Vignettes from ‘Stalin’s War of Extermination,’ part 1

Introduced and with an Afterword by Wolf Stoner
National Vanguard Russian correspondent

Introduction

THIS YEAR Putin’s Russia intends to celebrate 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory in World War 2 on grand scale. The preparations have already started, months before the event.

The Soviet Union built its identity around the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Civil War — and Soviet participation in World War 2, which they named “the Great Patriotic War.”

After the collapse of the USSR back in 1991, the mythological status of the October Revolution collapsed as well. Instead of a deified event of universal significance, it was relegated to the status of a typical seizure of power amidst social chaos — nothing glorious whatsoever. “Comrade Lenin” has lost his demigod’s halo and has became the butt of many jokes. The 1990s were a period of disillusionment and a sober reassessment of history. The glitzy banners were torn down and the ugly face of the Soviet monster was bared for all to see.

But after a few years the ruling elite started to fear the ongoing disillusionment in society. The collapse of the old System’s false values now threatened the revamped System too. If the whole state structure was based on lies and crimes, then what kind of legitimacy could it claim?

In order to save its shaky authority the post-Soviet Russian state started to reverse the narrative. There was no way to rehabilitate the whole Soviet mythology including Lenin and the October Revolution. Instead, a truncated version was chosen, wherein the Soviet victory in the World War 2 was presented as the most important event in history; the glorious salvation of the world by the Soviet people; something for which all of humanity must be in debt to Russia forever.

In Putin’s Russia a new state/national identity was created. It was the Soviet victory myth on steroids. This fairy-tale version of the Soviet-German conflict was to be used as the state’s main propaganda tool, both inside and outside of Russia.

Its purpose was not only to legitimize the System, but to buttress its revanchist territorial claims to its neighbors. Each time when something was not to the Kremlin’s liking, its mouthpieces started crying about “neo-Nazis” and “disrespect” to “the heroes who saved the world from the evil Germans.”

Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has become the apotheosis of this process. The accompanying propaganda war is based entirely on the newly refurbished Russian myth of WW2. Russia’s 2022 invasion was framed in such a way as to present it as a necessary and just action in order to complete the unfinished job of “annihilating evil Nazis.” And this is the way the majority of the brainwashed Russian populace sees it.

In Russia, the Second World War isn’t history. It is an ever-present event in which everyone must participate; at the very least, one must pay regular obeisance to this myth and its idols. In recent years, this collective insanity has descended to the level of an Aztec-like religious frenzy in which bloodthirsty gods require ample human sacrifices. In some perverted way, the whole war against Ukraine has become a kind of bloody ritual in which incalculable numbers of victims are brought to the crimson altar of this new religion.

In order to understand this awful phenomenon, and to decipher the inner thoughts of the Kremlin’s rulers, and their motives, we need to understand the original event on which this bloody cult is based.

Joachim Hoffmann’s book Stalin’s War of Extermination 1941-45 (Theses and Dissertations Press, 2001) provides an excellent overview of this event. In stark contrast to many mainstream historical studies, this book is not biased in the Soviets’ favor. It shows the Red Army as it was.

It must be noted that this book isn’t a revisionist one. It doesn’t attempt to disprove the accusations leveled at Germany in the Nuremberg show trials. The author presents an historical study of the subject without imposing any ideological interpretation.

Joachim Hoffmann have no intention to exculpate Germany in anything. His task was to approach the Red Army and the Soviet Union with the same measuring stick as was used against Germany.

The especial value of this book now is that it shows the modus operandi of the Soviet war machine; the mindset of Kremlin rulers and the way they intended to use their military. When Putin’s army invaded Ukraine in 2022, it acted according to the same template; with total disregard of any laws or human decency. The whole world was taken aback. It seemed impossible. But if people had better studied the past and paid more attention to such historical studies as this, then, there would have been no surprise. More than this: There would be much less likelihood that such events would be repeated.

