Chris Culpin
How popular was
Hitler?
Chris Culpin examines the ‘cult of the leader’ that
surrounded Hitler and asks why he became so revered,
and why his popularity finally waned
AQA AS Totalitarian
ideology in theory and
practice, c.1848–c.1941
AQA AS Life in Nazi
Germany 1933–45
Edexcel AS From Second
Reich to Third Reich:
Germany, 1918–45
Edexcel A2 From Kaiser
to Führer: Germany,
1900–1945
OCR (A) AS Democracy
and dictatorship in
Germany 1919–63
OCR (A) AS
Dictatorship and
democracy in Germany
1933–63
OCR (A) A2 Nazi
Germany 1933–45
2
20thCHR 8i3 print.indd 2
Argument
Man-made pseudo-hero
Hitler’s life went through different stages: unlikeable
individual in early life, headline-grabbing fanatic
in the 1920s, and propagandised great hero-leader
(Führer) who ultimately failed to fulfil his promises
and was scorned 1930–45.
T
here are problems in trying to give a straight
answer to the question in the title of this article.
When are we talking about, for example? For
the first 30-odd years of his life Adolf Hitler was
not liked by his family, his school, or his pre-war
Vienna acquaintances. Then in the last 30 months
of his life he was (covertly) scorned by the German
people who, recognising at last that they had been
lied to, blamed him for the disaster they knew was
about to overwhelm them.
Yet we have seen the photos of Hitler’s popularity at
its peak in the 1930s: the crowds of smiling admirers
surrounding him while he awkwardly embraces little
fair-haired children. It is easy to dismiss such images
Enquiring history: it makes
you think!
Chris Culpin and Steven J.
Mastin’s new book Nazi
Germany 1933–45 is being
published by Hodder
Education in the Enquiring
History series. It will be
available in September
2013 as both paperback
and e-book (www.
hoddereducation.co.uk).
The Enquiring History series helps you with the most
difficult part of history — thinking through the issues.
Examiners report that A-level history candidates often
let themselves down because they know a lot but they
don’t think hard enough about the question. Deeper
thinking = improved understanding = better grades.
20th Century History Review
20/12/2012 17:17
The sources for what the German
people really thought pose problems
for the historian. There are the reports
from government, police, party and
Sicherheitsdienst (SD) security services.
These were confidential, and did not
hide criticisms, but people knew
what trouble they could get into by
commenting unfavourably on the
Nazi government, and particularly
on Hitler himself.
There are, on the other hand, the
reports sent secretly from Germany
to the Social Democrat Party (SPD,
or SoPaDe) abroad. Naturally they
were eager to latch on to any antiNazi murmurings. We are limited,
as historian Ian Kershaw says in The
Hitler Myth: ‘However imperfect,
the historian’s judgement, based
on patient source criticism…and a
readiness to read between the lines,
must suffice’.
Hitler’s emergence as the adored leader
was slow. If the Beer-Hall Putsch had succeeded,
the war hero Lüdendorff would have taken power.
Already, though, Hitler’s charisma as a speaker had
begun to work. Not only the dim and mentally
unstable Hess, but also Himmler, Rosenberg, Göring,
Streicher and Goebbels all devoted themselves to
him from 1922/23 onwards. Goebbels wrote in his
diary in 1925: ‘Adolf Hitler, I love you because you
are both great and simple at the same time. What
one calls a genius’.
Early converts to Nazism describe hearing Hitler
for the first time as being like a religious conversion:
‘There was only one thing for me, either to win with
Adolf Hitler or to die with him. The personality of
the Führer had me totally in its spell’. The cult of
leadership started at this time: the title of Führer, the
personal bodyguard known as the Schutzstaffel (SS)
and the salute, compulsory from 1926.
By the end of the ‘quiet years’, 1925–31, Hitler’s
leadership of the Nazi Party was secure. To most
Germans, however, he was a strange and irrelevant
fanatic, with floppy hair and a funny moustache.
The presidential election of 1932, his appointment as
chancellor in January 1933 and particularly Hitler’s
20thCHR 8i3 print.indd 3
• What problems are there in deciding if Hitler was
genuinely popular?
• Was there a difference between Hitlerism and
Nazism?
What did people really
think?
