Hitler
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Hitler also framed the war as a racial struggle between two ‘slivers’ of the ‘Germanic people’. ‘Britain did not cultivate the continent,’, he asserted, ‘but rather slivers of the Germanic peoples of our continent moved as Anglo-Saxons [sic] and Normans to that Island and enabled a development there which is certainly unique.’ This was yet another instance of the Führer’s admiration for British exceptionalism. ‘In the same way,’ Hitler continued, ‘America did not discover Europe, but the other way around,’ and whatever value it possessed it had drawn from the old continent, even if the United States had since been corrupted by ‘Jewish’ and ‘black African’ influences. Indeed, the Führer stressed, Germany had ‘helped to defend the United States with the blood of many of its sons’. In that sense, though Hitler did not quite put it that way, the new conflict was also a Germanic civil war. Summarizing towards the end of his speech, therefore, Hitler spoke of the clash between the Reich and an ‘Anglo-Saxon-Jewish-capitalist world’ which was trying to ‘exterminate’ Germany. These were the same themes that had driven Hitler since the 1920s. Now they were leading him to their logical conclusion: a war of annihilation against Anglo-Saxons, the Jews and their Bolshevik puppets.
The declaration of war on the United States was the moment to which Hitler’s entire career had been building up and also the one which, as we have seen, he had by his own lights tried so hard to avoid or delay.289 Neither ignorance nor insouciance led him into war with the most powerful state on earth, but rather the conviction that a confrontation was inevitable sooner or later. It was the only formal declaration of war which Hitler made. The speech marked a caesura in Hitler’s long rhetorical duel with Roosevelt. The long cold war had turned hot. From now on, the Reich would not merely talk back but shoot back.
Over the next weeks and months, the consequences of Hitler’s shift to global war became clear. The first casualties were the Jews, the hostages who were now held responsible of the behaviour of the United States. On 12 December, the day after the declaration of war on the United States, Hitler met with the Gauleiter in a hastily convened conference.290 He reminded them of his threat in 1939 to retaliate against Jewry in the event of their ‘plunging’ Europe into war. ‘The world war is here,’ Hitler continued, ‘[and] the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.’291 Likewise, he instructed Rosenberg, whose major speech on world Jewry had been delayed by the American entry into the war, to delete references to ‘the New York Jews’. These had evidently been intended as a threat, which was now redundant. Rosenberg suggested that he should now not speak of ‘the extermination of the Jews’. ‘The Führer,’ he records, ‘approved this approach and said that they had burdened us with the war’ with all its ‘destruction’, so that ‘it was no wonder if the consequences should strike them first’.292 In Russia, Jews of both sexes and all ages, in or out of uniform, had long been treated as illegal combatants and killed out of hand. 293 Now the Jews of Germany, central and western Europe were to be murdered as well. Whether the entry of the United States into the war was the decisive factor here, or merely an accelerant,294 one thing is clear: the principal motivation for and context to Hitler’s war of annihilation against European Jewry was his relationship with the United States, which was now entering a new and more deadly phase. The murder of the Jews was now a settled matter; what remained open were questions of definition and implementation.
Hitler’s global war also required a global strategy. With the Japanese attack on Britain’s position in East Asia, the breach with the British Empire–another confrontation which Hitler had tried so hard to avoid–was complete. On 9 December 1941, the secret meeting with the mufti was publicized. Hitler was now irrevocably aligned with anti-colonial forces in the Middle East. For all his private ambivalence about the fate of the white race in the Far East, he exulted in Japanese victories.295 On 13 December, Hitler met with Oshima to discuss the new situation.296 In the New Year, he said, major operations in Russia would be resumed. Hitler stated that his ‘principal aim’ was ‘first the destruction of Russia’, then an ‘advance across the Caucasus towards the south’, and the ‘torpedoing of the Anglo-Saxon [sic] navies and merchant marine’. His first blow in Russia would be in the south, partly ‘because of the oil’, to be followed by the strike into Iraq and Iran against the British Empire. Only then would he turn his attention back to the central sector. Capturing Moscow was of ‘less importance for him’. On several occasions, Oshima suggested that Japan and the Reich coordinate their operations, but Hitler showed little interest in that. The only thing he specifically asked of the Japanese was that they cut off the supply of American war material to the Soviet Union via Vladivostok, which they never did.
