by Ian Kershaw
Goebbels himself had played no small part over the years in pushing for a ‘radical solution’. He had been one of the most important and high-placed of the party activists pressing Hitler on numerous occasions to take radical action on the ‘Jewish Question’. The Security Police had been instrumental in gradually converting an ideological imperative into an extermination plan. Many others, at different levels of the regime, had contributed in greater or lesser measure to the continuing and untrammelled process of radicalization. Complicity was massive, from the Wehrmacht leadership and captains of industry down to party hacks, bureaucratic minions, and ordinary Germans hoping for their own material advantage through the persecution then deportation of a helpless, but unloved, minority which had been deemed to be the implacable enemy of the new ‘people’s community’.
But Goebbels knew what he was talking about in singling out Hitler’s role. This had often been indirect, rather than overt. It had consisted of authorizing more than directing. And the hate-filled tirades, though without equal in their depth of inhumanity, remained at a level of generalities. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt about it: Hitler’s role had been decisive and indispensable in the road to the ‘Final Solution’. Had he not come to power in 1933 and had a national-conservative government, perhaps a military dictatorship, gained power instead, discriminatory legislation against Jews would in all probability still have been introduced in Germany. But without Hitler, and the unique regime he headed, the creation of a programme to bring about the physical extermination of the Jews of Europe would have been unthinkable.
22
Last Big Throw of the Dice
I
Snow still lay on the ground at the Wolf ’s Lair. An icy wind gave no respite from the cold. But, at the end of February 1942, there were the first signs that spring was not far away. Hitler could not wait for the awful winter to pass. He felt he had been let down by his military leaders, his logistical planners, his transport organizers; that his army commanders had been faint-hearts, not tough enough when faced with crisis; that his own strength of will and determination had alone staved off catastrophe. The winter crisis had sharpened his sense, never far from the surface, that he had to struggle not just against external enemies, but against those who were inadequate, incapable, or even disloyal, in his own ranks. But the crisis had been surmounted. This in itself was a psychological blow to the enemy, which had also suffered grievously. It was necessary now to attack again as soon as possible; to destroy this mortally weakened enemy in one final great heave. This was how his thoughts ran. In the insomniac nights in his bunker, he was not just wanting to erase the memories of the crisis-ridden cold, dark months. He could hardly wait for the new offensive in the east to start – the push to the Caucasus, Leningrad, and Moscow, which would wrestle back the initiative once more. It would be a colossal gamble. Should it fail, the consequences would be unthinkable.
For those in the Führer Headquarters not preoccupied with military planning, life was dull and monotonous. Hitler’s secretaries would go for a daily walk to the next village and back. Otherwise, they whiled away the hours. Chatting, a film in the evenings, and the obligatory gathering each afternoon in the Tea House and late at night again for tea made up the day. ‘Since the tea-party always consists of the same people, there is no stimulation from outside, and nobody experiences anything on a personal level,’ Christa Schroeder wrote to a friend in February 1942, ‘the conversation is often apathetic and tedious, wearying, and irksome. Talk always runs along the same lines.’ Hitler’s monologues – outlining his expansive vision of the world – were reserved for lunch or the twilight hours. At the afternoon tea-gatherings, politics were never discussed. Anything connected with the war was taboo. There was nothing but small-talk. Those present either had no independent views, or kept them to themselves. Hitler’s presence dominated. But it seldom now did much to animate. He was invariably tired, but found it hard to sleep. His insomnia made him reluctant to go to bed. His entourage often wished he would do so. The tedium for those around him seemed at times incessant. Occasionally, it was relieved in the evenings by listening to records – Beethoven symphonies, selections from Wagner, or Hugo Wolf ’s Lieder. Hitler would listen with closed eyes. But he alwayswanted the same records. His entourage knew the numbers off by heart. He would call out: ‘Aida, last act,’ and someone would shout to one of the manservants: ‘Number hundred-and-something.’
