The situation:* England has lost this war. Like a drowning person, she grasps at every straw. Nevertheless, some of her hopes are naturally not without a certain logic … The destruction of France … has directed the glances of the British warmongers continually to the place from which they tried to start the war: to Soviet Russia.
Both countries, Soviet Russia and England, are equally interested in a Europe … rendered prostrate by a long war. Behind these two countries stands the North American Union goading them on….
Hitler next explained that with large Soviet military forces in his rear he could never assemble the strength—“particularly in the air”—to make the all-out attack on Britain which would bring her down.
Really, all available Russian forces are at our border … If circumstances should give me cause to employ the German Air Force against England, there is danger that Russia will then begin its strategy of extortion, to which I would have to yield in silence simply from a feeling of air inferiority … England will be all the less ready for peace for it will be able to pin its hopes on the Russian partner. Indeed this hope must naturally grow with the progress in preparedness of the Russian armed forces. And behind this is the mass delivery of war material from America which they hope to get in 1942 …
I have therefore, after constantly racking my brains, finally reached the decision to cut the noose before it can be drawn tight … My over-all view is now as follows:
1. France is, as ever, not to be trusted.
2. North Africa itself, insofar as your colonies, Duce, are concerned, is probably out of danger until fall.
3. Spain is irresolute and—I am afraid—will take sides only when the outcome of the war is decided …
5. An attack on Egypt before autumn is out of the question …
6. Whether or not America enters the war is a matter of indifference, inasmuch as she supports our enemy with all the power she is able to mobilize.
7. The situation in England itself is bad; the provision of food and raw materials is growing steadily more difficult. The martial spirit to make war, after all, lives only on hopes. These hopes are based solely on two assumptions: Russia and America. We have no chance of eliminating America. But it does lie in our power to exclude Russia. The elimination of Russia means, at the same time, a tremendous relief for Japan in East Asia, and thereby the possibility of a much stronger threat to American activities through Japanese intervention.
I have decided under these circumstances to put an end to the hypocritical performance in the Kremlin.
Germany, Hitler said, would not need any Italian troops in Russia. (He was not going to share the glory of conquering Russia any more than he had shared the conquest of France.) But Italy, he declared, could “give decisive aid” by strengthening its forces in North Africa and by preparing “to march into France in case of a French violation of the treaty.” This was a fine bait for the land-hungry Duce.
So far as the air war on England is concerned, we shall, for a time, remain on the defensive …
As for the war in the East, Duce, it will surely be difficult, but I do not entertain a second’s doubt as to its great success. I hope, above all, that it will then be possible for us to secure a common food-supply base in the Ukraine which will furnish us such additional supplies as we may need in the future.
Then came the excuse for not tipping off his partner earlier.
If I waited until this moment, Duce, to send you this information, it is because the final decision itself will not be made until 7 o’clock tonight …
Whatever may come, Duce, our situation cannot become worse as a result of this step; it can only improve … Should England nevertheless not draw any conclusions from the hard facts, then we can, with our rear secured, apply ourselves with increased strength to the dispatching of our enemy.
Finally Hitler described his great feeling of relief at having finally made up his mind.
… Let me say one more thing, Duce. Since I struggled through to this decision, I again feel spiritually free. The partnership with the Soviet Union, in spite of the complete sincerity of our efforts to bring about a final conciliation, was nevertheless often very irksome to me, for in some way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts and my former obligations. I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.
With hearty and comradely greetings,
Your
ADOLF HITLER114
At 3 o’clock in the morning of June 22, a bare half hour before the German troops jumped off, Ambassador von Bismarck awakened Ciano in Rome to deliver Hitler’s long missive, which the Italian Foreign Minister then telephoned to Mussolini, who was resting at his summer place at Riccione. It was not the first time that the Duce had been wakened from his sleep in the middle of the night by a message from his Axis partner, and he resented it. “Not even I disturb my servants at night,” Mussolini fretted to Ciano, “but the Germans make me jump out of bed at any hour without the least consideration.”115 Nevertheless, as soon as Mussolini had rubbed the sleep from his eyes he gave orders for an immediate declaration of war on the Soviet Union. He was now completely a prisoner of the Germans. He knew it and resented it. “I hope for only one thing,” he told Ciano, “that in this war in the East the Germans lose a lot of feathers.”116 Still, he realized that his own future now depended wholly on German arms. The Germans would win in Russia, he was sure, but he hoped that at least they would get a bloody nose.
