Speer responded by turning Hitler’s attention to the area that formed the real basis of their personal relationship – architecture and town planning. Five days after the Posen speech, Speer persuaded Hitler to issue an edict, entitling him, even during the war, to start planning for the rebuilding of bombed cities ‘by preparing plans for urban reconstruction’.39 Speer was given extensive special powers, imposing significant restrictions on the ambitions of the Gauleiters in this sphere, a deliberate demonstration of his power and one that anticipated the position he was hoping to acquire after the war. A circular of November 1943, containing his Posen speech to the Gauleiters, and once again emphasizing their responsibility for implementing the measures to ensure increased armaments production, reinforced the message. It underlined once more his claim to leadership on the home front.40
Hitler also set boundaries to Speer’s ambitions, however. For example, at a meeting about the labour shortage in the German war economy on 4 January 1944,41 Hitler opposed his armaments minister, who wanted to solve the problem by reallocating orders to France. Speer had already held talks with the French in September 1943, which he had got Hitler to approve.42 However, Hitler now decided to support Sauckel’s solution to the labour problem through forced recruitment, and, during the coming months, the latter did what he could to try to get hold of workers from the French firms that Speer had wanted reserved for German contracts.
At the end of 1943, Himmler too was on a collision course with Speer. He ensured that in the course of the reorganization of the Reich Economics Ministry, from which Speer removed certain important responsibilities, two of his closest colleagues were given key positions. Otto Ohlendorf, the head of the SD’s Home Department, took over the important Main Department II of the Economics Ministry, and Franz Hayler, head of the Reich Group Commerce, became the new state secretary. This intervention was designed to ensure that, in preparing for the post-war economy, the Economics Ministry would be in a position to impose limits on the kind of economic planning Speer was introducing.43
It now became clear that Speer had overplayed his hand. He had alienated the Gauleiters, Sauckel, and Bormann; the alliance with Himmler had failed, indeed the latter had built up a counterweight to him within the Economics Ministry; and Goebbels too began to distance himself.44 Moreover, Hitler was bound to regard the fact that Speer was on his way to becoming the second most powerful man in the regime as a challenge to start thinking again about his successor. Although Hitler had declared Göring to be his deputy in 1939, and had confirmed this decision in 1941,45 the latter’s growing weakness and declining prestige meant this settlement of the succession now appeared highly problematic. Any further strengthening of Speer’s position might compel Hitler to appoint a new deputy. This would involve disavowing Göring as well as having to make clear to other candidates, such as Himmler or Goebbels, why they were not qualified to become ‘Führer’. There was thus something to be said for leaving open the question of succession, and for putting Speer, who was making such efforts to become the second man in the regime, in his place.
The opportunity arrived very soon. On 18 January, Speer had to undergo a knee operation. However, during his stay in the Hohenlychen clinic, which was run by Professor Gebhardt, an intimate of Himmler’s, his health rapidly deteriorated. While Speer believed that he was the victim of deliberately poor treatment by Gebhardt, and thought that Himmler had been trying to have him killed, it is more plausible that it was in fact years of stress and overwork that had led to his physical and psychological collapse.46
During his absence from the ministry, Speer’s opponents, both within and outside his ministry, set about trying to destroy the crown prince’s position, and Hitler did not back him. Already during the autumn, and increasingly after Speer became ill, Bormann passed on to Hitler complaints about the closing down of particular businesses and about other measures taken by the Armaments Ministry, with the aim of damaging Speer’s reputation. Ley and Göring intrigued against him, and, within his ministry, a growing number of colleagues wanted to settle scores with their often arrogant boss.47 A few days after his operation, Speer sent several memoranda to Hitler, in which, above all, he asked for more responsibilities in the armaments sphere at the expense of the Gauleiters and the Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization. He was no doubt intending to demonstrate his undiminished commitment and to counteract what he feared was Hitler’s loss of trust in him. Significantly, however, Hitler did not respond to these initiatives.48 When, after more than three months, Speer returned to the political stage, regaining his previous position of power was to cost him considerable effort.
