Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  For the German people, Paulus’s missed chance to gain immortality was scarcely a central concern. Their thoughts, when they heard the dreaded announcement – false to the last – on 3 February that the officers and soldiers of the 6th Army had fought to the final shot and ‘died so that Germany might live’, were of the human tragedy and the scale of the military disaster.375 The ‘heroic sacrifice’ was no consolation to bereft relatives and friends.376 The women of Nuremberg were among those with many husbands, fathers, sons, or brothers in the 6th Army. As the news broke on 3 February they tore copies of newspapers out of the hands of sellers, shouting and wailing, beside themselves with grief. Men hurled abuse at the Nazi leadership. ‘Hitler has lied to us for three months,’ people raged. Gestapo men mingled in the crowds. But none of them intervened to arrest individuals from the distraught and angry crowds. It was rumoured that they had been instructed to hold back.377

  The SD reported that the whole nation was ‘deeply shaken’ by the fate of the 6th Army. There was deep depression, and widespread anger that Stalingrad had not been evacuated or relieved while there was still time. People asked how such optimistic reports had been possible only a short time earlier. They were critical of the underestimation – as in the previous winter – of the Soviet forces. Many now thought the war could not be won, and were anxiously contemplating the consequences of defeat.378

  Hitler had until Stalingrad been largely exempted from whatever criticisms people had of the regime. That now altered sharply.379 His responsibility for the debacle was evident. ‘For the first time,’ as Ulrich von Hassell noted, ‘the critical murmurings relate directly to him. To this extent there is a genuine leadership crisis… The sacrifice of most precious blood for the sake of pointless or criminal prestige is again plain to see.’380 People had expected Hitler to give an explanation in his speech on 30 January.381 His obvious reluctance to speak to the nation only heightened the criticism. The regime’s opponents were encouraged. Graffiti chalked on walls attacking Hitler, ‘the Stalingrad Murderer’, were a sign that underground resistance was not extinct.382 Appalled at what had happened, a number of army officers and highly-placed civil servants revived conspiratorial plans largely dormant since 1938-9.383

  In Munich, a group of students, together with one of their professors, whose idealism and mounting detestation of the criminal inhumanity of the regime had led them the previous year to form the ‘White Rose’ opposition-group, now openly displayed their attack on Hitler. The medical students Alexander Schmorell and Hans Scholl had formed the initial driving-force, and had soon been joined by Christoph Probst, Sophie Scholl (Hans’s sister), Willi Graf, and Kurt Huber, Professor of Philosophy at Munich University, whose critical attitude to the regime had influenced them in lectures and discussions. All the students came from conservative, middle-class backgrounds. All were fired by Christian beliefs and humanistic idealism. The horrors on the eastern front, experienced for a short time at first hand when Graf, Schmorell, and Hans Scholl were called up, converted the lofty idealism into an explicit, political message. ‘Fellow Students!’ ran their final manifesto (composed by Professor Huber), distributed in Munich University on 18 February. ‘The nation is deeply shaken by the destruction of the men of Stalingrad. The genial strategy of the World War [I] corporal has senselessly and irresponsibly driven (gebetzt) three hundred and thirty thousand German men to death and ruin. Führer, we thank you!’384

  It was a highly courageous show of defiance. But it was suicidal. Hans and Sophie Scholl were denounced by a porter at the university (who was subsequently applauded by pro-Nazi students for his action), and quickly arrested by the Gestapo. Christoph Probst was picked up soon afterwards. Their trial before the ‘People’s Court’, presided over by Roland Freisler, took place within four days. The verdict – the death-sentence – was a foregone conclusion. All three were guillotined the same afternoon. Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, and Alexander Schmorell suffered the same fate some months later. Other students on the fringe of the movement were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.385

  The regime had been badly stung. But it was not at the point of collapse. It would lash back without scruple and with utter viciousness at the slightest hint of opposition. The level of brutality towards its own population was about to rise sharply as external adversity mounted.

