Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  Hitler was aware, of course, that many women had to work to feed their families. ‘Only if a woman has children to be fed,’ he said, ‘would one be able to pay her children’s allowances.’ Once again, Hitler was determining pay not by performance, but by social function. ‘In principle,’ he explained, ‘our state must part company with the idea that pay is just compensation for work done.’ ‘We must do everything,’ he exhorted, ‘to preserve our people!’ ‘The one,’ Hitler went on, ‘only works for himself in the framework of the national community’ while another ‘maintains the Volk with family and sustains the future’. Hitler ended the discussion by saying that certain occupations were ‘not jobs for men’, such as teaching, waiter service and hairdressing, and these should be reserved for women. ‘So,’ he said in conclusion, there should be ‘equal pay for women only in exceptional circumstances in order to avoid trouble’.

  In June–July 1944, Hitler’s position was rocked by three existential challenges. On 6 June, the Anglo-Americans landed in Normandy, achieving complete surprise. At first, Hitler was unsure whether the landing was the main Allied effort or a diversion to be followed by a descent on the PasdeCalais or some other area.55 He constantly spurred his commanders on to greater efforts, to prevent Eisenhower from consolidating his position ashore, and to crush the bridgehead the Allies had established between the Orne and Vire rivers, if necessary through the use of heavy artillery.56 About a week after the landing, Hitler loosed a barrage of V1 missiles against southern England, especially London,57 but the effect was much more modest than he had hoped. That same day, Hitler barred all leave for the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS.58 On 17 June 1944, he made a rare trip to Soissons to meet Rommel and Rundstedt, and to thank those involved in the rocket deployment. That same day, Hitler rejected calls to evacuate the Channel Islands. Not long after, Hitler ordered the 9th and 10th SS panzer divisions transferred from the east to Normandy.

  Hitler’s strategy was clear. He told the military leaders gathered at the Berghof in late June, that due to the ‘crushing aerial superiority of the enemy’ and their ship-borne heavy guns, the chances of a successful counter-attack were low. That said, Hitler warned that they should ‘under no circumstances allow the development of a war of movement in France’, because ‘the enemy enjoys a far greater mobility than we do thanks to his mastery of the air and superior number of motor vehicles’. For this reason, Hitler stressed, ‘everything depends on pinning down the enemy by establishing a ring of containment around the bridgehead, and then wearing him down through the deployment of all means at close quarters’.59 A long stalemate ensued in the woods and hedges of the Normandy bocage. It was a brutal encounter, in which both sides–particularly the Hitler Youth SS Panzer Division and the dreaded Canadians–committed atrocities, although those on the German side were much worse. Operationally, the Wehrmacht may have performed better than the Allies,60 but thanks to the massive application of long-range firepower,61 the Anglo-Americans were winning the battle of attrition. It was only a matter of time before they blasted through the German lines and broke out into the open country beyond.

  Then, on 22 June 1944, three years to the day after the start of Barbarossa, Stalin launched ‘Operation Bagration’, a massive offensive directed against Army Group Centre.62 Hitler, who had expected the blow to fall in the Ukraine or the Baltic, was taken completely by surprise. Within a week the German front had given way; more than 350,000 men were lost before the offensive had run its course. On 27 June, Lindemann, the commander of Army Group North, warned that his force was in danger of being cut off.63 Hitler replaced him with General Friesner, the first of a series of rapid command changes in that strategically vital area. For the Army High Command, the Russian offensive quickly became the most pressing problem.64 The Führer was also profoundly worried by the Soviet advance, but his main concern in the east was not the central sector, where he could continue to trade space for time, but Romania and, especially, the Baltic. At a crisis meeting a fortnight after the start of the offensive, Dönitz–‘at the Führer’s request’–pointed out the importance of holding on to the area in order to safeguard the import of Swedish iron ore and preserve the training grounds for submarine crews.65

