Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  He left the matter open when he met the Commanders-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht on 21 July.144 ‘No clear picture on what is happening in England,’ Brauchitsch recorded Hitler as saying, when he reported back to Halder next day. ‘Preparations for a decision by arms must be completed as quickly as possible.’ Hitler would not allow the military initiative to be lost. But he was evidently still hoping for a diplomatic solution. ‘Crossing of Channel appears very hazardous to the Führer. On that account, invasion is to be undertaken only if no other way is left to bring terms with England,’ Halder reported. ‘England’s position is hopeless. The war is won by us,’ Hitler stated.

  But Britain still put her hopes in America, and in Russia. There was the possibility, said Hitler, referring to rumours of crisis in London, that a cabinet including Lloyd George, Chamberlain, and Halifax might come to power and seek peace terms.145 But, failing that, Britain would have to be reduced by an air-offensive combined with intensified submarine warfare to the state, by mid-September, when an invasion could be carried out. Hitler would decide within days, after hearing Raeder’s report in mid-week on naval operational logistics, whether the invasion would be carried out by autumn. Otherwise, it would be before the following May. The final decision on the intensity of submarine and air attacks would be left until the beginning of August. There was the possibility that the invasion might begin as early as 25 August.

  Hitler turned finally to the issue which had already started to bother him: the position of Russia. Stalin, he pointed out, had his own agenda. He was flirting with Britain to keep her in the war, to tie down Germany, and to exploit the situation to undertake his own expansionist policy. There were no indications of any Russian aggression towards Germany. ‘But,’ went on Hitler, ‘our attention must be turned to tackling the Russian problem and prepare planning.’ It would take four to six weeks to assemble the German military force. Its object would be ‘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’. He also mentioned the need to protect the Romanian oil-fields. Eighty to 100 divisions would be required. He contemplated attacking Russia that very autumn, to relieve the pressure of the air war on Britain.146 Compared with what had been achieved in the West, Hitler had remarked to Jodl and Keitel already at the time of the French capitulation ‘a campaign against Russia would be child’s play (Sandkastenspiel)’.147

  It was an astonishing prospect that Hitler held out to his army leaders. He was, of course, not yet committing himself to anything. But the two-front war which had always been anathema was now being entertained. Paradoxically, having advocated since the 1920s a showdown with the Soviet Union to destroy Bolshevism and win ‘Lebensraum’, Hitler had now come back to the idea of a war against Russia for strategic reasons: to force his erstwhile would-be friend, Britain, now stubbornly holding out against the odds, to terms. The ideological aim of smashing Bolshevism, though apparently invoked by Hitler as part of his reasoning, was at this point secondary to the strategic need to get Britain out of the war.148 It was a sign of the difficulties that Hitler had manoeuvred himself into. Britain would not play his game. But the military lesson he kept saying she would have to be taught, and which the German public now awaited, would be, he knew, a hazardous affair. So he was now moving to a step he – and most of his generals did not disagree – thought less dangerous: an attack on the Soviet Union.

  In fact, the army command, worried about the build-up of Soviet troops in southern Russia in connection with Stalin’s increasing pressure on the Balkan states, had already, in mid-June, added a further nine motorized divisions to the fifteen divisions previously designated for transfer to the east.149 And on 3 July Halder, without any orders from Hitler but following indications evidently passed on to him by Weizsäcker, in the Foreign Office, showed himself ready to anticipate the change in direction, to ‘work towards the Führer’, when he deemed it appropriate to have the possibilities of a campaign against the Soviet Union tested. The Chief of Staff, ahead of Hitler at this point, raised with his operational planners ‘the requirements of a military intervention which will compel Russia to recognize Germany’s dominant position in Europe’.150

  Hitler was still avoiding a final decision on Britain.151 But it was with the impression that Lord Halifax’s official spurning of his ‘peace offer’ in a broadcast speech on the evening of 22 July amounted to ‘England’s final rejection’ that he left, for what was to prove the last time, for Bayreuth, to see next day a performance of Götterdämmerung. ‘The die is cast,’ wrote Goebbels. ‘We’re tuning press and radio to a fight.’152 In fact, the die had not been finally cast. Hitler remained unsure how to proceed.

