by Ian Kershaw
While Matsuoka was in Berlin, preparations for ‘Marita’ were already furiously taking shape. Within little over a week they were ready. ‘Operation Marita’ was now set to begin at 5.20a.m. on Sunday morning, 6 April. The tension in the Propaganda Ministry and other agencies of the regime was feverish. Goebbels had already devised, with Hitler’s approval, the radio fanfares for the Balkan campaign, taken from the opening of ‘Prinz Eugen’.136 At 1a.m., feeling the tension himself and about to snatch a few hours’ sleep, he was summoned to the Führer. Hitler outlined the attack. He reckoned the campaign could take two months. Goebbels thought less. Hitler referred to the Friendship Treaty which the Soviet Union had signed with Yugoslavia only the day before.137 He had no fear of Russia. He had taken sufficient precautions. If Russia wanted to attack, then the sooner the better. If Germany were not to act now, the whole of the Balkans and Turkey would be inflamed. That had to be prevented. The war against the Serbs would be carried out ‘without mercy’.
The time seemed to drag. Goebbels drank tea with Hitler and, as a diversion, they talked about matters other than the war. Hitler turned to one of his favourite topics: making Linz into a cultural capital greater than Vienna. Goebbels said he would help as far as possible, in the first instance by setting up film studios there.138 Another hour passed. Then 5.20a.m. came. The attack had started. Hitler felt he could now go to bed.139
Shortly afterwards, Goebbels read out on the radio the proclamation Hitler had dictated.140 By then, hundreds of Luftwaffe bombers were turning Belgrade into a heap of smoking ruins. Hitler justified the action to the German people as retaliation against a ‘Serbian criminal clique’ in Belgrade which, in the pay of the British Secret Service, was attempting, as in 1914, to spread the war in the Balkans. The German troops would end their action once the ‘Belgrade conspirators’ had been overthrown and the last British soldiers had been forced out of the region.141 What could, of course, not be revealed was that the invasion of Yugoslavia would, in at least one important respect, be a trial-run for ‘Barbarossa’. Hitler had spoken privately about the campaign being ‘merciless (ohne Gnade)’.142 On 2 April, Chief of Staff General Halder – presumably acceding to a request from Heydrich – added two new target-groups alongside ‘Emigrants, Saboteurs, Terrorists’ to be dealt with by the Security Police and SD in the Balkan campaign: Communists and Jews.143
With the campaign in its early stages, Hitler left Berlin on the evening of 10 April, en route for his improvised field headquarters. These were located in his Special Train Amerika, stationed at the entrance to a tunnel beneath the Alps on a single-track section of the line from Vienna to Graz, in a wooded area near Mönichkirchen. The Wehrmacht Operational Staff, apart from Hitler’s closest advisers, were accommodated in a nearby inn. The tunnel was to offer protection in the event of danger from the air.144 The day before he left Berlin, Hitler had experienced the worst British air-raid yet over the Reich capital. Some of the historic buildings on Unter den Linden – including the State Opera House, the University, the State Library, and the Crown Prince’s Palace – were damaged. Hitler was furious with Göring at the failure of the Luftwaffe. He immediately commissioned Speer with the rebuilding of the Opera House.145
Hitler remained in his secluded, heavily guarded field headquarters for a fortnight. He was visited there by King Boris of Bulgaria, Admiral Horthy, the regent of Hungary, and Count Ciano – vultures gathering at the corpse of Yugoslavia.146 His fifty-second birthday on 20 April was bizarrely celebrated with a concert in front of the Special Train, after Göring had eulogized the Führer’s genius as a military commander, and Hitler had shaken the hand of each of his armed forces’ chiefs.147 While there Hitler heard the news of the capitulation of both Yugoslavia and Greece.148
After overcoming some early tenacious resistance, the dual campaign against Yugoslavia and Greece had made unexpectedly rapid progress.149 In fact, German operational planning had grossly overestimated the weak enemy forces. Of the twenty-nine German divisions engaged in the Balkans, only ten were in action for more than six days.150 On 10 April Zagreb was reached, and an independent Croatian State proclaimed, resting on the slaughterous anti-Serb Ustasha Movement. Two days later Belgrade was reached. On 17 April the Yugoslav army surrendered unconditionally. Around 344,000 men entered German captivity. Losses on the victors’ side were a mere 151 dead with 392 wounded and fifteen missing.151
