Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  But the problem was not one-sided. Certainly, as we have seen, the invasion of the Soviet Union was Hitler’s own idea – and that at the height of the triumph in summer 1940. But far from dismissing the idea as illusory, vainglorious, or risky to a degree that courted outright disaster, the army’s feasibility studies that summer had underwritten the proposition. The tension between the conflicting conceptions of the eastern campaign was still inwardly unresolved as far as Halder was concerned when Hitler’s Directive No.21 was issued on 18 December 1940, indicating Moscow as a secondary rather than primary objective. The conflict of the coming summer months was prefigured in this unresolved contradiction even before the campaign had started. If reluctantly, Army High Command had apparently accepted the alternative strategy which Hitler favoured. Strategic planning of the attack in subsequent months followed from this premiss.

  The strategy of first gaining control over the Baltic and cutting off essential Soviet economic heartlands in the south, while at the same time protecting German oil supplies in Romania, before attacking Moscow was not in itself senseless. And the fear that a frontal assault on Moscow would simply drive back instead of enveloping Soviet forces was a real one. Army High Command’s preference to deviate from the plan of ‘Barbarossa’ once the campaign was under way was not a self-evident improvement. The reversion to Halder’s originally preferred strategy was tempting because Army Group Centre had advanced faster and more spectacularly than anticipated, and was pressing hard to be allowed to continue and, as it thought, finish the job by taking Moscow. But even more it now followed from the realization that the army’s intelligence on Soviet military strength had been woeful. The attack on Moscow, though favoured in the OKH’s thinking from an early stage, had in fact come to be a substitute for the ‘Barbarossa’ plan, which had gone massively awry not simply because of Hitler’s interference, but also because of the inadequacy and failures of the army leadership.

  Since Hitler had placed the key men, Brauchitsch and Halder, in their posts, he must take a good deal of the blame for their failings. But as Commander in Chief of the Army, Brauchitsch was hopelessly weak and ineffectual. His contribution to strategic planning appears to have been minimal. Torn between pressures from his field commanders and bullying from Hitler, he offered a black hole where clear-sighted and determined military leadership was essential. Long before the crisis which would ultimately bring his removal from office, Brauchitsch was a broken reed. The contempt with which Hitler treated him was not without justification.

  Halder, partly though his own post-war apologetics and his flirtations (though they came to nothing) with groups opposed to Hitler, has been more generously viewed by posterity. As Chief of the General Staff, responsibility for the planning of army operations was his. The chequered relations with the High Command of the Wehrmacht, in large measure Hitler’s own mouthpiece, of course gravely weakened Halder’s position. But the Chief of the General Staff failed to highlight difficulties in the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan. The northward swing of Army Group Centre forces was not fully worked out. The problems that motorized forces would face in the terrain between Leningrad and Moscow were not taken into account. Halder was lukewarm from the outset about the concentration on the Baltic and would have preferred the frontal assault on Moscow. But instead of being settled beforehand, the dispute, as we have noted, was left to fester once the campaign was under way.148

  Moreover, the all-out attack on Moscow that Halder – and Commander of Army Group Centre Bock – were urging, would itself have been a highly risky venture. It would then almost certainly have been impossible to eliminate the large Soviet forces on the flanks (as happened in the ‘Battle of Kiev’). And the Russians were expecting the attack on the capital. Had the Wehrmacht reached the city, in the absence of a Luftwaffe capable of razing Moscow to the ground (as Hitler wanted), the result would probably have been a preview of what was eventually to happen at Stalingrad. And even had the city been captured, the war would not have been won. A Soviet psychological, political, economic, and military collapse as a consequence would have been unlikely.149

  Whatever the speculation on this, that the eastern campaign was blown off course already by late summer of 1941 cannot solely, or even mainly, be put down to Hitler’s meddling in matters which should have been left to the military professionals. The implication, encountered in some post-war memoirs, that, left to their own devices, the military would have won the war in the east for Germany was both a self-defensive and an arrogant claim. The escalating problems of ‘Barbarossa’ were ultimately a consequence of the calamitous miscalculation that the Soviet Union would collapse like a pack of cards in the wake of a Blitzkrieg resting on some highly optimistic assumptions, gross underestimation of the enemy, and extremely limited resources.150 This was Hitler’s miscalculation. But it was shared by his military planners.