The false “holy” status of the Red Army — that was accorded to it by Allied war propaganda — has allowed the USSR, and afterward Putin’s Russia, to hide behind this convenient cover, crying “neo-Nazis” each time someone exposes its criminal deeds. Now is the time to deprive these criminals of their special status and to show them for what they are. But it would be difficult to do so in regard to today’s criminals without addressing first the depredations of their predecessors. And so we present some abridged and slightly edited excerpts from this important book.

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Stalin’s War of Extermination
by Joachim Hoffmann

DR. JOACHIM HOFFMANN is clearly the most qualified specialist in Soviet military history in Germany. For over thirty years he has pored over Russian language documents about the Second World War. Stalin’s War of Extermination can be seen as the most important result of Dr. Hoffmann’s long-lasting research. Because he followed certain official guidelines, the Freiburg Court Vice-President Johann Birk confirmed that this book does not violate any German law. This procedure was necessary in order to protect the author from criminal prosecution in Germany, where historians dissenting with official German myths are frequently subject to prosecution and sometimes even imprisonment.

Since the 1920s, Stalin planned to invade Western Europe in order to initiate the “World Revolution.” The outbreak of the war between Germany and the Western Allies in 1939 gave Stalin the opportunity to prepare an attack against Europe which was unparalleled in history both in terms of Stalin’s far-reaching goals as well as in terms of the amount of troops and armaments amassed at the Soviet border.

Of course, Stalin’s aggressive intentions did not escape Germany’s notice who in turn planned a preventive strike against the Red Army. However, the Germans obviously underestimated both the strength of the Red Army and the determination of its leaders. What unfolded in June 1941 was undoubtedly the most cruel war in history.

Dr. Hoffmann’s book shows in detail how Stalin and his Bolshevik henchman used unimaginable violence and atrocities to break any resistance in the Red Army and to force their unwilling soldiers to fight against the Germans who were anticipated as liberators from Stalinist oppression by most Russians, Stalin ordered the killing of not only all German POWs — but also Soviet soldiers who fell into German hands alive, because they “failed to fight to their death.” Dr. Hoffmann also explains how Soviet propagandists incited their soldiers to unlimited hatred against everything German, and he gives the reader a short but extremely unpleasant glimpse into what happened when these Soviet soldiers, dehumanized by Soviet propaganda and brutality, finally reached German soil in 1945: A gigantic wave of looting, arson, rape, torture, and mass murder befell East Germany. After reading this book, the world should thank the German Army that they prevented Stalin from succeeding with his plans of World Revolution….

Stalin’s soldiers, in their own words, came, not as liberators, but as merciless avengers. All allegations to the contrary by today’s utilitarian propagandists belong to the realm of fairy tales and are a flat distortion of historical fact. If proof is required in this regard, simply consider the panic with which the entire population of the eastern provinces of the German Reich reacted to approach of the Red Army. It is not difficult to gather from the present study that the reality of the situation was to exceed even their worst fears.

It can be proven, with certainty, that the German-Soviet war — considered by Hitler to be inevitable following the fateful Molotov mission in November 1940 — just barely preempted a war of conquest that was planned and prepared under high pressure by Stalin; this is confirmed by ever more historical evidence today. Thus, it was not just Hitler, as a certain school of contemporary historiography would continue to have us believe, but Stalin, who, from the very outset, in his political and military leadership of the Red Army, employed methods of outrageous brutality that vastly surpassed anything that had ever previously occurred….

The present volume, based largely on previously unknown documents and archive sources of German and Soviet origin, therefore — uninfluenced by so-called “taboos and intellectual prohibitions” — deals quite consciously with the methods of waging war on the Soviet side of the East-ern Front…

The point of departure of the present description is, as stated above, the fact—which is now indisputable—that Hitler, through the initiation of hostilities, just barely preempted a war of aggression prepared by Stalin. This indisputable scholarly fact is the rock upon which the hopes of our ideologues, in the truest sense of the word, are wrecked. Their arguments are null and void, but their doctrinaire blindness, nevertheless, remains…

Chapter 1. May 5, 1941:
Stalin Proclaims the War of Aggression

THE imperialistic power politics inherent in the Soviet political system from the very beginning — but not given due attention by the public — also found striking external expression in the governmental coat of arms of the USSR, which was still current in 1991. The symbolism of this state coat of arms consists of a hammer and sickle menacingly and crudely encircling the whole world, surrounded by the following inflammatory words in several languages: “Proletarians of all Countries, Unite!” What is so poignantly made evident here is the goal, openly proclaimed by both Lenin and Stalin, of world domination by Soviet Communist power, or, as they called it, the “victory of Socialism all over the world.” It was none other than Lenin who, on December 6, 1920, stated in a speech that what was involved was to exploit the conflicts and contradictions between the capitalist states….

