‘The forthcoming campaign is more than just an armed conflict; it will lead, too, to a showdown of two different ideologies… The Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, the “oppressor” of the people up to now, must be eliminated.’
‘We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. A Communist is no comrade before or after the battle. This is a war of annihilation.’
‘Whether right or wrong, we must win… And when we have won, who will ask us about the method?’
With the decision to invade the Soviet Union, confirmed in the directive of 18 December 1940, Hitler had closed off his strategic options. In his anxiety not to concede the initiative in the war, he had shifted the entire focus of the German war effort to the aim of inflicting comprehensive military defeat on the Soviet Union — and obliterating it as a political entity — within a matter of months. He was backed by his military leaders, who, even if some had private reservations, at no point raised serious objections to his proposed course of action. In retrospect, it seems sheer idiocy. At the time, Hitler’s generals did not for the most part demur because they, like he, grossly underestimated Soviet military strength and capacity. Remarkable though it seems from a later perspective, the real anxiety from their point of view was directed not towards the Soviet Union but towards Great Britain — backed by its world empire and, it seemed increasingly likely, in due course by the untold resources of the USA. The gamble, which most military advisers — Admiral Raeder was an exception, Göring’s early reservations were soon dispelled1 — acceded to, rested on knocking out the USSR within a matter of four or five months to attain hegemony in Europe. Britain, her hand forced by Japanese action against Imperial territory in south-eastern Asia, would then have no choice but to come to terms. America, confronted in the Pacific by Japan, would keep out of the European arena. Germany would have won the war. Domination throughout Europe would be hers. Subsequent, and ultimately inevitable, confrontation with the USA could be contemplated from a position of strength.
Hitler had committed himself to action from which there was no turning back. Did he have a real choice? Grand-Admiral Raeder thought so. Some of the generals thought so. Ribbentrop thought so. Hitler himself, however, had only flirted in autumn 1940 with the ‘peripheral strategy’. Having mooted immediately after the victory in the West a campaign against the Soviet Union, the war he had for long advocated as the ultimate necessity, he became increasingly wedded to the idea. The attempt to erode British strength in the Mediterranean through balancing the interests of Italy, Spain, and Vichy France was abandoned at the first sign of self-evident difficulties. Probably, Hitler’s best strategy in autumn 1940 would have been to sit tight and await developments. Japan was playing her own game. As spring 1941 would show, she was willing to look to a rapprochement with the Soviet Union in order to have a free hand to the south. Direct conflict with Britain and the USA, as Japanese territorial ambitions insatiably grew, was almost inevitable. Had Hitler waited, the difficulties for both countries would without doubt have mounted sharply in the Pacific and the Far East. The Soviet Union and Germany, as Molotov’s visit had demonstrated, faced undoubted clashes in Scandinavia and in the Balkans. Russian expansionist aims conflicted directly with German interests in these regions. But the USSR posed no direct threat to Germany at this time. Himmler, probably echoing Hitler’s own views, had expressly rejected the notion of such a threat at a speech to Party functionaries around the time of Molotov’s visit to Berlin in November 1940. Russia, he stated, was ‘militarily harmless (militärisch ungefährlich)’. With a poor officer corps and badly equipped and trained, the Russian army ‘cannot pose any danger to us at all (Sie kann uns überhaupt nicht gefährlich werden)’.2 Had the will been there to co-exist and carve up continental Europe between them — effectively the basis of Ribbentrop’s thinking — it is hard to see which power could have prevented it, given the global commitments of Britain and the threat posed by Japan in the Pacific. But none of these scenarios fitted Hitler’s mentality — nor, ultimately, that of his military and Party leaders. From Hitler’s perspective, Germany could not afford to wait. Russia posed, in his eyes, a threat which could only mount in the following year or so. An immediate German strike would both remove that threat, and destroy the British hopes that hinged on American intervention. On the other hand, to lose the initiative meant, from Hitler’s point of view, to put himself and Germany in a strait-jacket that could only tighten. The war would then be lost. Germany’s chance would have gone. And such was the international enmity towards Germany which he and the National Socialist regime had prompted that any concessions from weakness would most likely mean the demise of his regime and his own ousting from power.
Moreover, to refrain from the bold move, to remain passive, would be — as seen by Hitler — to forfeit the psychological impetus that the war had built up. Sustaining the dynamism of the National Socialist Movement required the continuation of expansion, the conquest of new territories, the setting of new goals, the relentless pursuit of the millennium. The vision could not be limited; the quest could not be permanently halted through conventional territorial settlements that would leave — in Hitler’s eyes and those of his followers — the grail of a new society built upon racial purity and racial domination still unattained. If Nazism were to sustain and reinvigorate itself, were not to lose its ideological edge, the war had to continue. There could be no subsiding into sterility — a point which Hitler had emphasized as long ago as the Hoßbach meeting in November 1937.3
Such considerations predominated in Hitler’s mind. But there were, too, economic pressures, of which he was far from unaware. Germany had since 1939 become increasingly dependent upon the vast supplies of raw materials coming from the USSR. Under an agreement signed in January 1941, improving on that of February 1940, the Russians promised delivery of 2½ million tons of grain and 1 million tons of oil by May 1942, in return for German capital goods — in increasingly high demand in the war effort — whose delivery was scheduled to start in the summer of 1941. Problems in German supplies, given its overstretched war economy, were already causing tensions and difficulties in summer 1940. The economic problems in Germany were foreseen by planning experts as mounting in 1941. The dependence on Russia — anathema to all who put their faith in variants of autarkic policies resting on economic hegemony in Europe (Großraumwirtschaft) — was accordingly set to grow, not diminish. The Soviet threat to the Ploesti oil-fields in Romania posed real danger to the Axis war effort. Not for nothing did Hitler use this as an argument in remarking that the Russian air-force could turn these oil-fields into ‘an expanse of smoking ruins… and the life of the Axis depends on those oil-fields’.4
Economic, military, strategic, and ideological motives were not separable in Hitler’s thinking on the Soviet Union. They blended together, and were used by him with different strength at different times in persuading those in his company of the correctness and inevitability of his course of action. The cement holding them in place was, as it had been for nearly two decades, doubtless the imperative to destroy once and for all ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ — an aim which would at the same time provide the necessary security in ‘living-space’ and give Germany political and military dominance over the continent of Europe. But it was not until March 1941 that Hitler began to emphasize the overriding ideological objective of ‘Operation Barbarossa’. For Heydrich and Himmler, the chance to push for such an objective had already been recognized by that time.5
In the event, Hitler’s attempt to avoid being pinioned in a strait-jacket through retaining the strategic initiative — the gamble of ‘Operation Barbarossa’ — would lead, by the end of 1941, as the German war effort met with setback and crisis, the war in the East dragged on into the infinite future, and the Americans finally entered the arena, to precisely the vice setting around Germany that Hitler had wanted to avoid. A way out would now be difficult, if not impossible. The chips were down. And, by that time, the death camps were commencing operations. Victory or total destruction were emerging as the only options left. Hitler’s ‘all-or-nothing’ mentality had enveloped the German state and shaped the alternatives for its future. But by the end of 1941, though military fortune would fluctuate in a war that still had long to run, the odds would already be stacked in favour of destruction, not victory.
Between January and March 1941 the operational plans for ‘Barbarossa’ were put in place and approved by Hitler. Despite his show of confidence, he was inwardly less certain. On the very day that the directive for the attack on the Soviet Union was issued to the commanders-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, 18 December 1940, Major Engel had told Brauchitsch (who was still unclear whether Hitler was bluffing about invading the USSR) that the Führer was unsure how things would go. He was distrustful of his own military leaders, uncertain about the strength of the Russians, and disappointed in the intransigence of the British.6 Hitler’s lack of confidence in the operational planning of the army leadership was not fully assuaged in the first months of 1941. His intervention in the planning stage brought early friction with Halder, and led by mid-March to amendments of some significance in the detailed directives for the invasion.7
Already by the beginning of February, Hitler had been made aware of doubts — at any rate a mood less than enthusiastic — among some of the army leaders about the prospects of success in the coming campaign. General Thomas had presented to the Army High Command a devastating overview of deficiencies in supplies.8 Halder had noted in his diary on 28 January the gist of his discussion with Brauchitsch early that afternoon about ‘Barbarossa’: ‘The “purpose” (‘Sinn’) is not clear. We do not hit the English that way. Our economic potential will not be substantially improved. Risk in the west must not be underestimated. It is possible that Italy might collapse after the loss of her colonies, and we get a southern front in Spain, Italy, and Greece. If we are then tied up in Russia, a bad situation will be made worse.’9 Misgivings were voiced by the three army group commanders, Field-Marshals von Leeb, von Bock, and von Rundstedt, when they lunched with Brauchitsch and Halder on 31 January.10 Brauchitsch, as usual, was reluctant to voice any concern to Hitler. Bock, however, tentatively did so on 1 February. He thought the German army ‘would defeat the Russians if they stood and fought’. But he doubted whether it would be possible to force them to accept peace-terms. Hitler was dismissive. The loss of Leningrad, Moscow, and the Ukraine would compel the Russians to give up the fight. If not, the Germans would press on beyond Moscow to Ekaterinburg. War production, Hitler went on, was equal to any demands. There was an abundance of material. The economy was thriving. The armed forces had more manpower than was available at the start of the war. Bock did not feel it even worth suggesting that it was still possible to back away from the conflict. ‘I will fight,’ Hitler stated. ‘I am convinced that our attack will sweep over them like a hailstorm.’11
Halder pulled his punches at a conference with Hitler on 3 February. He brought up supply difficulties, but pointed to methods by which they could be overcome, and played down the risks that he had been emphasizing only days earlier. The army leaders accepted Hitler’s emphasis on giving priority to the capture of Leningrad and the Baltic coast over Moscow. But they neglected to work out in sufficient detail the consequences of such a strategy.12 Hitler was informed of the numerical superiority of the Russian troops and tanks. But he thought little of their quality. Everything depended upon rapid victories in the first days, and the securing of the Baltic and the southern flank as far as Rostov. Moscow, as he had repeatedly stressed, could wait. According to Below, Brauchitsch and Halder ‘accepted Hitler’s directives to wage war against Russia without a single word of objection or opposition’.13
In the days that followed the meeting, General Thomas produced further bleak prognoses of the economic situation. Fuel for vehicles sufficed for two months, aircraft fuel till autumn, rubber production until the end of March. Thomas asked Keitel to pass on his report to Hitler. Keitel told him that the Führer would not permit himself to be influenced by economic difficulties. Probably, the report never even reached Hitler. In any case, if Thomas was trying through presentation of dire economic realities to deter Hitler, his method was guaranteed to backfire. A further report demonstrated that if quick victories were attained, and the Caucasus oilfields acquired, Germany could gain 75 per cent of the materials feeding the Soviet war industry. Such a prognosis could only serve as encouragement to Hitler and to other Nazi leaders.14
Hitler remained worried about a number of aspects of the OKH’s planning. He was concerned that the army leadership was underestimating the dangers from Soviet strikes at the German flanks from the Pripet Marsh, and called in February for a detailed study to allow him to draw his own conclusions.15 In mid-March, he contradicted the General Staff’s conclusions, asserting — rightly, as things turned out — that the Pripet Marsh was no hindrance to army movement. He also thought the existing plan would leave the German forces overstretched, and too dependent upon what he regarded as the dubious strength of the Romanian, Hungarian, and Slovak divisions — the last of these dismissed merely on the grounds that they were Slavs — on the southern front. He ordered, therefore, the alteration from a two-pronged advance of Army Group South to a single thrust towards Kiev and down the Dnieper. Finally, he repeated his insistence that the crucial objective had to be to secure Leningrad and the Baltic, not push on to Moscow which, at a meeting with his military leaders on 17 March, he declared was ‘completely immaterial’ (‘Moskau völlig gleichgültig!’).16 At this conference, these alterations to the original operational plan were accepted by Brauchitsch and Halder without demur.17 With that, the military framework for the invasion was in all its essentials finalized.
While the preparations for the great offensive were taking shape, however, Hitler was preoccupied with the dangerous situation that Mussolini’s ill-conceived invasion of Greece the previous October had produced in the Balkans, and with remedying the consequence of Italian military incompetence in North Africa.
He did everything possible to avoid discomfiting Mussolini when the Italian dictator, embarrassed by the military setbacks in Albania and North Africa (where greatly outnumbered British troops had early in the month captured the Italian stronghold of Bardia), arrived at a small railway station near Salzburg, on 19 January for two days of talks at the Berghof.
Hitler and his military leaders were waiting on the platform in the snow.18 The talks began without delay. There was no hint of a mention of Italian military reversals. Discussion focused mainly on the Balkans, and on a renewed attempt, through personal persuasion by the Duce, to bring about Spanish intervention in the war and agreement to a German assault on Gibraltar.19 Reporting to Ciano on his private talks, Mussolini said ‘he found a very anti-Russian Hitler, loyal to us, and not too definite on what he intends to do in the future against Great Britain’. A landing was ruled out. The difficulty of such an operation contained an unacceptable risk of failure, after which Britain ‘would know that Germany holds only an empty pistol’.20
On the afternoon of 20 January, Hitler spoke for about two hours in the presence of military experts on the approaching German intervention in Greece. ‘He dealt with the question primarily from a technical point of view,’ Ciano recorded, ‘relating it to the general political situation. I must admit that he does this with unusual mastery. Our military experts are impressed.’21 Though the ‘very anti-Russian Hitler’ that Mussolini saw pointed to the future dangers from the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death, when the Jews, at present pushed out of the leadership, could take over again, and when Russian air-power could destroy the Romanian oil-fields, he gave not the slightest inkling that at that very time he was preparing to attack in the East.22 As usual, the Italians would be kept in the dark until the last minute.
