Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  All this shows that the Soviet Union was primarily attacked not because it was communist, but because Hitler believed that it could be (relatively) easily despoiled to support the short- and long-term struggle against Anglo-America. Once the invasion was decided, however, the ideological antagonism to the Soviet Union gained greater prominence. Front and centre here, of course, was Hitler’s preoccupation with the Jews, whom he saw as the directing mind behind both the Soviet Union and the emerging Anglo-American coalition. Soviet Jews, he believed, would drive resistance to the invasion and constitute a fifth column behind German lines. Hitler resolved to eliminate them in the course of, or immediately after, the invasion. At this point, he seems to have targeted only adult male Jews, whom he regarded as enemy combatants. There was, as yet, no expectation that all Soviet Jews would be murdered, regardless of age or sex, still less any operational plan to achieve this.75 There was also no direct spatial connection in Hitler’s mind between the planned murder of the Jews and the clearing of Lebensraum in the east, which was to be at the expense of the Slav population.

  In mid March 1941, the broad outline of Hitler’s plans for the murder of adult male Soviet Jews was clear. He instructed Himmler to establish four Einsatzgruppen of the Sicherheitspolizei and SD, totalling about 3,000 men, to carry out ‘special tasks’ behind the front lines.76 Over the next three months, these ‘tasks’ were more closely defined, and the cooperation of the Wehrmacht and other organizations was secured. Hitler was not merely the initiator of the planned mass executions, but was kept abreast of the preparations, not least because he had to arbitrate any resulting competency disputes.77 These killings were not the purpose of Operation Barbarossa, but consequent upon it. Hitler did not need to invade the Soviet Union to murder Jews, or to take them hostage; he already had millions of central and western European Jews under his control.

  The campaign against the Soviet Jews was not just a front in the struggle against Anglo-America, of course. It was also part of a much broader ideological war against Bolshevism. In late March 1941, Hitler pronounced the conflict to come not merely a war for resources, such as land and raw materials, but also a ‘contest between two world views’. He damned ‘Bolshevism’ as ‘synonymous with anti-social criminality’. For this reason, the Führer demanded, German soldiers should abandon the customary rules of war. ‘The communist is no comrade,’ he claimed, especially the ‘commissars’ and secret policemen deployed with the Red Army.78 On 12 May, he issued the notorious ‘Commissar Order’, according to which these ‘political leaders’ were to be ‘eliminated’ by the Wehrmacht immediately after capture. This measure was accompanied by a much more far-reaching directive the following day, which laid down the framework for military justice during Barbarossa. Partisans, he decreed, were ‘to be dispatched without mercy’, all other opposition was to be ‘crushed’, and where German units were attacked behind the lines ‘measures of collective violence’ were to be undertaken against the local population. Beyond that, Hitler determined, with reference to the ‘specificity of the enemy’ and the fact that Germany’s collapse in 1918 and subsequent travails were attributable to ‘Bolshevik influence’, that actions by Wehrmacht and rear-area forces against civilians should not be prosecuted, even if they would normally be considered military crimes.79

  Hitler, to sum up, planned two massive murder programmes in the course of or immediately after Barbarossa. Firstly, the killing of hundreds of thousands of communist cadres and millions of male Jews, in order to decapitate the Soviet leadership and to secure the rear areas. Secondly, the death by starvation of about 30 million Soviet citizens in order to use the grain saved to feed the Reich and–though this was implicit rather than explicit at this stage–to clear the land for later settlement by Germans.

  In late March 1941, Hitler was suddenly distracted by a crisis in the Balkans. In order to keep the British out and stabilize the Italian position in the Balkans he had long planned to bring Yugoslavia into the Axis orbit. On 14 February, Hitler received the Yugoslav prime minister, Dragiša Cvetković, at the Berghof, followed by a visit from Prince Paul of Yugoslavia on 4 March 1941. Hitler made both men the same offer, which was protection and possible territorial gains, such as Salonica, in return for a general alignment with the Third Reich; both prevaricated, with Paul warning Hitler that such an agreement would cost him his regency. On 25 March, Yugoslavia finally caved in under huge pressure. The pact was extremely unpopular, at least in Serbia, where pro-British feeling ran high. Hitler joked at the signing ceremony that the Yugoslavs looked as if they were at a funeral.80 An invasion of their country was, at this point, very far from Hitler’s mind.

