Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1936–1938. It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and Government officials, repression of peasants, Red Army leadership, and the persecution of unaffiliated persons, characterised by widespread police surveillance, widespread suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, and executions. In Russian historiography the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina (Russian: Ежовщина; literally, the Yezhov regime), after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, NKVD.

Great Purge in The War That Came Early
The Great Purge was still fresh in the minds of both Germans and Russians when war broke out on the European continent in 1938. Many Russians were still nervous about speaking their minds around their comrades in case one of them turned out to be an NKVD informer.

After the Generals' Plot, many German military officer's were being taken out of the front line and tried for treason that the soldiers of the army began to realise the similarity between precarious situation and that of the Russians.