Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  Hitler’s notions of a social ‘new order’ have to be placed in this setting of conquest, ruthless exploitation, the right of the powerful, racial dominance, and more or less permanent war in a world where life was cheap and readily expendable. His ideas often had their roots in the resentment that still smouldered at the way his own ‘talents’ had been left unrecognized or the disadvantages of his own social status compared with the privileges of the high-born and well-to-do. Thus he advocated free education, funded by the state, for all talented youngsters. Workers would have annual holidays and could expect once or twice in their lives to go on a sea-cruise.74 He criticized the distinctions between different classes of passengers on such cruise ships. And he approved of the introduction of the same food for both officers and men in the army.75 Hitler might appear to have been promoting ideas of a modern, mobile, classless society, abolishing privilege and resting solely upon achievement. But the central tenet remained race, to which all else was subordinated. Thus, in the east, he said, all Germans would travel in the upholstered first- or second-class railway carriages – to separate them from the native population.76 It was a social vision which could have obvious attractions for many members of the would-be master-race. The image was of a cornucopia of wealth flowing into the Reich from the east. The Reich would be linked to the new frontiers by motorways cutting through the endless steppes and the enormous Russian spaces. Prosperity and power would be secured through the new breed of supermen who lorded it over the downtrodden Slav masses.

  The vision, to those who heard Hitler describe it, appeared excitingly modern: a break with traditional class- and status-bound hierarchies to a society where talent had its reward and there was prosperity for all – for all Germans, that is. Indeed, elements of Hitler’s thinking were unquestionably modern.77 He looked, for instance, to the benefits of modern technology, envisaging steam-heated greenhouses giving German cities a regular supply of fresh fruit and vegetables all through the winter.78 He looked, too, to modern transport to open up the east. While the bounty of the east pouring into Germany would be brought by train, the car for Hitler was the vital transport means of the future.79 But for all its apparent modernity, the social vision was in essence atavistic. The colonial conquests of the nineteenth century provided its inspiration. What Hitler was offering was a modernized version of old-fashioned imperialist conquest, now translated to the ethnically mixed terrain of eastern Europe where the Slavs would provide the German equivalent of the conquered native populations of India and Africa in the British Empire.

  By mid-July, the key steps had been taken to translate the horrendous vision into reality. At an important five-hour meeting in the Führer Headquarters on 16 July attended by Göring, Rosenberg, Lammers, Keitel, and Bormann, Hitler established the basic guidelines of policy and practical arrangements for administering and exploiting the new conquests. Once more, the underlying premiss was the social-Darwinist justification that the strong deserved to inherit the earth. But the sense that what they were doing was morally objectionable nevertheless ran through Hitler’s opening comments, as reported by Bormann. ‘The motivation of our steps in the eyes of the world must be directed by tactical viewpoints. We must proceed here exactly as in the cases of Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium. In these cases, too, we had said nothing about our intentions and we will sensibly continue not to do so,’ Bormann recorded. ‘We will then again emphasize that we were compelled to occupy an area to bring order, and to impose security. In the interest of the native population we had to see to providing calm, food, transport etc. etc. Therefore our settlement. It should then not be recognizable that a final settlement is beginning! All necessary measures – shooting, deportation etc. – we will and can do anyway. We don’t want to make premature and unnecessary enemies. We will simply act, therefore, as if we wish to carry out a mandate. But it must be clear to us that we will never again leave these territories,’ Hitler’s blunt statement continued. ‘Accordingly, it is a matter of: 1. doing nothing to hinder the final settlement but rather preparing this in secret; 2. emphasizing that we are the liberators… Basically, it’s a matter of dividing up the giant cake so that we can first rule it, secondly administer it, and thirdly exploit it. The Russians have now given out the order for a partisan war behind our front. This partisan war again has its advantage: it gives us the possibility of exterminating anything opposing us. As a basic principle: the construction of a military power west of the Urals must never again be possible, even if as a consequence we have to wage war for a hundred years.’80

  Hitler proceeded to make appointments to the key positions in the occupied east. Rosenberg was confirmed next day as head of what appeared on the surface to be the all-powerful Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.81 But nothing was as it seemed in the Third Reich. Rosenberg’s authority, as Hitler’s decree made clear, did not touch the respective spheres of competence of the army, Göring’s Four-Year Plan organization, and the SS. The big guns, in other words, were outside Rosenberg’s control. More than that, Rosenberg’s own conception of winning certain nationalities as allies, under German tutelage, against Greater Russia – notions which he and his staff had been working on since the spring – fell foul of Himmler’s policy of maximum repression and brutal resettlement and Göring’s aims of total economic exploitation. Himmler was within weeks in receipt of plans for deporting in the coming twenty-five years or so over 30 million people into far more inhospitable climes further eastward. Göring was envisaging the starvation in Russia of 20–30 million persons – a prospect advanced even before the German invasion by the Agricultural Group of the Economic Staff for the East.82 All three – Rosenberg, Himmler, and Göring – could find a common denominator in Hitler’s goal of destroying Bolshevism and acquiring ‘living space’. But beyond that minimum, Rosenberg’s concept – no less ruthless, but more pragmatic – had no chance when opposed to the contrary idea, backed, as we have seen, by Hitler’s own vision, of absolute rapaciousness and repression.83

