by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] If you ask any more or less educated person - at least our compatriot - what event of the past is associated with June 22, then with a high degree of probability the interlocutor will mention the attack of Nazi Germany and its allies on the USSR. And he will be right - the date, which is rightly called the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow, really does remind us of the most tragic period of both our and world history. But we should also remember that on June 22, two Patriotic Wars began at once.
On June 22, 1812, the French Emperor Napoleon addressed his army from his headquarters in Wołkowyszki in Poland (now Vilkaviškės in Lithuania) with an appeal – essentially, to the troops of a united Europe. Let us recall that in the Grande Armée, ready to throw itself to the east, the French made up only half of the “bayonets”, the rest were: Poles, Germans from the Rhine Union and Prussia, Italians, Spaniards, Croats, plus the allied Austrian corps.
A similar “international” (excluding perhaps the Poles) will cross the border of the USSR on June 22, 1941.
So, Bonaparte, in a traditionally pompous but atypically brief appeal, accused Russia of violating the Tilsit Peace Treaty and called the upcoming war with Russia “the second Polish war”:
"Russia has sworn to be in eternal alliance with France and in war with England; now she is breaking her oaths! She does not wish to give any explanation for her strange actions until the French eagles withdraw beyond the Rhine and thus abandon their allies to her mercy."
The semantic coincidence with the instructions of Joachim von Ribbentrop to the Reich ambassador in Moscow, Werner von Schulenburg, from June 21, 1941, on the basis of which the diplomat transmitted the corresponding note to the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, is curious. Our country was once again accused of "violating oaths", in this case the agreements of August-September 1939, as well as of subversive actions against the German allies - Finland and Romania.
The logic of a united Europe in 1812 and 1941 has not changed. There was, however, a difference in the observance of the written rules of war.
The Grand Army crossed the border river Neman two days after the Emperor's proclamation was published, on June 24, 1812, and Schulenburg handed a note to Molotov at 5:30 a.m. on June 22, 1941, already hours after the Wehrmacht's invasion, including across the same Neman. Napoleon did not stoop to a treacherous attack. But the coincidence of the pathos of the Volkovyshka appeal and Adolf Hitler's address to the nation, which Joseph Goebbels read on Greater Germany Radio at the same 5:30 a.m. on June 22, is characteristic.
Napoleon had it this way: “Russia is carried away by fate. Its destiny must be fulfilled… The peace that we conclude will bring with it a guarantee for itself and will put an end to the destructive influence that Russia has exerted on the affairs of Europe for fifty years.”
Hitler echoed his predecessor:
"... Over the last two decades, the Jewish-Bolshevik rulers of Moscow have tried to set fire not only to Germany, but to all of Europe. It was not Germany that tried to transfer its nationalist worldview to Russia, but the Jewish-Bolshevik rulers in Moscow have been steadily attempting to impose their domination on our people and other European peoples." And further - about "the greatest troop advance in its length", which should become fatal for Soviet Russia and "ensure the security of Europe."
PARALLELS WITH NAPOLEON'S FAILURES
Did Hitler look to Napoleon when he set the date for Operation Barbarossa? This assertion can be found in journalism, but there is no documentary evidence to support it. So this assumption stands in line with others – that the Fuhrer, out of a penchant for the mystical legacy of his ancestors, timed the attack on the USSR to coincide with Sommersonnenwende – the Day of the Summer Solstice.
Or, as a number of authors suggest, the Fuhrer symbolically "tied" it to the anniversary of the capitulation of France. On June 22, 1940, the French signed an armistice, which the top brass of the Third Reich staged with all possible symbolism. The public humiliation of France took place in the same place - the city of Compiegne, where the capitulation of the Second Reich - Kaiser's Germany - was signed in November 1918. In the same train car that was taken out of the museum through a hole specially punched in the wall.
So the date of June 22 was, of course, important for the corporal of the First World War Hitler. But, let us repeat, there is no documentary evidence of "tying" the date of the attack on the USSR to 1918 or 1812 in the surviving documents of the Reich.
