by Ian Kershaw
Hitler’s emphasis on the Jews as germ-bacilli, and as responsible for the war and the spread of Bolshevism, was of course nothing new. And his deep-seated belief in the demonic power still purportedly in the hands of the Jews as they were being decimated needs no underlining. But this was the first time that he had used the ‘Jewish Question’ in diplomatic discussions to put heads of state under pressure to introduce more draconian anti-Jewish measures. What prompted this?
He would have been particularly alerted to the ‘Jewish Question’ in April 1943. The previous month, he had finally agreed to have what was left of Berlin’s Jewish community deported.115 In April, he was sent the breakdown, already mentioned, prepared by the SS’s statistician Richard Korherr of almost a million and a half Jews ‘evacuated’ and ‘channelled through (durchgeschleust)’ Polish camps.116 From the middle of the month, he was increasingly frustrated by accounts of the battle raging in the Warsaw ghetto, where the Waffen-SS, sent in to raze it to the ground, were encountering desperate and brave resistance from the inhabitants.117 Not least, only days before his meeting with Horthy, mass graves containing the remains of thousands of Polish officers, murdered in 1940 by the Soviet Security Police, the NKVD, had been discovered in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. Hitler immediately gave Goebbels permission to make maximum propaganda capital out of the issue.118 He also instructed Goebbels to put the ‘Jewish Question’ at the forefront of propaganda. Goebbels seized upon the Katyn case as an excellent opportunity to do just this.119
Hitler’s directive to Goebbels to amplify the propaganda treatment of the persecution of the Jews, and his explicit usage of the ‘Jewish Question’ in his meetings with foreign dignitaries, plainly indicate instrumental motives. He believed, as he always had done, unquestioningly in the propaganda value of antisemitism. He told his Gauleiter in early May that antisemitism, as propagated by the Party in earlier years, had once more to become the core message. He held out hopes of its spread in Britain. Antisemitic propaganda had, he said, to begin from the premiss that the Jews were the leaders of Bolshevism and prominent in western plutocracy. The Jews had to get out of Europe. This had constantly to be repeated in the political conflict built into the war.120 In his meetings with Antonescu and Horthy, Hitler was speaking, as always, for effect. As we have noted, he hoped to bind his wavering Axis partners closer to the Reich through complicity in the persecution of the Jews. In the autumn, in speeches held in Posen, Himmler would use the ‘Jewish Question’ in similar, but even more explicit, fashion to hold the Nazi leadership ever more tightly together through their complicity in the mass murder of the Jews.
Though satisfied with the outcome of his talks with Antonescu, Hitler felt he had failed to make an impact on Horthy. Goebbels suspected that Hitler’s harsh tone had not been helpful. The Hungarians, he remarked, recognized Germany’s weak position and knew wars were not won simply with words.121 Hitler told the Gauleiter that he had not succeeded in persuading Horthy of the need for tougher measures against the Jews. Horthy had put forward what Hitler described – only from his perspective could they be seen as such – as ‘humanitarian counter-arguments’. Hitler naturally dismissed them. As Goebbels summarized it, Hitler said: ‘Towards Jewry there can be no talk of humanity. Jewry must be cast down to the ground.’122
Earlier in the spring, Ribbentrop, picking up on fears expressed by Axis partners about their future under German domination, had put to Hitler loose notions of a future European federation.123 How little ice this cut with the Dictator can be seen from his reactions to his April meetings with heads of state and government – particularly the unsatisfactory discussion with Horthy. He drew the consequence, he told the Gauleiter in early May, that the ‘small-state rubbish (Kleinstaatengerümpeiy should be ‘liquidated as soon as possible’. Europe must have a new form – but this could only be under German leadership. ‘We live today,’ he went on, ‘in a world of destroying and being destroyed.’ He expressed his certainty ‘that the Reich will one day be master of the whole of Europe’, paving the way for world domination. He hinted at the alternative. ‘The Führer paints a shocking picture for the Reichs – and Gauleiter of the possibilities facing the Reich in the event of a German defeat. Such a defeat must therefore never find a place in our thoughts. We must regard it from the outset as impossible and determine to fight it to the last breath.’124