He could not know, nor did he suspect, nor did anyone else in the West, on either side, that they would get much worse. On Sunday morning, June 22, the day Napoleon had crossed the Niemen in 1812 on his way to Moscow, and exactly a year after Napoleon’s country, France, had capitulated at Compiègne, Adolf Hitler’s armored, mechanized and hitherto invincible armies poured across the Niemen and various other rivers and penetrated swiftly into Russia. The Red Army, despite all the warnings and the warning signs, was, as General Halder noted in his diary the first day, “tactically surprised along the entire front.”* All the first bridges were captured intact. In fact, says Halder, at most places along the border the Russians were not even deployed for action and were overrun before they could organize resistance. Hundreds of Soviet planes were destroyed on the flying fields.† Within a few days tens of thousands of prisoners began to pour in; whole armies were quickly encircled. It seemed like the Feldzug in Polen all over again.
“It is hardly too much to say,” the usually cautious Halder noted in his diary on July 3 after going over the latest General Staff reports, “that the Feldzug against Russia has been won in fourteen days.” In a matter of weeks, he added, it would all be over.
* Halder uses the English word “down” here in the German text.
† The emphasis in the report is Halder’s.
* In his report on this Thomas stresses how punctual Soviet deliveries of goods to Germany were at this time. In fact, he says, they continued to be “right up to the start of the attack,” and observes, not without amusement, that “even during the last few days, shipments of India rubber from the Far East were completed [by the Russians] over express transit trains”—presumably over the Trans-Siberian Railway.12
† The Germans had kept only seven divisions in Poland, two of which were transferred to the West during the spring campaign. The troops there, Halder cracked, were scarcely enough to maintain the customs service. If Stalin had attacked Germany in June 1940, the Red Army probably could have got to Berlin before any serious resistance was organized.
* It cost King Carol his throne. On September 6 he abdicated in favor of his eighteen-year-old son, Michael, and fled with his red-haired mistress, Magda Lupescu, in a ten-car special train filled with what might be described as “loot” across Yugoslavia to Switzerland. General Ion Antonescu, chief of the fascist “Iron Guard” and a friend of Hitler, became dictator.
* Minus southern Dobrudja, which Rumania was forced to cede to Bulgaria.
* It was si
gned in Berlin on September 27, 1940, in a comic-opera setting and ceremony which I have described elsewhere (Berlin Diary, pp. 532–37). In Articles 1 and 2, respectively, Japan recognized “the leadership of Germany and Italy in the establishment of a new order in Europe,” and the two countries recognized Japan’s leadership for the same in Greater East Asia. Article 3 provided for mutual assistance should any one of the powers be attacked by the United States, though America was not specifically mentioned, only defined. To me, as I wrote in my diary that day in Berlin, the most significant thing about the pact was that it meant that Hitler was now reconciled to a long war. Ciano, who signed the pact for Italy, came to the same conclusion (Ciano Diaries, p. 296). Also, despite the disclaimer, the pact was, and was meant to be, a warning to the Soviet Union.
* Their accuracy on this occasion was later confirmed by Stalin, though not intentionally. Churchill says he received an account of Molotov’s talks in Berlin from Stalin in August 1942 “which in no essential differs from the German record,” though it was “more pithy.” (Churchill, Their Finest Hour, pp. 585–86.)
* Churchill says the air raid was timed for this occasion. “We had heard of the conference beforehand,” he later wrote, “and though not invited to join in the discussion did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.” (Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 584.)
* Molotov’s parting shot is given by Churchill, to whom it was related by Stalin later in the war. (Churchill, Their Finest Hour, p. 586.)
* Sweden, which had refused transit to the Allies during the Russo–Finnish War, permitted this fully armed division to pass through. Hungary, of course, later joined in the war against Russia.
† The italics are Hitler’s.
* A good many historians have contended that Hitler in this first Barbarossa directive did not go into detail, a misunderstanding due probably to the extremely abbreviated version given in English translation in the NCA volumes. But the complete German text given in TMWC, XXVI, pp. 47–52 discloses the full details, thus revealing how far advanced the German military plans were at this early date.36
* Although they did not learn the contents of the secret accord at Montoire, both Churchill and Roosevelt suspected the worst. The King of England sent through American channels a personal appeal to Pétain asking him not to take sides against Britain. President Roosevelt’s message to the Marshal was stern and toughly worded and warned him of the dire consequences of Vichy France’s betraying Britain. (See William L. Langer, Our Vichy Gamble, p. 97. To write this book, Professor Langer had access to German documents that eleven years later have not been released by the British and American governments.)
* The Navy’s italics.