  If Hitler felt any personal remorse for Stalingrad or human sympathy for the dead of the 6th Army and their relatives, he did not let it show. Those in his close proximity could detect the signs of nervous strain.386 He hinted privately at his worry that his health would not stand up to the pressure.387 His secretaries had to put up with even longer nocturnal monologues as his insomnia developed chronic proportions. The topics were much the same as ever: his youth in Vienna, the ‘time of struggle’, the history of mankind, the nature of the cosmos. There was no relief from the boredom for his secretaries, who by now knew his outpourings on all topics more or less off by heart. There were not even any longer the occasional evenings listening to records to break up the tedium. Hitler, as he had told Goebbels some weeks earlier, now no longer wanted to listen to music.388 Talking was like a drug for him. He told one of his doctors two years later that he had to talk – about more or less anything other than military issues – to divert him from sleepless nights pondering troop dispositions and seeing in his mind where every division was at Stalingrad.389 As Below guessed, the bad news from the North African as well as from the eastern front must have led to serious doubts, in the privacy of his own room in the bunker of his headquarters, about whether the war could still be won.390 But outwardly, even among his entourage at the Wolf’s Lair, he had to sustain the façade of invincibility. No crack could be allowed to show. Hitler remained true to his creed of will and strength. A hint of weakness, in his thinking, was a gift to enemies and subversives. A crevice of demoralization would then swiftly widen to a chasm. The military, and above all else the Party, leaders must, therefore, never be allowed a glimmer of any wavering in his own resolution.

  There was not a trace of demoralization, depression, or uncertainty when he spoke to the Reichs – and Gauleiter for almost two hours at his headquarters on 7 February.391 He told them at the very beginning of his address that he believed in victory more than ever. Then he described what Goebbels referred to as ‘the catastrophe on the eastern front’.392 Hitler did not look close to home for the failings. While he said he naturally accepted full responsibility for the events of the winter,393 he left no doubt where in his view the real fault lay. From the beginning of his political career – indeed, from what is known of his earliest remarks on politics – he had cast around for scapegoats. The trait was too embedded in his psyche for him to stray from it now that, for the first time, an unmitigated national disaster had to be explained. Addressing the Party leadership, as in his private discussion with Goebbels a fortnight or so earlier, he once more placed the blame for the disaster at Stalingrad squarely on the ‘complete failure’ of Germany’s allies – the Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians – whose fighting powers met with his ‘absolute contempt’.394 The consequence of the collapse of Germany’s allies in the defensive front had been to endanger the Caucasus army. This had necessitated the ‘extraordinarily difficult order, involving much sacrifice’, that the 6th Army should stand fast and bind in the Red Army ‘to prevent the catastrophe gripping the entire eastern front’. Dreadful weather conditions, he said, had prevented it being supplied from the air, as had been presumed possible. Hitler took the view that the crisis, in broad terms, could be taken to be mastered. ‘The Caucasus army had been saved through the sacrifice of the 6th Army in Stalingrad.’395

  Not just the search for scapegoats, but the feeling of treachery and betrayal was entrenched in Hitler’s thinking. Another strand of his explanation for the disaster at Stalingrad was the prospect of imminent French betrayal, forcing him to retain several divisions, especially SS-divisions, in the west when they were desperately needed in the east.396 But
Hitler had the extraordinary capacity, as his Luftwaffe adjutant Below noted, of turning negative into positive, and convincing his audience of this.397 A landing by the Allies in France would have been far more dangerous, he claimed, than that which had taken place in North Africa and had been checked through the occupation of Tunis.398 He saw grounds for optimism, too, in the success of the U-boats, and in Speer’s armaments programme enabling better flak defence against air-raids together with full-scale production by the summer of the Tiger tank.399

