Hitler changes the direction of the offensive

On 12 August 1941 the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) issued a supplement to Directive No. 34, signed by its chief, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. The document laid down what the three German army groups were to do in the last weeks of summer, before the autumn rains turned the Russian roads to mud. Army Group North was to encircle Leningrad and link up with the Finns; Army Group South was to take the Crimea, the Donets Basin and the Kharkiv industrial region; and Army Group Centre was first to eliminate the Soviet concentrations threatening its flanks and only then to advance on a broad front against Moscow. Nine days later, on 21 August, Adolf Hitler settled a weeks-long dispute with his generals: the most important objective before winter was not the Soviet capital but the Crimea, the coal and industry of the Donbas, cutting off Soviet oil from the Caucasus, and the blockade of Leningrad. The tanks of Colonel General Heinz Guderian, which stood closest to Moscow, turned south, towards Ukraine.

It is often stated under 12 August that Hitler, against the advice of his generals, shifted part of his forces from before Moscow to the Leningrad and Crimean axes. That is a simplification. The supplement of 12 August was itself a compromise: it kept the advance on Moscow as an objective for that year and moved no troops south at all. The real transfers came in two steps – on 15 August a panzer corps of Army Group Centre went north, to Leningrad, and on 21 August Hitler sent Guderian’s panzer group and the 2nd Army to Ukraine. Nor were they heading for the Crimea, which was to be taken by the German 11th Army of Army Group South, but for the rear of the Soviet South-Western Front defending Kiev. Nor were all the generals opposed: the turn south was supported by the command of Army Group South and by the commander of the 2nd Army, and Guderian himself, sent to Hitler to argue for the march on Moscow, allowed himself to be persuaded. The main dispute was between Hitler and the commands of the army and of Army Group Centre, and it went down in history as the German “August crisis”.

A plan that fell apart

Directive No. 21 of December 1940 had assumed that the main forces of the Red Army would be destroyed west of the Dvina and the Dnieper, and that subsequent operations would be a pursuit. Moscow was to come after the capture of Leningrad, and Ukraine and the Donbas “in the course of the pursuit”. It did not settle what to do if the enemy did not collapse – and after seven weeks of war that is exactly what had happened. Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre had shattered Soviet armies at Białystok, Minsk and Smolensk, but the fighting in the Smolensk pocket ended only at the beginning of August, and east of the city the Red Army was still counter-attacking, particularly at Yelnya. Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North had stalled on the Luga line after the counter-attack at Soltsy and only in the first week of August reached the Gulf of Finland in Estonia. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South had indeed closed the pocket at Uman at the beginning of August, but it had not taken Kiev, and between it and Army Group Centre, beyond the Pripyat, stood the undefeated Soviet 5th Army.

The central army group had thus pushed far to the east, while its flanks hung in the air. The Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, noted in his diary on 11 August that before the war about 200 Soviet divisions had been reckoned with, and that 360 had already been counted: whenever the Germans smashed a dozen, the Russians put another dozen in the field. The panzer divisions were worn out. According to Army Group Centre’s reports at the end of July, Guderian’s panzer group had some 260 serviceable tanks out of more than 950 with which it had begun the war, and on 22 August the army group command reported that the mobile units were so “exhausted and worn out” that their operational use was out of the question before a thorough refit. Supplies travelled hundreds of kilometres over bad roads and railways being regauged to the European standard.

From Directive No. 33 to Directive No. 34

From the outset Hitler understood the aim of the campaign differently from his generals. For him the outcome of the war would be decided by the destruction of the Red Army and by depriving the Soviet Union of its grain, coal, ore and oil. The Army High Command (OKH) – Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch and Halder – believed, following Clausewitz, that the enemy’s main forces would stand where his capital was attacked: the centre of power and of the arms industry, and the hub of all the country’s railways.