The new military situation also drove Hitler to consolidate his authority within the Wehrmacht. In mid December 1941,he became aware of the magnitude of the crisis on the central front.297 Many commanders, whose troops were exhausted, outnumbered and often threatened with encirclement, wanted to retreat. Hitler gave permission for some withdrawals, but in general he demanded that the army stand fast. He argued that it was as dangerous to fall back, thus abandoning fixed positions, as it was to hold the line. It would also, the Führer argued, require ‘leaving behind artillery and materiel’. The commander of Army Group Centre, Bock, agreed with this assessment, saying that the decision whether or not to fall back was a matter of very fine judgement, and could sometimes only be made by tossing a coin.298 Over the course of the next few days he was bombarded by telephone calls and orders from Hitler demanding that he ‘not retreat a single step’ and ‘stick it out at all costs’.299 On 17 December, Bock–who had already offered to step down on health grounds–was invited to submit his resignation and was relieved of his command of Army Group Centre. Two days later, on 19 December 1941, Hitler sacked Brauchitsch and took over supreme command of the army himself.
Hitler saw the new conflict as one of attrition. The key to victory lay in production and destruction. One front was shipping. Hitler saw the ‘tonnage problem’ as ‘the decisive question of the current conduct of the war’. Whoever solved it would ‘probably win the war’.300 Either the U-boats would destroy enough shipping to cut Britain off from its ‘lifelines’ or they themselves would be destroyed in sufficient number to render the destruction of the Reich inevitable. The same logic applied on the air and on the ground, and to all theatres. The fronts were closely connected in Hitler’s mind, not least because of the vast quantities of materiel now being supplied to the Russians by Anglo-America, which he was well aware of.301 Right at the end of December 1941, the Führer remarked to Raeder that he would rather see the sinking in the Arctic of ‘four ships bringing tanks to the Russian front’ than the destruction of a much larger tonnage in the South Atlantic.302 If in the 1930s, Hitler had been engaged in a battle for consumption against the American dream, he was now embarked on a battle of production against the Soviet Union and–especially–Anglo-America.
For this, the Reich needed millions more workers. ‘We are not short of soldiers,’ Hitler lamented in early December 1941, ‘but of workers.’303 He proposed to make up the shortfall by drafting Russian prisoners. On Christmas Eve, he issued a formal decree determining that the ‘decisive’ issue for the German war economy was now the question of how to integrate the Soviet prisoners of war into the system of production. This required, he continued, ‘the provision of adequate rations and banishing the danger of a typhus epidemic’.304 The racial hierarchy at the start of Barbarossa had thus been reversed. Then, Hitler had planned to starve the Slavs to death, but keep the Jews of central and western Europe alive as hostages. Now the Slavs would live, if only to work, and the Jews would die.
17
The Struggle against the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and ‘Plutocracy’
As the new year unfolded, Hitler perceived himself as fighting a global war of annihilation. Germany would either completely destroy her enemies or be completely destroyed by them. ‘If the German people h
as lost its faith,’ Hitler told Himmler over a private luncheon on 27 January, ‘if the German people was no longer inclined to give itself body and soul in order to survive–then the German people would have nothing to do but disappear.’1 In Russia, he was locked in a desperate struggle with the Red Army along the entire central front. Globally, Hitler believed he faced a Jewish plutocratic plot to crush the Reich, and subject it to enslavement by the forces of international capitalism. Indeed, the war with the Jews was about to escalate into the greatest crime in European history, which he regarded as an act of pre-emptive destruction.
