impenetrable, which they do. But Case Blue, which is the operation in the summer of 1942, is driven towards the Caucasus. But by this point, it's no in the summer of 1942, is driven towards the Caucasus. But by this point, it's no longer Operation Barbarossa, right? No, Operation Barbarossa ends on the 25th of September 1941. So that being so, and this episode being about Operation Barbarossa.

It's time to go on a quiz. Could I just, before we end, one last question, which I think is a great question. I've always wondered, and it's asked by Nick Rogers, and Dominic mentioned Napoleon and Napoleon reaching Moscow. And he asked, did Hitler or his generals at any point study Napoleon's Russian campaign and attempt to draw lessons from it? They did study it, but they thought that was then and this is now and we've got lots of tanks. Okay. Good answer.

Okay, that's fair enough. Bro, thanks ever so much. Now, if you have listened to this and enjoyed it and want to know in absolutely microscopic detail, more about operation Barbarossa about the second world war, about every conceivable aspect of it, there are two episodes that you've done. You've put out, uh, about a month ago on the planning for operation Barbarossa, which are fabulous. And if you haven't listened to them, go check them out. All the other episodes as well. And am I right in thinking that you also have a We Have Ways Fest coming up?

You are absolutely correct, bro. On the 22nd to the 24th of July. So it's for anyone who does listen to We Have Ways Pod, then lots of your friends of the show, lots of historians. We've got historians coming from America, from Canada, from Germany, Austria, Poland. Lots and lots of trucks and hardware. Dominic, it's your summer holiday. Sort it out. Is this the thing that happens in Bicester? Does it happen in Bicester?

The Silverstone Race Circuit is a place called Black Pit Brewery. And it's a splendid place and it's a lot of fun. And you can find out more on wehavewaysfest.co.uk. Brilliant. Wehavewaysfest.co.uk. And we will actually be returning, Tom, to this issue when we're later in the summer when we will be doing a podcast with Ian McGregor, who's got a new book coming out this summer about Stalingrad.

Which is terrific, by the way. It's a very, very good book. Oh, so it's got an endorsement from a top World War II historian, or Second World War historian, I should say. Because you ban the phrase World War II on We Have Ways, don't you? We're British, aren't we?

Right. So, on that bombshell, we will see you next time for some more trucks goodbye bye-bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde.

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