‘If I don’t get the oil of Maykop and Grozny, then I must finish this war.’
‘Overall picture: have we extended the risk too far?’
‘You can be sure,’ he added, ‘that nobody will get us away from this place again!’
‘How can someone be so cowardly? I don’t understand it. So many people have to die. Then such a man goes and besmirches in the last minute the heroism of so many others.’
Snow still lay on the ground at the Wolf’s Lair. An icy wind gave no respite from the cold. But, at the end of February 1942, there were the first signs that spring was not far away.1 Hitler could not wait for the awful winter to pass.2 He felt he had been let down by his military leaders, his logistical planners, his transport organizers; that his army commanders had been faint-hearts, not tough enough when faced with crisis; that his own strength of will and determination had alone staved off catastrophe. Every crisis in his own mind amounted to a contest of will. The winter crisis had been no different. Coming through it had been yet another ‘triumph of the will’, comparable as he saw it with winning power against the odds in 1933. That the gamble of knocking out the Soviet Union within a few months had been absurd, or that the overall strategy of ‘Barbarossa’ had been flawed from the outset, never entered his head; nor that his own constant interference had compounded the problems of military command. The winter crisis had sharpened his sense, never far from the surface, that he had to struggle not just against external enemies, but against those who were inadequate, incapable, or even disloyal, in his own ranks. But the crisis had been surmounted. His leadership, he believed, had saved his army from the fate of Napoleon’s troops. They had survived the Russian winter. This in itself was a psychological blow to the enemy, which had also suffered grievously. It was necessary now to attack again as soon as possible; to destroy this mortally weakened enemy in one final great heave. This was how his thoughts ran. In the insomniac nights in his bunker, he was not just wanting to erase the memories of the crisis-ridden cold, dark months. He could hardly wait for the new offensive in the east to start — the push to the Caucasus, Leningrad, and Moscow, which would wrestle back the initiative once more.3 It would be a colossal gamble. Should it fail, the consequences would be unthinkable.
For those in the Führer Headquarters not preoccupied with military planning, life was dull and monotonous. Hitler’s secretaries would go for a daily walk to the next village and back. Otherwise, they whiled away the hours. Chatting, a film in the evenings, and the obligatory gathering each afternoon in the Tea House and late at night again for tea made up the day. ‘Since the tea-party always consists of the same people, there is no stimulation from outside, and nobody experiences anything on a personal level,’ Christa Schroeder wrote to a friend in February 1942, ‘the conversation is often apathetic and tedious, wearying, and irksome. Talk always runs along the same lines.’ Hitler’s monologues — outlining his expansive vision of the world — were reserved for lunch or the twilight hours. At the afternoon tea-gatherings, politics were never discussed. Anything connected with the war was taboo. There was nothing but small-talk. Those present either had no independent views, or kept them to themselves. Hitler’s presence dominated. But it seldom now did much to animate. He was invariably tired, but found it hard to sleep. His insomnia made him reluctant to go to bed. His entourage often wished he would do so. The tedium for those around him seemed at times incessant. Occasionally, it was relieved in the evenings by listening to records — Beethoven symphonies, selections from Wagner, or Hugo Wolf’s Lieder. Hitler would listen with closed eyes. But he always wanted the same records. His entourage knew the numbers off by heart. He would call out: ‘Aida, last act,’ and someone would shout to one of the manservants: ‘Number hundred-and-something.’4
The war was all that mattered to Hitler. Yet, cocooned in the strange world of the Wolf’s Lair, he was increasingly severed from its realities, both at the front and at home. Detachment ruled out all vestiges of humanity. Even towards those in his own entourage who had been with him for many years, there was nothing resembling real affection, let alone friendship; genuine fondness was reserved only for his young Alsatian.5 He had described the human being the previous autumn as no more than ‘a ridiculous “cosmic bacterium” (eine lächerliche “Weltraumbakterie”)’.6 Human life and suffering was, thus, of no consequence to him. He never visited a field-hospital, nor the homeless after bomb-raids. He saw no massacres, went near no concentration camp, viewed no compound of starving pris-oners-of-war. His enemies were in his eyes like vermin to be stamped out. But his profound contempt for human existence extended to his own people. Decisions costing the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers were made — perhaps it was only thus possible to make them — without consideration for any human plight. As he had told Guderian during the winter crisis, feelings of sympathy and pity for the suffering of his soldiers had to be shut out.7 For Hitler, the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed were merely an abstraction, the suffering a necessary and justified sacrifice in the ‘heroic struggle’ for the survival of the people.
Among ordinary soldiers, amid the brutality and barbarization, less heroic views of war could be encountered. One soldier on the eastern front who, in peacetime, had attended the Party rallies at Nuremberg, mourned the death of a comrade at the end of January. ‘Why must it always be: sacrifice, struggle, victory, death!’ he lamented. ‘Is the heroic death then the ideal of this globe?.’8 A young recruit from Cologne, by no means opposed to the regime, wrote in his diary a few weeks later, while in training in East Prussia before being sent to the eastern front: ‘I’m convinced that, if I knew that all this really had a meaning, I could and would voluntarily achieve much more. But for what? I ask myself. For what and for whom must we perish? For what and for whom be a slave? For what starve, freeze, and then finally croak? For what? For what? A thousand questions — no answer.’9
The ties which had bound a high proportion of the German population to Hitler since 1933 were starting to loosen. SD reports from early 1942 still declared that people craved shots of Hitler in the newsreels. ‘A smile of the Führer. His look itself gives us strength and courage again.’ Such effusions were mentioned as commonplace remarks.10 But Hitler was becoming a remote figure, a distant warlord. His image had to be refashioned by Goebbels to match the change which the Russian campaign had brought about. The première of his lavish new film, The Great King, in early 1942 allowed Goebbels to stylize Hitler by association as a latter-day Frederick the Great, isolated in his majesty, conducting a heroic struggle for his people against mighty enemies and ultimately overcoming crisis and calamity to emerge triumphant.11 It was a portrayal which increasingly matched Hitler’s self-image during the last years of the war.12
But the changed image could do nothing to alter reality: the German people’s bonds with Hitler were to weaken immeasurably as victories turned into defeats, advances into retreats, expansion into contraction, as the death-toll mounted catastrophically, allies deserted, and the war came to be widely recognized as leading to inevitable disaster. And as the war turned inexorably against Germany, Hitler cast around all the more for scapegoats.
An early complication in 1942 arose with the loss of his armaments minister, Dr Fritz Todt, in a fatal air-crash on the morning of 8 February, soon after taking off from the airfield at the Führer Headquarters.
Todt had masterminded the building of the motorways and the Westwall for Hitler.13 In March 1940 he had been been given the task, as a Reich Minister, of coordinating the production of weapons and munitions.14 Yet a further major office had come his way in July 1941 with the centralization in his hands of control over energy and waterways.15 In the second half of the year, as the first signs of serious labour shortage in German industry became evident, Todt was commissioned with organizing the mass deployment within Germany of Soviet prisoners-of-war and civilian forced labourers.16 The accumulation of offices pivotal to the war economy was an indication of Hitler’s high esteem for Todt. This was reciprocated. Todt was a convinced National Socialist. But by late 1941, fully aware of the massive armaments potential of the USA and appalled at the logistical incompetence of the Wehrmacht’s economic planning during the eastern campaign, he had become deeply pessimistic, certain that the war could not be won.17
His public statements naturally betrayed none of his private doubts. And during December and January, he had taken the vital steps in conjunction with industry in drastically rationalizing and concentrating armaments production. Hitler, who had been made aware of the gross inefficiencies in the production of weaponry and was anxious to maximize the turn-out of armaments during 1942, backed the changes.18 The decisive alteration was to give greater scope and incentive to industry to improve its own efficiency as well as freeing armaments production from intervention from the military and Four-Year Plan Organization and some of the stifling bureaucratic controls which had been imposed on it.19 At the same time, the priorities that had been accorded the Luftwaffe and navy, when it was presumed the war in the east would easily and quickly be won, were reversed to favour the army.20
On the morning of 7 February, Todt flew to Rastenburg to put to Hitler proposals which had arisen from his meeting a few days earlier with representatives of the armaments industries.21 What else transpired during his meeting with Hitler that afternoon is not known. No one else was present, and no notes or minutes were made. Later speculation that Todt demanded more extensive powers than Hitler was prepared to grant him, threatened resignation, or expounded defeatist views on the war rested on guesswork and some unreliable evidence.22 But the meeting was plainly anything but harmonious. In depressed mood, and after a restless night, Todt left next morning to head for Munich in a twin-engined Heinkel in. His own plane, a Junkers 52, was currently under repair, and he had borrowed the Heinkel — the personal plane of Field-Marshal Sperrle — from the Luftwaffe. It was flown by Todt’s usual pilot, who took it on a brief test-flight shortly before take-off.23
Shortly after leaving the runway, the plane turned abruptly, headed to land again, burst into flames, and crashed. The bodies of Todt and four others on board were yanked with long poles from the burning wreckage. An official inquiry ruled out sabotage.24 But suspicion was never fully allayed.25 What caused the crash remained a mystery. Hitler, according to witnesses who saw him at close quarters, was deeply moved by the loss of Todt, whom, it was said, he still greatly admired and needed for the war economy.26 Even if, as was later often claimed, the breach between him and Todt had become irreparable on account of the Armaments Minister’s forcefully expressed conviction that the war could not be won, it is not altogether obvious why Hitler would have been so desperate as to resort to having Todt killed in an arranged air-crash at his own headquarters in circumstances guaranteed to prompt suspicion. Had he been insistent upon dispensing with Todt’s services, ‘retirement’ on ill-health grounds would have offered a simpler solution. The only obvious beneficiary from Todt’s demise was the successor Hitler now appointed with remarkable haste: his highly ambitious court architect, Albert Speer. But Speer’s relationship with Todt had been excellent. And the only ‘evidence’ later used to hint at any involvement by Speer was his presence in the Führer Headquarters at the time of the crash and his rejection, a few hours before the planned departure, of an offer of a lift in Todt’s aeroplane.27 Whatever the cause of the crash that killed Todt — and the speed with which Hitler had the investigation hushed up naturally fuelled suspicion — it brought Albert Speer, till then in the second rank of Nazi leaders and known only as Hitler’s court-architect and a personal favourite of the Führer, into the foreground.
Speer’s meteoric rise in the 1930s had rested on shrewd exploitation of the would-be architect Hitler’s building mania, coupled with his own driving ambition and undoubted organizational talent. Hitler liked Speer. ‘He is an artist and has a spirit akin to mine,’ he said. ‘He is a building-person like me, intelligent, modest, and not an obstinate military-head.’28 Speer later remarked that he was the nearest Hitler came to having a friend.29 Now, Speer was in exactly the right place — close to Hitler — when a successor to Todt was needed. Six hours after the Reich Minister’s sudden death, Speer was appointed to replace him in all his offices.30 The appointment came as a surprise to many — including, if we are to take his own version of accounts at face value, Speer himself.31 But Speer was certainly anticipating succeeding Todt in construction work — and possibly more.32 At any rate, he lost no time in using Hitler’s authority to establish for himself more extensive powers than Todt had ever enjoyed.33 Speer would soon enough have to battle his way through the jungle of rivalries and intrigues which constituted the governance of the Third Reich. But once Hitler, the day after returning to Berlin for Todt’s state funeral on 12 February (at which he himself delivered the oration as his eyes welled with, perhaps crocodile, tears),34 had publicly backed Speer’s supremacy in armaments production in a speech to leaders of the armaments industries, the new minister, still not quite thirty-eight years of age, found that ‘I could do within the widest limits practically what I wanted’.35 Building on the changes his predecessor had initiated, adding his own organizational flair and ruthless drive, and drawing on his favoured standing with Hitler, Speer proved an inspired choice. Over the next two years, despite intensified Allied bombing and the fortunes of war ebbing strongly away from Germany, he presided over a doubling of armaments output.36
Hitler was full of confidence when Goebbels had the chance to speak at length with him during his stay in Berlin following Todt’s funeral. After the travails of the winter, the Dictator had reason to feel as if the corner was turned. During the very days that he was in Berlin the British were suffering two mighty blows to their prestige. Two German battleships, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, had steamed out of Brest and, under the very noses of the British, passed through the English Channel with minimal damage, heading for safer moorings at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel. Hitler could scarcely contain his delight.37 At the same time, the news was coming in from the Far East of the imminent fall of Singapore. Hitler expressed his admiration for the Japanese.38 But it was tinged with a feeling that the British were losing their Empire when they could have accepted his ‘Offer’ and fought alongside instead of against Germany. ‘This is wonderful, though perhaps also sad, news,’ he had said to the Romanian leader Anton-escu a few days earlier.39 He told Ribbentrop not to overdo the pronouncements on the fall of Singapore. ‘We’ve got to think in centuries,’ he apparently said. ‘One day the showdown with the yellow race will come.’40 Goebbels noted a degree of resignation that the Japanese advances meant ‘the driving-back of the white man’ in the Far East.41 But, despite his racial prejudices, Hitler took a pragmatic view. ‘I’m accused of sympathizing with the Japanese,’ his secretary recalled him saying. ‘What does sympathizing mean? The Japanese are yellow-skinned and slit-eyed. But they are fighting against the Americans and English, and so are useful to Germany.’42 His enemy’s enemy was his friend, in other words.
Most of all, Hitler was content about the prospects in the East. The problems of winter had been overcome, and important lessons learned. ‘Troops who can cope with such a winter are unbeatable,’ Goebbels noted. Now the great thaw had set in. ‘The Führer is planning a few very hard and crushing offensive thrusts, which are already in good measure prepared and will doubtless lead gradually to the smashing of Bolshevism.’43 Hitler conveyed the same enthusiasm in a morale-boosting speech to almost 10,000 trainee officers in the Sportpalast on 15 February. The world had been opposed to Frederick the Great and Bismarck. ‘Today, I have the honour to be this enemy,’ he declared, ‘because I am attempting to create a world power out of the German Reich.’ He was proud beyond measure that Providence had given him the opportunity to lead the ‘inevitable struggle’. They should be proud to be part of such momentous events.44 They gave him a rapturous reception. He left the huge hall with storms of applause and wild cheering ringing in his ears.45 He returned to his headquarters assured as ever that, whatever his problems with the High Command, he had the total backing of his young officers and men. For their part, enthused by Hitler’s rhetoric, the newly commissioned officers had little real awareness of what awaited them on active service in the east.
