The report for that day records fighting across Hitler’s empire: in the Caspian Sea, where the German Luftwaffe sank two enemy tankers and damaged five freighters; in the western Caucasus, where German troops repelled “enemy attacks” along a series of mountain strongholds; in the industrial outskirts of Stalingrad, where repeated Soviet tank attacks were repulsed “with as usual heavy enemy losses”; on the Mediterranean island of Malta; on the southeast coast of England, where German planes attacked industrial, transport, and harbor facilities. On the day in late October, the German armies were defending an empire that extended across two continents.
The arrival at wehrwolf of Sven Hedin’s latest book that day was more than a welcome distraction in Hitler’s bunkered isolation. Hedin was one of the few real heroes of Hitler’s life. In his youth, he had followed the adventures of the Swedish explorer with the same rapt attention he brought to Karl May novels. Hedin was a rugged, larger-than-life figure who entered some of the most severe, uncharted regions of the world and returned with stories of high adventure and, even more important, discoveries of consequence, charting some of the last unexplored regions of the earth. In an age before Everest had been scaled or the Atlantic traversed by air, Hedin was one of the most famous men on earth. In his legendary expedition across the Gobi Desert, he lost two-thirds of his eighty-man team to the bitter climate of the high plateau but emerged four months later emaciated yet triumphant. This was the sort of superhuman effort that fired Hitler’s imagination in his youth and drove his convictions in later life: the ability of the individual to defy seemingly insurmountable obstacles and emerge triumphant.
In October 1933, eight months into his own assertion of individual will, Hitler had dispatched a telegram to the aging Swedish explorer to congratulate him on the fortieth anniversary of the Gobi triumph. When Hitler learned that Hedin would be in Germany for a speaking tour, he invited him to the Reich Chancellery. Hedin returned, once again on a special invitation from Hitler, as a featured speaker at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Many visits were to follow, and Hedin regularly sent Hitler copies of his publications.
As with Eckart, Hitler showed respectful deference to this older man. When Hedin visited Hitler in his office in the New Reich Chancellery, Hitler would take him by the arm and show him to “his chair” in the small seating area beneath the portrait of Bismarck. With an easy intimacy, Hitler would chat with Hedin about adventure, politics, achievement, and personal concerns and ambitions. On one occasion, Hitler confessed to Hedin that he did not expect to see the completion of his lifelong “project” of establishing Germany as the world’s leading power. Hitler said that this task would be left to others to finish. “Keep in mind that I am over fifty years old,” Hitler said, to which Hedin replied dismissively, “I am seventy-five!”
“Yes, but you are an exception,” Hitler returned.
“Fifty is nothing at all,” Hedin insisted. “When you are as old as I am, Herr Reich Chancellor, you will feel just as fresh and energetic as I do.”
“Oh no, no, I will be exhausted long before that.”
Mostly, though, Hitler and Hedin talked about politics, in particular Germany’s relations with the Nordic countries, and frequently Russia, a country Hedin had visited more than forty times. Like Hitler, Hedin feared the “Bolshevization” of Europe, an apprehension he and Hitler discussed shortly after the invasion of Poland, a conversation Hedin, much to Hitler’s chagrin, shared afterward with the press, as Goebbels recorded in his diary in October 1939. “Afternoon with the Führer,” Goebbels wrote. “He is angry about an interview that Sven Hedin gave with the News Chronicle about their talk together. He trumpets Germany as an enemy of Russia. It will be denied immediately. Hedin will also have to issue a denial.” Russia and Germany, of course, were allies then.
As a lifelong Germanophile who had traveled with the German armies during the First World War and subscribed to the notion of racial superiority, though he did not embrace anti-Semitism, Hedin was more than happy to assist the greater German cause, as an emissary to Scandinavia, as an informal spy in Asia, and as a pro-isolationist agitator in the United States. In this latter role, he wrote a book-length appeal to the American people to keep out of the war, for the sake of Europe and America alike.
Hedin had undertaken three major lecture tours in America, in 1923, 1929, and 1932, traveling the continent from Boston, where he was treated briefly by Harvey Cushing, one of the leading surgeons of the day, to California, where he visited Yosemite and the observatory on Mount Wilson. In Stockholm, he had met Theodore Roosevelt. As a friend and admirer of the United States, he wrote in his book, which he finished in the autumn of 1941, he was acting in the best interest of its people. He reminded them that Frederick the Great had endorsed the American Revolution, and that during the Civil War, while France and England supported the Confederacy, Bismarck had provided loans to the Union. He argued that it was Roosevelt, not Hitler, who had plunged Europe into war, and he detailed Hitler’s repeated efforts to avert war in the summer of 1939. Hedin also warned that war with the German juggernaut would lead ultimately to U.S. defeat. He appealed to Americans, for their own sake, to recognize the real forces behind the war in Europe. “It is this satanically subtle propaganda that appeals to the Christianity, idealism, humanity and loyalty of the American people that is leading us into war,” Hedin wrote. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor the book became irrelevant, and Hedin turned to his German publisher in Leipzig. They published it in October 1942 under the title Amerika im Kampf der Kontinente (America in the Battle of the Continents), and dispatched a personally inscribed copy to the German chancellor.
