The Winds Rise Barbarossa (from WORLD EMPIRE LOST) TRANSLATOR'S NOTE! The world still wonders, a quarter of a century later, why Adolf Hitler turned east in June 1941, when he had England hanging on the ropes from disastrous defects in Africa and the Balkans, and from losses to U-boats, and when the United States was impotent to stop the knockout. It appeared then that Hitler had the Second World War all but won. With England mopped up, he could have proceeded to take on the Soviet union in a one-front war, after digesting his amazing gains. Instead, sparing England, he turned east, unloosed the biggest and longest bloodbath in history, left his rear open to the Normandy landing, and destroyed himself and Germany. Why? On this question, it seems to me that General von Roon, from the other side of the hill, sheds a lot of light. Since the American reader is more interested in operations in the west, I have greatly abridged this material. But i have tried to preserve the main thread of Roon's analysis.
V.H. The Turn EastHitler's invasion of the Soviet union is widely regarded as his great blunder, perhaps the greatest blunder in world history. For this view, there are two reasons. The first is, that people are as yet unable to think clearly about Adolf Hitler, an enigmatic and fearsome personality. The second and more important reason is that, in judging a military situation, laymen (and too many military men as well) seldom bother to get at the facts. Such judgment always begins by looking at a map. People are bored and confused by maps. Yet the key to Hitler's turn east in June 1941 lies in cartography. One has to look at a mop of Europe, preferably a terrain map that clearly shows rivers and the raised areas of mountains. And one has to bear in mind certain simple unchanging facts about war. War is a violent clash of energies. The energies are of three kinds: animal, mechanical, and chemical, as in the destructive process of fire. Until the seventeenth century, the animal energies of horses and men were decisive, although machines like catapults and crossbows were of some use. With the chemical energy of exploding gunpowder, a new factor was added. The American Civil War first reflected the industrial revolution, chiefly in the massive gain of troop mobility through railroads exploiting the chemical energies of a fossil fuel, coal; and also in guns with new ranges and accuracy, thanks to advanced metallurgy and design. Industrial war came fully into its own in 1914-18. The German people, operating on interior lines, on a grid of railroads brilliantly designed by Moltke for the swift shuttling of armies, with an industrial plant planned and built for war, all but beat a coalition that included nearly the whole world. In 1918, the revolutionary possibilities of a new use of fossil energy, the petroleum engine, were disclosed by the British tanks at Amiens, and by air combat among flimsy scout planes. A few military men grasped these possibilities; but only one postwar politician really understood them, and that man was an obscure ex-foot soldier, Adolf Hitler. Hitler saw that the British and French, the supposed victors, were so exhausted that world empire lay open to their successor; and that even a small nation, with massive bold use of the petroleum engine, especially in combined operations on the ground and in the air, could gain the prize. The Situation on the Map The drawback of horses in war is that they must have hay; Napoleon faltered at Borodino partly from a shortage of fodder. Similarly, a petroleum engine must have petroleum to burn. Adolf Hitler could never forget this simple fact, no matter how many armchair strategists and shallow-clever journalists did. There was only one filling station available for the German war effort on the European continent, and that was the oil under Rumania. We could get no oil by sea. All of Hitler's Balkan maneuvers and campaigns of 1940-41 therefore revolved around the Ploesti oil field.
The war could not be won in the Balkans, but Germany might have lost it there. A glance at the map shows that Ploesti, in the great plain drained by the Danube, lies dangerously near the Soviet border. Ploesti is a clear flat march from the Prut River of less than a hundred miles. But it is six hundred miles from Germany, and the Carpathian Mountains bar the way. For this reason, when war between Hungary and Rumania threatened in July of 1940, Hitler acted fast to force a settlement. The Soviet union did not like this. Russia, whether Czarist or Communist, has always stretched its becir claws toward the Balkan peninsula, and at the time Russia was sending vague threatening notes to Rumania. Hitler could not worry about Russian sensibilities, however, where his