Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  During the Great War our aircraft had normally been as good as those of the enemy. Perhaps at times, and before we started running out of raw materials in 1918, they were a little better. But here, too, the years between 1919 and 1933 had taken their toll. Not having been able to experiment with the very latest technology, we were in danger of first building prototypes and then prematurely putting them into serial production. Unless we were very careful, the outcome would be an air force that was out of date before it was even properly launched. I shall not go into detail except to say that, at the time we went to war in 1939, our military aircraft and their ancillary equipment were better than those of Italy, France, and Russia (of course). They were not, however, superior to those of the Royal Air Force. In 1940-41, that fact was to cost us dearly.

  Air power was a relatively new instrument. To be sure, it had been tested in Abyssinia and Spain. But those campaigns had been relatively small and low level. They could not bear comparison with what was facing us in Central and, even more so, Western Europe. As a result, no one had a very clear idea as how to use the Luftwaffe. Early on we decided that it would be independent of the other services. That was a decision that both our American enemies and our Japanese allies only reached after 1945.

  With that, though, the consensus ended. At the time and later, the best-known work on the question was Il dominio dell’areo. It had been written by an Italian general, Giulio Douhet, as far back as in 1921. I know that some of my commanders, the invaluable Milch in particular, read it. But they did not agree with its conclusions. The air force they built was designed to assist the army in its operations, including both close support and interdiction. Pace Douhet, it was not made for the heavy strategic bombing of civilian targets later practiced by England and the United States. For that, thousands upon thousands of four-engine bombers would have been required. In the event, the few we built suffered from defects that the Luftwaffe technical office never succeeded in overcoming.

  Except in 1897-1914, when Wilhelm II sank his heart, soul, and treasure into it, the navy had always formed by far the smallest part of our Prussian/German armed forces. It was so small, in fact, that Clausewitz did not even bother to mention its existence! My own inclination was to leave it so. However, the events of 1938-39 made it unequivocally clear that, my efforts at conciliation notwithstanding, England would not enter an alliance with us. It would, in fact, do whatever it could to obstruct us. Thus I was forced to change my mind.

  I turned to Raeder and asked him for a scheme to expand the navy so that it might take on the English if necessary. He came up with “Plan Z,” outlining an enormous buildup. It would only be completed, if it could ever be completed, in 1945. We were to have ten battleships, twelve battle cruisers, four aircraft carriers, three Panzerschiffe, five heavy cruisers, forty-four light cruisers, sixty-eight destroyers, and no fewer than two hundred forty-nine submarines.

  As with the Luftwaffe, and in view of the fact that the army had to take first priority, the plan proved to be far beyond our industrial capacity. Considering how long other countries had taken to develop their naval aviation and how long China is taking to do so right now, how Raeder could have thought he could do it in just a few years was also something of a mystery. In the end, only a few of the vessels he had in mind were finished and underwent sea trials. Some of the heavier units which were finished, especially, but not exclusively the two battleships, turned out to be not assets but burdens. One, the Bismarck, was sunk on its very first operation in the Atlantic. The other, the Tirpitz, never participated in any operations at all. Instead, anchored in some godforsaken Norwegian fjord, it had to be protected against enemy aircraft and submarines. Not only at enormous cost, but ultimately to no avail as well.

  We ourselves entered the war with fewer than one quarter of the submarines we were planning to build. To make things worse, some of those were training vessels and weren’t suitable for active operations. Of the rest, only one third could be on station at any one time. Raeder could not, of course, build better submarines than those the current technology permitted. But he was responsible for the fact that we did not have more of them. Raeder, who took up office in 1928, was an excellent organizer. He did as much as anyone to rebuild our navy from 1933 on. However, he remained at his post for too long. Strategically, his mind had gotten stuck in 1914. Like his former master, Wilhelm II, and like his master, the nineteenth-century American naval theorist Alfred Mahan, he was obsessed with capital ships. He always thought we could not have enough of them. I should have let him go much sooner than I did. Say, after the loss of the Bismarck in May 1941 instead of in January 1943. By the latter date he was 67 years old, high time for any commander to go.

  In September 1939, many of these problems were still in the future. Meanwhile, I had a war to run. On the evening of the 3rd of the month I left Berlin and boarded my special train, code-named Amerika. It was a cumbersome contraption, but it had to do. First came one or two armored wagons carrying anti-aircraft guns. Then came my wagon, complete with a fair-sized drawing room, a sleeping compartment, a bathroom, and compartments for my adjutants and manservants. Other wagons carried a command center with a conference room and an up-to-date communications center, dining facilities, and quarters for my military escort, medical staff, and press section. There were also some guest quarters. At the rear came another anti-aircraft wagon. The whole thing was pulled by two locomotives.