In contrast to the punitive attack on Yugoslavia, Hitler’s interest in the conquest of Greece was purely strategic. He forbade the bombing of Athens, and regretted having to fight against the Greeks. If the British had not intervened there (sending troops in early March to assist the Greek struggle against Mussolini’s forces), he would never have had to hasten to the help of the Italians, he told Goebbels.152 Meanwhile, the German 12th Army had rapidly advanced over Yugoslav territory on Salonika, which fell on 9 April. The bulk of the Greek forces capitulated on 21 April. A brief diplomatic farce followed. The blow to Mussolini’s prestige demanded that the surrender to the Germans, which had in fact already taken place, be accompanied by a surrender to the Italians. To avoid alienating Mussolini, Hitler was forced to comply. The agreement signed by General List was disowned. Jodl was sent to Salonika with a new armistice. This time the Italians were party to it. This was finally signed, amid Greek protests, on 23 April.153 Greeks taken prisoner numbered 218,000, British 12,000, against 100 dead and 3,500 wounded or missing on the German side. In a minor ‘Dunkirk’, the British managed to evacuate 50,000 men – around four-fifths of their Expeditionary Force, which had to leave behind or destroy its heavy equipment.154 The whole campaign had been completed in under a month.155
A follow-up operation to take Crete by landing parachutists was, while he was in Mönichkirchen, somewhat unenthusiastically conceded by Hitler under pressure from Göring, himself being pushed by the commander of the parachutist division, General Kurt Student.156 By the end of May, this too had proved successful. But it had been hazardous. And the German losses of 2,071 dead, 2,594 wounded, and 1,888 missing from a deployment of around 22,000 men were far higher than in the entire Balkan campaign. ‘Operation Mercury’ – the attack on Crete – convinced Hitler that mass paratroop landings had had their day. He did not contemplate using them in the assault the following year on Malta.157 Potentially, the occupation of Crete offered the prospect of intensified assault on the British position in the Middle East. Naval High Command tried to persuade Hitler of this.158 But his eyes were now turned only in one direction: towards the East.
On 28 April, Hitler had arrived back in Berlin – for the last time the warlord returning in triumph from a lightning victory achieved at minimal cost. Though people in Germany responded in more muted fashion than they had done to the remarkable victories in the West, the Balkan campaign appeared to prove once again that their Leader was a military strategist of genius. His popularity was undiminished. But there were clouds on the horizon. People in their vast majority wanted, as they had done all along, peace: victorious peace, of course, but above all, peace. Their ears pricked up when Hitler spoke of ‘a hard year of struggle ahead of us’ and, in his triumphant report to the Reichstag on the Balkan campaign on 4 May, of providing even better weapons for German soldiers ‘next year’. Their worries were magnified by disturbing rumours of a deterioration in relations with the Soviet Union and of troops assembling on the eastern borders of the Reich.159
What the mass of the people had, of course, no inkling of was that Hitler had already put out the directive to prepare ‘Operation Barbarossa’ – the invasion of the Soviet Union – almost five months earlier. That directive, of 18 December, had laid down that preparations requiring longer than eight weeks should be completed by 15 May.160 But it had not stipulated a date for the actual attack. (In one of the military conferences preceding the directive, on 5 December, Hitler had envisaged the end of May as the time to strike. But, so far in advance of a campaign which would be dependent upon weather conditions for the
vital initial advantage, this was no more than a date to aim at.161) In his speech to military leaders on 27 March, immediately following news of the Yugoslav coup, Hitler had spoken of a delay of up to four weeks as a consequence of the need to take action in the Balkans.162 Back in Berlin after his stay in Mönichkirchen, he lost no time – assured by Halder of transport availability to take the troops to the East – in arranging a new date for the start of ‘Barbarossa’ with Jodl: 22 June.163
