Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  While the army plunged tempestuously ahead, reaching the Dnieper in two weeks and a week later thrusting to Smolensk, the Einsatzgruppen set up their reign of terror in the occupied territories. They combed cities and towns, herded together Jews, Communist functionaries, intellectuals, and in general all potential leaders of society, and liquidated them. Otto Ohlendorf, one of the task-force commanders, testified in Nuremberg that in the course of the first year his unit murdered approximately 90,000 men, women, and children. The Jewish population of western Russia was especially affected; during this same period it is conservatively estimated that about half a million Jews were killed.36 Unmoved, Hitler pushed the extermination program forward. Over and beyond all the aims of conquest and exploitation, his statements of that period manifest the old, deep ideological hatred, once more as extreme as in his early years. “The Jews are the scourge of humanity,” he told Croatian Foreign Minister Kvaternik on July 21, 1941. “If the Jews were given their way, as they are in the Soviet paradise, they would carry out the maddest plans. That is how Russia has become a plague center for humanity…. If only one country for whatever reasons tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If there were no longer any Jews in Europe, the unity of the countries of Europe would no longer be disturbed.”

  In spite of their rapid advance, the German armies were able to start their pincers movement only in the central sector. On the other fronts they merely managed to roll the enemy back. “No enemy in front of us and no supplies behind us”: that was the quip for the special problems of this campaign. Nevertheless, by July 11 nearly 600,000 Russian prisoners were in German hands, including more than 70,000 deserters. Both Hitler and the army High Command thought the collapse of the Red Army was near. As early as July 3 Halder had noted: “It is probably not saying too much if I assert that the campaign against Russia was won within two weeks.” But he recognized that stubborn resistance based on the vastness of the area would occupy the German forces for many weeks to come.

  Hitler himself declared several days later that he did not believe resistance in European Russia would last much longer than six weeks. He did not know where the Russians would go then. “Perhaps the Urals or beyond the Urals. But we will follow them.” He would not shrink from pushing even beyond the Urals. He would pursue Stalin wherever he fled. But he did not think he would have to be fighting after the middle of September; in six weeks or so it would be pretty much all over.37 In the middle of July the emphasis in the armaments program was shifted to submarines and aircraft, and planning was begun for the return march of the German divisions, since this was expected to take place in two weeks. When General Kûstring, the last military attaché in Moscow, appeared at the Führer’s headquarters at this time to report, Hitler led him to a military map, gestured at the conquered territories, and declared: “No pig will ever eject me from here.”38

  The relapse into the coarseness of his early years corresponded to the satisfaction Hitler evidently felt in showing what he was capable of. He described the battles in the East to Spanish Ambassador Espinosa as sheer “massacres of human beings.” Sometimes, he said, the enemy had attacked in waves twelve or thirteen rows deep and had simply been cut down, “the people reduced to chopped meat.” The Russian soldiers, he said, were “partly in a state of torpor, partly of sighs and groans. The commissars are devils and… were being shot down.” Simultaneously, he indulged in long hate-filled fantasies. He conceived of starving out Moscow and Leningrad and thus bringing about an “ethnic catastrophe” that would “deprive not only Bolshevism of its centers, but wipe out the Moscovites.” Then he wanted to raze both cities to the ground. A gigantic reservoir would be created on the spot where Moscow had once stood, to extinguish all memory of the city and everything it had been. As a precautionary measure, he ordered that the expected offers of surrender be turned down, and justified this measure to his intimates: “Probably some people will clap their hands to their heads and ask: How can the Führer destroy a city like St. Petersburg? By nature I belong to an entirely different genus. But when I see that the species is in danger, my feelings give way to ice-cold resolution.”39

  In the course of August the German armies, after breaking through the “Stalin Line,” succeeded after all in impressive pincers movements on all the sectors of the front. Nevertheless, it became apparent that the optimistic reckonings of the previous month had been deceptive. However great the number of prisoners, the hordes of reserves that the enemy continually brought up to the front seemed even greater. Moreover, the Russians fought far more bitterly than had the Poles or Allied troops; and their determination to resist increased, after initial crises, as they recognized the annihilating nature of the war Hitler was waging. Moreover, the attrition of matériel in the dust and mud of the Russian steppes was greater than had been expected, and every victory drew the army more deeply into the endless spaces. In addition, the German war machine for the first time seemed to be reaching the limits of its capacity. Industry, for example, was producing only a third of the required 600 tanks a month. The infantry was obviously inadequately motorized for a campaign involving distances vaster than any hitherto conceived. The Luftwaffe could not handle a two-front war. And supplies of fuel at times shrank to the demand for a single month. In the face of all this, the question of where the remaining reserves could most effectively be applied became paramount. On what sector of the front could a blow be delivered that might decide the war?