Speaking to Goebbels on 6 May in Berlin, where he had come to attend the state funeral of SA-Chief Viktor Lutze (who had been killed in a car accident), Hitler accepted that the situation in Tunis was ‘fairly hopeless’. The inability to get supplies to the troops meant there was no way out. Goebbels summarized the way Hitler was thinking: ‘When you think that 150,000 of our best young people are still in Tunis, you rapidly get an idea of the catastrophe threatening us there. It’ll be on the scale of Stalingrad, and certainly also produce the harshest criticism among the German people.’125 But when he spoke the next day to the Reichs – and Gauleiter, Hitler never mentioned Tunis, making no reference at all to the latest news that Allied troops had penetrated as far as the outskirts of the city and that the harbour was already in British hands.126
Axis troops were, in fact, by then giving themselves up in droves. Within a week, on 13 May, almost a quarter of a million of them – the largest number taken so far by the Allies, around half of them German, the remainder Italian – surrendered. Only about 800 managed to escape.127 North Africa was lost. The catastrophe left the Italian Axis partner reeling. For Mussolini, the writing was on the wall. But for Hitler, too, the defeat was nothing short of calamitous. One short step across the Straits of Sicily by the Allies would mean that the fortress of Europe was breached through its southern underbelly.
In the Atlantic, meanwhile, the battle was in reality lost, even if it took some months for this to become fully apparent. The resignation on 30 January 1943 as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of Grand-Admiral Raeder, exponent of what Hitler had come to recognize as an outmoded naval strategy based upon a big surface battle fleet, and his replacement by Karl Dönitz, protagonist of the U-boat, had signalled an important shift in priorities.128 Hitler told his Gauleiter on 7 May that the U-boat was the weapon to cut through the arteries of the enemy. This weapon was, in his view, at the very beginning of its development. He expected great things of it.129 At the end of the month, he told Dönitz: ‘There can be no question of easing up on the U-boat war. The Atlantic is my western approach (Vorfeld), and if I have to wage a defensive there, it’s better than only being able to defend on the coast of Europe.’ He immediately agreed to Dönitz’s request to increase the construction rate of U-boats from thirty to forty a month.130 But, in fact, that very month forty-one U-boats carrying 1,336 men had been lost in the Atlantic – the highest losses in any single month during the war – and the number of vessels in operation at any one time had already passed its peak. In the light of the losses, Dönitz ordered the U-boats away from the Atlantic convoy routes and moved them to south-west of the Azores.131 The deciphering of German codes by British intelligence, using the ‘Ultra’ decryption methods, was allowing U-boat signals to be read. It was possible to know with some precision where the U-boats were operating. The use of long-range Liberators, equipped with radar, and able to cover ‘the Atlantic Gap’ – the 600-mile stretch of the ocean from Greenland to the Azores, previously out of range of aircraft flying from both British and American shores – was a second strand of the mounting Allied success against the U-boat menace.132 The crucial supplies between North America and Britain, gravely imperilled over the previous two years, could flow with increasing security. Nothing could hinder the Reich’s increasing disadvantage against the material might of the western Allies.
