Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  In the face of the circling coalition, now led by the most powerful state in the world, Hitler was ever more conscious of Germany’s weakness in terms of industrial capacity and mineral resources. America and Britain, he explained in a speech on 30 January 1942, ‘have the world at their disposal’, with everything needed for their war effort.23 This plenitude, he lamented, was ranged against the ‘three great have-nots’, that is, Italy, Japan and the Reich. Hitler knew that Germany’s chances of prevailing in this war of global redistribution were slim, unless he acted quickly. The Allies were already outproducing Germany in every major armaments category–aircraft, tanks and shipping–and they were increasingly able through bombing and the blockade to prevent Germany and German-occupied Europe from realizing their own economic potential.24 Sooner or later, the Reich would simply be overwhelmed.

  In view of all this, it is hardly surprising that Hitler struggled to develop a coherent strategy in early 1942. As Walter Warlimont, the deputy head of the OKW from December 1941, recalls, no thought had been given to the likely American strategy either.25 Hitler did not even issue a fresh directive addressing the new situation. Unlike the Anglo-Americans, the Third Reich never developed a worked-out strategy with its Axis partners. No summits, no hymn-singing, hardly any statements, no staff talks worth the name, none of the whole panoply of ‘grand alliance’. The Japanese, via Oshima, constantly pressed for closer coordination, but Hitler showed little interest. The reasons for this were simple. Hitler hesitated to support Oshima’s demand for an all-out attack on British India, even politically, because he still hoped for a negotiated settlement with London;26 the Führer dragged his feet about meeting the Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose, who was kicking his heels in Berlin. He did not want, he later told Mussolini, any such declaration to complicate a German-British separate peace in the same way as Berlin’s Polish policy had scuppered a rapprochement with the Tsarist Empire during the First World War.27 These exchanges illustrate how much Hitler was still preoccupied with British power, even at this stage of the war. For the rest, Hitler had no strategy for defeating the United States, because there obviously wasn’t one. The Führer knew that Germany, like Japan, had no technology, even at a realistic research stage, which could threaten the American mainland. He was quite simply stumped. ‘I am not yet sure,’ Hitler admitted to Oshima with disarming honesty on 3 January 1942, ‘how to defeat the United States.’28

  To be sure, Hitler concluded a military agreement with Italy and Japan on 18 January 1942, but it was largely for show.29 There was a rough division of the spheres of operation, with the Germans and Italians keeping west and the Japanese east of 70 degrees longitude east, but that was about it.30 In mid February 1942, the Führer did not respond to the demands of the Japanese military attachés, Vice Admiral Nomura and Lieutenant General Ichiro Banzai, and indeed of his own naval leadership, to link up the two strategies.31 Hitler never intended to join hands with the Japanese in the Indian Ocean,32 primarily because he didn’t think he had the capacity to do so in the near future. He also believed that he didn’t know enough about Japanese capabilities to make useful suggestions to their High Command.33 This may well have been the right decision, because, unlike Britain and the United States, who had in many respects a shared strategic culture, Germany and Japan had no experience of military cooperation or joint values to fall back on.

  Hitler now had to put out various fires across the continent. Right at the top of his list was the crisis on the central front in Russia, which raged throughout the first three months of 1942. From the beginning, Hitler insisted that withdrawals should only be undertaken in exceptional cases, and only with his express permission.34 Hitler was convinced that retreats would simply leave the troops facing the same threats in more exposed positions, and, by exposing the flanks, risk a precipitate collapse along the whole front. He attributed the crisis to military, physical and ideological weaknesses in the Wehrmacht. He did not hide his view that the army suffered from poor leadership, that the troops had gone soft, and that the Wehrmacht as a whole lacked the National Socialist spirit which would have enabled them to master the crisis more comfortably. On 8 January 1942, Hitler issued an order which claimed that the attacking Russians were not ‘first-class formations’, but ‘for the most part badly trained forces’, which were–‘contrary to frequent initial reports’ from the German troops–‘also often numerically inferior’.35 It was, Hitler stated, a question of ‘strength of nerves’, ‘especially of the leadership’; ‘the Russian,’ he added cruelly, ‘has demonstrated this strength of nerves.’ In other words, the Führer suggested, the whole Wehrmacht, especially its leadership, was in a funk and needed to get a grip.

