Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  Arriving in Florence on 28 October, I had a surprise waiting for me. Meeting me on the platform was a beaming Mussolini. Not since his visit to us three years earlier had I seen him so cheerful. He greeted me with the words, “Führer, we are marching!” From Albania into northwestern Greece, it turned out. We had, of course, known of the Italian preparations. With their typical lack of discipline, they were constitutionally unable to hide any large operation from anyone who wanted to know. Seen from a military-geographic point of view, Greece, and even more so Crete, reminded me of Norway. In any fight against the English in the Middle East, possessing them would have brought us important advantages.

  Seen in such a light, Mussolini’s move made good sense. But only, of course, if it had been carried out by the right army at the right season of the year and as part of a comprehensive plan. As it was, he had the wrong army, started his offensive at the wrong time, and did not have any plan at all. After a few days, his troops got stuck. Next, they were pushed back into Albania. At one point it even looked as if that piece of land might be lost. Meanwhile, the commander, the despicable General Ubaldo Soddu, filled his time by writing music for films.

  As Raeder and Göring kept telling me, implementing the so-called “peripheral strategy” would have implied reducing the army in favor of the Luftwaffe and the navy. Doing so would have taken years. To gain the necessary breathing room, it was indispensable that we come to some kind of agreement with Stalin. In particular Ribbentrop, who following his agreement with Molotov considered himself a diplomatic genius, was in favor of the scheme. Thereupon, he invited Molotov to visit Berlin on 11-13 November. He even prepared a draft treaty! But the talks, which aimed to turn the Tripartite Pact into a pact of four, did not go well. Ribbentrop tried to seduce the Russians by presenting them with the prospect of gains in the Persian Gulf. Molotov, while refusing to commit himself, demanded, as his price, additional territory in Finland, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria as well as the Straits of Denmark and the Dardanelles! Negotiations were still going on when English bombers paid Berlin a visit. They caused little damage, but a delighted Molotov was not slow to use the opportunity to have a little fun at Ribbentrop’s expense.

  Clearly, the peripheral strategy had failed. Truth be told, it had been stillborn. It went against my most cherished principles, and my heart had never been in it. By 5 December I had made up my mind. We would attack Stalin as soon as possible. Doing so would serve two ends. First, it would hack off the arm, a very strong arm as we later learned, that was standing ready to stab us in the back. Second, it would enable us to move toward the realization of our greatest objective: meaning, gaining living space for the German people in the east. Originally I had thought the two wars, the one against the West and the other against Russia, would be separate with a pause of perhaps several years in between. Now, with England defeated and unable to undertake anything serious against us in the near future, I came to the conclusion that I could and should fuse the two struggles into one.

  Meanwhile, I had other worries. The most important one was Italy, whose troops were going from one defeat to the next. On 9 December the English 8. Army in Egypt attacked westward. By the end of January they were threatening Tripoli, the capital of Libya. This being decades before oil was discovered under the sand, Libya itself was of no importance to us. To misquote Bismarck, it was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. But I could not afford to see Mussolini fail. Apart from Japan, which was not yet in the war, he was the only important ally we had. Looking back, it probably would have been best for us if he and his feckless country had stayed neutral. That was an idea, incidentally, I had played with during the early 1920s. The Italians would have formed a buffer against the English in the Mediterranean and helped us import some of the things we needed. But one cannot always get what one wants. Least of all in retrospect.

  I also had another problem. The English were helping the Greeks against the Italians. Next, they asked the Greek dictator, Ioannis Metaxas, to allow them to use his airfields to bomb the Romanian oilfields. Had they succeeded in their purpose, they would have brought our entire war machine to a halt. I had absolutely nothing against the Greeks. On the contrary, I rather admired their courage in fighting the Macaronis. I tried to solve the difficulty by having them join the Tripartite Pact. Pressed by the English, they refused. This left me with no choice but to order my staff to prepare to invade and occupy their country as well.

