5 Years Ago: A Signature That Changed The World -- Adolf Hitler's Big Gamble Would Lead To Disaster

Warped by furies as twisted as his swastika, Adolf Hitler on Dec. 18, 1940, signed Directive 21.

It was topmost secret. Only nine copies were issued.

At first it had been innocently code-named ``Fritz.'' Then Aufbau Ost -Buildup East. Finally, Case Barbarossa.

Barbarossa - Red Beard - was the nickname of Frederick I, a Holy Roman Emperor who drowned in 1190 while leading the Third Crusade. A folk myth grew up. Frederick was actually in seclusion in a cave on Kyffhauser Mountain in central Germany. Some day he would emerge to lead a German conquest of Europe.

Case Barbarossa was Hitler's equivalent: the invasion of the Soviet Union. It was, in retrospect, a mad gamble. It guaranteed that Germany would have to fight on two fronts, a burden that would crush Hitler's Third Reich.

Barbarossa ultimately also spawned another war, the cold one. Europe became encased in an Iron Curtain as Soviet armies repulsed Hitler's invasion and drove his Wehrmacht westward to its destruction. One menace bequeathed the battleground to another, the Soviet Union.

After postponements, Barbarossa was scheduled for June 22, 1941. Napoleon had begun his disastrous invasion of Russia on the same day 129 years before. Hitler knew the lesson well. Had he lost his senses?

One of Hitler's biographers, Alan Bullock, has written: ``The passions which ruled his mind were ignoble: hatred, resentment, the lust for dominance and, where he could not dominate, to destroy. . . . His dictatorship was barren of all ideas save one - the further extension of his own power and that of the nation with which he identified . . . to sustain the role of the `master race' over the degraded subject peoples of his new empire in the East. . . .''

In his political testament, ``Mein Kampf,'' Hitler wrote in 1924: ``If we talk about the new soil and territory in Europe today, we can think primarily only of Russia and its vassal border states. . . . The giant empire in the East is ready for collapse. And the end of the Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.''

Deeds matched words. The year he became chancellor, 1933, Hitler halted joint, secret training and rearmament with the Soviet Union. In 1936, Germany signed a pact with Japan against the Comintern, Marxism's international arm headed by Josef Stalin's Soviet Union. The next year Hitler told his generals: ``The German people have a right to greater living space than other peoples.'' Eventually they would have to fight Britain, France and the Soviet Union to get it.

But on Aug. 23, 1939, foreign ministers Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the Russian-German Non-Aggression Pact, one of the most stunning flip-flops in modern history. Two avowed mortal enemies were suddenly in bed together.

The stolid, expressionless Molotov explained to the Supreme Soviet: ``The political art in foreign affairs . . . is to turn yesterday's enemies into good neighbors. . . . The Soviet Union and Germany were enemies. The situation is now changed, and we have stopped being enemies.''

Hardly. Stalin's murderous purges of the Soviet army officer corps in 1937 had bled it white. He was left playing for time to rearm. By joining Hitler's invasion of Poland, which touched off World War II, he was also pushing Russia's frontier 200 miles to the west. The Soviet dictator was also deeply suspicious that capitalist Britain and France wanted the Soviet Union to exhaust itself and Germany in a war. Then they could deal with both.

To the man in the street in Moscow, wrote journalist Alexander Werth, the consensus was that ``it was nasty and unpleasant to have to pretend to make friends with Hitler, but as things were in 1939 we had to gain time at any price. We thought that war with France would last a long time and Germany would be greatly weakened. Selfish? Well, yes, but who isn't?''

In June 1940, even as his tanks were still rolling through France - and the Soviets had invaded the Baltic states - Hitler ordered planning for a Soviet campaign to begin.

The task was assigned to Col. Bernhard von Lossberg. His plan ran to 30 pages and was code-named ``Fritz'' for his son. It was predicated on an offensive in 1941 before Germans began complacently enjoying the fruits of their astonishing victories. And before Britain had been subdued.

