Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  In the last two months of the year, the onslaught on Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe’ intensified. In mid November 1943, the RAF and USAAF commenced a six-month air campaign against the Reich capital.349 Allied bombers also continued to batter other German cities. During the day, the Americans came for the factories and other parts of the German war economy; at night, the British came for the residential areas and for the Germans themselves. ‘What the German homeland has to put up with here,’ Hitler said, ‘is known to all of us, and what I feel personally about the matter, you can imagine.’350 City after city in which Hitler had spoken, which he had dominated with triumphal processions, collapsed under a hail of incendiaries and high explosive. The centre of Munich was struck by hundreds of RAF bombers on 6 September 1943, and again on 2 October. During the night of 22 and 23 October 1943, Kassel was engulfed by a firestorm. All the Führer could do was spit defiance against the ‘aerial terror’, which he claimed would only strengthen German resolve. Erhard Milch, the state secretary of the Air Ministry, argued after the autumn raids ‘that Germany itself is the real front line’.351 Likewise, the ‘situation reports’, Hitler’s daily meetings with the High Command, filed the bombing raids under ‘west’. The ‘Second Front’ already existed, not in France to be sure, but in the skies above Germany.

  In short, by the end of 1943, even before the first Allied soldier had set foot in France, the western powers were absorbing the greater part not merely of Hitler’s attention,352 but also of his resources. This was the decisive year in the great attritional battle. The war in the air ate up a huge proportion of the German war economy: in 1943, 41 per cent went on aircraft alone. The next-biggest item that year was ammunition, at 29 per cent. Another 8 per cent or so went on naval vessels, especially submarines, most of which were deployed against the west. Only about 6 per cent of the war economy was devoted to tank production, despite the demands of the eastern front. In autumn 1943, more than 2,000 anti-aircraft guns of 88 mm calibre, or above, were deployed in defence of the Reich, along with about 1,600 day and night fighters, far more than were deployed in the east. At the start of the year, just under 40 per cent of the Luftwaffe was based in the east; by its end, that figure had dropped further to about 35 per cent. One way or the other, most of the German war effort was now geared to fighting the Anglo-Americans, and the proportion increased with every passing month.353

  Worse still, the Reich had conclusively lost the battle of production. This was not for want of trying. German output increased substantially in 1943,354 but not nearly enough. This was partly because of the bombing. In mid December 1943, Hitler was informed that production of key weapons, such as assault guns, had been substantially reduced by Allied air-raids.355 He ended the year with fewer machine guns than he had started.356 Hitler’s main problem, though, was that western output grew so much more quickly. The Reich had drawn level with the Soviet Union in 1943, but she was being completely outproduced by the United States and, to a lesser extent, the British Empire. A substantial proportion of that output was going to the Russians, via the Arctic convoys, Iran and Vladivostok, giving them the edge in battlefield mobility. While most of the Wehrmacht was deployed in the east, and it suffered most of its casualties fighting the Red Army,357 its weakness there was largely one of equipment rather than manpower.358 Thanks to the Western Allies, the Soviet Union faced far fewer German tanks in the east (because they were never made) and many fewer fighters (because these were in the west). It was already clear that National Socialist élan and German brain would prove no match for western industrial brawn. Hitler could outproduce Stalin’s Five Year Plan, but not Roosevelt’s New Deal.

  Meanwhile, the Nazi leadership continued its internecine warfare.The winners and losers in these struggles were becoming clear by the end of 1943. Goebbels extended his authority well beyond propaganda into large swathes of the civilian sector. Himmler had consolidated his control over the security apparatus. Speer was the undisputed master of the German war economy. Göring, by contrast, had lost all authority. Rosenberg had been largely sidelined some time earlier, and his eastern European fiefdom was steadily shrinking anyway. In Hitler’s immediate vicinity, the main victor was Martin Bormann, whose unstoppable rise was noted. He had almost completely edged out Hans-Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Imperial Chancellery, whose ability to brief Hitler shrank further throughout the year.359 Bormann effectively controlled not only civilian access to Hitler, but also (it was believed) what came from the Führer. ‘Now Bormann was in power,’ Rosenberg wrote in the autumn of 1943, ‘because nobody who received a communication from him could distinguish whether this constituted a personal order of the Führer’s’, or merely reflected ‘Bormann’s own views’.360 Hitler’s authority, in fact, was not challenged, but the net result of all this was to cause the machinery of government to grind, if not to a halt, then ever more slowly.

