In early February 1942, Hitler summoned his armaments minister, Fritz Todt, to discuss how to increase production. He was killed when the plane taking him back from Rastenburg crashed. Hitler now appointed Albert Speer armaments minister. He was in no doubt that despite the short-term emphasis on weapons to defeat the Soviet Union, the main production battle was against Anglo-America. ‘The Führer,’ the OKW reported in late March 1942, ‘has ordered Speer to run up ammunition production on a really big scale, so that two-front trench war can be fought for years.’73 Hitler was preparing not for one last Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union, but for a long war of attrition against the global coalition. The Führer now issued a spate of orders emphasizing the centrality of production. ‘Every additional weapon and bullet,’ he announced in April 1942, ‘spares German blood.’74 He also demanded that the Reich follow the US example in production, avoiding artisanal refinements and the endless proliferation of models in favour of mass output.75 This was a subject to which he would return on many occasions as Germany was more and more crushingly outproduced by the American colossus.
Hitler backed his new minister to the hilt. Speer gradually imposed his authority on the many institutions and individuals running, or claiming to run, the German war economy. The new watchword was ‘rationalization’. Hitler issued decrees restricting the use of vehicles for all but the most essential tasks.76 In late March 1942, he appointed Fritz Sauckel general plenipotentiary for the supply of labour. The slave workers Hitler demanded were brought to the Reich in ever-larger numbers; they were accompanied by ‘voluntary’ labourers lured by the promise of high wages or driven by conditions at home. German output increased, and Speer’s self-promoting propaganda made sure everyone was aware of the fact. The extent to which the surge was a product of the minister’s initiatives or reflected decisions that had been taken much earlier is disputed. Large sections of the German armaments industry, such as aircraft and naval production, which made up the bulk of output even in 1942, were not yet under Speer’s control.77 What was clear even at the time, in any case, was that whoever was in charge in Berlin, the chances of matching the production of the enemy coalition, especially that of the United States, were slim. The problem was not the level of mobilization, which was already very high, but the imbalance in resources and industrial capacity.78
Nobody was more aware of this than Hitler himself. As we have seen, the immense American industrial potential had been a staple of his thinking in the 1920s, and had dominated his strategy since the late 1930s. He did not know the extent of Allied deliveries to the Soviet Union, which were substantial,79 but he was well aware they were taking place. The basic problem, which Hitler identified quite clearly, was that whereas Germany controlled most of Europe, it was at war with most of (the rest of) the world, or at least with its resources. The enemy coalition controlled the global commons: the sea lanes and the financial system. The mines, factories and farms of the world were mobilized by Anglo-American capital, transported in Allied shipping and directed against the Reich. By contrast, the Third Reich was confined to a European reservation, whose economies were cut off from the world markets and raw materials they had depended on. Hitler’s New European Order was–economically–much less than the sum of its pre-war parts. It was no match for the Anglo-American global cartel.80 Hitler admitted as much privately to the Gauleiter at a meeting in late May 1942.81
The Führer also struggled to counter the Anglo-American narrative, of whose negative and positive power he had no doubt. He continued to stress the mortal ideological challenge posed by ‘democratic capitalism’.82 Hitler’s critique was embodied by the German propaganda film Around the Statue of Liberty. A Stroll through the USA, which was made in 1941 but shown to him in early 1942. Its main purpose was to contrast the glitter of the American Dream with the brutal reality of life in the United States. There was footage of National Guard and police attacking strikers and demonstrators with tear gas. Workers, viewers were informed, had to slave for ‘gigantic capital trusts’. The important role played by Jews, such as the Rothschilds, Warburgs and others, was stressed. There were pictures of famous gangsters such as John Dillinger, of blacks dancing to swing music, of women wrestlers, and to crown the grotesquery a man jumping out of the seventh floor of a building in front of a crowd.83 Decadence, degeneracy and capitalist exploitation–this was the image of the United States which the Führer promoted in order to quell German concerns about fighting their much more prosperous cousins across the Atlantic. ‘The Führer has seen the film we made on American cultural life and expressed himself very positively about it,’ Goebbels noted on 15 February 1942, adding that Hitler had ‘given instructions to show this film to as much of the German public as possible’.84
The stress of total war took its toll on Hitler. He became more irritable and withdrawn.85 His zest was gone. Hitler remained in close contact with events, and was soon to move his headquarters close to the front line in the Ukraine, but the kind of propagandistic expeditions he had undertaken in Poland and France were a thing of the past.86 Above all, Hitler’s physical condition was deteriorating rapidly. This was visible even in the carefully edited newsreels.87 To those who saw him close up the decline was unmistakable. Goebbels noted after his visit on 20 March that Hitler had ‘already gone very grey’ and that he ‘looked much older’ when speaking of the winter crisis. The Führer struck him as ‘sick and frail’. Ciano, who saw him a few days later,88 also thought he had aged considerably.
