Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  Nazi leaders, for whom early optimism about repelling the invasion had within days evaporated, retained one big hope: the long-awaited ‘miracle weapons’. Not only Hitler thought these would bring a change in war-fortunes.153 More than fifty sites had been set up on the coast in the Pas de Calais from which the VI flying-bombs – early cruise missiles powered by jet engines and difficult to shoot down – could be fired off in the direction of London. Hitler had reckoned with the devastating effect of a mass attack on the British capital by hundreds of the new weapons being fired simultaneously. The weapon had then been delayed by a series of production problems. Now Hitler pressed for action. But the launch-sites were not ready. Eventually, on 12 June, ten flying-bombs were catapulted off their ramps. Four crashed on take-off; only five reached London, causing minimal damage.154 In fury, Hitler wanted to cancel production. But three days later, the sensational effect of the successful launch of 244 VIS on London persuaded him to change his mind.155 He thought the new destructive force would quickly lead to the evacuation of London and disruption of the Allied war effort.156

  The triumphalist tones of the Wehrmacht report on the launch of the VI, and of a number of newspaper articles, were equally fanciful, filling Goebbels – still anxious to shore up a mood of hold-out-at-all-costs instead of dangerous optimism – with dismay.157 The impression had been created, noted the Propaganda Minister with consternation, that the war would be over within days. He was anxious to stop such illusions. The euphoria could quickly turn into blaming the government. He ordered the reports to be toned down, and exaggerated expectations to be dampened – persuading Hitler that his own instructions to the press, guaranteed to foster the euphoric mood, follow the new guidelines.158

  The continued advance of the Allies, but also what seemed the new prospects offered by the VI, prompted Hitler to fly in the evening of 16 June from Berchtesgaden together with Keitel and Jodl and the rest of his staff to the western front to discuss the situation with his regional commanders, Rundstedt and Rommel. He wanted to boost their wavering morale by underlining the strengths of the VI, while at the same time stressing the imperative need to defend the port of Cherbourg.159 After their four Focke-Wulf Condors had landed in Metz, Hitler and his entourage drove in the early hours of the next morning in an armour-plated car to Margival, north of Soissons, where the old Führer Headquarters built in 1940 had been installed, at great expense, with new communications equipment and massively reinforced. The talks that morning took place in a nearby bomb-proof railway-tunnel.160

  Hitler, looking pale and tired, sitting hunched on a stool, fiddled nervously with his glasses and played with coloured pencils while addressing his generals, who had to remain standing.161 Rundstedt reported on the developments of the previous ten days, concluding that it was now impossible to expel the Allies from France.162 Hitler bitterly laid the blame at the door of the local commanders. Rommel countered by pointing to the hopelessness of the struggle against such massive superior force of the Allies. Hitler turned to the VI – a weapon, he said, to decide the war and make the English anxious for peace. Impressed by what they had heard, the field-marshals asked for the VI to be used against Allied beachheads, only to be told by General Erich Heinemann, the commander responsible for the launch of the flying-bomb, that the weapon was not precise enough in its targeting to allow this. Hitler promised them, however, that they would soon have jet-fighters at their disposal to gain control of the skies. As he himself knew, however, these had, in fact, only just gone into production.163

  After lunch (taken in a bunker because of the danger of air-attacks), Hitler spoke alone with Rommel. The discussion was heated at times. The field-marshal painted a bleak picture of the prospects. The western front could not be held for much longer, he stated, beseeching Hitler to seek a political solution. ‘Pay attention to your invasion front, not to the continuation of the war,’ was the blunt reply he received.164 Hitler waited no longer, and flew back to Salzburg that afternoon. At the Berghof that evening, dissatisfied at the day’s proceedings, Hitler remarked to his entourage that Rommel had lost his nerve and become a pessimist. ‘Only optimists can pull anything off today,’ he added.165

  The following day, 18 June, the Americans reached the western coast of the Cotentin peninsula, effectively cutting off the peninsula and the port of Cherbourg from reinforcements for the Wehrmacht. ‘They’re stating quite specifically that they have got through. Are they through or not?’ asked Hitler at the evening military conference. ‘Yes indeed, they’re through,’ was Jodl’s answer.166

