Meanwhile, Hitler wrote a letter to the Italian dictator informing him of the impending war with Yugoslavia.47 He also requested the ‘Duce’ to halt his offensive in Albania, which he agreed to do.48 Mussolini also acknowledged that Hitler would assume supreme command of the coming operations himself. The ‘Führer’ managed this by communicating his ‘proposals and wishes’ in personal letters to Mussolini and Horthy, thereby ‘taking account of the Allies’ sensitivities’.49 Ciano and Ribbentrop decided to ignore the Yugoslav foreign minister’s statement that Belgrade continued to recognize the international treaties it had signed, including the Tripartite Pact.50
The Balkan War
Hitler set the date for the attack on Yugoslavia as 6 April 1941. On 5 April, the day before the attack, the Soviet Union concluded a friendship and non-aggression pact with the new Simovic´ government in Yugoslavia.51 Late in the evening, Hitler summoned Goebbels, who noted: ‘He estimates the whole operation will take about 2 months. I think it’ll be shorter.’ Goebbels went on: ‘The war against the Serbian arsonists will be fought without mercy. The Führer is expecting a sniper war with a lot of casualties.’52
On the first day of the war the Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade, causing heavy losses among the civilian population, despite the fact that the Yugoslav government had declared the capital to be an ‘open city’, in other words that it would not be defended. Hitler’s decision to bomb the city nonetheless reflected his desire for retribution for Yugoslavia’s ‘betrayal’. It was no accident that the code word for the bombing of Belgrade was ‘Tribunal’. However, he did ban air raids on Athens. Indeed, Hitler became quite sentimental about the Greeks. Goebbels noted that the ‘Führer’ admired the courage of the Greeks and regretted having to fight them: ‘Perhaps there’s still something of the ancient Hellenes in them.’53 For Hitler the Balkan war was, above all, an anti-Serbian war of revenge, with old Austrian resentments playing a not unimportant part. The following day he told Goebbels the Serbs ‘had always been troublemakers. Now we must go in for the kill’. In contrast to the failed diplomatic methods of the Habsburg Monarchy they had to ‘sort things out in a big way’.54
The campaign made rapid progress. From 6 April onwards, the 12th Army advanced through Bulgaria towards northern Greece; the 2nd Army, along with a separate panzer unit, attacked Yugoslavia from Carinthia, Styria, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. As planned, the Wehrmacht was supported by Italian and Hungarian forces. By 10 April Zagreb had already been captured.55 Hitler left Berlin and established his headquarters in a special train south of Vienna Neustadt, near a tunnel that could offer protection in the event of air raids.56 On 12 April, he was already issuing ‘Provisional Directives for the Partitioning of Yugoslavia’. The parts of Slovenia that had originally belonged to Austria were assigned to Carinthia and Styria.57 Croatia became an ‘independent state’ with a puppet regime. On 14 April, Anton Pavelic´, the leader of the secret nationalist organization, Ustacha, who had hitherto been living in exile in Italy, took over the government as ‘head of state’ (Poglavnik).58 A military administration was established in Serbia, while the other Yugoslav territories were divided up between Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria.59
However, the war was not yet over. In response to the Yugoslav request for an armistice, the German leadership demanded unconditional surrender. On 13 April, the day German troops entered Belgrade, Hitler issued Directive No. 27, ordering the ‘annihilation’ of the Yugoslav armed forces, which had already been largely defeated.60 After almost all Yugoslav requests for concessions had been rejected, the surrender was completed on 17 April.61
The war in Greece went on for a few more days. The Greeks concentrated on holding their positions against the Italians in Albania, and were prepared to surrender only when the German troops were in their rear. On 21 April, evidently in response to a request from the Greeks, Hitler ordered the armistice to be conducted by the 12th Army without the participation of their Italian allies. However, as Mussolini protested, a second armistice was arranged on 23 April and this time the Italians took part.62 On 25 April, Hitler signed his directive for Operation Mercury, the conquest of the Greek island of Crete, where British troops had established bases.63 The attack eventually began on 20 May, carried out by paratroopers and glider forces. The military engagements, which involved heavy losses, continued until 2 June, leading to the evacuation of the British forces and the complete occupation of the island by German troops.64
In the meantime, German forces were making significant progress in North Africa. Following Hitler’s decision to bolster the almost hopeless Italian positions in North Africa, in February German troops under General Rommel arrived in Libya. Rommel moved against the British forces in Cyrenaica, pushing them back eastwards and conquering Benghazi, and, by the middle of April, he was outside Tobruk.65 This advance was made possible not least because of the transfer of British forces to Greece.
