Every spring, when Victory Day is approaching, television begins to show feature films dedicated to the Great Patriotic War. In all honesty, most of them are simply speculating on a great topic. It is necessary to sell something "interesting", pleasant for his little eyes, who have settled down from a peaceful life, to an average man burping in front of the TV with a bottle of beer in his hand.
So there are series, like "Fighters", the main intrigue of which is who will get under the pilot's skirt: a "bad" political officer or a "good" son of a repressed pre-revolutionary aristocrat with a volume of Goethe in German under his arm performed by actor Dyuzhev? Those who have not fought and have not even served tell others who have not fought that war is very interesting and erotic. Even, they say, there is time for the Russian soldier Goethe to read. Frankly, I am turned back by such films. They are immoral and deceitful.
Lies like the American Pearl Harbor. For they are made according to the same cliché - war and girls. And these films do not add anything to the answer to the question: why did our grandfathers win then? After all, the Germans were so organized, so well armed and had such excellent command that any "realist" could only surrender. How Czechoslovakia surrendered (without a fight!), Poland (almost without fights), France (easy and pleasant - like a Parisian prostitute “surrenders” to a client), as well as Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Yugoslavia, Greece …
But in the East it did not work out - everything went awry and for some reason ended not in Moscow, but in Berlin. Where it started.
It seems to me that the memoirs of the most advertised in the world "special forces" and "superdiversant" - SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Otto Skorzeny will help to somewhat clarify this issue. The same one - the liberator of Mussolini and the kidnapper of Horthy, the hunter of Tito, and at the same time the man who sniffed gunpowder in the 1941 offensive campaign in Russia. As part of the SS Reich Division, which was part of Guderian's Panzer Group.
The 1937 purge strengthened the Red Army
Otto Skorzeny advanced through Brest and Yelnya, participated in the encirclement of the troops of the Southwestern Front in Ukraine, and admired the distant domes of Moscow through binoculars. But he never got into it. And all his life the retired Obersturmbannfuehrer was tormented by the question: why did they not take Moscow after all? After all, they wanted. And we got ready. And they were good fellows: with a feeling of deep satisfaction, Skorzeny describes how he made a 12-kilometer march with full gear and shot almost without a miss. And he had to end his life in distant Spain - in exile, fleeing from the post-war German justice, which poisoned him with German pedantry "denazification", as a housewife hounds a cockroach. It's a shame!
Skorzeny's memoirs have never been translated in Ukraine. In Russia - only with banknotes. Basically those episodes where we are talking about special operations. The Russian version of the memoirs begins with the moment when Skorzeny, after his adventures near Moscow, ends up in the hospital. But in the original, it is preceded by another 150 pages. About how they went to Moscow and why, according to the author, they still suffered embarrassment.
One of the reasons for the defeat of the Germans, according to the SS veteran, was hidden sabotage among the German generals: “In the sanctuary of the old Prussian system - the General Staff of the Ground Forces - a small group of generals still hesitated between tradition and innovation, some regretfully parted with privileges … For people like Beck and his successor Halder … it was difficult to obey the man whom some called the "Czech corporal." Skorzeny devotes a lot of attention to the conspiracy of the military and believes that it existed in the form of secret opposition to the Fuhrer long before 1944.
As an example to Hitler, the author of his memoirs puts Stalin in 1937: “The gigantic purge among the military, carried out after the same mass executions among politicians, misled not only Heydrich and Schellenberg. Our political intelligence was convinced that we had achieved decisive success, and Hitler was of the same opinion. However, the Red Army, contrary to popular belief, was not weakened, but strengthened … The posts of the repressed commanders of armies, corps, divisions, brigades, regiments and battalions were occupied by young officers - ideological communists. And the conclusion: “After the total, terrible purge of 1937, a new, political Russian army appeared, capable of enduring the most brutal battles. Russian generals carried out orders, and did not engage in conspiracies and betrayal, as it often happened in our highest positions."
