Hitler

morning. Dominance in the air had been attained, the reports proclaimed. Grodno, Brest-Litowsk, Vilna, Kowno, and Dünaburg were in German hands. Two Soviet armies were encircled at Bialystok. Minsk had been taken. The Russians had lost, it was announced, 2,233 tanks and 4,107 aircraft. Enormous quantities of
matériel
had been captured. Vast numbers of prisoners had been taken. But the popular reception in Germany was less enthusiastic than had been hoped. People rapidly tired of the special announcements, one after theother, and were sceptical about the propaganda. Instead of being excited, their senses were dulled. Goebbels was furious at the OKW’s presentation, and vowed that it would never be repeated.
    The invasion of the Soviet Union was presented to the German public as a preventive war. This had been undertaken by the Führer, so Goebbels’s directives to the press ran, to head off at the last minute the threat to the Reich and the entire western culture through the treachery of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. At any moment the Bolsheviks had been planning to strike against the Reich and to overrun and destroy Europe. Only the Führer’s bold action had prevented this. More extraordinary than this propaganda lie is the fact that Hitler and Goebbels had convinced themselves of its truth. Fully aware of its falseness, they had to play out a fiction even among themselves to justify the unprovoked decision to attack and utterly destroy the Soviet Union.
    By the end of June the German encirclements at Bialystok and Minsk had produced the astonishing toll of 324,000 Red Army prisoners, 3,300 tanks, and 1,800 artillery pieces captured or destroyed. Little over a fortnight later the end of the battle for Smolensk doubled these figures. Already by the second day of the campaign, German estimates put numbers of aircraft shot down or destroyed on the ground at 2,500. When Göring expressed doubts at the figures they were checked and found to be 2–300 below the actual total. After a month of fighting, the figure for aircraft destroyed had reached 7,564. By early July it was estimated that eighty-nine out of 164 Soviet divisions had been entirely or partially destroyed, and that only nine out of twenty-nine tank divisions of the Red Army were still fit for combat.
    The scale of underestimation of Soviet fighting potential would soon come as a severe shock. But in early July it was hardly surprising if the feeling in the German military leadership was that ‘Barbarossa’ was on course for complete victory, that the campaign would be over, as predicted, before the winter. On 3 July Halder summed up his verdict in words which would come to haunt him: ‘It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.’ He did at least have the foresight to acknowledge that this did not mean that it was over: ‘The sheer geographical vastness of the country and the stubbornness of the resistance, which is carried on with all means, will claim our efforts for many more weeks to come.’
    II
    The territorial gains brought about by the spectacular successes of the Wehrmacht in the first phase of ‘Barbarossa’ gave Hitler command over a greater extent of the European continent than any ruler since Napoleon. His rambling, discursive outpourings, in his lunchtime or late-night monologues to his regular retinue, were the purest expression of unbounded, megalomaniac power and breathtaking inhumanity. They were the face of the future in the vast new eastern empire, as he saw it.
    ‘The beauty of the Crimea,’ he rhapsodized late at night on 5 July 1941, would be made accessible to Germans through a motorway. It would be their version of the Italian or French riviera. Every German, after the war, he remarked, had to have the chance with his ‘People’s Car’ (
Volkswagen
) personally to see the conquered territories, since he would have ‘to be ready if need be to fight for them’. The mistake of the pre-war era of limiting the colonial idea to the property of a few capitalists or companies could not be repeated. Roads would be more important in the future than the railways for passenger transport. Only through travel by road could a country be known, he asserted.
    He was asked whether it would be enough to stretch the conquests to the Urals. ‘Initially’, that would suffice, he replied. But Bolshevism had to be exterminated, and it would be necessary to carry out