Kevin Walsh asks on Wednesday, December 18, 2002 how we know what Stalin told his generals

What Stalin told his generals of plans to attack Germany

I HAVE received the videotape from the 2002 Real History Conference at Cincinnati, which included your own lecture and Eric Mueller’s. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It was well worth the cost and the wait. [How to buy the videotape set]On a different subject, I have an inquiry concerning your new edition of Hitler’s War. On pages 381 and 382 are references to two secret speeches given by Josef Stalin on May 5, 1941, including quotations from those speeches. In your notes on page 880, you indicate that these speeches are reported in the AA [Auswärtiges Amt] files and were known to Ribbentrop, Göring, and Weichs. I am curious to know how secret speeches by Josef Stalin ended up in the German archives and how National Socialist officials learned of them.

Kevin Walsh

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THREE captured Soviet generals who had been present at the speech were separately interrogated and they wrote down from memory what Joseph Stalin had said in a secret speech at the Frunse Academy, in May 1941; copies of those interrogations are in the German foreign ministry archives, and Soviet Marshal Zhukov also referred to the speech in the Russian-language edition of his memoirs (but not in the foreign language editions!)

The publisher of Hitler’s War in Germany (Hitler und seine Feldherren), Wolf-Jobst Siedler (a left-wing liberal but in every other way a nice guy) originally had these and similar passages removed from the first edition without telling me, as they do not accord with the “politically correct” version of BARBAROSSA presented by the conformist historians. Within two days of the book appearing I therefore ordered his publishing house Ullstein to stop selling the book, which they did.