At the very moment of Stalin’s gambit, Hitler was holding a massive war conference (June 14) in the Parliament Chamber of the Old Reich Chancellery, with reports by all commanders of army, naval, and air force groups on their Barbarossa preparations. The number of invited attendees was so large that they were directed to arrive at different times and use different entrances. “After luncheon,” General Halder wrote in his diary, “the Führer delivers a lengthy political address, in which he explains the reasons for his intention to attack Russia and evolves his calculation that Russia’s collapse would induce England to give in.”325
The Germans knew, of course, that the Soviets had been calling up reserves, moving forces to the frontier, furiously building border defenses, and stepping up patriotic propaganda.326 The Wehrmacht’s main worry was that, given its absurdly dense concentration of forces and weaponry smack up against the Soviet frontier, the Red Army could inflict great damage by striking preemptively—or, what might be worse, adjust their forward defense posture and move their own extremely vulnerable troops back away from the frontier, removing the danger of being wiped out in a lightning strike and preserving themselves for the counterstrike. Back on June 13, Timoshenko, in Zhukov’s presence, had phoned Stalin to request authorization to have frontline Red Army troops brought to a war footing. The despot refused, citing the forthcoming TASS bulletin, but the text baffled many Soviet military men, especially those in the field.327 Stalin did allow the general staff to order the western military districts to begin moving divisions of the second echelon, under the pretext of military exercises, up to within twelve to fifty miles of the frontier by July 1. This was suicidal.328
“The Führer estimates that the operation will take four months. I reckon on fewer,” Goebbels wrote in his diary (June 16), after yet another audience. “Bolshevism will collapse like a house of cards. We face victories unequaled in human history. We must act. Moscow intends to keep out of the war until Europe is exhausted and bled white. Then Stalin will move in and Bolshevize Europe and impose his own rule. We shall upset his calculations with one stroke. . . . The alliance with Bolshevism was always a blemish on our honor. Now it will be washed away. . . . The TASS denial, in the Führer’s opinion, is little more than a product of Stalin’s fear. Stalin is trembling at what is to come.”329
DOOM CLOSES IN
Golikov, of Soviet military intelligence, reported the accelerated German buildup in April, May, and June, from 70 to an estimated 110-plus divisions.330 Japanese intelligence refused to believe that Hitler had the temerity to attempt to conquer the Soviet Union, an attempt that the Japanese shrank from after being defeated at the Halha River by superior Soviet weaponry and tactics.331 British officials had unique, unimpeachable intelligence, yet they were exceedingly slow to understand that Hitler was planning not a campaign of intimidation and blackmail but an all-out invasion.332 Back on May 31, 1941, the British Code and Cipher School had reviewed the data gleaned from the Enigma intercepts and—finally—concluded that the rail movements eastward involved more than a bluff. But the war office and the foreign office did not rule out a last-second, one-sided deal between Germany and the USSR (the apparent lack of German-Soviet negotiations in Moscow, they speculated, must have meant they were taking place in Berlin, so that Stalin could conceal them from his own officials). On June 7, Enigma delivered the Luftwaffe’s order of battle for the USSR: this meant war was certain, and the experts judged that Poland and East Prussia were the principal staging grounds.333 “From every source at my disposal, including some most trustworthy, it looks as if a vast German onslaught on Russia was imminent,” Churchill wrote to Roosevelt (June 14).334 The NKGB obtained a copy.335