Hitler’s greatest worry, once Tunis had fallen, was the condition of his longest-standing ally. Immediately after the fall of Tunis, the Wehrmacht High Command’s Operations Staff had outlined – probably at Hitler’s request – a scenario ‘should Italy withdraw from the war’. It pos
ited the likelihood of the Allies forcing their way on to the European continent through the unstable and weakly defended Balkans. Hitler, in part it seems misled by a false lead given by British intelligence, which had deliberately planted disinformation on a corpse left floating off the Spanish coast,133 disagreed with his own staff and with Mussolini in thinking an Allied landing would be attempted not in Sicily, but in Sardinia. Contingency plans were made to move forces from both the western and eastern fronts to the Mediterranean, and to put Rommel – now largely restored to health – in command in Italy should an Italian collapse take place.134
By the time he heard a report on the situation in Italy in mid-May from Konstantin Alexander Freiherr von Neurath, son of the former Foreign Minister, and one-time Foreign Office liaison to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, Hitler was deeply gloomy. He thought the monarchists and aristocracy had sabotaged the war-effort in Italy from the beginning. He blamed them for preventing an Italian declaration of solidarity with Germany in 1939. If such a declaration had been forthcoming, he asserted, the British would not have hastened to sign the Guarantee for Poland, the French would not have gone along in their wake, and the war would not have broken out.135 He thought there was no longer the will in Italy to transport troops to Sicily to defend against an Allied landing. Whatever the Duce’s personal strength of will – and Hitler continued to detach him from his savage criticism of the Italians – it was being sabotaged.136
There was a big question mark, he thought, over Mussolini’s health – he had suffered from a stomach ulcer since September of the previous year – and his age, now approaching sixty, told against him. Hitler was sure that the reactionary forces associated with the King, Victor Emmanuel III – whose nominal powers as head of state had nevertheless still left him as the focus of a potential alternative source of loyalty – would triumph over the revolutionary forces of Fascism. A collapse had to be reckoned with.137 Plans must be made to defend the Mediterranean without Italy.138 How this was to be done with an offensive imminent in the east and no troops to spare, he did not say.
Hitler had intended around this time to move back to Vinnitsa. But the postponement of ‘Citadel’, the precarious situation in the Mediterranean, and problems with his own health made him decide suddenly to return from a short stay at the Wolf’s Lair to the Obersalzberg.139 He remained there until the end of June. During his weeks in the Bavarian Alps, the Ruhr district, Germany’s industrial heartland, continued to suffer devastation from the skies. In May there had been spectacular attacks on the big dams that supplied the area’s water. Had they been sustained, the damage done would have been incalculable. As it was, the dams could be repaired. Since the ‘dam-buster’ raids, the major cities of Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Bochum, Dortmund, and Wuppertal-Barmen had been laid waste in intensive night bombardment. The inadequacy of the air-defences was all too apparent. Hitler continued to vent his bile on Göring and the Luftwaffe.140 But his own powerlessness to do anything about it was exposed. Goebbels at least showed his face, touring the bombed-out cities, speaking at a memorial service in his home town of Elberfeld, and at a big rally in Dortmund.141 Hitler stayed in his alpine idyll. The Propaganda Minister thought a visit by the Führer pyschologically important for the population of the Ruhr. Though Goebbels had been impressed by the positive response he had encountered during his staged tour, more realistic impressions of morale provided in SD reports painted a different picture. Anger at the regime’s failure to protect them was widespread. The ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting had almost disappeared. Hostile remarks about the regime, and about Hitler personally, were commonplace.142
Hitler promised Goebbels towards the end of June that he would pay an extended visit to the devastated area. It was to take place ‘the next week, or the week after that’. Hitler knew only too well that this was out of the question. He had by then scheduled the beginning of ‘Citadel’ for the first week in July. And he expected the Allied landing off the Italian coast at any time. The human suffering of the Ruhr population had, ultimately, little meaning for him. ‘As regrettable as the personal losses are,’ he told Goebbels, ‘they have unfortunately to be taken on board in the interest of a superior war-effort (Kriegführung).’143
While on the Obersalzberg, Hitler was chiefly preoccupied with the prospect of an imminent invasion by the Allies in the south, and the approaching ‘Citadel’ offensive in the east.
He still thought that the Allied landing would come in Sardinia. Sicily was in his view secure enough, and could be held. (Since most of the island’s defenders were Italian, Hitler must have been either less confident than he seemed, or have amended his normally scathing assessment of the Italian armed forces.) He was determined not to retreat from Italy. There would be no withdrawal as far as the Po Valley, even were the Italians to pull out of the war. It was the first rule of the German conduct of war to fight away from the homeland. He thought the Italians more likely to give in bit by bit in deals with the enemy than to capitulate outright. His confidence in Mussolini had finally evaporated. It would be different, he thought, were the Duce still young and fit. But he was old and worn out. The royal family could not be trusted an inch. And – he added a characteristic last reflection – the Jews had not been done away with (beseitigt) in Italy, whereas in Germany (as Goebbels summarized) ‘we can be very glad that we have followed a radical policy. There are no Jews behind us who could inherit from us.’144
As the war had turned remorselessly against Germany, the beleaguered Führer had reverted ever more to his obsession with Jewish responsibility for the conflagration. In his Manichean world-view, the fight to the finish between the forces of good and evil – the Aryan race and the Jews – was reaching its climax. There could be no relenting in the struggle to wipe out Jewry.
