by A. N. Wilson
Hitler was the mastermind behind the Russian campaign. It was a blunder of enormous proportions to have undertaken it while Britain was still left undefeated. But he thrilled to the task. The very fact that his own generals were so uncertain about the outcome of Barbarossa filled him with confidence. And – at last – he was up against an enemy whom he could truly respect. Unlike Chamberlain and Daladier, the ‘little worms’, or Churchill, ‘a superannuated drunkard sustained by Jewish gold’, here was another mass-murderer, Stalin, who ‘must command our unconditional respect. In his own way he is the hell of a fellow! He knows his models, Genghis Khan and the others, very well.’11 When Hitler’s henchmen heard him expound this view at his headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair, in July 1942, they must, whatever their degree of loyalty to the Leader, have felt a chill pass through them. They must have realized that their Leader, to whom they had looked as a deliverer of easy victories, was now looking towards a future in which mass slaughter, far from being seen as undesirable, was a ‘model’ to be followed. To such a man, gore-stained glory, more than victory, was to become an aim.
The immense strength and skill of the Red Army and the titanic heroism of the Russian people in resisting invasion must have taken Hitler by surprise. To the reader sixty and more years later, the sheer scale of the campaign is not possible to absorb. Within one day, German attacks had demolished a quarter of the entire Soviet air force. Within four months, the Germans had occupied 600,000 square miles of Russian soil, captured 3 million Russian troops, butchered countless Jews and other civilians as they went, and come within sixty-five miles of Moscow. But within a further four months, more than 200,000 German soldiers had been killed, a staggering 726,000 wounded, and a further 113,000 incapacitated by frostbite.
In August 1941, Hitler made the decision that the German army should capture Kiev, rather than pressing on against fearsome odds to capture Moscow itself. It was another grievous tactical mistake. Kiev fell, with 665,000 Soviet prisoners taken by the Germans. Leningrad was besieged in September 1941, leading to some of the most terrible scenes of human carnage ever witnessed on European soil: 226 citizens arrested for cannibalism, while the bombs rained down for month after month, while thousands died of starvation in the cold, and putrefied bodies lay frozen in the ice.
Hitler’s Table Talk is perhaps revealing in this respect. While he condemned millions of his fellow human beings to the sufferings of that campaign, which had come about solely because of his belief that Russia would provide the German peoples with Lebensraum, he discoursed in August 1942 – that is, after that winter of countless deaths and horrifying misery – on his own capacity to endure the cold:
Having to change into long trousers was always a misery to me. Even with a temperature of below zero I used to go about in lederhosen. The feeling of freedom they give you is wonderful. Abandoning my shorts was one of the biggest sacrifices I had to make … Anything up to five degrees below zero I didn’t even notice. Quite a number of young people today already wear shorts all the year round; it is just a question of habit. In the future I shall have an SS Highland Brigade in lederhosen!
By the end of 1941, Hitler’s War had indeed become a World War. Very few countries remained outside the conflict. One which did was Spain. Although Hitler had sent planes and ammunition to help General Franco overcome the legal republican government of Spain in 1937, the cunning Spaniard would not repay his debt and enter the world war on Germany’s side. Mussolini, however, had taken Italy to war against Britain and France on 10 June 1940. This remains one of the most puzzling aspects of the war since no reason had ever existed why these countries should feel the remotest hostility towards one another.
Japan was an ally of Hitler, but he never really saw how it could be useful to him. When the Japanese Foreign Minister, Yōsuke Matsuoka, a graduate of the University of Oregon, visited Hitler in the summer of 1941, the German Leader urged upon him the desirability of attacking Singapore. This was because of Hitler’s obsession with the British Empire. The fact that a small nation of 45 million could control an empire of over 600 million people throughout the world filled him with envy, and after two years of war with Britain he saw Japan primarily as a way of undermining Britain. He did not see that Japan would be a useful ally against Russia, and that, had Japan attacked Siberia at the moment he launched his Barbarossa campaign, there would have been a real chance of defeating the Soviet Union. With his typical deviousness, Hitler did not even mention his Russian invasion plans when Matsuoka visited him days before the Barbarossa offensive. Matsuoka resigned as Foreign Minister not long after in protest over Japan’s refusal to engage on the Siberian front.
