Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  Since 1943 there had been a plan to ensure that essential armaments production was safe from bombing; the work of the Fighter Staff gave new impetus to this initiative. At the beginning of April Speer reported to Hitler that by the end of the year he would be able ‘to provide reliable protection against bombing raids’ to the ‘most vulnerable factories’ by ‘making them totally safe underground’.4 Yet in April Hitler, on Göring’s suggestion, gave Franz Xaver Dorsch, Speer’s deputy as head of the Todt Organization and, as Hitler knew, one of Speer’s main rivals,5 responsibility for constructing six extensive bunkers for fighter production.6 By giving these special assignments to Saur and Dorsch, Hitler was giving a clear sign that he had no scruples about dismantling Speer’s power base.

  Speer put up serious objections to Dorsch being given this task and threatened to resign.7 After an interview on 25 April at the Berghof, Hitler pandered to Speer’s considerable vanity and a solution began to emerge. At the end of April Speer, with Hitler’s approval, appointed Dorsch as head of construction in the ministry and made him his deputy as plenipotentiary for the building sector. This solution saved Speer’s face.8 Sauckel too was one of the rivals trying to undermine Speer’s position in the early months of the year. At the end of April 1944 he succeeded in persuading Hitler to water down the guarantees the latter had given Speer only in January to make available the labour he required for his ‘protected industries’ in occupied France and instead to support Sauckel’s recruitment policies.9

  Speer’s rapid loss of influence was to a great extent the result of Hitler’s leadership maxim of not taking notice of people’s established spheres of responsibility but rather of making individual top functionaries personally responsible for the whole of an assignment and then adjusting and realigning areas of responsibility as he saw fit. Speer for his part was someone who understood how to exploit this system. The key, which also secured his spectacular recovery, was the ‘Führer’s’ trust.

  When Speer fully returned to work in his ministry on 8 May he was determined not only to restore his authority within his fiefdom but to extend it. This was to occur at Göring’s expense in particular, for Göring had been the most active in undermining his power.10 Speer could exploit the fact that Göring’s prestige at this point was suffering huge damage from the sustained Allied bombing raids and the weakness of the fighter command’s defence. In Hitler’s regime, which was based totally on individuals, Göring’s weakness provided the opportunity for Speer to start expanding his power.

  In addition to their bombing of towns and cities,11 on 12 May the Americans (and later the British) began an air offensive to target German hydrogenation plants, thus striking at one of the most vulnerable points in the German war machine. At a crisis meeting on 22 and 23 May, Hitler demanded more anti-aircraft guns and screening smoke to protect the plants being targeted; apart from this there were few ideas on how to put up a more effective defence.12

  The next series of raids came on 28 and 29 May, reducing the daily production of aircraft fuel by more than half. Speer persuaded Hitler to sign a decree appointing a ‘General Commissar’ to restore fuel production. Equipped with extraordinary powers and supported by a staff drawn from industry and state agencies, Edmund Geilenberg, up to then the head of the main committee for munitions, attempted to deal with the Allied bombing campaign, though this seemed an almost hopeless task. In June the average production of aircraft fuel had fallen to 30 per cent of the March average.13 Only the fact that from June 1944 onwards the Allied air forces were mainly concentrated on preparing for the forthcoming landings in France saved the German war machine in the summer of 1944 from grinding to a halt.14

  Göring suffered a further serious loss of prestige when at a meeting with Luftwaffe chiefs on 23 May Hitler discovered that, although on numerous occasions he had ordered that the jet fighter Me 262 be developed into a ‘lightning bomber’,15 this command had not been carried out.16 He had ordered it against the advice of experts, his intention being to use the bomber to resist invasion and deliver ‘retaliatory strikes’ against Britain. When at the beginning of June Speer informed Hitler that he and Milch had both come to the conclusion that Luftwaffe armaments production should be incorporated into Speer’s ministry, Hitler immediately agreed.17

