‘It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.’
‘The whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus.’
‘What India was for England, the eastern territory will be for us.’
At dawn on 22 June over 3 million German troops advanced over the borders and into Soviet territory. By a quirk of history, as Goebbels noted somewhat uneasily, it was exactly the same date on which Napoleon’s Grand Army had marched on Russia 129 years earlier.1 The modern invaders deployed over 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motorized vehicles (including armoured cars), 7,000 artillery pieces, and 2,500 aircraft. Not all their transport was mechanized; as in Napoleon’s day, they also made use of horses — 625,000 of them. Facing the invading armies, arrayed on the western frontiers of the USSR, were nearly 3 million Soviet soldiers, backed by a number of tanks now estimated to have been as many as 14–15,000 (almost 2,000 of them the most modern designs), over 34,000 artillery pieces, and 8–9,000 fighter-planes.2 The scale of the titanic clash now beginning, which would chiefly determine the outcome of the Second World War and, beyond that, the shape of Europe for nearly half a century, almost defies the imagination.
Despite the numerical advantage in weaponry of the defending Soviet armies, the early stages of the attack appeared to endorse all the optimism of Hitler and his General Staff about the inferiority of their Bolshevik enemies and the speed with which complete victory could be attained. The three-pronged attack led by Field Marshals Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb in the north, Fedor von Bock in the centre, and Gerd von Rundstedt in the south initially made astonishing advances. By the end of the first week of July Lithuania and Latvia were in German hands. Leeb’s advance in the north, with Leningrad as the target, had reached as far as Ostrov. Army Group Centre had pushed even farther. Much of White Russia had been taken. Minsk was encircled. Bock’s advancing armies already had the city of Smolensk in their sights. Further south, by mid-July Rundstedt’s troops had captured Zitomir and Berdicev.3
The Soviet calamity was immense — and avoidable. Even as the German tanks were rolling forwards, Stalin still thought Hitler was bluffing, that he would not dare attack the Soviet Union until he had finished with Britain. Stalin had been well informed on the German military build-up and the growing menace of invasion. He had anticipated some German territorial demands but was confident that, if necessary, negotiations could stave off an attack in 1941 at least. By the following year, the Soviet Union would be more prepared. Though two of the top-ranking Soviet generals, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and General Georgi Zhukov, had put forward a plan on 15 May for a pre-emptive strike against Germany, Stalin had dismissed such a notion out of hand, fearing it would provoke the attack he wanted to avoid. There were no plans to invade Germany. A preventive war against an imminent Soviet invasion of the Reich was a Nazi propaganda legend.4 So convinced was Stalin of the correctness of his own diagnosis of the situation that he had chosen to ignore a veritable flood of intelligence reports warning of the imminent danger, some even predicting the precise date of the invasion.5 Once the attack took place, Stalin fell for days into a state of near mental collapse and deep depression. Amid violent mood-swings, one of his first actions was to hurl abuse at his military leaders and sack some of his top commanders.6
Stalin’s bungling interference and military incompetence had combined with the fear and servility of his generals and the limitations of the inflexible Soviet strategic concept to rule out undertaking the necessary precautions to create defensive dispositions and fight a rearguard action. Instead, whole armies were left in exposed positions, easy prey for the pincer movements of the rapidly advancing panzer armies.7 In a whole series of huge encirclements, the Red Army suffered staggering losses of men and equipment. By the autumn, some 3 million soldiers had trudged in long, dismal columns into German captivity. A high proportion would suffer terrible inhumanity in the hands of their captors, and not return.8 Roughly the same number had by then been wounded or killed.9 The barbaric character of the conflict, evident from its first day, had been determined, as we have seen, by the German plans for a ‘war of annihilation’ that had taken shape since March. Soviet captives were not be treated as soldierly comrades, Geneva conventions were regarded as non-applicable, political commissars — a category interpreted in the widest sense — were peremptorily shot, the civilian population subjected to the cruellest reprisals.10 Atrocities were not confined to the actions of the Wehrmacht. On the Soviet side, Stalin recovered sufficiently from his trauma at the invasion to proclaim that the conflict was no ordinary war, but a ‘great patriotic war’ against the invaders. It was necessary, he declared, to form partisan groups to organize ‘merciless battle’.11 Mutual fear of capture fed rapidly and directly into the spiralling barbarization on the eastern front. But it did not cause the barbarization in the first place. The driving-force was the Nazi ideological drive to extirpate ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. Hitler’s response in private to Stalin’s speech was revealing. The declaration of partisan war, he remarked, had the advantage of allowing the extermination of anyone who got in the way.12 The wide interpretation of ‘partisans’ by the Security Police ensured that Jews were particularly prominent among the increasing numbers liquidated.
Already on the first day of the invasion reports began reaching Berlin of up to 1,000 Soviet planes destroyed and Brest-Litowsk taken by the advancing troops. ‘We’ll soon pull it off,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary. He immediately added: ‘We must soon pull it off. Among the people there’s a somewhat depressed mood. The people want peace… Every new theatre of war causes concern and worry.’13
The main author of the most deadly clash of the century, which in almost four years of its duration would produce an unimaginable harvest of sorrow for families throughout central and eastern Europe and a level of destruction never experienced in human history, left Berlin around midday on 23 June. Hitler was setting out with his entourage for his new field headquarters, chosen for him the previous autumn, near Rastenburg in East Prussia.14 The presumption was, as it had been in earlier campaigns, that he would be there a few weeks, make a tour of newly conquered areas, then return to Berlin. This was only one of his miscalculations. The ‘Wolf’s Lair’ (Wolfsschanze) near Rastenburg was to be his home in the main for the next three and a half years. He would finally leave it a broken man in a broken country.
The Wolf’s Lair — another play on Hitler’s favourite pseudonym from the 1920s, when he liked to call himself ‘Wolf (allegedly the meaning of ‘Adolf’, and implying strength) — was hidden away in the gloomy Masurian woods, about eight kilometres from the small town of Rastenburg.15 Hitler and his accompaniment arrived there late in the evening of 23 June. The new surroundings were not greatly welcoming. The centre-point consisted of ten bunkers, erected over the winter, camouflaged and in parts protected against air-raids by two metres thickness of concrete. Hitler’s bunker was at the northern end of the complex. All its windows faced north so that he could avoid the sun streaming in. There were rooms big enough for military conferences in Hitler’s and Keitel’s bunkers, and a barracks with a dining-hall for around twenty people. Another complex — known as HQ Area 2 — a little distance away, surrounded by barbed wire and hardly visible from the road, housed the Wehrmacht Operations Staff under Warlimont. The army headquarters, where Brauchitsch and Halder were based, were situated a few kilometres to the north-east. Göring — designated by Hitler on 29 June to be his successor in the event of his death — and the Luftwaffe staff stayed in their special trains.16
Hitler’s part of the Führer Headquarters, known as ‘Security Zone One’, swiftly developed its own daily rhythm. The central event was the ‘situation discussion’ at noon in the bunker shared by Keitel and Jodl. This frequently ran on as long as two hours. Brauchitsch, Halder, and Colonel Adolf Heusinger, chief of the army’s Operations Department, attended once or twice a week. The briefing was followed by a lengthy lunch, beginning in these days for the most part punctually at 2p.m., Hitler confining himself as always strictly to a non-meat diet. Any audiences that he had on non-military matters were arranged for the afternoons. Around 5p.m. he would call in his secretaries for coffee. A special word of praise was bestowed on the one who could eat most cakes. The second military briefing, given by Jodl, followed at 6p.m. The evening meal took place at 7.30p.m., often lasting two hours. Afterwards there were films. The final part of the routine was the gathering of secretaries, adjutants, and guests for tea, to the accompaniment of Hitler’s late-night monologues.17 Those who could snatched a nap some time during the afternoon so they could keep their eyes open in the early hours.18 Sometimes, it was daylight by the time the nocturnal discussions came to an end.19
Hitler always sat in the same place at meals, with his back to the window, flanked by Press Chief Dietrich and Jodl, with Keitel, Bormann, and Bodenschatz opposite him. Generals, staff officers, adjutants, Hitler’s doctors, and any guests visiting the Führer Headquarters made up the rest of the complement.20 The atmosphere was good in these early days, and not too formal. The mood at this time was still generally optimistic.21 Life in the FHQ had not yet reached the stage where it could be described by Jodl as half-way ‘between a monastery and a concentration camp’.22
Two of Hitler’s secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, had also accompanied him to his field headquarters. Christa Schroeder described their life there to a friend, one week after arriving. Their living quarters were very simple. The sleeping section of their bunker was no larger than a compartment in a railway carriage. They had a toilet, a mirror, and a radio, but not much else. There were shower rooms, but without hot water in the early weeks. They had as good as nothing to do. Sleeping, eating, drinking, and chatting filled up most of their day. Some of the men in the otherwise entirely male company of the FHQ soon started to complain that the presence of Hitler’s two under-employed secretaries in the military complex was quite superfluous.23 Much of the secretaries’ energy was spent trying to swat away a constant plague of midges. Hitler complained that his advisers who had picked the spot had chosen ‘the most swampy, midge-infested, and climatically unfavourable area for him’, and joked that he would have to send in the Luftwaffe on the midge-hunt.24 ‘The chief, as those in his daily company called him, was generally in a good mood during the first part of the Russian campaign. He enjoyed light banter with his secretaries. When Christa Schroeder could not find her torch one night, as she emerged into the dark compound, Hitler remarked that she should not think he had stolen it. ‘I’m a country (Ländledieb) thief, not a lamp (Lämpledieb) thief,’ he quipped.25
How monochrome life in the confines of the Führer Headquarters rapidly became for Hitler’s secretaries was indicated in Christa Schroeder’s comments in a letter to a friend at the end of August: ‘We are permanently cut off from the world wherever we are — in Berlin, on the Mountain [at the Berghof], or on travels. It’s always the same limited group of people, always the same routine inside the fence.’ The danger was, she went on, ‘of losing contact with the real world’. Only the common life of the Wolfsschanze’s inhabitants, revolving around ‘the Chief, held the group together, she wrote. But should Hitler be absent, things immediately fell apart.26
As in Berlin or at the Berghof, a word during meals on one of Hitler’s favourite topics could easily trigger an hour-long monologue.27 In these early days, he usually faced a big map of the Soviet Union pinned to the wall. At the drop of a hat, he would launch into yet another harangue about the danger that Bolshevism signified for Europe, and how to wait another year would have been too late. On one occasion, his secretaries heard Hitler, as he stood in front of a big map of Europe, point to the Russian capital and say: ‘In four weeks we’ll be in Moscow. Moscow will be razed to the ground.’28 Everything had gone much better than could have been imagined, he remarked. They had been lucky that the Russians had placed their troops on the borders and not pulled the German armies deep into their country, which would have caused difficulties with supplies.29 Two-thirds of the Bolshevik armed forces and five-sixths of the tanks and aircraft were destroyed or severely damaged, he told Goebbels, on the Propaganda Minister’s first visit to Führer Headquarters on 8 July.30 After assessing the military situation in detail with his Wehrmacht advisers, Goebbels noted, the Führer’s conclusion was ‘that the war in the East was in the main already won’.31 There could be no notion of peace-terms with the Kremlin. (He would think differently about this only a month later.) Bolshevism would be wiped out and Russia broken up into its component parts, deprived of any intellectual, political, or economic centre. Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the east in a matter of weeks. He foresaw England’s fall ‘with a sleepwalker’s certainty’. Whether he would take up any offer of a compromise peace from London he could not say.32 On other occasions, even at this early stage, Hitler was less ebullient, betraying signs of uncertainty about the Soviet Union, about which, he said, they knew so little.33
News came in of 3,500 aircraft and over 1,000 Soviet tanks destroyed. But there was other news of fanatical fighting by Soviet soldiers who feared the worst if they surrendered. Hitler was to tell the Japanese Ambassador Oshima on 14 July that ‘our enemies are not human beings any more, they are beasts’.34 It was, then, doubtless echoing her ‘chief and the general atmosphere in FHQ when Christa Schroeder remarked to her friend that ‘from all previous experience it can be said to be a fight against wild animals’.35
Hitler had permitted no Wehrmacht reports during the very first days of the campaign.36 But Sunday, 29 June — a week after the attack had started — was, as Goebbels described it, ‘the day of the special announcements’. Twelve of them altogether, each introduced by the ‘Russian Fanfare’ based on Liszt’s ‘Les Préludes’, were broadcast, beginning at 11a.m. that morning.37 Dominance in the air had been attained, the reports proclaimed. Grodno, Brest-Litowsk, Vilna, Kowno, and Dünaburg were in German hands. Two Soviet armies were encircled at Bialystok. Minsk had been taken. The Russians had lost, it was announced, 2,233 tanks and 4,107 aircraft. Enormous quantities of matériel had been captured. Vast numbers of prisoners had been taken. But the popular reception in Germany was less enthusiastic than had been hoped. People rapidly tired of the special announcements, one after the other, and were sceptical about the propaganda. Instead of being excited, their senses were dulled. Goebbels was furious at the OKW’s presentation, and vowed that it would never be repeated.38
The invasion of the Soviet Union, for which, as we have seen, there had in contrast to previous campaigns been of necessity no prior manipulation of popular opinion, was presented to the German public as a preventive war. This had been undertaken by the Führer, so Goebbels’s directives to the press ran, to head off at the last minute the threat to the Reich and the entire western culture through the treachery of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. At any moment the Bolsheviks had been planning to strike against the Reich and to overrun and destroy Europe. Only the Führer’s bold action had prevented this.39 More extraordinary than this propaganda lie is the fact that Hitler and Goebbels had convinced themselves of its truth.40 Fully aware of its falseness, they had to play out a fiction even among themselves to justify the unprovoked decision to attack and utterly destroy the Soviet Union.
By the end of June the German encirclements at Bialystok and Minsk had produced the astonishing toll of 324,000 Red Army prisoners, 3,300 tanks, and 1,800 artillery pieces captured or destroyed. Little over a fortnight later the end of the battle for Smolensk doubled these figures.41 Already by the second day of the campaign, German estimates put numbers of aircraft shot down or destroyed on the ground at 2,500. When Göring expressed doubts at the figures they were checked and found to be 200–300 below the actual total.42 After a month of fighting, the figure for aircraft destroyed had reached 7,564.43 By early July it was estimated that eighty-nine out of 164 Soviet divisions had been entirely or partially destroyed, and that only nine out of twenty-nine tank divisions of the Red Army were still fit for combat.44
The scale of underestimation of Soviet fighting potential would soon come as a severe shock. But in early July it was hardly surprising if the feeling in the German military leadership was that ‘Barbarossa’ was on course for complete victory, that the campaign would be over, as predicted, before the winter. On 3 July Halder summed up his verdict in words which would come to haunt him: ‘It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.’ He did at least have the foresight to acknowledge that this did not mean that it was over: ‘The sheer geographical vastness of the country and the stubbornness of the resistance, which is carried on with all means, will claim our efforts for many more weeks to come.’45
The territorial gains brought about by the spectacular successes of the Wehrmacht in the first phase of ‘Barbarossa’ gave Hitler command over a greater extent of the European continent than any ruler since Napoleon. His power and might were at their peak. In his lunchtime or late-night monologues to his regular retinue in the Führer Headquarters, he revealed few, if any, signs of the wear and tear on his nerves which growing conflict with his army leaders and shifting fortunes at the front would cause during the coming weeks. His rambling, discursive outpourings were the purest expression of unbounded, megalomaniac power and breathtaking inhumanity. They were the face of the future in the vast new eastern empire, as he saw it.
