The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Germany’s Balkan ally Bulgaria took a more cautious line than the Hungarians and Romanians. King Boris III, who ran the country’s military and foreign policy and much else besides, was realistic enough to recognize that his army of peasant conscripts was not suited for modern warfare and had no interest in fighting far from home. Boris had to perform a delicate balancing act. He once remarked: ‘My army is pro-German, my wife is Italian, my people are pro-Russian. I’m the only pro-Bulgarian in this country.’136 He had eagerly joined in the dismemberment of Greece and Yugoslavia, and begun the Bulgarization of the education system and other aspects of public life in the areas occupied by his forces. But the Bulgarian annexation of Thrace sparked serious resistance, leading to a major uprising at the end of September 1941. Boris claimed with some justification that the army was needed there to put it down, which it did in the following months, killing between 45,000 and 60,000 Greeks and ordering the expulsion or resettlement of many more. Just as important from the king’s point of view, however, was the threat of internal revolt by fascist republicans. Partly to ward this off, but also yielding to German pressure, he had introduced antisemitic legislation in October 1940, banning sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews and ousting Jews from a variety of professions and industries. But the Bulgarian legislature had been careful to define Jews in religious terms, and many Jews were able to escape the effects of the legislation by converting, often merely on paper, to Christianity. In addition, the legislation was not very rigorously enforced. Jews were required by law to wear the ‘Jewish star’ on their clothes, for example, but the government factory commissioned to make them produced so few that the small number of Jews who had started wearing them soon took them off because nobody else was wearing them. The King was also obliged to dissolve the country’s Masonic lodges, a favourite target of Nazi and fascist conspiracy theorists, much to the irritation of his ministers, many of whom were Freemasons themselves. But, mindful of the looming power of the Russian colossus on his doorstep, he adamantly refused to provide any troops for the Soviet front, and indeed, although Bulgaria declared war on the Western Allies, it never declared war on the Soviet Union.137 Half-exasperated, half-admiring, Hitler called him ‘a very intelligent, even cunning man’, while Goebbels, more bluntly, called him ‘a sly, crafty fellow’.138

  For all its multinational trimmings, therefore, ‘Operation Barbarossa’ was thus in essence to be a German operation. As the winter snows of East-Central Europe melted and the ground thawed, the German armed forces began moving vast masses of men and equipment up to the Soviet border. Throughout May and early June 1941, Zygmunt Klukowski recorded endless columns of German troops and vehicles passing through his region of Poland, noting the passage of between 500 and 600 vehicles on 14 June alone, for example.139 Stalin hurriedly launched a futile policy of trying to appease the Germans by stepping up Soviet deliveries of Asian rubber and other supplies under the trade agreement signed in January 1941. As a dogmatic Marxist-Leninist, Stalin was convinced that Hitler’s regime was the tool of German monopoly capitalism, so that if he made available everything German business wanted, there would be no immediate reason to invade. Already, under trade provisions agreed under the Nazi-Soviet Pact early the previous year, the Soviet Union was supplying nearly three-quarters of Germany’s requirement of phosphates, over two-thirds of its imported asbestos, only a little less of its chrome ore, over half its manganese, over a third of its imported nickel, and, even more crucially, more than a third of its imported oil.140 Stalin personally vetoed proposals to disrupt the German military build-up by attacking across the Polish demarcation line. Reports from Soviet agents and even from members of the German embassy in Moscow that an invasion was imminent only convinced him that the Germans were playing hard-ball in their drive to extract economic concessions from him.141

  At the same time, Stalin realized that, as he told graduating military cadets in Moscow on 5 May 1941, ‘War with Germany is inevitable.’ Molotov might be able to postpone it for two or three months, but in the meantime it was vital to ‘re-teach our army and our commanders. Educate them in the spirit of attack.’142 Delivered to young officers as a rhetorical message for the future, this was not a statement of intent. Stalin did not believe that the Red Army would be ready to deal with the Germans until 1942 or perhaps even 1943. Not only had the General Staff not drawn up any plans for an attack on the German forces, it had no plans for a defence against them either.143 Although the Germans mounted a large and sophisticated deception plan to conceal the true nature of their intentions, Soviet intelligence began to send in accurate reports that the invasion was planned for around 22 June 1941. But Stalin would not listen. Earlier reports that the invasion plans were to become operational on 15 May 1941, though correct at the time, proved wrong when the Germans delayed Barbarossa in order to mount the invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. Hitler later blamed Mussolini for the consequences, but in fact the weather in East-Central Europe in these weeks would have made an invasion of the Soviet Union inadvisable even had the German Leader not been obliged to step in to rescue his Italian ally from the imbroglio in Southern Europe. The Soviet agents who had made the prediction lost all credibility as a result.144 The capitalist forces in Britain, including the exiled Polish government, seemed to Stalin’s narrow and suspicious mind to be feeding false information to him about German intentions in order to lure him into a battle. Surely in any case the German Leader would not invade while the conflict with Britain was still unresolved. When an ex-Communist soldier deserted the German forces on 21 June 1941 and swam across a river to tell the Russians on the other side that his unit had been given orders to invade the following morning, Stalin had him shot for spreading ‘disinformation’.145