  During the same armaments briefing, Speer managed to convince Hitler that the various independent armaments initiatives of the SS ought to ‘be subject to the same control’ as ‘the rest of armaments and war production’. It was unacceptable, he claimed, that every year Himmler imprisoned about 500,000 ‘runaway’ foreign workers and prisoners of war in concentration camps after the police recaptured them, thus making them unavailable for much more important armaments projects. He spoke to Hitler about the clash with Sauckel, which was still unresolved: in doing so, his aim was, he said, to ensure that ‘the main responsibility for everything connected with munitions and war production (and that includes labour) rests with me’.18 Over the next few weeks control over armaments was indeed adjusted in Speer’s favour. In the meantime, however, Hitler was forced to suffer yet more painful reverses.

  In mid-May the British and Americans in Italy had broken through the German ‘Gustav Line’. On 3 June the German defences in the Alban Hills south of Rome collapsed and the following day the Italian capital surrendered.19 When Goebbels paid Hitler a visit on the Obersalzberg on 5 June, Hitler informed him cheerfully that the news about Rome’s surrender had ‘not dismayed him at all’ for ‘the decisive action will doubtless be in the West’. He ‘awaited the invasion with complete confidence’, he explained to Goebbels; the new flying bomb (by which he meant the Fi 103, later the so-called V1) would be ready for use against London in a few days, even if the A 4 [V2] would take some time longer.20

  For months Hitler had been preparing intensively for the Allied landing in western Europe and had informed his entourage that Germany would still manage to bring about a turn in the war by achieving a great defensive success in the West. He had total confidence that, as so often in his career, the crisis would in the end turn into a triumphant victory. Had he not after all been proved right in being confident in 1923/25, 1932/33, 1934, or 1939/40?21

  During the night of the 5/6 June the Allied landings began on the coast of Normandy. Once more Hitler, who was informed about the ‘invasion’ in the course of the morning at the Berghof, acted as though he was extraordinarily optimistic. The landings had, he claimed, taken place exactly where he had expected them and the enemy troops would be pushed back into the sea. During the previous months Hitler had in fact referred to Normandy as a possible landing zone, but his pronouncements about the coming ‘invasion’ had indicated great uncertainty about the question ‘Where?’; the army had certainly not been concentrating its defences in Normandy. Thus his almost euphoric reaction to the landings was primarily designed to give confidence to those around him.

  Although the landing forces managed to secure their five beachheads relatively quickly, link up with each other, and bring in continuous reinforcements, it still took until the end of July before they were able to break through the hastily formed German defensive line and advance deep into France. During those weeks Hitler went on propounding his old illusion that by beating back the landing he could initiate the desired turn in the war. Thus on 17 July at a meeting in Margival, north of Soissons, he explained to Rundstedt and Rommel, his commanding officers responsible for the invasion front, that the invasion army would soon find itself the target of huge numbers of jet fighter-bombers, while the use of the new ‘catapult bomb’ against London would have such devastating effects as to make Britain give up the war.22 Attacks by the new flying bomb on London had actually begun during the night of 15/16 June, as Hitler had stipulated in mid-May.23

  In spite of Goebbels’s warning to hold back, hints about imminent ‘retaliation’ had found their way into German propaganda in the early months of 1944 and thus had awakened high expectations among the German population of some kind of c
ounterattack.24 On Hitler’s instructions the Reich press chief Dietrich issued a press notice suggesting that the deployment of this new weapon meant that ‘retaliation’ had already begun. During the following days Goebbels, who was worried that such an over-optimistic presentation of the situation might arouse expectations that for the time being could not be met,25 succeeded in softening this line and ensuring that there was scope for propaganda to provide more positive reports in the future.26 Hitler’s decision to name the weapon the V1 and thus to mark it out as the first of a series of ‘weapons of retaliation’ [Vergeltungswaffen] was also part of this propaganda tactic.27

  Yet this new, purportedly decisive, weapon was not to have the anticipated impact. In fact, only a little more than 20 per cent of the bombs landed in the Greater London area. Because they were far apart both spatially and temporally and had a load of under one ton each, their impact was far less than that of the major Allied air raids, with their relatively high degree of accuracy and their combined load each raid of several thousand tons.28 As a result, the population’s disappointed expectations produced the depressed mood that Goebbels had feared.29

