Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  Immediately on the heels of the announcement of Brauchitsch’s resignation came an even plainer sign of crisis in the east. On 20 December, Hitler published an appeal to the German people to send warm winter clothing for the troops in the east.376 Goebbels listed all the items of clothes to be handed in during a lengthy radio broadcast that evening.377 The population responded with shock and anger – astonished and bitter that the leadership had not made proper provision for the basic necessities of their loved ones fighting at the front and exposed to a merciless, polar winter.378

  Also on the day after Brauchitsch’s dismissal, Hitler sent a strongly-worded directive to Army Group Centre, reaffirming the order issued four days earlier to hold position and fight to the last man. ‘The fanatical will to defend the ground on which the troops are standing,’ ran the directive, ‘must be injected into the troops with every possible means, even the toughest… Where this will is not fully present the front will begin to crumble (ins Wanken geraten) without any prospect of stabilizing it once more in a prepared position. For, every officer and man must be clear that the withdrawal of the troops will expose them to the dangers of the Russian winter far more than staying in position, however inadequately equipped it may be. That is quite apart from the considerable, unavoidable material losses which must occur in a withdrawal… Talk of Napoleon’s retreat is threatening to become reality. Thus, there must only be a withdrawal where there is a prepared position further in the rear… But if troops have to leave a position without being offered an equivalent substitute, then a crisis of confidence in the leadership threatens to develop from every retreat.’ Where a systematic withdrawal was to take place, Hitler ordered the most brutal scorched-earth policy. ‘Every piece of territory which is forced to be left to the enemy must be made unusable for him as far as possible. Every place of inhabitation must be burnt down and destroyed without consideration for the population, to deprive the enemy of all possibility of shelter.’ He concluded with an appeal to the force of will and to a sense of superiority which must not be lost. There was, he declared, ‘no reason that the troops should lose their sense of superiority, constantly proven up to now, over this enemy. On the contrary, it will depend on strengthening everywhere the justified self-confidence and on possessing the will to cope with this enemy and the difficulties conditioned by the weather until sufficient reinforcements have arrived and the front is thereby finally secured.’379

  One commander, more unwilling than most to accept Hitler’s ‘Halt Order’ lying down, was the panzer hero Guderian. Through Schmundt, Guderian had a direct line to Hitler.380 He made use of it to arrange a special meeting at Führer Headquarters where he could put his case for withdrawal openly to Hitler. Guderian had his own way in dealing with military orders which he found unacceptable. With Bock’s connivance, he had tacitly ignored or bypassed early orders, usually by acting first and notifying later. But with Bock’s replacement by Kluge, that changed. Guderian and Kluge did not get on. Hitler was well informed of Guderian’s ‘unorthodoxy’. It is perhaps suprising, then, that he was still prepared to grant the tank commander an audience, lasting five hours, on 20 December, and allow him to put his case at length.381

  All Hitler’s military entourage were present. Guderian informed him of the state of the 2nd Panzer Army and 2nd Army, and his intention of retreating. Hitler expressly forbade this. But Guderian was not telling the whole story. The retreat, for which he had presumed to receive authorization from Brauchitsch six days earlier, was already under way. Hitler was unremitting. He said that the troops should dig in where they stood and hold every square yard of land. Guderian pointed out that the earth was frozen to a depth of five feet. Hitler rejoined that they would then have to blast craters with howitzers, as had been done in Flanders during the First World War. Guderian quietly pointed out that ground conditions in Flanders and Russia in midwinter were scarcely comparable. Hitler insisted on his order. Guderian objected that the loss of life would be enormous, Hitler pointed to the ‘sacrifice’ of Frederick the Great’s men. ‘Do you think Frederick the Great’s grenadiers were anxious to die?’ Hitler retorted. ‘They wanted to live, too, but the king was right in asking them to sacrifice themselves. I believe that I, too, am entitled to ask any German soldier to lay down his life.’ He thought Guderian was too close to the suffering of his troops, and had too much pity for them. ‘You should stand back more,’ he suggested. ‘Believe me, things appear clearer when examined at longer range.’382

