Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  These were scarcely signs of waning self-confidence.217 But his over-reaction, two days later, when news reached him that mountain troops had placed the German flag on the Elbrus, highest mountain of the Caucasus range at 5,630 metres, suggests that his self-confidence was a front, perhaps above all for himself. Beneath the façade, his nerves were edgy, his anxiety about the offensive growing. The troops presumably thought he would be pleased. In fact, he was furious at what he saw as a pointless mountaineering feat devoid of military purpose.218 Speer later wrote that he had seldom seen him so enraged, fuming for days at ‘these mad mountaineers’ who deserved to be put before a military court. In the middle of a war, he ranted, their idiotic ambition had driven them to climb an idiotic peak, when he had ordered everything to be concentrated on the taking of Suchum. It was in truth a minor escapade. But from Hitler’s near-hysterical over-reaction it seemed, Speer recalled, as if they had ruined his entire operational plan.219

  The last significant successes of Army Group B, meanwhile, had been in encircling and destroying two Russian armies south-west of Kalac, on the Don due west of Stalingrad, on 8 August.220 Advancing in punishing heat and hindered through chronic fuel shortage, on 23 August, the 6th Army, under General Friedrich Paulus, succeeded in reaching the Volga, north of Stalingrad.221 Amid heavy Soviet defences, the advance ground rapidly to a halt. The summer offensive had, as it turned out, run its course in less than two months.222 As early as 26 August Halder was noting: ‘Near Stalingrad, serious tension on account of superior counter-attacks of the enemy. Our divisions are no longer very strong. The command is heavily under nervous strain.’223 The 6th Army was, however, able to consolidate its position. Over the next weeks, it even gained the advantage. But the nightmare of Stalingrad was only just beginning.

  While the southern part of the massively extended front was running out of steam, with the 6th Army now bogged down at Stalingrad and List’s Army Group A stalled in the Caucasus, Kluge’s Army Group Centre had encountered a damaging setback, suffering horrendous casualties in an ill-fated attempt ordered by Hitler to wipe out Russian forces at Sukhinichi, 150 miles west of Moscow, from where it was hoped to establish the basis for a renewed drive on the capital. Kluge, on a visit to ‘Werwolf on 7 August, had asked Hitler to remove two armoured divisions from the offensive at Sukhinichi to deploy them against a threatening Soviet counterattack in the Rzhev area. Hitler had refused, insisting that they be retained for the Sukhinichi offensive. Kluge had marched out saying ‘You, my Führer, therefore assume responsibility for this.’224

  And in the north, by the end of August expectations of launching an assault and finally taking the hunger-torn city of Leningrad had been massively dented through the Soviet counter-offensive south of Lake Ladoga. Manstein’s nth Army had been brought up from the southern front to lead the planned final assault on Leningrad in September in the ‘Northern Lights’ offensive. Instead it found itself engaged in fending off the Soviet strike. There was no possibility of capturing Leningrad and razing it to the ground. The last chance of that had gone.225 Hitler’s outward show of confidence in victory could not altogether conceal his mounting inner anxiety. His temper was on a short fuse. Outbursts of rage became more common.226 He cast around as always for scapegoats for the rapidly deteriorating military situation in the east. It did not take him long to find them.

  Relations with Halder had already reached rock-bottom. On 24 August, the worsening situation at Rzhev had prompted the Chief of the General Staff to urge Hitler to allow a retreat of the 9th Army to a more defensible shorter line. In front of all those assembled at the midday conference, Hitler rounded on Halder. ‘You always come here with the same proposal, that of withdrawal,’ he raged. ‘I demand from the leadership the same toughness as from the front-soldiers.’ Halder, deeply insulted, shouted back: ‘I have the toughness, my Führer. But out there brave musketeers and lieutenants are falling in thousands and thousands as useless sacrifice in a hopeless situation simply because their commanders are not allowed to make the only reasonable decision and have their hands tied behind their backs.’227 Hitler stared at Halder. ‘What can you, who sat in the same chair (Dreh-schemel) in the First World War, too, tell me about the troops, Herr Halder, you, who don’t even wear the black insignia of the wounded?’228 Appalled, and embarrassed, the onlookers dispersed. Hitler tried to smooth Halder’s ruffled feathers that evening. But it was plain to all who witnessed the scene that the Chief of Staff’s days were numbered.229

