Operation Thunderstorm

e communicates a plan of Stalin for an invasion of whole Western Europe: "Operation Thunderstorm". It can be found in the so-called "Osobaya Papka", a file which contains about 100,000 Top Secret documents. In this file it is document Nr.103202/06. The paper is signed by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and the chief of the General Staff at that time Merezkov. It is dated 18 September 1940, three months before the German "Operation Barbarossa" was signed. After Georgy Zhukov became chief of the general staff in February 1941, the plan was called MP 41 (Mobilisatsyonni Plan 41). Bunich points to the Russian military archives, where it can be found (ZAMO, f. 15A, op.2154, d.4,l. 199-287). This document contains information about the Soviet military power in June 1941: 300 divisions, 8 million soldiers, 27,500 tanks, 32,628 airplanes. The total number of the German warplanes at that time was only about 6,000 although the majority of the Soviet aircraft was obsolete.

Bunich is not the only Russian historian who questioned the thesis of the "cowardly attack of the Wehrmacht against the peace loving Soviet Union". In 1989 appeared the book "Ledokol" (Icebreaker) by Viktor Suvorov, whose real name was Vladimir Bogdanovich Resun, in which advanced this theory. In February 1992, even the official military-historical Journal of the Russian forces — "Voenno-istorichesky Zhournal" — [1] published an article with the heading "Unquestionable Facts of the War's Beginning", where a speech by Zhdanov, one of Stalin's intimates, expressed that the Soviet Union had already started an "aggressive foreign policy" in 1939, with the decision to attack Finland. This article also mentions that the defense efforts of the Soviet Union were impeded by the prevailing aggressive thinking of the Soviet General Staff. These plans were extending to 1943 and to such an extent, that no effective measures against the German assault could be taken.

Bunich does not at all intend to polish up the image of Adolf Hitler. His first intention is to analyze who is guilty of having caused the immense human losses of Russia in World War II. He discovered a document, in which the total number of killed Russian soldiers is said to be 30.5 million — 8.5 million of them directly killed in battle, 22 million died after from their wounds, one half of them through tetanus. In Bunich's view Stalin is not the main responsible for these human losses, but Zhukov. Stalin was a statesman but not a soldier, in strategic questions he had to rely on the advice of his generals, and Zhukov was not a very talented one. For example he gave order to pile up heaps of ammunition under the bare sky in Soviet occupied Poland to a kind of Egyptian pyramids, which could be easily detected by the scout planes of the "Fliegerabteilung" of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris' "Abwehr" patrolling over this region as early as a month before the German attack. The Germans got a good picture of this monstrous mass of men and material and later easily destroyed it.

Bunich's "Operatsia Groza'" is full of yet unknown facts about the Third Reich. For example he reveals why Reinhard Heydrich was replaced as the head of the "SD" ("Sicherheitsdienst") by Walter Schellenberg and was made instead the Governor General of Bohemia: This happened because his

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