The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  The dazzling triumph over France brought Hitler to the pinnacle of his popularity in Germany and left his enemies gasping for breath. A jubilant victory parade through the center of Berlin honored the Wehrmacht and its stupendous achievements, and Hitler, in a special session of the Reichstag, awarded nine field marshal’s batons to his generals and named Göring Marshal of the Reich. The victory over France, he boasted in addressing the Reichstag, was “the most daring undertaking in the history of German warfare,” resulting in “the greatest and most glorious victory of all time.” A sense of euphoria swept the country. France had fallen, and England had been driven from the continent. Casualties were high—27,000 dead—but the British and French had suffered greater losses. Yet, despite the parades, the speeches, the scenes of German triumph in the newsreels, there remained the troublesome realization that the war was not, in fact, over. The British had been soundly beaten but didn’t seem to grasp the hopelessness of their position.

  Churchill, Hitler believed, was the problem. Churchill’s appointment as prime minister in May 1940 had come as a blow. For years an outspoken opponent of appeasement and National Socialism, a hotheaded “warmonger” to some in British official circles, Churchill relished his role as wartime leader. Despite the string of crushing defeats in Norway, the Low Countries, and France, Churchill was determined to stay in the fight. Anyone else at the helm in London would see reason, Hitler believed, would recognize that Britain’s ability to reverse the situation on the continent was nil, and that the best solution was to strike a deal. Britian should recognize the new realities of international politics and accommodate itself to them. Hitler was prepared to recognize the integrity of the British Empire; Germany had no demands to make on Britain—perhaps some restoration of German colonies in Africa, but beyond that nothing. London had merely to accept German hegemony on the continent and take the Führer’s word that Germany had no further ambitions. Yet, as the peoples of Europe had learned over the previous two years, the Führer’s promises counted for little. “Hitler always meant what he said,” British historian John Wheeler-Bennett once observed, “except when he gave his word.” The English, whose behavior Hitler could never fathom, were not prepared to accept these conditions.

  It was during these critical weeks in the summer of 1940, weeks when Britain stood alone, that Churchill delivered his most inspiring speeches, calling on the British people to persevere. They were speeches of desperation and defiance, swaddled in Churchill’s soaring Augustan rhetoric defiantly summoning the nation to fight to the bitter end, to never surrender to Nazi tyranny. It would be “their finest hour.” That speech was in Goebbels’s view brimming with “an insolence that can hardly be exaggerated.” It was “the speech of a raving lunatic. He wants to keep on fighting alone.”

  Nonetheless, on July 19 Hitler convened the Reichstag to give a much anticipated speech that was to contain a “magnanimous” offer to the British. There were really no issues dividing the two nations, Hitler declared. He renewed his offer to provide a military guarantee of the British Empire. But if the war continues, he warned, “Mr. Churchill should . . . trust me when as a prophet I now proclaim: A great world empire will be destroyed. A world empire which I never had the ambition to destroy or as much as harm.” He was working to prevent a needless calamity and felt compelled by his conscience to make another “appeal to reason in England. . . . I am not asking for something as the vanquished, but rather, as the victor.” He was “speaking in the name of reason. I see no compelling reason which could force the continuation of this war.” Only “Jews and Freemasons, armaments industrialists and war profiteers, international traders and stockjobbers” wanted this war.

  Here Nazi propaganda found its leitmotif for war with Britain. The threat of Judeo-Bolshevism faded temporarily, while Germany’s defense against Jewish plutocracy was moved stage center. Germany was not at war with the British people, but with the plutocrats backed by the Jews who had come to dominate British politics and society. “Our Jewish-democratic world enemy succeeded in inciting the English people to a state of war against Germany,” Hitler declared in the very first days of the conflict. “English and Jewish philistines,” the Nazi press insisted, “had a common political and economic interest in working against the process of liberation that Germany was leading against English-Jewish capitalist domination.” German journalists were to direct their attacks not against the British people but “against those eternal warmongers who act on behalf of Jewry, international capitalism, and the democracies and plutocracies.” Sadly, the British upper strata had become heavily “Jewified,” but at least now the German people knew who their true enemy was: “power-hungry, hate filled world Jewry.” England, Goebbels proclaimed, “was in the hands of the Jews.”

