The Führer also tackled the officer corps, whose want of ideological coherence he blamed for the failures in Russia; here the ‘September crisis’ in the Caucasus weighed much more heavily than the situation at Stalingrad. More broadly, Hitler wanted to break the aristocratic and upper-middle-class stranglehold on the military profession, in order–following the more progressive Prussian tradition–to make it a career open to talent.203 On 1 October 1942, very shortly after Hitler’s speech, Rudolf Schmundt was appointed head of the Heerespersonalamt. This marked a big shift in the Führer’s relations with the officer corps, whose social transformation he now pursued with vigour. A flurry of measures followed. The social opening of the officer corps happened not just because of the pressures of war, but because Hitler made it happen.204
These modernizing steps were accompanied by some more feudal stratagems to bind the generals closer to their Führer. He was already in the habit of rewarding them with substantial cash payments. Towards the end of September 1942, almost immediately after his eruption over the Caucasus, he gave Keitel a particularly fat birthday cheque with his ‘sincerest thanks… for the loyalty and devotion with which you have made yourself available to me… [during] a serious crisis’. In October 1942, he made the first land grant to a general, a confiscated Jewish estate in Silesia to Ewald von Kleist, whom he shortly afterwards made commander of Army Group A in the Caucasus. Hitler also made substantial gifts to members of the government, the party and the SS, including Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Rosenberg, Konstantin von Neurath, Robert Ley, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Fritz Sauckel, Chief of Police SS-Obergruppenführer Kurt Daluege and SA-Chief of Staff Wilhelm Schepmann.205
Hitler’s efforts to rally Germans behind the common cause were complicated by the continuing internecine warfare within the regime. He was still spending a lot of time mediating disputes between his paladins: between Goebbels and Rosenberg over how eastern ‘colonial policy’ was to be presented;206 between Rosenberg and Ribbentrop over control of the entire ‘Eastern Question’;207 between Rosenberg and the military commanders over the administration of the captured eastern territories;208 between Baldur von Schirach and the various state authorities over the evacuations of children from the big cities to the countryside;209 between Himmler and Ribbentrop over reporting to Hitler.210 There was also a low-intensity struggle over controlling access to Hitler between Lammers and Bormann, in which the latter was gradually gaining the upper hand.211 None of these disputes enhanced Hitler’s authority in the slightest. On the contrary they were a waste of everyone’s time and energy. Nor did Hitler encourage the party to establish a parallel state. On 2 December 1942, he issued a (futile) instruction forbidding the NSDAP from intervening formally in ‘private legal matters’, which should be left to the courts; at the most, the party might offer its informal mediation for an ‘amicable resolution’.212 With regard to forms of government, Hitler believed, there was no contest; whatever was administered least was best.
One way or the other, Hitler was still determined to outlast the enemy coalition, or at least to give that impression. He told the visiting Dutch fascist leader Anton Mussert on 10 December 1942 that he ‘would not capitulate but fight’, even if he had to recruit fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds.213 In a public speech, he claimed that whereas the Kaiser’s Germany had given up at fifteen minutes to twelve, he ‘only stopped on principle at five minutes past twelve’. Besides, he claimed, his position was much better than that of Frederick the Great, ‘who faced a coalition of 54 million with only 3.9 million [population]’. Today, he continued, Germany still held ‘bastions far from its own borders’. It had space to trade. That said, Hitler was under no illusions. ‘I know very well,’ he said, ‘that the fight is a very difficult one.’214
As the year drew to an end there was no disguising the military predicament of the Reich. More than 100,000 men remained besieged in Stalingrad, with dwindling hopes of resupply or relief. Many more were being rushed to Tunisia in order to bolster the Axis position. The RAF battered the Reich nightly, with increasing effectiveness. More than twice as many U-boats were sunk in 1942 than during the previous twelve months, most of them in the second part of the year. Allied counter-measures, which Hitler had expected, were taking their toll.215 Sinkings of merchant ships, which had peaked in November 1942, dropped markedly in December. To complete this tale of woe, on the very last days of the year the Kriegsmarine spectacularly failed to close with and destroy a poorly defended British Arctic convoy in the Barents Sea. The cause of this fiasco was not the timidity of the commanding admiral, but Hitler’s well-known reluctance to risk the loss of capital ships, which he now described as ‘dead iron’ and a ‘miserable copy of the Royal Navy’. ‘It was now his irrevocable decision,’ he announced to Raeder’s representative at headquarters, ‘to get rid of these useless ships’ and deploy the ‘good crews [and] these good weapons’ more usefully. Hitler was also worried that ‘lying around’ in port with the resulting reduction of ‘fighting keenness’ would turn the navy into a ‘nursery of revolution’, as had happened in 1918.216 He was determined that history should not repeat itself.