The cult of the leader
February 2013
Questions
• How far was the cult of the Führer a religious
movement?
March 1933 election victory, gave Goebbels his
opportunity. Hitler was projected as the man of the
people who had come to the fore to solve his nation’s
problems. Regular, massive and well-reported rallies
and commemorative celebrations meant that the cult
of Hitler now went outside the party to the whole
nation.
The role of propaganda
Even from 1933, and every year after that, Hitler’s
birthday on 20 April was a signal for outpourings
of enthusiasm. Every town had bunting across the
streets, shop window displays and processions,
while posters, magazine articles, newsreels and films
repeated the images. The greeting ‘Heil Hitler!’ was
used on all official correspondence from July 1933.
A lot of this was, of course, mere propaganda.
But the cult of the leader was only built on by the
propaganda, not created by it. From long before Hitler
was born, German culture had celebrated the myth
of the hero-leader, arising from the people, selfsacrificing for the rescue of the nation. Hitler played
up to this, with an austere lifestyle, unmarried, being
careful never to be photographed wearing glasses.
He was portrayed as always kind to children and
animals, and respectful of the elderly. Hitler told an
audience in 1937:
‘
It is a miraculous thing that, here in our country,
an unknown man was able to step forth from
the army of millions of German people, German
workers and soldiers, to stand at the fore of the
Reich and the nation.
TopFoto
Ingram
as propaganda — photo opportunities,
as we would say now, set up by the first
great master of modern propaganda,
Josef Goebbels. How can we tell how
genuine these images are?
’
Beer-Hall Putsch In
November 1923, this was
Hitler’s first attempt
to overthrow the
Weimar government
in order to establish a
right-wing nationalistic
government.
Lüdendorff A German
general who became a
prominent nationalist
leader after the First
World War.
Rosenberg An Estonian
supporter of the White
Russian opposition to the
Bolsheviks in 1918, he
escaped to France, then
Germany, where he
joined the NSDAP (Nazis).
Streicher Julius Streicher
was a prominent
Nazi who, through
his newspaper Der
Stürmer, promoted Nazi
propaganda and antiSemitism.
Children congratulating
Hitler on his birthday
in 1936
3
20/12/2012 17:17
There are a lot of misleading websites that
investigate Hitler’s sanity — be cautious about
believing or quoting these. A more reliable site is
the Encyclopaedia of World Biography, where a brief
history of Hitler can be found at: www.encyclopedia.
com/topic/Adolf_Hitler.aspx.
Another useful Hitler site is: www.tinyurl.com/ck9t4rw.
Also of interest is a contemporary ‘Profile of History’
recently published in the Daily Telegraph at: www.
tinyurl.com/cqfmnkf
Hindenburg A Prussian
German field marshal
who became a statesman
and politician. He served
as president of Germany
from 1925 to 1934.
Berchtesgaden Hitler’s
mountain-top home
in the Bavarian alps,
sometimes referred to as
‘the eagle’s nest’.
Sudeten Germans Ethnic
German people who
inhabited Czech land
bordering Germany.
Hitler sought to
unite all Germans in
one homeland and
demanded that the
Czechs should cede the
Sudetenland to him.
Hero-leaders from the past, Bismarck and Frederick
the Great, were recalled and compared. The death
of Hindenburg in 1934 and Hitler’s assumption of
the role of president as well as chancellor brought
the telling slogan ‘Hitler for Germany, the whole of
Germany for Hitler’.
Popular enthusiasm
The laughing, cheering crowds to be seen on
newsreels at the opening of autobahns (German
motorways), the masses of ‘pilgrims’ in the roads
around Berchtesgaden hoping to catch a glimpse of
their Führer, the eager recruits to Nazi organisations
— all seem to have been genuinely enthusiastic. His
appearance anywhere was an emotional experience.
His arrival in Hamburg — a city where the Nazis had
never done well in free elections — was recorded by
Hamburg school-teacher and diarist Luise Solmitz: ‘I
shall never forget the moment when he drove past us
in his brown uniform, performing the Hitler salute
in his own personal way…. The enthusiasm [of the
crowd] blazed up to the heavens.’
