The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  “We have reached the decisive period of the air war against England,” he declared. “The vital task is the defeat of the enemy air force. Our first aim is to destroy the enemy’s fighters.”34

  From August 24 to September 6 the Germans sent over an average of a thousand planes a day to achieve this end. For once the Reich Marshal was right. The Battle of Britain had entered its decisive stage. Though the R.A.F. pilots, already strained from a month of flying several sorties a day, put up a valiant fight, the German preponderance in sheer numbers began to tell. Five forward fighter fields in the south of England were extensively damaged and, what was worse, six of the seven key sector stations were so severely bombed that the whole communications system seemed to be on the verge of being knocked out. This threatened disaster to Britain.

  Worst of all, the pace was beginning to tell on the R.A.F. fighter defense. In the crucial fortnight between August 23 and September 6 the British lost 466 fighters destroyed or badly damaged, and though they did not know it at the time the Luftwaffe losses were less: 385 aircraft, of which 214 were fighters and 138 bombers. Moreover, the R.A.F. had lost 103 pilots killed and 128 seriously wounded—a quarter of all those available.

  “The scales,” as Churchill later wrote, “had tilted against Fighter Command … There was much anxiety.” A few more weeks of this and Britain would have had no organized defense of its skies. The invasion would almost certainly succeed.

  And then suddenly Goering made his second tactical error, this one comparable in its consequences to Hitler’s calling off the armored attack on Dunkirk on May 24. It saved the battered, reeling R.A.F. and marked one of the major turning points of history’s first great battle in the air.

  With the British fighter defense suffering losses in the air and on the ground which it could not for long sustain, the Luftwaffe switched its attack on September 7 to massive night bombings of London. The R.A.F. fighters were reprieved.

  What had happened in the German camp to cause this change in tactics which was destined to prove so fatal to the ambitions of Hitler and Goering? The answer is full of irony.

  To begin with, there was a minor navigational error by the pilots of a dozen German bombers on the night of August 23. Directed to drop their loads on aircraft factories and oil tanks on the outskirts of London, they missed their mark and dropped bombs on the center of the capital, blowing up some homes and killing some civilians. The British thought it was deliberate and as retaliation bombed Berlin the next evening.

  It didn’t amount to much. There was a dense cloud cover over Berlin that night and only about half of the eighty-one R.A.F. bombers dispatched found the target. Material damage was negligible. But the effect on German morale was tremendous. For this was the first time that bombs had ever fallen on Berlin.

  The Berliners are stunned [I wrote in my diary the next day, August 26]. They did not think it could ever happen. When this war began, Goering assured them it couldn’t … They believed him. Their disillusionment today therefore is all the greater. You have to see their faces to measure it.

  Berlin was well defended by two great rings of antiaircraft and for three hours while the visiting bombers droned above the clouds, which prevented the hundreds of searchlight batteries from picking them up, the flak fire was the most intense I had ever seen. But not a single plane was brought down. The British also dropped a few leaflets saying that “the war which Hitler started will go on, and it will last as long as Hitler does.” This was good propaganda, but the thud of exploding bombs was better.

  The R.A.F. came over in greater force on the night of August 28–29 and, as I noted in my diary, “for the first time killed Germans in the capital of the Reich.” The official count was ten killed and twenty-nine wounded. The Nazi bigwigs were outraged. Goebbels, who had ordered the press to publish only a few lines on the first attack, now gave instructions to cry out at the “brutality” of the British flyers in attacking the defenseless women and children of Berlin. Most of the capital’s dailies carried the same headline: COWARDLY BRITISH ATTACK. Two nights later, after the third raid, the headlines read: BRITISH AIR PIRATES OVER BERLIN!

  The main effect of a week of constant British night bombings [I wrote in my diary on September 1] has been to spread great disillusionment among the people and sow doubt in their minds … Actually the bombings have not been very deadly.

  September 1 was the first anniversary of the beginning of the war. I noted the mood of the people, aside from their frayed nerves at having been robbed of their sleep and frightened by the surprise bombings and the terrific din of the flak.

  In this year German arms have achieved victories never equaled even in the brilliant military history of this aggressive, militaristic nation. And yet the war is not yet over or won. And it was on this aspect that people’s minds were concentrated today. They long for peace. And they want it before the winter comes.

  Hitler deemed it necessary to address them on September 4 on the occasion of the opening of the Winterhilfe campaign at the Sportpalast. His appearance there was kept secret to the last moment, apparently out of fear that enemy planes might take advantage of the cloud cover and break up the meeting, though it was held in the afternoon, an hour before dark.

  I have rarely seen the Nazi dictator in a more sarcastic mood or so given to what the German people regarded as humor, though Hitler was essentially a humorless man. He described Churchill as “that noted war correspondent.” For “a character like Duff Cooper,” he said, “there is no word in conventional German. Only the Bavarians have a word that adequately describes this type of man, and that is Krampfhenne,” which might be translated as “a nervous old hen.”

  The babbling of Mr. Churchill or of Mr. Eden [he said]—reverence for old age forbids the mention of Mr. Chamberlain—doesn’t mean a thing to the German people. At best, it makes them laugh.