Little over a month earlier, Hitler had talked at length, prompted by Goebbels, about the ‘Jewish Question’. The Propaganda Minister thought it one of the most interesting discussions he had ever had with the Führer.145 Goebbels had been re-reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the crude Russian forgery purporting to outline a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world – with an eye on its use in current propaganda. He raised the matter over lunch. Hitler thought antisemitic propaganda would play an important part in the war effort, particularly in its impact on the British. He was certain of the ‘absolute authenticity’ of the Protocols. The Jews, he thought, were not working to a fixed programme; they were following, as always, their ‘racial instinct’.146 The Jews were the same all over the world, Goebbels noted him as saying, whether in the ghettos of the east ‘or in the bank palaces of the City [of London] or Wall Street’, and would instinctively follow the same aims and use the same methods without the need to work them out together. The question could well be posed, he went on (according to Goebbels’s summary of his comments), as to why there were Jews at all. It was the same question – again the familiar insect analogy – as why there were Colorado beetles (Kartoffelkäfer). His most basic belief – life as struggle – provided, as always, his answer. ‘Nature is ruled by the law of struggle. There will always be parasitic forms of existence to accelerate the struggle and intensify the process of selection between the strong and the weak… In nature, life always works immediately against parasites; in the existence of peoples that is not exclusively the case. From that results the Jewish danger. So there is nothing else open to modern peoples than to exterminate the Jews (Es bleibt also den modernen Völkern nichts anderes übrig, als die Juden auszurotten).’147
The Jews would use all means to defend themselves against this ‘gradual process of annihilation (allmählichen Vernichtungsprozeß)’. One of its methods was war.148 It was the same warped vision embodied in Hitler’s ‘prophecy’: Jews unleashing war, but bringing about their own destruction in the process. World Jewry, in Hitler’s view, was on the verge of a historic downfall (geschichtlichen Sturz). This would take time. He was presumably alluding to Jews out of German reach, especially in the USA, when he commented t
hat some decades would be needed ‘to cast them out of their power. That is our historic mission, which cannot be held up, but only accelerated, by the war. World Jewry thinks it is on the verge of a world victory. This world victory will not come. Instead there will be a world downfall. The peoples who have earliest recognized and fought the Jew will instead accede to world domination.’149
Four days after this conversation, on 16 May, SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop telexed the news: ‘The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more! The grand operation terminated at 20.15 hours when the Warsaw synagogue was blown up… The total number of Jews apprehended and destroyed, according to record, is 56,065…’150 A force of around 3,000 men, the vast majority from the SS, had used a tank, armoured vehicles, heavy machine-guns, and artillery to blow up and set fire to buildings which the Jews were fiercely defending and to combat the courageous resistance put up by the ghetto’s inhabitants, armed with little more than pistols, grenades, and Molotov cocktails. The month-long ghetto uprising had exacerbated Hitler’s mounting frustration with Hans Frank’s inability to maintain order in the General Government amid increasing unrest caused by SS attempts to uproot and deport 108,000 Poles from the Zamosc district in the Lublin area in order to resettle it with Germans.151 His long-standing readiness to link Jews with subversive or partisan actions made Hitler all the keener to hasten their destruction. After Himmler had discussed the matter with him on 19 June, he noted that ‘the Führer declared, after my report (Vortrag), that the evacuation of the Jews, despite the unrest that would thereby still arise in the next 3 to 4 months, was to be radically carried out and had to be seen through’.152