In his New Year’s Proclamation for 1943 Hitler lost no time in identifying the cause of the Reich’s present travails, namely its own fragmentation and its nemesis in the shape of the United States of America. Reprising old themes from the 1920s, he reminded his listeners that thanks to the ‘centuries-long decay of the first German Reich’, the German people had become ‘mere cultural fertilizer for the other world’. The ‘other’ world was Anglo-America, especially the United States, which to Hitler represented first and foremost a massive demographic threat to the Reich. ‘Countless millions of Germans,’ he told his audience, ‘were forced to leave their homeland.’ ‘It was they, in particular,’ Hitler went on, ‘who helped to build up that continent [America] which is now trying to plunge Europe into war for a second time.’217
In January 1943, the contest escalated further. Meeting at Casablanca in the middle of the month, Churchill and Roosevelt announced that they would accept nothing less than the ‘unconditional surrender’ of Hitler. Towards the end of January, the USAAF launched its first raid on the Reich, against the port of Wilhelmshaven; Hitler paid close attention to American press claims about the effectiveness of the bombing campaign.218 In North Africa, the first American ground troops were already in action against the Wehrmacht. The greatest threat, however, came from the productive power of the United States, soon to be epitomized by the iconic image of Norman Rockwell’s statuesque ‘Rosie the Riveter’ bestriding a slain copy of Mein Kampf. Hitler conceded as much in his proclamation. ‘What America intends to achieve in the way of production,’ he said, ‘has been communicated to us often enough by the babblings of the principal warmonger Roosevelt,’ adding that ‘what it can really do and has already achieved is not unknown to us’.219 The civil war, which in Hitler’s mind pitted German engineers and soldiers from both sides of the Atlantic against each other, was now in full swing.
With the plan of bringing back German-Americans to settle the new lands in east now on hold, the Third Reich hoped at least to retrieve some of the lost racial value among the US prisoners of war, whose numbers increased as the ground war in Tunisia intensified. The Coordination Centre for Ethnic Germans of the SS, which was given the task of trawling the camps for ‘American and British prisoners of war of German descent’,220 turned up many captives of German origin, but ultimately despaired of converting them. Later, Obersturmbannführer Rimann informed Himmler that ‘the continuing interrogation of American POWs of German descent has shown us the problems associated with our plan’. Most were second or third generation, and were ‘completely Americanized in attitude and behaviour’. 221 It was no different in the case of the Canadian Volksdeutsche captured at Dieppe, who all turned out–depressingly–to be volunteers.222
Hitler linked his continuing preoccupation with the fate of German emigrants with his policy towards the Jews. He had often b
een reproached, the Führer complained to Admiral Horthy, for his rough treatment of the Jews, but what about the ‘250,000 Germans’ who had had to ‘emigrate’ every year from the Reich? They had had to do so under such terrible conditions, Hitler alleged, that 30 per cent of them died en route to Australia.223
Meanwhile, the Reich was being battered by the British Empire. Hitler’s fury at the ascendancy of the Royal Navy on the high seas exploded in a confrontation with Admiral Raeder on 6 January 1943. He was sacked and replaced by Dönitz at the end of the month. The RAF continued to pound German cities, and–with increasing effect–German industry as well. In his New Year’s proclamation, Hitler acknowledged that the ‘homeland’ was facing ‘heavy bombing attacks’.224 The first attack on Berlin for more than a year took place on 16 January.225 This was merely a portent of what was to come. At Casablanca, Churchill and Roosevelt issued a directive for a combined bomber offensive aimed at ‘the progressive destruction of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their armed resistance is fatally weakened’.226 On 23 January, the 8th Army took Tripoli and advanced on Tunisia, threatening the remaining Axis position in North Africa, and perhaps the fascist regime in Italy with total collapse. Hitler also feared British raids and even full-scale invasions on the Channel Islands, in the Balkans and in Scandinavia, his anxiety stoked by a barrage of false information generated by British Intelligence.
