Hitler
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Only a few days later this harmony was again disturbed. The situation of the now almost completely encircled 1st Panzer Army became even more critical in the days that followed. Manstein gave notice that he would ignore Hitler’s order to hold the position and would command the 1st Panzer Army to break out of the pocket that was forming around it on his own authority.116 On 25 March Manstein was summoned once again to headquarters, where he had a heated argument with Hitler. Manstein stuck to his guns, however. Hitler terminated the discussion, whereupon Manstein told Hitler’s chief adjutant that he would resign. By the evening, however, Hitler surprised him by changing his mind and being prepared to listen to Manstein’s proposals. This startling willingness to give way prompted Manstein to put forward his ideas about how the eastern front might be stabilized and to recommend a German chief of the general staff for Antonescu. For ‘political reasons’, however, Hitler was unwilling to agree to that. On 28 March the 1st Panzer Army did finally begin to break out of the Soviet encirclement and after a few days this operation, supported by a relief attack mounted by an assault force hurriedly brought from France, was successful.117
On 27 March Hitler received Field-Marshal Ewald von Kleist at the Berghof, who asked Hitler to consent to his withdrawing with his Army Group A, which was operating to the south of Army Group South, from the River Bug to the lower Dniestr. He was astonished when Hitler agreed to this, although the latter demanded at the same time that, whatever happened, the Crimea should be held.
On two occasions within a short time Hitler had been reluctantly forced to give way to pressure from two of his most senior generals, which for him was an almost unbearable loss of face.118 He therefore decided to dismiss Manstein and Kleist, instructing them to come to the Berghof on 30 March, where he received them individually, telling them they were to be dismissed at the same time as conferring on them the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords.119 In the East, Hitler explained to Manstein, ‘the time for expansive operations’ had come to an end; now what they needed to do was ‘simply to hang on stubbornly’ and for this ‘new type of leadership’ he needed ‘a new name and a new watchword’. Walter Model, now promoted to the rank of field-marshal, was made Manstein’s successor, while Kleist made way for Ferdinand Schörer, who was promoted to the rank of Colonel General; he was considered to be a particularly sound National Socialist.120
As Hitler had explained to Manstein, his removal did indeed signify clearly that mobile warfare had been abandoned. This modern concept of war, in which the holding of territory was subordinated to evasive manoeuvres and the rapid formation of foci of attack, had always seemed a little suspect to Hitler. He had always rather mistrusted the brilliant strategies of the officers of the General Staff with their, as he saw it, arrogant bearing and sophisticated jargon. Hitler was more inclined to trust his personal experience of four years of trench warfare.
His idea of doggedly holding on whatever the cost was not, however, primarily motivated by military and operational considerations but rather by political and strategic ones. As he had done the previous winter, he emphasized that he had to hold certain positions in order to be able to use them as bases for future offensives. The change in name of Army Groups South and A to ‘North Ukraine’ and ‘South Ukraine’ was meant to point to the possibility of the Germans going on the offensive in the near future, precisely because the German army was still in control of only the extreme western edge of the Ukraine. Yet even if he had succeeded in repelling a landing by the Western Allies and as a result had prevented them from launching an offensive for years, the German army would have been a long way from having the necessary strength to mount offensives in the East of the kind it had launched in 1941 and 1942.
In Hitler’s view, however, the idea of going on the offensive again against the Red Army after repelling an invasion in the West, and of holding on to as much territory as possible in the East until that point, offered the only chance of escaping imminent defeat. As he had already been expecting an Allied landing in the spring of 1944, the need to hold on doggedly would, he thought, last for only a few months or even weeks. It must surely be possible simply to hang on for that length of time. On the other hand, he feared losing the operational base for the decisive offensive in the East if he were to give in to the ideas of his generals and respond flexibly to the Red Army attacks by shortening the front, surrendering territory, and adopting over all a more mobile approach. His generals were prepared to give up territory they had conquered in order to gain time. Hitler, by contrast, wished to make use of this time by bending every sinew to hold on to territory.
Hitler’s order to stand firm was an expression of the paralysis that had been increasingly affecting the regime since the autumn of the previous year. The rapid and large-scale operation to take control of much of Italy and its zones of occupation had been the last show of strength of which it was capable. Since then the focus externally had been on establishing the defence of ‘Fortress Europe’, and internally on gearing everything to economic exploitation, total repression, and merciless implementation of the programme to murder the Jews. The hope was that by conjuring up a terrifying apocalyptic vision of the total destruction that would come about if Germany were defeated, the regime would be able to mobilize people’s final reserves of stamina. No further allies had in fact jumped ship, enemy forces were still far from Germany’s borders, the air war had not been able to paralyse armaments production, and although resistance and partisan movements had grown to a significant size, they were not capable of posing a threat to Hitler’s empire. Hitler was aware, however, that this defensive position would collapse in the medium term under Allied pressure. Hitler’s watchword ‘Hold out, whatever the cost’, which from a purely military point of view was amateurish, in fact positively absurd, derived from a political and strategic plan to go on the offensive that did indeed have an inner logic and in theory offered a way out of the impasse of the war situation. In the light of the relative strengths of the opposing sides, however, it was unrealistic, and in fact delusional.