Hitler’s genuine popularity in the years from
1933 was enhanced by what many Germans saw
as real achievements. The restoration of national
pride through the rearmament programme
TopFoto
Hitler at the opening of the autobahn connecting
Frankfurt and Darmstadt, 1935
and the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936
brought widespread approval. So did the decline in
unemployment. The actions of the Gestapo in ‘dealing
with’ drunks, social nuisances and outcasts, regular
criminals and those seen as workshy, met with quiet
agreement.
Traditional religion played a large part in the life of
many Germans. While most Roman Catholics never
really embraced Nazism, Protestant clergy gladly
took up the message. German Protestant churches
had always seen themselves as bastions of the nation
and swastikas were soon seen in many churches.
The cult of Hitler had a semi-religious aspect, which
Hitler was not above using. In 1936 he told Nazis:
‘Once you heard the voice of a man, and that voice
knocked at your hearts, it wakened you and you
followed that voice.’
Scandals committed by Nazi Party
members
Throughout the Nazi period many Germans
distinguished between members of the Nazi Party,
together with the actions of Nazi government, and
the leader. Several local Nazi Party officials abused
their powers, enriched themselves, drove big cars
and commandeered desirable homes from their
former Jewish owners. They were to be seen eating
and drinking in expensive restaurants while the
standard of living of most Germans was static and
many foodstuffs, from 1937, were rationed.
Yet Hitler remained untainted by these scandals.
Most Germans took the view that ‘if Hitler had
known’ he would not have allowed these abuses. Even
the brutal gangster-style murders of the Night of the
Long Knives of June 1934 did Hitler’s popularity no
damage. At least 85 people were killed without trial,
12 of them Reichstag deputies. Yet this was seen as
a necessary ‘cleansing’ of unruly, drunken, corrupt,
sexually deviant elements.
As Hitler’s policies led inexorably towards war,
Germans began to have their doubts. Hitler came
in for considerable disapproval during the 1938
Sudeten crisis. ‘Not a man should be sacrificed for
the Sudeten Germans’ was a widely expressed view.
Hitler was annoyed and impatient at the results of the
September 1938 Munich peace agreement, but most
Germans welcomed it, and British prime minster
Neville Chamberlain received favourable publicity.
War with Poland in September 1939 began the high
point of Hitler’s popularity. The victory was so fast,
so cheap, that it seemed churlish not to celebrate.
The US reporter William Shirer noted:
Peter Newark’s Military Pictures
Weblinks
‘
4
20thCHR 8i3 print.indd 4
I still have to find a German, even among those
who do not like the regime, who sees anything
wrong in the German destruction of Poland….
As long as the Germans are successful and do
not have to pull in their belts too much, this will
not be an unpopular war.
’
20th Century History Review
20/12/2012 17:17
TopFoto
The extraordinary blitzkrieg victories in western
Europe in 1940 brought fresh accolades. Added to
all his other supposed qualities, Hitler was now a
military genius as well.
Hitler’s popularity disappears
Stalingrad was the turning-point, not just of Germany’s
war fortunes, but of Hitler’s personal popularity. A
great leader has to be invincible: charisma is fatally
undermined by failure. As the war dragged on, the
Nazis imposed ever heavier demands on the German
Further reading
Evans, R. J. (2003) The Coming of the Third Reich,
Penguin.
Evans, R. J. (2005) The Third Reich in Power, Penguin.
Evans, R. J. (2008) The Third Reich at War, Penguin.
Gellately, R. (2002) Backing Hitler, Oxford University
Press.
Kershaw, I. (1987) The Hitler Myth, Oxford University
Press.
Hamburg, Germany, after it was bombed in the
Second World War — Hitler never visited
bombed cities
people. From 1942 Allied bombing raids caused
enormous civilian casualties, but also disruption,
homelessness and continual strain.
Hitler never visited bombed cities. Families had
to face terrible uncertainty over the fate of members
fighting on the Eastern Front. Half of all German
casualties occurred in the last 18 months of the war.
People made sour jokes about when the war would
end: ‘The war will end when Goebbels’ trousers fit
Göring’. Even SD reports tell of a frightened people,
unmoved by Hitler’s speeches now, mocking the
desperate loyalty of fanatical Nazis. Party members
stopped wearing their uniforms in the street. The
Hitler salute fell out of use. The power of the Hitler
myth no longer worked.