  He had long since convinced himself of what German propaganda was trumpeting. It was he who wanted peace. Churchill, backed by the ‘Jewish plutocracy’, was the warmonger – the obstacle to the triumph. While in Bayreuth, Hitler saw the friend of his youth days, August Kubizek, for the last time. Hitler told Kubizek, as gullible as ever, that the war had hindered all his great plans for rebuilding Germany. ‘I did not become Chancellor of the Great German Reich in order to wage war,’ he said. Kubizek believed him.153 Probably Hitler believed himself.

  He went from Bayreuth to the Obersalzberg. While he was there, the army leadership learnt from Raeder that the navy could not be ready for operations against England before 15 September. The earliest date for an invasion, depending on the moon and tides, was the 26th of that month. If that date proved impossible, the invasion would have to be put off until the following May.154 Brauchitsch was sceptical that the navy could provide the basis for an invasion in the autumn. (In fact, the navy had concluded that it was highly inadvisable to attempt to invade at any point that year, and was highly sceptical about the prospects of an invasion at any time.155) Halder agreed with Brauchitsch in eliminating the notion of an operation during bad weather. But they foresaw disadvantages, military and political, in a postponement to the following year. They considered possibilities of weakening Britain’s overseas position through attacks on Gibraltar, Haifa, and Suez, support for the Italians in Egypt, and inciting the Russians to move on the Persian Gulf. An attack on Russia was rejected in favour of the maintenance of friendly relations.156

  Hitler, meantime, had been privately consulting jodl. On 29 July he asked the Chief of the Wehrmacht Directional Staff about deploying the army in the east, and whether it might be possible to attack and defeat Russia that very autumn. Jodl totally ruled it out on practical grounds. In that case, Hitler said, absolute confidence was needed. Feasibility studies were to be undertaken, but knowledge confined to only a few staff officers. Remarkably, in fact, the Wehrmacht had not waited for Hitler’s order. ‘The army,’ Jodl was later to remark, ‘had already learnt of the Führer’s intentions at the stage when these were still being weighed up. An operational plan was therefore drawn up even before the order for this was given.’ And already in July, as he later put it ‘on his own initiative (aus eigenem Antrieb)’, Lieutenant-Colonel Bernhard von Loßberg, from the ‘National Defence Department’ (Abteilung Landesverteidigung), headed by Major-General Walter Warlimont, had begun work on an ‘operational study for a Russian campaign (an die Bearbeitung einer Operationsstudie für einen Rußlandfeldzug)’.157 The draft plan was at this stage merely intended to be held in readiness for the point at which it might be needed. Hitler’s discussion with Jodl indicated that this point had arrived.

  Loßberg, two other members of Warlimont’s staff, and Warlimont himself, were sitting in the restaurant car of the special train Atlas, in the station at Bad Reichenhall, when Jodl came down from the Berghof to report on his discussion with Hitler.158 According to Warlimont, the consternation at what they heard – meaning the dreaded war on two fronts – gave rise to an hour of bitter argument. Jodl countered by stating Hitler’s opinion that it was better to have the inevitable war against Bolshevism now, with German power at its height, than later; and that by au
tumn 1941 victory in the East would have brought the Luftwaffe to its peak for deployment against Britain.159 Whatever the objections – it is impossible to know whether Warlimont was exaggerating them in his post-war account – the feasibility studies under the code-name ‘Aufbau-Ost’ (Build-Up in the East) were now undertaken with a greater sense of urgency.160

  Two days later, on 31 July, Hitler met his military leaders at the Berghof. Raeder repeated the conclusion his naval planners had reached that the earliest date for an invasion of Britain could be no earlier than 15 September, and favoured postponing it until the following May. Hitler wanted to keep his options open. Things would become difficult with the passing of time. Air attacks should begin straight away. They would determine Germany’s relative strength. ‘If results of air warfare are unsatisfactory, invasion preparations will be stopped. If we have the impression that the English are crushed and that effects will soon begin to tell, we shall proceed to the attack,’ he stated. He remained sceptical about an invasion. The risks were high; so, however, was the prize, he added. But he was already thinking of the next step. What if no invasion took place? He returned to the hopes Britain placed in the USA and in Russia. If Russia were to be eliminated, then America, too, would be lost for Britain because of the increase in Japan’s power in the Far East. Russia was ‘the factor on which England is relying the most’. The British had been ‘completely down’. Now they had revived. Russia had been shaken by events in the West. The British were now clutching on, hoping for a change in the situation during the next few months.

