Second World War: Frozen to death by the Fuhrer ..

Second World War: Frozen to death by the Fuhrer - Telegraph



Second World War: Frozen to death by the Fuhrer

In an extract from his new book, historian Andrew Roberts shows how Hitler's troops were fatally ill-equipped for the 1941 invasion of Russia in 1941








The Russians have a saying that there is no such thing as cold weather, only the wrong kind of clothing. Prior to Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis could have been certain that their invasion of Russia, which began on June 22, 1941, was in for a very cold winter.

It was a matter of simple statistical analysis, the kind at which Adolf Hitler's High Command was supposed to excel. But the German commissariat had hubristically not transported anything like enough woollen hats, gloves, long johns and overcoats to Russia.

Suddenly, there was a desperate need for millions of such items, over and above what could be looted from the Russians and the Poles. On December 20, 1941, Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, broadcast an appeal for warm clothing to send to the troops, saying: "Those at home will not deserve a single peaceful hour if even one soldier is exposed to the rigours of winter without adequate clothing." Yet two years of clothes rationing meant that there was little to give.

In October 1941, Hitler let drop a number of remarks that might provide a clue to why he had not sufficiently concerned himself with his men's welfare when it came to the great Russian freeze. "One can't put any trust in the meteorological forecasts," he told Martin Bormann and others during table-talk at Berchtesgaden.

Believing himself to be as much an expert in meteorology as in everything else, Hitler, a world-class know-all, went on to state that "weather prediction is not a science that can be learnt mechanically. What we need are men gifted with a sixth sense, who live in nature and with nature – whether or not they know anything about isotherms and isobars. As a rule, obviously, these men are not particularly suited to the wearing of uniforms. One of them will have a humped back, another will be bandy-legged, a third paralytic. Similarly, one doesn't expect them to live like bureaucrats."
These "human barometers", as Hitler dubbed them – who don't much sound like exemplars of the Master Race – would have telephones installed in their homes free of charge and would predict the weather for the Reich and "be flattered to have people relying on [their] knowledge". These woodland folk would be people "who understand the flights of midges and swallows, who can read the signs, who feel the wind, to whom the movements of the sky are familiar. Elements are involved in that kind of thing that are beyond mathematics." Or parody.
Hitler was proud of his own hardiness in the cold, boasting on August 12, 1942, how "having to change into long trousers was always a misery to me. Even with a temperature of 10 below zero, I used to go about in lederhosen. The feeling of freedom they give you is wonderful. Abandoning my shorts was one of the biggest sacrifices I had to make… Anything up to five degrees below zero I don't even notice. Quite a number of young people of today already wear shorts all the year round; it is just a question of habit. In the future, I shall have an SS Highland Brigade in lederhosen."
Yet if Hitler was under the impression that the Wehrmacht could withstand sub-zero temperatures in sub-standard winter clothing, he was soon proved wrong.
In some areas, the Germans were well prepared for Barbarossa; they had printed a German-Russian phrasebook, for example, with questions such as "Where is the collective farm chairman?" and "Are you a Communist?" (it was inadvisable to answer the latter in the affirmative).
Yet when it came to proper clothing in a winter campaign in one of the world's coldest countries, there was simply not enough, and what was provided was often not warm enough either. All this springs directly from Hitler's belief that the campaign would be over in three months – by late September 1941 – before the weather turned.
The horrific results of the lack of warm clothing were truly disgusting. The Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte recalled in his novel Kaputt how he had watched the German troops returning from the Eastern Front, and was in the Europeiski Café in Warsaw when "suddenly I was struck with horror and realised that they had no eyelids. I had already seen soldiers with lidless eyes, on the platform of the Minsk station a few days previously on my way from Smolensk.
"The ghastly cold of that winter had the strangest consequences. Thousands and thousands of soldiers had lost their limbs; thousands and thousands had their ears, their noses, their fingers and their sexual organs ripped off by the frost. Many had lost their hair… Many had lost their eyelids. Singed by the cold, the eyelid drops off like a piece of dead skin… Their future was only lunacy."
This was the pass to which their ludicrous lack of preparedness had brought the Wehrmacht. The title of the autobiography of Reinhard Spitzy, Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop's private secretary, was How We Squandered the Reich. For the Germans to be defeated in the field of battle was one thing – and it took another year for it to happen on any significant scale – but for them to have been improperly provided for by their own leadership and General Staff was quite another.
In May 1942, Winston Churchill used the opportunity of the second anniversary of his taking the premiership to mock Hitler over his "first blunder" of invading Russia. "There is a winter, you know, in Russia," he said. "For a good many months the temperature is apt to fall very low. There is snow, there is frost, and all that. Hitler forgot about this Russian winter. He must have been very loosely educated. We all heard about it at school; but he forgot it. I have never made such a bad mistake as that."
Of course, Hitler had heard of it at school as well, and furthermore his library featured large numbers of books on Napoleon and his campaigns, which were covered in extensive marginalia in his own handwriting, as well as several biographies of generals of the Napoleonic era. Yet he did not learn the most obvious lesson from his predecessor.