Barbarossa Unleashed – Hitler Uncovering His Fatal Obsession-ZZ

In 1941, Hitler’s empire covered Europe
from the continent’s western corner to the east.

Berlin rode a wave of euphoria while the German army
rampaged from victory to victory.

I’ve always argued
that the German army of World War II was one
of the most remarkable fighting machines the world has ever seen.

What could stand in the way
of the Wehrmacht? How could Hitler’s lightning
war be extinguished? Perhaps only by the mania of its creator.

In June 1941, Hitler tore up the non-aggression pact
between Germany and the Soviet Union, invading by surprise across
a thousand-mile front and attempting
to stun Stalin’s Soviet lands into submission.

Some of his most important
and influential advisers came to him before he invaded Russia, and they said,
“My Führer, this cannot be done.

” “We do not have the resources.

” However, Hitler listened and said,
“Thank you,” and then went and invaded Russia.

Led by a deluded belief that racial superiority
and willpower were enough, Hitler took on a vast land and people
in their own world of ice and grit.

The Hitler-Stalin conflict is something
you cannot find an analogy for in history.

There, Hitler’s soldiers writhed
amidst the snowdrifts of Moscow, the ruins of Stalingrad,
and the dust clouds of Kursk.

Everything was freezing.

The guns were freezing.

The clothing was freezing.

The men were freezing.

It is absolutely brutal,
and many of them are not prepared.

Humans seize up the tools of war.

Seize up.

They were attacking
with sharpened spades through sewers.

They were attacking out of cellars.

It was a savage battle
that terrified the German soldiers.

It’s wrong to talk
about the Second World War as if it was a conventional war in which rational military considerations
play an important part.

These people only take power
in political chaos, and then, out of that chaos, they build something that looks
like an achievement at first.

They build a monolithic state, and then, of course,
their ambitions don’t stop there.

This vast invasion
would bring Hitler’s Reich crashing down around him, stretching resources, manpower,
and his deranged vision to their limits.

This is Hitler
Uncovering his Fatal Obsession.

It’s always been a British conceit to believe that Britain
was the foremost enemy of Nazi Germany.

In truth, going back to the 1930s
and even in the 1920s, Hitler’s designs were always in the East.

It was always in Russia and the Ukraine that he envisaged
the creation of Germany’s great empire.

Hitler and a lot of the Nazi ideologues
were very keen on this idea of Lebensraum of room to live,
for an expanding German population.

The whole idea of this future occupation,
of the future colonization, involved killing by starvation
of around 30 million Soviet citizens.

This was called the Hungerplan.

They were particularly interested
in the farmland and in keeping enough Russian
and Ukrainian farmers and peasants
basically to work as helots or slaves, for the German Reich.

Hitler thought of the Soviet Union as a vast mass of subhuman peasants loaded over
by a small clique of Jewish Bolsheviks.

It’s an extraordinary view,
because Stalin himself was anti-Semitic, and he was not steered
by the Jews in any way.

How could they possibly do that? In fact, he launched
various anti-Semitic campaigns himself.

However, that was the Nazi view,
that was Hitler’s view.

He thought
that if you invaded the Soviet Union, defeated their armies,
and decapitated the system, then it would all collapse because the great masses of Russians,
Belarusians, Ukrainians, and others were just simply
not capable of running a state themselves.

It was a profound misconception.

However, that is what he believed, and you can see this emerging many times
through the war itself and Hitler’s overconfidence
in dealings with the Soviet Union.

However, in August 1939, the world was stunned by the news
that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact
of non-aggression.

From Moscow on the 22nd anniversary
of the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s Foreign Minister
Vyacheslav Molotov served notice
that once again Russia was a player in Europe’s game of power politics.

Loudly, he denounced France and England
as capitalist instigators of war and branded the US
as an unneutral war profiteer.

For six long years, every Russian worker
has been told that Hitler’s Germany was the Soviet Union’s deadliest
and most dangerous enemy.

However, today,
Nazi Germany and Communist Russia are bound by a treaty of non-aggression.

A reciprocal trade agreement
calls for the delivery to warring Germany of millions of dollars
worth of sorely needed raw materials.

The relationship between Nazi Germany
and the Soviet Union from the beginning of Hitler’s rise
to power is quite a surprising one.

In the background, in fact,
they continued economic relations, which were quite intense.

Solzhenitsyn said that Hitler was probably
the only man that Stalin ever trusted.