  Thus it came about that we started preparing for operations both in North Africa and the Balkans. Our advance units reached Tripoli in January-February 1941. At their head I put General Erwin Rommel. I knew him from the time he had been in charge of my headquarters battalion. Having been awarded the Pour le Mérite in World War I, he was reputed to be a brilliant leader and excellent tactician. So rapid were his movements during the French campaign that the enemy called his troops the Ghost Division! He had not, however, previously given any sign that he was capable of higher strategic thought. Nor, given his somewhat jejune character, am I certain that he ever developed any such thing. In this he was typical of my generals. They were masters of their profession but of very little else.

  Rommel’s original assignment was to hold Tripoli. But on 30 March he disobeyed his orders and went on the offensive. He embarked on a spectacular drive eastward, bypassed Tobruk, and reached the Egyptian border. Over the next two years Rommel’s “little hunting expedition,” as Göring called it, probably cost us more than it was worth. His communications were always coming under attack. Repeatedly, we were compelled to divert the Luftwaffe to attack the English base at Malta. We also had to give the Italian Navy some of our precious oil. Losses at sea, especially of materiel, were quite heavy. Much later, it turned out that the English had been reading our codes and deploying their forces accordingly.

  Originally, Rommel only had two German divisions under his command. At peak, he had four out of a total of perhaps two hundred. However, in proportion to its size the Africa Corps, as it became known, received more tanks and motor transport than did our formations in any other theater. Keeping them supplied in the desert created enormous difficulties. Hence, militarily, it might have been better if Rommel had halted at Benghazi, dug in, and waited for the English to do what they could. Even if Rommel had occupied Egypt, the British Empire, aided and abetted by Roosevelt, would have held. These, however, were the years of our victories. I, with public opinion in mind, could not order him to retreat.

  Rommel’s own qualities as a commander were one thing. But what enabled him to achieve his initial victories was the fact that the English had withdrawn many of their forces from Libya and sent them to Greece instead. In doing so they sealed the fate of that country. Throughout the winter we kept moving troops through Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria in the direction of Thrace. Ere we could attack, though, there was the problem of Yugoslavia to be solved. The key railway on which our forces, engaging the Greeks, would have to depend passed dangerously close to the Yugoslav frontier. It was a risk I could not take. I put pressure on the Regent, Prince Paul, to join the Tripartite Pact. On 25 March he finally did so. A mere two days later, he and his government were overthrown by a military coup. It was one, needless to say, that had been prepared in London and was orchestrated from there.

  Having grown up in pre-1914 Austria, no one detested the Serb Bombenschmeisser (bomb throwers) more than I did. But this went beyond my personal tastes. What was at stake was the honor, or credibility, as they say today, of the German Reich. I immediately ordered Halder to drive from Zossen to Berlin. Guessing my intent, he prepared some preliminary plans on the way; this was one of the few times I felt really happy to have him at my side. I gave him the go-ahead, and he set his staff to work. They only took ten days to do what had to be done: select the main axes along which our forces were to advance, bring them up and deploy them along the border, look after the logistics, set up a communications network, and the like. On 6 April, to show the Serbs who was
boss, we opened the offensive by bombing the hell out of Belgrade. How the Serbs howled! Next, our ground forces went into action. Cutting through the 800,000 strong Yugoslav Army like a knife through butter, they moved on the city from several different directions and quickly captured it. By 17 April everything was over.

  Meanwhile, our forces invading Greece from the north faced unexpectedly tough resistance. It was to no avail, however, since we circumvented the so-called Metaxas line by making a right hook through newly occupied Yugoslav territory. Driving south, our troops reached Thermopylae and forced their way through. We took some of the English prisoner. The remainder fled. The rest was easy. On 27 April our flag was hoisted on the Acropolis. Four days later, our spearheads reached the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese. The Greeks had no choice but to capitulate. At the last moment there was some difficulty because Mussolini insisted that they surrender to his forces, too. By now I had learned to despise those forces, especially their feckless generals, with all my heart. But again, circumstances forced me to agree.