On 15 March, Hitler was back again in Berlin. The serious losses over the winter made it essential that he attend the midday ceremony on Heroes’ Memorial Day. Only at the end of his speech did Hitler come to the commemoration of the dead. For the most part he offered no more than his usual regurgitation of the responsibility of the ‘Jewish-capitalist world conspirators’ for the war and heroization of the struggle — aimed, he asserted, at a lasting peace.46 He portrayed the previous months as a struggle above all against the elements in a winter the like of which had not been seen for almost a century and a half.47 ‘But one thing we know today,’ he declared. ‘The Bolshevik hordes, which were unable to defeat the German soldiers and their allies this winter, will be beaten by us into annihilation this coming summer.’48
Many people were too concerned about the rumoured reductions in food rations to pay much attention to the speech.49 Goebbels was well aware that food supplies had reached a critical point and that it would need a ‘work of art’ to put across to the people the reasons for the reductions.50 He acknowledged that the cuts would lead to a ‘crisis in the internal mood’.51 Hitler, in full recognition of the sensitivity of the situation, had summoned the Propaganda Minister to his headquarters to discuss the issue before ration-cuts were announced.52 Goebbels had so many problems to bring to Hitler’s attention that he scarcely knew where he should begin.53 His view was that the deterioration in morale at home demanded tough measures to counter it. People would understand the hardships of war if they fell equally on all the population. But as it was — Goebbels’s own class resentments came strongly into play — the better-off were able through the black market and ‘connections’ to avoid serious deprivations. Göring had signed a law banning the black market. But its severity had been reduced through the intervention of the Economics Minister. Goebbels was determined to take the matter to the Führer, and hoped for the support of Bormann and the Party in getting Hitler to intervene to back more radical measures.54
On his return to Berlin on 18 March after some days away in the ‘Ostmark’ and Bavaria, Goebbels had been appalled at a ‘scandalous scene’ in the station where soldiers travelling to the eastern front were having to stand in the corridors of trains ‘while fine ladies, returning sunburnt from holiday, naturally had their sleeping-compartments’. What was needed, he claimed, was a law under which ‘all offences against known National Socialist principles of leadership of the people in war will be punished with corresponding retribution’.55 That, too, he was going to put before Hitler during his visit to the Führer Headquarters. But Goebbels felt that, as things were, a radical approach to the law, necessary in total war, was being sabotaged by representatives of the formal legal system. He approved of Bormann’s demands for tougher sentences for black-marketeering.56 And he took it upon himself to press Hitler to change the leadership of the Justice Ministry, which since Gürtner’s death the previous year had been run by the State Secretary, Franz Schlegelberger. ‘The bourgeois elements still dominate there,’ he commented, ‘and since the heavens are high and the Führer far away, it’s extraordinarily difficult to succeed against these stubborn and listlessly working authorities.’57 It was in this mood — determined to persuade Hitler to support radical measures, attack privilege, and castigate the state bureaucracy (above all judges and lawyers) — that Goebbels arrived at the Wolf’s Lair on the ice-cold morning of 19 March.58
He met a Hitler showing clear signs of the strain he had been under during the past months, in a state of mind that left him more than open to Goebbels’s radical suggestions. He needed no instruction about the mood in Germany, and the impact the reduction in food rations would have.59 Lack of transport prevented food being brought from the Ukraine, he complained. The Transport Ministry was blamed for the shortage of locomotives. He was determined to take tough measures. Goebbels then lost no time in berating the ‘failure’ of the judicial system. Hitler did not demur. Here, too, he was determined to proceed with ‘the toughest measures’. Goebbels paraded before Hitler his suggestion for a new comprehensive law to punish offenders against the ‘principles of National Socialist leadership of the people’. He wanted the Reich Ministry of Justice placed in new hands, and pressed for Otto Thierack, ‘a real National Socialist’, an SA-Gruppenfiihrer, and currently President of the notorious People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) — responsible for dealing with cases of treason and other serious offences against the regime — to take the place left by Gürtner.60 Five months later, Hitler would make the appointment that Goebbels had wanted, and, in Thierack’s hands, the capitulation of the judicial system to the police state would become complete.61
For now, Hitler placated Goebbels with a suggestion to prepare the ground for a radical assault on social privilege by recalling the Reichstag and having it bestow upon him ‘a special plenipotentiary power’ so that ‘the evil-doers know that he is covered in every way by the people’s community’. Given the powers which Hitler already possessed, the motive was purely populist. An attack on the civil servants and judges, and upon the privileged in society — or, as Hitler put it, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘neglecters of duty in public functions’ — could not fail to be popular with the masses. Up to this point, judges could not be dismissed — not even by the Führer. There were limits, too, to his rights of intervention in the military sphere. The case of Colonel-General Erich Hoepner still rankled deeply. Hitler had sacked — Hoepner in January and dismissed him from the army in disgrace for retreating in disobedience to his ‘Halt Order’. Hoepner had then instituted a law-suit against the Reich over the loss of his pension rights — and won. With Hitler’s new powers, this could never happen again. Examples could be set in the military and civilian sector to serve as deterrents to others and ‘clear the air’.62
‘In such a mood,’ wrote Goebbels the next day, ‘my suggestions for the radicalization of our war-leadership naturally had an absolutely positive effect on the Führer. I only need to touch a topic and I have already got my way. Everything that I put forward individually is accepted piece for piece by the Führer without contradiction.’63
The encouragement of Hitler to back the radicalization of the home-front continued after Goebbels’s return from the Wolf’s Lair. Apart from the Propaganda Minister, it came in particular from Bormann and Himmler. On 26 March, the SD reported on a ‘crisis of confidence’ resulting from the failure of the state to take a tough enough stance against black-marketeers and their corrupt customers among the well-placed and privileged. Himmler, it seems, had directly prompted the report; Bormann made Hitler aware of it. Three days later, Goebbels castigated black-marketeering in Das Reich, publicizing two instances of the death-penalty being imposed on profiteers.64
It was on this same evening, that of 29 March, Hitler treated his small audience in the Wolf’s Lair to a prolonged diatribe on lawyers and the deficiencies of the legal system, concluding that ‘every jurist must be defective by nature, or would become so in time’.65
This was only a few days after he had personally intervened in a blind rage with acting Justice Minister Schlegelberger and, when he proved dilatory, with the more eagerly compliant Roland Freisler (later the infamous President of the People’s Court as successor to Thierack but at this time Second State Secretary in the Justice Ministry), to insist on the death penalty for a man named Ewald Schlitt. This was on no more solid basis than the reading of a sensationalized account in a Berlin evening paper of how an Oldenburg court had sentenced Schlitt to only five years in a penitentiary for a horrific physical assault — according to the newspaper account — that had led to the death of his wife in an asylum. The court had been lenient because it took the view that Schlitt had been temporarily deranged. Schlegelberger lacked the courage to present the case fully to Hitler, and to defend the judges at the same time. Instead, he promised to improve the severity of sentencing. Freisler had no compunction in meeting Hitler’s wishes. The original sentence was overturned. In a new hearing, Schlitt was duly sentenced to death, and guillotined on 2 April.66
Hitler had been so enraged by what he had read on the Schlitt case — which matched all his prejudices about lawyers and fell precisely at the time when the judicial system was being made the scapegoat for the difficulties on the home front — that he had privately threatened, should other ‘excessively lenient’ sentences be produced, ‘to send the Justice Ministry to the devil through a Reichstag law’.67 As it was, the Schlitt case was brought into service as a pretext to demand from the Reichstag absolute powers over the law itself.
Hitler rang Goebbels on 23 April to tell him that he had now decided to deliver the speech to the Reichstag he had for long had in mind. Goebbels undertook to make the necessary arrangements to summon the Reichstag for 3p.m. on Sunday, 26 April.68
Goebbels went round to the Reich Chancellery for lunch shortly after Hitler’s arrival in Berlin at midday on the 25th. He found him looking well and feeling in good form, though in a particularly sour mood at the failure of air-defences to protect the Heinkel works in Rostock from damage in a bombing raid, following the opening of the British bombing offensive with a devastating attack on Lübeck at the end of March.69 Hitler extended his criticism from the Luftwaffe to the lack of initiative of the ‘unmodern’ navy and its lack of any ‘leadership of stature’.70 But, as regards the eastern front, he was confident that the lessons of the winter had been learned and full of optimism about the coming offensive, now in an advanced stage of preparation. Reports had been handed to him detailing starvation and cannibalism among the army and civilian population of the Soviet Union, and the abysmal level of equipment of the Red Army’s soldiers.71 It seemed — something he would persistently claim throughout 1942 — that the Soviet Union was almost on its last legs. Goebbels was clearly less certain that Germany would attain decisive successes in the summer. And Hitler himself gave an indication that total victory in the east would not be attained in 1942, speaking of building a more solid line of defence in the coming winter, when supplies for the German troops would no longer pose a problem.72
He soon launched into one of his favourite obsessions — vegetarianism. Much of the remainder of the ‘discussion’ consisted of a lecture on the dangers of meat-eating.73 In the war, Hitler remarked, there was little to be done about upturning eating methods. But he intended to see to the problem once the war was over. Similarly with the question of the Christian Churches — one of Goebbels’s pet themes, which he brought up once more: it was necessary for the time being, commented Hitler, not to react to the ‘seditious’ actions of the clergy; ‘the showdown’ would be saved for a ‘more advantageous situation after the war’ when he would have to come as the ‘avenger’.74
In a shortened lunch next day, just before Hitler’s Reichstag speech, a good deal of the talk revolved around the devastation of Rostock in a renewed British raid — the heaviest so far. Much of the housing in the centre of the Baltic harbour-town had been destroyed. But the Heinkel factory had lost only an estimated 10 per cent of its productive capacity.75 German retaliation to British raids had consisted of attacks on Exeter and Bath. Goebbels favoured the complete devastation of English ‘cultural centres’.76 Hitler, furious at the new attack on Rostock, agreed, according to Goebbels’s account. Terror had to be answered with terror. English ‘cultural centres’, seaside resorts, and ‘bourgeois towns’ would be razed to the ground. The psychological impact of this — and that was the key thing — would be far greater than that achieved through mostly unsuccessful attempts to hit armaments factories. German bombing would now begin in a big way. He had already given out the directive to prepare a lengthy plan of attack on such lines.77
Goebbels raised — during the midday meal, not in private discussion — the ‘Jewish Question’ once more. By this time some if not all of the slaughterhouses in Poland were in operation. Hitler’s remarks remained, as always, menacingly unspecific. He briefly restated, according to Goebbels, his ‘pitiless (unerbittlich)’ stance: ‘he wants to drive the Jews absolutely out of Europe’. The Propaganda Minister knew, as did other ‘insiders’, what this meant. He had, after all, referred to the liquidation of the Jews in unmistakable terms in his own diary entry only a month earlier.78 The ‘hardest punishment’ that could be inflicted on the Jews was ‘still too mild’, he now added.79
Why Hitler had chosen this moment to summon the Reichstag was the subject of much speculation and rumour among the mass of the population. But the background to it and the coming assault on the judicial system remained closely guarded secrets.80 What turned out to be the last ever session of the Great German Reichstag began punctually at 3p.m. that afternoon. Hitler spoke for little over an hour. He was nervous at the beginning, starting hesitantly, then speaking so fast that parts of his speech were scarcely intelligible.81 Much of it was taken up with the usual long-winded account of the background to the war. This was followed by a description of the struggle through the previous winter — with a strong hint that the war would not be over before a new winter had to be faced.82 He then came to the centrepoint of his address. He implied that transport, administration, and justice had been found lacking. There was a side-swipe (without naming names) at General Hoepner: ‘no one can stand on their well-earned rights’, but had to know ‘that today there are only duties’. He requested from the Reichstag, therefore, ‘the express confirmation that I possess the legal right to hold each one to fulfilment of his duties’ with rights to dismiss from office without respect to ‘acquired rights’. Using the Schlitt case as his example, he launched into a savage attack on the failings of the judiciary. From now on, he said, he would intervene in such cases and dismiss judges ‘who visibly fail to recognize the demands of the hour’.83
As soon as Hitler had finished speaking, Göring read out the ‘Resolution (Beschluß)’ of the Reichstag. This unusual form of decree — a proposal by the Reichstag President for approval by the members of the Reichstag — had been suggested, then composed, by Lammers at breakneck speed before the session in order to obviate any constitutional problems but also to underline the formal granting by the popular assembly of such far-reaching powers to Hitler.84 According to the ‘Resolution’, Hitler was empowered ‘without being bound to existing legal precepts’, in his capacity as ‘Leader of the Nation, Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, Head of Government and supreme occupant of executive power, as supreme law-lord (oberster Gerichtsherr) and as Leader of the Party’ (the last an addition specifically inserted by Lammers), to remove from office and punish anyone, of whatever status, failing to carry out his duty, without respect to pensionable rights, and without any stipulated formal proceedings.85
Naturally, the ‘Resolution’ was unanimously approved.86 The last shreds of constitutionality had been torn apart. Hitler now was the law.
Many people were surprised that Hitler needed any extension of his powers. They wondered what had gone on that had prompted his scathing attacks on the internal administration. Disappointment was soon registered that no immediate actions appeared to follow his strong words.87 Lawyers, judges, and civil servants were not unnaturally dismayed by the assault on their professions and standing. What had caused it was in their eyes a mystery. The Führer had evidently, they thought, been crassly misinformed.88 The consequences were, however, unmistakable. As the head of the judiciary in Dresden pointed out, with the ending of all judicial autonomy Germany had now become a ‘true Führer state’.89
Hitler could ignore the predictable lamentations from judges and lawyers who, with few exceptions, would nevertheless continue to comply with everything demanded of them. In futile attempts to defend status and authority, they would more readily than ever bend over backwards to accommodate every inhumane initiative, thereby undermining precisely what they hoped to preserve — a state based upon the rule of law, however harsh, and the power of the judiciary to interpret and impose that law. Hitler’s populist instincts had not deserted him. Less elevated sections of the population enthused over his assault on rank and privilege.90 This had successfully allowed him to divert attention from more fundamental questions about the failures of the previous winter and to provide a much-needed morale-booster through easy attacks on cheap targets.
After his speech, Hitler, warmed by the euphoria in the Reichstag, the enthusiasm of the crowds lining the streets back to the Reich Chancellery, and the fawning congratulations of his entourage, could relax, look forward to a break in his alpine retreat, and unfold his plans for the great refashioning of Linz into ‘the city on the Danube’, a cultural metropolis to outshine Vienna.91
For the mass of the German people, only the prospect of the peace that final victory would bring could sustain morale for any length of time. Many ‘despondent souls’, ran one Party report on the popular mood, were ‘struck only by one part of the Führer’s speech: where he spoke of the preparations for the winter campaign of 1942-43. The more the homeland has become aware of the cruelty and hardship of the winter struggle in the east, the more the longing for an end to it has increased. But now the end is still not in sight. Many wives and mothers are suffering as a result.’92 The hopes briefly raised by the successes of the summer offensive would rapidly give way to despair in the calamities that the coming autumn and winter would bring.
