Preventive War Thesis

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A German infantryman and a dead Soviet soldier in front of a burning tank, June 1941

The claim that the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 prevented an imminent Soviet attack on the German Reich is referred to as a preventive war thesis , a preventive strike thesis or a preventive war legend. It was therefore not a war of aggression in violation of international law , but a preventive strike covered by international martial law . The Red Army had been prepared for an intended attack in the spring and summer of 1941.

Historians had invalidated the thesis in the 1960s. In 1985 it was published again. From 1990 onwards, newly found documents were at times also discussed in historical studies . The thesis was refuted again by 1997 through international research exchanges. It is considered the main component of historical revisionism in German right-wing extremism , which aims to relativize or deny war guilt and the crimes of Nazi Germany .

Origin from Nazi propaganda

Adolf Hitler with his staff, June 1940

On July 31, 1940, Adolf Hitler announced his decision to go to war against the Soviet Union to a circle from the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) . On December 18, 1940, he ordered the " Operation Barbarossa " to be prepared militarily. On March 30, 1941, he announced his war aims to all the Wehrmacht generals involved : A race-ideological war of annihilation against Bolshevism was inevitable because the USA would soon ally with Great Britain against Germany and it was important to be independent of imports from enemy states through conquests in the east to become. After the victorious Balkan campaign, Hitler added in a further speech to the Wehrmacht generals on June 14, 1941: Since the Soviet Union wanted to stab Germany in its back in the war in the West, it would have to start its own war against it before the favorable opportunity now had passed . The expected victory over the Soviet Union would secure the German food and raw material supply, make the German position of power on the continent incontestable and thus cause Great Britain to give up the fight. Hitler asserted the necessity of this war of aggression, even though the " Foreign Armies East " department on March 15, 1941 had judged the advance of Soviet troops to the Soviet western border as a "defensive measure" against German troop shifts to the east.

The Nazi propaganda camouflaged the Wehrmacht's decision to go to war and preparations for war with many distracting reports, so that the Soviet and British leaders were deceived and the Nazi regime was able to take full advantage of the surprise element of the attack. The National Defense Department in the OKW stated on April 28, 1941 that any assertion of a Soviet intention to attack, which was allegedly “recognizable by the massing of the Russian army on the German-Russian border”, was only to “camouflage the entire German operational intentions” against potential ones Allies of Germany success. The “German operational intentions”, that is, plans of attack, should be presented “as planned offensive defensive measures, if necessary,” insofar as they could not be completely concealed.

On March 30, 1941, after Hitler had informed the Wehrmacht leadership of his war aims, Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary: “Our deployment is almost complete. Outside, nobody has a clue what the Führer is up to. His blows will be all the more devastating. Our camouflage worked perfectly. ”On June 16, he noted Hitler's reasons for the war, which Hitler had explained to him on the same day:

“We are facing an unparalleled triumph. […] We have to take action. Moscow wants to stay out of the war until Europe is tired and bled to death. Then Stalin would like to act, Bolsheviks Europe and take up his regiment. This calculation throws him a line. [...] Russia would attack us if we were weak, and then we would have the two-front war, which we avoid through this preventive action. "

At the beginning of the attack by the Wehrmacht on June 22, 1941 at 3:00 a.m., Goebbels informed his employees in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and at 5:30 a.m. read a prepared statement by Hitler on all German radio stations, which was later published in more detail the same day Languages ​​was spread. At the same time, an identical order of the day was issued to the "soldiers of the Eastern Front". The Foreign Office sent a note to the Soviet Union, which gave the reasons for the alleged "military countermeasures". This was in fact a declaration of war , although this word was avoided on Hitler's express orders. This note was presented at the same time to the Soviet Ambassador Vladimir Dekanosow in Berlin and the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in Moscow and was then also broadcast on the radio. All of these propaganda documents essentially contained the assertion that Germany had merely forestalled Soviet plans of aggression. The attack on the Soviet Union was a preventive war. The Soviet Union was "deployed with all its armed forces on the German border, ready to jump. The Soviet government has betrayed and broken the treaties and agreements with Germany [...] Bolshevik Moscow is about to stab in the back of National Socialist Germany in its struggle for existence. "

In addition, Hitler's appeal to the Wehrmacht soldiers and Goebbels' leading article in the Völkischer Beobachter of June 22, 1941 mentioned an alleged “plot” by the British and Soviets for a “hateful policy of encirclement” against Germany. The Wehrmacht report of June 27, 1941 claimed: "The first five days of the operation have shown that the Soviet Wehrmacht was ready to attack M ITTELEUROPE ". On June 30, 1941, the headline of the Völkischer Beobachter : “Deployment of the Soviet armies smashed. The Führer saved Europe from Bolshevik invasion ”.

These justifications took up the already in the First World War used Einkreisungsthese and the invasion of Poland thesis used an imposed self-defense back and took into account the spread among the German rejection of aggressive war. The "mortal enmity" sought here ( anti-communism on principle ) had been a central component of National Socialism since 1919 . In his program Mein Kampf in 1925, Hitler spoke of “ Jewish Bolshevism ” which threatened the whole world with enslavement, thus combining this image of the enemy with anti-Semitism , racism and a global conspiracy theory . The Nazi propaganda brought this ideology, which it had temporarily postponed after the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, to the fore again. From July 1941, the Foreign Office supplemented the thesis of the “ European crusade against Bolshevism”, for which the Germans had a “European mandate”. In this way, the troops of allied states should also be ideologically integrated and attuned to a future “ reorganization of Europe ” according to National Socialist ideas. This also recruited volunteers for the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS in the conquered and occupied areas. This justification model also reflects the field post of German soldiers from the initial phase of the German-Soviet war.

The Nazi propaganda upheld the preventive war thesis until the end of the war. Goebbels noted in his diary on July 3, 1941: “Moscow's intention to attack Germany and Central Europe is now beyond any doubt. The Führer acted at the last moment. ” On January 30, 1943, after the lost battle of Stalingrad, Hermann Göring spoke to surviving soldiers about the fact that“ the Russian ”had used the time before 1941 for his“ enormous armor ”and“ encirclement ” “Hundreds of airfields on the border” and “ten times as many planes and five times as many tanks as we believed” were built. Recognizing this “deadly danger”, Hitler was no longer able to “procrastinate” and made his decision “about the existence or crime of the West ”. Heinrich Himmler asserted in his Poznan speech on October 4, 1943 that without the German attack , Josef Stalin would have “perhaps launched a quarter to six months” later “for his great invasion of Central and Western Europe”.

post war period

Already on May 15, 1945, Alfred Jodl , Chief of the Wehrmacht Command Staff , used the preventive war thesis to justify accusations expected from the victorious powers:

"We [...] did not lead the attack against Russia because we wanted the space, but because day after day the Russian march continued enormously and would have led to ultimate demands in the end."

In the Nuremberg Trials (1945–1949), almost all of the Nazi perpetrators charged with planning the war of aggression followed this line and often attributed the German defeat to an individual failure of Hitler. Former National Socialists continued to spread the political myth of defending against the “Asian threat” in the post-war period, which was marked by the Cold War . In 1950, for example, Kurt Assmann wrote that Hitler's speech to the commanders-in-chief on June 14, 1941 had convinced all of the audience that a preventive war was necessary. Although Stalin did not plan a war of aggression at the time, he would in any case have exploited the course of the war for Soviet expansion. This was confirmed after the end of the war, so that no one could dispute Hitler's correct assessment of the situation at the time. Such statements in memoirs of Wehrmacht generals also influenced historical accounts of the war against the Soviet Union.

In his book Enterprise Barbarossa , published in 1963 , the former press spokesman for Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and SS-Obersturmbannführer Paul Carell presented the German attack in 1941 as a justified preventive attack with which Hitler thwarted Stalin's acute intentions to attack and conquer. Only Philipp W. Fabry and Erich Helmdach followed this thesis in the 1960s and 1970s . It served war veterans, right-wing extremists and national conservatives "to prove the old assertion of the National Socialists [...] retrospectively as correct and to portray Stalin himself as the aggressor." Historians such as Gerhard L. Weinberg , John Erickson , Karl-Heinz Janßen and Andreas Hillgruber dismissed this Preventive war thesis in the 1960s.

Nonetheless, Carell retained this thesis and applied it to day-to-day politics. In October 1979, when the NATO double decision was being planned, he demanded that NATO and the Bundeswehr should, if necessary, wage a preventive war against the “red extortion” of the Eastern Bloc even without “final proof of the opposing intentions”. In 1992 he interpreted the Battle of Stalingrad as a “victory and downfall of the 6th Army ” and affirmed: “The German attack on June 21, 1941 was objectively a preventive strike.” In a foreword he wrote in 1995: “The Wehrmacht struck earlier than expected, Already on June 22nd, with full force, in the middle of the Soviet offensive deployment, so that the Red Army was thrown into chaos. ”He speculated about a possible German victory over the Soviet Union if the strike occurs six weeks earlier as originally planned would.

1980s debate

The historian Andreas Hillgruber declared in 1982 as a conclusion of his research that Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union was not a preventive act of war against an opponent who was ready to attack, but that Hitler had declared conquest as his goal in 1925 and consistently pursued it in all "tactical twists" of his policy since 1933 . Hillgruber therefore saw “revisionist interpretations” of the attack on the USSR as “thoroughly refuted” and as a “relapse” into earlier, actually overcome, stages of the historical discussion. Even the West German media did not question, until 1984, that the Nazi regime wanted to implement its “real intentions” in 1941, namely its racist and imperialist program to conquer “ living space in the east ”.

