What horrors have preceded us, what infernos bellow up in the air, with the resounding cries of the past? The hell of bygone times seems so far distant, but life is an animate poem, with contours that ebb and flow like the waves; it has happiness and fulfillment, and then springs misery. But mankind prevails, hope arises again, but after so much time of comfort, what came before the torments of the past, appear again. The old vows to never repeat the evils of the past get corroded, they grow weary and our forsaken; their fate is to be derelict on the road upon which man treads forward into the forlorn days of the bygone hearth of burning fields, of villages set ablaze, of temples of science whose prophet is Darwin.
Germany and the Soviet Union were allies, but it was a fleeting moment, one of deception and cunning. On Saturday, June 21st of 1941, Heinz Guderian, the German Panzer commander, was spaying at the Tsarist Russian fortress at Brest-Litovsk. Seeing how strong the Soviet defenses were. What he noticed was that they were lacking. While the two superpowers were, on paper, allies, the Germans were preparing for war. It reminds me of something: the Nordstream 2 pipeline. The Russians financed it, the Europeans built it, all to the ire of the Americans. But now the Germans are preparing for war, deploying troops to Lithuania, and shifting their rhetoric to a more militarist style. Mankind turns his gaze away from the past, and says that “we will not repeat the our past mistakes”, but as he turns his face to the future, he treads upon a maze that merely brings him back to the nightmare of his ancestors.
In the latter part of May, 1941, the Soviet intelligence agent, Richard Sorge, found out that the Germans had set June 20th, 1941, as the date they would invade Russia. After he conveyed what he discovered to Moscow, his warning fell on incredulous ears. His message was marked as “suspicious. To be listed with telegrams intended as provocation.”
The signs were there, the Germans knew what was to come. The German ambassador Schulenburg wrote to his foreign minister, Ribbentrop that any conflicts with Russia would be resolved, while simultaneously writing that his embassy staff was being heavily reduced since the German diplomats were leaving Russia.
In May of 1941, Schulenburg told the Soviet ambassador to Berlin, Dekanozov, about Hitler’s plans to invade the Soviet Union. Dekanozov relayed his information to Molotov who passed it on to Stalin who replied:
“We shall consider that disinformation has now reached the level of ambassadors.”
The Soviets thought that they could manage the Germans. And look today, and what do you see? Russia working to pull in Germany and Turkey — both historical enemies of Russia — from NATO. But since there is nothing new under the sun, and to quote Solomon, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be” (Ecclesiastes 1:9), the blunders and negligence that led to the conflagrations of the past shall wick their way through the dry grass of human existence.
A Soviet agent in the Luftwaffe reported that the Germans had made their final preparations for an invasion. Stalin’s response was:
“Comrade Merkulov, you can send your ‘source from the staff of the German air force to his fucking mother. This is not a ‘source’ but disinformation.”
German deserters even came to the Soviets with the warning of a German invasion. But the order was that such deserters were to be shot. On June 21st of 1941, Dekanozov, the Soviet ambassador to Berlin, told Lavrentiy Beria (head of the NKVD) of the coming Nazi flood. Beria then told Stalin that Dekanozov would be held accountable for disinformation. There was an accurate report of the coming Germans, to which Beria expressed his denial, telling the messenger:
“My people and I, Iosif Vissarionovich, firmly remember your wise prediction: Hitler will not attack us in 1941.”
The irony of this cynical response was that as he wrote this, the Germans were already at the frontiers. The day after Beria’s reply, on June 22nd, by 2 AM, it was impossible to send the warnings of the German deserters, because German special forces had cut the telephone lines. By 4 in the morning the alarms in Moscow were going off, awakening the Soviet politicians, many of whom were suffering from hangovers. The warnings were true. All of the intelligence agents who spoke of a German invasion, all of the German deserters who spoke of the Nazi plan, were right, and all of the naysayers were brought to nought.
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