Page 318 - The Chief Culprit
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If It Weren’t for Winter!
Future historians will come to the conclusion that, if one considers the military situation,
the invasion of Russia was a political mistake and all military efforts were doomed from
the start.
—C G H H, PANZER OPERATIONS
uring the war with the Soviet Union, Goebbels’s “Reich Ministry for People’s
Enlightenment and Propaganda” quickly filled newspaper and magazine pages with
Dthousands of photographs: German automobiles stuck in Russian mud, a horse
being flogged because it couldn’t pull a cart out of the terrible slush, blizzards covering tanks
with a thick layer of snow, and gusts of wind ripping the summer hat off a poor German
soldier’s head.
e core principle of propaganda is visual appeal. Goebbels showed the shocked Germans
back home tons of chronicles: mud, mud, mud, impassable mud, endless fields, plains, snow, and
hurricane-strength wind knocking the soldiers off their feet.( e photos were taken on an air-
field, where a three-engine J-52’s propellers helped the storm, adding wind—and drama—to the
situation.) If it were not for winter . . . from German staffs and memoirs of generals were added to
Goebbels’s propaganda, and featured descriptions of the horrors of the Russian winter, the impas-
sable mud, and the unimaginable lack of roads.
It would seem that Marxist historians should have refuted these claims, so that nobody
repeated the conclusions of Hitler’s defenders. However, Marxist historians not only did not
refute those claims, but they joined the chorus of Nazi voices. Marxist propagandists de-
clared that the Russians were completely unprepared for war, and it wasn’t them that defeated
Hitler: all the credit should go to the endless Russian plains, the mud, and the fierce winter.
Why did the Communists need to repeat the Nazi lies? e answer was simple: they
needed to prove that the Soviet Union could not have invaded Europe. ey had to demon-
strate weakness. Here is an example: “Artillery, motorcycles, trucks, and even tanks got stuck
in the impenetrable mud; airplane wheels got stuck in the ground on air bases. e supply
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