Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  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. 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.

  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. 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. 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.

  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. 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 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.

  Hitler 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, since there were no replacements. All in all, Hitler concluded, the time was not ripe for the extraordinary measures the Propaganda Minister wanted. He 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.

  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, he thought, 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.

  The following 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 assault on that day. The main thrust of the massive 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. Based on fatally flawed intelligence relayed to Chief of the General 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, comprising 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. Only belatedly, it appears, did the realization dawn, against Zeitzler’s continued advice, that the offensive was likely to come against Army Group Centre. 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’.

  The relatively mild beginnings of the offensive then misled Hitler’s military advisers into thinking at first that it was a decoy. 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 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.

  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. 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. The Wehrmacht divisions lost through such a disastrous tactical error would have been vital in defending other parts of the front.

  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 that time 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. The next months would bring even worse calamities and, together with the unstoppable advance of the All
ies in the west, would usher in the final phase of the war.

  VIII

  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 a defensive strategy had become the only one available, Hitler’s inadequacies as supreme German warlord were fully exposed. It was not that he was wholly devoid of tactical knowledge, despite his lack of formal training. Nor was it the case that professionals who knew better were invariably forced into compliance with the lunatic orders of an amateur military bungler. 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. The innate self-destructive tendency which had always been implicit in his characteristic all-or-nothing stance as a politician now conveyed itself, catastrophically, to military leadership.

  It was inevitable that seasoned military strategists and battle-hardened generals, schooled in more subtle forms of tactical command, would clash with him – often stridently – when their reading of the options available was so diametrically at variance with those of their supreme commander, and where the orders he emitted seemed to them so plainly militarily suicidal. They were also, however, schooled in obedience to orders of a superior; and Hitler was head of state, head of the armed forces, and since 1941 – disastrously – commander-in-chief (responsible for tactical decisions) of the army. Refusal to obey was not only an act of military insubordination; it was a treasonable act of political resistance.

  Few were prepared to go down that route. But loyalty even to the extent of belief in the Führer’s mission was no safeguard against dismissal if near-impossible demands were not met. In accordance with his warped logic, where ‘will’ had not triumphed, however fraught the circumstances, Hitler blamed the weakness or inadequacy of the commander. Another commander with a superior attitude, he presumed, would bring a different result – however objectively unfavourable the actual position. The commander of Army Group Centre, Field-Marshal Busch, a Hitler loyalist, correspondingly paid the price for the ‘failure’ of Army Group Centre during the onset of the Soviet offensive. He was dismissed by Hitler on 28 June, and replaced by one of his favourite commanders, the tough and energetic newly-promoted Field-Marshal Walter Model (who at the same time retained his command of Army Group North Ukraine) – dubbed by some, given the frequency with which he was charged with tackling a crisis, ‘Hitler’s fireman’.

  Within days, there was a change of command, too, in the west. Reports to the High Command of the Wehrmacht submitted by the Commander-in-Chief, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt, and the Commander of Panzer Group West, General Geyr von Schweppenburg, had drawn a pessimistic picture of the prospects of holding the lines against enemy inroads in France. Jodl played to Hitler’s sentiments by noting that this meant the first step towards the evacuation of France. The report had followed similarly realistic assessments of the situation on the western front delivered by Rundstedt and Rommel at the Berghof two days earlier, on 29 June. On 3 July, Rundstedt received a handwritten notice of his dismissal from Hitler. Officially, he had been replaced on grounds of health. The sacking of Geyr and Field-Marshal Hugo Sperrle, who had been responsible for air-defences in the west, also followed. Rundstedt’s replacement, Kluge, at that time high in Hitler’s esteem, arrived in France, as Guderian later put it, ‘still filled with the optimism that prevailed at Supreme Headquarters’. He soon learnt differently.

  Another military leader who fell irredeemably from grace at this time was Chief of the Army General Staff Kurt Zeitzler. When appointed as replacement to Halder in September 1942, Zeitzler had impressed Hitler with his drive, energy, and fighting spirit – the type of military leader he wanted. The relationship had palled visibly since the spring of 1944, when Hitler had pinned a major part of the blame for the loss of the Crimea on Zeitzler. By May, Zeitzler was indicating his wish to resign. The Chief of Staff’s strong backing at the end of June for withdrawing the threatened Army Group North in the Baltic to a more defensible line, and his pessimism about the situation on the western front, amounted to the last straw. Zeitzler could no longer see the rationale of Hitler’s tactics; Hitler was contemptuous of what he saw as the defeatism of Zeitzler and the General Staff. At the end of his tether following furious rows with Hitler, Zeitzler simply disappeared from the Berghof on 1 July. He had suffered a nervous breakdown. Hitler never spoke to him again. He would have Zeitzler dismissed from the Wehrmacht in January 1945, refusing him the right to wear uniform. Until his replacement, Guderian, was appointed on 21 July, the army was effectively without a Chief of the General Staff.