supply of petroleum was concerned. Without oil, the entire German war machine was but a mountain of dead iron. But Russia's conduct gave him pause. His pact with Stalin was just a truce. He so regarded it, and he had to assume that a ruthless butcher like Stalin so regarded it. The question was, when would Russia move? This, Hitler could only guess from Russia's actions. In the Balkans, in the summer of 1940, while we were completing our brilliant campaign in France, the Soviet union moved into Besscrabla, bringing the Red Army to the banks of the Prut, an advance averaging one hundred miles along a broad front toward our oil. Bulgaria, with a border only fifty miles from Ploesti, began at the same time to make territorial demands and military threats. In these gestures of Bulgaria against Rumania, we possessed hard intelligence that Russian intrigue was at work. These ominous moves took place during the so-called "Battle of Britain." Western newspapers and broadcasters virtually ignored them. Western historians still ignore them. Balkan politics have always confused and bored Westerners, especially Americans. Yet this tense obscure maneuvering around Rumanian petroleum was much more crucial than all the romantically headlined dogfights in the English skies. Authors who chew over and over the Battle of Britain invariably wonder at Adolf Hitler's marked lack of interest in it. None of them seem to know enough military chronology and cartography to appreciate that the Fuhrer had his eye, all during that inconclusive air skirmish, on the vital lowlands of the Danube. Late in July, with the "Battle of Britain" barely started, Hitler ordered General Jodl to begin staff work on an invasion of the Soviet union, to be set for late 1940 or the spring of 1941. Western writers often cite this move as conclusive proof of the German leader's "perfidy." But this comes of not looking at maps or studying chronology. Had Hitler not taken this precauflon after Russia's tightening squeeze play on Ploesti, he would have been guilty of criminal neglect of his nation's interests.
The Grand Strategy Picture Hitler's world view was Hegelian. Nations, empires, cultures, all have their season in history, the great Hegel taught us. They come, and they go. Not one is permanent, but in each age one dominates and gives the theme. In this succession of world dominions, we recognize the evolving will of the God of history, the World Spirit. God therefore expresses and reveals himself in the will of those world-historical individuals, like Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon, who lead their states to world empire. Conventional morality cannot apply to the deeds of such men, for it is they who create the new modes and themes of morality in each age. This Hegelian world view is, of course, at the other pole from the petit bourgeois morality which expects great nations to behave like well-brought-up young ladies in a finishing school, and would hold a mighty armed people no different, in the rules applicable to its conduct, than some pale shoe clerk. The big bourgeois powers like France, England, and America built their strength and expanded their territory by actions indistinguishable from armed robbery. Having achieved their "manifest destiny," they found it easy, of course, to scold a young vigorous Germany seeking to play its world role in turn. Adolf Hitler was not, however, a personality much impressed by such preachments. In his program, the attack on Russia was the doorway through which Germany would enter world dominion. Russia was our India, to be conquered and exploited in British style. Germany had the will, the strength, the sense of destiny. She lacked only the food, the living space, and the petroleum. These things she had to take. Hitler's view was that once rule of the European continent was firmly in Germany'grasp, the Anglo-Saxon sea powers would perforce change their governments, choosing (s) politicians who could get along with the new German world imperium. The Center of Gravity Clausewitz says, "We may... establish it as a principle that if we conquer all our enemies by conquering one of them, the defeat of that one must be the aim of the war, because in that one we hit the common center of gravity of the whole war." The attack on Russia, which aimed for control of the central land moss of the earth with its limitless manpower and natural resources, was the true strike at the center of gravity. Much specious argument is offered that England was "really" the center of gravity, because she could raise another coalition to combat Germany. This is the writing of men obsessed by Napoleonic analogies. England was neutralized, and virtually out of the war, in the spring of 1941, except for the minor nuisance of her air raids. She no longer ruled the seas. Japan and America both surpassed her. They presented no immediate problem to Germany, though a reckoning with the United States always lay in the future.