In early April 1942, Hitler was finally able to turn his attention towards preparing the summer offensive against the Soviet Union. Like Barbarossa, this was ultimately directed against the Western Allies. Unlike Barbarossa, which had both political and economic objectives at the outset, the purpose of ‘Operation Blue’, as it was codenamed, was primarily economic and military; political considerations played hardly any role in its original conception. Hitler aimed to complete the unfinished business of 1941, which was the capture of the resources necessary to continue the struggle against Anglo-America, and the denial of these resources to the enemy. He set out his objectives in Directive 41 on 5 April 1942.89 The Wehrmacht was to crush the Soviet Union and cut her off from her principal industrial centres. Sebastopol, which had been under siege since late October 1941, was finally to be taken. Then, Russian forces were to be destroyed west of the Don. After that, the main motorized and armoured forces would wheel south to break into the Caucasus and seize the passes and the oil-fields there; their flanks were to be secured through the capture of Voronezh and Stalingrad to the north and east. Only once this had been done should the Wehrmacht proceed to the next objective, which was the final strangulation of Leningrad and a link-up with the Finns nearby.
The centrality of the economic objectives was emphasized by Hitler on many occasions. ‘If I don’t get the oil of Maykop and Grozny,’ he warned the commander of the 6th Army, Friedrich Paulus, ‘then I must end this war.’90 Contrary to later legend, Operation Blue did not envisage three diverging axes of advance towards Voronezh, Stalingrad and the Caucasus. The two cities were merely to be secured in order to defend the northern flank of the operation. Hitler did not even insist on the capture of Stalingrad, saying only that it should ‘at least be subjected to heavy artillery fire in order to knock it out as an armaments and communications centre’; no mention was made of any symbolic or political importance attached to the city. The main thrust was to be directed south, towards the oil-fields.91 It was a war for oil.92
Conscious that he was asking ever more of his soldiers and the German people, the Führer reminded them of what they were fighting for, and why young men were being sent thousands of miles away from their homes. In February 1942, he already let slip that they might have to fight their way to the Caucasus.93 Now, as the final touches were being put to the plan, he returned to his primary war aims in two speeches in April and May 1942. The Germans, Hitler argued, were a ‘subjugated’ people who had been put in ‘chains’ by ‘dem
ocracy’, the ‘Jewish brain trusts’ and ‘stock exchanges and banks’, supported by Bolshevism. In order to secure their ‘daily bread in order to live’ as ‘have-nots’, they would have to confront the international ‘propertied’ class. This was a global enemy, but Hitler announced that it would be beaten in Russia. ‘The east is the battlefield,’ he explained, ‘in which the outcome will be decided.’94 It was there, Hitler told another audience of officer cadets in late May 1942, that Germany would find the resources and the living space to prevent itself from disappearing off the face of the earth.95 The exploiters might be mainly in the west, but the redistribution would take place primarily in the east.