  Even Hitler’s military right hand, the loyal and devoted Jodl, was now made to feel the full impact of his wrath. On 5 September List had asked for Jodl to be been sent to Army Group A headquarters at Stalino, north of the Sea of Azov, to discuss the further deployment of the 39th Mountain Corps.230 The visit took place two days later. From Hitler’s point of view, the purpose was to urge List to accelerate the advance on the largely stalled Caucasus front. Hitler’s patience at the lack of progress had been extremely thin for some time. But far from bringing back positive news, Jodl returned that evening with a devastating account of conditions. It was no longer possible to force the Soviets back over the mountain passes. The most that could be achieved, with greater mobility and maximum concentration of forces, was a last attempt to reach Grozny and the Caspian Sea. Hitler grew more angry with every sentence. He lashed out at the ‘lack of initiative’ of the army leadership; and now for the first time attacked Jodl, the messenger bearing bad news.231 It was the worst crisis in relations between Hitler and his military leaders since the previous August.232 Hitler was in a towering rage. But Jodl stood his ground. It turned into a shouting-match.233 Jodl fully backed List’s assessment of the position. Hitler exploded. He accused Jodl of betraying his orders, being talked round by List, and taking sides with the Army Group. He had not sent him to the Caucasus, he said, to have him bring back doubts among the troops.234 Jodl retorted that List was faithfully adhering to the orders Hitler himself had given.235 Beside himself with rage, Hitler said his words were being twisted. Things would have to be different. He would have to ensure that he could not be deliberately misinterpreted in future.236 Like a prima donna in a pique, Hitler stormed out, refusing to shake hands (as he invariably had done at the end of their meetings) with Jodl and Keitel.237 Evidently depressed as well as angry, he said to his Wehrmacht adjutant Schmundt that night, ‘I’ll be glad when I can take off this detestable uniform and trample on it.’238 He saw no end to the war in Russia since none of the aims of summer 1942 had been realized. The anxiety about the forthcoming winter was dreadful, he said. ‘But on the other hand,’ noted Army Adjutant Engel, ‘he will retreat nowhere.’239

  Hitler now shut himself up in his darkened hut during the days. He refused to appear for the communal meals. The military briefings, with as few present as possible, took place in a glacial atmosphere in his own hut, not in the headquarters of the Wehrmacht staff. And he refused to shake hands with anyone. Within forty-eight hours, a group of shorthand typists, practised stenographers from the Reichstag (where the need for active stenographers was by now hardly pressing), arrived at FHQ. Hitler had insisted upon a record of all military briefings being taken so that he could not again be misinterpreted.240

  The day after the confrontation with Jodl, Hitler dismissed List. Demonstrating his distrust of his generals, he himself for the time being took over the command of Army Group A. He was now commander of the armed forces, of one branch of those armed forces, and of one group of that branch. At the same time, Keitel was deputed to tell Halder that he would soon be relieved of his post. Keitel himself and Jodl were also rumoured to be slated for dismissal.241 Jodl admitted privately that he had been at fault in trying to point out to a dictator where he had gone wrong. This, Jodl said, could only shake his self-confidence – the basis of his personality and actions. Jodl added that whoever his own replacement might be, he could not be more of a staunch National Socialist than he himself was.242

  In the event, the worsening condi
tions at Stalingrad and in the Mediterranean prevented the intended replacement of Jodl by Paulus and Keitel by Kesselring.243 But there was no saving Halder. Hitler complained bitterly to Below that Halder had no comprehension of the difficulties at the front and was devoid of ideas for solutions. He coldly viewed the situation only from maps and had ‘completely wrong notions’ about the way things were going.244 Hitler pondered Schmundt’s advice to replace Halder by Major-General Kurt Zeitzler, a very different type of character – a small bald-headed, ambitious, dynamic forty-seven-year-old, firm believer in the Führer, who had been put in by Hitler in April to shake up the army in the west and, as Rundstedt’s chief of staff, to build up coastal defences.245 Göring, too, encouraged Hitler to get rid of Halder.246