This was the context within which Hitler regarded the crisis in Russia. What was being defended there, he told the soldiers of the eastern front, was the living space and the living standard required to defend Germany against Bolshevism and the ‘Jewish-capitalist hyenas’, by securing the space necessary for ‘a secure food supply’ and ‘those raw materials without which human cultures are no longer imaginable today’.227 His main concern here was not Stalingrad, whose real predicament had still not been revealed to the German people, but the situation on the Don, where the Red Army had broken through in January 1943.228 The whole Donetsk industrial district was in danger, and with it Hitler’s entire industrial strategy for waging the war as a whole. When the generals recommended a retreat to save men, he refused. ‘Without materiel,’ Hitler said, ‘I cannot do it.’ Men without equipment, he added, were no use. The Donetsk region was already a cornerstone of Speer’s plans to raise production. If it were lost, Hitler warned, ‘the entire armaments programme will be redundant’, including ‘the entire tank programme’ as well as the ‘artillery programme’ and the ‘great ammunition programme’.229
The garrison at Stalingrad, left to its fate as resources were diverted to North Africa and the Don, was slowly ground down. On 21 January, Hitler rejected a direct appeal from Manstein to allow the 6th Army to surrender in order to prevent further bloodshed. Once the Red Army had overrun the last airfield and split the pocket in two, the end was only a matter of time. On 30 January 1943, the anniversary of the seizure of power, Hitler sent his last radio message to stiffen the garrison. He appointed Paulus field marshal, observing that no commander of that rank had ever been taken prisoner in German history. The inference was clear: Paulus should commit suicide rather than go into captivity. On 31 January 1943, the southern pocket surrendered. Two days later, the northern garrison also threw in the towel. Paulus was captured along with his entire staff. 110,000 men became prisoners of war; 60,000 had been killed or had starved to death during the siege. Only 5,000 were ever to return from the Soviet camps. It was the greatest defeat of the Wehrmacht so far.
Hitler was devastated by the fall of Stalingrad, not just by the loss of the men and materiel, but by the way in which Paulus had disobeyed orders. He feared that Stalin would make political capital out of his high-ranking captives. ‘You have to imagine it,’ he said: ‘[Paulus] comes to Moscow and [sees] the rat’s cage [in the notorious Lubyanka prison].’ ‘He will sign everything,’ Hitler predicted.230 In fact, it was to take a year and a half, but in the end Hitler was absolutely right: the field marshal did speak against the Nazi regime on a Moscow radio station. Hitler also worried that Paulus’s surrender complicated the narrative within which Hitler wanted to embed the disaster at Stalingrad. His plan had been to transfigure the suffering of the garrison into a European epic, which would stand alongside the winter battles of 1941–2 in the regime’s story-telling. As the news of the surrender came in, Hitler clutched at straws. Perhaps, he suggested, one could argue that even the staffs fought to the last man, and that they ‘only succumbed to overwhelming force when injured and overpowered’.231 His final communiqué on Stalingrad, issued on 3 February 1943 after the pocket had fallen, stated that the 6th Army had fought ‘until the last breath’. ‘They died,’ Hitler claimed, ‘so that Germany should live.’232
Stalingrad severely damaged the regime and Hitler’s own standing. It came at a time when he was under pressure at home for other reasons. In mid February 1943, the racial policy of the regime ran into unexpectedly fierce opposition. So far, Jews in mixed marriages had been exempt from deportation. When the Gestapo locked up about 2,000 of them in the Berlin Jewish Community Office in the Rosenstrasse, prior to sending them east, their wives staged a noisy protest. Hitler supported Goebbels’s decision to back down, but insisted that the Jews had to be removed from the capital one way or the other.233 During the first half of 1943, Hitler was also anxious about the effect of ‘shortages’ and rationing on civilian morale.234 The Third Reich was in the grip of a full-scale political and military crisis.