  As the year drew to a close, Hitler remained a man in full command of his faculties and still master if not of his destiny, then of the Third Reich and much of Europe. German forces still stood everywhere on enemy soil: off the North Cape, halfway down the Italian boot, in Greece, at the Pyrenees and deep inside the Soviet Union. Hitler still cut an impressive figure at military briefings, with no signs of any mental breakdown.361 Physically, though, the deterioration was dramatic. Not many people knew that the Führer had required a hefty dose from Dr Morell to cope with the Italian collapse during the autumn, but most could see that he was a sick man. The symptoms of Parkinson’s disease were now manifest.362 His decline was visible even in the Wochenschau newsreels, at least to the Imperial Chancellery doctor Ernst Schenck, who noticed the stoop but attributed it to a spinal problem.363 Werner Best, who met him in person in December 1943 for the first time in more than a year, was ‘shocked’. ‘He gave the impression of a tired, broken [and] old man,’ he recalls, he walked haltingly and was so stooped that he appeared ‘hunched’. ‘His face,’ Best continued, ‘was sunken and lined’, and his ‘eyes were rigid and appeared reproachful’. Even so, Best notes, Hitler dominated the conversation with a wide-ranging review of various topics.364

  18

  The Fall of ‘Fortress Europe’

  On New Year’s Day 1944, Hitler issued a proclamation to the German people, and an order to the Wehrmacht. Both showed that the Führer’s war aims and legitimating ideology remained unchanged after more than four years of war. Germany, he claimed, was a ‘socialist people’s state’ embarked on a ‘survival struggle not merely of the German Reich but of the entire European continent’ against the ‘Bolshevik-plutocratic world conspirators and their Jewish wire-pullers’.1 If it did not resist, Hitler warned, the Reich and Europe as a whole risked being enslaved and starved by the forces of international plutocracy and imperialism. ‘Wherever Britain rules today,’ he remarked, alluding to the recent mass famine in Bengal, when the Allies had diverted grain from starving Indians to support the European fronts,2 or at the very least refused to supply the necessary shipping to feed the victims, ‘hunger and misery are a feature of life’.3 Globally, therefore, Hitler saw himself as resisting Anglo-American imperialism. In Europe, by contrast, he was desperately trying to hold on to his colonial gains, especially in the east. ‘After four years of battle,’ he pointed out, ‘Germany, which began the war with 634,000 square kilometres of German Lebensraum,’ now occupied ‘2,650,000 square kilometres of Europe’.4

  Hitler conceded that 1943 had been an extremely difficult year. The ‘disgraceful treason against the Duce’ had forced Germany to take ‘very tough decisions’, including large-scale withdrawals of forces not under attack, which had been difficult for individual soldiers to understand. Men had been withdrawn from the east in order to secure ‘the rest of the European Lebensraum’ against the onslaught of the ‘Anglo-Saxon forces’. In the Balkans, the ‘subterranean agitation’ of ‘British-paid traitors’ was threatening the German position. Hitler also admitted, referring to the Battle of the Atlantic, that ‘the scal
es of technical innovation in the year 1943’ had tilted in the direction of the enemy. Most painful of all, though, had been the Allied air attacks on the Reich, which had reduced many German cities to ‘rubble’.5 The Führer vowed to surmount these challenges. He swore that ‘the hour of reprisal’ for the bombing would come. He would rebuild German cities. Above all, the Führer vowed to repel the expected Allied invasion. He promised ‘the plutocratic western world’ a ‘worthy reception’ wherever they landed.

  Over the next five months, Hitler’s confidence was tested by the Allied storm on ‘Fortress Europe’. In late January 1944, the Americans and British Empire forces landed behind the German lines at Anzio and Nettuno, not far south of Rome, achieving complete surprise. Hitler demanded that the Allied bridgehead be swiftly sealed off, hammered with artillery fire and then overrun. This was partly because he knew that, once established, the enemy would not be easily dislodged, partly in order to discourage further landings, partly because he feared the effects of Allied air superiority, and partly to reduce the political fallout.6 Despite determined efforts, however, Kesselring was unable to throw the Allies back into the sea, and after months of heavy fighting around Monte Cassino, he was forced to pull back in mid May. Hitler declared Rome an undefended ‘open city’, and on 5 June 1944 the Italian capital fell to US general Mark Clark. All this before a single Allied soldier had landed in northern France, which was where Hitler was expecting the main Anglo-American effort to take place.