  Hitler took a number of steps to help his embattled troops. Some, such as the call to the civilian population to donate items of winter clothing to reinforcements departing for the eastern front, were as much propagandistic as practical, as reflected in the fact that Goebbels was put in charge of the effort.36 Others, such as his emphasis on the use of air power, had an important effect on operations. When large numbers of German troops found themselves cut off in early 1942, such as at Demyansk, he ordered that they be resupplied by the Luftwaffe. This was done with success, though at considerable cost. Hitler also demanded that tactical air power be used to compensate for the local weakness of the ground forces. If the Luftwaffe was not ready, or prevented from flying by weather conditions, the Führer recommended that counter-attacks be called off. This order caused serious difficulties on the ground, partly because of the problem of synchronizing operations between the air force and the army units, and partly because, as Bock complained, ‘apprehensive and hesitant leaders’ could hide behind the Führer’s will.37 In this case, at any rate, Hitler was on the more cautious side of the argument.

  The winter crisis also posed a major narratival challenge to the Führer. He was sensitive to the charge that his invasion, which had begun on the same June day as Napoleon’s about 130 years earlier, might end in the same way. Hitler desperately wanted to avoid scenes of chaotic retreat, with frozen German corpses strewn across the newspapers of the world.38 When issuing his order to withdraw, for example, Hitler stressed that it was ‘the first time that I have given orders for the retreat of a large section of the front’, and that he expected that this ‘withdrawal will take place in a manner worthy of the German army’.39 In the middle of January, Hitler announced that the ‘operational danger’ in the south had been ‘dealt with’,40 but elsewhere the danger persisted another two months. By late March 1942, the last Soviet attacks had been seen off. It had been a harrowing experience, as Hitler freely admitted both privately and publicly.41

  Meanwhile, Hitler moved to tighten his grip on occupied Europe. He issued a ferocious decree against Soviet partisans which determined that they should ‘in principle’ be subject to the ‘death penalty’.42 Six weeks later, in late January 1942, he appointed a higher SS and police commander in Serbia in order to deal with the guerrilla movement there, which at that point was largely made up of royalist Chetniks.43 Hitler was also grappling with communist partisans under Tito, who were for the most part based in Croatia and Bosnia. In Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich governed with a mixture of carrot and (a very big) stick. Despite his constant recourse to the language of annihilation, Hitler decided not to use poison gas against partisans, at least for now, probably because Churchill threatened in a radio broadcast that if it were deployed on the eastern front, Britain would retaliate with gas against German cities.44 This shows that although all of Hitler’s attempts to signal to the Anglo-Americans were unsuccessful, messages going in the other direction were received by Berlin and acted upon. A result of this was that the Führer was conscious of the connection between the war against Anglo-America, the eastern front and the battle in the skies of Germany.

  The Führer, no doubt aware of calls for a ‘Second Front’,45 was also profoundly concerned about the threat of a British invasion, or at le
ast of raids. In late January 1942, naval intelligence highlighted the threat of an Allied landing in Norway, one of many in the course of the war.46 This worried Hitler, not just because of the threat to the supply of iron ore, but also because of the danger that the Allies would use Scandinavia as a springboard from which to attack northern Germany. The following month, Hitler sent two battleships, sometimes also described as battle cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen from Brest in an audacious ‘Channel dash’ through the Straits of Dover to new berths in Norway.47 The main purpose of the mission was to deter any British landing in Scandinavia in the first instance, not to attack British convoys to Russia. In addition, Hitler invested huge resources in the construction of fortifications in Norway. These included pillboxes, gun emplacements, winter-proof highways, airfields, rail connections, U-boat bases and various industrial facilities.48