Hours after his Reichstag speech, Hitler left for Munich, en route to the Berghof and a meeting with Mussolini. He was in expansive mood next lunchtime at his favourite Munich restaurant, the Osteria.93 He held forth to Hermann Giesler, one of his favoured architects, and his companion-in-arms from the old days of the Party’s early struggles in Munich, Hermann Esser, on his plans for double-decker express trains to run at 200 kilometres an hour on four-metre-wide tracks between Upper Silesia and the Donets Basin. Naturally, there would be difficulties in bringing about this rail programme, he admitted, but one should not be put off by them.94 Two days later, at a snow-covered Berghof with Eva Braun acting as hostess, he was regaling his supper guests with complaints about the lack of top Wagnerian tenors in Germany, and the deficiencies of leading conductors Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch. Walter, a Jew who had become renowned as the director of the Bavarian State Opera and Leipziger Gewandhaus before being forced out by the Nazis in 1933 and emigrating to America, was an ‘absolute nonentity’, claimed Hitler, who had ruined the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera to the extent that it was capable only of playing ‘beer music’. Although Walter’s arch-rival Knappertsbusch, tall, blond, blue-eyed, had the appearance of a model ‘aryan’ male, listening to him conduct an opera was ‘a punishment’ to Hitler’s mind, as the orchestra drowned out the singing and the conductor performed such gyrations that it was painful to look at him. Only Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had turned the Berlin Philharmonic into such an outstanding, magnificent orchestra, one of the regime’s most important cultural ambassadors, and acknowledged maestro in conducting the Führer’s own favourite Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner, met with his unqualified approval.95
Between monologues, he had had ‘discussions’ with Mussolini in the baroque Klessheim Castle, once a residence of the Prince Bishops of Salzburg, now luxuriously refurbished with furniture and carpets removed from France to make a Nazi guest-house and conference-centre.96 The atmosphere was cordial. Hitler looked tired to Ciano, and bearing the signs of the strains of the winter. His hair, Ciano noticed, was turning grey. Hitler’s primary aim was to convey optimism to Mussolini about the war in the east.97 Ribbentrop’s message to Ciano, in their separate meeting, was no different: the ‘genius of the Führer’ had mastered the evils of the Russian winter; a coming offensive towards the Caucasus would deprive Russia of fuel, bring the conflict to an end, and force Britain to terms; British hopes from America amounted to ‘a colossal bluff’.98
The talks continued the next day, now with military leaders present, at the Berghof. How much of a genuine discussion there was is plain from Ciano’s description: ‘Hitler talks, talks, talks, talks,’ non-stop for an hour and forty minutes. Mussolini, used himself to dominating all conversation, had to suffer in silence, occasionally casting a surreptitious glance at his watch. Ciano switched off and thought of other things. Keitel yawned and struggled to keep awake. Jodl did not manage it: ‘after an epic struggle’, he finally fell asleep on a sofa.99 Mussolini, overawed as always by Hitler, was, apparently, satisfied with the meetings.100
In reality, they had no concrete results. Hitler had, as usual, begun with a rosy-hued account of the war in the east, giving the impression that Soviet industrial capacity had fallen sharply and that the military calibre of the Red Army had also diminished. He drew the conclusion, typically, that ‘it can therefore in no way become worse, but only better’.101 He repeated his assumption that if Russia were defeated, Britain’s hopes would have gone. But he went on to indicate the dangers of a British landing in the west, or in North Africa. With either eventuality in mind, there was need, he urged, for great caution in dealing with France, whose collaboration was merely opportunistic. In North Africa, it had to be reckoned that the French colonies would support an Allied invasion. The Axis powers had therefore to be ready, he stressed to Mussolini, to seize unoccupied France at any critical moment. Hitler was half-hearted about the Italians’ plans for an early assault on Malta. As far as the Mediterranean was concerned, his own priority was to provide what limited support he could to Rommel’s forthcoming North African offensive, soon to be launched. This had to precede an attack on Malta.102 His eyes were, however, on the east. That is where the war on land would be decided, he declared.103
Back at the Berghof, after the Italian party had left, Hitler told his lunchtime ensemble how impressed he had been by Hermann Giesler’s spacious refurbishment of Klessheim. ‘Generous ideas’ about spaciousness needed to be incorporated by architects into town-planning in Germany. Then the higgledy-piggledy housing complexes of Zwickau, Gelsenkirchen, Bitterfeld and other towns ‘without any culture’ could be avoided. ‘It was, therefore, his firm resolution,’ he was recorded as stating, ‘to see to it that a bit of culture comes even into the smallest town and that as a result the appearance of our towns slowly reaches an ever-higher level.’104
A week later, on 8 May, the Wehrmacht began its planned spring offensive. The first targets for Manstein’s nth Army, as laid down in Hitler’s directive of 5 April, were the Kerch peninsula and Sevastopol in the Crimea.105 The directive stipulated the drive on the Caucasus, to capture the oil-fields and occupy the mountain passes that opened the route to the Persian Gulf, as the main goal of the summer offensive to follow, code-named ‘Blue’. The removal of the basis of the Soviet war-economy and the destruction of remaining military forces — thought catastrophically weakened over the winter — would, it was presumed, bring victory in the east. There, Hitler had reasserted in planning the summer operations, the war would be decided.106 The key factor was no longer ‘living space’, but oil. ‘If I don’t get the oil of Maykop and Grozny,’ Hitler admitted, ‘then I must finish (liquidieren) this war.’107
The Wehrmacht and Army High Commands did not contradict the strategic priority. In any case, they had no better alternative to recommend. And the lack of a coordinated command structure meant, as before, competition for Hitler’s approval — a military version of ‘working towards the Führer’.108 It was not a matter of Hitler imposing a dictat on his military leaders. Despite his full recognition of the gravity of the German losses over the winter, Halder entirely backed the decision for an all-out offensive to destroy the basis of the Soviet economy.109 The April directive for ‘Blue’ bore his clear imprint.110 And despite the magnitude of their miscalculation the previous year, operational planners, fed by highly flawed intelligence, far from working on the basis of a ‘worst-case-scenario’, backed the optimism about the military and economic weakness of the Soviet Union.111
Whatever the presumptions of Soviet losses — on which German intelligence remained woefully weak — the Wehrmacht’s own strength, as Halder knew only too well, had been drastically weakened. Over a million of the 3.2 million men who had attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 were by now dead, captured, or missing.112 At the end of March, only 5 per cent of army divisions were fully operational.113 The figures that Halder gave Hitler on 21 April were chilling in the extreme. Some 900,000 men had been lost since the autumn, only 50 per cent replaced (including the call-up of all available twenty-year-olds, and serious inroads into the labour-force at home). Only around 10 per cent of the vehicles lost had been replaced (though most of the losses of tracked vehicles could be made good). Losses of weapons were also massive. At the beginning of the spring offensive, the eastern front was short of around 625,000 men.114 Given such massive shortages, everything was poured into bolstering the southern offensive in the Soviet Union. Of the sixty-eight divisions established on this part of the front, forty-eight had been entirely, and seventeen at least partly, reconstituted.115
Poor Soviet intelligence meant the Red Army was again unprepared for the German assault when it came.116 By 19 May, the Kerch offensive was largely over, with the capture of 150,000 prisoners and a great deal of booty. A heavy Soviet counter on Kharkhov had been, if with difficulty, successfully fended off.117 By the end of May, the battle at Kharkhov had also resulted in a notable victory, with three Soviet armies destroyed, and over 200,000 men and a huge quantity of booty captured.118 This was in no small measure owing to Hitler’s refusal, fully endorsed by Halder, to allow Field-Marshal Bock, since mid-January Commander of Army Group South, to break off the planned offensive and take up a defensive position.119
Hitler had reason to feel pleased with himself when he spoke for two hours behind closed doors in the Reich Chancellery to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter on the afternoon of 23 May. He had come to Berlin for the funeral of Carl Rover, Gauleiter of Weser-Ems, which had taken place the previous day.120 After a difficult period, also on the home front, he evidently could not miss the opportunity to bolster the solidarity and loyalty of his long-standing Party stalwarts, a vital part of his power-base. And in such company, he was prepared to speak with some candour about his aims.
One of these was the Party’s own work. The death of such a valued comrade as Rover was an indication that successors for Party leaders of his generation, now aged between forty-five and sixty years old (the dead Gauleiter had been born in 1889), needed to be cultivated. But they would not be able to tackle problems which the ‘sworn community’ of the original Party leadership had eschewed. It was his usual fixation with the question of time and mortality. They had been destined (ausersehen) to solve the problems which the National Socialist revolution had brought to the fore. Nothing must be put off. However inconvenient, the issues must be successfully solved. He hoped himself to survive the war. He was convinced that no one else would be able to master its difficulties.121
Hitler turned to the war in the east. He described the winter crisis, castigating the failings of the leaders of the Wehrmacht, the organizers of transport, the judiciary, and the civil service.122 Japan’s intervention had been a blessing, at a time when Germany was facing catastrophe. Some established army leaders had lost their nerve in this situation. He alone — this was the gist of his remarks — had, through his unyielding refusal of requests to retreat, prevented ‘a Napoleonic débâcle’.123 He had praise for the Waffen-SS in the east, and for the Party as the backbone of the home front, the counter to doubts and pessimism.124 He was determined, after their ‘insidious’ behaviour during the winter, he said, doubtless playing here on the many complaints fed to him by Goebbels and the other Gauleiter, to destroy the Christian Churches after the war.125 A revolution against the regime would never occur, he declared, if rebellious elements were dealt with in time. He had given Himmler express orders, should there be a danger of the Reich ‘sinking into chaos’, to ‘shoot the criminals in all concentration camps’.126
Hitler said he recognized in Stalin a ‘man of stature who towered above the democratic figures of the Anglo-Saxon powers’. He naturally knew, Goebbels reported him as saying, ‘that the Jews are determined under all circumstances to bring this war to victory for them, since they know that defeat also means for them personal liquidation’. It was a more forthright version of his ‘prophecy’ — on this occasion unmistakably and explicitly linking it, in Goebbels’s understanding of what was intended, with the physical liquidation of the Jews.127
Hitler emphasized that the war in the east was not comparable with any war in the past. It was not a simple matter of victory or defeat, but of ‘triumph or destruction (Triumph oder Untergang)’. He was aware of the enormous capacity of the American armaments programme. But the scale of output claimed by Roosevelt ‘could in no way be right’. And he had good information on the scale of Japanese naval construction. He reckoned on serious losses for the American navy when it clashed with the Japanese fleet.128 He took the view ‘that in the past winter we have won the war’. Preparations were now in place to launch the offensive in the south of the Soviet Union to cut off the enemy’s oil supplies. He was determined to finish off the Soviets in the coming summer.129
He looked to the future. His vision was very familiar to those who had been his lunch or supper guests in the Wolf’s Lair. Hitler was frank about his imperialist aims. The Reich would massively extend its land in the east, gaining coal, grain, oil, and above all national security. In the west, too, the Reich would have to be strengthened. The French would ‘have to bleed for that’. But there it was a strategic, not an ethnic, question. ‘We must solve the ethnic (völkischen) questions in the east.’ Once the territory needed for the consolidation of Europe was in German hands, it was his intention to build a gigantic fortification, like the limes of Roman times, to separate Asia from Europe. He went on with his vision of a countryside settled by farmer-soldiers, building up a population of 250 million within seventy or eighty years. Then Germany would be safe against all future threats. It should not be difficult, he claimed, to preserve the ethnic-German (völkisch) character of the conquered territories. ‘That would also be the actual meaning of this war. For the serious sacrifice of blood could only be justified through later generations gaining from it the blessing of waving cornfields.’ Nice though it would be to acquire a few colonies to provide rubber or coffee, ‘our colonial territory is in the east. There are to be found fertile black earth and iron, the bases of our future wealth.’ He ended his vision of the future with the vaguest notion of what he understood as a social revolution. The National Socialist Movement, he said, had to make sure that the war did not end in a capitalist victory, but in a victory of the people. A new society would have to be constructed out of the victory, one resting not on money, status, or name, but on courage and test of character (Bewährung). He was confident that victory would be Germany’s. Once the ‘business in the east’ was finished — in the summer, it was to be hoped — ‘then the war is practically won for us. Then we will be in the position of conducting a large-scale pirate-war against the Anglo-Saxon powers, which in the long run they will not be able to withstand.’130
Little over a week later, Hitler was back in Berlin again, this time to address around 10,000 young officers in the Sportpalast on 30 May. Naturally, he struck a different tone. But essentially it offered the same images of the dire spectre of a Bolshevik victory and the power and prosperity of imperialist conquest. Kerch and Kharkov were, he told them, merely the ‘prelude’ to what was to follow in the summer. Germany would — and must — succeed, he declared. If the enemy proved victorious, then ‘Our German people would be exterminated (ausgerottet). Asiatic barbarity would plant itself in Europe. The German woman would be fair game for these beasts. The intelligentsia would be slaughtered. Whatever gives us the characteristic features of a higher form of mankind would be exterminated and annihilated (vernichtet).’ Victory for the Reich, on the other hand, and the acquisition of ‘living-space’, would give future generations grain, iron, coal, oil, flax, rubber, and wood in abundance.131
Hitler had been in ebullient mood when Goebbels saw him at lunchtime in the Reich Chancellery on the day before his speech to the officers. With the advance to the Caucasus, he told his Propaganda Minister, ‘we’ll be pressing the Soviet system so to say on its Adam’s Apple.’132 He thought the new Soviet losses at Kerch and Kharkov were not reparable; Stalin was reaching the end of his resources; there were major difficulties with food-supplies in the Soviet Union; morale there was poor.133 He had concrete plans for the extension of the Reich borders also in the West. He took it as a matter of course that Belgium, with its ancient Germanic provinces of Flanders and Brabant, would be split into German Reichsgaue. So would, whatever the views of Dutch National Socialist leader Anton Mussert, the Netherlands.134
Two days earlier, on 27 May, one of Hitler’s most important henchmen, Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and since the previous autumn Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, had been fatally wounded in an assassination attempt carried out by patriotic Czech exiles who had been flown from London — with the aid of the British subversive warfare agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) — and parachuted into the vicinity of Prague. Heydrich’s own security had become lax. That morning, he left his palatial residence at Panenske Brezany, around twelve miles from Prague, to drive to his headquarters at the Hradcany Castle in the capital without bodyguard, in an open Mercedes, alone with his chauffeur. He always took the same route. The two assassins, and their comrade who would serve as the look-out, had observed him regularly. Heydrich was a little late leaving that morning. It was just after 10.30a.m. when the look-out flashed the signal by mirror that his car was approaching the hairpin bend where it would be forced to slow down, and where the attempt would be made. As the car slowed, the first Czech agent, Josef Gabcik, stepped out, pulled a sten-gun from under his coat, and pressed the trigger. The gun jammed. But Gabcik’s companion, Jan Kubis, ran towards the car and lobbed his grenade at it. The bomb hit the back wheel and exploded. Heydrich, injured in the blast, tried to pursue his assailant, before collapsing. Kubis, also wounded by the explosion, escaped on a bicycle. Gabcik disappeared on a crowded tram after shooting Heydrich’s chauffeur in both legs. The look-out walked away quietly. By the wrecked Mercedes, one of the most powerful men in Hitler’s Reich lay mortally injured.135
Hitler always favoured brutal reprisals. There could be no doubt that the attack on one of the key representatives of his power would provoke a ferocious response.
The assassins themselves were betrayed, for a large money reward, by another Czech SOE agent. Eventually trapped by the SS, they committed suicide after engaging in a gun-battle. But their deaths contributed little towards satiating the Nazi blood-lust. To this end, over 1,300 Czechs, some 200 of them women, were eventually rounded up by the SS and executed. On 10 June the entire village of Lidice — the name had been found on a Czech SOE agent arrested earlier — was to be destroyed, the male inhabitants shot, the women taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp, the children removed.136
Hitler’s mood was ripe for Goebbels to bring up once more the question of the deportation of Berlin’s remaining Jews. The involvement of a number of young Jews (associated with a Communist-linked resistance group led by Herbert Baum) in the arson attempt at the anti-Bolshevik exhibition ‘The Soviet Paradise’ in Berlin’s Lustgarten on 18 May enabled the Propaganda Minister to emphasize the security dangers if the 40,000 or so Jews he reckoned were still in the Reich capital were not deported.137 He had been doing his best, he had noted a day earlier, to have as many Jews as possible from his domain ‘shipped off to the east’.138 Goebbels now pleaded for ‘a more radical Jewish policy’ and, he said, ‘I push at an open door with the Führer,’ who told Speer to find replacements for the Jews in the armaments industry with ‘foreign workers’ as soon as possible.139
Talk moved to the dangers of possible internal revolt in the event of a critical situation in the war, something Hitler had touched upon in his speech to the Gauleiter a few days earlier.140 If the danger became acute, he now repeated, the prisons ‘would be emptied through liquidations’ to prevent the possibility of the gates being opened to let the ‘revolting mob’ loose on the people.141 But in contrast to 1917 there was nothing to fear from the German workers, remarked Hitler. All German workers desired victory. They had most to lose by defeat and would not contemplate stabbing him in the back. ‘The Germans take part in subversive movements only when the Jews lure them into it,’ Goebbels had Hitler saying. ‘Therefore one must liquidate the Jewish danger, cost what it takes.’ West-European civilization only provided a façade of assimilation. Back in the ghetto, Jews soon returned to type. But there were elements among them who operated ‘with dangerous brutality and thirst for revenge (Rachsucht)’. ‘Therefore,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘the Führer does not wish at all that the Jews be evacuated to Siberia. There, under the hardest living conditions, they would doubtless again represent a vigorous element. He would most like to see them resettled in Central Africa. There they would live in a climate that would certainly not make them strong and capable of resistence. At any rate, it is the aim of the Führer to make Western Europe entirely free of Jews. Here they can no longer have any home.’142
Did such remarks mean that Hitler was unaware that the ‘Final Solution’ was under way, that Jews had already been slaughtered in their thousands in Russia and were now being murdered by poison gas in industrialized mass-killing centres already operating in Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-Birkenau (with Treblinka and Maidanek soon to follow)? That seems inconceivable, even if he did not need to be informed of the fine detail of what was taking place, or for that matter of the very names of the extermination camps. As we have noted, reports of the slaughter by the Einsatzgruppen in the USSR had been requested to be sent to Hitler on a regular basis. In December 1941, he had explicitly affirmed to Himmler that Jews — meaning, certainly, those in the east — were to be ‘exterminated as partisans’. And in March 1942, Goebbels had referred to Hitler as the inspiration behind the most ‘radical solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’, in referring to the liquidation of the Jews from the Lublin district.