Mussolini returned from the talks ‘elated’ (as Ciano remarked) ‘as he always is after a meeting with Hitler’.23 It was as well the Duce left when he did. Had he stayed two days longer his growing sense of inferiority towards his senior Axis partner would have been sharpened still further by the disastrous news for his Fascist regime that now Tobruk had fallen to the British.24
Popular contempt in Germany for the Italian war effort was matched by the growing disdain of the Nazi leaders for their Fascist counterparts.25 ‘Mussolini has lost a great deal of prestige,’ remarked Goebbels towards the end of January 1941, seeing the Duce’s position weakened through the military debacle in North Africa.26 Whatever the doubts, and his own criticisms of the Italians, Hitler had no option but to stick with his Axis partner.27
In all, during the calamitous month of January the fighting in Libya had seen some 130,000 Italians captured by the British.28 The likelihood of a complete rout for the Italians in North Africa had to be faced. By 6 February, Hitler was briefing the general he had selected to stop the British advance and hold Tripolitania for the Axis.29 This was Erwin Rommel, who, with a combination of tactical brilliance and bluff, would throughout the second half of 1941 and most of 1942 turn the tables on the British and keep them at bay in North Africa.
Hitler’s hopes of a vital strategic gain in the Mediterranean — notably affecting the situation in North Africa — by the acquisition of Gibraltar were, however, to be dashed again by the obstinacy of General Franco. Already at the end of January, Hitler had been informed by Jodl that ‘Operation Felix’ — the planned assault on Gibraltar — would have to be shelved, since the earliest it could now take place would be in mid-April. The troops and weapons would by then be needed for ‘Barbarossa’, at that time scheduled for a possible start only a month later.30 Hitler still hoped that Mussolini, at his meeting on 12 February with Franco, might persuade the Caudillo to enter the war. The day before the meeting, Hitler sent Franco a personal letter, exhorting him to join forces with the Axis powers and to recognize ‘that in such difficult times not so much wise foresight as a bold heart can rescue the nations’.31 Franco was unimpressed. He repeated Spanish demands on Morocco, as well as Gibraltar. And he put forward in addition, as a price for Spain’s entering the war at some indeterminate date, such extortionate demands for grain supplies — saying the 100,000 tons already promised by the Germans were sufficient for only twenty days — that there was no possibility they would be met.32 Spain, as before, had to be left out of the equation.
Hitler confirmed the ‘dreadful conditions’ in Spain which Goebbels reported to him the day after his big speech in the Sportpalast on 30 January 1941, to mark the eighth anniversary of his appointment as Chancellor.33 The Propaganda Minister found Hitler in high spirits, confident that Germany held the strategic initiative, convinced of victory, revitalized as always by the wild enthusiasm — like a drug to him — of the vast crowd of raucous admirers packed into the Sportpalast. ‘I’ve seldom seen him like this in recent times,’ Goebbels remarked.34 ‘The Führer always impresses me afresh,’ he added. ‘He is a true Leader, an inexhaustible giver of strength.’35
In his speech, Hitler had concentrated almost exclusively on attacking Britain. He did not devote a single syllable to Russia; nor did he mention the Soviet Union again in any public speech before 22 June 1941, the day of the invasion.36 When speaking to Goebbels the following day, however, Hitler did refer to a report on Russia compiled on the basis of seven years’ experience of the country by the son of the former prominent KPD member Ernst Torgler. ‘Horrible!’ commented Goebbels (presumably echoing Hitler’s sentiments in recording the gist of their conversation). ‘Everything confirmed what we suspected, believed, and also said.’ Goebbels reinforced such impressions on the basis of a report on the situation in Moscow which he himself had received from a leading figure in his Ministry.37
One other aspect of Hitler’s speech on 30 January was noteworthy. For the first time since the beginning of the war, he reiterated his threat ‘that, if the rest of the world should be plunged into a general war through Jewry, the whole of Jewry will have played out its role in Europe!’ ‘They can still laugh today about it,’ he added, menacingly, ‘just like they used to laugh at my prophecies. The coming months and years will prove that here, too, I’ve seen things correctly.’38 Hitler had made this threat, in similar tones, in his Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939. In repeating it now, he claimed to recall making his ‘prophecy’ in his speech to the Reichstag at the outbreak of war. But, in fact, he had not mentioned the Jews in his Reichstag speech on 1 September, the day of the invasion of Poland. He would make the same mistake in dating on several other occasions in the following two years.39 It was an indication, subconscious or more probably intentional, that he directly associated the war with the destruction of the Jews.
Why did he repeat the threat at this juncture? There was no obvious contextual need for it. He had referred earlier in the speech to ‘a certain Jewish-international capitalist clique’, but otherwise had not played the antisemitic tune.40 Probably the repeated ‘prophecy’ as intended, as was the original in January 1939, as a threat to what Hitler always regarded as a Jewish-run ‘plutocracy’ in Britain and the USA. It was a repeat of the blackmail ploy that he held the Jews in his power as hostages.
But within the few weeks immediately prior to his speech, Hitler had had the fate of the Jews on his mind, commissioning Heydrich at this point with the task of developing a new plan, replacing the defunct Madagascar scheme, to deport the Jews from the German sphere of domination.41 His repeated ‘prophecy’ was presumably a veiled hint at such an intention, vague though any plan still was at this stage.
Perhaps Hitler had harboured his ‘prophecy’ in the recesses of his mind since he had originally made it. Perhaps one of his underlings had reminded him of it. But, most probably, it was the inclusion of the extract from his speech in the propaganda film Der ewige Jude, which had gone on public release in November 1940, that had stirred Hitler’s memory of his earlier comment.42 Whatever had done so, the repeat of the ‘prophecy’ at this point was ominous. Though he was uncertain precisely how the war would bring about the destruction of European Jewry, he was sure that this would be the outcome. And this was only a matter of months before the war against the arch-enemy of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was to be launched. The idea of the war to destroy the Jews once and for all was beginning to take concrete shape in Hitler’s mind.
According to the account — post-war recollections, resting partly on earlier, lost notes in diary form — of his army adjutant Gerhard Engel, Hitler discussed the ‘Jewish Question’ soon after his speech, on 2 February, with a group of his intimates.43 Keitel, Bormann, Ley, Speer, and Ribbentrop’s right-hand man and liaison officer Walther Hewel were present. Ley brought up the topic of the Jews. This was the trigger for Hitler to expound at length on his thoughts. He envisaged the war accelerating a solution. But it also created additional difficulties. Originally, it had lain within his reach ‘to break the Jewish power at most in Germany’. He had thought at one time, he said, with the assistance of the British of deporting the half a million German Jews to Palestine or Egypt. But that idea had been blocked by diplomatic objections. Now it had to be the aim ‘to exclude Jewish influence in the entire area of power of the Axis’. In some countries, like Poland and Slovakia, the Germans themselves could bring that about. In France, it had become more complicated following the armistice, and was especially important there. He spoke of approaching France and demanding the island of Madagascar to accommodate Jewish resettlement. When an evidently incredulous Bormann — aware, no doubt, that the Madagascar Plan had by now been long since shelved by the Foreign Ministry and, more importantly, by the Reich Security Head Office — asked how this could be done during the war, Hitler replied vaguely that he would like to make the whole ‘Strength through Joy’ fleet available for the task, but feared its exposure to enemy submarines. Then, in somewhat contradictory fashion, he added: ‘He was now thinking about something else, not exactly more friendly.’44
This cryptic comment (assuming that Engels’s account is an accurate representation of what Hitler had said) was, it can reasonably be speculated, a hint that the defeat of the Soviet Union, anticipated to take only a few months, would open up the prospect of wholesale deportation of the Jews to the newly conquered lands in the east — and forced labour under barbarous conditions in the Pripet marshlands (stretching towards White Russia in what were formerly eastern parts of Poland) and in the frozen, arctic wastes in the north of the Soviet Union. Such ideas were being given their first airing around this time by Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann.45 They would not have hesitated in putting their ideas to Hitler. The thinking was now moving way beyond what had been contemplated under the Madagascar Plan, inhumane though that itself had been. In such an inhospitable climate as that now envisaged, the fate of the Jews would be sealed. Within a few years most of them would starve, freeze, or be worked to death.46 The idea of a comprehensive territorial solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ had by now become effectively synonymous with genocide.
Hitler had been under continued pressure from Nazi leaders to deport the Jews from their own territories, with, now as before, the General Government seen as the favoured ‘dumping ground’. Among the most persistent was the Gauleiter of Vienna, and former Hitler Youth Leader, Baldur von Schirach, who had been pressing hard since the previous summer to relieve the chronic housing problems of Vienna by ‘evacuating’ the city’s 60,000 Jews to the General Government. Hitler had finally agreed to this in December 1940. The plans were fully prepared by the beginning of February 1941.47 Fresh from his visit to Vienna in March, on the third anniversary of the Anschluß, Hitler discussed with Hans Frank and Goebbels the imminent removal of the Jews from Vienna. Goebbels, anxious to be rid of the Jews from Berlin, was placated with an indication that the Reich capital would be next. ‘Later, they must sometime get out of Europe altogether,’ the Propaganda Minister added.48
Despite the problems which had arisen in 1940 about the transfer of Jews and Poles into the General Government, Heydrich (partly under pressure from the Wehrmacht, which needed land for troop exercises) had approved in January 1941 a new plan to expel 771,000 Poles together with the 60,000 Jews from Vienna (bowing to the demands for deportation from Schirach, backed by Hitler) into Hans Frank’s domain to make room for the settlement of ethnic Germans.49 A major driving-force behind the urgency of the ambitious new resettlement programme was the need to accommodate (and incorporate in the work-force) ethnic Germans who had been brought to Poland from Lithuania, Bessarabia, Bukovina and elsewhere in eastern Europe and since then miserably housed in transit camps. Frank’s subordinates were dismayed at having to cope with a massive new influx of ‘undesirables’.50 In the event, however, inevitable logistical complications of the new plan soon revealed it as a grandiose exercise in inhumane lunacy. By mid-March the programme had ground to a halt. Only around 25,000 people had been deported into the General Government. And only some 5,000, mainly elderly, Jews had been removed from Vienna.51 There was still no prospect, within the confines of the territory currently under German control, of attaining either the comprehensive resettlement programme that Himmler was striving for, or, within that programme, solving what seemed to be becoming a more and more intractable problem: removing the Jews.
From comments made by Eichmann’s associate, Theodor Dannecker, and, subsequently, by Eichmann himself, it was around the turn of the year 1940–41 that Heydrich gained approval from Hitler — whether through the intercession of Göring or of Himmler is not clear — for his proposal for the ‘final evacuation’ of German Jews to the General Government.52 On 21 January Dannecker noted: ‘In accordance with the will of the Führer, the Jewish question within the part of Europe ruled or controlled by Germany is after the war to be subjected to a final solution (einer endgültigen Lösung).’ To this end, Heydrich had obtained from Hitler, via Himmler or Göring, the ‘commission to put forward a final solution project (Endlösungsprojektes)’.53 Plainly, at this stage, this was still envisaged as a territorial solution — a replacement for the aborted Madagascar Plan. Eichmann had in mind a figure of around 5.8 million persons.54
Two months later, Eichmann told representatives of the Propaganda Ministry that Heydrich ‘had been commissioned with the final evacuation of the Jews (endgültigen Judenevakuierung)’ and had put forward a proposal to that effect some eight to ten weeks earlier. The proposal had, however, not been accepted ‘because the General Government was not in a position at that time to absorb a single Jew or a Pole’.55 When, on 17 March, Hans Frank visited Berlin to speak privately with Hitler about the General Government — presumably raising the difficulties he was encountering with Heydrich’s new deportation scheme — he was reassured, in what amounted to a reversal of previous policy, that the General Government would be the first territory to be made free of Jews.56 But only three days after this meeting, Eichmann was still talking of Heydrich presiding over the ‘final evacuation of the Jews’ into the General Government.57 Evidently (at least that was the line that Eichmann was holding to), Heydrich still at this point had his sights set on the General Government as offering the basis for a territorial solution. Frank was refusing to contemplate this. And Hitler had now opened up to him the prospect of his territory being the first to be rid of its Jews. Perhaps this was said simply to placate Frank. But in the light of the ideas already taking shape for a comprehensive new territorial solution in the lands soon to be conquered (it was presumed) of the Soviet Union, it was almost certainly a further indicator that Hitler was now envisaging a new option for a radical solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ once the war was over by mass deportation to the East.
Heydrich and his boss Himmler were certainly anxious to press home the opportunity to expand their own power-base on a grand scale by exploiting the new potential about to open up in the East. Himmler had lost no time in acquainting himself with Hitler’s thinking and, no doubt, taking the chance to advance his own suggestions. On the very evening of the signing of the military directive for ‘Operation Barbarossa’ on 18 December, he had made his way to the Reich Chancellery for a meeting with Hitler. No record of what was discussed survives. But it is hard to imagine that Himmler did not raise the issue of new tasks for the SS which would be necessary in the coming showdown with ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’.58 It was a matter of no more at this point than obtaining Hitler’s broad authority for plans still to be worked out.