  Two days later, the Führer was stunned by news of a coup by Serbian officers in Belgrade.81 He had long been deeply concerned about British penetration of the country, and must have been further unsettled by the signature of a treaty of friendship and non-aggression between the new regime and the Soviet Union a week later, and the news that Roosevelt was planning to offer Belgrade assistance under the Lend-Lease programme.82 Hitler issued Directive 25, which authorized the invasion of Yugoslavia and its destruction as an independent state.83 All Yugoslav professions of friendship were to be ignored. The attack was also conceived as a shaping operation in advance of the long-planned attack on Greece. Hitler now scrambled to make contact with Yugoslavia’s internal enemies; Rosenberg was instructed to find Croatian collaborators.84

  The driving force behind the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece was not an interest in either country per se, or an established enmity towards the local population, still less the quest for Lebensraum.85 In the directive setting out his plans for the region after the invasion, Hitler envisaged German gains to be relatively modest–some former Habsburg parts of Slovenia adjoining Carinthia and Styria were to be annexed to the Reich.86 There was no mention of any plans to settle Germans south of those areas. Hitler had shown no previous interest in any of the Yugoslav peoples, and the codename he gave the operation against their state–‘Punishment’–expressed a purely spontaneous rage. He was actually sympathetic to the Greeks, not least because of their classical heritage, and regretted that he ‘had’ to attack them. ‘The Führer says,’ Rosenberg noted in his diary, ‘that he is very sorry that he has to fight with the Greeks.’87 Hitler’s principal purpose in both operations was to prop up Italy, to exclude Britain from the Balkans, and secure his flanks for the attack on the Soviet Union. The Führer’s ‘Proclamation’ to the German people at the start of the Balkan campaign duly framed the attack as part of the struggle against ‘British imperialism’ and ‘Jewish high finance’. ‘We have swept [our] northern flank clear of the British,’ he continued, and ‘we are determined not to tolerate such a threat in the south either.’88

  On 6 April 1941, Hitler struck at Yugoslavia, beginning with a massive air attack on Belgrade. That same day, German forces poured into Greece from Bulgaria; other units raced through the Vardar Valley in Yugoslav Macedonia to outflank the Greek defences on the Metaxas Line with Bulgaria from the west. Yugoslavia surrendered in mid April 1941. By then Hitler had already turned his attention south. On 13 April 1941, he issued Directive 27 to complete the destruction of Greece and to drive Britain completely out of the Balkans.89 The Greeks and the British offered furious resistance but were soon overcome. German aircraft were careful to spare the major sites of classical significance. ‘There are to be no bombs on Athens,’90 Hitler ordained. Within three weeks, mainland Greece had been completely overrun. Most of the British expeditionary force escaped south across the Mediterranean.

  By late April and early May 1941, Hitler’s position appeared to have improved, but the overall situation had not changed much. In Latin America, for example, particularly in Argentina, the British secret service and propaganda spread misinformation about Hitler’s alleged plans to subvert the continent.91 This was addressed not merely to local governments and populations but also to the American president, who duly recycled these stories in h
is own speeches against Nazi Germany. In mid April 1941, Roosevelt extended the US defence perimeter to include the Azores. The Romanian oil-fields at Ploesti remained within range of RAF bombers on Crete. Hitler also fretted about British invasion plans against the Iberian Peninsula.92 In Iraq, British troops landed at Basra in defiance of the new nationalist and pro-Nazi Baghdad government, which turned to Hitler for help.

