Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  I

  An early complication in 1942 arose with the loss of his armaments minister, Dr Fritz Todt, in a fatal air-crash on the morning of 8 February, soon after taking off from the airfield at the Führer Headquarters.

  Todt had masterminded the building of the motorways and the Westwall for Hitler.13 In March 1940 he had been been given the task, as a Reich Minister, of coordinating the production of weapons and munitions.14 Yet a further major office had come his way in July 1941 with the centralization in his hands of control over energy and waterways.15 In the second half of the year, as the first signs of serious labour shortage in German industry became evident, Todt was commissioned with organizing the mass deployment within Germany of Soviet prisoners-of-war and civilian forced labourers.16 The accumulation of offices pivotal to the war economy was an indication of Hitler’s high esteem for Todt. This was reciprocated. Todt was a convinced National Socialist. But by late 1941, fully aware of the massive armaments potential of the USA and appalled at the logistical incompetence of the Wehrmacht’s economic planning during the eastern campaign, he had become deeply pessimistic, certain that the war could not be won.17

  His public statements naturally betrayed none of his private doubts. And during December and January, he had taken the vital steps in conjunction with industry in drastically rationalizing and concentrating armaments production. Hitler, who had been made aware of the gross inefficiencies in the production of weaponry and was anxious to maximize the turn-out of armaments during 1942, backed the changes.18 The decisive alteration was to give greater scope and incentive to industry to improve its own efficiency as well as freeing armaments production from intervention from the military and Four-Year Plan Organization and some of the stifling bureaucratic controls which had been imposed on it.19 At the same time, the priorities that had been accorded the Luftwaffe and navy, when it was presumed the war in the east would easily and quickly be won, were reversed to favour the army.20

  On the morning of 7 February, Todt flew to Rastenburg to put to Hitler proposals which had arisen from his meeting a few days earlier with representatives of the armaments industries.21 What else transpired during his meeting with Hitler that afternoon is not known. No one else was present, and no notes or minutes were made. Later speculation that Todt demanded more extensive powers than Hitler was prepared to grant him, threatened resignation, or expounded defeatist views on the war rested on guesswork and some unreliable evidence.22 But the meeting was plainly anything but harmonious. In depressed mood, and after a restless night, Todt left next morning to head for Munich in a twin-engined Heinkel in. His own plane, a Junkers 52, was currently under repair, and he had borrowed the Heinkel – the personal plane of Field-Marshal Sperrle – from the Luftwaffe. It was flown by Todt’s usual pilot, who took it on a brief test-flight shortly before take-off.23

  Shortly after leaving the runway, the plane turned abruptly, headed to land again, burst into flames, and crashed. The bodies of Todt and four others on board were yanked with long poles from the burning wreckage. An official inquiry ruled out sabotage.24 But suspicion was never fully allayed.25 What caused the crash remained a mystery. Hitler, according to witnesses who saw him at close quarters, was deeply moved by the loss of Todt, whom, it was said, he still greatly admired and needed for the war economy.26 Even if, as was later often claimed, the breach between him and Todt had become irreparable on account of the Armaments Minister’s forcefully expressed conviction that the war could not be won, it is not altogether obvious why Hitler would have been so desperate as to resort to having Todt killed in an arranged air-crash at his own headquarters in circumstances guaranteed to prompt suspicion. Had he been insistent upon dispensing with Todt’s services, ‘retirement’ on ill-health grounds would have offered a simpler solution. The only obvious beneficiary from Todt’s demise was the successor Hitler now appointed with remarkable haste: his highly ambitious court architect, Albert Speer. But Speer’s relationship with Todt had been excellent. And the only ‘evidence’ later used to hint at any involvement by Speer was his presence in the Führer Headquarters at the time of the crash and his rejection, a few hours before the planned departure, of an offer of a lift in Todt’s aeroplane.27 Whatever the cause of the crash that killed Todt – and the speed with which Hitler had the investigation hushed up naturally fuelled suspicion – it brought Albert Speer, till then in the second rank of Nazi leaders and known only as Hitler’s court-architect and a personal favourite of the Führer, into the foreground.

