by Ian Kershaw
Ultimately, these arguments were seen by the other members of the War Cabinet, apart from Halifax, to be convincing. And even Halifax concurred in the wording of the telegram sent on the evening of 28 May to Reynaud, which stated the position Churchill had set out, though the final wording was shaped largely by Chamberlain, with assistance from the Foreign Secretary himself.
Three days, from Halifax’s meeting in the late afternoon of the 25th to the agreement reached on the telegram to Reynaud on the evening of the 28th, were needed to arrive at the decision. It was a collective agreement, with Halifax finally bowing to the wishes of the other members of the War Cabinet and in so doing indicating his own binding commitment to the decision (a point of no small importance in demonstrating the government’s unity to Parliament and to the country). It had been reached by reasoned discussion among five ministers (occasionally with a sixth, Sinclair, joining the deliberations). Of these, Churchill held primacy, though not outright dominance. He won his case by reason, not power and browbeating. The military case for reasoned hope, advanced by the chiefs of staff, had also contributed to the growing mood of resilience. Churchill had instinctive backing from Attlee and Greenwood. But the member of the War Cabinet whose support was most valuable was Chamberlain, who, as always, dissected all points of the argument with precision, before his initial ambivalence gave way to firm backing for the Prime Minister’s stance. By this time, Halifax had little option (beyond a resignation which would have been as damaging as it was futile, and was never more than a fleeting thought) but to yield to the position adopted by all his colleagues.
Striking about the way the decision was reached was how few individuals were involved in it, and how limited, in a parliamentary democracy, was the number of those who had any inkling of what was at stake. Only the small circle of the War Cabinet knew. Beyond those few ministers, as good as nothing filtered out. The members of the wider Cabinet remained largely in the dark. Only the highest level of officialdom within the Cabinet and Foreign Office was aware of what was happening. The general public had, of course, no notion of the momentous decision facing the War Cabinet, and, in fact, only gradually grasped the enormity of what was taking place so close to home, on the other side of the English Channel, a situation scarcely imaginable in today’s society of global television and near-instant coverage of wars taking place thousands of miles away.
History, too, cast a veil over what had taken place. Neither Churchill nor Halifax enlightened the readers of their postwar memoirs about the short-lived proposal to use Italian mediation to come to terms with Hitler. Churchill had, in fact, included in a draft of his war memoirs a reference to Halifax’s willingness to placate a ‘dangerous enemy’, mentioning his meeting with Bastianini, but bowed to encouragement that he should use discretion, and omitted it from the published version.134 Only when the public records were released, thirty years after the events, did it become fully apparent how vital the deliberations of those May days of 1940 had been to Britain’s future.135
What would have happened had Halifax’s alternative strategy been adopted naturally remains in the realm of speculation and conjecture. We have already seen something of what Churchill and the other members of the War Cabinet thought it would imply, however, and we know enough of German plans (to be explored in the next chapter) to have an idea what might have awaited Britain had she sued for peace.136
A first German prerequisite of any negotiations would surely have been a change of government in London. Churchill, long seen as the arch-exponent of an anti-German, warmongering faction (which Nazi warped thinking associated with Jewish influence), and his supporters would have been forced out of office. Germany would have insisted upon a government more attuned to the interests of the Reich, and more prepared to make significant concessions in the interests of European peace than ever could have been expected under Churchill’s leadership. Churchill himself imagined, as we have seen, that the Germans would have insisted upon a puppet government led by Oswald Mosley, the British Fascist leader.137 More probable would have been an attempt to install as the head of a new administration, dependent on the favour of Berlin, David Lloyd George, Britain’s Prime Minister during the First World War, admired by Hitler and a great admirer, in turn, of the German dictator when he had met him at Berchtesgaden in 1936.
Churchill had, in fact, wanted Lloyd George in his Cabinet and had asked him on 13 May to become Minister of Agriculture. Lloyd George declined, prompted by his unwillingness to serve with Chamberlain. He was by this time in his late seventies. He thought that Britain could not win the war, and would have to seek a negotiated settlement at some point.138 But he still had great stature, and remained influential, abroad as well as in Britain. With the situation looking so bleak towards the end of May, Churchill spoke to Chamberlain about including Lloyd George in the government. Chamberlain replied frankly. He did not trust Lloyd George, and could not work with him. Churchill, he said, would have to choose between them. The Prime Minister immediately backed down, adamant that he wanted Chamberlain to stay. They were serving together and ‘would go down together’, Churchill remarked, somewhat elliptically. He himself did not know Lloyd George’s mind, he stated, or whether he would prove defeatist.139 This did not prevent him approaching Lloyd George on a number of further occasions, though all attempts to bring him into the Cabinet foundered on the mutually bitter enmity between him and Chamberlain.
