Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)
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In October, Hitler accepted Ribbentrop’s recommendation to have Rome’s 8,000 Jews sent ‘as hostages’ to the Austrian concentration camp at Mauthausen. This followed moves by the Reich Security Head Office in Berlin, which wanted to deport them to Upper Italy to be ‘liquidated’. Anticipating possible problems with the Vatican, Ribbentrop appears to have modified the intentions in suggesting the deportation to Mauthausen. Again, the ‘action’ to round up the Jews misfired. Most of the Jewish community were able to avoid capture. Some were hidden by disgusted non-Jewish citizens. Thousands found shelter in Rome’s convents and monasteries, or in the Vatican itself. In return, the Papacy was prepared to maintain public silence on the outrage. A strong and unequivocal protest from the Pontiff might well have deterred the German occupiers, unsure of the reactions, and prevented the deportations of the Jews they could lay their hands upon. The Germans were expecting such a protest. It never came. Despite Hitler’s directive, following his Foreign Minister’s advice, those Jews captured were not, in fact, sent to Mauthausen. Of the 1,259 Jews who fell into German hands, the majority were taken straight to Auschwitz.236
Hitler’s compliance with SS demands to speed up and finish off the ‘Final Solution’ was unquestionably driven by his wish to complete the destruction of those he held responsible for the war. He wanted, now as before, to see the ‘prophecy’ he had declared in 1939 and repeatedly referred to, fulfilled. But, even more so than in the spring when he had encouraged Goebbels to turn up the volume of antisemitic propaganda, there was also the need, with backs to the wall, to hold together his closest followers in a sworn ‘community of fate’, bonded by their own knowledge of and implication in the extermination of the Jews.
On 4 October, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler spoke openly and frankly about the killing of the Jews to SS leaders gathered in the town hall in Posen, the capital of the Warthegau. He said he was ‘referring to the Jewish evacuation programme, the extermination of the Jewish people’. It was, he went on, ‘a glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and never can be written. For we know how difficult we would have made it for ourselves if, on top of the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war, we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators, and troublemakers. We would now probably have reached the 1916 – 17 stage when the Jews were still part of the body of the German people (Volkskörper).’ The mentality was identical with Hitler’s. ‘We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people,’ Himmler concluded, ‘to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us… We do not want in the end, because we have exterminated a bacillus, to become ill through the bacillus and die.’237 The vocabulary, too, was redolent of Hitler’s own. Himmler did not refer to Hitler. There was no need to do so. The key point for the Reichsführer-SS was not to assign responsibility to a single person. The crucial purpose of his speech was to stress their joint responsibility, that they were all in it together.238
Two days later, in the same Golden Hall in Posen, Himmler addressed the Reichs – and Gauleiter of the Party. The theme was the same one. He gave, as Goebbels recorded, an ‘unvarnished and candid picture’ of the treatment of the Jews.239 Himmler declared: ‘We faced the question: what should we do with the women and children? I decided here too to find a completely clear solution. I did not regard myself as justified in exterminating the men – that is to say, to kill them or have them killed – and to allow the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the earth.’ Himmler seemed to be indicating that the extension of the killing to women and children had been his initiative. He immediately, however, associated himself and the SS with a ‘commission’ (Auftrag) – ‘the most difficult which we have had so far.’240 The Gauleiter, among them Goebbels who had spoken directly with Hitler on the subject so many times, would have had no difficulty in presuming whose authority lay behind the ‘commission’. Again, the purpose of the remarkably frank disclosures on the taboo subject was plain. Himmler marked on a list those who had not attended his speech or noted its contents.241