  Goebbels’s propaganda barrage against England proved enormously successful, especially with the young. “German public opinion is boiling hot,” Goebbels noted with satisfaction in his diary. The German people were “aflame” with hatred of Britain, and war against England “will be a relief,” Goebbels concluded. “That is what the German people want.” Gestapo reports on public opinion bore this out, registering a rising impatience for a decisive blow against the warmonger Churchill and the British people. “Overwhelming is the hope that the Führer attack England immediately,” one report in June claimed, and that “the British will really get it in the neck.” Another noted that “people could hardly wait for the attack to start, and everybody wanted to be present at Britain’s impending defeat.” The jaunty popular war song “We’re Going Against England,” released in July, captured that sense of confidence and resentment. It played on the radio in a continuous loop, and for a change German popular opinion seemed to charge out in front of Hitler and the Nazi leadership. Hitler was frustrated and angry when the very next evening the BBC broadcast a flat refusal of his peace offering, and a day later Foreign Minister Lord Halifax officially rejected it. “The Führer,” Halder recorded in his diary, “is very strongly preoccupied by the question why England is still unwilling to ‘choose the way to peace.’ ” Hitler had given his last offer to Britain. The war would continue. Unable to coax London into a settlement, Hitler ordered preparations to begin for an invasion of Britain. He had hoped to avoid such a step; to bluff the British into an agreement. An invasion was to be a last resort. But Churchill’s incomprehensible truculence left him few options. On July 16 Hitler signed Directive No. 16, “About the Preparation of a Landing Operation Against England,” authorizing the Wehrmacht to begin planning for an invasion of Britain.

  When on July 16 the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW—the Supreme Command of all German armed forces) for the first time confronted the stark realities of an amphibious landing in southern England, the challenges were sobering. Unlike operations against Poland and France, both of which were the result of months of staff planning, Operation Sea Lion was from the beginning an improvisation. Not even the most rudimentary plan for an invasion of Britain had been drafted when France fell in June 1940. Yet, the target date Hitler set was August 15. An undertaking, the outcome of which could decide the war and whose success would require extraordinary coordination between the army, navy, and air force, was to be operational in one month.

  The original plan for Sea Lion called for 500,000 troops to land along a two-hundred-mile coastal front in the south-southeast of England. Halder believed that an invasion in a more concentrated area would be suicidal. Admiral Raeder was mortified when he saw the plan. He lacked the necessary ships to transport troops across the Channel and began requisitioning river barges, fishing trawlers, and tugs. Having suffered heavy losses in the waters off Norway, he also lacked the warships to block the Royal Navy. These considerations convinced Hitler to postpone the launch of Sea Lion until September 15, by which time Raeder hoped to scrape together enough landing craft to ferry the army across.

  The key to success for the entire endeavor was the Luftwaffe’s ability to establish air superiority over t
he Channel and the landing zones, but the army and the navy could summon little confidence in their ability to accomplish that mission. Göring’s air force would have to drive the Royal Navy from the scene, destroy the RAF, break the initial resistance of British land forces, and annihilate reserves behind the lines. With his usual bluster, Göring assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe would subdue the Royal Air Force in five weeks.

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  On the morning of July 10, 1,500 German bombers appeared over coastal England, attacking several port cities—Plymouth, Dover, Portsmouth, and others. For almost three weeks German bombers attacked coastal defenses and sank over forty thousand tons of British shipping but never really dented the Royal Navy’s strength in the Channel. Bombing in the daytime and without the benefit of fighter escorts, the Luftwaffe lost one hundred bombers by August 1. Raids on August 13 signaled a shift in targets. German planes began an assault on British air defenses to neutralize British airpower “in the shortest possible time.” The raids focused on military airfields in coastal areas, flying units, supply, and the aircraft industry. Remarkably, only one attack was made on the radar installations that dotted Britain’s eastern and southeastern coastline. The Luftwaffe knew their purpose but underestimated their importance.