Himmler and Heydrich were to be kept busy over the next weeks in plotting their new empire. Himmler informed a select group of SS leaders in January that there would have to be a reduction of some 30 million in the Slav population in the East.59 The Reich Security Head Office commissioned the same month preparations for extensive police action.60 By early February Heydrich had already carried out preliminary negotiations with Brauchitsch about using units of the Security Police alongside the army for ‘special tasks’. No major difficulties were envisaged.61
What such ‘special tasks’ might imply became increasingly clear to a wider circle of those initiated into the thinking for ‘Barbarossa’ during February and March. On 26 February General Georg Thomas, the Wehrmacht’s economics expert, learned from Göring that an early objective during the occupation of the Soviet Union was ‘quickly to finish off (erledigen) the Bolshevik leaders’.62 A week later, on 3 March, Jodl’s comments on the draft of operational directions for ‘Barbarossa ‘which had been routinely sent to him made this explicit: ‘all Bolshevist leaders or commissars must be liquidated forthwith’. Jodl had altered the draft somewhat before showing it to Hitler.63 He now summarized Hitler’s directions for the ‘final version’. These made plain that ‘the forthcoming campaign is more than just an armed conflict; it will lead, too, to a showdown between two different ideologies… The socialist ideal can no longer be wiped out in the Russia of today. From the internal point of view the formation of new states and governments must inevitably be based on this principle. The Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, as the “oppressor” of the people up to now, must be eliminated.’ The task involved, the directions went on, was ‘so difficult that it cannot be entrusted to the army’.64 Jodl had the draft retyped in double-spacing to allow Hitler to make further alterations. When the redrafted version was finally signed by Keitel on 13 March, it specified that ‘the Reichsführer-SS has been given by the Führer certain special tasks within the operations zone of the army’, though there was now no direct mention of the liquidation of the ‘Bolshevik-Jewish intelligentsia’ or the ‘Bolshevik leaders and commissars’.65
Even so, the troops were to be directly instructed about the need to deal mercilessly with the political commissars and Jews they encountered. When he met Göring on 26 March, to deal with a number of issues related to the activities of the police in the eastern campaign, Heydrich was told that the army ought to have a three- to four-page set of directions ‘about the danger of the GPU-Organization, the political commissars, Jews etc., so that they would know whom in practice they had to put up against the wall’.66 Göing went on to emphasize to Heydrich that the powers of the Wehrmacht would be limited in the east, and that Himmler would be left a great deal of independent authority. Heydrich laid before Göring his draft proposals for the ‘solution of the Jewish Question’, which the Reich Marshal approved with minor amendments. These evidently foresaw the territorial solution, which had been conceived around the turn of the year, and already been approved by Himmler and Hitler, of deportation of all the European Jews into the wastelands of the Soviet Union, where they would perish.67
During the first three months of 1941, then, the ideological objectives of the attack on the Soviet Union had come sharply into prominence, and had largely been clarified. Most active in pressing forward the initiative had been Reinhard Heydrich, alongside his nominal boss Himmler.68 Göring, the heads of the Four-Year Plan Organization, and the High Command of the Wehrmacht had also been deeply implicated. Hitler had authorized more than initiated. His precise role, as so often, is hidden in the shadows. But he had little need to move into the foreground. His radical views on ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ were known to all. The different policy-objectives of the varying — and usually competing — power-groups in the regime’s leadership could be reconciled by accepting the most radical proposals, from Heydrich and Himmler, on the treatment of the arch-enemy in the East. This, in any case, complied with Hitler’s own ideological impulses. He set the tone once more, therefore, for the barbarism while others preoccupied themselves with its mechanics. And, in the context of the imminent showdown, the barbarism was now adopting forms and dimensions never previously encountered, even in the experimental training-ground of occupied Poland.
By mid-March, discussions between the Security Police and army leadership about the treatment of political commissars were, as we have already noted, well advanced. Here, too, in the fateful advance into the regime’s planned murderous policy in the Soviet Union, the army leaders were complicitous. On 17 March, Halder noted comments made that day by Hitler: ‘The intelligentsia put in by Stalin must be exterminated. The controlling machinery of the Russian Empire must be smashed. In Great Russia force must be used in its most brutal form.’69 Hitler said nothing here of any wider policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’. But the army leadership had two years earlier accepted the policy of annihilating the Polish ruling class. Given the depth of its prevalent anti-Bolshevism, it would have no difficulty in accepting the need for the liquidation of the Bolshevik intelligentsia.70 By 26 March, a secret army order laid down, if in bland terms, the basis of the agreement with the Security Police authorizing ‘executive measures affecting the civilian population’.71 The following day, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch, announced to his commanders of the eastern army: ‘The troops must be clear that the struggle will be carried out from race to race (von Rasse zu Rasse), and proceed with necessary severity.’72
The army was, therefore, already in good measure supportive of the strategic aim and the ideological objective of ruthlessly uprooting and destroying the ‘jewish-Bolshevik’ base of the Soviet regime when, on 30 March, in a speech in the Reich Chancellery to over 200 senior officers lasting almost two and a half hours, Hitler stated with unmistakable clarity his views of the coming war with the Bolshevik arch-foe, and what he expected of his army. This was not the time for talk of strategy and tactics. It was to outline to generals in whom he still had little confidence the nature of the conflict that they were entering. He rehearsed once more his familiar arguments. England’s hopes had been placed in the United States and Russia. The Russian problem had to be settled without delay. This was the key to Germany’s accomplishment of its other tasks. Manpower and matériel would then be at her disposal. In Russia, the aim had to be to crush the armed forces and break up the state. Hitler repeated his disparaging comments about Russian armaments — numerically superior but in quality poor. His confidence was undimmed. The Russians, he stated, would collapse under the combined onslaught of German tanks and planes. Once the military tasks had been achieved, no more than about sixty divisions would be needed in the east, releasing the rest for action elsewhere.
He went on to the most striking part of his speech — the ideological aims of the war. He was forthright: ‘Clash of two ideologies. Crushing denunciation of Bolshevism, identified with a social criminality. Communism is an enormous danger for our future. We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. A Communist is no comrade before or after the battle. This is a war of annihilation. If we do not grasp this, we shall still beat the enemy, but thirty years later we shall again have to fight the Communist foe. We do not wage war to preserve the enemy.’ He went on to stipulate the ‘extermination of the Bolshevist commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia’. ‘We must fight against the poison of disintegration,’ he continued. ‘This is no job for military courts. The individual troop commanders must know the issues at stake. They must be the leaders in this fight’… ‘Commissars and GPU men,’ he declared, ‘are criminals and must be dealt with as such.’ The war would be very different to that in the West. ‘In the East, harshness today means lenience in the future.’ Commanders had to overcome any personal scruples.73
Brauchitsch claimed after the war that he had been surrounded by outraged generals when Hitler had finished speaking.74 Had this been the case, it would merely have prompted the question why they (or Brauchitsch on their behalf) did not express their outrage to Hitler. However, General Warlimont, who was present, recalled ‘that none of those present availed themselves of the opportunity even to mention the demands made by Hitler during the morning’.75 When serving as a witness in a trial sixteen years after the end of the war, Warlimont, explaining the silence of the generals, declared that some had been persuaded by Hitler that Soviet Commissars were not soldiers but ‘criminal villains (kriminelle Verbrecher)’. Others — himself included — had, he claimed, followed the officers’ traditional view that as Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht Hitler ‘could do nothing unlawful’.76
The day after Hitler’s speech to the generals, 31 March 1941, the order was given to prepare, in accordance with the intended conduct of the coming campaign, as he had outlined it, guidelines for the ‘treatment of political functionaries (Hoheitsträger)’. Exactly how this order was given, and by whom, is unclear. Halder presumed, when questioned after the war, that it came from Keitel.
‘When one has seen how, dozens of times, Hitler’s most casual observation would bring the over-zealous Field Marshal running to the telephone to let loose all hell, one can easily imagine how a random remark of the dictator’s would worry Keitel into believing that it was his duty on this occasion to give factual expression to the will of the Führer even before the beginning of hostilities. Then he or one of his subordinates would have telephoned OKH and asked how matters stood. If OKH had in fact been asked such a question, they would naturally have regarded it as a prod in the rear and would have got moving at once.’77 Whether there had been a direct command by Hitler, or whether — as Halder presumed — Keitel had once more been ‘working towards the Führer’, the guidelines initiated at the end of March found their way by 12 May into a formal edict.78 For the first time, they laid down in writing explicit orders for the liquidation of functionaries of the Soviet system. The reasoning given was that ‘political functionaries and leaders (commissars)’ represented a danger since they ‘had clearly proved through their previous subversive and seditious work that they reject all European culture, civilization, constitution, and order. They are therefore to be eliminated.’79
This formed part of a set of orders for the conduct of the war in the East (following from the framework for the war which Hitler had defined in his speech of 30 March) that were given out by the High Commands of the Army and Wehrmacht in May and June. Their inspiration was Hitler. That is beyond question. But they were put into operative form by leading officers (and their legal advisers), all avidly striving to implement his wishes,80
The first draft of Hitler’s decree of 13 May 1941, the so-called ‘Barbarossa-Decree’, defining the application of military law in the arena of Operation Barbarossa, was formulated by the legal branch of the Wehrmacht High Command.81 The order removed punishable acts committed by enemy civilians from the jurisdiction of military courts. Guerrilla fighters were to be peremptorily shot. Collective reprisals against whole village communities were ordered in cases where individual perpetrators could not be rapidly identified. Actions by members of the Wehrmacht against civilians would not be automatically subject to disciplinary measures, even if normally coming under the heading of a crime.82
The ‘Commissar Order’ itself, dated 6 June, followed on directly from this earlier order. Its formulation was instigated by the Army High Command.83 The ‘Instructions on the Treatment of Political Commissars’ began: ‘In the struggle against Bolshevism, we must not assume that the enemy’s conduct will be based on principles of humanity or of international law. In particular, hate-inspired, cruel, and inhumane treatment of prisoners can be expected on the part of all grades of political commissars, who are the real leaders of resistance… To show consideration to these elements during this struggle, or to act in accordance with international rules of war, is wrong and endangers both our own security and the rapid pacification of conquered territory… Political commissars have initiated barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare. Consequently, they will be dealt with immediately and with maximum severity. As a matter of principle, they will be shot at once, whether captured during operations or otherwise showing resistance.’84
The ready compliance of leading officers with the guidelines established by Hitler for the criminal conduct of the war in the East was unsurprising. It had followed the gradual erosion of the traditional position of power of the armed forces’ — especially the army’s — leadership since 1933. Milestones on the way had been the Röhm affair of 1934 (when the SA’s leaders had been liquidated, in no small measure to placate the army) and, especially, the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis of 1938. The great victory in the West in 1940 had silenced the doubters, underlining the rapidly growing inferiority complex of the armed forces’ leadership towards Hitler. The subordination of the army to a Leader whose political programme had for long served its own ends had turned inexorably into subservience to a Leader whose high-risk gambles were courting disaster and whose ideological goals were implicating the army in outright criminality.
Not that this can be seen as the imposition of Hitler’s will on a reluctant army. In part, the army leadership’s rapid compliance in translating Hitler’s ideological imperatives into operative decrees was in order to demonstrate its political reliability and avoid losing ground to the SS, as had happened during the Polish campaign.85 But the grounds for the eager compliance went further than this. In the descent into barbarity the experience in Poland had been a vital element. Eighteen months’ involvement in the brutal subjugation of the Poles — even if the worst atrocities were perpetrated by the SS, the sense of disgust at these had been considerable, and a few generals had been bold enough to protest about them — had helped prepare the ground for the readiness to collaborate in the premeditated barbarism of an altogether different order built into ‘Operation Barbarossa’.