In mid-July Hitler decided to use Army Group Centre’s tanks on the flanks. Directive No. 33 of 19 July and its supplement of 23 July ordered Guderian’s panzer group, after the battle of Smolensk, to turn south-east into Ukraine and then beyond the Don towards the Caucasus, and the group of Colonel General Hermann Hoth to turn north, towards Leningrad. The infantry alone was to advance on Moscow. The heavy fighting at Smolensk meant that on 30 July Directive No. 34 postponed these tasks “for the time being”: Army Group Centre went over to the defensive, and both panzer groups were to be pulled out of the line for about ten days of rest and refitting.

At the beginning of August Hitler went to the front himself to form his own view. On 4 August he flew from the Wolf’s Lair to Bock’s headquarters at Borisov. According to the records of the conference, Guderian and Hoth gave assurances that their groups would be ready for operations by mid-August if they received new engines for their worn-out tanks; Hitler promised the two groups 400 engines in all, although Guderian alone needed 300. He then explained at length that Leningrad, the Donbas and the Crimea were more important than Moscow, and cited the opinions of weather experts: in the south the rains began in mid-September, near Moscow a month later. Bock interjected that a well-prepared advance on Moscow could decide the war. On 6 August, at Rundstedt’s headquarters in Berdychiv, where Hitler also met Marshal Ion Antonescu, the commander of Army Group South likewise spoke of Moscow’s importance. Hitler, however, listed the order of objectives: Leningrad, eastern Ukraine, and only then Moscow.

Halder tried to work through the OKW. On 7 August he asked General of Artillery Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, whether Hitler wanted to defeat the USSR or to seize the economic resources of Ukraine and the Caucasus; Jodl replied that he wanted both at once. Halder nevertheless convinced him that chasing every threat to the flanks dispersed the forces, and on 10 August Jodl’s staff presented Hitler with a memorandum: since the main Soviet forces stood before Moscow, their destruction and the capture of the capital were the most important task, and the advance could begin at the end of August, once the flanks had been secured by limited attacks. In those same days Hitler fell ill with dysentery; his British biographer Ian Kershaw suggests that his indisposition may have contributed to the dictator yielding ground to the generals for a few days.

The supplement of 12 August

The result was the “Ergänzung der Weisung 34” of 12 August. For Army Group South it set three tasks: to prevent the Russians from building a continuous defence on the Dnieper, to take the Crimea, and to seize the Donets Basin and the Kharkiv industrial region. The attack on Kiev itself was to be halted. The city, the document declared, was to be destroyed with incendiary bombs and artillery fire as soon as sufficient means were available. Army Group Centre was first to eliminate the Soviet concentrations driving into its flanks – in the south above all at Gomel, in the north at Velikiye Luki – and then, once the panzer groups had been refitted, to attack on a broad front towards Moscow, so as to deprive the enemy before winter of his “state, armaments and communications centre”. The condition, however, was explicit: first the operation at Leningrad had to be completed, and General Wolfram von Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps, lent to Army Group North, had to return to Luftflotte 2. In the north the advance was to lead to the encirclement of Leningrad and a link-up with the Finns.

The supplement therefore moved none of Army Group Centre’s forces south, and spoke only in very general terms about reinforcing Army Group North. The historian David Glantz calls it a compromise. The generals could read into it approval for the march on Moscow; Hitler could read confirmation that Leningrad and Ukraine had to come first.

15 August: a panzer corps to Leningrad

The compromise lasted three days. On 12 August the Soviet 34th Army struck south of Lake Ilmen at the German X Corps of the 16th Army near Staraya Russa and drove deep into its rear, threatening to cut off the flank of Army Group North advancing on Novgorod. Leeb had to turn back from the Luga the motorised corps of General Erich von Manstein, which threw the Russians back in the last ten days of August. At the same time, on 15 August, after a report from Brauchitsch, Hitler ordered all further attacks by Army Group Centre in the direction of Moscow to be halted and the army group to go over to the defensive. Army Group North was to complete its advance as quickly as possible, and Bock was to hand over to it as many divisions from Hoth’s panzer group as Leeb could use and supply. On Hitler’s direct order, General Rudolf Schmidt’s XXXIX Motorised Corps, with one panzer and two motorised divisions, went north. Bock protested, but in vain. This was the first real movement of forces “from before Moscow” towards Leningrad of which popular chronologies speak.