If militarily England was through, why was she not surrendering? Obviously, because she hoped for deliverance from the Soviet union, or the United States, or both. America was far off and almost unarmed. Russia, on the other hand, was rapidly rearming, at our very borders, and openly threatening the lifeblood of Germany at Ploesti. True, she was attempting to mollify us, in the usual crude fashion of Russian diplomacy, by sending wheat and oil; but in return she was receiving machinery for arming herself against us. To be dependent for long in this fashion on a Stalin was intolerable. Our bid for world empire was always a race against time. Germany was much smaller than its two great rivals, the Soviet union and the United States of America. Its advantage lay only in its unity of purpose, its discipline, and the forceful leadership of Hitler. By 1941 it was clear that Franklin Roosevelt intended to get into the battle as soon as he could convert his industries to war, and delude his unwilling countrymen into following him; and it was equally clear that Stalin was only seeking a safe cowardly way to cut Germany's throat at Ploesti. Hitler put the case plainly in a frank and eloquent letter to Mussolini, on the eve of June 22: "Soviet Russia and England are equally interested in a Europe... rendered prostrate by a long war.... Behind these two countries stands the North American union, goading them on.... I have therefore, after constantly racking my brains, finally reached the conclusion to cut the noose before it can be drawn tight." Was Barbarossa Sound? The argument that Hitler should have finished off England first has no realistic basis. Hitler resembled Caesar in his determination to take, wherever it could be found, the lands and the resources his nation wanted. He was like Alexander in his broad vision of a new peaceful world order. But in his strategy he was Napoleonic, for like Napoleon his central problem was that he was surrounded by enemies. The Napoleonic solution was to use speed, energy, surprise, and extreme concentration of his forces at the attack point, in order to knock off his foes one at a time. This was what Hitler did. He always had a brilliant if somewhat adventurous sense of grand strategy; only his dilettantish interference in tactical operations, and his inability to be soldierly in the clutch, were ruinous. In May of 1940 he had allotted a mere two dozen divisions in the east to confront the more than two hundred divisions of the Red Army, while he finished France and drove the disarmed British remnant off the continent. it was a fantastic gamble, but a perspicacious one. Stalin, who might have taken Berlin, proved only to happy to let Germany destroy France, while he grabbed lond in the Baltic and the Balkans. In 1941 the Soviet union had grown much stronger. It had moved within a hundred miles of Ploesti. It had gained control of the Baltic Sea. It had massed on its borders, confrontingGermany and its conquered Polish territory, more than three million soldiers. And it was demanding a free hand in the Dardanelles, Bulgaria, and Finland. These demands, brought by Molotov in November 1940, were the last straw. Hitler felt he really had only three choices. He could shoot himself, leaving the German people to negotiate a surrender; he could attempt the inconclusive task of subjugating England with the carnage of a Channel crossing, opening himself meantime to a treacherous assault from the east; or he could ignore neutralized, prostrate England, and attempt to realize his entire historic aim, in the hour of his greatest strength, in one devastating blow. Barbarossa was the solution: a one-front Napoleonic thrust, not the opening of a true two-front war. Unprejudiced military historians of the future will never be able/ to fault Hitler for turning east. From the start he was playing against odds. He lost his well-calculated risk through a combination of operational errors and misfortunes, and the historic accident that at this hour he was opposed by a ruthless, spidery genius of the same metal-Franklin Roosevelt. The Role of Roosevelt Roosevelt's essential problem in 1941 was timing. He was playing from temporary weakness against an opponent playing from top strength. The weakness of the American President was both internal and external. Where the German people were united behind their leader, the American people, confused and nonplussed by Roosevelt's supercilious and untrustworthy personality, were divided. Where Hitler disposed of the greatest armed forces