Viktor Suvorov (2007)

In 1983, the military historian Joachim Hoffmann took the view in two essays in the compilation Das Deutsche Reich und die Second World War (publisher: Military History Research Office of the Federal Armed Forces (MGFA)) that the offensive deployment of the Red Army before June 1941 indicated intentions to attack. Jürgen Förster pointed out in the same volume that Hitler had commissioned the Wehrmacht to plan the attack on July 31, 1940, but that until the German attack, Soviet policy had been aimed at avoiding war and, despite all warnings, considered the German troop deployment as a means of political pressure.

A public preventive war debate began only two non-historians: In 1985 the Austrian philosopher Ernst Topitsch presented the Second World War “in its political core as an attack by the Soviet Union” on the western democracies. In this context, “Germany and later Japan only served the Kremlin as military tools”. The Soviets had “provoked Hitler's attack themselves” “in order to stand before the whole world as the victim of an 'attack'”. The Soviet defector Viktor Suvorov supported this thesis in 1985/86 with two essays in a British military magazine and claimed for his part that Stalin had planned a war against Germany for June 1941.

In the West German historians' dispute, public interest in these theses grew. Guest author Günther Gillessen declared in 1986 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) that Suvorov's account was plausible and could save the Germans from a “special debt of peace” propagated by the Soviet Union. Hoffmann stated in a letter to the editor that "in the summer of 1941 one aggressor, Hitler, had the last opportunity to forestall the other aggressor". The "offensive line-up of the Red Army and the military measures on the Soviet side" in 1941 posed "a serious strategic threat" to Germany. The Soviet policy had shown "unchanged aggressiveness". Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner then claimed that “it has not yet been scientifically decided whether the beginning of the Russian campaign is to be regarded as a 'preventive war' or not”. The historian Ernst Nolte claimed in 1987 that the German war of aggression in 1941 was an "objectively justified and inevitable decision-making battle" and an understandable preventive reaction to what the National Socialists saw as a permanent threat. Other historians rejected this thesis as untenable because of the lack of concrete evidence.

Some conservative media outlined the preventive war thesis in detail. Some historians who rejected it were polemically portrayed in the published reactions as "moskauffriendly". Gillessen denied in 1987 that he had wanted to question the German war guilt towards the Soviet Union. For Arno Klönne and other historians, however, he had made positions open to discussion that were previously considered extremist because of their proximity to National Socialism . Participants in an international conference of historians organized by the Joseph Wirth Foundation in March 1987 judged the media dissemination of the preventive war thesis as a “dangerous campaign”.

Debate in the 1990s

Molotov and Ribbentrop on August 23, 1939, one day before the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in Moscow

Newly published documents

As a result of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policy , some new original documents from Soviet archives, some known only from secondary sources that could not be verified until then, have been accessible and published since 1985. Some have been used to support or refute the preventive war thesis.

On August 19, 1939, at a secret Politburo meeting in front of Comintern representatives , Stalin is said to have explained his calculation for the Hitler-Stalin Pact to drive Germany and the Western powers into war against each other in order to then triumph over the weakened capitalist states. This was claimed by the French Havas news agency on November 28, 1939; Nazi propaganda was based on this. Stalin denied the agency report on November 30, 1939 as "empty chatter". In 1958, Eberhard Jäckel doubted the authenticity of this alleged Stalin speech for reasons of content and because many of the Politburo protocols launched in the West had proven to be falsified. In 1994, the Russian historian Tatiana Buschujewa discovered the original agency report in German loot files and published it in Moscow as evidence that Stalin had deliberately provoked Hitler's attack.

In 1991/92 three general staff plans of the Red Army from 1940/41 were republished. The new strategic operational plan of September 18, 1940 was based on a massive German invasion in the event of war and provided for this to be held up first to secure the national borders and then to undertake limited counter-attacks. A reform draft of March 11, 1941, which responded to the German troop deployment, provided for counter-offensives only under favorable conditions.

A Stalin speech on May 5, 1941 in the Kremlin to the graduates of the Soviet military academies commented in detail on the state of the Red Army and the course of the Second World War to date. After various versions of the text, Stalin finally replied to a toast:

“When implementing the defense of our country, we are obliged to act aggressively. We must move from defense to a military policy of offensive action. We have to rebuild our education, our propaganda, agitation, our press in an offensive spirit. The Red Army is a modern army, but a modern army is an offensive army. "

Since 1941, this speech was only known in excerpts and from testimony and was not included in Stalin's works. It was not until 1990 that a report on the speech was found in the party archive of the CPSU , the authenticity of which is, however, disputed.

The then Soviet major general Alexander Wassilewski drafted a concept paper for the "strategic deployment of the armed forces of the USSR in the event of a war against Germany" by May 15, 1941. He expected a German attack. To ward off this he proposed a secret mobilization , as well as the covert concentration of the Red Army, a preventive strike in Poland and the occupation of East Prussia :

“If you take into account that Germany has mobilized its entire army, including rear services, there is a possibility that it will precede us during the deployment and carry out a surprise attack.
To prevent this [and to smash the German army], I consider it necessary under no circumstances to allow the German high command to take the initiative to forestall the enemy when it is deployed and to attack the German army when it is in the deployment phase and cannot yet build a front or organize the combined arms battle. "

Chief of Staff Georgi Zhukov , Defense Minister Semyon Tymoshenko and Stalin did not sign the document, so its influence on Soviet planning is controversial. Volkogonov first mentioned the document in 1989, and Vladimir Karpov published it in a Russian military magazine in 1990. Since then it has been reprinted many times and in 1998 it was also published in German translation.

Zhukov reported in a volume of memoirs published posthumously in 1992 that he had presented the “reflections” to Stalin on May 15, 1941. He categorically rejected a preventive strike and forbade further discussions about it. He also banned further replenishment of the cover army on the western border until the evening of June 22nd and only allowed troop concentrations of a defensive character so as not to provoke the Germans. Tymoshenko had already announced in a private conversation in 1961 that he and Zhukov had proposed to Stalin in mid-June 1941 a preventive strike against the German deployment. He got angry and warned his generals: “If you irritate the Germans at the border, if you move troops without our permission, then your heads will roll. Remember that! "Wassilewski said in an unpublished interview in 1965:

“By studying the reasons that made it impossible for our armed forces to repel the attack by fascist forces on our country and even put it in a disastrous position, there is no need to talk about whether the armed forces of the Soviet Union […] have a plan had to repel this attack. Rather, we should talk about why our armed forces were not brought into combat readiness in time and were not in it, but in which they should have been in an offensive defense plan. "

Representative of a German preventive war

In 1989 Viktor Suvorov's book Der Eisbrecher , published in German, sparked a new debate on the preventive war thesis. Suvorov based this on the formation of the Red Army near the Soviet western border, the dismantling of defenses on the Molotov Line that would have hindered an advance, and alleged Stalin speeches on August 19, 1939 and May 5, 1941. For the earlier speech he gave Stalin's denial as the source, for the later a text version allegedly leaked to the German defense but otherwise unproven. Accordingly, Stalin said: "Yes, I want to attack Hitler ... 1942." This should have deceived Hitler about the date of Stalin's attack planned for July 6, 1941.

On the basis of the newly published Soviet documents and Suvorov's book since 1990, right-wing conservative and right-wing extremist authors such as Fritz Becker, Max Klüver, Walter Post, Carl Gustav Ströhm, Heinz Trettner and others in the 1990s asserted that Stalin's intention to attack, which Hitler had thwarted by Hitler, was now proven. Adolf von Thadden and Wolfgang Strauss cited, among other things, the agency report published in 1994 about the alleged Stalin speech of August 19, 1939. Magazines such as the Ostpreußenblatt , the Staatsbriefe , Nation und Europa , the Junge Freiheit and the National-Zeitung offer these authors up to today a forum, for example for mutual positive reviews of their publications.

In 1993, Ernst Nolte advocated the thesis of an “objective” German preventive war in his work Streitpunkte . He lectured on the arguments of revisionist authors and asked whether the German attack, in view of the Soviet claim to trigger the world revolution , should not be understood as a preventive strike in the long term if the ideologies of both opponents are taken seriously.

Werner Maser said since 1994 that Hitler and Stalin had mutually planned preventive wars against each other. Even before 1941, Stalin wanted to wage war against the German Reich several times. He had described the Soviet war preparations since the end of December 1940 as a "necessary measure to initiate a preventive war". His plan provided for a huge attack operation under the code name “Groza” (thunderstorm) for July 1941 at the latest. Hitler's attack only preceded Stalin's attack by a few hours. Maser referred to the following processes:

  • On the day of the German attack, the Soviet war planes would have been lined up on airfields near the western border, unlike when defending in Soviet areas to the rear.
  • Minefields, explosive charges built into bridges, railway stations and other important buildings and thousands of kilometers of barbed wire barriers were originally built for the Soviet defense, but were then dismantled only two days before the German attack "because they would have made an offensive more difficult".

These Soviet preparations were foiled by the German attack at a time when the Red Army was "hardly at all prepared for the defense and not yet adequately prepared for the offensive".

Joachim Hoffmann confirmed his views in 1991 in a letter to the editor to a Soviet military magazine, an essay and his book Stalin's War of Extermination , which he published in 1995 after leaving the MGFA. In it he claimed that Hitler had only anticipated the military preparations of the Red Army, which had "started long ago" in 1941. This showed:

  • the deployment of the Red Army near the border,
  • Statements of interrogated prisoners of war and defected Red Army soldiers, according to which an imminent invasion of Germany in the Red Army was an open secret;
  • exact maps of East Prussia that fell into the hands of the Wehrmacht after the invasion;
  • Zhukov's “considerations”, which he presented to Stalin on May 15, 1941 as a ready-made plan of attack and to which Stalin had approved.
  • Stalin himself said war with Germany was imminent on several occasions. Hoffmann quoted Stalin's speech on May 5, 1941. In his diary, the writer WW Vishnevsky interpreted your statements of an obligation to switch to the “war policy of attack operations” as a signal for an imminent attack on Germany: “Our campaign in the West is coming In the fifth, amended edition of this book from 1999, Hoffmann referred to Suvorov's version of the alleged Stalin speech of August 19, 1939.