  Much of the rest of Hitler’s address was on the ‘psychology’ of war. Goebbels had shrewdly played on Hitler’s instincts in demanding the rad-icalization of the ‘home front’ and the move to ‘total war’. The urgings of the Propaganda Minister found their echo in Hitler’s rallying-call to his Gauleiter. The crisis was more of a psychological than a material one, he declared, and must therefore be overcome by ‘psychological means’. It was the Party’s task to achieve this. The Gauleiter should remember the ‘time of struggle’. Radical measures were now needed. Austerity, sacrifice, and the end of any privileges for certain sectors of society was the order of the day. The setbacks but eventual triumph of Frederick the Great – the implied comparison with Hitler’s own leadership was plain – were invoked.400 The setbacks now being faced – solely the fault of Germany’s allies – even had their own psychological advantages. Propaganda and the Party’s agitation could awaken people to the fact that they had stark alternatives: becoming master of Europe, or undergoing ‘a total liquidation and extermination’.401

  Hitler pointed out one advantage which, he claimed, the Allies possessed: that they were sustained by international Jewry. The consequence, Goebbels reported Hitler as saying, was ‘that we have to eliminate Jewry not only from Reich territory but from the whole of Europe’. Goebbels noted approvingly that Hitler had again adopted his own viewpoint, and that within the foreseeable future there would be no more Jews in Berlin. ‘The ruthlessness towards Jewry which [Hitler] impresses on all Gauleiter,’ Goebbels added, ‘has long since been the political order of the day in Berlin.’402

  Hitler categorically ruled out, as he always had done, any possibility of capitulation.403 He stated that any collapse of the German Reich was out of the question. But his further remarks betrayed the fact that he was contemplating precisely that. The event of such a collapse ‘would represent the ending of his life’, he declared. It was plain who, in such an eventuality, the scapegoats would be: the German people themselves. ‘Such a collapse could only be caused through the weakness of the people,’ Goebbels recorded Hitler as saying. ‘But if the German people turned out to be weak, they would deserve nothing else than to be extinguished by a stronger people; then one could have no sympathy for them.’404 The sentiment would stay with him to the end.

  To the Party leadership, the backbone of his support, Hitler could speak in this way. The Gauleiter could be rallied by such rhetoric. They were after all fanatics as Hitler himself was. They were part of his ‘sworn community’. The responsibility of the Party for the radicalization of the ‘home front’ was music to their ears. In any case, whatever private doubts (if any) they harboured, they had no choice but to stick with Hitler. They had burnt their boats with him. He was the sole guarantor of their power.

  The German people were less easily placated than Hitler’s immediate viceroys. When he spoke in Berlin to the nation for the first time since Stalingrad, on the occasion (which this year, of all years, he could not possibly avoid) of Heroes’ Memorial Day on 21 March 1943, his speech gave rise to greater criticism than any Hitler speech since he had become Chancellor.405

  The speech was one of Hitler’s shortest. Goebbels was pleased that it was only fifteen pages long; it lessened the chances of being interrupted by the British air-raid that was feared and predicted.406 Hitler told Goebbels that he wanted to use the speech for another fierce attack on Bolshevism. He felt like an old propagandist, he said: propaganda meant repetition.407 Perhaps it was the anxiety, as Goebbels had hinted, about a possible air-raid which made Hitler race through his speech in such a rapid and dreary monotone. Whatever the reason, the routine assault on Bolshevism and on Jewry as the force behind the ‘merciless war’ could stir little enthusiasm. Disappointment was profound. Rumours revived about Hitler’s poor health – along with others that it had been a substitute who had spoken, while the real Führer was under house-arrest on the Obersalzberg suffering from a mental breakdown after Stalingrad. Extraordinary was the fact that Hitler never even directly mentioned Stalingrad in a ceremony meant to be devoted to the memory of the fallen and at a time where the trauma was undiminished. And his passing reference, at the end of his speech, to a figure of 542,000 German dead in the war was presumed to be far too low and received with rank incredulity.408

