The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  Believe me, gentlemen, I feel a deep disgust for this type of unscrupulous politician who wrecks whole nations. It almost causes me pain to think that I should have been selected by fate to deal the final blow to the structure which these men have already set tottering … Mr. Churchill … no doubt will already be in Canada, where the money and children of those principally interested in the war have already been sent. For millions of other people, however, great suffering will begin. Mr. Churchill ought perhaps, for once, to believe me when I prophesy that a great Empire will be destroyed—an Empire which it was never my intention to destroy or even to harm …

  Having thus tilted at the dogged Prime Minister and attempted to detach the British people from him, Hitler came to the point of his lengthy speech.

  In this hour I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Great Britain as much as elsewhere. I consider myself in a position to make this appeal since I am not the vanquished begging favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason.

  I can see no reason why this war must go on.*

  He was not more specific than that. He made no concrete suggestions for peace terms, no mention of what was to happen to the hundred million people now under the Nazi yoke in the conquered countries. But there were few if any in the Reichstag that evening who believed that it was necessary at this stage to go into the details. I mingled with a good many officials and officers at the close of the session and not one of them had the slightest doubt, as they said, that the British would accept what they really believed was a very generous and even magnanimous offer from the Fuehrer. They were not for long to be deceived.

  I drove directly to the Rundfunk to make a broadcast report of the speech to the United States. I had hardly arrived at Broadcasting House when I picked up a BBC broadcast in German from London. It was giving the British answer to Hitler already—within the hour. It was a determined No!*

  Junior officers from the High Command and officials from various ministries were sitting around the room listening with rapt attention. Their faces fell. They could not believe their ears. “Can you make it out?” one of them shouted to me. He seemed dazed. “Can you understand those British fools?” he continued to bellow. “To turn down peace now? They’re crazy!”

  The same evening Ciano† heard the reaction to the crazy English on a much higher level in Berlin than mine. “Late in the evening,” he noted in his diary, “when the first cold English reactions to the speech arrive, a sense of ill-concealed disappointment spreads among the Germans.” The effect on Mussolini, according to Ciano, was just the opposite.

  He … defines it “a much too cunning speech.” He fears that the English may find in it a pretext to begin negotiations. That would be sad for Mussolini, because now more than ever he wants war.44

  The Duce, as Churchill later remarked, “need not have fretted himself. He was not to be denied all the war he wanted.”45

  “As a maneuver calculated to rally the German people for the fight against Britain,” I wrote in my diary that night, “Hitler’s speech was a masterpiece. For the German people will now say: ‘Hitler offers England peace, and no strings attached. He says he sees no reason why this war should go on. If it does, it’s England’s fault.’”

  And was that not the principal reason for giving it, three days after he had issued Directive No. 16 to prepare the invasion of Britain? He admitted as much—beforehand—to two Italian confidants, Alfieri and Ciano. On July 1 he had told the ambassador:

  … It was always a good tactic to make the enemy responsible in the eyes of public opinion in Germany and abroad for the future course of events. This strengthened one’s own morale and weakened that of the enemy. An operation such as the one Germany was planning would be very bloody … Therefore one must convince public opinion that everything had first been done to avoid this horror …

  In his speech of October 6 [when he had offered peace to the West at the conclusion of the Polish campaign—W.L.S.] he had likewise been guided by the thought of making the opposing side responsible for all subsequent developments. He had thereby won the war, as it were, before it had really started. Now again he intended for psychological reasons to buttress morale, so to speak, for the action about to be taken.46

  A week later, on July 8, Hitler confided to Ciano that

  he would stage another demonstration so that in case the war should continue—which he thought was the only real possibility that came into question—he might achieve a psychological effect among the English people … Perhaps it would be possible by a skillful appeal to the English people to isolate the English Government still further in England.47

  It did not prove possible. The speech of July 19 worked with the German people, but not with the British. On July 22 Lord Halifax in a broadcast made the rejection of Hitler’s peace offer official. Though it had been expected, it somehow jolted the Wilhelmstrasse, where I found many angry faces that afternoon. “Lord Halifax,” the official government spokesman told us, “has refused to accept the peace offer of the Fuehrer. Gentlemen, there will be war!”

  It was easier said than done. In truth neither Hitler, the High Command nor the general staffs of the Army, Navy and Air Force had ever seriously considered how a war with Great Britain could be fought and won. Now in the midsummer of 1940 they did not know what to do with their glittering success; they had no plans and scarcely any will for exploiting the greatest military victories in the history of their soldiering nation. This is one of the great paradoxes of the Third Reich. At the very moment when Hitler stood at the zenith of his military power, with most of the European Continent at his feet, his victorious armies stretched from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from the Atlantic to beyond the Vistula, rested now and ready for further action, he had no idea how to go on and bring the war to a victorious conclusion. Nor had his generals, twelve of whom now bandied field marshals’ batons.