Said Hitler: ``Of course the people will never see the point of this new campaign. . . . (They) must always be led by the nose to paradise. . . . We cannot keep up this level of armament much longer. . . . It is why we have to use force now, because one day the countless millions of Slavs are going to come. Perhaps not even in 10 years time, perhaps only after 100, but they will come.''

Two months later, Hitler's staff began laying out a remote headquarters in East Prussia.

Hitler's army commander, Walter von Brauchitsch, confidently predicted only a mopping-up operation would remain after a major battle of ``up to four weeks.'' Alfred Jodl, another of Hitler's ``yes'' generals, said: ``The Russian colossus will prove to be a pig's bladder. Prick it and it will burst.''

The general staff was so confident that only one soldier in five was issued winter clothing. Napoleon had made the same mistake.

Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler's chief of staff, had doubts about a two-front war but kept silent. He paid for his loyalty, as did Jodl, with his life. Before his execution at Nuremberg, Keitel wrote: ``(Hitler) wrongly assessed the reserves of Bolshevism and the Soviet state, and it was thus he brought about the ruin of himself and the Third Reich he had created.''

Gen. Heinz Guderian, Hitler's brilliant tank commander in France, had few illusions: ``So long as war in the West was undecided, any new undertaking must result in war on two fronts; and Adolf Hitler's Germany was even less capable of fighting such a war than had been the Germany of 1914.''

Hitler was not totally blinded by his monomania. ``I had always maintained that we ought at all costs to avoid war on two fronts,'' he confided to his aide Martin Bormann, ``And you may rest assured that I pondered long and hard over Napoleon's experience in Russia. Why, then, may you ask, why this war against Russia?''

There was no hope of ending the war by an invasion of Britain with the United States playing an increasingly aggressive role. Time was on Russia's side. Strike sooner than later.

Directive 21 stressed that victory must be achieved quickly. ``We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down. . . . When Barbarossa begins, the world will hold its breath.''

As the months passed, Hitler seemed to adopt the fatalism of a gambling addict who sees no alternative to putting everything on the turn of a card. ``If it fails, then it will all be over anyway. If it succeeds, it will . . . probably force Britain to make peace.''

In any event, said the former World War I corporal, ``I do not expect my generals to understand me; but I shall expect them to obey my orders.''

Stalin was also gambling. For time. His actions in the seven months before Barbarossa seem inscrutable, even incomprehensible. Barbarossa was not Pearl Harbor. Stalin had repeated warnings from multiple directions.

In November 1940 he was concerned about German troop movements in Romania and Finland. (The Soviets had already seized part of the former and were about to invade the latter.) Stalin sent Molotov and an entourage to Berlin to protest.

Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, as bubbly-headed as the champagne he used to sell, blithely offered the Soviets partnership in the Germany-Italy-Japan Axis. This could satisfy the Soviet Union's historic quest for a warm-water seaport.

``Which sea?'' asked the blunt Molotov. Ribbentrop airily offered the Persian Gulf or perhaps the Indian Ocean. Molotov wanted a base in Denmark, deep in Germany's Baltic flank.

Ribbentrop pressed his plan on Molotov in an air-raid shelter when a diplomatic dinner was adjourned underground due to British bombers. Britain was defeated, said the German foreign minister, and her empire would be there for Russia's taking.

``If that is so, why are we in this shelter, and whose are those bombs which fall?'' Molotov deadpanned.

Moscow subsequently agreed to join the Axis. Hitler never even replied to the offer. German troops were concentrating in the East, he said, to protect vital interests in Romanian oil and Swedish iron ore, which was true enough as far as it went.

But Barbarossa's intent was far more Hitlerian. ``The war against Russia,'' he ordered, ``cannot be fought in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, merciless and unrelenting harshness.''

Special Action Groups - Einsatzgruppen - were formed to ``cleanse'' occupied territory of Jews and other objectionables.

In February 1941 the British ambassador to Moscow warned of a German attack set for June. The source, not revealed, was Ultra, Britain's masterful cracking of the code machine which Germany thought was invulnerable. The president of the Skoda Works in Czechoslovakia, a Soviet informant, told Moscow he had been ordered to increase armament production for an invasion in June.

