1944

by Jay Winik

  But all that was in the past. The reality, as 1943 unfolded, was far more sobering. In the Soviet Union, the Germans’ situation was rapidly deteriorating. Hitler had failed to provide adequate winter gear for his troops, and as the bitter Moscow winter set in, the Germans’ weapons froze, as did the men themselves. Snow alternated with rain, and ice with mud; and the exhausted Germans lapsed into despair. Within months, the Nazis’ casualties would total well over 1 million. All the previous successes—the Anschluss; the blitzkrieg in Poland and France—could not stave off tragedy in the freezing streets of Russia. One German general ruefully commented that in Moscow “the myth of the invincibility of the German army was broken.”

  In Stalingrad, the situation was equally dire. The Red Army successfully outmaneuvered the Germans forty miles to the west by the Don bend. With his troops on the verge of utter collapse, Hitler exhorted his commanders to stand and perish; in desperation, he cabled to Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, “Surrender is out of the question. The troops will defend themselves to the last!” (Earlier, he had heatedly pounded his fists and shouted to his staff, “I won’t leave the Volga!”) Nevertheless, after furious attempts to reprovision the embattled Nazi troops, surrender is exactly what Paulus did. Twenty-two German and two Romanian divisions—the flower of the German army—were left to shiver and perish in the alleyways of Stalingrad. Of the 300,000 men of the Sixth Army, there were only 91,000 tattered survivors to surrender; and only 5,000 would ever return to Germany.

  For the Nazis, the situation was also bleak in the Mediterranean. Here was the endgame for Rommel, the famed Desert Fox. Hitler demanded that he hold North Africa rather than relinquish it. That order too was ill-fated. Montgomery furiously counterattacked, and after suffering heavy casualties, Rommel ignored Hitler’s message to “hurl every gun and every man into the fray. . . . Victory or death,” and undertook a mass retreat. As Montgomery’s armor slashed at the German columns, Rommel’s escape route became a death trail: every gully, every flattened knoll, every escarpment was littered with burned-out vehicles and exploded tanks. Collecting himself, Rommel, with almost reckless gallantry, did what he could, striking at II Corps in a series of brilliant thrusts at the Kasserine Pass—a sobering defeat for the still inexperienced Americans—and later hurling his men four times at Montgomery. Reinforced by 110,000 troops and hundreds of tons of supplies, he jabbed, probed, and dug in wherever he could, but his last-ditch stand was to little avail.

  Soon, nothing could stem the magnificent advance of the Allied columns. Having started two thousand miles apart, American troops and the British Eighth Army, moving like a great human scythe, were finally united, cutting off Rommel’s escape path.

  Tunis itself would fall, and an exhausted Rommel, in waning health and depressed, would be hastily summoned back to Germany to spare him the mortification of his drubbing; he relinquished control of his forces and never returned to his once sacred sand of North Africa. The remaining Nazi forces quickly began to crumble, and almost 250,000 prisoners were seized, over 100,000 of them German. To both Roosevelt and Churchill, Tunis was as important a victory as Stalingrad. Stalin himself seemed to agree, wiring to Roosevelt: “I congratulate you and the gallant U.S. and British troops on the brilliant victory which has resulted in the liberation” of Tunis.

  Grudgingly, Hitler also acknowledged the importance of the Allies’ victory. With understatement, he told some of his officers that the Germans’ efforts in Tunisia had postponed the Allies’ invasion of Europe by six months. Moreover, having once declared that holding Tunis was crucial for the outcome of the conflict, he insisted that if he had not made a stand in North Africa, the Allies would already have gained a foothold in Italy and raced into the main chain of the Alps at the historic Brenner Pass.

  “That,” he said, “would inevitably have led rapidly to the loss of the war.”

  By this stage, Hitler’s foul moods and towering rages were notorious. At Wolf’s Lair, walled off from the German people and even from his generals, surrounded largely by yes-men and lackeys, he now listened only to the advice of party sycophants, his personal physician, and his astrologist, all of whom were under his spell. Despite his exhaustion and ill health, however, his resolve never wavered. He remained ruthless, even as every element of his strategy was collapsing around him. Goebbels remarked, “We have not only a leadership crisis, but strictly speaking a ‘Leader Crisis’! We are sitting here in Berlin . . . [and] I can’t even report to him about the most urgent measures.”