  Guderian returned to the front empty-handed. Within days, Kluge had requested the tank commander’s removal, and on 26 December, Guderian was informed of his dismissal.383 He was far from the last of the top-line generals to fall from grace during the winter crisis. Within the following three weeks Generals Helmuth Förster, Hans Graf von Sponeck, Erich Hoepner, and Adolf Strauß were sacked, Field-Marshal von Leeb was relieved of his command of Army Group North, and Field-Marshal von Reichenau died of a stroke. Sponeck was sentenced to death – subsequently commuted – for withdrawing his troops from the Kerch peninsula on the Crimean front. Hoepner, also for retreating, was summarily expelled from the army with loss of all his pension rights.384 By the time that the crisis was overcome, in spring, numerous subordinate commanders had also been replaced.385

  The crisis lasted into January. On New Year’s Eve, while the newly acquired gramophone blared out Lieder by Richard Strauss and, of course, the inevitable Wagner, and the inhabitants of the Führer Headquarters got tipsier and merrier, Hitler spent three hours on the telephone to Kluge, insisting that the front be held.386 When he was eventually finished, he summoned his secretaries for tea in the middle of the night. Their good spirits soon evaporated. Hitler swiftly dampened the mood by nodding off to sleep. The merry-making palled. His entourage, coming in to congratulate him, removed their smiles and put on serious faces. It was so dreadful that Christa Schroeder went back to her room and burst into tears. She found the remedy in returning to the mess and joining a few of the young officers there in singing sea-shanties to the accompaniment of copious amounts of alcohol.387

  It was mid-January before Hitler was prepared to concede the tactical withdrawal for which Kluge had been pleading.388 By the end of the month, the worst was over. The eastern front, at enormous cost, had been stabilized. Hitler claimed full credit for this. It was, in his eyes, once more a ‘triumph of the will’. Looking back, a few months later, he blamed the winter crisis on an almost complete failure of leadership in the army. One general had come to him, he said, wanting to retreat. He had asked the general whether he really thought it would be less cold fifty kilometres to the rear. He had also asked whether the retreat would only stop at the borders of the Reich. On hearing that it might indeed be necessary to withdraw so far, he immediately dismissed the general, he said, telling him to get back to Germany as quickly as possible. He would himself take over the leadership of the army, and it would stay where it was. It was plain to him, he went on, that a retreat would have meant ‘the fate of Napoleon’. He had ruled out any retreat at all. ‘And I pulled it off! That we overcame this winter and are today in the position again to proceed victoriously… is solely attributable to the bravery of the soldiers at the front and my firm will to hold out, cost what it may.’389

  Salvation through the Führer’s genius was, of course, the line adopted (and believed) by Goebbels and other Nazi leaders.390 Their public statements combined pure faith and impure propaganda. But despite Halder’s outright condemnation – after the war – of Hitler’s ‘Halt Order’, not all military experts were so ready to interpret it as a catastrophic mistake. Kluge’s Chief of Staff, General Guenther Blumentritt, for instance, was prepared to acknowledge that the determination to stand fast was both correct and decisive in avoiding a much bigger disaster than actually occurred.391

  Hitler’s early recognition of the dangers of a full-scale collapse of the front, and the utterly ruthless determination with which he resisted demands to retreat, probably did play
a part in avoiding a calamity of Napoleonic proportions.392 But, had he been less inflexible, and paid greater heed to some of the advice coming from his field commanders, the likelihood is that the same end could have been achieved with far smaller loss of life. Moreover, stabilization was finally achieved only after he had relaxed the ‘Halt Order’ and agreed to a tactical withdrawal to form a new front line.393

  The strains of the winter crisis had left their mark on Hitler. He was now showing unmistakable signs of physical wear and tear. Goebbels was shocked when he saw him in March. Hitler looked grey, and much aged. He admitted to his Propaganda Minister that he had for some time felt ill and often faint. The winter, he acknowledged, had also affected him psychologically.394 But he appeared to have withstood the worst. His confidence was, certainly to all outward appearances, undiminished. Hints, given in the autumn, of doubts at the outcome of the war, were no longer heard.395 He told his entourage in the Führer Headquarters that the entry of Japan had been a turning-point in history, which would denote ‘the loss of a whole continent’ – regrettable, because the loss would be that of the ‘white race’.396 The British would not be able to prevail against Japan once Singapore had been lost.397 The question would then be whether Britain could hold on to India. He was sure that, offered the chance of keeping India (and preventing the complete disintegration of the Empire) while abandoning Europe to Germany, almost the entire British population would be in favour.398

