Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  Well before the campaign in Norway was finished, Hitler turned his attention back to the west. On 1 May 1940, he set the date for the attack as 5 May. On 2 May, he held last-minute discussions on the airborne operations. The date of the attack was delayed yet again, so that on 7 May, Hitler announced 9 May as the new date, followed shortly after by 10 May. On that day, the Führer set off for his field headquarters at the Felsennest in the Eifel region of western Germany. Now the real war would begin, a contest which Hitler did not expect to be either quick or easy. The main target of the offensive remained Britain. In his ‘Proclamation’ to the attacking Wehrmacht units, the Führer singled out the ‘British rulers of the world’ in particular for their alleged determination to ‘prevent Germany at all costs from achieving unity’, and to deny the Reich ‘the necessities of life which are necessary to ensure the survival of an 80-million strong people’.161

  The attack in the west unfolded pretty much as Hitler had envisaged. Key fortresses and bridges were secured by coup de main or airborne assault. The German army advanced into Belgium and Holland, sweeping aside local resistance. French and British forces advanced to meet them.162 The German armour punched through lightly held Allied defences in the Ardennes. Attempts to establish a defensible line were disrupted by incessant attacks from the air, and flanking movements by the panzers; a mixture of adrenaline and narcotics kept the German columns moving. The whole phenomenon became known as ‘Blitzkrieg’–‘lightning war’. Within a fortnight, Belgium and Holland had been completely overrun, and the British and French were falling back to the Channel ports.

  Once again, Hitler’s hand was visible not merely in the planning of the campaign,163 but in its execution. The Führer spent most of the first three weeks of the campaign in his Felsennest headquarters, closely watching and intervening in operations.164 He was also, however, prone to even greater panic and hesitation than during the fighting in Norway. After seven days of advancing at breakneck speed, Hitler suddenly became worried about Allied counter-attacks, especially from the south.165 That afternoon, Hitler went to the army group commander, Rundstedt, to warn of the ‘importance which the southern flank had not only for the operations of the entire army’ but ‘politically’ and psychologically. He feared that any ‘setback’ would boost not merely the military but also the ‘political leadership of our enemies’. For this reason, Hitler concluded, the requirement was not for a ‘rapid advance to the Channel coast but rather for the quickest establishment of a dependable defence’ along the rivers to the south.166 ‘The Führer is incredibly nervous,’ Halder added that evening, ‘he is afraid of his own success, wants to risk nothing and would therefore ideally like to halt’ the advance; again, his fear was for his ‘left’ (southern) flank.167 Hitler wanted to wait until the infantry divisions had come up before authorizing further thrusts by the armoured and motorized formations.

  On the same day as Hitler launched his western offensive, the Chamberlain government fell over its mismanagement of the Norway campaign. Winston Churchill became prime minister of an all-party government. This was extremely bad news for the Führer, as the new British leader represented everything that he hated and feared. Three days after his appointment, Churchill delivered his first address to parliament as prime minister. He vowed to pursue ‘victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be’. He promised the British people only ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. Like Roosevelt, and his rival Hitler, Churchill proved to be master of the set-piece oration. The US president had long been in the Führer’s sights, but now the prime minister moved centre stage. The rhetorical duel between the Führer and the British leader had begun.

  The stunning victories over Britain and France in Norway and Flanders took Mussolini by surprise. He now scrambled to enter the war before Germany had completed her triumph. Hitler’s response was revealing of his strategic priorities. He had little interest in seeing the Italians pile in against France, but very much welcomed anything Mussolini might undertake against the British in the western and central Mediterranean, particularly Malta and Gibraltar, or the eastern end, especially the Suez Canal.168 On the very last day of May, Mussolini sent a letter announcing that Italy would declare war on 5 June; she actually did so five days later. The Italian scavenging operation in southern France was quickly bogged down, and to Hitler’s fury not much was done in the Mediterranean either.169