  On February 20, 1943, one of Hitler’s aides was struck by how the Führer’s appearance had changed. “In the intervening fourteen months,” the aide observed, “he had aged greatly.” He watched in horror as Hitler’s left hand shook wildly; he also noted that Hitler’s speech was hesitant, and his manner “less assured.” Actually, Hitler’s decline was far worse than the aide realized. He was increasingly haunted by stomach ailments. His eyes were cloudy and he moved like an old man. More and more often, his left leg spasmed and he dragged his feet and stooped as he walked; he was by all accounts developing Parkinson’s disease. And he was beset by bouts of depression and sleepless nights. Desperate to prevent further degeneration, he was taking twenty-eight pills a day; they didn’t work.

  Nevertheless, with merciless determination, Hitler still thundered back and forth, pacing melodramatically and screaming about his cowardly commanders—about their stupidity and ineptitude and lack of patriotism, about their reluctance to push their men to the breaking point or their lack of imagination on the battlefield. And everywhere he looked, he saw betrayal, incompetence, and most of all weakness. Coarse and unreasonable, he berated his aides and advisers. Fanatical and stubborn, he considered no tactical matter too small for his attention, however foolish his interference might be, which only compounded the strategic difficulties.

  Listening to the dismal reports from the front, his days were frantic. Evenings were calmer, though even then he fidgeted with his spectacles or twirled his red pencils. Then typically, he would linger at the fireplace lecturing his tired and often bewildered officers. As he launched into yet another dull, rambling monologue, his face was invariably weather-beaten, yet his eyes were strangely alive and his expression was curiously upbeat. The script rarely varied. There were the objects of his hatred: bureaucrats; Germany’s royal family; intellectuals; industrialists; stockbrokers; the beautiful city of Saint Petersburg (he refused to call it Leningrad), which was to be sealed off, bombarded, and starved out; lawyers; the Luftwaffe; and his own inner circle, which had let him down: Göring and Speer, to name but two. There were also the objects of his great affection: peasant girls; the average soldier; the countryside; the soil of Germany; his cherished Volkswagens (“the people’s cars”); the simple worker; bright-eyed infants; his dog Blondi; Mussolini. And there were his rivals: Roosevelt, that “torturous, pettifogging Jew”; Churchill, that “unprincipled swine” and “old whore”; Stalin, that “half beast, half giant” who he nevertheless thought was a model of leadership. Of course, there were incessant generalizations about whole peoples—the English, whom he secretly admired even as he despised them (his inspiration for exploitation and domination remained the British Empire); the Russians, who were less than human; the Americans, whom he held in disdain. And there were the ones he invariably came back to—the cause of all the world’s woes: Jews.

  WHAT IN THE END explains the depths of depravity in Hitler and his Nazi regime? Was it in fact the purest unbounded expression of megalomaniacal power and breathtaking inhumanity the world has ever seen? Or was Hitler merely a right-wing rabble-rouser who somehow became the personification of a nation that ran amok? What is certain is that everything about him seems to defy analysis. Among history’s long roll call of dictators and despots, Hitler stands alone, dwarfing Caesar and Genghis Khan, Idi Amin and Pol Pot; he literally created the paradigm for totalitarian dictatorship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But in the end history is left with the s
ame haunting, unanswerable questions. Why did Hitler commit these unimaginable crimes? How, in one of the most civilized nations in Europe, did he ascend to power and remain in power while executing such policies of carnage and killing?

  And how did this one time disheveled nobody plunge the world into cataclysmic war?

  Almost everything about him defies easy categorization. One of his favorite movies was King Kong. He was a loner all his life, with virtually no friends and no confidants—Goebbels was the closest thing he had to a friend. His relationship with his mistress, Eva Braun, seems to have been at most tepid; he kept her with him as a companion, and married her only at the end—just before providing her with poison and then shooting himself. Actually he showered far more emotion on his dog Blondi. He worked hard, and often, to teach himself the manners that enabled him to enter refined Germanic circles, but no matter how hard he tried, he remained crass and self-absorbed. He was also chaste and puritanical, and he neither drank nor smoked; in a number of ways he was reminiscent of the French revolutionary despot Robespierre.