  Traveling across country where there was no danger of air attack, we used to halt in the open, enabling me to take a short walk when I felt like it. When such a danger did exist, we stopped near railway tunnels so as to quickly take shelter in them in case of an alarm. The train also served as a forward base from which my entourage and I would take trips in our heavy six-wheeled Mercedes Geländwagen, cross-country cars. Doing so, we were regularly followed by a horde of motorized functionaries, all of whom kept jostling one another for what, today, is known as a photo op. There was also another train of the same kind. It was nicknamed Heinrich and carried Ribbentrop, Himmler, and Hans Lammers. The latter was Chief of the Reich Chancellery and thus my principal liaison to the bureaucrats at home. These trains were an innovation. Much later, the firm that built them, having passed under the control of the so-called German Democratic Republic, also provided a similar, but much more luxurious, one for Mao Zedong.

  The war woke up the infantryman in me. Unlike Wilhelm II and other heads of state, I went into the most forward positions and watched the enemy through a periscope while the battle was still going on. During stops I shared the troops’ food. Wherever I went, I was received with tremendous acclaim. And, of course, I made Goebbels and Hoffmann see to it that the appropriate photographs and films should be widely disseminated—not that they needed prompting! I held meetings with my generals—in fact it was at this time that I first met Jodl. But I did not feel obliged to interfere much. One reason was that they proved more competent than I, and perhaps they themselves, had thought. After all, they had not been in action for twenty years. And another reason was that the Polish defenses were antiquated and weak.

  First, we destroyed much of their air force on the ground. Next, we shot down the rest in air-to-air combat. Doing so was easy, since almost all of their planes were obsolescent. Next, our mastery of the air enabled us to interdict their columns as they marched to the front. Above all, the Poles vastly exaggerated their own strength. Some of them even hoped to march on Berlin! They committed the classic error of concentrating their forces too far forward. This meant Posen instead of behind the Vistula as they should have. Determined not to give up any territory, they ended by being unable to defend themselves and losing all of it.

  On the 6th I toured the battlefield of Tucheler Heide in northern Poland. A powerful Polish corps had been surrounded there and was desperately trying to break out. It was during this battle that they famously pitted their cavalry against our tanks. As the saying goes, the line between courage and lunacy is a narrow one, wit
h none more so than with the Poles! The roads we traveled were strewn with the debris of war: wrecked vehicles and hideously mutilated corpses of horses and men. And not just soldiers either.

  To be sure, Göring had explicitly ordered the Luftwaffe to stick to the laws of war. Given our military doctrine and the way our air force was constructed, doing so made good operational sense. But here and there mistakes were made. I am told that this happened because, observed from a fast-flying aircraft, columns of civilian refugees often look much like military ones. Both consist mainly of covered wagons, and both are smothered by dust or mud. I myself had been through enough slaughter to spare, so the sight did not affect me too much. But I presume that some of our younger troops had different feelings.

  It was during my stay in this area that I was informed that Krakow, a key city hundreds of kilometers to the south where some Polish forces had fled, had fallen. At Krakow and elsewhere, our bombers had concentrated on railway yards and communication knots. Hence it had received little damage. Far less so, for example, than many Belgian and French cities did during the Great War and, again at the time of the Allied Normandy Landings. The case of Warsaw was very different. Already on 10 September, being surrounded on all sides, its situation was hopeless. But the Poles simply refused to surrender.

  On the 25th I visited the commander on the spot, General Johannes von Blaskowitz. The record of the meeting is extant. He told me that, until then, our air force and artillery had only fired at military objectives such as enemy batteries as well as vital installations such as gas, water, and power stations. There was nothing particularly sinister about this. In fact our targets were not very different from those the U.S. and its allies attacked in Baghdad in 1991 and in Belgrade in 1999. We did not, of course, have the precision-guided munitions the Americans had built at such enormous expense. But our aircraft, especially the Stukas, flew much lower and were specifically designed to hit their targets accurately. Not only were there far more of them, but they were able to fly several times as many sorties each day as their late twentieth-century successors.

  Blaskowitz was an officer of the old school. Not long afterward he started raising objections to the way the SS was treating the Polish intelligentsia and the Jews, condemning what he called “criminal atrocities, maltreatment, and plundering.” To show him who was the boss, I transferred him to some minor post in the West while at the same time offering an amnesty to the SS personnel involved. At this point, though, he asked for, and received, my permission to try to persuade the Poles to surrender on reasonable terms. Officers would keep their daggers and be taken into honorable captivity. Ordinary soldiers and NCOs would be released as soon as we had finished processing them. That very evening we dropped millions of leaflets to that effect. Our efforts were to no avail.

  This left us with no option but to subject the city to an all-out assault by our infantry and artillery. However, we had a problem. The Luftwaffe, it turned out, did not have a sufficient number of aircraft suitable for dropping incendiaries. So we were forced to use our Ju-52 transports for the purpose. We had a man stand at each open door, wearing a harness so as not to fall down, to shovel the bomblets into the empty space below! Accuracy, of course, was out of the question. The city suffered horribly, and 26,000 people are said to have died. But that was not my fault. In fact I had done my best to prevent such a disaster from taking place. On 5 October I visited Warsaw for the second time, using the opportunity to visit Field-Marshal Pilsudski’s former residence and to lay a wreath in his death chamber. More important, I attended a grand victory parade our army had organized. As the troops marched past smartly, looking almost as if they had not just put a difficult campaign behind them, I took the salute. Didn’t Nietzsche write that victory is the best cure for the soul? How right he was.

