This was the real meaning of Lebensraum. Racially self-defeating squabbles between Germans and Italians on one side and the French and British on the other---to say nothing of all the other nationalities dragged into the conflict---made chances of a combined defense against the Communist colossus increasingly slender. But with the Continent secure and the British in retreat from every battlefield, the Fuehrer could finally turn his attention to the East. His decision was not easily made, however. He realized that his forces would be outnumbered on land, sea and in the air, and that Russia had virtually endless reserves of man-power and natural resources.

Germany would not only be fighting at a distinct numerical disadvantage, but her own supplies of ores and fuels could not sustain prolonged operations. Only a series of knock-out blows that could send the Reds reeling would decide the campaign before winter. The Fuehrer was not unconscious of Napoleon’s misadventure in Russia and freezing retreat from Moscow. Every day the Soviet military grew stronger. It would eventually reach levels of invincibility neither the Third Reich nor all of a united Europe could match.

In Hitler’s favor during the first half of 1941 was Soviet unpreparedness, and the poor quality of its weapons, all of which (save only the T-34 tank) were markedly inferior to German arms. Of fundamental importance was the inherent anarchy of Communism itself; the concept of state-enforced equality would especially reveal its unworkability in the Red Army, where discipline was enforced by pistol-waving Jewish commissars authorized to shoot reluctant Russian soldiers in the back of the head.

Bombing raids against industrial centers like Coventry, where production resumed just a month after the Luftwaffe devastated it, showed Hitler that factories were less important targets than their means of production: oil and minerals. War-plants could always be rebuilt or new ones constructed; but the loss of vital resources was permanent. Accordingly, after reducing the Soviets’ defenses, Hitler planned to capture or destroy their access to natural resources, thereby starving out all their factories. Although unaware of the details, he knew that Soviet arms manufacture was in full swing by 1940.

Indeed, Stalin’s military advisors informed their Marshal as early as 1939, just when the non-aggression treaty was signed, that they would be ready to invade German-held Poland, defeat the Reich and over-run the rest of Europe in the next two years. With the Wehrmacht heavily engaged in south-eastern Europe and North Africa, they expected all the warring powers to have so weakened themselves by then that a Soviet take-over was deemed inevitable.

By 1942, the Red Army would have a gargantuan army of 32,000 tanks, ten times as many German Panzers. The same day Stalin signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Ambassador Ribbentrop, the Marshal ordered the immediate construction of 96 new airfields for bombers to use against the Reich, with an additional 180 planned for 1942. So long as Hitler was still fighting Britain, Stalin argued, he would never attack the USSR.

But on June 14, a spy-ring of traitors in the German General Staff notified their superiors in Moscow that the Wehrmacht was going to attack in eight days. They were seconded by several closet-Communists in the German Army, who defected to the Russian lines. As though these advance warnings were not enough, British Secret Service confirmed the up-coming date of the invasion for the Soviets, thanks to Admiral Canaris. Stalin ordered a black-out of all towns and cities near the Polish border, then issued orders for his military districts to be brought up to combat readiness. All this availed him naught on the morning of June 22, however, when the largest artillery barrage in history blasted his incomplete defenses to pieces, throwing the entire Red Army command and control systems into utter chaos.

What marked this campaign from the beginning and grew to the end of the war was the galvanizing effect it had on Europeans. They suddenly realized that Adolf Hitler was not merely a German conqueror, but the protector of their civilization. They joined his cause by the hundreds of thousands, eventually forming half-a-million volunteers in the Waffen-(or "armed") SS. There was the Spanish "Blue Division", the Croatian "Handschar", French "Charlemagne" and Danish "Viking".

There were Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Slovenians, Serbs, Slovakians, Hungarians, Wallonians, Belgians, Dutch, Russians, Ukrainians, Chechniya, and Cossacks---united for the first time under the Swastika symbol of their race. With Operation Barbarossa, National Socialism finally came into its own as a pan-Aryan idea. "Despite the past efforts of Napoleon, the one-million-strong Waffen-SS represented the first truly pan-European army to ever exist" (Carto, p.7).