  Opposing Rosenberg’s wishes, Hitler had yielded in the conference of 16 July to the suggestion of Göring, backed by Bormann, that the – even by Nazi standards – extraordinarily brutal and independent-minded Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia, should be made Reich Commissar of the key territory of the Ukraine.84 Koch, like Hitler, but in contrast to Rosenberg, rejected any idea of a Ukrainian buffer-state. His view was that from the very beginning it was necessary ‘to be hard and brutal’. He was held in favour in Führer Headquarters. Everyone there thought he was the most suitable person to carry out the requirements in the Ukraine. It was seen as a compliment when they called him the ‘second Stalin’.85

  In contrast to the tyrant, Koch, who continued to prefer his old East Prussian domain to his new fiefdom, Hinrich Lohse, appointed as Reich Commissar in the Baltic, now renamed the Ostland, made himself a subject of ridicule among the German occupying forces in his own territory with his fanatical and often petty bureaucratization, unleashed in torrents of decrees and directives. For all that, he was weak in the face of the power of the SS, and other competing agencies.86 Similarly, Wilhelm Kube, appointed at the suggestion of Göring and Rosenberg as General Commissar in Belorussia, proved not only corrupt and incompetent on a grandiose scale, but another weak petty dictator in his province, his instructions often ignored by his own subordinates, and forced repeatedly to yield to the superior power of the SS.87

  The course was set, therefore, for a ‘New Order’ in the east which belied the very name. Nothing resembled order. Everything resembled the war of all against all, built into the Nazi system in the Reich itself, massively extended in occupied Poland, and now taken to its logical dénouement in the conquered lands of the Soviet Union.

  III

  In fact, despite the extraordinary gains made by the advancing Wehrmacht, July would bring recognition that the operational plan of ‘Barbarossa’ had failed. And for all the air of confidence that Hitler displayed to his entourage
in the Wolf’s Lair, these weeks also produced early indications of the tensions and conflicts in military leadership and decision-making that would continue to bedevil the German war effort. Hitler intervened in tactical matters from the outset. As early as 24 June he had told Brauchitsch of his worries that the encirclement at Bialystok was not tight enough.88 The following day he was expressing concern that Army Groups Centre and South were operating too far in depth. Halder dismissed the worry. ‘The old refrain!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘But that is not going to change anything in our plans.’89 On 27, 29, and 30 June and again on 2 and 3 July Halder recorded worried queries or interventions by Hitler in tactical deployments of troops.90 ‘Again the whole place is in a state of jitters,’ Halder remarked about FHQ on 3 July, ‘because the Führer is afraid that the wedge of Army Group South now advancing eastward might be threatened by flank attacks from north and south.’ Halder admitted that in tactical terms the fear was not unwarranted. But he resented the interference. ‘What is lacking on top level,’ he confided to his diary notes, ‘is that confidence in the executive commands which is one of the most essential features of our command organization, and that is so because it fails to grasp the coordinating force that comes from the common schooling and education of our Leader Corps.’91

  Halder’s irritation at Hitler’s interference was understandable. But the errors and misjudgements, even in the first, seemingly so successful, phase of ‘Barbarossa’, were as much those of the professionals in Army High Command as of the former First World War corporal who now thought he was the greatest warlord of all time.

  The mounting conflict with Hitler revolved around the implementation of the ‘Barbarossa’ strategic plan that had been laid down the previous December in Directive 21. This in turn had emanated from the feasibility studies carried out during the summer by military strategists. Planning had, in fact, been initiated as we noted, by Halder on 3 July 1940 almost a month before Hitler gave the verbal orders on the 31st to prepare a spring campaign in the East.92 Feasibility studies followed, the most important, produced at the beginning of August 1940, by General Erich Marcks, Chief of Staff of the 18th Army. War games were carried out at Army Headquarters to test the studies. Army High Command had favoured at this point, based especially on the ‘Mareks Plan’, making Moscow the key objective. Hitler’s own, different, conception was not dissimilar in a number of essentials from the independent strategic study prepared for the Wehrmacht Operational Staff by Lieutenant-Colonel Bernhard Loßberg in September 1940, though it differed from this, too, on the crucial question of Moscow.93

  The emphasis in Hitler’s ‘Barbarossa Directive’ in December, and in all subsequent strategic planning, had been on the thrusts to the north, to take Leningrad and secure the Baltic, with a further thrust to the south, to take the Ukraine.94 Even if unenthusiastically, the Army General Staff had accepted the significant alteration of what it had originally envisaged. According to this amended plan, Army Group Centre was to advance as far as Smolensk before swinging to the north to meet up with Leeb’s armies for the assault on Leningrad. The taking of Moscow figured in the agreed plan of ‘Barbarossa’ only once the occupation of Leningrad and Kronstadt had been completed.95