As the full barbarity of the Commissar Order became more widely known to officers in the weeks immediately prior to the campaign, there were, here too, honourable exceptions. Leading officers from Army Group Β (to become Army Group Centre), General Hans von Salmuth and Lieutenant-Colonel Henning von Tresckow (later a driving-force in plans to kill Hitler), for example, let it be known confidentially that they would look for ways of persuading their divisional commanders to ignore the order. Tresckow commented: ‘If international law is to be broken, then the Russians, not we, should do it first.’86 As the remark indicates, that the Commissar Order was a breach of international law was plainly recognized.87 Field-Marshal Fedor von Bock, Commander of Army Group Centre, rejected the shooting of partisans and civilian suspects as incompatible with army discipline, and used this as a reason to ignore the implementation of the Commissar Order.88
But, as Warlimont’s post-war comments acknowledged, at least part of the officer corps believed Hitler was right that the Soviet Commissars were ‘criminals’ and should not be treated as ‘soldiers’ in the way that the enemy on the western front had been treated. Colonel-General Georg von Küchler, Commander of the 18th Army, for instance, told his divisional commanders on 25 April that peace in Europe could only be attained for any length of time through Germany presiding over territory that secured its food-supply, and that of other states. Without a showdown with the Soviet Union, this was unimaginable. In terms scarcely different from those of Hitler himself, he went on: ‘A deep chasm separates us ideologically and racially from Russia. Russia is from the very extent of land it occupies an Asiatic state… The aim has to be, to annihilate the European Russia, to dissolve the Russian European state… The political commissars and GPU people are criminals. These are the people who tyrannize the population… They are to be put on the spot before a field court and sentenced on the basis of the testimony of the inhabitants… This will save us German blood and we will advance faster.’89 Even more categorical was the operational order for Panzer Group 4, issued by Colonel-General Erich Hoepner (who three years later would be executed for his part in the plot to kill Hitler) on 2 May — still before the formulation of the Commissar Order: ‘The war against the Soviet Union is a fundamental sector of the struggle for existence of the German people. It is the old struggle of the Germanic people against Slavdom, the defence of European culture against Moscovite-Asiatic inundation, the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. This struggle has to have as its aim the smashing of present-day Russia and must consequently be carried out with unprecedented severity. Every military action must in conception and execution be led by the iron will mercilessly and totally to annihilate the enemy. In particular, there is to be no sparing the upholders of the current Russian-Bolshevik system.’90
The complicity of Küchler, Hoepner, and numerous other generals was built into the way they had been brought up and educated, into the way they thought. The ideological overlap with the Nazi leadership was considerable, and is undeniable. There was support for the creation of an eastern empire. Contempt for Slavs was deeply ingrained. The hatred of Bolshevism was rife throughout the officer corps.91 Antisemitism — though seldom of the outrightly Hitlerian variety — was also widespread. Together, they blended as the ideological yeast whose fermentation now easily converted the generals into accessories to mass murder in the forthcoming eastern campaign.92
In the last week of March, three days before he defined the character of ‘Operation Barbarossa’ to his generals, Hitler received some highly unwelcome news with consequences for the planning of the eastern campaign. He was told of the military coup in Belgrade that had toppled the government of Prime Minister Cvetkovic and overthrown the regent, Prince Paul, in favour of his nephew, the seventeen-year-old King Peter II. Only two days earlier, in a lavish ceremony on the morning of 25 March in Hitler’s presence in the palatial surrounds of Schloß Belvedere in Vienna, Cvetkovic had signed Yugoslavia’s adherence to the Tripartite Pact, finally — following much pressure — committing his country to the side of the Axis. Hitler regarded this as ‘of extreme importance in connection with the future German military operations in Greece’.93 Such an operation would have been risky, he told Ciano, if Yugoslavia’s stance had been questionable, with the lengthy communications line only some twenty kilometres from the Yugoslav border inside Bulgarian territory.94 He was much relieved, therefore, although, he noted, ‘internal relations in Yugoslavia could despite everything develop in more complicated fashion’.95 Whatever his forebodings, Keitel found him a few hours after the signing visibly relieved, ‘happy that no more unpleasant surprises were to be expected in the Balkans’.96 It took less than forty-eight hours to shatter this optimism. The fabric of the Balkan strategy, carefully knitted together over several months, had been torn apart.
This strategy had aimed at binding the Balkan states, already closely interlinked economically with the Reich, ever more tightly to Germany. Keeping the area out of the war would have enabled Germany to gain maximum economic benefit to serve its military interests elsewhere.97 The initial thrust was anti-British, but since Molotov’s visit to Berlin German policy in the Balkans had developed an increasingly anti-Soviet tendency.98
Mussolini’s reckless invasion of Greece the previous October had then brought a major revision of objectives. The threat posed by British military intervention in Greece could not be overlooked. The Soviet Union could not be attacked as long as danger from the south was so self-evident. By 12 November Hitler had issued Directive No. 18, ordering the army to make preparations to occupy from Bulgaria the Greek mainland north of the Aegean should it become necessary, to enable the Luftwaffe to attack any British air-bases threatening the Romanian oil-fields.99 Neither the Luftwaffe nor navy leadership were satisfied with this, and pressed for the occupation of the whole of Greece and the Peloponnese. By the end of November, the Wehrmacht operational staff agreed.100 Hitler’s Directive No.20 of 13 December 1940 for ‘Operation Marita’ still spoke of the occupation of the Aegean north coast, but now held out the possibility of occupying the whole of the Greek mainland, ‘should this be necessary’.101 The intention was to have most of the troops engaged available ‘for new deployment’ as quickly as possible.102
With the directive for ‘Barbarossa’ following a few days later, it was obvious what ‘new deployment’ meant. The timing was tight. Hitler had told Ciano in November that Germany could not intervene in the Balkans before the spring.103 ‘Barbarossa’ was scheduled to begin in May. When unusually bad weather delayed the complex preparations for ‘Marita’, the timing problems became more acute. And once Hitler finally decided in March — following earlier military advice, as we have seen — that the operation had to drive the British from the entire Greek mainland and occupy it, the campaign had to be both longer and more extensive than originally anticipated.104 It was this which caused Hitler, in opposition to the strongly expressed views of the Army High Command, to reduce the size of the force initially earmarked for the southern flank in ‘Barbarossa’.105
In the intervening months, strenuous efforts had been made on the diplomatic front to secure the allegiance of the Balkan states. Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia had joined the Tripartite Pact in November 1940.106 Bulgaria, actively courted by Hitler since the previous autumn, finally committed itself to the Axis on 1 March.107 The last piece in the jigsaw was the hardest to fit in: Yugoslavia. Its geographical position alone made it vital to the success of an attack on Greece. Here, too, therefore, beginning in November, every attempt was made to bring about a formal commitment to the Tripartite Pact. The promise of the Aegean port of Salonika offered some temptation.108 The threat of German occupation — the stick, as always, alongside the carrot — provided for further concentration of minds. But it was plain that, among the people of Yugoslavia, allegiance to the Axis would not be a popular step. Hitler and Ribbentrop put Prince Paul under heavy pressure when he visited Berlin on 4 March. Despite the fear of internal unrest, which the Regent emphasized, Prince Paul’s visit paved the way for the eventual signing of the Tripartite Pact on 25 March. Hitler was prepared to accept the terms which the Yugoslav government stipulated: a guarantee of the country’s territorial integrity; no through-passage for German troops; no military support for the invasion of Greece; no future requests for military support; and backing for the claim to Salonika.109 But within hours of Prime Minister Cvetkovic and Foreign Minister Cincar-Markovic signing the Pact in Vienna, high-ranking Serbian officers, who had long resented Croat influence in the government, staged their coup.110
Hitler was given the news on the morning of the 27th. He was outraged. He summoned Keitel and Jodl straight away. He would never accept this, he shouted, waving the telegram from Belgrade. He had been betrayed in the most disgraceful fashion and would smash Yugoslavia whatever the new government promised.111 ‘The Führer does not let himself be messed around in these matters,’ noted Goebbels a day or two later.112 Hitler had also immediately sent for the heads of the Luftwaffe and army — Göring and Brauchitsch — together with Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. As usual putting a favourable complexion on unwelcome events, he now emphasized the good fortune that the coup had taken place when it had done, and not after ‘Barbarossa’ had already begun.113 As it was, there was still just about time to settle the Balkan issue.114 But there was now great urgency. Halder had also been peremptorily summoned from Zossen. Hitler asked him forthwith how long he needed to prepare an attack on Yugoslavia. Halder provided on the spot the rudiments of an invasion-plan, which he had devised in the car on the way from Zossen.115
By one o’clock, Hitler was addressing a sizeable gathering of officers from the army and Luftwaffe.116 ‘Führer is determined,’ ran the report of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, ‘… to make all preparations to smash Yugoslavia militarily and as a state-form.’ Speed was of the essence. It was important to carry out the attack ‘with merciless harshness’ in a ‘lightning operation’. This would have the effect of deterring the Turks and offering advantages for the subsequent campaign against Greece. The Croats would back Germany and be rewarded with their autonomy. The Italians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians would have territorial gains at Yugoslavia’s expense in return for their support. The beginning of ‘Operation Barbarossa’, Hitler added, would have to be postponed for up to four weeks.117 There was no discussion.118 He ordered preparations to begin immediately. The army and Luftwaffe were to indicate their intended tactics by the evening.
Jodl summarized Hitler’s objectives in the military directive for the attack that went out the same day.119 The plans for the invasion of Greece and the build-up to ‘Barbarossa’ were fully revised at breakneck speed to allow for the preliminary assault on Yugoslavia. Hitler gave no sign of acknowledgement of the work of his General Staff.120 The operation was eventually scheduled to begin in the early hours of 6 April.121 ‘But that is now only a small beginning,’ noted Goebbels. ‘The problem of Yugoslavia will not take up too much time… The big operation then comes later: against R.’122
The Yugoslav crisis had caused Hitler’s meeting with the hawkish Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, to be put back a few hours. It also necessitated Ribbentrop being called away from the preliminary talks with his Japanese counterpart to attend Hitler’s briefing.123 Matsuoka’s visit to Berlin was accompanied by enormous pomp and circumstance. Every effort was made to impress the important guest. As usual on state visits, cheering crowds had been organized — this time waving the little Japanese paper flags that had been handed out in their thousands. The diminutive Matsuoka, invariably dwarfed by lanky SS men around him, occasionally acknowledged the crowd’s applause with a wave of his top-hat.124
Hitler placed great store on the visit. His hope — encouraged by Raeder and Ribbentrop — was to persuade the Japanese to attack Singapore without delay.125 With ‘Barbarossa’ imminent, this would tie up the British in the Far East. The loss of Singapore would be a catastrophic blow for the still undefeated Britain. This in turn, it was thought in Berlin, would serve to keep America out of the war.126 And any possible rapprochement between Japan and the USA, worrying signs of which were mounting, would be ended at one fell swoop.127 Hitler sought no military assistance from Japan in the forthcoming war against the Soviet Union. In fact, he was not prepared to divulge anything of ‘Barbarossa’ — though in his talks with Matsuoka earlier that morning Ribbentrop had indicated a deterioration in Soviet-German relations and strongly hinted at the possibility that Hitler might attack the Soviet Union at some point.128
Hitler outlined for Matsuoka the military successes and position of the Axis powers. On all fronts they were in command. Britain had lost the war, and it was only a question of whether she would recognize this. Britain’s two hopes, he went on, again singing the old refrain, were American aid and the Soviet Union. The former would play no significant part before 1942. And Germany had available 160 to 180 divisions which he would not hesitate to use against the Soviet Union if need be — though he added that he did not believe the danger would materialize. Japan, he implied, need have no fear of attack from the Soviet Union in the event of her moving against Singapore: 150 German divisions — Hitler more than doubled the actual number — were standing on the border with Russia.129 No time could be more favourable, therefore, for the Japanese to act.130
Hitler had deployed his full rhetorical repertoire. But he was sorely disappointed at Matsuoka’s reply. An attack on Singapore was, the Japanese Foreign Minister declared, merely a matter of time, and in his opinion could not come soon enough. But he did not rule Japan, and his views had not so far prevailed against weighty opposition. ‘At the present moment,’ he stated, ‘he could not under these circumstances enter on behalf of his Japanese Empire into any commitment to act.’131
Hitler was going to get nothing out of Matsuoka, whom he later described as ‘combining the hypocrisy of an American Bible missionary with the cunning of a Japanese Asiatic’.132 It was clear: Hitler had to reckon without any Japanese military intervention for the foreseeable future. He continued to see this as a vital step in the global context. As Ciano noted, a few weeks later, ‘Hitler still considers the Japanese card as extremely important in order, in the first place, to threaten and eventually counterbalance completely any American action.’133 When Matsuoka returned briefly to Berlin in early April to report on his meeting with Mussolini, Hitler was prepared to give him every encouragement. He acceded to the request for technical assistance in submarine construction. He then made an unsolicited offer. Should Japan ‘get into’ conflict with the United States, Germany would immediately ‘draw the consequences’. America would seek to pick off her enemies one by one. ‘Therefore Germany would,’ Hitler said, ‘intervene immediately in case of a conflict Japan-America, for the strength of the three Pact powers was their common action. Their weakness would be in letting themselves be defeated singly.’134 It was the thinking that would take Germany into war against the United States later in the year following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Meanwhile, the Soviet — Japanese neutrality pact which Matsuoka negotiated with Stalin on his way back through Moscow — ensuring that Japan would not be dragged into a conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union, and securing her northern flank in the event of expansion in south-east Asia — came as an unpleasant surprise to Hitler.135
While Matsuoka was in Berlin, preparations for ‘Marita’ were already furiously taking shape. Within little over a week they were ready. ‘Operation Marita’ was now set to begin at 5.20a.m. on Sunday morning, 6 April. The tension in the Propaganda Ministry and other agencies of the regime was feverish. Goebbels had already devised, with Hitler’s approval, the radio fanfares for the Balkan campaign, taken from the opening of ‘Prinz Eugen’.136 At 1a.m., feeling the tension himself and about to snatch a few hours’ sleep, he was summoned to the Führer. Hitler outlined the attack. He reckoned the campaign could take two months. Goebbels thought less. Hitler referred to the Friendship Treaty which the Soviet Union had signed with Yugoslavia only the day before.137 He had no fear of Russia. He had taken sufficient precautions. If Russia wanted to attack, then the sooner the better. If Germany were not to act now, the whole of the Balkans and Turkey would be inflamed. That had to be prevented. The war against the Serbs would be carried out ‘without mercy’.