  Against what had seemed in the depths of the winter crisis almost insuperable odds, Germany was ready by spring to launch another offensive in the east. The war still had a long way to go.399 Certainly, the balance of forces at this juncture was by no means one-sided. And the course of events would undergo many vagaries before defeat for Germany appeared inexorable. But the winter of 1941–2 can nevertheless, in retrospect, be seen to be not merely a turning-point, but the beginning of the end.400

  The aim advanced by Hitler since the summer of 1940, with the backing of his military strategists, had been to force Britain to come to terms and keep America out of the war through inflicting a swift and comprehensive defeat upon the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941, Germany had failed to defeat the Soviet Union and was now embroiled in a long, enormously bitter and costly, war in the east. Britain had not only been uninterested in coming to terms, but was now fighting alongside the USA and, since concluding a mutual assistance agreement in Moscow on 12 July 1941, allied – whatever the continuing frictions – with the Soviet Union.401 Not least, Germany was now at war with America. Whatever Hitler’s contempt, he knew no ways of defeating the USA.402 And if final victory over the Soviet Union could not rapidly be achieved, America’s mighty resources would soon weigh in the contest. Hitler now had to place his hopes in the Japanese, who might seriously weaken the British and lock the USA into conflict in the Pacific. But he could no longer depend upon the power of German arms alone. Germany no longer held the initiative. He had always predicted that time was running against Germany in its bid for supremacy. His own actions more than those of anyone else had ensured that this was indeed now proving to be the case. Though it would not become fully plain for some months, Hitler’s gamble, on which he had staked nothing less than the future of the nation, had disastrously failed.

  10

  FULFILLING THE ‘PROPHECY’

  ‘I already stated on 1 September 1939 in the German Reichstag – and I refrain from over-hasty prophecies – that this war will not come to an end as the Jews imagine, with the extermination of the European–Aryan peoples, but that the result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry. For the first time the old Jewish law will now be applied: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’

  Hitler, speaking in the Sportpalast,

  Berlin, 30 January 1942

  ‘A judgement is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric, but fully deserved. The prophecy which the Führer gave them along the way for bringing about a new world war is beginning to become true in the most terrible fashion… Here, too, the Führer is the unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution.’

  Goebbels, diary entry, 27 March 1942

  It was no accident that the war in the east led to genocide. The ideological objective of eradicating ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was central, not peripheral, to what had been deliberately designed as a ‘war of annihilation’. It was inseparably bound up with the military campaign. With the murderous onslaught of the Einsatzgruppen, backed by the Wehrmacht, launched in the first days of the invasion, the genocidal character of the conflict was already established. It would rapidly develop into an all-out genocidal programme, the like of which the world had never seen.

  Hitler spoke a good deal during the summer and autumn of 1941 to his close entourage in the most brutal terms imaginable about his ideological aims in crushing the Soviet Union. During the same months, he also spoke on numerous occasions in his monologues in the Führer Headquarters – though invariably in barbaric generalizations – about the Jews. These were the months in which, out of the contradictions and lack of clarity of anti-Jewish policy, a programme to kill all the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe began to take concrete shape.

  In contrast to military affairs, where his repeated interference reflected his constant preoccupation with tactical minutiae and his distrust of the army professionals, Hitler’s involvement in ideological matters was less frequent and less direct. Hitler had laid down the guidelines in March 1941. He needed to do little more. Self-combustion would see to it that, once lit, the genocidal fires would rage into a mighty conflagration amid the barbarism of the war to destroy ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. When it came to ideological aims, in contrast to military matters, Hitler had no need to worry that the ‘professionals’ would let him down. He could rest assured that Himmler and Heydrich, above all, would leave no stone unturned in eliminating the ideological enemy once and for all. And he could be equally certain that they would find willing helpers at all levels among the masters of the new Imperium in the east, whether these belonged to the Party, the police, or the civilian bureaucracy.