  There is, of course, a reason for this, although it was not clear to us at the time. The Germans, despite their vaunted military talents, lacked any grand strategic concept. Their horizons were limited—they had always been limited—to land warfare against the neighboring nations on the European Continent. Hitler himself had a horror of the sea* and his great captains almost a total ignorance of it. They were land-minded, not sea-minded. And though their armies could have crushed in a week the feeble land forces of Britain if they had only been able to come to grips with them, even the narrow waters of the Dover Straits which separated the two—so narrow that you can see across to the opposite shore—loomed in their minds, as the splendid summer began to wane, as an obstacle they knew not how to overcome.

  There was of course another alternative open to the Germans. They might bring Britain down by striking across the Mediterranean with their Italian ally, taking Gibraltar at its western opening and in the east driving on from Italy’s bases in North Africa through Egypt and over the canal to Iran, severing one of the Empire’s main life lines. But this necessitated vast operations overseas at distances far from home bases, and in 1940 it seemed beyond the scope of the German imagination.

  Thus at the height of dizzy success Hitler and his captains hesitated. They had not thought out the next step and how it was to be carried through. This fateful neglect would prove to be one of the great turning points of the war and indeed of the short life of the Third Reich and of the meteoric career of Adolf Hitler. Failure, after so many stupendous victories, was now to set in. But this, to be sure, could not be foreseen as beleaguered Britain, now holding out alone, girded herself with what small means she had for the German onslaught at the summer’s end.

  * It was first reported and long believed that from 25,000 to 30,000 Dutch were killed, and this is the figure given in the 1953 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However, at Nuremberg the Dutch government gave the figure as 814 killed.8

  * There were no criminal convictions at Nuremberg for the bombing of Rotterdam.r />
  * The two armored corps of Reinhardt and Guderian made up General Ewald von Kleist’s panzer group, which consisted of five tank divisions and three motorized infantry divisions.

  * After the war Gamelin stated that his reply was not “There is none,” but “There is no longer any.” (L’Aurore, Paris, November 21, 1949.)

  * From, among others, General Sir Alan Brooke, who commanded the British IInd Corps and later became Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Stoff. See Sir Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide, based on Alanbrooke’s diaries.

  * This fact, established from the records of Rundstedt’s own headquarters, did not prevent the General from making several statements after the war which put the blame entirely on Hitler. “If I had had my way,” he told Major Milton Shulman, a Canadian intelligence officer, “the English would not have got off so lightly at Dunkirk. But my hands were tied by direct orders from Hitler himself. While the English were clambering into the ships off the beaches, I was kept uselessly outside the port unable to move … I sat outside the town, watching the English escape, while my tanks and infantry were prohibited from moving. This incredible blunder was due to Hitler’s personal idea of generalship.” (Shulman, Defeat in the West, pp. 42–43.)

  To a commission of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg on June 20, 1946 (mimeographed transcript, p. 1490), Rundstedt added: “That was a very big mistake of the Commander … How angry we leaders were at that time is indescribable.” Rundstedt made similar declarations to Liddell Hart (The German Generals Talk, pp. 112–13) and to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in the trial of United States v. Leeb (pp. 3350–53, 3931–32, of the mimeographed transcript).

  Telford Taylor in The March of Conquest and Major L. F. Ellis in The War in France and Flanders, 1939–40 have analyzed the German Army records of the incident and drawn conclusions that somewhat differ. Ellis’ book is the official British account of the campaign and contains both British and German documents. Taylor, who spent four years as an American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, is an authority on the German documents.

  * A good many of the exhausted Tommies on the beaches, who underwent severe bombings, were not aware of this, since the air clashes were often above the clouds or some distance away. They knew only that they had been bombed and strafed all the way back from eastern Belgium to Dunkirk, and they felt their Air Force had let them down. When they reached the home ports some of them insulted men in the blue R.A.F. uniforms. Churchill was much aggrieved at this and went out of his way to put them right when he spoke in the House on June 4. The deliverance at Dunkirk, he said, “was gained by the Air Force.”

  * On this day, June 17, 1940, the exiled Kaiser sent from Doorn, in occupied Holland, a telegram of congratulations to Hitler, whom he had for so long scorned as a vulgar upstart. It was found among the captured Nazi papers.

  Under the deeply moving impression of the capitulation of France I congratulate you and the whole German Wehrmacht on the mighty victory granted by God, in the words of the Emperor Wilhelm the Great in 1870: “What a turn of events brought about by divine dispensation.”