  Within Germany itself, Hitler moved to improve the aerial defences of the Reich. He was appalled by the fact that when the RAF had struck Lübeck over a weekend in late March 1942, there was nobody in the relevant Berlin offices to respond. ‘The Führer,’ Lammers reported a few days later, ‘has strongly condemned this situation’ and instructed that all supreme Reich authorities and agencies of the Wehrmacht should be contactable ‘on all days, including Sundays and holidays’.49 Hitler removed control of the relief effort for Lübeck, which had hitherto been chaotic, from the Ministry of the Interior, and entrusted it to Goebbels.50 This reflected a recognition on the Führer’s part that combating Allied ‘terror-bombing’ was as much a matter of propaganda as practicality. It was the start of an ever-growing involvement of the propaganda minister not only in civil defence but in the Nazi war effort more generally.51 Goebbels became a ubiquitous presence after bombing raids, whereas the Führer refused point blank to visit the shattered cities as Churchill had done, or–with one exception–to allow himself to be photographed among the ruins.

  Hitler also explored ways of striking back at the Western Allies. He authorized a series of retaliatory raids on British towns in mid April 1942, though not on London.52 This resulted in the ‘Baedeker raids’–called after the famous guidebook because they targeted sites of cultural importance–in Exeter, Bristol, Bath, Norwich and York.53 They were so ineffective and the losses were so great that the attacks had to be called off by the summer. Hitler now sought alternative methods of delivering terror to Britain, and to build new weapons of mass destruction. In early June 1942, Wilhelm Ohnesorge, the minister for posts and telegraphs, who was also responsible for one strand of the German atomic research programme, tried to interest Hitler in the possibility of building an atomic bomb. The Führer refused to listen, remarking to the military men in attendance that ‘of all people’, his ‘minister of post’ was the one to ‘offer him the wonder-weapon which we need’.54 If Germany was to strike back at her enemies in the near future, other methods would have to be used. Right at the end of June, he instructed his scientists to prepare for the deployment of chemical weapons by the spring of 1943.55 Time, clearly, was of the essence. It would appear that Hitler disregarded the atomic option, not because of any ethical or scientific reservations, but because it seemed unlikely that it would be available in time to make any difference to the course of the war.

  Hitler also struck against Anglo-American economic and military targets. On the high seas, he redoubled his efforts against Allied shipping. The U-boats caught the Americans unawares in the Caribbean and off the east coast, sinking a large number of oil tankers.56 In the North Atlantic, the ‘wolf packs’ gathered to attack the convoys feeding the home islands and the entire war machine. In the course of the spring and early summer sinkings steadily mounted to the horror of the Churchill government. The main theatre, however, in which Hitler sought to deliver a decisive blow against Britain was the Mediterranean. In early 1942, the Führer took a personal interest in the fate of every individual Axis ship bringing supplies to Rommel, for example following the progress of a convoy which left Naples for Libya on 5 January 1942 and advising Mussolini on how individual vessels were to be loaded. A fortnight later, Rommel counter-attacked on his own initiative. He pushed the British before him, halting just west of Gazala in early February due to a shortage of supplies. An exultant Hitler told General Nehring, who was on the way from the eastern front to take up the position of chief of staff to the Afrika Korps, that he hoped that the threat to Egypt, combined with their immense and humiliating losses in the Far East, would make Britain more amenable to peace talks.57

  Hitler now concentrated on the reduction of Malta, which remained a bone in the Axis throat and whose fall would seriously damage Churchill’s standing at home. In February 1942, the Luftwaffe began a massive assault on the island, which was intensified from 20 March 1942. By April 1942 Rommel’s supply position was greatly eased, while the situation on the island was desperate. In this context, the German and Italian High Commands discussed whether to mount a coup de main against the island. In mid April 1942, Hitler agreed to the operation and to a new offensive by Rommel, but failed to send more than a fraction of the reinforcements requested. Soon the Italians got cold feet and demanded not only a huge allocation of fuel oil to enable a landing, but also much greater German military participation. At first, it seemed as if Hitler would concur. His meeting with Mussolini in late April 1942 went very well, and the Führer agreed to deploy a large number of paratroops and other assets against the island. The planned sequencing, though, was crucial, as Hitler did not have the resources to begin with Malta or to carry out the Egypt and Malta operations simultaneously. In the end, it was decided that Rommel’s offensive in Libya would come first, in late May or early June, followed by the landing on Malta, ‘Operation Hercules’, in mid July or at the latest by mid August.58