  While all this was going on, the Anglo-American air fleets pummelled the Third Reich’s transportation system, communications networks and energy supply. These attacks had begun before the invasion, and escalated thereafter into an unprecedented aerial battering. In the four months from June 1944, more bombs were dropped on the Reich than during the entire war until that point.66 Allied bombing was also growing more accurate, not least because of the collapse of the Luftwaffe, which allowed Anglo-American fighter-bombers to roam at will. Railways were blown up; canals mined. On 2 June, Hitler lamented the shortages of oil.67 In late June, he was presented by Speer with a list of the systematic Allied attacks on refineries and hydrogenation plants, and warned of the inevitable ‘catastrophic consequences’.68 Shortly after that, his armaments minister handed over a detailed memorandum on the effects of the Anglo-American bombing on the fuel situation. On 2 June 1944, on the eve of the invasion, Hitler was forced to cut the number of motor vehicles available to the Wehrmacht and SS by ‘on average 30 per cent’ to save fuel.69 At the very moment when he most needed mobility and energy, it was being sapped by enemy action.

  In late June 1944, Hitler reflected on the challenges facing the Third Reich in two secret landmark speeches at Berchtesgaden. His starting point was Germany’s central location. The Reich, he warned, was encircled, just as it had been before 1918. ‘We are built into this Europe,’ Hitler argued, and therefore have ‘enemies in all corners’ of the map, the ‘same ones’ as in the World War. This meant that Germany either would have to be ‘a state of Spartan toughness with an outlook held by the entire nation and an army which was always ready to strike’ or else ‘we shall always be the cultural fertilizer or the butt of others’. The German people, he reiterated, risked extinction if it failed to prevail in war, which ensured ‘the natural selection of the strong’ and ‘the elimination of the weak’. To ensure this, Hitler continued, he would have to do two things. First, to achieve his original aim of ‘liberating the German people from international capitalist influences’, that is the Jews. This he had achieved. ‘The Jew,’ Hitler said simply, ‘is gone.’70

  Secondly, Hitler would also have to strengthen the German people racially. He began this section of his speech by reminding his audience that ‘race is something different from Volk’ and that the German people was ‘made up of a whole series of racial kernels’. His usual biological determinism was tempered by a sense of uncertainty, when he referred to the ‘Mendelian laws of selection’ by which a child could supposedly inherit the characteristic of either the father or the mother. The conception of race he now expounded was in many ways voluntarist and inclusive. Hitler stressed that for him external appearance was less decisive than internal character. It was quite possible, he claimed, that there might be ‘a person who looked absolutely un-Nordic, but who was in their inner core [and] in their behaviour completely Nordic’. The Führer also stressed that the Germans needed discipline–he used the word Drill, which means the same in English as in German–to make up for their lack of inherent and instinctive racial coherence. ‘Thanks to our racial fragmentation as a result of the lack of a herd-instinct’, he argued, a ‘barbaric education’ was required to ‘make good what nature has unfortunately denied us’ by ‘overcoming’ the ‘different racial kernels’ in the German people.71 It was his old theme: the Germans required discipline to provide the coherence which came naturally to the British.

  The Führer’s second speech, to the leaders of the German war economy,72 was very different. It addressed the problem of production, and was given in the shadow not only of the Allied bombing but also of the ‘Morgenthau Plan’. Speer seems to have seen, or got wind of, an early version of the plan of US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to de-industrialize Germany after her d
efeat. ‘Should the war be lost,’ Speer wrote in his notes for Hitler, the result would be ‘merciless extirpation of German industry, to eliminate competition in world markets. The enemy has concrete economic plans, which confirm this.’73 The Führer’s speech also emphasized the dangers of defeat, though he warned the industrialists that the only choice they would have then would be whether to commit suicide or to allow them themselves to be ‘strung up’ or be sent to work in Siberia by the Soviet security forces.74 Typically, Hitler had geared his speech to his audience, who were in practice far more worried about the terrors of Bolshevism than Anglo-American capitalism.