  He was also a notorious neurotic who was obsessed with germs. Once, when he was informed that a former whore had touched him, he was horrified and rushed to take a bath—he was terrified of venereal disease. The German nation and foreign emissaries alike regarded his icy, enigmatic stare as mesmerizing. Well, it should have been: he spent hours before a tall mirror, refining it. The same was true of his elaborate gestures. He was a spellbinding speaker; his orations were like the music of his cherished Wagner: he would start tentatively, then gradually speed up and produce cascades of powerful rhetoric.

  The keystone of his life is his beginnings. He was born at Braunau am Inn, Austria, on April 20, 1889, on a chilly and overcast Easter Sunday—the son of a respected fifty-two-year-old Austrian customs official, Alois Hitler, and his third wife, Klara Poelzl, a young peasant girl. Both came from the backwoods of Lower Austria, and the family had a comfortable middle-class life. Nevertheless, as a child Adolf was resentful and lazy. He was also moody and prone to outbursts. Pictures of him as a baby depict Hitler looking almost bewildered. What stood out then, as they would later, were his remarkable eyes, eerily staring out into space.

  His father was humorless and dictatorial; he was also a bad-tempered drunk, who frequently beat the young Adolf. The boy alternately feared and despised him; by contrast, he passionately adored his indulgent, hardworking mother, and would carry her picture with him all his life, even during his last days in the bunker. She may well have been the only person he ever loved. “I had honored my father,” he wrote in Mein Kampf, “but loved my mother.”

  The family moved several times, then they settled in the small provincial city of Linz; for the rest of his life, Hitler always considered Linz his hometown. His family sent him to a Realschule for secondary schooling—unlike the more traditional Gymnasium, it was based on “modern” subjects. But here he was maladjusted, his record was mediocre, he had no close friends—nor did he seek any—and others considered him high-handed and hot-tempered. Only the rousing stories of great Germanic feats kindled any interest in him; he was instinctively a nationalist from the very start. His father adamantly insisted that Adolf become a civil servant, while the rebellious Adolf wanted to be an artist—to which his father responded, “No, never as long as I live!” Fate intervened, however. On January 3, 1903, his father sat down, poured himself a glass of wine, suddenly collapsed, and just as quickly died.

  At the age of sixteen, Hitler dropped out of school to pursue his dream of becoming a painter. His doting mother agreed. But Hitler drifted. He idled away his days, nurturing fantasies about a future as an eminent artist. In the evenings he went to the theater or opera and stayed up long past midnight. In the mornings he slept late. He would then spend his time sketching and dreaming—that is, when he wasn’t trying his hand at poetry.

  Increasingly, he developed an affected manner and began to wear a dark overcoat and fedora and wield a magnificent black cane. Relatives implored him to find a job; he scoffed at the idea. Instead his fantasy world intensified, and so did his artistic ambitions. Suddenly he began to dream about moving to Vienna and attending the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts. These were, by his own account, his “happiest days,” almost like “a beautiful dream.”

  The dream soon ended, when his mother developed fatal breast cancer. He looked after her as much as he could before packing his bags and boarding a train for Vienna in September 1907 to sit for the entrance exam at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he was one of more than 100 candidates. He made the first cut, only to fail the next stage of tests. When he asked the director of the academy why he flunked, the Rector calmly explained that Hitler’s talents lay not in painting but in architecture.

  By this stage, his mother had died at the young age of forty-seven, and Hitler was prostrated with grief. He was also broke; his mother’s sickness almost completely depleted the family savings. In his own words, “poverty and hard reality” now stared him in the face. He had enough savings to get by for a year, but little more.

  Once again, he packed his bags and left the cozy provincialism of Linz, this time permanently, moving to Vienna.