  Reactions to the speech were a clear indicator that the German people’s bonds with Hitler were dissolving. This was no overnight phenomenon. But Stalingrad was the point at which the signs became unmistakable. There was no rebellion in the air; Hitler was right about that. The mood was sullenly depressed, anxious about the present, fearful of the future, above all else weary of the war; but not rebellious. To all but the few who had served the regime from the inside, had contacts in high places with recourse to the power of the military, and were now actively conspiring to bring about Hitler’s downfall, thoughts of overthrowing the regime could scarcely be entertained. The regime was far too strong, its capacity for repression far too great, its readiness to strike down all opposition far too evident (and becoming even more so as positive support waned and loyalties weakened). The reserves of hard-core Nazi support were still substantial. They could be found especially – though here, too, there were unmistakable signs of erosion – among members of a younger generation that had swallowed Nazi ideals in school, among many ordinary front soldiers desperately clinging to a ray of hope, and, naturally, most of all among Party activists who had combined fervent belief with careerism.409 Fanatical devotees of the Führer cult, who had not wavered in their adulation of Hitler, or who were implicated in the crimes against humanity which he had inspired, remained in control of the home front, itching to resort to any measures, however ruthless, to shore up the regime’s foundations. For the bulk of the population, there was no alternative to struggling on.

  In this, at least, the dictator and the people he led were at one. Hitler, as more and more ordinary citizens now recognized, had closed off all avenues that might have brought compromise peace. The earlier victories were increasingly seen in a different light. There was no end in sight. But it now seemed clear to growing numbers of ordinary citizens that Hitler had taken them into a war which could only end in destruction, defeat, and disaster. There was still far to go, but over the next months the miseries of war would rebound in ever greater ferocity on the population of Germany itself. What was revealed after Stalingrad would become over those months ever clearer: for all the lingering strength of support, the German people’s love affair with Hitler was at an end. Only the bitter process of divorce remained.

  12

  BELEAGUERED

  ‘We have not only a “leadership crisis”, but strictly speaking a “Leader crisis”!’

  Speer, recalling Goebbels’s assessment in late

  February 1943

  ‘Germany and its allies were in the same boat on a stormy sea. It was obvious that in this situation anyone wanting to get off would drown immediately.’

  Hitler, speaking to Admiral Horthy of Hungary,

  April 1943

  ‘Herr Feldmarschall: we are not master here of our own decisions.’

  Hitler to Field-Marshal von Kluge, 26 July 1943,

  after the fall of Mussolini the previous day

  ‘A glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and never can be written… We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.’

  Himmler, speaking to SS leaders in Posen about
the

  ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, 4 October 1943

  ‘The English claim that the German people have lost their trust in the Führer,’ Goebbels declared. It was the opening to the fifth of his ten rhetorical questions towards the end of his two-hour speech proclaiming ‘total war’ on the evening of 18 February 1943. The hand-picked audience in Berlin’s Sportpalast rose as one man to denounce such an outrageous allegation. A chorus of voices arose: ‘Führer command, we will obey.’ The tumult lasted for what seemed an age. Orchestrating the frenzied mood to perfection, the propaganda maestro eventually broke in to ask: ‘Is your trust in the Führer greater, more faithful, and more unshakeable than ever? Is your readiness to follow him in all his ways and to do everything necessary to bring the war to a triumphant end absolute and unrestricted?’ Fourteen thousand voices hysterically cried out in unison the answer invited by Goebbels in his bid to quell doubters at home and to relay to the outside world the futility of any hope of inner collapse in Germany. Goebbels ended his morale-boosting peroration – which had been interrupted more than 200 times by clapping, cheering, shouts of approbation, or thunderous applause – with the words of Theodor Körner, the patriotic poet from the time of Prussia’s struggle against Napoleon: ‘Now people, arise – and storm burst forth!’ The great hall erupted. Amid the wild cheering the national anthem ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ and the Party’s ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ rang out. The spectacle ended with cries of ‘the great German Leader Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.’1