20thCenturyHistoryReviewOnline
Go online for a revision activity to
accompany this article.
Shirer, W. (1941) Berlin Diary, Alfred A. Knopf.
Vaizey, H. (2010) Surviving Hitler’s War, Palgrave
MacMillan.
Ask your teacher if your school subscribes to the
20thCenturyHistoryReviewOnline archive, where you
will find further information on Göring, Goebbels,
Hess and Himmler, and their roles within the Nazi
Party — ‘The rise and fall of Hitler’s henchmen’,
Vol. 7, No. 1, pp.16–17.
February 2013
20thCHR 8i3 print.indd 5
Chris Culpin helped to write the 2008 National
Curriculum for history and was director of the
Schools History Project for 11 years. He was
education consultant to BBC Schools TV for many
years and is a fellow of the Historical Association
and winner of the HA Norton Medlicott Medal
in 2007. He has written a number of groundbreaking history textbooks.
5
20/12/2012 17:17
The Western Front during th
The British Army’s pe
Stalemate and tren
Race for
the sea
(November 1914–
August 1918)
(September–
November
1914)
Peter Newark’s Pictures
After the German attempt
to take Paris quickly failed,
the two sides focused upon
securing control of Channel
and North Sea ports.
British commander-in-chief: Field Marshal Sir John French
1915
Deployment of the British
Expeditionary Force (BEF)
(August–September 1914)
Britain declared war on Germany
on 4 August 1914 and rapidly
deployed the BEF, battle-ready
sections of the British Army, to
France.
Peter Newark’s MiLitarY Pictures
the British expeditionary Force
embarking on a troopship to
France, august 1914
16
20thCHR 8i1 print.indd 16
1916
The ‘miracle on the Marne’
(September 1914)
Battle of Loos
(September–October 1915)
Following a month of German
military successes, the French
and British armies succeeded
in halting the German advance
towards Paris during the first
Battle of the Marne.
A costly British assault on the
Germans. Failure to achieve a clear
victory at Loos undermined support
for the leadership of Sir John French.
Loos was also notable as the first
place the British used poison gas.
Battle of the Somme
(July–November 1916)
Haig ordered a huge strike against the
German Army near the River Somme.
The battle was preceded by a weeklong bombardment. The depth and
strength of the German trenches meant
that the bombardment was ineffective.
While there was no decisive British
victory, ultimately the BEF gained
control of the area. The battle was the
largest in British military history and the
first day alone cost the British and its
allies 57,000 casualties.
20th Century History Review
01/08/2012 16:14
g the First World War
Barbara Warnock
y’s perspective
The two sides formed a line of
trenches across northwestern
Belgium and northeastern France.
Stalemate developed as the front
line remained fairly static.
Hundred
Days
Offensive
(August–
November
1918)
Peter Newark’s MiLitarY Pictures
and trench warfare
British commander-in-chief: Field Marshal Douglas Haig
1917
1918
Battle of Amiens
(August 1918)
Third Ypres (Passchendaele)
(July–November 1917)
The British forces, whose tactics and
weaponry were by this stage highly
effective, played a decisive role. By
2 October the German defences on the
Hindenburg Line had been breached.
The British aimed to remove the
Germans from the position they
held overlooking the Belgian
town of Ypres. Poor weather
reduced the battlefield to a
muddy swamp. Britain and its
allies eventually succeeded in
capturing Passchendaele, at the
cost of 200,000 men.
Spring Offensive
(March–July 1918)
20thCenturyHistoryReviewOnline
Go online for a printable
PDF of this centre spread.
September 2012
20thCHR 8i1 print.indd 17
iNGraM
Germany launched a final
attempt to win on the Western
Front with a series of attacks.
However, German forces and
resources were exhausted.
the British front in Flanders, 1917
17
01/08/2012 16:14
Richard Overy
The Great
Patriotic War
AQA A2 Triumph and
collapse: Russia and the
USSR, 1941–1991
Edexcel [AQ: AS or A2?]
