Stalingrad Read Free

although they did not dare express their views too forcefully, had little doubt that Hitler was planning to invade. They had even sent on the proofs of a phrase book prepared for invading troops, which had been brought secretly to the Soviet consulate by a German Communist printer. Useful terms included the Russian for ‘Surrender!’, ‘Hands up!’, ‘Where is the collective farm chairman?’, ‘Are you a Communist?’, and ‘I’ll shoot!’
    Berezhkov’s renewed telephone calls to the Wilhelmstrasse were met by the statement that Ribbentrop ‘is not here and nobody knows when he will return’. At midday, he tried another official, the head of the political department. ‘I believe something is going on at Führer headquarters. Very probably everybody’s there.’ But the German Foreign Minister was not out of Berlin. Ribbentrop was busy preparing instructions to the German Embassy in Moscow, headed ‘Urgent! State Secret!’ Early the next morning, some two hours after the invasion began, the ambassador, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, was to convey to the Soviet government a list of grievances to serve as the pretext.
    As the Saturday afternoon in Berlin turned to evening, the messages from Moscow grew increasingly frantic. Berezhkov rang the Wilhelmstrasse every thirty minutes. Still no senior functionary would accept his call. From the open window of his office, he could see the old-fashioned Schutzmann helmets of the police guarding the embassy. Beyond them, Berliners were taking a Saturday evening stroll on the Unter den Linden. The polarity between war and peace had abewildering air of unreality. The Berlin–Moscow express was about to pass through the waiting German armies and cross the frontier as if nothing were amiss.
    In Moscow, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, summoned Count von der Schulenburg to the Kremlin. The German ambassador, after overseeing the destruction of the embassy’s secret papers, set off for the meeting called for half past nine. When challenged with the evidence of German preparations, he did not admit that an invasion was about to take place. He simply expressed his astonishment that the Soviet Union could not understand the situation and refused to answer any questions until he had consulted Berlin.
    Schulenburg, a diplomat of the old school who believed in Bismarck’s dictum that Germany should never make war on Russia, had good reason to be astonished by the Kremlin’s ignorance. Over two weeks before, he had invited Dekanozov, then back in Moscow, to a private lunch and warned him of Hitler’s plans. The old count clearly felt absolved from any loyalty to the Nazi regime after the Führer had blatantly lied to him, claiming to have no designs against Russia. * But Dekanozov, astonished at such a revelation, immediately suspected a trick. Stalin, reacting in the same way, exploded to the Politburo: ‘Disinformation has now reached ambassadorial level!’ Stalin was certain that most warnings had been ‘
Angliyskaya provokatsiya’ –
part of a plot by Winston Churchill, the arch-enemy of the Soviet Union, to start a war between Russia and Germany. Since Hess’s flight to Scotland, the conspiracy had grown even more complicated in his mind.
    Stalin, who had refused to accept the possibility of an invasion until that Saturday afternoon, still remained terrified of provoking Hitler. Goebbels, with some justification, compared him to a rabbit mesmerized by a snake. A succession of reports from frontier guards told of tank engines being warmed up in the woods across the border,of German army engineers constructing bridges across rivers and removing barbed-wire entanglements in front of their positions. The commander of the Kiev Special Military District warned that war would begin in a matter of hours. Reports arrived that in Baltic ports, German ships had suddenly stopped loading and sailed for home. Yet Stalin, the totalitarian dictator, still could not