The Third Reich’s Biggest Mistake

[1]

General Andrei Vlasov, who commanded the German-backed Russian Liberation Army.

3,698 words

The Third Reich was not profuse in mistakes; otherwise, it would not have been able to battle for almost six years against the major world powers, in numerical and material inferiority and with so few and counterproductive allies. However, it itself made a vital mistake which resulted in losing the war.

Contrary to Hollywood’s presumptions, the Western front was always of minor importance during the Second World War. If Germany had been victorious in the East, it would have been absolutely impossible for the United States and Great Britain to set foot on the European mainland. Not without reason, historian Erik Norling notes the relative scarcity of Anglo-American heroes in comparison with those produced by Germany and Russia, for few were the inhabitants of those Atlantic countries who felt their interests were threatened by the war. Thus, none of the so-called “Western democracies,” where the populations were mostly against seeing their countries enter the conflict, would have been able to sustain a war at anything remotely resembling the same cost as the Soviet Union paid — specifically, about ten million soldiers and approximately 16 million civilians.

Despite the myth, all historians know that the Second World War was decided on the steppes of Russia — and that German anti-Slavism played a decisive role in this tragic defeat.

Before going into the matter, it is necessary to point out that the tendency to despise the Slavs, which was widespread among the Germans at the time — especially among the Prussians — did not originate with National Socialism, with which it bears no connection, but stemmed from the period of Prussian hegemony and the nineteenth-century “Drang nach Osten.” Even the very concept of “Lebensraum” predates Hitler’s birth. The fact that this anti-Slavism was not a National Socialist doctrinal question but a more generally German attitude is shown by the fact that, among the exponents of the Slavophobic faction, we find indistinctly National Socialist personalities and others who ran contrary to that worldview, especially in the Wehrmacht.

The opposite was the case as well: One also finds National Socialists and non-National Socialists alike among the leading representatives of the Slavophile wing. For example, one of the most outspoken supporters of Hitler’s regime among the General Staff, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, vehemently supported the Slavophile thesis. Ministers Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg,[1] [2] and Walther Darré, for example, were likewise clear supporters. The Slavophiles had in Heinrich Himmler their most powerful adversary, but even he would eventually change his mind on this.[2] [3]

The point is that when German troops entered the Soviet Union in 1941, they were welcomed in many areas as liberators. In Ukraine especially, huge crowds came out to throw flowers and cheer. By 1943, although many Ukrainian civilians would flee the advancing Red Army and accompany the retreating Germans, the attitude of the people were unfortunately no longer the same.

Erich Koch, a former German Communist who later became a high official in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) who had belonged to the party’s Strasserist faction and was close to National Bolshevism, was given the governorship of occupied Ukraine. Koch treated the Ukrainian people rudely, which aroused disaffection among some of them.[3] [4] The irreducible Ukrainian nationalist militiamen, who were furiously anti-Communist and anti-Jewish, but who lacked cadres, were pushed to wage war on their own. Under different circumstances, they could have been attracted to making common cause with the Germans and thus would have had much greater effectiveness than what ended up happening. Even so, 100,000 Ukrainians joined the Waffen-SS, making them the non-Germanic people who contributed the most volunteers to the fight — an impressive figure, but one which, in a republic that was home to the Cossacks and which had been at the epicenter of the worst Communist massacres, could have been much higher.

[5]

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The same could be said of the other Soviet republics and of the Russians themselves, who soon began to desert with the intention of joining the German ranks against the Marxist tyranny that was exterminating them.[4] [7] In total, more than a million men, coming from the most varied nationalities of the Soviet Union, fought alongside the Germans against their own State, which had been kidnapped by Communist tyranny.[5] [8]

Faced with this situation, Stalin was terrified that Germany would turn the war against Soviet Communism into a political and revolutionary war of liberation, and that the people, instead of fighting against the Germans, would rebel against the Bolshevik elites. He therefore promised the Russians greater political openness through a series of liberalizations in the economic field and the implementation of political and religious freedoms.

Although he never intended to fulfill his promises of freedom, he tried desperately to make them credible. For this goal, the churches, which had previously been destroyed or converted into stables, were reopened; socialism took a discreet second place in war propaganda; the Communist International, or Komintern, was dissolved; the political Commissariat within the Red Army was abolished, and its name was changed from “Red Army” to “Soviet Army”; love for the land, which the Kremlin had previously tried to eradicate, was encouraged; the League of Militant Atheists was dissolved and the Orthodox Church was courted;[6] [9] the military saw the Tsarist ranks and its symbols, such as shoulder pads on the uniforms, were reintroduced — and so on.

