Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  Even more than he felt let down by his own Luftwaffe, Hitler voiced utter contempt for the failure of the German allies to hold the line against the Soviet counter-attack. The Romanians were bad, the Italians worse, and worst of all were the Hungarians. The catastrophe would not have occurred had the entire eastern front been controlled by German units, as he had wanted. The German bakers’ and baggage-formations, he fumed, had performed better than the élite Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian divisions. But he did not think the Axis partners were ready to desert. Italy would ‘like to dance out of line’; though as long as Mussolini was there, this could be ruled out. The Duce was clever enough to know that it would mean the end of Fascism, and his own end. Romania was essential to Germany for its oil, Hitler said. He had made it plain to the Romanians what would come their way should they attempt anything stupid.

  Hitler still hoped – at least that is what he told Goebbels – that parts of the 6th Army could hold out until they could be relieved. In fact, he knew better than anyone that there was not the slightest chance of it. The 6th Army was on its last legs. On 22 January, the very day that Goebbels had had his talks with Hitler at FHQ, Paulus had requested permission to surrender. Hitler rejected it. He then rejected a similar plea from Manstein to allow the 6th Army’s surrender. As a point of honour, he stated, there could be no question of capitulation. In the evening, he telegraphed the 6th Army to say that it had made an historic contribution in the greatest struggle in German history. The army was to stand fast ‘to the last soldier and the last bullet’.

  Since 23 January the 6th Army had been beginning to break up. It was split in two as Soviet troops cutting through from the south and the west of the city joined forces. By 26 January the division of the 6th Army was complete. One section raised the white flag on the 29th. The same day, Paulus sent Hitler a telegram of congratulations on the tenth anniversary of his take-over of power on the 30th.

  The ‘celebrations’ in Germany for the anniversary of Hitler’s day of triumph in January 1933 were in a low key. All bunting was banned. Hitler did not give his usual speech. He remained in his headquarters and left it to Goebbels to read out his proclamation. A single sentence referred to Stalingrad: ‘The heroic struggle of our soldiers on the Volga should be a warning for everybody to do the utmost for the struggle for Germany’s freedom and the future of our people, and thus in a wider sense for the maintenance of our entire continent.’ In Stalingrad itself, the end was approaching. Feelers were put out by the remnants of the 6th Army to the Soviets that very evening, 30 January 1943, for a surrender. Negotiations took place next day. On that day, the announcement was made that Paulus had been promoted to Field-Marshal. He was expected to end the struggle with a hero’s death. In the evening, he surrendered. Two days later, on 2 February, the northern sector of the surrounded troops also gave in. The battle of Stalingrad was over. Around 100,000 men from twenty-one German and two Romanian divisions had fallen in battle. A further 113,000 German and Romanian soldiers were taken prisoner. Only a few thousand would survive their captivity.

  VIII

  Hitler made no mention of the human tragedy when he met his military leaders at the midday conference on 1 February. What concerned him was the prestige lost through Paulus’s surrender. He found it impossible to comprehend, and impossible to forgive. ‘Here a man can look on while 50–60,000 of his soldiers die and defend themselves bravely to the last. How can he give himself up to the Bolsheviks?’ he asked, nearly speechless with anger at what he saw as a betrayal. He could have no respect for an officer who chose captivity to shooting himself. ‘How easy it is to do something like that. The pistol – that’s simple. What sort of cowardice does it take to pull back from it?’ ‘No one else is being made field-marshal in this war,’ he avowed (though he did not keep to his word). He was certain – it proved an accurate presumption – that, in Soviet hands, Paulus and the other captured generals would within no time be promoting anti-German propaganda. Drawing on horror-stories of tortures in Russian prisons that had circulated in the völkisch press since the early 1920s, he said: ‘They’ll lock them up in the rat-cellar, and two days later they’ll have them so softened-up that they’ll talk straight away … They’ll now come into the Lubljanka, and there they’ll be eaten by rats. How can someone be so cowardly? I don’t understand it. So many people have to die. Then such a man goes and besmirches in the last minute the heroism of so many others. He could release himself from all misery and enter eternity, national immortality, and he prefers to go to Moscow. How can there be a choice? That’s crazy.’

  For the German people, Paulus’s missed chance to gain immortality was scarcely a central concern. Their thoughts, when they heard the dreaded announcement – false to the last – on 3 February that the officers and soldiers of the 6th Army had fought to the final shot and ‘died so that Germany might live’, were of the human tragedy and the scale of the military disaster. The ‘heroic sacrifice’ was no consolation to bereft relatives and friends.

  The SD reported that the whole nation was ‘deeply shaken’ by the fate of the 6th Army. There was deep depression, and widespread anger that Stalingrad had not been evacuated or relieved while there was still time. People asked how such optimistic reports had been possible only a short time earlier. They were critical of the underestimation – as in the previous winter – of the Soviet forces. Many now thought the war could not be won, and were anxiously contemplating the consequences of defeat.