† By this time a ramshackle British desert force of one armored division, an Indian infantry division, two infantry brigades and a Royal Tank regiment—31,000 men in all—had driven an Italian force three times as large out of Egypt and captured 38,000 prisoners at a cost of 133 killed, 387 wounded and 8 missing. The British counteroffensive, under the over-all command of General Sir Archibald Wavell, had begun on December 7 and in four days Marshal Graziani’s army was routed. What had started as a five-day limited counterattack continued until February 7, by which time the British had pushed clear across Cyrenaica, a distance of 500 miles, annihilated the entire Italian army of ten divisions in Libya, taken 130,000 prisoners, 1,240 guns and 500 tanks and lost themselves 500 killed, 1,373 wounded and 55 missing. To the skeptical British military writer General J. F. Fuller it was “one of the most audacious campaigns ever fought.” (Fuller, The Second World War, p. 98.)
The Italian Navy had also been dealt a lethal blow. On the night of November 11–12, bombers from the British carrier Illustrious (which the Luftwaffe claimed to have sunk) attacked the Italian fleet at anchor at Taranto and put out of action for many months three battleships and two cruisers. “A black day,” Ciano began his diary on November 12. “The British, without warning, have sunk the dreadnought Cavour and seriously damaged the battleships Littorio and Duilio.”
* The italics and double exclamation points are Raeder’s.
† Operation Marita was promulgated in Directive No. 20 on December 13, 1940. It called for an army of twenty-four divisions to be assembled in Rumania and to descend on Greece through Bulgaria as soon as favorable weather set in. It was signed by Hitler.53
* The strategy was essentially that laid down in Directive No. 21 of December 18, 1940. Again in comments to Brauchitsch and Halder, Hitler emphasized the importance of “wiping out large sections of the enemy” instead of forcing them to retreat. And he stressed that “the main aim [his emphasis] is to gain possession of the Baltic States and Leningrad.”
* “The war against Yugoslavia should be very popular in Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria,” Hitler sneered. He said he would give the Banat to Hungary, Macedonia to Bulgaria and the Adriatic coast to Italy.
† It had originally been set for May 15 in the first Barbarossa directive of December 18, 1940.
* On April 12, 1941, six days after the launching of his attack, Hitler issued a secret directive dividing up Yugoslavia among Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. Croatia was created as. an autonomous puppet state. The Fuehrer helped himself liberally, Germany taking territory contiguous to the old Austria and keeping under its occupation all of old Serbia as well as the copper- and coal-mining districts. Italy’s grab was left somewhat vague, but it did not amount to much.65
* Charles A. Lindbergh, the hero flyer, who had seemed to this writer to have fallen with startling naïveté, during his visits to Germany, to Nazi propaganda boasts, was already consigning Britain to defeat in his speeches to large and enthusiastic audiences in America. On April 23, 1941, at the moment of the Nazi victories in the Balkans and North Africa, he addressed 30,000 persons in New York at the first mass meeting of the newly formed America First Committee. “The British government,” he said, “has one last desperate plan: … To persuade us to send another American Expeditionary Force to Europe and to share with England militarily, as well as financially, the fiasco of this war.” He condemned England for having “encouraged the smaller nations of Europe to fight against hopeless odds.” Apparently it did not occur to this man that Yugoslavia and Greece, which Hitler had just crushed, were brutally attacked without provocation, and that they had instinctively tried to defend themselves because they had a sense of honor and because they had courage even in the face of hopeless odds. On April 28 Lindbergh resigned his commission as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve after President Roosevelt on the twenty-fifth had publicly branded him as a defeatist and an appeaser. The Secretary of War accepted the resignation.
* “It was the first time I found myself involved in a conflict between my soldierly conceptions and my duty to obey,” Field Marshal von Manstein declared on the stand at Nuremberg in discussing the Commissar Order. “Actually, I ought to have obeyed, but I said to myself that as a soldier I could not possibly co-operate in a thing like that. I told the Commander of the Army Group under which I served at that time … that I would not carry out such an order, which was against the honor of a soldier.”74
As a matter of record, the order, of course, was carried out on a large scale.
* “A man of straw,” Hitler later called him. (Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 153.)
† The emphasis is in the original order.
‡ On July 27, 1941, Keitel ordered all copies of this directive of May 13 concerning courts-martial destroyed, though “the validity of the directive,” he stipulated, “is not affected by the destruction of the copies.” The July 27 order, he added, “would itself be destroyed.” But copies of both survived and turned up at Nuremberg to haunt the High Command.
Four days before, on July 23, Keitel had issued another order marked “Top Secret”:
On July 22, the Fuehrer after receiving the Commander of the Army [Brauchitsch] issued the following order:
In view of the vast size of the occup
ied areas in the East, the forces available for establishing security will be sufficient only if all resistance is punished not by legal prosecution of the guilty, but by the spreading of such terror by the occupying forces as is alone appropriate to eradicate every inclination to resist amongst the population.77
* Churchill has graphically described how he received the news late that Saturday night while visiting in the country and how at first he thought it too fantastic to believe. (The Grand Alliance, pp. 50–55.)
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