  From 1908 to 1913 Hitler, looking disheveled and run-down, kicked around in anti-Semitic, cosmopolitan Vienna, pursuing the mundane life of a small-time artist. Barely eking out a living, he had long since given up his visions of becoming a great painter; now he nourished the futile hope that he could somehow become a consequential architect. But failure begat failure: he was a dropout, had no real qualifications and no real hope of gaining any, and he had no real friendships. And he had contempt for a society that regarded him as an unstable crank. In truth, at twenty-five years old, he was little more than a vagabond. By his own admission, he was “the nobody of Vienna.” At one point he had been so down and out that he was wearing lice-infested clothes and living with tramps and drunkards in a seedy hostel dormitory. To earn money he shoveled snow, carried bags for passengers at the railroad station, and did other odd jobs; he even entertained the idea of peddling a sensational “hair restorer.” Whenever possible, he hawked his sketches and paintings. And whenever he could, he sought solace in reading the racist trash that was so prominent on Vienna’s newsstands; he greatly admired the radical anti-Semitic nationalism associated with the pan-German leader Georg Ritter von Schönerer.

  Later Hitler moved to the Men’s Home, a modest step up from the hostel. Fellow drifters nicknamed him “Ohm Paul Kruger,” after the Boer leader renowned for his resistance against the British.

  His main passion remained music: Beethoven, Bruckner, Mozart, and Brahms. Vienna had some of the finest opera houses in all of Europe, yet when Verdi and Puccini played to packed houses at the Court Opera, Hitler was unimpressed—they were Italian. Beset by grandiose visions and dilettante dreams, Hitler’s only love was for Germanic music, above all for his cherished Wagner, whose works were for him almost a mystical experience. In Wagner, Hitler insisted over and over, he heard the “rhythms of a bygone world”—a world of epic battles and blazing redemption, of philosopher kings, Teutonic heroes, knights, and a heroic Germanic past. And slowly, his own worldview was evolving.

  Hitler was not yet a vegetarian, but he was, increasingly, a prude. Vienna hummed with culture, commerce, writers, thinkers, and academicians. Moreover, it had sexual codes intended to maintain the pristine character of the Germanic people. But it also had a seamier, more illicit side: decadence, sin, prostitution. To Hitler, Vienna had lost its clean, righteous high purpose and had become a new Babylon. Here, amid the red-light district, he hated the openly erotic art of Gustav Klimt, and the spectacle of tranvestite young men, “powdered and rouged,” sauntering into shadowy bars. And he hated the prostitutes seeking customers in the city’s scruffy tenement blocks, or the entertainers making love to men and women sprawled naked on bar counters showered under spotlights, as well as the brawny whores brandishing whips and the women offering Mutter und Tochter (“m
other and daughter”) sex.

  Hitler himself was a deviant, yet in a different way. Terrified of disease and dirt, he was also seemingly frightened of women. He never dated and had no girlfriends; actually, once, at the opera house, a girl showed sexual interest in him. He scurried away. And homosexuality disgusted him. So did masturbation. Prostitution too, though it nevertheless strangely fascinated him. More than once, he was seen lingering on the Spittelberggasse, staring at the voyeurs fondling one another; still, he ranted about moral decadence and the evils of selling sex.

  He was, meanwhile, developing politically. Already a strident German nationalist, he hated the Social Democrats and was horrified by the multilingual parliament; he also despised the multinational Hapsburg state, and he developed a distaste for the mixing of foreign peoples which, he lamented, corroded “this old site of German culture.” Although he was barely scraping out enough money to live on—he brazenly insisted he could no longer paint for hire unless the spirit moved him—he compensated for the frustrations of his indolent life by sitting in cheap cafés and haranguing anyone who would listen about his grand visions of a greater Germany. Increasingly, while the accounts of this remain vague, he was seduced by the crackpot racial theories of Karl Lueger, the demagogic, anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna (“the greatest German mayor of all times”). He now believed all of society’s ills could be traced to “the Reds”; then, fleetingly, he lit on “the Jesuits”; then finally he arrived at “the Jew.” By his own account, this was his “greatest transformation of all.” Whether it was chaos or corruption in cultural life or politics, it all came down to the “seducer of our people”—the Jew, systematically undermining the centuries-old purity of the perfect Aryan race.

  Was Hitler alone in thinking this? Not in Vienna, which remained one of the most prejudiced, anti-Jewish cities in Europe. Toxic anti-Semitism was seemingly everywhere: at Easter, Jews were repeatedly accused of ceremonial child slaughter; and in the press, Jews were routinely described as being responsible for prostitution and perversion.