  Already on 29 June Hitler was worried that Bock’s Army Group Centre, where the advance was especially spectacular, would overreach itself.96 On 4 July he claimed that he faced the most difficult decision of the campaign: whether to hold to the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan, amend it to provide for a deep thrust towards the Caucasus (in which Rundstedt would be assisted by some of Army Group Centre’s panzer forces), or retain the panzer concentration in the centre and push forward to Moscow.97 The decision he reached by 8 July was the one wanted by Halder: to press forward the offensive of Army Group Centre with the aim of destroying the mass of the enemy forces west of Moscow.98 The amended strategy now discarded Army Group Centre’s turn towards Leningrad, built into the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan.99 The ‘ideal solution’, Hitler accepted, would be to leave Leeb’s Army Group North to attain its objectives by its own means.100 However, Hitler was even now by no means reconciled to the priority of capturing Moscow – in his eyes, as he said, ‘merely a geographical idea’.101

  The conflict with Army High Command, supported by Army Group Centre, about concentration on the taking of Moscow as the objective, continued over the next weeks. Hitler pressed, in revised operational form, for priority to be given to the capture of Leningrad, and now included in the south the drive to the industrial area of Kharkhov and into the Caucasus, to be reached before the onset of winter. At the same time, his ‘Supplement to Directive No.33’, dated 23 July, indicated that Army Group Centre would destroy the enemy between Smolensk and Moscow by its infantry divisions alone, and would then ‘take Moscow into occupation’.102

  By late July Halder had changed his tune about the certainty and speed of victory. Early in the month he had told Hitler that only forty-six of the known 164 Soviet divisions were still capable of combat. This had been in all probability an overestimation of the extent of destruction; it was certainly a rash underestimation of the enemy’s ability to replenish its forces. On 23 July he revised the figure to a total of ninety-three divisions. The enemy had been ‘decisively weakened’, but by no means ‘finally smashed’, he concluded. As a consequence, since the Soviet reserves of manpower were now seen to be inexhaustible, Halder argued even more forcefully that the aim of further operations had to be the destruction of the areas of armaments production around Moscow.103

  As the strength of Soviet defences was being revised, the toll on the German army and Luftwaffe also had to be taken into account. Air-crews were showing signs of exhaustion; their planes could not be maintained fast enough. By the end of July only 1,045 aircraft were serviceable. Air-raids on Moscow demanded by Hitler were of little effect because so few planes were available. Most of the seventy-five raids on the Soviet capital carried out over the next months were undertaken by small numbers of bombers, scarcely able to make a pinprick in Soviet armaments production.104 The infantry were even more in need of rest. They had been marching, and engaged in fierce fighting, for over a month without a break. The original operational plan had foreseen a break for recuperation after twenty days. But the troops had received no rest by the fortieth day, and the first phase of the campaign was not over.105 By this time, casualties (wounded, missing, and dead) had reached 213,301 officers and men.106 Moreover, despite miracles worked by Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner’s organization, transport problems on roads often unfit even in midsummer for mechanized transport brought immeasurable problems of maintaining supply-lines of fuel, equipment, and provisions to the rapidly advancing army. Supplies for Army Group Centre required twenty-five goods trains a day. But despite working round the clock to convert the railway lines to a German gauge, only eight to fifteen trains a day were reaching the front line in late July and early August.107

  It was becoming obvious already by the end of July that the revised ‘Barbarossa’ operational plan as laid down in Hitler’s Supplement to Directive No.33 could not be carried out before winter descended.108 Hitler interpreted this as demanding panzer support from Army Group Centre for the assault on Leningrad. Moscow could wait. Halder took the diametrically opposite view. Making Moscow the objective would ensure that the Soviets committed the bulk of their forces to its defence. Taking the city, including its communications system and industries, would split the Soviet Union and render resistance more difficult. The implication was that the capture of the capital would bring about the fall of the Soviet system, and the end of the eastern war.109 If the attack on Moscow were not pushed through with all speed, the enemy would bring the offensive to a halt before winter, then regroup. The military aim of the war against the Soviet Union would have failed.110

  Hitler was still adamant that capturing the industrial region of Kharkhov and the Donets Basin and cutting off Soviet oil supplies would undermine resistance more than the fall of Mosco
w.111 But he was wavering. At this point, even Jodl and the Wehrmacht Operations Staff had been converted to the need to attack Moscow.112 Citing the arrival of strong enemy reinforcements facing and flanking Army Group Centre, Hitler now, on 30 July, cancelled the Supplement to Directive No.33.113 Halder was momentarily ecstatic. ‘This decision frees every thinking soldier of the horrible vision obsessing us these last few days, since the Führer’s obstinacy made the final bogging down of the eastern campaign appear imminent.’114 But when Directive No.34 was issued the same day it offered Halder little comfort. Army Group Centre was to recuperate for the next attack; in the north the assault on Leningrad was to continue; and Army Group South was to destroy the enemy forces west of the Dnieper and in the vicinity of Kiev.115 The real decision – for or against the drive to Moscow – had effectively just been postponed for a while.116