Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  The approach of war with the United States, and the continued grip of the British blockade, much aggravated by the invasion of Russia, injected new urgency into operations in Russia, and vindicated the existing shift from military and ideological objectives towards the pursuit of economic aims. Hitler inveighed in one of his nightly monologues against the British stranglehold over the life of the continent, and looked forward to the time when Europe could be supplied from the granaries and mines of the Ukraine and Volga basin.201 Two days later, Hitler explained the strategic and economic motivations for these measures at some length in a separate memorandum for the OKW. His very first line reminded the military leadership why they were in the Soviet Union in the first place. ‘The aim of this campaign,’ he explained, ‘is to eliminate Russia as a continental ally of Britain’ (it was of course only an ally of Britain because of Hitler’s invasion) and thus ‘deprive [her] of any hope of escaping [her] fate with the help of the remaining great power’.202 Hitler then went on to stress the importance of securing the resources of Russia for the German war economy.

  Over the next fortnight, Hitler intervened repeatedly to ensure that his instructions were being followed.203 There was heavy opposition from the generals, some of whom were loath to release units under their command, and others of whom objected that the main enemy force in the central front was still unbroken,204 but the Führer would brook no argument. The doubters were soon silenced by a string of spectacular victories, when the Wehrmacht encircled Soviet armies at Uman and west of Kiev, taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners.205 The city of Kiev itself fell towards the end of the following month, to Hitler’s immense delight.206 Once again, the Führer had been vindicated.

  In the meantime, Hitler was preparing his next move against the Jews, whom he held responsible not merely for the Atlantic Charter but for the whole thrust of American policy. On 19 August 1941, the Führer reminded Goebbels of his ‘prophecy in the Reichstag, that if Jewry succeeded in provoking another world war’, the conflict would ‘end with the destruction of Jewry’. Hitler noted that his prediction was now ‘coming true in these weeks and months with an almost eerie certainty’. Here he distinguished between what was happening ‘in the east’ where ‘the Jews must foot the bill’, and what had taken in place in Germany, where they ‘had already paid it in part and would have to pay even more in future’. ‘Their last refuge,’ Hitler concluded, ‘remains North America, and there they will sooner or later have to pay as well.’207 There was a marked increase in the number of Jews murdered around this time, but although some Einsatzgruppen commanders recalled after the war that there had been ‘an order for the comprehensive liquidation of the Jews from the Führer himself’ in mid August,208 no documentary evidence survives, nor can we be sure what might have triggered such an order. Part of the intensification may have been down to the self-radicalization of the SS apparatus. One way or the other, from 15 August at least one of the Einsatzgruppen began to shoot women and children as well as men.209 The first documented annihilation of an entire Jewish community took place early the following month.210 On 1 September 1941, all Jews in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe were ordered to wear a yellow star. This was intended partly to make their identification as a potential enemy agent easier,211 and partly to signal to the outside world that the Reich had millions of hostages under its control.

  Throughout the autumn following the Atlantic Charter, Anglo-America steadily increased the pressure on Hitler. The RAF struck repeatedly at German cities, culminating in a series of raids on Berlin, Cologne and Mannheim in early November. British bombers hammered the Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen almost nightly in harbour at Brest.212 In the Atlantic, there were only twenty-two submarines operational by mid November, which was far too few to make an impact. Sinkings dropped still further. In North Africa, the supply situation was dire, and in late September 1941 Raeder warned Hitler in the strongest terms that the Afrika Korps could not be maintained unless there was an additional large-scale deployment of Luftwaffe units to the theatre. Throughout October, German and Italian ships were attacked so successfully by units based on Malta that supplies to Rommel all but ceased. On 8 November 1941, a vital convoy was completely destroyed; the Italians were too short of fuel oil to intervene. Ten days later, the British went on the offensive in North Africa.

