Directive No. 21: Operation Barbarossa

On 18 December 1940, at the Führer’s headquarters, Adolf Hitler signed the secret Weisung Nr. 21, Directive No. 21, code-named Fall Barbarossa (Case Barbarossa). Its first sentence read: “The German Armed Forces must be prepared, even before the conclusion of the war against England, to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign.” The army was to use all available formations for this, with the proviso that the occupied countries had to remain secured against surprises. Preparations requiring more time were to be started at once and completed by 15 May 1941. Hitler intended to issue the order to concentrate troops on the frontier eight weeks before the planned start of the operation. The document was drawn up in nine copies, marked Chefsache. Nur durch Offizier (“a matter for commanders only; to be delivered by an officer only”). The first three went to the commanders-in-chief of the army, the navy and the air force; the rest stayed at the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW).

It is often said that on this day Hitler issued a directive to “begin planning” the attack on the Soviet Union. That needs correcting. Planning had already been under way for five months: army staff officers had been working on a war against the USSR since July, and Hitler had announced his decision to wage it to his generals on 31 July 1940. Directive No. 21 brought the stage of studies and war games to a close. It approved an operational plan that was already in existence and ordered all three services to move from planning to preparation. The date of the attack itself remained open, and Hitler reserved the decision to himself, but from that moment the whole machinery of the Wehrmacht was working towards war in the east.

A war he had long had in mind

War against the Soviet Union had from the outset been Hitler’s chief political aim. In Mein Kampf, in the mid-1920s, he wrote that Germany must win “living space” in the east, “in Russia and her vassal border states”, and that the Bolshevik state, ruled in his view by Jews, was “ripe for collapse”. After coming to power he repeated this programme, combining racism, antisemitism and conquest, to his generals. In February 1939 he told them that the next war would be “a pure war of ideologies”.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 did not change this aim. Hitler treated it as a manoeuvre that allowed him to crush Poland and strike in the west without the threat of a two-front war. On 27 August 1939 he told party officials that he had made a pact “with Satan to drive out the Devil”, and in November he told his commanders that treaties were kept only as long as they served a purpose.

For the time being the Reich needed the pact. Under the economic agreement of February 1940 the USSR supplied grain, oil and ores, which blunted the effects of the British blockade. Stalin, for his part, was taking what the secret protocol had granted him: in the summer of 1940 he incorporated Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia into the USSR and forced Romania to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. In this way the Red Army moved closer to the oilfields at Ploiești, from which Germany drew its fuel.

The decision of 31 July

Even during the campaign in France Hitler’s thoughts had turned back to the east. On 2 June 1940 he told General Gerd von Rundstedt that once peace had been made with London he would at last have a free hand for his “great and real task”, the reckoning with Bolshevism. But there was no peace. Winston Churchill’s Britain fought on, and in mid-July Hitler ordered preparations for a landing in England (Directive No. 16), in which he himself had little faith.

The staff officers got ahead of the political decision. As early as 3 July the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, told his officers to examine “how a military blow against Russia is to be carried out so as to compel her to recognise Germany’s dominant role in Europe”. The headquarters of the Eighteenth Army and further divisions were transferred to the east, officially for defence. Independently of the OKH (the Army High Command), Lieutenant Colonel Bernhard von Loßberg of the National Defence Section on the OKW staff began on his own initiative to sketch a study of a war in the east, later given the code name “Fritz”. Historians such as Rolf-Dieter Müller now stress that the generals were not passive executors in this matter: they wanted to have a plan ready before the Führer asked for one.

On 21 July Hitler told the commanders-in-chief of the services that England was fighting on because she was counting on Russia and America, and instructed the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, to take up “the Russian problem”. Brauchitsch, who knew of Halder’s preliminary work, at once presented an outline: the Red Army could be defeated in four to six weeks with 80–100 divisions. The Chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and the Chief of the Operations Staff, General Alfred Jodl, persuaded Hitler, however, that concentrating troops on the frontier would take at least four months, so it was too late to attack in the autumn of 1940. On 29 July Jodl told his closest colleagues that the Führer had decided to remove the Bolshevik threat once and for all “at the earliest possible date, that is, in May 1941”.