On 9 April 1942, a time when the deportations from western European countries to the gas-chambers of Poland were also getting under way, Hans Frank told his underlings in the General Government that orders for the liquidation of the Jews came ‘from higher authority’.143 Himmler himself was to claim explicitly in an internal, top-secret, letter to SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, Chief of the SS Main Office, on 28 July 1942, that he was operating directly under Hitler’s authority: ‘The occupied Eastern territories are being made free of Jews. The Führer has placed the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders.’144
How much detail Hitler asked for, or was given, cannot be known. But, one indication at the very least, that he was aware of the slaughter of huge numbers of Jews, is provided by a report which Himmler had drawn up for him at the end of 1942 providing statistics on Jews ‘executed’ in southern Russia on account of alleged connection with ‘bandit’ activity. Having ordered in mid-December that partisan ‘bands’ were to be combated ‘by the most brutal means (mit den allerbrutalsten Mitteln)’, also to be used against women and children, Hitler was presented by Himmler with statistics for southern Russia and the Ukraine on the number of ‘bandits’ liquidated in the three months of September, October, and November 1942. The figures for those helping the ‘bands’ or under suspicion of being connected with them listed 363,211 ‘Jews executed’. The connection with subversive activity was an obvious sham. Others in the same category ‘executed’ totalled ‘only’ 14,257.145
Four months after this, in April 1943, Himmler would have an abbreviated statistical report on ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ sent to Hitler. Aware of the taboo in Hitler’s entourage on explicit reference to the mass killing of the Jews, Himmler had the statistical report presented in camouflage language. The fiction had to be maintained. Himmler ordered the term ‘Special Treatment’ (itself a euphemism for killing) deleted from the shortened version to be sent to Hitler. His statistician, Dr Richard Korherr, was ordered simply to refer to the ‘transport of Jews’. There was reference to Jews being ‘sluiced through’ unnamed camps. The camouflage-language was there to serve a specific purpose. Hitler would understand what it meant, and recognize the Reichsführer-SS’s ‘achievement’.146
When he spoke at lunchtime on 29 May 1942 to Goebbels and to his other guests at his meal-table about his preference for the ‘evacuation’ of the Jews to Central Africa, Hitler was sustaining the fiction which had to be upheld even in his ‘court circle’ that the Jews were being resettled and put to work in the east.147 Goebbels himself, in his diary entry, went along with the fiction, though he knew only too well — as an earlier explicit entry in his diary indicates — what was happening to the Jews in Poland.148 Hitler, as we noted in the previous chapter, had spoken in early 1941 of deporting the Jews to the east. The Madagascar Plan, if he had ever taken it seriously, had by then been abandoned for some time. In September 1941 he had authorized the deportation of the Jews to the east. Speaking now of sending the Jews to central Africa, when only a fortnight earlier he had once more indicated how little interest he had in overseas colonies and when, at this juncture, there was no prospect of attaining territory there, amounted to no more than a fig-leaf to cover what he knew was actually happening.149 Hitler had by now internalized his authorization of the killing of the Jews. It was typical of his way of dealing with the ‘Final Solution’ that he spoke of it either by repeating what he knew had long since ceased to be the case; or by alluding to the removal of Jews from Europe (often in the context of his ‘prophecy’) at some distant point in the future.
Hitler’s preoccupation with secrecy remained intense. Nowhere is there an explicit indication, even in discussions with adjutants or secretaries, of his knowledge of the extermination of the Jews.150 The subject was probably mentioned, if at all, only privately to Himmler and in general terms (as in their discussion on 18 December 1941), and otherwise darkly hinted at in camouflaged remarks, whose meanings were perfectly well understood by those aware of what was happening. Himmler adopted the same strategy.151
Why was Hitler so anxious to maintain the fiction of resettlement, and uphold the ‘terrible secret’ even among his inner circle? A partial explanation is doubtless to be found in Hitler’s acute personal inclination to extreme secrecy which he translated into a general mode of rule, as laid down in his ‘Basic Order’ of January 1940, that information should only be available on a ‘need-to-know’ basis.152 Knowledge of extermination could provide a propaganda gift to enemies, and perhaps stir up unrest and internal difficulties in the occupied territories, particularly in western Europe.153 And as regards public opinion in the Reich itself, the Nazi leadership believed that the German people were not ready for the gross inhumanity of the extermination of the Jews.154 Hitler had agreed with Rosenberg in mid-December 1941, directly following the declaration of war on the USA, that it would be inappropriate to speak of extermination in public.155 Late in 1942., Bormann was keen to quell rumours circulating about the ‘Final Solution’ in the east.156 Himmler would later, speaking to SS leaders, refer to it as ‘a never to be written glorious page of our history’.157 Evidently, it was a secret to be carried to the grave.
In his public statements referring to his 1939 ‘prophecy’, Hitler could now lay claim to his place in ‘the glorious secret of our history’ while still detaching himself from the sordid and horrific realities of mass killing.158 Beyond that, a further incentive to secrecy was that Hitler wanted no bureaucratic and legal interference. He had experienced this in the ‘euthanasia action’, necessitating his unique written authorization, and the problems which subsequently arose from it. His tirades about the judicial system and bureaucracy in the spring of 1942 were a further indicator of his sensitivity towards such interference. To avoid any legalistic meddling, Himmler explicitly refused in the summer of 1942 to entertain attempts to define ‘a Jew’.159
In addition, there was probably, however, a deep psychological underlay to Hitler’s obsessive secretiveness about the fate of the Jews. The Third Reich was mighty, but even now perhaps, so his warped thinking must have run, not so mighty as the power of the Jews — the ‘world conspiracy’ in which he still fervently believed. He still had no means of tackling the Jews whom he believed to be behind the war with Britain and, above all, with the USA. Whatever his public optimism, there is the occasional veiled hint that he entertained the thought, in the darkness of his insomniac nights, that he might lose the war, that his enemies might prevail.160 Some ordinary Germans, swallowing Nazi propaganda and betraying their ingrained prejudices, voiced their worries by the middle of the war of the ‘revenge of the Jews’ if Germany were to lose its struggle.161 It seems hardly conceivable that Hitler did not also entertain such a concern in the recesses of his mind. Withholding his knowledge of the ‘Final Solution’, even from his close associates, would ensure that such information could not reach his archenemies.
Manstein’s difficulties in taking Sevastopol held up the start of ‘Operation Blue’ — the push to the Caucasus — until the end of June.162 But at this point, Hitler need have no doubts that the war was going well. In the Atlantic, the U-boats had met with unprecedented success. In the first six months of 1942, they had sunk almost a third more shipping tonnage than during the whole of 1941, and far fewer U-boats had been lost in the process.163 And on the evening of 21 June came the stunning news that Rommel had taken Tobruk. Through brilliant tactical manoeuvring during the previous three weeks, Rommel had outwitted the ineffectively led and poorly equipped British 8th Army and was then able to inflict a serious defeat on the Allied cause by seizing the stronghold of Tobruk, on the Libyan coast, capturing 33,000 British and Allied prisoners-of-war (many of them South African) and a huge amount of booty.164 It was a spectacular German victory and a disaster for the British. The doorway to German dominance of Egypt was wide open. All at once there was a glimmering prospect in view of an enormous pincer of Rommel’s troops pushing eastwards through Egypt and the Caucasus army sweeping down through the Middle East linking forces to wipe out the British presence in this crucial region.165 Hitler, overjoyed, immediately promoted Rommel to Field-Marshal. Italian hopes of German support for an invasion of Malta were now finally shelved until later in the year. Hitler backed instead Rommel’s plans to advance to the Nile. Within days, German troops were in striking distance of Alexandria.166
One dark cloud on an otherwise sunny horizon was, however, the damage being caused to towns in western Germany by British bombing raids. On 30 May, Hitler had said that he did not think much of the RAF’s threats of heavy air-raids. Precautions, he claimed, had been taken. The Luftwaffe had so many squadrons stationed in the west that destruction from the air would be doubly repaid.167 That very night, the city centre of Cologne was devastated by the first 1,000-bomber raid. The Luftwaffe’s own claims that only seventy British bombers were involved, of which forty-four had been shot down, were regarded even by the Nazi leadership as absurd. Hitler believed the more realistic reports from the Party regional office in Cologne. Goebbels had himself telephoned Führer Headquarters to give an estimate of 250-300 bombers taking part.168 Hitler was enraged at the failure of the Luftwaffe to defend the Reich, blaming Göring personally for neglecting the construction of sufficient flak installations.169
Despite the bombing of Cologne, the military situation put Hitler and his entourage in excellent mood in early June. On the first day of the month Hitler was flown in his ‘Führer Machine’ — a spacious, four-engined Focke-Wulf, with simple interior and few special features other than a writing desk in front of his own seat — to Army Group South’s headquarters at Poltava to discuss with Field-Marshal Bock the timing and tactics of the coming offensive. Apart from Manstein, all the commanders were present as Hitler agreed to Bock’s proposal to delay the start of ‘Operation Blue’ for some days in order to take full advantage of the victory at Kharkov to destroy Soviet forces in adjacent areas. Hitler informed the commanders that the outcome of ‘Blue’ would be decisive for the war.170 Back in the Wolf’s Lair, he told his lunchtime gathering next day that the number of blue-eyed, blonde women he had seen in Poltava had slightly shaken his racial views.171 He had been astonished at how well-fed and –clothed the people of the area were. There could be no talk there of famine.172
On 4 June, Hitler paid a surprise visit — it had been arranged only the previous day — to Finland. Officially, the visit was to mark the seventy-fifth birthday of the Finnish military hero, Marshal Baron Carl Gustaf von Mannerheim, supreme commander of the Finnish armed forces. How pleased Mannerheim was to have his birthday party hijacked by Hitler can only be surmised. But the Finns had little choice other than to comply. Despite their growing unease at the alliance with Germany, which they had entered into prior to ‘Barbarossa’ in the expectation of a swift and comprehensive victory of the Wehrmacht,173 no current alternative to German tutelage was available. For Hitler, some sense of the significance he attached to the meeting can be judged from the fact that, apart from a number of trips to Italy and his meetings in southern France with Pétain and Franco in 1940, it was the only time he had travelled to an area outside direct German control.174
The aim of the informal visit was to bolster Finnish solidarity with Germany through underlining for Mannerheim — a veteran of struggles with the Red Army — the immensity of the threat of Bolshevism. The Finns would at the same time be warned about any possible considerations of leaving German ‘protection’ and putting out feelers to the Soviet Union. In addition, the visit would head off any possible ties of Finland with the western Allies.175
The meeting took place in Mannerheim’s special train in the middle of woods near the air-field at Immola.176 First came the ceremonials — Hitler presented Mannerheim with the Great Golden Cross of the German Order of the Eagle — followed by lunch. Then the main participants withdrew for a confidential meeting. For an hour and a half, Hitler ran through his usual account of the war for his almost entirely silent small audience of Mannerheim, State President Risto Ryti, and Keitel. Shorn of its usual hectoring and guttural tone, his Austrian accent helped to make his rhetoric on the tape-recorded first eleven minutes — a unique survival of political comments recorded without Hitler’s knowledge — sound more lively and engaged than a written précis might make it appear.177 His main concern was to emphasize the growing danger from the Soviet Union — far greater than had been imagined even at the start of ‘Barbarossa’ — and the inevitability of the conflict. He underscored the consistency of German policy.178 Of course, he held to the version that Germany had been forced to act through a preventive war to head off imminent Soviet aggression.179 Hitler’s monologue amounted by that point to no more than a broad survey of the war. He had no intention of entering into any discussion of future military plans. He never once, for instance, mentioned the coming offensive. The Finns were only informed of that one day before it began, during Mannerheim’s return visit.180
The meeting had no concrete results. That was not its aim. For now, Hitler had reassured himself that he had the Finns’ continued support. He was well satisfied with the visit.181 For their part, the Finns maintained their superficially good relations with Germany, while keeping a watchful eye on events. The course of the war over the next six months conveyed its own clear message to them to begin looking for alternative loyalties.182
While Hitler was en route to Finland, news came through from Prague that Reinhard Heydrich had died of the wounds he had suffered in the attack on 27 May.183 Back in his headquarters, Hitler put it down to ‘stupidity or pure dimwittedness (reinen Stumpfsinn)’ that ‘such an irreplaceable man as Heydrich should expose himself to the danger’ of assassins, by driving without adequate bodyguard in an open-top car, and insisted that Nazi leaders comply with proper security precautions.184 Hitler was in reflective mood at the state funeral in Berlin on 9 June. So soon after the loss of Todt, it seemed to him — and, in fact, was not far from the truth — as if the Party and state leadership only assembled for state funerals.185 He spent time in the evening reminiscing with Goebbels about the early days of the Party, how hard it had been to book a hall in Munich, the difficulties in filling the Circus Krone, his relief at speaking for the first time in the Sportpalast to an audience that neither smoked nor drank, and paid attention. ‘The Führer is very happy in these memories,’ remarked Goebbels. ‘He lives from the past, which seems to him like a lost paradise.’186
‘Operation Blue’, the great summer offensive in the south, began on 28 June.187 A week earlier, a German plane carrying operational plans for ‘Blue’ had crashed behind enemy lines.188 Stalin thought it was deliberate disinformation and ignored it, as he did warnings from Britain.189 The offensive, carried out by five armies in two groups against the weakest part of the Soviet front, between Kursk in the north and Taganrog on the Sea of Azov in the south, was able — as ‘Barbarossa’ had done the previous year — to use the element of surprise to make impressive early gains.190 Meanwhile, on 1 July, finally, the fall of Sevastopol brought immediate promotion to Field-Marshal for Manstein.191
After the initial break through the Russian lines, the rapid advance on Voronezh ended in the capture of the city on 6 July. This brought, however, the first confrontation of the new campaign between Hitler and his generals. Voronezh itself was an unimportant target. But a Soviet counter-attack had tied down two armoured divisions in the city for two days. This slowed the south-eastern advance along the Don and allowed enemy forces to escape. Hitler was enraged that Bock had ignored his instructions that the advance of the panzer divisions was to proceed without any hold-ups to the Volga in order to allow maximum destruction of the Soviet forces. In fact, when he had flown to Bock’s headquarters at Poltava on 3 July, Hitler had been far less dogmatic and clear in face-to-face discussion with the field-marshal than he was in the map-room of the Wolf’s Lair.192 But that did not save Bock. Hitler said he was not going to have his plans spoiled by field-marshals as they had been in autumn 1941. Bock was dismissed and replaced by Colonel-General Freiherr Maximilian von Weichs.193
To be closer to the southern front, Hitler moved his headquarters on 16 July to a new location, given the name ‘Werwolf, near Vinnitsa in the Ukraine.194 Sixteen planes, their engines already whirring, waited on the runway at the Wolf’s Lair that day for Hitler and his entourage to take them on a three-hour flight to their new surrounds. After a car-ride along rutted roads, they finally arrived at the damp, mosquito-infested huts that were to be their homes for the next three and a half months.195 Even the Wolf’s Lair began to seem idyllic. At the ‘Werwolf, the days were stiflingly hot, the nights, even in high summer, distinctly chilly. The mosquitoes were an even greater plague than they had been in East Prussia. Everyone had to take each day a bitter-tasting medicine called Atibrin as a precaution against malaria. Halder was pleased enough with the layout of the new headquarters. Hitler’s secretaries were less happy with their cramped quarters. As at Rastenburg, they had little to do and were bored. A visit to a local abattoir and meat-processing plant, collective farm, or decrepit theatre in the nearby town was, apart from watching old films, the closest thing to escapism.196 For Hitler, the daily routine was unchanged from that in the Wolf’s Lair. At meals — his own often consisted of no more than a plate of vegetables with apples to follow — he could still appear open, relaxed, engaged.197 As always, he monopolized dinner-table topics of conversation on a wide variety of topics that touched on his interests or obsessions. These included the evils of smoking, the construction of a motorway system throughout the eastern territories, the deficiencies of the legal system, the achievements of Stalin as a latter-day Ghengis Khan, keeping the standard of living low among the subjugated peoples, the need to remove the last Jews from German cities, and the promotion of private initiative rather than a state-controlled economy.198
Away from the supper soliloquies, however, tension mounted once more between Hitler and his military leaders. The military advance continued to make ground. But the numbers of Soviet prisoners captured steadily diminished. This was endlessly discussed at FHQ.199 Hitler’s military advisers were worried. They took it that the Soviets were pulling back their forces in preparation for a big counter-offensive, probably on the Volga, in the Stalingrad region.200 Halder had warned as early as 12 July of concern at the front that the enemy, recognizing German envelopment tactics, was avoiding direct fight and withdrawing to the south.201 Hitler’s view was, however, that the Red Army was close to the end of its tether. He pressed all the more for a speedy advance.202
His impulsive, though sometimes — as the Voronezh episode had shown — unclear or ambiguous command-style caused constant difficulties for the operational planners. But the essential problem was more far-reaching. Hitler felt compelled by two imperatives: time, and material resources. The offensive had to be completed before the might of Allied resources came fully into play. And possession of the Caucasian oil-fields would, in his view, both be decisive in bringing the war in the east to a successful conclusion, and provide the necessary platform to continue a lengthy war against the Anglo-Saxon powers.203 If this oil were not gained, Hitler had said, the war would be lost for Germany within three months.204 Following his own logic, Hitler had, therefore, no choice but to stake everything on the ambitious strike to the Caucasus in a victorious summer offensive.205 Even if some sceptical voices could be heard, Halder and the professionals in Army High Command had favoured the offensive. But the gap, already opened up the previous summer, between them and the dictator was rapidly widening. What Hitler saw as the negativity, pessimism, and timidity of Army High Command’s traditional approaches drove him into paroxysms of rage. Army planners for their part had cold feet about what increasingly seemed to them a reckless gamble carried out by dilettante methods, more and more likely to end in disaster. But they could not now pull out of the strategy which they had been party to implementing. A catastrophe at Stalingrad was the heavy price that would soon be paid. The German war effort had set in train its own self-destructive dynamic.