  On 11 April 1941, Hitler let it be known that he had read of the ‘national struggle of the Arabs with great interest and sympathy’. The Führer stressed that the Arabs, as an ‘old people of culture’, had shown themselves eminently capable of ruling themselves. For this reason, Hitler announced that he would recognize ‘the complete independence of the Arab states’ where it existed or was desired, a clear tilt at the British Empire.93 Privately, though, he was as scathing of the Arabs as he had been in the 1920s. ‘Unfortunately,’ Hitler remarked, ‘Arabs [are] unreliable and can be bribed,’ something which the British and French ‘understood’ very well.94 Later that month, Hitler authorized Ribbentrop to receive the Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose: the Führer refused a meeting with him himself, at least for now.95 Bose explained that although British and communist propaganda suggested that Nazism supported the subjugation of other races, the Hitler–Stalin Pact had revealed Hitler’s true ‘social’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ instincts to many Indians. These exchanges showed the hopes which some of the ‘global south’ invested in Nazism, but Hitler remained hesitant. Bose and Husseini were much more interested in him than he in them.

  Hitler had greater hopes of Japan. In late March and early April he had two meetings with the Japanese foreign minister, Matsuoka, who reached Germany by an adventurous and circuitous route via the Soviet Union. Hitler explained that his aim was to ‘break’ the ‘British hegemony’ in Europe and to exclude any ‘American intervention in Europe’. In this context the Tripartite Pact had the great merit that it deterred the US from ‘entering into the war officially’. Hitler concluded that while there would always be a ‘certain risk’, now was the best chance Japan would ever have of attacking the British Empire. Hitler promised to intervene ‘immediately in the event of conflict between Japan and America’ if the latter intervened to protect the British Empire against a Japanese attack.96 He did not encourage the Japanese to fight the Soviet Union, no doubt partly because he thought he did not need their help and partly because he wanted them to remain focused on Anglo-America. For this reason, Hitler was entirely unperturbed by the Japanese-Russian Non-Aggression Pact of 13 April 1941.

  Even now, Hitler had not yet completely given up hope of conciliating Britain. Informal contacts were maintained throughout early 1941, though it is not clear whether the Führer personally encouraged them or was even aware that they were taking place.97 The most important of these lines of communication, which may have been opened with Hitler’s approval, ran from Britain directly to the office of the deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess. He had been planning a mission to England, undertaking various dry runs, and drawing up documents, since the end of the previous year. British Intelligence indulged the dialogue, perhaps in order to find out more about Hitler’s intentions, especially towards the Soviet Union.

  Hess met with Hitler on 5 May 1941. There is no evidence that he discussed his plans with the Führer on that occasion, but nor did anything that was said then deter him from taking a truly momentous step. On 10 May 1941, Hess, a skilled pilot, took off from Haunstetten airfield near Augsburg and flew more than 1,700 kilometres, some of it over territory closely patrolled by the RAF, to the east coast of Scotland. There he parachuted safely. Hess requested to see the Duke of Hamilton, whom he believed to be sympathetic to a negotiated solution, and presented him with his personal plan for a peace between Germany and Britain.98 It was one of the war’s most dramatic stories, a Shakespearean excursion into the enemy camp. Though it is unlikely that Hitler knew of his deputy’s general intention, still less the precise date of the mission, there can be no doubt that Hess believed he was acting in accordance with his wishes.99 The timing of the mission, immediately after the British humiliation in Greece and before the start of Barbarossa, was certainly propitious, and the use of an aristocratic ‘go-between’ was something of which Hitler–who greatly overestimated the power of the court and the nobility in Britain–would probably have approved. The drift of Hess’s statements to his British interlocutors–that talks would depend on the resignation of the Churchill government, that the U-boats would soon starve out Britain, that Germany had no aggressive intent towards the United States and that British hopes of American support were illusory–was very much the sort of message that the Führer wanted to convey.

  The next morning, Hess’s adjutant handed Hitler a long letter, which Hess had written before his departure. No copy of the original exists. The gist of it was that Hess had tried to reach Britain in order to promote a compromise peace; it was clear, by inference, since the Führer had not heard directly from him, that the mission had failed. Hitler was deeply shocked and alarmed–‘crushed’ in Rosenberg’s phrase.100 Witnesses said that he had not been so upset since the death of Geli Raubal.101 All the same, the Führer seems to have decided to give the British some more time to respond; he appears to have made no attempt to issue an immediate pre-emptive statement. Hitler waited nearly two days for news of his deputy, not knowing whether he was dead or alive. In Britain, Hess tried hard to convince his interlocutors, and his final (unsent) letter to Hitler, written in captivity, was full of regret for the failure of his mission, but in no sense apologetic for having tried.102 By then, however, it was long clear that the British would not negotiate.