I think that’s going too far, but he certainly trusted him
more than anyone else.

Maybe it was a lack of judgment,
or it may be a certain admiration.

There was a moment when Hitler decided
to get rid of his opposition.

At the night of the Long Knives,
when the Brownshirts were murdered, Stalin is reported as saying, “Clever man, that’s the way
of dealing with the opposition.

” In fact, his own purge of his opposition,
which cost hundreds of thousands of lives, began shortly afterward.

It may not be a coincidence.

Under the dictatorships of Hitler
and Stalin, Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union
simultaneously invaded Poland in September 1939,
marking the beginning of World War II.

The country was carved up in just the way
that the two invading forces had planned in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

By 1940, Hitler had reached Paris, and the Allies
were forced to evacuate at Dunkirk.

Britain was now under direct attack, and the German war machine
had an air of invincibility.

With his sights now set on the east, Hitler had his chance
to fulfill his ultimate obsession when he launched Operation Barbarossa.

On the practical side,
the German armed forces, which in this case, of course,
means the army and the air force, saw little problem with it.

This is the campaign they knew
for a fact they could execute.

This is the campaign that you could say they would have regarded
as their bread and butter.

This is not the dilemma they found themselves confronted with
the previous summer when essentially confronting
the United Kingdom.

Most of the senior officers
would have known that even if the Luftwaffe
had won the Battle of Britain, crossing the channel
would still not have been viable which was immensely frustrating
to these gentlemen.

Now, all of a sudden, all they have to do
is cross an international border, and that’s the thing they do.

They come with a new tool
of high-intensity land warfare, the Panzer Division, which essentially is capable
of unprecedented feats on the field of battle.

German agents had been working
behind the lines inside Russia for some weeks before the invasion.

It was the fact that the Russians
had gotten wind of this and reported it to Stalin
that made it so incredible that Stalin
was not only disbelieving himself but also absolutely refusing
to allow any precautions to be taken in the forward areas.

Hitler had managed
to hoodwink Stalin in a very strange way.

Stalin was somebody who was one of the greatest tricksters
history has ever known, yet, he fell into this trap
of actually believing somehow that the Nazi-Soviet pact
was going to work.

When Hitler started sending aircraft
over the frontier, Stalin felt that this was part
of a negotiating tactic to force the Soviet Union
to pay more in the pact.

They did not know
about these huge preparations.

They did know
about the concentration of troops.

Already, you saw all the way
from the Baltic to the Black Sea, enormous concentrations of troops, in many cases hidden wherever
they could be in forests and so forth.

However, Stalin even believed the story that this was to avoid bombing
from Britain, and this is why they’d all been moved
to the East.

Thus, when on the day the first German unit
swept across the border, and when they first signaled
some of the border guards on the other side to come and talk,
these border guards advanced and, of course, were mown down,
and the Germans then swept on past them.

The Russians were taken by surprise even more dramatically than the Americans
at Pearl Harbor a few months later that the Russian forward areas
they’ve been explicitly forbidden to take any of the precautions
they might have taken if they’d observed all the warnings
they’d had, that Marshal Zhukov had urged on Stalin, that Soviet intelligence
had urged on Stalin, and Stalin absolutely refused to accept.

He had many warnings, indeed, both from the British
and from the Americans, but he kept on thinking
that this was an English provocation to get him to start fighting the Germans.

They had a very difficult time
knowing what to do when suddenly
they found themselves under fire.

This was one of the reasons
why there was such chaos and such panic on the Soviet side.

Operation Barbarossa would be the largest military campaign
in history.

The sheer scale of the fighting
and the brutality of the warfare proved to be the turning point
of World War II.

At the start of World War II, the Soviet Union had invaded
the eastern half of Poland and occupied the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all as part of an agreement
with Nazi Germany.

The Soviets had attempted
to capture Finland as well but were met with fierce resistance.

However, in June 1941, they were now on the defensive
as Hitler broke the non-aggression pact and German forces marched
into Soviet-controlled Poland and beyond.

The West never had good agents
in the corridors of power in Nazi Germany in the course of the war.

Stalin had fabulous human resources, and they were all the time
for months before the invasion reporting back to Moscow
that this invasion was coming.

Yet, Stalin refused
to accept a word of it.

Thus, all his forces in the forward areas and the Soviet aircraft
were destroyed on the ground.

Hundreds of Soviet aircrafts.