‘The beauty of the Crimea,’ he rhapsodized late at night on 5 July 1941, would be made accessible to Germans through a motorway. It would be their version of the Italian or French riviera.46 Every German, after the war, he remarked, had to have the chance with his ‘People’s Car’ (Volkswagen) personally to see the conquered territories, since he would have ‘to be ready if need be to fight for them’. The mistake of the pre-war era of limiting the colonial idea to the property of a few capitalists or companies could not be repeated. Roads would be more important in the future than the railways for passenger transport. Only through travel by road could a country be known, he asserted.47
He was asked whether it would be enough to stretch the conquests to the Urals. ‘Initially’, that would suffice, he replied. But Bolshevism had to be exterminated, and it would be necessary to carry out expeditions from there to eradicate any new centres that might develop. ‘St Petersburg’ — as he called Leningrad — ‘was as a city incomparably more beautiful than Moscow.’48 But its fate, he decided, was to be identical to that of the capital. ‘An example was to be made here, and the city will disappear completely from the earth.’ It was to be sealed off, bombarded, and starved out.49 He imagined, too, that little would ultimately be left of Kiev. He saw the destruction of Soviet cities as the basis for lasting German power in the conquered territories.50 No military power was to be tolerated within 300 kilometres east of the Urals.51 ‘The border between Europe and Asia,’ he stated, ‘is not the Urals but the place where the settlements of Germanic types of people stop and pure Slavdom begins. It is our task to push this border as far as possible to the east, and if necessary beyond the Urals.’52
Hitler thought the Russian people fit for nothing but hard work under coercion.53 ‘The Slavs,’ he declared, ‘were a rabbit-family (Kaninchenfamilie) who would never proceed beyond the family association if not forced to do so by a ruling class. Their natural and desired condition was one of general disorganization.’54 ‘The Ukrainians,’ he remarked on another occasion, ‘were every bit as idle, disorganized, and nihilistically asiatic as the Greater Russians.’ To speak of any sort of work ethic was pointless. All they understood was ‘the whip’. He admired Stalin’s brutality. The Soviet dictator, he thought, was ‘one of the greatest living human beings since, if only through the harshest compulsion, he had succeeded in welding a state out of this Slavic rabbit-family’.55 He described ‘the sly Caucasian’ as ‘one of the most extraordinary figures of world history’, who scarcely ever left his office but could rule from there through a subservient bureaucracy.56
Hitler’s model for domination and exploitation remained the British Empire. His inspiration for the future rule of his master-race was the Raj. He voiced his admiration on many occasions for the way such a small country as Great Britain had been able to establish its rule throughout the world in a huge colonial empire. British rule in India in particular showed what Germany could do in Russia. It must be possible to control the eastern territory with a quarter of a million men, he stated. With that number the British ruled 400 million Indians. Russia would always be dominated by German rulers. They must see to it that the masses were educated to do no more than read road signs, though a reasonable living standard for them was in the German interest.57 The south of the Ukraine, in particular the Crimea, would be settled by German farmer-soldiers. He would have no worries at all about deporting the existing population somewhere or other to make room for them. The vision was of a latter-day feudal type of settlement: there would be a standing army of 1½-2 million men, providing some 30–40,000 every year for use each year when their twelve-year service was completed. If they were sons of farmers, they would be given a farmstead, fully equipped, by the Reich in return for their twelve years of military service. They would also be provided with weapons. The only condition was that they must marry country-not town-girls.58 German peasants would live in beautiful settlements, linked by good roads to the nearest town. Beyond this would be ‘the other world’ where the Russians lived under German subjugation. Should there be a revolution, ‘all we need to do is drop a few bombs on their cities and the business will be over’.59 After ten years, he foresaw, there would be a German élite, to be counted on when there were new tasks to be undertaken. ‘A new type of man will come to the fore, real master-types, who of course can’t be used in the west: viceroys.’60 German administrators would be housed in splendid buildings; the governors would live in ‘palaces’.61
His musings on the prospect of a German equivalent of India continued on three successive days and nights from 8–11 August. India had given the English pride. The vast spaces had obliged them to rule millions with only a few men. ‘What India was for England, the eastern territory will be for us,’ he declared.62
For Hitler, India was the heart of an empire that had brought Britain not only power, but prosperity. Ruthless economic exploitation had always been central to his dream of the German empire in the east. Now, it seemed, that dream would soon become reality. ‘The Ukraine and then the Volga basin will one day be the granaries of Europe,’ he foresaw. ‘And we’ll also provide Europe with iron. If Sweden won’t supply it one of these days, good, then we’ll take it from the east.63 Belgian industry can exchange its products — cheap consumer wares — for corn from these areas. From Thuringia and the Harz mountains, for example, we can remove our poor working-class families to give them big stretches of land (große Räume).’64 ‘We’ll be an exporter of corn for all in Europe who need it,’ he went on, a month later. ‘In the Crimea we will have citrus fruits, rubber plants (with 40,000 hectares we’ll make ourselves independent), and cotton. The Pripet marches will give us reeds. We will deliver to the Ukrainians head-scarves, glass chains as jewellery, and whatever else colonial peoples like. We Germans — that’s the main thing — must form a closed community like a fortress. The lowest stable-lad must be superior to any of the natives…’65
Autarky, in Hitler’s thinking, was the basis of security. And the conquest of the east, as he had repeatedly stated in the mid-1920s, would now offer Germany that security. ‘The struggle for hegemony in the world will be decided for Europe through the occupation of the Russian space,’ he told his entourage in mid-September. ‘This makes Europe the firmest place in the world against the threat of blockade.’66 He returned to the theme a few days later. ‘As soon as I recognize a raw material as important for the war, I put every effort into making us independent in it. Iron, coal, oil, corn, livestock, wood — we must have them at our disposal… Today I can say: Europe is self-sufficient, as long as we just prevent another mammoth state existing which could utilize European civilization to mobilize Asia against us.’ He compared, as he had frequently done many years earlier, the benefits of autarky with the international market economy and the mistakes, as he saw them, made by Britain and America through their dependence upon exports and overseas markets, bringing cut-throat competition, corresponding high tariffs and production costs, and unemployment. Britain had increased unemployment and impoverished its working class by the error of industrializing India, he continued. Germany was not tied to exports, and this had meant that it was the only country without unemployment. ‘The country that we are now opening up is for us only a raw-material source and marketing area, not a field for industrial production… We won’t need any more to look for an active (aufnahmefähigen) market in the Far East. Here is our market. We simply need to secure it. We’ll deliver cotton goods, cooking-pots, all simple articles for satisfying the demand for the necessities of life. We won’t be able to produce anything like so much as can be marketed here. I see there great possibilities for the build-up of a strong Reich, a true world-power… For the next few hundred years we will have a field of activity without equal.’67
Hitler was blunt about his justification for conquering this territory: might was right. A culturally superior people, deprived of ‘living space’, needed no further justification.68 It was for him, as always, a matter of the ‘laws of nature’. ‘If I harm the Russians now, then for the reason that they would otherwise harm me,’ he declared. ‘The dear God, once again, makes it like that. He suddenly casts the masses of humanity on to the earth and each one has to look after himself and how he gets through. One person takes something away from the other. And at the end you can only say that the stronger wins. That is after all the most sensible order of things.’69
There would be no end of the struggle in the east, that was clear, even after a German victory. Hitler spoke of building an ‘Eastern Wall’ along the Urals as a barrier against sudden inroads from the ‘dangerous human reservoir’ in Asia. It would be no conventional fortification, but a live wall built of the soldier-farmers who would form the new eastern settlers. A permanent border struggle in the east will produce a solid stock and prevent us from sinking back into the softness of a state system based purely on Europe.’70 War was for Hitler the essence of human activity. ‘What meeting a man means for a girl,’ he declared, ‘war meant for him.’71 He referred back frequently in these weeks to his own experiences in the First World War, probably the most formative of his life. Looking at the newsreel of the ‘Battle of Kiev’, he was completely gripped by ‘a heroic epic such as there had never previously been’. He immediately then added (in flat contradiction) that it had been like that in what he always called ‘the World War’, but that nobody had been able to record it in the same way for posterity. ‘I’m immensely happy to have experienced the war in this way,’ he added. 72 If he could wish the German people one thing, he remarked on another occasion, it would be to have a war every fifteen to twenty years. If reproached for the loss of 200,000 lives, he would reply that he had enlarged the German nation by 2½ million, and felt justified in demanding the sacrifice of the lives of a tenth. ‘Life is horrible (grausam). Coming into being, existing, and passing away, there’s always a killing (ein Töten). Everything that is born must later die. Whether it’s through illness, accident, or war, that remains the same.’73
Hitler’s notions of a social ‘new order’ have to be placed in this setting of conquest, ruthless exploitation, the right of the powerful, racial dominance, and more or less permanent war in a world where life was cheap and readily expendable. His ideas often had their roots in the resentment that still smouldered at the way his own ‘talents’ had been left unrecognized or the disadvantages of his own social status compared with the privileges of the high-born and well-to-do. Thus he advocated free education, funded by the state, for all talented youngsters. Workers would have annual holidays and could expect once or twice in their lives to go on a sea-cruise.74 He criticized the distinctions between different classes of passengers on such cruise ships. And he approved of the introduction of the same food for both officers and men in the army.75 Hitler might appear to have been promoting ideas of a modern, mobile, classless society, abolishing privilege and resting solely upon achievement. But the central tenet remained race, to which all else was subordinated. Thus, in the east, he said, all Germans would travel in the upholstered first- or second-class railway carriages — to separate them from the native population.76 It was a social vision which could have obvious attractions for many members of the would-be master-race. The image was of a cornucopia of wealth flowing into the Reich from the east. The Reich would be linked to the new frontiers by motorways cutting through the endless steppes and the enormous Russian spaces. Prosperity and power would be secured through the new breed of supermen who lorded it over the downtrodden Slav masses.
The vision, to those who heard Hitler describe it, appeared excitingly modern: a break with traditional class- and status-bound hierarchies to a society where talent had its reward and there was prosperity for all — for all Germans, that is. Indeed, elements of Hitler’s thinking were unquestionably modern.77 He looked, for instance, to the benefits of modern technology, envisaging steam-heated greenhouses giving German cities a regular supply of fresh fruit and vegetables all through the winter.78 He looked, too, to modern transport to open up the east. While the bounty of the east pouring into Germany would be brought by train, the car for Hitler was the vital transport means of the future.79 But for all its apparent modernity, the social vision was in essence atavistic. The colonial conquests of the nineteenth century provided its inspiration. What Hitler was offering was a modernized version of old-fashioned imperialist conquest, now translated to the ethnically mixed terrain of eastern Europe where the Slavs would provide the German equivalent of the conquered native populations of India and Africa in the British Empire.
By mid-July, the key steps had been taken to translate the horrendous vision into reality. At an important five-hour meeting in the Führer Headquarters on 16 July attended by Göring, Rosenberg, Lammers, Keitel, and Bormann, Hitler established the basic guidelines of policy and practical arrangements for administering and exploiting the new conquests. Once more, the underlying premiss was the social-Darwinist justification that the strong deserved to inherit the earth. But the sense that what they were doing was morally objectionable nevertheless ran through Hitler’s opening comments, as reported by Bormann. ‘The motivation of our steps in the eyes of the world must be directed by tactical viewpoints. We must proceed here exactly as in the cases of Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium. In these cases, too, we had said nothing about our intentions and we will sensibly continue not to do so,’ Bormann recorded. ‘We will then again emphasize that we were compelled to occupy an area to bring order, and to impose security. In the interest of the native population we had to see to providing calm, food, transport etc. etc. Therefore our settlement. It should then not be recognizable that a final settlement is beginning! All necessary measures — shooting, deportation etc. — we will and can do anyway. We don’t want to make premature and unnecessary enemies. We will simply act, therefore, as if we wish to carry out a mandate. But it must be clear to us that we will never again leave these territories,’ Hitler’s blunt statement continued. ‘Accordingly, it is a matter of: 1. doing nothing to hinder the final settlement but rather preparing this in secret; 2. emphasizing that we are the liberators… Basically, it’s a matter of dividing up the giant cake so that we can first rule it, secondly administer it, and thirdly exploit it. The Russians have now given out the order for a partisan war behind our front. This partisan war again has its advantage: it gives us the possibility of exterminating anything opposing us. As a basic principle: the construction of a military power west of the Urals must never again be possible, even if as a consequence we have to wage war for a hundred years.’80
Hitler proceeded to make appointments to the key positions in the occupied east. Rosenberg was confirmed next day as head of what appeared on the surface to be the all-powerful Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.81 But nothing was as it seemed in the Third Reich. Rosenberg’s authority, as Hitler’s decree made clear, did not touch the respective spheres of competence of the army, Göring’s Four-Year Plan organization, and the SS. The big guns, in other words, were outside Rosenberg’s control. More than that, Rosenberg’s own conception of winning certain nationalities as allies, under German tutelage, against Greater Russia — notions which he and his staff had been working on since the spring — fell foul of Himmler’s policy of maximum repression and brutal resettlement and Göring’s aims of total economic exploitation. Himmler was within weeks in receipt of plans for deporting in the coming twenty-five years or so over 30 million people into far more inhospitable climes further eastward. Göring was envisaging the starvation in Russia of 20–30 million persons — a prospect advanced even before the German invasion by the Agricultural Group of the Economic Staff for the East.82 All three — Rosenberg, Himmler, and Göring — could find a common denominator in Hitler’s goal of destroying Bolshevism and acquiring ‘living space’. But beyond that minimum, Rosenberg’s concept — no less ruthless, but more pragmatic — had no chance when opposed to the contrary idea, backed, as we have seen, by Hitler’s own vision, of absolute rapaciousness and repression.83
Opposing Rosenberg’s wishes, Hitler had yielded in the conference of 16 July to the suggestion of Göring, backed by Bormann, that the — even by Nazi standards — extraordinarily brutal and independent-minded Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia, should be made Reich Commissar of the key territory of the Ukraine.84 Koch, like Hitler, but in contrast to Rosenberg, rejected any idea of a Ukrainian buffer-state. His view was that from the very beginning it was necessary ‘to be hard and brutal’. He was held in favour in Führer Headquarters. Everyone there thought he was the most suitable person to carry out the requirements in the Ukraine. It was seen as a compliment when they called him the ‘second Stalin’.85
In contrast to the tyrant, Koch, who continued to prefer his old East Prussian domain to his new fiefdom, Hinrich Lohse, appointed as Reich Commissar in the Baltic, now renamed the Ostland, made himself a subject of ridicule among the German occupying forces in his own territory with his fanatical and often petty bureaucratization, unleashed in torrents of decrees and directives. For all that, he was weak in the face of the power of the SS, and other competing agencies.86 Similarly, Wilhelm Kube, appointed at the suggestion of Göring and Rosenberg as General Commissar in Belorussia, proved not only corrupt and incompetent on a grandiose scale, but another weak petty dictator in his province, his instructions often ignored by his own subordinates, and forced repeatedly to yield to the superior power of the SS.87
The course was set, therefore, for a ‘New Order’ in the east which belied the very name. Nothing resembled order. Everything resembled the war of all against all, built into the Nazi system in the Reich itself, massively extended in occupied Poland, and now taken to its logical dénouement in the conquered lands of the Soviet Union.
In fact, despite the extraordinary gains made by the advancing Wehrmacht, July would bring recognition that the operational plan of ‘Barbarossa’ had failed. And for all the air of confidence that Hitler displayed to his entourage in the Wolf’s Lair, these weeks also produced early indications of the tensions and conflicts in military leadership and decision-making that would continue to bedevil the German war effort. Hitler intervened in tactical matters from the outset. As early as 24 June he had told Brauchitsch of his worries that the encirclement at Bialystok was not tight enough.88 The following day he was expressing concern that Army Groups Centre and South were operating too far in depth. Halder dismissed the worry. ‘The old refrain!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘But that is not going to change anything in our plans.’89 On 27, 29, and 30 June and again on 2 and 3 July Halder recorded worried queries or interventions by Hitler in tactical deployments of troops.90 ‘Again the whole place is in a state of jitters,’ Halder remarked about FHQ on 3 July, ‘because the Führer is afraid that the wedge of Army Group South now advancing eastward might be threatened by flank attacks from north and south.’ Halder admitted that in tactical terms the fear was not unwarranted. But he resented the interference. ‘What is lacking on top level,’ he confided to his diary notes, ‘is that confidence in the executive commands which is one of the most essential features of our command organization, and that is so because it fails to grasp the coordinating force that comes from the common schooling and education of our Leader Corps.’91
Halder’s irritation at Hitler’s interference was understandable. But the errors and misjudgements, even in the first, seemingly so successful, phase of ‘Barbarossa’, were as much those of the professionals in Army High Command as of the former First World War corporal who now thought he was the greatest warlord of all time.
