Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  Goebbels relished his moment of triumph. He appeared to have finally achieved what he had desired for so long: control over the ‘home front’ with ‘the most extensive plenipotentiary powers … that have up to now been granted in the National Socialist Reich’, with rights – the decisive factor in his view – to issue directives to ministers and the highest-ranking governmental authorities. To his staff, he spoke of having ‘practically full dictatorial powers’ within the Reich.

  However, nothing was ever quite what it seemed in the Third Reich. The decree itself limited Goebbels’s powers in some respects. He could issue directives to the ‘highest Reich authorities’. But only they could issue any consequential decrees and ordinances. And these had to be agreed with Lammers, Bormann, and Himmler (in the capacity he had adopted when becoming Interior Minister, as Plenipotentiary for Reich Administration). Any directives related to the party itself had to have Bormann’s support (and, behind Bormann, to correspond with Hitler’s own wishes). Unresolved objections to Goebbels’s directives had to pass to Lammers for Hitler’s own final decision. Beyond the wording of the decree itself, Hitler let Goebbels know that those authorities directly responsible to him – those involved in the rebuilding plans for Berlin, Munich, and Linz, his motor-vehicle staff, and the personnel of the Reich Chancellery, Presidential Chancellery, and Party Chancellery – were also excluded from the directives. The Wehrmacht, its recruitment now under Himmler’s authority, had been exempt from the outset.

  Such restrictions on his powers left Goebbels’s enthusiasm for his new task undimmed. The belief that ‘will’ would overcome all problems was immediately put into action as with his usual forceful energy he unleashed a veritable frenzy of activity in his new role. The staff of fifty that he rapidly assembled from a number of ministries, most prominently from his own Propaganda Ministry, prided themselves on their unbureaucratic methods, swift decision-making, and improvisation. As his main agents in ensuring that directives were implemented in the regions, leaving no stone unturned in the quest to comb out all reserves of untapped labour, Goebbels looked to the party’s Gauleiter, bolstering their already extensive powers as Reich Defence Commissars. They could be relied upon, in his view, to reinvoke the spirit of the ‘time of struggle’, to ensure that bureaucracy did not get in the way of action. (In practice, the cooperation of the Gauleiter was assured as long as no inroads were made into the personnel of their own party offices. Bormann ensured that they were well protected.)

  Behind the actionism of the party, Goebbels also needed Hitler’s backing. He ensured that this was forthcoming through a constant stream of bulletins on progress (Führer-Informationen), printed out on a ‘Führer-Machine’ – a typewriter with greatly enlarged characters which Hitler’s failing eyesight could cope with – recording successes and couching general recommendations (such as simplifying unnecessary bureaucratic paperwork) in such a way that, given Hitler’s frame of mind, approval would be as good as automatic, thereby opening up yet further avenues for intervention. Nevertheless, Hitler did not give blanket approval to all measures suggested by Goebbels. He could rely upon Bormann to bring to his attention any proposals which his own still sharp antennae would tell him might have an unnecessarily harmful impact on morale, both at home and quite especially among soldiers at the front.

  Goebbels certainly produced a new, extreme austerity drive within Germany in the first weeks in his new office as Total War Plenipoteniary. But a large proportion of the 451,800 men sifted out of the administration and economy were too old for military service. Goebbels was forced, therefore, to turn to fit men in reserved occupations – work thought essential for the war-effort, including skilled employment in armaments factories or food production. Their replacement, where possible, by older, less fit, less experienced, less qualified workers was both administratively complicated and inefficient. And the net addition of women workers numbered only little over quarter of a million. Athough, partly through Goebbels’s measures, it proved possible to send around a million men to the front between August and December 1944, German losses in the first three of those months numbered 1,189,000 dead and wounded. Whatever the trumpeting by Goebbels of his achievements as Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort, the reality was that he was scraping the bottom of the barrel.

  And among the most bizarre aspects of the ‘total war’ drive in the second half of 1944 was the fact that at precisely the time he was combing out the last reserves of manpower, Goebbels – according to film director Veit Harlan – was allowing him, at Hitler’s express command, to deploy 187,000 soldiers, withdrawn from active service, as extras for the epic colour film of national heroism, Kolberg, depicting the defence of the small Baltic town against Napoleon as a model for the achievements of total war. According to Harlan, Hitler as well as Goebbels was ‘convinced that such a film was more useful than a military victory’. Even in the terminal crisis of the regime, propaganda had to come first.

  The evocation of heroic defence of the fatherland by the masses against the invading Napoleonic army – the myth enunciated in Kolberg – was put to direct use in the most vivid expression of the last-ditch drive to ‘total war’: the launching by Heinrich Himmler of the Volkssturm, or people’s militia, on 18 October 1944, the 131st anniversary of the legendary defeat of Napoleon in the ‘Battle of the Peoples’ near Leipzig, when a coalition of forces under Blücher’s leadership liberated German territory from the troops of the French Emperor once and for all. The Volkssturm was the military embodiment of the party’s belief in ‘triumph of the will’. It was the party’s attempt to militarize the homeland, symbolizing unity through the people’s participation in national defence, overcoming the deficiencies in weapons and resources through sheer willpower.