The most important military and political contest, however, remained the confrontation with Anglo-America, or–as Hitler almost invariably called them, using the common German parlance–the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (Angelsachsen). The American entry into the war brought this ‘racial’ struggle even more into the open. Until the end, whether privately or in formal documents, Hitler spoke of ‘Anglo-Saxon powers’,2 ‘Anglo-Saxon statesmen’,3 ‘Anglo-Saxon units’ or simply ‘the Anglo-Saxons’.4 They were words which expressed hatred, fear–and respect. When Kesselring praised the abilities of British soldiers, Hitler looked at him sharply and replied ‘Yes, they too are Germanic’;5 in fact he considered them, and Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent, the better Germans. The Führer’s notion of racial kinship and nagging sense of inferiority resurfaced again when he remarked in a speech that ‘in reality we colonized the Britons and not the Britons us’.6 He continued to enthuse privately about the British.7 Conscious of the dangers of this particular discourse, Goebbels instructed the Propaganda Ministry on 13 January 1942 that the word ‘Anglo-Saxon’, which suggested a tribal kinship, should be replaced with the phrase ‘Anglo-American plutocracy’.8 It was no use, almost everybody, from the Führer down, continued to refer to them as ‘Anglo-Saxons’. To the outside world, this might have seemed the Nazism of small difference, but for Hitler the distinction was crucial. The war pitted Teutons–Germanen–against Anglo-Saxons. It had become a clash of the Aryans.
Worse still, from Hitler’s point of view, like Britain, the new enemy had been built up by Germans. In the Führer’s mind, it was the best and brightest of Germans who had made their way there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and had consequently been lost to the Fatherland. The racially valuable part of the United States was not just Germany’s alter ego, but its better self. Returning to the theme which had driven the whole Lebensraum conception, he told an audience of officer cadets in mid February 1942 that there were ‘continents’–by which he principally meant North America–which had been ‘elevated to their height by the infusion of German blood’. This, Hitler continued, was the result of the historic mismatch between German population growth and the space available to feed it. The steady decline in German ‘living standards’ had forced them ‘to emigrate to other territories and thus become disloyal to their own homeland and people’. Hitler spelled out the terrifying meaning of this for the cadets, who would soon find themselves fighting their own kin. ‘We supplied the cultural fertilizer for all the states who stand against us today,’ he lamented. If someone admired ‘America and its technology’ today, Hitler continued, then he could only point out that ‘the engineers of America today’ were ‘mostly second- or third-generation German emigrants’. ‘We supplied them with this material,’ Hitler went on, adding that ‘all the good soldier material they have came from our German homeland’.9 In Hitler’s conception, the war with the United States was thus also a Germanic civil war.
Nothing epitomizes the ambivalence of the relationship between Nazi Germany, the United States and the British Empire better than the continuing, now clandestine, exchange of photographs between the two sides even after the outbreak of war. There was a daily flight between Lisbon and Berlin from the spring of 1942 until the end of the war, bringing photos to and from the Western Allies (about 40,000 in all).10 Hitler was on the distribution list, receiving his daily copies in person from Ribbentrop’s envoy Walter Hewel, though what use he made of the photographs is not known. The purpose was not simply to gain military or political intelligence, but to engage in a form of covert messaging. Nazi propagandists used pictures supplied by Associated Press to make anti-Semitic and anti-capitalist propaganda points against the USA.11 Carefully selected pictures of the Führer were sent in the other direction to shape Hitler’s image across the Atlantic; they were published in hundreds of American outlets. Even in war, the two sides remained entangled with each other.
