Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Otherwise that meeting was chiefly intended as a reply to the enemy alliance, whose outlines could already be discerned. Some two weeks before, Roosevelt and Churchill, after meeting off the coast of Newfoundland, had formulated their war aims in the Atlantic Charter. The Axis partners now countered with Hitler’s slogans of a “New Order for Europe” and “European solidarity.” Taking up the watchword of a “Pan-European crusade against Bolshevism,” they tried to rouse that type of internationalism (an unexamined inner contradiction) that was peculiar to all the Fascist movements. But in this matter, too, the consequences of Hitler’s renunciation of politics soon made themselves felt. It was exactly as if he had not been the man who had used the principle of tactical duality to supreme advantage—that form of courtship which inextricably combined intimidation with promises. For now he seemed to count only the principle of crude domination. “If I conquer a free country only to give it back its freedom, what’s the point?” he asked early in 1942. “One who has spilled blood has the right to exercise rule.” And he said he could only smile when “the blabbermouths claim that union can be brought about by talking.

  … Union can only be created and preserved by force.” Even later, under the impact of continual defeats, he rejected all the proposals by members of his entourage that would have relaxed the stupid pattern of crushing the rest of Europe and instituted relations more akin to partnerships. It drove him “mad,” he declared, when people kept coming at him all the time about the alleged honor of these “stinking little countries” that existed only because “a few European powers could not agree on devouring them.” Nowadays all he could think of was the stark and uninspired concept of mustering all one’s force and stubbornly holding out.

  The same tendency, sharpened by moods of panic, meanwhile led at the front to his first serious disagreement with the generals. As long as the German armies had been successful, differences of opinions could be covered over and recurrent mistrust drowned out in ringing toasts to victory. But when the tide began to turn, the long repressed resentment came to the fore with redoubled force. Hitler now intervened more and more frequently in operations; he issued direct instructions to army groups and sector staffs, and quite often even interfered in the tactical decisions on the divisional and regimental levels. The commander in chief of the army was “hardly more than a letter-carrier,” Halder noted on December 7, 1941. Twelve days later, in conjunction with the disputes over the “hold-the-line” order, Brauchitsch was allowed to resign—in disfavor. In keeping with the prime solution he had found for all previous crises in the leadership, Hitler himself assumed the role of commander in chief of the army. It was only one more proof of the totally chaotic organization on all planes that he thus became his own subordinate twice over. For, in 1934, after Hindenburg’s death, he had assumed the (predominantly ceremonial) office of supreme commander of the armed forces. And, in 1938, after Blomberg’s resignation, he had taken over the (actual) High Command of the armed forces. Now he justified his decision in a remark that, along with expressing his deep distrust of the army people, announced his intention to heighten the role of ideology: “Anybody can handle operational leadership—that’s easy,” he declared. “The task of the commander in chief of the army is to give the army National Socialist training. I know no general of the army who could perform this task the way I would have it. Therefore I have decided to take over the command of the army myself.”

  Along with von Brauchitsch, the commander in chief of Army Group Center, von Bock, was relieved and replaced by Field Marshal von Kluge; von Rundstedt, commander in chief of Army Group South, was replaced by Field Marshal von Reichenau. General Guderian was relieved of his command for infractions of the “hold-the-line” order; General Hoepner was actually cashiered and General von Sponeck condemned to death. Field Marshal von Leeb, commander in chief of Army Group North, voluntarily resigned. Many other generals and divisional commanders were recalled. The “expressions of contempt” Hitler had applied to von Brauchitsch since the end of 1941 now represented his opinion of the high-ranking officers as a whole: “A vain, cowardly scoundrel—who has completely ruined the whole campaign plan in the East by his continual interference and his continual disobedience.” Half a year earlier, in the jubilant days of the Battle of Smolensk, he had said that he had “marshals of historic stature and a unique corps of officers.”44

  During the early months of 1942 the grim defensive battles on all sectors of the front continued. Again and again war diaries note “undesirable developments,” “awful mess,” “day of savage fighting,” “deep penetrations,” or “dramatic scene with the Führer.” At the end of February Moscow was once again more than sixty-two miles from the front. At this time total German casualties came to something over 1 million, or 31.4 per cent of the Eastern army. The heavy fighting did not ebb until the spring, with the beginning of the thaw; by then both sides were exhausted. Visibly scarred by what had happened, Hitler admitted to his table companions that the winter disaster had virtually stunned him for a moment; no one could imagine what energy these three months had cost him and what a terrible toll they had taken of his nerves. Goebbels, visiting him at the Führer’s headquarters, was shocked by his appearance. He found him “very much aged”; he did not recall ever having seen him “so serious and so subdued.” Hitler complained of spells of dizziness and declared that the mere sight of snow gave him physical pain. When he went to Berchtesgaden for a few days at the end of April and was caught by a belated snowstorm there, he hurriedly departed again. “It’s a kind of flight from the snow,” Goebbels noted.

