Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  A one-sided military campaign in Poland brought overwhelming victory in little more than three weeks. But Hitler had no expectation that the half-hearted offer of peace on his terms, made in a speech to the Reichstag on 6 October, would be taken up in London or Paris. He was already plotting his next move. The sense that time favoured his enemies, and that to strike early meant to seize the initiative, to retain the whip-hand–as we have noted, a constant feature of Hitler’s psychology–left him impatient with the easy triumph in Poland. He was now anxious to attack the west without delay. With Poland defeated and the Soviet Union, his new-found ally, posing no danger for the time being, Germany was secure in the east. The western front lay open. The circumstances could never be better. The opportunity had to be taken while it lasted to impose a crushing defeat upon France and force Britain to acknowledge her weakness and come to terms. With the war in the west then effectively won, he could turn his attention to preparing for the war he had always wanted to fight: the showdown in the east with ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’, to destroy Stalin’s Russia and to secure Germany’s long-term future by acquiring ‘living space’ and unlimited material resources. This was Hitler’s thinking in autumn 1939.

  His generals recoiled at the dangers of such a risky early strike against the west, magnified by the imminent onset of bad weather. To brush aside the weak and antiquated Polish army in a brief campaign was one thing. To launch a major offensive against France, its huge army shielded by the elaborate defences of the Maginot Line, and joined in powerful alliance with Great Britain and the British Empire, was quite another. The generals knew that the armed forces were in no fit state for a full-scale, probably long-drawn-out, conflict against powerful enemies. Even the brief Polish campaign had left half the German tanks and motorized vehicles out of action. An immediate continuation of the war by an attack in the west was, in their eyes, unthinkable.

  Hitler fumed at their hesitancy and caution. But perhaps he sensed that they were right. At any rate, he bowed to their worries about bad weather conditions and transport difficulties to accept delay after delay–twenty-nine in all–to the launch of the western offensive. Detailed operational planning was not worked out until February of 1940. Then the need to intervene in Scandinavia, where German troops had invaded Denmark and Norway in April, took precedence. The postponements proved invaluable in building up the armed forces. And they eventually resulted in the tactically bold and brilliant plan to attack where least expected, by scything through the wooded Ardennes region of southern Belgium and into lowland France towards the coast. The plan had initially been the tactical brainwave of Lieutenant-General Erich von Manstein but had been seized upon and turned into military directives by Hitler, impatient at the uninspired and conventional ideas of his army High Command. This was the plan behind the attack that eventually commenced on the early morning of 10 May.30

  The offensive was a stunning success, greater than even Hitler had expected. The Dutch surrendered after five days. The Belgians, their neutrality violated by German troops for the second time in a generation, held out longer, until almost the end of the month. But though the small Belgian army fought gallantly, it was swiftly broken by German might. And, whatever their strength on paper, the French army, ineptly led, badly equipped and poor in morale, proved no match for the Wehrmacht. The fabled fortifications of the Maginot Line, built to fend off any possible third assault within a lifetime from across the Rhine, served little practical purpose in the event. They were incapable of halting the main German thrust, which simply bypassed them. Defiance crumbled. On 14 June, less than five weeks after the offensive had been launched, German troops entered Paris. Hitler was exultant as the news was brought to him three days later that the French had sued for peace. His revenge over the French was complete–or would be once the armistice was signed in his presence on 21 June in the self-same railway carriage in which the Germans had been compelled to capitulate in 1918. The scale of the triumph took his incipient megalomania onto a new plane. And his self-glorification (embracing a sense of infallibility) was magnified by the plaudits of his generals, who had, sometimes reluctantly, to concede not only the magnitude of what had been possible under Hitler, but also his direct role in the extraordinarily successful strategic plan of attack. Only the British, Hitler thought, now stood between him and complete victory in the west. Surely they would see sense, and come to terms?

  II

  On 6 July 1940 Hitler returned in triumph to Berlin to celebrate before a vast, adoring public the spectacular victory over France and the conclusion of the astonishing western campaign. It was his greatest ever homecoming. To the hundreds of thousands who had waited for hours along the flower-strewn streets of the Reich capital, it seemed as if the end of the war was close at hand. Only Great Britain now appeared to stand in the way of final victory. Few among the cheering crowds imagined that she would pose much of a lasting obstacle to the mighty Wehrmacht. Even in the full flush of the crushing defeat of the French, however, Hitler’s military advisers and even the dictator himself were less than sure that Britain’s resistance would be swiftly overcome. Behind Britain, too, lay the shadow, if still indistinct, of the United States. Though as yet the sentiment was seldom spoken out loud, the lingering fear was there nonetheless: should the United States mobilize her colossal might and wealth to enter the war, as in 1917, the chances of German total victory would rapidly recede. The twin problem: how to get Britain out, and how to keep America out of the war, loomed large, therefore, in the thoughts of Hitler and the German military leadership during the immediate weeks following the capitulation of France. The outright priority was to persuade (or, failing that, compel through military force) Britain to negotiate a settlement.31 Removing Britain from the war would both deter America from engagement in Europe and free Germany’s rear to allow Hitler to engage upon the war he had wanted to fight since the 1920s: the war to destroy ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ and gain an enormous eastern empire at the expense of the Soviet Union.