Heinz Magenheimer represented in 2000 like Maser, Hitler and Stalin had "prepared themselves synchronously for the offensive". Although one could “not speak of a German preventive war in the conventional, military sense”, the German attack “could very well assign a medium-term preventive function”, since it was supposed to prevent the “danger of an extortionate policy, even a definitive two-front war”. He considered this danger evoked by the Nazi propaganda from 1941 to be realistic.

Representative of a Soviet plan of attack

Since 1990, the reasons that led to the German attack and the initial defeats of the Red Army in 1941/42 have been openly discussed and scientifically researched in Russia as well. In 1992 the Russian edition of Suvorov's Icebreaker was published . In other books he carried out his thesis on the basis of the memoirs of the Soviet military. This led to a historians' dispute in Russia about the status of Soviet war preparations in 1941 and the intentions associated with it. Without claiming a German preventive war, some Russian military historians see the archive documents published since 1990 as evidence of Soviet plans for attack. Because of the initials of the defense minister and the respective chiefs of the general staff, as well as the confidentiality notes, the general staff plans were authentic, intended directly for Stalin and commissioned by him.

Vladimir Neweschin considers the Stalin speech of May 5, 1941 to be the mandate or impetus for the “considerations” of May 15, 1941. Otherwise, the Soviet military leaders would not have dared to draw up this detailed plan. The troop line-up proposed therein was largely congruent with the actual troop line-up at the beginning of the war, so the plan of attack had been implemented.

Valery Danilov also assumed in 1993 that the "considerations" had been "drawn up on the instructions of Stalin and on the basis of the military strategic concepts issued by him". He considered unauthorized action by the General Staff to be unthinkable, as it would have acted as a group protest against Stalin and thus endangered the authors. He referred to General Vasilevsky's information from 1967, according to which Zhukov and Tymoshenko had submitted their draft to Stalin on May 15, 1941. Her and Stalin's signatures cannot be found on it. Danilov nevertheless assumed that Stalin had approved the document. After that, they started restructuring the Red Army from defense to attack, but without a specific attack date. Danilov also referred to information provided by Hoffmann in 1983 that Stalin's military policy “forced Hitler to react”. He did not doubt his guilt as the aggressor.

Mikhail Meltyukhov sees Zhukov's “considerations” as a direct preventive strike. The plan for this had been drawn up beforehand and formed the basis of Soviet military planning from 1940 to 1941. Almost no real major Soviet defense plans had been found, but various versions of the attack plan had been found. The first version of this was drawn up after the attack on Poland in 1939, the last version around May 1, 1941. After that, the line-up of the troops was also chosen.

Boris Sokolow supported Suvorov's theses, although he admitted many errors and misrepresentations in his book in 1993. In 1998 he compared the situation before the German-Soviet War with that before the Soviet winter war against Finland in 1939: How "Finnish troops" were set up for this purpose, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided in June 1941 to set up Polish troops. The plan of attack against Finland in 1939 was also similar to the “counter-attack plans” of 1941: Both were designed to secure the state border in the event of aggression, although hardly anyone suspected Finland's ability to attack the Soviet Union in 1939.

In the English-speaking world, Suvorov received hardly any attention. Two authors, Richard C. Raack and Albert L. Weeks , followed his thesis that Stalin had planned to conquer Western Europe before June 1941.

Counter arguments by German historians

Most German historians on the Second World War have since rejected the preventive war thesis that had been propagated again from 1985. Some dealt with it in particular and affirmed that the Nazi regime planned and carried out a racially motivated war of annihilation against the Soviet Union from the beginning, which could not be separated from the Holocaust that took place in it. They particularly refer to:

  • German attack planning, which lasted almost a year, was continuously and independently of Soviet policy,
  • the intentions to conquer, subjugate and annihilate repeatedly declared internally by both state and armed forces leaders,
  • lack of evidence for German preventive strike intentions,
  • German knowledge of the Soviet war preparations in 1941 and their consistent assessment as defensive.

Bernd Bonwetsch assessed Suvorov's 1989 book as an apologetic attempt to "take the cloak of aggression from Germany". Although one had to condemn much of Stalin's policy, a plan to raid Germany before June 1941 was not part of his “sin account”. In 2000, he added that the Soviet troop deployment near the border did not indicate any intention to attack, as it had been in line with the Soviet strategy of offensive defense to fight the fight on enemy soil. The short version of the Stalin speech of May 5, 1941 is not necessarily authentic, since witnesses reproduced its content differently: According to it, Stalin spoke more of the inevitable, not of the intended war. He would not have announced an attack in front of hundreds of listeners. However, since then the Soviet propaganda has taken a more offensive tone in order to prepare the Red Army soldiers for war. This resulted from knowledge about the German deployment, not from our own war intentions.

Hans-Adolf Jacobsen , who published the war diaries of the Wehrmacht generals in the 1960s, recalled Hitler's long-standing plan of attack in 1991 in the Soviet military newspaper Krasnaja Zvezda : According to Major General Erich Marcks, Hitler never assumed “that the Russians will show the Germans the kindness to be the first to attack them. "

Gerd R. Ueberschär explained the German attack on the Soviet Union, conceived as a war of annihilation, in 1991, following Hillgruber and other intentionalists from Hitler's 1925 Eastern program in Mein Kampf . Hitler portrayed war as a necessary means of conquering "living space" and smashing "Bolshevism" and since 1933 has often affirmed this goal in front of Wehrmacht generals. His decision to invade the Soviet Union put this very own program of National Socialism into practice. Hitler's statement on June 25, 1940 to OKW boss Wilhelm Keitel also speaks against planning the “Operation Barbarossa” as a preventive war : At that time, he described the planned Russian campaign as a “sandpit game” compared to the Western campaign , making the Soviet military strength and readiness for the armed forces blatant underrated. In addition, Ueberschär later referred to Joseph Goebbels' diary entries, around December 4, 1940: Despite its Pan-Slavism, Russia would “never do anything against us: out of fear.” On April 6, 1941, Goebbels wrote: “The Führer is not afraid of Russia. He has adequately shielded himself. And if it wants to attack: the sooner the better. ”That is why Ueberschär declared Suworow's theses in 1992 as“ clearly irrelevant for the science of history ”. They would only find favor with "scientific outsiders, yesterday, non-specialist hobby historians and authors from the right-wing extremist environment". In 1997 he affirmed that the proponents of the preventive war thesis primarily had extra-scientific motives. Your thesis has "nothing to do with historical studies", but belongs to "the most recent distortions of our historical view that have occurred for political reasons".

In 1996, Wigbert Benz proved that Suworow had falsified quotations.

Bernd Wegner judges the “deliberations” of May 15, 1941 as a non-binding draft of the General Staff, which Stalin neither commissioned nor ordered to implement, but expressly rejected. In 1997 he referred to documented statements from Stalin's environment and the lack of preparations for an attack by the Red Army.

In 1998, Karl-Heinz Janßen recalled the German research result that had existed for decades:

“The war of robbery, conquest and extermination against the Soviet Union had been prepared jointly by the generals and Hitler since the summer of 1940. Of course, the Red Army responded with a counter-march, which, however, was considered defensive by the German General Staff until the very end. "

From the summer of 1940 to June 1941, the Soviet intelligence services informed Stalin precisely about the German war plans and war aims, the General Staff about the lack of resilience of the Red Army; However, he disregarded all warnings to the end.

Manfred Messerschmidt pointed out in 2000 that Stalin had been informed of the German decision to go to war since August 1940 and that all Soviet military plans and maneuvers in January and February 1941 were based on an expected German attack. This is the only way to understand the documents of May 5 and 15, 1941; moreover, Stalin clearly disapproved of the preventive strike plan. Hitler, on the other hand, expressly ordered on November 12, 1940 that war preparations be continued regardless of the behavior of the Soviet Union. Hoffmann's, Masers, Beckers and Posts theses are a speculative construct with which they revived the Nazi motif of "saving Europe":

"This 'new' thesis is the old thesis of German war propaganda."

Counter arguments by non-German historians

The Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky criticized Suvorov's theses as early as 1986 as an attempt to view the Soviet war preparations apart from the political context. In 1995, in his book The Icebreaker Myth, published in Russia, he demonstrated many mistakes and errors of Suvorov. In 1999 in The Great Deception he explained Stalin's foreign policy out of his concern about a peace between Germany and Great Britain and a possible joint attack by these states on the Soviet Union. Rudolf Hess's flight to Great Britain (May 10, 1941) fueled this concern. Therefore, in the spring of 1941, Stalin tried above all to appease Hitler and to avoid any conflict with the German Reich.

In his biography of Stalin, published in 1989, Dmitri Volkogonov interpreted Stalin's speech of May 5, 1941 not as a mandate for a specific plan of attack, but as a warning to intensify armament and vigilance against dangerous allies in the sense of a defense strategy that would end the war as quickly as possible in the event of a German attack should carry to the German territory. In view of the recognizable threat from the Wehrmacht, he interpreted the plan of May 15, 1941 as "politically extremely clever"; But Stalin did not sign it, so it is uncertain whether he knew him. In addition, ideologically blinded, he did not believe in the various signs and news of the imminent attack by the Wehrmacht, but rather considered them to be Western disinformation . In 1992/93 Wolkogonov searched hundreds of "special folders" of the Central Committee of the CPSU , which had been declared secret, for a commission of historians , but found "no material about Stalin's secret intentions to attack Germany". Such a “huge company” would have been impracticable without planning and operational staff preparations. In 1993, Volkogonov found neither Comintern participants nor the statements of Stalin alleged by the agency in the results of a Politburo meeting on August 19, 1939. In his visitor journal he only found his assignment to Foreign Minister Molotov to conclude the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

Richard J. Evans pointed out in 1991 that Stalin was aware of the weakness of the Red Army after his “ purges ” from 1936–1939 and that Hitler and the Wehrmacht generals did not expect any serious resistance during their war preparations from 1940–1941.