  Despite the demands of the Russian campaign, Hitler followed all these developments with alarm. They made clear that the destruction of the British will to resist, which had been a key objective of Barbarossa, was some way off. He also fretted that the British might launch a desperate relief offensive somewhere on behalf of Stalin, catching the Axis unawares. One area of vulnerability was Norway, where the Führer never ceased to fear commando operations, and even a full-scale landing, which would endanger his access to Swedish iron ore. Another worry was the Channel Islands. Hitler’s main concern, however, was the Mediterranean, where there was the danger of a British return to the continent via North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, the Aegean and the Balkans. His fear was that a collapse in the Mediterranean would be followed by the disintegration of the fascist regime in Italy, which is of course exactly what happened in the summer and autumn of 1943. ‘The domestic political situation in Italy,’ he told the SKL, ‘has been put under severe strain by the food shortages and the British bombing attacks.’ Hitler went on to warn that the fascist regime was by no means ‘as secure as the German government’ and that its replacement by another would put Italy ‘inevitably into the camp of our enemies’.213 The Führer blamed Britain’s continued refusal to compromise on the manipulation of Churchill by the Jews.214

  These anxieties were aggravated by signs of restiveness within Hitler’s European empire. He worried about the loyalty of the subject peoples, especially the apparently passive Czechs, whose armaments production he deemed insufficient, and the Ukrainians, who he feared might become ‘the rallying point of a pan-Russian resistance’.215 Hitler’s main concern, though, was sabotage and guerrilla warfare. The invasion of the Soviet Union ranged communists across the continent against the Third Reich. Resistance movements in western Europe stirred. In Russia the partisan movement slowly gathered momentum and in the autumn of 1941 a nationalist rising broke out in Serbia. On 16 September 1941, Hitler ordered a series of military and diplomatic measures to pacify the Balkans.216 He was convinced that London (and ‘the Jews’) were behind all these endeavours, and that they were designed to link up with British landing forces.

  Meanwhile, the American threat loomed ever larger. On 11 September 1941, Roosevelt gave a dramatic ‘Fireside Chat’ to the nation, in which he announced that ‘when you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him’. At around the same time, he gave instructions to the US navy to shoot at German raiders on sight (this followed an encounter between USS Green and a German submarine).217 Towards the end of the month, Roosevelt spoke in a crowded ballroom at the symbolically named Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. In his short remarks, he mentioned Hitler no fewer than twenty-one times. Roosevelt claimed that the ‘shooting’ with Germany had already started, that ‘history has recorded who fired the first shot’, and that ‘all that will matter is who fired the last shot’. He also produced a map forged, or at least distorted beyond recognition, by British Intelligence to allege Nazi designs not merely on Latin America ‘but against the United States as well’.218 Much more so than the Atlantic Charter, the president’s speeches in September and October 1941 were effectively declarations of war. All this was accompanied by frequent condemnations of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, despotism and plans to suppress Christianity.

  Hitler registered the growing enmity of the United States with alarm. The German embassy there kept him well informed, and warned him that American diplomats around the world were sharing intelligence with the British.219 Hitler was particularly preoccupied by the size of the American armaments industry, and well aware that Roosevelt was supplying Stalin with war mater
ial and (from 6 November) with billions of dollars’ worth of loans. He therefore repeatedly sought to reassure his interlocutors that American capacity was much exaggerated.220 Publicly, Hitler responded to taunts about American ‘numbers’ with claims that the number of Europeans working for him far exceeded the number of Americans making weapons for Roosevelt.221 The threat was not perceived merely as military and economic, however, but also as racial. In a meeting with Italy’s Ciano in late October 1941, Hitler acknowledged the challenge of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ to the Axis, but added with characteristic bluster that there were not only 500 million Europeans facing 230 million Americans, but that ‘only 60 million Anglo-Saxons lived in America, while the rest was made up of Italians, Germans and other races’.222 This was ironic, given his repeatedly stated scepticism since the 1920s about the alliance-value of most Europeans.

  To make matters worse, the state of the German war economy as it faced the combined might of Anglo-America, which had so exercised Hitler at the start of 1941, had not improved by the autumn. On the contrary, in mid September 1941, the Führer was forced to admit that the armaments industry was already ‘running at more than full capacity’.223 Nor was the supply of raw materials or foodstuffs any more secure. The British blockade still stood. Germany’s principal source of oil at Ploesti was threatened by Soviet aircraft based in the Crimea. ‘The Führer,’ it was reported in early September 1941, was ‘very anxious to end the threat from there to the oil-producing areas of Ploesti.’224 The message was clear: unless Hitler could secure additional raw materials and radically increase production, Germany would lose the war of attrition with Anglo-America.