The mounting conflict with Hitler revolved around the implementation of the ‘Barbarossa’ strategic plan that had been laid down the previous December in Directive 21. This in turn had emanated from the feasibility studies carried out during the summer by military strategists. Planning had, in fact, been initiated as we noted, by Halder on 3 July 1940 almost a month before Hitler gave the verbal orders on the 31st to prepare a spring campaign in the East.92 Feasibility studies followed, the most important, produced at the beginning of August 1940, by General Erich Marcks, Chief of Staff of the 18th Army. War games were carried out at Army Headquarters to test the studies. Army High Command had favoured at this point, based especially on the ‘Mareks Plan’, making Moscow the key objective. Hitler’s own, different, conception was not dissimilar in a number of essentials from the independent strategic study prepared for the Wehrmacht Operational Staff by Lieutenant-Colonel Bernhard Loßberg in September 1940, though it differed from this, too, on the crucial question of Moscow.93
The emphasis in Hitler’s ‘Barbarossa Directive’ in December, and in all subsequent strategic planning, had been on the thrusts to the north, to take Leningrad and secure the Baltic, with a further thrust to the south, to take the Ukraine.94 Even if unenthusiastically, the Army General Staff had accepted the significant alteration of what it had originally envisaged. According to this amended plan, Army Group Centre was to advance as far as Smolensk before swinging to the north to meet up with Leeb’s armies for the assault on Leningrad. The taking of Moscow figured in the agreed plan of ‘Barbarossa’ only once the occupation of Leningrad and Kronstadt had been completed.95
Already on 29 June Hitler was worried that Bock’s Army Group Centre, where the advance was especially spectacular, would overreach itself.96 On 4 July he claimed that he faced the most difficult decision of the campaign: whether to hold to the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan, amend it to provide for a deep thrust towards the Caucasus (in which Rundstedt would be assisted by some of Army Group Centre’s panzer forces), or retain the panzer concentration in the centre and push forward to Moscow.97 The decision he reached by 8 July was the one wanted by Halder: to press forward the offensive of Army Group Centre with the aim of destroying the mass of the enemy forces west of Moscow.98 The amended strategy now discarded Army Group Centre’s turn towards Leningrad, built into the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan.99 The ‘ideal solution’, Hitler accepted, would be to leave Leeb’s Army Group North to attain its objectives by its own means.100 However, Hitler was even now by no means reconciled to the priority of capturing Moscow — in his eyes, as he said, ‘merely a geographical idea’.101
The conflict with Army High Command, supported by Army Group Centre, about concentration on the taking of Moscow as the objective, continued over the next weeks. Hitler pressed, in revised operational form, for priority to be given to the capture of Leningrad, and now included in the south the drive to the industrial area of Kharkhov and into the Caucasus, to be reached before the onset of winter. At the same time, his ‘Supplement to Directive No.33’, dated 23 July, indicated that Army Group Centre would destroy the enemy between Smolensk and Moscow by its infantry divisions alone, and would then ‘take Moscow into occupation’.102
By late July Halder had changed his tune about the certainty and speed of victory. Early in the month he had told Hitler that only forty-six of the known 164 Soviet divisions were still capable of combat. This had been in all probability an overestimation of the extent of destruction; it was certainly a rash underestimation of the enemy’s ability to replenish its forces. On 23 July he revised the figure to a total of ninety-three divisions. The enemy had been ‘decisively weakened’, but by no means ‘finally smashed’, he concluded. As a consequence, since the Soviet reserves of manpower were now seen to be inexhaustible, Halder argued even more forcefully that the aim of further operations had to be the destruction of the areas of armaments production around Moscow.103
As the strength of Soviet defences was being revised, the toll on the German army and Luftwaffe also had to be taken into account. Air-crews were showing signs of exhaustion; their planes could not be maintained fast enough. By the end of July only 1,045 aircraft were serviceable. Air-raids on Moscow demanded by Hitler were of little effect because so few planes were available. Most of the seventy-five raids on the Soviet capital carried out over the next months were undertaken by small numbers of bombers, scarcely able to make a pinprick in Soviet armaments production.104 The infantry were even more in need of rest. They had been marching, and engaged in fierce fighting, for over a month without a break. The original operational plan had foreseen a break for recuperation after twenty days. But the troops had received no rest by the fortieth day, and the first phase of the campaign was not over.105 By this time, casualties (wounded, missing, and dead) had reached 213,301 officers and men.106 Moreover, despite miracles worked by Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner’s organization, transport problems on roads often unfit even in midsummer for mechanized transport brought immeasurable problems of maintaining supply-lines of fuel, equipment, and provisions to the rapidly advancing army. Supplies for Army Group Centre required twenty-five goods trains a day. But despite working round the clock to convert the railway lines to a German gauge, only eight to fifteen trains a day were reaching the front line in late July and early August.107
It was becoming obvious already by the end of July that the revised ‘Barbarossa’ operational plan as laid down in Hitler’s Supplement to Directive No.33 could not be carried out before winter descended.108 Hitler interpreted this as demanding panzer support from Army Group Centre for the assault on Leningrad. Moscow could wait. Halder took the diametrically opposite view. Making Moscow the objective would ensure that the Soviets committed the bulk of their forces to its defence. Taking the city, including its communications system and industries, would split the Soviet Union and render resistance more difficult. The implication was that the capture of the capital would bring about the fall of the Soviet system, and the end of the eastern war.109 If the attack on Moscow were not pushed through with all speed, the enemy would bring the offensive to a halt before winter, then regroup. The military aim of the war against the Soviet Union would have failed.110
Hitler was still adamant that capturing the industrial region of Kharkhov and the Donets Basin and cutting off Soviet oil supplies would undermine resistance more than the fall of Moscow.111 But he was wavering. At this point, even Jodl and the Wehrmacht Operations Staff had been converted to the need to attack Moscow.112 Citing the arrival of strong enemy reinforcements facing and flanking Army Group Centre, Hitler now, on 30 July, cancelled the Supplement to Directive No.33.113 Halder was momentarily ecstatic. ‘This decision frees every thinking soldier of the horrible vision obsessing us these last few days, since the Führer’s obstinacy made the final bogging down of the eastern campaign appear imminent.’114 But when Directive No.34 was issued the same day it offered Halder little comfort. Army Group Centre was to recuperate for the next attack; in the north the assault on Leningrad was to continue; and Army Group South was to destroy the enemy forces west of the Dnieper and in the vicinity of Kiev.115 The real decision — for or against the drive to Moscow — had effectively just been postponed for a while.116
In early August Hitler remained wedded to Leningrad as the priority. He reckoned this would be cut off by 20 August, and then troops and aircraft could be redeployed by Army Group Centre. The second priority for Hitler was, as before, ‘the south of Russia, especially the Donets region’, which formed the ‘entire basis of the Russian economy’. Moscow was a clear third on his priority-list. He recognized that in this order of priorities the capital could not be taken before winter. Halder tried unavailingly to get Brauchitsch to obtain a clear decision on whether to put everything into delivering the enemy a fatal blow at Moscow or taking the Ukraine and the Caucasus for economic reasons. He persuaded Jodl to intervene with Hitler to convince him that the objectives of Moscow and the Ukraine had to be met.117
By now, Halder was realizing the magnitude of the task facing the Wehrmacht. ‘The whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus,’ he wrote on 11 August. ‘At the outset of the war, we reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360. These divisions indeed are not armed and equipped according to our standards, and their tactical leadership is often poor. But there they are, and if we smash a dozen of them, the Russians simply put up another dozen… And so our troops, sprawled over an immense front line, without any depth, are subjected to the incessant attacks of the enemy.’118
In his Supplement to Directive No.34, issued on 12 August, Hitler for the first time stated categorically that once the threats from the flanks were eliminated and the panzer groups were refreshed the attack on the enemy forces massed for the protection of Moscow was to be prosecuted. The aim was ‘the removal from the enemy before winter of the entire state, armaments, and communications centre around Moscow’, ran the directive.119 Three days later, however, Hitler intervened once more in the tactical dispositions by ordering panzer forces from the northern flank of Army Group Centre to help Army Group North resist a strong Soviet counterattack.120
His concession, if heavily qualified, on Moscow, then — in effect — rapid negation of the decision, may have been affected by the severe attack of dysentery from which he was suffering in the first half of August. Despite mounting hypochondria, he had, in fact, over the past years enjoyed remarkably good health — perhaps surprisingly so, given his eating habits and lifestyle. But he had now been laid low at a vital time. Goebbels found him still unwell and ‘very irritable’, though on the mend, when he visited FHQ on 18 August. The weeks of tension, and the unexpected military difficulties of the past month — ‘a distinctly bad time’ — had taken their toll, the Propaganda Minister thought.121 In fact, electrocardiograms taken at the time indicated that Hitler had rapidly progressive coronary sclerosis. Morell’s discussion of the results of the tests could have done little to lift Hitler’s mood, or to lessen his hypochondria.122
Probably Hitler’s ill-health in August, at a time when he was stunned by the recognition of the gross underestimation by German intelligence of the true level of Soviet forces, temporarily weakened his resolve to continue the war in the east. Goebbels was plainly astonished, on his visit to FHQ on 18 August, to hear Hitler entertain thoughts of accepting peace terms from Stalin and even stating that Bolshevism, without the Red Army, would be no danger to Germany.123 (Stalin, in fact, appears briefly to have contemplated moves to come to terms, involving large-scale surrender of Soviet territory, in late July.)124 In a pessimistic state of mind about an early and comprehensive victory in the east, Hitler was clutching at straws: perhaps Stalin would sue for peace; maybe Churchill would be brought down; quite suddenly peace might break out. The turnabout could come as quickly as it had done in January 1933, he suggested (and would do so on other occasions down to 1945), when, without prospects at the start of the month, the National Socialists had within a matter of weeks found themselves in power.125
Halder’s own nerves were by this point also frayed. He now thought the time had come to confront Hitler once and for all with the imperative need to destroy the enemy forces around Moscow. On 18 August Brauchitsch sent Halder’s memorandum on to Hitler. It argued that Army Groups North and South would have to attain their objectives from within their own resources, but that the main effort must be the immediate offensive against Moscow, since Army Group Centre would be unable to continue its operations after October on account of weather conditions.126
Halder’s memorandum had been prepared by Colonel Heusinger, the army’s Chief of Operations Department. Two days after its submission, Heusinger discussed the memorandum with Jodl. Hitler’s closest military adviser suggested psychological motives behind the dictator’s strategic choices. Heusinger recalled Jodl saying that Hitler had ‘an instinctive aversion to treading the same path as Napoleon. Moscow gives him a sinister feeling (etwas Unheimliches).’ When Heusinger reaffirmed the need to defeat the enemy forces at Moscow, Jodl replied: ‘That’s what you say. Now I will tell you what the Führer’s answer will be: There is at the moment a much better possibility of beating the Russian forces. Their main grouping is now east of Kiev.’ Heusinger pressed Jodl to support the memorandum. Jodl finally remarked: ‘I will do what I can. But you must admit that the Führer’s reasons are well thought out and cannot be pushed aside just like that. We must not try to compel him to do something which goes against his inner convictions. His intuition has generally been right. You can’t deny that!’127 The Führer myth still prevailed — and among those closest to Hitler.
Predictably, Hitler’s reply was not long in coming — and was a devastating riposte to Army High Command. On 21 August, Army High Command was told that Hitler rejected its proposals as out of line with his intentions. Instead, he ordered: ‘The principal object that must be achieved yet before the onset of winter is not the capture of Moscow, but rather, in the South, the occupation of the Crimea and the industrial and coal region of the Donets, together with isolation of the Russian oil regions in the Caucasus and, in the North, the encirclement of Leningrad and junction with the Finns.’ The immediate key step was the encirclement and destruction of the exposed Soviet Fifth Army in the region of Kiev through a pincer movement from Army Groups Centre and South. This would open the path for Army Group South to advance south-eastwards towards Rostov and Kharkhov. The capture of the Crimea, Hitler added, was ‘of paramount importance for safeguarding our oil supply from Romania’. All means had to be deployed, therefore, to cross the Dnieper quickly to reach the Crimea before the enemy could call up new forces.128
Hitler developed his arguments the following day in a ‘Study’ blaming Army High Command for failing to carry out his operational plan, reaffirming the necessity of shifting the main weight of the attack to the north and south, and relegating Moscow to a secondary target. Brauchitsch was accused of lack of leadership in allowing himself to be swayed by the special interests of the individual army groups. And particularly wounding was the praise, in contrast, handed out to Göring’s firm leadership of the Luftwaffe.129
In this ‘Study’ of 22 August, Hitler rehearsed once more the objective of eliminating the Soviet Union as a continental ally of Britain, thereby removing from Britain hope of changing the course of events in Europe. This objective, he claimed, could only be attained through annihilation of Soviet forces and the occupation or destruction of the economic basis for continuing the war, with special emphasis on sources of raw materials. He reasserted the need to concentrate on destroying the Soviet position in the Baltic and on occupying the Ukraine and Black Sea region, which were vital in terms of raw materials for the Soviet war economy. He also underlined the need to protect German oil supplies in Romania. Army High Command was to blame for ignoring his orders to press home the advance on Leningrad. He insisted that the three divisions from Army Group Centre, intended from the beginning of the campaign to assist the numerically weaker Army Group North, should be rapidly supplied, and that the objective of capturing Leningrad would then be met. Once this was done, the motorized units supplied by Army Group Centre could be used to concentrate on their sole remaining objective, the advance on Moscow. In the south, too, there was to be no diversion from original plans to move on Moscow. Once the destruction of the Soviet forces east and west of Kiev which threatened the flank of Army Group Centre was accomplished, he argued, the advance on Moscow would be significantly eased. He rejected, therefore, the Army High Command’s proposals for the further conduct of operations.130
In the privacy of his diary notes, Halder could not contain himself. ‘I regard the situation created by the Führer’s interference unendurable for the OKH,’ he wrote. ‘No other but the Führer himself is to blame for the zigzag course caused by his successive orders.’ The treatment of Brauchitsch, Halder went on, was ‘absolutely outrageous’. Halder had proposed to the Commander-in-Chief that both should offer their resignation. But Brauchitsch had refused such a step ‘on the grounds that the resignations would not be accepted and so nothing would be changed’.131
Deeply upset, Halder flew next day to Army Group Centre headquarters. The assembled commanders predictably backed his preference for resuming the offensive on Moscow. They were agreed that to move on Kiev would mean a winter campaign. Field-Marshal von Bock suggested that General Heinz Guderian, one of Hitler’s favourite commanders, and particularly outspoken at the meeting, should accompany Halder to Führer Headquarters in an attempt to persuade the dictator to change his mind and agree to Army High Command’s plan.
It was getting dark as Halder and Guderian arrived in East Prussia. According to Guderian’s later account — naturally aimed at reflecting himself in the best light — Brauchitsch forbade him to raise the question of Moscow. The southern operation had been ordered, the Army Commander-in-Chief declared, so the problem was merely one of how to carry it out. Discussion was pointless. Neither Brauchitsch nor Halder accompanied Guderian when he went in to see Hitler, who was flanked by a large entourage including Keitel, Jodl, and Schmundt. Hitler himself raised the issue of Moscow, according to Guderian, and then, without interruption, let him unfold the arguments for making the advance on the Russian capital the priority. When Guderian had finished, Hitler started. Keeping his temper, he put the alternative case. The raw materials and agricultural base of the Ukraine were vital for the continuation of the war, he stated. The Crimea had to be neutralized to rule out attacks on the Romanian oil-fields. ‘My generals know nothing about the economic aspects of war,’ Guderian heard him say for the first time. Hitler was adamant. He had already given strict orders for an attack on Kiev as the immediate strategic objective. Action had to be carried out with that in mind. All those present nodded at every sentence that Hitler spoke. The OKW representatives were entirely behind him. Guderian felt isolated. He avoided all further argument. He took the view, so he remarked much later, that since the decision to attack the Ukraine was confirmed, it was now his task to ensure that it was carried out as effectively as possible to ensure victory before the autumn rains.
When he reported to Halder next day, 24 August, the Chief of the Army General Staff fell into a rage at Guderian’s complete volte-face on being confronted by Hitler at first hand.132 Halder’s dismay was all the greater since Guderian, whom he had considered as a possible future Army Commander-in-Chief, had been among the most vehement critics of Hitler during the meeting at Army Group Centre Headquarters the previous day.133 Bock shared Halder’s contempt for the way the outspoken and forthright Guderian had caved in under Hitler’s pressure.134 In reality, whatever the opprobrium now heaped on him by his superiors, there had been little prospect of Guderian changing Hitler’s mind.135 At any rate, the die was cast. The great battle for Kiev and mastery of the Ukraine was about to begin.
By the time the ‘Battle of Kiev’ was over on 25 September — the city of Kiev itself had fallen six days earlier — the Soviet south-west front was totally destroyed. Hitler’s insistence on sending Guderian’s Panzer Group south to bring about the encirclement had led to an extraordinary victory. An astonishing number of Soviet prisoners — around 665,000 — were taken. The enormous booty captured included 884 tanks and 3,018 artillery pieces.136 The victory paved the way for Rundstedt to go on to occupy the Ukraine, much of the Crimea, and the Donets Basin, with further huge losses of men and material for the Red Army.137 In the light of the immense scale of the Soviet losses in the three months since the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’, the German military leadership now concluded that the thrust to Moscow — given the name ‘Operation Typhoon’ — could still succeed despite starting so late in the year.138
It was scarcely any wonder, basking in the glow of the great victory at Kiev, that Hitler was in ebullient mood when Goebbels spoke alone with him in the Führer Headquarters on 23 September. Hitler’s reported comments afford a notable insight into his thinking at this juncture. After bitterly complaining about the difficulties in getting his way with the ‘experts’ in the General Staff, Hitler expressed the view that the defeats imposed on the Red Army in the Ukraine marked the breakthrough. ‘The spell is broken,’ Goebbels recorded. Things would now unfold quickly on other parts of the front. New great victories could be expected in the next three to four weeks. By mid-October, the Bolsheviks would be in full retreat. The next thrust was towards Kharkov, which would be reached within days, then to Stalingrad and the Don. Once this industrial area was in German hands, and the Bolsheviks were cut off from their coal supplies and the basis of their armaments production, the war was lost for them.
Leningrad, birthplace of Bolshevism, Hitler repeated, would be destroyed street by street and razed to the ground. Its 5 million population could not be fed.139 The plough would one day once more pass over the site of the city. Bolshevism began in hunger, blood, and tears. It would end the same way. Asia’s entry-gate to Europe would be closed, the Asiatics forced back to where they belonged. A similar fate to Leningrad, he reiterated, might also befall Moscow. The attack on the capital would follow the capture of the industrial basin. The operation to surround the city should be completed by 15 October. And once German troops reached the Caucasus Stalin was lost. Hitler was sure that in such a situation, Japan would not miss the opportunity to make gains in the east of the Soviet Union. What then happened would be up to Stalin. He might capitulate. Or he might seek a ‘special peace’, which Hitler would naturally take up. With its military power broken, Bolshevism would represent no further danger. It could be driven back to Asia. It might retain extra-European imperialist ambitions, but that could be a matter of indifference to Germany.