The OKH memorandum and the order of 21 August

The Army High Command decided to persuade Hitler in writing. On 18 August Brauchitsch sent him a memorandum prepared by Halder’s staff. The main Soviet forces, it argued, were massing in front of Army Group Centre in expectation of a German advance on Moscow. Only a blow in the centre would destroy the enemy’s strongest armies and tear his front apart. Because of the weather, only September and October remained for the Moscow operation, and the mobile units, given only makeshift refits, were now capable only of operations over limited distances. They therefore had to be husbanded for a single decisive operation, and the other army groups were strong enough to manage on their own. The advance by more than fifty divisions was to begin at the start of September. The same day an assessment of the situation prepared at the OKW by General Walter Warlimont fully supported the proposal.

Hitler rejected it sharply on 20 August, and on 21 August he signed an order to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army. The army’s proposal, he wrote, did not accord with his intentions: “The most important objective to be achieved before the onset of winter is not the capture of Moscow, but the seizure of the Crimea and of the industrial and coal region on the Donets, and the cutting off of the Russians from their oil supplies from the Caucasus area, and in the north the encirclement of Leningrad and the link-up with the Finns.” The situation, he wrote, favoured a concentric attack by the adjoining wings of Army Groups Centre and South on the Soviet 5th Army, which must not be allowed to withdraw. Army Group Centre was to commit all the forces necessary for this, regardless of further plans, because only the destruction of this army would open the way for Army Group South to Kharkiv and Rostov. Hitler considered the capture of the Crimea a matter of the first importance for protecting the Romanian oilfields from Soviet aircraft, and a rapid advance to the Caucasus desirable in order to put pressure on Iran. Only once these tasks had been accomplished would it be time for Moscow – in accordance with the supplement of 12 August.

The next day, 22 August, Hitler added a “study” criticising the OKH’s conduct of the war to date. In it he argued that destroying the enemy’s sources of raw materials, or taking them from him, was even more important than seizing industrial plants, since factories could be rebuilt or machinery bought abroad, but coal, oil and iron could not be replaced by imports. Halder found the document humiliating. As he noted, he proposed to Brauchitsch that they should both resign. Brauchitsch refused: a resignation would not be accepted in any case, and it would change nothing.

Guderian at the Wolf’s Lair

One last attempt remained. On 23 August Halder flew to Bock’s headquarters at Borisov with Hitler’s order. It was agreed that Guderian, who as a front-line commander enjoyed Hitler’s trust, would fly to East Prussia and try to persuade him. That evening Guderian arrived at the Wolf’s Lair. Brauchitsch, as Guderian later recalled, forbade him even to mention Moscow, because the decision had been taken. Hitler, however, asked him for his opinion himself. Guderian spoke of Moscow as a centre of communications, power and industry; of the impression its fall would make in the USSR and in the world; of soldiers who were waiting for nothing but the march on Moscow; and of the fact that the tanks would have to drive more than 400 kilometres south and as far again back, losing the time needed for a decisive blow before winter.

Hitler heard him out and then spoke at length about the raw materials and food of Ukraine, without which the war could not be continued, and about the Crimea as “the Soviet Union’s aircraft carrier” aimed at Romanian oil. Soviet aircraft flying from the Crimea had already bombed Constanța and the refineries at Ploiești, vital to the Reich’s oil supply, in June and July. It was then, according to Guderian’s memoirs, that the remark was made: “My generals know nothing about the economic aspects of war.” Keitel, Jodl and the others present nodded in agreement with Hitler. Guderian gave way and promised to carry out the order, asking only that his panzer group should not be split up. When he returned to Borisov the next day, Halder – as Guderian wrote – suffered a nervous breakdown and held his change of mind against him. After the war each of them described the scene in his own way.

