by Ian Kershaw
Cheering crowds, which the Party never had any trouble in mobilizing, lined the streets as Hitler was driven in the afternoon to the Sportpalast. A rapturous reception awaited him in the cavernous hall.214 Goebbels compared it with the mass meetings in the run-up to power.215 The first part of Hitler’s speech was spent in blaming the war on Britain’s warmongering clique, backed by international Jewry.216 He went on to justify the attack on the Soviet Union as preventive. He said German precautions had been incomplete on only one thing: ‘We had no idea how gigantic the preparations of this enemy were against Germany and Europe, and how immense the danger was, how by a hair’s breadth we have escaped the annihilation not only of Germany, but of the whole of Europe.’ He described the threat as ‘a second Mongol storm of a new Gengis Khan’. But, he claimed, at last coming out with the words that his audience were anxious to hear: ‘I can say today that this enemy is already broken and will not rise up again.’217
He went on, to the delight of his audience, to pour scorn on British propaganda and heap praise both on the Wehrmacht and on the efforts of the home front. Almost every sentence towards the end was interrupted by storms of applause. Hitler, despite the lengthy break, had not lost his touch. The audience in the Sportpalast rose as one in an ecstatic ovation at the end.218 Hitler was thrilled with his reception. The mood, he said, was just as it had been in the ‘time of struggle’ before 1933. And the cheering of the ordinary Berliners in the streets had ‘not for a long time been so great and genuine’.219 But he was in a hurry to get away. He was driven straight back to the station. By 7p.m., a mere six hours after he had arrived, he was on his way back to his headquarters in East Prussia.220
Goebbels had been with Hitler on the way to the station as the latest news came in from the front. The advance was going even better than expected.221 The Führer had taken all factors into account, commented Goebbels. Realistically assessing all circumstances, he had reached the conclusion ‘that victory can no longer be taken from us’.222 Only the weather gave rise to concern. ‘If the weather stays as it is at present,’ the Propaganda Minister wrote, ‘then we might hope that our wishes will be fulfilled.’223
The Russian weather was, however, predictable. It would, all too soon, turn wet. Within weeks, the rains would give way to arctic conditions. However optimistic Hitler appeared to be, his military leaders knew they were up against time.224
The early stages of the advance could, nonetheless, scarcely have gone better. Halder purred, soon after its start, that Operation Typhoon was ‘making pleasing progress’ and pursuing ‘an absolutely classical course’.225 The German army had thrown seventy-eight divisions, comprising almost 2 million men, and nearly 2,000 tanks, supported by a large proportion of the Luftwaffe, against Marshal Timoshenko’s forces.226 Once more, the Wehrmacht seemed invincible. Once more, vast numbers of prisoners – 673,000 of them – fell into German hands, along with immeasurable amounts of booty, this time in the great encirclements of the double battle of Brjansk and Viaz’ma in the first half of October.227 It was hardly any wonder that the mood in the Führer Headquarters and among the military leadership was buoyant. Jodl thought the victory at Viaz’ma the most decisive day of the Russian war, comparable with Königgrätz.228 Quartermaster Eduard Wagner imagined the Soviet Union to be on the verge of collapse. In a letter to his wife on 5 October, he wrote: ‘At present the Moscow operation is under way. We have the impression that the last great collapse is imminent… Operational aims are set that would once have made one’s hair stand on end. Eastwards of Moscow! Then, I estimate, the war will be largely over and perhaps there will then indeed be the collapse of the system. That’ll take us on a good stretch in the war against England. Over and again, I’m amazed at the Führer’s military judgement. He is intervening this time, one could say decisively, in the course of the operations, and up to now he has always been right.’229
On the evening of 8 October, Hitler spoke of the decisive turn in the military situation over the previous three days. Werner Koeppen, Rosenberg’s liaison at Führer Headquarters, reported to his boss that ‘the Russian army can essentially be seen as annihilated’.230 Hitler’s view – he would soon have to revise it drastically – was that Bolshevism was heading for ruin through lack of tank defences.231 ‘The rapid collapse of Russia would have a disastrous impact on England,’ he asserted. Churchill had placed all his hopes in the Russian war-machine. ‘Now that too is past.’232
