* Kleist confirmed this to Liddell Hart: “The Fourth Panzer Army … could have taken Stalingrad without a fight at the end of July, but was diverted south to help me in crossing the Don. I did not need its aid, and it merely congested the roads I was using. When it turned north again a fortnight later the Russians had gathered just sufficient forces at Stalingrad to check it.” By that time Kleist needed the additional tank force. “We could have reached our goal [the Grozny oil] if my forces had not been drawn away … to help the attack on Stalingrad,” he added. (Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk, pp. 169–71.)
* Halder relates that “quite by accident” he came across in the Ukraine about that time a book about Stalin’s defeat of General Denikin between the Don bend and Stalingrad during the Russian Civil War. He says the situation then was very similar to that of 1942 and that Stalin exploited “masterfully” Denikin’s weak defenses along the Don. “Hence,” he adds, “came the changing of the name of the city from ‘Tsaritsyn’ to ‘Stalingrad.’”
* The sacking of Halder was a loss not only to the Army but to historians of the Third Reich, for his invaluable diary ends on September 24, 1942. He was eventually arrested, placed in the concentration camp at Dachau along with such illustrious prisoners as Schuschnigg and Schacht and liberated by U.S. forces at Niederdorf, South Tyrol, on April 28, 1945. Since then, up to the time of writing, he has collaborated with the U.S. Army in a number of military historical studies of World War II. His generosity to this writer in answering queries and pointing out sources has already been noted.
† The faithful and fanatically loyal General Jodl, Chief of Operations at OKW, also was in Hitler’s doghouse at this time. He had opposed the sacking of Field Marshal List and General Halder and his defense of them sent Hitler into such a rage that for months he refused to shake hands with Jodl or dine with him or any other staff officer. Hitler was on the point of firing Jodl at the end of January 1943 and replacing him with General Paulus, but it was too late. Paulus, as we shall shortly see, was no longer available.
* Stumme, who was acting commander in the absence of Rommel, had died of a heart attack the first night of the British offensive while fleeing on foot over the desert from a British patrol that had almost captured him.
† The next day, November 4—after telling Bayerlein, “Hitler’s order is a piece of unparalleled madness. I can’t go along with this any longer”—General von Thoma donned a clean uniform, with the insignia of his rank and his decorations, stood by his burning tank until a British unit arrived, surrendered and in the evening dined with Montgomery at his headquarters mess.
* Rommel’s losses at El Alamein were 59,000 killed, wounded and captured, of whom 34,000 were Germans, out of a total force of 96,000 men.
* I learn from Hitler’s captured daily calendar book that the celebration had been moved from the old Buergerbräukeller, where the putsch had taken place, to a more elegant beer hall in Munich, the Loewenbräukeller. The Buergerbräukeller, it will be remembered, had been wrecked by a time bomb which had just missed killing the Fuehrer on the night of November 8, 1939.
* General Giraud at that moment was arriving in Algiers. He had escaped from a German POW camp and settled in the south of France, where he was taken off by a British submarine on November 5 and brought to Gibraltar to confer with Eisenhower just before the landings.
† “During the night,” Ciano wrote in his diary on November 9, “Ribbentrop telephoned. Either the Duce or I must go to Munich as soon as possible. Laval will also be there. I wake up the Duce. He is not very anxious to leave, especially since he is not feeling very well. I shall go.”
* It is only fair to point out that Hitler strongly suspected, not without reason, that the French fleet might try to sail for Algeria and join the Allies. Despite his treacherous dealings with the Germans and his violent hatred of the British, Admiral Darlan, who happened to be visiting an ailing son at Algiers, had been pressed into service by Eisenhower as French commander in North Africa not only because he seemed to be the only officer who could get the French Army and Navy to cease resisting the Anglo–American landings but also in the hope that he could get the admiral commanding in Tunisia to oppose the German landings there and also induce the French fleet in Toulon to make a dash for North Africa. The hopes proved vain, although Darlan tried. To his message ordering Admiral de Laborde to bring the fleet over from Toulon he received an answer in one expressive—if indelicate—word: “Merde.” (See the Procès du M. Pétain.)
* Some 125,000 Germans, according to General Eisenhower, out of a total of 240,000 Axis troops, the rest being Italian. This number includes only those who surrendered during the last week of the campaign—May 5 to 12, 1943. (Crusade in Europe, p. 156.)
