by A. N. Wilson
By then he knew this was a lie, and another orchestra was playing in his soul, a drama in which easy victories were reserved for the mean and lowly; and in which the true glory, of fire and of blood, was found in the huge orgasmic music of self-destruction.
EIGHT
War Lord
An older generation in England sometimes spoke of ‘Hitler’s War’, to distinguish it from the First World War. In many senses, the Second World War was indeed Hitler’s war. Against military advice at home, and diplomatic pleadings from abroad, he had launched the invasion of Poland. And now, not only Germany, but the other countries of Europe, and eventually of the world, were to be caught up in Hitler’s scheme. Whatever the appeasers in England might have hoped before 3 September 1939, once war broke out, only three options remained: either Hitler would be defeated; or he would be totally successful; or – a fantasy-option, as hindsight makes clear, but one to which, for example, Lord Halifax clung until 1941 – there would be a period of fighting, and then a ceasefire, after which Hitler would continue to control Europe while Britain retained her empire in the rest of the world.
Lord Halifax’s fantasy was almost certainly one which Hitler himself shared. He had been taken by surprise when the ‘little worms’, Chamberlain and Daladier, declared war on him merely because he had sent the panzer divisons to reclaim Danzig for Prussia. The first part of ‘Hitler’s War’ – from 1939 to 1941 – was, in a sense, an anti-climactic prelude to his real war aim: the invasion and conquest of Russia.
During the first nine months of the war it seemed as if the same outstanding good luck which had blessed his life as a peacetime leader would continue to buoy Hitler’s career as a warlord. In a sense, however, the success was disconcerting. It was not what he had planned, and it must have been fairly clear to any of the military top brass that Germany’s economy, and Germany’s fighting power, could not sustain a war on two fronts. His decision in 1941 to invade Russia before he had thoroughly defeated Britain was a major tactical blunder.
But despite horrible losses of life on both sides in those early months it looked as though Hitler’s victory would be swift. A key moment was his successful invasion of neutral Norway in April 1940. Both sides in the war saw the strategic importance of Norway in a naval war. From October 1939, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder urged the conquest upon Hitler as a way of protecting the transportation of iron ore from the Gällivare mines in northern Sweden to Germany and establishing U-boat bases along the fjords, especially at Trondheim. Also, Sweden was never going to come into the war against Germany, whereas King Haakon VII of Norway was pro-British – and in the event escaped Norway in time to form a government in exile in London. At the Nuremberg trials, Admiral Raeder was prosecuted for violating Norway’s neutrality, a charge which many saw as the hypocrisy of ‘victor’s justice’.1 The British were as anxious as the Germans to disturb this neutrality. The Germans simply outwitted them. British troops were sent to the fjords with heavy field guns and no equipment to get them to the tops of the cliffs. Some British soldiers, in the freezing spring weather, were issued with tropical kit to confuse the enemy. Others were wearing Arctic boots from 1919 that were several sizes too large.
Talking to his military colleagues the next year, Hitler saw the Norwegian campaign as decisive. ‘I cannot understand even in retrospect, how it was that the powerful British Navy did not succeed in defeating, or at least in hindering, an operation which did not have even the support of the very modest German forces. If the Norwegian campaign had failed, we should not have been able to create the conditions which were a pre-requisite for the success of our submarines.’2
All this was true. The truth only redoubles the paradox of the events of that summer. The calamity of the Norwegian campaign can be laid squarely at the door of the First Lord of the Admiralty in London, Winston Churchill. Yet its total failure led to a vote in the House of Commons of no confidence, not in Churchill, but in the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. This in turn led to Chamberlain’s resignation and his replacement by Churchill, who would prove to be Hitler’s nemesis.
Norway fell in April 1940. In the next two months, Denmark was defeated. The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg fell. And, on 20 June, France conceded defeat. Both militarily and psychologically, it was a moment that Hitler needed to reach if he was to undo the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles. No one, however, on either side, could have predicted that he would achieve his object so soon.