  Eight days later, the German garrison in Cherbourg surrendered. With this port in their possession (even if it took nearly a month to repair German destruction and make use of the harbour), and almost total control of the skies, the Allies had few further worries about their own reinforcements. Advance against tenacious defence was painfully slow. But the invasion had been a success. Any prospect of forcing the Allied troops, arriving in ever greater numbers, back into the sea had long since dissolved.167 Hitler was furious that the Allies had gained the initiative. He was left now with little more than the hope that the Alliance would split.168

  When Goebbels saw him for a three-hour private discussion on 21 June, he remained resistant, however, to suggestions that the time had come to take drastic steps, finally, to introduce the ‘total war’ that the Propaganda Minister had advocated for so long. Goebbels had used one of his best contacts at Führer Headquarters, Wehrmacht adjutant General Schmundt, to engineer his visit and prepare the ground for his proposals.169 On arrival at the Berghof, Goebbels heard a report by Schmundt and Julius Schaub, the general factotum, of Hitler’s visit to the western front, and of his decision, in the light of the situation there, to remove two panzer divisions from the east. While they talked, news came in of the heaviest daytime raids yet on Berlin – destroying many of the main representative and government buildings in the centre of the city. Göring’s popularity had, unsurprisingly, sunk to an all-time low on the Obersalzberg, with Hitler raging about the Reich Marshal’s incompetence. Goebbels also had a chance to speak to Speer, who told him of the precarious situation following the American raids on the fuel plants. By August, fuel for tanks and planes would be in short supply. Drastic measures were needed to contain consumption in the civilian sector. Having seen Salzburg, on his arrival there, looking as it had done in peacetime, Goebbels’s instincts to press for new powers to take control over the revitalization of the ‘total war’ effort and the mobilization of remaining forces on the home front were sharpened still further.170

  After lunch, sitting together in the great hall of the Berghof, with its huge window opening out to a breathtaking panorama of the Alps, Goebbels fully expounded his argument. He expressed his doubts about groundless optimism, ‘not to say illusions’, about the war. ‘Total war’ had remained a mere slogan. The crisis had to be recognized before it could be overcome. A thorough reform of the Wehrmacht was urgently necessary. Göring, he had observed (here came the usual attacks on the Reich Marshal), lived in a complete fantasy world. The Propaganda Minister extended his attack to the remainder of the top military leadership. The Führer needed a Scharnhorst and a Gneisenau – the Prussian military heroes who had created the army that repelled Napoleon – not a Keitel and a Fromm (commander of the Reserve Army), he declared. Goebbels promised that he could raise a million soldiers through a rigorous reorganization of the Wehrmacht and draconian measures in the civilian sphere. The people expected and wanted tough measures. Germany was close to being plunged into a crisis which could remove any possibility of taking such measures with any prospect of success. It was necessary to act with realism, wholly detached from any defeatism, and to act now.171

  Characteristically, Hitler began his wordy reply with a potted history of the Wehrmacht. He accepted that there were some weaknesses in the organization of the Wehrmacht, and that few of its leaders were National Socialists. But to dispense with them during the war would be a nonsense (Und
ing), since there were no replacements. He defended Keitel and Fromm. The overblown organization of the Wehrmacht had been necessary for the occupation of the huge areas of the east that had been conquered. Though these had now largely been lost, a reorganization could not take place overnight. Hitler was bitter at the ‘absolute failure’ of the Luftwaffe, which he laid at Göring’s door. His own wishes had been ignored by Luftwaffe technical experts. Reform in the Luftwaffe was needed, and had already been started. He could not rely upon his generals, who had ‘swindled’ him the whole time. The war had not produced a single genius among them.

