Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  In late January 1944, Himmler sent out a circular to the head of the Security Service, the head of the Coordination Centre for Ethnic Germans, and the head of the SS Main Office. He demanded that those American prisoners who had German parents or grandparents should be separated from their comrades and brought to a ‘special camp’. Himmler’s plan was ‘to influence’ this ‘lost Germanity’ in a clever way in order ‘to gradually win it back again’.26 He was not, of course, interested in German Jews like Henry Kissinger of the US army, who were also preparing to return to the European mainland, but in the Eisenhowers.27 In both cases, the stones the Fatherland had rejected would become capstones in the coalition facing the Reich. In the Eisenhauers, Germany had exported peace, but it re-imported war.

  In this context, it is unsurprising that Hitler should have returned to one of his central preoccupations, which was the supposed inherent racial weakness of the German people. In late January 1944, he summoned the senior military leadership to the Wolf’s Lair.28 He told them that in Germany the racial core had been undermined by domestic divisions since the Reformation, unlike in England, which at this time had begun its ascent to ‘later world domination’. ‘Already in those days,’ he claimed, ‘the sun did not go down on the German Reich.’ Instead of world power, however, Germany lost importance and her people so that her population numbered only 85 million rather than the 300 million she would otherwise have had, a clear reference to the demographic losses through war and emigration. Without the Thirty Years War, Hitler continued, the New World would certainly have been German. Even so, and here Hitler echoed an enduring myth in early twentieth-century Germany, the United States nearly became German. The decision to make English the official language of America, he averred, was only taken ‘with a one-vote majority, and this vote was sadly given by a German’. The Führer’s anxiety about the lost Germans and their propensity to turn their back on the Fatherland could not have been more clearly expressed.

  This is why Hitler was so exercised about the composition of the German ‘people’ (Volk), which he distinguished from the Nordic race. ‘We know today,’ Hitler explained in his briefing to the military, ‘that the Volk does not really represent a [single] racial unit but a racial conglomerate’, and that the ‘values’ didn’t lie in the conglomerate as a whole but in the ‘racial kernels’. ‘A people,’ he elaborated, ‘is a community of people of the same language [and] history’, which might endow them with ‘similar sentiments’ but this did not mean that they were of the ‘same racial belonging’. ‘We are one people,’ Hitler continued, ‘but we are not one race.’ It was, so to speak, a case of one Volk, and one Führer, but many races. ‘Our people,’ he explained, ‘is composed of a whole series of racial kernels,’ but ‘the decisive racial kernel, which has formed the German people in the purely organizational sense, is the Nordic one’. This ‘Nordic-Germanic’ core had imposed itself out of a ‘subconscious instinct for domination’ and absorbed the others.

  Hitler was more ambivalent about this racial mixing than one might imagine. On the one hand, he was determined to distil the Nordic racial core. On the other hand, Hitler saw positive sides to the ‘marriage of the races’ in the German Volk. ‘There is a Slavic race,’ he said, ‘which is musical’, and ‘a Germanic race, whose nature is wholly unmusical’. ‘Both combined,’ Hitler claimed, ‘suddenly produce great composers,’ such as ‘Beethoven Wagner and Bruckner’. The ‘key thing’ was to ‘gradually bring [each] racial kernel to bear on that part of our community where it is most suited to do the necessary work’. In music, that might be a Slavic-Nordic blend, but, for military purposes, the Reich would need the pure Nordic strain. In other words, in Hitler’s vision each racial core would have its function within the German Volk.

  The Führer blamed the stunted development of Germany’s Nordic core on capitalism. ‘The process of pure capital formation,’ he claimed, and the growth of a ‘general education’ which had nothing to do with the development of ‘true racial value’ had led to the creation of a wealthy class which took over politics despite lacking the ability to do so. Capitalism and racism, in Hitler’s book, were not compatible. Once again, Hitler illustrated this point with reference to the British. ‘We see here the difference between Germany and Britain,’ he continued, where ‘[we] still [find] a very distinctive pure master race which still controls politics and thus ensures a completely unified leadership over the decades’. More than four years into the war, far from dismissing the British as racially corrupted by the Jews, Hitler still saw them as a racial model. In fact, he coined the very term ‘master race’ to describe their ruling class.