  Meanwhile, Stalin had launched three offensives in the east. In the north, he punched through the German lines around Leningrad and lifted the siege of that city, which had lasted nearly two and a half years. The Soviet dictator was now poised to strike at Finland, and break into the Baltic. Stalin also attacked on two fronts in the Ukraine, cutting off the Crimea and pushing westwards towards Romania and central Europe. Soon the Germans were left holding only a small perimeter line around Sebastopol. The Soviet advance was greatly facilitated by the mobility conferred on the Red Army by hundreds of thousands of Lend-Lease trucks, jeeps and other vehicles.7

  The cumulative effect of the reverses on Hitler’s European allies was shattering. They had been wavering since Stalingrad; now they were openly eyeing the exits. After the loss of Odessa in April 1944, the Romanians became increasingly anxious. Hitler confronted Marshal Antonescu with evidence that his foreign minister was in secret contact with the western powers.8 Hungary, the furthest away from the Red Army, was also the least dependable, and appeared on the verge of collapsing in early 1944. The Führer also knew that the Finns, who were desperate by the start of the summer, were longing to make a separate peace with Stalin. The war at sea was also going badly. In March 1944, Dönitz withdrew his U-boats from the Atlantic and ordered them to switch from ‘wolf-pack’ tactics to operating individually or perhaps in pairs or groups of three.

  In the air the situation, already bad, became steadily worse. On 1 January 1944, the Americans set up the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe to coordinate the assault on the Reich. That same day saw a heavy RAF raid on the German capital, one of nine in six weeks. On 6 March, the USAAF launched its first daylight raid on Berlin.9 Shortly afterwards, however, the ‘Battle of Berlin’ was called off due to heavy losses and the obstinate refusal of the wide-avenued city to burn.10 The campaign had cost the RAF around 500 bombers, claimed the lives of 10,000 Berliners, left 400,000 of them homeless, and many more without basic services. Other German cities were also hit, some heavily, in particular Augsburg (25/26 February), Essen (26/27 March) and Munich (24/25 April), where a whole suburb was almost entirely obliterated by the RAF. Even when there were no large-scale attacks in progress, Germans were tormented by the incessant buzzing of RAF Mosquitoes, hitting pinpoint targets and those of opportunity. The raids had a substantial impact on domestic morale, which was depressed both by the human and material devastation and by the increasing evidence of Anglo-American daylight air superiority over the Reich. Hitler was well aware of all this, and there is a rare photograph of him inspecting bomb damage in 1944.11

  The Führer was also in no doubt about the huge damage being inflicted not merely on German industry, but also on the transportation system and energy supply. In late February, the USAAF launched six devastating raids on German aircraft factories, leading Speer to warn Hitler of a crisis in fighter production.12 In late April 1944, he was briefed on the production losses at Krupp’s, following the renewed attacks on Essen; Hitler was also warned about the reduced fighter output after the attacks on the Dornier plant at Friedrichshafen.13 The Führer was particularly concerned about the damage Allied air attacks inflicted on vehicle production, which was essential to maintain mobility in modern warfare. Hitler fretted about the good Allied intelligence underlying these raids, which he attributed to domestic treason.14 Perhaps most worrying of all were the USAAF attacks on the Reich’s oil production, to which three large-scale raids from bases in Italy were devoted in April–June 1944. In late May 1944, Speer briefed Hitler on the mounting oil supply problems due to systematic American attacks on the Romanian oil refineries; the Führer was also given a list of damaged oil installations in Hungary and the Reich itself, and an assessment of the expected catastrophic reduction in output.15

  Finally, there was the horrendous attrition of the Luftwaffe, which was flushed out by the raids, and which was losing hundreds of aircraft a month in German airspace alone.16 This metric considerably understates the extent to which Hitler’s war effort was now geared to fighting the bombing war. More than 800,000 men were permanently deployed to defend the Reich, many of them manning the 14,000 heavy and 40,000 light anti-aircraft guns. Another million men were involved in clearing up or restoring essential services. The Russians noted a growing decline in the quantity and ability of German pilots on the eastern front.17 The production of aircraft, flak artillery and other weaponry for the defence of the Reich absorbed a huge and growing proportion of Nazi industrial capacity. In short, the American entry into the war was already proving decisive, long before a single man set foot in Normandy.

