Hitler and Stalin in Perspective: Secret Speeches on the Eve of Barbarossa

Abstract

Two complementary speeches made by Hitler and Stalin in the months before the invasion are uniquely revealing. On 30 March 1941 Hitler addressed the leaders of the Wehrmacht’s forces deployed in the east about the military situation and the nature of the planned campaign. Five weeks later, on 5 May, Stalin presented a similar overview of the military situation at a Red Army graduation ceremony attended by many Soviet leaders. Despite their great importance neither speech exists as a certain text, and the present article contains different sets of notes for both speeches. The notes on Hitler’s speech made by Col. Gen. Franz Halder have been available in published form for many years, but they can now be compared with a second and longer version, by Col. Gen. Hermann Hoth, which has never been published before. The first extensive notes of Stalin’s speech were published only in the 1990s, and these have more recently been supplemented by notes from the diaries of Georgi Dimitrov and V.A. Malyshev. Stalin’s speech has not, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, been published in full in English before, and neither have the Dimitrov and Malyshev notes.