  The solution to the racial weakness of the German people, Hitler claimed, lay in the ‘mobilization of racial value’. In so far as this involved giving the Germans the discipline they naturally lacked, this required ‘drill’, by which he meant both ‘square-bashing’ and ‘indoctrination’. Hitler laid more stress, though, on ‘understanding’, the kind of internal confidence and strength which came naturally to the Nordic core (and, one might add, to Anglo-Saxons). ‘That is why discipline and breeding can under no circumstances replace inner conviction,’ he explained, but at best complement it. There were many ways of achieving this. One was through culture, especially music, the appreciation of which would help to establish racial value. ‘When I strike a chord,’ Hitler explained, ‘then the strings which are tuned to that chord react,’ whereas the others did not, or did so only belatedly. This theory explains why Hitler could not accept that Jews understood great German composers such as Wagner. Another method of racial improvement was the creation of ideological coherence, and here the Führer acknowledged the Bolshevik achievement in effecting ‘an immense ideological re-education’ in Russia after 1917. Germans would need ‘uniformity of world view’, ‘nerves and power’ and ‘fanaticism’ to prevail. Most importantly of all, Hitler wanted to establish what he considered racial unity in Germany by overcoming the capitalist order and working for the ‘construction of a new classless society’.

  On the military and political front, Hitler continued the strategy he had developed the previous year.29 He increasingly believed that the only way of dealing with the threat from the air was through ‘relocation’, and given the ever-increasing range of the Anglo-American bomber fleets that meant going underground. Hitler demanded that these measures should not just be temporary but part of a ‘large-scale and final relocation of the entire German industrial capacity below the surface’.30 While the Anglo-Saxons ruled the skies above, in other words, the Germans and their slave-dwarves burrowed further and further underground, causing the mountains to resonate with the Wagnerian tinkling of hammers on metal.

  Meanwhile, Hitler prepared to repel the imminent Allied invasion; this was his main priority.31 He believed that the best chance he had of doing so was to prevent the Anglo-Americans from getting ashore, or by overrunning the bridgehead before the enemy had time to consolidate. This involved building extensive fortifications, about which Hitler enthused at length. ‘I am the greatest fortress-builder of all time,’ he remarked without obvious irony in January 1944, ‘I built the Westwall [and] I have erected the Atlantic Wall.’32 Most of the Wehrmacht leadership, who favoured manoeuvre over static warfare, frowned on the Führer’s continuing obsession with steel and concrete. In the first few months of the year, a bitter argument raged between Rommel and the commander of the tank forces in the west, the redoubtable Geyr von Schweppenburg, about the deployment of the panzer divisions. Geyr, who still hankered for the great panzer manoeuvres of the early years, wanted to maintain a large operational reserve well behind the coast to strike once the enemy’s main ‘centre of gravity’ had become clear. Rommel, who had extensive experience of Anglo-American air power, knew that his tanks would never reach the beaches unless they were close by.33 Hitler–who was also under no illusions about the mobility of German formations under conditions of Allied air superiority–tended to agree with Rommel. He warned th
at, once established, the bridgehead would be ‘systematically’ expanded ‘with the massed deployment of the air force and heavy weapons of all types’.34 Hitler compromised to keep the peace, and also to hedge his bets. Some of the panzers were kept close to the coast, the rest were held back.