The risk of military disaster was seriously magnified by Hitler’s Directive No.45 of 23 July 1942. Thereafter, a calamity was waiting to happen. Unlike the April directive, in which Halder’s hand had been visible, this directive rested squarely on a decision by Hitler, which the General Staff had sought to prevent.206 The directive for the continuation of ‘Blue’, now renamed ‘Operation Braunschweig’, began with a worryingly unrealistic claim: ‘In a campaign of little more than three weeks, the broad goals set for the southern flank of the eastern front have been essentially achieved. Only weak enemy forces of the Timoshenko armies have succeeded in escaping envelopment and reaching the southern bank of the Don. We have to reckon with their reinforcement from the Caucasus area.’207
Earlier in the month, Hitler had divided Army Group South into a northern sector (Army Group B, originally under Field-Marshal von Bock, then, after his sacking, under Colonel-General Freiherr von Weichs) and a southern sector (Army Group A, under Field-Marshal Wilhelm List).208 The original intention, under his Directive No.41 of 5 April, had been to advance on the Caucasus following the encirclement and destruction of Soviet forces in the vicinity of Stalingrad. This was now altered to allow attacks on the Caucasus and Stalingrad (including the taking of the city itself) to proceed simultaneously. List’s stronger Army Group A was left to destroy enemy forces in the Rostov area, then conquer the whole of the Caucasus region alone. This was to include the eastern coast of the Black Sea, crossing the Kuban and occupying the heights around the oil-fields of Maykop, controlling the almost impenetrable Caucasian mountain passes, and driving south-eastwards to take the oil-rich region around Grozny, then Baku, far to the south on the Caspian Sea. The attack on Stalingrad was left to the weaker Army Group B, which was expected thereafter to press on along the lower Volga to Astrakhan on the Caspian.209 The strategy was sheer lunacy.
Only the most incautiously optimistic assessment of the weakness of the Soviet forces could have justified the scale of the risk involved. But Hitler took precisely such a view of enemy strength. Moreover, he was as always temperamentally predisposed to a risk-all strategy, with alternatives dismissed out of hand and boats burned to leave no fall-back position. As always, his self-justification could be bolstered by the dogmatic view that there was no alternative. Halder, aware of more realistic appraisals of Soviet strength, and the build-up of forces in the Stalingrad area, but unable to exert any influence upon Hitler, was by now both seriously concerned and frustrated at his own impotence.210 On 23 July, the day that Hitler issued his Directive No.45, Halder had written in his diary: ‘This chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions and develops into a positive danger. The situation is getting more and more intolerable. There is no room for any serious work. This so-called leadership is characterized by a pathological reacting to the impressions of the moment and a total lack of any understanding of the command machinery and its possibilities.’211 On 15 August, Halder’s notes for his situation report began: ‘Overall picture: have we extended the risk too far?’212 The question was well warranted. But the insight had come rather late in the day.
By mid-August, Army Group A had swept some 350 miles to the south, over the north Caucasian plain. It was now far separated from Army Group B, with a lengthy exposed flank, and formidable logistical problems of ensuring supplies.213 Its advance now slowed markedly in the wooded foothills of the northern Caucasus.214 Maykop was taken, but the oil-refineries were left in ruins, systematically and expertly destroyed by the retreating Soviet forces.215 The impetus had by now been lost. Hitler showed little sense of realism when he spoke privately to Goebbels on 19 August. Operations in the Caucasus, he said, were going extremely well. He wanted to take possession of the oil-wells of Maykop, Grozny, and Baku during the summer, securing Germany’s oil supplies and destroying those of the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet border had been reached, the breakthrough into the Near East would follow, occupying Asia Minor and overrunning Iraq, Iran, and Palestine, to cut off Britain’s oil supplies. Within two or three days, he wanted to commence the big assault on Stalingrad. He intended to destroy the city completely, leaving no stone on top of another. It was both psychologically and militarily necessary. The forces deployed were reckoned to be sufficient to capture the city within eight days.216
These were scarcely signs of waning self-confidence.217 But his over-reaction, two days later, when news reached him that mountain troops had placed the German flag on the Elbrus, highest mountain of the Caucasus range at 5,630 metres, suggests that his self-confidence was a front, perhaps above all for himself. Beneath the façade, his nerves were edgy, his anxiety about the offensive growing. The troops presumably thought he would be pleased. In fact, he was furious at what he saw as a pointless mountaineering feat devoid of military purpose.218 Speer later wrote that he had seldom seen him so enraged, fuming for days at ‘these mad mountaineers’ who deserved to be put before a military court. In the middle of a war, he ranted, their idiotic ambition had driven them to climb an idiotic peak, when he had ordered everything to be concentrated on the taking of Suchum. It was in truth a minor escapade. But from Hitler’s near-hysterical over-reaction it seemed, Speer recalled, as if they had ruined his entire operational plan.219
The last significant successes of Army Group B, meanwhile, had been in encircling and destroying two Russian armies south-west of Kalac, on the Don due west of Stalingrad, on 8 August.220 Advancing in punishing heat and hindered through chronic fuel shortage, on 23 August, the 6th Army, under General Friedrich Paulus, succeeded in reaching the Volga, north of Stalingrad.221 Amid heavy Soviet defences, the advance ground rapidly to a halt. The summer offensive had, as it turned out, run its course in less than two months.222 As early as 26 August Halder was noting: ‘Near Stalingrad, serious tension on account of superior counter-attacks of the enemy. Our divisions are no longer very strong. The command is heavily under nervous strain.’223 The 6th Army was, however, able to consolidate its position. Over the next weeks, it even gained the advantage. But the nightmare of Stalingrad was only just beginning.
While the southern part of the massively extended front was running out of steam, with the 6th Army now bogged down at Stalingrad and List’s Army Group A stalled in the Caucasus, Kluge’s Army Group Centre had encountered a damaging setback, suffering horrendous casualties in an ill-fated attempt ordered by Hitler to wipe out Russian forces at Sukhinichi, 150 miles west of Moscow, from where it was hoped to establish the basis for a renewed drive on the capital. Kluge, on a visit to ‘Werwolf on 7 August, had asked Hitler to remove two armoured divisions from the offensive at Sukhinichi to deploy them against a threatening Soviet counterattack in the Rzhev area. Hitler had refused, insisting that they be retained for the Sukhinichi offensive. Kluge had marched out saying ‘You, my Führer, therefore assume responsibility for this.’224
And in the north, by the end of August expectations of launching an assault and finally taking the hunger-torn city of Leningrad had been massively dented through the Soviet counter-offensive south of Lake Ladoga. Manstein’s nth Army had been brought up from the southern front to lead the planned final assault on Leningrad in September in the ‘Northern Lights’ offensive. Instead it found itself engaged in fending off the Soviet strike. There was no possibility of capturing Leningrad and razing it to the ground. The last chance of that had gone.225 Hitler’s outward show of confidence in victory could not altogether conceal his mounting inner anxiety. His temper was on a short fuse. Outbursts of rage became more common.226 He cast around as always for scapegoats for the rapidly deteriorating military situation in the east. It did not take him long to find them.
Relations with Halder had already reached rock-bottom. On 24 August, the worsening situation at Rzhev had prompted the Chief of the General Staff to urge Hitler to allow a retreat of the 9th Army to a more defensible shorter line. In front of all those assembled at the midday conference, Hitler rounded on Halder. ‘You always come here with the same proposal, that of withdrawal,’ he raged. ‘I demand from the leadership the same toughness as from the front-soldiers.’ Halder, deeply insulted, shouted back: ‘I have the toughness, my Führer. But out there brave musketeers and lieutenants are falling in thousands and thousands as useless sacrifice in a hopeless situation simply because their commanders are not allowed to make the only reasonable decision and have their hands tied behind their backs.’227 Hitler stared at Halder. ‘What can you, who sat in the same chair (Dreh-schemel) in the First World War, too, tell me about the troops, Herr Halder, you, who don’t even wear the black insignia of the wounded?’228 Appalled, and embarrassed, the onlookers dispersed. Hitler tried to smooth Halder’s ruffled feathers that evening. But it was plain to all who witnessed the scene that the Chief of Staff’s days were numbered.229
Even Hitler’s military right hand, the loyal and devoted Jodl, was now made to feel the full impact of his wrath. On 5 September List had asked for Jodl to be been sent to Army Group A headquarters at Stalino, north of the Sea of Azov, to discuss the further deployment of the 39th Mountain Corps.230 The visit took place two days later. From Hitler’s point of view, the purpose was to urge List to accelerate the advance on the largely stalled Caucasus front. Hitler’s patience at the lack of progress had been extremely thin for some time. But far from bringing back positive news, Jodl returned that evening with a devastating account of conditions. It was no longer possible to force the Soviets back over the mountain passes. The most that could be achieved, with greater mobility and maximum concentration of forces, was a last attempt to reach Grozny and the Caspian Sea. Hitler grew more angry with every sentence. He lashed out at the ‘lack of initiative’ of the army leadership; and now for the first time attacked Jodl, the messenger bearing bad news.231 It was the worst crisis in relations between Hitler and his military leaders since the previous August.232 Hitler was in a towering rage. But Jodl stood his ground. It turned into a shouting-match.233 Jodl fully backed List’s assessment of the position. Hitler exploded. He accused Jodl of betraying his orders, being talked round by List, and taking sides with the Army Group. He had not sent him to the Caucasus, he said, to have him bring back doubts among the troops.234 Jodl retorted that List was faithfully adhering to the orders Hitler himself had given.235 Beside himself with rage, Hitler said his words were being twisted. Things would have to be different. He would have to ensure that he could not be deliberately misinterpreted in future.236 Like a prima donna in a pique, Hitler stormed out, refusing to shake hands (as he invariably had done at the end of their meetings) with Jodl and Keitel.237 Evidently depressed as well as angry, he said to his Wehrmacht adjutant Schmundt that night, ‘I’ll be glad when I can take off this detestable uniform and trample on it.’238 He saw no end to the war in Russia since none of the aims of summer 1942 had been realized. The anxiety about the forthcoming winter was dreadful, he said. ‘But on the other hand,’ noted Army Adjutant Engel, ‘he will retreat nowhere.’239
Hitler now shut himself up in his darkened hut during the days. He refused to appear for the communal meals. The military briefings, with as few present as possible, took place in a glacial atmosphere in his own hut, not in the headquarters of the Wehrmacht staff. And he refused to shake hands with anyone. Within forty-eight hours, a group of shorthand typists, practised stenographers from the Reichstag (where the need for active stenographers was by now hardly pressing), arrived at FHQ. Hitler had insisted upon a record of all military briefings being taken so that he could not again be misinterpreted.240
The day after the confrontation with Jodl, Hitler dismissed List. Demonstrating his distrust of his generals, he himself for the time being took over the command of Army Group A. He was now commander of the armed forces, of one branch of those armed forces, and of one group of that branch. At the same time, Keitel was deputed to tell Halder that he would soon be relieved of his post. Keitel himself and Jodl were also rumoured to be slated for dismissal.241 Jodl admitted privately that he had been at fault in trying to point out to a dictator where he had gone wrong. This, Jodl said, could only shake his self-confidence — the basis of his personality and actions. Jodl added that whoever his own replacement might be, he could not be more of a staunch National Socialist than he himself was.242
In the event, the worsening conditions at Stalingrad and in the Mediterranean prevented the intended replacement of Jodl by Paulus and Keitel by Kesselring.243 But there was no saving Halder. Hitler complained bitterly to Below that Halder had no comprehension of the difficulties at the front and was devoid of ideas for solutions. He coldly viewed the situation only from maps and had ‘completely wrong notions’ about the way things were going.244 Hitler pondered Schmundt’s advice to replace Halder by Major-General Kurt Zeitzler, a very different type of character — a small bald-headed, ambitious, dynamic forty-seven-year-old, firm believer in the Führer, who had been put in by Hitler in April to shake up the army in the west and, as Rundstedt’s chief of staff, to build up coastal defences.245 Göring, too, encouraged Hitler to get rid of Halder.246
That point was reached on 24 September. A surprised Zeitzler had by then been summoned to FHQ and told by Hitler of his promotion to full General of the Infantry and of his new responsibilities.247 After what was to be his last military briefing, Halder was, without ceremony, relieved of his post. His nerves, Hitler told him, were gone, and his own nerves also strained. It was necessary for Halder to go, and for the General Staff to be educated to believe fanatically in ‘the idea’. Hitler, Halder noted in his final diary entry, was determined to enforce his will, also in the army.248
The traditional General Staff, for long such a powerful force, its Chief now discarded like a spent cartridge, had arrived at its symbolic final point of capitulation to the forces to which it had wedded itself in 1933. Zeitzler began the new regime by demanding from the members of the General Staff belief in the Führer.249 He himself would soon realize that this alone would not be enough.
The battle for Stalingrad was by now looming. Both sides were aware how critical it would be. The German leadership remained optimistic.
Hitler’s plans for the massively over-populated city on the Volga were similar to the annihilatory intentions he had held about Leningrad and Moscow. ‘The Führer orders that on entry into the city the entire male population should be done away with (beseitigt),’ the Wehrmacht High Command recorded, ‘since Stalingrad, with its thoroughly Communist population of a million, is especially dangerous.’250 Halder noted simply, without additional comment: ‘Stalingrad: male population to be destroyed (vernichtet), female to be deported’.251
When he visited FHQ on 11 September, General von Weichs, Commander of Army Group B, had told Hitler he was confident that the attack on the inner city of Stalingrad could begin almost immediately and be completed within ten days.252 Indeed, the early signs were that the fall of the city would not be long delayed. But by the second half of September, the contest for Stalingrad had already turned into a battle of scarcely imaginable intensity and ferocity. The fighting was taking place often at point-blank range, street by street, house by house. German and Soviet troops were almost literally at each other’s throats. The final taking of what had rapidly become little more than a shell of smoking ruins, it was coming to be realized, could take weeks, even months.253
Elsewhere, too, the news was less than encouraging. Rommel’s offensive at El Alamein in the direction of the Suez Canal had to be broken off already on 2 September, only three days after it had begun. Rommel remained confident, both publicly and in private, over the next weeks, though he reported on the serious problems with shortages of weapons and equipment when he saw Hitler on 1 October to receive his Field-Marshal’s baton.254 In reality, however, the withdrawal of 2 September would turn out to be the beginning of the end for the Axis in North Africa.255 Its morale revitalized under a new commander, General Bernard Montgomery, and its lost, out-of-date armour replaced by new Sherman tanks, the 8th Army would by autumn prove more than a match for Rommel’s limited forces.256
In the Reich itself, the British nightly raids had intensified. Munich, Bremen, Düsseldorf, and Duisburg were among the cities that now suffered serious destruction.257 Hitler said he was glad his own apartment in Munich had been badly damaged; he would not have liked it spared — obviously it would not have looked good — if the rest of the city had been attacked. He thought the raid might have a salutary effect in waking up the population of Munich to the realities of the war.258 Air-raids had another good side, he had told Goebbels in mid-August: the enemy had ‘taken work from us’ in destroying buildings that would in any case have had to be torn down to allow the improved post-war town planning.259 Such remarks scarcely betrayed much feeling for the suffering of ordinary people in the raids. For these, the wail of the sirens, disturbed nights in air-raid shelters, and rumours — exaggerated or not — of the horrors in other cities tore at the nerves. And the helplessness of the Luftwaffe to defend their cities shook people’s confidence in the leadership.260 Hitler felt his own impotence to respond as he would have liked: by revenge through even greater destruction of British cities. But there was a shortage of German bombers. The Heinkel 177 had, as Hitler had long predicted, proved unsuccessful, with repeated engine failures preventing its active use. And the Junkers 88 could not be produced in sufficient numbers, since priority had to be accorded to fighters. Powerless to do much against the mounting threat from the skies, Hitler said he trusted Göring’s assurances that things would soon be improved in the Luftwaffe.261
At the end of September, Hitler flew back to Berlin. He had promised Goebbels to use the opening of the Winter Aid campaign to address the nation during the second half of September.262 Once more, it was important to sustain morale at a vital time.
