The Chief Culprit by Viktor Suvorov

Chief Culprit: Stalin's Grand Design to start World War II by Viktor Suvorov. Suvorov's book is based on extensive research into the Soviet archives.

Both Lenin and Stalin believed that another world war was necessary in order to achieve the triumph of communism. A war even bloodier than the previous one. Germany was to play the key role. He needed to build Germany up and involve it in a bloody war with England and France and he needed a common border with Germany so that his forces could easily roll in when Germany was distracted. His agent of choice was Hitler's NSDAP party because the other parties were opposed to war. The NSDAP though was slipping in popularity. In the emergency Reichstag election of November 6, 1932, the NSDAP received only 11,705,000 votes, 2 million less than in the previous election. The Social Democrats received 7,231,000 votes and the Communist Party, 5,971,000 votes. If the Communists had joined the Social Democrats, the Nazis would now be a quaint but unpleasant memory. Instead, Stalin ordered the German Communist Party to oppose the Social Democrats. This allowed Hitler to forge alliances with splinter parties and obtain a majority. Stalin built Germany up through delivery of essential supplies such as oil, cotton, grain, magnesium, chrome, copper,tin,nickel, vanadium, wolfram and molybdenum. Suvorov states that without these supplies, Hitler would have been unable to conquer Europe.

Germany and the USSR were to attack Poland simultaneously but Stalin delayed his attack for two weeks so that the onus of starting the war would fall on Germany. While Hitler was mopping up France, Stalin took over the Baltic republics and took Bessarabia from Rumania. This placed him within 100 kilometers of the Ploesti oilfield. Huge armies were placed in Bessarabia, ready to seize the oilfields. Hitlers intelligence revealed that huge Soviet armies were assembling at the border. Hitler decided to forego the planned assault on Britain because the Soviets were by far the greater threat. He quietly began marshalling forces on his eastern border. Soviet intelligence did not see any evidence of a planned German assault because supplies necessary to fight a Winter war were not being amassed by Germany. Things like sheepskin coats and low temperature lubricants.

Operation Barbarossa took place two weeks before the planned Soviet assault on Germany. The Soviets had massed 174 divisions right at the border. Trouble was that they were equipped with offensive weapons only, not defensive ones. For example, all the planes were bombers, no fighter planes to protect the bombers. The plan was for the bombers to destroy the Luftwaffe on the ground and there would then be no need for fighter planes. The reverse happened. The Luftwaffe destroyed the Soviet planes and then destroyed thousands of Soviet tanks. These 174 divisions were obliterated but they formed only the First Echelon of Soviet armies. Further on in, German forces encountered the Second Echelon of armies, an even larger force. Fortunately, many of the Second Echelon's heavy weapons were still in transit. German intelligence was not even aware of the existence of the Second Echelon forces. Many of these were also destroyed but German hopes of reaching Moscow before the Winter were beginning to fade. The Soviets had limitless manpower and weapons. They had 10 times the number of tanks, planes and heavy artillery than the German forces. Suvorov points out though that even if German forces had reached Moscow, this would still not have ended the war because of the vast industries in the Urals, hundreds of miles further east. For manpower, the Soviets began sending out millions of Gulag prisoners to fight. There were not enough Red Army uniforms, so they fought in their black Gulag uniforms. Behind them were NKVD troops, ready to shoot anyone who refused to fight or contemplated surrender. The Gulag soldiers were treated as expendable cannon fodder. When the British offered the Soviets mine detectors, the offer was declined. The Soviet general explained that they used human beings for that purpose. They would make thousands of Gulag soldiers run across the mine fields, detonating the mines with their bodies.