In the first hours, you had the German pilots
who had had to fight for their lives during the campaign in France, and suddenly couldn’t believe
what they were seeing.

However, there they are on this first day,
flying over Russian airfields, where all these Russian aircraft
are lined up in rows for them to machine gun and bomb.

The troops, of course, were simply easy meat
for those German divisions that were storming forward.

Remember,
the Red Army was totally demoralized.

Stalin had shot most
of his senior generals.

He shot his superb Marshal Tukhachevsky, who had had his own philosophy
of blitzkrieg and had worked out a way
of dealing with any German invasion.

Partly because Stalin was afraid
of Napoleon appearing in times of war, and he might have been right.

The military might have taken over.

The Red Army was demoralized,
but no senior officers virtually.

Most of the people of the rank
of colonel above were dead or in the camps and crippled,
and then they just lost the war, very humiliating against Finland.

The great Red Army was nearly defeated by a small group
of Finnish skiing soldiers.

The Finns did have to make peace
in the end, but to lose to a tiny nation like that
was such a humiliation that they had no confidence,
and it took some considerable time before new figures appeared.

Stalin himself seems to have gone
into a depression for three weeks, not knowing what to do, what to say, and even wondering
if his colleagues might arrest them.

He was terrified.

Here, all his predictions, all his promises,
never mind to the Russian people, his promises to his own closest members
of the Presidium, and all the rest of it,
they’d all been proved worthless, that Hitler had launched
this devastating invasion, that his armies were retreating in chaos
with hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Stalin thought that those around him were going to do
what he would have done in the same place and have him shot.

We have these few days
of quite extraordinary paralysis at the top in Moscow,
where Stalin has just gone, almost sitting there
waiting like a condemned man for his executioners to arrive.

He does nothing, he says nothing.

There are no public statements.

There’s nothing that comes out of Moscow.

He is amazed when so craven was the mood among the leadership
of the Soviet Union at this point.

So terrorized after all the purges,
that he suddenly finds these wretched men coming to their leader who’s betrayed them
and saying, “Oh, Comrade Stalin, what should we do?” They were so accustomed
to this absolute mastery by this one man that Stalin suddenly found
after a few days that he wasn’t going to be shot.

Instead, he remained the only man whom everybody turned
to make some decisions.

One of Stalin’s first moves
after reasserting his control was to sign a military alliance
with the United Kingdom, the Anglo-Soviet treaty.

Inside the Kremlin
where the appeasement pact that immediately preceded September 1st,
1939, was signed, there is today another meeting,
a sober meeting with the Fighting British.

Molotov is there,
and so is Stalin, whose word is law, and also Sir Stafford Cripps,
the British Ambassador.

Molotov signs
for the Union of Soviet Republics.

The agreement means supplies
not only from Britain but probably from America
as well via Britain.

Perhaps that’s why the camera catches
a real smile from Stalin.

Stalin’s smile
would not last long, though, as his son Yakov Dzhugashvili was captured
by the Nazis just four days later.

He’d been serving
on the Soviet front lines during the Battle of Smolensk
and had surrendered to the German forces.

It was a significant blow to Stalin,
who had demanded no surrender at all, and the Germans quickly took advantage
of the situation with propaganda leaflets that encouraged other Soviet citizens
to follow his example.

Bringing the propaganda weapon
to the front, the Nazis vainly hoped
to sap Russian resistance by loudspeaker appeals to surrender.

Very few experiments convinced them
that the Red Army’s scorn to listen.

[German spoken audio] The Germans advanced
only through burning towns.

So far, fighting necessarily
on the defensive, the Soviets can go back a long way.

Russia is a vast country.

She can afford
to yield more devastated miles and more blown-up bridges
than any other country in the world.

The German army and Air Force generals
tasked with the execution of Barbarossa would have drawn strength from the fact
that the majority of them had already served in World War I, which is when armies of the Central Powers
had defeated Imperial Russia, something that the Swedes
had failed to do at the very peak of their military proficiency.

This is something Napoleon failed to do.

Essentially, the Imperial German Army is the only army
to ever inflict a total defeat on Russia in a main theater of operations.

On top of which, based on what happened in places
like Norway, France, and the Balkans, the German senior officer corps feels
that their army is, if anything, far more formidable
than anything they had back in 1940.

What took them three years
last time around, this time would probably take them
three to four months.

They were moving about 50 miles
a day in some parts, and this went on right from the Baltic all the way down
close to the Black Sea, an enormous thousand-mile front.