The time seemed to drag. Goebbels drank tea with Hitler and, as a diversion, they talked about matters other than the war. Hitler turned to one of his favourite topics: making Linz into a cultural capital greater than Vienna. Goebbels said he would help as far as possible, in the first instance by setting up film studios there.138 Another hour passed. Then 5.20a.m. came. The attack had started. Hitler felt he could now go to bed.139
Shortly afterwards, Goebbels read out on the radio the proclamation Hitler had dictated.140 By then, hundreds of Luftwaffe bombers were turning Belgrade into a heap of smoking ruins. Hitler justified the action to the German people as retaliation against a ‘Serbian criminal clique’ in Belgrade which, in the pay of the British Secret Service, was attempting, as in 1914, to spread the war in the Balkans. The German troops would end their action once the ‘Belgrade conspirators’ had been overthrown and the last British soldiers had been forced out of the region.141 What could, of course, not be revealed was that the invasion of Yugoslavia would, in at least one important respect, be a trial-run for ‘Barbarossa’. Hitler had spoken privately about the campaign being ‘merciless (ohne Gnade)’.142 On 2 April, Chief of Staff General Halder — presumably acceding to a request from Heydrich — added two new target-groups alongside ‘Emigrants, Saboteurs, Terrorists’ to be dealt with by the Security Police and SD in the Balkan campaign: Communists and Jews.143
With the campaign in its early stages, Hitler left Berlin on the evening of 10 April, en route for his improvised field headquarters. These were located in his Special Train Amerika, stationed at the entrance to a tunnel beneath the Alps on a single-track section of the line from Vienna to Graz, in a wooded area near Mönichkirchen. The Wehrmacht Operational Staff, apart from Hitler’s closest advisers, were accommodated in a nearby inn. The tunnel was to offer protection in the event of danger from the air.144 The day before he left Berlin, Hitler had experienced the worst British air-raid yet over the Reich capital. Some of the historic buildings on Unter den Linden — including the State Opera House, the University, the State Library, and the Crown Prince’s Palace — were damaged. Hitler was furious with Göring at the failure of the Luftwaffe. He immediately commissioned Speer with the rebuilding of the Opera House.145
Hitler remained in his secluded, heavily guarded field headquarters for a fortnight. He was visited there by King Boris of Bulgaria, Admiral Horthy, the regent of Hungary, and Count Ciano — vultures gathering at the corpse of Yugoslavia.146 His fifty-second birthday on 20 April was bizarrely celebrated with a concert in front of the Special Train, after Göring had eulogized the Führer’s genius as a military commander, and Hitler had shaken the hand of each of his armed forces’ chiefs.147 While there Hitler heard the news of the capitulation of both Yugoslavia and Greece.148
After overcoming some early tenacious resistance, the dual campaign against Yugoslavia and Greece had made unexpectedly rapid progress.149 In fact, German operational planning had grossly overestimated the weak enemy forces. Of the twenty-nine German divisions engaged in the Balkans, only ten were in action for more than six days.150 On 10 April Zagreb was reached, and an independent Croatian State proclaimed, resting on the slaughterous anti-Serb Ustasha Movement. Two days later Belgrade was reached. On 17 April the Yugoslav army surrendered unconditionally. Around 344,000 men entered German captivity. Losses on the victors’ side were a mere 151 dead with 392 wounded and fifteen missing.151
In contrast to the punitive attack on Yugoslavia, Hitler’s interest in the conquest of Greece was purely strategic. He forbade the bombing of Athens, and regretted having to fight against the Greeks. If the British had not intervened there (sending troops in early March to assist the Greek struggle against Mussolini’s forces), he would never have had to hasten to the help of the Italians, he told Goebbels.152 Meanwhile, the German 12th Army had rapidly advanced over Yugoslav territory on Salonika, which fell on 9 April. The bulk of the Greek forces capitulated on 21 April. A brief diplomatic farce followed. The blow to Mussolini’s prestige demanded that the surrender to the Germans, which had in fact already taken place, be accompanied by a surrender to the Italians. To avoid alienating Mussolini, Hitler was forced to comply. The agreement signed by General List was disowned. Jodl was sent to Salonika with a new armistice. This time the Italians were party to it. This was finally signed, amid Greek protests, on 23 April.153 Greeks taken prisoner numbered 218,000, British 12,000, against 100 dead and 3,500 wounded or missing on the German side. In a minor ‘Dunkirk’, the British managed to evacuate 50,000 men — around four-fifths of their Expeditionary Force, which had to leave behind or destroy its heavy equipment.154 The whole campaign had been completed in under a month.155
A follow-up operation to take Crete by landing parachutists was, while he was in Mönichkirchen, somewhat unenthusiastically conceded by Hitler under pressure from Göring, himself being pushed by the commander of the parachutist division, General Kurt Student.156 By the end of May, this too had proved successful. But it had been hazardous. And the German losses of 2,071 dead, 2,594 wounded, and 1,888 missing from a deployment of around 22,000 men were far higher than in the entire Balkan campaign. ‘Operation Mercury’ — the attack on Crete — convinced Hitler that mass paratroop landings had had their day. He did not contemplate using them in the assault the following year on Malta.157 Potentially, the occupation of Crete offered the prospect of intensified assault on the British position in the Middle East. Naval High Command tried to persuade Hitler of this.158 But his eyes were now turned only in one direction: towards the East.
On 28 April, Hitler had arrived back in Berlin — for the last time the warlord returning in triumph from a lightning victory achieved at minimal cost. Though people in Germany responded in more muted fashion than they had done to the remarkable victories in the West, the Balkan campaign appeared to prove once again that their Leader was a military strategist of genius. His popularity was undiminished. But there were clouds on the horizon. People in their vast majority wanted, as they had done all along, peace: victorious peace, of course, but above all, peace. Their ears pricked up when Hitler spoke of ‘a hard year of struggle ahead of us’ and, in his triumphant report to the Reichstag on the Balkan campaign on 4 May, of providing even better weapons for German soldiers ‘next year’. Their worries were magnified by disturbing rumours of a deterioration in relations with the Soviet Union and of troops assembling on the eastern borders of the Reich.159
What the mass of the people had, of course, no inkling of was that Hitler had already put out the directive to prepare ‘Operation Barbarossa’ — the invasion of the Soviet Union — almost five months earlier. That directive, of 18 December, had laid down that preparations requiring longer than eight weeks should be completed by 15 May.160 But it had not stipulated a date for the actual attack. (In one of the military conferences preceding the directive, on 5 December, Hitler had envisaged the end of May as the time to strike. But, so far in advance of a campaign which would be dependent upon weather conditions for the vital initial advantage, this was no more than a date to aim at.161) In his speech to military leaders on 27 March, immediately following news of the Yugoslav coup, Hitler had spoken of a delay of up to four weeks as a consequence of the need to take action in the Balkans.162 Back in Berlin after his stay in Mönichkirchen, he lost no time — assured by Halder of transport availability to take the troops to the East — in arranging a new date for the start of ‘Barbarossa’ with Jodl: 22 June.163
Towards the end of the war, casting round for scapegoats, Hitler looked back on the fateful delay as decisive in the failure of the Russian campaign. ‘If we had attacked Russia already from 15 May onwards,’ he claimed, ‘… we would have been in a position to conclude the eastern campaign before the onset of winter.’164 This was simplistic in the extreme — as well as exaggerating the inroads made by the Balkan campaign on the timing of ‘Barbarossa’.165 Weather conditions in an unusually wet spring in central Europe would almost certainly have ruled out a major attack before June — perhaps even mid-June.166 Moreover, the major wear and tear on the German divisions engaged on the Balkan campaign came less from the belated inclusion of Yugoslavia than from the invasion of Greece — planned over many months in conjunction with the planning for ‘Barbarossa’.167 What did disadvantage the opening of ‘Barbarossa’ was the need for the redeployment at breakneck speed of divisions that had pushed on as far as southern Greece and now, without recovery time, had rapidly to be transported to their eastern positions.168 In addition, the damage caused to tanks by rutted and pot-holed roads in the Balkan hills required a huge effort to equip them again for the eastern campaign, and probably contributed to the high rate of mechanical failure during the invasion of Russia.169 Probably the most serious effect of the Balkan campaign on planning for ‘Barbarossa’ was the reduction of German forces on the southern flank, to the south of the Pripet Marshes.170 But we have already seen that Hitler took the decision to that effect on 17 March, before the coup in Yugoslavia.
The weaknesses of the plan to invade the Soviet Union could not be laid at the door of the Italians, for their failure in Greece, or the Yugoslavs, for what Hitler saw as their treachery. The calamity, as it emerged, of ‘Barbarossa’ was located squarely in the nature of German war aims and ambitions. These were by no means solely a product of Hitler’s ideological obsessiveness, megalomania, and indomitable willpower. Certainly, he had provided the driving-force. But he had met no resistance to speak of in the higher echelons of the regime. The army, in particular, had fully supported him in the turn to the East. And if Hitler’s underestimation of Soviet military power was crass, it was an underestimation shared with his military leaders, who had lost none of their confidence that the war in the Soviet Union would be over long before winter.
Meanwhile, Hitler was once more forced by events outside his control, this time close to home, to divert his attention from ‘Barbarossa’.
When he stepped down from the rostrum at the end of his speech to Reichstag deputies on 4 May, he took his place, as usual, next to the Deputy Leader of the Party, his most slavishly subservient follower, Rudolf Heß.171 Only a few days later, while Hitler was on the Obersalzberg, the astonishing news came through that his Deputy had taken a Messerschmitt 110 from Augsburg, flown off on his own en route for Britain, and disappeared. The news struck the Berghof like a bombshell.172 The first wish was that he was dead. ‘It’s to be hoped he’s crashed into the sea,’ Hitler was heard to say.173 Then came the announcement from London — by then not unexpected — that Heß had landed in Scotland and been taken captive. With the Russian campaign looming, Hitler was now faced with a domestic crisis. More important still: Heß had provided the British with a gift for propaganda or intelligence purposes. In fact, the decision was soon taken in the British cabinet to ignore the obvious propaganda opportunity in order to put pressure on Stalin at a critical juncture.174
On the afternoon of Saturday, 10 May, Heß had said goodbye to his wife, Ilse, and young son, Wolf Rüdiger, saying he would be back by Monday evening. From Munich he had travelled in his Mercedes to the Messerschmitt works in Augsburg. There, he changed into a fur-lined flying suit and Luftwaffe captain’s jacket. (His alias on his mission was to be Hauptmann Alfred Horn.) Shortly before 6p.m. on a clear, sunlit evening, his Messerschmitt 110 taxied on to the runway and took off. Shortly after 11p.m., after navigating himself through Germany, across the North Sea, and over the Scottish Lowlands, Heß wriggled out of the cockpit, abandoning his plane not far from Glasgow, and parachuted — something he had never practised — to the ground, injuring his leg as he left the plane.
