The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  * At Nuremberg Hess told the tribunal that Lord Simon had introduced himself to him as “Dr. Guthrie” and had declared, “I come with the authority of the Government and I shall be willing to discuss with you as far as seems good anything you would wish to state for the information of the Government.”89

  * Hess, a sorry, broken figure at Nuremberg, where for a part of the trial he faked total amnesia (his mind had certainly been shattered), outlived Hitler. He was sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Tribunal, escaping the death sentence largely due to his mental collapse. I have described his appearance there in End of a Berlin Diary.

  The British treated him as a prisoner of war, releasing him on October 10, 1945, so that he could stand trial at Nuremberg. During his captivity in England, he complained bitterly at being denied “full diplomatic privileges,” which he constantly demanded, and his none too balanced mind began to deteriorate and he had long stretches of amnesia. He told Dr. Kelley, however, that he twice tried to kill himself during his internment. He became convinced, he said, that the British were trying to poison him.

  * On April 5, the day before the German attack on Yugoslavia, the Soviet government had hastily concluded a “Treaty of Nonaggression and Friendship” with the new Yugoslav government, apparently in a frantic attempt to head off Hitler. Molotov had informed Schulenburg of it the night before and the ambassador had exclaimed that “the moment was very unfortunate” and had tried, unsuccessfully, to argue the Russians into at least postponing the signing of the treaty.96

  * Sam Woods, a genial extrovert whose grasp of world politics and history was not striking, seems to those of us who knew him and liked him the last man in the American Embassy in Berlin likely to have come by such crucial intelligence. Some of his colleagues in the embassy still doubt that he did. But Cordell Hull has confirmed it in his memoirs and disclosed the details. Woods, the late Secretary of State relates, had a German friend, an anti-Nazi, who had contacts high in the ministries, the Reichsbank and the Nazi Party. As early as August 1940, this friend informed Woods of conferences taking place at Hitler’s headquarters concerning preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union. From then on this informant kept the commercial attaché au courant of what was transpiring both at the General Staff and among those planning the economic spoliation of Russia. To avoid detection, Woods met his informant in various movie houses in Berlin and in the darkness received scribbled notes from him. (See The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, II, pp. 967–68.)

  I left Berlin in December 1940. George Kennan, the most brilliant Foreign Service officer at the embassy, who remained there, informs me that the embassy learned from several sources of the coming attack on Russia. Two or three weeks before the assault, he says, our consul at Koenigsberg, Kuykendall, relayed a report specifying correctly the exact day it would begin.

  * This is from the last diary entry of Ciano, made on December 23, 1943, in Cell 27 of the Verona jail, a few days before he was executed. He added that the Italian government learned of the German invasion of Russia a half hour after it began. (Ciano Diaries, p. 583.)

  * Hassell confirms this. Writing in his diary two days later, June 16, he remarks: “Brauchitsch and Halder have already agreed to Hitler’s tactics [in Russia]. Thus the Army must assume the onus of the murders and burnings which up to now have been confined to the S.S.”

  At first the anti-Nazi “conspirators” had naively believed that Hitler’s terror orders for Russia might shock the generals into joining an anti-Nazi revolt. But by June 16 Hassell himself is disillusioned. His diary entry for that date begins:

  A series of conferences with Popitz, Goerdeler, Beck and Oster to consider whether certain orders which the Army commanders have received (but which they have not as yet issued) might suffice to open the eyes of the military leaders to the nature of the regime for which they are fighting. These orders concern brutal … measures the troops are to take against the Bolsheviks when Russia is invaded.

  We came to the conclusion that nothing was to be hoped for now … They [the generals] delude themselves … Hopeless sergeant majors! [The Von Hassell Diaries, pp. 198–99.]

  * The expression is Churchill’s.

  * Thus ended the veteran ambassador’s diplomatic career. Returning to Germany and forced to retire, he joined the opposition circle led by General Beck, Goerdeler, Hassell and others and for a time was marked to become Foreign Minister of an anti-Hitler regime. Hassell reported Schulenburg in 1943 as being willing to cross the Russian lines in order to talk with Stalin about a negotiated peace with an anti-Nazi government in Germany. (The Von Hassell Diaries, pp. 321–22.) Schulenburg was arrested and imprisoned after the July 1944 plot against Hitler and executed by the Gestapo on November 10.

  * Hitler’s emphasis.

  * There is a curious notation in Halder’s diary that first day. After mentioning that at noon the Russian radio stations, which the Germans were monitoring, had come back on the air he writes: “They have asked Japan to mediate the political and economic differences between Russia and Germany, and remain in active contact with the German Foreign Office.” Did Stalin believe—nine hours after the attack—that he somehow might get it called off?

