The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  To superintend the new camp and the supply of slave labor for I. G. Farben there arrived at Auschwitz in the spring of 1940 a gang of the most choice ruffians in the S.S., among them Josef Kramer, who would later become known to the British public as the “Beast of Belsen,” and Rudolf Franz Hoess, a convicted murderer who had served five years in prison—he spent most of his adult life as first a convict and then a jailer—and who in 1946, at the age of forty-six, would boast at Nuremberg that at Auschwitz he had superintended the extermination of two and a half million persons, not counting another half million who had been allowed to “succumb to starvation.”

  For Auschwitz was soon destined to become the most famous of the extermination camps—Vernichtungslager—which must be distinguished from the concentration camps, where a few did survive. It is not without significance for an understanding of the Germans, even the most respectable Germans, under Hitler, that such a distinguished, internationally known firm as I. G. Farben, whose directors were honored as being among the leading businessmen of Germany, God-fearing men all, should deliberately choose this death camp as a suitable place for profitable operations.

  FRICTION BETWEEN THE TOTALITARIANS

  The Rome–Berlin Axis became squeaky that first fall of the war.

  Sharp exchanges at various levels took place over several differences: the failure of the Germans to carry out the evacuation of the Volksdeutsche from Italian South Tyrol, which had been agreed upon the previous June; failure of the Germans to supply Italy with a million tons of coal a month; failure of the Italians to ignore the British blockade and supply Germany with raw materials brought through it; Italy’s thriving trade with Britain and France, including the sale to them of war materials; Ciano’s increasingly anti-German sentiments.

  Mussolini, as usual, blew hot and cold, and Ciano recorded his waverings in his diary. On November 9, the Duce had trouble composing a telegram to Hitler congratulating him on his escape from assassination.

  He wanted it to be warm, but not too warm, because in his judgment no Italian feels any great joy over the fact that Hitler escaped death—least of all the Duce.

  November 20…. For Mussolini the idea of Hitler’s waging war, and, worse still, winning it, is altogether unbearable.

  The day after Christmas the Duce was expressing a “desire for a German defeat” and instructing Ciano to secretly inform Belgium and Holland that they were about to be attacked. * But by New Year’s Eve he was talking again of jumping into the war on Hitler’s side.

  The chief cause of friction between the two Axis Powers was Germany’s pro-Russian policy. On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Red Army had attacked Finland and Hitler had been placed in a most humiliating position. Driven out of the Baltic as the price of his pact with Stalin, forced to hurriedly evacuate the German families who had lived there for centuries, he now had to officially condone Russia’s unprovoked attack on a little country which had close ties with Germany and whose very independence as a non-Communist nation had been won from the Soviet Union largely by the intervention of regular German troops in 1918.* It was a bitter pill to swallow, but he swallowed it. Strict instructions were given to German diplomatic missions abroad and to the German press and radio to support Russia’s aggression and avoid expressing any sympathy with the Finns.

  This may have been the last straw with Mussolini, who had to cope with anti-German demonstrations throughout Italy. At any rate, shortly after the New Year, 1940, on January 3, he unburdened himself in a long letter to the Fuehrer. Never before, and certainly never afterward, was the Duce so frank with Hitler or so ready to give such sharp and unpleasant advice.

  He was “profoundly convinced,” he said, that Germany, even if assisted by Italy, could never bring Britain and France “to their knees or even divide them. To believe that is to delude oneself. The United States would not permit a total defeat of the democracies.” Therefore, now that Hitler had secured his eastern frontier, was it necessary “to risk all—including the regime—and sacrifice the flower of German generations” in order to try to defeat them? Peace could be had, Mussolini suggested, if Germany would allow the existence of “a modest, disarmed Poland, which is exclusively Polish. Unless you are irrevocably resolved to prosecute the war to a finish,” he added, “I believe that the creation of a Polish state … would be an element that would resolve the war and constitute a condition sufficient for the peace.”

  But it was Germany’s deal with Russia which chiefly concerned the Italian dictator.

  … Without striking a blow, Russia has in Poland and the Baltic profited from the war. But I, a born revolutionist, tell you that you cannot permanently sacrifice the principles of your Revolution to the tactical exigencies of a certain political moment … It is my duty to add that one further step in your relations with Moscow would have catastrophic repercussions in Italy …45

  Mussolini’s letter not only was a warning to Hitler of the degeneration of Italo–German relations but it hit a vulnerable target: the Fuehrer’s honeymoon with Soviet Russia, which was beginning to get on the nerves of both parties. It had enabled him to launch his war and destroy Poland. It had even given him other benefits. The captured German papers reveal, for instance, one of the best-kept secrets of the war: the Soviet Union’s help in providing ports on the Arctic, the Black Sea and the Pacific through which Germany could import badly needed raw materials otherwise shut off by the British blockade.