  Just the same, the Führer’s main focus in his remarks to these leading industrialists was on the contest with the western powers, both as a battle of production and as an ideological struggle. He contrasted the ‘liberal state’ of capitalism, in which ‘the economy’ was ‘in the end a servant of capital’, and the Volk was ‘the servant of the economy’, with the National Socialist state, in which the Volk was ‘dominant’, ‘the economy’ was ‘an instrument to preserve the Volk’ and ‘capital’ was merely ‘a means to lead the economy’. These remarks were intended to put his audience in their places, and to remind them of the Nazi primacy of politics over the economy. The basis of national survival, Hitler continued, was the availability of ‘living space’ with all the precious natural resources to feed the population and supply the factories with raw materials. That was what the war was about, the Führer reiterated, and everything had to be geared to winning it. ‘War is the mobilization of all the forces of the people,’ he said, ‘and everything has to be subordinated to that.’

  Hitler spelled out what this meant for German industry. ‘This is not just a war of soldiers,’ he explained, ‘but especially of engineers’. By this Hitler meant not only inventors, but also the machine tool engineers needed for mass production. He expressed some admiration for the quality and quantity of Soviet output, particularly with regard to the legendary T-34 tank, but his principal concern was the Anglo-Americans. Their technological advances in the field of detection had basically neutralized the U-boat arm. They had also achieved a ‘mass production of aircraft’, which threatened to ‘crush’ the Reich. He now called upon German industry to support the mass production of new weapons, such as the Panther tank, the upgraded Tiger tanks and especially the new U-boats. For this reason, Hitler wanted a move away from ‘quality work’–what he also called ‘German workmanship’–towards ‘mass production’ for war purposes. This was another explicit rejection of Germany’s artisanal past, and any sense of a Mittelstand future.

  What both speeches had in common was an underlying anxiety about the challenge of Anglo-America, both racially and economically. By referring to the danger of Germans becoming mere ‘cultural fertilizer’ for other peoples, his first set of remarks hinted at one of his enduring preoccupations, namely the way in which German emigration had invigorated the United States. This obsession was made explicit in his second speech, when he came to the question of engineers. ‘The engineers of the Americans,’ he claimed, ‘are for the most part of German origin,’ especially of ‘Swabian-Alemannic blood’. Astonishingly, Hitler sought to counter this threat by insisting that he had German engineers as well. ‘And I have the same group of Alemannic,’ he continued, ‘they are working for us today.’ ‘Superiority of the enemy,’ Hitler scoffed, ‘there you can see how little they are superior.’75 As so often, the Führer was protesting too much. One was once again left with the overwhelming impression that in Hitler’s mind the best Germans were fighting and producing for the other side.

  These were the last major speeches Hitler made at Berchtesgaden. He had not had much joy there of late. For years it had been a building site; lately much of the complex had been draped in camouflage netting and shrouded in artificial fog to confuse potential Allied bombers. The magnificent views onto the Untersberg were often obscured. On 14 July Hitler left the Berghof for Rastenburg, never to return.

  Though there was considerable war weariness in Germany by mid 1944, there was neither elite nor popular appetite for a revolution against their Führer. Active resistance was confined to a relatively small number of people, driven by a variety of motives including fear of losing the war, patriotism, fear of a Soviet victory, opportunism and genuine revulsion at the crimes being perpetrated in Germany’s name. In the course of 1943, they had become increasingly organized, working out a rough plan for the post-war order, and–in a stroke of genius–had subverted the existing regime contingency plans for civil unrest–code-named ‘Valkyrie’–into their own blueprint for a coup. Such was the centrality of Hitler, rather than the regime as a whole, that the conspirators were agreed that any action must begin with his removal, and preferably death. Various attempts to kill Hitler in the course of 1943 were unsuccessful, and the leader of the conspiracy, Count Stauffenberg, had already brought explosives into Hitler’s presence on three occasions in July without going through with the attempt, but later in the month, the conspirators were ready to move again.

  On 20 July 1944, Stauffenberg arrived at Führer Headquarters in Rastenburg with two bombs in his briefcase.76 Almost immediately things began to go wrong. Hitler’s schedule was changed at short notice. Stauffenberg only had time to prime one of the charges. The meeting was moved from the usual bunker to another location. Despite this, the plot nearly worked. Stauffenberg succeeded in placing his briefcase close to Hitler under a stout oak table. He then left the barracks. The bomb went off as planned, but Hitler was shielded from the worst of the blast by the table. Fortunately for him, the explosion took place in a wooden barracks, so that much of the force was dissipated outwards, and not in the bunker, where everybody inside would have been cremated. Though his injuries were far from trivial, Hitler got away with perforated ear-drums and some heavy bruising. He had been very lucky: the blast was large and four of the people in the building were so seriously injured that they soon died of their wounds.