The war was all that mattered to Hitler. Yet, cocooned in the strange world of the Wolf ’s Lair, he was increasingly severed from its realities, both at the front and at home. Detachment ruled out all vestiges of humanity. Even towards those in his own entourage who had been with him for many years, there was nothing resembling real affection, let alone friendship; genuine fondness was reserved only for his young Alsatian. Human life and suffering were of no consequence to him. He never visited a field-hospital, nor the homeless after bomb-raids. He saw no massacres, went near no concentration camp, viewed no compound of starving prisoners-of-war. His enemies were in his eyes like vermin to be stamped out. But his profound contempt for human existence extended to his own people. Decisions costing the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers were made – perhaps it was only thus possible to make them – without consideration for any human plight. The hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed were merely an abstraction, the suffering a necessary and justified sacrifice in the ‘heroic struggle’ for the survival of the people.
Hitler was by now becoming a remote figure for the German people, a distant warlord. His image had to be refashioned by Goebbels to match the change which the Russian campaign had brought about. The première of the lavish new film The Great King in early 1942 allowed Goebbels to stylize Hitler by association as a latter-day Frederick the Great, isolated in his majesty, conducting a heroic struggle for his people against mighty enemies and ultimately overcoming crisis and calamity to emerge triumphant. It was a portrayal which increasingly matched Hitler’s self-image during the last years of the war.
But the changed image could do nothing to alter reality: the German people’s bonds with Hitler were starting to loosen. And as the war turned inexorably against Germany, Hitler cast around all the more for scapegoats.
An early complication in 1942 arose with the loss of his armaments minister, Dr Fritz Todt, in a fatal air-crash on the morning of 8 February, soon after taking off from the airfield at the Führer Headquarters.
Todt had masterminded the building of the motorways and the Westwall for Hitler. In March 1940 he had been given the task, as a Reich Minister, of coordinating the production of weapons and munitions. Yet a further major office had come his way in July 1941 with the centralization in his hands of control over energy and waterways. In the second half of the year, as the first signs of serious labour shortage in German industry became evident, Todt was commissioned with organizing the mass deployment within Germany of Soviet prisoners-of-war and civilian forced labourers. The accumulation of offices pivotal to the war economy was an indication of Hitler’s high esteem for Todt. This was reciprocated. Todt was a convinced National Socialist. But by late 1941, fully aware of the massive armaments potential of the USA and appalled at the logistical incompetence of the Wehrmacht’s economic planning during the eastern campaign, he had become deeply pessimistic, certain that the war could not be won.
On the morning of 7 February, Todt had flown to Rastenburg to put to Hitler proposals which had arisen from his meeting a few days earlier with representatives of the armaments industries. The meeting that afternoon was plainly anything but harmonious. In depressed mood, and after a restless night, Todt left next morning to head for Munich in a twin-engined Heinkel 111. Shortly after leaving the runway, the plane turned abruptly, headed to land again, burst into flames, and crashed. The bodies of Todt and four others on board were yanked with long poles from the burning wreckage. An official inquiry ruled out sabotage. But suspicion was never fully allayed. What caused the crash remaine
d a mystery.
Hitler, according to witnesses who saw him at close quarters, was deeply moved by the loss of Todt, whom, it was said, he still greatly admired and needed for the war economy. Even if, as was later often claimed, the breach between him and Todt had become irreparable on account of the Armaments Minister’s forcefully expressed conviction that the war could not be won, it is not altogether obvious why Hitler would have been so desperate as to resort to having Todt killed in an arranged air-crash at his own headquarters in circumstances guaranteed to prompt suspicion. Had he been insistent upon dispensing with Todt’s services, ‘retirement’ on ill-health grounds would have offered a simpler solution. The only obvious beneficiary from Todt’s demise was the successor Hitler now appointed with remarkable haste: his highly ambitious court architect, Albert Speer. But the only ‘evidence’ later used to hint at any involvement by Speer was his presence in the Führer Headquarters at the time of the crash and his rejection, a few hours before the planned departure, of an offer of a lift in Todt’s aeroplane. Whatever the cause of the crash that killed Todt, it brought Albert Speer, till then in the second rank of Nazi leaders and known only as Hitler’s court architect and a personal favourite of the Führer, into the foreground.