  But within an hour of Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on 19 July, the first press reports were telling him of Britain’s icy response to his ‘appeal to reason’ to come to terms with Germany and avoid the destruction of her Empire.32 On 22 July a broadcast speech by the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, made public what Hitler already knew, that Britain would not entertain the possibility of a negotiated settlement and was determined to fight on.33 Even before Halifax’s speech, Hitler had acknowledged the categorical rejection of his ‘appeal’ and on 21 July raised with his commanders-in-chief the prospect of invading the Soviet Union that very autumn.

  His underlying reasons were ideological, as they had been for almost two decades. Through an attack on the Soviet Union he would destroy the power of the Jews, embodied in his world-view by the Bolshevik regime, and at the same time gain ‘living space’ for German settlement. Victory would make Germany masters of Europe and provide the base for a racially purified empire which would be equipped eventually to challenge the United States for world domination. But it was now obvious that the war to destroy Bolshevism would not be fought as he had envisaged it, with Britain’s support (or at least tolerance). Britain was refusing even at this stage to fit into the concept he had devised all those years ago. Somehow, she had to be compelled to do so, or at least removed from the equation as a hostile force. ‘The Führer is greatly puzzled by Britain’s persisting unwillingness to make peace,’ the army chief of staff, Franz Halder, had noted on 13 July. ‘He sees the answer (as we do) in Britain’s hope on Russia, and therefore counts on having to compel her by main force to agree to peace.’34 However strong the ideological motivation, therefore, the urgency implicit in the startling suggestion that the Soviet Union should be attacked that autumn was not ideological but military-strategic. And that was how Hitler presented it to his commanders-in-chief on 21 July.

  ‘No clear picture on what is happening in England’, Hitler declared. ‘Preparations for a decision by arms must b
e completed as quickly as possible.’ He refused, he said, to let the military and political initiative slip. Germany had won the war, he brashly claimed. Britain’s position was hopeless, but she continued because of the expectation of American help over time, and because she ‘puts hope in Russia’. This could come from Russia stirring up the Balkans, with the effect of cutting off German fuel supplies, or by Britain inciting the Soviet Union to act against Germany. Stalin, he suggested, was ‘flirting with Britain to keep her in the war and tie us down, with a view to gaining time and taking what he wants, knowing he could not get it once peace breaks out’. Hitler concluded that ‘Britain must be reduced by the middle of September, at the time when we make the invasion’. But he was less certain than he sounded about this prospect. He thought the crossing of the Channel ‘very hazardous’, and stipulated that invasion was ‘to be undertaken only if no other way is left to reach terms with Britain’. The way to force the issue, in his view, was to destroy the Soviet Union. ‘Our attention must be turned to tackling the Russian problem and prepare planning,’ he stated. The object was ‘To crush [the] Russian army or at least take as much Russian territory as is necessary to bar enemy air raids on Berlin and Silesian industries’. It would take four to six weeks to assemble an invading army. ‘If we attack Russia this autumn, pressure of the air war on Britain will be relieved.’35

  He was ready, therefore, to plunge Germany for a short time (he thought) into war in the east with the war in the west still not conclusively won, raising the spectre of the war on two fronts, dreaded by military strategists and the general public alike. When General Alfred Jodl, head of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff and Hitler’s main adviser on military strategy, told his immediate subordinates on 29 July of the intention to launch an eastern campaign, the prospect of a war on two fronts prompted an hour of worried argument. Jodl, whether from conviction or not, countered objections with the case advanced by Hitler: the showdown with Bolshevism was inevitable, so it was better to have it now, while German military power was at its height; and by autumn 1941 the Luftwaffe, strengthened by victorious deployment in the east, would again be ready to be let loose on Britain.36 Hitler himself was dismissive of anxieties about a war on two fronts. Intoxicated by the grandeur of the victory in the west, he had told his chief military advisers at the time of the French capitulation that ‘a campaign against Russia would be child’s play’.37

  Hitler justified the war as necessary to remove Britain’s last possible major ally on the Continent. He claimed, too, that the Soviet Union was ‘the Far Eastern sword of Britain and the United States, pointed at Japan’.38 The implication was that victory over the Soviet Union would free Japan to undertake her ambitious southern expansion without fear of Soviet power in the rear, with the combined effect of undermining British power in the Far East, tying down the United States in the Pacific and deterring her involvement in the Atlantic and in Europe. The projected short eastern campaign offered, therefore, the prospect not only of complete hegemony on the European continent, but even of overall final victory in the war. After that, at some indeterminate future date, would come the showdown with the United States. There was no contradiction between ideology and military-strategic considerations in Hitler’s thoughts of invading the Soviet Union. They went hand in hand. The essential motivating force, as ever, was ideological. But in the actual decision-making, the strategic imperative dominated.39