  OPERATION BARBAROSSA

  I

  As preparations for the invasion were intensifying in Berlin, Hitler’s official deputy, Rudolf Hess, became increasingly worried at the prospect of a war on two fronts, a war for which ominous historical precedents, above all in 1914-18, were ever present in the minds of the leading Nazis. Slavishly devoted to Hitler, Hess was convinced, not without reason, that the Nazi Leader’s main objective in the west since the conquest of France had been to bring Britain to the negotiating table. Over the past few years, Hess, never the sharpest of the Nazi minds, had lost influence steadily; his access to Hitler had been seriously reduced since the outbreak of the war in September 1939, and the considerable powers of his office had been increasingly wielded by his ambitious deputy, Martin Bormann. Hess had not been involved in the planning for Operation Barbarossa and indeed he had never played any role in foreign policy at all. Yet he considered himself well qualified to do so. Hess’s teacher, the geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer, had instilled in him a belief that it was Britain’s destiny to join in the world struggle against Bolshevism on Germany’s side. In the resentful and befuddled mind of the Deputy Leader there took shape a daring plan. He himself would fly to Britain to negotiate peace. Delivering an agreement would restore him to Hitler’s favour and secure Germany’s rear for the forthcoming attack on the Soviet Union. Despite Hitler’s explicit orders to the contrary, Hess continued to hone his flying skills in secret. He had a Messerschmitt Me110 specially prepared for his use, and he obtained maps and weather charts for Germany, the North Sea and northern Britain. At six in the evening on 10 May 1941, he put on a fur-lined flying-suit, took off from the airfield of the Messerschmitt works in Augsburg and headed north-west, in the direction of the British Isles.146

  Five hours later, Hess parachuted out of the plane near Glasgow, leaving it to continue, pilotless, until eventually it burst into flames and crashed. He landed, somewhat awkwardly, in a field. Approached by a local farmhand, he said his name was Alfred Horn, and he had a message for the Duke of Hamilton, whose home was in the vicinity. The aristocrat had been a member of the Anglo-German Society before the war, and Haushofer’s son Albrecht had told Hess that he would be an important addressee for peace overt
ures. The advice showed both Haushofer’s ignorance and Hess’s gullibility. In fact, Hamilton was not a particularly significant political figure in British politics. By this time a wing-commander in the Royal Air Force, he was extremely unlikely to act as a willing conduit for German peace overtures. Summoned in response to Hess’s request, Hamilton arrived at the Home Guard hut where Hess had been taken and was quickly convinced that he was face-to-face with the Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party. After the stress of his daring flight, Hess’s mental confusion was such that he made no real attempt to discuss a separate peace with the Duke, and indeed he could think of nothing more than to repeat Hitler’s vague ‘peace offer’ made the previous July. The diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick, who had served in the Berlin Embassy from 1933 to 1938 and spoke good German, was sent to Scotland to interrogate Hess, and managed to extract a bit more information. Hess, he said in his report, ‘had come here without the knowledge of Hitler in order to convince responsible persons that since England could not win the war, the wisest course was to make peace now.’ Hess knew Hitler better than most, and he could assure Kirkpatrick that the German Leader had no designs on the British Empire. This was feeble stuff. ‘Hess,’ concluded Kirkpatrick, ‘does not seem . . . to be in the near counsels of the German government as regards operations.’147 For the rest of the war, Hess was kept imprisoned in various places, including the Tower of London. His self-imposed ‘mission’ had been completely pointless. It reflected nothing but his own mental confusion and lack of realism.148

  Hitler himself knew nothing about Hess’s flight until one of the Deputy Leader’s adjutants, Karl-Heinz Pintsch, arrived at the Berghof towards midday on 11 May 1941 to deliver a letter in which Hess told the Nazi Leader of his intentions and informed him that he would be in England by the time he read it. If he disapproved of the venture, Hess wrote, then Hitler could simply write him off as a madman. No news had yet leaked out from the British. Appalled, Hitler immediately summoned Bormann and told G̈ring over the telephone to come straight away from his castle near Nuremberg. ‘Something dreadful has happened,’ he said.149 Desperately worried in case the British should break the news first, thus suggesting to Mussolini and Germany’s other allies that he was trying to make a separate peace with Britain behind their backs, Hitler sanctioned a radio announcement that was broadcast at eight in the evening on 11 May 1941, taking up Hess’s own suggestion and ascribing the flight to the Deputy Leader’s mental derangement and hallucination. The broadcast told the German people that Hess had flown off towards the British Isles but had probably crashed en route. On 13 May 1941, the BBC reported Hess’s arrival in Scotland and his subsequent capture. In the meantime, on the advice of Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press chief, a second announcement had been put out over German radio underlining Hess’s delusional state and mental confusion. Goebbels, arriving at the Berghof later in the day, thought this only compounded the disaster. ‘At the moment,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘the whole thing is still really confused.’ ‘The Leader is completely crushed,’ he added. ‘What a spectacle for the world: a mentally deranged second man after the Leader.’150