He returned to a familiar theme. With the defeat of Bolshevism, England would have lost its last hope on the Continent. Its last chance of victory would disappear. And the increasing successes by U-boats in the Atlantic which would follow in the next weeks would put further pressure on a Churchill who was betraying signs of nervous strain.140 Hitler did not rule out Britain removing Churchill in order to seek peace. Hitler’s terms would be as they always were: he was prepared to leave the Empire alone, but Britain would have to get out of Europe. The British would probably grant Germany a free hand in the east, but try to retain hegemony in western Europe. That, he would not allow. ‘England had always felt itself to be an insular power. It is alien to Europe, or even hostile to Europe. It has no future in Europe.’141
All in all, the prospects at this point, in Hitler’s eyes, were rosy. One remark indicated, however, that an early end to the conflict was not in sight. Hitler told Goebbels in passing — his assumption would soon prove disastrously misplaced — that all necessary precautions had been made for wintering the troops in the east.142
By this time, in fact, Hitler and the Wehrmacht leaders had already arrived at the conclusion that the war in the East would not be over in 1941. The collapse of the Soviet Union, declared an OKW memorandum of 27 August, approved by Hitler, was the next and decisive war aim. But, the memorandum ran, ‘if it proves impossible to realize this objective completely during 1941, the continuation of the eastern campaign has top priority for 1942’.143 The military successes over the summer had been remarkable. But the aim of the quick knock-out blow at the heart of the ‘Barbarossa’ plan had not been realized. In spite of their vast losses, the Soviet forces had been far from comprehensively destroyed. They continued to be replenished from an apparently limitless reservoir of men and resources, and to fight tooth and nail in the proclaimed ‘Great Patriotic War’ against the aggressor. German losses were themselves not negligible. Already before the ‘Battle of Kiev’, casualties numbered almost 400,000, or over 11 per cent of the eastern army.144 Replacements were becoming more difficult to find. By the end of September, half of the tanks were out of action or in different stages of repair.145 And by now the autumn rains were already beginning to turn the roads into impassable quagmires. Whatever the successes of the summer, objective grounds for continued optimism had to be strongly qualified. The drive to Moscow that began on 2 October, seeking the decisive victory before the onset of winter, rested on hope more than expectation. It was a desperate last attempt to force the conclusive defeat of the Soviet Union before winter. It amounted to an improvisation marking the failure of the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan rather than its crowning glory.146
Hitler’s own responsibility for the difficulties now faced by the German army is evident. Whereas Stalin learnt from the calamities of 1941 and came to leave military matters increasingly to the experts,147 Hitler’s interference in tactical detail as well as grand strategy, arising from his chronic and intensifying distrust of the Army High Command, was, as Halder’s difficulties indicated, intensely damaging. The tenacity and stubbornness with which he refused to concede the priority of an attack on Moscow, even when for a while, at the end of July, not just the army leadership but his own closest military adviser, Jodl, had accepted the argument, was quite remarkable. After the glorious victories of 1940, Hitler believed his own military judgement was superior to that of any of his generals. His contempt for Brauchitsch and Halder was reinforced on every occasion that their views on tactics differed from his. Conversely, the weeks of conflict, and the bewildering way in July and August in which directives were arrived at, then amended, undermined the confidence in Hitler not just of the hopelessly supine Brauchitsch and of Halder’s Army General Staff, but also of the field commanders.
But the problem was not one-sided. Certainly, as we have seen, the invasion of the Soviet Union was Hitler’s own idea — and that at the height of the triumph in summer 1940. But far from dismissing the idea as illusory, vainglorious, or risky to a degree that courted outright disaster, the army’s feasibility studies that summer had underwritten the proposition. The tension between the conflicting conceptions of the eastern campaign was still inwardly unresolved as far as Halder was concerned when Hitler’s Directive No.21 was issued on 18 December 1940, indicating Moscow as a secondary rather than primary objective. The conflict of the coming summer months was prefigured in this unresolved contradiction even before the campaign had started. If reluctantly, Army High Command had apparently accepted the alternative strategy which Hitler favoured. Strategic planning of the attack in subsequent months followed from this premiss.
The strategy of first gaining control over the Baltic and cutting off essential Soviet economic heartlands in the south, while at the same time protecting German oil supplies in Romania, before attacking Moscow was not in itself senseless. And the fear that a frontal assault on Moscow would simply drive back instead of enveloping Soviet forces was a real one. Army High Command’s preference to deviate from the plan of ‘Barbarossa’ once the campaign was under way was not a self-evident improvement. The reversion to Halder’s originally preferred strategy was tempting because Army Group Centre had advanced faster and more spectacularly than anticipated, and was pressing hard to be allowed to continue and, as it thought, finish the job by taking Moscow. But even more it now followed from the realization that the army’s intelligence on Soviet military strength had been woeful. The attack on Moscow, though favoured in the OKH’s thinking from an early stage, had in fact come to be a substitute for the ‘Barbarossa’ plan, which had gone massively awry not simply because of Hitler’s interference, but also because of the inadequacy and failures of the army leadership.
Since Hitler had placed the key men, Brauchitsch and Halder, in their posts, he must take a good deal of the blame for their failings. But as Commander in Chief of the Army, Brauchitsch was hopelessly weak and ineffectual. His contribution to strategic planning appears to have been minimal. Torn between pressures from his field commanders and bullying from Hitler, he offered a black hole where clear-sighted and determined military leadership was essential. Long before the crisis which would ultimately bring his removal from office, Brauchitsch was a broken reed. The contempt with which Hitler treated him was not without justification.
Halder, partly though his own post-war apologetics and his flirtations (though they came to nothing) with groups opposed to Hitler, has been more generously viewed by posterity. As Chief of the General Staff, responsibility for the planning of army operations was his. The chequered relations with the High Command of the Wehrmacht, in large measure Hitler’s own mouthpiece, of course gravely weakened Halder’s position. But the Chief of the General Staff failed to highlight difficulties in the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan. The northward swing of Army Group Centre forces was not fully worked out. The problems that motorized forces would face in the terrain between Leningrad and Moscow were not taken into account. Halder was lukewarm from the outset about the concentration on the Baltic and would have preferred the frontal assault on Moscow. But instead of being settled beforehand, the dispute, as we have noted, was left to fester once the campaign was under way.148
Moreover, the all-out attack on Moscow that Halder — and Commander of Army Group Centre Bock — were urging, would itself have been a highly risky venture. It would then almost certainly have been impossible to eliminate the large Soviet forces on the flanks (as happened in the ‘Battle of Kiev’). And the Russians were expecting the attack on the capital. Had the Wehrmacht reached the city, in the absence of a Luftwaffe capable of razing Moscow to the ground (as Hitler wanted), the result would probably have been a preview of what was eventually to happen at Stalingrad. And even had the city been captured, the war would not have been won. A Soviet psychological, political, economic, and military collapse as a consequence would have been unlikely.149
Whatever the speculation on this, that the eastern campaign was blown off course already by late summer of 1941 cannot solely, or even mainly, be put down to Hitler’s meddling in matters which should have been left to the military professionals. The implication, encountered in some post-war memoirs, that, left to their own devices, the military would have won the war in the east for Germany was both a self-defensive and an arrogant claim. The escalating problems of ‘Barbarossa’ were ultimately a consequence of the calamitous miscalculation that the Soviet Union would collapse like a pack of cards in the wake of a Blitzkrieg resting on some highly optimistic assumptions, gross underestimation of the enemy, and extremely limited resources.150 This was Hitler’s miscalculation. But it was shared by his military planners.
While the tumultuous developments on the eastern front unfolded, the Reich was gradually turning into a Führer state with an absentee Führer. During the summer of 1940, Hitler had been away at his headquarters on the western front for approaching two months.151 It had been no more than an interlude. But once the eastern campaign had started, and especially once it was realized that this was to be no repeated rapid military triumph, his absence became prolonged and then, in effect, permanent. Whereas Churchill was concerned to speak to the British people and let himself be seen as often as was practicable, Hitler practically disappeared from the public eye. During the remaining months of 1941, and with the popular mood in the Reich far from buoyant, he scarcely left his field headquarters to appear in public in Germany. Pressed by Goebbels to give a speech to rouse sagging morale, he deigned to spend six hours in Berlin on 3 October. A month later, on 8 November, he travelled to Munich, gave his customary address to the ‘Old Fighters’ of the Movement to commemorate the Putsch, spoke next day to the Reichs — and Gauleiter, and left immediately for the Wolf’s Lair. And he attended on 21 November the funeral in Berlin of General Ernst Udet (the First World War flying-ace in charge of air armaments who had committed suicide after Göring had made him the scapegoat for the Luftwaffe’s failures on the eastern front), returning six days later for the ceremony prolonging the Anti-Comintern Pact and using the occasion to receive a number of foreign dignitaries before departing again for his field headquarters in East Prussia after a stay of two days.152
Otherwise the German people saw him only in occasional newsreel clips, usually in the company of his generals. His continued absence in 1941 was the start of a process which, as the war progressed and final victory became a mirage, would transform the most notable populist leader of the twentieth century, the masterly demagogue whose power base had rested in no small measure on his unrivalled ability to play on the expectations and resentments of the people, into a remote and distant figure.
Hitler’s increasing detachment meant an inevitable acceleration of the existing, strongly developed tendency towards the disintegration of any semblance of coordinated administration of the Reich. The stark figures for governmental legislation provide an indicator. Out of 445 pieces of legislation in 1941, only seventy-two laws, published Führer decrees, and ministerial decrees represented any semblance of inter-ministerial policy formation. The remaining 373 decrees were produced by individual ministries without wider consultation.153
Bormann’s appointment as head of the newly designated Party Chancellery in May 1941 accentuated rather than checked the trend. His proximity to Hitler, bureaucratic energy, ideological commitment, and ruthless drive certainly gave the Party new impetus and scope for intervention, after years of leadership by the weak and ineffectual Rudolf Heß. Bormann saw his role, in belonging ‘to the closest staff of the Führer’, as channelling selected information to Hitler and ‘continually informing the Reichsleiter, Gauleiter, and heads of organizations of the decisions and opinions of the Führer’.154 Though, under the influence of events in the east, Bormann’s leadership of the Party now accentuated the ideological tone and radicalization of policy on the home front, it brought no coordination of government. On the contrary: the consequence in practice was to intensify still further intergovernmental conflict and heighten the unresolvable tension built into the Nazi regime between the demands of bureaucratic administration and the anti-bureaucratic pressures of an ideologically driven leadership of the regime.155
Hitler’s role remained, of course, pivotal. He was, as ever, the linchpin of the system (if ‘system’ is an appropriate term for such an administrative free-for-all) and the fount of ideological legitimation. He was also kept informed, though in unsystematic and ill-balanced ways, of, frequently, quite trivial as well as more important issues. But the insistence on retaining all the overriding controls of every significant sphere of rule in his own hands, coupled with his physical absence from the centre of government, almost total preoccupation with the war effort, and complete distaste for bureaucratic methods, meant an inescapable fragmentation of the machinery of government and, accompanying it, an ever-intensifying radicalization of the regime.
Hitler’s ultimate gamble of war in the east to destroy Bolshevism with one swift knock-out blow was also to put his own popularity at risk, and with that the very focus of the regime’s support. Hitler’s immense popularity had been attained during the 1930s through successes, beyond all else through ‘victories without bloodshed’ that had brought territorial expansion and returned national pride and strength to a humiliated country. Once war had begun in 1939, the victories were quick, spectacular and, if not ‘without bloodshed’, then nevertheless relatively painless for the German people. But to retain the heights of popularity reached after the stunning victory over France in 1940, Hitler needed to bring final victory. That had so far eluded him. Sensitive as he was to the fickleness of popular support, and never forgetting how collapsing morale had given way to revolutionary fervour in 1917–18, he knew how much rested on the rapid and complete crushing of the Soviet Union. Victory in the east would produce the material base of lasting power and prosperity — endless bounty from the riches of the new territories to improve living standards at home, and limitless opportunities for upward mobility, wealth, and domination. Failure to deliver the knockout blow would, by contrast, endanger the regime. It meant prolonged war — in its wake, increasing sacrifice and privation, suffering and misery, and with that in due course the conditions in which the regime’s popularity and his own unique authority could be undermined.
Though Nazi loyalists welcomed the showdown with the arch-enemy, following the uneasy period of what they saw as an artificial and purely tactical pact, the initial reactions of the German people to the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’, unprepared as they were for the extension of the war in the east, were for the most part anxiety and dismay.156 As we have already noted, the first ‘special announcements’ of the remarkable advance and military successes of the Wehrmacht had, as Goebbels realized, far from their desired effect. As the triumphalist communiqués of the Wehrmacht High Command continued to blare out of their radios, one bulletin after another reporting yet a further grandiose victory, proclaiming the total defeat or annihilation of the enemy, and announcing Stalin’s deployment of his last reserves, hopes were raised of an early end to the conflict. (They were encouraged by the tone of propaganda: Goebbels had told media representatives on 22 June that the war in the east would be over within eight weeks.157) Ardent Nazis were naturally jubilant, outright opponents depressed. But the deep anxieties and hopes of an early peace — a victorious one if at all possible, but above all an end to war — among the mass of the population could not for long be banished. And, however great the reported victories of the Wehrmacht were, no end seemed in sight. As the summer wore on, it was obvious that Stalin had far from used up his last reserves. Scepticism in the reports started to mount. Moreover, accounts of hard fighting, fierce resistance by the Red Army, and, especially, of ‘horrible bestialities’ and the ‘inhumane way of fighting of the Bolsheviks’ and ‘criminal types’ in the ‘Jewish state’, not unnaturally increased the worries, whatever the scale of the victories, of those with fathers, brothers, sons, and husbands at the front.158
A young soldier, just married and home on leave, left an indication in his diary of the mood after only two weeks of fighting when he attended a Sunday morning service in his church: ‘There were read out — in a quite matter-of-fact way — the name, year of birth, date and place of death of the dead and fallen, and precisely these cold facts had a doubly moving effect. The widows sobbed throughout the church…’159 But such observations did not prevent approval of Nazi aims. The same soldier noted, a few days later, his approval of the antisemitic films Jud Süß and Die Rothschilds, remarking on how the Jewish banking family had been able through their money to determine the politics of Europe. And when, in early August, he watched newsreels of the fighting in the east, he commented on the ‘demonic’ manner of fighting of the Red Army — contemptuous of ‘all rules of civility and humanity’, ‘truly Russian-Asiatic’, as he put it.160
Attitudes towards the war — and the need to fight it — were divided. In stark contrast with the views of this soldier, the wishes of a farming community in northern Franconia, according to the outspoken report of the local Landrat, could scarcely have been more distant from the ideological aims of the Nazi leadership. There was in his area, he wrote, ‘not the least understanding for the realization of plans for world domination… Overworked and exhausted men and women do not see why the war must be carried still further into Asia and Africa.’161 At the end of August, the same Landrat wrote: ‘I have only the one wish, that one of the officials in Berlin or Munich… should be in my office some time when, for example, a worn-out old peasant beseechingly requests allocation of labourers or other assistance, and as proof of his need shows two letters, in one of which the company commander of the elder son answers that leave for the harvest cannot be granted, and in the other of which the company commander of the younger son informs of his heroic death in an encounter near Propoiszk.’162
From the point of view of most ordinary Germans, the ‘good times’, as they remembered them from the 1930s, were over. Conditions of daily life were deteriorating sharply. The cause of this was, they saw, the war. What was needed was an end to war and return to ‘normality’, not yet another — unnecessary, as many people thought — extension of the conflict, and now against the most implacable and dangerous enemy. Daily concerns dominated the mood, alongside fears for loved ones at the front. Reports from cities highlighted the ‘catastrophic state of provisions’ and anger at food shortages and high prices. Industrial workers were becoming increasingly alienated by working conditions and wage levels. The ‘little man’ was again the stupid one, the SD from Stuttgart reported as a commonly held view. He was having to work hard at great sacrifice, as had always been the case, to benefit the ‘big noises (Bonzen), plutocrats, toffee-nosed (Standesdünkel), and war-profiteers’. ‘What does national community mean here?’ was plaintively asked.163 In the Alpine reaches of southern Bavaria, the mood was ‘bad and tired of war’, dominated by the ‘constantly mounting great and small worries of everyday life’, and — it was somewhat theatrically claimed — comparable with that of 1917.164
On top of this came new worries. It was while the ferocious warfare was raging on the eastern front that, within the Reich, the Nazi regime’s renewed assault on Christianity, which had begun in early 1941, reached its climax. At the same time, the disturbing rumours — which over the previous year had spread like wildfire — about the killing of mentally sick patients taking place in asylums were causing intensified disquiet. Elimination of ‘life not worth living’ had an increasingly threatening ring to it, potentially for every family, as psychologically scarred as well as physically badly injured young soldiers in ever larger numbers were brought back from the front and housed in hospitals, sanatoria, and asylums throughout the Reich.
Despite Hitler’s own repeatedly expressed wish for calm in relations with the Churches as long as the war lasted — the reckoning with Christianity, in his view, had to wait for the final victory — a wave of anti-Church agitation, accompanied by an array of new measures, had taken place during the first half of 1941. The activism appears in the main to have come from below, as anti-Church radicals exploited wartime needs to try to break the vexing hold — strengthened by the anxieties of the war itself — which the Churches continued to have on the population. But it certainly had encouragement from above, particularly through Bormann and the Party Chancellery. In a confidential circular to all Gauleiter in June 1941, Bormann had expressly declared that Christianity and National Socialism were incompatible. The Party must struggle, therefore, to break the Church’s power and influence.165 Whether this represented Hitler’s wishes, given his essential stance on relations with the Churches during the war, is extremely doubtful. On the other hand, Bormann never acted directly contrary to what Hitler wanted. Most probably, he misinterpreted on this occasion Hitler’s repeated rantings about the malevolent influence of Christianity and sent the wrong signals to Party activists.166
By the time Bormann wrote his circular, antagonism among churchgoers had already intensified through bans on Church publications, the replacement of Catholic nuns by ‘brown sisters’ from the Nazi welfare organization (the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, or NSV), the shifting of celebrations of feast days from weekdays to the nearest Sunday, and attempts to abolish school prayers. Rumours spread that baptism of children would soon no longer be allowed, and that priests would be turned out of their presbyteries. In some localities, the closure of monasteries, eviction of the monks, and sequestration of monastic property to accommodate refugees or provide space for Party offices caused immense anger.167
A highpoint of popular unrest provoked by Nazi attacks on the Church occurred in predominantly Catholic Bavaria in the summer of 1941. The Gauleiter of the ‘Traditional Gau’ of Munich and Upper Bavaria, one of Hitler’s oldest allies, Adolf Wagner, acting in his capacity as Education Minister, had ordered in April the removal of crucifixes from Bavarian schoolrooms. Whether, as was later claimed, he was trying ‘to give visible effect to the teaching handed down by Reichsleiter Bormann, that National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable opposites’, or whether he was acting on his own initiative cannot be established.168 Wagner’s order went out several weeks before Bormann’s circular, which cannot, therefore, have provoked the ‘action’. But Wagner probably read the signals coming from Party headquarters earlier in the year and acted — without apparently any consultation in Bavaria itself — to give direct meaning to the anti-Church drive in his own province, where the power of Catholicism was a thorn in the side of the Party, by attacking the very symbol of Christianity itself.