  Though Goebbels continued to harbour the belief that he would incorporate in his ‘total war’ commission the organization of the ‘Volkswehr’ (People’s Defence), as it was initially to be called, leaving the military aspects to the SA, Bormann and Himmler had come to an agreement to divide responsibility between them. Drafts for a decree by Hitler were put forward in early September. He eventually signed the decree on 26 September, though it was dated to the previous day. It spoke of the ‘final aim’ of the enemy alliance as ‘the eradication of the German person’. This enemy must now be repulsed until a peace securing Germany’s future could be guaranteed. To attain this end, Hitler’s decree went on, in typical parlance, ‘we set the total deployment of all Germans against the known total annihilatory will of our Jewish-international enemies’. In each party Gau, the ‘German Volkssturm’ was to be established, comprising all men capable of bearing weapons between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Training, military organization, and provision of weaponry fell to Himmler as Commander of the Reserve Army. Political and organizational matters were the province of Bormann, acting on Hitler’s behalf. Party functionaries were given the task of forming companies and battalions. A total number of 6 million Volkssturm men was envisaged. Each Volkssturm man had to swear an oath that he would be ‘unconditionally loyal and obedient to the Führer of the Great German Reich Adolf Hitler’, and would ‘rather die than abandon the freedom and thereby the social future of my people’.

  The men called up had to provide their own clothing, as well as eating and drinking utensils, cooking equipment, a rucksack, and blanket. And since munitions for the front were in short supply, the weaponry for the men of the Volkssturm was predictably miserable. It was little wonder that the Volkssturm was largely unpopular, and widely seen as pointless on the grounds that the war was already lost. Reluctance to serve in the Volkssturm, especially on the eastern front, was well justified. Gauleiter Erich Koch reported severe losses among Volkssturm units in East Prussia already in October. The losses were militarily pointless. They did not hold up the Red Army’s advance by a single day. In all, approaching 175,000 citizens who were mainly too old, too young, or too weak to fight lost their lives in the Volkssturm. The futility of the losse
s was a clear sign that Germany was close to military bankruptcy.

  As the autumn of 1944 headed towards what would prove the last winter of the war, the fabric of the regime was still holding together. But the threads were visibly starting to fray. The closing of the ranks which had followed Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt had temporarily seen a revitalization of the élan of the party. Hitler had, almost as a reflex, turned inwards to those he trusted. His distance, not just from the army leaders he detested, but also from the organs of state administration, started to extend immeasurably with his increased reliance on a diminishing number of his long-standing paladins. Bormann’s position, dependent upon the combination of his role as head of the party organization and, especially, his proximity to Hitler as the Führer’s secretary and mouthpiece, guarding the portals and restricting access, was particularly strengthened. He was one of the winners from the changed circumstances after 20 July. Another was Goebbels who, like Bormann, had seized the opportunity to enhance his own position of power as the party increased its hold over practically all walks of life within Germany. Mobilization and control had been the essence of party activity since the beginning. Now, as the regime tottered, it returned to its essence.

  Another development, from a most unlikely source, provides in retrospect – at the time it was still well concealed – the clearest indication that the regime was starting to teeter. Among the biggest beneficiaries of the failed coup of 20 July 1944 had been Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Hitler had given ‘loyal Heinrich’, his trusted head of the labyrinthine security organization, overall responsibility for uncovering the background to the conspiracy and for rounding up the plotters. And beyond his other extensive powers, Himmler had now also gained direct entrée into the military sphere as Commander of the Reserve Army, with a remit to undertake a full-scale reorganization. He was soon, as we have seen, also to have control over the people’s militia, the Volkssturm. Yet at this very time, Himmler, conceivably now the most powerful individual in Germany after Hitler, was playing a double game, combining every manifestation of utmost loyalty with secret overtures to the West in the forlorn hope of saving not just his skin but his position of power in the event of the British and Americans eventually seeing sense and turning, with the help of his SS, to fend off the threat of Communism. In October, Himmler used an SS intermediary to put to an Italian industrialist with good connections in England a proposal to make twenty-five German divisions in Italy available to the Allies as a defence against Communism in return for a guarantee of the preservation of the Reich’s territory and population. Both the British and the Americans rejected the overtures out of hand. In this scenario, Hitler would have been dispensable. But it was pure self-delusion. Himmler was too centrally implicated in the most appalling facets of the Nazi regime to be taken seriously by the Allies as a prospective leader of a post-Hitlerian Germany. For Himmler, too, there was no way out. Without Hitler’s backing, his power would evaporate like a breath in the chill morning air. This was as true in late 1944 as at any other time during the Third Reich.