  IV

  While the tumultuous developments on the eastern front unfolded, the Reich was gradually turning into a Führer state with an absentee Führer. During the summer of 1940, Hitler had been away at his headquarters on the western front for approaching two months.151 It had been no more than an interlude. But once the eastern campaign had started, and especially once it was realized that this was to be no repeated rapid military triumph, his absence became prolonged and then, in effect, permanent. Whereas Churchill was concerned to speak to the British people and let himself be seen as often as was practicable, Hitler practically disappeared from the public eye. During the remaining months of 1941, and with the popular mood in the Reich far from buoyant, he scarcely left his field headquarters to appear in public in Germany. Pressed by Goebbels to give a speech to rouse sagging morale, he deigned to spend six hours in Berlin on 3 October. A month later, on 8 November, he travelled to Munich, gave his customary address to the ‘Old Fighters’ of the Movement to commemorate the Putsch, spoke next day to the Reichs – and Gauleiter, and left immediately for the Wolf’s Lair. And he attended on 21 November the funeral in Berlin of General Ernst Udet (the First World War flying-ace in charge of air armaments who had committed suicide after Göring had made him the scapegoat for the Luftwaffe’s failures on the eastern front), returning six days later for the ceremony prolonging the Anti-Comintern Pact and using the occasion to receive a number of foreign dignitaries before departing again for his field headquarters in East Prussia after a stay of two days.152

  Otherwise the German people saw him only in occasional newsreel clips, usually in the company of his generals. His continued absence in 1941 was the start of a process which, as the war progressed and final victory became a mirage, would transform the most notable populist leader of the twentieth century, the masterly demagogue whose power base had rested in no small measure on his unrivalled ability to play on the expectations and resentments of the people, into a remote and distant figure.

  Hitler’s increasing detachment meant an inevitable acceleration of the existing, strongly developed tendency towards the disintegration of any semblance of coordinated administration of the Reich. The stark figures for governmental legislation provide an indicator. Out of 445 pieces of legislation in 1941, only seventy-two laws, published Führer decrees, and ministerial decrees represented any semblance of inter-ministerial policy formation. The remaining 373 decrees were produced by individual ministries without wider consultation.153

  Bormann’s appointment as head of the newly designated Party Chancellery in May 1941 accentuated rather than checked the trend. His proximity to Hitler, bureaucratic energy, ideological commitment, and ruthless drive certainly gave the Party new impetus and scope for intervention, after years of leadership by the weak and ineffectual Rudolf Heß. Bormann saw his role, in belonging ‘to the closest staff of the Führer’, as channelling selected information to Hitler and ‘continually informing the Reichsleiter, Gauleiter, and heads of organizations of the decisions and opinions of the Führer’.154 Though, under the influence of events in the east, Bormann’s leadership of the Pa
rty now accentuated the ideological tone and radicalization of policy on the home front, it brought no coordination of government. On the contrary: the consequence in practice was to intensify still further intergovernmental conflict and heighten the unresolvable tension built into the Nazi regime between the demands of bureaucratic administration and the anti-bureaucratic pressures of an ideologically driven leadership of the regime.155

  Hitler’s role remained, of course, pivotal. He was, as ever, the linchpin of the system (if ‘system’ is an appropriate term for such an administrative free-for-all) and the fount of ideological legitimation. He was also kept informed, though in unsystematic and ill-balanced ways, of, frequently, quite trivial as well as more important issues. But the insistence on retaining all the overriding controls of every significant sphere of rule in his own hands, coupled with his physical absence from the centre of government, almost total preoccupation with the war effort, and complete distaste for bureaucratic methods, meant an inescapable fragmentation of the machinery of government and, accompanying it, an ever-intensifying radicalization of the regime.