Air defence had picked up the flight path, and observers had seen the plane’s occupant bale out before it exploded in flames. A local Scottish farmhand, Donald McLean, was, however, first on the scene. He quickly established that the parachutist, struggling to get out of his harness, was unarmed. Asked whether he was British or German, Heß replied that he was German; his name was Hauptmann Alfred Horn, and he had an important message to give to the Duke of Hamilton. Another local man, the elderly William Craig, had by this time arrived on the scene. While Craig went off to summon assistance, the limping Heß was escorted back to the cottage where McLean lived with his wife and mother, and offered a cup of tea (which he declined in favour of water). Within a short time, a few members of the local Home Guard, already heading for the farm after seeing a parachutist come down near by, entered the cottage. Smelling of whisky and prodding their prisoner with an old First World War pistol, they bundled him into a car and drove him to Home Guard headquarters — a scout-hut in the next village. Police and more Home Guard officers, curious about the German captive as word spread, soon turned up. They were followed a little later by Major Graham Donald, Assistant Group Officer of the Royal Observer Corps, who had seen the course of Heß’s plane charted on his maps before it had disappeared from trace. The prisoner, by now — well after midnight, an hour and a half or more after landing — tired and probably becoming increasingly agitated about the prospects of fulfilling his ‘mission’, impressed upon Donald that he had a vital secret message for the Duke of Hamilton. Donald undertook to contact the Duke. But he was not deceived by ‘Hauptmann Horn’; he said he would tell the Duke of Hamilton that he had Rudolf Heß in his custody. The message was, however, not passed on in this form. When Hamilton was informed in the early hours that a captured German pilot was demanding to speak to him, there was no reference to Heß, and the name of Hauptmann Alfred Horn meant nothing to the Duke. Puzzled, and very tired, Hamilton made arrangements to interview the mysterious airman next day, and went to bed.175
The Duke, a wing-commander in the RAF, arrived from his base to talk to the German captive by mid-morning on 11 May. ‘Hauptmann Horn’ admitted that his true name was Rudolf Heß. The discussion was inconsequential, but convinced Hamilton that he was indeed face to face with Heß. By the evening he had flown south, summoned to report to Churchill at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, a palatial eighteenth-century residence in magnificent grounds, frequently used by the British Prime Minister as a weekend headquarters. Churchill was in the midst of a dinner party. A film, the hilarious The Marx Brothers Go West, had been arranged for the evening. Churchill was glad of the diversion from the gloomy news coming in of the damage wrought by a heavy air-raid on London the previous night. ‘Now, come and tell us this funny story of yours,’ Churchill joked to Hamilton, as he entered the dining-room. Hamilton suggested the story would be better told in private. The other guests, apart from the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, withdrew. Hamilton then described what had happened. But a full debriefing had to wait until after midnight. ‘Hess or no Hess,’ Churchill announced, ‘I am going to see the Marx Brothers.’176
By the following day, Monday 12 May, the professionals from the Foreign Office were involved. It was decided to send Ivone Kirkpatrick, from 1933 to 1938 First Secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin and a strong opponent of Appeasement, to interrogate Heß. Kirkpatrick and Hamilton left to fly to Scotland in the early evening. It was after midnight by the time they arrived at Buchanan Castle, near Loch Lomond, to confront the prisoner.177
The first Hitler knew of Heß’s disappearance was in the late morning of Sunday, 11 May, when Karl-Heinz Pintsch, one of the Deputy Führer’s adjutants, turned up at the Berghof. He was carrying an envelope containing a letter which Heß had given him shortly before taking off, entrusting him to deliver it personally to Hitler. With some difficulty, Pintsch managed to make plain to Hitler’s adjutants that it was a matter of the utmost urgency, and that he had to speak personally to the Führer.178 When Hitler read Heßs letter, the colour drained from his face.179 Albert Speer, busying himself with architectural sketches at the time, suddenly heard an ‘almost animal-like scream’. Then Hitler bellowed, ‘Bormann immediately! Where is Bormann?!’180
In his letter, Heß had outlined his motives for flying to meet the Duke of Hamilton, and aspects of a plan for peace between Germany and Britain to be put before ‘Barbarossa’ was launched. He claimed he had made three previous attempts to reach Scotland, but had been forced to abort them because of mechanical problems with the aircraft.181 His aim was to bring about, through his own person, the realization of Hitler’s long-standing idea of friendship with Britain which the Führer himself, despite all efforts, had not succeeded in achieving. If the Führer were not in agreement, then he could have him declared insane.182
Göring — residing at the time in his castle at Veldenstein near Nuremberg — was telephoned straight away. Hitler was in no mood for small-talk. ‘Göing, get here immediately,’ he barked into the telephone. ‘Something dreadful has happened.’ Ribbentrop was also summoned.183 Hitler, meanwhile, had ordered Pintsch, the hapless bearer of ill tidings, and Heß’s other adjutant, Alfred Leitgen, arrested, and spent his time marching up and down the hall in a rage.184 The mood in the Berghof was one of high tension and speculation.185 Amid the turmoil, Hitler was clear-sighted enough to act quickly to rule out any possible power-vacuum in the Party leadership arising from Heß’s defection. That very day, he issued a terse edict stipulating that the former office of the Deputy Leader would now be termed the Party Chancellery, and be subordinated to him personally. It would be led, as before, by Party Comrade Martin Bormann.186 It was reminiscent of the way Hitler had dealt with the Gregor Strasser crisis of 1932 by — at least nominally — taking the reins into his own hands.187 In practice, making Bormann the chief of the Party’s central office would provide from now on a level of interventionist zeal by the Party, increasingly imposing its ideologically driven activism on the regime’s administration, on a scale which had never been witnessed under Heß.188
Accompanied by General Ernst Udet, Göring arrived during the evening. Hitler repeated the hope that Heß had crashed. He asked Göring and Udet whether it was probable that Heß would manage to reach his flight-target near Glasgow. They thought it could be ruled out. In their view, Heß did not have sufficient mastery of the technical equipment. Hitler disagreed. At that, Ribbentrop was dispatched to Rome to prevent any potential rift in the Axis. The news from London could break at any time. It was vital to obviate any presumption by Mussolini that Germany was attempting to arrange a separate peace with Britain.189
Hitler was furious to learn that Heß, despite being banned from flying, had prepared his plans in minute detail. He persuaded himself — taking his lead from what Heß himself in his letter had suggested — that the Deputy Führer was indeed suffering from mental delusion, and insisted on making his ‘madness’ the centre-point of the extremely awkward communiqué which had to be put out to the German people.190 Since there was still nothing from Britain, but some sort of official announcement from Berlin was thought to be unavoidable, it was suggested that the Deputy Führer had probably crashed en route. There was still no word of Heß’s whereabouts when the communiqué was broadcast at 8p.m. that evening. The communiqué mentioned the letter which had been left behind, showing ‘in its confusion unfortunately the traces of a mental derangement’, giving rise to fears that he had been the ‘victim of hallucinations’. ‘Under these circumstances,’ the communiqué ended, it had to be presumed that ‘Party Comrade Heß had somewhere on his journey crashed, that is, met with an accident’.191
Goebbels, overlooked in the first round of Hitler’s consultations, had by then also been summoned to the Obersalzberg. ‘The Führer is completely crushed,’ the Propaganda Minister noted in his diary. ‘What a spectacle for the world: a mentally-deranged second man after the Führer.’192 The following day, on reaching the Berghof, he was shown the letters left by Heß. ‘A muddle-headed shambles, schoolboy dilettantism,’ was his verdict on Heß’s intention to work through the Duke of Hamilton to bring down Churchill and attain peace-terms. ‘That Churchill would immediately have him arrested hadn’t, unfortunately, occurred to him.’ The letters, he claimed, were full of ‘half-baked occultism’. He pointed to Heß’s belief in horoscopes. ‘A thoroughly pathological business,’ he concluded.193 Meanwhile, early on 13 May, the BBC in London had brought the official announcement that Heß indeed found himself in British captivity.
The first German communiqué composed by Hitler the previous day would plainly no longer suffice. The new communiqué of 13 May acknowledged Heß’s flight to Scotland, and capture. It emphasized his physical illness — he had suffered from a gall-bladder complaint — stretching back years, which had put him in the hands of mesmerists, astrologists, and the like, bringing about ‘a mental confusion’ that had led to the present action. It also held open the possibility that he had been entrapped by the British Secret Service. Affected by delusions, he had undertaken the action of an idealist without any notion of the consequences. His action, the communiqué ended, would alter nothing in the struggle against Britain.194
The two communiqués, forced ultimately to concede that the Deputy Führer had flown to the enemy, and attributing the action to his mental state, bore all the hallmarks of a hasty and ill-judged attempt to play down the enormity of the scandal. Remarkably, Goebbels had not been informed of what had happened until the evening of 12 May.195 Hitler had not turned to him for propaganda advice on how to present the débâcle, but had relied instead at first on Otto Dietrich, the Press Chief. Goebbels was highly critical from the outset about the ‘mental illness’ explanation. None of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter who inundated him with telephone calls about the position, he wrote, believed the ‘madness’ story. ‘It sounds so absurd that it could be taken for a mystification,’ he frankly admitted.196 His own preference would have been to say nothing until forced to do so, then to suggest that Heß, as had been claimed of Gregor Strasser in 1932, had ‘evidently lost his nerve’ at the last minute.197 This way, weakness rather than insanity could have been blamed. It would have been an easier interpretation to defend.198 As it was, a real difficulty had to be faced: how to explain that a man recognized for many years as mentally unbalanced had been left in such an important position in the running of the Reich. ‘It’s rightly asked how such an idiot could be the second man after the Führer,’ Goebbels remarked.199
SD reports and other soundings of popular reactions told Goebbels of the damaging impact on the morale of the people.200 For the Nazi Party’s standing, the fall-out from the Heß affair was disastrous. Hefty and sustained criticism of the Party and its representatives had been widespread even during the victorious summer of 1940. Alongside the adulation for the Führer and the eulogies for the Wehrmacht went feelings that the Party and its representatives had perhaps once served some purpose, but were by now superfluous. Many thought the Party functionaries were corrupt, interfering, and self-serving — feathering their own nest at home, shirking, and draft-dodging while the indomitable Führer and his brave soldiers were at the front, facing the enemy. As before the war, the corruption, high-handedness, loose living, and other personal failings of the jumped-up ‘tin-pot gods (Nebengötter) were the subject of extensive condemnation. The popular distaste was much in evidence in the months before the Heß scandal. It was, then, scarcely surprising that, alongside the deep shock and dismay felt by Party members and loyal supporters, Heß’s defection now evoked a wave of massive criticism cascading down on the heads of the Party hacks.201
A sense of the popular feeling could be grasped from the innumerable wild rumours that sprouted overnight in all parts of the Reich in what one government official dubbed ‘the month of rumours’.202 It was, for instance, rumoured that Himmler and Ley had fled abroad, that the Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria, Adolf Wagner, had been caught on the border trying to export into Switzerland 22 million Reich Marks robbed from monasteries, and that Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher, Count Helldorf (the Police Chief of Berlin), and Walther Darre (the Blut und Boden guru) had been shot for their involvement in Heß’s ‘treason’.203 Of course, none of the rumours was true. But their existence — and negative rumour was an important mode of criticism in the police state — graphically highlights the low popular esteem of leading Party representatives. Goebbels felt the blow to prestige so deeply that he wanted to avoid being seen in public. ‘It’s like an awful dream,’ he remarked. ‘The Party will have to chew on it for a long time.’204 The only solution from his point of view was to batten down the hatches and let the hurricane blow itself out. Soon he was commenting that the issue was losing its dramatic effect.205 It was turning into a nine-days’ wonder.
Hitler himself was occasionally caught in the line of fire of criticism. One popular joke doing the rounds at the time had Heß summoned before Churchill. The British Prime Minister, bulldog expression on his face, cigar in his mouth, was supposed to have said: ‘So you’re the madman are you?’ ‘Oh, no,’ Heß replied, ‘only his Deputy.’206 But, generally, the contrast between the scarcely diluted contempt for the Party functionaries and the massive popularity of Hitler himself, embodying all that was seen to be positive in National Socialism, was stark. Much sympathy was voiced for the Führer who now had this, on top of all his other worries, to contend with. As ever, it was presumed that, while he was working tirelessly on behalf of the nation, he was kept in the dark, let down, or betrayed by some of his most trusted chieftains.207
This key element of the ‘Führer myth’ was one that Hitler himself played to when, on 13 May, he addressed a rapidly arranged meeting of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter at the Berghof. There was an air of tension when Göring and Bormann, both grim-faced, entered the hall before Hitler made his appearance. Bormann read out Heß’s final letter to Hitler. The feeling of shock and anger among those listening was palpable. Then Hitler came into the room. Much as in the last great crisis within the Party leadership, in December 1932, he played masterfully on the theme of loyalty and betrayal.208 Heß had betrayed him, he stated. He appealed to the loyalty of his most trusted ‘old fighters’. He declared that Heß had acted without his knowledge, was mentally ill, and had put the Reich in an impossible position with regard to its Axis partners. He had sent Ribbentrop to Rome to placate the Duce. He stressed once more Heß’s long-standing odd behaviour (his dealings with astrologists and the like). He castigated the former Deputy Führer’s opposition to his own orders in continuing to practise flying. Heß, he said, had arranged for a specially adapted Messerschmitt to be fitted out, and had had regular weather charts for the North Sea sent to him for months. A few days before Heß’s defection, he went on, the Deputy Führer had come to see him and asked him pointedly whether he still stood to the programme of cooperation with England that he had laid out in Mein Kampf. Hitler said he had, of course, reaffirmed this position.
When he had finished speaking, Hitler leaned against the big table near the window. According to one account, he was ‘in tears and looked ten years older’.209 ‘I have never seen the Führer so deeply shocked,’ Hans Frank told a gathering of his subordinates in the General Government a few days later.210 As he stood near the window, gradually all the sixty or seventy persons present rose from their chairs and gathered round him in a semicircle. No one spoke a word.211 Then Göring provided an effusive statement of the devotion of all present. The intense anger was reserved only for Heß.212 The ‘core’ following had once more rallied around their Leader, as in the ‘time of struggle’, at a moment of crisis. The regime had suffered a massive jolt; but the Party leadership, its backbone, was still holding together.
At least one of those present, Gauleiter Ernst Wilhelm Bohle of the Auslandsorganisation (Foreign Countries’ Organization), thought — or so he asserted after the war — that Heß had acted with Hitler’s full knowledge and encouragement.213 Some other contemporaries, notably General Karl Heinrich Bodenschatz, Göring’s adjutant, who was present at the Berghof when the news was broken to Hitler, also remained convinced of his involvement. Their voices have sometimes carried weight down the ages. However, there is not a shred of compelling and sustainable evidence to support the case.214
All who saw Hitler in the days after the news of Heß’s defection broke registered his profound shock, dismay, and anger at what he saw as betrayal. This has sometimes been interpreted, as it was also by a number of contemporaries, as clever acting on Hitler’s part, concealing a plot which only he and Heß knew about.215 Hitler was indeed capable, as we have noted on more than one occasion, of putting on a theatrical performance. But if this was acting, it was of Hollywood-Oscar calibre.
That the Deputy Führer had been captured in Britain was something that shook the regime to its foundations. As Goebbels sarcastically pointed out, it never appears to have occurred to Heß that this could be the outcome of his ‘mission’. It is hard to imagine that it would not have crossed Hitler’s mind, had he been engaged in a plot. But it would have been entirely out of character for Hitler to have involved himself in such a hare-brained scheme. His own acute sensitivity towards any potential threat to his own prestige, towards being made to look foolish in the eyes of his people and the outside world, would itself have been sufficient to have ruled out the notion of sending Heß on a one-man peace-mission to Britain. But, in any case, there was every reason, from his own point of view, not to have become involved and to have most categorically prohibited what Heß had in mind.
Certainly, Hitler was a gambler. But he invariably weighed the odds and took what seemed to him calculable risks. He was always highly nervous, even hesitant, before any attempted coup. In this instance, his behaviour was unremarkable in the days building up to the Heß drama. The chances of the Heß flight succeeding — even if, for which there is no evidence, there had been enticement from the British Secret Service — were so remote that Hitler would not conceivably have entertained the prospect.216 And had he done so, it is hard to believe that he would have settled on Heß as his emissary. Heß had not been party to the planning of ‘Barbarossa’. He had been little in Hitler’s presence over the previous months. His competence was confined strictly to Party matters. He had no experience in foreign affairs. And he had never been entrusted previously with any delicate diplomatic negotiations.217
In any case, Hitler’s motive for contemplating a secret mission such as Heß attempted to carry out would be difficult to grasp. For months Hitler had been single-mindedly preparing to attack and destroy the Soviet Union precisely in order to force Britain out of the war. He and his generals were confident that the Soviet Union would be comprehensively defeated by the autumn. The timetable for the attack left no room for manoeuvre. The last thing Hitler wanted was any hold-up through diplomatic complications arising from the intercession by Heß a few weeks before the invasion was to be launched. Had ‘Barbarossa’ not taken place before the end of June, it would have had to be postponed to the following year. For Hitler, this would have been unthinkable. He was well aware that there were those in the British establishment who would still prefer to sue for peace. He expected them to do so after, not before, ‘Barbarossa’.
