On March 28, at 5:00 p.m. Berlin time, Dekanozov’s secretary at the embassy received an anonymous tip: “Around May a war will begin against Russia,” the caller, speaking in German, stated, then hung up.118 In Moscow that same day, Stalin sought to squeeze ever more blood from a stone, convening the chemical industry bosses—the commissar, his deputies, factory directors—in the Little Corner. The Soviet Union had still not fully mastered production of tires from synthetic rubber, even though it had invented the latter.119 Stalin laced into Nikolai Patolichev, a peasant’s son (b. 1908) who had been orphaned at twelve, then started working at a factory and, following the terror, in 1939, became party boss of Yaroslavl province, site of the rubber industry. Patolichev, one of Stalin’s “new people,” had just become a full member of the Central Committee. “Stalin used sharp expressions and I honestly did not know how this conversation was going to end for me,” Patolichev would recall. “Stalin paced in silence, thinking. The minutes seemed incredibly long.” Finally the despot, smiling, announced the formation of a commission of Patolichev, Khrushchev, and Nikolai Bulganin to get the chemical commissariat to ramp up production.120
BALKAN TREACHERY
Under very intense German pressure, Bulgaria had joined the Axis, alongside Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. This left just two nonaligned states in southeastern Europe: Greece, which was under military assault by Italy, and Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav regent, the Oxford-educated Prince Paul, who ruled for the seventeen-year-old King Petar II, was pressured into signing on to the Axis on March 25. Almost immediately thereafter, at 2:15 a.m. on March 27, 1941, Serbian air force officers overthrew him. Eden telegrammed “provisional authority” to the British envoy in Belgrade “to do what he thought fit to further a change of Government, even at the risk of precipitating a German attack.”121 But although Britain intelligence supported the coup, it was a Yugoslav initiative.122 A delighted Churchill, content to see the Serbs do the fighting, wrote that “Hitler had been stung to the quick.”123 Golikov sent Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and Timoshenko a detailed report on March 28, 1940, claiming that “German circles were dumbfounded.”124
Hitler fulminated against the British for pulling the strings, and in his fury, on that very day (March 27), he issued Directive No. 25, “to destroy Yugoslavia militarily and as a state.”125 On March 30, some 250 field marshals, generals, admirals, and staff officers, seated by rank and seniority, secretly gathered for breakfast in the Great Hall of the New Reich Chancellery, where Hitler delivered a two-hour harangue laying out his case for an invasion of the USSR. “The Russian is inferior,” he stated. “The army is without leadership,” while “armament capacities [are] not very good.” Stalin, Hitler allowed, was “clever,” but the Soviet leader “had gambled on Germany’s bleeding to death in the autumn of 1939.” He emphasized that “this is a war of annihilation. If we do not grasp this, we shall still beat the enemy, but thirty years later we shall again have to fight the Communist enemy.” Captured commissars were to be “eliminated immediately by the troops.” Indeed, “one of the sacrifices which commanders have to make is to overcome any scruples they might have.”126
German embassy staff in Belgrade were ordered to leave on April 2 (the ambassador had been recalled for consultations) and to warn “friendly” embassies to do likewise.127 The Yugoslav minister in Moscow, Milan Gavrilović, effectively a Soviet agent, was instructed by Molotov to have a delegation come to Moscow immediately to conduct secret negotiations for a “military and political pact.”128 Schulenburg, summoned to the Kremlin on April 4, warned Molotov that “the moment chosen by the Soviet Union for negotiation of such a treaty had been very unfortunate.” Molotov replied that Yugoslav accession to the Tripartite Pact with Germany could remain in force.129 On April 4, “Sophocles” reported out of Belgrade on German troops massing on the border with Yugoslavia, and conversations to the effect of “Keep in mind that in May we’ll start a war against the USSR, and within seven days we’ll be in Moscow; while it is not too late, join us.”130 Stalin knew what was coming: on April 5, “Alta” learned from “Aryan” of Germany’s imminent invasion of Yugoslavia and summoned her handler, Zaitsev (“Bine”), to a Berlin cinema; “Bine” hurried to the Soviet embassy to inform Tupikov (“Arnold”), who reported to Moscow that a German invasion of Yugoslavia would take place the next morning, April 6, and that Berlin was reckoning on the destruction of Yugoslavia in fourteen days.131