Stalin was early devoted to this principle of Bolshevism, which was proven by his well-known speech before the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party in July 1925. At that time, Stalin declared: “Should the war begin, we will not stand by inactively; we will enter the war, but we will enter as the last belligerent. We shall throw a weight on the scales that should be decisive.” This “Stalin Doctrine,” as Alexandr Nekrich has shown with admirable clarity, and regardless of statements to the contrary, was never abandoned. It retained its force, and the effort to “incite fascist Germany and the West against each other,” as stated by author Viacheslav I. Dashichev, became a genuine idée fixe with Stalin.

In 1939, when the Red Army found itself increasing in strength due to a rapidly growing gigantic armaments program, Stalin believed that the time had come to intervene as a belligerent in the crisis of “world capitalism.” Both the British Ambassador, Sir Stafford Cripps, and the American Ambassador, Laurence F. Steinhardt, warned that Stalin wanted to bring about a war, not only in Europe, but in East Asia as well, as early as 1939. Recently revealed documents of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel) offer sufficiently clear information in this regard. “The conclusion of our agreement with Germany,” according to the Narkomindel on July 1, 1940, to the Soviet Ambassador in Japan, “was dictated by the desire for a war in Europe.” In regard to the Far East, a telegram from Moscow to the Soviet Ambassadors in Japan and China on July 14, 1940, accordingly states: “We would agree to any treaty that brought about a collision between Japan and the United States.” Undisguised in these diplomatic instructions is the mention of a “Japanese-American war, which we would gladly like to see.” M, Nikitin transcribes Moscow’s attitude with the following words: “The Soviet Union, for its part, was interested in distracting British and American attention from European problems, and in Japanese neutrality during the period of the destruction of Germany and the ‘liberation’ of Europe from capitalism.”

On August 19, 1939, there was a surprise secret meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee, which included the participation of the members of the Russian section of the Communist International. During the meeting Stalin announced, in a programmatic speech, that the time had now come to apply the torch of war to the European powder keg. Stalin declared flatly that “if we accept the German proposal for the conclusion of a Non-Aggression pact with them,” it was to be assumed that “they would naturally attack Poland, and the intervention of France and England in this war would be inevitable.” The resulting “serious unrest and disorder” would, as he remarked, lead to a destabilization of Western Europe, without “us,” ie., without the Soviet Union, being initially drawn into the conflict. For his closest comrades, he drew the conclusion, already proclaimed in 1925, that, in this way, “we can hope for an advantageous entry into the war.” In Stalin’s vision, a “broad field of activity” now opened up for the development of the “world revolution.” In other words, for the achievement — which had never been abandoned — of the Sovietization of Europe and Bolshevik domination.

He concluded with the call: “Comrades! In the interests of the USSR — the homeland of the workers — get busy, and work so that war may break out between the Reich and the capitalistic Anglo-French bloc!”

As the first stage for the achievement of imperialist domination, Stalin designated the Bolshevization of Germany and Western Europe. The Non-Aggression Pact, with the momentous additional secret protocol, was concluded between the representatives of the Reich’s government and the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics four days after this secret speech, on August 23, 1939….

Russian historians today have long seen an immediate connection between August 23, 1939, and June 22, 1941. The August 23, 1939, Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler enabled Stalin to achieve his initial goal. Marshal Zhukov of the Soviet Union recalled that Stalin was “convinced that the Pact would enable him to wrap Hitler around his little finger.”