One cannot but agree with this. Unlike Hitler, Stalin created a system completely obeying him. Therefore, in the fall of 1941, when the Germans were stationed near Moscow, there was no conspiracy of generals in the Red Army. And he was in the Wehrmacht three years later. Although at that time it was much further to Berlin. It is impossible to imagine that Stalin was blown up by one of the "friends" in the Kremlin, as Colonel Stauffenberg tried to do in Wolfschanz with the adored Fuhrer.
The Abwehr did not report anything important
“In war,” writes Otto Skorzeny, “there is another little-known but often decisive aspect - the secret one. I'm talking about events taking place far from the battlefields, but having a very large impact on the course of the war - they entailed huge losses of equipment, deprivation and death of hundreds of thousands of European soldiers … More than any other, the Second World War was a war of intrigue. …
Skorzeny directly suspects the head of German military intelligence, Admiral Canaris, of secretly working for the British. It was Canaris who convinced Hitler in the summer of 1940 that a landing in Britain was impossible: “On July 7, he sent Keitel a secret report in which he informed that the Germans landing in England were awaiting 2 divisions of the first line of defense and 19 divisions of the reserve. The British at that time had only one unit ready for battle - the 3rd Division of General Montgomery. The general recalls this in his memoirs … From the very beginning of the war and at decisive moments, Canaris acted as the most formidable enemy of Germany."
If Hitler had known then about the disinformation that his own intelligence chief was feeding him, Britain would have been defeated. And in the summer of 1941, Hitler would have waged a war not on two fronts, but only on one - the Eastern one. Agree, the chances of taking Moscow in this case would have been much higher. “I spoke to Canaris three or four times,” Skorzeny recalls, “and he did not impress me as a tactful or exceptionally intelligent person, as some write about him. He never spoke directly, he was cunning and incomprehensible, and this is not the same thing. " And be that as it may: "The Abwehr never reported anything really important and substantial to the OKW."
"We did not know"
This is one of the most frequent complaints of the great saboteur: “We did not know that the Russians used not the best soldiers and outdated equipment in the war with Finland. We didn’t realize that their hard-won victory over the brave Finnish army was just a bluff. It is about concealing a huge force capable of attacking and defending, about which Canaris, the head of intelligence of the Wehrmacht, should have known at least something."
Like everyone else, Skorzeny was struck by the "magnificent T-34s." The Germans also had to rush to these tanks with bottles filled with gasoline. In films, such an episode is typical of the depiction of the heroism of a Soviet soldier forced to fight almost with his bare hands. But in reality it happened the other way around. Moreover, regularly: “German anti-tank guns, which easily hit T-26 and BT tanks, were powerless against the new T-34s, which suddenly appeared from uncompressed wheat and rye. Then our soldiers had to attack them with the help of "Molotov cocktails" - ordinary gasoline bottles with a lit ignition cord instead of a cork. If the bottle hit the steel plate that protected the engine, the tank caught fire … "Faust-cartridges" appeared much later, so at the beginning of the campaign some Russian tanks were restrained by direct fire only by our heavy artillery."
In other words, all the anti-tank artillery of the Reich was useless against the new Russian tank. It could only be contained with heavy cannons. But the memoirist was equally impressed by the sapper units of the Red Army and their equipment - it made it possible to build a 60-meter bridge, making it possible to ferry vehicles up to 60 tons in weight! The Wehrmacht did not possess such equipment.
Technical inconsistency
The entire calculation of the German offensive doctrine was based on the high mobility of motorized units. But motors require spare parts and constant maintenance. And with this in the German army there was no order. Diversity of cars in one division interfered. “In 1941,” Skorzeny laments from his own experience in the Reich division, “every German automobile company continued to produce different models of its brand, just as it had before the war. A large number of models did not allow the creation of an adequate stock of spare parts. In the motorized divisions there were about 2 thousand vehicles, sometimes 50 different types and models, although 10-18 would have been enough. In addition, our artillery regiment had more than 200 trucks, represented by 15 models. In the rain, mud or frost, even the best specialist could not provide quality repairs."