Towards the end of the war, casting round for scapegoats, Hitler looked back on the fateful delay as decisive in the failure of the Russian campaign. ‘If we had attacked Russia already from 15 May onwards,’ he claimed, ‘… we would have been in a position to conclude the eastern campaign before the onset of winter.’164 This was simplistic in the extreme – as well as exaggerating the inroads made by the Balkan campaign on the timing of ‘Barbarossa’.165 Weather conditions in an unusually wet spring in central Europe would almost certainly have ruled out a major attack before June – perhaps even mid-June.166 Moreover, the major wear and tear on the German divisions engaged on the Balkan campaign came less from the belated inclusion of Yugoslavia than from the invasion of Greece – planned over many months in conjunction with the planning for ‘Barbarossa’.167 What did disadvantage the opening of ‘Barbarossa’ was the need for the redeployment at breakneck speed of divisions that had pushed on as far as southern Greece and now, without recovery time, had rapidly to be transported to their eastern positions.168 In addition, the damage caused to tanks by rutted and pot-holed roads in the Balkan hills required a huge effort to equip them again for the eastern campaign, and probably contributed to the high rate of mechanical failure during the invasion of Russia.169 Probably the most serious effect of the Balkan campaign on planning for ‘Barbarossa’ was the reduction of German forces on the southern flank, to the south of the Pripet Marshes.170 But we have already seen that Hitler took the decision to that effect on 17 March, before the coup in Yugoslavia.
The weaknesses of the plan to invade the Soviet Union could not be laid at the door of the Italians, for their failure in Greece, or the Yugoslavs, for what Hitler saw as their treachery. The calamity, as it emerged, of ‘Barbarossa’ was located squarely in the nature of German war aims and ambitions. These were by no means solely a product of Hitler’s ideological obsessiveness, megalomania, and indomitable willpower. Certainly, he had provided the driving-force. But he had met no resistance to speak of in the higher echelons of the regime. The army, in particular, had fully supported him in the turn to the East. And if Hitler’s underestimation of Soviet military power was crass, it was an underestimation shared with his military leaders, who had lost none of their confidence that the war in the Soviet Union would be over long before winter.
VI
Meanwhile, Hitler was once more forced by events outside his control, this time close to home, to divert his attention from ‘Barbarossa’.
When he stepped down from the rostrum at the end of his speech to Reichstag deputies on 4 May, he took his place, as usual, next to the Deputy Leader of the Party, his most slavishly subservient follower, Rudolf Heß.171 Only a few days later, while Hitler was on the Obersalzberg, the astonishing news came through that his Deputy had taken a Messerschmitt 110 from Augsburg, flown off on his own en route for Britain, and disappeared. The news struck the Berghof like a bombshell.172 The first wish was that he was dead. ‘It’s to be hoped he’s crashed into the sea,’ Hitler was heard to say.173 Then came the announcement from London – by then not unexpected – that Heß had landed in Scotland and been taken captive. With the Russian campaign looming, Hitler was now faced with a domestic crisis. More important still: Heß had provided the British with a gift for propaganda or intelligence purposes. In fact, the decision was soon taken in the British cabinet to ignore the obvious propaganda opportunity in order to put pressure on Stalin at a critical juncture.174
On the afternoon of Saturday, 10 May, Heß had said goodbye to his wife, Ilse, and young son, Wolf Rüdiger, saying he would be back by Monday evening. From Munich he had travelled in his Mercedes to the Messerschmitt works in Augsburg. There, he changed into a fur-lined flying suit and Luftwaffe captain’s jacket. (His alias on his mission was to be Hauptmann Alfred Horn.) Shortly before 6p.m. on a clear, sunlit evening, his Messerschmitt 110 taxied on to the runway and took off. Shortly after 11p.m., after navigating himself through Germany, across the North Sea, and over the Scottish Lowlands, Heß wriggled out of the cockpit, abandoning his plane not far from Glasgow, and parachuted – something he had never practised – to the ground, injuring his leg as he left the plane.