“We have tricked Hitler for the moment,” was Stalin’s opinion, according to Nikita Khrushchev. The August 23, 1939, Non-Aggression Pact encouraged Hitler to attack Poland and, as a result — just as Stalin expected — a European war broke out. The Soviet Union participated as an aggressor, beginning on September 17, 1939, without, of course, incurring a declaration of war from the Western powers. The leader responsible for Soviet foreign policy, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Molotov, spoke before the Supreme Soviet on October 31, 1939. He said: “A single blow against Poland, first by the Germans, and then by the Red Army, and nothing remained of this misbegotten child of the Versailles Treaty, which owed its existence to the repression of non-Polish nationalities.” It was the express wish of Stalin that nothing should remain of the national existence of Poland.

Through the waging of aggressive war against Poland and Finland; through the extortionate annexation of the sovereign republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and through the threat of war against Romania, the Soviet Union, as a result of its treaties with Hitler, expanded its territory by 426,000 sq. km. This territory was approximately equivalent to the surface area of the German Reich in 1919. In so doing, Stalin tore away the protective buffer states on his Western border while significantly improving his base for deployment toward the West. In Stalin’s view, it was now time for the next step, and indeed the conditions for it were favorable. Germany’s political and strategic situation, regardless of initial German military achievements, was considered in Moscow to be critical. Decisive victory in the war with England was increasingly receding into the distance. Standing behind Great Britain, with growing certainty, was the United States of America, German forces were scattered all over Europe, locked in a single front against Great Britain stretching from Norway to the Pyrenees, On the other hand, Germany’s inability to fight a protracted war in terms of economics was very well-known in Moscow. The German Reich was becoming exceedingly vulnerable in regard to the possibility of being cut off from vital petroleum imports from Romania. Detailed studies of the German economic and armaments situation in these circumstances gave rise to a belief in Moscow that Germany was lapsing into a condition of hopeless military inferiority. That the Soviet leadership was “afraid of Germany and its armed forces” has been proven by M. Nikitin to be a fiction of Stalinist historiography.

During these circumstances in late 1940, while the strategic military situation for Germany and its Axis partner, Italy, was becoming increasingly more difficult, Stalin — through Molotov in Berlin on November 12-13, 1940 — transmitted the delivery of a demand. The demand boiled down to an expansion of the Soviet “sphere of influence” that was to include Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Greece, i.e., all of southeastern Europe, and, in the north, Finland — with which a peace treaty had been solemnly concluded only in March of that year. A so-called “Swedish question” was also raised. The Soviet Union, in other words, was now demanding a dominant position in all of Eastern Europe and the Baltic. Furthermore, it demanded the creation of bases on the outlets of the Black Sea as well as discretionary passage through the outlets of the Baltic (Great Belt, Small Belt, Sund, Kattegat, and Skagerrack). The Reich, engaged in a struggle for its existence, would be hemmed in simultaneously from the north and south.

These demands, delivered in the midst of an increasingly difficult military situation, were so provocative that they left the Germans, as a practical matter, only one alternative: to submit to subjugation or to fight. These demands amounted to a deliberately calculated provocation in which the psychological motive is of principal interest, because it reveals the extent to which Stalin must have believed himself to be utterly safe in terms of his military superiority at that time. If Stalin had really been afraid of Hitler, as he repeatedly allowed the German Embassy in Moscow to believe, he would hardly have provoked the Germans in a manner that, in the view of Emst Topitsch, amounted to a “summons” — a thinly disguised demand for subjugation. That Molotov, in the days of his mission to Berlin, was in constant, intensive telegraphic contact with Stalin, proves beyond a doubt that he was acting on Stalin’s direct instructions….

