by Ian Kershaw
Hitler’s speech on the afternoon of Thursday, 11 December, lasted one and a half hours.323 It was not one of his best. The first half consisted of no more than the lengthy, triumphalist report on the progress of the war which Hitler had intended to provide long before the events of Pearl Harbor. There was some surprise at the figure of 160,000 German dead which Hitler gave; a far higher figure had been presumed.324 (The figure matched, in fact, those available to the army leadership, though Hitler omitted to mention that total German losses, including wounded and more than 35,000 missing, were by this time over 750,000 men.)325 The rest of the speech was largely taken up with a long-drawn-out, sustained attack on Roosevelt. Hitler built up the image of a President, backed by the ‘entire satanic insidiousness’ of the Jews, set on war and the destruction of Germany.326 Eventually he came to the climax of his speech: the provocations – up to now unanswered – had finally forced Germany and Italy to act. He read out a version of the statement he had had given to the American Chargé d’Affaires that afternoon, with a formal declaration of war on the USA. He then read out the new agreement, signed that very day, committing Germany, Italy, and Japan to rejecting a unilateral armistice or peace with Britain or the USA.327
In Goebbels’s view, Hitler’s speech had had a ‘fantastic’ effect on the German people, to whom the declaration of war had come neither as a surprise, nor a shock.328 In reality, the speech had been able to do little to raise morale which, given the certain extension of the war into the indefinite future, and now the opening of aggression against a further powerful adversary, had sunk to its lowest point since the conflict began.329
Goebbels was, in fact, not blind to the poor state of morale.330 Hitler, for his part, had the capacity, as always, to convince not only himself, but those in his presence, that things were less bad than they seemed. Not only did he see Japan’s entry into the war as a turning-point. He also continued to convey optimism about the eastern front, despite the depressing situation there. ‘The Führer doesn’t take too tragically the events in the theatre of the eastern campaign,’ Goebbels recorded, after he had spoken to Hitler on 9 December.331 Weather and supplies problems had compelled a need, already present, for a break to build up strength and resources for a spring offensive against the Soviet Union – in the south at the end of April, and in the centre in mid-May. This would be so carefully prepared that it would quickly lead to victory. By then the army would be completely ready, and would not have to tap its last reserves.
Hitler’s ability to put a positive gloss even on a major setback allowed him even to see the onset of the bad weather in the east in the autumn as an advantage. Had the rainy weather not arrived when it did, he said, German troops would have pushed so far forward that the supplies problem could not have been solved. This showed ‘how good fate is to us and how it prevents us through its own intervention from mistakes which without that we would doubtless have made’.332 He acknowledged how necessary it had been to call off the offensive in order to give time for the exhausted troops to recuperate. And he admitted that there were at present no sufficient weapons to counter the heavy Russian panzers. Where they kept producing them from was a mystery, but ‘currently the most serious concern of the front’. ‘The Bolsheviks,’ he went on, ‘are for the most part comparable with animals; but animals, too, are sometimes unyielding (standhaft), and since the Soviet Union needs take no consideration of its own people, it is in a certain way superior to us.’333 But Hitler concluded that the recent setbacks were only temporary ones, and that Germany’s position, especially after the entry of the Japanese into the war, was so favourable that ‘the conclusion of this mighty continental struggle was not in doubt’.334
The following day, Hitler was at least somewhat more realistic. He conceded that the situation in the east was ‘at the moment not very good’, and agreed with Goebbels’s wishes to prepare the people for unavoidable setbacks through propaganda more attuned to the realism of the harshness of war and the sacrifices it demanded. Hitler and Goebbels evidently discussed the catastrophic lack of winter clothing for the troops, and the effect this was having on morale.335 Goebbels was well aware from the bitter criticism in countless soldiers’ letters to their loved ones of how bad the impact of the supplies crisis was on morale, both at the front and at home.336 But Hitler’s eyes were already set on the big spring offensive in 1942.337 And, as always when faced with setbacks, he pointed to the ‘struggle for power’, and how difficulties had at that time been overcome.338
The need to boost morale, in the first instance among those he held responsible for upholding it on the home front, undoubtedly lay behind Hitler’s address – the second in little over a month – to his Gauleiter on the afternoon of 12 December.