It was in this spirit that the Nazi regime stepped up plans for the colonization of Russia. Hitler had plenty of space, with more in prospect; what he lacked was the right sort of people to settle it. On 23 April 1942, the Reichsführer-SS, Himmler, penned a memorandum in Hitler’s headquarters on ‘The retrieval of Volksdeutsche from America and Africa after the war’. ‘It is our task,’ the Reichsführer announced, ‘to bring back every person of German blood who has any value at all, in order to settle the captured acres.’ This could not be done by the Nazi Party because the main target group of albeit ‘politically unquestionably contaminated Volksdeutsche’ lay in ‘America’, beyond the political control of the Reich. Instead, Himmler called for ‘personal recruitment’ through family ties. Himmler was acknowledging the deep entanglement of Germany with America in one breath and demanding their disentanglement in the next.96
The fluidity of the American-German racial relationship, which had so preoccupied Hitler since the 1920s, was personified by the case of Hitler’s former close associate Ernst Hanfstaengl, a man who had crossed and recrossed the Atlantic. Since fleeing Germany in 1937, he had been resident in Britain. On 30 June 1942, following President Roosevelt’s direct request, he arrived in the United States to pursue psychological warfare against the Third Reich. He advised the president on the Führer’s mindset. Hanfstaengl was thus the only man who worked directly for both Hitler and Roosevelt; he personified the two degrees of separation between the German Reich and the United States.97 His son, Egon, whose godfather was Hitler, joined the US army. The Hanfstaengls were thus an example of the very thing that Hitler feared most: Germans in American uniform fighting other Germans.
Perhaps surprisingly, Hitler did not pay much attention to the Dutch or the Scandinavians, about whom Himmler and his SS leaders enthused at length.98 The discourse around the ‘Greater Germanic Reich’ was largely generated by them, not the Führer himself. He remained focused on extracting troops from these areas. Hitler’s ambivalence was reflected in his jaundiced view of marriages between locals and the German occupiers. He suggested that these relationships were based largely on ‘sexual urges which could not be satisfied elsewhere’, and hoped that the sight of German women would bring returning soldiers ‘to their senses’, not least because many of them had effectively lost their chances of finding a man through war deaths. After Himmler remonstrated, Hitler relented a little, but added that ‘in his experience’–which was based on looking at marriage applications–German men tended in 90 per cent of cases to ‘marry the most unworthy [Scandinavian or Dutch] women and girls’ one could possibly imagine.99
Perhaps even more surprisingly, Hitler began to take a more positive view of the Slavs. Rosenberg, who had been given such short shrift by his leader in 1941, saw his chance in early May 1942. He showed Hitler pictures of male and female Ukrainian workers in the Heinkel Werke. ‘The Führer,’ he noted, ‘expressed his astonishment about [their] extraordinary good looks’ and even their ‘beauty’.100 The Nazi regime now began to look with more favour on the Ukrainians, Czechs and Poles, among whom Hitler assumed there to be about a million of those capable of being ‘re-Germanized’. Through the instrument of the Deutsche Volkslisten, Nazi bureaucrats commenced the laborious process of ‘retrieving’ the ‘high-value’ Germans from the Slavic ‘mass’, which in practice meant the Germanization of large numbers of people Hitler had previously wanted to eliminate. It was a huge exercise in racial hydrogenation, the derivation of an ersatz Volk from an ‘inferior’ base. The man who had started his career criticizing the notion of ‘Germanization’ of peoples, rather than territory, now superintended the greatest attempted assimilation project in German history.101
By contrast, the fate of the Jews was fixed. Nothing could stop the machinery of destruction, which was in full throttle by the middle of the year.102 The rate of deportation was slowed briefly and slightly in mid June 1942 by the preparations for Operation Blue. These were given priority over what were classified as ‘non-essential’ transports to the camps, which only involved a tiny proportion of the available rolling stock.103 Hitler himself seems to have taken relatively little interest in the details of the killings he had ordered,104 but he was deeply concerned with the intellectual battle against Jewry. He declared the ‘systematic intellectual struggle’ against ‘Jews, freemasons’ and their allies to be a vital task. To this end, he wanted all libraries and archives to be examined for material which might be used for the ‘ideological tasks of the NSDAP’ and ‘later scholarly research in institutions of higher education’.105