  Hitler had until Stalingrad been largely exempted from whatever criticisms people had of the regime. That now altered sharply. His responsibility for the debacle was evident. People had expected Hitler to give an explanation in his speech on 30 January. His obvious reluctance to speak to the nation only heightened the criticism. The regime’s opponents were encouraged. Graffiti chalked on walls attacking Hitler, ‘the Stalingrad Murderer’, were a sign that underground resistance was not extinct. Appalled at what had happened, a number of army officers and highly-placed civil servants revived conspiratorial plans largely dormant since 1938–9.

  In Munich, a group of students, together with one of their professors, whose idealism and mounting detestation at the criminal inhumanity of the regime had led them the previous year to form the ‘White Rose’ opposition-group, now openly displayed their attack on Hitler. The medical students Alexander Schmorell and Hans Scholl had formed the initial driving-force, and had soon been joined by Christoph Probst, Sophie Scholl (Hans’s sister), Willi Graf, and Kurt Huber, Professor of Philosophy at Munich University, whose critical attitude to the regime had influenced them in lectures and discussions. All the students came from conservative, middle-class backgrounds. All were fired by Christian beliefs and humanistic idealism. The horrors on the eastern front, experienced for a short time at first hand when Graf, Schmorell, and Hans Scholl were called up, converted the lofty idealism into an explicit, political message. ‘Fellow Students!’ ran their final manifesto (composed by Professor Huber), distributed in Munich University on 18 February. ‘The nation is deeply shaken by the destruction of the men of Stalingrad. The genial strategy of the World War [I] corporal has senselessly and irresponsibly driven three hundred and thirty thousand German men to death and ruin. Führer, we thank you!’

  It was a highly courageous show of defiance. But it was suicidal. Hans and Sophie Scholl were denounced by a porter at the university (who was subsequently applauded by pro-Nazi students for his action), and quickly arrested by the Gestapo. Christoph Probst was picked up soon afterwards. Their trial before the ‘People’s Court’, presided over by Roland Freisler, took place within four days. The verdict – the death-sentence – was a foregone conclusion. All three were guillotined the same afternoon. Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, and Alexander Schmorell suffered the same fate some months later. Other students on the fringe of the movement were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.

  The regime had been badly stung. But it was not at the point of collapse. It would lash back w
ithout scruple and with utter viciousness at the slightest hint of opposition. The level of brutality towards its own population was about to rise sharply as external adversity mounted.

  If Hitler felt any personal remorse for Stalingrad or human sympathy for the dead of the 6th Army and their relatives, he did not let it show. Those in his close proximity could detect the signs of nervous strain. He hinted privately at his worry that his health would not stand up to the pressure. His secretaries had to put up with even longer nocturnal monologues as his insomnia developed chronic proportions. The topics were much the same as ever: his youth in Vienna, the ‘time of struggle’, the history of mankind, the nature of the cosmos. There was no relief from the boredom for his secretaries, who by now knew his outpourings on all topics more or less off by heart. Even the occasional evenings listening to records to break up the tedium had stopped. Hitler, as he had told Goebbels some weeks earlier, now no longer wanted to listen to music. Talking was like a drug for him. He told one of his doctors two years later that he had to talk – about more or less anything other than military issues – to divert him from sleepless nights pondering troop dispositions and seeing in his mind where every division was at Stalingrad. As Below guessed, the bad news from the North African as well as from the eastern front must have led to serious doubts, in the privacy of his own room in the bunker of his headquarters, about whether the war could still be won. But outwardly, even among his entourage at the Wolf’s Lair, he had to sustain the façade of invincibility. No crack could be allowed to show. Hitler remained true to his creed of will and strength. A hint of weakness, in his thinking, was a gift to enemies and subversives. A crevice of demoralization would then swiftly widen to a chasm. The military, and above all else the party, leaders must, therefore, never be allowed a glimmer of any wavering in his own resolution.

  There was not a trace of demoralization, depression, or uncertainty when he spoke to the Reichs- and Gauleiter for almost two hours at his headquarters on 7 February. He told them at the very beginning of his address that he believed in victory more than ever. Then he described what Goebbels referred to as ‘the catastrophe on the eastern front’. Hitler did not look close to home for the failings. While he said he naturally accepted full responsibility for the events of the winter, he left no doubt where in his view the real fault lay. From the beginning of his political career – indeed, from what is known of his earliest remarks on politics – he had cast around for scapegoats. The trait was too embedded in his psyche for him to stray from it now that, for the first time, an unmitigated national disaster had to be explained. Addressing the party leadership, as in his private discussion with Goebbels a fortnight or so earlier, he once more placed the blame for the disaster at Stalingrad squarely on the ‘complete failure’ of Germany’s allies – the Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians – whose fighting powers met with his ‘absolute contempt’.

  Not just the search for scapegoats, but the feeling of treachery and betrayal was entrenched in Hitler’s thinking. Another strand of his explanation for the disaster at Stalingrad was the prospect of imminent French betrayal, forcing him to retain several divisions, especially SS-divisions, in the west when they were desperately needed in the east. But Hitler had the extraordinary capacity, as his Luftwaffe adjutant Below noted, of turning negative into positive, and convincing his audience of this. A landing by the Allies in France would have been far more dangerous, he claimed, than that which had taken place in North Africa and had been checked through the occupation of Tunis. He saw grounds for optimism, too, in the success of the U-boats, and in Speer’s armaments programme enabling better flak defence against air-raids together with full-scale production by the summer of the Tiger tank.