Speer’s meteoric rise in the 1930s had rested on shrewd exploitation of the would-be architect Hitler’s building mania, coupled with his own driving ambition and undoubted organizational talent. Hitler liked Speer. ‘He is an artist and has a spirit akin to mine,’ he said. ‘He is a building-person like me, intelligent, modest, and not an obstinate military-head.’ Speer later remarked that he was the nearest Hitler came to having a friend. Now, Speer was in exactly the right place – close to Hitler – when a successor to Todt was needed. Six hours after the Reich Minister’s sudden death, Speer was appointed to replace him in all his offices. The appointment came as a surprise to many – including, if we are to take his own version of accounts at face value, Speer himself. But Speer was certainly anticipating succeeding Todt in construction work – and possibly more. At any rate, he lost no time in using Hitler’s authority to establish for himself more extensive powers than Todt had ever enjoyed. Speer would soon enough have to battle his way through the jungle of rivalries and intrigues which constituted the governance of the Third Reich. But once Hitler, the day after returning to Berlin for Todt’s state funeral on 12 February (at which he himself delivered the oration as his eyes welled with, perhaps crocodile, tears), had publicly backed Speer’s supremacy in armaments production in a speech to leaders of the armaments industries, the new minister, still not quite thirty-eight years of age, found that ‘I could do within the widest limits practically what I wanted’. Building on the changes his predecessor had initiated, adding his own organizational flair and ruthless drive, and drawing on his favoured standing with Hitler, Speer proved an inspired choice. Over the next two years, despite intensified Allied bombing and the fortunes of war ebbing strongly away from Germany, he presided over a doubling of armaments output.
Hitler was full of confidence when Goebbels had chance to speak at length with him during his stay in Berlin following Todt’s funeral. After the travails of the winter, the Dictator had reason to feel as if the corner was turned. During the very days that he was in Berlin the British were suffering two mighty blows to their prestige. Two German battleships, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, had steamed out of Brest and, under the very noses of the British, passed through the English Channel with minimal damage, heading for safer moorings at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel. Hitler could scarcely contain his delight. At the same time, the news was coming in from the Far East of the imminent fall of Singapore. Most of all, Hitler was content about the prospects in the east. The problems of winter had been overcome, and important lessons learned. ‘Troops who can cope with such a winter are unbeatable,’ Goebbels noted. Now the great thaw had set in. ‘The Führer is planning a few very hard and crushing offensive thrusts, which are already in good measure prepared and will doubtless lead gradually to the smashing of Bolshevism.’
II
On 15 March, Hitler was back again in Berlin. The serious losses over the winter made it essential that he attend the midday ceremony on Heroes’ Memorial Day. In his speech, he portrayed the previous months as a struggle above all against the elements in a winter the like of which had not been seen for almost a century and a half. ‘But one thing we know today,’ he declared. ‘The Bolshevik hordes, which were unable to defeat the German soldiers and their allies this winter, will be beaten by us into annihilation this coming summer.’
Many people were too concerned about the rumoured reductions in food rations to pay much attention to the speech. Goebbels was well aware that food supplies had reached a critical point and that it would need a ‘work of art’ to put across to the people the reasons for the reductions. He acknowledged that the cuts would lead to a ‘crisis in the internal mood’. Hitler, in full recognition of the sensitivity of the situation, had summoned the Propaganda Minister to his headquarters to discuss the issue before ration-cuts were announced. Goebbels’s view was that the deterioration in morale at home demanded tough measures to counter it. He was determined to take the matter to the Führer, and hoped for the support of Bormann and the party in getting Hitler to intervene to back more radical measures. He felt that, as things were, a radical approach to the law, necessary in total war, was being sabotaged by representatives of the formal legal system. He approved of Bormann’s demands for tougher sentences for black-marketeering. And he took it upon himself to press Hitler to change the leadership of the Justice Ministry, which since Gürtner’s death the previous year had been run by the State Secretary, Franz Schlegelberger. ‘The bourgeois elements still dominate there,’ he commented, ‘and since the heavens are high and the Führer far away, it’s extraordinarily difficult to succeed against these stubborn and listlessly working authorities.’ It was in this mood – determined to persuade Hitler to support radical measures, attack privilege, and castigate the state bureaucracy (above all judges and lawyers) – that Goebbels arrived at the Wolf ’s Lair on the ice-cold morning of 19 March.