Himmler’s speeches, ensuring that his own subordinates and the Party leadership were fully in the picture about the extermination of the Jews, had been – there can be no doubt about it – carried out with Hitler’s approval. The very next day after listening to Himmler, the Gauleiter were ordered to attend the Wolf’s Lair to hear Hitler himself give an account of the state of the war. That the Führer would speak explicitly on the ‘Final Solution’ was axiomatically ruled out. But he could now take it for granted that they understood that there was no way out. Their knowledge underlined their complicity. Unusually, Goebbels made no diary entry that day. Only the published communiqué on the meeting survives. But it is not unenlightening. ‘The entire German people know,’ Hitler had told the Reichs – and Gauleiter, ‘that it is a matter of whether they exist or do not exist. The bridges have been destroyed behind them. Only the way forward remains.’242
When (for the last time, as it turned out) Hitler addressed the Party’s ‘Old Guard’ in Munich’s Löwenbräukeller on the Putsch anniversary, 8 November, he was as defiant as ever.243 According to SD reports, the speech, broadcast on the radio, went down well – though in the main only among Party fanatics and fervent believers. Their morale was again temporarily lifted, especially by the strong hints of imminent retaliation against Britain for the bombing terror – to be unleashed during the second half of November in five major raids on Berlin itself.244 Few others could find in the empty bombast any consolation for lives of loved ones sacrificed in vain, homes destroyed, cities laid waste, hardship and misery, and a war which they recognized as to all intents and purposes lost.245 But those careless enough to voice such sentiments had to reckon with swift retribution. Their fate had been expressly indicated in Hitler’s speech. There would be no capitulation, no repeat of 1918, he had declared once again – the nightmare of that year indelibly imprinted on his psyche – and no undermining of the front by subversion at home. Any overheard subversive or defeatist remark, it was clear, would cost the person making it his or her head.246
By this time – though of course he made no hint of it in his speech – Hitler was anxious about a looming new grave military threat, one which, if not repulsed, would result in Germany’s destruction: what he took to be the certainty of an invasion in the west during the coming year. ‘The danger in the east remains,’ ran his preamble to his Directive No.51 on 3 November, ‘but a greater danger is looming in the west: the Anglo-Saxon landing!… If the enemy succeeds here in breaking through our defence on a broad front, the consequences within a short time are unforeseeable. Everything suggests that the enemy, at the latest in spring but perhaps even earlier, will move to attack the western front of Europe.’247
To his military advisers, on 20 December, he said he was certain that the invasion would take place some time after mid-February or early March. The next months would be spent in preparation for the coming great assault in the west. This, Hitler remarked, would ‘decide the war’.248
13
HOPING FOR MIRACLES
‘There are so many disagreements on the enemy side, that the coalition is bound to fall apart one day.’
Hitler, speaking to Field-Marshal von Manstein,
4 January 1944
‘I wish these prognoses of the Führer were right. We’ve been so often disappointed recently that you feel some scepticism rising up within you.’
Goebbels, 4 March 1944
‘The Führer did not know whether or when an invasion would occur, but the English had adopted measures which could only be maintained for 6–8 weeks and a serious crisis would break out in England if the invasion did not occur. He would then deploy new technical weapons which were effective within a radius of 250–300 kilometres and would transform London into a heap of ruins.’
Hitler, speaking to Mussolini, 22 April 1944
‘If we repel the invasion, then the scene in the war will be completely transformed. The Führer reckons for certain with this. He has few worries that this couldn’t succeed.’