The deputy head of the Soviet Institute for Military History, Yuri Kirschin , pointed out in 1991 that there were serious deficits in the equipment and general level of training of the Red Army in 1941, so that it was hardly capable of active warfare.

In 1993 Oleg Wischljow compared the Soviet plans of 1941 with simultaneous German army, secret service and diplomatic documents. On the one hand, it showed Stalin's efforts to avoid war at all costs because of his misjudgment of German intentions and in view of the military weakness of the Red Army. On the other hand, it showed that the Nazi regime realistically assessed the weakness of the Red Army and therefore reacted neither to Soviet deterrent measures nor to peace initiatives, but successfully exploited the Soviet delay in the conflict to implement the attack plan of July 1940.

Yuri Gorkow analyzed the Soviet deployment and mobilization plans from 1941 and showed that they only provided for offensive measures after successful defense against invasions. Troops and material were only allocated for defensive tasks. Preparations for an attack were not ordered at any level of command. The operational plans of the western military districts forbade flying over and crossing the state border without the permission of the Military Council. The full mobilization should respond to the anticipated attack of the opponent. Many of the units moved west from the interior were to structurally fortify the new line of defense; A large part of the annual military expenditure was intended for these construction tasks in 1940/41. Accordingly, the Red Army was not aimed at an attack against Germany. The plan of May 15, 1941 also shows no offensive doctrine, since offensive main troops were to be followed by defensive cover troops afterwards. In addition, this individual document cannot prove a plan of attack as long as Stalin's order to attack is not proven. Its implementation would have taken a lot of time. Army General Machmut Garejew added that Stalin had forbidden full mobilization at the time, and that the partial mobilization and forwarding of some troops since May 1941 had not been sufficient for offensive operations.

David M. Glantz stated in Stumbling Colossus in 1998 that the Red Army was not ready for action in the summer of 1941, neither in terms of training nor equipment, and that its intelligence system was just as inadequate as its leadership, which was largely responsible for the Great Terror of 1937 to Had fallen victim in 1939.

In 1998, Nikolai Rachmanitschew described the Red Army's offensive strategy and explained that its mobilization plan of October 1940 could not be implemented due to the continuous formation of new troops and their redistribution. It was precisely the relocation of many units to the western border without regard to supply routes and equipment that caused their initial defeats to a major extent. Analysis of all military reports from 1940 and 1941 shows that the Soviet leadership was neither prepared for a surprise attack at the time, nor did it plan an attack itself.

Alexander Borosnjak declared in 1998 that Stalin's dinner speech of May 5, 1941 could not be seen as an order for a plan of attack, since it had only varied common propaganda motifs and 10 days would not have been enough to create such a detailed plan. He explained the sales success of Suvorov's book in Russia with the fact that the state-mandated Stalinist image of history after the end of the Soviet Union could be replaced by mere reverse anti-Stalinist history myths due to a lack of archival research and reliable document editions.

Lev Besymensky interprets Stalin's speech of May 5, 1941 in connection with the disastrous state of the Red Army. He reacted to intelligence information from the same day about Hitler's plan of attack and said hardly anything new, "especially since the Soviet doctrine also provided for the unconditional transition from defense to offensive at that time" and saw its troops like any army as a "modern army of attack". Stalin tried here to appease Hitler and to encourage the officers present and to orient them towards "full combat readiness" of the Red Army. In doing so, he had almost predicted the coming catastrophe and its causes, namely the defensive ability of his army.

Exchange and reissue of sources

As a result of the debate, Western historians intensified their academic exchange with Russian colleagues. A historians' conference on the preventive war legend in Moscow in 1995 made international research on the German-Soviet war in Russia better known and led to a convergence of the positions of all those involved. Bianka Pietrow-Ennker summarized the conference result:

“In 1941 the Red Army neither prepared an offensive, nor was it capable of an offensive. [...] In June 1941, the German leadership did not assume any acute threat from the Soviet armed forces either. "

As a result of this rapprochement, editions of Soviet documents from the war period and German-Russian collections of articles appeared, some by proponents and opponents of the preventive war thesis. The state-sponsored Joint Commission for Research into the Recent History of German-Russian Relations , founded in 1997, also makes the German-Soviet War one of its key issues.

As a result of this research exchange, the preventive war thesis is considered to be refuted on both the Soviet and German sides. It is therefore rejected as untenable in overview works on the Nazi era and contemporary history .

Research status since 2000

The preventive war thesis has been represented in Germany since 2000 by some historians assigned to the extreme or new right , such as Stefan Scheil . The other German-speaking historians reject their publications as methodologically unscientific, revisionist and semantic attempts at relief. In Russia they represent some journalists who continue to refer to the preventive strike plan of May 15, 1941 and ignore the fact that Stalin rejected it.

In 2001, Bernd Wegner summarized the state of research on the thesis of the German preventive war against the Soviet Union. From 1939 to 1941, the Nazi regime and the OKW had no concerns about an imminent attack by the Soviet Union: "On the contrary: Hitler attacked the Soviet Union because he considered the Red Army to be weak, not strong." The German General Staff interpreted the counter-march of the Red Army defensively until the end. At best, Nazi leaders feared Stalin's later intentions to conquer, precisely because the Soviet Union stayed out of the world war in order - according to their assumption - to use the result for its own expansion. This fear was not entirely unrealistic; but latent or potential threats were excluded as a reason for war under international law, and the German attack was not intended to preserve an existing legal status as a last resort , but to completely change Europe through conquests according to Nazi ideas. So from May 1941 on, Hitler only feared a diplomatic peace initiative from Stalin. The Red Army was unable to conquer in 1941 because of its incomplete reorganization. With these research results, the preventive war thesis is "scientifically done".

In 2002, Henning Köhler declared the German-Soviet War less from Hitler's program, but more from his power politics at the time: Hitler decided to go to war in 1940 in order to take Britain's hope of a “ continental sword ” and thus induce a peace treaty. Köhler also pointed out that the Nazi regime did not fear a Soviet preventive strike. This was "completely unreal in view of the far too low mobility of the Soviet armed forces and their unsolved supply problems".

In 2004, the Russian historian Sergei Slutsch demonstrated in detail that Stalin's alleged speech of August 19, 1939 was a forgery. He judged their up to then frequent use for the preventive war thesis as a futile attempt to "shift the main responsibility for this war [...] from Hitler to Stalin, in which some Russian historians in anti-Stalinist overzealousness and complete neglect of the standards of historiographical professionalism and source criticism the apologetic Trends have played into the hands of some German historians and journalists. ”Nonetheless, right-wing extremist and new-right authors continue to rely on this falsification. This denial of a research result marks such publications.

Manfred Hildermeier pointed out in 2007 that

  • After Germany's rapid victories in Western Europe since 1940, Stalin shied away from entering the war on the side of Great Britain,
  • the Red Army in 1940 was hardly capable of attack because of the "purges" of 1937/38, as became apparent in the winter war of 1939/40,
  • After the occupations granted to him by Germany in the Baltic States and Southeastern Europe, Stalin did not seek further expansion, but rather consolidation and defense;
  • he kept the Hitler-Stalin pact and economic agreement until June 22, 1941,
  • Despite precise information from the secret service, he misjudged the German troop deployment in the spring of 1941 and did not expect an attack,
  • the Red Army did not overcome its organizational weakness until the summer of 1941, but was initially able to be overrun precisely because of its offensive position,
  • there were no concrete and sufficient preparations for an attack on the Soviet side and the necessary order from Stalin is unfounded, but his refusal to follow his generals' pre-emptive strike plans is documented.

That is why a Soviet plan of attack against Germany at the time is still extremely unlikely. At the same time, this rules out the possibility that the German attack anticipated and thwarted such an allegedly acutely imminent Soviet attack, i.e. it had a preventive character regardless of the aims of the Nazi regime.

Bogdan Musiał again interpreted Stalin's dinner speech of May 5, 1941 in an essay from 2006 as evidence of a specific intention to attack. Jörg Gägel and Reiner Steinweg (2007) saw no sufficient evidence for this. In 2008 Musial claimed in his work Kampfplatz Deutschland that Stalin had upgraded the Red Army in the spring of 1941 to become the “largest invasion army of all time” for a war of aggression against Germany planned for 1942. Hitler correctly assessed Stalin's foreign policy goals in June 1941. Since the Nazi regime was not aware of his plans for attack, his attack should not be regarded as a preventive strike. The right-wing national newspaper and Junge Freiheit author Thorsten Hinz welcomed Musial's book as support for the preventive war thesis. Bert Hoppe , Dittmar Dahlmann and Wolfram Wette, among others, criticized Musial's thesis as a variant of the preventive war thesis that was not covered by any concrete and reliable evidence. Against Musial, Jochen Laufer interpreted Stalin's rearmament in 1941 as a failed attempt at a military deterrent in order to preserve the greatest possible freedom of action.