It was a stunning success
for the invading troops.

They were surrounding the Red Army
in massive encircling operations and capturing hundreds of thousands
of Red Army soldiers.

It generated a sense of euphoria
amongst the German Army leadership and in Hitler, of course, too.

At this stage, Hitler was still regarded by most of the generals and most Germans
as a great military genius as a result
of what had happened the previous year.

The previous year,
he conquered the old enemy France in a plan he devised
after the official army plans had been accidentally betrayed
to the West.

He was still regarded, I think,
as an extraordinary military genius, a natural, instinctive genius
who had not been trained like the Prussian generals had but who broke the rules
and broke them successfully.

There’s a general sense of elation
and euphoria through June and July 1941.

When the invasion started,
many of them were optimistic.

One can tell all this
from the letters home.

Many were optimistic, thinking
that it would only take a few weeks.

In fact,
many of their officers had told them, “You’ll be able to go on leave
by September.

” Hitler came up with this phrase, “Kick in the door,
and the whole rotten structure” “will come tumbling down.

” However, that was not the case in the end,
and even in the first few weeks, they found that soldiers
were fighting in small groups when they had expected them all
to throw down their arms and surrender.

Some Russians resisted
with fanatical determination.

They fought literally to the death, and they took
an amazing number of Germans with them, just in isolated pockets at first
and so on.

However, some German officers who saw this and saw the ferocity with which,
amid all the mass surrenders, some committed Russians fought,
they had this worm of doubt in their minds,
just worms of uncertainty.

They began to think that if more Russians started to fight
the way that a few of these guys had done, we were going to have a problem.

These historic pictures
are the first record of the Battle of Russia.

The defense of 180 million people against Hitler’s
all-powerful Panzer divisions.

The film was made
by Russian army cameramen at the frontline during the first few weeks of the war.

The largest battle
in the history of mankind was unfolding in the summer of 1941.

The Soviet Union
suffered tremendous losses, but its incredible resilience
would eventually prove decisive in the outcome of World War II.

With the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the entire landscape
of World War II had changed.

Germany was fighting
in both western and eastern France, and Britain now had a formidable new ally.

From London, Winston Churchill himself
answers the question about Britain.

Broadcasting to the world
only a few hours after Germany struck, the prime minister says.

Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust
for blood and plunder.

Now, this bloodthirsty guttersnipe
must launch his mechanized armies upon new fields of slaughter,
pillage, and devastation.

Poor as are the Russians peasants,
workmen and soldiers, he must steal their daily bread from them.

Hitler’s reaction,
as well as anybody else’s, was enthusiastic, and essentially,
they felt that they had been vindicated.

They felt that essentially the doomsayers, or the handful of critics
that had essentially piped up, had been all wrong.

Essentially,
by the time you get to mid-July, he is telling the Japanese ambassador, “Listen, we will probably wrap this up
in another month, max.

” Then, of course,
you get to the last week of July when Soviet resistance
begins to stiffen just outside Smolensk, and they do not exactly inflict
a major defeat on the Germans, they just slow them down.

They slow them down, and this initial slowing down process
then turns into a month-long stalemate to the east of Smolensk
throughout August 1941.

By the very first day of September, both the HQ staff of the Army Group Center
and Adolf Hitler himself were starting to be seriously concerned.

General Voroshilov, Marshal
of the Soviet Army, directs defenses.

It is noteworthy that no great masses
of troops are shown here, but significantly only small groups.

Likewise, the Western armies
under General Timoshenko are deployed in great depth,
with only a few soldiers visible.

The pictures of Marshal Budyonny’s forces
in the southwest still reveal another significant fact, the apparently excellent service of supply
behind the Russian artillery, with really modern guns
protecting the front.

Right from the start,
there were three main axes of attack on the Soviet Union.

Hitler had insisted on one of the prongs
heading towards Leningrad, partly for psychological reasons,
again, the cradle of Bolshevism, but also, he insisted that it was vital to dominate
the Baltic for economic reasons, so that wasn’t entirely clear.

The central one for the Army Group Center
was to head basically towards Moscow.

However, Hitler had a curious,
superstitious view that he shouldn’t exactly
follow Napoleon’s route because then the same fate
would happen to him.

The third one, of course,
was the Army Group South, which was going into Ukraine
to establish control over the breadbasket of the Soviet Union and then head on towards the Caucasus
and the oil wells.