The need to counteract Allied narratives increased with the ‘United Nations Declaration’ of 1 January 1942, which amounted to a declaration of war by most of the world against the German Reich. Recalling the Atlantic Charter, each signatory committed itself to ‘employ its full resources, military or economic’ against those members of the Axis with which it was already at war, to cooperate with the other Allied powers and not to make a separate peace. The contractants were, to list them in the order in which they appeared in the ‘Declaration’, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, China, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Poland, South Africa and Yugoslavia. Others, such as the Free French, signed up subsequently. They all expressed their hope that their declaration ‘may be adhered to by other nations which are, or which may be, rendering material assistance and contributions in the struggle for victory over Hitlerism’.12 The Führer may not have been aware of the Allied ‘Germany first’ policy,13 but from the specific reference to his defeat–the German leader was the only one singled out by name–he could work it out for himself.
For all the kinship and ambivalence, therefore, the deadliness of the antagonism between the Third Reich and Anglo-America was not in doubt. This was most clearly demonstrated by the bombing war, which entered into a new phase in early 1942. Churchill had spoken on earlier occasions of the need to attack civilian targets. ‘There is one thing that will bring [Hitler] down,’ he said, ‘and that is an absolutely devastating exterminating attack by heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.’ It was only now, however, that ‘area bombing’ became the official strategy. On 14 February 1942, the Air Staff issued a directive that bombing should concentrate on the ‘morale of the enemy civilian population and in particular the industrial workers’.14 The purpose of the exercise was not military, in the narrow sense, but political: to punish and to coerce. Shortly after, Air Marshal Arthur Harris was appointed head of Bomber Command to carry it out. The reason for striking the urban working class was that their densely populated inner city or inner suburban residential areas were much more easily hit from the air than industrial or military installations, which required ‘precision-bombing’.15
In the spring of 1942, the new strategy was first put into effect with devastating raids on Lübeck in late March, and on Rostock in late April. Four weeks later, the first of a number of ‘1,000 bomber’ raids struck Cologne.16 Hitherto, the impact of RAF operations had not been trivial, but these attacks were of a completely different order of magnitude. The number of civilian dead was still relatively small, usually in the hundreds, but the physical damage and psychological impact were immense; the total number of at least temporary refugees and homeless ran into the hundreds of thousands. The nights of fire had begun, starting a conflagration which would spread until it consumed the entire Reich.17 Allied bombing claimed both the innocent and the guilty. German cities were changed for ever. Life would never be the same again. In the course of this campaign some 2.5 million tons of bombs were dropped on continental Europe, most of them on Germany. The RAF lost 22,000 aircraft and nearly 80,000 aircrew, mainly to German fighters and flak; the Americans about 18,000 planes and about the same number of men as the RAF. These were figures comparable to French military losses at Verdun. There were 500,000 German civilian casualties. A second front, the western front, was t
aking shape not in France but in the skies above the Reich.18 The war had finally come to Germany.
Hitler was deeply affected by the attacks on German cities, and was under no illusion about what they meant for their inhabitants, his own credibility and his ability to prosecute the war. Though he himself was not directly endangered by the raids, which went nowhere near any of his military headquarters, and from which he was protected by a system of bunkers in Berlin, the Führer was personally affected by the threat to his loved ones, especially Eva Braun. She lived in Munich, which was not only home to crucial industrial plants, including BMW, Krauss-Maffei and Dornier, but was also the ‘capital of the movement’, and Germany’s third-largest residential centre. The city had already been struck in September and December 1941; it was attacked twice in 1942 and at increasingly regular intervals until the end of the war.19 ‘After every air-raid on Munich,’ Karl von Eberstein, the SS commander responsible for the city recalls, ‘Hitler called her [Eva] in person to see if she was safe.’20 He wanted Eva to move to the Berghof, but she refused on the grounds that life there was too boring. It was the big attacks on Lübeck, Rostock, Cologne and Bremen which worried Hitler most, however.21 These not only caused considerable economic damage and dislocation, but also undermined the standing of the regime. The Luftwaffe was failing to defend the Reich; Göring’s star, already falling after the failure over England, fell further. The NSDAP, which was tasked with the civilian response, was clearly not up to the job either. Hitler was so appalled by the destruction, and his own impotence, that in April 1942, he refused to allow newsreel footage of the aftermath of the raid on Rostock to be shown.22