Rudolf Heß at no time, whether during his interrogations after landing in Scotland, in discussions with his fellow-captives while awaiting trial in Nuremberg, or during his long internment in Spandau, implicated Hitler. His story never wavered from the one he gave to Ivone Kirkpatrick at his first interrogation on 13 May 1941. ‘He had come here,’ so Kirkpatrick summed up in his report, ‘without the knowledge of Hitler in order to convince responsible persons that since England could not win the war, the wisest course was to make peace now. From a long and intimate knowledge of the Führer, which had begun eighteen years ago in the fortress of Landsberg, he could give his word of honour that the Führer had never entertained any designs against the British Empire. Nor had he ever aspired to world domination. He believed that Germany’s sphere of interest was in Europe and that any dissipation of Germany’s strength beyond Europe’s frontiers would be a weakness and would carry with it the seeds of Germany’s destruction.’ He admitted, when pressed by Kirkpatrick on whether Russia was to be seen as part of Europe or Asia, that Germany had some demands on Russia, but denied that Hitler was planning to attack the Soviet Union.218
Heß’s British interlocutors rapidly reached the conclusion that he had nothing to offer which went beyond Hitler’s public statements, notably his ‘peace appeal’ before the Reichstag on 19 July 1940. Kirkpatrick concluded his report: ‘Heß does not seem… to be in the near counsels of the German government as regards operations; and he is not likely to possess more secret information than he could glean in the course of conversations with Hitler and others.’219 If, in the light of this, Heß was following out orders from Hitler himself, he would have had to be as supreme an actor — and to have continued to be so for the next four decades — as was, reputedly, the Leader he so revered. But, then, to what end? He said nothing that Hitler had not publicly on a number of occasions stated himself.220 He brought no new negotiating position. It was as if he presumed that the mere fact of the Deputy Führer voluntarily — through an act involving personal courage — putting himself in the hands of the enemy was enough to have made the British government see the good will of the Führer, the earnest intentions behind his aim of cooperation with Britain against Bolshevism, and the need to overthrow the Churchill ‘war-faction’ and settle amicably.221 The naivety of such thinking points heavily in the direction of an attempt inspired by no one but the idealistic, other-worldly, and muddle-headed Heß.
His own motives were not more mysterious or profound than they appeared. Heß had seen over a number of years, but especially since the war had begun, his access to Hitler strongly reduced. His nominal subordinate, Martin Bormann, had in effect been usurping his position, always in the Führer’s company, always able to put in a word here or there, always able to translate his wishes into action. A spectacular action to accomplish what the Führer had been striving for over many years would transform his status overnight, turning ‘Fräulein Anna’, as he was disparagingly dubbed by some in the Party, into a national hero.222
Heß had remained highly influenced by Karl Haushofer — his former teacher and the leading exponent of geopolitical theories which had influenced the formation of Hitler’s ideas of Lebensraum — and his son Albrecht (who later became closely involved with resistance groups). Their views had reinforced his belief that everything must be done to prevent the undermining of the ‘mission’ that Hitler had laid out almost two decades earlier: the attack on Bolshevism together with, not in opposition to, Great Britain. Albrecht Haushofer had made several attempts to contact the Duke of Hamilton — whom he had met in Berlin in 1936 — before the Heß escapade, but had received no replies to his letters. Hamilton himself strenuously denied, with justification it seems, receiving the letters, and also denied Heß’s claim to have met him at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.223
By August 1940, when he began to plan his own intervention, Heß was deeply disappointed in the British response to the ‘peace-terms’ that Hitler had offered. He was aware, too, that Hitler was by this time thinking of attacking the Soviet Union even before Britain was willing to ‘see sense’ and agree to terms. The original strategy lay thus in tatters. Heß saw his role as that of the Führer’s most faithful paladin, now destined to restore through his personal intervention the opportunity to save Europe from Bolshevism — a unique chance wantonly cast away by Churchill’s ‘warmongering’ clique which had taken over the British government. Heß acted without Hitler’s knowledge, but in deep (if confused) belief that he was carrying out his wishes.
Heß now became an unwitting pawn in the moves by British intelligence to bluff Stalin. Churchill was reluctantly dissuaded by Anthony Eden and Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, from his initial instinct to make maximum propaganda capital out of Heß’s capture — something Hitler and Goebbels both expected and feared.224 Prompted by a report from Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador to Moscow, that Heß’s flight to Scotland had newly inflamed the old paranoia in the Soviet leadership of a peace arranged between Britain and Germany at Russia’s cost, Eden and Cadogan devised a more subtle ploy, aimed at strengthening Soviet resistance to Hitler. The absence of anything more than the most terse public statement about Heß’s capture was part of the idea.225
By the beginning of June, thanks to the code-breaker ‘Ultra’, which since mid-1940 had enabled the decrypting of German military intelligence cyphers, the British cabinet was aware that Hitler would strike against the Soviet Union during the second half of the month.226 The British had also been tipped off, indirectly, through a leak passed on via Dahlems, by no less a person than Göring — concerned, as Heß was, to avoid a two-front war.227 Anxious to wean the Soviet Union away from Germany, Churchill was among a number of those who had let Stalin know as early as April to expect a German attack.228
The aim of Eden, Cadogan, and Lord Beaverbrook was now to exploit Heß’s capture by sowing further doubts in Stalin’s mind about whether Britain was about to strike a deal with Hitler, based upon peace proposals advanced by the former Deputy Führer, while at the same time, through warnings of German intentions, leaving the door open to a rapprochement between Britain and the Soviet Union. The threat of a compromise peace, it was reasoned, might strengthen Moscow’s fears of isolation to the extent that the Red Army could launch a preventive attack on the Wehrmacht. At the same time, supplying Stalin with information about German plans could encourage him to seek contact with Britain. Either way, British interests would be well served. Stalin was, therefore, sent deliberately conflicting signals of British intentions. Under the pressure they were attempting subtly to exert, the British Secret Service envisaged a third — the most likely — reaction by Stalin: adopting a wait-and-see stance.229
Predictably, Stalin indeed followed the third option. He brushed away warnings, confident that Hitler would not risk a two-front war. Heß’s defection bolstered this confidence, since Stalin presumed the Deputy Führer had been commissioned by Hitler to put out peace feelers, and that only a few weeks remained available if an attack were to be launched. The silence from London about Heß together with rumours that Britain might be ready to pull out of the war, aligned with the warnings of an imminent attack by Hitler on Russia, further reinforced the presumption of a serious split within the British government. From Stalin’s point of view, this meant the likelihood of delay, thereby hindering agreement with Germany, and blocking the chances of a German attack while there was still time that year.230
However, Stalin tried to keep his options open — just in case. On the day that the capture of Heß was announced in London, 13 May, Stalin had four additional armies moved into the western border area of the Soviet Union. A further twenty-five divisions followed early in June, when rumours of Berlin and London agreeing a separate peace were rife.231 By the time ‘Barbarossa’ came to be launched, large Russian tank divisions were ranged in forward positions in an arc around Bialystok and Lemberg. They were intended to be in a position to convert readily into an attack-force should, against Stalin’s expectations, a separate peace be speedily agreed between Britain and Germany.232
Stalin had seen in Heß’s flight to Britain a rationality, as part of Hitler’s planned strategy, which was not there. He had been encouraged in this by British policy. What the Soviet dictator could not contemplate was, unfortunately for him and his country, the real position: that Hitler had had nothing to do with the absurd Heß adventure; that he had no desire at this point to enter into negotiations with Britain; and that he was fixated upon a ‘war of annihilation’ to destroy the Soviet Union, aimed at leaving Britain then with no choice but to seek terms.
By the middle of May, after a week preoccupied by the Heß affair, Hitler could begin to turn his attention back to this imminent showdown. The directive he signed on 23 May, supporting the pro-Axis regime in Iraq (which had come to power following a military coup at the beginning of April, had refused to allow British troop movements in the country, and had sent Iraqi troops to surround a British air-base) had little more than nominal significance. A small number of German aeroplanes, carrying troops, had already flown to Iraq in mid-May. They could do little to help the weak Iraqi army fend off the invading British relief forces, which ultimately re-established a pro-British administration. In any case, Hitler’s directive made plain that a decision on any German attempt to undermine the British position in the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf would only follow ‘Barbarossa’.233
The end of what had been a troubled month for Hitler brought further gloom to the Berghof with the news on 27 May of the loss of the powerful battleship Bismarck, sunk in the Atlantic after a fierce battle with British warships and planes. Some 2,300 sailors went down with the ship.234 Hitler did not brood on the human loss. His fury was directed at the naval leadership for unnecessarily exposing the vessel to enemy attack — a huge risk, he had thought, for potentially little gain.235
Meanwhile, the ideological preparations for ‘Barbarossa’ were now rapidly taking concrete shape. Hitler needed to do nothing more in this regard. He had laid down the guidelines in March. These sufficed, we saw earlier, for the High Commands of the Wehrmacht and the Army to convert them in May and early June into the series of orders to liquidate the Soviet Political Commissars and offer a ‘shooting licence’236 against the Russian civilian population outside the jurisdiction of military courts for German soldiers.237 It was during May, too, that Heydrich assembled the four Einsatzgruppen (‘task groups’) which would accompany the army into the Soviet Union. Each of the Einsatzgruppen comprised between 600 and 1,000 men (drawn largely from varying branches of the police organization, augmented by the Waffen-SS) and was divided into four or five Einsatzkommandos (‘task forces’) or Sonderkommandos (‘special forces’).238 The middle-ranking commanders for the most part had an educated background. Highly qualified academics, civil servants, lawyers, a Protestant pastor, and even an opera singer, were among them.239 The top leadership was drawn almost exclusively from the Security Police and SD.240 Like the leaders of the Reich Security Head Office, they were in the main well-educated men, of the generation, just too young to have fought in the First World War, that had sucked in völkisch ideals in German universities during the 1920s.241 During the second half of May, the 3,000 or so men selected for the Einsatzgruppen gathered in Pretzsch, north-east of Leipzig, where the Border Police School served as their base for the ideological training that would last until the launch of ‘Barbarossa’.242 Heydrich addressed them on a number of occasions. He avoided narrow precision in describing their target-groups when they entered the Soviet Union. But his meaning was, nevertheless, plain. He mentioned that Jewry was the source of Bolshevism in the East and had to be eradicated in accordance with the Führer’s aims. And he told them that Communist functionaries and activists, Jews, Gypsies, saboteurs, and agents endangered the security of the troops and were to be executed forthwith.243 By 22 June the genocidal whirlwind was ready to blow.
‘Operation Barbarossa rolls on further,’ recorded Goebbels in his diary on 31 May. ‘Now the first big wave of camouflage goes into action. The entire state and military apparatus is being mobilized. Only a few people are informed about the true background.’ Apart from Goebbels and Ribbentrop, ministers of government departments were kept in the dark. Goebbels’s own ministry had to play up the theme of invasion of Britain. Fourteen army divisions were to be moved westwards to give some semblance of reality to the charade.244
As part of the subterfuge that action was to be expected in the West while preparations for ‘Barbarossa’ were moving into top gear, Hitler hurriedly arranged another meeting with Mussolini on the Brenner Pass for 2 June.245 It was little wonder that the Duce could not understand the reason for the hastily devised talks.246 Hitler’s closest Axis partner was unwittingly playing his part in an elaborate game of bluff.