In 2008, Rolf-Dieter Müller summed up the current state of research “that the Barbarossa company was not a preventive war. [...] Stalin's order to attack in accordance with Hitler's “ Directive No. 21 ” has not yet been issued. An immediate threat from the USSR has demonstrably never played a role in the planning process on the German side. This important result has not yet been seriously questioned. "

In 2010, Jörg Echternkamp , historian at MGFA, briefly summarized the scientifically proven arguments against the preventive war thesis in a retrospective and showed how attempts had been made from 1963 to enforce it in a journalistic way. In 2011 Christian Hartmann , historian at the Institute for Contemporary History , identified the “Operation Barbarossa” as “a war of aggression that the Third Reich opened without any need” and “from the outset as a race-ideological war of annihilation”, whereby “the initiative for this war alone emanated from Germany ”. Admittedly, Stalin had “also pursued imperialist goals” since the mid-1920s, but they should only be put into practice “when capitalist Europe had spent itself again in a new world war”. During the German attack on June 22, 1941, however, "it cannot even be remotely said that the Wehrmacht had preempted an impending Soviet attack with a preventive strike."

literature

Representative of the preventive war thesis

  • Viktor Suvorov, Dmitrij Khmelnizki (ed.): Attack on Europe. Pour le Mérite Verlag, Selent 2009, ISBN 978-3-932381-53-9 .
  • Andreas Naumann: acquittal for the armed forces. Grabert-Verlag , Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-87847-215-3 .
  • Stefan Scheil: 1940/41. The escalation of World War II. Olzog, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-7892-8151-4 .
  • Werner Maser: Forgery, poetry and truth about Hitler and Stalin. Olzog, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-7892-8134-4 .
  • Albert L. Weeks: Stalin's Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2003, ISBN 0-7425-2192-3 .
  • Walter Post: Operation Barbarossa. German and Soviet attack plans in 1940/41. 3rd edition, Mittler & Sohn, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-8132-0772-2 .
  • Viktor Suvorov: Stalin's first strike prevented. Hitler stifles the world revolution. Pour le Mérite Verlag , Selent 2000, ISBN 3-932381-09-2 .
  • Joachim Hoffmann: Stalin's War of Extermination 1941–1945. Planning, execution and documentation. 6th edition, Herbig, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-7766-2079-X .
  • Heinz Magenheimer: decisive battle 1941. Soviet war preparations - deployment - clash. Osning, Bielefeld 2000, ISBN 3-9806268-1-4 .
  • Gerhard Baumfalk: Assault or Preventive Strike? The German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941: an investigation into the background and causes. RG Fischer, 1997, ISBN 3-89501-493-1 .
  • Wolfgang Strauss: Operation Barbarossa and the Russian historians' dispute. Herbig, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-7766-2028-5 .
  • Viktor Suworow: Der Tag M. 2nd edition, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-608-91676-8 .
  • Richard C. Raack: Stalin's Drive to the West, 1938-1945: The Origins of the Cold War. Stanford University Press, Stanford 1995, ISBN 0-8047-2415-6 .
  • Heinz Magenheimer: Turning the War in Europe 1939–1945: Management Decisions, Background, Alternatives. Olzog, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-7892-8380-0 .
  • Werner Maser: The broken word. Hitler, Stalin and the Second World War. Olzog, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-7892-8260-X .
  • Adolf von Thadden: Two attackers: The attack by the German Wehrmacht on the Red Army, which was also deployed to attack, in June 1941. Heitz and Höffkes, Essen 1993, ISBN 3-926650-30-3 .
  • Ernst Topitsch: Stalin's War. Moscow's grab for world domination. Strategy and Failure (1985) Busse Seewald, Herford 1993, ISBN 3-512-03112-9 .
  • Fritz Becker: In the fight for Europe. Stalin's moves against Germany and the West. 2nd edition, Leopold Stocker, Graz 1993, ISBN 3-7020-0611-7 .
  • Viktor Suvorov: The icebreaker. Hitler in Stalin's calculations. Klett-Cotta , Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-608-91511-7 .
  • Max Klüver: Preventive Strike 1941. On the prehistory of the Russian campaign. (1986) 2nd edition, Druffel-Verlag , Leoni am Starnberger See 1988, ISBN 3-8061-1046-8 .
  • Joachim Hoffmann: The Soviet Union until the eve of the German attack. In: Military History Research Office (ed.): The attack on the Soviet Union. The German Reich and the Second World War. Volume 4, 2nd edition, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 978-3-421-06098-3 , pp. 38-97.
  • Philipp W. Fabry: The Soviet Union and the Third Reich. A documented history of German-Soviet relations from 1933 to 1941. (1971) Busse-Seewald, Stuttgart-Degerloch 1984, ISBN 3-512-00038-X
  • Erich Helmdach: Assault? The Soviet-German deployment in 1941. (1975) Verlag Berg , Kurt Vowinckel, Berg am See 1983, ISBN 3-921655-18-8 .
  • Udo Walendy : Moscow decided to go to war in 1940. Vlotho 1982 ( Historical Facts No. 14).
  • David Leslie Hoggan : Did Hitler Plan a War of Aggression against Soviet Russia? Germany in Past and Present 27 (3) / 1979, pp. 7-10.
  • Philipp W. Fabry: The Hitler-Stalin Pact 1939-1941. A contribution to the method of Soviet foreign policy. Fundus, Darmstadt 1962.
  • David Leslie Hoggan: The Forced War. The causes and originators of the 2nd World War. Publishing house of the Deutsche Hochschullehrer-Zeitung, Tübingen 1961.

Representative of Soviet attack plans in 1941

  • Mikhail Ivanovich Meltjuchow: Ideologičeskie dokumenty maja-ijunja 1941 goda o sobytijach Vtoroj mirovoj vojny. In: Otečestvennaja istorija 1995, issue 2, pp. 70–85.
  • Wladimir A. Neweschin: The Pact with Germany and the Idea of ​​an “Offensive War (1939-1941)”. In: The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 8, 1995, Issue 4, pp. 809-843.
  • Vladimir A. Neweschin: Reč 'Stalina 5 maja 1941 goda i apologija nastupatel'noj vojny. In: Otečestvennaja istorija 1995, issue 2, pp. 54–69.
  • Vladimir A. Neweschin: Stalinskij vybor 1941 goda: oborona ili… "lozung nastupatel'noj vojny"? Po povodu knigi G. Gorodeckogo “Mif Ledokola”. In: Otečestvennaja istorija 1996, issue 3, pp. 55–73.
  • В. А. Невежин: Синдром наступательной войны. Советская пропаганда в преддверии "священных боев", 1939–1941 гг. Moscow 1997.

Document and essay collections

  • Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation: Documenty vneschnej politiki. Volume 13, 2 half volumes, Moscow 1995/1998.
  • Juri Afanasjew (ed.): Drugaja Vojna: 1939–1945 ("The Other War"). 1996.
  • WP Naumow (Ed.): 1941 god. Documenty. 2 volumes, Moscow 1998.
  • Gerd R. Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenskij (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. The controversy over the preventive war thesis . (1998) New edition: Primus, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-89678-776-7 .
  • Stefan Voss: Stalin's preparations for war 1941 - researched, interpreted and instrumentalized. An Analysis of Post-Soviet Historiography. Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-86064-717-2 .

Debilitating the preventive war thesis

  • Alex J. Kay : Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940-1941. Berghahn, New York / Oxford 2006, ISBN 1-84545-186-4 .
  • Sven Felix Kellerhoff : Was the attack on the Soviet Union a preventive strike? In: Sven Felix Kellerhoff, Lars-Broder Keil: German legends. About the "stab in the back" and other myths of history. 2nd edition, Christoph Links, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-86153-257-3 , pp. 68-91.
  • Lev A. Bezymenskij: Stalin and Hitler. The dictators' poker game. Structure, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-351-02539-4 .
  • Oleg Wischljow : On the military intentions and plans of the USSR in the summer of 1941. In: Babette Quinkert (ed.): “We are the masters of this country”. Causes, course and consequences of the German attack on the Soviet Union. VSA, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-87975-876-X , pp. 44-54.
  • Rainer F. Schmidt : Appeasement or attack? A critical inventory of the so-called “Preventive War Debate ” on June 22, 1941. In: Jürgen Elvert, Susanne Krauß (Ed.): Historical debates and controversies in the 19th and 20th centuries. Franz Steiner, Essen 2002, ISBN 3-515-08253-0 , pp. 220-233.
  • Bernd Wegner: Preventive War 1941? On the controversy over a pseudo-military history problem. In: Jürgen Elvert, Susanne Krauß (ed.): Historical debates and controversies in the 19th and 20th centuries. Franz Steiner, Essen 2002, ISBN 3-515-08253-0 , pp. 206-219.
  • Sven Felix Kellerhoff: Preventive Strike? In: Lars-Broder Keil, Sven Felix Kellerhoff: German legends: From the stab in the back and other myths of history. Christoph Links, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-86153-257-3 , pp. 96-119.
  • David M. Glantz: The Military Strategy of the Soviet Union. A history. (1992) Reprint, Routledge / Curzon, Abingdon 2001, ISBN 0-7146-8200-4 .
  • Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (Ed.): Preventive War? The German attack on the Soviet Union. 2nd edition, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-596-14497-3 .
  • Gabriel Gorodetsky: Grand Illusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia. Yale University Press, New Haven 1999; German: The great deception. Hitler, Stalin and the "Barbarossa" company. Siedler, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-88680-709-6 ( review by Bianka Pietrow-Ennker , Die Zeit, March 29, 2001; fee required)
  • David M. Glantz: Stumbling Colossus. The Red Army on the Eve of World War. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence 1998, ISBN 0-7006-0879-6 .
  • Armin Pfahl-Traughber : Preventive War or Assault? On new interpretations of the German war against the Soviet Union of 1941. In: Neue Politische Literatur 43, 1998, pp. 264–277.
  • David M. Glantz: The Initial Period of War on the Eastern Front. June 22 – August 1941. Proceedings of the Fourth Art of War Symposium. (1987) Reprint, Frank Cass, London 1997, ISBN 0-7146-4298-3 .
  • Bianka Pietrow-Ennker: Germany in June 1941 - a victim of Soviet aggression? On the controversy over the preventive war thesis. In: Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.): The Second World War. Analyzes. Main features. Research balance sheet. (1989) Seehamer, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-932131-38-X , pp. 586-607.
  • Wolfram Wette: The thesis of preventive war and the attack on the Soviet Union. In: Klaus Meyer , Wolfgang Wippermann (Ed.): Against forgetting. The war of extermination against the Soviet Union 1941–1945. German-Soviet historians' conference in Berlin in June 1991 on the causes, victims and consequences of the German attack on the Soviet Union. (1991) Haag and Herchen, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-89228-755-4 , pp. 43-58.
  • Wigbert Benz: The lie of the German preventive war 1941. In: Learn history: Legends - Myths - Lies. Issue 52, 1996, pp. 54-59.
  • Gabriel Gorodetsky: Mif Ledokola, Nakanune vojny (“The icebreaker myth”). Moscow 1995.
  • David M. Glantz: Soviet Military Operational Art. In Pursuit of Deep Battle. (1990) Routledge / Curzon, Abingdon 1991, ISBN 0-7146-3362-3 .
  • Gabriel Gorodetsky: Stalin and Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union. An examination of the legend of the German pre-emptive strike. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 37, 1989, issue 4, pp. 645–672 (PDF; 1.3 MB).
  • Wolfram Wette: On the revival of anti-Bolshevism by historical means. Or: what is behind the preventive war thesis? In: Gernot Erler, Rolf-Dieter Müller, Ulrich Rose (Eds.): Geschichtswende? Disposal attempts for German history (1987) 2nd edition, Dreisam, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-89125-255-2 , pp. 86-115.
  • Hans-Ulrich Wehler : Disposal of the German Past? A polemical essay. Gutenberg Book Guild, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-7632-3461-6 .
  • Johannes Zukertort: German militarism and the legend of the preventive war of Hitler-Germany against the Soviet Union. 1960.

