Hitler's Greatest Gamble

Abstract

Hitler's Greatest Gamble James J. Sheehan (bio) Jonathan Dimbleby, Operation Barbarossa: The History of a Cataclysm. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. xliii + 595 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Among the greatest challenges facing the historian of modern warfare is capturing war's extraordinary scale without losing sight of its human dimension. Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union that began in June 1941, was one of the greatest battles in history, engaging millions of combatants, raging across hundreds of miles, lasting six months. Behind these figures were the broken lives of individual soldiers and civilians who were caught in the battle's murderous machinery. Barbarossa set in motion four years of vicious combat in which both sides were profligate with the lives of their troops and savage in their treatment of the enemy. To cite just one statistic: of the 5.7 million Soviet soldiers captured by the Germans, some 3.3 million perished from hunger, disease, or mistreatment. Those who managed to survive captivity were often punished after their liberation, since the Soviet authorities regarded being captured as a form of treason. Jonathan Dimbleby's book does justice to both the battle's scale and its impact on individuals' lives. Barbarossa's is, as he shows in convincing detail, an extraordinary story that begins when 3.3 million German troops attacked along an 1800-kilometer front, stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans. During the first weeks of the campaign, things went just as the invaders hoped: badly led, equipped with inferior weapons, and pursuing poorly executed tactics, the Soviets lost massive amounts of men, weapons, and aircraft. By the first week of July, well-informed German commanders predicted a rapid and relatively easy victory. But then the momentum of the German advance began to slow. By October, the Soviet resistance had stiffened, just as the first signs of winter appeared. In early December, the Russians launched a broad counter-offensive that did not destroy the Wehrmacht but did force it to assume defensive positions. This move, in effect, brought Barbarossa to an end. Neither Moscow nor St.Petersburg was captured, the regime remained intact, and the quality of the Red Army's leadership and weaponry dramatically improved. In addition to providing a clear account of the ebb and flow of military operations, [End Page 75] Dimbleby portrays the human face of battle with a skillfully arranged set of first-hand accounts taken from diaries, letters, and official documents. About the global significance of Barbarossa there can be no question. But was it "the most decisive campaign in the Second World War"? If Hitler had won this battle would he have become, as Dimbleby argues, "the master of Europe's destiny" (p. xxxvii)? Perhaps. But it seems equally possible that even had the Germans captured Moscow at the end of 1941, the Soviet regime would have survived. As the battle moved further east, the German conquerors might have found themselves in a situation similar to their Japanese allies in China, unable to convert battlefield victories into effective control over their enemy's vast territory. Hitler's fantasy of creating a stable colonial empire stretching to the Urals was just that, a fantasy that would have, sooner or later, shattered against the hard edges of geopolitical realties. Although Dimbleby devotes most of his book to the military history of Barbarossa, he weaves two other themes into his main story. One is the murder of Europe's Jews, which is not, to be sure, a result of the Russian campaign, but was an important part of Hitler's motives for moving east and did help shape the way the campaign was conducted. Dimbleby follows the now generally accepted narrative of Germany's racial imperialism in which the army—almost all of the generals and large numbers of ordinary troops—were deeply involved in the war's greatest atrocity. Dimbleby also examines the international setting of the German invasion and its aftermath. His book begins (rather awkwardly, in my opinion) with the agreement between the Soviet Union and the German Republic signed at Rapallo in 1922, when both states tried to overcome the international...