Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  The September crisis was the operational turning point of the war, and also Hitler’s final breach with the military leadership. He accused the commanders of not merely misunderstanding the operational plan from the beginning–‘failure to recognize the centre of gravity’156–but defying his direct orders. Hitler was also convinced that elements within the headquarters were betraying secrets to the enemy.157 There was in fact an MI6 agent in or close to the OKW, codenamed ‘Knopf’, originally recruited by the Poles, who was providing London with detailed accounts of Hitler’s thinking.158 Hitler’s main concern, though, was that the failure to take the ports in time had wrecked the strategic purpose of the operation, which was to supply the spearheads across the Black Sea, and to extract the oil–at least that of Maykop–in tankers from Tuapse to Romania and from there up the Danube to Germany.159 ‘Whoever loses the oil,’ Hitler lamented, ‘loses the war.’160 In effect, he had conceded that if the war was not lost, it certainly could no longer be won.

  Hitler now tried to mitigate the damage. He gave orders for the extraction of oil from Maykop, stressing the ‘decisive importance’ of rebuilding the installations there.161 Only a dribble ever reached the Reich. Hitler also instructed the Luftwaffe to destroy the Soviet oil-fields beyond his grasp. On 7 October orders were given to attack the installations at Grozny, which the Luftwaffe executed three days later, and a fortnight afterwards he demanded a raid on faraway Baku.162 Göring simply did not have the resources for that. Hitler’s main response, though, was to switch focus to Stalingrad. Formerly a secondary target, its importance had been steadily growing in Hitler’s mind in the course of the campaign, even before the crisis in the Caucasus. If the city could be captured and the Soviet line of communication north–south could be cut, then Hitler could realize at least some of the campaign’s strategic objectives. The Führer was optimistic. His faith in the commander of the attacking force was such that he had considered him the only replacement for Jodl. Paulus, he remarked, was ‘the only man’ whom ‘he trusted personally’, the first man whom he had ‘noticed’ among senior Wehrmacht officers, someone who was ‘fanatical’ about ‘motorization’ and a man of ‘balanced personality’ who was able to ‘hold his nerve’.163

  So from October to mid November 1942, the 6th Army battered its way into Stalingrad.164 The Luftwaffe, at Hitler’s direct request, pounded the city into rubble. Paulus advanced slowly through the ruins; the Russians clung on grimly with their backs to the Volga. Losses were heavy on both sides. Stalingrad’s landmarks–the grain elevator, the factories, the tennis racket railway sidings–acquired global significance; its very name seemed to epitomize the stakes. By early October, many Germans, and indeed world opinion, had come to see the struggle as a battle of wills between Stalin and the Führer.165 Hitler became more and more obsessed with the capture of the city, urging Paulus on. ‘The difficulties of the battle for Stalingrad,’ he told the men of the 6th Army a month later, ‘and the reduced combat strengths are known to me.’ Despite this, Hitler demanded that they should attack once more with the same energy ‘they had so often shown before’ and the ‘élan they had so often demonstrated’ in order to break through at least at the artillery factory and the metal factory, reaching the Volga and capturing these areas of the city.166

  That said, Hitler, who intensely personalized his rivalry with Churchill and Roosevelt, was not pursuing a personal vendetta with Stalin, whom he hardly ever mentioned in public. The name of the city was an irrelevance to him. Hitler’s immediate target was the Soviet economy and communications system. ‘I wanted to get to the Volga at a particular place, at a particular city,’ he said, adding that it ‘coincidentally carried the same name as Stalin himself’. ‘But don’t think for a moment,’ he continued, ‘that I marched there for that reason’, but rather because it was ‘a very important place’. No fewer than 30 million tonnes of goods, including 9 million tonnes of oil, large quantities of manganese and the entire grain harvest of the Kuban, Hitler claimed, passed through the city every year.167 His strategic objective was to deliver political effect, not in Moscow but in London. In early October 1942, Hitler brusquely rejected Jodl’s suggestion that troops be withdrawn from Stalingrad ‘and emphasized for the first time that the capture of Stalingrad was important not only for operational reasons, but also urgently necessary for psychological reasons’, that is to impress ‘world opinion’ and to cheer ‘the allies’.168 If the city fell, Hitler remarked to his entourage, then Churchill might fall or at least become more amenable to making peace.169 In short, the push on Stalingrad, like the entire war, was primarily driven by the contest against Anglo-America.