  Despite his criticisms, his answer could offer Goebbels little encouragement. All in all, Hitler concluded, the time was not ripe for the extraordinary measures the Propaganda Minister wanted. Despite Goebbels’s pleas, he wanted to proceed for the time being with the tried and tested methods. He thought that they would come through the present crises with such methods. If more serious crises took place – among them, entry of Turkey on the Allied side, the collapse of Finland, inability (which he acknowledged as a possibility) to hold the eastern front, or failure to break the bridgeheads in the west – then he would be ready to take ‘completely abnormal measures’. Goebbels summed up: ‘The Führer does not regard the crisis as sufficiently serious and compelling that it could persuade him to pull out all the stops.’172 Hitler told Goebbels that the instant he felt the need to resort to ‘final measures’, he would bestow the appropriate powers on the Propaganda Minister. But ‘for the time being he wanted to proceed along the evolutionary, not revolutionary, way’. Goebbels went away empty-handed, leaving what he regarded as one of the most serious meetings he had had with Hitler sorely disappointed.173

  Goebbels was evidently dubious about Hitler’s continued positive gloss on military prospects. He doubted, correctly, the reassurances that it ought to be possible to hold Cherbourg until the two new divisions from the east could arrive; and Hitler’s view that a massive panzer attack could then destroy the Allied bridgehead. On the ‘wonder-weapons’, however, the Führer’s expectations seemed realistic enough to the Propaganda Minister. Hitler did not, thought the Propaganda Minister, over-estimate the impact of the V1 (short for Vergeltungswaffe-1 – ‘Retaliation Weapon 1’), as Goebbels had now dubbed the flying-bomb. But he hoped to have the A4 rocket (later renamed the V2) ready for launching by August, and looked to its destructive power to help decide the war. Hitler ruled out once again any prospect of an ‘arrangement’ with Britain, but was less inclined – so Goebbels inferred – to dismiss the possibility at some point of coming to terms with the Soviet Union. This could not be entertained given the present military situation, though a significant shift in fortunes in the Far East might alter the position. As Goebbels realized, however, this was entering the realm of vague musings.174

  If Hitler had been unnerved at all by what he had heard from his commanders in the west during his short and turbulent visit a few days earlier, he had shown not the slightest trace of it during his private discussion with Goebbels. And when, the next afternoon, he again addressed his generals – adumbrating once more his belief in the survival of the fittest, emphasizing that no internal revolution was possible since the Jews were ‘gone’ and that he would mercilessly wipe out the slightest hint of internal subversion, stressing that to give in always meant ‘destruction… in the long run complete destruction’, that the current struggle was for Germany’s very existence, and, underlining his unshaken belief that he had been called by Providence, that the dangers would be surmounted, that ‘this new state will never capitulate’ – he again performed to perfection the role of Führer, with no hint of weakness or doubt.175 He could still enthuse his audience – at least momentarily.176

  That same day, 22 June 1944, exactly three years since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army launched its new big offensive in the east. Hitler had predicted that Stalin would not be able to resist the appeal of launching his offensive on that day.177 The main thrust of the massive Soviet offensive – the biggest undertaken, deploying almost 2½ million men and over 5,000 tanks, backed by 5,300 planes, and given by Stalin the code-name ‘Bagration’ after a military hero in the destruction of Napoleon’s Grand Army in 1812 – was aimed at the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Centre.178 Based on fatally flawed intelligence relayed to Chief of Staff Zeitzler by the head of the eastern military intelligence service, Reinhard Gehlen, German preparations had, in fact, anticipated an offensive on the southern part of the front, where all the reserves and the bulk of the panzer divisions had been concentrated. Army Group Centre had been left with a meagre thirty-eight divisions, comprizing only half as many men and a fifth of the number of tanks as the Red Army had, in a section of the front stretching over some 800 miles.179 Only belatedly, it appears, did the realization dawn, against the continued advice of Chief of the General Staff Zeitzler, that the offensive was likely to come against Army Group Centre.180 But when Field-Marshal Ernst Busch, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, recommended shortening the front to more defensible limits, Hitler contemptuously asked whether he too was one of those generals ‘who always looked to the rear’.181