The German Army’s professionals were some of the finest
professional warriors the world has ever seen,
and they were not stupid.

They knew how big Russia was.

They knew how limited
the resources of the Wehrmacht were and, above all,
their problems with mobility.

They were appalled
by some of Hitler’s decisions.

It was almost a contest on incompetence
between Hitler and Stalin.

Hitler’s insistence on dividing forces and going in two
or three directions at once, whereas the German Army
had always taken pride in saying, “You decide where your Schwerpunkt” “and your main axis of attack
is going to be, and you go for it.

” Of course, the professionals always
wanted Moscow to be at the sharp front.

You go for Moscow, and once you’ve got it
and the north of Russia, the rest will come gradually,
but Hitler wouldn’t have that.

The army generals
were mostly Prussian aristocrats.

They are very traditional.

They all look back to Clausewitz, the great military theorist
of the Napoleonic Wars.

Clausewitz said, “The way you win a war
is to locate the main force of the enemy,” “engage it in battle, exterminate it,
and bingo, you got a victory.

” That’s what they wanted to do.

They wanted to go to Moscow, where they saw
the main force of the enemy, the Red Army, and they wanted to do that.

Hitler had a broader strategic vision.

What Germany lacked was, above all,
natural resources, particularly oil.

Hitler divided his forces, advancing toward Kyiv,
Ukraine, and the Caucasus.

Now, the generals didn’t think
this was a very good idea.

They still fixated on this idea
of annihilating the main enemy force and for Moscow.

Eventually, the Nazis scored
a stunning success in Kyiv, and they look as if
they’re doing pretty well over there, motoring through the Caucasus without encountering
very serious opposition, so the forces are reunited
and moved towards Moscow.

The problem is that time has been lost.

The planned German offensive
to seize Moscow itself was named Operation Typhoon, which launched on the 2nd of October 1941.

Just over a month into the assault, Stalin chose to hold
a military parade in Red Square to stiffen Soviet resolve.

However, it was forces outside his control that proved decisive
in the defence of the capital.

Winter comes early.

This has always saved Russia.

Napoleon didn’t believe
his weather forecasters.

Hitler didn’t believe
his weather forecasters.

Whatever’s wrong with Russian machinery, if you’ve ever had a Russian car,
it starts at minus 30 or even minus 40, and a German car does not.

The same applies to tanks,
and the German machinery could not cope.

Hitler had also reckoned
on reaching Moscow like Napoleon had reckoned
before things got bad.

There was no winter clothing.

In fact, fur coats
had to be sent from Germany.

The Nazis, Hitler, and the military
leadership were so arrogant that, in the autumn, they publicly declared,
“We’ve won.

” “We’ve defeated the Soviets.

” It’s a complete illusion.

The troops didn’t have winter clothing.

They were still dressed
in summer clothing.

Goebbels realized
that the soldiers were freezing to death.

Organizers had a big appeal
in Germany itself.

Bring us your winter clothing.

Let’s have your fur coats, please,
to support our boys down in Russia, but it’s all too late.

I’ve always argued
that the German Army in World War II was one of the most remarkable
fighting machines that the world has ever seen,
albeit a dreadful cause.

However, the incompetence with which the advance
on Moscow was organized, and, above all, the absolute lack
of preparations for winter, which anybody who knew any history at all,
anybody who knew what happened, Napoleon’s army in 1812 knew that the Russians
got pretty cold out there in the winter.

To send these men to attack Russia and to attack Moscow
with no winter clothing, and I have met German veterans
of that campaign, describing to me these dreadful moments
when they had to put sheets of newspaper under their tunics
because they had no winter coats, they had to light fires
under the tanks and vehicles to get them started in the morning
that everything was freezing.

The guns were freezing, the clothing was freezing,
and the men were freezing.

The one thing that the Red Army
was incredibly well equipped with, not very surprisingly,
was winter clothing.

As winter descended,
the Germans made no preparations because of this unbelievable series
of blunders and errors.

However, when the winter came
and these first terrible freezes, they got one
of the most devastating shocks of the war, but of course,
it shouldn’t have been a shock.

Despite the terrible conditions, German armed forces still attempted
to encircle Moscow in a pincer movement where the two invading forces
planned to unite in the city of Noginsk.

If you capture Moscow,
you capture the capital, and if you do it efficiently
by doing a pincer movement around it, you capture all the leaders.

In theory, if you capture the leaders, as Hitler planned
to hang them publicly in Red Square, then the whole fabric collapses.