How to proceed?
During the autumn of 1943 Hitler had succeeded in consolidating his regime once more, both internally and externally, after the loss of his main ally, and indeed had even significantly extended the territory under his direct rule. It was nevertheless obvious that, if a war on two fronts continued or a third front opened up in western Europe, military defeat was inevitable.
During September and October 1943 Goebbels spoke to Hitler on several occasions about the possibility of making separate peace deals. Although Hitler clearly agreed, he nevertheless dismissed any concrete steps at the present time. On 9 September he came out with the conjecture that it would be ‘easier to do something with the British than with the Soviets’. He also said he was sure that the British would be unwilling to surrender their conquests in the Mediterranean – Sicily, Calabria (Corsica and Sardinia would no doubt be added) – and on the basis of these territorial gains ‘might be more open to an arrangement’. The tensions between the Soviet Union and the Anglo–Americans were, however, not yet developed enough to be successfully exploited, he said, and so they had to go on waiting, although a crucial factor would be ‘to restore order to our fronts’. When Goebbels once again brought up the subject of separate peace deals on 27 October – in the meantime Badoglio’s Italy had declared war on Germany – Hitler explained to him that he was now tending ‘more to the Soviet side’. Allegedly, both sides, the Soviets and the Western Allies, had made ‘secret overtures’, he said, but Hitler had not responded to them because, as he confided to Goebbels, ‘we must not negotiate when things are going so badly for us’.49 This change of attitude on Hitler’s part in favour of possible talks with the Soviet Union was in fact based on real events: In September there had been tentative contacts (but not talks or official meetings) in Stockholm involving German and Soviet go-betweens.50
But if regaining the military initiative was the precondition for peace talks, how might that be achieved? In the winter of 1943/44 Hitler set his mind to it, focusing above all on the Allies’ landing in western Europe, which was feared to be imminent. He was convinced that this constituted the greatest threat, but that it also offered opportunities to bring about a decisive turn in the entire war situation.51 For militarily the failure of a large-scale landing in western Europe would set the Allies back years. It was possible, as he had explained to Goebbels in September, that Britain would settle for its strengthened position in the Mediterranean and be prepared to make a separate peace.
That prospect made him willing to accept setbacks on the eastern front, which was still more than 500 kilometres from the old Reich border, although these setbacks could not be allowed to jeopardize his strategic position in eastern and southern Europe. Since the winter of 1942/43 there could be no more talk of ‘annihilating’ the Soviet Union or of forcing it back behind a secure frontier established far to the east, and, by discontinuing the Battle of Kursk offensive in the summer of 1943, the Wehrmacht had surrendered its last chance of regaining the initiative on at least part of the front. What remained was a defensive battle that had to be continued until the hoped for decisive turn in the West. Only then, on Hitler’s reckoning, could he send reinforcements to the East and in this way possibly force a draw with Stalin. This was the background to the comment he made to Goebbels in October about possible approaches to the Soviet Union.