On 8 April the Red Army began its offensive to reconquer the Crimea and forced the German 17th Army defending the peninsula to retreat to the fortress of Sebastopol. In spite of the hopeless situation, in mid-April Hitler refused to allow the army to evacuate across the Black Sea, justifying this on the grounds that such a move might drive neutral Turkey into the enemy camp. At the end of April he removed the army’s commander, Erwin Jaenecke, from his command for his negative assessment of the situation. When, in view of the by now catastrophic situation in the Sebastopol area, Hitler finally gave his consent for the evacuation on 9 May, only 30,000 men out of around 60,000 who had made up the force in this final phase could be rescued. On 14 May the Army High Command was obliged to announce the end of the fighting.121
Hungary: The last chapter in Hitler’s Jewish policy
‘Exterminate, so that you yourself are not exterminated.’ This was the maxim Hitler had impressed on the Reichsleiters and Gauleiters on 17 April after the funeral of Gauleiter Adolf Wagner. The Hungarians were finally to be forced to adopt this ruthless precept. In April the German authorities in occupied Hungary pushed through a set of anti-Jewish laws along German lines. They laid the foundation for large-scale deportations that were organized from Budapest by a special RHSA task force led by Eichmann. As early as mid-April the Hungarian police were gathering the country’s Jews together in ghettos and camps. At the end of April the first deportations to Auschwitz began, and from mid-May these became extensive and systematic. As a rule, four trains set off for Auschwitz daily with 3,000 people in each.122 Up to the point when deportations were halted at the beginning of July 437,000 Jews had been deported in this manner to the extermination camp at Auschwitz, where the overwhelming majority were murdered immediately on arrival.
Hitler considered that the new Hungarian government was already so compromised by its involvement in Germany’s policies towards the Jews that it could no longer
leave the alliance. ‘At any rate the Hungarians will no longer be able to escape the logic of the Jewish question’, as Goebbels put it in his record of Hitler’s comments on the subject at the end of April. ‘If you say A, you must say B, and now that the Hungarians have got started with anti-Jewish policies they cannot apply the brakes any more. After a certain point these policies acquire their own momentum.’123 This provides another example of the central role played by anti-Jewish policies in Hitler’s efforts to bind his ‘allies’ to him.
Hitler continued to follow events in Hungary with great attention and intervened during the summer to prevent the deportations from stalling. At the beginning of July, in response to world-wide protests, Horthy decreed that the deportations should be halted, immediately before the Jews living in Budapest were also caught up in them. When Prime Minister Sztójay then asked Veesenmayer if they could take up the offers made by several states to permit Jews to immigrate or to transit, Hitler, when consulted, decided that this could be allowed if ‘the deportation of Jews to the Reich, temporarily halted by the Reich Administrator’, were ‘completed immediately with all possible speed’.124 Powerful German pressure made the Hungarian government finally agree at the beginning of August to a resumption of the deportations, but the rapidly approaching military defeat of the Axis powers (on 23 August Romania declared it had left the alliance and joined the anti-Hitler coalition) meant that this never happened.
In line with Hitler’s maxim of using anti-Jewish policies as an indicator of the loyalty of those allies he still had, the Nazi regime attempted in the course of 1944 to draw other vassal states into its radical measures following the example of Hungary. Now it was Slovakia, which had halted deportations in October 1942, that was put under pressure: just like the previous year, on 12 May 1944 at Schloss Klessheim the Slovakian delegation under Tiso was browbeaten about ‘the Hungarians’ treachery’ and the ‘Jewification’ of Hungary as a clear warning to the regime in Bratislava.125
As far as the regime was concerned, the mass murder of the Hungarian Jews essentially marked the end of the ‘Final Solution’ (even though Jews were hunted down literally right up to the end of the war and hundreds of thousands of Jewish concentration camp inmates were to die by the time it was over). Shortly before the start of the Hungarian deportations Hitler therefore decided to change the focus of propaganda, which up to then had concentrated on creating images of the Jews as the enemy. Since the summer of 1941 the Third Reich had been pursuing the war primarily as a ‘war against the Jews’, in other words conjuring up an enemy that would explain the existence of this unnatural alliance of ‘plutocrats’ and ‘Bolsheviks’. But now that the Third Reich was finally on the defensive, Hitler no longer thought it opportune to go on with propaganda that focused on the distorted image of the Jews as the universal enemy. And given that the last Jewish communities in German-occupied Europe would soon be annihilated, the propaganda cliché of the Jew as the enemy within, who had to be defeated by Germany and her allies so that the foundations for a ‘New Europe’ could be laid, had necessarily reached the end of its useful life.