On 31 July, at the Berghof, Hitler told the army’s top commanders the same thing. Halder recorded his line of reasoning: England’s hope lay in Russia and America, and if Russia dropped out, America would drop out too. “Russia must be disposed of. Spring 1941.” The sooner the better, and the operation made sense only if it shattered the state “at one blow”. The aim was to be “the destruction of Russia’s vital strength”, and 120 divisions were to be prepared for the war, with the army’s total strength raised to 180. None of the generals present objected, although the day before Brauchitsch and Halder had agreed between themselves that it would be better to keep the friendship of the USSR until England had been defeated.

Staff officers at their maps

The first complete operational plan was prepared for the OKH by Major General Erich Marcks, chief of staff of the Eighteenth Army. He presented it to Halder on 5 August. Marcks assumed that the Red Army would stand and fight, and proposed the main thrust north of the Pripet Marshes (Polesie), through the “Smolensk gateway” towards Moscow, the country’s political, economic and communications centre. Once Moscow had been taken, the troops were to wheel south towards Ukraine and the Donets Basin. The final objective was a line from the lower Don through the middle Volga to the Northern Dvina, to be reached in 9–17 weeks. Marcks believed that once the Red Army had been broken it would no longer be able to put up organised resistance. Neither he nor the other planners took seriously the millions of trained reservists with which the USSR could make good its losses.

Material preparations began at the same time. On 9 August the OKW issued the Aufbau Ost (“Build-up East”) order on developing the General Government as a base of operations: railways, roads, communications, barracks and airfields. On 6 September Jodl instructed the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, to ensure that Moscow should on no account gain the impression that Germany was preparing an offensive. In October a German military mission went to Romania, officially to train the army and protect the oilfields, while German military transports passed through Finland to Norway under a transit agreement signed in September.

On 3 September Lieutenant General Friedrich Paulus, until then chief of staff of the Sixth Army, became Oberquartiermeister I of the Army General Staff – in effect Halder’s deputy for operations. Halder entrusted him with drawing all the existing studies together into a single plan. On 15 September Loßberg handed Jodl his “Operational Study East”, which envisaged two armoured wedges and the encirclement of Soviet forces near the frontier, warned against letting them escape behind the Dvina and the Dnieper, and counted on the participation of Finland and Romania. On 29 October Paulus submitted a memorandum on the “foundations of the Russian operation”.

The plan was tested in war games that Paulus conducted at OKH headquarters at Zossen near Berlin on 29 November and on 3 and 7 December, attended by the chiefs of staff of the future army groups. The first game covered the frontier battles and the advance to the Pskov–Minsk–Kyiv line; the next, operations further east, towards Moscow. The conclusions were sobering. There were barely enough forces for the attack itself, and practically no reserves. On reaching the Dnieper and the Dvina the army would have to halt for several weeks to bring up supplies. The Quartermaster General, General Eduard Wagner, calculated that lorries could supply the troops only a few hundred kilometres from the railheads, and Soviet railways were of a wider gauge than German ones. At their conferences with Hitler neither Brauchitsch nor Halder laid any stress on these warnings.

Molotov and the conference of 5 December

Throughout the autumn Hitler formally kept other options open. The Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, urged on him a “continental bloc” stretching from Spain to Japan, in which the USSR, alongside the states of the Tripartite Pact, would turn against the British Empire. On 12 November, the day Vyacheslav Molotov arrived in Berlin, Hitler signed Directive No. 18. It stated that political talks were to clarify Russia’s attitude, but that “irrespective of their outcome” all the preparations for the east already ordered verbally were to continue.

The talks with Molotov confirmed Hitler in his conviction that the world could not be divided with Stalin on his own terms. Molotov refused to be diverted towards India and the Persian Gulf and asked instead about Finland, Bulgaria, Romania and the Black Sea Straits – areas Germany regarded as its own hinterland. On 25 November Moscow transmitted its conditions for joining the Tripartite Pact, from the withdrawal of German troops from Finland to bases on the Bosporus. Berlin never replied. Molotov’s visit was not the cause of a decision taken in July, but it removed the last political doubts and quickened the pace of work.