  During these raids the Germans inflicted terrible casualties on the RAF, shooting down more than one hundred British planes, but suffered heavy losses as well. If British pilots were able to bail out, most landed on British soil and could be back in the air again quickly, while German air crews shot down over England were lost for the war. On August 24, with losses rising alarmingly, the Luftwaffe shifted its priorities once again, returning to missions against RAF airfields. During the last week of August, the RAF lost so many planes and pilots that replacements could not keep pace. Fighter Command lost almost three hundred aircraft between August 24 and September 6, far more than German fighter losses. RAF Fighter Command, and hence British air defenses, was teetering on the brink of disaster, and alarm swept the government.

  During the night of August 24, German planes attempting to bomb an RAF base on the outskirts of London strayed off course and dropped bombs on the center of the city. Before hostilities had begun, all combatants had issued solemn promises to refrain from attacking civilian targets, but the Luftwaffe had already bombed Warsaw and the center of Rotterdam. Warsaw could be claimed as a military target, since the Polish army was still resisting in the city, and the May bombing of Rotterdam, Berlin maintained, was due to pilot error. The RAF had also launched several desultory raids on a number of western German cities. On May 11, Mönchengladbach in the Rhineland had become the first German city to experience an air raid, but the RAF soon hit Hamburg, Kiel, Koblenz, Düsseldorf, and other targets in the following days. These raids produced little serious damage and few casualties; one could hardly speak of a systematic bombing campaign, but the shock produced on the German public was tremendous. Germans had been led to believe that the Fatherland was invulnerable to attack from the air and could hardly believe that the vanquished British had the temerity to launch raids on the Reich.

  In retaliation for the London bombing, Churchill ordered a raid on Berlin for the very next night. Göring had famously joked that if a single British bomber managed to reach Berlin, he should be called Meyer, and the population of the city had great confidence in the field marshal’s boast. A British bomber would have to fly deep into German airspace, dodge concentrations of flak en route, somehow elude flocks of Luftwaffe fighters, and then penetrate the outer and inner rings of antiaircraft batteries around Berlin. An impossible task. Yet on the night of August 25, a small RAF bomber force did just that. While air raid sirens wailed and powerful searchlights raked the sky, the squadron dropped bombs on the densely populated Kreuzberg section of the city. The Görlitz train station was badly damaged, bomb craters pockmarked the neighborhood’s main street, and streetcar tracks lay twisted into a tangle of bizarre shapes. Twelve civilians were killed in the raid, and over nine hundred residents were left homeless. In the following week, the RAF returned for three consecutive nights. Rousted from their beds in the middle of the night by screaming sirens, civilians groped in the fathomless darkness to find their way to cellars or official air raid shelters. There they huddled for three or four hours, waiting nervously for the all-clear to be sounded. The war had come home to the Reich.

  Speaking to a full house at the Sportpalast on September 4, Hitler raged against the British terror bombing. If the Royal Air Force “drop two thousand, or three thousand, or four thousand kilograms of bombs,” he shrieked, “then we will now drop 150,000; 180,000; 230,000; 306,000; 400,000; yes, one million kilograms in a single night. And should they declare they will greatly increase their attacks on our cities, then we will raze their cities to the ground. . . . The hour will come that one of us will break, and it will not be National Socialist Germany.” It was a dramatic reversal of his August 1 War Directive No. 17, explicitly forbidding the Luftwaffe to launch terror raids on the civilian population unless he had given his specific permission to do so. In one of his notorious monologues over dinner at the Reich Chancellery, Hitler, who only weeks before had cautioned the Luftwaffe to avoid hitting civilians, now exclaimed: “Göring wants to use innumerable incendiary bombs of an altogether new type to create sources of fire in all parts of London. Fires everywhere. Thousands of them. Then they’ll unite in one gigantic area conflagration. Göring has the right idea. Explosive bombs don’t work, but it can be done with incendiary bombs—total destruction of London. What use will their fire department be once that really starts.” Within six months, terror bombing of civilian targets became the norm for both Britain and Germany.