He began with the consequences of Pearl Harbor. If Japan had not entered the war, he would have at some point had to declare war on the USA. ‘Now the East-Asia conflict falls to us like a present in the lap,’ Goebbels reported him saying. The pyschological significance should not be underrated. Without the conflict between Japan and the USA, a declaration of war on the Americans would have been difficult to accept by the German people. As it was, it was taken as a matter of course. The extension to the conflict also had positive consequences for the U-boat war in the Atlantic. Freed of restraint, he expected the tonnage sunk now to increase greatly – and this would probably be decisive in winning the war. Aware of objections that the alliance with the Japanese stood opposed to ‘the interests of the white man in East Asia’, Hitler was frank, forthright, and pragmatic: ‘Interests of the white race must at present give place to the interests of the German people. We are fighting for our life. What use is a fine theory if the basis of life (Lebensboden) is taken away?… In a life-and-death struggle, all means available to a people are right. We would ally ourselves with anyone if we could weaken the Anglo-Saxon position.’339
He turned to the war in the east. Both tone and content were much as they had been with Goebbels in private. He acknowledged that the troops had had for the time being to be pulled back to a defensible line, but, given the supplies problems, saw this as far better than standing some 300 kilometres further east. The troops were now being saved for the coming spring and summer offensive. A new panzer army in preparation within Germany would be ready by then. He also alluded to the difficulties in defending against the Russian tanks, but pointed out that a new anti-tank gun was well in preparation. He viewed the general situation very favourably. The North African campaign, he misleadingly stated, was well provided for, and an Allied landing on the Continent for the time being out of the question. The difficulties faced at present were determined by the elements (naturbedingt).340
It was his firm intention, he declared, in the following year to finish off (erledigen) Soviet Russia at least as far as the Urals. ‘Then it would perhaps be possible to reach a point of stabilization in Europe through a sort of half-peace’, by which he appeared to mean that Europe would exist as a self-sufficient, heavily armed fortress, leaving the remaining belligerent powers to fight it out in other theatres of war. An attack on the European Continent, he claimed, would then be much less possible than at present. And given the progress made in German anti-aircraft weapons, he was ‘extraordinarily sceptical’ about the impact, which, he thought, would become ever more limited, of British air-raids. If this turned out to be the case, he claimed, Britain would be in a quandary.341
He outlined his vision of the future. His National Socialist conviction, he said, had become even stronger during the war. It was essential after the war was over to undertake a huge social programme embracing workers and farmers. The German people had deserved this. And it would provide – always the political reasoning behind the aim of material improvement – the ‘most secure basis of our state system (unseres staatlichen Gefüges)’. The enormous housing programme he had in mind would, he stated openly, be made possible through cheap labour – through depressing wages. The work would be done by the forced labour of the def
eated peoples. He pointed out that the prisoners-of-war were now being fully employed in the war economy. This was as it should be, he stated, and had been the case in antiquity, giving rise in the first place to slave labour. German war debts would doubtless be 200–300 billion Marks. These had to be covered through the work ‘in the main of the people who had lost the war’. The cheap labour would allow houses to be built and sold at a substantial profit which would go towards paying off the war-debts within ten to fifteen years.342
Hitler put forward once more his vision of the east as Germany’s ‘future India’, which would become within three or four generations ‘absolutely German’.343 There would, he made clear, be no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches. After the trouble of the summer, he had to take a line which both appeased the Party hotheads but also restrained their instincts. For the time being, he ordered slow progression in the ‘Church Question’. ‘But it is clear,’ noted Goebbels, himself numbering among the most aggressive anti-Church radicals, ‘that after the war it has to find a general solution… There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world-view.’344
Pressing engagements in Berlin – particularly the audience next day with Ambassador Oshima to award him the Great Golden Cross of the Order of the German Eagle – prevented Hitler from returning that evening, as he had intended, to the Wolf’s Lair.345 When he eventually reached his headquarters again, in the morning of 16 December, it was back to a reality starkly different from the rosy picture he had painted to his Gauleiter.346 A potentially catastrophic military crisis was unfolding.
VII
Already before Hitler had left for Berlin, Field-Marshal von Bock had outlined the weakness of his Army Group against a concentrated attack, and stated the danger of serious defeat if no reserves were sent.347 Then, while Hitler was in the Reich capital, as the Soviet counter-offensive penetrated German lines, driving a dangerous wedge between the 2nd and 4th Armies, Guderian reported the desperate position of his troops and a serious ‘crisis in confidence’ of the field commands.348 After Schmundt had been sent to Army Group Centre on 14 December to discuss the situation at first hand, Hitler responded immediately, neither awaiting the report from Brauchitsch, who had accompanied Schmundt, nor involving Halder.349 Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm, Commander of the Reserve Army, was summoned and asked for a report on the divisions that could be sent straight away to the eastern front. Göring and the head of the Wehrmacht transport, Lieutenant-General Rudolf Gercke, were told to arrange the transport.350 Four and a half divisions of reserves, assembled throughout Germany at breakneck speed, were rushed to the haemorrhaging front. Another nine divisions were drummed up from the western front and the Balkans.351 On 15 December Jodl passed on to Halder Hitler’s order that there must be no retreat where the front could possibly be held. But where the position was untenable, and once preparations for an orderly withdrawal had been made, retreat to a more defensible line was permitted.352 This matched the recommendations of Bock and of the man who would soon replace him as Commander of Army Group Centre, at this time still commanding the 4th Army, Field-Marshal Günther von Kluge.353 That evening, Brauchitsch, deeply depressed, told Halder that he saw no way out for the army from its current position.354 Hitler had by this time long since ceased listening to his broken Army Commander-in-Chief – by now, as Halder put it, ‘scarcely any longer even a postman (kaum mehr Briefträger)’ – and was dealing directly with his Army Group Commanders.355