Air defence had picked up the flight path, and observers had seen the plane’s occupant bale out before it exploded in flames. A local Scottish farmhand, Donald McLean, was, however, first on the scene. He quickly established that the parachutist, struggling to get out of his harness, was unarmed. Asked whether he was British or German, Heß replied that he was German; his name was Hauptmann Alfred Horn, and he had an important message to give to the Duke of Hamilton. Another local man, the elderly William Craig, had by this time arrived on the scene. While Craig went off to summon assistance, the limping Heß was escorted back to the cottage where McLean lived with his wife and mother, and offered a cup of tea (which he declined in favour of water). Within a short time, a few members of the local Home Guard, already heading for the farm after seeing a parachutist come down near by, entered the cottage. Smelling of whisky and prodding their prisoner with an old First World War pistol, they bundled him into a car and drove him to Home Guard headquarters – a scout-hut in the next village. Police and more Home Guard officers, curious about the German captive as word spread, soon turned up. They were followed a little later by Major Graham Donald, Assistant Group Officer of the Royal Observer Corps, who had seen the course of Heß’s plane charted on his maps before it had disappeared from trace. The prisoner, by now – well after midnight, an hour and a half or more after landing – tired and probably becoming increasingly agitated about the prospects of fulfilling his ‘mission’, impressed upon Donald that he had a vital secret message for the Duke of Hamilton. Donald undertook to contact the Duke. But he was not deceived by ‘Hauptmann Horn’; he said he would tell the Duke of Hamilton that he had Rudolf Heß in his custody. The message was, however, not passed on in this form. When Hamilton was informed in the early hours that a captured German pilot was demanding to speak to him, there was no reference to Heß, and the name of Hauptmann Alfred Horn meant nothing to the Duke. Puzzled, and very tired, Hamilton made arrangements to interview the mysterious airman next day, and went to bed.175
The Duke, a wing-commander in the RAF, arrived from his base to talk to the German captive by mid-morning on 11 May. ‘Hauptmann Horn’ admitted that his true name was Rudolf Heß. The discussion was inconsequential, but convinced Hamilton that he was indeed face to face with Heß. By the evening he had flown south, summoned to report to Churchill at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, a palatial eighteenth-century residence in magnificent grounds, frequently used by the British Prime Minister as a weekend headquarters. Churchill was in the midst of a dinner party. A film, the hilarious The Marx Brothers Go West, had been arranged for the evening. Churchill was glad of the diversion from the gloomy news coming in of the damage wrought by a heavy air-raid on London the previous night. ‘Now, come and tell us this funny story of yours,’ Churchill joked to Hamilton, as he entered the dining-room. Hamilton suggested the story would be better told in private. The other guests, apart from the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, withdrew. Hamilton then described what had happened. But a full debriefing had to wait until after midnight. ‘Hess or no Hess,’ Churchill announced, ‘I am going to see the Marx Brothers.’176
By the following day, Monday 12 May, the professionals from the Foreign Office were involved. It was decided to send Ivone Kirkpatrick, from 1933 to 1938 First Secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin and a strong opponent of Appeasement, to
interrogate Heß. Kirkpatrick and Hamilton left to fly to Scotland in the early evening. It was after midnight by the time they arrived at Buchanan Castle, near Loch Lomond, to confront the prisoner.177
The first Hitler knew of Heß’s disappearance was in the late morning of Sunday, 11 May, when Karl-Heinz Pintsch, one of the Deputy Führer’s adjutants, turned up at the Berghof. He was carrying an envelope containing a letter which Heß had given him shortly before taking off, entrusting him to deliver it personally to Hitler. With some difficulty, Pintsch managed to make plain to Hitler’s adjutants that it was a matter of the utmost urgency, and that he had to speak personally to the Führer.178 When Hitler read Heßs letter, the colour drained from his face.179 Albert Speer, busying himself with architectural sketches at the time, suddenly heard an ‘almost animal-like scream’. Then Hitler bellowed, ‘Bormann immediately! Where is Bormann?!’180
In his letter, Heß had outlined his motives for flying to meet the Duke of Hamilton, and aspects of a plan for peace between Germany and Britain to be put before ‘Barbarossa’ was launched. He claimed he had made three previous attempts to reach Scotland, but had been forced to abort them because of mechanical problems with the aircraft.181 His aim was to bring about, through his own person, the realization of Hitler’s long-standing idea of friendship with Britain which the Führer himself, despite all efforts, had not succeeded in achieving. If the Führer were not in agreement, then he could have him declared insane.182