  Meanwhile, some 300,000 British soldiers were encircled on the Channel coast in a rapidly shrinking pocket. London began to organize their hasty evacuation, but there was no chance of taking more than a fraction of them out if the panzers overran the perimeter defences. For several crucial days, no such attack came.170 Hitler hesitated, not for political but for military reasons. The original decision to halt the panzers on 24 May was taken by the army group commander, Rundstedt, against the wishes of the High Command; the Führer merely upheld it.171 This may have been partly motivated by the desire to assert his authority over the OKW, but it is more likely that Hitler was simply showing the same caution he had manifested on several occasions throughout the previous three weeks. His tanks had outrun their supply lines, and, like the rest of the Wehrmacht, he had a healthy–and at this point probably exaggerated–respect for British abilities. The order to halt the attack on Dunkirk was accompanied by an instruction not to move beyond a line to the north and east of the pocket.172

  Hitler had good reason to be careful. The retreat to Dunkirk is rightly remembered as a British disaster, and there were certainly scenes of panic and cowardice. In general, however, the advancing Germans did not believe they were witnessing a rout. The bulk of the BEF fell back in reasonable order, fighting all the way. German sources all attest to the resistance they encountered: ‘the encircled enemy has defended himself tenaciously’; ‘the enemy is fighting tenaciously and bravely to gain time for the embarkation of his troops’; ‘the battle is hard, the British are as tough as leather’; despite the fact that the cordon around Dunkirk is getting ever smaller, the enemy is defending himself with the courage of despair’.173 These statements mirror Hitler’s own long-established rhetoric about British ‘tenacity’ and ‘toughness’. They somewhat contradict the equally frequent claims by German generals at the time and since that Hitler should have ordered the Wehrmacht to crush the British forces in Dunkirk without mercy. Even if Dunkirk lacked any sort of perimeter line when the tanks were ordered to stop, taking the town might not have been as easy as it looks today.

  The Führer did not think that a full-scale ground attack on Dunkirk was either feasible or necessary. He claimed that the ‘terrain in Flanders’–which he knew well from the First World War – ‘was unsuitable for tanks on account of being waterlogged’,174 obviously fearing that his armoured units would get bogged down among the canals and waterways. He also told Army Group A that it was ‘necessary to spare the armoured forces for coming operations’, and that ‘a further narrowing of the pocket would only result in an undesirable reduction in the activity of the Luftwaffe’.175 Besides, the day before the tanks were halted, Göring told an enthusiastic Hitler that the Luftwaffe could complete the destruction of the BEF. Shortly afterwards, the Führer remarked on the ‘ideological reliability of the Luftwaffe compared to the army’, and this may have been an additional reason to deny the coup de grâce to the army and grant it to the airforce.176

  On 24 May 1940, the same day as he confirmed Rundstedt’s halt order, Hitler issued a new directive to the Wehrmacht. It fell into three parts. First, he defined the ‘next aim of the operation’ as the ‘destruction of the encircled Anglo-French-Belgian forces through a concentric attack of our northern wing as well as the rapid capture and securing of the Channel coast there’. The Luftwaffe was tasked with ‘breaking all enemy resistance’ in the pocket, and ‘preventing the escape of British forces across the English Channel’, and securing the southern flank of Army Group A (Hitler’s perpetual concern). Only once this h
ad been done, Hitler decreed, should the Wehrmacht ‘proceed to the destruction of [the remaining] enemy forces in France’. The Luftwaffe, for its part, was instructed to begin ‘large-scale operations against the British homeland’, right away once sufficient aircraft were available. Significantly, the Führer ordered that this be done ‘independently’ of the operations at Dunkirk and should be continued ‘even after’ the subsequent push south against the rest of the French army had begun.177

  Hitler’s thinking at Dunkirk is thus clear enough. He halted the tanks for military reasons within an overall political-strategic concept. His main focus was on the delivery of political and psychological effect against Britain. This was to be done, first, through the destruction of the BEF’s will to resist at Dunkirk, not its physical annihilation. Secondly, he was already thinking of the next stage of his campaign, which was a devastating aerial and naval assault on the home islands from his new bases. There is no evidence whatsoever that Hitler offered the BEF a ‘golden bridge’ to retreat across in order to facilitate a negotiated settlement.178