"Free Arab" and "Free Indian" SS divisions were made up of volunteers who wanted to fight the Zionist Jews and imperialist English, respectively. Even Tibetan warrior-monks mounted on their tough little Himalayan ponies trotting across the Steppes joined to chastise atheistic Communists.

By the end of Barbarossa’s first day, the Luftwaffe had downed 400 enemy aircraft, destroying twice that number on the ground, at the cost of very few casualties. Most of the Bug River’s strategic bridges, whose capture in tact was vital for the offensive to succeed, fell quickly into German hands. The next day, the Soviets regained enough of their composure to launch furious counter-attacks with masses of tanks north-east of Tilsit, Lithuania. After these were virtually annihilated by Panzers coordinated with Stukas, the Germans swept fifty miles into Russian-held Poland.

Ten days later, at Bialystok, they captured 290,000 prisoners, 2,500 tanks, and 1,500 artillery. Retreating to the Latvian border, the Russians dug-in behind the heavily fortified Stalin Line, their version of the Maginot Line, and just as "impregnable". By July 15, German armor, followed by infantry divisions, had punched through it, captured Vitebsk, and encircled another huge pocket of Reds around Smolensk. They surrendered less than three weeks later, all 310,000 of them. An additional 100,000 were captured just three days later in the Uman pocket. In sharp contrast, German losses in both men and materiel were extremely low.

After some two months of annihilating combat, the Soviet fighting machine was in shambles, still completely off-balance, and unable to mount a single, successful counter-attack. Destruction of man-power, weaponry and territory was nothing short of catastrophic. Doubtless, had Hitler’s offensive not been tampered with and allowed to proceed as it had from the out-set, the USSR would have collapsed by autumn. But now occurred a turning-point that decided not only the whole campaign, but the war itself.

In late summer, Hitler was bed-ridden with severe stomach cramps. For several weeks, he was incommunicado, and utterly out of touch with the outside world. Taking advantage of his ill health, members of the General Staff split his offensive in half, diverting it away from the south, toward Moscow. The Russian capital had less strategic value, but now the German Army generals vied among themselves for its apparently easy capture in the name of personal glory. By the time Hitler sufficiently recovered from his intestinal problems, it was too late for him to stop Operation Typhoon, the drive northward.

In mid-October, torrential rains transformed the battlefields into seas of mud, drastically slowing the German advance, and allowing the Soviets time to evacuate Moscow’s government and factories, the original objectives for which the generals had launched Typhoon. Since the Fuehrer could not recall the movement they set in motion, he tried to control it by switching from a direct assault on Moscow to its envelopment, in the hope at least that some of its plant parts and political leaders might be taken.

But by October 30, the mud was beginning to freeze, and German troops, still wearing their summer uniforms, were suffering horribly in sub-zero temperatures. The Second Panzer Army almost totally exhausted its fuel, as the entire supply system virtually broke down, because the generals had drastically over-extended their supply lines by breaking away from the originally unified offensive in the south. There, the Germans continued to score important successes, capturing major cities like Kiev and Kharkov.

In fact, the whole Crimea, apart from Sevastopol and Kerch, fell to Army Group South, just as Hitler had envisioned. Meanwhile, Typhoon’s units were reduced to half their established strength. The replacement system was not able to keep up with their losses, and the entire Army drive against Moscow ground to a halt. The Soviets made good use of the German break-down, rushing re-enforcements to defend their capital. A colossal disaster was in the making.

In sharp contrast to Typhoon’s dilemma, Army Group South was still rolling toward victory, finally seizing Kerch. By the time the Germans in the north had recovered enough strength to re-start their drive against Moscow on November 7, no less than 80 Siberian divisions stood between them and the city. These included 718,000 men, 7,985 guns and 720 tanks. Their sudden arrival had been the result of one, unknown man in far-off Tokyo.

Richard Sorge was a German Communist posing as a National Socialist, while living with a secretary in the Japanese General Staff. She passed him top secret military information, which he transmitted to his superiors in the Soviet Union. In early October, 1941, he informed them that the Japanese Army in Manchuria, at the Siberian border, scaled down to hardly more than a skeleton force, because Tokyo had secretly foresworn any planned attack on the USSR.