On 26 April 1944 Hitler told his Propaganda Minister ‘that international Jewry is certainly not as sympathetic to Stalin as people generally suppose. In a number of respects he treats the Jews rather harshly.’ In the same conversation Hitler expressed the view that the emergence of strikes in Britain was probably ‘Trotskyite’ and a sign of ‘opposition to the war and to Stalin’. ‘Jewish influence’ was of course behind it, he said, and this could be ‘very useful for our purposes at the moment’.126
These comments suggest that Hitler no longer held to the ideologically motivated dogma that had preoccupied him for twenty-five years, namely that Jewishness and Bolshevism were identical. This astonishing departure from a core element in his world view was the result of the political situation. Now that the Soviet Union was so unmistakably on the offensive, it was no longer important to present it as part of a ‘world-wide Jewish conspiracy’, thereby emphasizing how it could form an alliance with the west. On the contrary, now that Germany was on the defensive, it was vital to emphasize the differences in the enemy camp and bank on such a heterogeneous coalition breaking up. Thus, from then on anti-communist and anti-Semitic propaganda were kept separate. Anti-Semitic propaganda was geared towards American Jews, who were styled as the driving force behind the Western Allies’ war; at the same time the ‘Bolshevik’ peril was evoked with all its terrors.127
On 26 May Hitler gave a speech in the Platterhof, the guesthouse on the Obersalzberg, to generals and senior officers who had just completed an indoctrination course in Nazi ideology at a Party college. This speech can be regarded as the culmination of Hitler’s efforts to imbue the army with Nazi doctrine (a process he had begun by introducing National Socialist Leadership Officers). He first went back to 1918, but after the usual Party narrative he became more philosophical. Via discussion of the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems he found a way into his Social Darwinist philosophy, according to which life was ‘an endless struggle’. After discussing the alleged racial superiority of the Germans, he came to the key point of his speech: his policies towards the Jews, a chapter that, significantly, he treated as if already closed.
‘By removing the Jews I have dealt with any possibility in Germany of some kind of revolutionary cell or nucleus forming. People may of course say to me: “Could you not have solved the problem more simply – or not more simply, because any other way would have been more complicated – but more humanely?” Gentlemen, we are engaged in a life and death struggle. If our enemies were to gain victory in this struggle the German nation would be exterminated. Bolshevism would slaughter countless millions of our intellectuals. Anyone who wasn’t shot in the back of the neck would be carted off. The children from more elevated social groups would be separated out and disposed of. . . . Precisely in this situation, as in every other, humane policies would amount to the greatest cruelty to one’s own nation. If I am making the Jews hate me I would at least be loath to miss out on the advantages of their hatred.’ These advantages, Hitler continued, consisted in Germany having ‘a cleanly organized national body, which cannot be influenced by alien forces.’ Hitler had a negative example immediately to hand: Hungary. ‘The whole country disintegrating and corroded, Jews everywhere, nothing but Jews up to the highest positions, and the whole state covered by, it has to be said, a dense network of spies and agents. . . . I have intervened here too and now this problem also will be solved.’128
41
Defeat Looms
In the summer of 1944 Hitler’s regime faced what was up to that point its most serious crisis. The long-expected Allied landing had been successful, the Soviet offensive that began shortly afterwards led to the destruction of an entire German army group, air raids were bringing about the almost total collapse of German production of aviation fuel, and on 20 July 1944 Hitler only narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, planned as the first step in a comprehensive coup d’état. Hitler’s response to this crisis was once again to carry out a restructuring of his regime and to equip the advocates of a radical course for the war – Speer, Himmler, Bormann, and Goebbels – with further powers. The influence of this ‘Gang of Four’ was already growing considerably during the spring as a result of the continuing deterioration in conditions within the Third Reich. A significant factor in this process was that the Armaments Minister, Speer, whose ambition had led him to overplay his hand at the end of 1943, was able from May 1944 onwards to strengthen his position once more. Speer’s sudden loss of power and then meteoric recovery were the result of Hitler’s personalized leadership style.
At the end of April 1944 Speer gradually resumed his official responsibilities after a break caused by illness in the first months of the year. The Armaments Minister, who in the past had been treated as Hitler’s successor, was, however, forced to admit that he had much ground to make up.
Since the end of 1943 intens
ive air raids on the German aviation industry had led to a steep decline in aircraft production. Speer, prompted by Milch, had proposed the formation of a ‘Fighter Staff’ to Hitler in February. It was to be made up of representatives of state bodies and industry who, equipped with special powers, would re-energize the production of fighter aircraft. Whereas Speer, however, wished to entrust this task to his friend Karl Hanke, the Gauleiter of Silesia, Hitler appointed Karl Saur, Speer’s rival, as head of the ‘Fighter Staff’; in view of his illness, Speer’s being assigned overall control was at first purely a formality.1 By employing ruthless methods the Fighter Staff did, however, manage to increase fighter production from its nadir of 1,323 planes in February 1944 to 3,558 in September.2 Speer, who since his return to work had been taking an active role in the Fighter Staff, now claimed special credit for this success achieved by the ministry he headed.3