For the time being, however, he had to accept the Soviet advance. By late September/early October Army Groups Centre and South had withdrawn to the so-called Panther line, which meant among other things the loss of Smolensk and the Donbas. Only Army Group North remained in its old position outside Leningrad, thus forming a curved front that protruded dangerously far eastwards.52
In October the Red Army began its attack on Army Group South, positioned on the far side of the Dnieper; on 6 November it took Kiev. To the south of the Dnieper the Red Army attacked Army Group A reaching the Black Sea by 5 November and cutting off the Crimea from the north. Army Group South was holding the Dnieper line in only two areas between these successful Soviet thrusts, the wedge stretching far to the east on the lower Dnieper being particularly precarious.53
When Field-Marshal von Manstein, the commander-in-chief of the army group, met with Hitler on 7 November, he told him plainly that the Kiev situation was already irretrievable. Instead it was crucial that they secured the ‘victory that could be won on the lower Dnieper’. What in the eyes of the military was a salient that could no longer be defended, in Hitler’s deluded mind had to be held, whatever the cost. His explanation was that it was absolutely necessary to safeguard access to the sources of manganese ore in Nikopol and from there to re-conquer the gateway to the Crimea. The enemy must on no account take possession of the peninsula, which might then be used as the base for air attacks on the Romanian oilfields.54
Hitler was not prepared to follow the military logic of army professionals; instead, his view of how to conduct the war as a totality was to gear it to political and strategic objectives, to give it an ideological foundation, and, not least, to include economic factors. The day after his meeting with Manstein, Hitler underlined this position in his customary speech to mark 8 November. This time he was less concerned to project confidence in victory, concentrating instead on the allegedly small band of ‘criminals’ who did not have faith in Germany’s victory and threatening to ‘do away with them’: ‘What happened in 1918 will not happen a second time in Germany.’ Hitler was making it clear that any ‘stab in the back’ delivered to the army at the front, such as had caused Germany’s defeat in the First World War (and he was not alone in holding this view), would be prevented in this war because of his decisive, politically and ideologically solid leadership. The speech was recorded on magnetic tape and broadcast that evening, after Goebbels, with Hitler’s consent, had had ‘a very few slightly awkward formulations’ cut.55 Goebbels was relieved that after months Hitler was once again being heard in public.
On 24 December the Red Army in the Kiev area again launched a large-scale offensive on the northern flank of Army Group South.56 Manstein once more felt he must press Hitler to surrender not only the Dnieper salient, which stretched far to the east, but also the Crimea, in order to free up troops for a counterattack in the north of his army group. When on 4 January he presented this view to Hitler at the latter’s headquarters, Hitler flatly refused.57
During this visit Manstein tried one more time to introduce his proposal for a change to the military leadership structure, in other words to find one in which Hitler was to a greater extent ‘relieved of the burden’ of operational leadership of the army in the east. Manstein recalled after the war that he had hardly mentioned the subject before Hitler began to fix him with his stare:
He stared at me with a look that gave me the feeling that he intended to crush my will to say anything further to him. I cannot remember ever having seen a look on someone’s face that so strongly expressed the power of his will. . . . Suddenly the notion of an Indian snake charmer flashed across my mind. It was a sort of wordless battle that took place between us within the space of a few seconds. I realised that he must have used that look in his eyes to intimidate a good many people, or to use a vulgar but in this case fitting expression, to ‘break them’.
When Manstein, according to his account, stood his ground, Hitler declared that he alone had the authority to decide what troops should be made available for individual theatres of war.
Colonel General Guderian, who had been dismissed by Hitler in the winter crisis of 1941/42 but had been brought back in the spring of 1943 as General Inspector of panzer divisions, also attempted in January to raise with Hitler the appointment of a Wehrmacht Chief of the General Staff (he had already put the same proposal to Jodl in November 1943), but Hitler stonewalled.58
The controversies involving Manstein and Guderian showed that during this winter of crises the tensions between Hitler and his top military men increased still further. However, whereas in the previous two winter crises military and strategic issues relating to the conduct of the war in the East had been dominant, this time Hitler was determined to subordinate the military to the primacy of his political leadership and to the ideological premises underpinning it. For him this was the crucial precondition for surviving this critical juncture, until they could regain the initiative in the war.