  On November 10, 1939, Molotov even agreed to the Soviet government’s paying the freight charges on all such goods carried over the Russian railways.46 Refueling and repair facilities were provided German ships, including submarines, at the Arctic port of Teriberka, east of Murmansk—Molotov thought the latter port “was not isolated enough,” whereas Teriberka was “more suited because it was more remote and not visited by foreign ships.”47

  All through the autumn and early winter of 1939 Moscow and Berlin negotiated for increased trade between the two countries. By the end of October Russian deliveries of raw stuffs, especially grain and oil, to Germany were considerable, but the Germans wanted more. However, they were learning that in economics, as well as politics, the Soviets were shrewd and hard bargainers. On November 1, Field Marshal Goering, Grand Admiral Raeder and Colonel General Keitel, “independently of each other,” as Weizsaecker noted, protested to the German Foreign Office that the Russians were demanding too much German war material. A month later Keitel was again complaining to Weizsaecker that Russian requirements for German products, especially machine tools for manufacturing munitions, were “growing more and more voluminous and unreasonable.”48

  But if Germany wanted food and oil from Russia, it would have to pay for them in the goods Moscow needed and wanted. So desperate was the blockaded Reich for these necessities from Russia that later, on March 30, 1940, at a crucial moment, Hitler ordered that delivery of war material to the Russians should have priority even over that to the German armed forces.*50 At one point the Germans threw in the unfinished heavy cruiser Luetzow as part of current payments to Moscow. Earlier, on December 15, Admiral Raeder proposed selling the plans and drawings for the Bismarck, the world’s biggest battleship (45,000 tons), then building, to the Russians if they paid “a very high price.”51

  By the end of 1939 Stalin himself was personally participating in the negotiations at Moscow with the German trade delegation. The German economists found him a formidable trader. In the captured Wilhelmstrasse papers there are long and detailed memoranda of three memorable meetings with the awesome Soviet dictator, who had a grasp of detail that stunned the Germans. Stalin, they found, could not be bluffed or cheated but could be terribly demanding, and at times, as Dr. Schnurre, one of the Nazi negotiators, reported to Berlin, he “became quite agitated.” The Soviet Union, Stalin reminded the Germans, had “rendered a very great service to Germany [and] had made enemies by rendering this assistance.” In return it expected some consideration from Berlin. At one conference at the Kremlin on
New Year’s Eve, 1939–40,

  Stalin characterized the total price of the airplanes as out of the question. It represented a multiplication of the actual prices. If Germany did not wish to deliver the airplanes, he would have preferred to have this openly stated.

  At a midnight meeting in the Kremlin on February 8

  Stalin requested the Germans to propose suitable prices and not to set them too high, as had happened before. As examples were mentioned the total price of 300 million Reichsmarks for airplanes and the German valuation of the cruiser Luetzow at 150 million RM. One should not take advantage of the Soviet Union’s good nature.52

  On February 11, 1940, an intricate trade agreement was finally signed in Moscow providing for an exchange of goods, during the ensuing eighteen months, of a minimum worth of 640 million Reichsmarks. This was in addition to the trade agreed upon during the previous August amounting to roughly 150 millions a year. Russia was to get, besides the cruiser Luetzow and the plans of the Bismarck, heavy naval guns and other gear and some thirty of Germany’s latest warplanes, including the Messerschmitt fighters 109 and 110 and the Ju-88 dive bombers. In addition the Soviets were to receive machines for their oil and electric industries, locomotives, turbines, generators, Diesel engines, ships, machine tools and samples of German artillery, tanks, explosives, chemical-warfare equipment and so on.53

  What the Germans got the first year was recorded by OKW—one million tons of cereals, half a million tons of wheat, 900,000 tons of oil, 100,000 tons of cotton, 500,000 tons of phosphates, considerable amounts of numerous other vital raw materials and the transit of a million tons of soybeans from Manchuria.54

  Back in Berlin, Dr. Schnurre, the Foreign Office’s economic expert, who had masterminded the trade negotiations for Germany in Moscow, drew up a long memorandum on what he had gained for the Reich. Besides the desperately needed raw materials which Russia would supply, Stalin, he said, had promised “generous help” in acting “as a buyer of metals and raw materials in third countries.”

  The Agreement [Schnurre concluded] means a wide-open door to the East for us … The effects of the British blockade will be decisively weakened.55

  This was one reason why Hitler swallowed his pride, supported Russia’s aggression against Finland, which was very unpopular in Germany, and accepted the threat of Soviet troops and airmen setting up bases in the three Baltic countries (to be eventually used against whom but Germany?). Stalin was helping him to surmount the British blockade. But more important than that, Stalin still afforded him the opportunity of fighting a one-front war, of concentrating all his military might in the west for a knockout blow against France and Britain and the overrunning of Belgium and Holland, after which—well, Hitler had already told his generals what he had in mind.

