[59] Five days before the attack, Stalin received a report from a spy in the German Air Ministry that "all preparations by Germany for an armed attack on the Soviet Union have been completed, and the blow can be expected at any time. France was also renowned as the global leader in artillery and had a distinctive advantage over Germany in this respect. [146] While some scholars claim that evidence suggests that Stalin considered, and even attempted, negotiating peace with Germany in 1941 and 1942, others find this evidence unconvincing and even fabricated. Images (courtesy of Britannica Image quest) are included in a separate pack. An extensive list of rapes committed by German soldiers was compiled in the so called "Molotov Note" in 1942. [95] The manuals had the force of law and violations of the manuals counted as legal offenses. [56], In an effort to demonstrate peaceful intentions toward Germany, on 13 April 1941, Stalin oversaw the signing of a neutrality pact with Japan. Bertriko, Jean-Jacques Subrenat, A. and David Cousins, This view is disputed by Werner Maser and. [9] Another clause of the treaty was that Bessarabia, then part of Romania, was to be joined to the Moldovan SSR, and become the Moldovan SSR under control of Moscow. By changing the official policy of the party and the state towards religion, he could engage the Church and its clergy in mobilising the war effort. [130] The frontoviki usually addressed their company commanders as Batya (father). [131], Stalin personally told a Polish general requesting information about missing Polish officers that all of the Poles were freed, and that not all could be accounted because the Soviets "lost track" of them in Manchuria. "[10][20][21] German officials stated that, unlike Britain, Germany could permit the Soviets to continue their developments unmolested, and that "there is one common element in the ideology of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union: opposition to the capitalist democracies of the West". Smolensk: German command opened a brothel for officers in which hundreds of women and girls were driven by force, often by arms and hair. Germany sent in large numbers of mechanized divisions to Belgium and the Netherlands to have the Franco-British alliance believe its intelligence was correct and that the major attack would come from the north. [118] The experience of combat tended to bind the men together regardless of their language or ethnicity, with one Soviet veteran recalling: "We were all bleeding the same blood.". See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. [72] On 6 November 1941, Stalin rallied his generals in a speech given underground in Moscow, telling them that the German blitzkrieg would fail because of weaknesses in the German rear in Nazi-occupied Europe and the underestimation of the strength of the Red Army, and that the German war effort would crumble against the Anglo-American-Soviet "war engine". Loss records for 17 VA are incomplete. Even so, according to Glantz, they were plagued by an ineffective defence doctrine against well-trained and experienced German forces, despite possessing some modern Soviet equipment, such as the KV-1 and T-34 tanks.