This improvement in troop morale was to be achieved by propagating a ‘fighting will’ unequivocally inspired by Nazism at all levels of the military hierarchy.59 To this end Hitler, responding to proposals from Bormann, had decided to give the officers hitherto responsible for ‘leadership in military values’ at divisional level and with the higher-ranking staff officers the new title of ‘National Socialist Leadership Officers’,60 as he rejected the old term as a relic of a pre-Nazi army that was still dependent on bourgeois values.61
In a Führer decree of 22 December Hitler ordered the creation of a National Socialist Leadership Staff within the OKW that, ‘taking instructions directly from me’ (in other words, over Keitel’s head) and working in concert with the Party Chancellery, was to guarantee ‘that the troops received the necessary political training and motivation’.62 Further National Socialist Leadership Staffs were created in the three Wehrmacht branches, and in addition to the already existing full-time National Socialist Leadership Officers they covered the whole of the military hierarchy down to battalion level with a network of part-time National Socialist Leadership Officers. As the involvement of the Party Chancellery suggests, the aim was less to increase the Party’s influence on the Wehrmacht but rather a new structure was supposed to ensure that the commanding officers showed no uncertainty or laxity as far as ideology was concerned.63
As Hitler explained at a briefing in January, the whole business was worthwhile only if it was clear ‘that all complaints about and criticisms of directives involving ideology will be punished in exactly the same way as criticisms of tactical or other military matters and that it will cost the officer in question his rank and his neck. . . . He must not criticize any order he receives, particularly not in the presence of subordinates.’64 In this briefing Hitler made detailed use of his experiences as an ‘education officer’ in 1919, for as far as he was concerned ‘the gradual saturation of the whole army with National Socialist ideas’ was ‘the most important thing of all’. Accordingly, he considered the propaganda activities of the League of German Officers, which had been formed in September 1943 under General Walther von Seydlitz from officers who were prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, to be the ‘most dangerous thing occurring at the front at the moment’.65
On 27 January Hitler received his field-marshals and senior commanders at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters.66 His address to them there was the first in a series in which he aimed to demonstrate ‘National Socialist leadership’ of the army by instructing his commanders on ideological matters.67 He was convinced that only if the military leaders focused on the primacy of political leadership would it be possible to conduct the war in such a way as to enable them to regain the initiative in the medium term. In addition, they were, he said, engaged in a ‘struggle’ that would ‘end in the annihilation of the German nation if we do not prevail’. He also expressed the expectation that if his regime should find itself in a serious crisis the entire officer corps would stand before him to protect
him, ‘with their swords drawn’.68
Manstein took Hitler’s call to mean he doubted the loyalty of his officer corps and was provoked by this ‘deliberate affront’ to interject, ‘And that is what we will do, my Führer!’ Hitler seemed to be slightly rattled by this, he recalled, and replied with an icy stare, ‘Thank you, Field-Marshal von Manstein!’ After the meeting he told him he would not tolerate such interruptions. Manstein, who had clearly intended to convey his annoyance at Hitler’s long-winded ‘ideological’ lecture, was thus marked down by Hitler to lose his command.69
In the meantime the military situation around Army Group South was becoming more critical. After Hitler’s refusal to withdraw forces from the Dnieper bend, in January 1944 Manstein had at first succeeded in blocking the Soviet assault on Uman,70 but an extremely dangerous situation then developed in the Cerkassy area, where Army Group South held a stretch of terrain about forty kilometres long along the Dnieper, whereas it had been pushed back a long way from the river on other sectors of the front. Thus a ‘balcony’ extending for a hundred kilometres had formed, which, the military agreed, practically invited the Red Army to encircle the German forces positioned there. Yet Hitler was not prepared to abandon this salient, the sad remnant of the ‘Dnieper Line’, for he clung to the idea of launching an offensive from here in the coming spring aimed at Kiev.71 At the end of January the Red Army did in fact employ a pincer movement to encircle the German troops, consisting of two German corps, in the front of the salient. Yet even in this new situation Hitler refused to surrender this territory, in his eyes a ‘fortress on the Dnieper’, and forbade the troops to break out of the encirclement. Eventually, however, Manstein succeeded in getting his way: in the end the encircled German troops were able to break out of the pocket, supported by a relief operation from outside, and a second Stalingrad was prevented.72
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