The result, in any case, was to stir up a torrent of embittered protest, articulated above all by mothers of schoolchildren. Their letters to loved ones at the front were read by soldiers incredulous at what the ‘Bolsheviks in the homeland’ were doing, and threatened to have a damaging effect on the troops’ morale. Mass meetings in village halls, refusal to send children to school, collection of signatures on petitions, and public demonstrations by angry mothers meant that the matter could not be ignored. One petition, accompanied by a signed list containing 2,331 names, ran: ‘The sons of our town stand in the east in the struggle against Bolshevism. Many are giving their lives in the cause. We cannot understand that particularly in this hard time people want to take the cross out of the schools.’169 Wagner was forced to revoke his earlier order. But things had become so chaotic that Party functionaries in some areas only then started actually removing the crucifixes. It was autumn before the heat generated wholly unnecessarily by the issue gradually subsided. The damage done to the standing of the Party in such regions was immeasurable and irreparable.170
Hitler did not escape the wrath of Bavarian Catholics. Farmers in some areas removed his picture from their houses. ‘Rather Wilhelm by the grace of God than the idiot of Berchtesgaden (Lieber Wilhelm von Gottes Gnaden als den Depp von Berchtesgaden)’ was a sentiment registered in Munich.171 But the Führer myth — of his ignorance of actions carried out behind his back by his underlings — was still strong, if not wholly unscathed. ‘The Führer doesn’t want this, and certainly knows nothing of this removal of the crosses,’ shouted one woman during a demonstration.172 ‘You wear brown shirts on top, but inside you’re Bolsheviks and Jews. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to carry on behind the Führer’s back,’ ran an anonymous letter traced to a woman in the Berchtesgaden area.173 As such remarks indicate, the strength of feeling on the Crucifix issue was entirely compatible with support for Hitler, and for the ‘crusade against godless Bolshevism’, which Catholic Bishops themselves had applauded.174 But the Crucifix issue, though confined to one part of Germany, had cast momentary light on the increasing fragility of backing for Party and regime as the inevitable radicalization and lack of coordinated, pragmatic policy intensified. Aggression turned outwards, as long as it was painless and successful, was largely unobjectionable, it seems. But as soon as aggression was directed inwards, at widely held traditional belief systems as opposed to unloved but harmless minorities, it was a different matter altogether. The ‘total claim’ made by Nazism, its intolerance towards any institutional framework the Movement did not control, and the inbuilt ‘cumulative radicalization’ of the system meant, therefore, an inexorable trend towards greater, not less, social conflict.175
This now emerged in an issue at the very heart of the regime’s ideology as, in midsummer 1941, serious disquiet over the ‘euthanasia action’ came out into the open. All too credible rumours about the killing of asylum patients had been circulating since summer 1940. Taking place in selected asylums within Germany, in close reach of major centres of population, it had been impossible to keep the ‘action’ as close a secret as had been intended. Those in the immediate vicinity saw the grey buses arrive, the patients unload and enter the asylum, the crematorium chimneys continually smoking.176 Occasionally, as at Absberg in Franconia in February 1941, there had been public demonstrations of sympathy for the victims as they were loaded on to the buses to take them to what everyone knew was a certain death.177 The secrecy, and absence of any public statement, let alone law, authorizing what was known to be happening, stoked the fires of alarm. Protest letters landed in the Reich Chancellery and the Reich Justice Ministry. Some were even from dyed-in-the-wool National Socialists.178 Others, on occasion not mincing words, were from prominent churchmen.179 But the churchmen up to this point had kept their protests confidential. On 7 July a pastoral letter from German bishops was read out in Catholic churches, declaring that it was wrong to kill except in war or for self-defence.180 But this veiled attempt to criticize the ‘euthanasia action’ left no obvious mark. The death-mills stayed working.
Then, on 3 August 1941, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, the Catholic Bishop of Münster in Westphalia, referring to the pastoral letter, in a most courageous sermon in the St Lamberti Church in Münster, openly denounced in plain terms what was happening. Galen, deeply conservative, anti-liberal, and anti-socialist, had been thought in some Church circles in the 1930s even to be a Nazi sympathizer.181 In June 1941, like some other Catholic bishops, he had welcomed the attack on the Soviet Union and offered his prayers for the ‘successful defence against the Bolshevik threat to our people’.182 But by July, as Münster suffered under a hail of British bombs, he delivered a series of sermons denouncing in the most forthright terms the Gestapo’s suppression of religious orders in the city.183
On 14 July, a day after a sermon attacking the closure of the monasteries, Galen sent a telegram to the Reich Chancellery requesting Hitler to defend the people against the Gestapo. The following Sunday, 20 July, he read out the telegram in church. Two days later he wrote to Lammers with what could only be seen as a criticism of Hitler and his state. The Führer’s involvement with foreign and military matters was such, Galen remarked, that he was not in a position to deal with all the petitions and complaints sent to him. ‘Adolf Hitler is not a divine being, raised above every natural limitation, who is able to keep an eye on and direct everything at the same time. However, when as a result of this overloading with work of the responsible leader… the Gestapo shatters unrestrained the home front… then I know (I am called upon)… to raise my voice loudly.’184
Popular unrest at the closing of the monasteries was also brought to Hitler’s attention by Lammers on 29 July while a protest by Bishop Franz Rudolf Bornewasser of Trier was being discussed. It seems likely that Galen’s telegram, and the contents of his letter to Lammers, were referred to Hitler at the same time. Bishop Bornewasser’s confidential protest had already linked the unrest over the closing of monasteries to the disquiet about the killing of ‘unworthy life’. Galen now did the same — but in public. His fury over the dissolution of the monasteries lit the fuse for his open assault on the Nazi ‘euthanasia programme’.185
In his sermon on 3 August, Bishop Galen again pilloried the Gestapo for its attacks on Catholic religious orders. Then he came to the ‘euthanasia action’. ‘There is a general suspicion verging on certainty,’ the Bishop stated, ‘that these numerous deaths of mentally ill people do not occur of themselves but are deliberately brought about, that the doctrine is being followed, according to which one may destroy so-called “worthless life”, that is kill innocent people if one considers that their lives are of no further value for the nation and the state.’ In emotional terms, Galen pointed out the implications. People who had become invalids through labour and war, and the soldier risking his life at the front, would all be at risk. ‘Some commission can put us on the list of the “unproductive”, who in their opinion have become worthless life. And no police force will protect us and no court will investigate our murder and give the murderer the punishment he deserves. Who will be able to trust his doctor any more? He may report his patient as “unproductive” and receive instructions to kill him. It is impossible to imagine the degree of moral depravity, of general mistrust that would then spread even through families if this dreadful doctrine is tolerated, accepted, and followed.’186
Even before Galen delivered his sermon, Hitler had been sufficiently concerned about morale and popular unrest at such a critical juncture of the war that he had issued orders to Gauleiter to cease until further notice all seizures of Church and monastic property. Under no circumstances were independent actions by Gauleiter permissible. Similar instructions went to the Gestapo.187 According to Papen, Hitler attributed all the blame to the hotheads in the Party. He had told Bormann that the ‘nonsense’ had to stop, and that he would tolerate no conflict, given the internal situation.188 It was simply a tactical move. Hitler sympathized with the radicals, but acted pragmatically.189 As his comments a few months later made plain, he fully approved of the closure of the monasteries.190 Only the need for peace in relations with the Churches to avoid deteriorating morale on the home front determined his stance. Events in the Warthegau (where by 1941 94 per cent of churches and chapels in the Posen-Gnesen diocese were closed, 11 per cent of the clergy murdered, and most of the remainder thrust into prisons and concentration camps) showed the face of the future.191 A victorious end to the war would unquestionably have brought a renewed, even more savage onslaught on the Churches. But in the context of such widespread unrest, Hitler had to take seriously the impact of Galen’s sermon on the killing of asylum patients, a copy of which had been brought to him by Lammers.192 Moreover, with that sermon, reproduced in thousands of clandestine copies and circulated from hand to hand, the secrecy surrounding the ‘euthanasia action’ had been broken.193
The Nazi leadership realized that it was helpless in the circumstances to take strong action against Galen. It was suggested to Bormann that Galen should be hanged. Bormann answered that, while the death penalty was certainly warranted, ‘considering the war circumstances the Führer would scarcely decree this measure’. Goebbels acknowledged that if anything were undertaken against the Bishop, support from the population of Münster and Westphalia could be written off during the war.194 He hoped that a favourable turn in the eastern campaign would provide the opportunity to deal with him.195 Not surprisingly, since he was aware of Hitler’s concern about the decline in morale in the wake of the Church conflict, Goebbels spoke against arousing public discussion over ‘euthanasia’ at precisely that time. ‘Such a debate,’ noted Goebbels, ‘would only inflame feelings anew. In a critical period of the war, that is extraordinarily inexpedient. All inflammatory matters should be kept away from the people at present. People are so occupied with the problems of the war that other problems only arouse and irritate them.’196 Goebbels’s comments on popular opinion during his visit to Führer Headquarters on 18 August must have reinforced Hitler’s view that the time had come to calm the unrest at home. On 24 August, Hitler stopped the T4 ‘euthanasia action’ as secretly as he had started it two years earlier.197
On the very same day, Hitler, through an internal Party circular, ordered replacement buildings for damaged hospitals in areas threatened by bombing raids to be constructed. The barrack-like prefabricated constructions were to be attached to asylums and nursing homes, which were to have their existing patients relocated in order to make room for air-raid victims. The costs of the removal of the patients were to be borne by the ‘Community Patients Transport Service’ — precisely the same organization, run by the Chancellery of the Führer, whose buses had carried the asylum inmates to their deaths in the ‘euthanasia’ centres. Specifically acknowledging the disquiet which this would cause, the order — signed by none other than Hitler’s doctor, Karl Brandt, who along with Bouhler had been authorized in autumn 1939 to carry out the ‘euthanasia action’ — stated that relatives would be informed in advance about the destination of the patients, and would be able to visit them there. The press would undertake a propaganda campaign to explain what was happening and prevent rumours spreading.198
In his sermon of 3 August, Bishop Galen had cleverly brought the ‘euthanasia action’ into connection with the bombing-raids on Münster, which he hinted were a ‘punishment of God’ for the offences against the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Galen’s sermon had linked the three areas — attacks on the Church, ‘euthanasia’, and bombing-raids on German cities — in which alienation of the population from the regime, and the consequent threat to morale, was greatest. The population of the industrial belt of Westphalia were bearing the brunt of the raids. As SD reports pointed out, morale in the area was suffering accordingly. At the same time the attacks on the monasteries and religious orders in the area had reached their high point. And this was at precisely the juncture when the patients from the Westphalian asylums were being deported to the ‘euthanasia’ killing-centres. Any attempt to provide emergency hospitals for the victims of the air-raids, to combat the effect on morale, had to make use of the spare capacity of the asylums. But this could only be attained by removing the patients. And this would immediately give rise to further unrest. It was in the grip of this strait-jacket that Hitler bowed to the pressure created by Galen’s protest. His pragmatic solution, it seems, was to halt the T4 ‘Action’ in order to be able to offer the hospital care for air-raid victims, and the accompanying assurances necessary to calm the unrest in Westphalia and restore morale.199
By the time of Hitler’s ‘halt order’, the T4 ‘euthanasia action’ had already killed more than the 70,000 victims foreseen at the outset of the ‘programme’.200 Bouhler had in fact boasted to Goebbels as early as January 1941 that 40,000 mentally sick patients had already been liquidated, and that there were another 60,000 still to be dealt with.201 By the end of 1941, the number gassed, starved to death, or poisoned with lethal injections was nearer 100,000 than 70,00o.202 The ‘halt order’ ended the ‘euthanasia programme’ neither completely nor permanently. Tens of thousands of concentration-camp prisoners, ill or incapable of work, were, after selection by doctors, to perish in existing, or newly established, ‘euthanasia’-centres by 1945.203 As for the T4 personnel: new tasks were rapidly found for them. The experts in gassing techniques were, within a few weeks, already being redeployed to start the planning in Poland of a far larger mass-killing ‘programme’: the extermination of Europe’s Jews.
In his lengthy talk with Hitler on 23 September, Goebbels took the opportunity to describe the state of morale within Germany. Hitler, remarked the Propaganda Minister, was well aware of the ‘serious psychological test (Belastungsprobe)’ to which the German people had been subjected over the past weeks. After the notable slide in morale, Goebbels pressed Hitler, who had not appeared in public since the start of the Russian campaign and had last spoken to the German people on 4 May, following the victorious Balkan campaign, to come to Berlin to address the nation. Hitler agreed that the time was ripe, and asked Goebbels to prepare a mass meeting to open the Winter Aid campaign at the end of the following week.204 The date of the speech was fixed for 3 October. Even on the day before, Goebbels had a struggle with Führer Headquarters to establish that Hitler would, indeed, be coming to Berlin to speak in the Sportpalast. Only in the evening did Hitler finally confirm his appearance. Goebbels was now at last able to make the preparations. That day, 2 October, ‘Operation Typhoon’, the great offensive against Moscow, had been launched.205 The early news from the front was good. The scene for the speech could not have been better, thought Goebbels. He hoped the Führer would be in good form. ‘The impression of his address in Germany and in the entire world will then, after a six-month period of silence, be an immense one.’206
In his proclamation to the soldiers on the Eastern Front at the start of ‘Operation Typhoon’, Hitler described Bolshevism as essentially similar to the worst kind of capitalism in the poverty it produced, stressing that ‘the bearers of this system are also in both cases the same: Jews and only Jews!’207 Now was the last push before winter to deliver the enemy ‘the deadly thrust’.208 Similar sentiments were to dominate his address to the nation.