Bock had, in fact, already recommended to Brauchitsch on 13 December that Hitler should make a decision on whether the Army Group Centre should stand fast and fight its ground, or retreat. In either eventuality, Bock had openly stated, there was the danger that the Army Group would collapse ‘in ruins (in Trümmer)’. Bock advanced no firm recommendation. But he indicated the disadvantages of retreat: the discipline of the troops might give way, and the order to stand-fast at the new line be disobeyed.356 The implication was plain. The retreat might turn into a rout. Bock’s evaluation of the situation, remarkably, had not been passed on to Hitler at the time. He only received it on 16 December, when Bock told Schmundt what he had reported to Brauchitsch three days earlier.357
That night, Guderian, who two days earlier had struggled through a blizzard for twenty-two hours to meet Brauchitsch at Roslavl and put his case for a withdrawal, was telephoned on a crackly line by Hitler: there was to be no withdrawal; the line was to be held; replacements would be sent.358 Army Group North was told the same day, 16 December, that it had to defend the front to the last man. Army Group South had also to hold the front and would be sent reserves from the Crimea after the imminent fall of Sevastopol. Army Group Centre was informed that extensive withdrawals could not be countenanced because of the wholesale loss of heavy weapons which would ensue. ‘With personal commitment of the Commander, subordinate commanders, and officers, the troops were to be compelled to fanatical resistance in their positions without respect for the enemy breaking through on the flanks or rear.’359
Hitler’s decision that there should be no retreat, conveyed to Brauchitsch and Halder in the night of 16–17 December, was his own. But it seems to have taken Bock’s assessment as the justification for the high-risk tactic of no-retreat. His order stated: ‘There can be no question of a withdrawal. Only in some places has there been deep penetration by the enemy. Setting up rear positions is fantasy. The front is suffering from one thing only: the enemy has more soldiers. It doesn’t have more artillery. It’s much worse than we are.’360
On 13 December, Field-Marshal von Bock had submitted to Brauchitsch his request to be relieved of his command, since, so he claimed, he had not overcome the consequences of his earlier illness.361 Five days later, Hitler had Brauchitsch inform Bock that the request for leave was granted. Kluge took over the command of Army Group Centre.362 On 19 December it was the turn – long overdue – of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field-Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, to depart.
Brauchitsch’s sacking had been on the cards for some time. Hitler’s military adjutants had been speculating over his replacement since mid-November.363 His health had for weeks been very poor. He had suffered a serious heart attack in mid-November.364 At the beginning of December, his health, Halder noted, was ‘again giving cause for concern’ under the pressure of constant worrying.365 Hitler spoke of him even in November as ‘a totally sick man, at the end of his tether’.366 Squeezed in the conflict between Hitler and Halder, Brauchitsch’s position was indeed unenviable. But his own feebleness had contributed markedly to his misery. Constantly trying to balance demands from his Army Group Commanders and from Halder with the need to please Hitler, his weakness and compliance had left him ever more exposed in the gathering crisis to a Leader who from the start lacked confidence in his army leadership and was determined to intervene in tactical dispositions. It was recognized by those who saw the way Hitler treated him that Brauchitsch was no longer up to the job.367 Brauchitsch, for his part, was anxious to resign, and tried to do so immediately following the start of the Soviet counter-offensive in the first week of December. He thought of Kluge or Manstein as possible successors.368
Hitler disingenuously told Schmundt at the time (and commented along similar lines to his Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, two days later) that he was clueless about a replacement. Schmundt had for some time favoured Hitler himself taking over as head of the army, to restore confidence, and now put this to him. Hitler said he would think about it.369 According to Below, it was in the night of 16–17 December that Hitler finally decided to take on the supreme command of the army himself. At the height of the crisis which culminated in the ‘stand-fast’ order, Brauchitsch had shown himself in Hitler’s eyes to be once and for all dispensable.370 The names of Manstein and Kesselring were thrown momentarily into the ring. But Hitler did not like Manstein, brilliant commander though he was. And Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring, known as a tough and capable organizer, and an eternal
optimist, was earmarked for command of the Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean (and, perhaps, was in addition thought to be too much in Göring’s pocket).371 In any case, Hitler had convinced himself by this time that being in charge of the army was no more than a ‘little matter of operational command’ that ‘anyone can do’.372 Halder, who, it might have been imagined, would have had most to lose by the change-over, in fact appears to have welcomed it. He seems momentarily to have deluded himself that through this move, taking him directly into Hitler’s presence in decision-making, he might expand his own influence to matters concerning the entire Wehrmacht. Keitel put an early stop to any such pretensions, ensuring that, as before, Halder’s responsibilities were confined to strictly army concerns and that he himself took over all non-operational tasks which had previously pertained to the OKH.373
Hitler’s takeover of the supreme command of the army was formally announced on 19 December.374 In one sense, since Brauchitsch had been increasingly bypassed during the deepening crisis, the change was less fundamental than it appeared. But it meant, nevertheless, that Hitler was now taking over direct responsibility for tactics, as well as grand strategy. No other head of a belligerent state – not even Stalin, who after the early débâcle, pulled back somewhat from direct intervention in army tactics – was so closely involved in the minutiae of military affairs. Hitler was absurdly overloading himself still further. And his takeover of direct command of the army would deprive him, in the eyes of the German public, of scapegoats for future military disasters.375