Page 206 - The Chief Culprit

Destruction of the Security Pale on the Eve of the War y 167

Hitler used the roads, bridges, stocks of coal, rails, and the sectional bridges that the Soviet
leadership prepared in the western regions of its country.
As we know, all that did not help the invading German army: its advance was not as
fast as planned. But even this advance could have been stopped if Zhukov had not built roads
on the eve of the war, had not created huge reserves of railroad tracks, bridges, and construc-
tion materials. He should have introduced an effective system of defense: all bridges should
have been blown up, all materiel reserves liquidated, railroads and trains evacuated, roads
destroyed, drowned, turned into swamps and saturated with mines.
On Soviet territory, all mines were disarmed and the barriers taken down. On the
eve of the German invasion, General of the Army D. Pavlov, a commander of the Western
Special Military District (then already secretly transformed into the Western Front), said
that the Soviet sappers were not paying enough attention to preparing themselves properly
for removing mines and other obstacles on enemy territory.
If the Soviet marshals had known better, they would have started their war on June 21:
then they would not have needed to take down German obstacles, because the German army
was doing on the German territory exactly what the Red Army was doing on Soviet territory.
In early June, German troops were disarming mines, evening out barricades, and concentrat-
ing troops right on the border, without keeping in front of them any security pale.
Soviet Marshal K. S. Moskalenko, who in 1941 commanded the First Artillery Anti-
Tank Brigade, counted those German actions as an unquestionable piece of evidence that the
Germans would attack soon. At the same time, the NKVD border troops were dismantling
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their own barbwire on the very border to clear the way into enemy territory for the “libera-
tion” army. ey had cut barbwire in exactly the same way before the “liberation” of Poland,
Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina. Now it was Germany’s turn.