  Speer’s meteoric rise in the 1930s had rested on shrewd exploitation of the would-be architect Hitler’s building mania, coupled with his own driving ambition and undoubted organizational talent. Hitler liked Speer. ‘He is an artist and has a spirit akin to mine,’ he said. ‘He is a building-person like me, intelligent, modest, and not an obstinate military-head.’28 Speer later remarked that he was the nearest Hitler came to having a friend.29 Now, Speer was in exactly the right place – close to Hitler – when a successor to Todt was needed. Six hours after the Reich Minister’s sudden death, Speer was appointed to replace him in all his offices.30 The appointment came as a surprise to many – including, if we are to take his own version of accounts at face value, Speer himself.31 But Speer was certainly anticipating succeeding Todt in construction work – and possibly more.32 At any rate, he lost no time in using Hitler’s authority to establish for himself more extensive powers than Todt had ever enjoyed.33 Speer would soon enough have to battle his way through the jungle of rivalries and intrigues which constituted the governance of the Third Reich. But once Hitler, the day after returning to Berlin for Todt’s state funeral on 12 February (at which he himself delivered the oration as his eyes welled with, perhaps crocodile, tears),34 had publicly backed Speer’s supremacy in armaments production in a speech to leaders of the armaments industries, the new minister, still not quite thirty-eight years of age, found that ‘I could do within the widest limits practically what I wanted’.35 Building on the changes his predecessor had initiated, adding his own organizational flair and ruthless drive, and drawing on his favoured standing with Hitler, Speer proved an inspired choice. Over the next two years, despite intensified Allied bombing and the fortunes of war ebbing strongly away from Germany, he presided over a doubling of armaments output.36

  Hitler was full of confidence when Goebbels had the chance to speak at length with him during his stay in Berlin following Todt’s funeral. After the travails of the winter, the Dictator had reason to feel as if the corner was turned. During the very days that he was in Berlin the British were suffering two mighty blows to their prestige. Two German battleships, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, had steamed out of Brest and, under the very noses of the British, passed through the English Channel with minimal damage, heading for safer moorings at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel. Hitler could scarcely contain his delight.37 At the same time, the news was coming in from the Far East of the imminent fall of Singapore. Hitler expressed his admiration for the Japanese.38 But it was tinged with a feeling that the British were losing their Empire when they could have accepted his ‘Offer’ and fought alongside instead of against Germany. ‘This is wonderful, though perhaps also sad, news,’ he had said to the Romanian leader Anton-escu a few days earlier.39 He told Ribbentrop not to overdo the pronouncements on the fall of Singapore. ‘We’ve got to think in centuries,’ he apparently said. ‘One day the showdown with the yellow race will come.’40 Goebbels noted a degree of resignation that the Japanese advances meant ‘the driving-back of the white man’ in the Far East.41 But, despite his racial prejudices, Hitler took a pragmatic view. ‘I’m accused of sympathizing with the Japanese,’ his secretary recalled him saying. ‘What does sympathizing mean? The Japanese are yellow-skinned and slit-eyed. But they are fighting against the Americans and English, and so are useful to Germany.’42 His enemy’s enemy was his friend, in other words.

  Most of all, Hitler was content about the prospects in the East. Th
e problems of winter had been overcome, and important lessons learned. ‘Troops who can cope with such a winter are unbeatable,’ Goebbels noted. Now the great thaw had set in. ‘The Führer is planning a few very hard and crushing offensive thrusts, which are already in good measure prepared and will doubtless lead gradually to the smashing of Bolshevism.’43 Hitler conveyed the same enthusiasm in a morale-boosting speech to almost 10,000 trainee officers in the Sportpalast on 15 February. The world had been opposed to Frederick the Great and Bismarck. ‘Today, I have the honour to be this enemy,’ he declared, ‘because I am attempting to create a world power out of the German Reich.’ He was proud beyond measure that Providence had given him the opportunity to lead the ‘inevitable struggle’. They should be proud to be part of such momentous events.44 They gave him a rapturous reception. He left the huge hall with storms of applause and wild cheering ringing in his ears.45 He returned to his headquarters assured as ever that, whatever his problems with the High Command, he had the total backing of his young officers and men. For their part, enthused by Hitler’s rhetoric, the newly commissioned officers had little real awareness of what awaited them on active service in the east.