The turn south

As early as 22 August Bock received the order to send south Guderian’s panzer group and the 2nd Army of Colonel General Maximilian von Weichs. Both had already been fighting on Army Group Centre’s southern flank since 8 August: on 19–21 August they took Gomel, capturing some 50,000 prisoners according to German figures, and reached Starodub. On 25 August Guderian pushed on south against the Soviet Central Front and the newly formed Bryansk Front of Lieutenant General Andrei Yeremenko, and on 26 August he captured an intact bridge over the Desna at Novhorod-Siverskyi. In Ukraine, in the last ten days of August, the divisions of Army Group South seized bridgeheads on the Dnieper at Dnipropetrovsk and Kremenchuk, from which the second pincer – Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group – was to strike.

On the Soviet side the danger was recognised by General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, commander of the Reserve Front since the end of July. As he recalled, on 19 August he reported to Joseph Stalin that the Germans had abandoned the attack on Moscow for the time being and intended to turn against the Central and South-Western Fronts, towards Chernihiv and Konotop. The Stavka, however, assumed that the Bryansk Front would stop Guderian, and for a long time took his turn south for a manoeuvre before an attack on Moscow from the south-west. Yeremenko’s counter-attacks and massed Soviet air attacks at the turn of August and September did not halt the German tanks. Nor would Stalin agree to the withdrawal from Kiev demanded by the commander of the South-Western Direction, Marshal Semyon Budyonny, and the commander of the South-Western Front, Colonel General Mikhail Kirponos.

The historians’ dispute

After the war the decision of August 1941 became one of the most debated controversies of the Second World War. Halder in his 1949 study Hitler als Feldherr, Guderian in his memoirs and many other German generals presented it as a mistake that cost the Germans Moscow and perhaps the whole war: the two months spent in Ukraine meant that the advance on the capital bogged down in the autumn mud and the winter frost.

Most modern historians judge the matter more cautiously. The German military historian Ernst Klink wrote, in the history of the war published in the Federal Republic, that Army Group South’s being stuck before Kiev made a blow from the north into the rear of the Soviet front unavoidable, and that even the capture of a ruined Moscow would not have brought “final victory”. Students of logistics point out that Army Group Centre’s railways and lorry columns could not have supplied a great offensive on Moscow in August, and that leaving the undefeated South-Western Front on the flank threatened a blow into the side of the troops marching on the capital. Some authors, among them David Stahel, believe that the Barbarossa plan had already failed in the summer, and that the dispute over direction was a symptom of that failure rather than its cause. Christian Hartmann, Halder’s biographer, observes that the Chief of Staff, who before the war had underestimated the Red Army no less than Hitler had, over time shifted all the blame on to the dictator. Jürgen Förster sees in the sharpness of the August quarrel a sign of the growing awareness that the lightning war could no longer be won in 1941.

Place in the war

The turn south brought the Germans the largest encirclement of the war. On 15–16 September the spearheads of Guderian and Kleist met at Lokhvytsia, far east of Kiev; on 19 September the Germans entered the city, and on 20 September Kirponos was killed. The Germans announced the capture of 665,000 prisoners; according to Russian figures the South-Western Front lost more than 600,000 men in the battle of Kiev. In the north, on 8 September, the Germans reached Lake Ladoga at Shlisselburg and cut Leningrad off from the rest of the country, while at the end of September the German 11th Army attacked the Perekop Isthmus and by mid-November had taken almost the whole of the Crimea except Sevastopol.

Hitler returned to Moscow on 6 September with Directive No. 35. Operation Typhoon began on 30 September and 2 October and, after the great pockets at Vyazma and Bryansk, bogged down in the mud and frost on the approaches to the capital; on 5 December the Red Army went over to the counter-offensive. Brauchitsch left in December, and Hitler himself took over command of the army. In 1942, now without resistance from his generals, he sent his main forces south, for the oil of the Caucasus and to Stalingrad – and lost again. The August dispute showed that the Wehrmacht lacked the strength to take Leningrad, Ukraine and Moscow all at once, and that Hitler, in choosing economic objectives, was still counting on the Soviet Union not surviving the loss of its richest lands.