Russia

Russia appears less as a closely observed landscape than as the vast eastern space on which the regime’s military ambitions, racist fantasies, and plans for mass violence converge. The characters speak of conquest and defeat in confident abstractions; the country’s scale and resistance repeatedly make those abstractions untenable.

The eastern horizon

For Boris Eltz, the war’s strategic arithmetic had become unmistakable. He argues that Germany is fighting the USSR on one front and the United States and British Empire on another, and dates the armaments planners’ recognition that victory was impossible to November 1941. His account turns Russia from a distant theatre into the central test of the regime’s judgment: Germany has attacked a country whose population and territory cannot be made to disappear through battlefield victories.

Boris makes that scale concrete through a deliberately stark calculation. Even if Germany killed five million people, captured another five million, and starved thirty million, he says, 125 million would remain. He imagines that razing Leningrad and Moscow would still leave an insurgency stretching along the Urals, and asks how Siberia—an area he compares to eight Europes—could ever be pacified. His figures and comparisons are part of a character’s argument, not an impersonal statistical account; their force lies in the impossibility of the conquest he describes.

Confidence against resistance

The military talk elsewhere in the novel offers a counterpoint to Boris’s appraisal. Wolfram Prufer insists that German soldiers are worth five Russians and that German fanaticism and brutality will overcome numerical disadvantage. He distinguishes Russia from France and the Low Countries by portraying its people as uncivilized and incapable of surrender. His racist language converts resistance into an alleged racial trait, allowing him to treat a difficult military reality as proof of enemy savagery rather than evidence against German assumptions.

That confidence persists even as the military position deteriorates. When the German Sixth Army is surrounded, Prufer maintains that Erich von Manstein will break through with six divisions and turn the situation around. Paul Doll dismisses the possibility of defeat as biologically impossible, imagining Germany’s opponents as an inferior rabble. Against these assurances, Boris’s earlier strategic argument reads as a diagnosis of a regime that mistakes its own brutality for a guarantee of victory. The distance between prediction and circumstance is central to Russia’s significance in the book: the country is made to bear the weight of fantasies that the unfolding war steadily disproves.

Conquest imagined as removal

Russia also enters the novel’s account of the formation of exterminatory policy. A discussion of the July 31, 1941 authorization describes an earlier imagined solution: after a quick victory over Russia, Jewish people might be sent to a cold, barren place beyond the Urals or into the Arctic Circle. In this conception, the eastern territories are not merely to be conquered; they are imagined as a destination where mass removal could be carried out at a distance. The proposal depends on the expectation of a rapid German victory, an expectation that the military narrative elsewhere undermines.

The same discussion describes how that territorial solution receded as Nazi officials faced the number of Jewish people brought under German control through annexation and occupation. Pressure among officials in Poland, and a succession of further decisions, accompanied a shift from killing men to killing women and children as well. Russia thus figures in a grim contrast: territory beyond the Urals is first imagined as a place to which people could be expelled, while the widening policy of murder makes the geography of exile increasingly irrelevant to the perpetrators’ purpose.

The limits of military technology

The novel also refuses to make the means of killing the whole explanation. In a conversation about the industrial character of the genocide, Professor Entress argues that gas chambers and crematoria accelerated the process, economized on resources, and spared the nerves of the killers, but were not its underlying cause. Bullets and pyres, he says, would have served the perpetrators’ intent in the end. He points to the Einsatzgruppen having already killed well over a million people with bullets and insists that the will to kill was decisive.

This argument places the eastern killing operations alongside the novel’s debate about conquest: military failure does not erase the regime’s capacity or determination to inflict mass death. Russia is therefore more than the setting of an invasion. It is the territory against which German claims of racial and military superiority are tested, and the imagined space through which deportation plans give way to an increasingly comprehensive policy of murder.