  The struggle against the Western Allies was accompanied by an escalation in the war against the Jews. In Hitler’s conception, ‘they’ were responsible for leading the Anglo-Saxons astray. In January 1942, he repeated his prophecy of three years earlier ‘that the war will not take the course that the Jews imagine, which is that the European-Aryan peoples will be exterminated’, but rather that ‘the result of this war will be the destruction of Jewry’.59 On 20 January 1942, Heydrich finally managed to hold his long-planned conference in a villa at Wannsee. The assembled bureaucrats discussed definitions of who was a Jew–something that continued to concern Hitler throughout the year60–and the modalities of ‘deportation’, which by this stage was coming to mean mass murder. The lists included numbers of Jews in the areas under German control and countries presumably still to be conquered or coerced, such as Sweden. Hitler was determined to banish the Jewish presence in Europe–the whole of Europe–for ever. A Rubicon had clearly been crossed. Despite the slaughter of Soviet and Serbian Jewry in 1941, most European Jews were still alive at the start of 1942; by the end of the year, most of them were dead.61 Hitler may not have followed every detail of what even Goebbels described as a ‘pretty barbaric procedure’, but he was certainly, as the propaganda minister went on to say, ‘the constant protagonist and advocate of a radical solution’.62

  Meanwhile, Hitler escalated his foreign propaganda, which was largely directed against Bolshevism, international capitalism and the Jews within Europe, and against the British Empire, the United States, international capitalism and the Jews in the rest of the world. As the Germans prepared to attack the Middle East, the Caucasus and Persia, and even Afghanistan seemed in contention, much of the focus was on the area east of Libya and west of India. Now that the United States had entered the war, Nazi propagandists bombarded Arab audiences throughout the summer of 1942 with stories about the ‘Jewish’ White House of President Roosevelt.63 There was also a ‘Muslim Moment’ in Hitler’s strategy.64 German propagandists cast the Führer as a Koranic figure, a new ‘mahdi’ or–for the Iranian Shiites–the twelfth Imam.’ Hitler regarded these efforts with amusement, but also with approval. Though Hitler believed th
e Arabs to be racially inferior, of course, he was much more positive about Islam, which he considered a martial religion far superior to Christianity.65

  It is hard to say exactly how successful Hitler’s efforts in the Middle East were. By no means everybody who heard, or may have heard, the Nazi broadcasts to the Middle East was sympathetic. The later Ayatollah Khomeini, for example, published an anti-Hitler tract in 1942.66 The Arabs employed by the propaganda apparatus in Berlin were instruments rather than equal allies of the regime.67 Where Nazi propaganda went beyond local traditions was in its international focus, and in providing a conspiratorial view not merely of the Middle East but of the entire world system. The ‘General Standard Guidelines for Foreign Propaganda’ of the Foreign Ministry targeted ‘Jews, Bolsheviks and plutocrats’ as well as that ‘exponent of Jewry’, Roosevelt.68 One way or the other, the political programme of radical pan-Arabism, especially its anti-Semitism, chimed with Hitler’s.

  At home, Hitler threw himself into the production battle in earnest. Despite the nasty shock he had received in 1941 regarding the quantity and quality of Russian equipment, his main focus was on matching not Soviet output, but that of Anglo-America, especially the United States. On 10 January 1942, as the winter crisis raged in the east, Hitler set out his long-term priorities. These had not shifted since 1940–41. ‘The long-term aim,’ he decreed, ‘remains the expansion of the Luftwaffe and the navy to fight the Anglo-Saxon powers’.69 What had changed was merely the timing. Now, in a concession to the unexpectedly strong resistance put up by the Red Army, and the need to capture the Soviet resources necessary to outlast Anglo-America, Hitler ordered that production should concentrate ‘initially’ on the ‘increased needs’ of the army; the other two services were to take a step back, for now.70 Particular attention was paid to the production of ammunition, which was deemed more urgent than tanks.71 Naval construction was to focus on submarines, escort vessels and the defence of Norway. Despite the temporary salience of the Russian front, the decree stressed the continued importance of coastal defence (against the British).72