Goebbels,7 June 1944
I
‘The year 1944 will make tough and severe demands of all Germans. The course of the war, in all its enormity, will reach its critical point during this year. We are fully confident that we will successfully surmount it.’1 This, and the prospect of new cities rising resplendently after the war from the bombed-out ruins, was all Hitler had to offer readers of his New Year proclamation in 1944. Fewer than ever of them were able to share his confidence. For the embattled soldiers at the front, Hitler’s message was no different. The military crisis of 1943 had been brought about, he told them, by sabotage and treachery by the French in North Africa and the Italians following the overthrow of Mussolini. But the greatest crisis in German history had been triumphantly mastered. However hard the fighting in the east had been, ‘Bolshevism has not achieved its goal.’ He glanced at the western Allies, and at the future: ‘The plutocratic western world can undertake its threatened attempt at a landing where it wants: it will fail!’2
Since Germany had been forced on to the defensive, experiencing only setbacks, Hitler had not changed his tune. His stance had become immobilized, fossilized. In his view, the military disasters had been the consequence of betrayal, incompetence, disobedience of orders, and, above all, weakness. He conceded not a single error or misjudgement on his own part. No capitulation; no surrender; no retreat; no repeat of 1918; hold out at all costs, whatever the odds: this was the unchanging message. Alongside this went the belief – unshakeable (apart, perhaps, from his innermost thoughts and bouts of depression during sleepless nights) but an item of blind faith, not resting on reason – that the strength to hold out would eventually lead to a turning of the tide, and to Germany’s final victory. In public, he expressed his unfounded optimism through references to the grace of Providence. As he put it to his soldiers on 1 January 1944, after overcoming the defensive period then returning to the attack to impose devastating blows on the enemy, ‘Providence will bestow victory on the people that has done most to earn it.’ His instinctive belief in reward for the strongest remained intact. ‘If, therefore, Providence grants life as the prize to those who have fought and defended the most courageously, then our people will find mercy from the just arbiter who at all times gave victory to the most meritorious.’3
However hollow such sentiments sounded to men at the various fronts, suffering untold hardships, enduring hourly danger, often realizing they would never see their loved ones again, they were, for Hitler himself, far from mere cynical propaganda. He had to believe these ideas – and did, certainly down to the summer of 1944, if not longer. The references, in public and private, to ‘Providence’ and ‘Fate’ increased as his own control over the course of the war declined.4 The views on the course of the war which he expressed to his generals, to other Nazi leaders (including private conversations with Goebbels), and to his immediate entourage gave no inkling that his own resolve was wavering, or that he had become in any way resigned to the prospect of defeat. If it was an act, then it was one brilliantly sustained, and remained substantially unchanged whatever the context or personnel involved. ‘It is impressive, with what certainty the Führer believes in his mission,’ noted Goebbels in his diary in early June 1944.5 Others who saw Hitler frequently, in close proximity, and were less impressionable than Goebbels, thought the same.6 Without the inner conviction, Hitler would have been unable to sway those around him, as he continued so often to do, to find new resolve. Without it, he would not have engaged so fanatically in bitter conflicts with his military leaders. Without it, he would have been incapable, not least, of sustaining in himself the capacity to continue, despite increasingly overwhelming odds.
The astonishing optimism did not give way, despite the mounting crises and calamities of the first half of 1944. But the self-deception involved was colossal. Hitler lived increasingly in a world of illusion, clutching as the year wore on ever more desperately at whatever straws he could find. The invasion, when it came, would be repulsed without doubt, he thought. He placed enormous hopes, too, in the devastating effect of the ‘wonder-weapons’. When they failed to match expectations, he would remain convinced that the alliance against him was fragile and would soon fall apart, as had occurred in the Seven Years War two centuries earlier following the indomitable defence of one of his heroes, Frederick the Great. Even at the very end of a catastrophic year for Germany, he would not give up hope of this happening. He would still be hoping for miracles.