And here is the result. Just near Moscow: “On December 2, we continued to move forward and were able to occupy Nikolaev, located 15 km from Moscow - during clear sunny weather, I saw the domes of Moscow churches through binoculars. Our batteries fired at the outskirts of the capital, but we no longer had gun tractors. " If the tools are still there, and the tractors "all went out", it means that the German "super-equipment" had to be left on the road due to breakdowns. And you can't drag heavy guns on your hands.
The German army approached Moscow completely exhausted: “On October 19, torrential rains began, and Army Group Center got stuck in the mud for three days … The picture was terrible: a column of vehicles stretched for hundreds of kilometers, where thousands of vehicles stood in three rows, stuck in the mud. sometimes on the hood. There was not enough gasoline and ammunition. Support, an average of 200 tons per division, was delivered by air. Were lost three priceless weeks and a huge amount of material resources … At the cost of hard work and hard labor, we managed to pave 15 kilometers of road from round timber … We dreamed that it would get colder as soon as possible”.
But when frosts struck from November 6 to 7, and the division in which Skorzeny served was delivered ammunition, fuel, some food and cigarettes, it turned out that there was no winter oil for engines and weapons - the engines started up problematic. Instead of winter uniforms, the troops received sand-colored kits intended for the Afrika Korps, and equipment painted in the same light colors.
Meanwhile, frosts intensified to 20 and even 30 degrees. With sincere amazement the gallant SS man describes the winter outfit of Soviet soldiers - sheepskin coats and fur boots: “An unpleasant surprise - for the first time near Borodino we had to fight the Siberians. They are tall, excellent soldiers, well-armed; they are dressed in wide fur sheepskin coats and hats, with fur boots on their feet. " Only from Russian prisoners did the Germans learn that shoes in winter should be a little spacious so that the foot does not freeze: “Having carefully studied the equipment of courageous Siberians taken prisoner at Borodino, we learned that, for example, if there are no felt boots, then leather boots do not need to be shod and, most importantly, they should be free, not to squeeze the feet. This was known to all skiers, but not to our clothing service specialists. Almost all of us wore fur boots taken from dead Russian soldiers."
Excellent Russian intelligence
Almost the main reason for the defeat of the German army Skorzeny considers excellent Russian intelligence. The "Red Chapel" - a spy network in Europe, most often from staunch anti-Nazis - allowed the Soviet General Staff to have information about the strategic intentions of the Germans. He also remembers the super agent Richard Sorge, thanks to whose information that Japan would not enter the war, 40 divisions, transferred from the Far East, appeared near Moscow.
“The Reich's war strategy was better,” says Skorzeny. “Our generals had a stronger imagination. However, from the rank and file to the company commander, the Russians were equal to us - courageous, resourceful, gifted camouflage masters. They fiercely resisted and were always ready to sacrifice their lives … Russian officers, from the division commander and below, were younger and more resolute than ours. From October 9 to December 5, the Reich division, the 10th Panzer Division and other units of the 16th Panzer Corps lost 40 percent of their staff. Six days later, when our positions were attacked by newly arrived Siberian divisions, our losses exceeded 75 percent."
Here is the answer to the question why the Germans did not take Moscow? They were simply knocked out. Skorzeny himself no longer fought at the front. As an intelligent person, he realized that the chances of surviving in this meat grinder were minimal, and took the opportunity to go to serve in the SS sabotage unit. But he was no longer attracted to the front line - stealing dictators is much more pleasant and safer than coming face to face with Siberians in felt boots fighting with the support of the T-34 and the world's best intelligence.
P. S. The author of this article is a well-known Ukrainian journalist, writer and historian Oles Buzina was killed in Kiev at the entrance of his house.