It would have worked,
possibly if Hitler got there in time, or if autumn had been warmer
and winter hadn’t come so soon.

There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that even soldiers
who had been in combat from day one were ready to give it one last go to go for a high-risk late autumn offensive in order to grab Moscow
and finish the war.

There’s even a staff officer
in the HQ or Fourth Army who is, that’s the bizarre thing,
a committed anti-Nazi.

He writes things
in the letters to his family, which would have, at the very least
gotten him sacked from the army and probably worse.

He’s basically saying, “We need to give it a go.

” “We’re this close.

” “We can’t drop it.

” This is the do-or-die moment, and this is somebody who is not sold
on the idea of Lebensraum or anything of the kind.

There’s this feeling of, my God, we are this close,
and yes, winter’s closing in, and we may only have 16 days or so,
but we need to make it count.

That’s what keeps many of them going.

Then, of course, you get to December 5th, which by coincidence
is the day when the offensive ends and the temperature drops.

It literally goes from minus 15, which for much of the time
is still barely tolerable, to minus 13 places.

However, there is another factor,
that Hitler hoped that his ally, Japan, would move in from the other end,
cross Siberia, and they could then meet in the Urals
and finish the job.

However,
Stalin learned from his spy in Tokyo that the Japanese
had no plans to invade Russia.

They were so busy holding on to China and mopping up the remnants
of the British, the French, and the Dutch Empire around the Pacific that they had no interest
in invading Siberia.

What would they want Siberia for when the rich picks
of tropical countries like Vietnam and Burma are available? This is what saved Stalin,
he found out from his spies that it was safe
to move his Siberian troops to Moscow.

These were the only Russian troops
that had enjoyed a victory in 1938.

They had fought the Japanese in Manchuria,
and they’d won the battle, and they came properly equipped
for Siberia.

When they appeared in Moscow, the Germans realized
that they would never get to the center of the city.

They got to the outskirts, and they even got to the tram terminus
on the western outskirts, but they could get no further.

Berlin predicted,
when these Nazi films were being made, that Russia
would be blitzed in a few weeks.

Today, American news agencies
report Russia is strongly counterattacking and that less than one-fiftieth
of Russia’s vast area has been invaded.

These pictures show them the beginning
of the blitz that turned into a siege.

The successful defense of Moscow
was a huge symbolic victory for the Soviet Union.

For the first time
since Operation Barbarossa began, the German forces
were not only being resisted, they were being driven back.

In December 1941, the German armies planned
to capture Moscow in Operation Typhoon, but it failed
on the outskirts of the city.

German troops had to try
and make dugouts and trenches and so on, but you’ve got deep frozen ground.

It’s very difficult.

The supply situation is okay.

They’re not starving, but they’re not able to withstand
this terrible freezing cold, and all the letters home
complain about this, and there are stories of how soldiers
on guard duty at night are found in the morning standing,
dead, stiff, literally frozen to death.

It’s hard to exaggerate the depth,
seriousness, and power of the Russian winter.

In this context, of course, everybody starts thinking
of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, which was met with similar circumstances.

Met with deep cold.

He met with Russian troops,
making attacks on all sides, and everybody said,
“This is Hitler’s 1812.

” Ironically, this is just like Napoleon
because, of course, just the previous year, he’d made a special visit to Paris
after the fall of France to pay his respects
to the tomb of Napoleon.

I think, feeling,
“I’ve done better than him,” and now here
he was suffering the same fate.

Napoleon said, “I’ve not been defeated
by the Russian generals.

” “I’ve been defeated by General Winter.

” You could say the German attempt to get to Moscow
started in mid-November 1941, and it died a slow death,
a gradual death around December 3rd, 4th, and 5th.

Then you can say the operation ends, and they are left more or less frozen
in place close to Moscow, but not close enough.

Then you’ve got the second phase
of the Battle of Moscow, which is the Russian counterattack.

I would stake a claim
that the Russian counterattacks around Moscow were among the decisive moments
of the Second World War, maybe more so than Stalingrad, which happened more than a year later,
maybe more so than Kursk two years later, because this was the moment at which the Germans not only
find themselves failing to take Moscow, but they find themselves
being driven back from Moscow.

Now, again and again, tactically,
German units would win little victories.

They’d win little success.

They’d inflict devastating casualties
on the advancing Russians, but the Russians
had enormous quantities of people, and Stalin was completely indifferent, as were his generals,
to how many of them he lost.