  The army High Command and the commanders of the Army Group Center unanimously demanded that they be allowed to concentrate all formations for the attack on Moscow. The enemy, they assumed, would assemble all available forces outside the capital for the great decisive battle. Thus the campaign could be concluded within the schedule, and the rules of blitzkrieg could be abided by. Hitler, on the contrary, called for attacking in the north, in order to cut the Russians off from access to the Baltic. Simultaneously, he wanted an advance on a broad front in the south, with the aim of seizing the rich agricultural and industrial regions of the Ukraine and the Donetz Basin and the oil supplies of the Caucasus. This plan was a prime sample both of his arrogance and his dilemma. Although he pretended that in his certainty of victory he could afford to ignore the capital, he was actually trying to relieve the economic strain, which was becoming more and more evident. “My generals know nothing about a war economy,” he repeatedly declared. The obstinate dispute, which once again revealed the divisions between Hitler and the generals, was finally ended by a directive ordering the Army Group Center to place its motorized formations at the disposal of the commanders in the north and south. “Unacceptable,” “outrageous,” Halder noted, and proposed to Brauchitsch that they hand in a joint resignation. But the commander in chief refused.

  The great victory in the Battle of Kiev, which netted the German side approximately 665,000 prisoners and enormous quantities of matériel, seemed once again to confirm Hitler’s military genius—especially since this success also ended the flank threat to the central sector and thus truly opened the way to Moscow. In fact Hitler now consented to the offensive against the capital. But blinded by the unbroken succession of triumphs, spoiled by fortune in war, he thought he could simultaneously continue to pursue his far-flung aims in the north and in the south as well: cutting the Murmansk railroad line, capturing Rostov and the oil region of Maikop, and advancing the more than 375 miles to Stalingrad. As if he had forgotten the old rule about concentrating all forces at one place at a time, he thus made his troops draw farther and farther apart. On October 2, 1941, Field Marshal von Bock, with reduced forces, at last opened the offensive against Moscow, after a delay of nearly two months. On the following day Hitler made a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, in which he surpassed himself in vulgar boasting. He described Germany’s enemies as “democratic nonentities,” “louts,” “animals and beasts,” and announced that “this enemy is already broken and will never rise again.”


  Four days later the autumnal rains began. Fighting superior enemy forces, the German armies opened their offensive on a hopeful note, achieving two great encirclements near Vyasma and Bryansk. But then the deepening morass crippled all operations. The movement of supplies slowed; fuel in particular grew short; more and more vehicles and guns became stuck in the mud. The halted offensive did not begin moving forward again until the middle of November, when mild frost ensued. The tank troops assigned to complete the northern encirclement at last came within almost twenty miles of the Soviet capital near Krasnaya Polyana, while the units attacking from the west approached to within more than thirty miles of the city’s center. Then the Russian winter descended abruptly. The temperature dropped to twenty degrees below and later sometimes even to sixty below zero.

  The onset of intense cold found the German armies completely unprepared. Certain that the campaign would be over in three to four months, Hitler in one of his characteristic gestures had again placed his back against the wall and ordered no winter equipment for the troops. “For there will be no winter campaign,” he had rebuked General Paulus when the commander recommended precautionary measures for the coming winter. At the front thousands died of cold. Vehicles and automatic weapons failed. The wounded froze to death in the hospitals, and soon the casualties from cold exceeded those lost in the fighting. “There was panic here,” Guderian declared, and at the end of November he reported that his troops were “done for.” A few days later, in temperatures of twenty below zero, the formations outside Moscow made a last desperate attempt to break through the Russian lines. A few units penetrated as far as the suburbs of the capital. Through their field glasses they could see the towers of the Kremlin and observe movements in the streets. Then the offensive ground to a halt.

  Meanwhile, altogether unexpectedly, a Soviet counteroffensive began with freshly introduced Siberian elite divisions. The German troops were thrown back with heavy losses. For a few days the front appeared to waver and be on the point of vanishing into the Russian snow. Hitler unyieldingly rejected all appeals by the generals to avoid the disaster by tactical withdrawals. He feared the loss of weapons and gear, and dreaded the enormous psychological effects that would necessarily follow the shattering of his image of personal invincibility.40 On December 16 he issued an order demanding of every soldier “fanatical resistance” in their present positions, “without regard for enemy breakthroughs on the flank and rear.” When Guderian remonstrated against the senseless sacrifices this order entailed, Hitler asked whether the general believed that Frederick the Great’s grenadiers had died gladly. “You stand too close to the events,” he charged Guderian. “You have too much pity for the soldiers. You ought to disengage yourself more.”

  To this day it is widely believed that the “stand” order outside Moscow, and Hitler’s obstinate determination, stabilized the crumbling front. But the armies’ loss of substance and the longer supply lines canceled out all conceivable advantages. Moreover, the decision also suggested Hitler’s growing incapacity to react flexibly. The process of stylizing himself into a monument, which he had undergone for so many years, was now obviously affecting his temperament and locking him into a sort of monumental rigidity. But no matter what he decided in the face of this crisis, there could no longer be any doubt that much more than his projected blitzkrieg, Operation Barbarossa, ground to a halt before the Soviet capital. Clearly, his entire plan for the war had foundered.