Stalin’s feeling of superiority, as expressed in the revelation of his aggressive intentions, was, of course, entirely justified by the truly gigantic increase in Soviet armaments production, which at that time was just getting into high gear. Half a year later, on the date of the outbreak of the war, on June 22, 1941, the Red Army possessed no less than 24,000 tanks, including 1,861 type T-34 tanks (a medium tank, perhaps the most effective armored weapon of the entire war) and KV (Klim Voroshilov) tanks (a series of heavy tanks), which had no equal anywhere in the world; 358 units of these were manufactured in 1940, while 1,503 units were manufactured in the first six months of 1941. Since 1938, the Air Forces of the Red Army had received a total of 23,245 military aircraft, including 3,719 aircraft of the latest design. The Red Army also had 148,000 artillery pieces and mortars of all types and systems. The inventory of the Red Navy, in addition to a multiplicity of ships of other types, had 291 or, according to Soviet sources, at least 213 submarines — an expressly aggressive weapon. This meant that the Soviet Armed Forces had a larger fleet of submarines than any other country in the world, outnumbering those of the world’s leading maritime nation, Great Britain, more than four-fold.

Soviet armored forces, in the judgment of a competent expert, Marshal of Armored Troops Poluboyarov, were superior to those of any foreign power, both in numbers and in “technical equipment, organizational formations, and combat operation.” This was true, not only of the unsurpassed T-34 medium tank and the KV-series heavy tank, but also of the so-called older models: the T-26 (light tank for infantry support), BT-7 (lightly armored “fast” tank, originally used for cavalry support), T-28 (medium tank) and T-35 (heavy tank). Of those Soviet tanks enumerated, the T-28 medium tank and the T-35 heavy tank were clearly superior to the German PzKpfw III (Panzerkampfwagen III, a medium tank) and PzKpfw IV (also a medium tank but with slightly more armor and much better armament than the PzKpfw III) in almost all combat qualities and technical specifications. Even the BT-7 Soviet “fast” tank (bystrochodnyj tank), mass-produced on the order of 9,000 units, exceeded the German PzKpfw III standard tank in armament, armor, horsepower, speed, and range. In regard to the armament with which many models of the PzKpfw III medium tank were equipped, it was even inferior to the Soviet T-26 light tank. 3,719 Soviet airplanes of the most modern design had been delivered since 1940: the MiG-3, LaGG-3, and Yak-1 fighter planes; and the Pe-2 dive-bomber. The ll-2 fighter-bomber — of which 2,650 were manufactured in the first half of 1941 alone — was in no way inferior to comparable German models; on the contrary, they were superior to German models for their speed alone. Even older Soviet models exhibited considerable performance qualities, and could, like the well-known Polikarpov I-16 Rata (Rat) fighter plane, be very dangerous to German combat aircraft because of its maneuverability. Finally, some of the artillery weapons of the Red Army, including the 132 mm (5.2 inch) BM-13 rocket launcher (which had 16 launching rails and was later nicknamed “Stalin organ” for the sound it made), the 76 mm (3 inch) field gun, the 122 mm (4.8 inch) howitzer, and the 152 mm (6 inch) howitzer (heavy artillery), was partly of a quality that aroused the astonishment of top German officers. All these findings have been confirmed with increased accuracy by new Russian research work.

The personnel and material superiority of the troops of the Red Army on June 22, 1941, is clear from a mere comparison of strength. Thus, their armed strength, as early as May 15, 1941, as the General Staff reported to Stalin, consisted of 303 divisions; of these 303 divisions, 258 divisions and 165 flight regiments were deployed in offensive positions against Germany, Finland, and Romania at that time. Contrary to earlier claims, all these large units were, as a result of quietly manning them with reservists, no longer very far below their authorized strength, according to mobilization figures. The total of 303 divisions, as reported by the General Staff of the Red Army to Stalin on May 15, 1941, had, moreover, further increased by the beginning of the war, due to the intensive reactivation of units. For example, until the beginning of August 1941, 330-350 divisions were deployed facing the German and German-allied armies, which would have resulted in a total strength of the Red Army of at least 375 divisions at that time. According to Soviet sources, 3,550 German tanks and assault guns (cannons mounted on tank chassis and used to support armored forces in the field) faced 14,000-15,000 Soviet tanks — an estimate that, out of a total inventory of 24,000 tanks, is, however, too low. Especially when one considers that, of 92 mechanized divisions (according to the figures of May 15), 88 were stationed on the western border alone. There were also numerous independent armored battalions, such as in the cavalry and infantry divisions, which would mean a total inventory of approximately 22,000 Soviet tanks. 1,700 of the German tanks, moreover, consisted of the quite insufficient PzKpfw I and PzKpfw II types (both tank types had light armor and armament), as well as the light Czech-built P 38 tank. As a result, only 1,850 of these 3,550 German tanks and assault guns were capable of fighting it out with their Soviet adversaries.