On 5 December Brauchitsch and Halder presented the OKH operational plan to Hitler at the Reich Chancellery. Hitler approved it but placed the emphasis in his own way. He believed that the question of hegemony in Europe would be decided in the struggle with Russia, and that the Red Army, worse armed and worse led, would disintegrate if its main forces were encircled rather than merely pushed back. He demanded two strong panzer groups to trap the Soviet forces in pockets, and particular attention to the Baltic and Ukraine. Halder noted his words that Moscow was “not very important”. Hitler gave mid-May as the earliest date and roughly the Volga as the objective, from where the Luftwaffe could destroy Soviet industry further east. He judged the landing in England, postponed in October until the spring of 1941, to be impracticable. Halder recorded the instruction to set the Otto plan – the preparations on the existing assumptions – “in full motion”. On 13 December he passed the conclusions on to the chiefs of staff of the army groups: “We are not seeking a conflict with Russia, but from the spring of 1941 we must be ready for this task as well.”

The text of the directive was prepared, on the basis of Loßberg’s study and the OKH plan, by the National Defence Section of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, headed by General Walter Warlimont. Jodl submitted the draft to Hitler on 17 December. According to Warlimont’s account, the Führer then demanded a change that had not been in the OKH plan: after defeating the Soviet forces in Belarus, the central army group was to send strong mobile forces north to destroy the enemy in the Baltic states together with the group advancing from East Prussia and to take Leningrad, and only then to advance on Moscow. The next day Hitler signed the amended document. It was initialled by Loßberg, Warlimont, Jodl and Keitel.

What the directive ordered

From the outset the directive stipulated that the Luftwaffe must not break off its attacks on England and its shipping, and that the Kriegsmarine was to continue to fight Britain above all.

The section headed “General Intention” stated that the bulk of the Soviet army in western Russia was to be destroyed “in daring operations, by driving forward deep armoured spearheads”, so that units capable of fighting could not withdraw into the depths of the country. Then, in a rapid pursuit, the Wehrmacht was to reach a line from which the Soviet air force could no longer attack the Reich. The final objective was “to erect a barrier against Asiatic Russia on the general line Volga–Arkhangelsk”, from which, if necessary, the Luftwaffe could destroy the last Soviet industrial region in the Urals. Historians call this objective the A-A line, after Arkhangelsk and Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga. The directive itself does not mention Astrakhan.

The theatre of operations was divided by the Pripet Marshes. North of them two army groups were to attack, and the main effort lay with them. The central group, with very strong armoured and motorised forces, was to advance from the area of Warsaw and to the north of it, destroy the Soviet forces in Belarus, and then turn part of its strength north. The northern group, attacking from East Prussia, was to make for Leningrad. Only after the destruction of the forces in the Baltic states and the capture of Leningrad and Kronstadt was the advance on Moscow, “an important centre of communications and armaments”, to continue. South of the marshes, an army group with its main weight in the Lublin area was to strike towards Kyiv and destroy the Soviet forces in Ukraine while they were still west of the Dnieper, while German forces from Romania were to form the wide-reaching outer arm of the encirclement across the lower Prut. In the pursuit that followed, the Donets Basin was to be taken and Moscow reached quickly; its capture would mean “a decisive political and economic success”.

A separate section dealt with “anticipated allies”. On the flanks of the operation, the active participation of Romania and Finland could be counted on. Romania, ruled since September by General Ion Antonescu, was to support the German southern flank with selected forces, pin down Soviet forces where there were no Germans, and provide services in the rear. Finland, which in March had been forced to accept the harsh terms of the Moscow Peace, was to cover a German northern group brought over from Norway, pin down Soviet forces by attacking on both sides of Lake Ladoga, and capture the base at Hanko, which the USSR had leased after the Winter War. German forces from Norway were to secure the nickel mines in the Petsamo (Pechenga) area and strike at the railway to Murmansk. The directive even assumed that Sweden would make its railways and roads available for the deployment. None of these countries was told of the plan at the time.