  Hitler’s ultimate gamble of war in the east to destroy Bolshevism with one swift knock-out blow was also to put his own popularity at risk, and with that the very focus of the regime’s support. Hitler’s immense popularity had been attained during the 1930s through successes, beyond all else through ‘victories without bloodshed’ that had brought territorial expansion and returned national pride and strength to a humiliated country. Once war had begun in 1939, the victories were quick, spectacular and, if not ‘without bloodshed’, then nevertheless relatively painless for the German people. But to retain the heights of popularity reached after the stunning victory over France in 1940, Hitler needed to bring final victory. That had so far eluded him. Sensitive as he was to the fickleness of popular support, and never forgetting how collapsing morale had given way to revolutionary fervour in 1917–18, he knew how much rested on the rapid and complete crushing of the Soviet Union. Victory in the east would produce the material base of lasting power and prosperity – endless bounty from the riches of the new territories to improve living standards at home, and limitless opportunities for upward mobility, wealth, and domination. Failure to deliver the knockout blow would, by contrast, endanger the regime. It meant prolonged war – in its wake, increasing sacrifice and privation, suffering and misery, and with that in due course the conditions in which the regime’s popularity and his own unique authority could be undermined.

  Though Nazi loyalists welcomed the showdown with the arch-enemy, following the uneasy period of what they saw as an artificial and purely tactical pact, the initial reactions of the German people to the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’, unprepared as they were for the extension of the war in the east, were for the most part anxiety and dismay.156 As we have already noted, the first ‘special announcements’ of the remarkable advance and military successes of the Wehrmacht had, as Goebbels realized, far from their desired effect. As the triumphalist communiqués of the Wehrmacht High Command continued to blare out of their radios, one bulletin after another reporting yet a further grandiose victory, proclaiming the total defeat or annihilation of the enemy, and announcing Stalin’s deployment of his last reserves, hopes were raised of an early end to the conflict. (They were encouraged by the tone of propaganda: Goebbels had told media representatives on 22 June that the war in the east would be over within eight weeks.157) Ardent Nazis were naturally jubilant, outright opponents depressed. But the deep anxieties and hopes of an early peace – a victorious one if at all possible, but above all an end to war – among the mass of the population could not for long be banished. And, however great the reported victories of the Wehrmacht were, no end seemed in sight. As the summer wore on, it was obvious that Stalin had far from used up his last reserves. Scepticism in the reports started to mount. Moreover, accounts of hard fighting, fierce resistance by the Red Army, and, especially, of ‘horrible bestialities’ and the ‘inhumane way of fighting of the Bolsheviks’ and ‘criminal types’ in the ‘Jewish state’, not unnaturally increased the worries, whatever the scale of the victories, of those with fathers, brothers, sons, and husbands at the front.158

  A young soldier, just married and home on leave, left an indication in his diary of the mood after only two weeks of fighting when he attended a Sunday morning service in his church: ‘There were read out – in a quite matter-of-fact way – the name, year of birth, date and place of death of the dead and fallen, and precisely these cold facts had a doubly moving effect. The widows sobbed throughout the church…’159 But such observations did not prevent approval of Nazi aims. The same soldier noted, a few days later, his approval of the antisemitic films Jud Süß and Die Rothschilds, remarking on how the Jewish banking family had been able through their money to determine the politics of Europe. And when, in early August, he watched newsreels of the fighting in the east, he commented on the ‘demonic’ manner of fighting of the Red Army – contemptuous of ‘all rules of civility and humanity’, ‘truly Russian-Asiatic’, as he put it.160