Stalin’s Russia 1924–53
TopFoto
OCR (A) A2 Russia and
its rulers 1855–1964
Richard Overy analyses how and why Russia was successful
in avoiding being taken over by the Nazis in the early 1940s
AQA A2 Triumph and
collapse: Russia and the
USSR, 1941–1991
Edexcel AS Stalin’s
Russia 1924–53
OCR (A) A2 Russia and
its rulers 1855–1964
Argument
Turn tables, win war
Although Stalin did not at first believe that Hitler had
invaded the Soviet Union, he and his apparatchiks
rallied the Soviet people to save the country from the
Nazis. The ‘Great Patriotic War’ became a mammoth
military and industrial exercise to marshal all forces to
defend the homeland.
A
Teutonic Knights Similar
to the Knights Templar,
these were German
knights, formerly
crusaders, who turned to
the defence of Catholic
Christianity, as they saw
it, in northern Europe.
22
20thCHR 8i4 print.indd 22
mong all the 70-year anniversaries being
marked during 2012–13, the anniversary of
the Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from
August 1942 to the end of January 1943, is among
the most significant. The battle came at the mid-point
of a titanic struggle between the German and Soviet
armed forces, which began on 22 June 1941 when
almost 4 million Axis troops mounted the largest
invasion in history against the Soviet Union and its
Communist society.
Stalin and his government decided to call Soviet
resistance ‘the Great Patriotic War’ to make it clear
that this was not just a war to save communism
from defeat and extinction, but a war of the Russian
people against a cruel invader. Soviet propaganda
played down the defence of the Communist system
and highlighted the heroic victories of the Russian
past, won first against the Teutonic Knights in the
thirteenth century, then against Napoleon and his
Grand Army in 1812. The Soviet population was
roused to fight for the defence of the motherland,
though there were many who also fought to defend
the revolutionary achievement, a factor that is often
overlooked.
The Soviet Union facing defeat
The war looked from the outset to be a disaster for
the Soviet state. German armies pushed forward on
all fronts, encircling large numbers of Soviet soldiers
and destroying almost all the tanks and aircraft
mustered by the Red Army on the western frontier.
By September Leningrad was under siege, Kiev, the
capital of Ukraine, was captured and German forces
had overrun the most fertile and industrially rich
areas of the Soviet Union. Soviet steel production
sank to a mere 8 million tons against a German steel
output of 29 million. The only resource the Soviet
Union had in abundance was oil, and it was this
20th Century History Review
26/02/2013 16:21
White
Sea
L. Onega
L. Ladoga
Leningrad
Baltic Sea
Operation Bagration
In June 1944, as the
Western Allies were
struggling to defeat
German armies after
D-Day, the Red Army
launched a vast
operation across
Belorussia against a
large concentration of
German armies.
German and Axis forces
June–September 1941
German and Axis forces
October–December 1941
Front line, December 1941
Oilfields
FINLAND
0
km
500
Ural
Mountains
Riga
Army
Group
E A S T North
PRUSSIA
Minsk
Army
Group
Centre
Smolensk
Dn
on
D
es
Kharkov
UKRAINE
ROMANIA
CRIMEA
BULGARIA
R. D
on
e
Stalingrad
tz
ter
Carpathian
Mountains
Kursk
Kiev
R. D
N
USSR
R.
Army
Group
South
Moscow
ieper
20thCHR 8i4 print.indd 23
Soviet success owed a great deal to the way the
economic war effort was organised. At first much
had to be improvised as threatened industrial plant
was evacuated to safer sites in the Urals or Siberia.
In the second half of 1941, 2,600 enterprises were
bodily moved eastwards along with 25 million
workers and their families — an achievement the
German side had never imagined possible. Once
the industry was moved, Stalin established regular
committee meetings, almost every day of the war,
at which production problems were identified and
measures taken to cope with them.
Soviet planning for the Five-Year Plans in the
1930s had created a familiarity with a regime of
planning targets and overfulfilment, and this culture
was adopted during the war. Weapons were massproduced in huge factory halls. There were not many
types of tank or aircraft, so that long production runs
were possible. By the end of 1942 the Soviet Union,
Kursk From 5 to 13 July
1943 a major battle
was fought around the
Russian city of Kursk, in
which for the first time
in good summer weather
the Red Army withstood
the German attack and
then mounted a massive
counteroffensive that
drove the Germans back.
R.