As Hitler settled in to his private quarters with his personally dedicated copy of America in the Battle of the Continents, he found himself reading a history of the outbreak of the war as he believed it would ultimately be recorded for posterity. Three years earlier, when he gathered his generals in the great hall at the Berghof for his lecture on the imminent invasion of Poland, he reminded them that ultimately it was left to the victor to write the history of wars. “The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not,” Hitler told them. “When starting and waging war it is not right that matters, but victory.” In the months and years that followed, Hitler’s army had marched from one victory to the next, extending Gemany’s reach to unprecedented dimensions. As Hitler sat down with Hedin’s book, he was confident that the war he had conceived and launched was on the verge of being won.
In that hour, his empire—which stretched from the Channel Islands off the English coast to the shore of the Black Sea, from the Arctic Circle to the Tropic of Cancer—was proving remarkably resilient, at least based on that day’s battlefront reports, to the onslaught of enemy armies. It seemed a good occasion to begin reading a history of how this war had begun.
“No question is more easily understandable than why a new catastrophe came so quickly after the First World War,” Hedin began. “Many people were quick to give an answer: the culprit was once again Germany. This ‘once again’ by itself shows how quickly people have forgotten the turn of events in the short span of time between 1919 and 1939 even though they themselves lived it.” Hedin reminded his readers that the origins of the Second World War lay not in German annexations of Austria or the Sudetenland, or even in the subsequent invasion of Poland, but in the punishing terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the miseries they visited on the German people—deprivation, humiliation, starvation—coupled with a British foreign policy agenda that established a single-issue position on Germany: Delenda est Germania, “Germany must be obliterated.”
Hedin devotes a chapter to Hitler’s alleged attempts to counter British machinations to provoke another war with Germany. He cites a speech on May 21, 1935, as the onset of Hitler’s four-year peace campaign. “A healthy social policy can provide a people in a few short years more children by promoting childbearing than one can by conquering and subjecting foreign peoples,” Hitler expla
ined to the German Reichstag, declaiming an emphatic “Nein!” to war. He went on to say, “National Socialist Germany’s desire for peace is based on deeply held ideological convictions.”
According to Hedin, Hitler spent the next four years in an attempt to reach reasonable accommodations with his European neighbors, only to find himself confronted by subterfuge and arrogance. “All of Adolf Hitler’s offers were arrogantly dismissed and declared insincere from the outset,” Hedin writes. “They were always viewed as a threat, never as an attempt to reestablish a great but long-humiliated people as an equal in the circle of other great nations.” Hedin focuses on Hitler’s repeated efforts in the summer of 1939 to avert war, in particular, the eleventh-hour peace proposal that was hand-delivered to the British embassy in Berlin the night before the outbreak of the conflict.2 Hedin cites the nine-point proposal in its entirety, and observes, “It is rare to find among the diplomatic files of recent history a document that equals this proposal in its restraint, rapprochement, and understanding for the needs of a country.”
As Hitler sat in his armchair in the rustic wooden hut in that isolated Ukrainian forest, he was certainly comforted and cheered by Hedin’s words. Hitler had built a career on deluding others with his lies, illusions, and false promises, but by age fifty-three he had also mastered the art of self-delusion—Halder spoke of Selbsthypnose—so much so that he could take comfort in believing that the current borders of his empire were as fixed as the history of his empire upon the page. The following morning, Hitler wrote to Hedin:
Most Honorable Herr Doctor Sven von Hedin!3
You were kind enough to forward to me a personally inscribed copy of your book America in the Battle of the Continents, which was recently published by the FA Brockhaus Verlag Leipzig. I thank you warmly for the attention you have shown me. I have already read the book and welcome in particular that you so explicitly detailed the offers I made to Poland at the beginning of the war. When I think back on that time, it all seems so far away, and seems so unreal to me that I almost blame myself for having been so forthcoming with my proposals.
Hitler expressed relief that Poland had rejected his repeated attempts at finding a peaceful solution, for had he not gone to war in 1939, he told Hedin, Germany would have been lulled into a false sense of security and turned its attentions to cultural instead of military matters, while the Soviet Union would have continued to prepare itself for war. “And even if we had not neglected armaments, they would have remained within normal limits, which would have left us a few years later in a position of helpless inferiority before the Asian colossus,” Hitler claimed. “Under these circumstances, the fate of Europe and with it thousands of years of culture would have found its end.”
Hitler envisioned Europe being overrun by “millions of warriors as fanatic as they are brutal,” equipped with an “unimaginable array of weapons.” Fortunately for Europe, fate had determined that Hitler should go to war. Europe had been spared. Germany had emerged as the final bastion before the Bolshevik hordes.
Then Hitler turned to the central thesis of Hedin’s book: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “Without question, the individual guilty of this war, as you correctly state at the end of the book, is exclusively the American president Roosevelt,” Hitler wrote. “Ironically, by starting this war, he and his cronies have unintentionally and unwittingly awakened this continent just in time and allowed it to confront with open eyes a danger that a few years later could not have been held in check.”
