The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  No holds were to be barred in the taking of Russia. Hitler insisted that the generals understand this very clearly. Early in March 1941, he convoked the chiefs of the three armed services and the key Army field commanders and laid down the law. Halder took down his words.73

  The war against Russia [Hitler said] will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the comprehension of you generals but … I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated. German soldiers guilty of breaking international law … will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and therefore has no rights under it.

  Thus was the so-called “Commissar Order” issued; it was to be much discussed at the Nuremberg trial when the great moral question was posed to the German generals whether they should have obeyed the orders of the Fuehrer to commit war crimes or obeyed their own consciences.*

  According to Halder, as he later remembered it, the generals were outraged at this order and, as soon as the meeting was over, protested to their Commander in Chief, Brauchitsch. This spineless Field Marshal* promised that he would “fight against this order in the form it was given.” Later, Halder swears, Brauchitsch informed OKW in writing that the officers of the Army “could never execute such orders.” But did he?

  In his testimony on direct examination at Nuremberg Brauchitsch admitted that he took no such action with Hitler “because nothing in the world could change his attitude.” What the head of the Army did, he told the tribunal, was to issue a written order that “discipline in the Army was to be strictly observed along the lines and regulations that applied in the past.”

  “You did not give any order directly referring to the Commissar Order?” Lord Justice Lawrence, the peppery president of the tribunal, asked Brauchitsch.

  “No,” he replied. “I could not rescind the order directly.”75

  The old-line Army officers, with their Prussian traditions, were given further occasion to struggle with their consciences by subsequent directives issued in the name of the Fuehrer by General Keitel on May 13. The principal one limited the functions of German courts-martial. They were to give way to a more primitive form of law.

  Punishable offenses committed by enemy civilians [in Russia] do not, until further notice, come any longer under the jurisdiction of the courts-martial …

  Persons suspected of criminal action will be brought at once before an officer. This officer will decide whether they are to be shot.

  With regard to offenses committed against enemy civilians by members of the Wehrmacht, prosecution is not obligatory even where the deed is at the same time a military crime or offense.†

  The Army was told to go easy on such offenders, remembering in each case all the harm done to Germany since 1918 by the “Bolsheviki.” Courts-martial of German soldiers would be justified only if “maintenance of discipline or security of the Forces call for such a measure.” At any rate, the directive concluded, “only those court sentences are confirmed which are in accordance with the political intentions of the High Command.”76 The directive was to “be treated as ‘most secret.’”‡

  A second directive of the same date signed by Keitel on behalf of Hitler entrusted Himmler with “special tasks” for the preparation of the political administration in Russia—“tasks,” it said, “which result from the struggle which has to be carried out between two opposing political systems.” The Nazi secret-police sadist was delegated to act “independently” of the Army, “under his own responsibility.” The generals well knew what the designation of Himmler for “special tasks” meant, though they denied that they did when they took the stand at Nuremberg. Furthermore, the directive said, the occupied areas in Russia were to be sealed off while Himmler went to work. Not even the “highest personalities of the Government and Party,” Hitler stipulated, were to be allowed to have a look. The same directive named Goering for the “exploitation of the country and the securing of its economic assets for use by German industry.” Incidentally, Hitler also declared in this order that as soon as military operations were concluded Russia would be “divided up into individual states with governments of their own.”78

  Just how this would be done was to be worked out by Alfred Rosenberg, the befuddled Balt and officially the leading Nazi thinker, who had been, as we have seen, one of Hitler’s early mentors in the Munich days. On April 20 the Fuehrer appointed him “Commissioner for the Central Control of Questions Connected with the East-European Region” and immediately this Nazi dolt, with a positive genius for misunderstanding history, even the history of Russia, where he was born and educated, went to work to build his castles in his once native land. Rosenberg’s voluminous files were captured intact; like his books, they make dreary reading and will not be allowed to impede this narrative, though occasionally they must be referred to because they disclose some of Hitler’s plans for Russia.

  By early May, Rosenberg had drawn up his first wordy blueprint for what promised to be the greatest German conquest in history. To begin with, European Russia was to be divided up into so-called Reich Commissariats. Russian Poland would become a German protectorate called Ostland, the Ukraine “an independent state in alliance with Germany,” Caucasia, with its rich oil fields, would be ruled by a German “plenipotentiary,” and the three Baltic States and White Russia would form a German protectorate preparatory to being annexed outright to the Greater German Reich. This last feat, Rosenberg explained in one of the endless memoranda which he showered on Hitler and the generals in order, as he said, to elucidate “the historical and racial conditions” for his decisions, would be accomplished by Germanizing the racially assimilable Balts and “banishing the undesirable elements.” In Latvia and Estonia, he cautioned, “banishment on a large scale will have to be envisaged.” Those driven out would be replaced by Germans, preferably war veterans. “The Baltic Sea,” he ordained, “must become a Germanic inland sea.”79

  Two days before the troops jumped off, Rosenberg addressed his closest collaborators who were to take over the rule of Russia.

