shal Fedor von Bock had begun to bludgeon his army group’s
way into Moscow, despite the sub-Napoleonic temperatures.
The high command hoped that they might yet pull it off they
had, after all, already killed . million Russian troops and taken
. million prisoners. The Nazi spearheads were only twelve
miles from the center of Moscow. The Soviet capital’s streets
were mined, the remaining population was reported to be buy-
ing German dictionaries. Göring’s diary shows that he spent this
week accompanied by art experts Behr, Hofer, and Robert
Bernheim, trawling through the Jeu de Paume and private gal-
leries in Paris; Rosenberg’s files reveal that a shipment of works
of art was dispatched to Carinhall on December . Then Göring
went on to try his fortune in Antwerp, The Hague, and Am-
sterdam with his sister Olga and his sisters-in-law Ilse and Else.
He could hardly hear it from here in the conquered west-
ern territories, but the whole eastern front was creaking like an
iceberg about to break up. General Heinz Guderian, whose fro-
zen Second Panzer Army was struggling forward south of Mos-
cow, found his ill-equipped tank crews dying of cold. The in-
fantry were poorly clad and ill-equipped too. “The Luftwaffe,”
he fumed in a letter to his wife, “is methodically commanded.
But we in the army have to put up with horrifying bungling.”
On December , at –°C, with tank turrets frozen solid, guns
jamming, and explosives only fizzling in the sub-zero tempera-
tures, Guderian had to stop his assault.
With this, the nightmare began. Stalin unleashed a coun-
teroffensive, with the magnificent T- tanks appearing en
masse. The German reverse threatened to become a rout. Hitler
dismissed pot-bellied army generals and flew out to investigate
on the spot. “If you think about it,” reflected Air Corps Com-
mander Richthofen in his diary, “there’s got to be a catastro-
phe.”