He did not do so without loss of life. These summer campaigns saw grievous casualties on both sides. About 1.5 million French troops were passed into German captivity in that humiliating June. And the reason why the French capitulated, and why the hero of Verdun, General Pétain, told them to lay down their arms, was quite simple. They could not tolerate a repetition of the slaughter which France had seen, on its own soil, during the long trench warfare of 1914–18. The Germans had lost 27,000 men in the short campaign, with 111,000 wounded. The French had lost a crippling 92,000 with over 200,000 wounded. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had lost 11,000 men killed and with 14,000 wounded. They limped to retreat at Dunkirk where they were rescued by Royal Navy vessels and by a flotilla of ‘little boats’ – pleasure steamers and the like. The catastrophe was celebrated as if it were some kind of triumph, and the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ is still invoked today as a synonym for British esprit de corps. But the Dunkirk spirit had left Hitler the master of Europe.
On 22 June, at Compiègne, fifty miles north-east of Paris, in the same railway carriage where the Germans had themselves surrendered to the French in 1918, French General Charles Huntziger signed the French surrender. The American radio correspondent William Shirer, watching through binoculars, caught Hitler’s expression at that scene. ‘I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.’3
When he visited Paris, Hitler was of course cock-a-hoop, but in a provincial, autodidactic manner which must secretly have embarrassed the more sophisticated Albert Speer, the architect summoned to be at his side. ‘I love Paris’, said Hitler guilelessly, ‘it has been a place of artistic importance since the nineteenth century’ – the sort of remark you can imagine passing between the sixteen-year-old Hitler and his friend Kubizek in Linz, but which, made by a fifty-year-old man, was embarrassing. ‘Like you, I would have studied here’, he blustered, ‘if Fate had not pushed me into politics, since my ambitions before the First World War were in the field of art.’ Free now, as a world-conqueror, to rewrite history, he omitted to mention that another consideration was that he had failed to get into art school and had been congenitally lazy.
A high point of his visit to Paris was at Napoleon’s tomb in Les Invalides, where, with a cap held respectfully to his breast, he paid tribute to the last megalomaniac to attempt the domination of all Europe. To Hermann Giesler, the other architect brought along with Speer to accompany the Leader to Paris, he said, ‘You will design my tomb.’ Flushed with Napoleonic fervour, and to celebrate the victory over the French, Hitler created, Napoleon-style, twelve new Field Marshals, but one of them, Wilhelm Keitel, could have spoken for them all when he said, ‘I had no authority. I was Field Marshal in name only. I had no troops, no authority – only to carry out Hitler’s orders.’ He was speaking to a psychiatrist at Nuremberg in 1945, after his master was dead and his country was in ruins.
With Europe at his feet, Hitler had to decide what to do about the puzzling British. Less than a year earlier, they had been offering him terms of peace on the sole condition that he would keep out of Poland. They had then joined forces with the French, and historical opinion remains divided as to whether or not Hitler committed a blunder in allowing the BEF to escape at Dunkirk, or whether he was deliberately letting them off lightly in the hope of negotiating a peaceful armistice with the government in Westminster.
Winston Churchill, the new Prime Minister, was a passionate Francophile and one of his first ac
ts on taking office had been an attempt to send all available British fighter planes to assist the French in their last struggle. Had he done so, it is difficult to see what would have prevented Hitler from invading Britain in the late summer of 1940, inflicting heavy losses in battles on the British mainland, and, presumably, winning the war. As Churchill announced his scheme in the Cabinet room, the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Cyril Newall, and the Leader of the Liberal Party, Archibald Sinclair, were attempting to point out to Churchill the disaster which would ensue if his plan were followed. The insults which were being heaped on their heads by the new Prime Minister were, in the view of one present, ‘unbelievable’. Like Hitler, Churchill was able to get his own way by bullying those around him into submission. Unlike Hitler, he did occasionally have the grace to listen to reason. Just as he was on the point of telephoning the French premier and promising British planes, Sir Hugh Dowding, Commander in Chief of Fighter Command in the Royal Air Force, got to his feet ‘… and taking my graph with me, I walked round to the seat occupied by the Prime Minister. I laid the graph on the table in front of him, and I said, “If the present rate of wastage continues another fortnight, we shall not have a single Hurricane left in France or in this country.” I laid particular emphasis on “or in this country”. ’ 4
Churchill saw reason. The Battle of Britain was won in the air by the ‘few’ – the fighter pilots with Spitfires and Hurricanes. The British got the better of the fighting, largely because they had pioneered the use of radar. After two weeks of heroic fighting on both sides, as August came to an end, a German bomber, a Heinkel HE-11, instead of bombing the British airfields, dropped its load on London docks, probably by mistake. Churchill’s bruiser mentality made an immediate, highly controversial, decision. He would commit the war crime of bombing civilians.