Hitler did not mention a word of ‘Barbarossa’ to his Italian friends. He claimed on the return journey to have dropped a hint.247 But, if so, it completely passed Mussolini by. The two dictators talked alone for almost two hours, before being joined by their Foreign Ministers. Hitler had wept, Mussolini reported, when he spoke about Heß.248 If so, he was weeping about the political damage the former Deputy Führer had done. There were no personal lamentations for the loss of one of his most loyal devotees over so many years.249 Ciano and Ribbentrop were meanwhile reviewing relations with a number of countries and the general state of the war. ‘Rumours in circulation on the beginning of operations against Russia in the near future,’ remarked Ribbentrop, ‘are to be considered devoid of foundation, at least excessively premature.’ He conveyed the impression that the German build-up of troops was solely in response to the Soviet military concentration on the German frontier, and that any action by the Reich would only follow an attempted attack by the Red Army.250
Hitler had evidently, to Mussolini’s irritation, monopolized their private ‘discussion’. He now proceeded to do the same in the presence of the Foreign Ministers. His rambling tour d’horizon was practically devoid of any genuine substance that might have warranted an urgent meeting.251 The Italians, worried that the purpose of the meeting was to force concessions on them to the advantage of France, were glad to learn that relations between Germany and France were unchanged.252 Hitler, his views as always amplified by Ribbentrop, described what he saw as an increasingly critical situation in Britain, speculating on Lloyd George as Churchill’s likely successor and a much more amenable policy towards peace with the Axis as a consequence. He ruled out an invasion of Cyprus, which Mussolini had encouraged. Finally, turning to the ‘Jewish Question’, Hitler declared that ‘all Jews must get out of Europe altogether after the war’, and mentioned Madagascar — a project definitively discarded over six months earlier — as a possible solution.253 The Soviet Union was noticeable for its absence in the discourse.254
The published communiqué simply stated that the Führer and Duce had held friendly discussions lasting several hours on the political situation.255 The deception had been successful. Ciano’s general impression was ‘that for the moment Hitler has no precise plan of action’. Mussolini, too, so Ciano remarked, was ‘convinced that a compromise peace would be received by the Germans with the greatest enthusiasm. “They are now sick of victories…”’256
When he met the Japanese ambassador Oshima the day after his talks with Mussolini, Hitler dropped a broad hint — which was correctly understood — that conflict with the Soviet Union in the near future was unavoidable.257 But the only foreign statesman to whom he was prepared to divulge more than hints was the Romanian leader Marshal Antonescu, when Hitler met him in Munich on 12 June.258 Antonescu had to be put broadly in the picture. After all, Hitler was relying on Romanian troops for support on the southern flank. Antonescu was more than happy to comply. He volunteered his forces without Hitler having to ask. When 22 June arrived, he would proclaim to his people a ‘holy war’ against the Soviet Union.259 The bait of recovering Bessarabia and North Bukovina, together with the acquisition of parts of the Ukraine, was sufficiently tempting to the Romanian dictator.260 Even to Antonescu, a few days before ‘Barbarossa’, Hitler betrayed as little as possible. His explanation for the coming showdown with the Soviet Union was couched entirely in terms of a necessary defensive reaction to counter the military menace posed to Germany and Europe through Stalin’s expansionism. He mentioned no date. Antonescu divined, however, that one was imminent.261 The Romanian leader agreed that a conflict with Russia could not be delayed. The Soviet army would not offer strong resistance, he thought, and the people wanted their liberation. The Romanian people were thirsting for their revenge for the injustices they had suffered at the hands of the Russians. Comparisons with Napoleon were out of place, he said, given the motorization of modern warfare. Hitler rejoined ‘that the aim of the action did not consist of allowing the Russian armies to retreat into their vast land, but that the armies had to be annihilated (vernichtet)’.262
On 14 June Hitler held his last major military conference before the start of ‘Barbarossa’. The generals arrived at staggered times at the Reich Chancellery to allay suspicion that something major was afoot. Hitler sought an account from each army commander of planned operations in the respective theatres during the first days of the invasion. For the most part he listened without interruption. The picture he gleaned was one of numerical advantage, but qualitative inferiority, of the Red Army. The outlook was, therefore, positive. After lunch, Hitler spoke for about an hour.263 He went over the reasons for attacking Russia. Once again, he avowed his confidence that the collapse of the Soviet Union would induce Britain to come to terms.264 Hitler emphasized that the war was a war against Bolshevism. The Russians would fight hard and put up tough resistance. Heavy air-raids had to be expected. But the Luftwaffe would attain quick successes and smooth the advance of the land forces. The worst of the fighting would be over in about six weeks. But every soldier had to know what he was fighting for: the destruction of Bolshevism. If the war were to be lost, then Europe would be bolshevized.265 Most of the generals had concerns about opening up the two-front war, the avoidance of which had been a premiss of military planning. But they did not voice any objections. Brauchitsch and Halder did not speak a word.266
Two days later Hitler summoned Goebbels to the Reich Chancellery — he was told to enter through a back door in order not to raise suspicions — to explain the situation. Hitler looked well, thought Goebbels, despite living in an extraordinary state of tension, as invariably was the case before major ‘actions’. Hitler told Goebbels that once the ‘action’ had started, he would become calm, as had been the case on numerous earlier occasions.267 He greeted his Propaganda Minister warmly. Then he gave him an account of developments. The Greek campaign had taken its toll of matériel, so that the military build-up had been somewhat delayed. But it would be completed now within a week, and the attack on Russia would then immediately commence, it was good that the weather was so poor, Hitler remarked, and that the harvest in the Ukraine had not yet ripened. As a result, they could hope to gain most of it. The attack would be the most massive history had ever seen. There would be no repeat of Napoleon (a comment perhaps betraying precisely those subconscious fears of history indeed repeating itself). The Russians had around 180–200 divisions, about as many as the Germans, he said, though there was no comparison in quality. And the fact that they were massed on the Reich borders was a great advantage. ‘They would be smoothly rolled up.’ Hitler thought ‘the action’ would take about four months. Goebbels estimated even less time would be needed: ‘Bolshevism will collapse like a house of cards,’ he thought. Hitler had by this time convinced himself of the preventive war theory he had concocted. ‘We have to act,’ Goebbels recounted. ‘Moscow wants to keep out of the war till Europe is exhausted and sucked of its life-blood. Then Stalin would like to act, to bolshevize Europe, and bring in his form of rule.’ The German action would put a stop to this. No geographical limits were put on ‘the action’. The fight would continue until Russian power had ceased to exist.
Goebbels continued his summary of Hitler’s argument — that the defeat of Russia would free some 150 divisions and massive resources for the conflict with Britain. ‘The thrust (Tendenz) of the entire campaign is clear,’ wrote Goebbels: ‘Bolshevism must fall and England will have its last conceivable continental weapon knocked out of its hand.’ ‘The Bolshevik poison must be removed from Europe.’ All true Nazis, he added, would rejoice to see the day that ‘genuine socialism’ took the place of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ in Russia. The Pact of 1939 — ‘a stain on our badge of honour’ — would be washed away. ‘That which we have spent our lives fighting, we will now annihilate.’ He conveyed this thought to Hitler, who said: ‘Whether right or wrong, we must win. That is the only way. And it is morally right and necessary. And when we have won, who will ask us about the method? In any case, we have chalked up so much that we have to win, otherwise our entire people — and in first place we ourselves, with all that is dear to us — will be wiped out.’
Hitler asked Goebbels about public opinion. The Propaganda Minister replied that people believed that relations with the Soviet Union were still sound, but would be behind the regime ‘when we call on them’. He pointed out that the veil of secrecy had meant an entirely different approach to that previously deployed. Pamphlets were now being produced en masse by printers and packers who were confined to the Propaganda Ministry until the invasion took place. In fact, Goebbels was less in touch with opinion than he imagined. Given the extent of the military build-up in the eastern provinces of the Reich, it was hardly surprising that rumours had been rife for weeks about an imminent conflict with Russia.268 Even so, the concealment was broadly successful. According to one internal report, ‘the concentration of numerous troops in the eastern areas had allowed speculation to arise that significant events were afoot there, but nevertheless probably the overwhelming proportion of the German people did not think of any warlike confrontation with the Soviet Union’.269
Goebbels himself, after his meeting with Hitler on 18 June, had been driven out of the back gate of the Reich Chancellery and through the city, ‘where people are harmlessly walking about in the rain. Happy people,’ he wrote, ‘who know nothing of all our concerns and live for the day.’270
By 18 June, 200,000 pamphlets had been printed for distribution to the troops.271 On 21 June Hitler dictated the proclamation to the German people to be read out the next day.272 Hitler was by this time looking over-tired, and was in a highly nervous state, pacing up and down, apprehensive, involving himself in the minutiae of propaganda such as the fanfares that were to be played over the radio to announce German victories.273 Goebbels was called to see him in the evening. They discussed the proclamation, to which Goebbels added a few suggestions. They marched up and down his rooms for three hours. They tried out the new fanfares for an hour. Hitler gradually relaxed somewhat. ‘The Führer is freed from a nightmare the closer the decision comes,’ noted Goebbels. ‘It’s always so with him.’ Once more Goebbels returned to the inner necessity of the coming conflict, of which Hitler had convinced himself: ‘There is nothing for it than to attack,’ he wrote, summing up Hitler’s thoughts. ‘This cancerous growth has to be burned out. Stalin will fall.’ Since July the previous year, Hitler indicated, he had worked on the preparations for what was about to take place. Now the moment had arrived. Everything had been done which could have been done. ‘The fortune of war must now decide.’ At 2.30a.m., Hitler finally decided it was time to snatch a few hours’ sleep.274 ‘Barbarossa’ was due to begin within the next hour.275
Goebbels was too nervous to follow his example. At 5.30a.m., just over two hours after the German guns had opened fire on all borders, the new Liszt fanfares sounded over German radios. Goebbels read out Hitler’s proclamation.276 It amounted to a lengthy pseudo-historical justification for German preventive action. The Jewish-Bolshevik rulers in Moscow had sought for two decades to destroy not only Germany, but the whole of Europe. Hitler had been forced, he claimed, through British encirclement policy to take the bitter step of entering the 1939 Pact.277 But since then the Soviet threat had magnified. At present there were 160 Russian divisions massed on the German borders. ‘The hour has now therefore arrived,’ Hitler declared, ‘to counter this conspiracy of the Jewish-Anglo-Saxon warmongers and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevik headquarters in Moscow.’278 A slightly amended proclamation went out to the soldiers swarming over the border and marching into Russia.279
On 21 June, Hitler had at last composed a letter to his chief ally, Benito Mussolini, belatedly explaining and justifying his reasons for attacking the Soviet Union. The letter was delivered to Ciano at 3a.m. next morning, just as the attack was about to begin. Ciano had to disturb Mussolini to convey the news to him — greatly to the annoyance of the Italian dictator, who complained that the Germans told him nothing then broke his sleep to announce a fait accompli.280 Once more, the same arguments, all resting on the need to undertake a preventive strike, were rehearsed. Characteristically, Hitler underlined the dangers of waiting. Time, as always, was not on Germany’s side. The Soviet Union would be stronger in a year’s time, England — pinning its hopes on the USSR — would be even less ready for peace, and by then the mass delivery of material from the USA would be coming available. His conclusion was typical: ‘Whatever may now come, Duce, our situation cannot become worse as a result of this step; it can only improve.’ Hitler ended his letter with sentences which, as with his comments to Goebbels, give insight into his mentality on the eve of the titanic contest: ‘In conclusion, let me say one more thing, Duce. Since I struggled through to this decision, I again feel spiritually free. The partnership with the Soviet Union, in spite of the complete sincerity of the efforts to bring about a final conciliation, was nevertheless often very irksome to me, for in some way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts, and my former obligations. I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.’281
The most destructive and barbaric war in the history of mankind was beginning. It was the war that Hitler had wanted since the 1920s — the war against Bolshevism. It was the showdown. He had come to it by a roundabout route. But, finally, Hitler’s war was there: a reality.
For almost a year this war had been consciously worked towards and prepared by the German leadership. Hitler’s inability to bring Britain to the conference table had provided the spur to contemplate the bold move of a strike in the East even while the contest in the West remained unsettled. The perceived shortage of time, given the looming threat of the USA and the near-certainty of at least indirect involvement in the war through massive supplies of material if the war dragged into a further year, was the driving-force. The need to secure unlimited sources of raw materials from Soviet territory and to ensure that there would be no interruption to oil supplies from Romania was an additional central motive. Ideological considerations — the need to eradicate Bolshevism once and for all — deeply embedded in Hitler’s psyche for almost two decades, had not been the primary determinant of the timing of the showdown. But they gave it its indelible colouring, its sense not just of war, but of crusade.
Had Britain been ready to come to terms, the war against the Soviet Union would nonetheless have still gone ahead at some point — in the conditions Hitler had always hoped for. Hitler had sought the conflict. He was the main author of a war which had been a central element in his thinking for almost two decades. But when it came actually to planning, not just imagining, the showdown, the Wehrmacht leadership, including the leaders of the army, the key branch of the armed forces as regards the war in the east, had gone along with every step. They had let Hitler dictate the course of events. At no point had they seriously attempted to discourage him. On the contrary, the combination of anti-Bolshevism and gross underestimation of Soviet military capabilities had prompted army chiefs to be no less optimistic than Hitler himself about the ease with which the USSR would be defeated.
If the initial aims had been forged by strategic consideration, the ideological input had not been long in coming. Himmler and Heydrich, rapidly spotting a chance to extend their own empire and to create an entire new vast area for their racial experiments, had no difficulty in exploiting Hitler’s long-established paranoia about ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ to advance new schemes for solving ‘the Jewish problem’. By March, Hitler had laid down the parameters of a genocidal war which willing agents in the Wehrmacht as well as the SS leadership were only too ready to translate into firm guidelines for action.
The war in the East, which would decide the future of the Continent of Europe, was indeed Hitler’s war. But it was more than that. It was not inflicted by a tyrannical dictator on an unwilling country. It was acceded to, even welcomed (if in different measure and for different reasons), by all sections of the German élite, non-Nazi as well as Nazi. Large sections of the ordinary German population, too, including the millions who would fight in lowly ranks in the army, would — once they had got over their initial shock — go along with the meaning Nazi propaganda imparted to the conflict, that of a ‘crusade against Bolshevism’. The more ideologically committed pro-Nazis would entirely swallow the interpretation of the war as a preventive one to avoid the destruction of western culture by the Bolshevik hordes. They fervently believed that Europe would never be liberated before ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was utterly and completely rooted out. The path to the Holocaust, intertwined with the showdown with Bolshevism, was prefigured in such notions. The legacy of over two decades of deeply rooted, often fanatically held, feelings of hatred towards Bolshevism, fully interlaced with antisemitism, was about to be revealed in its full ferocity.