  As if all this were not bad enough, Hitler was plunged into a serious domestic crisis in the autumn of 1941. There was considerable popular disquiet about the euthanasia programme and open opposition from the Roman Catholic Church. In August 1941, the Bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen, denounced the killings from the pulpit.225 Whatever Galen’s motivation, he had mounted a direct challenge to the regime, because the Führer’s ignorance of the unpopular killings could no longer be pleaded or assumed. Hitler’s outrage was increased by the fact that the BBC broadcast the text of the sermon and the RAF dropped it in pamphlet form over Germany and the front lines.226 This spat reflected a much broader tension between the Third Reich and Christianity, which the Führer expatiated on privately at length throughout the autumn. He inveighed against ‘Jewish Christianity’227 and celebrated the fact that the obscurantist church was no longer strong enough ‘to counter the insights of science with burnings at the stake’. All the same, Hitler lamented that it was still possible for a child to be told the true scientific story about the creation of the earth in one lesson, and then to be subjected to the ‘creation story of the Bible’ in religion class.228

  These conflicts aggravated the already poor relations between the regime and the Catholic Church, not least because of the continuing attempts by some local leaders to remove religious imagery from the classroom, known loosely as the ‘crucifix decrees’. Worse still, a related high political crisis was brewing in the party around the figure of Josef Wagner, the Gauleiter of Westphalia South (which adjoined Münster) and imperial commissar for price control. A strict Catholic, he was already under suspicion, but the pot boiled over when his pregnant daughter announced her intention to marry her lover, an SS man who had broken with the church. Wagner’s wife denounced and cursed her daughter in a letter which eventually found its way to Hitler, who was outraged.229

  The growing number of air attacks also sapped confidence in the regime. They were justified by Allied propaganda as retaliation for German actions in Russia,230 and were understood by many in the population as a western front established by the Anglo-Americans and the Jews to punish them.231 Westphalian Catholics, for example, saw a connection between the sin of the euthanasia programme and the particularly heavy RAF raids on Münster and environs. The Führer himself took a keen interest in the resulting evacuation of the civilians from urban areas into the countryside.

  Hitler responded to all these challenges with a mixture of evasion and confrontation, both at home and abroad. He rejected calls that Galen be executed, as Bormann argued, or sent to a concentration camp, as the Justice Ministry desired. Instead, Hitler compromised.232 He would defer the punishment of Galen and the confrontation with the church as a whole until after the war. ‘After the war,’ he remarked, ‘I will also tackle this problem decisively.’233 In the meantime, Hitler ordered an end to attacks on monasteries on 31 July. He ordered the end to adult and child euthanasia on 24 August 1941, again on the assumption that it would be resumed after the conflict was over; ‘wild’ (unofficial) euthanasia continued, however, and killed perhaps another 100,000 people. Four days later, the crucifix decree was rescinded. In early September, Hitler demanded an end to any actions ‘which might adversely affect the feeling of unity among the populace’.234 Josef Wagner, by contrast, was crushed. At a carefully choreographed meeting of the Gauleiter in Munich on 9 November 1941, he was publicly excoriated and expelled from the room and the party.235

  With regard to America, Hitler continued to tread very warily. He refused to let the Kriegsmarine off the leash in the Atlantic. Instead, Hitler continued the long rhetorical duel with the United States, culminating in a climactic set-piece attack on Roosevelt on 8 November 1941, to mark the anniversary of the beer hall putsch. Despite the battle raging in Russia, its main emphasis was the struggle with Anglo-America, especially the looming contest with the United States. Despite the battle against Bolshevism raging in the east, Hitler spent far more time attacking western capitalism, and the supposed connection between the stock market and the armaments industry and the belligerent policies of the western democracies.236 Both Stalin and Churchill were mentioned, but the principal addressee of Hitler’s remarks was Roosevelt. The Führer was anxious to discredit the faked map that the president had referred to at the Mayflower Hotel. ‘I am not a secondary schoolboy who draws maps in a school atlas,’ he averred, pointing out that ‘South America [was] as far away as the moon’ for him. Surprisingly, Hitler did not make an issue of Roosevelt’s disability, though he was well aware of it. In early November 1941, the Führer remarked privately that the otherwise unrestrained American press never mentioned the fact that the president was in a wheelchair, and that his condition was ‘very cleverly’ concealed at events and in photographs.237