Web links

Wiktionary: Preventive war thesis  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. BMI / University of Tübingen: Report on the Protection of the Constitution 2001. (PDF; 5.1 MB) p. 99 and 120; Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution: The importance of anti-Semitism in current German right-wing extremism. (PDF; 445 kB) p. 27, fn. 114.
  2. Johannes Hürter: Hitler's Army Leader - The German Commanders-in-Chief in the War against the Soviet Union 1941/42. 2nd edition, Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-486-58341-7 , pp. 2-4 and p. 221.
  3. Jürgen Förster: The company 'Barbarossa' as a war of conquest and extermination. In: Military History Research Office (ed.): The German Reich and the Second World War, Volume 4, Stuttgart 1983, p. 444 and fn. 123–125. According to this, Hitler's speech of June 14, 1941 is only known from the war diaries of some generals and has been passed down contradictingly.
  4. Wolfram Wette: The Nazi propaganda thesis of the alleged preventive war character. In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. 40.
  5. Bernd Wegner: Preventive War 1941? In: Jürgen Elvert, Susanne Krauß (ed.): Historical debates and controversies in the 19th and 20th centuries. 2002, p. 215f. (Source ibid., Can be viewed in the Federal Archives-Military Archives, RW 4 / v.475)
  6. Elke Fröhlich (Ed.): The diaries of Joseph Goebbels. Part I: Records 1923–1941. Volume 9: December 1940 to July 1941. Institute for Contemporary History / Saur, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-598-23739-1 , p. 212; Raimond Reiter: Hitler's Secret Policy. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 3-631-58146-7 , p. 57 .
  7. Eike Fröhlich (Ed.): The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, Part I , Munich 1998, p. 377f.
  8. Wolfram Wette: The propaganda music accompanying the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär, Wolfram Wette (Ed.): "Operation Barbarossa": The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941: Reports, analyzes, Documents. Schöningh, Paderborn 1984, ISBN 3-506-77468-9 , pp. 116-119, citations p. 118.
  9. Günter Wegmann (Ed.): "The High Command of the Wehrmacht announces ...": The German Wehrmacht report. Volume I: 1939-1941. Biblio, Osnabrück 1982, p. 590.
  10. Bernd Wegner: Preventive War 1941? In: Jürgen Elvert, Susanne Krauss: Historical debates and controversies in the 19th and 20th centuries. 2002, p. 213
  11. Wolfram Wette: The Nazi propaganda thesis of the alleged preventive war character. In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, pp. 42–46.
  12. Steffen Werher: Danish volunteers in the Waffen SS. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Berlin 2004, pp. 64–83; for recruitment in the occupied territories of the USSR: Dieter Pohl : Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht. German military occupation and native population in the Soviet Union 1941–1944. Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, pp. 173-181.
  13. Ortwin Buchbender, Reinhold Sterz (ed.): The other face of the war. German field post letters 1939–1945. Beck, Munich 1982, pp. 68-88.
  14. Elke Fröhlich (Ed.): The diaries of Joseph Goebbels. Records 1923–1941. December 1940 - July 1941. Volume 9, Saur, Munich 1998, p. 420; Bernd Wegner: Preventive War 1941? In: Jürgen Elvert, Susanne Krauß (ed.): Historical debates and controversies in the 19th and 20th centuries. 2002, p. 213, fn. 47
  15. ^ Peter Krüger: Etzels Halle and Stalingrad. Goering's speech of January 30, 1943. In: Joachim Heinzle, Anneliese Waldschnidt (Ed.): The Nibelungs. A German madness, a German nightmare. Studies and documents on the reception of the Nibelung material in the 19th and 20th centuries. Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 175-177.
  16. ^ Heinrich Himmler: Poznan speech of October 4, 1943 (full text). In: 1000dokumente.de .
  17. Percy Ernst Schramm (Ed.): War Diary of the High Command of the Wehrmacht 1940–1945 - A Documentation. Special edition in 8 volumes. Volume 4, Weltbild, Augsburg 1996, ISBN 3-7637-5933-6 , p. 1503. Quoted in Bernd Wegner: Preventive War 1941? In: Jürgen Elvert, Susanne Krauss: Historical debates and controversies in the 19th and 20th centuries. 2002, p. 214 .
  18. Examples: Erich von Manstein and Joachim von Ribbentrop on Zeno.org.
  19. Heinz Duchhardt (Ed.): Option Europe: German, Polish and Hungarian European plans of the 19th and 20th centuries. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-525-36287-0 , pp. 206-208.
  20. Kurt Assmann: German fateful years. Brockhaus, Wuppertal 1950, pp. 228-230; quoted by Jürgen Förster: Summary. In: Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (Ed.): Preventive War? Frankfurt am Main 2000, p. 210.
  21. ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller, Gerd R. Ueberschär: Hitler's War in the East 1941-1945: A research report. New edition, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2000, ISBN 3-534-14768-5 , pp. 33 and 74.
  22. a b c d e see representatives of the preventive war thesis under literature .
  23. Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. IX (foreword).
  24. ^ Gerhard L. Weinberg: Review of Philipp Fabry's Der Hitler-Stalin-Pakt, 1939-1941. In: The American Historical Review Volume 69, No. 1, October 1963; Review of Philipp Fabry's The Soviet Union and the Third Reich. In: Slavic Review , Volume 31, No. 3, September 1972.
  25. John Erickson: Preparations for War of the Soviet Union 1940/41. In: Andreas Hillgruber (Ed.): Problems of the Second World War. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne / Berlin 1967, pp. 75–99.
  26. Gerd R. Ueberschär, Wolfram Wette (ed.): "Enterprises Barbarossa" , Paderborn 1984, p. 41.
  27. Paul Carell: The Red Blackmail. In: Welt am Sonntag , October 21, 1979.
  28. ^ Paul Carell: Stalingrad. Victory and fall of the 6th Army. (1992) Munich 2003, p. 336.
  29. ^ Walter Post: Operation Barbarossa. German and Soviet attack plans in 1940/41. Hamburg 1995, p. 10f .; Criticism from Wigbert Benz: Paul Carell's “Operation Barbarossa”. Ribbentrop's press chief Paul K. Schmidt as the protagonist of the “clean” Wehrmacht and “preventive” warfare from 1941 to 1995. historisches-centrum.de, 2005.
  30. ^ Andreas Hillgruber: Hitler's strategy. Politics and warfare 1940–1941. 2nd edition 1982; quoted by Wolfram Wette: Defense lies. Why the myth of the German preventive war against Russia is being revived . In: Die Zeit , No. 28, July 8, 1988.
  31. Andreas Hillgruber: Again: Hitler's turn against the Soviet Union 1940. In: History in Science and Education 33, 1982, pp. 214-226.
  32. Gerhard Schreiber: On the perception of the Barbarossa company in the German press. In: Gerd Ueberschär, Wolfram Wette (ed.): "Enterprise Barbarossa" , Paderborn 1984, p. 41.
  33. Joachim Hoffmann: The Soviet Union up to the eve of the German attack and The conduct of war from the perspective of the Soviet Union. In: Military History Research Office (Ed.): The German Reich and the Second World War Volume 4: The attack on the Soviet Union. (1983) Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2nd edition, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-421-06098-3 , pp. 38-97 and pp. 713-809.
  34. Jürgen Förster: Hitler's decision to go to war against the Soviet Union. In: Military History Research Office (Ed.): The German Reich and the Second World War Volume 4: The attack on the Soviet Union. 2nd edition, Stuttgart 1987, pp. 13-18 and 35f.
  35. ^ Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, Wolfgang Benz, Wolfgang Neugebauer: The Auschwitz deniers. 'Revisionist' historical lie and historical truth. Elefanten Press, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-88520-600-5 , p. 189.
  36. ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller, Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.): Hitler's War in the East 1941-1945: a research report. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2000, ISBN 3-534-14768-5 , pp. 27f. and p. 414; Primary evidence ibid. P. 432, fn. 272–273: Viktor Suworow: Who Was Planning to Attack Whom in June 1941, Hitler or Stalin? In: Rusi. Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies , Volume 130, 1985, pp. 50-55; Viktor Suvorov: Yes, Stalin Was Planning to Attack Hitler in June 1941. In: Rusi , Volume 131, 1986, pp. 73 f .; P. 434: Ernst Topitsch: Stalins Krieg (1985), 3rd edition 1990.
  37. Günther Gillessen: The War of the Dictators. Did Stalin want to attack the German Reich in the summer of 1941? FAZ No. 191, August 20, 1986; Received by Reinhard Kühnl (ed.): The past that does not pass: the “Historians Debate”, presentation, documentation, criticism. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-7609-1114-5 , p. 124; Hermannus Pfeiffer: The FAZ: Inquiries about a central organ. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-7609-1202-8 , p. 159; Hans Schafranek, Robert Streibel: June 22, 1941: The attack on the Soviet Union. Picus, Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-85452-224-X , p. 25.
  38. Reinhard Kühnl (Ed.): Past that does not pass away , Cologne 1987, p. 120.
  39. Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner: Fear of a predator that is already dead. In: Rheinischer Merkur / Christ and Welt 51, December 12, 1986, p. 19; received by Gernot Erler (Ed.): Geschichtswende? Disposal attempts on German history. Dreisam-Verlag, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-89125-255-2 , p. 105.