  On 21 June, on a visit to the Berghof, Goebbels made another attempt to persuade Hitler finally to implement measures for ‘total war’, although Hitler objected that it was ‘not yet the right time’. The same was true, he said, of moves to end the war by political means. As on the eve of the invasion,30 he still did not believe it was possible ‘to come to an arrangement with England’. Whether it might at some point come about with the Soviet Union was something he wished ‘to leave an open question’; the present state of the war would make it doubtful, though.31 Instead, Hitler was relying completely on the V 2, as rocket A 4 was now being called. He assured Goebbels it would be deployed at the beginning of August and though it would not ‘be immediately decisive for the war, it would probably bring a decisive outcome closer’.32 Until then propaganda would be forced to compensate for the bad news from all fronts with the prospect of imminent ‘retaliation’.33

  The very next day, on the third anniversary of the German invasion, the great Soviet summer offensive against the front salient of Army Group Centre began. Thus the strategy on which Hitler had based his entire conduct of the war since the end of 1943 had failed. He had assumed that a successful defensive operation against the invasion in the West would free up a large number of troops for an offensive in the East and might force a ‘decisive end to the war’. Now, however, it became clear how much a war on two fronts favoured his opponents. It was obvious that the Red Army would quickly exploit the fact that German forces were tied down in the West after the Allied invasion in order to mount its own large-scale offensive. The fact that Hitler had expected the Soviet attack to begin on 22 June,34 without being capable of any effective countermeasures, makes clear how flawed his own strategy was.

  By the beginning of July the Red Army had succeeded in almost completely destroying three German armies with twenty-eight divisions. On 3 July it recaptured Minsk, on 14 July Vilnius in Lithuania.35 Hitler could do nothing but watch these events helplessly. In view of the overall situation, a fire-fighting operation by German units from other fronts was impossible. He therefore fired his generals.

  When on 29 July at the Berghof Rundstedt and Rommel attempted to make clear to him the hopelessness of the situation in the West, Hitler at first responded with a speech about the miracle weapons. The new weapons would be the ‘miracle that turned the war’, just as the death of the Russian Empress in the Seven Years’ War had been for Frederick the Great.36 Only four days later, on 3 July, he had Rundstedt replaced and transferred the supreme command in the West to Field-Marshal von Kluge.37 This was followed by the dismissals of the commander of Panzer Group West, Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, and in August of the Luftwaffe Field-Marshall Hugo Sperrles, responsible for air defence in the West.38 The Chief of the General Staff, Zeitzler, who in the previous months had increasingly suffered Hitler’s disapproval, was replaced at the end of July by Guderian,39 while the supreme commander of the defeated Army Group Centre, Field-Marshal von Busch, had already been forced to go in June. He was replaced by Field-Marshal Model.40

  On 15 July Rommel took action. He explained in a letter to Hitler that ‘the situation in Normandy’ was becoming ‘more difficult day by day’ and was close to developing into a ‘serious crisis’. After a bleak description of the extremely precarious position of his own troops, who could not hold out much longer, Rommel came to an unequivocal conclusion: ‘I must ask you to recognise the position we are in and act without delay.’41 The tone of the letter guaranteed that Rommel would face repercussions, were Hitler to react negatively to it. It did not come to that, however, because on 17 July Rommel was seriously injured during a low-flying air attack.

  In mid-July Hitler had already taken measures in case of further advances by the Western Allies. On 13 July he replaced the existing military administration in Belgium and Northern France with a civilian administration and appointed Grohé, the Gauleiter of Cologne–Aachen, as Reich Commissar for this area.42 In addition, on that same day he signed two decrees dealing with the authority of military agencies in relation to civil administrative bodies and Party offices in the event of the enemy’s penetration of Reich territory.43 Hitler was in other words already preparing to defend the Reich.