  The job of feeding the German people [he said] stands at the top of the list of Germany’s claims on the East. The southern [Russian] territories will have to serve … for the feeding of the German people.

  We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of that surplus territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity, bare of any feelings … The future will hold very hard years in store for the Russians.80

  Very hard years indeed, since the Germans were deliberately planning to starve to death millions of them!

  Goering, who had been placed in charge of the economic exploitation of the Soviet Union, made this even clearer than Rosenberg did. In a long directive of May 23, 1941, his Economic Staff, East, laid it down that the surplus food from Russia’s black-earth belt in the south must not be diverted to the people in the industrial areas, where, in any case, the industries would be destroyed. The workers and their families in these regions would simply be left to starve—or, if they could, to emigrate to Siberia. Russia’s great food production must go to the Germans.

  The German Administration in these territories [the directive declared] may well attempt to mitigate the consequences of the famine which undoubtedly will take place and to accelerate the return to primitive agricultural conditions. However, these measures will not avert famine. Any attempt to save the population there from death by starvation by importing surpluses from the black-soil zone would be at the expense of supplies to Europe. It would reduce Germany’s staying power in the war, and would undermine Germany’s and
Europe’s power to resist the blockade. This must be clearly and absolutely understood.81

  How many Russian civilians would die as the result of this deliberate German policy? A meeting of state secretaries on May 2 had already given a general answer. “There is no doubt,” a secret memorandum of the conference declared, “that as a result, many millions of persons will be starved to death if we take out of the country the things necessary for us.”82-And Goering had said, and Rosenberg, that they would be taken out—that much had to be “clearly and absolutely understood.”

  Did any German, even one single German, protest against this planned ruthlessness, this well-thought-out scheme to put millions of human beings to death by starvation? In all the memoranda concerning the German directives for the spoliation of Russia, there is no mention of anyone’s objecting—as at least some of the generals did in regard to the Commissar Order. These plans were not merely wild and evil fantasies of distorted minds and souls of men such as Hitler, Goering, Himmler and Rosenberg. For weeks and months, it is evident from the records, hundreds of German officials toiled away at their desks in the cheerful light of the warm spring days, adding up figures and composing memoranda which coldly calculated the massacre of millions. By starvation, in this case. Heinrich Himmler, the mild-faced ex-chicken farmer, also sat at his desk at S.S. headquarters in Berlin those days, gazing through his pince-nez at plans for the massacre of other millions in a quicker and more violent way.

  Well pleased with the labors of his busy minions, both military and civilian, in planning the onslaught on the Soviet Union, her destruction, her exploitation and the mass murder of her citizenry, Hitler on April 30 set the date for the attack—June 22—made his victory speech in the Reichstag on May 4 and then retired to his favorite haunt, the Berghof above Berchtesgaden, where he could gaze at the splendor of the Alpine mountains, their peaks still covered with spring snow, and contemplate his next conquest, the greatest of all, at which, as he had told his generals, the world would hold its breath.

  It was here on the night of Saturday, May 10, 1941, that he received strange and unexpected news which shook him to the bone and forced him, as it did almost everyone else in the Western world, to take his mind for the moment off the war. His closest personal confidant, the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, the second in line to succeed him after Goering, the man who had been his devoted and fanatically loyal follower since 1921 and, since Roehm’s murder, the nearest there was to a friend, had literally flown the coop and on his own gone to parley with the enemy!

  THE FLIGHT OF RUDOLF HESS

  The first report late that evening of May 10 that Rudolf Hess had taken off alone for Scotland in a Messerschmitt-110 fighter plane hit Hitler, as Dr. Schmidt recalled, “as though a bomb had struck the Berghof.”83 General Keitel found the Fuehrer pacing up and down his spacious study pointing a finger at his forehead and mumbling that Hess must have been crazy.84 “I’ve got to talk to Goering right away,” Hitler shouted. The next morning there was an agitated powwow with Goering and all the party gauleiter as they sought to “figure out”—the words are Keitel’s—how to present this embarrassing event to the German public and to the world. Their task was not made easier, Keitel later testified, by the British at first keeping silent about their visitor, and for a time Hitler and his conferees hoped that perhaps Hess had run out of gasoline and fallen into the chilly North Sea and drowned.

  The Fuehrer’s first information had come in a somewhat incoherent letter from Hess which was delivered by courier a few hours after he took off at 5:45 P.M. on May 10 from Augsburg. “I can’t recognize Hess in it. It’s a different person. Something must have happened to him—some mental disturbance,” Hitler told Keitel. But the Fuehrer was also suspicious. Messerschmitt, from whose company airfield Hess had taken off, was ordered arrested, as were dozens of men on the deputy leader’s staff.

