Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

In a fireside chat broadcast over the radio on December 29, 1940, Roosevelt had called upon the American people to serve as “the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.” The president explained that “if Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere.” Roosevelt vowed to supply Britain (“the spearhead of resistance to world conquest”) with weaponry against Nazi Germany while keeping America out of the fighting.⁵⁶ Even at peace, the American colossus was now manufacturing as much weaponry as either Germany or Britain, while also seeing its living standard rise. Germany’s many occupied territories could never match the United States or Britain in productivity. In 1941, America would manufacture nearly 20,000 military aircraft, of which more than 5,000 would go to Britain. Germany took deliveries of 78 aircraft from occupied France and the Netherlands.⁵⁷

Hitler was wont to expiate on American degeneracy and contamination by Jewry, but he was well aware of America’s productive power and resources, and how the United States, together with Britain, was rich in transport, too. Herein lay the strategic component of his quest for Lebensraum. For Hitler, annihilation of the Soviet Union and international Jewry was an end in itself. But he had a further aim, forced upon him, in his view, by necessity: to establish the equivalent of a British empire or U.S. transcontinentality by conquering and racializing Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It was his awe and fear of U.S. power, ultimately, that propelled him to take on what he long said needed to be done: eradicate “Judeo-Bolshevism.”⁵⁸ Hitler was caught in something of a vicious circle: all of his spectacular battlefield victories had only accelerated Anglo-American cooperation, the very phenomenon helping to drive his pursuit of these victories in the first place. To be sure, he could continue to secure crucial resources from Stalin via trade. But whenever Germany ran into difficulty meeting its contractual obligations, Stalin had shown he could turn off the spigot of grain, timber, oil, and alloys. Hitler might end up succumbing to the contemptible fate he foresaw for Britain, running the risk of abject dependency on the United States, but in his case the dependency involved the USSR. How could Germany even supply its own military if the Soviets kept demanding so many advanced machine tools? How long would it be before the USSR became too strong even to take on? How long before Stalin might launch his own war against Germany?

To Hitler, a consolidation of his gains and a defensive stance looked like a losing proposition, for time, he felt, was not on his side. American involvement with Britain would grow; the USSR would just get stronger. Thus, given the military infeasibility of a cross-Channel invasion, his options seemed to be (1) air strikes against peripheral targets of the British empire in the Near East, to raise Britain’s costs for refusing his offers of accommodation on his terms, an option that meant continued tolerance of his relationship with “Judeo-Bolshevism” and Stalin’s “blackmail”; (2) the continental bloc idea advanced by Ribbentrop, which would confront the Anglo-Americans with equivalent productive and military force but would potentially increase Hitler’s dependence on Stalin’s good graces; or (3) an unprovoked attack on a country with a massive army of 4 million men and modern weaponry, some of it German supplied. The latter was in many ways the riskiest choice but, given Hitler’s worldview, aspirations, and calculations, the one that seemed to make the most sense.⁵⁹ Understanding that from the outside required a level of insight no foreign power commanded.

On January 30, 1941, Hitler showed that he understood that the Soviet Union would not launch a preemptive strike, telling his high command behind closed doors, “As long as Stalin lives, the Russians will not attack, for Stalin is cautious and reasonable.” Nonetheless, German officialdom and propaganda emphasized the presence of Soviet troops on the common border as a direct threat to Germany. In his speech, the Führer moved the start date of Barbarossa from May 15 to June 2, evidently acknowledging the scale of the operation, and repeated his prophecy, made two years earlier, of a coming annihilation of the Jews.⁶⁰

JUDO