on earth, at their peak of strength and fighting trim, Roosevelt had no Army, no Air Force, and a dispersed, ill-trained Navy. How then could the American President bring any weight to bear? Yet he did it. He was well trained in the devices of impotence, having won the presidency in a wheelchair. The first thing he had to do was strengthen Churchill's hand. Only Churchill, the amateur military adventurer with his obsessive hatred of Hitler, could keep England in the war. Churchill was having a wonderful time playing general and admiral, as his memoirs relate. However, under his leadership the Empire was going down the drain. England's one chance to save it lay in getting rid of its grand-talking Prime Minister, and electing a responsible politician to make peace with Germany. Had this occurred, the present world map would look unguessably different, but the pink areas of the British Empire would still stretch around the globe. Roosevelt's masterstroke of Lend-Lease kept Churchill in power. The Americans sent the British precious little in 1941. But Lend-Lease gave this brave, beaten people hope, and wars are fought with hope.
Hope was also the main commodity Franklin Roosevelt sent the Soviet union in 1941, though supplies started to trickle through in November and December. Stalin knew the gargantuan industrial potential of America. That knowledge, and Roosevelt's pledges of help, stiffened him to fight. He sensed that while Roosev would never sacrifice much American blood to save the Soviet union, he would probably send the Russians all kinds of arms, so that Slav bravery and selfsacrifice could fight the American battle for world hegemony. The Convoy Decision Roosevelt's instinct for subtle and breathtaking chicanery on a world scale was never better displayed than in his conduct on the question of the Atlantic convoys. Most Americans were indifferent to the European war in May 1941. The soundest people were against intervening. Roosevelt Managed to find an unpleasant name for them: "isolationists." However, in the circles around him, his sycophants kept urging him to initiate convoying of American ships to England. Indeed, it made very little sense to keep loading up English ships, only to have America's food and arms go to the ocean bottom. Roosevelt obstinately refused to convoy. He had already received intelligence of the coming attack on Russia. In fact the whole world seemed to know it was coming, except Stalin. The last thing he wanted to do was interfere. He saw in it the inevitable slaughter of vast numbers of Germans. This prospect wormed his heart. But an outbreak of war in the Atlantic could have halted Barbarosso. Hitler could have countermanded the orders until dawn on June 22. An order to stand down from Barbarossa would have been obeyed with great relief by the German General Staff. Franklin Roosevelt understood what not too many other politicians of the time could grasthat even Hitler in the last analysis depended on public opinion. The German people were united behind him and ready for any sacrifice, but they were not ready to commit plain suicide. News of war with the United States would have taken all the spiritual steam out of the drive on Russia. The German public had no understanding of America's military weakness. Despite Goebbels's propaganda, they remembered only that America's entry into the last war had spelled defeat. Roosevelt was ready for war with Germany, he ardently desired it, but not until we were embroiled with the tough gigantic hordes of Stalin. So he kept his own counsel, put off his advisers, and kept twisting and turning under the probes of the press about convoying. His one course to ensure war between Germany and Russia was to hold off the convoying decision. That was what he did. He baffled and dismayed everybody around him, includinghis own wife. But he gained his grisly aim on June 22, when Hitler turned east. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Roon's defense of Barbarossa is unusual; most other German military writers do condemn it as the fatal opening of a two-front war. it seems Roon either played a part in designing the operation, or that the plan submitted by the Army Staff agreed with his own study made at Supreme Headquarters. Every man cherishes his own ideas, particularly military men. The argument about the key role of the Ploesti oil fields is not emphasized in many other military histories. Hitler began planning to attack Russia as far back as July 1940. The nonaggression pact was then less than a year old, and Stalin was punctiliously delivering vast quantities of war materials, including oil, to Germany. Hitler's act does look a bit like bad faith, if faith can be said to exist between two master criminals. The usual extenuation in German writings is that the Soviet troop buildups showed Stalin's intent to attack, and that Hitter merely forestalled him. But most German historians now concede that the Russian buildup was defensive. Hitler always regarded the attack on Russia to gain Lebensroum as his chief policy. it was natural for him to start planning it in July 1940, when his huge land armies were at maximum strength, with no other place to go. This was the big picture, and the oil supply problem may have been a detail. Nevertheless, Roon's discussion illuminates Hitter's problems.