April 2013
The economic war effort
ni
In 1942 Hitler decided that Russian oil was the most
important target. Axis forces ruled over one-third of
the Soviet Union, but to defeat what was left of the
Soviet military and to complete the German plan
(known as ‘General Plan East’) to build a permanent
empire in the east it was regarded as essential to seize
the oil. It was also necessary to cut the Red Army off
from its fuel supply and destroy it in one final great
encirclement around Moscow. This was an ambitious
plan but the German leadership was confident that
in good summer campaigning weather, against an
enemy that it consistently underestimated, victory
was still possible.
The strategy proved in the end to be a gamble.
German and Axis forces reached as far as Stalingrad
and the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, but
could get no further. Facing stiffening Red Army
resistance and at the end of long and vulnerable
supply lines, the German offensive ground to a halt.
In Stalingrad the Red Army faced its hardest test. Two
armies, the 62nd and 64th, held back the German
Sixth Army in the ruins of the city for long enough
to enable General Georgii Zhukov, Stalin’s deputy
supreme commander, to plan a counter-stroke.
Operation Uranus, which opened on 19 November
1942, was a complete success. The long German line
to Stalingrad was cut and the Sixth Army encircled.
On 31 January Field Marshal Paulus surrendered.
The Soviet forces went on to win historic victories at
Kursk in July 1943, at Kiev in November 1943 and in
summer 1944 Operation Bagration, which destroyed
the German Army Group Centre in Belorussia, the
powerful core of the invading armies.
It has only been possible with the opening of archives
since 1990 for historians to explain more fully how
this remarkable Soviet revival became possible.
lg a
The road to Stalingrad
Explaining Soviet victory
R. V
o
that drove Hitler to divert his forces southwards in
September 1941 across the Ukraine, instead of seizing
Moscow, as his generals wanted.
The result was that neither Hitler nor the military
leadership got what they wanted. The German Army
was hundreds of kilometres from the oil when Hitler
changed his mind and ordered the seizure of Moscow.
By the late autumn, however, the weather threatened
to make it impossible to capture Moscow before
German forces froze and their supply lines closed up.
Somehow the Red Army found the reserves and
the stamina to defend Moscow. Stalin sent the rest
of the government and Communist Party leadership
to safety in the city of Kuibyshev, further to the east,
but on 18 October, with German forces converging
on the capital, he made a historic decision to stay in
Moscow and face the risks. Although historians are
generally dismissive of Stalin’s strategic capability
during the war, the psychological impact of staying
put to defend Moscow played an important part in
restoring Soviet confidence. In December 1941 the
German thrust failed and a second year of war became
inevitable (Figure 1).
Sea of
Azov
Rostov
Caspian
Sea
Black Sea
Caucasus
Mountains
TURKEY
Figure 1Map showing the positions of German forces at the end of 1941, and
places mentioned in the article
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26/02/2013 16:21
Table 1 Soviet and German war production: a comparison
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
25,436
34,900
40,300
20,900
Aircraft
USSR
15,735
Germany
11,776
15,409
28,807
39,807
7,540
Tanks
USSR
6,590
24,446
24,089
28,963
15,400
Germany
5,200
9,300
19,800
27,300
—
USSR
17.9
8.1
8.5
10.9
12.1
Germany
28.2
28.7
30.6
25.8
—
USSR
33.0
22.0
18.0
18.2
19.4
5.7
6.6
7.6
5.5
1.3
Steel (million tons)
Oil (million tons)
Germany
Cheliabinsk The
Urals city, nicknamed
‘Tankograd’, where a
large proportion of
Soviet production of the
famous T-34 tank was
based. Out of range of
German aircraft, tanks
could be produced
without interruption.
with a fraction of its steel, was producing more
weapons of every kind than the Germans (Table 1).
Soviet attitudes
The second factor was the attitude of the Soviet
population. It has often been argued that the system
kept fighting only because the Soviet security system,
based on the Interior Ministry (NKVD), forced
workers to work and soldiers to fight.
• Why did the Soviet regime call the war against
Germany the ‘Great Patriotic War’?
• What factors best explain the ability of the Soviet
Union to defeat Hitler’s Germany?
Workers were expected to work in sub-zero
temperatures, sometimes in factories with no proper
roofing or heating, but somehow they kept going.
One 15-year-old girl in Cheliabinsk, the famous
‘Tank City’ in the Urals, was forced to work without
protective clothing in a room in which scraps of hot
metal would hit her legs and feet where she worked.
