From the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa, there existed a lack of clarity over whether Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, or the Ukraine, a key agricultural and industrial center, should be of a higher priority. General Franz Halder, chief of the Army General Staff and Barbarossa’s head planner, argued that Moscow should be the more important objective, as he believed the Soviets would commit their remaining reserves into a showdown over Moscow, thus giving an opportunity for the Germans to win the decisive victory their “lightning war” needed to bring the Soviet campaign to a quick end. Hitler, however, claimed that the Soviet Union could not possibly hope to fight a war of attrition without Ukraine’s economic resources; once deprived of those, Stalin would have no choice but to surrender. Fedor von Bock and Gerd von Rundstedt, the field marshals commanding Army Groups Center and South respectively, agreed with Halder. The Fuhrer, however, was supreme in all of Germany; he could not be overruled. Working with General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff for the Wehrmacht high command, Halder even sought to deceive Hitler by feeding him reports exaggerating the Soviet forces near Moscow while minimizing enemy forces elsewhere. Unfortunately for the generals, Hitler interpreted this to mean that other areas were ripe for the taking, and he considered to regard Moscow as a tertiary target.

On August 22, Halder took one last gamble in the hopes of changing Hitler’s mind. He invited Heinz Guderian, the brash and outspoken commander of Second Panzer Group, to a meeting with Hitler and several senior Wehrmacht officers. Hitler was considering splitting up Guderian’s panzer group, which was attached to Army Group Center, and sending it south to finish off Soviet forces in the Ukraine. Guderian protested, but once it was apparent Hitler would not budge, he solicited Hitler’s permission not to split up his panzer group, but to send all of it south. Hitler agreed to this, and upon hearing the news, Halder felt certain that Hitler had bribed Guderian (not an uncommon practice during the Third Reich). Halder asked Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the supreme commander of the German army, to resign with him in protest. Brauchitsch refused, and unwilling to take the jump alone, Halder resigned himself to the reality that taking Moscow would have to wait.

Even if Halder had gotten his way, it is doubtful capturing Moscow would have made a significant difference for the Germans. Firstly, the logistical nightmare predicted before Operation Barbarossa had come to reality, and Army Group Center barely had the supplies required to hold on to what territory it had, much less to make a successful push on Moscow. Despite having superior equipment and training than the Soviets, the Germans could not fight without sufficient munitions. Secondly, in poor supply and with an exposed southern flank, there are no assurances that the Germans would have overcome the heavy defenses the Soviets erected around Moscow. Also, comparatively, the Soviets were well-supplied thanks to railroad connections in neighboring Gorky (modern-day Nizhny Novgorod). The best the Germans could have hoped for would be to capture Joseph Stalin himself in the unlikely event that he did not evacuate before the city fell, and even then, the capture or death of the Soviet dictator would not guarantee a political disintegration. While Stalin had his cult of personality, he was not considered an infallible, Heaven-sent “messiah” in the same way Hitler was in Germany. In his absence, any of his ambitious inner circle members – security chief Lavrentiy Beria, foreign secretary Vyacheslav Molotov, or eventual successor Nikita Khrushchev – could have won in a power struggle to safeguard the continued existence of the USSR.

Speaking of Khrushchev, he served as the political commissar on the Southwestern Front, commanded by Stalin’s friend and ally Marshal Semyon Budyonny, a Civil War veteran and cavalry commander. Stalin ordered Budyonny to defend Kiev to the last and provided him with around 1.5 million men (approximately half of the strength of the entire Red Army in Europe). Although fully loyal to Stalin, Budyonny was not equal to the task of stopping the German advance. In late August, as First Panzer Group under General Ewald von Kleist attacked from the south, Guderian’s Second Panzer Group swooped down from the north toward Kiev. Budyonny refused to retreat despite the imminent encirclement of Kiev, and the requirement that any major decisions receive Stalin’s permission further slowed down an already inadequate response. Even if Budyonny had acknowledged that the position was hopeless, however, Stalin was deeply dedicated to preventing Kiev and the Ukrainian region from falling into German hands.

In the late 1920s and into the 1930s, Stalin had done a U-turn, dropping the more moderate market-oriented New Economic Policy (NEP) previously adopted by the Soviet Union, and instead embarking on a program of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization. These policies, coupled with severe drought, caused the 1932-33 Soviet famine that led to the death of around seven million people, mostly in the Ukraine. (Several countries, including the Ukraine, consider the famine a deliberate act of genocide meant to crush Ukrainian nationalism, although there is no consensus among historians and this remains a subject of academic debate.) Given long-standing resentment within Ukraine toward the yoke of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union, Stalin at the very least no doubt anticipated that the Germans winning the “hearts and minds” of the Ukrainians and turning them against the Soviet regime would be no hard effort. Fortunately for Stalin, the harsh occupation of the Germans and their genocidal policies ensured any enthusiasm by Ukrainian nationalists was short-lived. Nazi officials initially embraced the creation of an independent Ukrainian state by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), but this was a ploy; after using the OUN to massacre ethnic Poles in west Ukraine, many OUN leaders were detained and killed by the Germans.

On September 11, armored spearheads from Kleist’s First Panzer Group linked up with Guderian’s Second Panzer Group at Lubny, around 120 miles east of Kiev. They had created a pocket 120 miles deep and 300 miles long with five Soviet armies trapped within – roughly the size of Germany itself. Stalin replaced Budyonny with the more capable Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, but still did not permit any retreats until the evening of September 17 – far too late for a neat evacuation. Nevertheless, the time taken to complete the massive encirclement combined with tenacious, desperate Soviet resistance, some Soviet forces did escape. Budyonny, Timoshenko, and Khrushchev all made it out. General Mikhail Kirponos, however, who had shown uncharacteristic initiative for a Soviet commander early during Operation Barbarossa, was trapped and killed in action defending Kiev on September 20. Although German troops entered the city on September 19, fighting with pockets of defenders continued until September 25.

The first Battle of Kiev remains the largest encirclement in history and was probably the greatest Soviet defeat of the entire German-Soviet war. Not only did Stalin’s insistence on a last stand at Kiev divert vital manpower and material from Moscow, but as Hitler anticipated, it paved the way for Army Group South to advance deep into Crimea and the industrial heartland of the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. The Soviets lost over 700,000 casualties while the German forces suffered around 45,000. Nevertheless, the poor infrastructure and persistent logistical problems deflated German hopes of a fast and easy victory. Most importantly, Soviet soldiers – especially those encircled and with nothing to lose – made their German counterparts pay in blood for every mile they took. Instead of throwing down their weapons despite their situation, Soviet troops dug in deeper and fought more intensely. Such resolve would become a pattern, repeated at Moscow, Stalingrad, and on countless other battlefields.

Sources

Fritz, Stephen. 2015. Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.

Glantz, David and Jonathan House. 1995. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.

Megargee, Geoffrey. 2007. War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.