  † General Guenther Blumentritt, chief of staff of the Fourth Army, later recalled that a little after midnight on the twenty-first, when the German artillery had already zeroed on its targets, the Berlin-Moscow express train chugged through the German lines on the Bug and across the river into Brest Litovsk “without incident.” It struck him as a “weird moment.” Almost equally weird to him was that the Russian artillery did not respond even when the assault began. “The Russians,” he subsequently wrote, “were taken entirely by surprise on our front.” As dawn broke German signal stations picked up the Red Army radio networks. “We are being fired on. What shall we do?” Blumentritt quotes one Russian message as saying. Back came the answer from headquarters: “You must be insane. And why is your signal not in code?” (The Fatal Decisions, edited by Seymour Freidin and William Richardson.)

  24

  A TURN OF THE TIDE

  BY THE BEGINNING of autumn 1941, Hitler believed that Russia was finished.

  Within three weeks of the opening of the campaign, Field Marshal von Bock’s Army Group Center, with thirty infantry divisions and fifteen panzer or motorized divisions, had pushed 450 miles from Bialystok to Smolensk. Moscow lay but 200 miles farther east along the high road which Napoleon had taken in 1812. To the north Field Marshal von Leeb’s army group, twenty-one infantry and six armored divisions strong, was moving rapidly up through the Baltic States toward Leningrad. To the south Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s army group of twenty-five infantry, four motorized, four mountain and five panzer divisions was advancing toward the Dnieper River and Kiev, capital of the fertile Ukraine, which Hitler coveted.

  So planmaessig (according to plan), as the OKW communiqués put it, was the German progress along a thousand-mile front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and so confident was the Nazi dictator that it would continue at an accelerated pace as one Soviet army after another was surrounded or dispersed, that on July 14, a bare three weeks after the invasion had begun, he issued a directive advising that the strength of the Army could be “considerably reduced in the near future” and that armament production would be concentrated on naval ships and Luftwaffe planes, especially the latter, for the conduct of the war against the last remaining enemy, Britain, and—he added—“against America should the case arise.”1 By the end of September he instructed the High Command to prepare to disband forty infantry divisions so that this additional manpower could be utilized by industry.2

  Russia’s two greatest cities, Leningrad, which Peter the Great had built as the capital on the Baltic, and Moscow, the ancient and now Bolshevik capital, seemed to Hitler about to fall. On September 18 he issued strict orders: “A capitulation of Leningrad or Moscow is not to be accepted, even if offered.”3 What was to happen to them he made clear to his command
ers in a directive of September 29:

  The Fuehrer has decided to have St. Petersburg [Leningrad] wiped off the face of the earth* The further existence of this large city is of no interest once Soviet Russia is overthrown …

  The intention is to close in on the city and raze it to the ground by artillery and by continuous air attack …

  Requests that the city be taken over will be turned down, for the problem of the survival of the population and of supplying it with food is one which cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for existence we have no interest in keeping even part of this great city’s population.†4

  That same week, on October 3, Hitler returned to Berlin and in an address to the German people proclaimed the collapse of the Soviet Union. “I declare today, and I declare it without any reservation,” he said, “that the enemy in the East has been struck down and will never rise again … Behind our troops there already lies a territory twice the size of the German Reich when I came to power in 1933.”

  When on October 8, Orel, a key city south of Moscow, fell, Hitler sent his press chief, Otto Dietrich, flying back to Berlin, to tell the correspondents of the world’s leading newspapers there the next day that the last intact Soviet armies, those of Marshal Timoshenko, defending Moscow, were locked in two steel German pockets before the capital; that the southern armies of Marshal Budënny were routed and dispersed; and that sixty to seventy divisions of Marshal Voroshilov’s army were surrounded in Leningrad.

  “For all military purposes,” Dietrich concluded smugly, “Soviet Russia is done with. The British dream of a two-front war is dead.”

  These public boasts of Hitler and Dietrich were, to say the least, premature. ‡ In reality the Russians, despite the surprise with which they were taken on June 22, their subsequent heavy losses in men and equipment, their rapid withdrawal and the entrapment of some of their best armies, had begun in July to put up a mounting resistance such as the Wehrmacht had never encountered before. Halder’s diary and the reports of such front-line commanders as General Guderian, who led a large panzer group on the central front, began to be peppered—and then laden—with accounts of severe fighting, desperate Russian stands and counterattacks and heavy casualties to German as well as Soviet troops.

  “The conduct of the Russian troops,” General Blumentritt wrote later, “even in this first battle [for Minsk] was in striking contrast to the behavior of the Poles and the Western Allies in defeat. Even when encircled the Russians stood their ground and fought.”5 And there proved to be more of them, and with better equipment, than Adolf Hitler had dreamed was possible. Fresh Soviet divisions which German intelligence had no inkling of were continually being thrown into battle. “It is becoming ever clearer,” Halder wrote in his diary on August 11, “that we underestimated the strength of the Russian colossus not only in the economic and transportation sphere but above all in the military. At the beginning we reckoned with some 200 enemy divisions and we have already identified 360. When a dozen of them are destroyed the Russians throw in another dozen. On this broad expanse our front is too thin. It has no depth. As a result, the repeated enemy attacks often meet with some success.” Rundstedt put it bluntly to Allied interrogators after the war. “I realized,” he said, “soon after the attack was begun that everything that had been written about Russia was nonsense.”