  Göring’s aircraft duly pummelled Dunkirk, but they did not stop the evacuation. Senior Wehrmacht figures, who could see that the British were getting away, demanded an immediate attack. The Führer effectively left the decision to Rundstedt.179 The offensive was eventually resumed, but the British and French troops holding the perimeter put up a ferocious fight, making good use of the canals and waterways to delay the advance, just as the Führer had feared they would do. On 1–2 June 1940 Hitler went to Brussels to be close to the final showdown in Artois and Flanders. But it was too late. Most of the BEF were long gone. The British rearguard was evacuated on the night of 2–3 June.

  Hitler now turned south to finish off the French. On 6 June 1940, he moved his headquarters to Brûly-de-Pesche near Charleville close to the Franco-Belgian frontier. It was christened ‘The Wolf’s Gorge’, an appellation which probably alluded to Hitler’s codename–‘Wolf’–during the 1920s, but which may also have been a nod to the gorge of the same name in Carl Maria von Weber’s popular opera Der Freischütz. If Hitler had set ambitious goals for the offensive, he had still not lost his innate operational caution, rejecting some of the Army High Command’s more ambitious suggestions as ‘too risky’.180 Be that as it may, the German advance was relentless. On 14 June, Paris was abandoned to the Germans. Three days later, France sued for peace. Hitler’s triumph was complete.

  The scale of the German victory was totally unexpected. France and Britain were both highly developed western societies. The French deployed millions of men, and between them the Allies could command as many or more aircraft, tanks, and artillery, of roughly similar quality, than the Germans. In terms of transport, the British and French were well ahead. Most of the German army marched on foot and much of its artillery and supplies was moved by horse-drawn wagons. The divide was epitomized by the reaction of the commander of Army Group B, Fedor von Bock, to the sight of the British equipment left behind at Dunkirk: ‘immeasurable amounts of vehicles, guns, tanks and army equipment’, which suggested a ‘plenitude of kit which we poor devils admired with envy’.181 The only slight advantage Hitler had enjoyed was in fighter aircraft; everything else was down to superior German tactics and élan. Hitler’s triumph was thus, in the grand scheme of things, a monumental fluke.182 It was a strange defeat for France and Britain; for Hitler, an even stranger victory.183

  Like many Germans, Hitler was deeply conscious that the Wehrmacht had beaten an enemy which had bested them twenty years earlier, and that towns and villages which they had fought over for years had fallen within days and sometimes even hours. Following in the wake of his advancing armies, the Führer took several trips down memory lane. At the height of the Dunkirk crisis on 29 May 1940, he went to Ypres immediately after it was captured. The Führer went through the Menin Gate, whose lion represented both Flanders and Britannia. In June, Hitler undertook further trips. On one of them he encountered the already legendary Erwin Rommel of the 7th Panzer Division, who demonstratively signalled his loyalty by rushing towards the Führer with his right arm in salute.184 Hitler sought to make these journeys more than just a triumphal progress. By visiting not merely the German memorial at Langemarck but also the Canadian one at Vimy Ridge and the French one at Loretto in Artois, he tried to suggest a common fate now transcended. Hitler had refought the Great War and in so doing had finally ended it, or so he believed. In retrospect, though, these trips can also be read as a tacit admission that the war of movement was over, and that the war of attrition was about to begin. Just as the German armies’ sweep into Belgium in 1914 was followed by four years of hard slog, Hitler’s victory of 1940 was simply the prelude to a much longer struggle.

  The interplay between past and present was most evident in Hitler’s handling of the armistice discussions with the French.185 He insisted these take place at Compiègne, in the same heavily symbolic railway carriage in which the Germans had accepted the Allied terms in 1918. In the month between the first time he mentioned the notion to Jodl on 20 May 1940186 and his arrival at Compiègne on 20 June 1940, Hitler thought carefully about the choreography of the event. ‘He even held a dry run beforehand’, as witnessed by an astonished German diplomat. Observing the solitary Führer saluting and greeting a void, Erich Kordt remarked, ‘He is rehearsing his piece.’187 When the French arrived, Hitler put on a well-prepared performance. He simply dictated his terms, sitting in the same seat that Foch had spoken from when setting out his conditions in 1918. Hitler did not wait for the details, but left hurriedly while the French plenipotentiaries communicated with the government in Bordeaux. There were no negotiations, as such. It was all for show, for the benefit of the huge array of global media and the Wochenschau cameras capturing the whole event.