Around 1p.m. next day, Hitler’s train pulled into Berlin. Goebbels was immediately summoned to the Reich Chancellery. He found Hitler looking well and full of optimism. In the privacy of Hitler’s room, he was given an overview of the situation at the front. The advance was proceeding better than expected. Big successes were being attained. ‘The Führer is convinced,’ commented Goebbels, ‘that if the weather stays moderately favourable the Soviet army will be essentially smashed within fourteen days.’209 Through the proclamation, every soldier knew what was at stake: annihilating the Bolshevik army before the onset of winter; or getting stuck half-way and having to put off the decision until the following year. Hitler was of the opinion that the worst of the war would be over if the attack succeeded: ‘for what will we gain in new armaments and economic potential from the industrial areas lying before us! We have already conquered so many sources of oil that the oil which the Soviet Union had promised to us on the basis of earlier economic treaties now flows to us from our own production.’210 The USA were in no position to affect the course of the war. Once Germany had the decisive Russian agricultural and industrial areas in its possession, ‘we will be fairly independent and can cut off the English imports through our U-Boats and Luftwaffe’.211 Hitler was in no mood for compromises. He thought it necessary to come to a clear decision with Britain, since otherwise the ‘bloody showdown would have to be repeated in a few years’. He did not think it likely that Stalin would capitulate, though he could not rule it out.212 He also thought the ‘London plutocracy’ would continue to wage tough resistance. But his view was ‘that everything that happens is on the whole the product of fate’. It was good, in retrospect, that none of the peace feelers since 1939 involving Poland, France, and Britain had come to anything. ‘The most cardinal problems would then have still remained unsolved, and would doubtless sooner or later have again led to war. Another military force besides ours must never exist in Europe.’213
Cheering crowds, which the Party never had any trouble in mobilizing, lined the streets as Hitler was driven in the afternoon to the Sportpalast. A rapturous reception awaited him in the cavernous hall.214 Goebbels compared it with the mass meetings in the run-up to power.215 The first part of Hitler’s speech was spent in blaming the war on Britain’s warmongering clique, backed by international Jewry.216 He went on to justify the attack on the Soviet Union as preventive. He said German precautions had been incomplete on only one thing: ‘We had no idea how gigantic the preparations of this enemy were against Germany and Europe, and how immense the danger was, how by a hair’s breadth we have escaped the annihilation not only of Germany, but of the whole of Europe.’ He described the threat as ‘a second Mongol storm of a new Gengis Khan’. But, he claimed, at last coming out with the words that his audience were anxious to hear: ‘I can say today that this enemy is already broken and will not rise up again.’217
He went on, to the delight of his audience, to pour scorn on British propaganda and heap praise both on the Wehrmacht and on the efforts of the home front. Almost every sentence towards the end was interrupted by storms of applause. Hitler, despite the lengthy break, had not lost his touch. The audience in the Sportpalast rose as one in an ecstatic ovation at the end.218 Hitler was thrilled with his reception. The mood, he said, was just as it had been in the ‘time of struggle’ before 1933. And the cheering of the ordinary Berliners in the streets had ‘not for a long time been so great and genuine’.219 But he was in a hurry to get away. He was driven straight back to the station. By 7p.m., a mere six hours after he had arrived, he was on his way back to his headquarters in East Prussia.220
Goebbels had been with Hitler on the way to the station as the latest news came in from the front. The advance was going even better than expected.221 The Führer had taken all factors into account, commented Goebbels. Realistically assessing all circumstances, he had reached the conclusion ‘that victory can no longer be taken from us’.222 Only the weather gave rise to concern. ‘If the weather stays as it is at present,’ the Propaganda Minister wrote, ‘then we might hope that our wishes will be fulfilled.’223
The Russian weather was, however, predictable. It would, all too soon, turn wet. Within weeks, the rains would give way to arctic conditions. However optimistic Hitler appeared to be, his military leaders knew they were up against time.224
The early stages of the advance could, nonetheless, scarcely have gone better. Halder purred, soon after its start, that Operation Typhoon was ‘making pleasing progress’ and pursuing ‘an absolutely classical course’.225 The German army had thrown seventy-eight divisions, comprising almost 2 million men, and nearly 2,000 tanks, supported by a large proportion of the Luftwaffe, against Marshal Timoshenko’s forces.226 Once more, the Wehrmacht seemed invincible. Once more, vast numbers of prisoners — 673,000 of them — fell into German hands, along with immeasurable amounts of booty, this time in the great encirclements of the double battle of Brjansk and Viaz’ma in the first half of October.227 It was hardly any wonder that the mood in the Führer Headquarters and among the military leadership was buoyant. Jodl thought the victory at Viaz’ma the most decisive day of the Russian war, comparable with Königgrätz.228 Quartermaster Eduard Wagner imagined the Soviet Union to be on the verge of collapse. In a letter to his wife on 5 October, he wrote: ‘At present the Moscow operation is under way. We have the impression that the last great collapse is imminent… Operational aims are set that would once have made one’s hair stand on end. Eastwards of Moscow! Then, I estimate, the war will be largely over and perhaps there will then indeed be the collapse of the system. That’ll take us on a good stretch in the war against England. Over and again, I’m amazed at the Führer’s military judgement. He is intervening this time, one could say decisively, in the course of the operations, and up to now he has always been right.’229
On the evening of 8 October, Hitler spoke of the decisive turn in the military situation over the previous three days. Werner Koeppen, Rosenberg’s liaison at Führer Headquarters, reported to his boss that ‘the Russian army can essentially be seen as annihilated’.230 Hitler’s view — he would soon have to revise it drastically — was that Bolshevism was heading for ruin through lack of tank defences.231 ‘The rapid collapse of Russia would have a disastrous impact on England,’ he asserted. Churchill had placed all his hopes in the Russian war-machine. ‘Now that too is past.’232
Hitler had been in an unusually good mood at the meal table on the evening of 4 October, having just returned from a visit to Army High Command’s headquarters to congratulate Brauchitsch on his sixtieth birthday. Not for the first time, he gazed into the future in the ‘German East’. Within the next half-century, he foresaw 5 million farms settled there by former soldiers who would hold down the Continent through military force. He placed no value in colonies, he said, and could quickly come to terms with England on that score. Germany needed only a little colonial territory for coffee and tea plantations. Everything else it could produce on the Continent. Cameroon and a part of French Equatorial Africa or the Belgian Congo would suffice for Germany’s needs. ‘Our Mississippi must be the Volga, not the Niger,’ he concluded.233
Next evening, after Himmler had regaled those round the dinner table with his impressions of Kiev, and how 80–90 per cent of the impoverished population there could be ‘dispensed with’, Hitler came round to the subject of German dialects. It started with his dislike of the Saxon accent and spread to a rejection of all German dialects. They made the learning of German for foreigners more difficult. And German now had to be made into the general form of communication in Europe.234
Hitler was still in expansive frame of mind when Reich Economics Minister Walther Funk visited him on 13 October. The eastern territories would mean the end of unemployment in Europe, he claimed. He envisaged river links from the Don and the Dnieper between the Black Sea and the Danube, bringing oil and grain to Germany. ‘Europe — and not America — will be the land of unlimited possibilities.’235
Four days later, the presence of Fritz Todt prompted Hitler to an even more grandiose vision of new roads stretching through the conquered territories. Motorways would now run not just to the Crimea, but to the Caucasus, as well as more northerly areas. German cities would be established as administrative centres on the river crossings. Three million prisoners-of-war would be available to supply the labour for the next twenty years. German farmsteads would line the roads. ‘The monotonous Asiaticlike steppe would soon offer a totally different appearance.’ He now spoke of 10 million Germans, as well as settlers from Scandinavia, Holland, Flanders, and even America putting down roots there. The Slav population would ‘have to vegetate further in their own dirt away from the big roads’. Knowing how to read the road-signs would be quite sufficient education. Those eating German bread today, he said, did not get worked up about the regaining of the East Elbian granaries with the sword in the twelfth century. ‘Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.’ Hitler wished he were ten to fifteen years younger to experience what was going to happen.236
But by this time weather conditions alone meant the chances of Hitler’s vision ever materializing were sharply diminishing. The weather was already bad. By mid-October, military operations had stalled as heavy rains swept over the front. Units were stranded. The vehicles of Army Group Centre were bogged down on impassable roads. Away from the choked roads, nothing could move. ‘The Russians are impeding us far less than the wet and the mud,’ commented Field-Marshal Bock.237 Everywhere, it was a ‘struggle with the mud’.238 On top of that, there were serious shortages of fuel and munitions.239
There was also, not before time, concern now about winter provisions for the troops. Hitler directly asked Quartermaster-General Wagner, on a visit to Führer Headquarters, about this on 26 October. Wagner promised that Army Groups North and South would have a half of their necessary provisions by the end of the month but Army Group Centre, the largest of the three, would only have a third. Supplying the south was especially difficult since the Soviets had destroyed part of the railway track along the Sea of Azov.240 A few days later, on 1 November, Hitler paid a visit to the headquarters of the Army High Command to look at the exhibition of winter clothing which Wagner had assembled. Once more the Quartermaster-General assured Hitler that provision of the troops with sufficient clothing was in hand. Hitler accepted the assurance.241 When Wagner spoke to Goebbels, he gave the Propaganda Minister the impression that ‘everything had been thought of and nothing forgotten’.242
In fact, Wagner appears to have become seriously concerned by this vital matter only with the rapid deterioration of the weather in mid-October, while Halder had been aware as early as August that the problem of transport of winter clothing and equipment to the eastern front could only be solved by the defeat of the Red Army before the worst of the weather set in.243 Brauchitsch was still claiming, when he had lengthy talks with Goebbels on 1 November, that an advance to Stalingrad was possible before the snows arrived and that by the time the troops took up their winter quarters Moscow would be cut off.244 By now this was wild optimism. Brauchitsch was forced to acknowledge the existing weather problems, the impassable roads, transport difficulties, and the concern about the winter provisioning of the troops.245 In truth, whatever the unrealism of the Army and Wehrmacht High Commands about what was attainable in their view before the depths of winter, the last two weeks of October had had a highly sobering effect on the front-line commanders and the initial exaggerated hopes of the success of ‘Operation Typhoon’.246 By the end of the month the offensive of Army Group Centre’s exhausted troops had ground temporarily to a halt.247
The impression which Hitler gave, however, in his traditional speech to the Party’s old guard, assembled in the Löwenbräukeller in Munich on the late afternoon of 8 November, the anniversary of the 1923 Putsch, was quite different.248 The speech was intended primarily for domestic consumption.249 It aimed to boost morale, and to rally round the oldest and most loyal members of Hitler’s retinue after the difficult months of summer and autumn. Hitler paraded once more before his audience the victories in earlier campaigns and why he had felt compelled to attack the Soviet Union. He went on to describe the scale of the Soviet losses. ‘My Party Comrades,’ he declared, ‘no army in the world, including the Russian, recovers from those.’250 ‘Never before,’ he went on, ‘has a giant empire been smashed and struck down in a shorter time than Soviet Russia.’251 He remarked on enemy claims that the war would last into 1942. ‘It can last as long as it wants,’ he retorted. ‘The last battalion in this field will be a German one.’252 Despite the triumphalism, it was the strongest hint yet that the war was far from over.
The next day, after the usual ceremony at the ‘Temples of Honour’ of the Putsch ‘heroes’ on the Königsplatz in Munich, Hitler addressed his Reichsleiter and Gauleiter. The speech was in effect an appeal for unconditional loyalty to the very backbone of the Party, Hitler’s essential hardcore body of diehard support. His way of doing this, as usual, was a mixture of veiled threat and pathos. Those who stepped out of line, showed themselves weak, or conspired against him would be ruthlessly dealt with, was the first part of his message. He referred to the dismissal (in the previous year) of Josef Wagner from his position as Gauleiter of Westphalia-South and of Silesia. Wagner’s pro-Catholic sympathies (and those of his wife) were declared incompatible with the post of a Gauleiter. He had actually been the victim of inner-party intrigues. But the last straw for Hitler had been a letter from Frau Wagner (apparently with her husband’s backing), forbidding their daughter to marry a non-Christian SS-man. Hitler spoke darkly of the conspiratorial behaviour of Wagner and former SA chief Captain Franz Pfeffer von Salomon — now lodged in a concentration camp.253 Both were said to have had close relations with Rudolf Heß. Hitler stressed what a blow for him the Heß affair had been, and how thankful he was that British propaganda had missed the opportunity to portray the Deputy Führer as his ambassador carrying a peace-offer. Germany would have lost its allies as a result, Hitler imagined — something which even now stopped the blood in the veins.
He moved to pathos. There could never be any thought of capitulation. He would continue the war until it finished in victory. ‘And should a serious crisis afflict the Fatherland,’ he said with no sense of an apparent contradiction, ‘he would be seen with the last division.’254 To ensure the morale of the population, he placed his entire trust in the Party and his Reichsleiter and Gauleiter, ‘who must now place themselves around him as a solemnly sworn body (festverschworenes Korps)’.255 The Soviet Union he saw as already defeated, though it was impossible to predict how long resistance would last. He hoped to reach the goals intended before winter within four weeks. Then the troops could take up their winter quarters.
He ended with an appeal to have confidence, and to rejoice in the opportunity to take part in a struggle to shape Europe’s future. Germany was in a position to counter the greatest efforts of the United States. And what the overthrow of the Soviet Union signified could still not be fully grasped. It would give Germany land of limitless horizons. ‘This land, which we have conquered with the blood of German sons, will never be surrendered. Some time later millions of German peasant families will be settled here in order to carry the thrust of the Reich far to the east.’256
Shortly after his speech, Hitler was again on his way back to East Prussia, arriving back in the Wolf’s Lair on the evening of the next day.257 In the east, by this time, the snow was falling. Torrential rain had given way to ice and temperatures well below zero Fahrenheit. Even tanks were often unable to cope with ice-covered slopes. For the men, conditions were worsening by the day. There was already an acute shortage of warm clothing to protect them. Severe cases of frostbite were becoming widespread. The combat-strength of the infantry had sunk drastically.258 Army Group Centre alone had lost by this time approaching 300,000 men, with replacements of little more than half that number available.259
It was at this point, on 13 November, that, at a top-level conference of Army Group Centre, in a temperature of –8 degrees Fahrenheit, Guderian’s panzer army, as part of the orders for the renewed offensive, was assigned the objective of cutting off Moscow from its eastward communications by taking Gorki, 250 miles to the east of the Soviet capital.260 The astonishing lack of realism in the army’s orders derived from the perverse obstinacy with which the General Staff continued to persist in the view that the Red Army was on the point of collapse, and was greatly inferior to the Wehrmacht in fighting-power and leadership. Such views, despite all the evidence to the contrary, still prevailing with Halder (and, indeed, largely shared by the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, Bock), underlay the memorandum, presented by the General Staff on 7 November, for the second offensive.261 The hopelessly optimistic goals laid down — the occupation of Maykop (a main source of oil from the Caucasus), Stalingrad, and Gorki were on the wish-list — were the work of Halder and his staff. There was no pressure by Hitler on Halder. In fact, quite the reverse: Halder pressed for acceptance of his operational goals. These corresponded in good measure with goals Hitler had foreseen as attainable only in the following year.262 Had Hitler been more assertive at this stage in rejecting Halder’s proposals, the disasters of the coming weeks might have been avoided. As it was, Hitler’s uncertainty, hesitancy, and lack of clarity allowed Army High Command the scope for catastrophic errors of judgement.263
The opposition which Halder’s plans encountered at the conference on 13 November then resulted in a restriction of the goals to a direct assault on Moscow. This was pushed through in full recognition of the insoluble logistical problems and immense dangers of an advance in near-arctic conditions without any possibility of securing supplies. Even the goal was not clear. The breach of Soviet communications to the east could not possibly be attained. Forward positions in the vicinity of Moscow were utterly exposed. Only the capture of the city itself, bringing — it was presumed — the collapse and capitulation of the Soviet regime and the end of the war, could justify the risk.264 But with insufficient air-power to bomb the city into submission before the ground-troops arrived, entry into Moscow would have meant street-by-street fighting. With the forces available, and in the prevailing conditions, it is difficult to see how the German army could have proved victorious.
Nevertheless, in mid-November the drive on Moscow recommenced. Hitler was by now distinctly uneasy about the new offensive. On the evening of 25 November he expressed, according to the recollection of his Army Adjutant, Major Gerhard Engel, his ‘great concern about the Russian winter and weather’. ‘We started a month too late,’ he went on, returning once more to the strategy he had always favoured. ‘The ideal solution would be the fall of Leningrad, capture of the southern area, and then, in that event, a pincer attack on Moscow from south and north together with frontal assault. Then there would be the prospect of an eastern wall with military bases.’ Hitler ended, characteristically, by remarking that time was ‘his greatest nightmare’.265
A few days earlier, Hitler had been more outwardly optimistic in a three-hour conversation with Goebbels. The Propaganda Minister remarked on how well Hitler was looking — almost unscathed from the pressures of the war, he thought. At first the discussion ranged over the situation in North Africa, where Hitler was more pessimistic than Army High Command about holding the position, given the inability to transport sufficient troops and material to that front. He foresaw setbacks there, and advised Goebbels not to raise expectations of military success. But his eyes were so fixed on the east, Goebbels recorded, that he regarded events in North Africa as no more than ‘peripheral’, and unable to affect events on the Continent itself.266 Hitler then turned to the eastern campaign. Once more he repeated his intention of destroying Leningrad and Moscow. ‘If the weather stays favourable, he still wants to make the attempt to encircle Moscow and thereby abandon it to hunger and devastation.’267
Whether an advance to the Caucasus would prove successful depended on the weather. But the improvement in weather and road conditions — on the frozen surfaces, instead of mud — had at least allowed motorized units to operate again. The supplies problems were serious. But he remained confident that the troops would master the situation. Goebbels asked him if he still believed in victory. Typically, he answered that ‘if he had believed in victory in 1918 when he lay without help as a half-blinded corporal in a Pomeranian military hospital, why should he not now believe in our victory when he controlled the strongest armed forces in the world and almost the whole of Europe was prostrate at his feet?’ He played down the difficulties; they occurred in every war. ‘World history was not made by weather,’ he added.268
Three days later, Goebbels was telephoned from FHQ and told to be cautious in his propaganda about the exhibition of winter clothing for the troops. It was proving scarcely possible to transport the provisions to the front. In these circumstances, such an exhibition at home could stir up ‘bad blood’.269 The caution was justified. Within weeks, the start of an emergency winter-clothing collection in Germany would give the most obvious sign that propaganda reassurance about provisions for the troops had been misplaced. It pointed unmistakably to a serious failure in planning.270
On 29 November, with Hitler once again briefly in Berlin, Goebbels had a further chance to speak with him at length. Hitler appeared full of optimism and confidence, brimming with energy, in excellent health.271 He professed still to be positive, despite the reversal in Rostov, where General Ewald von Kleist’s panzer army had been forced back the previous day after initially taking the city.272 Hitler now intended to withdraw sufficiently far from the city to allow massive air-raids which would bomb it to oblivion as a ‘bloody example’. The Führer had never favoured, wrote Goebbels, taking any of the Soviet major cities. There were no practical advantages in it, and it simply left the problem of feeding the women and children. There was no doubt, Hitler went on, that the enemy had lost most of their great armaments centres. That, he claimed, had been the aim of the war, and had been largely achieved. He hoped to advance further on Moscow. But he acknowledged that a great encirclement was impossible at present. The weather uncertainty meant any attempt to advance a further 200 kilometres to the east, without secure supplies, would be madness. The front-line troops would be cut off and would have to be withdrawn with a great loss of prestige which, at the current time, could not be afforded. So the offensive had to take place on a smaller scale.273 Hitler still expected Moscow to fall. When it did, there would be little left of it but ruins. In the following year, there would be an expansion of the offensive to the Caucasus to gain possession of Soviet oil supplies — or at least deny them to the Bolsheviks. The Crimea would be turned into a huge German settlement area for the best ethnic types, to be incorporated into the Reich territory as a Gau — named the ‘Ostrogoth Gau’ (Ostgotengau) as a reminder of the oldest Germanic traditions and the very origins of Germandom.274
Hitler was evidently by this time in his element, and allowing Goebbels a sight of the vision of German prosperity based on colonization and exploitation of the east that he had expounded many times to his entourage in the Wolf’s Lair. He returned, as always, to the threat from the west. It was only a matter of when London would recognize the ‘hopeless position of the plutocracies’.275 He expressed confidence — in contrast to some of his comments only a few days later — that the troops were being provided with winter equipment. Once that was the case, the weather would determine how far the advance would go. ‘What cannot be achieved now, will be achieved in the coming summer,’ were Hitler’s sentiments, according to Goebbels’s notes. ‘In any event, the Bolsheviks were to be driven back to Asia. European Russia must be won for Europe.’ Hitler saw 1942 as difficult, but a far better situation developing in 1943. Foodstuffs and raw materials were now available from the occupied European parts of the Soviet Union. Once the exploitation of the area was properly organized, ‘our victory can no longer be endangered’.276
Hitler’s show of optimism was put on to delude Goebbels — or himself. On the very same day that he spoke with the Propaganda Minister, he was told by Walter Rohland — in charge of tank production and just back from a visit to the front — in the presence of Keitel, Jodl, Brauchitsch, Leeb, and other military leaders, of the superiority of the Soviet panzer production. Rohland also warned, in the light of his own experience gleaned from a trip to the USA in 1930, of the immense armaments potential which would be ranged against Germany should America enter the war. The war would then be lost for Germany.277 Fritz Todt, one of Hitler’s most trusted and gifted ministers, who had arranged the meeting about armaments, followed up Rohland’s comments with a statement on German armaments production. Whether in the meeting, or more privately afterwards, Todt added: ‘This war can no longer be won militarily.’ Hitler listened without interruption, then asked: ‘How, then, should I end this war?’ Todt replied that the war could only be concluded politically. Hitler retorted: ‘I can scarcely still see a way of coming politically to an end.’278
As Hitler was returning to East Prussia on the evening of 29 November, the news coming in from the front was not good.279 Over the next days things were to worsen markedly.