The Luftwaffe was to paralyse the Soviet air force and support the main thrusts, attacking industry only once the mobile operations were over. The Kriegsmarine was to prevent the Soviet fleet from breaking out of the Baltic; once Leningrad was lost, that fleet would find itself in a “hopeless situation”.

The most revealing part was section IV, on secrecy. All orders issued by commanders were to be worded as if they concerned “precautionary measures in case Russia should alter her present attitude towards us”. The circle of those in the know was to be kept as small as possible, and further officers were to be brought in as late as possible and only to the extent needed for their own work. Otherwise, Hitler warned, the disclosure of preparations “whose timing has not yet been fixed” would cause the gravest political and military damage. The directive said not a word about the nature of the future occupation. The orders that turned the campaign into a war of annihilation came a few months later.

Redbeard

In the staffs the plan for war against the USSR had until then gone by various names. At the OKH it was spoken of as the Otto plan, while Loßberg’s study at the OKW was called “Fritz”. Directive No. 21 introduced a new code name. According to Loßberg’s post-war account, the change was made on the OKW staff when the document was being drafted, and historians link it with Hitler’s own predilections. Frederick I Barbarossa, “Redbeard”, a twelfth-century emperor, drowned in Asia Minor in 1190 during the Third Crusade. According to legend, popularised by nineteenth-century nationalists, he sleeps in the Kyffhäuser mountains and will awaken to restore Germany’s greatness. By January 1941 the name Unternehmen Barbarossa, Operation Barbarossa, was already appearing in some Wehrmacht documents.

Place in the war

Despite these precautions, Moscow soon learned of the directive. On 29 December 1940 Soviet military intelligence received a report from Berlin from the journalist Ilse Stöbe (“Alta”), based on information from the diplomat Rudolf von Scheliha (“Ariets”): Hitler had given orders to prepare for war with the Soviet Union, which he would declare in March 1941. Stalin later received dozens of such warnings but regarded them to the end as provocations. On 10 January 1941 the two states signed a further economic agreement, and Soviet grain and oil kept travelling to the Reich until the last night of peace.

In Germany some officers still believed the directive could be reversed. On 28 January 1941, after a conversation with Brauchitsch, Halder noted: “Barbarossa: purpose not clear. We do not hit the English.” A few days later, on 3 February, he nevertheless presented Hitler with the finished directive on the concentration of forces, raising no objections. In March Hitler demanded that the war in the east be “a struggle between two world views”, and his instructions gave rise to orders that exempted soldiers in advance from responsibility for crimes against civilians, ordered political commissars of the Red Army to be shot (the Commissar Order) and gave SS units a free hand behind the front. Economic planners took it for granted from the start that “tens of millions of people” would starve to death (the Hunger Plan) as the Wehrmacht lived off the resources of the occupied country.

The date set in the directive was not met. In the spring of 1941 Germany first had to deal with the Balkans, where aid to the Italians, bogged down in their war with Greece, and a coup in Yugoslavia led in April to the Balkan campaign. Historians disagree on how far it was this, and how far a late spring and unfinished preparations, that delayed the start. The Wehrmacht and its allies attacked the Soviet Union on Sunday 22 June 1941 with nearly 3.8 million soldiers on a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The plan to destroy the Red Army in a few weeks failed. In December 1941 the German armies were halted before Moscow, and the war in the east, the bloodiest part of the Second World War, lasted almost four years and, according to the most widely accepted estimates, cost the lives of 26–27 million Soviet citizens.

The Wehrmacht never reached the Volga–Arkhangelsk line. The closest to the Volga it came was in 1942, with the Sixth Army commanded by Friedrich Paulus, co-author of the 1940 plan. After its destruction at Stalingrad, Paulus testified in 1946 before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg about how the attack had been prepared, and Directive No. 21, captured in the German archives, became one of the pieces of prosecution evidence against Keitel and Jodl.