  After four months there he finally left the Berghof on 16 July and returned to his Wolf’s Lair headquarters. He was never to return to the Obersalzberg. The evening before he left he looked one more time at his paintings hanging in the great hall and then said goodbye to his guests in a manner that gave his Luftwaffe adjutant the impression that he was consciously taking ‘leave for ever’.44

  In June and July, during the dramatic military events following the Allied landings, fundamental changes were taking place in the armaments sector; in the wake of the 20 July plot, these changes would result in the shift in the balance of power that had been on the horizon for some time in favour of a group of four men, namely Speer, Goebbels, Bormann, and Himmler.

  After his crucial decision at the beginning of June to hand Luftwaffe armaments to Speer, on 20 June Hitler ordered Göring himself to take charge of this transfer to Speer’s ministry. Göring demonstrated his annoyance at this loss of power by dismissing his state secretary, Milch, from all his posts. Speer, however, immediately appointed Milch as his deputy.45 In addition, on 19 July Hitler signed the decree drafted by Speer’s ministry concerning the concentration of munitions and war production that transferred to Speer all powers relating to the technical construction and rationalization of weapons and war matériel. Speer now held the key to controlling the whole production process.46 Following Hitler’s decree Speer streamlined the armaments ministry’s regional organization, thereby strengthening his position vis-à-vis the Gauleiters.47

  At the armaments conferences in Essen and Linz in June Speer demonstrated his key position to the industrialists and attempted to boost their damaged morale. This was also the purpose of a speech that Hitler made after the Linz conference on 26 June on the Obersalzberg to about 150 leading figures in the armaments industry. Its main point was to counteract dissatisfaction within the industry about Nazi tendencies to favour state control of the economy. Hitler assured them: ‘If this war ends in victory for us then private initiative will be triumphant in the German economy!’ While looking decidedly forlorn and battered,48 Hitler tried to appear confident of victory, but his rambling references to his own charisma no longer convinced anyone present: ‘The gods love someone who demands the impossible of them. . . . And if we achieve the impossible, providence will reward us.’49

  During June and July Speer also succeeded in achieving total dominance over his rival Sauckel with regard to ‘labour deployment’, having already obtained Hitler’s backing at the beginning of June.50 First of all he made sure that inside the Reich itself the responsibilities of the heads of the regional armaments agencies, who were answerable to him,
were substantially expanded in relation to the Gau employment offices, which were part of Sauckel’s empire.51 Shortly afterwards he made his second move by putting a stop to Sauckel’s practice of compulsory recruitment. On 2 July 1944, almost four weeks after the Allied landings in Normandy, Sauckel was forced to report to Hitler that during the previous few weeks the recruitment of labour from Italy and western Europe had practically come to a standstill.52 At the meeting of top officials then called by Hitler for 11 July 1944 it became evident that Sauckel would have to drop his existing policy of recruiting forced labour.53 Thus Speer had managed to bring the whole of armaments production under his authority, at the same time resuming his role as crown prince. Yet it would soon be clear that this apparent resurgence was little more than a ‘false dawn before the final downfall’.54

  At this point Speer and Goebbels began a joint initiative, although one in which they had different roles, to step up the war effort. At the beginning of July in a leading article Goebbels had again taken up the slogan of ‘Total War’;55 he had claimed in a speech in Breslau on 7 July that the nation faced its ‘To be or not to be’.56 After Hitler had rejected his June proposals to ramp up the war effort as premature, Goebbels attempted, as he had done the previous year, to get his way once again by making use of ‘public opinion’, which he could shape. At the same time, Speer drew Hitler’s attention at an armaments briefing to the fact that, as far as the mobilization of labour was concerned, ‘there were still possibilities to exploit on the home front and in the army’; doing so required a significantly ‘more stringent . . . idea of what was meant by the country’s total commitment’.57 He therefore suggested that Hitler might speak to a small circle (Speer had Himmler, Lammers, Keitel, Sauckel, Goebbels, and himself in mind) about the ‘requirements for this increased commitment’. Hitler agreed and the meeting was fixed for 22 July.