On 28 April, Hitler made a triumphal entry into Berlin. On the same day, he met the German ambassador, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, who had just arrived from Moscow, in the Reich Chancellery. Schulenburg attempted in vain to allay Hitler’s deep-seated mistrust of Soviet policy. He assured him that the Soviet agreement with Yugoslavia was not directed against Germany. Moreover, there was no indication that the Soviet Union had been behind the putsch in Belgrade, or that the Soviets were seeking a rapprochement with Britain. Hitler evidently resented being contradicted, for he abruptly ended the meeting.66 Two days later, on 30 April, Halder briefed Hitler about the state of the preparations for Barbarossa. It was on this occasion that the date of the attack was fixed for 22 June.67 On 4 May, Hitler gave a report to the Reichstag on the Balkan campaign. ‘The German Wehrmacht’, he told them, ‘will always intervene, whenever and wherever required’.68
Failure to secure a strategic agreement with Japan
In the middle of the preparations for the war in the Balkans, Hitler had tried to secure Germany’s position in the impending war with the Soviet Union by reaching a strategic agreement with his ally, Japan. A unique opportunity was provided by the visit of the Japanese Foreign Minister, Matsuoka Yosuke, who arrived in Berlin at the end of March, having already held talks in Moscow.69 As he had already made clear in his Directive No. 24 of 5 March, Hitler wanted to ‘get [Japan] to take action in the Far East as soon as possible’, in order to pin down British forces and to get the United States to focus on the Pacific. He was, however, determined to keep the Barbarossa operation secret from the Japanese, thereby considerably limiting his room for negotiation.70
During his first meeting with Matsuoka on 1 April, referring to Germany’s relationship with the Soviet Union, Hitler stated that, although, ‘as was well-known [the Reich] had made a treaty’, ‘more important than this was the fact that, if necessary, it had 160–180 divisions ready to defend itself against Russia’, although he did not believe it would come to a war. Matsuoka was surprised by this statement, since the Japanese leadership assumed that Germany was still working to construct a ‘continental bloc’ including the Soviet Union. However, for Japan the stabilization of its relationship with the Soviet Union was the decisive prerequisite for its plans to expand in South-East Asia.
Hitler pressed his guest, arguing that there would probably never be a more favourable opportunity for the Tripartite powers to act together: Britain was pinned down by the war in Europe; America was only just beginning to rearm; and the Soviet Union could not take the initiative because of the German forces on its western frontier; Japan was the strongest power in East Asia, and there were no conflicts of interest between Germany and Japan. However, Matsuoka remained reserved. They would attack Singapore sooner or later, but at the moment he could not ‘make any commitment on behalf of Japan’.
