| From Unity, 4 June 2005 |
The bitch that bore him is in heat again*Part 4By Marion Baur,1 Hermann Glaser-Baur,2 and Gűnther Judik3 |
| The commanders of the Soviet army believed that 1942 would see a major attempt by the fascists to take Moscow, as during the previous year. Their preparations for such a move made the superiority of the aggressors in the south all the more effective. They broke through the Soviet front almost at their leisure, and the fascist 6th Army moved towards Stalingrad at rapid speed. Other Nazi armies pushed through the gap in the front, deep into the Caucasus and to the Black Sea coast as far as Novorossiysk.
In Ukraine important industrial centres and large fertile areas fell into their hands, and the German daily news from the front lines was loaded with reports about victories. But the OKW (high command of the Nazi army) noticed quickly that, unlike the year before, they did not succeed in surrounding larger units of the Red Army. The attempt to take Stalingrad while moving failed. German troops reached the Volga at the end of August, but then a fierce battle, for literally every house, started. Both sides suffered huge losses, and despite a constant supply of new soldiers, the attacking power of the fascist troops ceased. On 19 November the Soviet army started a surprise attack against both wings of the German front near Stalingrad. Deep behind the 6th Army the Soviet tank units joined, broke through the German supply routes, and tightened the ring around the fascist army. Hitler refused to let the surrounded troops, led by General Paulus, break out towards the west and decided instead to supply the 300,000 soldiers by air. He also concentrated massive forces for attack. But all attempts were in vain. The fascists had to flee the Caucasus, and the Stalingrad army, reduced to just 91,000 survivors, had to capitulate at the end of January. Stalingrad was the lost chance of Hitler Germany to decide the war with a victory over its main enemy, the Soviet Union. The Nazi propaganda about the “decisive battle” turned into the opposite: Stalingrad became the symbol of the possibility of defeating the massive military machine of German fascism, which relied on the economic power of almost the whole of Europe. This wasn’t just the victory of the Soviet soldiers and the thousands of armed partisans: it was the victory of the hinterland and Soviet economy, able to supply the fighters despite unbelievable losses and destruction. Stalingrad gave a massive boost and new hope to the anti-fascist resistance in all countries. In 1943 the German high command made one last attempt to win back the initiative. They concentrated all their forces at Kursk. The new attacking weapons, Tiger and Panther tanks as well as the overweight Ferdinands, were put into battle, all of them stronger than the Soviet tanks at the time. But the breakthrough failed. In the largest tank battle in history, 6,000 tanks fought on a narrow part of the front. The German offensive was not a success and was halted after a few days in August 1943. From Kursk back to Berlin, the initiative stayed with the Red Army. And the western Allies? They made a huge contribution to the defeat of fascism. In 1942 they landed in Dakar and Casablanca, far from Berlin. They occupied French North Africa and smashed what had once been the proud Africa Corps. On 9 July more than 300,000 American and British soldiers landed in Sicily. German troops, which were moved in quickly, could not prevent the fall of Sicily after thirty-eight days. The Italian troops had given little or no resistance, and the deep crisis of Italian fascism became obvious. On 25 July, Mussolini was axed by the king and the parliament. The new government of Badoglio—despite its lip service to staying faithful to Hitler Germany—put out feelers to the United States. The liberation of the imprisoned Mussolini by SS men could not stop Italy from dropping out of the fascist bloc, and the Italian front had to be held by troops that were brought in from France and Germany. It remained an unimportant front until the end of the war. In Greece and especially in Yugoslavia, which had developed a very strong group of partisans led by Tito, German troops were able to secure the formerly Italian-occupied harbour towns, but in the hinterland the conditions became more favourable for the “people’s army” led by Tito, and it played a leading role in the liberation of Yugoslavia. The air war against Germany led by the United States and Britain—the answer to the criminal attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, London and Coventry in the early years of the war—certainly weakened Germany. And we must not forget the supplies of goods that were part of the Allied agreement, which came from the United States and Canada to the Soviet Union. These supplies, though only 5 per cent of the Soviet war supply, still proved very important. The offensives of 1943–45, when the mobility of the Red Army was much increased by the delivery of American lorries, clearly showed the importance of Allied help. Soviet soldiers sometimes ironically called the American tinned meat the “second front”; but it helped—indeed it kept soldiers alive during the very difficult years. After the landing of the Allied forces, the Soviet front remained the main one, and the fighting on the eastern front was bitter to the end. 60 per cent of fascist troops were placed in the eastern front. For a short period, when the Nazis planned their Ardennes offensive, they moved elite units to the west. It proved a failure, and the immediate attacks by the Red Army at the Weichsel front made the fascists move their heavyweights back to the east. The incredible losses of human life and the fierce fighting were characteristics of the Soviet front, and even the storming of Berlin and the liberation of Prague and Vienna at the end of the war happened at the cost of tens of thousands of dead soldiers. From the landing in Normandy to the capitulation of the fascist armies, 174,000 American soldiers lost their lives. Between 22 June 1941 and 8 May 1945, 8.5 million Soviet soldiers were killed. This number does not take into account the millions who starved to death or were murdered while prisoners of war, nor the civilian deaths. It is now a proven historical fact that almost one in two of the 55 million dead of the Second World War was a citizen of the Soviet Union. The reader should stop for a moment at this point and try to take this figure in. The Soviet Union was the military winner and political winner of the war; economically it was the clear loser. Many of the problems that occurred in the years after the defeat of fascism were determined by this fact. *A quotation from Bertolt Brecht, referring to Adolf Hitler: “Don’t rejoice in his defeat, you men! For though the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”—Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941, epilogue added 1958). 1. German-born member of the CPI. 2. German-born member of the CPI. 3. Historian, member of the History Commission of the German Communist Party. |
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