  That point was reached on 24 September. A surprised Zeitzler had by then been summoned to FHQ and told by Hitler of his promotion to full General of the Infantry and of his new responsibilities.247 After what was to be his last military briefing, Halder was, without ceremony, relieved of his post. His nerves, Hitler told him, were gone, and his own nerves also strained. It was necessary for Halder to go, and for the General Staff to be educated to believe fanatically in ‘the idea’. Hitler, Halder noted in his final diary entry, was determined to enforce his will, also in the army.248

  The traditional General Staff, for long such a powerful force, its Chief now discarded like a spent cartridge, had arrived at its symbolic final point of capitulation to the forces to which it had wedded itself in 1933. Zeitzler began the new regime by demanding from the members of the General Staff belief in the Führer.249 He himself would soon realize that this alone would not be enough.

  VI

  The battle for Stalingrad was by now looming. Both sides were aware how critical it would be. The German leadership remained optimistic.

  Hitler’s plans for the massively over-populated city on the Volga were similar to the annihilatory intentions he had held about Leningrad and Moscow. ‘The Führer orders that on entry into the city the entire male population should be done away with (beseitigt),’ the Wehrmacht High Command recorded, ‘since Stalingrad, with its thoroughly Communist population of a million, is especially dangerous.’250 Halder noted simply, without additional comment: ‘Stalingrad: male population to be destroyed (vernichtet), female to be deported’.251

  When he visited FHQ on 11 September, General von Weichs, Commander of Army Group B, had told Hitler he was confident that the attack on the inner city of Stalingrad could begin almost immediately and be completed within ten days.252 Indeed, the early signs were that the fall of the city would not be long delayed. But by the second half of September, the contest for Stalingrad had already turned into a battle of scarcely imaginable intensity and ferocity. The fighting was taking place often at point-blank range, street by street, house by house. German and Soviet troops were almost literally at each other’s throats. The final taking of what had rapidly become little more than a shell of smoking ruins, it was coming to be realized, could take weeks, even months.253

  Elsewhere, too, the news was less than encouraging. Rommel’s offensive at El Alamein in the direction of the Suez Canal had to be broken off already on 2 September, only three days after it had begun. Rommel remained confident, both publicly and in private, over the next weeks, though he reported on the serious problems with shortages of weapons and equipment when he saw Hitler on 1 October to receive his Field-Marshal’s baton.254 In reality, however, the withdrawal of 2 September would turn out to be the beginning of the end for the Axis in North Africa.255 Its morale revitalized under a new commander, General Bernard Montgomery, and its lost, out-of-date armour replaced by new Sherman tanks, the 8th Army would by autumn prove more than a match for Rommel’s limited forces.256

  In the Reich itself, the British nightly raids had intensified. Munich, Bremen, Düsseldorf, and Duisburg were among the cities that now suffered serious destruction.257 Hitler said he was glad his own apartment in Munich had been badly damaged; he would not have liked it spared – obviously it would not have looked good – if the rest of the city had been attacked. He thought the raid might have a salutary effect in waking up the population of Munich to the realities of the war.258 Air-raids had another good side, he had told Goebbels in mid-August: the enemy had ‘taken work from us’ in destroying buildings that would in any case have had to be torn down to allow the improved post-war town planning.259 Such remarks scarcely betrayed much feeling for the suffering of ordinary people in the raids. For these, the wail of the sirens, disturbed nights in air-raid shelters, and rumours – exaggerated or not – of the horrors in other cities tore at the nerves. And the helplessness of the Luftwaffe to defend their cities shook people’s confidence in the leadership.260 Hitler felt his own impotence to respond as he would have liked: by revenge through even greater destruction of British cities. But there was a shortage of German bombers. The Heinkel 177 had, as Hitler had long predicted, proved unsuccessful, with repeated engine failures preventing its active use. And the Junkers 88 could not be produced in sufficient numbers, since priority had to be accorded to fighters. Powerless to do much against the mounting threat from the skies, Hitler said he trusted Göring’s assurances that things would soon be improved in the Luftwaffe.261

  At the end of September, Hitler flew back to Berlin. He had promised Goebbels to use the opening of the Winter Aid campaign to address the nation during the second half of September.262 Once more, it was important to sustain morale at a vital time.