  II

  On 15 March, Hitler was back again in Berlin. The serious losses over the winter made it essential that he attend the midday ceremony on Heroes’ Memorial Day. Only at the end of his speech did Hitler come to the commemoration of the dead. For the most part he offered no more than his usual regurgitation of the responsibility of the ‘Jewish-capitalist world conspirators’ for the war and heroization of the struggle – aimed, he asserted, at a lasting peace.46 He portrayed the previous months as a struggle above all against the elements in a winter the like of which had not been seen for almost a century and a half.47 ‘But one thing we know today,’ he declared. ‘The Bolshevik hordes, which were unable to defeat the German soldiers and their allies this winter, will be beaten by us into annihilation this coming summer.’48

  Many people were too concerned about the rumoured reductions in food rations to pay much attention to the speech.49 Goebbels was well aware that food supplies had reached a critical point and that it would need a ‘work of art’ to put across to the people the reasons for the reductions.50 He acknowledged that the cuts would lead to a ‘crisis in the internal mood’.51 Hitler, in full recognition of the sensitivity of the situation, had summoned the Propaganda Minister to his headquarters to discuss the issue before ration-cuts were announced.52 Goebbels had so many problems to bring to Hitler’s attention that he scarcely knew where he should begin.53 His view was that the deterioration in morale at home demanded tough measures to counter it. People would understand the hardships of war if they fell equally on all the population. But as it was – Goebbels’s own class resentments came strongly into play – the better-off were able through the black market and ‘connections’ to avoid serious deprivations. Göring had signed a law banning the black market. But its severity had been reduced through the intervention of the Economics Minister. Goebbels was determined to take the matter to the Führer, and hoped for the support of Bormann and the Party in getting Hitler to intervene to back more radical measures.54

  On his return to Berlin on 18 March after some days away in the ‘Ostmark’ and Bavaria, Goebbels had been appalled at a ‘scandalous scene’ in the station where soldiers travelling to the eastern front were having to stand in the corridors of trains ‘while fine ladies, returning sunburnt from holiday, naturally had their sleeping-compartments’. What was needed, he claimed, was a law under which ‘all offences against known National Socialist principles of leadership of the people in war will be punished with corresponding retribution’.55 That, too, he was going to put before Hitler during his visit to the Führer Headquarters. But Goebbels felt that, as things were, a radical approach to the law, necessary in total war, was being sabotaged by representatives of the formal legal system. He approved of Bormann’s demands for tougher sentences for black-marketeering.56 And he took it upon himself to press Hitler to change the leadership of the Justice Ministry, which since Gürtner’s death the previous year had been run by the State Secretary, Franz Schlegelberger. ‘The bourgeois elements still dominate there,’ he commented, ‘and since the heavens are high and the Führer far away, it’s extraordinarily difficult to succeed against these stubborn and listlessly working authorities.’57 It was in this mood – determined to persuade Hitler to support radical measures, attack privilege, and castigate the state bureaucracy (above all judges and lawyers) – that Goebbels arrived at the Wolf’s Lair on the ice-cold morning of 19 March.58

  He met a Hitler showing clear signs of the strain he had been under during the past months, in a state of mind that left him more than open to Goebbels’s radical suggestions. He needed no instruction about the mood in Germany, and the impact the reduction in food rations would have.59 Lack of transport prevented food being brought from the Ukraine, he complained. The Transport Ministry was blamed for the shortage of locomotives. He was determined to take tough measures. Goebbels then lost no time in berating the ‘failure’ of the judicial system. Hitler did not demur. Here, too, he was determined to proceed with ‘the toughest measures’. Goebbels paraded before Hitler his suggestion for a new comprehensive law to punish offenders against the ‘principles of National Socialist leadership of the people’. He wanted the Reich Ministry of Justice placed in new hands, and pressed for Otto Thierack, ‘a real National Socialist’, an SA-Gruppenfiihrer, and currently President of the notorious People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) – responsible for dealing with cases of treason and other serious offences against the regime – to take the place left by Gürtner.60 Five months later, Hitler would make the appointment that Goebbels had wanted, and, in Thierack’s hands, the capitulation of the judicial system to the police state would become complete.61