To the detriment of the Marxist aphorism that “the fatherland is an invention of the bourgeoisie,” the conflict was proclaimed not a sacrifice for the Communist “revolution,” but the Second Great Patriotic War, very significantly evoking the original Great Patriotic War that had been fought against Napoleon’s revolutionary France. The “Internationale,” which had been the Soviet Union’s anthem, was replaced by a genuinely patriotic one. Classist and Marxist propaganda was deemphasized and national and popular sentiments were stimulated. Previously denigrated Russian historical heroes from before the Revolution, such as Alexander Nevsky,[7] [10] were likewise vindicated.

It was even promised that the Communist Party would be dissolved, along with the abhorred kolkhozes (the same ones that, ironically, the inept Erich Koch had maintained), and even that Stalin would eventually be replaced by a Russian nationalist regime. Moreover, amnesty was promised to fellow countrymen who had gone over to the other side, if they returned.

Of course, what happened was just the opposite, and almost all the things that had been temporarily changed in order to mislead the naïve were reversed as soon as the war ended.

Despite the fact that the Soviet promises were dubious, the Third Reich never offered an alternative to the peoples of the USSR given that it was pursuing a secondary objective of obtaining Lebensraum (living space) for the densely-populated Germany, and harbored an anti-Slavic attitude. Thus, no winning over of the Soviet population was sought and no proselytizing or recruitment was carried out — at least initially — among its peoples.

That would prove to be a tremendous fault, for, as the Wehrmacht discovered, it was not possible to defeat Russia in its territory without the support of the Russian people. There were just not enough troops to conquer sufficient land to end the war, and to make matters worse, partisans who were springing up across the immense territory that was already occupied made it difficult to control. The Germans should have recalled that even the previously invincible Napoleon was finally defeated by the Russians when they pursued a strategy of ceding ground and avoiding large battles, even at the enormous price of abandoning Moscow to its fate (and the French leader did not hesitate to set fire to it). The brutal Russian winter and guerrilla tactics ultimately undermined the Napoleonic army’s power on its way back home.

To illustrate this point, the Soviet Union was 27 times the size of National Socialist Germany. Thus, the more land the Germans conquered, the longer their lines of communication from Central Europe had to be extended, and the more partisans and saboteurs had to be controlled in the rear. At the same time, Stalin moved his factories beyond the Ural Mountains, where they were free from attack, and as his army retreated they left nothing but scorched earth, commissioning special commandos to set fire to warehouses, silos, crops, and even entire localities. (There is likewise evidence that they sometimes did this dressed as German soldiers to anger the locals.)

Thus, by far the most colossal mistake made by the Third Reich was to exclude a fundamental part of the white race from their revolution. Instead of waging a war of liberation to free the Russian people from the Jewish claws, “Operation Barbarossa,” the name under which the USSR was invaded, was approached as a simple preventive war — striking before the USSR could attack Germany, which was what Stalin planned to do[8] [11] — and as conquest for Lebensraum. This error is doubly tragic if we think of the positive reception the Germans initially received on Soviet territory and how relatively easy it initially would have been to engage in political warfare by inciting sabotage, revolt, and a change of sides — but unfortunately, there were no such efforts until it was too late.

Of course, apart from anti-Slavism, there were other reasons that delayed the launching of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA). The most important was a question of political consistency: It was not easy to reconcile the interests of the western Soviet republics — precisely those that made up most of the territory occupied by the Germans — which aspired to independence from Russia, with those of the Russian volunteers, who at that time also had an imperialist mentality and did not look favorably upon secession by those republics.[9] [12] It would probably not have been an insurmountable obstacle, had the Russians been granted liberation from Bolshevik tyranny along with the promise of the end of the military occupation after war’s end. After all, the Bolshevik regime itself had given up almost as much territory at the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. In fact, although it came too late, Andrei Vlasov, who commanded the ROA, eventually accepted the possibility of self-determination and independence for the aforementioned republics.

We could likewise mention the narrow-mindedness of those White Russians who had been exiled after the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921, and who formed a hodgepodge of aristocrats, Tsarist reactionaries, independence fighters, and so on. Many of them, like Anton Denikin, did not understand the times and were in favor of stupidly “defending” the country even at the cost of keeping the most genocidal government in history in power in a white land so that it could continue exterminating its own citizens. Others, on the other hand, acted more intelligently and supported the Germans.