He met a Hitler showing clear signs of the strain he had been under during the past months, in a state of mind that left him more than open to Goebbels’s radical suggestions. He needed no instruction about the mood in Germany, and the impact the reduction in food rations would have. Lack of transport prevented food being brought from the Ukraine, he complained. The Transport Ministry was blamed for the shortage of locomotives. He was determined to take tough measures. Goebbels then lost no time in berating the ‘failure’ of the judicial system. Hitler did not demur. Here, too, he was determined to proceed with ‘the toughest measures’. Goebbels paraded before Hitler his suggestion for a new comprehensive law to punish offenders against the ‘principles of National Socialist leadership of the people’. He wanted the Reich Ministry of Justice placing in new hands, and pressed for Otto Thierack, ‘a real National Socialist’, an SA-Gruppenführer, and currently President of the notorious People’s Court – responsible for dealing with cases of treason and other serious offences against the regime – to take the place left by Gürtner. Five months later, Hitler would make the appointment that Goebbels had wanted, and, in Thierack’s hands, the capitulation of the judicial system to the police state would become complete.
For now, Hitler placated Goebbels with a suggestion to prepare the ground for a radical assault on social privilege by recalling the Reichstag and having it bestow upon him ‘a special plenipotentiary power’ so that ‘the evil-doers know that he is covered in every way by the people’s community’. Given the powers which Hitler already possessed, the motive was purely populist. An attack on the civil servants and judges, and upon the privileged in society – or, as Hitler put it, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘neglecters of duty in public functions’ – could not fail to be popular with the masses. Up to this point, judges could not be dismissed – not even by the Führer. T
here were limits, too, to his rights of intervention in the military sphere. The case of Colonel-General Erich Hoepner still rankled deeply. Hitler had sacked Hoepner in January and dismissed him from the army in disgrace for retreating in disobedience to his ‘Halt Order’. Hoepner had then instituted a law-suit against the Reich over the loss of his pension rights – and won. With Hitler’s new powers, this could never happen again. Examples could be set in the military and civilian sector to serve as deterrents to others and ‘clear the air’.
‘In such a mood,’ wrote Goebbels the next day, ‘my suggestions for the radicalization of our war-leadership naturally had an absolutely positive effect on the Führer. I only need to touch a topic and I have already got my way. Everything that I put forward individually is accepted piece for piece by the Führer without contradiction.’
The encouragement of Hitler to back the radicalization of the home front continued after Goebbels’s return from the Wolf ’s Lair. Apart from the Propaganda Minister, it came in particular from Bormann and Himmler. On 26 March, the SD reported on a ‘crisis of confidence’ resulting from the failure of the state to take a tough enough stance against black-marketeers and their corrupt customers among the well-placed and privileged. Himmler, it seems, had directly prompted the report; Bormann made Hitler aware of it. Three days later, Goebbels castigated black-marketeering in Das Reich, publicizing two instances of the death-penalty being imposed on profiteers.
It was on this same evening, that of 29 March, that Hitler treated his small audience in the Wolf ’s Lair to a prolonged diatribe on lawyers and the deficiencies of the legal system, concluding that ‘every jurist must be defective by nature, or would become so in time’.
This was only a few days after he had personally intervened in a blind rage with acting Justice Minister Schlegelberger and, when he proved dilatory, with the more eagerly compliant Roland Freisler (later the infamous President of the People’s Court as successor to Thierack but at this time Second State Secretary in the Justice Ministry), to insist on the death-penalty for a man named Ewald Schlitt. This was on no more solid basis than the reading of a sensationalized account in a Berlin evening paper of how an Oldenburg court had sentenced Schlitt to only five years in a penitentiary for a horrific physical assault – according to the newspaper account – that had led to the death of his wife in an asylum. The court had been lenient because it took the view that Schlitt had been temporarily deranged. Schlegelberger lacked the courage to present the case fully to Hitler, and to defend the judges at the same time. Instead, he promised to improve the severity of sentencing. Freisler had no compunction in meeting Hitler’s wishes. The original sentence was overturned. In a new hearing, Schlitt was duly sentenced to death, and guillotined on 2 April.