-V.H. NE 22, 1941JU The players in our drama were now scattered around the earth. Their stage had become the planet, turning in the solar spotlight that illumined half the scene at a time, and that moved always from east to west. At the first paling of dawn, six hundred miles to the west of Moscow, at exactly 3:15A.m. by myriads of German wristwatches, German cannon began to flash and roar along a line a thousand miles long, from the icy Baltic to the warm Black Sea. At the same moment fleets of German Planes, which had taken off some time earlier, crossed the borders and started bombing Soviet airfields, smashing up aircraft on the ground by the hundreds. The morning stars still twinkled over the roads, the rail lines, and the fragrant fields, when the armored columns and infantry divwons-multitudes upon multitudes of young healthy helmeted Teutons in gray battle rigme rolling or walking toward the orangestreaked dark east, on the flat Polish plains that stretched toward Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. A sad and shaken German ambassador told Foreign Minister Molotov in Moscow, shortly after sunrise, that since Russia was obviously about to attack Germany, the Leader had wisely ordered the Wehrmacht to strike first in self-defense. The oval gray slab of Molotov's face, we are told, showed a very rare emotion-surprise. History also records that Molotov said, "Did we deserve this?" The GERMAN ambassador, his message delivered, slunk out of the room. He had worked all his life to restore the spirit of Rapallo, the firm alliance of Russia and Germany. Eventually Hitler had him shot. Molotov's surprise at the invasion was not unique. Stalin was surprised. Since his was theonly word or attitude in Russia that mattered, the Red Army and the entire nation were surprised. The attack was an unprecedented tactical success, on a scale never approached before or since. Three and a half million armed men surprised four and a half million armed men. The Pearl Harbor surprise attack six months later involved, by contrast, only some thousands of combatants on each side. Communist historians use events to prove their dogmas. Ts makes for good propaganda but bad record-keeping. Facts that are hard to fit into the Party theories tend to slide into oblivion. Many facts of this most gigantic of land wars, which the Russians call Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina, 'The Great Patriotic War"-'Second World War" is not a phrase they favor-may never be known. The Communist historians assert that Stalin was to blame for neglecting intelligence warnings, and that is why the German surprise attack was successful. It is a very simple way to look at the amazing occurrence. So far as it goes, it is true. Sunlight touched the red Krembn towers, visible from the windows of Leslie Slote's flat, and fell on an opened letter from Natalie Henry in Rome, lying on his desk by the window. Slote had gone to bed very late and he was still asleep. Natalie had sent him a joyous screed, for suddenly Aaron Jastrow had received his passport! He actually had it in hand and they were getting ready to leave on a Finnish freighter sailing early in July; and going by ship would even enable Aaron to retrieve much of his library. Knowing nothing of Byron's action at the White House, Natalie had written to thank Slote in effervescent pages. The news astonished the Foreign Service man, for in Italy he had felt he was encountering the cotton-padded stone wau that was a State Department specialty. In his answer, which lay unfinished beside her letter, he took modest credit for the success, and then explained at length why he thought the rumored impending invasion of Russia was a false alarm, and why he was sure the Red Army would crush a German attack if by chance one came. Trying to find gracious words about Natalie's pregnancy, he had given up and gone to bed. By the time his alarm clock woke him, his letter was out of date; but he did not yet know it. Peering out of the window, he -,aw the usual morning sights of Moscow: a hazy blue sky, men in caps and young women in shawls walking to work, a crowded rusty bus wobbling up a hill, old