He looked well when Goebbels saw him at a late lunch on 28 September, after speaking to 12,000 young officers in the Sportpalast. He was more optimistic than Goebbels had imagined he would be about Stalingrad. The city would soon be taken, Hitler claimed. Then the advance on the Caucasus could proceed again, even during the winter. Goebbels did not share the optimism.263 It was as if Hitler felt unable to deviate, even in private, from the fiction that all was going well in the eastern campaign. His Luftwaffe adjutant, Below, thought Hitler was by now starting to deceive himself about the realities of the situation.264
Next day, Hitler spoke to a small group of generals, along with Göring and Speer, about the dangers of an invasion in the west. Fiasco though it had been, the attempted landing of Canadian troops in Dieppe in mid-August had been a new reminder of the threat. But by the spring, when the new Atlantic Wall with its 15,000 bunkers was constructed, the Reich would be immune, he claimed.265
Hitler’s Sportpalast speech on 30 September combined a glorification of German military achievements with a sarcastic, mocking attack on Churchill and Roosevelt.266 This was nothing new, though the hand-picked Sportpalast audience lapped it up. They, and the wider audience listening to the broadcast of the speech, took especial note when Hitler suggested that, after the perils of the last winter had been surmounted, the worst was now behind them, and the economic benefits of the occupied territories would soon be flowing to Germany to improve the standard of living.267 He went on to repeat his prophecy about the Jews — by now a regular weapon in his rhetorical armoury — in the most menacing phrases he had so far used: ‘The Jews used to laugh, in Germany too, about my prophecies. I don’t know if they’re still laughing today, or whether the laughter has already gone out of them. But I, too, can now only offer the assurance: the laughter will go out of them everywhere. And I will also be right in my prophecies.’268 But the speech was most notable of all for his assurances about the battle for Stalingrad. The metropolis on the Volga, bearing the Soviet leader’s name, was being stormed, he declared, and would be taken. ‘You can be sure,’ he added, ‘that nobody will get us away from this place again!’269
His public display of optimism was unbounded, even in a more confined forum, when he addressed the Reichs — and Gauleiter for almost three hours the following afternoon. He felt at ease, he told the gathering, in the company of his most long-standing Party comrades.270 ‘The Gauleiter,’ he had told Goebbels in mid-August, ‘never cheat me’ — unlike, he had said, his generals. ‘They are my most loyal and reliable colleagues. If I lost trust in them I wouldn’t know whom to trust.’271 He outlined the plans to thrust to the Caucasus, to cut the Soviet Union off from its oil. He said he had wanted to undertake that the previous year, but Brauchitsch had pushed the campaign in a completely different direction, towards Moscow ‘which is relatively uninteresting for us’. But he was certain that Germany would now gain possession of the oil-fields of Grozny, while a first priority was to get those oil-wells captured in a ruined state in Maykop flowing again. ‘The capture of Stalingrad,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘is for him an established fact,’ even if it could still take a little time. Once that was attained, Astrakhan would be the next target, then the destruction by the Luftwaffe of the key Soviet oil-fields of Baku. Thereafter, as he had already told Goebbels several weeks earlier (when he had spoken of overrunning Iraq, Iran, and Palestine), his sights were set on the British oil supplies from Mesopotamia and the Middle East.272 Surveying the position of his enemies, Hitler came to the remarkable conclusion that ‘the war was practically lost for the opposing side, no matter how long it was in a position to carry it on’. Only an internal upheaval in Germany could snatch victory for the enemy. It was the Party’s job to see that that could never happen. He had effusive praise for the Party’s work. The longer the war went on, commented Goebbels, the closer the Führer came to the Party.273
Hitler’s absurd optimism at the beginning of October scarcely accorded with the growing anxieties of his military advisers about the situation in Stalingrad. Winter was now no longer far off. Paulus, Weichs, Jodl, and Zeitzler all favoured pulling back from a target which, largely in ruins, had by now lost all significance as a communications and armaments centre, and taking up more secure winter positions. The only alternative was to pour in heavy reinforcements.274 Hitler’s view — he had said so to Goebbels in mid-August — was that this time winter had been so well prepared for that the soldiers in the east would be living better than most of them had done in peacetime.275
On 6 October, after Paulus had reported a temporary halt to the attack because his troops were exhausted, Hitler ordered the ‘complete capture’ of Stalingrad as the key objective of Army Group B.276 There might indeed have been something to be said for choosing the protection of even a ruined city to the open, exposed steppes over the winter had the supplies situation been as favourable as Hitler evidently imagined it to be, had the supply lines been secure, and had the threat of a Soviet counter-offensive been less large. However, the indicators are that only insufficient winter provision for the 6th Army had been made. Supply-lines were now overstretched on an enormously long front, and far from secure on the northern flank. And intelligence was coming in of big concentrations of Soviet troops which might pose real danger to the position of the 6th Army. Withdrawal was the sensible option.277
Hitler would not hear of it. At the beginning of October, Zeitzler and Jodl heard him for the first time, in outrightly rejecting their advice about the danger of being bogged down in house-to-house fighting with heavy losses, stress that the capture of the city was necessary not just for operational, but for ‘psychological’ reasons: to show the world the continued strength of German arms, and to boost the morale of the Axis allies.278 More than ever contemptuous of generals and military advisers who lacked the necessary strength of will, and convinced that he alone had prevented an ignominious full-scale retreat through his unbending insistence on standing fast the previous winter, he now refused to countenance any suggestion of withdrawal from Stalingrad. But his ‘halt order’ of the previous winter had had tactical merit. This time, it had none. Fear of loss of face had taken over from military reasoning. Hitler’s all too public statements in the Sportpalast and then to his Gauleiter had meant that taking Stalingrad had become a matter of prestige.279 And, though he claimed the fact that the city bore Stalin’s name was of no significance,280 retreat from precisely this city would clearly compound the loss of prestige.
In the meantime, Hitler was starting to acknowledge mounting concern among his military advisers about the build-up of Soviet forces on the northern banks of the Don — the weakest section of the front, where the Wehrmacht was dependent on the resolution of its allied armies — the Romanians, Hungarians, and Italians.281
The situation in North Africa was by this time also critical. Montgomery’s 8th Army had begun its big offensive at El Alamein on 23 October. Rommel had quickly been sent back from sick-leave to hold together the defence of the Axis forces and prevent a breakthrough. Hitler’s initial confidence that Rommel would hold his ground had rapidly evaporated. Lacking fuel and munitions, and facing a numerically far superior enemy, Rommel was unable to prevent Montgomery’s tanks penetrating the German front in the renewed massive onslaught that had begun on 2 November. The following day, Hitler sent a telegram in response to Rommel’s depressing account of the position and prospects of his troops. ‘In the situation in which you find yourself,’ ran his message to Rommel, ‘there can be no other thought than to stick it out, not to yield a step, and to throw every weapon and available fighter into the battle.’ Everything would be done to send reinforcements. ‘It would not be the first time in history that the stronger will triumphed over stronger enemy battalions. But you can show your troops no other way than victory or death.’282 Rommel had not waited for Hitler’s reply. Anticipating what it would be, he had ordered a retreat hours before it arrived. Generals had been peremptorily dismissed for such insubordination during the winter crisis at the beginning of the year. Rommel’s standing with the German people — only weeks earlier, he had been feted as a military hero — was all that now saved him from the same ignominy.283
By 7 November, when Hitler travelled to Munich to give his traditional address in the Löwenbräukeller to the marchers in the 1923 Putsch, the news from the Mediterranean had dramatically worsened. En route from Berlin to Munich,284 his special train was halted at a small station in the Thuringian Forest for him to receive a message from the Foreign Office: the Allied armada assembled at Gibraltar, which had for days given rise to speculation about a probable landing in Libya, was disembarking in Algiers and Oran.285 It would bring the first commitment of American ground-troops to the war in Europe.286
Hitler immediately gave orders for the defence of Tunis. But the landing had caught him and his military advisers off-guard. And Oran was out of reach of German bombers, which gave rise to a new torrent of rage at the incompetence of the Luftwaffe’s lack of planning.287 Further down the track, at Bamberg, Ribbentrop joined the train. He pleaded with Hitler to let him put out peace feelers to Stalin via the Soviet embassy in Stockholm with an offer of far-reaching concessions in the east. Hitler brusquely dismissed the suggestion: a moment of weakness was not the time for negotiations with an enemy.288 In his speech to the Party’s ‘Old Guard’ on the evening of 8 November, Hitler then publicly ruled out any prospect of a negotiated peace. With reference to his earlier ‘peace offers’, he declared: ‘From now on there will no more offer of peace.’289
It was hardly the atmosphere which Hitler would have chosen for a big speech. Not only had he nothing positive to report; the speech had to take place in the midst of a military crisis. Goebbels even had difficulty in pinning down exactly when the speech should start. Hitler needed time after his arrival in Munich to orientate himself on the Allied landing in North Africa and decide what to do.290 He was still uncertain when he arrived in the Brown House at 4p.m. He discussed the position of France and Italy with Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Keitel. Telephone calls were made to Paris, Rome, and Vichy. No decision could be arrived at in the brief time before the speech, which had been put back from its scheduled time to begin, eventually, at 6p.m.291
According to Goebbels, the news on the radio of the Allied landing in Africa had ‘electrified’ the Party gathering. ‘Everyone knows that, if things are pushed down a certain path, we are standing at a turning-point of the war.’292 But if the Party’s ‘Old Fighters’ expected any enlightenment from Hitler on the situation, they were to be disappointed. The usual verbal. assaults on Allied leaders and blustering parallels with the internal situation before the ‘seizure of power’ were all he had to offer. Refusal to compromise, the will to fight, determination to overcome the enemy, the lack of any alternative to complete success, and the certainty of final victory in a war for the very existence of the German people formed the basis of the message. Unlike the Kaiser, who had capitulated in the First World War at ‘quarter to twelve’, he ended, so he stated, ‘in principle always at five past twelve’.293 He again held out the prospect of imminent victory in Stalingrad. ‘I wanted to take it and, you know, we are modest: we have it. There are only a few tiny places there.’ If it was still taking a little time, it was because he wanted to avoid a second Verdun. He did not touch upon the Allied landings in North Africa. And the retreat forced upon Rommel’s Afrika Korps by the British 8th Army was passed over in a single sentence: ‘If they say they advanced somewhere in the desert; they’ve already advanced a few times and have had to pull back again.’294
For the fourth and last time in the year, Hitler invoked his ‘prophecy’ about the Jews. At that point in his big speech, he had just ruled out compromise and any peace-offer with external enemies. He referred to his earlier stance towards the enemy within. It had been impossible to come to any understanding with them (so Hitler now said, though at the time he had made a point of not seeking one). They had wanted force; and got it. ‘And these internal enemies, they have been eliminated (beseitigt),’ he said. Then he came to the Jews. ‘Another power too, which was once very present in Germany, has meanwhile learnt that National Socialist prophecies are not empty talk. That is the main power which we have to thank for all the misfortune: international Jewry. You will still remember the meeting of the Reichstag in which I declared: If Jewry somehow thinks it can bring about an international world war to exterminate European races, then the result will be not the extermination of the European races but the extermination (Ausrottung) of Jewry in Europe. I’ve always been laughed at as a prophet. Of those who laughed then, countless ones are no longer laughing today. And those who are still laughing, will also perhaps not be doing so before long (in einiger Zeit).’295
The speech was not one of Hitler’s best. He had been a compelling speaker when he had been able to twist reality in plausible fashion for his audience. But now, he was ignoring unpalatable facts, or turning them on their head. The gap between rhetoric and reality had become too wide. To most Germans, as SD reports were making apparent, Hitler’s speeches could no longer have more than a superficial impact. Even those momentarily roused by his verbal show of defiance were quickly overwhelmed once more by the concerns of everyday existence — food supplies, labour shortages, work conditions, worries about loved ones at the front, air-raids. And the news of the Allied landing in North Africa cast a deep pall of gloom about mighty forces stacked against Germany in a war whose end seemed even farther away than ever. This came on top of growing unease, whatever Hitler had said, about Stalingrad. Criticism of the German leadership for embroiling people in such a war was now more commonplace (if necessarily for the most part carefully couched), and often implicitly included Hitler — no longer detached, as he used to be, from the negative side of the regime. Hitler’s popularity had sagged. Rumours that he was physically or mentally ill, had suffered a nervous breakdown, had to be permanently attended by doctors, and fell into such frenzies of rage that he resorted to biting the carpet, had become widespread since the summer of 1942.296 The implication that the German leader and his regime were out of control was uncomfortably close to the truth.
But Hitler’s key audience had, primarily, been not the millions glued to their radio-sets, but his oldest Party loyalists inside the hall.297 It was essential to reinforce this backbone of Hitler’s personal power, and of the will to hold together the home front. Here, among this audience, Hitler could still tap much of the enthusiasm, commitment, and fanaticism of old.298 He knew the chords to play. The music was a familiar tune. But everyone there must have recognized — and in some measure shared — a sense of self-deception in the lyrics.
He stayed in the company of his Gauleiter, his most trusted paladins, until three in the morning. Every conceivable topic was discussed. Hitler held forth, among other things, on his theory that cancer was caused by smoking. Only the war was not touched upon. That was perhaps for the best in the circumstances, commented Goebbels.299
Hitler’s real concern that evening was the reaction of the French to the events in North Africa; the Ministerial Council was meeting in Vichy at that very time. He initially told Ambassador Abetz to press the Vichy regime to declare war on the British and Americans. But, realizing that the French would play for time, when time was of the essence, he was then forced to soften his demands and not insist upon a formal declaration of war. The telephone wires between Munich, Vichy, and Rome were buzzing all evening, but no conclusive steps were agreed. At that point, Hitler decided upon a meeting in Munich with Laval and Mussolini. By then, news was coming in that the initial resistance was crumbling in French North Africa.300 The landing had been secured.
By the time Ciano arrived in Munich — Mussolini felt unwell and declined to go — Hitler had heard that General Henri Giraud had put himself at the service of the Allies and been smuggled out of France and transported to North Africa. Commander of the French 7th Army before the débâcle of 1940 and imprisoned since that time, Giraud had escaped captivity and fled to unoccupied France earlier in the year. The danger was that he would now provide a figurehead for French resistance in North Africa and a focus of support for the Allies. Suspicion, which soon proved justified, was also mounting by the hour that Admiral Jean François Darían, too, head of the French armed forces, was preparing to change sides. The Americans had won Darían over just before the ‘Torch’ landings with an offer to recognize him as head of the French government. Inevitable conflict with the British, who favoured de Gaulle, was to be obviated when a young French monarchist assassinated Darían just before Christmas.301
Hitler, as we noted, had stressed the need to be ready to occupy southern France in his talks with Mussolini at the end of April. The concern about Giraud and Darían now meant that any thought of concessions to the French had been dissipated. When Ciano met Hitler on the evening of 9 November — Laval was travelling by car and expected only during the night — he had made up his mind. Laval’s input would be irrelevant. Hitler would not ‘modify his already definite point of view: the total occupation of France, landing in Corsica, a bridgehead in Tunisia’.302 When he eventually arrived, Laval, looking like a minor French provincial worthy, out of place among the military top brass and trying to pass pleasantries about his long journey, was treated with scarcely more than contempt. Hitler demanded landing points in Tunisia. Laval tried to wring concessions from Italy. Hitler refused to waste time on such deliberations. Laval, anxious to avoid responsibility for yielding territory to the Axis, suggested he should be faced with a fait accompli. He apparently had not realized that this was precisely what was intended.