  This was his first severe setback after nearly twenty years of unremitting political and military triumphs. His decision to hold the positions outside Moscow at all costs sprang from his consciousness of being at a turning point. His gamble had been carried to such a pitch that it had to collapse at the first defeat, and all its premises went down with it. By the middle of November, at any rate, he seems to have been filled with forebodings. He spoke to a small group about the idea of a “negotiated peace” and once again voiced vague hopes that the conservative ruling class of England would see the light.41 It was as though he wanted to forget that it was he who had betrayed the principle of his successes and would never again be in a position to fight one main enemy with the aid of the other. Ten days later, when the disastrous cold descended, he seemed for the first time to have an intimation that he was facing more than an isolated failure. In a military conference held toward the end of the war General Jodi stated that already then, in view of the calamity of the Russian winter, Hitler as well as he realized that “victory could no longer be achieved.”42 On November 27 Quartermaster General Wagner tendered a report at the Führer’s headquarters whose gist Halder summed up in one sentence: “We have reached the end of our human and material forces.” And that same evening, in one of those bleak, misanthropic moods that so often assailed him during the crises of his life, Hitler told a foreign visitor: “If the German people are no longer so strong and ready for sacrifice that they will stake their own blood on their existence, they deserve to pass away and be annihilated by another, stronger power.” In a second conversation, later that night and again with a foreign visitor, he voiced the same idea and added the remark: “If that is the case I would not shed a tear for the German people.”43

  Recognition that his design for the war as a whole had failed also lurked behind Hitler’s decision, on December 11, 1941, to declare war on the United States—the war he had dreaded all along. Four days before, 350 Japanese carrier planes had attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and the airfields on Oahu with a hail of bombs, thus initiating the conflict in the Far East. In Berlin Ambassador Oshima requested that the Reich immediately enter the war on his country’s side. And although Hitler had repeatedly pressed his Far Eastern ally to attack the Soviet Union or the British Empire in Southeast Asia and had made it plain how inopportune a war against the United States would be for Germany, he instantly acted on the Japanese request. He did not even blame the Japanese for their insulting secrecy—though at bottom he thought he alone had the right to such secrecy. And he brushed aside Ribbentrop’s objection that, according to the letter of the Tripartite Pact, Germany was by no means obligated to give aid. The spectacular surprise attack with which Japan had begun the war had deeply impressed him, and by now he had reached the point of being carried away by such dramatics. “My heart swelled when I heard of the first Japanese operations,” he said to Oshima.

  There were some advantages in beginning the war with thè United States immediately. The German naval forces were now free to conduct the war at sea without restriction, whereas they had previously had to put up with all provocations by the American side. Moreover, the Japanese strikes came at the right moment to veil the crisis in Russia. And, finally, defiance also played a part in Hitler’s decision, bitterness at the way the war had gone off the rails, so that in mockery of all his plans he had not been able to win it in a series of lightning blows.

  All these arguments, however, were not very convincing and could not conceal the fact that Hitler was entering the new conflict with America without a major motive. In little more than two years he had gambled away a dominant political position and united the most powerful countries in the world, despite all their previous enmities, in an “unnatural alliance.” The decision to go to war against the United States was even less free, even more coerced, than the decision to attack the Soviet Union. In fact, it was really no longer an act of his own volition but a gesture governed by a sudden awareness of his own impotence. That gesture was Hitler’s last strategic initiative of any importance.

  The effect of American participation in the war instantly became apparent in a stiffening and extension of Allied efforts. On the day of the German attack upon the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill had declared in a radio address that he would not retract anything he had said against Communism for twenty-five years, but that in the face of the drama beginning in the East “the past with its crimes, it follies and tragedies” faded. Churchill always tried to preserve an awareness of the distance that separated him fro
m his new ally, but President Roosevelt threw himself into the support of the Soviet Union with the total commitment that the moment and the enemy required. Some time before the American entry into the war, he had included the Soviet Union along with Britain in the LendLease program of material support. But now he mobilized the entire potential of the country. Within a single year he increased the number of tanks built to 24,000, the production of planes to 48,000. By 1943 he had twice doubled the strength of the American army to a total of 7 million men, and by the end of the first year of the war had raised American armaments production to the same level as that of the three Axis powers taken together. By 1944 he had doubled it once more.

  On American initiative the Allies now began co-ordinating their strategy. Unlike the Tripartite Pact powers, which were never able to develop unified military planning, the Allied commissions and staffs that were immediately established held more than 200 conferences and consistently arranged for joint measures. They were aided by the fact that they agreed on a distinct goal—to defeat the enemy—whereas Germany, Italy, and Japan were pursuing extremely vague and at the same time excessive aims, each by itself in different parts of the world. The three great have-not powers were as fascinated as they were driven by their own dynamism. Mussolini commented on their vast appetite for territory in a remark he made at the end of August, 1941, when he joined Hitler in inspecting the ruins of the fortress of Brest-Litowsk. The German dictator was going on in his usual way about his plans for carving up the world. Utilizing a pause, Mussolini, the story goes, interjected with ironic mildness that when the partitioning was over there would be “nothing left but the moon.”