The Japanese were in the war for what they could get out of it. They did not want a long, drawn-out conflict, still less a mutually assured plan of world-destruction. As early as 1942, Emperor Hirohito was instructing his Prime Minister, Tojo, ‘not to miss any opportunity to terminate the war’.12
But it was the Japanese who had made the war a truly global conflict some months earlier. On 7 December 1941 they bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, destroying a sizeable proportion of the American fleet. Had more ships been in harbour that morning, the Japanese might have had some chance, eventually, of winning a war against the United States in the Far East. As it was, they brought into the war a rich, huge enemy, who had now finally been forced to side with Britain and its empire against Hitler. The Japanese thereby released Stalin from any fear that he would be attacked on his eastern front.
Hitler, unable to appreciate the blow which the Japanese had unwittingly struck against their own side, was exultant. ‘We cannot lose this war! Now we have a partner who has not been defeated in three thousand years!’ On the basis of this flimsy piece of history, Hitler proceeded to compound the blunder of invading Russia. Having allowed his anti-Jewish mania to blind him to the extreme anti-Semitism of the American establishment, the strength of isolationism in the United States Senate and the unwillingness of the American public to engage in a world war, he decided that Roosevelt was being manipulated by a gang of Jews. For this ridiculous and inaccurate reason, he declared war on the United States of America, and thereby sealed his own doom.
NINE
The Final Solution
Hitler did not invent anti-Semitism. He told the readers of My Struggle that when he first went to Vienna as a young man, he was shocked by the anti-Semitic tone of the Austrian newspapers, ‘which seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation’.1 By the end of the book, however, he had come to accept, with a manic fervour, all the clichés of anti-Semitic belief: that a Jewish conspiracy lay behind both the capitalism swindle, and the Bolshevik attempt to overthrow that swindle; that the Jews were conspiring to undermine the European nations by impregnating their women, pocketing their savings, and corrupting their morality by spreading syphilis, modern art and trade unionism.
‘With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her own people.’2
So he believed in 1923, when he dictated the words to Hess. And nineteen years on, talking to his court in the Wolfsschanze, his headquarters in East Prussia, he often discoursed upon comparable themes – for example, upon the fact that ‘the Jew’ was always on the look-out to destroy ‘the natural order’ by ‘sleight of hand’: ‘The Jew introduced Christianity into the ancient world – in order to ruin it – re-opened the same breach in modern times – this time taking as his pretext the social question. It’s the same sleight of hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St Paul, Mordechai became Karl Marx …’ He had decided that ‘the people that is rid of its Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order’.3
Already, by the middle of the war, Germans were beginning to recognize what it felt like to be on the way towards achieving natural order. For one thing, they had toothache, since most of the dentists in Germany had been deported or had gone into exile. For another,
they had very few nuclear physicists left, and those who had gone were helping the Americans to pioneer nuclear weaponry. The fortunate universities of Britain and America now had their Albert Einstein, their Ernst Gombrich, their Eduard Fraenkel to adorn their faculties, thanks to the German Leader’s belief that such individuals were undermining the natural order.
But most Jews in Europe had neither the money nor the opportunity to escape. Before the war, Germany was not alone in assuming the desirability of sending Jews into exile, voluntarily or otherwise. In 1937, the Polish Government approached the French and the British with a view to dispatching a million Jews either to Madagascar or to British South Africa. In 1938, the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, reiterated the possibility of the Madagascar option to Ribbentrop, and, in 1939, Chamberlain and Roosevelt, realizing that the Jews were not wanted in Germany, or in German-occupied Austria, or the former Czechoslovakia, or in Poland, asked Mussolini whether there might be an opportunity to relocate them in Ethiopia, which the Italian dictator had brutally invaded and colonized two years previously.