women standing in line at the milk store, more old women queueing at a bread store. The Kremlin loomed across the river, huge, massive, still, the walls dark red in the morning sun, the multiple gold domes gleaming on the cathedrals. There were no air raid alarms. There were as yet no loudspeaker or radio reports. It was a scene of tranquil peace. Stalin and Molotov were waiting a while before sharing their astonishment with the people they had led into this catastrophe. But at the front, several million Red Army men were already sharing it and trying to recover from it before the Germans could kill them all. Knowing nothing of this, Slote went to the embassy with a light heart, hoping to dispose of some overdue work on this quiet Sunday. He found the building in a most un-sabbathlike turmoil; and there he learned, with a qualm in his gut, that once again the Germans werecoming. The sunrise slid westward to Minsk. Its first rays along a broad silent street fell on a cleanshaven workingman in a cloth cap and a loose worn suit dusted all over with flour Had Natalie Henry been walking this street, she could not possibly have recognized her relative, Berel Jastrow. Shorn of a beard, the broad flat Slavic face with its knobby peasant nose gave him a nondescript East European look, as did the shoddy clothing. He might have been a Pole, a Hungarian, or a Russian, and he knew the three languages well enough to pass as any of these. Though over fifty, Berel always walked fast, and this morning he walked faster. At the bakery, on a German shortwave radio he kept behind flour sacks, he had heard Dr. Goebbels from Berlin announce the attack, and in the distance, just after leaving work, he had heard a familiar noise: the thump of bombs. He was concerned, but not frightened. Natalie Henry had encountered Berel as a devout prosperous merchant, the happy father of a bridegroom. Berel had another side. He had served on the eastern front in the Austrian army in the last war. He had been captured by the Russians, had escaped from a prison camp, and had made his way back through the forests to Austrian lines. In the turmoils of 1916 he had landed in a mixed German and Austrian unit. Early in his army service he had learned to bake and to cook, so as to avoid eating forbidden foods. He had lived for months on bread, or roasted potatoes, or boiled cabbage, while cooking savory soups and stews which he would not touch. He knew army life, he could survive in a forest, and he knwe how to get along with Germans, Russians, and a dozen minor Danubian nationalities, Anti-Semitism was the normal state of things to Berel Jastrow. It frightened him no more than war and he was just as practiced in dealing with it. He turned off the main paved avenue, and walked a crooked way through dirt streets and alleys, past one-story wooden houses, to a courtyard where chickens strutted clucking in the mire, amid smells of breakfast, woodsmoke, and barnyard. 'You've finished work early," said his daughter-in-law, stirring a pot on a wood-burning oven while holding a crying baby on one arm. She was visibly pregnant again; and with a kerchief on her cropped hair, and her face pinched and irritable, the bride of a year and a half looked fifteen years older. In a corner, her husband in a cap and sheepskin jacket murmured over a battered Talmud volume. His beard too was gone, and his hair cut short. Three beds, a table, three chairs, and a crib filled the tiny hot room. All four dwelled there. Berel's wife and daughter had died in the winter of 1939 Of the spotted fever that had swept bombedout Warsaw. At that time the Germans had not gotten around to walling up the Jews; and using much of his stored money for bribes, Berel Jastrow had bought himself, his son, and his daughter-in-law out of the city, and had joined the trickle of refugees heading eastward to the Soviet union through back roads and forests. The Russians were taking in these people and treating them better than the Germans had,though most had to go to lonely camps beyond the Urals. With this remnant of his family Berel had made his way to Minsk, where some relatives lived. Nearly all of the city's bakers were off in the army, so the Minsk bureau for aliens had let him stay. "I'm home early because the Germans are coming again." Accepting a cup of tea from the daughter-in-law, Berel sank into a chair and smiled sadly at her stricken expression. "Didn't you hear the bombs?" "Bombs? What bombs?" His son closed the book and looked up with fright on his pale bony face. "We heard nothing. You mean they're fighting the Russians now?" "It just started. I heard it on the radio. The bombs must have come from airplanes. I suppose the Germans were bombing the railroad. The front is very far away." The woman said wearily, shushing the wailing baby as it pounded her with a little fist, "They won't beat the Red Army so fast." The son stood. "Let's leave in the clothes we're wearing." 