The last page of Hitler’s letter to Hedin.
Hitler did not doubt for “a second” that the Germans and their allies would triumph over the Soviets. He reaffirmed his “unshakable determination” not to lay down weapons until all Europe, east and west, was “rescued” from the Bolshevik threat. “I use this occasion, my esteemed Herr Sven von Hedin,” Hitler concluded, “to extend my best wishes for your health and for your continued welfare, I remain most heartily yours. Most humbly, Adolf Hitler.” Hitler signed and dispatched the letter. The following day, he departed for his headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia. He never returned to the Wehrwolf.
In the days to come, Hitler continued to muse on Hedin’s book and talked about it the following week, during his annual address commemorating the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. But during that week much had changed. On the morning of November 9, 1942, word came that American troops had landed on the coast of North Africa and established a beachhead. As he spoke, Hitler was not himself. “We are fighting in the far reaches to protect our homeland so that we can keep the war far away in order to spare us the fate we would suffer if it were closer—the way a few German cities are now experiencing and having to experience,” Hitler said in the opening moments that evening. “It is therefore better to keep the front a thousand or if necessary even two thousand kilometers from our homeland than to have the front on the border of the Reich and have to defend it there.” Hitler urged the roomful of party stalwarts to vigilance and fortitude, in the knowledge that their cause was a just one, and to remember that they represented the bulwark of European civilization.
“In these days, Sven Hedin published a book in which, thankfully, he cited word for word the proposal on Poland that I submitted to the English,” Hitler said. “I felt a chill when I reread this proposal and can only be thankful that destiny saw fit that things should go differently.” Expanding on the observation he had made to Hedin the previous Friday, Hitler said that had the Germans devoted the last decade to financing their schools, beautifying their towns, and building streets and apartments instead of building up their military, the results would have been catastrophic for Europe. “And one day the storm from the East would have been unleashed and swept across Poland before we would have even noticed and stood less than a hundred and fifty kilometers east of Berlin. That this did not happen is to the credit of the gentlemen who rejected my proposal back then.”
For the next two hours, Hitler talked about Jewish conspiracies, Napoleon’s defeat in 1812, the German defeat in 1918, and the inevitability of disaster for the Americans. Plagiarizing Hedin’s prediction that the Americans could never develop military capacity equal to that of the German army, with its centuries-old traditions, that the current U.S. soldiers who were training with plywood guns and cannons and cardboard tanks were no match for the battle-hardened veterans of the Wehrmacht, Hitler derisively dismissed the American war machine. He chided the Americans about their “herring boats” mounted with cannons. He dismissed the notion of U.S. “secret weapons.” And he assured his audience, quoting Hedin almost verbatim, that the war would be won not with wealth and weaponry but by the force of will. “What we have is a holy conviction and a holy will, and in the end that is a thousand times more decisive than gold in the struggle between life and death.” The war was not to be won by mass production or equipment, or even by the size of the armies, but by the iron will of titan figures. This was a battle of wills among Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt.
“When Roosevelt attacks North Africa today with the observation that he has to protect it from Germany and Italy, it is not worth wasting a single word on the lying phrases of this old gangster,” Hitler said. “He is without doubt the most hypocritical in that entire club that opposes us.” Hitler denounced the American president as a “freemason,” as a “puppet of the Jews,” as an enemy of freedom and true democracy, as the Oberstrolch, or chief rogue. “And when this Oberstrolch von Roosevelt— there is no other term for him—comes here and declares he must rescue Europe with American methods, I can only say: The man should worry about saving his own country!”
Quoting from Hedin, Hitler observed that Roosevelt was using the war in Europe as a means of distracting American attention from the thirteen million unemployed at home. He contrasted American materialism with European values, and tallied the alliance that had assembled itself in defense of European culture—Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland, Slovakia, Croatia, and Spain. “Think about this, everyone,
every man and woman, that in this war it will be a question of existence or obliteration of our people,” Hitler concluded. “And if you comprehend that, then every thought and every action you take should represent a prayer for our Germany!”
The speech ended with polite but subdued applause. There were no chorus chants of “Sieg Heil!” Hitler departed the hall and withdrew immediately to his Prince Regent Square apartment. Max Domarus, the great chronicler of Hitler oratory, claimed that it was the most “miserable” speech of Hitler’s political career. In contrast, Goebbels had found Hitler in “admirable” form that evening, but could not overlook the portentous developments along the battle fronts. “Everyone knows that if things can be forced into a particular direction,” he observed in his diary that evening, “we are at a turning point of the war.”
The American landings that morning in North Africa were clearly on everyone’s mind, as was the accumulating evidence that the course of the war was beginning to shift measurably. Two days earlier, the British had shattered the German defenses at El Alamein, dispatching Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps into headlong retreat. Pressure was mounting on the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. That same week, halfway around the world, American marines had captured Japanese positions on a small island called Guadalcanal, the first significant U.S. victory in the Pacific.
On Tuesday, November tenth, the day after Hitler’s beer hall speech, Winston Churchill also reflected on recent developments. He expressed cautious optimism following the German defeat at El Alamein. “Now this is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end,” he said. “But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
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