Stalin was demonstrating not just his willingness to bargain, but also his possession of a mighty arsenal and weapons-manufacturing capacity.174 “They let us see everything,” Krebs, the Russian-speaking German deputy military attaché in Moscow, wrote to Berlin in the middle of a tour of the five biggest Soviet aviation factories. “Clearly Russia wants to frighten possible aggressors.”175 Schulze-Boysen (“Elder”), the spy in the Nazi air ministry, reported that “the Germans did not expect to encounter such well-organized and functioning industry. A number of the objects shown to them proved to be a big surprise. For example, the Germans did not know about the existence of a 1,200-horsepower plane engine. . . . A big impression was made by the mass of more than 300 I-18 planes. . . . The Germans did not suppose that in the USSR the serial production of such planes in such high numbers had been established.” Krebs concluded that the German general staff “was depressed.”176 Stalin’s spies also told him that German war games had revealed to the German general staff the logistical problems of waging a prolonged war against the Soviets, and, in parallel, he ordered that Hitler’s military attaché be taken deep into the Soviet rear to be shown the mass production of T-34 tanks.177
But Hitler, once apprised, was reinforced in his view that the USSR was arming on a massive scale and needed to be attacked before it was too late.178 At the same time, whereas Germany’s military intelligence had had next to no useful information about the Red Army’s armaments or troop locations before it ramped up high-altitude reconnaissance flights, in January 1941, now they had it in abundance.179
CACOPHONY
In Berlin, fewer and fewer German businessmen were appearing at the Soviet trade mission. The NKVD reported that over the past year and a quarter, it had captured 66 German spy handlers and 1,596 German agents, including 1,338 in western Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics, with hundreds of incidents of live fire at the border. Over the first four months of 1941, at least 17,000 trains were reported to have ferried German troops and heavy weapons to Soviet frontiers.180 Was it certain war? Internally, the British had dismissed the intelligence regarding Hitler’s preparations for a war against the Soviet Union, but now, thanks to the Enigma decoding, they had discovered that Hitler was ordering more and more of the Luftwaffe transferred eastward, away from bombing sites for the UK. Still, the British attributed the eastern buildup to a “war of nerves” being waged to force concessions from Stalin.
Stalin knew that the Germans had ceased using the Trans-Siberian to transport their diplomatic pouches to and from Tokyo, and Sorge reported (April 17) that the Germans would also cease to use the Trans-Siberian for the import of critical rubber from Japan. But Sorge undercut this message, noting that “the tension in relations between Germany and the USSR was decreasing,” which meant the Germans might not follow through on their intention to cease using the Trans-Siberian. He also wrote of supposed factionalism within Nazi ruling circles and suggested that the “pro-war faction” had not gained ascendancy. Sorge added: “The German embassy [in Tokyo] received a telegram from Ribbentrop stating that Germany would not launch a war against the USSR if the latter did not provoke it. But if the war turned out to be provoked, then it would be short and end with the severe defeat of the USSR. The German general staff has completed all preparations.”181
On April 22, Sándor Radó (“Dora”), a Hungarian Communist and Soviet military intelligence operative, reported from Geneva a date of June 15 for an attack on Ukraine. On April 23, Stalin and Molotov decreed the formation of large numbers of new artillery and parachute units with forced production of equipment.182 The next day, Stalin phoned Ilya Ehrenburg to tell him that the second and third parts of his anti-German novel,