  Just as, from autumn 1939 onwards until his ‘halt order’ of August 1941, he had seen no need to involve himself in the ‘euthanasia action’ any further, once he had authorized its commencement, so now he would see no cause to participate in the daily business of the dirty work of genocide. That was neither his style, nor his inclination.1 Organization, planning, and execution could confidently be left to others. There was no shortage of those keen to ‘carry out practical work for our Führer’.2 It was sufficient that his authorization for the major steps was provided; and that he could take for granted that, with regard to the ‘Jewish Question’, his ‘prophecy’ of 1939 was being fulfilled.

  I

  On the eve of ‘Barbarossa’, Hitler had assured Hans Frank that the Jews would be ‘removed’ from the General Government ‘in the foreseeable future’. Frank’s province could therefore be regarded merely as a type of ‘transit camp’ (Durchgangslager).3 Frank registered the pleasure at being able to ‘get rid’ of the Jews from the General Government, and remarked that Jewry was ‘gradually perishing’ in Poland. ‘The Führer had indeed prophesied that for the Jews,’ commented Goebbels.4 From early in the year the intention had been, as we have already noted, to deport the Jews from Frank’s domain to the east, following the victory over the Soviet Union – expected by the autumn.5 The Jews from Poland, then from the rest of Europe, would be wiped out in the east within a few years by starvation and being worked to death in the icy wastes of an arctic climate. For those incapable of work, the intended fate, if not spelled out, was not difficult to imagine.

  The 5–6 million Jews of the USSR were included in the wholesale resettlement scheme for the racial reordering of eastern Europe, the ‘General Plan for the East’ which Himmler, two days after the launch of ‘Barbarossa’, had commissioned his settlement planners to prepare. The Plan envisaged the deportation over the subsequent thirty years of 31 million persons
, mainly Slavs, beyond the Urals and into western Siberia.6 Without doubt, the Jews would have been the first ethnic group to perish in a territorial solution which, for them, was tantamount to their death warrant. What was intended was in itself plainly genocidal. The ‘territorial solution’ could, therefore, be seen as a type of intended ‘final solution’. But shooting or gassing to death all the Jews of Europe – the full-scale industrialized killing programme that evolved over the following months into what would then be a differently defined ‘final solution’ – was at this stage not in mind.

  Reinhard Heydrich had already in March received the green light from Hitler to send the Einsatzgruppen into the Soviet Union in the wake of the Wehrmacht to ‘pacify’ the conquered areas by eradicating ‘subversive elements’. Hitler had specified in March that ‘the Bolshevist-Jewish intelligentsia must be eliminated’.7 Heydrich had been more than ready to apply a most liberal interpretation to this mandate in his briefings to the Einsatzgruppen in Pretzsch and Berlin in the weeks before the campaign.

  According to a letter which Heydrich sent on 2 July to the four newly appointed Higher SS and Police Leaders for the conquered areas of the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen had been instructed to liquidate, alongside Communist functionaries and an array of ‘extremist elements’, ‘all Jews in the service of the Party and state’.8 Heydrich’s verbal briefings must have made clear that the widest interpretation was to be placed on such an instruction.

  From the beginning, the killings were far from confined to Jews who were Communist Party or State functionaries. Already on 3 July, for instance, the chief of the Einsatzkommando in Luzk in eastern Poland had some 1,160 Jewish men shot. He said he wanted to put his stamp on the town.9 In Kaunas (Kowno) in Lithuania as many as 2,514 Jews were shot on 6 July.10 Shootings were carried out by Einsatzkommando 3, based in this area, on twenty days in July. Of the ‘executions’, totalling 4,400 (according to a meticulous listing), the vast majority were Jews.11 But the briefings had evidently not been unambiguous.12 They were capable of being interpreted in different ways. Whereas Einsatzgruppe A, in the Baltic, was almost unconstrained in its killing, Einsatzgruppe Β in White Russia initially targeted, in the main, the Jewish ‘intelligentsia’, while Einsatzgruppe C spoke of working the Jews to death in reclaiming the Pripet Marshes.13 While some Einsatzkommandos were slaughtering Jews more or less indiscriminately, one killer squad in Chotin on the Dniester confined its murderous action in early July to Communist and Jewish ‘intellectuals’ (apart from doctors).14