Another reason was that the USSR, unlike the other belligerent countries, had not signed the Geneva Convention, so it did not refrain from committing all sorts of war crimes. Germany had signed it but was exempt from complying with it in the case of a country that did not respect it. The food rations and treatment of the Soviet prisoners were therefore much worse than those offered to the prisoners of other nationalities, since they knew that captured Germans did not have a better fate awaiting them. This was also a mistake, in spite of everything, because it hindered concord between Germans and Russians.[10] [13] On the other hand, the Communists were busy killing even the most conciliatory German officials, such as Bauer, the Vice Governor of the Galitzia region, who was murdered by a Bolshevik agent because of his special empathy for the Ukrainians.

And this discord brings us to an additional motive: mistrust. Since most of the volunteers came from prison camps and controlled territories — young men educated by the Communist regime — and not so much from white Russians in exile or deserters who had crossed the front lines, it was possible that many were faking adhesion just to take the opportunity to return to the other side or to swell the ranks of the partisans, after having been armed. Although there was no way of knowing at first, in time such mistrust proved unfounded, and the Russian volunteers stood out for their bravery and ferocity. And as for the Soviet workers sent to Germany, Himmler himself, although very reluctant at first, eventually accepted the fact that cases of sabotage were far less frequent than he had feared. It is also true that the insubordination and reckless actions of certain natural allies did not help to dispel this initial mistrust, such as when the Wehrmacht penetrated a few kilometers into Ukrainian territory, after which the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) declared the country’s independence, unilaterally and by surprise. Afterwards they only managed to get themselves arrested by the Germans, even though the latter had released their leader after the defeat of Poland, where Stepan Bandera had been imprisoned, two years earlier.

[14]

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We could find undoubtedly find various thoughtful reasons to explain the Germans’ Slavophobic stance, but it would be irrelevant. It is not a question of elucidating what amount of blame belongs to each party, but only to show the error of the policy of exclusion of entire segments of the Race as being considered unworthy of enjoying the fruits of the Identitarian Revolution (NS, third positionist, or however we want to approach it).

The past cannot be changed. Nonetheless, it can be used to learn a valuable lesson: The only possibility to win is to do the right thing; that is, to incorporate all white peoples equally into the Revolution, and the subsequent future White Union, making a clear distinction between the subjugated peoples and the elite that dominates them and to treat all sister ethnicities as what they are. At a time of struggle for the survival of the Race, any past grudges are like arguing about greyhounds and hounds — or, as the Byzantines did, about the sex of angels.

We know that this racial brotherhood and unity is perfectly possible because, even without intending it, it was very close to being achieved. In fact, despite all the mainstream narratives to the contrary, the Second World War was largely a European civil war between a European national side and its opposition, which was also composed of brethren but manipulated by an enemy media empire dominated by Jewry, and of treacherous governments that used their peoples as cannon fodder to serve the interests of the former. The French state was an Allied power, Germany’s historical rival from its very birth, and yet more Frenchmen gave their lives fighting under Adolf Hitler’s orders than under those of Édouard Daladier, the self-proclaimed “liberator” of France Charles de Gaulle, and other French or Western political puppets.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for his part, noted the singular fact that a part of the Russian people had joined the army of an attacking country — something that, in Russia’s long history, had never happened before. And it certainly did not happen out of mere “opportunism.” These were not cowards who deserted for fear of finding themselves on the losing side. Not surprisingly, among the Russians who took up arms against their former comrades were real warriors, including many who had previously been awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.[11] [16] The transfer of Soviet soldiers to the Third Reich continued until the very end of the war, when it was more than obvious that Germany would be defeated. The Slav fighters who joined from the very beginning maintained their warlike ardor and continued to ignore Stalin’s kind offers to surrender.[12] [17]

If, in spite of the lack of will to accept the Soviet peoples in the crusade against the System, in spite of the fact that enlistment efforts came very late (precisely when the potential recruits had less motive to believe in the possibility of an Axis victory) — in spite of everything, the recruitment of a million Soviet combatants (some historians put it at 1.4 million)[13] [18] was reached, it is evident that a serious and early effort to do so would have decisively shifted the balance of power in the war towards the other side.

The German Third Reich should have been transformed into a European First Reich. To succeed, National Socialism needed to have been more faithfully National Socialist: It should have conceived the whole of the Race as a Nation without excluding any ethnic community, such as the Slavs; it should have defined its internal borders as based on ethnicity (unlike the Commissariats that were created in the East); it should have brought revolution to the entire white world under its rule, instead of maintaining the least disruptive governments possible and then being forced to negotiate with unreliable collaborators like Vichy France. It should even have allied with the nationalist movements of Arabia and other races, encouraging them to fight for independence from the European colonial powers, which would have been a mortal blow for the English empire and provoked the creation of new ethnostates, both for the whites and for the non-white races, which would then have all been free from supremacisms, wars, and forced coexistence. (In reality, this alliance was never sought in order to satisfy the Pétain government, since France still possessed an immense colonial empire and intended to preserve it).