  40. Ernst Nolte: The European Civil War 1917–1945. National Socialism and Bolshevism. Herbig, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-7766-9003-8 , pp. 460-466; received by Wolfgang Schieder: National Socialism in the Misjudgment of Philosophical Historiography. In: History and Society. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1989, pp. 89–146, here p. 95; Hans Schafranek, Robert Streibel: June 22, 1941 , Vienna 1991, p. 27; Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, Wolfgang Benz, Wolfgang Neugebauer: Die Auschwitzleugner , Berlin 1996, p. 193.
  41. Wigbert Benz: Preventive Genocide? On the controversy about the character of the German war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. In: Blätter für Deutsche und Internationale Politik 10/1988, pp. 1215–1227; Gerd R. Ueberschär: Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union. In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. 55.
  42. Gerd Ueberschär: Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union 1941. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. 54f.
  43. Günther Gillessen: The War of the Dictators. A first summary of the debate about Hitler's attack in the east. FAZ No. 47, February 25, 1987.
  44. Arno Klönne: Bundestag election, historians' debate and “Cultural Revolution from the Right”. In: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 32, 1987, issue 3, pp. 285–296.
  45. ^ Lew Besymenski: Katheder-Revanchismus. Thoughts on the origins of a political-psychological campaign. In: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 32, 1987, issue 3, pp. 273–284.
  46. Sergej Slutsch: Stalin's "War Scenario 1939". A speech that never existed. The story of a fake. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Volume 52, 2004, Issue 4 (PDF; 1.7 MB), pp. 597–636, here p. 605.
  47. Eberhard Jäckel: About an alleged speech of Stalin from August 19, 1939. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1958, No. 4, pp. 380–389.
  48. Bernd Bonwetsch: Stalin's statements on the policy towards Germany 1939-1941. In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. 148f.
  49. Alexander Jakowlew (ed.): "Vojenno istoritschenskij schurnal" . 12/1991, 1/1992, 2/1992; German translated into: Lev A. Bezymenskij: Selected Soviet documents. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenskij (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, pp. 157-173 and 177-183.
  50. Situation report and enemy situation assessment of the department "Foreign Army East" , March 15, 1941, in: Gerd R. Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (Ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. 276.
  51. Nikolaj M. Romanitschew: Military plans for a counter-attack by the USSR. In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, pp. 90–93.
  52. ↑ Abridged version of IV Stalin's speech to the graduates of the Academy of the Red Army in the Kremlin, May 5, 1941 . In: 1000dokumente.de ; Translation to: Eastern Europe , Vol. 1992, No. 3, pp. 248-252.
  53. Lev Bezymenskij: Stalin's speech of May 1941 - newly documented. In: Gerd-R. Ueberschär, Lev Bezymenskij (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, pp. 131-144.
  54. Considerations of the General Staff of the Red Army on the plan of a strategic deployment of the armed forces of the USSR in the event of a war against Germany and its allies, not before May 15, 1941. In: 1000dokumente.de ; Translation according to Gerd-R. Ueberschär, Lev Bezymenskij (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, pp. 186-193.
  55. Considerations of the General Staff of the Red Army on the plan of a strategic deployment of the armed forces of the USSR in the event of a war against Germany and its allies, not before May 15, 1941 . In: 1000dokumente.de ; Gerd R. Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenskij (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941, Darmstadt 2011, pp. 186-188 (emphasis in the original, p. 187).
  56. Considerations of the General Staff of the Red Army on the plan of a strategic deployment of the armed forces of the USSR in the event of a war against Germany and its allies, not before May 15, 1941. Introduction. In: 1000dokumente.de .
  57. Contemporary history: Sleeping aggressors. In: Der Spiegel, May 28, 1990.
  58. Considerations of the General Staff of the Red Army on the plan of a strategic deployment of the armed forces of the USSR in the event of a war against Germany and its allies, not before May 15, 1941. References to sources and literature. In: 1000dokumente.de .
  59. Lev Bezymenskij: Selected Soviet documents. In: Gerd-R. Ueberschär, Lev Bezymenskij (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, pp. 186-193.
  60. Georgi Zhukov: Wospominanija i rasmyschlenija. Volume 1, Moscow 1992, p. 358 ff .; Lecture at Juri Gorkov: June 22, 1941: Defense or attack? In: Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (Ed.): Preventive War? Frankfurt am Main 2000, p. 206, fn. 10.
  61. Lev A. Bezymenskij: Stalin's speech of May 5, 1941. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenskij (Ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. 142.
  62. Quoted from Alexander Borosnjak : A Russian historians' dispute ? In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. 121.
  63. Victor Suvorov: The icebreaker. Hitler in Stalin's calculations. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1989, pp. 210-212 and more often.
  64. Hans-Erich Volkmann: The legend of the preventive war. Die Zeit, June 13, 1997.
  65. Adolf von Thadden: Stalin's trap: he wanted war. Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996, ISBN 3-920722-41-8 , p. 96.
  66. Wolfgang Strauss: Operation Barbarossa and the Russian historians' dispute. Herbig, 1999, ISBN 3-7766-2028-5 , p. 93.
  67. Wolfgang Strauss: Stalin's prevented first strike. Ostpreußenblatt, July 29, 2000.
  68. Wolfgang Strauss: Progress of Revisionism in Russia ( Memento of December 24, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 116 kB). In: Staatsbriefe 7/2000.
  69. Examples from Klaus Kornexl: The worldview of the intellectual right in the Federal Republic of Germany. Shown using the example of the weekly magazine Junge Freiheit. Utz, Munich 2008, ISBN 3-8316-0761-3 , p. 134.
  70. Examples from Stephan Braun, Alexander Geisler, Martin Gerster (eds.): Strategies of the extreme right: Backgrounds - Analyzes - Answers. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 3-531-15911-9 , p. 414.
  71. Ernst Nolte: Points of contention. Present and future controversies about National Socialism. Propylaeen, Berlin 1993, pp. 268-270.
  72. Werner Maser: Der Wortbruch , Munich 1994, p. VIII and p. 376–378.
  73. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: The preparations for the attack in the Soviet Union. In: Bernd Wegner (Ed.): Two ways to Moscow. From the Hitler-Stalin Pact to "Operation Barbarossa". Piper, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-492-11346-X , pp. 367-388.
  74. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Stalin's War of Extermination 1941–1945. Munich 1995, pp. 40-42.
  75. ^ Joachim Hoffmann: Stalin's War of Extermination. Planning, execution and documentation. 5th, revised and expanded edition, Munich 1999, pp. 25–27.
  76. Heinz Magenheimer: decisive battle 1941. Soviet war preparations - deployment - clash. Osning, Bielefeld 2000, pp. 135f.
  77. Alexander Borosnjak : A Russian Historians' Dispute ? In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, pp. 117f. and 123.
  78. Vladimir Nevežin: Considerations of the General Staff of the Red Army on the plan of a strategic deployment of the armed forces of the USSR in the event of a war against Germany and its allies, not before May 15, 1941. Introduction. In: 1000dokumente.de .
  79. ^ Valery Danilov: Has the General Staff of the Red Army prepared a preventive strike against Germany? In: Österreichische Militärische Zeitschrift 1993/1, pp. 41–51, citations p. 43.
  80. Alexander I. Boroznjak: A Russian Historians' Dispute ? In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. 119.
  81. Mikhail I. Meltjuchow: Упущенный шанс Сталина. Советский Союз и борьба за Европу: 1939–1941. Veče, Moscow 2000, ISBN 5-7838-1196-3 .
  82. Boris V. Sokolov: Kak nacalas vtoraja mirovaja. In: Nezavisimaja gazeta , December 31, 1993.
  83. Boris V. Sokolov: World War II Revisited: Did Stalin Intend to Attack Hitler? In: Journal of Slavic Military Studies , Volume 11, 1998, Issue 2, pp. 113-141.
  84. Situation reports of the department "Foreign Army East" responsible for enemy reconnaissance from March 15 to June 13, 1941. In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenskij (Ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. 276-280.
  85. Bernd Bonwetsch: What did Stalin want on June 22, 1941? Comments on the “Short Course” by Viktor Suvorov. In: Blätter für Deutsche und Internationale Politik 1989, No. 6, pp. 687–695.
  86. Bernd Bonwetsch: Preparations for War of the Red Army 1941. In: Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (Ed.): Preventive War ? , Frankfurt am Main 2000, pp. 176-179.
  87. Krasnaya Zvezda, May 23, 1991; quoted by Alexander I. Boroznjak: A Russian historians' dispute ? In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. 128.
  88. Gerd R. Ueberschär: Hitler's decision to go to war against the Soviet Union and the preventive war discussion in recent literature. In: Hans Schafranek, Robert Streibel (Ed.): June 22, 1941. The attack on the Soviet Union. Picus, Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-85452-224-X , pp. 13-22.