This news could not have come at a better time for Stalin. Until now, in spite of the German offensive, he maintained a huge army to protect eastern Russia against Japanese invasion, which he deemed inevitable. But with word that no such invasion was going to occur, he hurriedly transferred the bulk of his Siberian forces to the front before Moscow. Its defenses would have been much weaker without Sorge’s espionage, and even the conservative German generals might have taken the city before year’s end. Instead, the fresh, fully equipped Siberian divisions assembled just in time to meet the enemy.

On November 29, they attacked the Germans at Rostov, pushing them from Mariupol and Taganrog to quickly improvised defensive positions on the River Mius. The Swastika flew within 19 miles of Moscow, but now temperatures dropped to minus 35 degrees Centigrade. The weather, like the Siberians, had come to Stalin’s rescue. German truck, tank, armored vehicle and aircraft engines would not start, weapons refused to operate, and the infantry suffered massive cases of frost-bite.

The generals’ northern offensive had literally frozen to a halt. In the midst of their distress, the Soviets launched a major counter-attack on December 5, across the frozen Volga River, north-west of Moscow. German resistance was unexpectedly fierce, so much so, only one of the three armies thrown against them succeeded in recapturing Turginovo, after penetrating twenty miles of Wehrmacht-held territory.

The next day, however, General Zhukov, in command of Russian forces, attacked the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups, compelling their withdrawal. Then on the 13th, General Timoshenko’s 13th Army struck the right flank of the German Second Army, mauling it badly and forcing it to quit the field. On that day, the German generals panicked. They issued secret orders for a rapid, full-scale retreat of the entire Army Group Center to a proposed "winter line" 90 miles to the rear, where they intended to establish a static defense, a la World War One’s Western Front trench warfare.

This cowardly contingency, the result of broken nerve, was nothing less than a rout that would have handed the entire campaign over to the Soviets. Fortunately, Hitler learned of it in time. Exasperated after sacking a number of his quailing generals to re-stabilize the situation they had brought about, he took personal command of the whole Army. By demanding no further withdrawals, under any circumstances, he forced the Soviets’ counter-offensive to slow.

On February 1, 1942, their attempt to encircle the 4th and 9th Panzer Armies at Vyazma failed due to stiffened resistance put there by the Fuehrer’s iron orders; the tables unexpectedly turned on the Reds; they found themselves suddenly surrounded and threatened with their own annihilation by German steel. But the consequences of the German generals’ incompetence continued to threaten the Eastern Front with calamity.

On the 8th, 90,000 Germans were suddenly cut off at Demyansk, south of Lake Ilmen, where the previous month, the general in command had begged the Fuehrer’s permission to withdraw and hide behind the River Lovat. Hitler refused, replaced the conventional, aristocratic general with a National Socialist, and ordered him to stand fast to the last man. The surrounded troops fanatically fought off every assault, and were re-supplied by a Luftwaffe air-lift. Their perseverance paid off, when the Russians were forced to abandon the Demyansk pocket, because the Germans elsewhere resumed the offensive.

By mid-March, they were again vigorously attacking the neck of the Soviet advance on both flanks, when they encircled the Second Shock Army under Russia’s ablest commander, General Vlasov. Stalin’s best efforts to relieve him failed, and Vlasov not only surrendered to the Germans, but joined them in their Aryan crusade against Soviet Communism. In what may have been Adolf Hitler’s greatest personal triumph, he had singlehandedly saved the entire Eastern Front from collapsing and falling back on Europe, while restoring the campaign in the Wehrmacht’s favor.

More to the point, he had reversed wholesale retreat and imminent defeat into a new advance toward victory. In this, he proved himself beyond all doubt the best commander of the war, and among history’s greatest military geniuses. But Russia had become precisely the kind of campaign he planned to avoid, because Germany lacked raw materials needed to fight a prolonged struggle.

Nearly four years later, as Communist barbarians were poised to overwhelm Berlin, Hitler had not forgotten how his hitherto successful conquest of Russia had been sabotaged by egomaniacal conservatives. With enemy shells exploding overhead, he collared one of his generals in the underground bunker, and reminded him of 1941’s attack on the Soviet capital: "We were dazzled by our nearness to Moscow, and just had to capture it. Remember, Guderian, you were the one who wanted to be first into Moscow at the head of your army! And just look at the consequences!"

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