  Stauffenberg, who had observed the detonation from a safe distance, assumed that Hitler had been killed. Now a central flaw in the conspiracy became apparent. Stauffenberg had to return to Berlin to tell the conspirators that Hitler was dead, and lead the coup. Valuable time was lost, and although Valkyrie did unfold in many places, especially in Paris, a major nerve-centre of the conspiracy, where the army placed more than 1,000 SS and SD men under arrest, the regime soon regained the initiative. Symbolically, the turning point came when the commander of the Grossdeutschland Wachbatallion, Major Otto Ernst Remer, sent to apprehend Goebbels, who believed that Hitler was dead and that he was suppressing a coup, was put on a direct telephone to Hitler in Rastenburg. The sound of the Führer’s voice was enough to persuade Remer. Goebbels was released and began to direct counter-measures. In the evening a radio broadcast announced that the Führer was alive and would soon address the German people. Stauffenberg and several of his co-conspirators were shot out of hand by the commander of the Reserve Army, General Fromm, who was trying to cover up his own involvement in the failed plot. The coup was over.

  The 20 July plot and its background epitomized the weakness and strength of Hitler’s governing style. Far from being paranoid, at least until this point, Hitler had thrived on giving his military and administrative elites sufficient room to explore their lethal creativity. This made him extraordinarily vulnerable to enemies within the walls. Until this point, more than eleven years into the regime, and four years into the war, those attending the daily briefings were neither searched nor disarmed. Stauffenberg was able to bring explosives into Hitler’s presence on at least four separate occasions. It took the Führer six weeks after the coup to get around to forbidding the bearing of arms in his presence, and to ordering the guard detail to search all strangers for concealed weapons.77

  Here we must not mistake the Führer’s trust for mere laziness or gullibility. For it was this very flexibility which also made Hitler’s power so resilient. What blunted the coup was the
decision of the communications centre in Berlin to pass on the messages from the Wolf’s Lair, rather than those from Olbricht’s office in the Reserve Army Headquarters. What killed it was the quick-wittedness of the commander of the standby battalion, the ardent National Socialist Otto Ernst Remer, who disobeyed the order to arrest Goebbels once he had spoken to Hitler in person. The regime was saved not because the troops followed orders–thanks to the thoroughness of the plotters these remained ambiguous–but because key personnel acted on their own initiative.

  Though Hitler’s injuries were not life threatening, and he was active again the same day, the explosion inflicted much more damage than it first appeared. Visitors to the headquarters remarked on how stooped and worn out Hitler looked.78 His ears bled for several weeks afterwards, and he was unable to travel by air. The only upside, Hitler noted, was that the blast seemed to have cured the severe shaking in his left leg, although he ‘wouldn’t recommend such a cure’.79

  Hitler was shocked by the attempt on his life, but not surprised. He had long suspected elements of the officer corps of treachery. Now Hitler felt vindicated. His radio speech the day after the explosion painted the conspirators as a ‘small clique’, of reactionary nobles, who had been trying to repeat the ‘stab in the back’ of 1918.80 In his subsequent address to the Gauleiter, the Führer claimed that ‘these traitors’ had been engaged in ‘sabotage’ not just since ‘1941’, but since the ‘seizure of power’.81 Hitler also saw his survival as a sign of ‘providence’, of his triumph in adversity. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, he told the visiting Mussolini that he had experienced a ‘miraculous deliverance, especially because it is not the first time that I have escaped death in this way’. This made him ‘more than ever convinced’ that he was destined to ‘bring our great cause’, that is the war, to ‘a happy conclusion’.82 Physically, therefore, Hitler was seriously affected by the plot. Politically, he was re-energized. Now he would press ahead with the implementation of National Socialist principles, especially in the army.