  The thinking behind Hitler’s strategy remained political rather than military. He still wanted to inflict such a bloody defeat on the Allied landing forces in France that Churchill would be confronted with another Gallipoli, and Roosevelt would lose the presidential election in November. ‘A failed landing,’ Hitler predicted to his generals in late March 1944, ‘will prevent the re-election of Roosevelt in America.’ He would probably end up in prison. ‘In Britain too,’ a defeat would increase ‘war-weariness’ and undermine Churchill.35 ‘The British know very well,’ he told the Slovak leader Monsignor Tiso in mid May 1944, ‘that if they launch an invasion today and it failed, they would then have had it.’36 One way or the other, the Führer stressed, reprising the theme of Directive 51, the ‘western front’ was the ‘decisive front’ upon which ‘alone’ the ‘outcome of the war and thus the fate of the Reich depended’.37

  In the east, Hitler continued to stand on the defensive, holding positions for as long as possible, and then trading space for time. His strategic objectives there were threefold, all driven by the primacy of the western front. Firstly, Hitler wanted to retain as much Russian Lebensraum and resources as he could in order to support the German war economy against Anglo-America. Secondly, at Dönitz’s request, the Führer was determined to keep the Russians out of the Baltic, because he needed it to train crews for the new generation of U-boats out of range of Allied bombers.38 Thirdly, Hitler wanted to keep Stalin at bay until he had seen off the Anglo-Americans, after which he would settle accounts in the east. His main focus was on the northern and southern sectors.39 Reinforcements were sent to Estonia. General Lindemann, the new commander of Army Group North, was summoned to the Berghof in early April 1944 and lectured by Hitler on the importance of defending the Baltic.40 In the south, Hitler hung on in the Crimea until 5 May 1944, when he finally ordered the evacuation of Sebastopol.

  Of all the allies, it was Hungary which gave the most cause for concern. It still lay some way away from the Red Army, but Hitler was convinced that the Kállay administration had been suborned by the Jews and the British. ‘I have known for some time,’ Hitler declared on 12 March 1944, ‘that the Hungarian government has been preparing [to] betray the allied European nations.’ He explained this conduct with reference to the allegedly all-powerful role of ‘Jewry’ in Hungary and the activities of ‘individual reactionaries’ and ‘corrupt elements of the Hungarian aristocracy’. Hitler therefore decided to occupy Hungary and pave the way for a ‘national’ government there.41 He summoned its ruler, Admiral Horthy, to the palace of Klessheim near Salzburg on 18 March 1944 for a meeting which proved particularly stormy. On 19 March 1944, the Wehrmacht and SS occupied Hungary.

  This was the context to the next stage in Hitler’s war against the Jews. Thousands were seized within days of the invasion, and more than 800,000 were at risk.42 Under pressure from the recently established War Refugee Board and his Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt issued a stern warning to Hitler about their fate and that of European Jewry as a whole. ‘In one of the blackest crimes of all history,’ the president declared in a radio broadcast on 24 March 1944, ‘the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour.’ It was therefore obvious, he continued, ‘that we should again proclaim our determination that none who participate in these acts of savagery shall go unpunished’. The New York Times reported on this speech under the headline ‘Roosevelt warns Germans on Jews; says all guilty must pay for atrocities’.43 If Hitler received the message, which is likely, he was certainly not swayed by it. In mid May 1944, the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews began, with 430,000 taken to Auschwitz within two months, three-quarters of whom were immediately murdered.44 Hitler personally ordered 10,000 Wehrmacht soldiers returning from the Crimea to help the SS to guard the transports.45

  Hitler’s priorities in early 1944 were reflected in his deployment of forces. The vast majority of the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe, and thus a huge proportion of the war economy, were geared towards fighting the Anglo-Americans. It is true that most of the army was still stationed in the east in June 1944, with 164 divisions and 1,900 tanks there, and 111 divisions and 1,900 tanks in France, the Balkans and Italy, but these figures are deceptive. The proper metric here is not ‘man-months’,46 but what one might call ‘machine-months’, that is the amount of time and capacity devoted to production. Taken together, a clear preponderance of the German effort was being directed to fight the war with the western powers, even before the first Allied soldier set foot in Normandy. Moreover, the higher quality and ideological commitment of the forces deployed in the west told their own story. Far from using his feared and trusted SS armoured formations and parachute divisions primarily against the Bolsheviks, Hitler sent most of them to France and Italy,47 to confront the Third Reich’s most dangerous military and ideological enemies.