  For now, Hitler placated Goebbels with a suggestion to prepare the ground for a radical assault on social privilege by recalling the Reichstag and having it bestow upon him ‘a special plenipotentiary power’ so that ‘the evil-doers know that he is covered in every way by the people’s community’. Given the powers which Hitler already possessed, the motive was purely populist. An attack on the civil servants and judges, and upon the privileged in society – or, as Hitler put it, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘neglecters of duty in public functions’ – could not fail to be popular with the masses. Up to this point, judges could not be dismissed – not even by the Führer. There were limits, too, to his rights of intervention in the military sphere. The case of Colonel-General Erich Hoepner still rankled deeply. Hitler had sacked – Hoepner in January and dismissed him from the army in disgrace for retreating in disobedience to his ‘Halt Order’. Hoepner had then instituted a law-suit against the Reich over the loss of his pension rights – and won. With Hitler’s new powers, this could never happen again. Examples could be set in the military and civilian sector to serve as deterrents to others and ‘clear the air’.62

  ‘In such a mood,’ wrote Goebbels the next day, ‘my suggestions for the radicalization of our war-leadership naturally had an absolutely positive effect on the Führer. I only need to touch a topic and I have already got my way. Everything that I put forward individually is accepted piece for piece by the Führer without contradiction.’63

  The encouragement of Hitler to back the radicalization of the home-front continued after Goebbels’s return from the Wolf’s Lair. Apart from the Propaganda Minister, it came in particular from Bormann and Himmler. On 26 March, the SD reported on a ‘crisis of confidence’ resulting from the failure of the state to take a tough enough stance against black-marketeers and their corrupt customers among the well-placed and privileged. Himmler, it seems, had directly prompted the report; Bormann made Hitler aware of it. Three days later, Goebbels castigated black-marketeering in Das Reich, publicizing two instances of the death-penalty being imposed on profiteers.64

  It was on this same evening, that of 29 March, Hitler treated his small audience in the W
olf’s Lair to a prolonged diatribe on lawyers and the deficiencies of the legal system, concluding that ‘every jurist must be defective by nature, or would become so in time’.65

  This was only a few days after he had personally intervened in a blind rage with acting Justice Minister Schlegelberger and, when he proved dilatory, with the more eagerly compliant Roland Freisler (later the infamous President of the People’s Court as successor to Thierack but at this time Second State Secretary in the Justice Ministry), to insist on the death penalty for a man named Ewald Schlitt. This was on no more solid basis than the reading of a sensationalized account in a Berlin evening paper of how an Oldenburg court had sentenced Schlitt to only five years in a penitentiary for a horrific physical assault – according to the newspaper account – that had led to the death of his wife in an asylum. The court had been lenient because it took the view that Schlitt had been temporarily deranged. Schlegelberger lacked the courage to present the case fully to Hitler, and to defend the judges at the same time. Instead, he promised to improve the severity of sentencing. Freisler had no compunction in meeting Hitler’s wishes. The original sentence was overturned. In a new hearing, Schlitt was duly sentenced to death, and guillotined on 2 April.66

  Hitler had been so enraged by what he had read on the Schlitt case – which matched all his prejudices about lawyers and fell precisely at the time when the judicial system was being made the scapegoat for the difficulties on the home front – that he had privately threatened, should other ‘excessively lenient’ sentences be produced, ‘to send the Justice Ministry to the devil through a Reichstag law’.67 As it was, the Schlitt case was brought into service as a pretext to demand from the Reichstag absolute powers over the law itself.