  He moved to his momentous conclusion: remove Russia from the equation. Halder’s notes retained Hitler’s emphasis. ‘With Russia smashed, England’s last hope would be shattered. Germany then will be master of Europe and the Balkans. Decision: Russia’s destruction must therefore be made a part of this struggle. Spring 1941. The sooner Russia is crushed the better. Attack achieves its purpose only if Russian state can be shattered to its roots with one blow. Holding part of the country alone will not do. Standing still for the following winter would be perilous. So it is better to wait a little longer, but with the resolute determination to eliminate Russia… If we start in May 1941, we would have five months to finish the job.’161

  Unlike the anxious reactions on the occasions in 1938 and 1939 when the generals had feared war with Britain, there is no indication that they were horror-struck at what they heard. (As we have noted, Halder, gleaning what was in the air, had anticipated Hitler in broaching, at the beginning of the month, the possibility of military intervention to force the Russians to recognize German dominance.)162 The fateful underestimation of the Russian military potential was something Hitler shared with his commanders. Intelligence on the Soviet army was poor. But the underestimation was not solely the result of poor intelligence. Airs of disdain for Slavs mingled easily with contempt for what Bolshevism had managed to achieve. Contact with Soviet generals in the partition of Poland had not impressed the Germans. The dismal showing of the Red Army in Finland (where the inadequately equipped Finns had inflicted unexpected and heavy losses on the Soviets in the early stages of the ‘Winter War’ of 1939–40) had done nothing to improve its image in their eyes. Not least, there was the apparent madness which had prompted Stalin to destroy his own officer corps. Whereas an attack on the British Isles remained a perilous undertaking, an assault on the Soviet Union raised no great alarm. A true ‘lightning war’ could be expected here.163

  The day after the meeting on the Berghof, Hitler signed Directive No. 17, intensifying the air-war and sea-war against Britain as the basis for her ‘final subjugation’. He explicitly – underscoring the sentence in the Directive – reserved for himself a decision on the use of terror bombing.164 The offensive was set to begin four days later, but was postponed until the 8th. It was again postponed on account of the weather conditions until the 13th.165 From then on, the German fighters sought to sweep the Royal Air Force from the skies. Wave after wave of attacks on the airfields of southern England was launched. Spitfires, Hurricanes and Messerschmitts wheeled, arched, dived, and strafed each other in the dramatic and heroic dogfights on which Britain’s survival at this point depended. The early optimistic results announced in Berlin soon proved highly misleading.166 The task was beyond the Luftwaffe. At first by the skin of their teeth the young British pilots held out, then gradually won the ascendancy. Despite Hitler’s orders that he alone was to decide on terror-bombing, 100 planes of the Luftwaffe acting, it seems, under a loosely worded directive from Göring issued on 2 August, had attacked London’s East End on the night of 24 August. As retaliation, the RAF carried out the first British bombing raids on Berlin the following night.167 Ineffective though they were, they came as a shock to the people of Berlin. Göring had once joked that should British planes ever reach Germany, his name was not Hermann Göring, but Hermann Meier. From now on, caustic Berlin tongues dubbed him ‘Herr Meier’.168

  Hitler regarded the bombing of Berlin as a disgrace.169 As usual, his reaction was to threaten massive retaliation. ‘We’ll wipe out their cities! We’ll put an end to the work of these night pirates,’170 he fumed at a speech in the Sportpalast on 4 September. He spoke with Göring about undertaking the revenge. From 7 September the nightly bombing of London began.171 It was the turn of the citizens of Britain’s capital to experience night after night the terror from the skies. The shift to terror-bombing marked a move away from the idea of the landing which Hitler had never whole-heartedly favoured. Persuaded by Göring, he now thought for a while that Britain could be bombed to the conference-table without German troops having to undertake the perilous landing.172 But, dreadful though the ‘Blitz’ was, the Luftwaffe was simply not powerful enough to bomb Britain to submission. The chief of the Luftwaffe’s Operational Staff (Luftwaffenführungstab), General Otto Hoffmann von Waldau, stated almost a month after the high-point of the ‘Battle of Britain’ that an air-fleet four times the size would have been needed to force Britain to its knees.173