  The relatively mild beginnings of the offensive then misled Hitler’s military advisers into thinking initially that it was a decoy.182 However, the initial opening was sufficient to breach the German defences around Vitebsk. Suddenly, the first big wave of tanks swept through the gap. Others rapidly followed. Bombing and heavy artillery attacks accompanied the assault. Busch appealed to Hitler to abandon the ‘fortified places’ (Feste Plätze) in Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev, and Bobruisk, which had been been established in the spring in a vain attempt to create a set of key defensive strongholds – fortresses to be held come what may under the command of selected tough generals.183

  Hitler’s answer could have been taken as read. The ‘fortified places’ were to be held at all costs; every square metre of land was to be defended.184 Busch, one of Hitler’s fervent admirers among the generals, accepted the order without demur. He sought to carry it out unquestioningly as a demonstration of his loyalty. The consequences were predictable. The Red Army swept around the strongholds, and the German not Soviet divisions were tied down, then encircled and finally destroyed by the forces following in the wake of the advance troops.185 The Wehrmacht divisions lost through such a disastrous tactical error would have been vital in defending other parts of the front.186

  Within two days of the start of the offensive, the 3rd Panzer Army in Vitebsk had been cut off, followed a further two days later by the encirclement of the 9th Army near Bobruisk. By the first days of July, the 4th Army faced the same fate near Minsk. Reinforcements drawn from the southern part of the front could not prevent its destruction. By the time the offensive through the centre slowed by mid-July, the Soviet breakthrough had advanced well over 200 miles, driven a gap 100 miles wide through the front, and was within striking range of Warsaw. Army Group Centre had by then lost twenty-eight divisions with 350,000 men in a catastrophe even greater than that at Stalingrad. By this time, devastating offensives in the Baltic and in the south were gathering momentum.187 The next months would bring even worse calamities and, together with the unstoppable advance of the Allies in the west, would usher in the final phase of the war.

  VIII

  Hitler’s response to the military disasters of the early summer was characteristic: he blamed others, and sacked his commanders. Whatever Hitler’s capabilities as a military strategist had been, they had paid dividends only while Germany held the whip-hand and lightning offensives had been possible. Once – irrevocably after the failure of ‘Citadel’ in summer 1943 – a defensive strategy had become the only one available, Hitler’s inadequacies as supreme German warlord were fully exposed. As the records of the military conferences with his advisers indicate, it was not that he was wholly devoid of tactical knowledge, despite his lack of formal training. Nor was it the case, as was sometimes adumbrated in post-war apologetics of German generals,
that professionals who knew better were invariably forced into compliance with the lunatic orders of an amateur military bungler. As the verbatim notes of the conferences show, Hitler’s tactics were frequently neither inherently absurd, nor did they usually stand in crass contradiction to the military advice he was receiving.

  Even so: at points of crisis, the tensions and conflicts invariably surfaced. And by 1944, the individual military crises were accumulating into one almighty, life-or-death crisis for the regime itself. Hitler’s political adroitness was by this time long gone. He dismissed out of hand all contemplation of a possible attempt to reach a political solution. Bridges had been burnt (as he had indicated on several occasions); there was no way back. And, since he refused any notion of negotiating from a position other than one of strength, from which all his earlier successes had derived, there was in any case no opportunity to seek a peace settlement. The gambling instinct which had stood Hitler in such good stead down to 1941 had long since lost its effectiveness in what had become a backs-to-the-wall struggle. But the worse the situation became, the more disastrously self-destructive became Hitler’s other overriding and irrational instinct – that ‘will’ alone would triumph over all adversity, even grossly disparate levels of manpower and weaponry. As we have seen, he was wont, on occasion, to compare – absurdly – the adversity he had often faced in his rise to power with the current adversity in the throes of a world war. In a sense, his own invariable resort – all the more, the worse the crisis became – to a simple belief in ‘triumph of the will’ as the way out was indeed a replication of his attitude at critical junctures during the ‘time of struggle’ (such as the Party Leadership crisis of July 1921 or the crisis surrounding Gregor Strasser in December 1932). The innate self-destructive tendency which had been implicit in his all-or-nothing stance at such times now conveyed itself, catastrophically, to military leadership.