The War in Ukraine: Phase Two
On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany launched its surprise attack against the USSR. As the two totalitarian systems clashed, a struggle of titanic proportions and unprecedented brutality commenced.
Along a 2000-mile front, stretching from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, over 3 million German and allied troops stormed Soviet forces numbering over 2 million men. Because of Stalin’s great faith in Hitler’s commitment to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Soviets had disregarded numerous warning signals of the onslaught and were, consequently, caught completely off guard. Moreover, Stalin’s generals committed the strategic blunder of stationing too many troops too close to the border. This allowed swift-moving German tank columns to encircle and destroy them in huge pincer movements. As the Soviets suffered one disastrous defeat after another, as panic enveloped the Soviet leadership, including Stalin himself, and as chaos reigned in the government, it appeared that the collapse of the Soviet Union was imminent.The largest part of the invading force, the German army group South led by Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt, was assigned to Ukraine. And it was in Ukraine that the Germans scored some of their most impressive early successes, the largest of which was the destruction of a huge Soviet force around Kiev in September 1941 and the capture of over 650,000 prisoners. As a result, about four months after launching their invasion, the Germans occupied almost all of Ukraine. By December 1941 they controlled about 80 million people, or 42% of the Soviet Union’s population, and a large part of its economic facilities. They took 3.8 million Soviet military prisoners (of whom an estimated 1.3 million were Ukrainians). The relative ease with which these men were captured was an indication of the indifferent attitude many Red Army men had about fighting in defense of the Soviet system.
Lack of support for the Soviets was even more pronounced among Ukraine’s civilian population. In Western Ukraine, where Soviet rule was especially unpopular, Germans were often welcomed as liberators. In Eastern Ukraine the general reaction to the Germans was more guarded, but the feeling was widespread that their coming would lead to improvements over the Stalinist regime. Hence, the frequent photographs that appeared in the German press of cheerful Ukrainians greeting the arriving Germans with the traditional bread and salt.
The Soviets’ hurried retreat had tragic consequences for thousands of political prisoners in the jails of Western Ukraine. Unable to evacuate them in time, the NKVD slaughtered their prisoners en masse during the week of 22–29 June 1941, regardless of whether they were incarcerated for major or minor offenses. Major massacres occurred in Lviv, Sambir, and Stanyslaviv in Galicia, where about 10,000 prisoners died, and in Rivne and Lutsk in Volhynia, where another 5000 perished. Coming on the heels of the mass deportations and growing Soviet terror, these executions added greatly to the West Ukrainians’ abhorrence of the Soviets.
Overcoming their initial disarray, the Soviet authorities began to organize a more orderly retreat. In traditional Russian fashion, they instituted a “scorched earth” policy, which, in Stalin’s words, called for making “life in the rear of the enemy unbearable.” As a result, all economic enterprises that might be useful to the Germans were marked for destruction. Kiev, for example, suffered more damage from the retreating Soviets, who blew up many of its major buildings, than from the advancing Germans. In the Donbas, most of the mines were flooded and the huge Dnieper hydroelectric works, as well as all the fifty-four blast furnaces in Ukraine, were destroyed by the Soviets.
A remarkable feature of the Soviet retreat was the massive evacuation of munitions plants, skilled labor, and important intellectuals beyond the Urals and to Soviet Central Asia.
In what was perhaps the largest evacuation in history, the Soviets moved about 1500 factories and over 10 million people – more than a third of these from Ukraine – beyond the grasp of the Germans. Ufa, the capital of the Soviet Bashkir republic situated in the Urals, became the wartime seat of the Ukrainian Soviet government. This massive transfer of industrial enterprises and population contributed greatly to the Soviet ability to continue the war.Particularly active during the course of the evacuation was the NKVD. Suspecting all those who sought to avoid resettlement of disloyalty to the Soviet state, it arrested and executed large numbers of people. Jailed prisoners with sentences over three years were shot so as not to leave behind any anti-Soviet elements who might be of potential use to the Germans. Also, many NKVD agents were left behind to infiltrate the German administrative apparatus, especially the police, and to observe the behavior of those who had not been evacuated.
Map 24 The German invasion of 1941