* In his postwar memoirs, Field Marshal von Manstein says that on December 19, in disobedience to Hitler’s orders, he actually directed the Sixth Army to begin to break out of Stalingrad to the southwest and make a junction with the Fourth Panzer Army. He publishes the text of the directive. But it contained certain reservations and Paulus, who still was under orders from Hitler not to break out, must have been greatly confused by it. “This,” declares Manstein, “was our one and only chance of saving the Sixth Army.” (Manstein, Lost Victories, pp. 336–41, 562–63.)
* According to the figure given by the Bonn government in 1958. Many of the prisoners died during an epidemic of typhus in the following spring.
† Hitler was correct in his forecast, except for the timing. By July of the following summer Paulus and Seydlitz, who became the leaders of the so-called National Committee of Free Germany, did take to the air over the Moscow radio to urge the Army to eliminate Hitler.
Book Five
BEGINNING OF THE END
27
THE NEW ORDER
NO COMPREHENSIVE BLUEPRINT for the New Order was ever drawn up, but it is clear from the captured documents and from what took place that Hitler knew very well what he wanted it to be: a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people would be made the slaves of the German master race and whose “undesirable elements”—above all, the Jews, but also many Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them—would be exterminated.
The Jews and the Slavic peoples were the Untermenschen—subhumans. To Hitler they had no right to live, except as some of them, among the Slavs, might be needed to toil in the fields and the mines as slaves of their German masters. Not only were the great cities of the East, Moscow, Leningrad and Warsaw, to be permanently erased* but the culture of the Russians and Poles and other Slavs was to be stamped out and formal education denied them. Their thriving industries were to be dismantled and shipped to Germany and the people themselves confined to the pursuits of agriculture so that they could grow food for Germans, being allowed to keep for themselves just enough to subsist on. Europe itself, as the Nazi leaders put it, must be made “Jew-free.”
“What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest,” declared Heinrich Himmler on October 4, 1943, in a confidential address to his S.S. officers at Posen. By this time Himmler, as chief of the S.S. and the entire police apparatus of the Third Reich, was next to Hitler in importance, holding the power of life and death not only over eighty million Germans but over twice that many conquered people.
What the nations [Himmler continued] can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnaping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves to our Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest to me.
Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only in so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished …1
Long before Himmler’s Posen speech in 1943 (to which we shall return, for it covers other aspects of the New Order) the Nazi chiefs had laid down their thoughts a
nd plans for enslaving the people of the East.
By October 15, 1940, Hitler had decided on the future of the Czechs, the first Slavic people he had conquered. One half of them were to be “assimilated,” mostly by shipping them as slave labor to Germany. The other half, “particularly” the intellectuals, were simply to be, in the words of a secret report on the subject, “eliminated.”2
A fortnight before, on October 2, the Fuehrer had clarified his thoughts about the fate of the Poles, the second of the Slavic peoples to be conquered. His faithful secretary, Martin Bormann, has left a long memorandum on the Nazi plans, which Hitler outlined to Hans Frank, the Governor General of rump Poland, and to other officials.3
The Poles [Hitler “emphasized”] are especially born for low labor … There can be no question of improvement for them. It is necessary to keep the standard of life low in Poland and it must not be permitted to rise … The Poles are lazy and it is necessary to use compulsion to make them work … The Government General [of Poland] should be used by us merely as a source of unskilled labor … Every year the laborers needed by the Reich could be procured from there.
As for the Polish priests,
they will preach what we want them to preach. If any priest acts differently, we shall make short work of him. The task of the priest is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid and dull-witted.
There were two other classes of Poles to be dealt with and the Nazi dictator did not neglect mention of them.
It is indispensable to bear in mind that the Polish gentry must cease to exist; however cruel this may sound, they must be exterminated wherever they are …
There should be one master only for the Poles, the German. Two masters, side by side, cannot and must not exist. Therefore, all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia are to be exterminated. This sounds cruel, but such is the law of life.
This obsession of the Germans with the idea that they were the master race and that the Slavic peoples must be their slaves was especially virulent in regard to Russia. Erich Koch, the roughneck Reich Commissar for the Ukraine, expressed it in a speech at Kiev on March 5, 1943.
We are the Master Race and must govern hard but just … I will draw the very last out of this country. I did not come to spread bliss … The population must work, work, and work again … We definitely did not come here to give out manna. We have come here to create the basis for victory.