Hitler had been in an unusually good mood at the meal table on the evening of 4 October, having just returned from a visit to Army High Command’s headquarters to congratulate Brauchitsch on his sixtieth birthday. Not for the first time, he gazed into the future in the ‘German East’. Within the next half-century, he foresaw 5 million farms settled there by former soldiers who would hold down the Continent through military force. He placed no value in colonies, he said, and could quickly come to terms with England on that score. Germany needed only a little colonial territory for coffee and tea plantations. Everything else it could produce on the Continent. Cameroon and a part of French Equatorial Africa or the Belgian Congo would suffice for Germany’s needs. ‘Our Mississippi must be the Volga, not the Niger,’ he concluded.233
Next evening, after Himmler had regaled those round the dinner table with his impressions of Kiev, and how 80–90 per cent of the impoverished population there could be ‘dispensed with’, Hitler came round to the subject of German dialects. It started with his dislike of the Saxon accent and spread to a rejection of all German dialects. They made the learning of German for foreigners more difficult. And German now had to be made into the general form of communication in Europe.234
Hitler was still in expansive frame of mind when Reich Economics Minister Walther Funk visited him on 13 October. The eastern territories would mean the end of unemployment in Europe, he claimed. He envisaged river links from the Don and the Dnieper between the Black Sea and the Danube, bringing oil and grain to Germany. ‘Europe – and not America – will be the land of unlimited possibilities.’235
Four days later, the presence of Fritz Todt prompted Hitler to an even more grandiose vision of new roads stretching through the conquered territories. Motorways would now run not just to the Crimea, but to the Caucasus, as well as more northerly areas. German cities would be established as administrative centres on the river crossings. Three million prisoners-of-war would be available to supply the labour for the next twenty years. German farmsteads would line the roads. ‘The monotonous Asiaticlike steppe would soon offer a totally different appearance.’ He now spoke of 10 million Germans, as well as settlers from Scandinavia, Holland, Flanders, and even America putting down roots there. The Slav population would ‘have to vegetate further in their own dirt away from the big roads’. Knowing how to read the road-signs would be quite sufficient education. Those eating German bread today, he said, did not get worked up about the regaining of the East Elbian granaries with the sword in the twelfth century. ‘Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.’ Hitler wished he were ten to fifteen years younger to experience what was going to happen.236
But by this time weather conditions alone meant the chances of Hitler’s vision ever materializing were sharply diminishing. The weather was already bad. By mid-October, military operations had stalled as heavy rains swept over the front. Units were stranded. The vehicles of Army Group Centre were bogged down on impassable roads. Away from the choked roads, nothing could move. ‘The Russians are impeding us far less than the wet and the mud,’ commented Field-Marshal Bock.237 Everywhere, it was a ‘struggle with the mud’.238 On top of that, there were serious shortages of fuel and munitions.239
There was also, not before time, concern now about winter provisions for the troops. Hitler directly asked Quartermaster-General Wagner, on a visit to Führer Headquarters, about this on 26 October. Wagner promised that Army Groups North and South would have a half of their necessary provisions by
the end of the month but Army Group Centre, the largest of the three, would only have a third. Supplying the south was especially difficult since the Soviets had destroyed part of the railway track along the Sea of Azov.240 A few days later, on 1 November, Hitler paid a visit to the headquarters of the Army High Command to look at the exhibition of winter clothing which Wagner had assembled. Once more the Quartermaster-General assured Hitler that provision of the troops with sufficient clothing was in hand. Hitler accepted the assurance.241 When Wagner spoke to Goebbels, he gave the Propaganda Minister the impression that ‘everything had been thought of and nothing forgotten’.242