  On 17 September Stalin sent his forces to invade eastern Poland as the secret protocol in our agreement required him to. Our troops, though, had not been informed. Consequently, Guderian’s tanks drove all the way east to Brest Litovsk. He was highly annoyed. Who can blame him? Naturally he obeyed, but not before asking, and receiving, permission to hold a common parade with the Red Army on the 22nd. The campaign over, we reannexed the territories we had lost in 1918-19 and then some. I entrusted the work of re-Germanizing them to Himmler. He lost no time in throwing out Poles and moving in people of sound German stock.

  One advantage of the process was that it enabled him to look after thousands of our Volksgenossen who, without having to be told, had fled from the Red Army. And, of course, Himmler, making liberal use of his special police units, had anyone who might resist us shot. Taking account of our annexations and those of the Russians, we cut Poland’s territory by about three quarters. The rest I turned into a Generalgouvernement; for some reason I do not recall, we used the French term. The governor was my former lawyer and trusted collaborator, Hans Frank. Over the next five years we exploited the country to the hilt, partly because we were, after all, involved in a world war and partly because the Poles deserved no better.

  During all that time our opponents in the West did not lift a finger to help the Poles. Perhaps that was one reason why my generals, cautious as ever, were still pinning their hopes on peace with them. So much so, in fact, that, on 15 September 1939, Halder issued instructions not only for the withdrawal of most of our combat troops from Poland—that made sense—but for partial demobilization! I, however, knew more about international politics than the brass at Zossen did. I very much doubted whether we could achieve peace. Furthermore, I was of two minds. Prewar Poland was a large and rather underdeveloped country. Properly digesting it would have taken decades. But suppose the Allies had accepted our victory and agreed to make peace on the basis of the status quo. Was that really what we wanted? I was already fifty years old, and my time was running out. Besides, I had no doubt that we would have to settle accounts with the West. If not now, then later. But we no longer lived in the period of cabinet wars, when decisions were made by a few crowned heads and their mistresses. The illusions of politicians and generals notwithstanding, one cannot simply start and end a war whenever one feels like doing so.

  Had the decision been mine alone, we would have struck as early as October 1939. But my generals, as so often, procrastinated. The war with Poland, they said, though victorious, had revealed not the forces’ strengths but their various weaknesses. They did not have this, and they did not have that. They could not do this, and they could not do that. This and that had to be fixed, and, of course, they needed time to fix it. Could I, the great dictator, have forced them to act against their “professional” judgment? In theory, perhaps yes. In practice, no. The Wehrmacht, including the officer corps above all, was an exceptionally cohesive organization. That, in fact, was the real secret of its outstanding performance. Such an organization has to be handled with care, or else it will fall to pieces in one’s hands.

  The international environment was not getting any better either. The Spanish Civil War had finally ended, and ended well for us. But Italy, instead of using the opportunity to join us, found one excuse after another why it should not do so. Whether it was Ciano who incited the Duce against us or the Duce who secretly gave Ciano his marching orders was, in the end, immaterial. The example of Rome was not without effect on other European countries. The Scandinavian countries, Benelux, and Switzerland all hedged their bets. Hungary, Romanian, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey, though more sympathetic to our cause, did the same. Even that great hypocrite, Roosevelt, was starting to give some trouble. In public he tried to present himself as a disinterested peacemaker, a stance he hoped would help him win the 1940 elections. However, documents rescued from the Polish Foreign Ministry in Warsaw showed that, behind the scenes, he had been goading England and France to hold firm against us. In the long run he would almost certainly join them in fighting us, just as his predecessor, the equally hypocritical Wilson, had done during the Great War.

  More immediately, Stalin was usi
ng the international situation to strengthen his own position. First, in the summer, his armed forces dealt those of Japan a powerful blow at the Battle of Khalkhin-Gol in faraway Manchuria. Faraway it might have been, but it taught the Japanese what was what. It also put an end to any desire they may have felt to fight Russia in the future. Instead, they continued their hopeless attempt to take over China with all its huddled, teeming masses while also starting to prepare for war against England and the U.S.

  Feeling that their rear was secure, the Russians attacked Finland so as to increase the distance between the Finns (and us) and Leningrad as well as to get a better hold on the Baltic. Finland was vital to us because it provided us with nickel from the mines at Petsamo. Without this raw material, which we needed to produce high-quality steel and for which there was no other source, we might as well have closed shop. We knew it, the Allies knew it, and the Russians also knew it.

  The strange thing was that, with regard to this particular war, we and our Western enemies found ourselves on the same side. Both of us sympathized with the Finns as the underdogs. What is more, they were civilized underdogs resisting the Asiatic hordes coming at them. They fought as bravely as any people in history. Much later, one military expert rated them as Europe’s best soldiers, saying they were even better than ours. Perhaps they were. However, given the enormous numerical and material superiority they were facing, there was only so much they could do. In the end they had to surrender to Stalin’s demands.