Immediately on his return to the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler fell into ‘a state of extreme agitation’ about the position of Kleist’s panzer army, thrown back from Rostov. Kleist wanted to move back to a secure defensive position at the mouth of the Bakhmut river. Hitler forbade this and demanded the retreat be halted further east. Brauchitsch was summoned to Führer Headquarters and subjected to a torrent of abuse. Browbeaten, the Commander-in-Chief, an ill and severely depressed man, passed on the order to the Commander of Army Group South, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt. The reply came from Rundstedt, evidently not realizing that the order had come from Hitler himself, that he could not obey it, and that either the order must be changed or he be relieved of his post.280 This reply was passed directly to Hitler. In the early hours of the following morning, Rundstedt, one of Hitler’s most outstanding and loyal generals, was sacked — the scapegoat for the setback at Rostov — and the command given to Field-Marshal Walter von Reichenau.281 Later that day, Reichenau telephoned to say the enemy had broken through the line ordered by Hitler and requested permission to retreat to the line Rundstedt had demanded. Hitler concurred.282
On 2 December, Hitler flew south to view Kleist’s position for himself. He was put fully in the picture about the reports, which he had not seen, from the Army Group prior to the attack on Rostov. The outcome had been accurately forecast. He exonerated the Army Group and the panzer army from blame. But he did not reinstate Rundstedt.283 That would have amounted to a public acceptance of his own error.
By that same date, 2 December, German troops, despite the atrocious weather, had advanced almost to Moscow. Reconnaissance troops reached a point only some twelve miles from the city centre.284 But the offensive had become hopeless. In intense cold — the temperature outside Moscow on 4 December had dropped to — 32 degrees Fahrenheit — and without adequate support, Guderian decided on the evening of 5 December to pull back his troops to more secure defensive positions. Hoepner’s 4th Panzer Army and Reinhardt’s 3rd, some twenty miles north of the Kremlin, were forced to do the same.285 On 5 December, the same day that the German offensive irredeemably broke down, the Soviet counter-attack began. By the following day, 100 divisions along a 200-mile stretch of the front fell upon the exhausted soldiers of Army Group Centre.286
Amid the deepening gloom in the Führer Headquarters over events in the east, the best news Hitler could have wished for arrived. Reports came in during the evening of Sunday, 7 December that the Japanese had attacked the American fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.287 Early accounts indicated that two battleships and an aircraft carrier had been sunk, and four others and four cruisers severely damaged.288 The following morning President Roosevelt received the backing of the US Congress to declare war on Japan.289 Winston Churchill, overjoyed now to have the Americans ‘in the same boat’ (as Roosevelt had put it to him), had no difficulty in obtaining authorization from the War Cabinet for an immediate British declaration of war.290
Hitler thought he had good reason to be delighted. ‘We can’t lose the war at all,’ he exclaimed. ‘We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years.’291
This rash assumption was predicated on the view which Hitler had long held: that Japan’s intervention would both tie the United States down in the Pacific theatre, and seriously weaken Britain through an assault on its possessions in the Far East.292 Goebbels echoed the expectations: ‘Through the outbreak of war between Japan and the USA, a complete shift in the general world picture has taken place. The United States will scarcely now be in a position to transport worthwhile material to England let alone the Soviet Union.’293
Relations between Japan and the USA had been sharply deteriorating throughout the autumn. With the collapse of any rapprochement by mid-October over the loosening of the economic sanctions which were biting hard in Japan, the government of Prince Konoye had resigned and been replaced by an administration headed by General Tojo.294 Since then, the hardliners and warmongers in the military had been increasingly in the ascendant. Early in November they had fixed a deadline for agreement with the Americans. If none could be reached, they had stipulated, there would be war.295 Though kept in the dark about details, the German Ambassador in Tokyo, General Eugen Ott, informed Berlin early in November of his impressions that war between Japan and the USA and Britain was likely. He had also learned that the Japanese administration was about to ask for an assurance that Germany would go to Japan’s aid in the event of her becoming engaged in war with the USA.296 Such information doubtless lay behind Hitler’s optimism, when speaking to Goebbels in the middle of the month, that Japan would ‘actively enter the war in the foreseeable future’.297
The Japanese leadership had, in fact, taken the decision on 12 November that, should war with the USA become inevitable, an attempt would be made to reach agreement with Germany on participation in the war against America, and on a commitment to avoid a separate peace. Any insistence by Germany on Japan’s involvement in the war against the Soviet Union would be met with the response that Japan did not intend to intervene for the time being. Should Germany then delay her entry into the war against the USA, this would have to be taken on board.298
On 21 November Ribbentrop had laid down the Reich’s policy to Ott: Berlin regarded it as self-evident that if either country, Germany or Japan, found itself at war with the USA, the other country would not sign a separate peace.299 Two days later, General Okamoto, the head of the section of the Japanese General Staff dealing with foreign armies, went a stage further. He asked Ambassador Ott whether Germany would regard itself as at war with the USA if Japan were to open hostilities.300 There is no record of Ribbentrop’s replying to Ott’s telegram, which arrived on 24 November. But when he met Ambassador Oshima in Berlin on the evening of 28 November, Ribbentrop assured him that Germany would come to Japan’s aid if she were to be at war with the USA. And there was no possibility of a separate peace between Germany and the USA under any circumstances. The Führer was determined on this point.301
For the Japanese, little depended on the agreement with Germany. Already two days before Ribbentrop met Oshima, Japanese air and naval forces had set out for Hawaii. And on 1 December, the order had been given to attack on the 7th.302
Ribbentrop’s assurances were fully in line with Hitler’s remarks during Matsuoka’s visit to Berlin in the spring, that Germany would immediately draw the consequences should Japan get into conflict with the USA.303 But at this point, before entering any formal agreement with the Japanese, Ribbentrop evidently deemed it necessary to consult Hitler. He told Oshima this on the evening of 1 December.304 The next day, Hitler flew, as we have seen, to visit Army Group South following the setback at Rostov. Bad weather forced him to stay overnight in Poltava on the way back, where he was apparently cut off from communications. He was able to return to his headquarters only on 4 December.305 Ribbentrop reached him there and gained approval for what amounted to a new tripartite pact — which the German Foreign Minister rapidly agreed with Ciano — stipulating that should war break out between any one of the partners and the USA, the other two states would immediately regard themselves as also at war with America.306 Already before Pearl Harbor, therefore, Germany had effectively committed itself to war with the USA should Japan — as now seemed inevitable — become involved in hostilities.
The agreement, which had inserted the mutual pledge and not just left a one-sided commitment, was still unsigned when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. This unprovoked Japanese aggression gave Hitler what he wanted without having already committed himself formally to any action from the German side. However, he was keen to have a revised agreement — completed on 11 December, and now stipulating only an obligation not to conclude an armistice or peace treaty with the USA without mutual consent — for propaganda reasons: to include in his big speech to the Reichstag that afternoon.307
The idea of a speech to the Reichstag in mid-December, giving an account of the war-year 1941, had been in Hitler’s mind for some weeks. He had spoken to Goebbels about it as early as 21 November.308 Immediately following Pearl Harbor, he decided to make a declaration of war on the USA the high-point of his long-planned speech. As soon as he heard the news of the Japanese attack, he telephoned Goebbels, expressing his delight, and ordering the summoning of the Reichstag for Wednesday, 10 December, ‘to make the German stance clear’. Goebbels commented: ‘We will, on the basis of the Tripartite Pact, probably not avoid a declaration of war on the United States. But that’s now not so bad. We’re now to a certain extent protected on the flanks. The United States will no longer be so rashly able to provide England with aircraft, weapons, and transport-space, since it can be presumed that they will need all that for their own war with Japan.’309
From a propaganda point of view, the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor was most timely for Hitler. Given the crisis on the eastern front, he had little of a positive nature to include in a progress-report to the German people. No further mention had, in fact, been made of a speech to the Reichstag since he had himself originally raised the prospect weeks earlier. With nothing but setbacks and a prolonged war, contrary to all promises, to account for, he would almost certainly have wished to avoid a speech. But now the Japanese attack gave him a positive angle. On 8 December, Ribbentrop told Ambassador Oshima that the Führer was contemplating the best way, from the psychological point of view, of declaring war on the United States.310 Since he wanted time to prepare carefully such an important speech, Hitler had the assembling of the Reichstag postponed from 10 December, the date he had originally stipulated, to the next day, despite Japanese pressure for an earlier date.311 At least, Goebbels remarked, the time of the speech, three o’clock in the afternoon, though scarcely good for the German public, would allow the Japanese and Americans to hear it.312
On the morning of 9 December, Hitler’s train pulled in at the Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin.313 He told Goebbels, who saw him at midday, of his suprise and initial incredulity at the attack on Pearl Harbor, though he had always expected that Japan would be forced to act before long if she did not want to give up her claim to world-power status.314 ‘The Führer is beaming again with optimism and confidence in victory,’ Goebbels remarked. ‘It is good, after so many days when we’ve had to digest unpleasant news, to come into direct contact with him again.’315 Hitler still had to prepare his speech. He gave Goebbels a résumé of what he intended to say.316 But when Goebbels saw him again the following lunchtime, 10 December, Hitler had still found no time, he said, to begin work on the speech.317
That Germany would declare war on the USA was, as we have seen, a matter of course. No agreement with the Japanese compelled it.318 But Hitler did not hesitate. A formal declaration might have to wait until the Reichstag could be summoned. But at the earliest opportunity, on the night of 8–9 December, he had already given the order to U-boats to sink American ships.319 A formal declaration of war was necessary to ensure as far as possible — in accordance with the agreement of 11 December — that Japan would remain in the war.320 And it was also important, from Hitler’s point of view, to retain the initiative, and not let this pass to the United States. Certain, as he had been for many months, that Roosevelt was just looking for the chance to intervene in the European conflict, Hitler thought that his declaration was merely anticipating the inevitable and, in any case, formalizing what was in effect already the situation. Not least, for the German public, it was important to demonstrate that he still controlled events. To await a certain declaration of war from America would, from Hitler’s standpoint, have been a sign of weakness.321 Prestige and propaganda, as always, were never far from the centre of Hitler’s considerations. ‘A great power doesn’t let itself have war declared on it, it declares war itself,’ Ribbentrop — doubtless echoing Hitler’s sentiments — told Weizsäcker.322
Hitler’s speech on the afternoon of Thursday, 11 December, lasted one and a half hours.323 It was not one of his best. The first half consisted of no more than the lengthy, triumphalist report on the progress of the war which Hitler had intended to provide long before the events of Pearl Harbor. There was some surprise at the figure of 160,000 German dead which Hitler gave; a far higher figure had been presumed.324 (The figure matched, in fact, those available to the army leadership, though Hitler omitted to mention that total German losses, including wounded and more than 35,000 missing, were by this time over 750,000 men.)325 The rest of the speech was largely taken up with a long-drawn-out, sustained attack on Roosevelt. Hitler built up the image of a President, backed by the ‘entire satanic insidiousness’ of the Jews, set on war and the destruction of Germany.326 Eventually he came to the climax of his speech: the provocations — up to now unanswered — had finally forced Germany and Italy to act. He read out a version of the statement he had had given to the American Chargé d’Affaires that afternoon, with a formal declaration of war on the USA. He then read out the new agreement, signed that very day, committing Germany, Italy, and Japan to rejecting a unilateral armistice or peace with Britain or the USA.327
In Goebbels’s view, Hitler’s speech had had a ‘fantastic’ effect on the German people, to whom the declaration of war had come neither as a surprise, nor a shock.328 In reality, the speech had been able to do little to raise morale which, given the certain extension of the war into the indefinite future, and now the opening of aggression against a further powerful adversary, had sunk to its lowest point since the conflict began.329
Goebbels was, in fact, not blind to the poor state of morale.330 Hitler, for his part, had the capacity, as always, to convince not only himself, but those in his presence, that things were less bad than they seemed. Not only did he see Japan’s entry into the war as a turning-point. He also continued to convey optimism about the eastern front, despite the depressing situation there. ‘The Führer doesn’t take too tragically the events in the theatre of the eastern campaign,’ Goebbels recorded, after he had spoken to Hitler on 9 December.331 Weather and supplies problems had compelled a need, already present, for a break to build up strength and resources for a spring offensive against the Soviet Union — in the south at the end of April, and in the centre in mid-May. This would be so carefully prepared that it would quickly lead to victory. By then the army would be completely ready, and would not have to tap its last reserves.
Hitler’s ability to put a positive gloss even on a major setback allowed him even to see the onset of the bad weather in the east in the autumn as an advantage. Had the rainy weather not arrived when it did, he said, German troops would have pushed so far forward that the supplies problem could not have been solved. This showed ‘how good fate is to us and how it prevents us through its own intervention from mistakes which without that we would doubtless have made’.332 He acknowledged how necessary it had been to call off the offensive in order to give time for the exhausted troops to recuperate. And he admitted that there were at present no sufficient weapons to counter the heavy Russian panzers. Where they kept producing them from was a mystery, but ‘currently the most serious concern of the front’. ‘The Bolsheviks,’ he went on, ‘are for the most part comparable with animals; but animals, too, are sometimes unyielding (standhaft), and since the Soviet Union needs take no consideration of its own people, it is in a certain way superior to us.’333 But Hitler concluded that the recent setbacks were only temporary ones, and that Germany’s position, especially after the entry of the Japanese into the war, was so favourable that ‘the conclusion of this mighty continental struggle was not in doubt’.334
The following day, Hitler was at least somewhat more realistic. He conceded that the situation in the east was ‘at the moment not very good’, and agreed with Goebbels’s wishes to prepare the people for unavoidable setbacks through propaganda more attuned to the realism of the harshness of war and the sacrifices it demanded. Hitler and Goebbels evidently discussed the catastrophic lack of winter clothing for the troops, and the effect this was having on morale.335 Goebbels was well aware from the bitter criticism in countless soldiers’ letters to their loved ones of how bad the impact of the supplies crisis was on morale, both at the front and at home.336 But Hitler’s eyes were already set on the big spring offensive in 1942.337 And, as always when faced with setbacks, he pointed to the ‘struggle for power’, and how difficulties had at that time been overcome.338
The need to boost morale, in the first instance among those he held responsible for upholding it on the home front, undoubtedly lay behind Hitler’s address — the second in little over a month — to his Gauleiter on the afternoon of 12 December.
He began with the consequences of Pearl Harbor. If Japan had not entered the war, he would have at some point had to declare war on the USA. ‘Now the East-Asia conflict falls to us like a present in the lap,’ Goebbels reported him saying. The pyschological significance should not be underrated. Without the conflict between Japan and the USA, a declaration of war on the Americans would have been difficult to accept by the German people. As it was, it was taken as a matter of course. The extension to the conflict also had positive consequences for the U-boat war in the Atlantic. Freed of restraint, he expected the tonnage sunk now to increase greatly — and this would probably be decisive in winning the war. Aware of objections that the alliance with the Japanese stood opposed to ‘the interests of the white man in East Asia’, Hitler was frank, forthright, and pragmatic: ‘Interests of the white race must at present give place to the interests of the German people. We are fighting for our life. What use is a fine theory if the basis of life (Lebensboden) is taken away?… In a life-and-death struggle, all means available to a people are right. We would ally ourselves with anyone if we could weaken the Anglo-Saxon position.’339
He turned to the war in the east. Both tone and content were much as they had been with Goebbels in private. He acknowledged that the troops had had for the time being to be pulled back to a defensible line, but, given the supplies problems, saw this as far better than standing some 300 kilometres further east. The troops were now being saved for the coming spring and summer offensive. A new panzer army in preparation within Germany would be ready by then. He also alluded to the difficulties in defending against the Russian tanks, but pointed out that a new anti-tank gun was well in preparation. He viewed the general situation very favourably. The North African campaign, he misleadingly stated, was well provided for, and an Allied landing on the Continent for the time being out of the question. The difficulties faced at present were determined by the elements (naturbedingt).340
It was his firm intention, he declared, in the following year to finish off (erledigen) Soviet Russia at least as far as the Urals. ‘Then it would perhaps be possible to reach a point of stabilization in Europe through a sort of half-peace’, by which he appeared to mean that Europe would exist as a self-sufficient, heavily armed fortress, leaving the remaining belligerent powers to fight it out in other theatres of war. An attack on the European Continent, he claimed, would then be much less possible than at present. And given the progress made in German anti-aircraft weapons, he was ‘extraordinarily sceptical’ about the impact, which, he thought, would become ever more limited, of British air-raids. If this turned out to be the case, he claimed, Britain would be in a quandary.341
He outlined his vision of the future. His National Socialist conviction, he said, had become even stronger during the war. It was essential after the war was over to undertake a huge social programme embracing workers and farmers. The German people had deserved this. And it would provide — always the political reasoning behind the aim of material improvement — the ‘most secure basis of our state system (unseres staatlichen Gefüges)’. The enormous housing programme he had in mind would, he stated openly, be made possible through cheap labour — through depressing wages. The work would be done by the forced labour of the defeated peoples. He pointed out that the prisoners-of-war were now being fully employed in the war economy. This was as it should be, he stated, and had been the case in antiquity, giving rise in the first place to slave labour. German war debts would doubtless be 200–300 billion Marks. These had to be covered through the work ‘in the main of the people who had lost the war’. The cheap labour would allow houses to be built and sold at a substantial profit which would go towards paying off the war-debts within ten to fifteen years.342
Hitler put forward once more his vision of the east as Germany’s ‘future India’, which would become within three or four generations ‘absolutely German’.343 There would, he made clear, be no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches. After the trouble of the summer, he had to take a line which both appeased the Party hotheads but also restrained their instincts. For the time being, he ordered slow progression in the ‘Church Question’. ‘But it is clear,’ noted Goebbels, himself numbering among the most aggressive anti-Church radicals, ‘that after the war it has to find a general solution… There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world-view.’344
Pressing engagements in Berlin — particularly the audience next day with Ambassador Oshima to award him the Great Golden Cross of the Order of the German Eagle — prevented Hitler from returning that evening, as he had intended, to the Wolf’s Lair.345 When he eventually reached his headquarters again, in the morning of 16 December, it was back to a reality starkly different from the rosy picture he had painted to his Gauleiter.346 A potentially catastrophic military crisis was unfolding.