We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here.4
Nearly a year before, on July 23, 1942, when the German armies in Russia were nearing the Volga and the oil fields of the Caucasus, Martin Bormann, Hitler’s party secretary and, by now, right-hand man, wrote a long letter to Rosenberg reiterating the Fuehrer’s views on the subject. The letter was summed up by an official in Rosenberg’s ministry:
The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we don’t need them, they may die. Therefore compulsory vaccination and German health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives or practice abortion—the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to 100…. Every educated person is a future enemy. Religion we leave to them as a means of diversion. As for food they won’t get any more than is absolutely necessary. We are the masters. We come first.5
When the German troops first entered Russia they were in many places hailed as liberators by a population long ground down and terrorized by Stalin’s tyranny. There were, in the beginning, wholesale desertions among the Russian soldiers. Especially in the Baltic, which had been under Soviet occupation but a short time, and in the Ukraine, where an incipient independence movement had never been quite stamped out, many were happy to be freed from the Soviet yoke—even by the Germans.
There were a few in Berlin who believed that if Hitler played his cards shrewdly, treating the population with consideration and promising relief from Bolshevik practices (by granting religious and economic freedom and making true co-operatives out of the collectivized farms) and eventual self-government, the Russian people could be won over. They might then not only co-operate with the Germans in the occupied regions but in the unoccupied ones strive for liberation from Stalin’s harsh rule. If this were done, it was argued, the Bolshevik regime itself might collapse and the Red Army disintegrate, as the Czarist armies had done in 1917.
But the savagery of the Nazi occupation and the obvious aims of the German conquerors, often publicly proclaimed, to plunder the Russian lands, enslave their peoples and colonize the East with Germans soon destroyed any possibility of such a development.
No one summed up this disastrous policy and all the opportunities it destroyed better than a German himself, Dr. Otto Bräutigam, a career diplomat and the deputy leader of the Political Department of Rosenberg’s newly created Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. In a bitter confidential report to his superiors on October 25, 1942, Bräutigam dared to pinpoint the Nazi mistakes in Russia.
In the Soviet Union we found on our arrival a population weary of Bolshevism, which waited longingly for new slogans holding out the prospect of a better future for them. It was Germany’s duty to find such slogans, but they remained unuttered. The population greeted us with joy as liberators and placed themselves at our disposal.
Actually, there was a slogan but the Russian people soon saw through it.
With the inherent instinct of the Eastern peoples [Bräutigam continued], the primitive man soon found out that for Germany the slogan “Liberation from Bolshevism” was only a pretext to enslave the Eastern peoples according to her own methods … The worker and peasant soon perceived that Germany did not regard them as partners of equal rights but considered them only as the objective of her political and economic aims … With unequaled presumption, we put aside all political knowledge and … treat the peoples of the occupied Eastern territories as “Second-Class Whites” to whom Providence has merely assigned the task of serving as slaves for Germany …
There were two other developments, Bräutigam declared, which had turned the Russians against the Germans: the barbaric treatment of Soviet prisoners of war and the shanghaiing of Russian men and women for slave labor.
It is no longer a secret from friend or foe that hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners of war have died of hunger or cold in our camps … We now experience the grotesque picture of having to recruit millions of laborers from the occupied Eastern territories after prisoners of war have died of hunger like flies …
In the prevailing limitless abuse of the Slavic humanity, “recruiting” methods were used which probably have their origin only in the blackest periods of the slave traffic. A regular man hunt was inaugurated. Without consideration of health or age the people were shipped to Germany …*
German policy and practice in Russia had “brought about the enormous resistance of the Eastern peoples,” this official concluded.
Our policy has forced both Bolshevists and Russian nationalists into a common front against us. The Russian fights today with exceptional bravery and self-sacrifice for nothing more or less than recognition of his human dignity.
Closing his thirteen-page memorandum on a positive note Dr. Bräutigam asked for a complete change of policy. “The Russian people,” he argued, “must be told something concrete about their future.”6
But this was a voice in the Nazi wilderness. Hitler, as we have seen, already had laid down, before the attack began, his directives on what would be done with Russia and the Russians* and he was not a man who could be persuaded by any living German to change them by one iota.
On July 16, 1941, less than a month after the commencement of the Russian campaign but when it was already evident from the initial German successes that a large slice of the Soviet Union would soon be within grasp, Hitler convoked Goering, Keitel, Rosenberg, Bormann and Lammers (the last, head of the Reich Chancellery) to his headquarters in East Prussia
to remind them of his aims in the newly conquered land. At last his goal so clearly stated in Mein Kampf of securing a vast German Lebensraum in Russia was in sight and it is clear from the confidential memorandum of the meeting drawn up by Bormann (which showed up at Nuremberg)7 that he wanted his chief lieutenants to understand well what he intended to do with it. His intentions, he admonished, must however not be “publicized.”
There is no need for that [Hitler said] but the main thing is that we ourselves know what we want … Nobody must be able to recognize that it initiates a final settlement. This need not prevent our taking all necessary measures—shooting, resettling, etc.—and we shall take them.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Page 149