  Several generals, Guderian, Blumentritt and Sepp Dietrich among them, have left reports expressing astonishment at their first encounter with the Russian T-34 tank, of which they had not previously heard and which was so heavily armored that the shells from the German antitank guns bounced harmlessly off it. The appearance of this panzer, Blumentritt said later, marked the beginning of what came to be called the “tank terror.” Also, for the first time in the war; the Germans did not have the benefit of overwhelming superiority in the air to protect their ground troops and scout ahead. Despite the heavy losses on the ground in the first day of the campaign and in early combat, Soviet fighter planes kept appearing, like the fresh divisions, out of nowhere. Moreover, the swiftness of the German advance and the lack of suitable airfields in Russia left the German fighter bases too far back to provide effective cover at the front. “At several stages in the advance,” General von Kleist later reported, “my panzer forces were handicapped through lack of cover overhead.”6

  There was another German miscalculation about the Russians which Kleist mentioned to Liddell Hart and which, of course, was shared by most of the other peoples of the West that summer.

  “Hopes of victory,” Kleist said, “were largely built on the prospect that the invasion would produce a political upheaval in Russia … Too high hopes were built on the belief that Staun would be overthrown by his own people if he suffered heavy defeats. The belief was fostered by the Fuehrer’s political advisers.”7

  Indeed Hitler had told Jodl, “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”

  The opportunity to kick in the door seemed to the Fuehrer to be at hand halfway through July when there occurred the first great controversy over strategy in the German High Command and led to a decision by the Fuehrer, over the protests of most of the top generals, which Halder thought proved to be “the greatest strategic blunder of the Eastern campaign.” The issue was simple but fundamental. Should Bock’s Army Group Center, the most powerful and so far the most successful of the three main German armies, push on the two hundred miles to Moscow from Smolensk, which it had reached on July 16? Or should the original plan, which Hitler had laid down in the December 18 directive, and which called for the main thrusts on the north and south flanks, be adhered to? In other words, was Moscow the prize goal, or Leningrad and the Ukraine?

  The Army High Command, led by Brauchitsch and Halder and supported by Bock, whose central army group was moving up the main highway to Moscow, and by Guderian, whose panzer forces were leading it, insisted on an all-out drive for the Soviet capital. There was much more to their argument than merely stressing the psychological value of capturing the enemy capital. Moscow, they pointed out to Hitler, was a vital source of armament production and, even more important, the center of the Russian transportation and communications system. Take it, and the Soviets would not only be deprived of an essential source of arms but would be unable to move troops and supplies to the distant fronts, which thereafter would weaken, wither and collapse.

  But there was a final conclusive argument which the generals advanced to the former corporal who was now their Supreme Commander. All their intelligence reports showed that the main Russian forces were now being concentrated before Moscow for an all-out defense of the capital. Just east of Smolensk a Soviet army of half a million men, which had extricated itself from Bock’s double envelopment, was digging in to bar further German progress toward the capital.

  The center of gravity of Russian strength [Halder wrote in a report prepared for the Allies immediately after the war]8 was therefore in front of Army Group Center …

  The General Staff had been brought up with the idea that it must be the aim of an operation to defeat the military power of the enemy, and it therefore considered the next and most pressing task to be to defeat the forces of Timoshenko by concentrating all available forces at Army Group Center, to advance on Moscow, to take this nerve center of enemy resistance and to destroy the new enemy formations. The assembly for this attack had to be carried out as soon as possible because the season was advanced. Army Group North was in the meantime to fulfill its original mission and to try to contact the Finns. Army Group South was to advance farther East to tie down the strongest possible enemy force.

  … After oral discussions between the General Staff and the Supreme Command [OKW] had failed, the Commander in Chief of the Army [Brauchitsch] submitted a memorandum of the General Staff to Hitler.

  This, we learn from Halder’s diary, was done on August 18. “The effect,” says Halder, “was explosive.” Hitler had his hungry eyes on the food belt and industr
ial areas of the Ukraine and on the Russian oil fields just beyond in the Caucasus. Besides, he thought he saw a golden opportunity to entrap Budënny’s armies east of the Dnieper beyond Kiev, which still held out. He also wanted to capture Leningrad and join up with the Finns in the north. To accomplish these twin aims, several infantry and panzer divisions from Army Group Center would have to be detached and sent north and especially south. Moscow could wait.

  On August 21, Hitler hurled a new directive at his rebellious General Staff. Halder copied it out word for word in his diary the next day.

  The proposals of the Army for the continuation of the operations in the East do not accord with my intentions.

  The most important objective to attain before the onset of winter is not the capture of Moscow but the taking of the Crimea, the industrial and coal-mining areas of the Donets basin and the cutting off of Russian oil supplies from the Caucasus. In the north it is the locking up of Leningrad and the union with the Finns.