Already before Hitler had left for Berlin, Field-Marshal von Bock had outlined the weakness of his Army Group against a concentrated attack, and stated the danger of serious defeat if no reserves were sent.347 Then, while Hitler was in the Reich capital, as the Soviet counter-offensive penetrated German lines, driving a dangerous wedge between the 2nd and 4th Armies, Guderian reported the desperate position of his troops and a serious ‘crisis in confidence’ of the field commands.348 After Schmundt had been sent to Army Group Centre on 14 December to discuss the situation at first hand, Hitler responded immediately, neither awaiting the report from Brauchitsch, who had accompanied Schmundt, nor involving Halder.349 Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm, Commander of the Reserve Army, was summoned and asked for a report on the divisions that could be sent straight away to the eastern front. Göring and the head of the Wehrmacht transport, Lieutenant-General Rudolf Gercke, were told to arrange the transport.350 Four and a half divisions of reserves, assembled throughout Germany at breakneck speed, were rushed to the haemorrhaging front. Another nine divisions were drummed up from the western front and the Balkans.351 On 15 December Jodl passed on to Halder Hitler’s order that there must be no retreat where the front could possibly be held. But where the position was untenable, and once preparations for an orderly withdrawal had been made, retreat to a more defensible line was permitted.352 This matched the recommendations of Bock and of the man who would soon replace him as Commander of Army Group Centre, at this time still commanding the 4th Army, Field-Marshal Günther von Kluge.353 That evening, Brauchitsch, deeply depressed, told Halder that he saw no way out for the army from its current position.354 Hitler had by this time long since ceased listening to his broken Army Commander-in-Chief — by now, as Halder put it, ‘scarcely any longer even a postman (kaum mehr Briefträger)’ — and was dealing directly with his Army Group Commanders.355
Bock had, in fact, already recommended to Brauchitsch on 13 December that Hitler should make a decision on whether the Army Group Centre should stand fast and fight its ground, or retreat. In either eventuality, Bock had openly stated, there was the danger that the Army Group would collapse ‘in ruins (in Trümmer)’. Bock advanced no firm recommendation. But he indicated the disadvantages of retreat: the discipline of the troops might give way, and the order to stand-fast at the new line be disobeyed.356 The implication was plain. The retreat might turn into a rout. Bock’s evaluation of the situation, remarkably, had not been passed on to Hitler at the time. He only received it on 16 December, when Bock told Schmundt what he had reported to Brauchitsch three days earlier.357
That night, Guderian, who two days earlier had struggled through a blizzard for twenty-two hours to meet Brauchitsch at Roslavl and put his case for a withdrawal, was telephoned on a crackly line by Hitler: there was to be no withdrawal; the line was to be held; replacements would be sent.358 Army Group North was told the same day, 16 December, that it had to defend the front to the last man. Army Group South had also to hold the front and would be sent reserves from the Crimea after the imminent fall of Sevastopol. Army Group Centre was informed that extensive withdrawals could not be countenanced because of the wholesale loss of heavy weapons which would ensue. ‘With personal commitment of the Commander, subordinate commanders, and officers, the troops were to be compelled to fanatical resistance in their positions without respect for the enemy breaking through on the flanks or rear.’359
Hitler’s decision that there should be no retreat, conveyed to Brauchitsch and Halder in the night of 16–17 December, was his own. But it seems to have taken Bock’s assessment as the justification for the high-risk tactic of no-retreat. His order stated: ‘There can be no question of a withdrawal. Only in some places has there been deep penetration by the enemy. Setting up rear positions is fantasy. The front is suffering from one thing only: the enemy has more soldiers. It doesn’t have more artillery. It’s much worse than we are.’360
On 13 December, Field-Marshal von Bock had submitted to Brauchitsch his request to be relieved of his command, since, so he claimed, he had not overcome the consequences of his earlier illness.361 Five days later, Hitler had Brauchitsch inform Bock that the request for leave was granted. Kluge took over the command of Army Group Centre.362 On 19 December it was the turn — long overdue — of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field-Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, to depart.
Brauchitsch’s sacking had been on the cards for some time. Hitler’s military adjutants had been speculating over his replacement since mid-November.363 His health had for weeks been very poor. He had suffered a serious heart attack in mid-November.364 At the beginning of December, his health, Halder noted, was ‘again giving cause for concern’ under the pressure of constant worrying.365 Hitler spoke of him even in November as ‘a totally sick man, at the end of his tether’.366 Squeezed in the conflict between Hitler and Halder, Brauchitsch’s position was indeed unenviable. But his own feebleness had contributed markedly to his misery. Constantly trying to balance demands from his Army Group Commanders and from Halder with the need to please Hitler, his weakness and compliance had left him ever more exposed in the gathering crisis to a Leader who from the start lacked confidence in his army leadership and was determined to intervene in tactical dispositions. It was recognized by those who saw the way Hitler treated him that Brauchitsch was no longer up to the job.367 Brauchitsch, for his part, was anxious to resign, and tried to do so immediately following the start of the Soviet counter-offensive in the first week of December. He thought of Kluge or Manstein as possible successors.368
Hitler disingenuously told Schmundt at the time (and commented along similar lines to his Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, two days later) that he was clueless about a replacement. Schmundt had for some time favoured Hitler himself taking over as head of the army, to restore confidence, and now put this to him. Hitler said he would think about it.369 According to Below, it was in the night of 16–17 December that Hitler finally decided to take on the supreme command of the army himself. At the height of the crisis which culminated in the ‘stand-fast’ order, Brauchitsch had shown himself in Hitler’s eyes to be once and for all dispensable.370 The names of Manstein and Kesselring were thrown momentarily into the ring. But Hitler did not like Manstein, brilliant commander though he was. And Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring, known as a tough and capable organizer, and an eternal optimist, was earmarked for command of the Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean (and, perhaps, was in addition thought to be too much in Göring’s pocket).371 In any case, Hitler had convinced himself by this time that being in charge of the army was no more than a ‘little matter of operational command’ that ‘anyone can do’.372 Halder, who, it might have been imagined, would have had most to lose by the change-over, in fact appears to have welcomed it. He seems momentarily to have deluded himself that through this move, taking him directly into Hitler’s presence in decision-making, he might expand his own influence to matters concerning the entire Wehrmacht. Keitel put an early stop to any such pretensions, ensuring that, as before, Halder’s responsibilities were confined to strictly army concerns and that he himself took over all non-operational tasks which had previously pertained to the OKH.373
Hitler’s takeover of the supreme command of the army was formally announced on 19 December.374 In one sense, since Brauchitsch had been increasingly bypassed during the deepening crisis, the change was less fundamental than it appeared. But it meant, nevertheless, that Hitler was now taking over direct responsibility for tactics, as well as grand strategy. No other head of a belligerent state — not even Stalin, who after the early débâcle, pulled back somewhat from direct intervention in army tactics — was so closely involved in the minutiae of military affairs. Hitler was absurdly overloading himself still further. And his takeover of direct command of the army would deprive him, in the eyes of the German public, of scapegoats for future military disasters.375
Immediately on the heels of the announcement of Brauchitsch’s resignation came an even plainer sign of crisis in the east. On 20 December, Hitler published an appeal to the German people to send warm winter clothing for the troops in the east.376 Goebbels listed all the items of clothes to be handed in during a lengthy radio broadcast that evening.377 The population responded with shock and anger — astonished and bitter that the leadership had not made proper provision for the basic necessities of their loved ones fighting at the front and exposed to a merciless, polar winter.378
Also on the day after Brauchitsch’s dismissal, Hitler sent a strongly-worded directive to Army Group Centre, reaffirming the order issued four days earlier to hold position and fight to the last man. ‘The fanatical will to defend the ground on which the troops are standing,’ ran the directive, ‘must be injected into the troops with every possible means, even the toughest… Where this will is not fully present the front will begin to crumble (ins Wanken geraten) without any prospect of stabilizing it once more in a prepared position. For, every officer and man must be clear that the withdrawal of the troops will expose them to the dangers of the Russian winter far more than staying in position, however inadequately equipped it may be. That is quite apart from the considerable, unavoidable material losses which must occur in a withdrawal… Talk of Napoleon’s retreat is threatening to become reality. Thus, there must only be a withdrawal where there is a prepared position further in the rear… But if troops have to leave a position without being offered an equivalent substitute, then a crisis of confidence in the leadership threatens to develop from every retreat.’ Where a systematic withdrawal was to take place, Hitler ordered the most brutal scorched-earth policy. ‘Every piece of territory which is forced to be left to the enemy must be made unusable for him as far as possible. Every place of inhabitation must be burnt down and destroyed without consideration for the population, to deprive the enemy of all possibility of shelter.’ He concluded with an appeal to the force of will and to a sense of superiority which must not be lost. There was, he declared, ‘no reason that the troops should lose their sense of superiority, constantly proven up to now, over this enemy. On the contrary, it will depend on strengthening everywhere the justified self-confidence and on possessing the will to cope with this enemy and the difficulties conditioned by the weather until sufficient reinforcements have arrived and the front is thereby finally secured.’379
One commander, more unwilling than most to accept Hitler’s ‘Halt Order’ lying down, was the panzer hero Guderian. Through Schmundt, Guderian had a direct line to Hitler.380 He made use of it to arrange a special meeting at Führer Headquarters where he could put his case for withdrawal openly to Hitler. Guderian had his own way in dealing with military orders which he found unacceptable. With Bock’s connivance, he had tacitly ignored or bypassed early orders, usually by acting first and notifying later. But with Bock’s replacement by Kluge, that changed. Guderian and Kluge did not get on. Hitler was well informed of Guderian’s ‘unorthodoxy’. It is perhaps suprising, then, that he was still prepared to grant the tank commander an audience, lasting five hours, on 20 December, and allow him to put his case at length.381
All Hitler’s military entourage were present. Guderian informed him of the state of the 2nd Panzer Army and 2nd Army, and his intention of retreating. Hitler expressly forbade this. But Guderian was not telling the whole story. The retreat, for which he had presumed to receive authorization from Brauchitsch six days earlier, was already under way. Hitler was unremitting. He said that the troops should dig in where they stood and hold every square yard of land. Guderian pointed out that the earth was frozen to a depth of five feet. Hitler rejoined that they would then have to blast craters with howitzers, as had been done in Flanders during the First World War. Guderian quietly pointed out that ground conditions in Flanders and Russia in midwinter were scarcely comparable. Hitler insisted on his order. Guderian objected that the loss of life would be enormous, Hitler pointed to the ‘sacrifice’ of Frederick the Great’s men. ‘Do you think Frederick the Great’s grenadiers were anxious to die?’ Hitler retorted. ‘They wanted to live, too, but the king was right in asking them to sacrifice themselves. I believe that I, too, am entitled to ask any German soldier to lay down his life.’ He thought Guderian was too close to the suffering of his troops, and had too much pity for them. ‘You should stand back more,’ he suggested. ‘Believe me, things appear clearer when examined at longer range.’382
Guderian returned to the front empty-handed. Within days, Kluge had requested the tank commander’s removal, and on 26 December, Guderian was informed of his dismissal.383 He was far from the last of the top-line generals to fall from grace during the winter crisis. Within the following three weeks Generals Helmuth Förster, Hans Graf von Sponeck, Erich Hoepner, and Adolf Strauß were sacked, Field-Marshal von Leeb was relieved of his command of Army Group North, and Field-Marshal von Reichenau died of a stroke. Sponeck was sentenced to death — subsequently commuted — for withdrawing his troops from the Kerch peninsula on the Crimean front. Hoepner, also for retreating, was summarily expelled from the army with loss of all his pension rights.384 By the time that the crisis was overcome, in spring, numerous subordinate commanders had also been replaced.385
The crisis lasted into January. On New Year’s Eve, while the newly acquired gramophone blared out Lieder by Richard Strauss and, of course, the inevitable Wagner, and the inhabitants of the Führer Headquarters got tipsier and merrier, Hitler spent three hours on the telephone to Kluge, insisting that the front be held.386 When he was eventually finished, he summoned his secretaries for tea in the middle of the night. Their good spirits soon evaporated. Hitler swiftly dampened the mood by nodding off to sleep. The merry-making palled. His entourage, coming in to congratulate him, removed their smiles and put on serious faces. It was so dreadful that Christa Schroeder went back to her room and burst into tears. She found the remedy in returning to the mess and joining a few of the young officers there in singing sea-shanties to the accompaniment of copious amounts of alcohol.387
It was mid-January before Hitler was prepared to concede the tactical withdrawal for which Kluge had been pleading.388 By the end of the month, the worst was over. The eastern front, at enormous cost, had been stabilized. Hitler claimed full credit for this. It was, in his eyes, once more a ‘triumph of the will’. Looking back, a few months later, he blamed the winter crisis on an almost complete failure of leadership in the army. One general had come to him, he said, wanting to retreat. He had asked the general whether he really thought it would be less cold fifty kilometres to the rear. He had also asked whether the retreat would only stop at the borders of the Reich. On hearing that it might indeed be necessary to withdraw so far, he immediately dismissed the general, he said, telling him to get back to Germany as quickly as possible. He would himself take over the leadership of the army, and it would stay where it was. It was plain to him, he went on, that a retreat would have meant ‘the fate of Napoleon’. He had ruled out any retreat at all. ‘And I pulled it off! That we overcame this winter and are today in the position again to proceed victoriously… is solely attributable to the bravery of the soldiers at the front and my firm will to hold out, cost what it may.’389
Salvation through the Führer’s genius was, of course, the line adopted (and believed) by Goebbels and other Nazi leaders.390 Their public statements combined pure faith and impure propaganda. But despite Halder’s outright condemnation — after the war — of Hitler’s ‘Halt Order’, not all military experts were so ready to interpret it as a catastrophic mistake. Kluge’s Chief of Staff, General Guenther Blumentritt, for instance, was prepared to acknowledge that the determination to stand fast was both correct and decisive in avoiding a much bigger disaster than actually occurred.391
Hitler’s early recognition of the dangers of a full-scale collapse of the front, and the utterly ruthless determination with which he resisted demands to retreat, probably did play a part in avoiding a calamity of Napoleonic proportions.392 But, had he been less inflexible, and paid greater heed to some of the advice coming from his field commanders, the likelihood is that the same end could have been achieved with far smaller loss of life. Moreover, stabilization was finally achieved only after he had relaxed the ‘Halt Order’ and agreed to a tactical withdrawal to form a new front line.393
The strains of the winter crisis had left their mark on Hitler. He was now showing unmistakable signs of physical wear and tear. Goebbels was shocked when he saw him in March. Hitler looked grey, and much aged. He admitted to his Propaganda Minister that he had for some time felt ill and often faint. The winter, he acknowledged, had also affected him psychologically.394 But he appeared to have withstood the worst. His confidence was, certainly to all outward appearances, undiminished. Hints, given in the autumn, of doubts at the outcome of the war, were no longer heard.395 He told his entourage in the Führer Headquarters that the entry of Japan had been a turning-point in history, which would denote ‘the loss of a whole continent’ — regrettable, because the loss would be that of the ‘white race’.396 The British would not be able to prevail against Japan once Singapore had been lost.397 The question would then be whether Britain could hold on to India. He was sure that, offered the chance of keeping India (and preventing the complete disintegration of the Empire) while abandoning Europe to Germany, almost the entire British population would be in favour.398
Against what had seemed in the depths of the winter crisis almost insuperable odds, Germany was ready by spring to launch another offensive in the east. The war still had a long way to go.399 Certainly, the balance of forces at this juncture was by no means one-sided. And the course of events would undergo many vagaries before defeat for Germany appeared inexorable. But the winter of 1941–2 can nevertheless, in retrospect, be seen to be not merely a turning-point, but the beginning of the end.400
The aim advanced by Hitler since the summer of 1940, with the backing of his military strategists, had been to force Britain to come to terms and keep America out of the war through inflicting a swift and comprehensive defeat upon the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941, Germany had failed to defeat the Soviet Union and was now embroiled in a long, enormously bitter and costly, war in the east. Britain had not only been uninterested in coming to terms, but was now fighting alongside the USA and, since concluding a mutual assistance agreement in Moscow on 12 July 1941, allied — whatever the continuing frictions — with the Soviet Union.401 Not least, Germany was now at war with America. Whatever Hitler’s contempt, he knew no ways of defeating the USA.402 And if final victory over the Soviet Union could not rapidly be achieved, America’s mighty resources would soon weigh in the contest. Hitler now had to place his hopes in the Japanese, who might seriously weaken the British and lock the USA into conflict in the Pacific. But he could no longer depend upon the power of German arms alone. Germany no longer held the initiative. He had always predicted that time was running against Germany in its bid for supremacy. His own actions more than those of anyone else had ensured that this was indeed now proving to be the case. Though it would not become fully plain for some months, Hitler’s gamble, on which he had staked nothing less than the future of the nation, had disastrously failed.