Ribbentrop, who met Matsuoka on a number of occasions during these days, was much more direct, trying to convince his Japanese colleague that Japan’s next step ought to be ‘a quick attack on Singapore’. Ribbentrop even went so far as
to make the highly disingenuous claim that the conquest of Singapore would ‘perhaps be the best way of keeping America out of the war because the United States would hardly dare risk sending its fleet into Japanese waters’. The argument was only too transparent. For German policy in Europe was banking precisely on America becoming entangled in a conflict in East Asia.71 And the Japanese guest was by no means prepared to accept the argument that the impending confrontation between Germany and the Soviet Union would leave Japan with a free hand in East Asia. Matsuoka even asked Ribbentrop ‘whether the Führer had ever contemplated a Russian–Japanese–German alliance’. Ribbentrop denied this and ‘described a closer cooperation with Russia as an absolute impossibility, as the cultures of the armies and of the two populations were completely contrary to one another’.72
As Matsuoka was intending to continue his talks in Moscow on his way back to Tokyo, Ribbentrop advised him ‘not to get in too deep with the Russians’. Indeed, he went considerably further: ‘If Russia were ever to attack Japan, Germany would immediately fight’. Hitler had already given the same ‘guarantee’ a few days earlier when talking to Oshima Hiroshi, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin.73 Thus Japan could ‘move southwards towards Singapore without any fear of possible complications with Russia’. Ribbentrop believed, however, that ‘Russia would not get involved in any military entanglements’. He went to the absolute limit of what Hitler had permitted to be mentioned about Barbarossa when adding that ‘in any event, he wanted to point out to Matsuoka that a conflict with Russia was at least within the bounds of possibility’.74 Interpreter Schmidt noted that in the course of the talks the German negotiators ‘referred increasingly openly to the impending conflict with the Soviet Union, without, however, ever actually spelling it out in so many words’.75
On 4 April, Hitler had another conversation with Matsuoka, who in the meantime had been in Rome. He emphasized ‘that if Japan got into a conflict with the United States, Germany would immediately take appropriate action’.76 Germany’s declaration that, if Japan became involved in a war with the United States or the Soviet Union it would immediately intervene, naturally implied that, in the event of a Soviet–German war, Japan would be expected to open a front against the Soviet Union. Matsuoka quickly made clear what he thought of this assumption. On his way back to Japan, he successfully pressed Moscow to agree a Japanese–Russian pact of neutrality, which was signed on 13 April, and was to remain in force throughout the whole of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Germany’s attempt to incorporate the attack on the Soviet Union into a global war was thus doomed from the start.
The Hess affair
A few weeks later, on 10 May, the ‘Führer’s’ deputy, Rudolf Hess, climbed into a fighter plane, which he had had placed at his disposal for test flights. Taking off from the airfield at the Messerschmidt works in Augsburg, he flew along a carefully prepared route over the North Sea, landing late in the evening by parachute on the estate of the Duke of Hamilton in Scotland. The two men had been acquaintances since the 1936 Olympic Games. According to his own account, Hess was pursuing a peace mission and aiming to advance it by establishing direct contact with Britain’s aristocracy. In this, however, he failed, as he was immediately arrested.
The German leadership, which was initially unaware of Hess’s arrest, was in total shock. On 12 May, Hitler announced on the radio that Hess, ‘whom he had banned from flying on account of a progressive illness he had been suffering from for years’, had nevertheless undertaken a flight. ‘A confused letter he left behind showed signs of mental derangement, which has given rise to fears that Party comrade Hess had been suffering from delusions.’ It was to be feared that Hess ‘had crashed, or had met with an accident’.77 ‘The Führer’, noted Goebbels, ‘is totally shattered’. ‘What a spectacle for the world; the second man in line after the Führer mentally deranged. Appalling and inconceivable.’78 The press was instructed ‘not to give [the matter] undue prominence beyond the need to inform people of the basic facts’.79
Hitler had everybody arrested or interrogated who was in any way connected with the flight: adjutants, secretaries, engineers, and Professor Karl Haushofer, who was a friend of Hess, and Haushofer’s son, Albrecht. In addition, Bormann, Hess’s chief of staff, and Goebbels began a large-scale campaign against astrologers, fortune-tellers, faith healers, occultists, and other alternative ‘teachings’, as it was assumed that Hess, who was very interested in such abstruse ideas, had been encouraged to act by people who belonged to these circles. Bormann could refer to Hitler, who had long been trying to reason Hess out of his ‘superstition’.80 On 12 May, Hitler abolished the position of Deputy Führer, renaming Hess’s previous office the Party Chancellery, appointing Bormann to head it, and, at the end of the month, making him a Reich Minister.81 Unlike Hess, however, he was not named as Hitler’s second successor after Göring. Instead, Göring was named as his sole deputy, responsible for carrying out Hitler’s functions in the event that he was prevented from doing so.82