While Laval was in the next room having a smoke, Hitler gave the order to occupy the remainder of France next day — 11 November, and the anniversary of the Armistice of 1918. Laval was to be informed next morning.303 In a letter to Marshal Pétain and a proclamation to the French people on 11 November, Hitler justified the occupation through the necessity to defend the coast of southern France and Corsica against Allied invasion from the new base in North Africa.304 That morning, German troops occupied southern France without military resistance, in accordance with the plans for ‘Operation Anton’ which had been laid down in May.305
At the Berghof for a few days, Hitler’s mask of ebullience slipped a little. Below found him deeply worried about the Anglo-American actions. He was also concerned about supplies difficulties in the Mediterranean, which British submarines had intensified. His trust in the Italians had disappeared. He was sure that they were leaking intelligence about the movement of German supply ships to the British. The deficiencies of the Luftwaffe also preoccupied him. Göring, Below heard, was not on top of things. Hitler preferred to deal with the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Hans Jeschonnek about detailed matters. Defence of the Reich depended too much on planes that were in the wrong place, or prevented from flying through bad weather. More flak artillery was needed in the vicinity of German cities. As regards the eastern front, he was hoping for ‘no new surprises’, but feared a large-scale Soviet offensive was imminent.306
On 19 November, Zeitzler told Hitler that the Soviet offensive had begun. Immediately, the Soviet forces to the north-west and west of Stalingrad broke through the weak part of the front held by the Romanian 4th Army. General Ferdinand Heim’s 48th Panzer Corps was sent in, but failed to heal the breach. Furious, Hitler dismissed Heim. He later ordered him to be sentenced to death — a sentence not carried out only through the intervention of Schmundt.307 The next day the Red Army’s ‘Stalingrad Front’ broke through the divisions of the Romanian 4th Army south of the city and met up on 22 November with the Soviet forces that had penetrated from north and west. With that, the 220,000 men of the 6th Army were completely encircled.308
Hitler had decided to return to the Wolf’s Lair that evening. His train journey back from Berchtesgaden to East Prussia took over twenty hours, owing to repeated lengthy stops to telephone Zeitzler. The new Chief of the General Staff insisted on permission being granted to the 6th Army to fight their way out of Stalingrad. Hitler did not give an inch.309 Already on 21 November he had sent an order to Paulus: ‘6th Army to hold, despite danger of temporary encirclement.’310 On the evening of 22 November, he ordered: ‘The army is temporarily encircled by Russian forces. I know the 6th Army and its Commander-in-Chief and know that it will conduct itself bravely in this difficult situation. The 6th Army must know that I am doing everything to help it and to relieve it.’311 He thought the position could be remedied. Relief could be organized to enable a break-out. But this could not be done overnight. A plan was hastily devised to deploy Colonel-General Hermann Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army, south-west of Stalingrad, to prepare an attack to relieve the 6th Army. But it would take about ten days before it could be attempted. In the meantime, Paulus had to hold out, while the troops were supplied by air-lift. It was a major, and highly risky operation. But Göring assured Hitler that it could be done. Jeschonnek did not contradict him. Zeitzler, however, vehemently disagreed. And from within the Luftwaffe itself, Colonel-General Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, who normally had Hitler’s ear, raised the gravest doubts both on grounds of the weather (with temperatures already plummeting, icy mists, and freezing rain icing up the wings of the planes) and of the numbers of available aircraft. Hitler chose to believe Göring.312
Hitler’s decision to air-lift supplies to the 6th Army until relief arrived was taken on 23 November. By then he had heard from Paulus that stores of food and equipment were perilously low and certainly insufficient for a defence of the position. Paulus sought permission to attempt to break out. Weichs, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group B, and Chief of the General Staff Zeitzler also fully backed this as the only realistic option.313 Zeitzler, evidently acting on the basis of a remarkable misunderstanding, actually informed Weichs at 2a.m. on 24 November that he had ‘persuaded the Führer that a break-out was the only possibility of saving the army’. Within four hours the General Staff had to transmit exactly the opposite decision by Hitler: the 6th Army had to stand fast and would be supplied from the air until relief could arrive.314 The fate of almost quarter of a million men was sealed with this order.
Hitler was not totally isolated in military support for his decision. Field-Marshal von Manstein had arrived that morning, 24 November, at Army Group Β headquarters to take command, as ordered by Hitler three days earlier, of a new Army Group Don (which included the trapped 6th Army). The main objective was to shore up the weakened front south and west of Stalingrad, to secure the lines to Army Group A in the Caucasus. He also took command of General Hoth’s attempt to relieve the 6th Army.315 But in contrast to Paulus, Weichs, and Zeitzler, Manstein did not approve an attempt to break out before reinforcements arrived, and took an optimistic view of the chances of an air-lift. Manstein was one of Hitler’s most trusted generals. His assessment can only have strengthened Hitler’s own judgement.316
By mid-December, Manstein had changed his view diametrically. Richthofen had persuaded him that, in the atrocious weather conditions, an adequate air-lift was impossible. Even if the weather relented, air supplies could not be sustained for any length of time.317 Manstein now pressed on numerous occasions for a decision to allow the 6th Army to break out.318 But by then the chances of a break-out had grossly diminished; in fact, once Hoth’s relief attempt was held up in heavy fighting some fifty kilometres from Stalingrad and some days later finally forced back, they rapidly became non-existent.319 On 19 December, Hitler once more rejected all pleas to consider a break-out. Military information in any case now indicated that the 6th Army, greatly weakened and surrounded by mighty Soviet forces, would be able to advance a maximum of thirty kilometres to the south-west — not far enough to meet up with Hoth’s relief Panzer army.320 On 21 December, Manstein asked Zeitzler for a final decision on whether the 6th Army should attempt to break out as long as it could still link with the 57th Panzer Corps, or whether the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe could guarantee air-supplies over a lengthy period of time. Zeitzler cabled back that Göring was confident that the Luftwaffe could supply the 6th Army, though Jeschonnek was by now of a different opinion. Hitler allowed an inquiry of the 6th Army Command about the distance it could expect to advance towards the south if the other fronts could be held. The reply came that there was fuel for twenty kilometres, and that it would be unable to hold position for long. Hoth’s army was still fifty-four kilometres away.321 Still no decision was taken. ‘It’s as if the Führer is no longer capable [of taking one],’ noted the OKW’s war-diarist Helmuth Greiner.322
6th Army Command itself described the tactic of a mass break-out without relief from the outside — ‘Operation Thunderclap’ — as ‘a catastrophe-solution’ (‘Katastrophenlösung’) .323 That evening, Hitler dismissed the idea: Paulus only had fuel for a short distance; there was no possibility of breaking out.324 Two days later, on 23 December, Manstein had to remove units from Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army to hold the crumbling left flank of his Army Group. With that, Hoth had to pull back his weakened forces. The attempt to break the siege of Stalingrad had failed.325 The 6th Army was doomed.
Paulus still sought permission to break out. But by Christmas Eve, Manstein had given up trying to persuade Hitler to give approval to what by this time could only be seen as a move of sheer desperation, without hope of success. The main priority was now to hold the left flank to prevent an even worse catastrophe.326 This was essential to enable the retreat of Army Group A from the Caucasus.327 Zeitzler had put the urgency of this retreat to Hitler on the evening of 27 December. Hitler had reluctantly agreed, then later changed his mind. It was too late. Zeitzler had telephoned through Hitler’s initial approval. The retreat from the Caucasus was under way.328 Stalingrad had become a lesser priority.329
Preoccupied though he was with the eastern front, and in particular with the now inevitable catastrophe in Stalingrad, Hitler could not afford to neglect what was happening in North Africa. And he was increasingly worried about the resolve of his Italian allies.
Montgomery had forced Rommel’s Afrika Corps into headlong retreat, and would drive the German and Italian army out of Libya altogether during January 1943.330 Encouraged by Göring, Hitler was now convinced that Rommel had lost his nerve.331 But at least the 50,000 German and 18,000 Italian troops rushed to Tunis in November and December had seriously held up the Allies, preventing their rapid domination of North Africa and ruling out an early assault on the European continent itself.332 Even so, Hitler knew the Italians were wobbling. Göring’s visit to Rome at the end of November had confirmed that.333 Their commitment to the war was by now in serious doubt.334 And when Ciano and Marshal Count Ugo Cavalero, the head of the Italian armed forces, arrived at the Wolf’s Lair on 18 December for three days of talks, it was in the immediate wake of the catastrophic collapse of the Italian 8th Army, overwhelmed during the previous two days by the Soviet offensive on the middle stretches of the Don. Hitler concealed his fury and dismay at what he saw as the military weakness of his Axis partner, alluding only in a single sentence to the Italian setbacks. His chief interest in the talks was in pressing upon the Italians the urgent need to intensify efforts — through greater sacrifices from the civilian population — to ensure sufficient transport for vital supplies to the forces in North Africa, emphasizing that this was ‘decisive for the war’. From the Italian point of view, the central concern was to suggest to Hitler that the time had come to end the war in the east and seek a settlement with the Soviet Union.335
It was the first time a summit with the Italians had taken place in East Prussia. Ciano referred to ‘the sadness of that damp forest and boredom of collective living in the Command barracks’. ‘There isn’t a spot of colour,’ he continued, ‘not one vivid note. Waiting-rooms filled with people smoking, eating, chatting. Kitchen odour, smell of uniforms, of boots.’336 The talks produced little that was constructive for either side. When Ciano put Mussolini’s case for Germany coming to terms with the Soviet Union in order to put maximum effort into defence against the western powers, Hitler was dismissive. Were he to do that, he replied, he would be forced within a short time to fight a reinvigorated Soviet Union once more.337 The Italian guests were non-committal towards Hitler’s exhortations to override all civilian considerations in favour of supplies for North Africa.338
For the German people, quite especially for the many German families with loved ones in the 6th Army, Christmas 1942 was a depressing festival. A radio broadcast linking troops on all the fighting fronts, including Stalingrad, brought tears to the eyes of many a family gathered around the Christmas tree back home, as the men at the ‘front on the Volga’ joined their comrades in singing ‘Silent Night’. The listeners at home did not know the link-up was a fake.339 Nor did they know that 1,280 German soldiers died at Stalingrad on that Christmas Day in 1942.340 They were, however, aware by then of an ominous fate hanging over the 6th Army.
The triumphalist propaganda of September and October, suggesting that victory at Stalingrad was just around the corner, had given way in the weeks following the Soviet counter-offensive to little more than ominous silence. Indications of hard fighting were sufficient, however, to make plain that things were not going to plan. Rumours of the encirclement of the 6th Army — passed on through despairing letters from the soldiers entrapped there — swiftly spread.341 It soon became evident that the rumours were no less than the truth. As the sombre mood at home deepened by the day, the terrible struggle in the streets of Stalingrad headed towards its inexorable dénouement.
Last letters home confirmed the worst fears. ‘Please don’t be sad and weep for me, when you receive this, my last letter,’ wrote one captain to his wife in mid-January. ‘I’m standing here in an icy storm in a hopeless position in the city of fate, Stalingrad. Encircled for months, we will tomorrow begin the last fight, man against man.’342 Another soldier compared the miserable reality of death in Stalingrad with the imagery of heroism: ‘They’re falling like flies, and no one bothers and buries them. Without arms and legs and without eyes, with stomachs ripped open, they lie around everywhere.’343 ‘We’re completely alone, without help from outside,’ ran another last letter home. ‘Hitler has left us in the lurch. This letter is going off while the airfield is still in our possession. We’re in the north of the city. The men of my battery guess it, too, but don’t know it as certainly as I do. This, then, is what the end looks like.’344 Some clutched vainly, even now, to final strands of belief in Hitler. ‘The Führer solidly promised to get us out of here. That’s been read out to us and we firmly believed it. I still believe it today, because I have to believe in something… I have believed my entire life, or at least eight years of it, always in the Führer and his word. It’s horrible how they’re in doubt here, and shameful to hear words spoken that you can’t contradict because they’re in line with the facts.’345 Such sentiments were by this time rare indeed among those fighting, suffering, and dying in the hell-hole of Stalingrad. Far more typical was the wretchedness expressed in the last letter of another despairing soldier: ‘I love you, and you love me, and so you should know the truth. It is in this letter. The truth is the knowledge of the hardest struggle in a hopeless situation. Misery, hunger, cold, resignation, doubt, despair, and horrible dying… I’m not cowardly, just sad that I can give no greater proof of my bravery than to die for such point-lessness, not to say crime… Don’t be so quick to forget me.’346
A series of letters from senior officers in the 6th Army, describing their plight in graphic detail, were received by Hitler’s Luftwaffe Adjutant, Nicolaus von Below. He showed them to Hitler, reading out key passages. Hitler listened without comment, except once commenting inscrutably that ‘the fate of the 6th Army left for all of us a deep duty in the fight for the freedom of the our people’.347 Below had the impression that Hitler realized by this time that victory in a two-front war against the Russians and the Americans could not be won. But Hitler betrayed no outward sign of weakening. He felt obliged to maintain the charade, even in his inner circle, that the war would be won — and he was able still to convey his optimism to those around him. What he really thought, no one knew.348
After Paulus had rejected a call to surrender, the final Soviet attack to destroy the 6th Army began on 10 January. An emissary to the Wolf’s Lair, seeking permission for Paulus to have freedom of action to bring an end to the carnage went unheeded by Hitler. On 15 January, he commissioned Field-Marshal Erhard Milch, the Luftwaffe’s armaments supremo and mastermind of all its transportation organization, with flying 300 tons of supplies a day to the besieged army. It was pure fantasy — though partly based on the inaccurate information that Zeitzler complained about on more than one occasion. Snow and ice on the runways in sub-arctic temperatures often prevented take-offs and landings. In any case, on 22 January the last airstrip in the vicinity of Stalingrad was lost. Supplies could now only be dropped from the air. The remaining frozen, half-starved troops, under constant heavy fire, were often unable to salvage them.349
By this time, the German people were already being prepared for the worst. After a long period of silence, the Wehrmacht report on 16 January had spoken in ominous terms of a ‘heroically courageous defensive struggle against the enemy attacking from all sides’.350 After Goebbels had visited the Wolf’s Lair on 22 January, and obtained Hitler’s backing for a radicalization of the home front in a drive for ‘total war’, the press was immediately instructed to speak of ‘the great and stirring heroic sacrifice which the troops encircled at Stalingrad are offering the German nation’. This was now to be brought into the direct context of mobilizing the population for ‘total war’.351
Hitler had bluntly described the plight of the 6th Army to Goebbels at their meeting. There was scarcely a hope of rescuing the troops. It was a ‘heroic drama of German history’.352 News came in as they talked, outlining the rapidly deteriorating situation. Hitler was said by Goebbels to have been ‘deeply shaken’.353 But he did not consider attaching any blame to himself. He complained bitterly about the Luftwaffe, which had not kept its promises about levels of supplies.354 Schmundt separately told Goebbels that these had been illusory. Göring’s staff had given him the optimistic picture they presumed he wanted, and he had passed this on to the Führer.355 It was a problem that afflicted the entire dictatorship — up to and including Hitler himself. Only positive messages were acceptable. Pessimism (which usually meant realism) was a sign of failure. Distortions of the truth were built into the communications system of the Third Reich at every level — most of all in the top echelons of the regime.