Hitler thought carefully about the execution of Operation Blue.106 He instructed the Wehrmacht to conduct tighter envelopment operations than in the previous year, to prevent the Red Army from slipping through the net.107 Hitler envisaged extensive use of the Luftwaffe to deal with the challenges posed by the numerical superiority of the enemy and the vastness of the space. He devoted a great deal of attention to the complex logistics of the whole operation. The Führer also put a lot of effort into coordinating the allied contribution, which was much more important this time around because the Wehrmacht lacked the manpower to complete the tasks on its own.108 Hitler supplied his partners with precious raw materials and military equipment, often at the expense of German needs. He also embarked on a diplomatic charm offensive. The Führer went to see the future Finnish president, Marshal Mannerheim, in person. The tape of part of that exchange–the only recording we have of Hitler speaking in private–has survived. It shows him to have been calm and measured in discussion, very far from the ranter of myth.109 More important than the Finns were the Hungarians and Romanians, especially the latter, to whom much of the protection of the flanks was entrusted.110
The attack in Russia was to be accompanied by an offensive in the Mediterranean. Originally, Hitler had hoped to begin with the conquest of Malta, which would have helped Rommel’s subsequent operations in North Africa. The Führer soon got cold feet, however. It was during the delayed meeting with Mussolini at Schloss Klessheim and Berchtesgaden on 29/30 April 1942 that it was agreed to delay the assault on the island until after Rommel’s attack. Three weeks later, following a sceptical briefing by General Student on plans for the landing, Hitler erupted against the Italians. He did not trust them to keep the operation a secret; he was sceptical of their ability to carry it out; and he feared that in the case of disaster the Luftwaffe would have to bail the Italians out.111 The Führer said that ‘intellectual’ preparations should continue, but in practical terms Operation Hercules was off the table. Hitler had flunked another landing operation against the British. The failure to eliminate Malta–Britain’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean–was to become one of the main reasons for the Axis defeat in North Africa.
These moves were part of a broader Axis strategy of loosely coordinated blows against the Soviet Union and the British Empire. The Germans would undertake a giant pincer movement against the Middle East by Rommel’s Afrika Korps and the armies pushing down through the Caucasus. In late March and early April 1942, a Japanese strike force had already thrust deep into the Indian Ocean, launching a devastating raid on British bases on Ceylon, and sinking an aircraft carrier. By late May and early June 1942, Japan had taken Burma. With a bit of imagination, India itself was in play. In this spirit, Hitler finally
met with the Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose in Berlin on 27 May 1942.112 The encounter, which was the only one the two men ever had, did not go well. Hitler refused to repudiate his wounding comments about Indian nationalism in Mein Kampf. The Führer, who was still pining for the British Empire, also told his visitor that it would take 150 years before the Indians were ready for self-government. Hitler therefore refused to issue any declaration on Indian independence. Not being able to find a use for the man himself, he suggested that Bose head for Japan, from whence he could attack British India from the east.
Hitler’s strategy for the summer of 1942 was a huge gamble. He assumed that the Russians would stand and fight to defend the vital Donbas industrial region, and therefore allow themselves to be encircled and destroyed. Hitler, like the general staff, was also under the impression that the Soviet Union had been fatally weakened by the losses of 1941 and the winter battles.113 The biggest problem of all, however, was that both operations depended very heavily on the performance of allies. The Mediterranean strategy required full Italian cooperation. Operation Blue hinged on the ability of the Hungarians and Romanians to secure the northern flank of the Wehrmacht while the mobile units raced south into the Caucasus. Given that Hitler had been warning against reliance on allies since the 1920s, and more recently on the eve of Barbarossa and of Rommel’s forthcoming offensive, this was exactly the position that he did not want to be in.
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