  As soon as he received the news of Hess’s defection, Hitler abolished the post of Deputy Leader and renamed Hess’s office the Party Chancellery, to be led as before by Bormann, but now under the formal supervision of Hess’s former ’minence grise. This move considerably enhanced Bormann’s power. There remained the problem of what spin to put on the event. Hitler had already summoned all the Reich Leaders and Regional Party Leaders to the Berghof. On 13 May 1941 he repeated to them that Hess was mentally ill. In an emotional appeal to their loyalty, he declared that Hess had betrayed and deceived him. At the end of the speech, as Hans Frank, who was present, told his staff in the General Government a few days later: ‘The Leader was more completely shattered than I have ever experienced him to have been.’151 As Goebbels had thought, the idea that his deputy had been mentally deranged for many years did not cast a particularly favourable light upon either him or his regime. Many Party members refused to believe the news at first. ‘Depression and uncertainty’ were the prevailing feelings noted by Nazi surveillance operatives.152 ‘Nobody believes he was ill,’ reported a local official in the rural Bavarian district of Ebermannstadt.153 No one to whom Field Marshal Fedor von Bock spoke about the ‘mysterious story’ believed the official account either.154 ‘Why doesn’t the Leader say anything about the Hess affair?’, asked Victor Klemperer’s friend Annemarie K̈hler. ‘He really ought to say something. What excuse will he use - Hess has been sick for years? But then he shouldn’t be Hitler’s deputy.’155 Lore Walb, now studying history at Heidelberg University, agreed. ‘If he had really been ill for a long time before (mentally ill, from time to time?), then why did he keep his leading position?’ she asked.156 Most people seem to have felt sympathy for Hitler at his deputy’s betrayal.157 They relieved their anxiety, bewilderment and disorientation by telling jokes. ‘So you’re the madman?’ one joke had Churchill saying to Hess as he arrives in the Prime Minister’s office for an interview. ‘No,’ Hess replies, ‘only his deputy.’ ‘British Press Notice: “Today we learned that Hess is indeed insane - he wants to go back to Germany.” ’ ‘That our government is mad is something we’ve known for a long time,’ Berliners were reported as saying, ‘but that they admit it - that’s something new!’158

  II

  The week or so he was forced to spend dealing with the Hess affair was an unwelcome distraction for Hitler. By the middle of May 1941, however, the Nazi Leader was turning his mind back to his plans for the creation of ‘living-space’ in Eastern Europe. His vision for the future of this vast area, stretching through Poland, the Ukraine and Belarus across wide tracts of European Russia and down into the Caucasus, was articulated most unrestrainedly in the monologues to which he subjected his lunch- and dinner-companions. From early July 1941 onwards, they were noted down on Bormann’s orders, and with Hitler’s agreement, by a Party official, Heinrich Heim, sitting unobtrusively in a corner of the room (for some periods he was replaced by another junior official, Henry Picker). The notes were later dictated to a stenographer, then handed to Bormann, who corrected them and filed them away for posterity. When Hitler was dead, they would be published, and his successors in the thousand-year Reich would be able to consult them for guidance on what their great Leader had thought on a whole range of political and ideological issues.159 Despite their tedious repetitiousness, they are indeed valuable as a guide to Hitler’s thinking on broad, general issues of policy and ideology. His views at this level changed little over the years, so what he was saying in the summer of 1941 give a good idea of what he must already have been thinking in the spring.

  In July 1941, Hitler amused himself by painting castles in the air for his guests on the subject of the future of Eastern Europe. Once conquest was complete, he said, the Germans would annex vast masses of territory for their own racial survival and expansion. ‘The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest.’160 ‘It’s inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilisation, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world.’161 The Crimea and the southern Ukraine would become ‘an exclusively German colony’, he said. The existing inhabitants would be ‘pushed out’.162 As for the rest of the east, a handful of Englishmen had controlled millions of Indians, he said, and so it would be with the Germans in Russia:

  The German colonist ought to live on handsome, spacious farms. The German services will be lodged in marvellous buildings, the governors in palaces . . . Around the city, to a depth of thirty to forty kilometres, we shall have a belt of handsome villages connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world, in which we mean to let the Russians live as they like. It is merely necessary that we should rule them. In the event of a revolution, we shall only have to drop a few bombs on their
cities, and the affair will be liquidated.163