  Hitler’s racial anxieties interacted with these politico-military threats. If most European Jews were now dead, he was still worried about the danger posed by the remaining pockets, and of course world Jewry in the Soviet Union and, especially, Anglo-America. Throughout the first few months of 1944, Hitler reiterated his view that the Jews had contaminated Britain18 and the United States, inducing false consciousness there which pitched them against the German Reich. He fretted over the supposed role of Hungarian Jews in turning that country against him. The Führer also continued to take a close interest in the persecution of the remaining elements of German Jewry. In the first months of the year, he issued no fewer than three new decrees on the status of ‘half-castes’ in order to ensure that ‘German blood’ was ‘kept pure’.19

  It is therefore ironic that by early 1944 Hitler’s policies had created the very racial dystopia he had wanted to avoid. To be sure, Hitler was well on the way to ‘ridding’ Europe of Jews, but there were more foreigners, especially Slavs, in Germany than ever before, working in the war economy.20 The risk of domestic racial ‘contamination’, reflected in the countless ordinances designed to stop it, was acute. Externally, Hitler was also in exactly the situation he had wanted to avoid. Allied to a coalition of Slavs and Latins, and other global ‘have-nots’, such as imperial Japan, the Germans manned a shrinking perimeter line against the (principally) ‘Anglo-Saxon’ onslaught, on land, at sea and in the air. Moreover, many of those now arrayed against the Reich were the descendants of the best elements of the German people who had left over the previous two centuries. Hitler presided over the greatest single wave of immigration into Germany at the very moment when he was under attack by her own emigrants.

  The commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, the man who was directing the American air campaign against the Reich, was General Spaatz. He was born Carl Spatz of German ancestry in Pennsylvania; he
added an ‘a’ to his name in 1937 to suggest Dutch rather than German origin.21 The names of some of the USAAF pilots shot down during the massive raid on Berlin on 6 March 1944 told their own story: Naushalter, Kolb, Griesel, Frantz, Radtke, Handorf, Lautenschlager, Wagner, Schimmel and Stauss.22 The first post-raid reconnaissance pictures were taken by Major Walter Weitner in a Spitfire of the US 7th Photo Group. This struggle should be understood not as a gentlemanly joust in the clouds like the ‘dogfights’ of the First World War, but as a desperate scramble with atrocities on both sides.23 Even so, some of those shot down reported being approached by German civilians for news of their relatives in America.24 The long entanglement with the United States continued even in adversity.

  Worse still, on the other side of the English Channel, a whole army of Anglo-Saxons, as both Hitler and the Wehrmacht almost invariably called them, many of them German in origin, waited to mount their invasion. The Führer was aware that the supreme command of the Allied Expeditionary Force had been given to Dwight Eisenhower, though it is not known what he made of the fact that his adversary descended from the Eisenhauers, pacifist Mennonites who left the Saarland for Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century.25 Among the men who would soon take the fight beyond the Rhine were General Clarence Huebner (V Corps), whose Stuttgart-born grandfather Gottfried Hübner had left for America in the early nineteenth century; General William Schmidt (76th Division), whose father was Austrian; General Walter Lauer (99th Division), both of whose parents were German; Emil Reinhardt (69th Division), whose grandfather Heinrich Christian Christoph Reinhardt was born in Brunswick in 1825; Herman Kramer, born to two German immigrants; General Donald Stroh (106th Division), whose great great grandfather was born in Rimsdorf/Saarland, before emigrating to fight in the American revolution; General Paul Baade (35th Division), whose grandfather Wilhelm Baade hailed from Windheim, Prussia in 1830; General Bertram Hoffmeister (Canadian 5th Armoured Division), whose paternal grandfather emigrated from Hamburg as a teenager.