  This explains why, in early November 1942, Hitler announced the fall of the city. ‘There was a major transhipment point there,’ he told an audience in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller in his annual address to commemorate the failed putsch, ‘which I wanted to take, and you–we are being modest–we actually have it’.170 The military leadership, who knew better, were aghast at Hitler’s optimism. Senior commanders called from Russia to say that Stalingrad was very far from having been taken.171 In fact, Hitler–who was already resigned to another winter in Russia–was not deluded. He claimed victory prematurely not primarily to cheer the anxious German public, or to depress the Russians, who knew that it was untrue, but rather to influence world opinion, particularly in Britain. A year before, in October 1941, Hitler had for the same reason instructed Dietrich to tell the world press that the Soviet Union was beaten. Now he was doing it again.

  In the autumn of 1942, Hitler was engulfed by multiple crises. In the west, the Anglo-Americans launched a series of devastating attacks. On 23 October 1942, Montgomery began his offensive at El Alamein.172 In the face of crushing Allied material superiority, especially in the air, Rommel was forced to retreat by 3 November. Five days later, the Anglo-Americans mounted Operation Torch, a huge landing in French North Africa. This not merely threatened Rommel’s flank, but blew the entire Axis position in the Mediterranean completely open. Not only had the U-boats been unable to stop the invasion, but their sinkings of Allied merchant shipping in the North Atlantic had peaked. Hitler now put his faith in the planned new generation of U-boat, but it would take time to build and deploy these.173 Then the Russians counter-attacked at Stalingrad in Operation Uranus. They broke through the German lines north of the city on 19 November, and a day later to the south. Some of the allied forces guarding the flanks–Romanian, Hungarian and Italian–fought bravely; many bolted.174 On 23 November the two pincers met at Kalach on the Don, well to the west of the city. The 6th Army, more than a quarter of a million men and a colossal quantity of equipment, was in the pocket.

  Hitler struggled to respond to this succession of blows. On 22 November, he ordered Paulus to stand fast while he worked out a plan.175 Two days later, immediately after the 6th Army was cut off, Hitler proclaimed Stalingrad a ‘fortress’. He forbade any talk of a break-out, and refused to give Paulus freedom of action.176 Hitler feared that the 6th Army would be caught out on the steppe in the open and annihilated. Much better, he thought, to dig in within the relative shelter of the city, especially in winter, and wait for relief. Perhaps it was with this in mind that Hitler announced the creation of a new decoration, the ‘Hand to Hand Fighting Clasp’, as ‘a visible sign of recognition of soldiers who fought man to man with cold steel and [other] weapons of close combat, but also as an encouragement towards the highest fulfilment of duty’.177 In the meantime, having been given assurances by Göring, Hitler planned to supply Paulus by air, just as he had done at Demyansk and Cholm the previous winter. From the start to the bitter end of the crisis, the Führer took all the main decisions on Stalingrad himself.178

  Hitler cast the struggle in Stalingrad as a clash of wills and endurance. In the end, he told the generals, it was a matter of ‘nerves’. The situation of the 6th Army became increasing desperate. Red Army attacks constantly shrank the perimeter. Men froze; equipment seized up. Supplies ran low,
as the Luftwaffe could fly in only a small part of the army’s requirements. Hitler was fully aware of this. When told in mid December of the daily total achieved in munitions, fuel and supplies, which was a fraction of what was needed, he remarked simply ‘that is terrible’.179 A relief offensive petered out well short of the city. Still, so long as Paulus held on to the three airfields at Stalingrad, and the 6th Army maintained cohesion, there was a chance of holding out until the spring.