  The Soviet advance had left the Red Army, in the northern sector of the front, poised not far from Vilna in Lithuania. Already, the borders of East Prussia were in their sights. On 9 July, Hitler flew with Keitel, Dönitz, Himmler, and Luftwaffe Chief of Staff General Günther Korten back to his old headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia. Field-Marshal Model and General Johannes Frießner, recently appointed as commander of Army Group North in place of General Georg Lindemann, joined them from the eastern front. The discussions ranged mainly over plans for the urgent creation of a number of new divisions to shore up the eastern front and protect any inroads into East Prussia. Model and Frießner sounded optimistic. Hitler, too, thought his Luftwaffe adjutant, Below, also remained positive about developments on the eastern front. Hitler flew back to the Berghof that afternoon. He had already hinted that, in the light of the situation in the east, he would have to move his headquarters back to East Prussia, even though the fortifications of his accommodation there were still incomplete. Reading between the lines of one or two comments, Below gained the impression, he later wrote, that during what were to prove Hitler’s last days at the Berghof, before he left on 14 July for the Wolf ’s Lair, never to return, he was no longer under any illusions about the outcome of the war. Even so, any hints of pessimism were more than countered by repeated stress on continuing the war, the impact of the new weapons, and ultimate victory. Once more, it was plain to Below that Hitler would never capitulate. There would be no repeat of 1918. Hitler’s political ‘mission’ had been based from the outset on that premiss. The entire Reich would go down in flames first.

  Hitler had lived amid the relative tranquillity of the Obersalzberg for almost four months. The regular entourage at the Berghof had dwindled somewhat in that time. And in the days before departure there had been few guests to enliven proceedings. Hitler himself had seemingly become more reserved. On the last evening, perhaps sensing he would not see the Berghof again, he had paused in front of the pictures hanging in the great hall. Then he had kissed the hand of Below’s wife and Frau Brandt, the wife of one of his doctors, bidding them farewell. Next morning, 14 July, he flew back to East Prussia, arriving at the Wolf ’s Lair, now heavily reinforced and scarcely recognizable from its appearance when first set up in 1941. He arrived in the late morning. At one o’clock he was running the military conference ther
e as if he had never been away. He was more stooping in his gait than earlier. But his continued strength of will, despite the massive setbacks, continued to impress the admiring Below.

  For others, this strength of will – or obstinate refusal to face reality – was precisely what was preventing an end to the war and dragging Germany to inevitable catastrophe. They were determined to act before it was too late – to save what was left of the Reich, lay the foundations of a future without Hitler, and show the outside world that there was ‘another Germany’ beyond the forces of Nazism.

  25

  Luck of the Devil

  I

  The attempt to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944 had a lengthy prehistory, dating back as far as the Sudeten crisis of 1938. The complex strands of this prehistory contained in no small measure profound manifestations and admixtures of high ethical values and a transcendental sense of moral duty, codes of honour, political idealism, religious convictions, personal courage, remarkable selflessness, deep humanity, and a love of country that was light-years removed from Nazi chauvinism. The prehistory was also replete – how could it have been otherwise in the circumstances? – with disagreements, doubts, mistakes, miscalculations, moral dilemmas, short-sightedness, hesitancy, ideological splits, personal clashes, bungling organization, distrust – and sheer bad luck.

  The actions of a lone assassin, the Swabian joiner Georg Elser, who shared none of the hesitancy of those within the power-echelons of the regime, had come within a whisker of sending Hitler into oblivion in the Bürgerbräukeller on the night of 8 November 1939. Good fortune alone had saved Hitler on that occasion. With the left-wing underground resistance groups, though never eliminated, weak, isolated, and devoid of access to the corridors of power, the only hope of toppling Hitler thereafter lay with those who themselves occupied positions of some power or influence in the regime itself.