BARBAROSSA ( June 22–December 5, 1941) because too much German-occupied land was scorched, wasted, or saw production plummet as policies of unadulterated expropriation stripped peasants of any incentive to plant or harvest What food was available would be mostly consumed by Axis armies of occupation during 1942 and after The effects of the shortfall on local populations would be correspondingly catastrophic It was in the underlying murderous spirit of BARBAROSSA that Hitler’s close toady on the OKW, General Fritz Halder, sent this cable to all German commanders on July 8, 1941: “It is Führer’s firm decision to level Moscow and Leningrad and make them uninhabitable, so as to relieve us of the necessity of having to feed the populations through the winter The cities will be razed by the Luftwaffe Panzers must not be used for the purpose.” Russia most certainly was not France: barbarization of Germany’s war in the east, extermination to accompany conquest, was built-in from the outset Out of four million Soviet soldiers taken captive in the first months of the war, 3.5 million were deliberately starved or allowed to freeze to death over the winter of 1941–1942 Five million Soviet POWs ultimately died of malice and neglect in German camps, victims not of the SS but of the Wehrmacht As with policies of food expropriation, far fewer Russians surrendered once it was understood that captivity meant mistreatment and death That further stiffened resistance to the invasion as ordinary men and women fought to the death, often in extraordinary circumstances Retreating Soviet soldiers salted buildings—especially any potential HQ—with booby traps and time-delayed mines Partisan bands formed to kill German shirkers and stragglers in the most savage ways, just as their forebears once killed freezing Frenchmen German retaliation was swift and brutal: 100 hostages were shot for every German killed by partisans, the semiofficial rate used across Nazi-occupied Europe Many more than that were killed in Belorussia and Ukraine But if villagers failed to kill Germans—whom many peasants initially regarded as liberators from the hated collective farms and other policies of the city-based Bolsheviks—the NKVD found out later and shot them as accused fascists or collaborators, or just “pour encourager l’autres.” The partisan war was waged without quarter from the start Wehrmacht and SS sweeps into forests and swamps killed everyone they found, while partisans tortured and mutilated German boys, often stuffing cut-off genitals in the mouths of the dead or dying From the start of BARBAROSSA then, tens of millions of ordinary people were trapped like barley between the great millstones of the most ruthless tyrannies known to history: National Socialism and Soviet Communism, the Wehrmacht and Red Army, the SS and NKVD, Hitler and Stalin Underlying German disregard for the long-term political and military effects of brutality on the local population was, to paraphrase Talleyrand, worse than a crime: it was a mistake It led the Germans to miss a main chance to persuade nonRussian and anti-Soviet peoples into greater collaboration The error arose ineluctably from the nature of the Nazi regime and from a core falsehood and assumption flowing from the idea of “Vernichtungskrieg,” that the Germans did not need to tap local nationalism to help them win a big war against the Soviet Union That was a fundamental miscalculation: it was always wishful thinking that any German war in the east would be quick and decisive, a “war of annihilation” in both 137