  And Hitler proceeded to make his audience, which consisted mostly of women nurses and social workers, laugh—and then applaud hysterically. He was faced with the problem of answering two questions uppermost in the minds of the German people: When would Britain be invaded, and what would be done about the night bombings of Berlin and other German cities? As to the first:

  In England they’re filled with curiosity and keep asking, “Why doesn’t he come?” Be calm. Be calm. He’s coming! He’s coming!

  His listeners found that crack very funny, but they also believed that it was an unequivocal pledge. As to the bombings, he began by a typical falsification and ended with a dire threat:

  Just now … Mr. Churchill is demonstrating his new brain child, the night air raid. Mr. Churchill is carrying out these raids not because they promise to be highly effective, but because his Air Force cannot fly over Germany in daylight … whereas German planes are over English soil every day … Whenever the Englishman sees a light, he drops a bomb … on residential districts, farms and villages.

  And then came the threat.

  For three months I did not answer because I believed that such madness would be stopped. Mr. Churchill took this for a sign of weakness. We are now answering night for night.

  When the British Air Force drops two or three or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then we will in one night drop 150-, 230-, 300- or 400,000 kilograms.

  At this point, according to my diary, Hitler had to pause because of the hysterical applause of the German women listeners.

  “When they declare,” Hitler continued, “that they will increase their attacks on our cities, then we will raze their cities to the ground.” At this, I noted, the young ladies were quite beside themselves and applauded phrenetically. When they had recovered, he added, “We will stop the handiwork of these night air pirates, so help us God!”

  On hearing this, I also noted, “the young German women hopped to their feet and, their breasts heaving, screamed their approval!”

  “The hour will come,” Hitler concluded, “when one of us will break, and it will not be National Socialist Germa
ny!” At this, I finally noted, “the raving maidens kept their heads sufficiently to break their wild shouts of joy with a chorus of ‘Never! Never!’”

  Ciano in Rome, listening to the broadcast, which was made from records some hours later, confessed to being perplexed. “Hitler must be nervous,” he concluded.35

  His nerves were a factor in the fatal decision to switch the Luftwaffe’s winning daylight attacks on the R.A.F. to massive night bombings of London. This was a political as well as a military decision, made in part to revenge the bombings of Berlin and other German cities (which were but pinpricks compared to what the Luftwaffe was doing to Britain’s cities) and to destroy the will of the British to resist by razing their capital. If it succeeded, and Hitler and Goebbels had no doubt it would, an invasion might not be necessary.

  And so on the late afternoon of September 7 the great air attack on London began. The Germans threw in, as we have seen,* 625 bombers and 648 fighters. At about 5 P.M. that Saturday the first wave of 320 bombers, protected by every fighter the Germans had, flew up the Thames and began to drop their bombs on Woolwich Arsenal, various gas works, power stations, depots and mile upon mile of docks. The whole vast area was soon a mass of flames. At one locality, Silvertown, the population was surrounded by fire and had to be evacuated by water. At 8:10 P.M., after dark, a second wave of 250 bombers arrived and resumed the attack, which was kept up by successive waves until dawn at 4:30 on Sunday morning. The next evening at 7:30, the attack was renewed by two hundred bombers and continued throughout the night. Some 842 persons were killed and 2,347 wounded, according to the official British historian, during these first two nights, and vast damage was inflicted on the sprawling city.36 The assault went on all the following week, night after night.†

  And then, stimulated by its successes, or what it thought were such, the Luftwaffe decided to carry out a great daylight assault on the battered, burning capital. This led on Sunday, September 15, to one of the decisive battles of the war.

  Some two hundred German bombers, escorted by three times as many fighters, appeared over the Channel about midday, headed for London. Fighter Command had watched the assembling of the attackers on its radar screens and was ready. The Germans were intercepted before they approached the capital, and though some planes got through, many were dispersed and others shot down before they could deliver their bomb load. Two hours later an even stronger German formation returned and was routed. Though the British claimed to have shot down 185 Luftwaffe planes, the actual figure, as learned after the war from the Berlin archives, was much lower—fifty-six, but thirty-four of these were bombers. The R.A.F. lost only twenty-six aircraft.

  The day had shown that the Luftwaffe could not for the moment, anyway, now that it had given Fighter Command a week to recover, carry out a successful major daylight attack on Britain. That being so, the prospect of an effective landing was dim. September 15 therefore was a turning point, “the crux,” as Churchill later judged, of the Battle of Britain. Though Goering the next day, in ordering a change of tactics that provided for the use of bombers in daylight no longer to bomb but merely to serve as decoys for British fighters, boasted that the enemy’s fighters “ought to be finished off within four or five days,”37 Hitler and the Army and Navy commanders knew better and two days after the decisive air battle, on September 17, as has been noted, the Fuehrer called off Sea Lion indefinitely.

