Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  The weaknesses in this conception were vast, and Hitler must have recognized at least some of them. Hitherto he had always made security in the West a prerequisite for the attack upon the Soviet Union and had viewed avoidance of a two-front conflict as a kind of fundamental law for German foreign policy. Now he was trying to obtain this security by a preventive blow and plunging into the adventure of a two-front war in order to anticipate having to fight a war on two fronts. He also underestimated the enemy just as he overestimated himself. “In three weeks we shall be in Petersburg,” he declared at the beginning of December. He told Bulgarian Ambassador Dragonoff that the Soviet Army was “no more than a joke.”

  But above all, what once more emerged was his inability to think a thought through to the end while retaining his hold on reality. Once he had conceived the first steps, he invariably at some point soared off into fantasy and brought his speculations to a visionary rather than a rational conclusion. A prime instance of this was the carelessness with which he considered the developments in the East that might follow the expected victory. It was the same mistake he had made in attacking Poland and then after the campaign in France. Even if he succeeded in another blitz campaign, in advancing to Moscow or even the Urals before the descent of winter, the war was by no means over, as he ought to have told himself. For beyond Moscow, beyond the Urals, lay vast spaces, where Russia’s remaining forces could be mustered and organized.

  At any rate, powerful German contingents would necessarily be tied down on the more or less open frontier where he planned to stop, and this factor would surely have some bearing on England’s and America’s determination to fight. But Hitler never thought things through in this way. He contented himself euphorically with such vague formulas as “collapse” or “reduction to rubble.” When Field Marshal von Bock, who was to receive the appointment of commander in chief of the Army Group Center, told him early in February that he thought a military victory over the Red Army possible but could not conceive of “how the Soviets are to be forced to make peace,” Hitler answered vaguely that “after the conquest of the Ukraine, Moscow and Leningrad… the Soviets will certainly consent to a compromise.” The remark revealed the whole shallowness of his ideas.

  However, he would now no longer hear of any objections. Undeterred by arguments or opposition, he prepared the attack. In October, 1940, on the night after his meeting with Petain, he received a letter from Mussolini informing him of Italy’s intention to invade Greece. Foreseeing the complications that this unexpected step was bound to have for the German flank in the Balkans, Hitler changed his travel plans and went to Florence for a hastily arranged meeting. But Mussolini, eager to pay the Germans back for the many similar surprises they had inflicted on him, as well as for their many victories, had hurried through the operation a few hours before Hitler’s arrival. But the necessity of sending German contingents to Greece when the Italian ally blundered into the expected trouble, did not keep Hitler from continuing the planning and the deployment for the campaign in the East. The same was true when Mussolini ran into trouble in Albania and in December, 1940, finally saw the North African front collapse. In every case Hitler met the disasters with equanimity and dispatched more and more fresh divisions to the threatened scenes without for a moment being distracted from his principal goal.

  On February 28, 1941, he considered himself forced to anticipate the Russians by marching into Bulgaria from the territory of his ally Rumania. A month or so later he had to conquer Yugoslavia, which under a group of rebellious officers had attempted to withdraw from German influence. But in spite of these new engagements he did not lose sight of the campaign against the Soviet Union. He merely postponed it by four possibly fateful weeks. On April 17 he received the capitulation of the Yugoslav army; six days later the Greeks surrendered, after having so long and so effectively resisted Mussolini’s soldiers. The German corps sent to North Africa under General Rommel needed only twelve days to recover all the territory the Italians had lost. Shortly afterward, between May 20 and 27, 1941, German parachute troops captured the island of Crete, and for a moment the entire British position in the Mediterranean seemed in deadly peril. With growing emphasis Raeder and the heads of the navy called for a grand offensive against the British Near Eastern positions by the autumn of 1941. That would, they promised, strike the Empire “a deadlier blow than the taking of London.” The anxieties of the Allied side, which were published after the war, largely confirmed this view. But Hitler once more refused to deviate from the obsession of eastward expansion. Some members of his entourage tried to change his mind, but in vain.27 In the West, the material weight of the United States was making itself felt more and more. The air war was already lost, and the U-boat war threatening to be lost. But not even this increasingly acute situation could check Hitler’s plans.