2,500 combat-ready German aircraft — 2,121 according to other sources — faced a total of allegedly “only” 10,000 to 15,000 Soviet aircraft of the existing 23,245 machines, which, even though of “older” designs, made their appearance in critical situations, giving the German Air Force no end of trouble, as Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels himself complained in his diaries. 7,146 German artillery pieces faced 37,000 Soviet artillery pieces — out of a total of 148,000 cannons and mortars that the Soviet armaments industry had already produced for the Red Army, according to Soviet data. In view of the fact that, apart from headquarters reserves, of 303 available divisions, 248 divisions, and of 218 available flight regiments, 165 regiments, were concentrated “in the West” as early as May 15, 1941, the proportion of weaponry stationed in the West must have been even greater. Even assuming the admitted order of magnitude, the Red Army, on June 22, 1941, possessed a five- to six-fold superiority in tanks, a five- to six-fold superiority in aircraft, and a five- to ten-fold, and perhaps even greater, superiority in artillery pieces. At the same time, it must be borne in mind that the mass production of modern weapons was really just gearing up. A huge increase in production figures was not only scheduled, but was actually achieved during the last six months of 1941, despite huge losses in industrial capacity as a result of the German conquest of Soviet territory.

On the tangible basis of a huge and increasingly rapid development of military arms production, the Red Army had unilaterally generated a bold doctrine based exclusively upon a theory of military aggression. It was characteristic of this military doctrine that the concept of a “war of aggression” as well as that of “unjust war,” became-obsolete as soon as the Soviet Union entered hostilities as a belligerent. Lenin had stated that what counted was not who attacked first or who fired the first shot, but rather, the causes of a war, its aims, and the classes that waged it. To Lenin and Stalin, any attack by the Soviet Union, against any country at all, was automatically a purely defensive war from the very outset. In addition, it was also a just and moral war under any circumstances. The distinction between preventive attack and counterattack was, furthermore, abandoned. Soviet military theory, moreover, assumed that modern wars were no longer declared, since every attacker naturally strove to ensure the advantage of the element of surprise. “Surprise has a paralyzing effect” stated the 1939 Field Duty Regulations, “therefore, all military action must be carried out with the greatest concealment and the greatest rapidity.” The Soviet attacks on Poland and Finland in 1939 were sudden attacks, without legal declaration of war. All tactical operations should be carried into enemy territory by means of immediate surprise attack, thus gaining control of the situation from the very initiation of hostilities.…

Since early 1940, Stalin believed that conflict with Germany was inevitable. Aware of the increasing strength of the Red Army and the deteriorating situation of the Reich, he used the graduation ceremony of the Military Academies on May 5, 1941, as his platform. Stalin announced to the Red Army leadership and a large military audience that, in view of the superiority of the Soviet Army, which had recently been attained, that the time had now come, in his words, “to abandon defensive tactics and adopt a military policy of attack operations.” The significance of this speech by Stalin in relation to his aggressive intentions is obvious from the simple fact that his words, in contrast to the usual practice, were concealed from the public; the text of his speech was hidden in central party archives….

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Afterword

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to Stalin’s seminal speech of 5 May 1941 where he, in essence, openly proclaimed his intention to wage an aggressive war against Europe. The full text of the speech is still kept secret in the Russian archives. Only an abridged version of it was made public in 1990s. But multiple secondary sources have allowed us to identify the main points of the speech.

The Russian government continues to conceal many documents pertaining to such sensitive topics in order to preserve its canonic version of history. But even though we are denied access to those archives, what we do know with certainty is enough to show us who intended to wage a war of aggression.

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Source: White Biocentrism