  It remained for us to occupy Crete as it was the most important strategic target of all. Back in 1940, both in Norway and France, the Luftwaffe had demonstrated its ability to move its bases forward at lightning speed. It did so on this occasion, too. On 20 May our offensive, combining paratroopers with gliders and transport aircraft, got under way. Opposing our troops were Commonwealth forces. Having just been evacuated from Greece, they were somewhat disorganized; nevertheless, they gave us a good, at times desperate, fight. In the end, assisted by some forces that arrived by sea, we prevailed. We also sent a good part of the English Navy in the waters around the island to the bottom of the sea; never again would any fleet that did not have strong support from the air dare confront one that did. But so heavy were our casualties that I developed serious doubts whether large-scale air assault had not had its day. After 1944, that did in fact prove the case.

  I myself had left Berlin on 10 April. Again traveling in Amerika, I set up my headquarters at Fürstenberg in southeast Austria. As always, we made sure there was a tunnel close at hand to serve as an air-raid shelter if necessary. To be honest, with the campaign going like clockwork there was little for me to do there, and I soon turned back. On 31 May I addressed the Reichstag, praising the German soldier and congratulating ourselves on our victories.

  I now found myself ruling an empire that stretched all the way from the North Cape to western Egypt. All of it had been acquired in fewer than two years and at the cost of very few casualties indeed. There had been no Verdun and no Battle of the Somme. I heard it said that, compared to me, even Napoleon and Hindenburg looked like miserable bunglers. So impressed was Keitel that he started speaking of me as der grösste Feldherr aller Zeiten, the greatest warlord of all time. That was typical of him. I wish he hadn’t, though, because the phrase soon gave rise to a comic abbreviation, der Gröfatz.

  No sooner had Crete fallen than some people, especially in the navy, suggested that, in view of our recent successes, we revive our peripheral strategy. I, however, turned down their request for a second time. Not only would the strategy in question take a long time to implement, but it would have left our problem with Russia intact. If anything, it would have made that problem even worse.

  23. “The World Will Hold Its Breath!”

  To retrace my steps, the die was cast in early December 1940. But not in the sense that there would be a war of expansion against Russia. That had been an unalterable part of my plan for many years past. However, the war in question would be part and parcel of the one we were already waging. In other words, the two would be fused into one.

  Russia, I knew, was like none of the opponents we had faced until this point. The country had assumed its more or less “modern” form under Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. Ever since, it had often been invaded. But it was never really defeated. Charles XII tried and failed. Napoleon tried and failed. The Allies in 1854-56 had made some gains, but they were minor and were soon lost again. Japan had tried, only to have the verdict of history reversed, to a large extent, in 1939. The most successful were Hindenburg and Ludendorff in 1914-18. Even so, by the autumn of 1940 Stalin had regained almost all that Holy Russia had lost. Briefly, from the moment Russia started casting its shadow over Europe toward the end of the seventeenth century, it had, on the whole, gone from strength to strength. And it was no wonder; in 1940, its population equaled that of Germany, France, and England combined. These Slav subhumans truly breed like rabbits.

  Other factors that made up Russia’s strength included the extreme hardiness of its people and the vast spaces that made it immune to blockades and into which its army could retreat. Add a railway system that used a wider gauge than the international standard and a road network that was, in reality, no network at all, and the difficulty of invading the country will become clear. But that was not all. In 1917-18 the Judeo-Bolsheviks came to power. I say Judeo-Bolsheviks, not simply Bolsheviks, as not only were many of their leading personalities Jewish, but at one point no fewer than fifty percent of the NKVD generals were. They set up a ruthless totalitarian government compared to which the one I built was child’s play. They started by killing millions of people during the civil war. Hardly had they stopped doing so than they turned on the peasantry, literally starving millions of people to death in order to obtain the necessary funds to industrialize the country. Then came the great purges of 1937-39, in which several hundreds of thousands more died.