On 26 August 1940, eighty-one RAF bombers flew over Berlin and unleashed their deadly load. There would still have been a chance, at this stage – albeit a small one – of Göring’s Luftwaffe concentrating all its energy on the defeat of the Hurricanes and Spitfires in the air over Britain and thereby winning control. But Churchill’s brutal mind had accurately read Hitler’s bullying nature. ‘When they declare that they will attack our cities in great strength, then we will eradicate their cities’, Hitler promised, in a typical piece of hyperbole.
By diverting the bombers from the airfields – where they would have destroyed British fighter planes – to British cities, where (as in German cities) civilian anger at the aerial bombardment hardened patriotic resolve, Hitler made a fundamental error of tactical judgement. By late September, the ‘Blitz’ had begun in London, with Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey and many of the Wren City churches satisfyingly – from Hitler’s viewpoint – ablaze. But the Battle of Britain had been lost. When Göring asked a young flying ace, Colonel Adolf Galland, what he needed to win, he replied, ‘an outfit of Spitfires for my group’. Göring marched off, growling as he went.5
By allowing the bombardment of civilians, and at a comparatively early stage of the war, Churchill behaved with a brutality which Hitler was only too prepared to match. More than any other war in history, this was one which involved everyone: not merely soldiers and airmen in battle, but citizens of all ages, huddling in air-raid shelters by night, and by day prepared – in munitions factories, in voluntary work as air-raid wardens, and in innumerable other ways – to ‘do their bit’. For as long as the Leader’s escapades led to prodigious victory abroad, Hitler retained his popularity with the Germans. But the old adulation was to be from now onwards sporadic and conditional, as it was with Churchill.
The faithful Hess – mein Hesserl, as Hitler called him, the second Kubizek, the Leader’s chum, and in consequence, the Deputy Leader, who had been with Hitler in Landsberg Prison, and typed out My Struggle – what a task! – had begun to have visions of lines of coffins and grieving mothers: the realities of war. More than a little crazy, Hess had consulted soothsayers and astrologers and the auguries were not good. True, the war appeared to be going well for the Germans during 1941. Hungary, with its large pro-Nazi population, had joined with the Reich. The difficult invasion of Greece was accomplished. Yugoslavia was crushed – the codename for that part of the campaign was PUNISHMENT.
Hess might have been crazy, but he and his astrologers were not deceived. The future was spattered with blood, littered with corpses; not thousands, but millions. Old flying ace from the First World War that he was, Hess did not believe that the war with Britain was necessary, and he was convinced that if he intervened, and sued for peace, it would be a way of saving lives. Through a member of the anti-Nazi resistance movement, called Albrecht Haushofer, Hess was persuaded that if he were to fly to Scotland and have secret talks with the Duke of Hamilton – a senior Scottish peer, known to both Churchill and the King – there would surely be the chance of, if not peace, then at least the talk of peace. After all, less than two years had passed since Sir Horace Wilson had confided in the Germans the offer, fashioned by Chamberlain and Halifax, that the British would do more or less anything to make peace.