  Hitler’s authority remained intact. But if they could have found an escape route by removing him or discarding him, there were now those among his closest paladins who would have followed it.

  III

  Meanwhile, the vice around Hitler’s Reich was tightening. Between June and September the Wehrmacht lost on all fronts well over a million men killed, captured, or missing. The losses of tanks, guns, planes, and other armaments were incalculable. The war in the air was by now almost wholly one-sided. Fuel shortages left many German fighters unable to take to the air as the British and American bomber armadas wreaked havoc on German towns and cities with impunity by day as well as by night. The war at sea had also by this time been definitively lost by Germany. The U-boat fleet had never recovered from its losses in the second half of 1943, while Allied convoys could now cross the Atlantic almost unmolested. In the meantime, the territories of the Nazi empire were shrinking markedly by the end of the summer following the advances of the Allies on both western and eastern fronts since June.

  On the western front, Germany’s military commanders had by then long viewed the continuation of the war as pointless. On replacing Rundstedt in early June, the weak and impressionable Kluge was easily persuaded by Hitler that the western commanders, especially Rommel, had been far too pessimistic in their judgement of the situation. After a two-day visit to the front, however, Kluge had been forced to admit that Rommel was right. In his letter to Hitler of 15 July, Rommel had explicitly stated that, heroically though the troops were fighting, ‘the unequal struggle is heading for its end’. He felt, therefore, compelled to ask Hitler, he wrote, ‘to draw the consequences from this position without delay’. He let the leaders of the conspiracy against Hitler know that he would be prepared to join them if the demands for an end to the war were dismissed. Germany’s most renowned field-marshal was never put to the test. Three days before Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded, Rommel was seriously injured when his car skidded from the road after being strafed by an enemy aircraft.

  Five days after the assassination attempt on Hitler, ‘Operation Cobra’, the Allied attack southwards towards Avranches, began with a ferocious ‘carpet-bombing’ assault by over 2,000 aircraft, dropping 47,000 tons of bombs on an already weakened German panzer division in an area of only six or so square miles. It ended on 30 July with the taking of Avranches and the opening not only of the route to the Brittany coastal ports, but also to the exposed German flank towards the east, and to the heart of France.

  The significance of the loss of Avranches was still not fully appreciated when Hitler provided Jodl with his overview of the entire military situation on the evening of 31 July. Hitler was far from unrealistic in his assessment. He was well aware of how threatening the position was on all fronts, and how impossible it was in the current circumstances to combat the overwhelming Allied superiority in men and materials, above all in air-power. His main hope was to buy time. Weapon technology, more planes, and an eventual split in the alliance would open up new opportunities. He had to get some breathing-space in the west, he told his Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, shortly after his briefing with Jodl. Then, with new panzer divisions and fighter formations, he could launch a major offensive on the western front. In common with many observers, Below had thought it more important to concentrate all forces against the Red Army in the east. Hitler replied that he could attack the Russians at a later point. But this could not be done with the Americans already in the Reich. (He led Below to believe at the same time that he feared the power of the Jews in the USA more than the power of the Bolsheviks.) His strategy was, therefore, to gain time, inflict a major blow on the western Allies, hope for a split in the alliance, and turn on the Russians from a new position of strength.

  Hitler thought, so he told Jodl, that the eastern front could be stabilized, as long as additional forces could be mobilized. But a breakthrough by the enemy in the east, whether in East Prussia or Silesia, imperilling the homeland itself and bearing serious psychological consequences, would pose a critical danger. Any destabilization on the eastern front would, he went on, affect the stance of Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Preventive measures had to be taken. It was vital to secure Hungary, both for vital raw materials such as bauxite and manganese and for communications lines with south-eastern Europe. Bulgaria was essential to securing a hold on the Balkans and obtaining ore from Greece. He also feared a British landing in the Balkans or on the Dalmatian islands, which Germany was scarcely in a position to ward off and which ‘could naturally lead to catastrophic consequences’.

  On the Italian front, Hitler saw the greatest advantage in the tying down of significant Allied forces which could otherwise be deployed elsewhere. The withdrawal of German forces into the Apennines would remove tactical mobility, would still not prevent an Allied advance, and would leave only retreat to alpine defence positions as a possibility – thereby freeing up
Allied troops for the western front. But as a last resort, he was prepared to give up Italy (and the entire Balkans), pull back German troops to the Alps, and withdraw his main forces for the vital struggle on the western front.

  This was for him the decisive theatre of war. The troops would not understand him remaining in East Prussia when valuable western parts of the Reich were threatened, and behind them the Ruhr – Germany’s industrial heartland. Preparations would have to be made to move Führer Headquarters to the west. Command would have to be centralized. Kluge, supreme commander in the west, could not be left with the responsibility. So paranoid was Hitler by now about treachery within the army, that he told Jodl it would be necessary in such an event to avoid communicating such a plan to army command in the west – pointing to Stülpnagel’s involvement in the plot against him – since it would probably be immediately betrayed to the enemy.