Document DvXNzeJ9aovogEy5MXrdz9Z25

PROLOGUE <*> At 3:30 a.m. on the morning of June 22,1941, German armed forces invaded the Soviet Union along a two-thousand-mile front, begin ning the largest and deadliest military campaign in history. Within a matter of weeks, more than a million Soviet men, women, and children would be killed. The campaign would eventually stall, Napoleon-like, in the bitter winter outside Stalingrad, but not be fore many millions more had died. Hitler had been rather jittery in the weeks leading up to opera tion Barbarossa. In his diary entry for the morning of the invasion, Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich's minister of popular enlighten ment and propaganda, wrote that only after the invasion had begun would the Fiihrer again become calm, as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. Goebbels was very close to Hitler, delighting in the precious hours he spent "eye to eye" with the man he called "a genius" and "the greatest commander of all time." The propaganda minister stayed up late with his beloved Fiihrer that predawn morning, pacing back and forth for hours in the huge salon of the Reichskanzlei. What did these two men talk about, only hours before the begin ning of the operation designed to reduce Slavs to slaves and to acquire Lebensraum for Germans in the depopulated East? Goebbels's diary reveals that the two men worked on Hitler's speech announcing the invasion and debated also the precise timing of its broadcast (final decision: 5:30 a.m. that morning). Both lamented the treachery of Rudolf Hess, the Fiihrer's former deputy and suc cessor, who only weeks before had parachuted into England to try to bargain a separate peace with Churchill. Both men marveled at the historic magnitude of the imminent invasion, the explosive surge that would redraw the map of Europe and extirpate the "cancerous tumor" of communism.1