The Third Reich should have understood its pan-Aryan revolutionary historical mission at an early time, and not merely the pan-Germanist one, which was something more typical of an archaic romantic völkisch nationalism than of a racial nationalism derived from a racial worldview.

Indeed, in the end there was a profound change of mentality in that sense, and the thesis of the “great Germanic space” gave way to the “European SS theory,” which foresaw a new order of European brotherhood[14] [19] — but it was already too late to make a difference in the course of the war. If this had come earlier, we would not today have to suffer any of the evils that now afflict us in these decadent societies produced by failed states: racial mixing, capitalism, cultural Marxism, replacement genocide, rampant crime in our streets, low birthrates, endangered pensions, parasitic panderers and castes . . .

It is in our hands to learn from History and not repeat the same mistake that caused us to lose the most vital war for our survival as a Race. This lesson must not be forgotten if we want to succeed in the next — and last — opportunity we will have to free ourselves.

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Notes

[1] [21] Already in 1927, six years before the NSDAP came to power, the very Nordicist Rosenberg made public his thesis that an alliance between Germany and Ukraine was essential for the foreign policy of the future National Socialist State. On May 9, 1941, before the outbreak of war against the Soviet Union, he presented his General Plan for the East, which envisaged the creation of a Ukrainian state allied with Germany. Given this background, Rosenberg, Head of the Foreign Policy Office, was appointed Minister for the Occupied Territories in the East.

[2] [22] In April 1943, Himmler authorized the first SS division of Ukrainian origin (as well as many other units derived from several other Soviet nationalities), and in the summer of 1944 two more SS divisions of Russian volunteers were created.

[3] [23] As Reichskommisar of Ukraine, he even forbade volunteers from eastern Ukraine to join the aforementioned 1st Ukrainian Division. It seems quite significant that Erich Koch was well-treated in the post-war period by the Communist authorities, spending a relatively comfortable stay in a Polish prison without ever being extradited to the USSR or tried for any crime in Ukraine.

[4] [24] If there is something that makes Communism different from other ideologies, it is that its favorite victims are its own citizens, who are killed in greater numbers at the hands of the repressive apparatus of the state itself than in military conflicts against other countries.

[5] [25] Compare this number, for the purposes of measuring the figure’s magnitude, with the almost 50,000 soldiers that Spain, which had an Axis-friendly fascist government, contributed in its famous Blue Division, for example.

[6] [26] This was immediately after the hardest years of the massive Stalinist purges and the ruthless persecution of the Church; however, a great number of useful fools still proliferated in it who participated in the deception, such as Metropolitan Sergei, who supported the Soviet war aims and incited anti-German sentiments.

[7] [27] Nevsky was a Prince (Marxist classism was set aside) and a saint of the Orthodox Church (atheism was set aside), but what counted for the Soviets was that he had fought and defeated the Germanic Teutonic Knights.

[8] [28] See The Icebreaker by Viktor Suvorov, who was a former Soviet military intelligence officer.

[9] [29] Instead of making anachronistic accusations against the Germans, it is worth remembering that this was a time when almost everyone, everywhere, was an expansionist or imperialist. In the 1940s, the so-called Western democracies possessed huge colonial empires, and some had even made use of concentration camps (which were originally invented by Great Britain to imprison Boers in South Africa). The Soviet Union, for its part, retained control over the nationalities that had already been subjugated by the Russian Empire, as well as many others that it had seized since the fall of the Tsar.

[10] [30] Winston Churchill would use the same tactic to inflame the British people, who were not enough enthusiastic about fighting a war “for Poland,” a country that he would hand over to the Soviet Union at the end of the war, anyway. What he did was to initiate a campaign of massive aerial terrorism against residential neighborhoods, hoping thereby to elicit a similar German response, which would in turn enrage the British people.

[11] [31] The leader of the Russian Liberation Army himself, the highly decorated General Andrei Vlasov, had been the first to defeat the Germans in a battle, specifically the Battle of Moscow.

[12] [32] It is true that Stalin placed large masses of Soviet troops who had been German prisoners of war in the Gulags, since they had been given the order to resist to the death at all costs; thus, to be captured was “treason.” Still, no one could have foreseen such a crime.

[13] [33] According to the calculations of the Minister of Agriculture, Herbert Backe. In addition, there were six million Soviet citizens working in Germany for the war industry.

[14] [34] See Eurofascism by Erik Norling.