  Two considerations were uppermost in Hitler’s mind over Stalingrad. Firstly, any withdrawal of the 6th Army not only would be risky but would inevitably involve the loss of a huge quantity of equipment, which he could not replace. ‘I am afraid,’ he confessed, ‘that if one now retreats, all the materiel will be lost.’180 He was particularly worried about the loss of the heavy artillery pieces, but also of the thousands of horses, many of which were on their last legs. Secondly, Hitler was under no illusion that the ground lost could be regained. ‘We will not recapture it,’ he warned the generals, adding that they should ‘not imagine that they will regain the ground after retreating and leaving all that equipment behind’. The Nazi tide was ebbing, leaving a scum of corpses and wrecked equipment, and it would not rise again.

  Though the drama at Stalingrad dominated the German public, and has since gained an ascendancy in the historical memory, the main contest in Hitler’s mind remained the struggle with Anglo-America. The country and name he singled out with particular ferocity in his rhetoric were not the Soviet Union and Stalin, but the United States and Roosevelt.181 In strategic terms, the Allied invasion of North Africa presented a much greater threat, which overshadowed the eastern crisis. The entire Mediterranean front, including Mussolini’s own position, and the future of the Axis itself were suddenly in contention. By late 1942, the brief aerial concentration on the east for Operation Blue was over. Despite the dire situation at Stalingrad, some 70 per cent of the Luftwaffe was deployed in the west, in the Mediterranean or in the Reich itself.182

  All this brought home the huge attritional challenge now posed by the Western Allies. Germany was manifestly outmatched in the air. In early September, Hitler lamented with respect to the Dieppe raid that while ‘we have 200 fighters’ the enemy ‘has 2,000’. ‘If the battle lasts for three days,’ he continued, ‘and I lose 37 or 40 machines a day’, then we ‘have had it,’ because the other side might have lost the same numbers of aircraft, but still had plenty to spare.183 The British now were beginning not only to claim strategic mastery of the skies, but to enjoy the tactical air superiority that had once been the hallmark of the Luftwaffe. Henceforth until the end of the war, Wehrmacht operations against the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ powers would be seriously constrained by the RAF and–increasingly–the USAAF. Hitler was shocked at the amount of shipping the Allies had been able to assemble for Operation Torch, which showed that his own calculations of the available levels of tonnage were completely awry.184 Hitler was also furious with the Luftwaffe–one observer reports ‘vicious attacks’–for failing to produce a viable long-range bomber with which he could have attacked the bridgehead.185

  If Hitler was to keep his allies in and the enemy coalition out, he would have to prevent the Anglo-Americans from gaining a foothold in Europe and even on its doorstep. Three days after Torch, he launched Operation Attila, the occupation of Vichy France, designed to pre-empt an Allied landing there. The seizure of the Vichy fleet failed when it was scuttled by the French before German tanks reached Toulon. The last major naval assets potentially available to the Third Reich had slipped from its grasp. The Führer was also determined to hold the line in North Africa. When Rommel descended uninvited on his headquarters in late November 1942 to demand the evacuation of Tunisia, Hitler refused. ‘For foreign political reasons,’ he explained, ‘a larger bridgehead in Africa simply must be held.’186 Despite the needs of the eastern front, and especially the agony at Stalingrad, Hitler dispatched a huge and well-equipped army to Tunisia, much of it by air, using precious transport capacity, in order to prop up Mussolini and to ensure that the area would not be used as a staging post for air-raids or invasions against his southern flank. The airlift was larger than the one staged at Stalingrad. When in early December 1942 the first Tiger tanks appeared, Hitler decided that they were not to be used piecemeal in Russia but in concentrated form in Africa against the British and Americans.187

  Hitler was in no doubt about the annihilatory nature of his struggle with the western powers. For him, this was epitomized not merely by the bombing war, but also by the conduct of military operations. The Führer was incensed by the alleged Canadian treatment of German prisoners during the Dieppe raid, after which some were found executed with their hands tied behind their backs. In September 1942, fearing another landing, he ordered the deportation of the Channel Islanders. Two thousand of them were sent to Biberach in Württemberg.188 On 18 October 1942, Hitler instructed that British ‘so-called commandos’, irrespective of how they had been deployed or whether or not they were in uniform, should be ‘killed down to the last man in battle or on the run’.189 In order to explain why he was demanding such drastic action, Hitler referred to the production crisis. ‘I do not know,’ he said, ‘whether every officer is aware that the destruction of a single electricity station can cost the Luftwaffe many thousands of tons of aluminium.’ The many unbuilt aircraft would then be missing at the front or in the defence of the Reich. ‘In the east,’ Hitler explained, ‘the war is a battle of extermination,’ adding that ‘Britain and America’ had ‘joined’ this form of warfare through practices which ‘in essence’ did not differ ‘in any way’ from those of Russian partisans. The general intention behind the instruction, which was the western equivalent of the commissar-order, was to radicalize the war in the west so that it harmonized with practices in the east.190