  In all German hearts there echoes the Leuthen chorale sung by the victors of Leuthen, the soldiers of the Great King: “Now thank we all our God!”

  Hitler, who believed that the mighty victory was due more to himself than to God, drafted a restrained reply, but whether it was ever sent is not indicated in the documents.21

  The Fuehrer had been furious a little earlier when he learned that a German unit which overran Doorn had posted a guard of honor around the exiled Emperor’s residence. Hitler ordered the guard removed and Doorn posted as out of bounds to all German soldiers. Wilhelm II died at Doorn on June 4, 1941, and was buried there. His death, Hassell noted in his diary (p. 200), “went almost unnoticed” in Germany. Hitler and Goebbels saw to that.

  * The defeatist French High Command forbade any offensive action against Italy. On June 14 a French naval squadron bombarded factories, oil tanks and refineries near Genoa, but Admiral Darlan prohibited any further action of this kind. When the R.A.F. tried to send bombers from the airfield at Marseilles to attack Milan and Turin the French drove trucks onto the field and prevented the planes from taking off.

  * It was blown up three days later, at Hitler’s command.

  * It was stipulated that it would go into effect as soon as the France—Italian armistice was signed, and that hostilities would cease six hours after that event.

  * It arrived there July 8. Ironically, it was destroyed in an Allied bombing of Berlin later in the war.

  * Such an advertisement appeared in the New York Times June 25, 1940.

  † By July 5, 1940, Thomsen had become so apprehensive about his payments that he cabled Berlin for permission to destroy all receipts and accounts:

  The payments … are made to the recipients through trusted go-betweens, but in the circumstances it is obvious that no receipts can be expected … Such receipts or memoranda would fall into the hands of the American Secret Service if the Embassy were suddenly to be seized by American authorities, and despite all camouflage, by the fact of their existence alone, they would mean political ruin and have other grave consequences for our political friends, who are probably known to our enemies …

  I therefore request that the Embassy be authorized to destroy these receipts and statements and henceforth dispense with making them, as also with keeping accounts of such payments.

  This telegraphic report has been destroyed.32

  * The doings of the German Embassy in Washington at this period, as disclosed in its own dispatches which are published in Documents on German Foreign Policy, would furnish the material for a revealing book. One is struck by me tendency of the German diplomats to tell the Nazi dictator pretty much what he wanted to hear—a practice common among representatives of totalitarian lands. Two officers of OKW told me in Berlin that the High Command, or at least the General Staff, was highly suspicious of the objectivity of the reports from the Washington embassy and that they had established their own military intelligence in the United States.

  They were not served very well by General Friedrich von Boetticher, the German military attaché in Washington, if one can judge by his dispatches included in the DGFP volumes. He never tired of warning OKW and the general staffs of the Army and Air Force to whom his messages were addressed, that America was controlled by the Jews and the Freemasons, which was exactly what Hitler thought. Boetticher also overestimated the influence of the isolationists in American politics, especially of Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, who emerges in his dispatches as his great hero. An extract or two indicates the tenor of his reports.

  July 20, 1940: … As the exponent of the Jews, who especially through Freemasonry control the broad masses of the American people, Roosevelt wants England to continue fighting and the war to be prolonged … The circle about Lindbergh has become aware of this development and now tries at least to impede the fatal control of American policy by the Jews … I have repeatedly reported on the mean and vicious campaign against Lindbergh, whom the Jews fear as their most potent adversary … [DGFP, X, pp. 254–55.]

  August 6, 1940: … The background of Lindbergh’s re-emergence in public and the campaign against him.

  The Jewish element now controls key positions in the American armed forces, after having in the last weeks filled the posts of Secretary of War, Assistant Secretary of War, and Secretary of the Navy with subservient individuals and attached a leading and very influential Jew, “Colonel” Julius Ochs-Adler, as secretary to the Secretary of War.

  The forces opposing the Jewish element and the present policy of the United States have been mentioned in my reports, taking account also of the importance of the General Staff. The greatly gifted Lindbergh, whose connections reach very far, is much the most important of them all. The Jewish element and Roosevelt fear the spiritual and, particularly, the moral superiority and purity of this man.

  On Su
nday [August 4] Lindbergh delivered a blow that will hurt the Jews. He … stressed that America should strive for sincere collaboration with Germany with a view to peace and the preservation of Western culture. Several hours later, the aged General Pershing, who has long been a puppet in the hands of Roosevelt, which means of the Jews, read over the radio a declaration, foisted upon him by the wire-pullers, to the effect that America would be imperiled by England’s defeat …