'And go where?" his father said. "East. f Berel said, "Once we do, we may not be able to stop till we're in Siberia." "Then let it be Siberia." "Sibe God mighty, Mendel, I don't want to go to Siberia," said the wife, patting the peevish baby. "Do you remember how the Germans acted in Warsaw?" Mendel said. "They're wild animals." "That was the first few weeks. They calmed down. We kept out of the way and we were all right, weren't we?" the father said calmly. "Give me more tea, please. Everybody expected to be murdered. So? The typhus and the cold were worse than the Germans." "They killed a lot of people." "People who didn't follow the rules. With the Germans, you have to follow the rules. And keep out of their sight." "Let's leave today." "Let's wait a week," said the father. "They're three hundred kilometers away. Maybe the RedArmy will give them a good slap in the face. I know the manager in the railroad ticket office. If we want to, we can get out in a few hours. Siberia is far off, and it's no place for a Jew." "You don't think we should leave today?" said the son. "No." "All right." Mendel sat down and opened his book. "I'm putting food on the table," said his wife. "Give me a cup of tea," said her husband. "I'm not hungry. And make that baby stop crying, please." Clever though he was, Berel Jastrow was making a serious mistake. The Germans were jumping off nearer Minsk than any other Soviet city, bringing another surprise, compared with which even their invasion of Russia has since paled in the judgment of men. Bright morning sunshine bathed the columns of soldiers that crawled like long gray worms on the broad green earth of Soviet-occupied Poland. Behind the advancing soldiers, out of range of the fire Hashes and smoke of the cannonading, certain small squads travelled, in different uniforms and under different orders. They were called Einsatzgruppen, Special Action Units, and they were something unparalleled in the experience of the human race. To place and understand these Special Action Units, one needs a brief clear picture of the invasion. Much of the European continent in that area is a low-lying, soggy saucer almost like everglades, spreading over thousands of square miles. This big swamp, the Pripet Marshes, has always confronted western invaders of Russia. They have had to go south or north of it. Adolf Hitler's generals, intending to break the Soviet state with one sharp blow in a few summer weeks, were hitting north and south of the great swamp at the same time. But the Special Action Units had no military purpose. Their mission concerned the Jews. From the time of Catherine the Great, Russia had compelled its millions of Jews to live in the "Pale," a borderland to the west, made up of districts taken in war from Poland and Turkey. The revolution had ended the Pale, but most of the Jews, impoverished and used to their towns and villages, had stayed where they were. The border defense belt held by the Red Army, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, was therefore precisely where most of the Soviet union's Jews lived. The Special Action Units were travelling executioners, and their orders were to kill Russia's Jews without warnin and m,ithout regard to age or sex. These orders were unwritten; they came down from Adolf Hitler throughGoering and Heydrich to the "Security Service," Germany's federal police, which organized the units. These squads had collateral orders to shoot summarily all commissars-political officers-of the Red Army. But these latter orders were on paper. There were four Special Action Units in all, placed to follow close on the three giant prongs of the German assault. Army Group South, composed of Germans and Rumanians, was striking into the Ukraine, south of the marshes and along the Black Sea into the Crimea. With them came two Special Action Units, for here the Jewish settlement was dense. Army Group Center was setting forth on the straight short road Napoleon took-Minsk, Smolensk, Vyazma, Borodino, Moscow. This road points north of the great swamp like an arrow for the capital. It passes between the headwaters of two rivers, one flowing north and the other south, the Dvina and the Dnieper. Military men call it the dry route and greatly favor it. With this main central thrust travelled another Special Action Unit. Army Group North was driving up along the Baltic toward Leningrad, and a Special Action Unit followed close behind. Counting officers and men, there were about three thousand of these travelling executioners all told in the four