One day she was too disabled by the injuries to
work, but her foreman came to her home and forced
her back to work her 12-hour day. This was a level
of coercion and sacrifice that no other state had to
endure during the war.
Patriotism
At the same time, though, there was a grim patriotic
enthusiasm for the conflict. Hatred of the German
enemy became central to Soviet propaganda. The poet
Ilya Ehrenburg wrote articles and poems for the Red
Army newspaper encouraging soldiers to kill every
German they found. ‘There is nothing jollier’, he
wrote, ‘than German corpses.’
Not every Soviet soldier became a crazed
killer, but there was a powerful sense
that every Russian had an obligation
to do everything possible to rid
the country of the Fascist
invader. Workers, despite
the hardships, took
pride in turning out
tank after tank.
Peter Newark’s Pictures
Coercion
The reality was much
more complex. It was
a brutal system, and
thousands of soldiers
were shot for desertion or
negligence, or put into penal
battalions that were forced to
clear enemy minefields.
Questions
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26/02/2013 16:21
A
a
Peter Newark’s Military Pictures
Weblinks
http://russiapedia.rt.com/russian-history/
the-great-patriotic-war/ gives unusual and
interesting details linked to the war that expand on
the usual dry ‘who did what to whom and when’
accounts.
At www.un.int/russia/new/azbuka/v/VOV_en.pdf
you can find a Russian version of the war.
An extremely full account of the war written from
Soviet/Russian sources can be found at http://tinyurl.
com/d4pfo7l. It is worth a visit if you want to ‘go the
extra mile’ for a better mark.
Further reading
Evan Mawdsley, E. (2005) Thunder in the East: the
Nazi–Soviet War 1941–1945, Hodder Arnold.
Merridale, C. (2006) Ivan’s War: the Red Army at War
1941–1945, Faber & Faber.
Overy, R. (1998) Russia’s War, Penguin.
Roberts, G. (2012) Stalin’s General: the Life of Georgy
Zhukov, Icon Books.
Samuelson, L. (2011) Tankograd, Palgrave/Macmillan.
A Soviet war poster from 1942 encouraging people
to ‘Follow this worker’s example, produce more for
the front!’
What they got as their reward was food from the
factory canteens. This was a major incentive to keep
working, since those who could not work got no
rations and had to rely on what their relatives or
friends might give them.
Prowess in battle
Finally, the Soviet armed forces learned quickly how
to fight much better against their German opponent.
The Red Army was adept at camouflage and deception.
The German Army had no idea that over 1 million
men were moved into place for Operation Uranus. The
Soviet generals, encouraged by the talented Zhukov,
also learned how to organise and ‘manage’ large-scale
operations by better communication and planning.
All of this was helped by Anglo-American Lend
Lease aid, which provided thousands of field
telephones and radios, and millions of kilometres
of cable. Most important for Red Army success was
Stalin’s willingness in 1942 to stand back from
running the war and allow his generals to do what
they were trained for. Stalin also agreed that the
Communist Party commissars attached to each
A red flag signals the Soviet Union’s triumph
at the Battle of Stalingrad in January 1943
April 2013
20thCHR 8i4 print.indd 25
military unit should no longer have any command
responsibilities. The reduction in political interference
allowed the armed forces to make the most of the
resources the economy was pouring out.
Counting the cost
The cost for the Soviet people was enormous. Current
estimates suggest 26–27 million dead, two-thirds of
them civilians. These statistics dwarf the losses of
those of the other European powers. Thousands of
towns and villages were destroyed, while the German
Army murdered millions of Soviet Jews as well as
partisans, who fought behind the German lines
against the invader.
Victory in the war was used to give the Stalin
regime greater legitimacy, and victory day (9 May
in the USSR) was celebrated with extraordinary
pageantry every year. Even now, in post-Communist
Russia, there remains a strong historical memory of
Soviet victory even though the system that produced
it has long disappeared.
20thCenturyHistoryReviewOnline
Go online for a revision activity
to accompany this article.
Professor Richard Overy is professor of history at
the University of Exeter and has researched and
published extensively on the history of the Hitler
and Stalin dictatorships, the Second World War,
air power in the twentieth century and German
history from c.1900.
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