  A few days after Compiègne, Hitler visited Paris.188 He stole into the city in the early hours of 24 June 1940 more as an architectural tourist than as a conqueror. Hitler brought with him Hermann Giesler, delivering on the boast he had made towards the end of the previous year, Speer, the sculptor Arno Breker and the increasingly ubiquitous Bormann.189 His first destination was the Paris Opera, where he astonished the usher with his detailed knowledge of the original ground plan. Then he was driven via the Madeleine, the Place de la Concorde, the Louvre and down the Champs-Elysées. He paused for longer at the Arc de Triomphe to study the inscriptions, all of which he already knew off by heart. The high point of the visit, however, was Hitler’s homage at Les Invalides, where he stood silently beside Napoleon’s sarcophagus with lowered head. This was a conscious echo of the famous scene in Potsdam in 1806, when Bonaparte had made a similar pilgrimage to the tomb of Frederick the Great. On leaving the building he told Bormann that he wanted the remains of the Duke of Reichstadt, Napoleon’s son by the Austrian princess Marie Louise, transferred from Vienna to Paris.190 The symbolism could not have been clearer: Hitler saw himself as continuing the Frederician and Napoleonic traditions, resolving in his person the Franco-German antagonism.

  In early July 1940, Hitler returned in triumph to Berlin, standing upright in his chauffeured car as he moved through the multitudes. His entrance, which the Führer planned in detail, has been compared to that of a conquering Roman emperor.191 The city was a sea of flowers and chanting crowds. Hitler was at the zenith of his power. Führer and ‘people’, the vast majority of whom exulted in the conquests, were closer than ever before; Hitler was dictator by ‘approbation’, at least for now.192 The dominance of most of continental Europe had fallen into his lap. Germany now held the seaboard from the Arctic to the Bay of Biscay. Hitler dominated a ring of allied and satellite states to the south and east. No trouble was to be expected from neutral Portugal or Switzerland, a country he despised.193 Spain and Finland very much leaned to his side. The relationship with the Soviet Union, it seemed, was stable. Hitler now not only directly controlled most of the mainland European economy–with a pre-war GDP larger than that of either the United States or the British
Empire and a substantially greater population194–he also had access to raw materials and foodstuffs well beyond its borders. Europe had been unified under Nazi leadership.195

  Hitler wasted no time in ordering the integration of western Europe into the German war economy. On 16 June 1940, even before France had sued for peace, he called for ‘coordinated planning for the occupied Belgian, French and Luxembourgeois territories’ within the framework of the Four Year Plan.196 A new order was in the offing.

  Hitler hoped to rule this space with as light a touch as possible. In his decree on the administration of the occupied territories in the west, he laid down that ‘conduct of the military administration’ should be such as to avoid the impression of ‘an intended annexation of the occupied territories’. The Hague Convention was to be observed. ‘The population is to be spared,’ Hitler added, ‘economic life is to be kept going.’ Hostile action by the population, on the other hand, would be ‘suppressed harshly’. In Norway, the Führer promised to release all Norwegian conscripts, holding on to the professionals only so long as the exiled government continued the war, or until they individually swore an oath not to take part in any further hostilities against Germany. In France, he gave members of the Wehrmacht strict instructions to show ‘restraint’ in their relations with the population, ‘as is appropriate for a German soldier’.197 The Führer also held back with annexations, which were for now limited to the small German-speaking province of Eupen-Malmedy.198 The purpose of all these moves was the same: to impress on non-Jewish Europeans that the war was over and that the benevolent rule of the Führer was the new normal. He had some success in this regard, at least initially.199