  This was reflected in Hitler’s public and private rhetoric. To be sure, he was anxious about Stalin and his ability to ‘turn’ captured German officers through ‘Bolshevik secret police methods’.48 But whereas he considered the Soviet danger to be a matter of compulsion, Hitler regarded the west as a more insidious and much greater threat. Firstly, he remained anxious that the Anglo-Americans might be seen as more plausible saviours from the perils of Bolshevism. He warned Germans–and Europeans–not to believe in the ‘British promises of help’. Only Germany, Hitler claimed, could ‘save Europe’ from the Soviet Union.49 Secondly, Hitler continued to see the west as a mortal ideological threat. In early 1944, the Heerespersonalamt published, at Hitler’s request, a book entitled What We Are Fighting For. The four enemies of the Third Reich were listed as world Jewry, Bolshevism, Britain and the United States. Neither the Soviet Union nor Slavdom was specifically included in this classification (though the USSR was implicit in the term ‘Bolshevism’). Instead, Hitler particularly stressed the importance of propaganda in the west.50

  Amidst all this, Hitler did not neglect the German home front. He continued to try to reduce the effect of the relentless bombing on the civilian population. From early 1944 almost all major urban centres were included in the mass evacuations of children to safer areas, but Hitler remained adamant that this should not involve any compulsion against hesitant parents. Nor did he try to take advantage of the programme to lure these young people away from their families and communities for purposes of political indoctrination.51 Likewise, Hitler remained extremely reluctant to use the ration card system to prevent evacuees–most of them women–from returning to their endangered cities. He preferred them to be educated about the dangers of bombing instead. ‘The [Führer] believes,’ Goebbels recorded in mid January 1944, ‘that the goal we aim for can be reached particularly through propaganda activities that once again bring before parents’ eyes quite graphically the dangers their children face.’52

  Worried about the huge losses of young men at the front, and its long-term demographic consequences, Hitler let it be known that the traditional concept of marriage needed to be rethought. After the war, he pointed out, there would be between 3 and 4 million women without husbands and no hope of getting one. They could not, Hitler continued, get their children ‘from the Holy Ghost’, but only from the remaining German men. For this reason, it might be necessary to deploy some of the most valuable surviving men to impregnate these women. Hitler was perfectly aware, of course, that many German women would resist this innovation for emotional reasons, and out of stubbornness, while serving soldiers might be disconcerted to learn that their womenfolk would be redistributed in this way after their violent deaths. For this reason, Hitler decided to tread carefully.53

  Hitler was concerned not only with women and reproduction, but also with w
omen and production. The issues this raised were ventilated at length during a meeting at the Berghof in late April 1944, when the question of women’s pay came up.54 Robert Ley, the leader of the German Labour Front, stated that he had been fighting for years for ‘equal pay for equal work for women’. Hitler was not so sure. He explained that pay was determined by two considerations, not only ‘performance’ but also ‘according to the responsibilities which an individual had in the framework of the national community and the state’. One could not pay simply according to performance because in that case one would have to pay twenty-four-year-olds more than fifty-year-olds. ‘The [working] woman,’ he said, ‘only has to look after herself,’ whereas the man had to care for his family. ‘If a woman has children,’ Hitler continued, ‘she must–that is always our ideal–stay at home and not work.’ This was because ‘the work of supporting a family’ had ‘traditionally’ been rated more highly than work done by women, ‘even if women performed the same’. Hitler was also worried that more pay for women without increased production of consumer goods for them to buy would lead to inflation.