  Between 10 and 13 September there were signs that Hitler had gone utterly cold on the idea of a landing.174 On 14 September he then told his commanders that the conditions for ‘Operation Sealion’ – the operational plan to attack Great Britain – had not been attained. The military chiefs themselves did not believe that a landing in England at that stage could be successfully carried out.175 ‘I had the impression at this discussion,’ wrote Nicolaus von Below many years later, ‘that Hitler had given up hope of a successful invasion of England the following spring. In autumn 1940 the great unknown, the fairly improvised crossing over the sea, frightened him. He was unsure.’176

  Meanwhile, the dogfights over southern England and the Channel coast intensified during the first fortnight in September, reaching a climacteric on Sunday, the 15th. The Wehrmacht admitted 182 planes lost in that fortnight, forty-three on the 15th alone.177 The horrors of the ‘Blitz’ would continue for months to be inflicted upon British cities – among the worst devastation the bombing of Coventry on the night of 14 November, as the German onslaught switched to the industrial belt of the Midlands to strike at more manageable targets than London.178 But the ‘Battle of Britain’ was over. Hitler had never been convinced that the German air-offensive would successfully lay the basis for the invasion of which he was in any case so sceptical. On 17 September he ordered the indefinite postponement – though, for psychological reasons, not the cancellation – of ‘Operation Sealion’.179

  The peace-overtures had failed. The battle for the skies had failed. Meanwhile, on 3 September the grant of fifty destroyers to Britain by the USA – a deal which Roosevelt had eventually pushed through, initially against much opposition from the isolationists – was, despite the limited use of the elderly warships, the plainest indication to date that Britain might in the foreseeable future be able to reckon with the still dormant military might of the USA.180 It was increasingly urgent to get Britain out of the war. Hitler’s options were, in autumn 1940, still not closed off
. There was the possibility of forcing Britain to come to terms through a strategy of attacks on her Mediterranean and Near Eastern strongholds. But once that option also faded Hitler was left with only one possibility: the one that was in his view not only strategically indispensable but embodied one of his most long-standing ideological obsessions. This point would not finally be reached until December 1940. By then it would be time to prepare for the crusade against Bolshevism.

  III

  Hitler did not have the power to bring the war to the conclusion he wanted. And, within Germany, he was powerless to prevent the governance of the Reich from slipping increasingly out of control. The tendencies already plainly evident before the war – unresolved Party-State dualism, unclear or overlapping spheres of competence, proliferation of ad hoc establishment of improvised ‘special authorities’ (Sonderbehörden) empowered to handle specific policy areas, administrative anarchy – were now sharply magnified. It was not that Hitler was a ‘weak dictator’.181 His power was recognized and acknowledged on all fronts. Nothing of significance was undertaken in contradiction to his known wishes. His popular support was immense. Opponents were demoralized and without hope. There was no conceivable challenge that could be mounted. The slippage from control did not mean a decline in Hitler’s authority. But it did mean that the very nature of that authority had built into it the erosion and undermining of regular patterns of government and, at the same time, the inability to keep in view all aspects of rule of an increasingly expanding and complex Reich. Even someone more able, energetic, and industrious when it came to administration than Hitler could not have done it. And during the first months of the war, as we have seen, Hitler was for lengthy stretches away from Berlin and overwhelmingly preoccupied with military events. It was impossible for him to stay completely in touch with and be competently involved in the running of the Reich. But in the absence of any organ of collective government to replace the cabinet, which had not met since February 1938, or any genuine delegation of powers (which Hitler constantly shied away from, seeing it as a potentially dangerous dilution of his authority), the disintegration of anything resembling a coherent ‘system’ of administration inevitably accelerated. Far from diminishing Hitler’s power, the continued erosion of any semblance of collective government actually enhanced it. Since, however, this disintegration went hand in hand – part cause, part effect – with the Darwinian struggle carried out through recourse to Hitler’s ideological goals, the radicalization entailed in the process of ‘working towards the Führer’ equally inevitably accelerated.182