Stalin, who trusted no one and suspected Winston Churchill was plotting to draw Russia into the war to ``save her chestnuts from the fire,'' reacted: ``This information is English provocation. Find out who is making this provocation and punish him.''

Several times, the Soviet's master spy in Tokyo, German journalist Richard Sorge, warned of a June invasion.

Even a modestly alert espionage ring - and Russia had a good one in the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) of communist sympathizers in Germany - would have noted the signs. Germany was requisitioning farm horses. East Prussian farmers along the Soviet border had been ordered not to plant spring crops. By April 1941 there had been 80 violations of Soviet air space. A German camera plane had made a forced landing 100 miles inside the Soviet Union.

Only days after Hitler ordered Directive 21 into effect, the Soviet military attache in Berlin was anonymously given a summary of Barbarossa. On April 19, 1941, Churchill, based on Ultra, personally warned Stalin.

Was Stalin irrational, or was he an ostrich burying his head in the sand? Current analysis is that he was neither. He, too, knew his Napoleon. Warned by the Yugoslav ambassador on April 6, 1941, of an invasion by Hitler, Stalin replied, ``Let him try it.''

But the rout of the French in only six weeks and sporadic attacks by Japan on the Soviet Union's Asian front left him skittish. Yet he could not bring himself to trust capitalist Britain and its tough-talking Churchill.

Marshal A.I. Yeremenko writes in his memoirs that Stalin ``failed to authorize defense measures . . . to avoid provoking Hitler before the Soviet army was fully armed. . . . His own hope was for the capitalists and the Nazis to destroy each other. . . .''

On April 3, 1941, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Japan. Drunk, he saw the Japanese off at the Moscow train station and embraced the German military attache, saying, ``We're going to remain friends, aren't we?''

As proof, the Soviet Union inexplicably honored its trade agreement with Germany, shipping 2 million tons of oil and 1.5 million tons of grain to the nation which was poised to attack it. Germany was supposed to repay with manufactured goods. ``Unavoidable delays'' kept this traffic to a minimum. (Scarcely three hours before the Barbarossa offensive began at 3 a.m. June 22, the frontier was opened for the Moscow-Berlin express train. Right behind it was a long freight of grain for Germany.)

On June 14, Sorge radioed Moscow: ``War begins June 22.'' Tass, the Soviet news agency, was nonetheless ordered to refute war rumors as ``clumsy propaganda by forces hostile to the U.S.S.R.''

On June 18, a German soldier fearing a court-martial for striking an officer deserted across the border and gave the Soviets the invasion timetable. ``No use getting into a panic about such nonsense,'' the local commander said.

Stalin met with his generals on the eve of the attack but declined to issue an alert. Barton Whaley in his book ``Codeword Barbarossa'' surmises that Stalin believed any German invasion would be preceded by an ultimatum, and none had been given.

He may also have been lulled by ingenious and plausible German disinformation. Hitler's devious propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, leaked word that rumors of an invasion were really a cover for an upcoming invasion of England.

Whaley says Stalin was ``partly deafened to the authentic signals of doom.''

More than 1,300 Soviet planes were destroyed on the ground when the blitzkrieg struck.

Barbarossa was, like Waterloo, a very near thing. Initial Soviet losses were appalling. While the two opponents' armies were about equal in manpower, the Germans had their panzers. But while each such division had 3,300 vehicles, only 300 were tracked. And tracks were essential to carry the assault forward across the muddy fields of roadless, peasant Russia.

The barbaric slaughter of civilians by the Einsatzgruppen cost Hitler the support he could well have found among the independent-minded Ukrainians and Byelorussians. Germany's invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece in March and April had also caused Barbarossa to be delayed a month. That loss of time gave Stalin a life-saving reprieve as the winter of 1941-42, the worst on record, froze Barbarossa in its tracks.

Barbarossa, of course, ultimately failed. Its collapse left the Soviet Union astride Eastern Europe all the way to the Elbe in central Germany. From that bastion the U.S.S.R. was to challenge the West for almost half a century until the Berlin Wall fell a year ago.