  Although London was to take a terrible pounding for fifty-seven consecutive nights from September 7 to November 3 from a daily average of two hundred bombers, so that it seemed certain to Churchill, as he later revealed, that the city would soon be reduced to a rubble heap, and though most of Britain’s other cities, Coventry above all, were to suffer great damage throughout that grim fall and winter, British morale did not collapse nor armament production fall off, as Hitler had so confidently expected. Just the opposite. Aircraft factories in England, one of the prime targets of the Luftwaffe bombers, actually outproduced the Germans in 1940 by 9,924 to 8,070 planes. Hitler’s bomber losses over England had been so severe that they could never be made up, and in fact the Luftwaffe, as the German confidential records make clear, never fully recovered from the blow it received in the skies over Britain that late summer and fall.

  The German Navy, crippled by the losses off Norway in the early spring, was unable, as its chiefs admitted all along, to provide the sea power for an invasion of Britain. Without this, and without air supremacy, the German Army was helpless to move across the narrow Channel waters. For the first time in the war Hitler had been stopped, his plans of further conquest frustrated, and just at the moment, as we have seen, when he was certain that final victory had been achieved.

  He had never conceived—nor had anyone else up to that time—that a decisive battle could be decided in the air. Nor perhaps did he yet realize as the dark winter settled over Europe that a handful of British fighter pilots, by thwarting his invasion, had preserved England as a great base for the possible reconquest of the Continent from the west at a later date. His thoughts were perforce turning elsewhere; in fact, as we shall see, had already turned.

  Britain was saved. For nearly a thousand years it had successfully defended itself by sea power. Just in time, its leaders, a very few of them, despite all the bungling (of which these pages have been so replete) in the interwar years, had recognized that air power had become decisive in the mid-twentieth century and the little fighter plane and its pilot the chief shield for defense. As Churchill told the Commons in another memorable peroration on August 20, when the battle in the skies still raged and its outcome was in doubt, “never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

  IF THE INVASION HAD SUCCEEDED

  The Nazi German occupation of Britain would not have been a gentle affair. The captured German papers leave no doubt of that. On September 9 Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the Army, signed a directive providing that “the able-bodied male population between the ages of seventeen and forty-five [in Britain] will, unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling, be interned and dispatched to the Continent.” Orders to this effect were sent out a few days later by the Quartermaster General, in OKH, to the Ninth and Sixteenth armies, which were assembled for the invasion. In no other conquered country, not even in Poland, had the Germans begun with such a drastic step. Brauchitsch’s instructions were headed “Orders Concerning the Organization and Function of Military Government in England” and went into considerable detail. They seem designed to ensure the systematic plunder of the island and the terrorization of its inhabitants. A special “Military Economic Staff England” was set up on July 27 to achieve the first aim. Everything but normal household stocks was to be confiscated at once. Hostages would be taken. Anybody posting a placard the Germans didn’t like would be liable to immediate execution, and a similar penalty was provided for those who failed to turn in firearms or radio sets within twenty-four hours.

  But the real terror was to be meted out by Himmler and the S.S. For this the dreaded R.S.H.A.,* under Heydrich, was put in charge. The man who was designated to direct its activities on the spot from London was a certain S.S. colonel, Professor Dr. Franz Six, another of the peculiar intellectual gangsters who in the Nazi time were somehow attracted to the service of Himmler’s secret police. Professor Six had left his post as dean of the economic faculty of Berlin University to join Heydrich’s S.D., where he specialized in “scientific matters,” the weirder side of which cast such a spell over the bespectacled Heinrich Himmler and his fellow thugs. What the British people missed by not having Dr. Six in their presence may be judged by his later career in Russia, where he was active in the S.S. Einsatzgruppen, which distinguished themselves in wholesale massacres there, one of the professor’s specialties being to ferret out captured Soviet political commissars for execution. *

  On August 1, the R.S.H.A. captured archives reveal, Goering told Heydrich to get busy. The S.S. Security Police and the S.D.
(Security Service) were to

  commence their activities simultaneously with the military invasion in order to seize and combat effectively the numerous important organizations and societies in England which are hostile to Germany.

  On September 17, which, ironically, was the date on which Hitler postponed the invasion indefinitely, Professor Six was formally appointed to his new post in England by Heydrich and told:

  Your task is to combat, with the requisite means, all anti-German organizations, institutions, and opposition groups which can be seized in England, to prevent the removal of all available material and to centralize and safeguard it for future exploitation. I designate London as the location of your headquarters … and I authorize you to set up small Einsatzgruppen in other parts of Great Britain as the situation dictates and the necessity arises.

  Actually, already in August Heydrich had organized six Einsatzkommando for Britain which were to operate from headquarters in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh—or in Glasgow, if the Forth Bridge was found blown up. They were to carry out Nazi terror; to begin with, they were to arrest all those on the “Special Search List, G.B. [Great Britain],” which in May had been hurriedly and carelessly compiled by Walter Schellenberg, another one of Himmler’s bright young university graduates, who was then chief of Amt (Bureau) IV E—Counterespionage—of R.S.H.A. Or so Schellenberg later claimed, though at this time he was mainly occupied in Lisbon, Portugal, on a bizarre mission to kidnap the Duke of Windsor.