  But when “this winter of our discontent,” as Guderian called it, was over and the German advance began moving once more with the coming of spring, Hitler regained his confidence. Sometimes, in moods of elation, he would even grumble that fate was letting him wage war only against second-class enemies. But his self-confidence was brittle and his nerves unstable. One of Chief of Staff von Halder’s diary entries makes that clear: “His underestimation of the enemy potentialities, always his shortcoming, is now gradually assuming grotesque forms. There is no longer any question of serious work. Morbid reaction to momentary impressions and complete incomprehension of the apparatus of leadership and its possibilities are characteristic of this so-called ‘leadership.’ ”

  From the plan of operations for the summer of 1942 it might appear that Hitler had learned from the experiences of the preceding year. Instead of being distributed among three spearheads as heretofore, all offensive forces were to be massed in the south in order “finally to annihilate what vital defensive strength the Soviets have left and to remove from their grasp as far as possible the principal sources of energy for their war economy.” It was also planned to cease operations in good time, prepare winter quarters, and, if need be, build a defensive line corresponding to the west wall (Ost-wall), which in itself would allow Germany to wage a hundred years’ war. “But in that case it would no longer cause us any special concern.”45

  But when the German troops reached the Don, during the second half of July, 1942, and had not yet been able to throw the projected pincers around the enemy forces, Hitler once more fell victim to his impatience and his nerves and forgot all the lessons of the past summer. On July 23 he gave orders to divide the offensive into two simultaneous, separating operations. Army Group B was to advance through Stalingrad to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Army Group A was to annihilate the enemy armies near Rostov, then reach the eastern coast of the Black Sea and, march toward Baku. The forces that at the beginning of the offensive had occupied a front of about 500 miles would, at the end of the operations, have to cover a line more than 2,500 miles long against an enemy whom they had been unable to engage in battle, let alone defeat.

  Hitler’s euphoric judgment of what the German army could do was presumably based on the illusory look of the map. In the late summer of 1942 his power had reached the point of its greatest extension. German troops stood on the North Cape and alo
ng the Atlantic Coast, in Finland, and throughout the Balkans. In North Africa General Rommel, whom the Allies had thought already beaten, had with inferior forces thrown the British back across the Egyptian border as far as El Alamein. In the East Wehrmacht soldiers crossed the border into Asia at the end of July. In the south they reached the burning, shattered refineries of Maikop at the beginning of August. But Hitler obtained hardly any of the oil that had served, during the cruel struggles of the preceding weeks, as the reason for the offensive. On August 21 German soldiers raised the swastika flag on the Elbrus, the highest mountain in the Caucasus. Two days later the Sixth Army reached the Volga at Stalingrad.

  But appearances were misleading. For the rapidly spreading war on three continents, on the seas and in the air, the men, the armaments, the transport, the raw materials and the leadership were lacking. By the time Hitler reached his zenith, he had long been a defeated man. The abrupt succession of crises and setbacks that now descended, their effects worsened by his rigidity, revealed the unreal nature of this enormously expanded power.

  The first symptoms of crisis appeared in the East. Since the beginning of the 1942 summer offensive Hitler had transferred his headquarters from Rastenburg to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine; and here, in the daily strategy conferences, he defended his decision to conquer both the Caucasus and Stalingrad. His defense grew increasingly vehement, although possession of the city on the Volga had meanwhile become virtually meaningless so long as the German armies could check traffic on the river. On August 21 there was an angry dispute when Halder argued that German effective strength was not sufficient for two such wearing offensives. The chief of staff implied that Hitler’s military decisions ignored the limits of what was possible and, as he later put it, gave “full power to wishful thinking.” When in the course of the argument he pointed out that the Russians were producing 1,200 tanks monthly, Hitler, almost beside himself, forbade him to utter “such idiotic nonsense.”46

  Approximately two weeks later the slowing of the advance on the Caucasus front gave rise to another clash in the Führer’s headquarters. This time the submissive General Jodi dared to defend Field Marshal List, commander of Army Group A. Moreover, Jodi quoted Hitler’s own words to prove that List was only obeying the instructions he had received. In a rage, Hitler broke off the conversation. On September 9 he demanded that the field marshal resign, and that same evening he himself took over the command of Army Group A. From this point on he suspended almost all contact with the generals attached to the Führer’s headquarters. For several months he even refused to shake hands with Jodi; he avoided the conference room. Conferences took place in very restricted groups, the atmosphere permanently icy, in his own small blockhouse, and precise minutes were taken. Hitler left his blockhouse only after dark, and by concealed paths. Henceforth he also took his meals alone, only his Alsatian dog keeping him company; he rarely asked visitors to join him. Thus the evening gathering at table dropped out of his life, and with it ended all that petty bourgeois sociability and cozy social intercourse in the Führer’s headquarters. At the end of September Hitler finally relieved Halder of his duties also. For some time he had been impressed by the reports from General Zeitzler, chief of staff to the commander in chief, West. They were distinguished by a wealth of tactical ideas and an optimistic attitude. Hitler said he now wanted “a man like this Zeitzler” at his side, and he appointed him the new army chief of staff.