units. They were setting out to kill between three and four million people, which figured out to more than ten thousand murders for each man. It was clearly beyond them. The plan was to start the process, and then recruit native anti-Semites and German soldiers to complete the gruesome, unheard-of, but entirely real job they were setting out to do. The Germans in the ranks of the Special Action Units were recruited mainly from the civil services: policemen, detectives, clerks, and the like. There were no lunatics or criminals among them. The officers were mostly lawyers, doctors, or businessmen, who through age or disability could not fight in the army. Many had high university degrees; one officer had been a theologian. Officers and men alike were good Germans, the sort of men who did not drive past red traffic lights, who liked opera and concerts, who read books, who wore ties and jackets, who had wives and children, who for the most part went to church and sang hymns, and who worked in little weekend gardens. Obedience was a German virtue. They had been recruited and ordered to kill these people. They had been told that the Jews were Germany's enemies, and that the only way to deal with them was to kill every last one of them, down to the babes in arms and their mothers. This word came from above. A prime German virtue was to accept such words from above and carry them out. Strangely, the Jews already in German hands, in the territories stretching west from the invasion line to the Atlantic Ocean, were not yet being killed en masse. Nor was a programeven under way to kill them. A mistaken idea exists that the Germans began killing Jews as soon as Hitler took power in 1933-That is untrue. They robbed the Jews, as they later robbed all the peoples they conquered, but the extortion was usually done under legal expropriation rules. Jews were often insulted, sometimes beaten, sometimes tortured, sometimes done to death or worked to death. But as late as June 22, 1941, only a few concentration camps existed, and Most Of the inmates were German opponents of Hitler. The existence of the camps filled the Jews with terror, but the Germans themselves were terrorized, too. By June 1941 the European Jews were living a vile life and were yielding the last scraps of their property to the squeeze of German law. But they were living. "One can live under any law," a German Jewish newspaper put it. So it happened that a Jew was safer behind the German lines, just then, than ahead of them. The Warsaw Jews, for instance, had reorganized themselves under the draconic Nazi rules. Though overwork, starvation, and cusease were taking a toll, they were in the main managing to survive. At this point the Jastrows would have been somewhat better off not to have left Warsaw. But Berel Jastrow, astute as he was and schooled in living with anti Semitism, had not anticipated the Special Action Units. They were something new. Adolf Hitler had given the order for the Einsatzgruppen back in March, so they may not have been much in his mind on June 22. He was following the progress of the invasion in a map room, where the light remained cool and gray long after sunrise. Disliking sunshine, the Fuhrer had ordered his eastern campaign headquarters, which he dubbed Wolfsscre, to be built facing north. A rail spur in a forest of east Prussia, not far from the jump-off line of Army Group North, led to this 'Wolf's Lair," a compound of concrete bunkers and wooden huts surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, and minefields. Wolfsschanze, in fact, singularly resembled a concentration camp. At the elbow of General Jodl stood one of the youngest and newest of German generals, Armin von Roon. Hitler did not like Roon and showed his dislike by abruptness. Roon came from a titled family, and spoke a polished Berlin German that contrasted sharply with Hitler's folksy, coarse Bavarian speech. His uniform, faultlessly tailored, contrasted too with Hitler's oversize, baggy soldier's coat. Above all, Roon had a beaked nose that looked a bit Jewish. But as a colonel in Operations, he had taken part in three elaborate Barbarossa war games. His memory was unusual; he knew to the hour the projected advances and had the picture of the thousand-mile-wide battlefield by heart. The Soviet union was for Roon rather like a table model, spectacularly larger than the ones used in the games. The troops were men, instead of pinned and numbered flags, but the principles and the scenario were the same, at least to start with. (At the Nuremberg trials, Roon denied knowledge of the Special Action Units, until confronted with the order to kill the commissars, countersigned by him for the Operations Section. Then he recalled it, but pl............