  When the prospect of attacking the Soviet Union that autumn was rapidly ruled out as impractical, he postponed it until May 1941. This was the date he had fixed in his meeting with Jodl on 29 July, and which he announced to his military leaders two days later. It was a momentous decision, perhaps the most momentous of the entire war. And it was freely taken. That is, it was not taken under other than self-imposed constraints. It was not taken in order to head off an immediate threat of attack by the Soviet Union. There was no suggestion at this time–the justificatory claim would come later–of the need for a pre-emptive strike. Hitler himself had acknowledged ten days earlier that the Russians did not want war with Germany.40 Nor was the decision taken in response to pressure from the military, or from any other lobby within the power-echelons of the regime. In fact, even on 30 July, the day before Hitler’s pronouncement, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Field Marshal Werner von Brauchitsch, and the chief of the General Staff of the army, Colonel-General Halder, agreed that ‘it would be better to be on terms of friendship with Russia’. They preferred to concentrate the military effort on the possibilities of attacking British positions in the Mediterranean (particularly Gibraltar) and the Middle East, saw no danger in Russian engagement in the Balkans and Persian Gulf, and envisaged helping the Italians create a Mediterranean empire and even cooperating with the Russians to consolidate the German Reich in northern and western Europe, from which basis a lengthy war against Britain could be contemplated with equanimity.41

  The pressure upon Hitler was subjective: his sense that no time could be lost before striking at the Soviet Union if the overall initiative in the war, based on the balance of power and armed might, were not to drain away from Germany towards Britain and, ultimately, the United States.42 This subjective pressure was, however, reinforced by the economic logic of Germany’s war. This in turn was rooted in the ideology of ‘living space’ and the closely related notion of Großraumwirtschaft: sphere of economic domination. When the euphoria following the victory over France started to die down, it was realized that Germany’s expectations of economic dominance on the European continent had an Achilles heel: the Soviet Union. In fact, in the summer of 1940 Germany was profiting handsomely from Soviet deliveries of food and raw materials under the economic agreements that flowed from the Hitler–Stalin Pact.43 Even so, Hitler was made aware by the Ministry of Economics that, to equip herself for a long war against Britain and, with growing certainty, the United States, Germany now needed vastly more than she was currently receiving from the Soviet Union. Even though, in the short term, Stalin would probably, to gain time, be prepared to bow to demands for increased supplies, there would inexorably be a growing dependence on the Soviet Union, too precarious a prospect for Hitler to tolerate. He agreed with his Economics Minister, Walther Funk, that the German ‘economic sphere’ (der ‘großdeutsche Wirtschaftsraum’) could not be ‘dependent upon forces and powers over whom we have no influence’.44 This view was widely shared in leading sectors of the Wehrmacht, big business and the ministerial bureaucracy. It meant Hitler’s decision for war against the Soviet Union was likely to find a good deal of support in all those vital groupings.45

  Whatever the misgivings of some generals about the venture, Hitler’s decision was neither opposed nor contested in the military leadership. In fact, sensing what was coming, the army’s General Staff had already begun to prepare feasibility studies weeks before Hitler announced his intention to strike at the Soviet Union.46 His military leaders were as aware as he was of the strategic position. They put forward no alternative strategy for attaining final victory, assuming that Britain could not be invaded or bombed into submission.47 Moreover, like Hitler, they grossly underestimated the Red Army (particularly since its poor showing in the ‘Winter War’ against Finland some months earlier), and they shared his detestation of Bolshevism, some of them even his identification of the Soviet regime with the power of the Jews. But it is doubtful in the extreme whether they would have of themselves come to recommend a decision, within a few weeks of the defeat of France, to prepare urgently for an invasion of the Soviet Union. That decision was Hitler’s, and his alone.

  The immensity of the catastrophe which he thereby invited would unfold ever more plainly from the autumn of 1941 onwards, once the German advance on Moscow stalled as the terrible Russian winter closed in. However, the question at issue here relates not to the attack itself, but to the decision to launch it, taken the previous year. Did Hitler, even as the logistics for what would come to be known as ‘Operation Barbarossa’ were being worked out
, have options which might have given him a better chance of ending (or even curtailing) the threat to Germany posed by Britain’s continuation of the war and America’s presumed eventual entry? Germany’s navy leadership thought so. And, for a while, so did the Foreign Ministry.

  The decision, effectively taken on 31 July 1940, to attack the Soviet Union the following spring was not turned into a war directive until 18 December.48 Even that directive, of course, did not mean in itself that an invasion had to be launched. But in December the points were switched irreversibly onto the track that led to that invasion. In the four months that intervened between July and December 1940, by contrast, Hitler seemed, in matters determining German strategy, strangely vacillating, unsure which way to turn, hesitant, indecisive, weak even, at the height of his power in his external dealings with lesser dictators (Mussolini and Franco), and the leader of defeated France (Marshal Pétain). He appeared at times to entertain military and foreign-policy suggestions which stood in contradiction to the war in the east. But by the late autumn it was clear that he had returned to the chosen path from which he had never seriously wandered: attacking the Soviet Union at the earliest opportunity with the strategic aim of attaining final victory in the war by conquering London via Moscow. It was a fateful choice of immense magnitude.