  If Hitler was mystified by Hess’s abrupt departure, so was Churchill by his unexpected arrival.* Stalin was highly suspicious. For the duration of the war, the bizarre incident remained a mystery, and it was cleared up only at the Nuremberg trial, in which Hess was one of the defendants. The facts may be briefly set down.

  Hess, always a muddled man though not so doltish as Rosenberg, flew on his own to Britain under the delusion that he could arrange a peace settlement. Though deluded, he was sincere—there seems to be no reason to doubt that. He had met the Duke of Hamilton at the Olympic games in Berlin in 1936, and it was within twelve miles of the Duke’s home in Scotland—so efficient was his navigation—that he baled out of his Messerschmitt, parachuted safely to the ground and asked a farmer to take him to the Scottish lord. As it happened, Hamilton, a wing commander in the R.A.F., was on duty that Saturday evening at a sector operations room and had spotted the Messerschmitt plane off the coast as it came in to make a landfall shortly after 10 P.M. An hour later it was reported to him that the plane had crashed in flames, that the pilot, who had baled out and who gave his name as Alfred Horn, had claimed to be on a “special mission” to see the Duke of Hamilton. This meeting was arranged by British authorities for the next morning.

  To the Duke, Hess explained that he was on “a mission of humanity and that the Fuehrer did not want to defeat England and wished to stop the fighting.” The fact, Hess said, that this was his fourth attempt to fly to Britain—on the three other tries, he had had to turn back because of weather—and that he was, after all, a Reich cabinet minister, showed “his sincerity and Germany’s willingness for peace.” In this interview, as in later ones with others, Hess was not backward in asserting that Germany would win the war and that if it continued the plight of the British would be terrible. Therefore, his hosts had better take advantage of his presence and negotiate peace. So confident was this Nazi fanatic that the British would sit down and parley with him, that he asked the Duke to request “the King to give him ‘parole,’ as he had come unarmed and of his own free will.”85 Later he demanded that he be treated with the respect due to a cabinet member.

  The subsequent talks, with one exception, were conducted on the British side by Ivone Kirkpatrick, the knowing former First Secretary of the British Embassy in Berlin, whose confidential reports were later made available at Nuremberg.86 To this sophisticated student of Nazi Germany Hess, after parroting Hitler’s explanations of all the Nazi aggressions, from Austria to Scandinavia and the Lowlands, and having insisted that Britain was responsible for the war and would certainly lose it if she didn’t bring a stop to it now, divulged his proposals for peace. They were none other than those which Hitler had urged on Chamberlain—unsuccessfully—on the eve of his attack on Poland: namely, that Britain should give Germany a free hand in Europe in return for Germany’s giving Britain “a completely free hand in the Empire.” The former German colonies would have to be returned and of course Britain would have to make peace with Italy.

  Finally, as we were leaving the room [Kirkpatrick reported], Hess delivered a parting shot. He had forgotten, he declared, to emphasize that the proposal could only be considered on the understanding that it was negotiated by Germany with an English government other than the present one. Mr. Churchill, who had planned the war since 1936, and his colleagues who had lent themselves to his war policy, were not persons with whom the Fuehrer could negotiate.

  For a German who had got so far in the jungle warfare within the Nazi Party and then within the Third Reich, Rudolf Hess, as all who knew him could testify, was singularly naïve. He had expected, it is evident from the record of these interviews, to be received immediately as a serious negotiator—if not by Churchill, then by the “opposition party,” of which he thought the Duke of Hamilton was one of the leaders. When his contacts with British officialdom continued to be restricted to Kirkpatrick, he grew bellicose and threatening. At an interview on May 14, he pictured to the skeptical diplomat the dire consequences to Britain if she continued the war. There would soon be, he said, a terrible and absolutely complete blockade of the British I
sles.

  It was fruitless [Kirkpatrick was told by Hess] for anyone here to imagine that England could capitulate and that the war could be waged from the Empire. It was Hitler’s intention, in such an eventuality, to continue the blockade of England … so that we would have to face the deliberate starvation of the population of these islands.

  Hess urged that the conversations, which he had risked so much to bring about, get under way at once. “His own flight,” as explained to Kirkpatrick, “was intended to give us a chance of opening conversations without loss of prestige. If we rejected this chance it would be clear proof that we desire no understanding with Germany, and Hitler would be entitled—in fact, it would be his duty—to destroy us utterly and to keep us after the war in a state of permanent subjection.” Hess insisted that the number of negotiators be kept small.

  As a Reich Minister he could not place himself in the position of being a lone individual subjected to a crossfire of comment and questions from a large number of persons.

  On this ridiculous note, the conversations ended, so far as Kirkpatrick was concerned. But—surprisingly—the British cabinet, according to Churchill,87 “invited” Lord Simon to interview Hess on June 10. According to the Nazi deputy leader’s lawyer at Nuremberg, Simon promised that he would bring Hess’s peace proposals to the attention of the British government.*88