  The annihilatory tendency in Hitler’s thinking about Anglo-America was also evident in his pursuit of weapons of mass retaliation. He was convinced that only a cataclysmic blow against Britain would force the RAF to end the attacks on German cities and Churchill to seek peace. Despairing of the Luftwaffe, the most promising avenue seemed to be rockets. In late June 1942, Speer briefed him about the progress of the experiments at Peenemünde. Hitler was initially sceptical.191 In early October 1942, however, there was the first successful rocket flight. By the middle of the month, Hitler was demanding the ‘mass deployment’ of rockets, at least 5,000 on the first occasion,192 so that ‘one can make a powerful impression with this weapon’.193 This was to involve a huge commitment of fuel, steel and other resources. By the end of the war Hitler had invested the equivalent of 39,000 aircraft in a rocket programme which ultimately proved irrelevant to the course of the war.194 The intended target of these weapons, it is worth repeating, was not the Soviet Union but Britain.

  The end of the wars of manoeuvre in Russia and North Africa accentuated the attritional character of the conflict for Hitler. Victory would go to those who could outproduce and outbleed the other side. On 1 October 1942, well before the Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad, Hitler told the Gauleiter that there would be no early end to the struggle and that the clash of production was now the main battle front. Increased mobilization would be necessary. A key factor, Hitler knew, was labour and he urged Sauckel to remedy the shortage caused by the increasing demands of the war and the absence of so many men at the front.195 He pushed for greater use of foreign workers, both forced and voluntary. While determined to remove Jews from the armaments factories of the Reich, Hitler agreed to Sauckel’s suggestion that Jewish ‘skilled workers’ be allowed to remain ‘initially’ in the General government; production took precedence over annihilation, at least for the moment.196 The demands of the production war drove Hitler to moderate his policy at least towards the non-Jewish population. He instructed that the Serbian prisoners sent to build fortifications in Norway should be ‘properly fed’ because thereby increasing their productivity was the only way ‘the numbers required could be reduce
d’, thus easing the pressure on accommodation, clothing and other supplies.197 Likewise, in the autumn of 1942, he ordered that the ‘native labourers and their families deployed to work in the oil industry should be fed in such a way as to safeguard their willingness and ability to work’.198 This was a sentiment which Hitler repeated on many occasions until the end of the war. That said, what actually happened was another matter. In the case of the Serbian prisoners, for example, a large number died on the way to Norway, and well over half of them did not survive the war.199

  Hitler also sought to mobilize the home front further. Towards the end of the following month, as the Soviet pincers were snapping shut at Kalach, he appointed a special envoy to investigate how best ‘underemployed or badly employed’ manpower could be released for service at the front or other duties.200 Hitler gave equal attention to the psychological mobilization of the German people, which was becoming increasingly dismayed by the evident stagnation on the battle fronts and the escalating bombing war. The question of how to respond to RAF attacks was not just a practical matter but also one of domestic politics. Hitler expressed his horror at the tendency of the Luftwaffe to play it down. ‘People can bear everything,’ Hitler continued, but they needed to be told ‘the brutal truth’,201 not lies that they knew to be untrue from personal observation. There was also the issue of how to reduce the danger to civilians not required for war production. Baldur von Schirach, who was keen to get children away from their families and indoctrinate them, favoured their mass evacuation in ‘whole school classes’ to safe areas. Fearful of the effects on morale, Hitler agreed to the plan, but only on condition that ‘all compulsion was strictly avoided’, adding that it was ‘the parents alone who should decide whether their children were evacuated’.202