  As early as October 17, 1939, with the Polish campaign scarcely over, he had reminded Keitel that Polish territory

  is important to us from a military point of view as an advanced jumping-off point and for strategic concentration of troops. To that end the railroads, roads and communication channels are to be kept in order.56

  As the momentous year of 1939 approached its end Hitler realized, as he had told his generals in his memorandum of October 9, that Soviet neutrality could not be counted on forever. In eight months or a year, he had said, things might change. And in his harangue to them on November 23 he had emphasized that “we can oppose Russia only when we are free in the West.” This was a thought which never left his restless mind.

  The fateful year faded into history in a curious and even eerie atmosphere. Though there was world war, there was no fighting on land, and in the skies the big bombers carried only propaganda pamphlets, and badly written ones at that. Only at sea was there actual warfare. U-boats continued to take their toll of British and sometimes neutral shipping in the cruel, icy northern Atlantic.

  In the South Atlantic the Graf Spee, one of Germany’s three pocket battleships, had emerged from its waiting area and in three months had sunk nine British cargo vessels totaling 50,000 tons. Then, a fortnight before the first Christmas of the war, on December 14, 1939, the German public was electrified by the news, splashed in flaming headlines and in bulletins flashed over the radio, of a great victory at sea. The Graf Spee, it was said, had engaged three British cruisers on the previous day four hundred miles off Montevideo and put them out of action. But elation soon turned to puzzlement. Three days later the press announced that the pocket battleship had scuttled herself in the Plate estuary just outside the Uruguayan capital. What kind of a victory was that? On December 21, the High Command of the Navy announced that the Graf Spee’s commander, Captain Hans Langsdorff, had “followed his ship” and thus “fulfilled like a fighter and hero the expectations of his Fuehrer, the German people and the Navy.”

  The wretched German people were never told that the Graf Spee had been severely damaged by the three British cruisers, which it outgunned,* that it had had to put into Montevideo for repairs, that the Uruguayan government, in accordance with international law, had allowed it to remain for only seventy-two hours, which was not enough, that the “hero,” Captain Langsdorff, rather than risk further battle with the British with his crippled ship, had therefore scuttled it, and that he himself, instead of going down with her, had shot himself two days afterward in a lonely hotel room in Buenos Aires. Nor were they told, of course, that, as General Jodl jotted in his diary on December 18, the Fuehrer was “very angry about the scuttling of Graf Spee without a fight” and sent for Admiral Raeder, to whom he gave a dressing down.57

  On December 12, Hitler issued another top-secret directive postponing the attack in the West and stipulating that a fresh decision would not be made until December 27 and that the earliest date for “A Day” would be January 1, 1940. He advised that Christmas leaves could therefore be granted. According to my diary, Christmas, the high point of the year for Germans, was a bleak one in Berlin that winter, with few presents exchanged, Spartan food, the menfolk away, the streets blacked out, the shutters and curtains drawn tight, and everyone grumbling about the war, the food and the cold.

  There was an exchange of Christmas greetings between Hitler and Stalin.

  Best wishes [Hitler wired] for your personal well-being as well as for the prosperous future of the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union.

  To which Stalin replied:

  The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every reason to be lasting and firm.

  In Berlin Ambassador von Hassell used the holidays to confer with his fellow conspirators, Popitz, Goerdeler and General Beck, and on December 30 recorded in his diary the latest plan. It was

  to have a number of divisions stop in Berlin “in transit from west to east.” Then Witzleben was to appear in Berlin and dissolve the S.S. On the basis of this action Beck would go to Zossen and take the supreme command from Brauchitsch’s hands. A doctor would declare Hitler incapable of continuing in office, whereupon he would be taken into custody. Then an appeal would be made to the people along these lines: prevention of further S.S. atrocities, restoration of decency and Christian morality, continuation of the war, but readiness for peace on a reasonable basis …

  But it was all unreal; all talk. And so confused were the “plotters” that Hassell devoted a long patch of his diary to the consideration of whether they should retain Goering or not!

  Goering himself, along with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Ley and other party leaders, used the New Year to issue grandiose proclamations. Ley said, “The Fuehrer is always right! Obey the Fuehrer!” The Fuehrer himself proclaimed that not he but “the Jewish and capitalistic warmongers” had started the war and went on:

  United within the country, economically prepared and militarily armed to the highest degree, we enter this most decisive year in German history … May the year 1940 bring the decision. It will be, whatever happens, our victory.

  On December 27 he had again postponed the attack in the West “by at l
east a fortnight.” On January 10 he ordered it definitely set for January 17 “fifteen minutes before sunrise—8:16 A.M.” The Air Force was to begin its attack on January 14, three days in advance, its task being to destroy enemy airfields in France, but not in Belgium and Holland. The two little neutral countries were to be kept guessing about their fate until the last moment.

  But on January 13 the Nazi warlord suddenly postponed the onslaught again “on account of the meteorological situation.” The captured OKW file on D Day in the West is thereafter silent until May 7. Weather may have played a part in the calling off of the attack on January 13. But we now know that two other events were mainly responsible—an unfortunate forced landing of a very special German military plane in Belgium on January 10 and a new opportunity that now appeared to the north.