Lloyd George was no outright defeatist. In the summer of 1940 he took the view that peace terms should not be undertaken immediately, but only once Britain had fended off the German onslaught and could therefore bargain from a better position. But Churchill and Chamberlain were right not to trust him. In autumn 1940 Lloyd George envisaged himself as a peace-making Prime Minister, once Britain’s survival was assured but it had been acknowledged that total victory against Germany was impossible. He would ‘wait until Winston is bust’, he told his secretary in October 1940.140 Before then, in June and July, as stories of peace-feelers became practically a daily occurrence, rumours had reached Berlin that Lloyd George would soon replace Churchill as Prime Minister.141 He would most probably have been acceptable to Hitler as the British equivalent of Marshal Philippe Pétain at the head of a Vichy-style government, conceivably under a restored King Edward VIII.142
Once embarked upon the ‘slippery slope’ of negotiations, as Churchill had put it, such a government would have been compelled from its position of weakness to concede territory and armaments to Germany. Though Hitler later on numerous occasions stated that he had wanted to preserve the British Empire, it is unthinkable that this meant preserving it in a position of any independent power. As we shall see in the next chapter, there would certainly have been heavy pressure coming from some parts of his regime, especially from the German navy, to make serious territorial gains at the expense of Britain, as well as ending once and for all any military threat from the Royal Navy.
Of course, an exiled British government would probably have continued the struggle from some part of the Dominions. It might also have been possible to get the fleet out and to the security of friendly harbours abroad. But it is hard to see how Britain could have emerged from any peace dealings to which it had committed itself in the late spring or summer of 1940 in anything other than a perilously enfeebled position.
With Britain supportive of Germany, or at least benevolently neutral towards the Reich, Roosevelt’s leanings towards providing material and military backing would have been stopped in their tracks. As it was, the case for supporting Britain was not easy to articulate for a public opinion still extremely cautious about overseas interventionism even when it was not outrightly isolationist. And with western Europe secured and any threat from the United States a distant one, Hitler would have been able to turn his full attention to fighting the war for ‘living space’ against the Soviet Union, but now with British backing.
The decision taken in late May 1940 not to seek peace terms had, then, the most profou
nd implications, and not just for Britain. A negotiated settlement to Germany’s advantage with a severely weakened Britain, followed or accompanied by the crushing military defeat of France, would have left Hitler victorious in the whole of western Europe. The British decision to fight on meant that Hitler was unable to end the war in the west. This at once greatly magnified the enormous gamble he had taken. He would now have to contemplate attacking the Soviet Union, the ideological arch-enemy, in the war that he had always intended to fight for ‘living space’ and to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, with the war in the west unfinished. And behind Britain stood the might of the United States, with the likelihood that American aid for the British war effort would be increasingly forthcoming. As Hitler saw it, time was not on Germany’s side. Germany had to remove Britain from the war before the Americans were ready and willing to enter it. If this were to take place before Germany had the complete mastery of Europe and all the Continent’s material resources at its disposal, the chances of final victory would be seriously diminished and, in the long run, perhaps altogether undermined. The British decision to stay in the war, therefore, imposed a new sense of urgency on Hitler. If the British government would not come to terms, he saw only two options: impose military defeat on Britain; or force her to acknowledge German supremacy on the Continent through defeating the Soviet Union in a rapid campaign, with the ultimate effect of keeping the Americans out of the war.
Hitler was unaware of the crucial deliberations of the British War Cabinet in the last week of May. Only after the British government’s swift rejection of his final, and lukewarm, ‘peace-offer’ in his Reichstag speech of 19 July, following his triumph over the French, was it plain that Britain was categorically set on rejecting all possibility of a negotiated end to the war. By then, with the British army safely brought back from Dunkirk, tentative steps were being taken in London and Washington to engineer the vital American aid. Hitler had to face his own critical decision. It was not long in coming.
2
Berlin, Summer and Autumn 1940
Hitler Decides to Attack the Soviet Union
The Führer is greatly puzzled by Britain’s persisting unwillingness to make peace. He sees the answer (as we do) in Britain’s hope on Russia, and therefore counts on having to compel her by main force to agree to peace.
Franz Halder, chief of the army General Staff,
diary entry for 13 July 1940
‘With Russia smashed, Britain’s last hope would be shattered. Germany then will be master of Europe and the Balkans. Decision: Russia’s destruction must therefore be made a part of this struggle. Spring 1941…If we start in May 1941, we would have five months to finish the job.’1 With these astonishing sentences, Adolf Hitler announced to his generals, meeting on 31 July 1940 at his Alpine retreat, the Berghof, in the mountains high above Berchtesgaden, his most fateful choice of the Second World War. It ushered in the bloodiest conflict in history, a titanic struggle in eastern Europe that would cost the lives of over thirty million Soviet and German citizens and leave vast areas of unprecedented destruction, ending nearly four years later with the German dictator’s suicide in the Berlin bunker and the Soviet Union dominant over half of the European continent for the following four and a half decades.
The magnitude of what Hitler was proposing appears, in the light of what happened, sheer madness. Napoleon had once tried it, and the campaign in 1812 had brought an ignominious end to the grande armée and to the Emperor’s own imperial dreams. In Hitler’s case, the gamble had even more catastrophic consequences. The decision looks like a death-wish for himself and his nation. Why, then, did he take it? Was it purely the delusory sense of infallibility in military judgement that the extraordinary triumph in the defeat of France had created, or perhaps just magnified? Was it the logical culmination of a wholly illogical ideology, an irrational lunacy aimed at the destruction of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’? If the decision was madness, why did the leaders of the armed forces go along with it? Was this simply an instance of the dictator imposing his own warped views on an unwilling following? Were other options available, only to be peremptorily rejected? Or, as his opening words suggested, did strategic imperatives lie behind the strange decision, imperatives that left Hitler less free in his choice than might at first appear to have been the case?