  Attitudes towards the war – and the need to fight it – were divided. In stark contrast with the views of this soldier, the wishes of a farming community in northern Franconia, according to the outspoken report of the local Landrat, could scarcely have been more distant from the ideological aims of the Nazi leadership. There was in his area, he wrote, ‘not the least understanding for the realization of plans for world domination… Overworked and exhausted men and women do not see why the war must be carried still further into Asia and Africa.’161 At the end of August, the same Landrat wrote: ‘I have only the one wish, that one of the officials in Berlin or Munich… should be in my office some time when, for example, a worn-out old peasant beseechingly requests allocation of labourers or other assistance, and as proof of his need shows two letters, in one of which the company commander of the elder son answers that leave for the harvest cannot be granted, and in the other of which the company commander of the younger son informs of his heroic death in an encounter near Propoiszk.’162

  From the point of view of most ordinary Germans, the ‘good times’, as they remembered them from the 1930s, were over. Conditions of daily life were deteriorating sharply. The cause of this was, they saw, the war. What was needed was an end to war and return to ‘normality’, not yet another – unnecessary, as many people thought – extension of the conflict, and now against the most implacable and dangerous enemy. Daily concerns dominated the mood, alongside fears for loved ones at the front. Reports from cities highlighted the ‘catastrophic state of provisions’ and anger at food shortages and high prices. Industrial workers were becoming increasingly alienated by working conditions and wage levels. The ‘little man’ was again the stupid one, the SD from Stuttgart reported as a commonly held view. He was having to work hard at great sacrifice, as had always been the case, to benefit the ‘big noises (Bonzen), plutocrats, toffee-nosed (Standesdünkel), and war-profiteers’. ‘What does national community mean here?’ was plaintively asked.163 In the Alpine reaches of southern Bavaria, the mood was ‘bad and tired of war’, dominated by the ‘constantly mounting great and small worries of everyday life’, and – it was somewhat theatrically claimed – comparable with that of 1917.164

  On top of this came new worries. It was while the ferocious warfare was raging on the eastern front that, within the Reich, the Nazi regime’s renewed assault on Christianity, which had begun in early 1941, reached its climax. At the same time, the disturbing rumours – which over the previous year had spread like wildfire – about the killing of mentally sick patients taking place in asylums were causing intensified disquiet. Elimination of ‘life not worth living’ had an increasingly threatening ring to it, potentially for every family, as psychologically scarred as well as physically badly injured young soldiers in ever larger numbers were brought back from the front and housed in hospitals, sanatoria, and asylums throughout the Reich.

  Despite Hitler’s own rep
eatedly expressed wish for calm in relations with the Churches as long as the war lasted – the reckoning with Christianity, in his view, had to wait for the final victory – a wave of anti-Church agitation, accompanied by an array of new measures, had taken place during the first half of 1941. The activism appears in the main to have come from below, as anti-Church radicals exploited wartime needs to try to break the vexing hold – strengthened by the anxieties of the war itself – which the Churches continued to have on the population. But it certainly had encouragement from above, particularly through Bormann and the Party Chancellery. In a confidential circular to all Gauleiter in June 1941, Bormann had expressly declared that Christianity and National Socialism were incompatible. The Party must struggle, therefore, to break the Church’s power and influence.165 Whether this represented Hitler’s wishes, given his essential stance on relations with the Churches during the war, is extremely doubtful. On the other hand, Bormann never acted directly contrary to what Hitler wanted. Most probably, he misinterpreted on this occasion Hitler’s repeated rantings about the malevolent influence of Christianity and sent the wrong signals to Party activists.166

  By the time Bormann wrote his circular, antagonism among churchgoers had already intensified through bans on Church publications, the replacement of Catholic nuns by ‘brown sisters’ from the Nazi welfare organization (the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, or NSV), the shifting of celebrations of feast days from weekdays to the nearest Sunday, and attempts to abolish school prayers. Rumours spread that baptism of children would soon no longer be allowed, and that priests would be turned out of their presbyteries. In some localities, the closure of monasteries, eviction of the monks, and sequestration of monastic property to accommodate refugees or provide space for Party offices caused immense anger.167