Clearly, even among the higher Nazi echelons, the idea of forcing the Jews into exile was how they envisaged ridding Germany of its Jewish population. Heinrich Himmler, who, among his other titles, was the Reich’s Commissar for the Strengthening of Ethnic Germandom, expressed the hope, on 15 May 1940, ‘to see the term “Jew” completely eliminated through the possibility of a large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some colony’. In October 1943, addressing an elite gathering of SS officers in a toneless voice, he spoke for three hours. After two hours, he referred to one of the tasks which would distinguish the true Waffen-SS man from the lily-livered ordinary German. Every normal German, he admitted, while tolerating, or even approving, the ill-treatment of Jews, would want to make an exception in the case of Jews known to them personally. It was to be their task, in the SS, to have no such scruples. ‘Most of you men know what it is like to see 100 corpses side by side, or 500 or 1,000.’ Because they were men who were capable of cruelty on a stupendous scale, they were the ones who would spearhead the Final Solution – ‘I am referring here to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.’4
Within less than three years, the Nazis had moved from the position of wanting to send the Jews into exile to calculating a means of killing them en masse. It was the cover of war which allowed them to do it, and it was their conquest of so much of Eastern Europe which so enormously increased the number of their victims. Jews numbered less than 1 per cent of the population in Germany and many of these had left. In Poland, Romania, and the Ukraine, it was a different story, with millions of Jews stranded, and unable to fly to the free world.
In 1941 Goebbels proposed to Hitler that the 78,000 Jews left in Berlin be made to wear the yellow Star of David on their clothing. It was a ‘scandal’ that ‘these parasites’ were allowed to disfigure the city, and Germans must look forward to a time when Berlin could become free of the Jews altogether, when they had been forced out and ‘pushed East’. ‘We must approach the problem without any sentimentality. One only has to imagine what the Jews would do to us if they had the power, to know what one must do, given that we have the power.’5 Hitler readily agreed.
The sheer energy wasted on their monstrous schemes of persecution, and eventually of mass murder, weakened the Nazi effectiveness in the war against Russia, and against the Western Allies. It also damaged the German economy. The war had caused acute labour shortages, and the murder or enforced movement of skilled Jewish workers away from their jobs left vacancies which could not be filled. The German workforce shrank during the war from 39 million to 29 million at a time when the war effort clearly required an increase of production in many vital areas.
‘Our country today is overpopulated’, Hitler remarked one evening in August 1942, ‘and the numbers emigrating to America are incredible. How I wish we had the German-Americans with us still. In so far as there are any decent people in America, they are all of German origin.’6 Like so many Hitler epigrams, it is a closely packed set of contradictions. Naturally, he was referring to the non-Jewish Germans who do indeed make up a large proportion of the American population. Yet there was a paradox, to put it mildly, in both deploring the over-population of Germany and wishing that the Germans in America would come back. It could be said that he had been doing his bit to decrease the population, with the gassing of the mentally ill, the driving of not only Jews but many others into voluntary exile, and the eventual slaughter of so many German Jews – not to mention the prodigious number of war casualties which came about as a result of the war he had himself instigated – the millions lost in battle, the 600,000 civilians eventually to be killed by aerial bombardment.
The Nazis nonsensically convinced themselves that the confiscation of Jewish property would solve the housing shortage. Bureaucratic rules were drawn up for the ‘evacuation’ of Jewish families when their houses and flats were taken away from them. They must leave the properties ‘clean and tidy’. Rent and utility bills must be settled. Keys must be handed in to the local Gestapo before the victims were sent to what would almost inevitably be their deaths.
Hitler was the prime author of this policy and of all the subsequent murders. Though his inner circle enthusiastically endorsed the policy, and though there were others who worked out the gruesome schemes of slave labour, starvation, or simple massacres prior to cremation in specially designed ovens, it was Adolf Hitler who was the prime mover, and the chief architect.