  Hitler could not, of course, escape the conflict with Britain, which was still his most immediate adversary in the autumn of 1941. Firstly, he sought to shore up his defences in Europe, especially in the west, where he believed a British diversionary attack to be imminent. In late October 1941, during the height of the fighting on the eastern front, he ordered that the Channel Islands be turned into an ‘impregnable fortress’, which was done with great effort and pointless expense over the next two years.238 Secondly, Hitler bolstered the Italian position in the Mediterranean, partly by diverting resources from the already faltering effort in the Atlantic, but especially at the expense of the eastern front. In mid September 1941, six submarines and a Fliegerkorps were sent to help cover convoy operations; more submarines followed.239 Towards the end of October, Hitler ordered preparations to be made for the dispatch of a whole air fleet under Albert Kesselring to the Mediterranean. Another Fliegerkorps was to be detached from Army Group Centre in support, over the objections of the OKH. Though the purpose of these deployments was to make good Italian deficiencies, Hitler made clear that whatever leading role the Germans might take in practice in that theatre, Italian sensitivities were to be respected.240

  The purpose of all these measures was political as well as military. Unlike the naval leadership, which believed that the defence of the ‘new order’ in Europe required the ‘defeat’ of Britain, Hitler himself stated privately in late October 1941 ‘that he was even now prepared to make peace with Britain at any time’, because the ‘European space’ already secured was ‘sufficient’ to guaran
tee ‘the future of the German people’. Germany had its Lebensraum, if it could keep it.241 That said, Hitler did not believe peace was possible so long as the current, allegedly Jewish-dominated, administration was in power in Britain, which is why he increased the military and diplomatic pressure to unseat Churchill.

  On 17 September 1941, Hitler met with Ribbentrop to discuss the role of the German Foreign Office in the deportation of Jews in central, southern and western Europe, where the diplomatic ramifications were potentially large.242 These measures were generally justified as retaliation for resistance activities.243 A day later, on 18 September 1941, Himmler informed Arthur Greiser, the Gauleiter of the Wartheland, that ‘the Führer wishes that the old [that is pre-war] Reich and the Protectorate [of Bohemia and Moravia] should be emptied [of Jews] from west to east as soon as possible’, and be sent to the ghetto at Lodz.244 On 7 October, Hitler instructed that ‘all Jews must be removed from the Protectorate’, sending them not to the General Government in the first instance, but ‘further east right away’. These deportations were delayed by the ‘large need of the military for transport capacity’;245 the priorities suggest that the struggle against the Jews was perceived as only one front in the overall war, albeit a very important one. The deportations of Jews from Bohemia and Moravia and the German Reich began a week later, on 15 October 1941. On 23 October, Himmler banned all Jewish emigration; now there was no escape.

  These measures were not just designed to eliminate the supposed danger of Jewish subversion within, but also to deter the United States. It was for this reason that the Jews of central and western Europe were to be deported, but not as yet systematically murdered. They were explicitly conceived of as hostages held against the eventuality of an American entry into the war.246 When Rosenberg demanded retaliation against German Jews for Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans,247 Hitler refused. The Foreign Office informed him that the Führer was ‘holding back this measure for the event of an American entry into the war’.248 Hitler made the alleged connection between the war, and especially the possibility of open conflict with the United States, and the Jews on several occasions. On 24 October 1941, he privately repeated the ‘prophecy’ he had made in January 1939.249 Three weeks later, Goebbels made the same connection publicly, in a leading article in the journal Das Reich under the headline of ‘the Jews are to blame’. He added that ‘[w]e are now experiencing the fulfilment of this prophecy and Jewry is experiencing a fate that, although hard, is still more than deserved’, namely a ‘gradual process of extermination’.250 Two days after that Rosenberg rehearsed the same argument at a press conference. The message could not have been clearer.