By 1941, however, this was the last thing which either Hitler or Churchill wanted. Perhaps Hess partly knew this. He was a brave, foolhardy man. He set out on the venture without having once practised a parachute jump, and he realized when he was in mid-air at the controls of his Messerschmitt Me-110 that he did not know how to position the plane before making such a jump. Not surprisingly, he broke his ankle upon his descent. After the farce of arriving in Scotland and being arrested by the Home Guard, Hess was eventually interviewed by the Lord Chancellor Sir John Simon and Lord Beaverbrook – now Air Minister as well as being in charge of the Churchill propaganda machine. Hess must have realized as soon as he met these two that his mission was in vain, that there would be no chance of Churchill negotiating a peace with Germany and that the only way for the war to end was by the scale of mass slaughter which he had most hoped to avoid. He was taken to the Tower of London and spent the rest of his days in captivity, after the war being kept in Spandau Prison by the Russians until his nineties, of no harm to anyone.
Hitler’s anger, when he heard of mein Hesserl’s escapade, had a slow boil. At first he spoke with wistful melancholy of his lost friend. Then the rage began to build. ‘Hess is first of all, a deserter, and if I ever catch him, he will pay for this as any ordinary traitor. Furthermore, it seems to me that this step was strongly influenced by the astrological cliques which Hess kept around him.’ Hitler gave orders at once that astrology should be banned.6 It had somehow come to his attention that Lord Rothermere’s newspapers, the Daily Mail in particular, had horoscopes. Many readers of the Daily Mail must have wondered how seriously they were meant to take these astrological speculations. He spoke about a year later of ‘the horoscope in which the Anglo-Saxons in particular have great faith’. Rather than thinking of horoscopes as a harmless game, he saw them as ‘a swindle whose significance must not be underestimated’.7
The propaganda machine went into overdrive to blacken the name of Rudolf Hess. He was in the grip of astrologers. He kept a pet lion. He was half-cracked. All of it was true, but, precisely because it was true, it begged the question of why Hitler had considered him a suitable person to be the Deputy Leader of the German dictatorship. Hess might have seemed deranged, but there was, at least, in his air-borne peace-mission, an ill-judged desire to save human life – not a consideration which seems to have worried Joseph Goebbels, as he limped about on his club foot and called for more and more Jews to be slaughtered; or Hermann Göring in his ever-more elaborate Ruritanian uniforms; or the sinister, bespectacled Heinrich Himmler. Well could you believe the despondent diarist Reck-Malleczewen, who wrote, of the progress of the war, ‘behind all this horror … there lies concealed a cosmic process, a gigantic psychosis and the unleashing of a horde of demons’.8
One of the fears of the demon-band was that Hess would have blurted out their secret plan to invade Russia. But Hess had as usua
l been prepared to lie for his master and hero. When asked directly by Sir John Simon, he had assured the Lord Chancellor that ‘there is no foundation for the rumours now being spread that Hitler is contemplating an early attack on Russia’.9 He said that on 10 June 1941.
Even as he spoke, huge numbers of troops were moving towards Germany’s eastern frontiers. By 22 June, Hitler’s Napoleonic message had been sent to them: ‘German soldiers! You are about to join battle, a hard and crucial battle. The destiny of Europe and the future of the German Reich, the existence of our nation, now lies in your hands alone.’10
He never spoke a truer word. Barbarossa, as the invasion of the Soviet Union was codenamed, unleashed the greatest, bloodiest and most difficult land campaign ever fought in the history of warfare. The failure of the German army to conquer Russia did indeed guarantee that Germany as a nation would be destroyed and that the eastern half of Europe would remain in bondage to the Communists until 1989. The tragic paradox at the centre of mid- to late-twentieth-century history is that Europe, and the world, owed its deliverance from the tyranny of Hitler to the heroism of the Red Army. Of course, Britain’s resistance to Hitler in 1940 played its part at the beginning of the conflict, as did the enormous contribution of men and arms by the United States when they eventually entered the conflict. But the Russian contribution was crucial: it was the resistance of the Russian people to invasion, siege and starvation, and the preparedness of Stalin to sacrifice millions of lives, both military and civilian in what Russians still call the Great Patriotic War, which secured Hitler’s defeat. To be delivered from the tyranny of Hitler, it was necessary to be delivered into the tyranny of Josef Stalin. If you were a Pole, a Czech, an East German, a Hungarian, a Serb or a Croat you did not have to be A. J. P. Taylor to see that this was a questionable form of liberation.