  There can be no doubt that Hitler saw and considered the many drawbacks of his new design: the risk of the two fronts, the experience of Napoleon with the insuperable spaces of Russia, the weakness of his Italian ally, and the squandering of his own forces in a manner that completely belied the whole idea of blitzkrieg. The obstinacy with which he ignored the counterarguments was not principally due to fixation on his central idea. Rather, he was becoming more and more aware that this summer of 1941 offered him the last remaining chance to carry out that concept. He was, as he himself said, in the situation of a man who has only one bullet left in his gun. And the special nature of his situation was that the effectiveness of the charge was steadily diminishing. For, as he knew, the war could not be won if it assumed the character of a war of matériel and attrition. Such a war would necessarily put Germany into a position of increasing dependence on the Soviet Union, while in the end inevitably confirming the superiority of the United States.

  It is conceivable that in the background of his thoughts the vague hope still lurked that such a strike might regain the neutrality of the conservative powers whose assistance he had had and gambled away. For he would be restoring the onetime enemy to his proper place as an enemy. This, at any rate, was the hope that prompted his old admirer Rudolf Hess to fly to England on May 10, 1941, on a self-appointed mission to put an end at last to the “wrong war.” The disdain with which he was received made it plain that this opportunity, too, had been squandered and that Hitler really had no choice. His decision to launch the war in the East at this particular time resembled an act of desperation.

  A great many of Hitler’s remarks from the autumn of 1940 on indicate how clearly he grasped his dilemma. His talks with diplomats, generals, and politicians, quite aside from their function in the given instance, constitute in toto a document showing a continual process of self-persuasion. His belittling of the enemy served the same purpose as his excoriation of that same enemy. The Soviet Union was on the one hand a “clay colossus without a head,” and on the other hand a “bolshevized wasteland,” “simple gruesome,” “a mighty national and ideological onslaught that threatens all of Europe”; and the pact he had concluded with that country not so long ago had suddenly become “very painful.” Then again he tried to pretend that he was not waging a two-front war: “Now the possibility exists,” he told his generals on March 30, 1941, “to strike Russia with our rear safe; that chance will not soon come again. I would be committing a crime against the future of the German people if I did not seize it!”

  His contentions were sustained by the certainty, which he claimed with ever-increasing impatience, that Providence presided over all his decisions. This growing effort to invoke irrational support strikingly reflected his state of uneasiness. Quite often his gestures of magical self-reassurance occurred as abrupt interjections in matter-of-fact conversations. For example, in a conversation with a Hungarian diplomat in March, 1941, after making a comparison between the armaments of Germany and the United States, he declared: “Thinking over my courses and proposals of the past, I have arrived at the conviction that Providence has arranged all this. For what I originally sought
would have been, if I had attained it by peaceful means, merely a partial solution which sooner or later would have given rise to new conflict. My only special wish is for an improvement in our relationship with Turkey.”

  Ever since the summer of 1940 there had been a number of diplomatic contretemps between Germany and the Soviet Union. Some had arisen through Moscow’s ruthless attempts to secure her own perimeter against the by now formidable power of the Reich. With this aim the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic countries and parts of Rumania, and tenaciously opposed German efforts to obtain greater influence in the Balkans. Nevertheless, Sir Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador in Moscow, predicted in the spring of 1941 that the Soviet Union would “with absolute certainty” resist all efforts to involve her in the war against Germany unless Hitler himself decided to attack the Soviet Union; but he was afraid that Hitler would not do his enemies this favor.

  And then he did that very thing. It was the last and most serious example of his suicidal impulse to double his stake once the game was going against him. The significant aspect of his present reckoning was that it balanced only on the negative side. If he lost the campaign against the Soviet Union, the war as a whole was lost. But if he won in the East, the whole war was by no means won, however he might delude himself about that.