In fact, Wagner appears to have become seriously concerned by this vital matter only with the rapid deterioration of the weather in mid-October, while Halder had been aware as early as August that the problem of transport of winter clothing and equipment to the eastern front could only be solved by the defeat of the Red Army before the worst of the weather set in.243 Brauchitsch was still claiming, when he had lengthy talks with Goebbels on 1 November, that an advance to Stalingrad was possible before the snows arrived and that by the time the troops took up their winter quarters Moscow would be cut off.244 By now this was wild optimism. Brauchitsch was forced to acknowledge the existing weather problems, the impassable roads, transport difficulties, and the concern about the winter provisioning of the troops.245 In truth, whatever the unrealism of the Army and Wehrmacht High Commands about what was attainable in their view before the depths of winter, the last two weeks of October had had a highly sobering effect on the front-line commanders and the initial exaggerated hopes of the success of ‘Operation Typhoon’.246 By the end of the month the offensive of Army Group Centre’s exhausted troops had ground temporarily to a halt.247
The impression which Hitler gave, however, in his traditional speech to the Party’s old guard, assembled in the Löwenbräukeller in Munich on the late afternoon of 8 November, the anniversary of the 1923 Putsch, was quite different.248 The speech was intended primarily for domestic consumption.249 It aimed to boost morale, and to rally round the oldest and most loyal members of Hitler’s retinue after the difficult months of summer and autumn. Hitler paraded once more before his audience the victories in earlier campaigns and why he had felt compelled to attack the Soviet Union. He went on to describe the scale of the Soviet losses. ‘My Party Comrades,’ he declared, ‘no army in the world, including the Russian, recovers from those.’250 ‘Never before,’ he went on, ‘has a giant empire been smashed and struck down in a shorter time than Soviet Russia.’251 He remarked on enemy claims that the war would last into 1942. ‘It can last as long as it wants,’ he retorted. ‘The last battalion in this field will be a German one.’252 Despite the triumphalism, it was the strongest hint yet that the war was far from over.
The next day, after the usual ceremony at the ‘Temples of Honour’ of the Putsch ‘heroes’ on the Königsplatz in Munich, Hitler addressed his Reichsleiter and Gauleiter. The speech was in effect an appeal for unconditional loyalty to the very backbone of the Party, Hitler’s essential hardcore body of diehard support. His way of doing this, as usual, was a mixture of veiled threat and pathos. Those who stepped out of line, showed themselves weak, or conspired against him would be ruthlessly dealt with, was the first part of his message. He referred to the dismissal (in the previous year) of Josef Wagner from his position as Gauleiter of Westphalia-South and of Silesia. Wagner’s pro-Catholic sympathies (and those of his wife) were declared incompatible with the post of a Gauleiter. He had actually been the victim of inner-party intrigues. But the last straw for Hitler had been a letter from Frau Wagner (apparently with her husband’s backing), forbidding their daughter to marry a non-Christian SS-man. Hitler spoke darkly of the conspiratorial behaviour of Wagner and former SA chief Captain Franz Pfeffer von Salomon – now lodged in a concentration camp.253 Both were said to have had close relations with Rudolf Heß. Hitler stressed what a blow for him the Heß affair had been, and how thankful he was that British propaganda had missed the opportunity to portray the Deputy Führer as his ambassador carrying a peace-offer. Germany would have lost its allies as a result, Hitler imagined – something which even now stopped the blood in the veins.
He moved to pathos. There could never be any thought of capitulation. He would continue the war until it finished in victory. ‘And should a serious crisis afflict the Fatherland,’ he said with no sense of an apparent contradiction, ‘he would be seen with the last division.’254 To ensure the morale of the population, he placed his entire trust in the Party and his Reichsleiter and Gauleiter, ‘who must now place themselves around him as a solemnly sworn body (festverschworenes Korps)’.255 The Soviet Union he saw as already defeated, though it was impossible to predict how long resistance would last. He hoped to reach the goals intended before winter within four weeks. Then the troops could take up their winter quarters.