Although he was a disastrous warlord, a disastrous director of operations
in that first year of the war, until he reluctantly handed it over
to his marshals, he gave his commanders around Moscow
just sufficient leeway for them to be able
to exercise the terrific skills to organize these counter-attacks.

This is where Stalin
was cleverer than Hitler.

Hitler never understood
that he was not a military genius and that he should stand back
and let his generals make decisions.

Stalin knew from the start
he was not a military genius.

He proved
that in the Civil War in the 1920s when he made some terrible mistakes.

After the defense of Moscow, he stood back
and let his generals decide what to do.

He withdrew all the party officials
who were constantly monitoring generals, censoring them, and forbidding them
to do what they wanted to do.

He gave people like Zhukov and Koniev
full-scope to do what they wanted, and he even took advice from them,
he didn’t object.

He stopped arresting generals.

That was the cleverest thing
that Stalin did, was to leave the job to the professionals,
and that, of course, is where Hitler made some very,
very serious mistakes.

Out there, Russian counter attackers
cite the remnants of a German invading force.

The city is strategic Tula,
just south of Moscow, and these are the first pictures
of Russia’s amazing drive.

The heroic defense of Tula helped destroy
the Nazi pincers around Moscow, and here’s how it happened.

Town after town
is recaptured in this fashion.

These are actual battle pictures
made under fire.

The evidence of blitzkrieg
that failed in Tula, in Mozhaysk,
and along a 1,700-mile front, Nazi dead testify
to the bogging down of Germany’s march.

How Mr.

Hitler can explain
this failure is a mystery, but no mystery
is the fighting determination of the tireless Russians.

Hitler always distrusted the generals, especially those he thought
were high-born.

He had a tremendous chip on his shoulder,
inevitably, in that particular way, especially as he probably knew
that people like Rundstedt referred to him as that bohemian corporal
and things like that.

He was determined to prove them wrong.

He much preferred to sack them
and then take over control, and he was a micromanager.

At times, he was even looking
at small-scale maps dictating where even companies,
let alone battalions, should be positioned and getting
the orders passed down the line.

This obsessive micromanaging
became thoroughly disastrous.

He would not give
the generals their heads, and in this particular case, after Moscow, he was determined to ensure
that none of them had the independence they would have liked to have in deciding
whether to withdraw or not.

Hitler moved southeast,
he ignored, after failing to get Moscow, he didn’t try again.

He didn’t even make Napoleon’s mistake, he was considering
going north to Leningrad.

They let Leningrad go on being besieged
and starved to death.

It had no military importance anyway.

What he decided he badly needed
was the oil fields at Baku on the Caspian Sea.

That change meant heading for the Volga and heading for a city that used
to be called the Tsar City, Tsaritsyn, which Stalin had renamed after himself,
Stalingrad.

Hitler’s planned offensive
in southern Russia was named Case Blue and would begin just a year
after the start of Operation Barbarossa.

The German attempt
to cross the Volga River and the legendary Battle of Stalingrad
that ensued would be seen by many as the most decisive turning point
of World War II.

One of the oldest things
about the Second World War is that in Berlin, the clever staff officers
and the clever officials around Hitler were much quicker to see
how much trouble they were in Russia than anybody was in the West.

That well into 1942, in fact,
even up to the autumn of 1942, all the smart money in London
and in Washington, the British generals
and the American generals still thought
the Russians were going to lose.

They still thought that as the Germans
kept delivering punch after punch on these huge offensives,
taking great swathes of territory.

They thought,
“Thank goodness,” “the Russians have lasted
a bit longer than we thought.

” However, the archives are stuffed
with British and American reports, as late as August and September 1942,
saying, “We think these guys
are still going to lose.

” However, in Berlin,
they weren’t thinking like that.

In Berlin, from the beginning
of 1942 onwards, they had this cold feeling,
the smart people in Berlin, having failed to make
that decisive victory, having inflicted this horror story
on the German army in the winter of 1941, ’42,
realized they were in big trouble.

In part two, we cover how Hitler’s obsession
with conquering the Soviet Union led to the most
devastating German defeats, both at the Battle of Stalingrad
and the Battle of Kursk.

Having survived a relentless onslaught, the Soviet Union would eventually drive
the invading forces out of their territory and all the way back
to the streets of Berlin, where Hitler’s obsession
finally died in the Führerbunker.