By October 1941, at Hitler’s specific command, Jewish emigration from the Reich was banned. The next month, mobile gas vans were used to kill Jews in Lodz in Poland and soon after that in Chelmno. Himmler’s deputy, SS General Reinhard Heydrich, pioneered the use of these mobile vans (which had initially been used to exterminate over 70,000 mental patients). They were simple devices, in which the carbon monoxide, instead of passing out through an exhaust pipe, turned back into the van. Mass shootings took place all over Eastern Europe. An SS officer in the German embassy in Paris came up with the idea of using Jewish slave labour in a vast road-building scheme – Transit Route IV, a supply road running from Przemysl in the south-east of Poland via Lviv and Tarnapol and far into the Ukraine – with the road surface to be constructed from the rubble of demolished synagogues and Jewish gravestones. In the labour camps which were established all over the East, hundreds of thousands of Jews perished from starvation or disease. The ultimate horror, if comparisons between one unspeakable experience and another can meaningfully be made, was in the camps deliberately constructed for the purpose of eliminating human beings by gassing on a huge scale. Auschwitz is the name best known to history, for it was at this Polish location that 1,100,000 people died. But there were many other places. At Treblinka, also in Poland, 900,000 died.
Throughout German-occupied Europe, the Jews were rounded up: a quarter of the Jews in France; three-quarters of the Jews in the Netherlands; Jews from Greece, and from Romania, where the local population was especially murderous towards them; from Bulgaria and Hungary, men, women and children were taken to their deaths. Hitler was responsible for the massacre of six million Jews.
When the war was over, and the mass graves were discovered, and the camps were liberated, the world watched the newsreels with an appalled incredulity. The mounds of children’s shoes, or of false teeth, were complemented by the heaped piles of skulls and skeletons. The skeletal survivors in their striped pyjamas stared at the cameras, making those who had fought against Adolf Hitler feel that all the mayhem and bloodshed of war over the previous six years had been experienced in a righteous cause. Under the cover of a war which had in any event been bloodier and more destructive than any conflict in the history of the human race, this other evil had been perpetrated, a mass slaughter so vast in its extent and so gruesome in its metaphysical motivations that the story has been told over and over again, in films and plays and histories and works of philosophical analysis. Behi
nd the gas chambers, the heaps of human remains, and the debased, dehumanized characters of those who operated these camps, there lay the dark story of European anti-Semitism, stretching back to the Christian belief, embedded in the Gospels, that the Jews had committed the ultimate blasphemy – deicide: the killing of the Incarnate God. No one will ever plumb the murky depths of this terrible story. But while hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of human beings are implicated in the guilt of it, one man stands out as the demonic maestro who made Auschwitz a possibility and thereby made almost everyone who has ever seen one of those post-war newsreels or read the story feel that new wastes of human heartlessness, new depths of mad wickedness, had been reached. That gruesome pioneer was Hitler.
TEN
Defeat
Hindsight makes it obvious that Hitler’s blunders as a war leader made the defeat of Germany inevitable. The first big mistake was in allowing the British Expeditionary Force to escape in the Dunkirk retreat. The defeat of the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain made the invasion of Britain in the summer of 1940 all the harder for Hitler, but had he made the attempt, and been successful, he would have been in a much stronger position to launch his great invasion of Russia the next year. The failure to join forces with the Japanese in the Russian campaign was another catastrophic mistake, ensuring the debacle of the whole Barbarossa campaign. The massacre of the Jews, as well as dissipating energy which could have been spent on the war effort, deprived the Reich of some of its finest minds and most skilled workers. By the end of 1941, Hitler had guaranteed that he would be defeated, and it was principally the Red Army which was his nemesis.
The Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–3 was the turning point of the war. Unlike Zhukov, Montgomery or MacArthur, Hitler was not a strategist, and he was trying to direct the fighting at Stalingrad from East Prussia, thousands of miles behind the lines, using a street-map of the city. It was at this point that Providence turned her back on him.