On 13 March, however, when the BBC announced that Hess was in British hands, Hitler had to issue another statement. Hess, he said, seemed ‘to have been deluded in thinking that, by approaching English acquaintances, he could somehow still manage to bring about an understanding between Germany and England’. Moreover, Hess, who had been suffering for some years from health problems, had recently ‘increasingly sought help from various mesmerists, astrologers etc.’, and might have been negatively influenced by such people. It was also conceivable that ‘Hess was lured into a trap by the British’. It was possible that the ‘idealist’ Hess had come to imagine that, by making a personal sacrifice, he would be able to prevent the British Empire’s downfall.83 A few days later, Goebbels ordered German propaganda to cease referring to the affair.84
The motives that prompted Hess to fly to England are still unclear. A peace mission undertaken on Hitler’s behalf can most probably be ruled out. He was unable to provide the British authorities with any kind of authority to negotiate, nor did he have any proposals for an Anglo–German peace that went beyond Hitler’s vague ‘appeal to reason’ of 19 July 1940. Moreover, Hitler’s statements of 12 and 13 May declaring that Hess was mad put paid to his role as a potential negotiator. Hess does seem, however, to have regarded himself as a peace emissary, acting on Hitler’s behalf, even if without his specific authorization. He was motivated by the idea that, by making contact with members of the aristocracy, he could bring about a change in Britain’s attitude before Germany became involved in a two-front war by attacking the Soviet Union. It appears that the Deputy Führer’s flight to Britain was a solo effort, which can only be understood against the background of his growing isolation within the Reich leadership.85
Towards the war of racial extermination
Hitler’s decision to launch a war against the Soviet Union had originally been taken in the summer of 1940. The attack was intended to resolve the dilemma into which Hitler, notwithstanding his brilliant victory in the West, had manoeuvered himself. In spite of all his attempts, Britain had neither been defeated nor compelled to agree a peace in accordance with his wishes. It possessed its own overseas resources with which to fight the war as well as those of the United States. Germany had to assume that the United States would enter the war and would do so just when German pressure on Britain was increasing. Hitler’s Soviet ally was waiting in the rear of the Reich, and Germany had to maintain a substantial military force to compensate for Russia’s growing military power. In short, time was working against Hitler’s Reich.
Thus Hitler had come to believe that a war against Russia would cut the Gordian knot. After victory over the Soviet Union, he would be in a position to concentrate all his forces on Britain, while Japan would be free from a threat to its rear and enabled to pin down American forces in East Asia. After toying during the final months of 1940 with alternatives to a war against the Soviet Union in the shape of an ‘anti-British continental bloc’, by the end of 194
0 his decision to fight a war in the East was irrevocable.
As the practical preparations for the attack began, in addition to military and strategic considerations, he became increasingly concerned with ideological goals. Since the beginning of the 1920s, he had been preoccupied with gaining ‘living space’ in the East, and we have seen that during the 1930s he had toyed with a project for the Ukraine. The space to be conquered had to be settled, economically exploited, and controlled. In accordance with his ideological premises, this had to occur on the basis of a racially determined hierarchy. The precondition for this was the destruction of the Soviet system and the violent elimination of the alleged Jewish leadership cadre in the Soviet Union. This would result in the destruction of the core of international ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, Hitler’s main bogeyman since the end of the First World War.
From March 1941 onwards, Hitler made a series of decisions that were largely responsible for ensuring that the war against the Soviet Union acquired the character of a war of racial conquest and extermination. His role is documented in numerous statements, hints, and orders, which generally did not meet with reservations or opposition from the military, but rather, during the coming weeks and months, were faithfully turned into orders. To begin with, on 3 March, Hitler ordered Jodl, the chief of the Wehrmacht leadership staff, to revise the OKW draft directives for the occupation administration in the territories that were to be conquered. Hitler’s new directive stated: ‘The forthcoming campaign is more than just an armed conflict; it will lead to a confrontation between two ideologies. Given the extent of the area involved, bringing this war to an end will require more than defeating the enemy’s armed forces. . . . The Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, as the people’s “oppressor” up to now, must be eliminated.’86 A week before, the head of the OKW armaments office, General Thomas, had already heard of a comment made by Hitler and relayed by Göring that ‘first of all, the Bolshevik leaders’ had to be ‘finished off quickly’.87
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