  But in still another respect Hitler’s decision to attack revealed a significant consistency. The Moscow Pact dated back to what had still been the “political” phase of his life. It had been a tactically motivated act of betrayal of his own ideological principles. Consequently, since he had now gone beyond his political phase, the pact had become an anachronism. “The Pact never was honestly intended,” Hitler now confessed to one of his adjutants. “For the ideological abysses are too deep.” What counted now was the honesty of his radical philosophy.

  Shortly after three o’clock in the morning of June 22, 1941, Mussolini was roused from sleep by a message from Hitler. “At night I don’t even disturb my servants, but the Germans make me jump out of bed without the slightest consideration,” he grumbled. The message began with a reference to “months of anxious pondering” and then informed Mussolini of the impending attack. “Since I have won through to this decision,” Hitler assured him, “I again feel inwardly free. Despite all the sincerity of my efforts to bring about a final détente, collaboration with the Soviet Union has nevertheless often been a heavy burden for me; for somehow it seemed to me a breach with my whole background, my views and my former obligations. I am happy to be rid of these spiritual torments.”28

  The feeling of relief was undoubtedly there but accompanied by a note of anxiety. Granted that the entourage, and especially the top military leaders, expressed extraordinary optimism. “For the German soldier nothing is impossible,” the Wehrmacht communiqué of June 11, 1941, had concluded, summing up the fighting in the Balkans and in North Africa. Only Hitler himself showed signs of depression and nervousness. But he was not the man to be deterred from realizing his life’s dream when only a few weeks’ fighting separated him from it. Then vast spaces in the East would be won, England would bow, and America yield. The world would pay homage to him. The risk increased the allure of the goal. On the night before the assault, in the midst of the bustle of preparations all around him, he said: “I feel as if I am pushing open the door to a dark room never seen before, without knowing what lies behind the door.”29

  The Third World War

  When “Barbarossa” starts, the world will hold its breath and keep still.

  Adolf Hitler

  Before dawn, about 3:15 A.M. on June 22, 1941, Hitler launched the offensive against the Soviet Union with 153 divisions, 600,000 motorized vehicles, 3,580 tanks, 7,184 artillery pieces, and 2,740 airplanes. It was the mightiest military force concentrated on a single theater of war in history. Alongside the German formations there were twelve divisions and ten brigades of Rumanian troops, eighteen Finnish divisions, three Hungarian divisions, and two and one-half Slovak divisions. Later this force was joined by three Italian divisions and the Spanish “Blue Division.” True to the pattern of most of the preceding campaigns, the attack started without a declaration of war. Once again the Luftwaffe took the lead with a massed surprise assault, which at one blow wiped out half of the approximately 10,000 Soviet Russian military planes. And, as had already been done in Poland and in the West, the attackers pushed massed wedges of tanks deep into the enemy territory, then closed the pincers thus formed to yield vast battles of encirclement. In the preceding years Hitler had steadily maintained that he was not planning any “Argonauts’ expedition” to Russia;30 now he set out on one.

  A second wave, following hard upon the military formations, consisted of the notorious Einsatzgruppen: special squads to whom Hitler had issued the assignment—as early as March 3—to exterminate “the Jewish-Bolshevistic intelligentsia” in the field of operations.31 From the outset these commandos gave the conflict its frightful, totally unexampled character. And for all that the campaign was strategically linked with the war as a whole, in its nature and in its morality it signified something else entirely. It was, so to speak, the Third World War.