  He looked well when Goebbels saw him at a late lunch on 28 September, after speaking to 12,000 young officers in the Sportpalast. He was more optimistic than Goebbels had imagined he would be about Stalingrad. The city would soon be taken, Hitler claimed. Then the advance on the Caucasus could proceed again, even during the winter. Goebbels did not share the optimism.263 It was as if Hitler felt unable to deviate, even in private, from the fiction that all was going well in the eastern campaign. His Luftwaffe adjutant, Below, thought Hitler was by now starting to deceive himself about the realities of the situation.264

  Next day, Hitler spoke to a small group of generals, along with Göring and Speer, about the dangers of an invasion in the west. Fiasco though it had been, the attempted landing of Canadian troops in Dieppe in mid-August had been a new reminder of the threat. But by the spring, when the new Atlantic Wall with its 15,000 bunkers was constructed, the Reich would be immune, he claimed.265

  Hitler’s Sportpalast speech on 30 September combined a glorification of German military achievements with a sarcastic, mocking attack on Churchill and Roosevelt.266 This was nothing new, though the hand-picked Sportpalast audience lapped it up. They, and the wider audience listening to the broadcast of the speech, took especial note when Hitler suggested that, after the perils of the last winter had been surmounted, the worst was now behind them, and the economic benefits of the occupied territories would soon be flowing to Germany to improve the standard of living.267 He went on to repeat his prophecy about the Jews – by now a regular weapon in his rhetorical armoury – in the most menacing phrases he had so far used: ‘The Jews used to laugh, in Germany too, about my prophecies. I don’t know if they’re still laughing today, or whether the laughter has already gone out of them. But I, too, can now only offer the assurance: the laughter will go out of them everywhere. And I will also be right in my prophecies.’268 But the speech was most notable of all for his assurances about the battle for Stalingrad. The metropolis on the Volga, bearing the Soviet leader’s name, was being stormed, he declared, and would be taken. ‘You can be sure,’ he added, ‘that nobody will get us away from this place again!’269

  His public display of optimism was unbounded, even in a more confined forum, when he addressed the Reichs – and Gauleiter for almost three hours the following afternoon. He felt at ease, he told the gathering, in the company of his most long-standing Party comrades.270 ‘The Gauleiter,’ he had told Goebbels in mid-August, ‘never cheat me’ – unlike, he had said, his general
s. ‘They are my most loyal and reliable colleagues. If I lost trust in them I wouldn’t know whom to trust.’271 He outlined the plans to thrust to the Caucasus, to cut the Soviet Union off from its oil. He said he had wanted to undertake that the previous year, but Brauchitsch had pushed the campaign in a completely different direction, towards Moscow ‘which is relatively uninteresting for us’. But he was certain that Germany would now gain possession of the oil-fields of Grozny, while a first priority was to get those oil-wells captured in a ruined state in Maykop flowing again. ‘The capture of Stalingrad,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘is for him an established fact,’ even if it could still take a little time. Once that was attained, Astrakhan would be the next target, then the destruction by the Luftwaffe of the key Soviet oil-fields of Baku. Thereafter, as he had already told Goebbels several weeks earlier (when he had spoken of overrunning Iraq, Iran, and Palestine), his sights were set on the British oil supplies from Mesopotamia and the Middle East.272 Surveying the position of his enemies, Hitler came to the remarkable conclusion that ‘the war was practically lost for the opposing side, no matter how long it was in a position to carry it on’. Only an internal upheaval in Germany could snatch victory for the enemy. It was the Party’s job to see that that could never happen. He had effusive praise for the Party’s work. The longer the war went on, commented Goebbels, the closer the Führer came to the Party.273