  In early September, the Luftwaffe shifted its targeting priorities away from the RAF airfields to an all-out assault on London. It was a drastic change in objectives, and its timing was critical. It was not just vengeance for attacks on Berlin, Hitler claimed, but would lure more British fighters into the skies, a move that Göring believed would hasten the RAF’s inevitable downfall. But, with the battered RAF on the verge of collapse, that shift in strategy would prove of decisive importance. London was heavily defended by two thousand antiaircraft guns, and for ten days in mid-September, long bright blue days, the skies over southeastern England were filled with formations of black German bombers droning toward London. Vectoring fighters from around the country to intercept, the RAF relentlessly attacked. Losses were astronomically high for both sides, but by mid-September the outcome was clear. The Germans had failed to attain their strategic objectives. The RAF had suffered grievous losses but had not been broken; British morale had not cracked, and the Luftwaffe had been unable to secure the necessary air superiority for a cross-Channel invasion. On September 17, Hitler, with some relief, ordered the indefinite postponement of Operation Sea Lion.

  The Battle of Britain was over, but the German air assault continued. The raids shifted to nighttime, metastasizing into the unrestrained aerial onslaught so many had feared. Fires engulfed London, turning large areas of the city into a blazing inferno. The Blitz, as the British called the German campaign of terror bombing, raged from September 1940 into the spring of 1941. During roughly thirty-seven weeks of unrelenting horror, the Luftwaffe bombed Liverpool, Hull, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, and other cities. In a particularly devastating raid on the night of November 14–15, 449 Luftwaffe bombers dropped 1,400 high-explosive bombs and 100,000 incendiaries on the industrial city of Coventry, creating a raging firestorm that consumed 50,000 buildings and killed 568 people. In London, 28,556 people, mostly civilians, lost their lives during the course of the bombing, marking an ominous new station on the road to total war. This was terror bombing, shorn of even the flimsiest justification about military targets, and with its coming, the character of the war was radically changed. What had begun as a confrontation between the armed forces of nations had now become a savage people’s war, a war in which the distinction between civilian and military ta
rgets was erased.

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  THE CRUSADE AGAINST JUDEO-BOLSHEVISM

  In the high summer of 1940, while bombs still rained down on England and Sea Lion had not yet been officially abandoned, Hitler ordered preliminary military planning for an invasion of the Soviet Union. After Hitler quietly suspended Sea Lion in September, he was actually relieved to be free of the operation, about which he had never been enthusiastic. It was a distraction, drawing him away from his basic ideological and geopolitical objectives. Those lay, as they always had, in the East, in Russia. A war of annihilation against Judeo-Bolshevism in the Soviet Union was the bedrock of Nazi ideology and a goal Hitler had obsessively embraced throughout his political career. It was the cause that defined and animated National Socialism; the confrontation between National Socialism and Communism was for him the main event, an epic clash of ideologies that would determine the fate of Germany, Europe, and the world. It would also vastly expand the scope and savagery of the war Hitler had unleashed, and with it, geopolitics and genocide would merge into one terrifying maelstrom, transforming the very nature of the war and bringing the merciless slaughter of millions.

  An attack on the Soviet Union, he assured his generals, would not draw Germany into a dreaded two-front war. England was barely clinging to life, desperately hoping for deliverance from either the United States or the USSR. A lightning conquest of the Soviet Union would eliminate Churchill’s last hope for salvation in Europe, and the Americans, despite Roosevelt’s strong anti-Nazi views, were a long way from intervening. A war in the East would provide the Reich with the Lebensraum of Hitler’s fantasies and create new opportunities to solve, once and for all, the “Jewish problem” in Europe. By late summer 1940, while German bombers blotted the skies over England and the German public was absorbed in speculation about the anticipated cross-Channel invasion, Hitler decided that he could defer his vision no longer.