He had, however, no rational ways out of the inevitable catastrophe to offer those who, in better times, had lavished their adulation upon him. Albert Speer, in a pen-picture drawn immediately after the war, saw Hitler’s earlier ‘genius’ at finding ‘elegant’ ways out of crises eroded by relentless overwork imposed on him by war’s demands, undermining the intuition which had required the more spacious and leisured lifestyle suited to an artistic temperament. The change in work-patterns – turning himself, against his natural temperament, into an obsessive workaholic, preoccupied by detail, unable to relax, surrounded by an unchanging and uninspiring entourage – had brought in its train, thought Speer, enormous mental strain together with increased inflexibility and obstinacy in decisions which had closed off all but the route to disaster.7
It was certainly the case that Hitler’s entire existence had been consumed by the prosecution of the war. The leisured times of the pre-war years were gone. The impatience with detail, detachment from day-to-day issues, preoccupation with grandiose architectural schemes, generous allocation of time for relaxation, listening to music, watching films, indulging in the indolence which had been a characteristic since his youth, had indeed given way to a punishing work-schedule in which Hitler brooded incessantly over the most detailed matters of military tactics, leaving little or no space for anything unconnected with the conduct of war in a routine essentially unchanged day in and day out. Nights with little sleep; rising late in the mornings; lengthy midday and early evening conferences, often extremely stressful, with his military leaders; a strict, spartan diet, and meals often taken alone in his room; no exercise beyond a brief daily walk with his Alsatian bitch, Blondi; the same surroundings, the same entourage; late-night monologues to try to wind down (at the expense of his bored entourage), reminiscing about his youth, the First World War, and the ‘good old times’ of the Nazi Party’s rise to power; then, finally, another attempt to find sleep: such a routine – only marginally more relaxed when he was at the Berghof – could not but be in the long run harmful to health and was scarcely conducive to calm and considered, rational reflection.
All who saw him pointed out how Hitler had aged during the war.8 He had once appeared vigorous, full of energy, to those around him. Now, his hair was greying fast, his eyes were bloodshot, he walked with a stoop, he had difficulty controlling a trembling left arm; for a man in his mid-fifties, he looked old.9 Despite his mounting hypochondria, Hitler had in fact enjoyed extremely robust health during the 1930s. But his health had started to suffer notably from 1941 onwards. Even then he spent scarcely a day bedridden through illness. But the increased numbers of pills and injections provided every day by Dr Morell – ninety varieties in all during the war and twenty-eight different pills each day – could not prevent the physical deterioration.10
By 1944, Hitler was a sick man – at times during the year extremely unwell. Cardiograms, the first taken in 1941, had revealed a worsening heart condition.11 And beyond the chronic stomach and intestinal problems that had increasingly come to plague him, Hitler had since 1942 developed symptoms, becoming more pronounced in 1944, which point with some medical certainty to the onset of Parkinson’s Syndrome. Most notably, an uncontrollable trembling of the left arm, jerking in his left leg, and a shuffling gait, were unmistakable to those who saw him at close quarters.12 But al
though the strains of the last phase of the war took their toll on him, there is no convincing evidence that his mental capacity was impaired.13 Hitler’s rages and violent mood-swings were inbuilt features of his character, their frequency in the final phase of the war a reflection of the stress from the rapidly deteriorating military conditions and his own inability to change them, bringing, as usual, wild lashings at his generals and any others on whom he could lay the blame that properly began at his own door.
In looking to the loss of ‘genius’ through pressures of overwork inappropriate to Hitler’s alleged natural talent for improvisation, Speer was offering a naïve and misleading explanation of Germany’s fate, ultimately personalizing it in the ‘demonic’ figure of Hitler.14 The adoption of such a harmfully over-burdensome style of working was no chance development. It was the direct outcome of an extreme form of personalized rule which had already by the time war began seriously eroded the more formal and regular structures of government and military command that are essential in modern states. No other war leader – not Churchill, Roosevelt, or even Stalin – was so consumed by the task of running military affairs, so unable to delegate authority. The breakdown of governmental structures in Germany had gone yet further than their erosion in the Soviet state under Stalin’s despotism. The reins of power were entirely held in Hitler’s hands. He was still backed by major power bases. None existed – whatever the growing anxieties among the military, some leading industrialists, and a number of senior figures in the state bureaucracy about the road down which he was taking them – that could bypass the Führer. All vital measures, both in military and in domestic affairs, needed his authorization. There were no overriding coordinating bodies – no war cabinet, no politburo. But Hitler, forced entirely on to the defensive in running the war, was now often almost paralysed in his thinking, and often in his actions. And in matters relating to the ‘home front’, while refusing to concede an inch of his authority he was, as Goebbels interminably bemoaned, nevertheless incapable of more than sporadic, unsystematic intervention or prevaricating inaction.