In Germany and Western Europe the Rote Kapelle - Red Orchestra (the code name given by the Abwehr) - the German counter espionage organisation to the largest Soviet spy ring and resistance organisation, had been providing information to the USSR from 1938. However, in the spirit of the Russo-German Pact, Stalin had stood it down in 1939. It was reactivated following the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 and by 1942 had some 100 radio transmitters forwarding information to the USSR.
The driving force behind the Rote Kapelle was Leopold Trepper, a Polish Jew who based himself in Belgium and made contact with dissident Germans. The most important of these were Harro Schulze-Boysen, grandson of Admiral von Tirpitz, and Arvid Harnack, nephew of a celebrated theologian, whose wife Mildred was American.
In the Far East a brilliant but eccentric Communist agent Richard Sorge had from February 1941 been warning the Russians that the attack was in the offing.
Among the other indicators of an impending attack on the ground was the Otto-Programme or Otto Programme, "Otto" standing for Ost or East. It was the code name for the development between October 1,1940 and May 10, 1941 of road and rail links through Eastern Europe to the borders of the USSR in preparation for Unternehmen Barbarossa.
In 1941 the German troop strengths began to change on the Soviet German border. In early March 1941 there were 34 divisions, by April 23 this figure had risen to 59 and finally by June 5 there were 100 divisions in the East.
On June 21 a young German Communist named Korpik slipped away from his unit's concentration area in Poland and crossed the border into the USSR in order to warn them of the impending attack. Writing of the incident after the war, Nikita Kruschev, the then leader of the USSR, reported that on Stalin's orders Korpik was shot as an agent provocateur.
On June 13 the Soviet authorities in the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, sovereign countries that had been occupied by the USSR in October 1939, arrested 50,000 potential enemies who might assist the Germans. Two days later German higher formation commanders were told the date and time of the impending attack on the USSR and armoured formations began to move up under cover of the short summer night.
On June 17, Finland began a secret mobilization. The Finns had been cultivated as potential allies by the Germans since 1940 and had agreed to seal off the northern Soviet port of Murmansk and to attack in the south east in the Lake Ladoga area near Leningrad. They were keen to reclaim the land lost to the USSR at the end of the Winter War.
On June 19 deserters from the German forces had filtered across the border and warned the Soviet forces of the impending attack. Like Korpik they were ignored, however black-outs were ordered for the major cities and towns near the border.
The Axis forces appeared formidable -weapons and equipment had been tested in battle and the men were veterans of three years of combat. They were, however, attacking an enemy of who they knew very little and across terrain that was unfamiliar.
For young men who had grown up in the close country of Western Europe or the city streets of the Ruhr, Hamburg or Berlin, the open plains of the steppe and distant unattainable horizons would become oppressive.
The USSR was 46 times bigger than Germany in its 1938 borders - it also had a population of 190,000,000 of whom 16,000,000 were men of military age. If it could buy time, the weight of these numbers would begin to take effect. Though the tanks would be the cutting edge of the attacks, supported by Panzergrenadiers in SdKfz 251 half tracks, the bulk of German forces would advance at the same speed as Napoleon's Grande Armee when it entered Russia in 1812. Men marched and were backed up by horse-drawn wagons, guns and field kitchens - the German Army deployed 750,000 horses for the attack on the Soviet Union. Of the 153 divisions in Barbarossa, 119 still contained horse-drawn vehicles.
Blitzkrieg Russia 1941-1942 -Will Fowler
Many observers have written about the slow, inexorable depression that the leaders in Berlin plunged into as the Russo-Soviet war progressed, but there were many men in more humble circumstances who were also deeply concerned at the loss of so many future fathers, future leaders of their country. One of these was a padre serving in a German mountain unit who had fought alongside his men throughout the long years of the war. Let his words of worry and concern be the epitaph to this war on the Eastern Front. He wrote these words in the autumn of 1941, shortly after the battle of Uman and only 4 months after the start of the war:
“Today I buried some more of my former parishioners who have died in this frightful land. Three more letters to write to add to the total of those which I have written already in this war. The deleted names of the fallen are now more numerous in my pocket diary than the names of the living. My parish is bleeding to death on the plains of this country. We shall all die out here.”
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