Hitler’s road to war has been exhaustively explored. But before we try to find some answers to the questions just posed, we need briefly to remind ourselves of some salient points in the prehistory of the fateful decision to attack the Soviet Union.
I
June 1941 was not the first time that German troops had invaded Russian soil or occupied huge tracts of eastern Europe. This had already happened during the First World War. In the latter half of 1915 the German army had overrun the parts of Poland ruled by Russia and occupied enormous swathes of territory along the Baltic coast. Two years later, in further advances, the Germans moved into Belorussia and the Ukraine.2 The harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, forced on the new Bolshevik regime on 3 March 1918, conceded German influence over Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belorussia and the Ukraine.3 It was a treaty that Hitler praised for providing the ‘land and soil’ needed to sustain the German people.4 And when, many years later, he outlined to his military leaders his political objectives on invading the Soviet Union–the establishment of buffer states in the Ukraine, the Baltic, Finland and White Russia (Belorussia)–they bore a distinct resemblance to the terms of Brest-Litovsk.5
The images the Germans gleaned of the country they were occupying in 1918 had a lasting impact, helping to shape the mentalities that fed into the second, far more vicious occupation a generation later. ‘Deepest Russia, without a glimmer of Central European Kultur’, one officer noted. ‘Asia, steppe, swamps, claustrophobic underworld, and a godforsaken wasteland of slime.’6 Led by such impressions, the occupiers intended to create a German military state in the Baltic region to impose order and introduce Kultur. The key figure in the utopian planning of the military state was General Erich Ludendorff, the most dynamic of the German army leaders in the second half of the war.7 In the early 1920s he was to come into close contact with Hitler, and to join him in the fiasco of the attempted beerhall putsch in November 1923.
In all probability, Ludendorff was among those who exercised some influence upon Hitler’s changing views on Russia in the early 1920s. It was during this time that the early, conventional Pan-German focus of Hitler’s ideas on foreign policy–with a main emphasis on restoring Germany’s 1914 borders, recovering the lost colonies and eventual revenge against the French and British victors of the war responsible for the hated Treaty of Versailles–gradually gave way to a new concentration on eastward expansion to gain territory at the expense of Russia, with the corollary of a policy of friendship towards Britain. In his first known statement of this view, in December 1922, Hitler stated: ‘the destruction of Russia with the help of England would have to be attempted. Russia would give Germany sufficient land for German settlers and a wide field of activity for German industry.’8 By 1924 the doctrine was fixed in Hitler’s mind, and he came to state it unequivocally towards the end of the second volume of his treatise, Mein Kampf, published in 1926: ‘We National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our prewar period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze towards the land in the east…If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.’9 Once formed, this doctrine of ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) remained unchanged, and was crucial to Hitler’s ‘world-view’ down to the Berlin bunker.
It was not an original idea. In fact, it had been a common strand of nationalist-imperialist thinking since the 1890s and had later been ‘intellectualized’ by influential geopolitical theorists, most notably Karl Haushofer, a Munich professor who had taught Hitler’s private secretary, Rudolf Hess. The ide
a drew on crude economics: that only increased territory for settlement allowed for the population growth essential to the strength and vitality of a great power. Germany’s borders were seen as too confined to allow for the necessary population expansion. Therefore, she needed to gain new territory. And whereas the British Empire, whose power Hitler admired and envied, had been built upon territory gained by overseas conquest and colonial exploitation, Germany’s had to be found closer to home, in eastern Europe.
Since no country, state or people would be prepared to give up its land, war for territorial gain was intrinsic to the Lebensraum idea. In this it was not just imperialist, but implicitly social Darwinist and racist, believing that the strong had the right to survive, while the weak deservedly went to the wall, and that the more vital, creative races should properly triumph over inferiors. Hitler himself, however, added a further vital racial component to it: antisemitism. Again, there was nothing original in Hitler’s antisemitic views, however vicious. He shared them with countless others–though the depth of his anti-Jewish paranoia was certainly unusual. But there was an originality in the way in which Hitler combined his pathological antisemitism with the notion of Lebensraum–the twin components of his singular world-view.10 This was by regarding Bolshevism as Jewish rule, a view he had formed by 1920, probably under the influence of his publicist associate Alfred Rosenberg, who hailed from the Baltic, and the rabid antisemitic and anti-Bolshevik tirades of Russian exiles which fed into the German right-wing press.11 In the passage already quoted, Germany’s need for land in the east was directly linked to the eradication of Jewish rule there. ‘For centuries,’ wrote Hitler, ‘Russia drew nourishment from [the] Germanic nucleus of its upper leading strata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally eliminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew…He himself is no element of organization, but a ferment of decomposition. The giant empire in the east is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.’12 ‘Living space’ in Russia would, in other words, be synonymous with the destruction of the power of Jewry there.
