In Europe

the east.
    It was here that agent Richard Sorge's espionage network played a decisive role. On 15 October, just as it seemed that Moscow would fall, a report came in from Sorge saying that Tokyo had made a final decision to concentrate on Singapore, Indochina and the United States. This time Stalin believed him. A few days later, during the festive parade to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution, his troops marched almost defiantly across Red Square and straight on to the front, just outside the city.
    Forty Siberian divisions were now dispatched hell for leather to Moscow, with troops specially trained and equipped for fighting under arctic conditions. They had warm white uniforms, thick fur-lined boots and fast skis. At twenty degrees below zero their T-34 tanks raced effortlessly through the snow. Atop their trucks were the strange-looking Katyusha rocket launchers that, with a gruesome howl, could fire more than a dozen 130-millimetre rockets at a time; the Germans soon began referring to them as ‘Stalin Organs’. In addition, these troops were fighting under the leadership of one of the outstanding generals of the Second World War, Georgi Zhukov. They deployed unobtrusively on the other side of Moscow, and began the counterattack on 6 December.
    The numbed soldiers of the
Wehrmacht
did not know what had hit them.
    Not far from Sheremetyevo airport stands the most significant war memorial in Europe. Today the traffic races heedlessly past, the monument suffers from the same inflation as the medals for sale on Moscow's street markets, yet its sobriety is moving. It consists, in fact, of nothing more than a pair of tank traps, a huge cross of welded rails, highly effective obstacles against any armoured attack. In all its simplicity, however, this iron sculpture marks the divide of the Second World War, the moment at which chance took a definitive turn, the furthest spot reached by German troops in December 1941. They never got any closer to Moscow.
    One week after the Germans had been routed, the Franco-American journalist Eve Curie, daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, the famous chemists, drove out from Moscow onto the battlefield with a convoy of her colleagues. She saw tanks and armoured cars abandoned everywhere in the open field, ‘stubborn, dead and cold, beneath a shroud of snow’.Along the highway lay hundreds and hundreds of frozen Germans, amid dead horses and deserted artillery, often in strange positions, like wax figurines fallen from a display case. Beside a demolished tank she saw the bodies of three
Wehrmacht
soldiers. The first one lay on his stomach, ‘his bare back looked like frozen wax’, the snowflakes floating down onto his blond hair. The other two lay on their backs, their arms and legs spread wide, one of them wearing an Iron Cross. ‘The uniforms were of such thin material that they would not have been warm enough even for occupied France’.
    This huge turnaround in the course of the Second World War took place within the space of a few days. Everything happened at the same time. On Saturday, 6 December, 1941, the German troops were beaten back from the gates of Moscow. The next day, Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. On Thursday, 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States with a lengthy tirade against President Franklin D. Roosevelt who, with the ‘satanic cunning of the Jews’, he said, was out to destroy Germany.
    Hitler's declaration of war on America is the most baffling of all his decisions. He owed Japan nothing, their alliance in no way committed him to fight alongside Japan against the United States. But with it he gave Roosevelt the decisive argument he needed to go to war in Europe, something the majority in Congress had blocked vehemently until then.
    Hitler himself was clearly itching for this war. He wanted to demonstrate that he could still take the initiative. ‘A great power does not let war be declared upon it, but declares war itself,’ Ribbentrop told Ernst von Weizsäcker, and that was Hitler's view as well. The attack on Pearl Harbor was exactly what he needed. After all the misery on the Eastern Front he could suddenly give a new, positive twist to his propaganda. After receiving the news about Pearl Harbor the Führer actually called for a bottle of champagne and, very much contrary to custom, drank two glasses himself.
    Hitler's optimistic assault on the Soviet Union, and above all his declaration of war on