  89. Ralf Georg Reuth (ed.): Joseph Goebbels: Diaries 1924–1945. Volume 4, Piper, Munich / Zurich 1992, pp. 1504 and 1554.
  90. Gerd R. Ueberschär: "Russia is our India." In: Hans-Heinrich Nolte (Ed.): Man against man: considerations and research on the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. Torch bearer, Hanover 1992, ISBN 3-7716 -2317-0 , p. 66.
  91. Gerd R. Ueberschär: The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. A new dispute about the old preventive war thesis? In: Johannes Klotz, Ulrich Schneider (Ed.): The self-conscious nation and its historical image. Historical legends of the New Right - fascism, Holocaust, Wehrmacht. Papy Rossa, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-89438-137-X , p. 146.
  92. Wigbert Benz: The lie of the German preventive war 1941. In: Learn history: Legends - Myths - Lies. Issue 52, 1996, pp. 54-59.
  93. Bernd Wegner: From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia and the World, 1939-1941. Military History Research Office (ed.), Berghahn / Providence 1997, ISBN 1-57181-882-0 , p. 128, fn. 48 (source: Dmitri Wolkogonow: Stalin. Triumph und Tragödie. A political portrait. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1989, p 547, footnote 36).
  94. ^ Karl-Heinz Janßen: All warnings ignored. In: Die Zeit No. 22, May 27, 1999; Quote ibid.
  95. Manfred Messerschmidt: On the controversy about German foreign and military policy. In: Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (Ed.): Preventive War? , Frankfurt am Main 2000, pp. 27f. and 31-34.
  96. Gabriel Gorodetsky: Was Stalin Planning to Attack Hitler in June 1941? In: RUSI Journal , Volume 131, 1986, No. 2.
  97. Gabriel Gorodetsky: Grand Illusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT 1999, p. 321.
  98. Dmitri Volkogonow: Stalin. Triumph and tragedy. A political portrait. (1989) Econ, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-546-49847-X , p. 496f .; Pp. 548-553, quoted p. 548.
  99. Dmitri Wolkogonow: Letter to the editor to Izvestija , January 16, 1993; quoted by Alexander I. Boroznjak: A Russian historians' dispute ? In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. 125.
  100. Bernd Bonwetsch: Preparations for War of the Red Army 1941. In: Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (Ed.): Preventive War ? Frankfurt am Main 2000, pp. 174f.
  101. ^ Richard J. Evans: In the shadow of Hitler? Historians' dispute and coming to terms with the past in the Federal Republic. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 66-69.
  102. Jurij Kiršin: The Soviet armed forces on the eve of the Great Patriotic War. In: Bernd Wegner (Ed.): Two ways to Moscow , Munich 1991, pp. 400–402.
  103. Oleg V. Wischljow: Pocemu medlil IV Stalin v 1941 g.? In: Novaja i novejsaja istorija 36, 1992, No. 1, pp. 86-97; No. 2, pp. 70-72.
  104. Juri Gorkow: June 22, 1941: Attack or Defense? In: Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (Ed.): Preventive War? Frankfurt am Main 2000, pp. 199-203.
  105. Juri Gorkow: Gotovil li Stalin upreždajuščij udar protiv Gitlera v 1941 g.? In: Novaja i novejšaja istorija 37, 1993, No. 3, pp. 29-45; lectures at Alexander I. Boroznjak: A Russian historians' dispute ? In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p. 120.
  106. Machmut A. Gareev: Eshche raz k voprosu: gotovil li Stalin preventativnyi udar v 1941 g.? In: Movaia i noveishaia istoriia 2/1994, p. 202.
  107. Nikolaj M. Romanicev: Military plans for a counter-attack by the USSR. In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, pp. 90-102.
  108. Alexander I. Boroznjak: A Russian Historians' Dispute ? In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, pp. 122–124.
  109. Lev A. Bezymenskij: Stalin's speech of May 5, 1941. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenskij (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, p 131-144.
  110. Bianka Pietrow-Ennker: It was not a preventive war . In: Die Zeit, February 24, 1995.
  111. Federal Office of Administration: History Commission ( Memento from May 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  112. Gerd Ueberschär: Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union 1941. In: Gerd Ueberschär, Lev A. Bezymenski (ed.): The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , Darmstadt 2011, pp. 56-69; Jürgen Förster: Summary. In: Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (Ed.): Preventive War? Frankfurt am Main 2000, pp. 208-214.
  113. Example: Kurt Bauer: National Socialism: Origins, Beginnings, Rise and Fall. UTB, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 3-8252-3076-7 , p. 379.
  114. ^ Wolfgang Wippermann : Controversial past. Facts and controversies about National Socialism. Elephanten Press, Berlin 1998, p. 111f. and 123.
  115. ^ Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, Wolfgang Benz, Wolfgang Neugebauer: Die Auschwitzleugner , Berlin 1996, p. 193; Gerd Wiegel : The future of the past. Conservative history discourse and cultural hegemony. Papy Rossa, Cologne 2001, p. 96.
  116. ^ Peter Linke: Flattering units for Joseph Goebbels: Russischer Historikerstreit about June 22, 1941. In: Friday, March 2, 2001.
  117. Bernd Wegner: Preventive War 1941? , in: Jürgen Elvert, Susanne Krauss (eds.): Historical debates and controversies in the 19th and 20th centuries. Essen 2002, pp. 213-219; Quote p. 215.
  118. Henning Köhler: Germany on the way to itself. A history of the century. Hohenheim-Verlag, Stuttgart 2002, pp. 386-389.
  119. Sergej Slutsch: Stalin's "War Scenario 1939". A speech that never existed. The story of a fake. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Volume 52, 2004, Issue 4, pp. 597–636 (PDF; 1.7 MB).
  120. Examples: Stefan Scheil: Five plus two: the European nation states, the world powers and the united unleashing of the Second World War. Duncker & Humblot, 2004, ISBN 3-428-11638-0 , p. 141; Andreas Naumann: acquittal for the German armed forces: "Operation Barbarossa" put to the test again. Grabert, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-87847-215-3 , p. 220; Rolf Kosiek: The big maneuverable: Corrections to contemporary history, Volume 3. Grabert, Tübingen 2007, ISBN 3-87847-235-8 , p. 281; Heinz Magenheimer: "Sergej Slutsch doesn't have a satisfactory answer". Young Freedom, January 28, 2005.
  121. Fabian Virchow : Against civilism: International relations and the military in the political conceptions of the extreme right. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 978-3-531-15007-9 , p. 341.
  122. Manfred Hildermeier: The Soviet Union 1917-1991. Oldenbourg, 2nd edition, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-486-58327-1 , pp. 597-599.
  123. Bogdan Musial: "We will grab the whole capitalism by the collar". Soviet preparations for a war of aggression in the 1930s and early 1940s. In: Wolfgang Benz et al. (Ed.): Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft (ZfG), 54th volume, issue 01, Metropol, Berlin 2006, ISSN  0044-2828 , p. 58.
  124. Jörg Gägel, Reiner Steinweg: Discourses of the Past in the Baltic Sea Region 2: The View of War, Dictatorship, Genocide, Occupation and Displacement in Russia, Poland and the Baltic States. Lit Verlag, Münster 2007, ISBN 3-8258-0203-5 , p. 47 .
  125. ^ Bogdan Musial: Kampfplatz Deutschland. Stalin's plans for war against the West. (Propylaen 2008) List Tb, Berlin 2010, ISBN 3-548-60947-3 , pp. 456f. and 460; See also Musial's summary in Kampfplatz Deutschland , Die Welt, March 15, 2008.
  126. Review of March 28, 2008; Lectures in: Stephan Braun, Alexander Geisler, Martin Gerster (eds.): Strategies of the extreme right: Backgrounds - Analyzes - Answers. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 3-531-15911-9 , p. 414 .
  127. Armin Pfahl-Traughber: Denied war guilt. With the preventive war thesis against the lifeblood of the Federal Republic. In: Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bpb), June 17, 2008.
  128. Bert Hoppe: Review of Kampfplatz Deutschland , in: Sehepunkte 9 (2009), No. 1.
  129. Dittmar Dahlmann: The Red Army and the "Great Patriotic War". In: Manuel Becker, Christoph Studt, Holger Löttel (eds.): The military resistance against Hitler in the light of new controversies: XXI. Königswinter Conference from 22.-24. February 2008. Lit Verlag, Münster 2010, ISBN 3-8258-1768-7 , p. 113 .
  130. Wolfram Wette: 1939 to 2009: Lies in the Service of War. In: Blätter für deutsche und Internationale Politik 9/2009 (PDF; 80 kB), p. 86, fn. 7.
  131. ^ Jochen Laufer: Pax Sovietica: Stalin, the Western Powers and the German Question 1941-1945. Böhlau, Vienna 2009, ISBN 3-412-20416-1 , p. 27 and fn. 21.
  132. ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller: The company "Barbarossa". In: Manuel Becker, Christoph Studt, Holger Löttel (eds.): The military resistance against Hitler in the light of new controversies , Münster 2010, pp. 83f.
  133. Jörg Echternkamp: The 101 Most Important Questions - The Second World War. Beck. Munich 2010, ISBN 3-406-59314-3 , pp. 34-36.
  134. ^ Christian Hartmann: Operation Barbarossa. The German War in the East 1941–1945. Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-61226-8 , p. 8.
  135. ^ Christian Hartmann: Operation Barbarossa. The German War in the East 1941–1945 , pp. 21f.
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