  At any rate, it dropped out of the framework of the “normal” European war, the rules of which had hitherto governed the conflict, although in Poland there had been glimmerings of a new and more radical practice. But the SS’s reign of terror in the conquered Polish territories had evoked opposition among the local military commanders. It was his experience with this reaction on the part of the regular army that now prompted Hitler to introduce his ideologically motivated extermination campaigns in the very zone of active operations. For after so many complications, detours, and reversed fronts, this war in Russia was in every sense his war. He waged it mercilessly, obsessively, and became increasingly neglectful of all other theaters. He made no tactical concessions. In particular, he abandoned his previous practice of seeking the military decision first, with the aid of seductive slogans of liberation, only to begin the work of enslavement and destruction after the military victory had been won. Here in Russia he was seeking nothing but “final solutions.” On March 30, 1941, he had summoned to the Berlin chancellery nearly 250 high-ranking officers of all branches of the service. He lectured them for two and a half hours on the novel nature of the impending war. Halder’s diary recorded the following statements:

  Our tasks in Russia: smash the armed forces, break up the State…. Struggle of two ideologies. Annihilating verdict upon Bolshevism, is equivalent to asocial criminality. Communism tremendous danger for the future. We must abandon the viewpoint of soldierly comradeship. The Communist is no comrade before and no comrade afterwards. What is involved is a struggle of annihilation….

  The struggle must be waged against the poison of sedition. That is no question of courts-martial. The commanders of the troops must know what is at stake. They must lead the way into the struggle…. Commissars and GPU men are criminals and must be treated as such…. The fight will be very different from the fight in the West. In the East harshness is kindness toward the future.

  The leaders must demand of themselves the sacrifice of overcoming their scruples.32

  Although none of those present took issue with what he was telling them, Hitler distrusted his generals. He thought them biased in favor of the traditional standards of their class and therefore did not content himself with mere slogans calling for harshness. Rather, his whole effort was bent toward abolishing the distinction of his special commandos; he wanted to fuse these elements into a totality that would make criminals of all by having all participate in waging his war of annihilation. In a succession of preparatory directives, administration of the rear areas was detached from the army and assigned to special Reich commissioners. Heinrich Himmler in his capacity of Reichsführer-SS was assigned to take over “special tasks” in the theater of operations. He had at his disposal four Einsatzgruppen (task forces) of security police and SD men, a total strength of 3,000 men, to carry out the tasks “ari
sing from the conflict of two opposed political systems which is to be carried out on a basis of finality.”

  In May, 1941, at a meeting in Pretzsch, Reinhard Heydrich orally gave the leaders of these groups, the order to murder all Jews, “Asiatic inferiors,” Communist functionaries, and gypsies.33 A “Führer’s decree” of the same period made members of the armed forces immune to prosecution for crimes against enemy civilians. Another directive, the so-called Commissar Order of June 6, 1941, specified that the political commissars of the Red Army, being “the authors of barbarously Asiatic methods of fighting… when captured in battle or in resistance are on principle to be disposed of by gunshot immediately.” And a “guideline” of the High Command of the armed forces, which was issued to the more than 3 million soldiers of the Eastern armies immediately before the beginning of the attack, called for “ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevistic agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, Jews, and total elimination of all active and passive resistance.”34 A strident campaign against the “Slavic subhumans” supplemented these measures. It conjured up images of the “Mongol onslaught” and defined Bolshevism as the contemporary form of the Asiatic scourge represented by Attila and Genghis Khan.

  These elements gave the war in the East its unusual dual character. It was undoubtedly an ideological war against Communism, and the offensive was sustained by a crusading mood. But simultaneously, and to a considerably greater degree, it was a colonial war of conquest in the style of the nineteenth century, though directed against one of the old European great powers and aimed at wiping out that Power. Hitler himself exposed the lie of the ideological justifications whose strident propaganda dominated the foreground. In the middle of July, speaking to a group of the topmost leaders, he irritably rejected the formula of a “war of Europe against Bolshevism.” He clarified his view as follows: “Fundamentally, therefore, what matters is conveniently dividing up the gigantic cake so that we can first control it, secondly administer it, and thirdly exploit it.” But such annexation plans were to be kept secret for the present. “Nevertheless we can and will carry out all necessary measures—shooting, resettlement, and so on.”35