He ended with an appeal to have confidence, and to rejoice in the opportunity to take part in a struggle to shape Europe’s future. Germany was in a position to counter the greatest efforts of the United States. And what the overthrow of the Soviet Union signified could still not be fully grasped. It would give Germany land of limitless horizons. ‘This land, which we have conquered with the blood of German sons, will never be surrendered. Some time later millions of German peasant families will be settled here in order to carry the thrust of the Reich far to the east.’256
Shortly after his speech, Hitler was again on his way back to East Prussia, arriving back in the Wolf’s Lair on the evening of the next day.257 In the east, by this time, the snow was falling. Torrential rain had given way to ice and temperatures well below zero Fahrenheit. Even tanks were often unable to cope with ice-covered slopes. For the men, conditions were worsening by the day. There was already an acute shortage of warm clothing to protect them. Severe cases of frostbite were becoming widespread. The combat-strength of the infantry had sunk drastically.258 Army Group Centre alone had lost by this time approaching 300,000 men, with replacements of little more than half that number available.259
It was at this point, on 13 November, that, at a top-level conference of Army Group Centre, in a temperature of –8 degrees Fahrenheit, Guderian’s panzer army, as part of the orders for the renewed offensive, was assigned the objective of cutting off Moscow from its eastward communications by taking Gorki, 250 miles to the east of the Soviet capital.260 The astonishing lack of realism in the army’s orders derived from the perverse obstinacy with which the General Staff continued to persist in the view that the Red Army was on the point of collapse, and was greatly inferior to the Wehrmacht in fighting-power and leadership. Such views, despite all the evidence to the contrary, still prevailing with Halder (and, indeed, largely shared by the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, Bock), underlay the memorandum, presented by the General Staff on 7 November, for the second offensive.261 The hopelessly optimistic goals laid down – the occupation of Maykop (a main source of oil from the Caucasus), Stalingrad, and Gorki were on the wish-list – were the work of Halder and his staff. There was no pressure by Hitler on Halder. In fact, quite the reverse: Halder pressed for acceptance of his operational goals. These corresponded in good measure with goals Hitler had foreseen as attainable only in the following year.262 Had Hitler been more assertive at this stage in rejecting Halder’s proposals, the disasters of the coming weeks might have been avoided. As it was, Hitler’s uncertainty, hesitancy, and lack of clarity allowed Army High Command the scope for catastrophic errors of judgement.263
The opposition which Halder’s plans encountered at the conference on 13 November then resulted in a restriction of the goals to a direct assault on Moscow. This was pushed through in full recognition of the insoluble logistical problems and immense dangers of an advance in near-arctic conditions without any possibility of securing supplies. Even the goal was not clear. The breach of Soviet communications to the east could not possibly be attained. Forward positions in the vicinity of Moscow were utt
erly exposed. Only the capture of the city itself, bringing – it was presumed – the collapse and capitulation of the Soviet regime and the end of the war, could justify the risk.264 But with insufficient air-power to bomb the city into submission before the ground-troops arrived, entry into Moscow would have meant street-by-street fighting. With the forces available, and in the prevailing conditions, it is difficult to see how the German army could have proved victorious.
Nevertheless, in mid-November the drive on Moscow recommenced. Hitler was by now distinctly uneasy about the new offensive. On the evening of 25 November he expressed, according to the recollection of his Army Adjutant, Major Gerhard Engel, his ‘great concern about the Russian winter and weather’. ‘We started a month too late,’ he went on, returning once more to the strategy he had always favoured. ‘The ideal solution would be the fall of Leningrad, capture of the southern area, and then, in that event, a pincer attack on Moscow from south and north together with frontal assault. Then there would be the prospect of an eastern wall with military bases.’ Hitler ended, characteristically, by remarking that time was ‘his greatest nightmare’.265