Even more than he felt let down by his own Luftwaffe, Hitler voiced utter contempt for the failure of the German allies to hold the line against the Soviet counter-attack. The Romanians were bad, the Italians worse, and worst of all were the Hungarians.356 The catastrophe would not have occurred had the entire eastern front been controlled by German units, as he had wanted. The German bakers’ and baggage-formations, he fumed, had performed better than the élite Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian divisions. But he did not think the Axis partners were ready to desert. Italy would ‘like to dance out of line’; though as long as Mussolini was there, this could be ruled out. The Duce was clever enough to know that it would mean the end of Fascism, and his own end. Romania was essential to Germany for its oil, Hitler said. He had made it plain to the Romanians what would come their way should they attempt anything stupid.357
Hitler still hoped — at least that is what he told Goebbels — that parts of the 6th Army could hold out until they could be relieved.358 In fact, he knew better than anyone that there was not the slightest chance of it. The 6th Army was on its last legs. On 22 January, the very day that Goebbels had had his talks with Hitler at FHQ, Paulus had requested permission to surrender. Hitler rejected it. He then rejected a similar plea from Manstein to allow the 6th Army’s surrender. As a point of honour, he stated, there could be no question of capitulation. In the evening, he telegraphed the 6th Army to say that through its struggle it had made an historic contribution in the greatest struggle in German history.359 The army was to stand fast ‘to the last soldier and the last bullet’.360
Since 23 January the 6th Army had been beginning to break up. It was split in two as Soviet troops cutting through from the south and the west of the city joined forces. By 26 January the division of the 6th Army was complete.361 One section raised the white flag on the 29th. The same day, Paulus sent Hitler a telegram of congratulations on the tenth anniversary of his takeover of power on the 30th.362
The ‘celebrations’ in Germany for the anniversary of Hitler’s day of triumph in January 1933 were in a low key. All bunting was banned.363 Hitler did not give his usual speech. He remained in his headquarters and left it to Goebbels to read out his proclamation.364 A single sentence referred to Stalingrad: ‘The heroic struggle of our soldiers on the Volga should be a warning for everybody to do the utmost for the struggle for Germany’s freedom and the future of our people, and thus in a wider sense for the maintenance of our entire continent.’365 In Stalingrad itself, the end was approaching. Feelers were put out by the remnants of the 6th Army to the Soviets that very evening, 30 January 1943, for a surrender. Negotiations took place next day.366 On that day, the announcement was made that Paulus had been promoted to Field-Marshal.367 He was expected to end the struggle with a hero’s death. In the evening, he surrendered.368 Two days later, on 2 February, the northern sector of the surrounded troops also gave in. The battle of Stalingrad was over. Around 100,000 men from twenty-one German and two Romanian divisions had fallen in battle. A further 113,000 German and Romanian soldiers were taken prisoner. Only a few thousand would survive their captivity.369
Hitler made no mention of the human tragedy when he met his military leaders at the midday conference on 1 February. What concerned him was the prestige lost through Paulus’s surrender. He found it impossible to comprehend, and impossible to forgive. ‘Here a man can look on while 50-60,000 of his soldiers die and defend themselves bravely to the last. How can he give himself up to the Bolsheviks?’ he asked, nearly speechless with anger at what he saw as a betrayal.370 He could have no respect for an officer who chose captivity to shooting himself.371 ‘How easy it is to do something like that. The pistol — that’s simple. What sort of cowardice does it take to pull back from it?’372 ‘No one else is being made field-marshal in this war,’ he avowed (though he did not keep to his word).373 He was certain — it proved an accurate presumption — that, in Soviet hands, Paulus and the other captured generals would within no time be promoting anti-German propaganda. Drawing on horror-stories of tortures in Russian prisons that had circulated in the völkisch press since the early 1920s, he said: ‘They’ll lock them up in the rat-cellar, and two days later they’ll have them so softened-up (mürbe) that they’ll talk straight away… They’ll now come into the Lubljanka, and there they’ll be eaten by rats. How can someone be so cowardly? I don’t understand it. So many people have to die. Then such a man goes and besmirches in the last minute the heroism of so many others. He could release himself from all misery and enter eternity, national immortality, and he prefers to go to Moscow. How can there be a choice? That’s crazy.’374
For the German people, Paulus’s missed chance to gain immortality was scarcely a central concern. Their thoughts, when they heard the dreaded announcement — false to the last — on 3 February that the officers and soldiers of the 6th Army had fought to the final shot and ‘died so that Germany might live’, were of the human tragedy and the scale of the military disaster.375 The ‘heroic sacrifice’ was no consolation to bereft relatives and friends.376 The women of Nuremberg were among those with many husbands, fathers, sons, or brothers in the 6th Army. As the news broke on 3 February they tore copies of newspapers out of the hands of sellers, shouting and wailing, beside themselves with grief. Men hurled abuse at the Nazi leadership. ‘Hitler has lied to us for three months,’ people raged. Gestapo men mingled in the crowds. But none of them intervened to arrest individuals from the distraught and angry crowds. It was rumoured that they had been instructed to hold back.377
The SD reported that the whole nation was ‘deeply shaken’ by the fate of the 6th Army. There was deep depression, and widespread anger that Stalingrad had not been evacuated or relieved while there was still time. People asked how such optimistic reports had been possible only a short time earlier. They were critical of the underestimation — as in the previous winter — of the Soviet forces. Many now thought the war could not be won, and were anxiously contemplating the consequences of defeat.378
Hitler had until Stalingrad been largely exempted from whatever criticisms people had of the regime. That now altered sharply.379 His responsibility for the debacle was evident. ‘For the first time,’ as Ulrich von Hassell noted, ‘the critical murmurings relate directly to him. To this extent there is a genuine leadership crisis… The sacrifice of most precious blood for the sake of pointless or criminal prestige is again plain to see.’380 People had expected Hitler to give an explanation in his speech on 30 January.381 His obvious reluctance to speak to the nation only heightened the criticism. The regime’s opponents were encouraged. Graffiti chalked on walls attacking Hitler, ‘the Stalingrad Murderer’, were a sign that underground resistance was not extinct.382 Appalled at what had happened, a number of army officers and highly-placed civil servants revived conspiratorial plans largely dormant since 1938-9.383
In Munich, a group of students, together with one of their professors, whose idealism and mounting detestation of the criminal inhumanity of the regime had led them the previous year to form the ‘White Rose’ opposition-group, now openly displayed their attack on Hitler. The medical students Alexander Schmorell and Hans Scholl had formed the initial driving-force, and had soon been joined by Christoph Probst, Sophie Scholl (Hans’s sister), Willi Graf, and Kurt Huber, Professor of Philosophy at Munich University, whose critical attitude to the regime had influenced them in lectures and discussions. All the students came from conservative, middle-class backgrounds. All were fired by Christian beliefs and humanistic idealism. The horrors on the eastern front, experienced for a short time at first hand when Graf, Schmorell, and Hans Scholl were called up, converted the lofty idealism into an explicit, political message. ‘Fellow Students!’ ran their final manifesto (composed by Professor Huber), distributed in Munich University on 18 February. ‘The nation is deeply shaken by the destruction of the men of Stalingrad. The genial strategy of the World War [I] corporal has senselessly and irresponsibly driven (gebetzt) three hundred and thirty thousand German men to death and ruin. Führer, we thank you!’384
It was a highly courageous show of defiance. But it was suicidal. Hans and Sophie Scholl were denounced by a porter at the university (who was subsequently applauded by pro-Nazi students for his action), and quickly arrested by the Gestapo. Christoph Probst was picked up soon afterwards. Their trial before the ‘People’s Court’, presided over by Roland Freisler, took place within four days. The verdict — the death-sentence — was a foregone conclusion. All three were guillotined the same afternoon. Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, and Alexander Schmorell suffered the same fate some months later. Other students on the fringe of the movement were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.385
The regime had been badly stung. But it was not at the point of collapse. It would lash back without scruple and with utter viciousness at the slightest hint of opposition. The level of brutality towards its own population was about to rise sharply as external adversity mounted.
If Hitler felt any personal remorse for Stalingrad or human sympathy for the dead of the 6th Army and their relatives, he did not let it show. Those in his close proximity could detect the signs of nervous strain.386 He hinted privately at his worry that his health would not stand up to the pressure.387 His secretaries had to put up with even longer nocturnal monologues as his insomnia developed chronic proportions. The topics were much the same as ever: his youth in Vienna, the ‘time of struggle’, the history of mankind, the nature of the cosmos. There was no relief from the boredom for his secretaries, who by now knew his outpourings on all topics more or less off by heart. There were not even any longer the occasional evenings listening to records to break up the tedium. Hitler, as he had told Goebbels some weeks earlier, now no longer wanted to listen to music.388 Talking was like a drug for him. He told one of his doctors two years later that he had to talk — about more or less anything other than military issues — to divert him from sleepless nights pondering troop dispositions and seeing in his mind where every division was at Stalingrad.389 As Below guessed, the bad news from the North African as well as from the eastern front must have led to serious doubts, in the privacy of his own room in the bunker of his headquarters, about whether the war could still be won.390 But outwardly, even among his entourage at the Wolf’s Lair, he had to sustain the façade of invincibility. No crack could be allowed to show. Hitler remained true to his creed of will and strength. A hint of weakness, in his thinking, was a gift to enemies and subversives. A crevice of demoralization would then swiftly widen to a chasm. The military, and above all else the Party, leaders must, therefore, never be allowed a glimmer of any wavering in his own resolution.
There was not a trace of demoralization, depression, or uncertainty when he spoke to the Reichs — and Gauleiter for almost two hours at his headquarters on 7 February.391 He told them at the very beginning of his address that he believed in victory more than ever. Then he described what Goebbels referred to as ‘the catastrophe on the eastern front’.392 Hitler did not look close to home for the failings. While he said he naturally accepted full responsibility for the events of the winter,393 he left no doubt where in his view the real fault lay. From the beginning of his political career — indeed, from what is known of his earliest remarks on politics — he had cast around for scapegoats. The trait was too embedded in his psyche for him to stray from it now that, for the first time, an unmitigated national disaster had to be explained. Addressing the Party leadership, as in his private discussion with Goebbels a fortnight or so earlier, he once more placed the blame for the disaster at Stalingrad squarely on the ‘complete failure’ of Germany’s allies — the Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians — whose fighting powers met with his ‘absolute contempt’.394 The consequence of the collapse of Germany’s allies in the defensive front had been to endanger the Caucasus army. This had necessitated the ‘extraordinarily difficult order, involving much sacrifice’, that the 6th Army should stand fast and bind in the Red Army ‘to prevent the catastrophe gripping the entire eastern front’. Dreadful weather conditions, he said, had prevented it being supplied from the air, as had been presumed possible. Hitler took the view that the crisis, in broad terms, could be taken to be mastered. ‘The Caucasus army had been saved through the sacrifice of the 6th Army in Stalingrad.’395
Not just the search for scapegoats, but the feeling of treachery and betrayal was entrenched in Hitler’s thinking. Another strand of his explanation for the disaster at Stalingrad was the prospect of imminent French betrayal, forcing him to retain several divisions, especially SS-divisions, in the west when they were desperately needed in the east.396 But Hitler had the extraordinary capacity, as his Luftwaffe adjutant Below noted, of turning negative into positive, and convincing his audience of this.397 A landing by the Allies in France would have been far more dangerous, he claimed, than that which had taken place in North Africa and had been checked through the occupation of Tunis.398 He saw grounds for optimism, too, in the success of the U-boats, and in Speer’s armaments programme enabling better flak defence against air-raids together with full-scale production by the summer of the Tiger tank.399
Much of the rest of Hitler’s address was on the ‘psychology’ of war. Goebbels had shrewdly played on Hitler’s instincts in demanding the rad-icalization of the ‘home front’ and the move to ‘total war’. The urgings of the Propaganda Minister found their echo in Hitler’s rallying-call to his Gauleiter. The crisis was more of a psychological than a material one, he declared, and must therefore be overcome by ‘psychological means’. It was the Party’s task to achieve this. The Gauleiter should remember the ‘time of struggle’. Radical measures were now needed. Austerity, sacrifice, and the end of any privileges for certain sectors of society was the order of the day. The setbacks but eventual triumph of Frederick the Great — the implied comparison with Hitler’s own leadership was plain — were invoked.400 The setbacks now being faced — solely the fault of Germany’s allies — even had their own psychological advantages. Propaganda and the Party’s agitation could awaken people to the fact that they had stark alternatives: becoming master of Europe, or undergoing ‘a total liquidation and extermination’.401
Hitler pointed out one advantage which, he claimed, the Allies possessed: that they were sustained by international Jewry. The consequence, Goebbels reported Hitler as saying, was ‘that we have to eliminate Jewry not only from Reich territory but from the whole of Europe’. Goebbels noted approvingly that Hitler had again adopted his own viewpoint, and that within the foreseeable future there would be no more Jews in Berlin. ‘The ruthlessness towards Jewry which [Hitler] impresses on all Gauleiter,’ Goebbels added, ‘has long since been the political order of the day in Berlin.’402
Hitler categorically ruled out, as he always had done, any possibility of capitulation.403 He stated that any collapse of the German Reich was out of the question. But his further remarks betrayed the fact that he was contemplating precisely that. The event of such a collapse ‘would represent the ending of his life’, he declared. It was plain who, in such an eventuality, the scapegoats would be: the German people themselves. ‘Such a collapse could only be caused through the weakness of the people,’ Goebbels recorded Hitler as saying. ‘But if the German people turned out to be weak, they would deserve nothing else than to be extinguished by a stronger people; then one could have no sympathy for them.’404 The sentiment would stay with him to the end.
To the Party leadership, the backbone of his support, Hitler could speak in this way. The Gauleiter could be rallied by such rhetoric. They were after all fanatics as Hitler himself was. They were part of his ‘sworn community’. The responsibility of the Party for the radicalization of the ‘home front’ was music to their ears. In any case, whatever private doubts (if any) they harboured, they had no choice but to stick with Hitler. They had burnt their boats with him. He was the sole guarantor of their power.
The German people were less easily placated than Hitler’s immediate viceroys. When he spoke in Berlin to the nation for the first time since Stalingrad, on the occasion (which this year, of all years, he could not possibly avoid) of Heroes’ Memorial Day on 21 March 1943, his speech gave rise to greater criticism than any Hitler speech since he had become Chancellor.405
The speech was one of Hitler’s shortest. Goebbels was pleased that it was only fifteen pages long; it lessened the chances of being interrupted by the British air-raid that was feared and predicted.406 Hitler told Goebbels that he wanted to use the speech for another fierce attack on Bolshevism. He felt like an old propagandist, he said: propaganda meant repetition.407 Perhaps it was the anxiety, as Goebbels had hinted, about a possible air-raid which made Hitler race through his speech in such a rapid and dreary monotone. Whatever the reason, the routine assault on Bolshevism and on Jewry as the force behind the ‘merciless war’ could stir little enthusiasm. Disappointment was profound. Rumours revived about Hitler’s poor health — along with others that it had been a substitute who had spoken, while the real Führer was under house-arrest on the Obersalzberg suffering from a mental breakdown after Stalingrad. Extraordinary was the fact that Hitler never even directly mentioned Stalingrad in a ceremony meant to be devoted to the memory of the fallen and at a time where the trauma was undiminished. And his passing reference, at the end of his speech, to a figure of 542,000 German dead in the war was presumed to be far too low and received with rank incredulity.408
Reactions to the speech were a clear indicator that the German people’s bonds with Hitler were dissolving. This was no overnight phenomenon. But Stalingrad was the point at which the signs became unmistakable. There was no rebellion in the air; Hitler was right about that. The mood was sullenly depressed, anxious about the present, fearful of the future, above all else weary of the war; but not rebellious. To all but the few who had served the regime from the inside, had contacts in high places with recourse to the power of the military, and were now actively conspiring to bring about Hitler’s downfall, thoughts of overthrowing the regime could scarcely be entertained. The regime was far too strong, its capacity for repression far too great, its readiness to strike down all opposition far too evident (and becoming even more so as positive support waned and loyalties weakened). The reserves of hard-core Nazi support were still substantial. They could be found especially — though here, too, there were unmistakable signs of erosion — among members of a younger generation that had swallowed Nazi ideals in school, among many ordinary front soldiers desperately clinging to a ray of hope, and, naturally, most of all among Party activists who had combined fervent belief with careerism.409 Fanatical devotees of the Führer cult, who had not wavered in their adulation of Hitler, or who were implicated in the crimes against humanity which he had inspired, remained in control of the home front, itching to resort to any measures, however ruthless, to shore up the regime’s foundations. For the bulk of the population, there was no alternative to struggling on.
In this, at least, the dictator and the people he led were at one. Hitler, as more and more ordinary citizens now recognized, had closed off all avenues that might have brought compromise peace. The earlier victories were increasingly seen in a different light. There was no end in sight. But it now seemed clear to growing numbers of ordinary citizens that Hitler had taken them into a war which could only end in destruction, defeat, and disaster. There was still far to go, but over the next months the miseries of war would rebound in ever greater ferocity on the population of Germany itself. What was revealed after Stalingrad would become over those months ever clearer: for all the lingering strength of support, the German people’s love affair with Hitler was at an end. Only the bitter process of divorce remained.