  Much of the rest of Hitler’s address was on the ‘psychology’ of war. The crisis was more psychological than material, he declared, and must therefore be overcome by ‘psychological means’. It was the party’s task to achieve this. The Gauleiter should remember the ‘time of struggle’. Radical measures were now needed. Austerity, sacrifice, and the end of any privileges for certain sectors of society were the order of the day. The setbacks but eventual triumph of Frederick the Great – the implied comparison with Hitler’s own leadership was plain – were invoked. The setbacks now being faced, solely the fault of Germany’s allies, even had their own psychological advantages. Propaganda and the party’s agitation could awaken people to the fact that they had stark alternatives: becoming master of Europe, or undergoing ‘total liquidation and extermination’.

  Hitler pointed out one advantage which, he claimed, the Allies possessed: that they were sustained by international Jewry. The consequence, Goebbels reported Hitler as saying, was ‘that we have to eliminate Jewry not only from Reich territory but from the whole of Europe’.

  Hitler categorically ruled out, as he always had done, any possibility of capitulation. He stated that any collapse of the German Reich was out of the question. But his further remarks betrayed the fact that he was contemplating precisely that. The event of such a collapse ‘would represent the ending of his life’, he declared. It was plain who, in such an eventuality, the scapegoats would be: the German people themselves. ‘Such a collapse could only be caused through the weakness of the people,’ Goebbels recorded Hitler as saying. ‘But if the German people turned out to be weak, they would deserve nothing else than to be extinguished by a stronger people; then one could have no sympathy for them.’ The sentiment would stay with him to the end.

  To the party leadership, the backbone of his support, Hitler could speak in this way. The Gauleiter could be rallied by such rhetoric. They were after all fanatics as Hitler himself was. They were part of his ‘sworn community’. The responsibility of the party for the radicalization of the ‘home front’ was music to their ears. In any case, whatever private doubts (if any) they harboured, they had no choice but to stick with Hitler. They had burnt their boats with him. He was the sole guarantor of their power.

  The German people were less easily placated than Hitler’s immediate viceroys. When he spoke in Berlin to the nation for the first time since Stalingrad, on the occasion (which this year, of all years, he could not possibly avoid) of Heroes’ Memorial Day on 21 March 1943, his speech gave rise to greater criticism than any Hitler speech since he had become Chancellor.

  The speech was one of Hitler’s shortest. Perhaps anxiety about a possible air-raid made Hitler race through it in such a rapid and dreary monotone. The routine assault on Bolshevism and on Jewry as the force behind the ‘merciless war’ could stir little enthusiasm. Disappointment was profound. Rumours revived about Hitler’s poor health – along with others that it had been a substitute who had spoken, while the real Führer was under house-arrest on the Obersalzberg suffering from a mental breakdown after Stalingrad. Extraordinary was the fact that Hitler never even directly mentioned Stalingrad in a ceremony meant to be devoted to the memory of the fallen and at a time when the trauma was undiminished. And his passing reference, at the end of his speech, to a figure of 542,000 German dead in the war was presumed to be far too low and received with rank incredulity.

  Hitler, as more and more ordinary citizens now recognized, had closed off all avenues that might have brought compromise peace. The earlier victories were increasingly seen in a different light. There was no end in sight. But it now seemed clear to increasing numbers of ordinary citizens that Hitler had taken them into a war which could only end in destruction, defeat, and disaster. There was still far to go, but what was revealed after Stalingrad would become ever clearer: for the vast majority of Germans, the love affair with Hitler was at an end. Only the bitter process of divorce remained.

  23

  Beleaguered

  I

  ‘The English claim that the German people have lost their trust in the Führer,’ Goebbels declared. It was the opening to the fifth of his ten rhetorical questions towards the end of his two-hour speech proclaiming ‘total war’ on the evening of 18 February 1943. The
hand-picked audience in Berlin’s Sportpalast rose as one man to denounce such an outrageous allegation. A chorus of voices arose: ‘Führer command, we will obey!’ The tumult lasted for what seemed an age. Orchestrating the frenzied mood to perfection, the propaganda maestro eventually broke in to ask: ‘Is your trust in the Führer greater, more faithful, and more unshakeable than ever? Is your readiness to follow him in all his ways and to do everything necessary to bring the war to a triumphant end absolute and unrestricted?’ Fourteen thousand voices hysterically cried out in unison the answer invited by Goebbels in his bid to quell doubters at home and to relay to the outside world the futility of any hope of inner collapse in Germany. Goebbels ended his morale-boosting peroration – which had been interrupted more than 200 times by clapping, cheering, shouts of approbation, or thunderous applause – with the words of Theodor Körner, the patriotic poet from the time of Prussia’s struggle against Napoleon: ‘Now people, arise – and storm burst forth!’ The great hall erupted. Amid the wild cheering the national anthem ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ and the party’s ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ rang out. The spectacle ended with cries of ‘the great German Leader Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil’.