  Now the risks of the Hess mission could no longer be ignored. Firstly, there was the danger that he would reveal the plan to attack Russia, of which Hess was aware in general terms. Secondly, there was the irritation of the Axis allies Japan and Italy, both of which stood to lose from a German rapprochement with Britain.103 Thirdly, there was the general embarrassment of the deputy Führer, the third-highest-ranking figure in the Third Reich, suddenly going absent without leave. On the evening of 12 May, German radio announced that Hess, who had been suffering for years from a ‘worsening illness’, had gone missing with his aircraft and was the victim of ‘delusions’, and blamed his flight on his adjutants.104 It was not a moment too soon, because the BBC broadcast Hess’s arrival in Britain very shortly afterwards. Hitler continued his damage-limitation exercise the following day. On 13 May 1941, he summoned the Gauleiter for an emergency meeting at the Berghof; the Führer tended to gather his old guard around him in times of crisis.105 Hitler’s task was not easy: to discredit Hess, whom everybody there knew very well, without further damaging himself. His remarks made clear that Hess had some peculiar notions, which most of his audience would have been familiar with in any case, but there was no suggestion that the deputy Führer was insane. Hitler did not excoriate Hess’s motives, which he described as well-meant and idealistic, but rather his refusal to submit to discipline.106

  The regime moved quickly to close ranks. On the same day as the radio broadcast disavowing Hess, Hitler abolished the office of the deputy Führer and replaced it with the Party Chancellery under the leadership of Martin Bormann. There was also an immediate Gestapo investigation into Hess’s connections,107 the main purpose of which was not so much to prove traitorous intent on his part or that of his collaborators, but to establish the extent of his knowledge about Barbarossa, and thus what he might divulge to the British. Hess’s removal from the line of succession moved at a rather more leisurely pace. The matter was put on the agenda in early June 1941,108 but it was only settled right at the end of the month, a week after the start of Barbarossa.109

  On 17 May 1941, just a week after his deputy had parachuted into Britain, Hitler issued Directive 29, giving the go-ahead for a sea and airborne assault on Crete, codenamed ‘Operation Mercury’.110 This was intended to complete the expulsion of the British from the Balkans, to secu
re the southern flank for Barbarossa and deprive the RAF of the last base from which it could attack the Romanian oil-fields.111 Despite the fact that Rommel was simultaneously surging eastwards across North Africa, Hitler was not planning a new Mediterranean strategy to drive Britain from Egypt and the Middle East. He complained to his military leaders that ‘one cannot be and help everywhere’. ‘In and of itself,’ the Führer continued, ‘the Orient would not be a problem, were it not for the fact that other plans [Barbarossa] were irrevocable.’ ‘Once those had succeeded,’ he went on, ‘then the gate to the Orient could be opened from there.’112 In other words, Hitler was expecting to break into the Middle East not through the heavily defended front door in Egypt, but by the (allegedly) more lightly guarded back door of the Soviet Caucasus.

  These measures were flanked by a political offensive in the Middle East. On 23 May, Hitler issued Directive 30.113 This proclaimed the ‘Arab freedom movement in the Middle East our natural ally against Britain’. In particular, Hitler stressed the importance of developments in Iraq, which threatened Britain’s position in the Middle East, and tied down forces there at the expense of other theatres. He ordered that ‘everything possible’ be done to support the rising by military means.114 Weapons, a military mission and about twenty aircraft were hurriedly sent to Iraq to help the government there. Hitler classified the personnel deployed as ‘volunteers’ according to the ‘model’ of the Condor Legion. They were to wear Iraqi uniforms, while Luftwaffe planes were to sport Iraqi insignia. Hitler also laid down the ‘basic principle’ of the accompanying propaganda, which was to be conducted by the Foreign Office in consultation with the OKW. ‘The victory of the Axis,’ he wanted the Arabs to be told, ‘will bring the countries of the Middle East freedom from the British yoke and thus self-determination.’115