  Amidst all this, they somehow succeeded in building a gigantic military industry. That shows you what sheer terror can do! To be sure, both then and later the quality of that industry often left something to be desired. Not so much in terms of the most important weapon systems, such as their tanks, artillery, and aircraft, which tended to be crude but functional. Some, particularly the T-34 tank, which we began to encounter in late 1941, were better than ours. But with regard to refinement, operator comfort, and finish, it was as if the designers were saying, “We do not care about these things because the equipment will soon be lost in battle anyhow. So why spend more on them than we must?” The same applied to every kind of ancillary equipment, such as wireless, optics, and photography. No decent German would have used such junk! Even their watches stopped working after a short time.

  Geographically, European Russia falls into two zones: a north and a south. They are separated by the Pripet Marshes, an elliptically shaped area some 480 kilometers long and 225 kilometers wide. It forms an almost impassable area of forests and swamps ideal, as it later turned out, for irregulars and bandits of every sort. Thus any invader will be faced with the question of where the center of gravity should be placed. The original plan, produced by some officers in the Army General Staff during the summer, was to go for the southern part of the front first. However, my Directive 21 of 18 December changed this. I did not want my divisions to get lost in the endless spaces of the Ukraine. Instead, the emphasis was on a rapid campaign aimed at destroying the opposing Red forces as close to the frontier as possible.

  To achieve the goal of Operation Barbarossa, the name I chose for it, we formed three army groups. Proceeding from left to right, Army Group North, commanded by Field-Marshal Ritter von Leeb, was to advance from East Prussia toward Leningrad by way of the Baltic States. Army Group Center, commanded by Field-Marshal Fedor von Bock and the most powerful of the three, was to take the historic route leading from Poland to Moscow. Only Army Group South, under Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, was to march south of the marshes into the Ukraine. Further south still our forces in Romania were to proceed northeast along the Black Sea Coast. Each of the three Army Groups was to have the support of a Luftflotte, an air fleet.

  A very serious problem we faced was that of intelligence. Compared with the West, Russia had always been secretive. That may have something to do with the Slavic soul, which tends to be inscrutable, devious, and undependable. Bad communications, which prevented news from spreading quickly and efficiently, d
id the rest. Stalin’s terror, some of which was directed against alleged “spies” and “saboteurs,” made things even worse. Compared to Russia, both his and that which he passed to his Communist successors, ours was a free and open country. His subjects, for that was what they were, were not even allowed to travel without a domestic passport! From Brest Litovsk to Vladivostok, every railway station had its cells to house those whom the NKVD caught on the way. From those cells to the concentration camps the road was often short.

  All this may have had its uses in maintaining Stalin’s regime. But it made obtaining the kind of information our commanders needed very difficult. The most elementary sources, of the kind that, in other countries, are freely available in any book or stationery shop, were absent. There were no reliable maps (some of the ones we had were deliberately misleading.) There were no guidebooks. There were hardly any technical magazines. There were not even any telephone books. Fortunately, we had, in the form of our Ju-86, reconnaissance aircraft capable of flying so high (50,000 feet), that no Russian anti-aircraft gun and no Russian fighter could shoot them down. During the last few months before the invasion they provided us with lots of vital information. But their range was limited, and they could not tell us what was happening deep inside enemy territory.

  Thus we entered the campaign with less detailed information than we ought to have and wanted to have. To cite just one example, we ourselves committed about 3,500 tanks. We knew that the Russians had more. But how many more? Estimates varied enormously. One was as high as 24,000. I could not believe my eyes and prohibited that number from being disseminated. But it turned out to be correct, give or take a few thousand. It’s no wonder that, later on, I compared myself to a wanderer who had lost his way in a snowstorm. Not knowing where he was, he crossed Lake Konstanz over the ice. Turning back and realizing what he had done, he himself turned into ice. I consoled myself by the plain fact that Providence had guided me during all these years. I trusted that it would continue to do so in the future.