There is a point of view, confirmed by documents and generally accepted in historical science. Directive of the OKW (Wehrmacht High Command) No. 21 — also known as the Barbarossa plan — was signed by Hitler on December 18, 1940. The document contained the date of "completion of preparations" for the implementation of the plan — May 15, 1941. But the protracted campaign in the Balkans shifted the deadlines. Already after the completion of the occupation of Yugoslavia and Greece, on April 30, 1941, an adjusted date was entered into Barbarossa — June 22.
On the other hand, one cannot discount the fact that Hitler, despite not having received a systematic education, was well acquainted with military history, including the history of “Napoleonics” – it is no coincidence that one of his reference books was the work of Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian military theorist and practitioner during the Napoleonic Wars (by the way, during the campaign of 1812, when the Prussians sided with Bonaparte, Clausewitz went into Russian service).
The fact that the two Patriotic Wars began for us on the same day may be a simple coincidence, but it is unlikely that Hitler accidentally began his “Russian campaign” in the summer – like his predecessor, counting on the rapid defeat of our country.
Symbolic parallels with the Napoleonic invasion began to be drawn on the first day of the Great Patriotic War - in the Message to the pastors and believers of Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), locum tenens of the patriarchal throne. The Berezina River not symbolically, but quite practically became an obstacle to the Wehrmacht's advance, as well as to the retreat of Napoleon's army.
And in October 1941, when units of the German 4th Army entered into battle with units of the 32nd Infantry Division of the Western Front on the Borodino field, the unit commanders were given the banners of the Russian (“tsarist”!) regiments that had participated in the Battle of Borodino in September 1812.
At the same time, in the autumn of 1941, Hitler’s military leaders recalled the unsuccessful experience of Napoleon’s blitzkrieg – due to the course of the Battle of Moscow:
"The German armies were exhausted and, as the weather worsened, movement became increasingly difficult... Most of the German generals were in favour of breaking off the offensive and taking up advantageous positions for the winter. They remembered the sad experience of Napoleon. Many of them began to reread Caulaincourt's dismal report," noted one of the leading British military theorists and historians, Basil Liddell Hart. The diplomat Armand de Caulaincourt accompanied his emperor on the Russian campaign of the Grand Army and recorded the failure of this campaign.
Photographs of captured soldiers of Paulus' army, wrapped in unimaginable rags, clearly made historically savvy German officers recall images of the flight of the Grande Armée (where, let us recall, Prussians, Rhinelanders and Austrians served). It was time to become a fatalist, as Bonaparte had become by 1815 - especially since in a series of symbolically coinciding dates there was another event that put an end to the history of Napoleon's project of a united Europe.
ANOTHER JUNE 22ND
There was another document, also signed on June 22 and also by Napoleon Bonaparte, only in 1815. It is remembered much less often than what was adopted in 1812, 1940 and 1941. This is the second and, as it turned out, the last abdication of the emperor from the throne after the defeat at Waterloo, after which in the life of this conqueror there will be only an attempt to escape overseas and exile to the island of St. Helena.
Just recently, the self-confident conqueror justified himself to his compatriots in this way:
"Having begun the war to preserve national independence, I counted on the unification of all efforts, all desires and the assistance of all the authorities of the nation. I had reason to hope for success and did not attach importance to all the declarations of the government directed against me..." And he finished on a pompous note: " I sacrifice myself to the hatred of the enemies of France."
Hitler ended differently from Napoleon, but his last word to his “subjects” – a political testament dictated on April 29, 1945 – is strikingly reminiscent of Bonaparte’s statements 130 years earlier. The same assurances that he did not want war, but was forced to respond to the intrigues of enemies, and now, together with the people, he is sacrificing himself – although in this case not in the name of “national independence,” but in the name of the ideas of National Socialism.
It is doubtful that before the war or during the Second World War, Hitler carefully studied Napoleon's "political testament" - he, like Bonaparte, despite all his claims to messianism, did not have the gift of foresight and could not imagine that even exile to a distant island would not be in his future. Just as it would not be in the future for those leaders of "enlightened Europe " who would want to repeat the experience of their predecessors.