Hitler scrambled to stabilize the front and shield the economically vital Donetsk basin. Pressure from the generals to withdraw further west mounted.235 Five days after the fall of Stalingrad, Manstein, the commander of the reformed Army Group South, cornered Hitler, demanding not only a more flexible defence but also a chief of staff for all fronts to ensure a more ‘joined-up’ strategy.236 On another visit by Hitler to Army Group at Zaporosje, Manstein was brutally frank. ‘It can’t go on like this, my Führer,’ he exclaimed. Towards the end of the month, Kluge came to Führer Headquarters and berated him about the state of affairs.237 All this took its toll on Hitler. ‘He had suddenly become very old,’ his valet Heinz Linge recalled, ‘his left arm and his left leg have been shaking since the loss of Stalingrad.’ Guderian, who saw him shortly after the disaster on the Volga, had the same impression. Eva Braun, who hadn’t seen Hitler for some time, was shocked by his appearance when they met again in February 1943. Goebbels, whose contact was more regular, was similarly aghast and Hitler himself remarked on the deterioration. The contemporary newsreel footage certainly shows a physical decline in the Führer.238
In early March 1943, the British launched the ‘Battle of the Ruhr’, a four-month sustained aerial assault on the centres of German war production in the west.239 Night after night, the RAF struck at the major industrial towns: no fewer than six raids on Essen, four on Duisburg and Cologne, two on Bochum, Düsseldorf, Gelsenkirchen and Dortmund, and one on Krefeld, Mülheim, Barmen-Wuppertal, Elberfeld-Wuppertal. Midway through the campaign the RAF destroyed the Möhne and Eder dams, causing severe flooding, huge destruction and thousands of civilian deaths. Not only were many factories repeatedly hit, but there was massive disruption to the transportation network, the supply of component parts and the sleep patterns of the labour force. Hitler was forced to order the evacuation of as many industries, workers and their families as possible, fully aware of the resulting short-term loss of output.240 The campaign cost him about six weeks of production in all, a huge figure;241 aircraft output lagged for nine months. Civilian morale, already febrile after the raids in 1942 and the disaster at Stalingrad, plummeted. When Goebbels raised the bombing war with Hitler three days after the start of the offensive, he was cut short. ‘The Führer hardly lets me finish,’ he wrote, ‘and declares immediately that [the bombing] was a worry which preoccupied him deep into the night.’242
Despite all these woes, Hitler staged a remarkable military comebac
k. In late February, the Afrika Korps badly mauled the Americans at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia. On the eastern front, Manstein counter-attacked vigorously and recaptured Kharkov.243 The vital Donetsk basin was retained for now. Meanwhile, the German armies in the Caucasus had been withdrawn without further disaster, and a bridgehead at Kerch and the Kuban retained. This not only shielded the Crimea from the Red Army, but gave Hitler a staging post for a fresh offensive in the summer. Where there were no critical strategic or economic interests at stake, Hitler traded space for time in the east. ‘Space,’ he explained in early March, ‘is one of the most important military factors,’ because ‘one can only operate if one has space.’ Had the crisis taken place on the old border of the Reich, Hitler argued, the war would have been lost. ‘Here in the east,’ he reiterated, ‘one can absorb this.’ In this spirit, Hitler ordered the evacuation of the Rzhev salient and other exposed areas in March 1943 in order to free up forces for deployment elsewhere.244
Buoyed by the victory at Kasserine, Hitler mused once more about the nature of his racial struggle with the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. Somewhat contrary to his usual rhetoric, he attributed the poor American performance on the battlefield to the decline of their agriculture as observed in photographs. This he contrasted with the robustness of the British. ‘There is no doubt,’ Hitler opined, ‘that the Briton is the best of the Anglo-Saxons’. He then proceeded to contrast once again the small size of Germany, which could be traversed by an aircraft in an hour and a quarter, with ‘entire continents’ such as ‘America, East Asia, Russia [and] Australia’. From there it was just a small step to speculating on what might have happened had Germans colonized Northern Australia, as the Duke of Windsor had allegedly suggested. Probably, he concluded, the British would simply have rounded them up at the outbreak of war.245 These reflections were embedded in a broader rumination about the importance of the ‘size of the state’s space’, which had enabled China to carry on fighting despite the loss of so much of its territory to the Japanese. The implication was plain: if Germany was to prevail in the clash of the continents, she would have to retain a comparable space to her rivals in Russia, contiguous to the Reich. The logic of Mein Kampf, the Second Book and Barbarossa still applied.
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