  Meanwhile, with increasing casualties, more and more units of the Sixth Army had reached Stalingrad and occupied positions in the north and the south of the city. To all appearances the Russians were determined this time not to evade but to give battle. An order of the day from Stalin had fallen into German hands. In it he informed his people in the tone of a concerned father of his country that from now on the Soviet Union could no longer surrender territory. Every foot of soil must be defended to the utmost. As though he felt personally challenged by this order, Hitler now demanded, against the advice both of Zeitzler and of General Paulus, the commander of the Sixth Army, the capture of Stalingrad. The city became a prestige item, its capture “urgently necessary for psychological reasons,” as Hitler declared on October 2. A week later he added that Communism must be “deprived of its shrine.” The bloody struggle for houses, residential areas, and factories which then began caused high casualties on both sides. Yet everyone momentarily expected news of the fall of Stalingrad.

  Since the winter disaster, when the specter of defeat had first appeared to him, Hitler had been giving all his energy to the Russian campaign. It became more and more obvious that he was neglecting all the other theaters of war. He still preferred thinking in terms of vast spans of time and distances, in eons and continents; but North Africa, for example, was too remote for him. In any case, he never adequately recognized the strategic importance of the Mediterranean area and thus once again demonstrated how nonpolitical and abstract, how essentially “literary” his thinking was. Lacking supplies and reserves, the Afrika Korps wasted its offensive strength. Submarine warfare, too, suffered from Hitler’s bias. Up to the end of 1941 no more than sixty U-boats were available for assignment. A year later the complement of approximately one hundred units, which had been called for at the beginning of the war, was at last attained. But by then the enemy, having felt the brunt of the U-boat warfare, had devised defensive measures that swung the balance the other way.

  In the air war, too, the whole picture now changed. At the beginning of January, 1941, the British cabinet had issued a strategic plan for the air war that aimed at eliminating Germany’s synthetic fuel industry in a series of purposeful air raids and thus, by “paralyzing vital segments of industry” numb the entire war-making ability of the Reich.47 But the concept, which undoubtedly would have given the events of the war a very different course if it had been implemented immediately, was not carried out until more than three years later. In the meantime, other views prevailed, principally the idea of area bombing, terror bombing of the civilian population. The new phase was initiated on the night of March 28, 1942, with a major raid by the Royal Air Force on Lübeck. The historic city of patricians “burned like kindling,” according to the official report. In response Hitler called in two bomber groups of approximately one hundred planes from Sicily. In the following weeks they carried out reprisal attacks, so-called Baedeker raids, against the artistic treasures of old English cities. The vast proportional difference in strength that had meanwhile developed became apparent when the British on May 30, 1942, responded with the first 1,000-bomber raid of the war. During the second half of the year the Americans joined them, and from 1943 on, Germany was exposed to an incessant air offensive, “round-the-clock” bombing. Taking account of the changed situation, Churchill declared in a speech in London’s Mansion House: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”48

  Events on the fronts confirmed this dictum. On November 2 General Montgomery, after preparatory massed artillery fire lasting for ten days, broke through the German-Italian positions at El Alamein with overwhelmingly superior forces. Shortly afterward, in the early morning hours of November 8, British and American troops landed on the coasts of Morocco and Algeria and occupied French North Africa as far as the Tunisian border. Some ten days later, on November 19, two Soviet army groups launched—in a raging snowstorm—the counteroffensive at Stalingrad. After successfully breaking through the Rumanian sector of the front they encircled some 220,000 men with 100 tanks, 1,800 guns and 10,000 vehicles between the Volga and the Don. When General Paulus reported the encirclement, Hitler ordered him to move his headquarters into the city and form a defense perimeter, a so-called hedgehog position. Only a few days before, Hitler had telegraphed to Rommel, in response to his request for permission to retreat: “In your present situation there can be no other thought but to persevere, to yield not a step, and to throw into the battle every weapon and every soldier that can still be freed for ser
vice…. It would not be the first time in history that a stronger will triumphed over the enemy’s stronger battalions. But you can show your troops no other way but the one that leads to victory or to death.”

  The three November offensives of 1942 marked the turning point of the war. The initiative had finally passed to the opposite side. As if he wanted one more stab at playing generalissimo, Hitler on November 11 ordered his troops to march into the unoccupied part of France. And in his annual speech delivered in commemoration of the putsch of November, 1923, he struck one of those rigid poses whose basis can only be the willingness to let the worst happen. “There will no longer be any peace offers coming from us,” he cried. In contrast to imperial Germany, he continued, there now stood at the head of the Reich a man who “has always known nothing but struggle and with it only one principle: Strike, strike, and strike again!”

  In me they… are facing an opponent who does not even think of the word capitulate. It was always my habit, even as a boy—perhaps it was naughtiness then, but on the whole it must have been a virtue after all—to have the last word. And let all our enemies take note: The Germany of the past laid down its arms before the clock struck twelve. I make it a principle not to stop until the clock strikes thirteen!49