Neville Chamberlain had finally vacated No. 10, having moved next door to No. 11 Downing Street instead. He was glad to still feel of use to Churchill at this hour of need, ‘But,’ he wrote to his sister, ‘if we suffer greater disasters we may all go down. I haven’t begun to hang my pictures yet…’
24
Hitler’s Dilemma
WHEN HITLER HEARD the news that the French wanted an armistice, his secretary, Christa Schroeder, saw him slap his thigh and laugh out loud with joy. She then listened to Keitel hail him as the greatest warlord of all time. What a victory it had been! They could scarce believe it. The French had suffered around 120,000 dead and missing, the Belgians, 7,500, the Dutch 3,000 and the British around 5,000 killed in action with a further 70,000 prisoners and missing. Over 1.5 million men had been taken prisoner. The Germans, on the other hand, lost 49,000 dead and missing, and 60 per cent of those losses had occurred during the last ten days. Incredibly, the 1st Panzer Division, the very spearhead of the entire campaign, had lost just 267 men killed in action, a little over 2 per cent of its number.
William Shirer was one of the journalists invited to witness the official armistice signing at the clearing in the woods where the railway wagon-lit stood. He was a little way away, but through binoculars watched Hitler step out of his car and stride towards them. ‘I observed his face,’ wrote William. ‘It was grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge. There was also in it a springy step, a note of the triumphant conqueror, the defier of the world.’
By the terms of the armistice, France was divided. The north and western seaboard would be occupied by the Germans, while the south would be left as a puppet state headed by Pétain, with its government in the small but elegant Auvergne spa town of Vichy. All France’s overseas possessions were also to be governed by Vichy. Much to his disappointment, Mussolini was not allowed to have the French fleet, but nor were the British. Germany, now fully convinced that U-boats were the key to naval success, agreed that the French navy should remain in port, inactive, although, of course, Hitler could always change his mind about that at a later stage.
Declaring the end in France to be the ‘most glorious victory of all time’, Hitler ordered that bells should be rung in the Reich for a week and that flags should be flown. The Third Reich was to celebrate. ‘How many mothers and wives will thank God that the war with France has ended so quickly,’ wrote Christa Schroeder. In Berlin, Else Wendel’s life had not much improved – she was still estranged from her sons and without the love of a good man – but even she was swept along by the carnival atmosphere of victory. ‘What stupendous successes!’ she wrote. ‘All my fears disappeared for there was hope again. I loved that spring and summer, and so did everyone in Berlin. Victory flags, victory music, victory gaiety. Everything was all right in Germany.’ She also thought it was brilliant of Hitler to sign the armistice in the same railway carriage as had been used in 1918. As far as she was concerned, France and Britain had asked for and got it. Germany stood once more in her true place in Europe. ‘A great people,’ she added, ‘who had proved themselves more than equal to the rest of the world.’
Hilda Müller, still training for Siemens, had been following the war carefully. It was unavoidable, for at the Siemens office there was a large map on which glass-headed pins were moved every time the Germans advanced. The radio would also be on. ‘We listened to the radio at work,’ she says. ‘It was known as Goebbels’ Gob.’ A loudspeaker had been set up, so that everyone could hear it. Whenever there was a success, there would be a special announcement on the radio and a Franz Liszt prelude would be played, followed by an announcement.
Hilda was pleased that the war seemed to be nearly over, but best of all was the announcement that the dance halls were to be reopened. ‘To be honest,’ she says, ‘France wasn’t so important to me as the fact that I could go dancing again.’
Hitler was determined to take a short break too, visiting the battlefields where he had served during the First World War, and to Dunkirk too, where he was delighted to find so much intact British kit strewn all over the place. ‘They thought only of their skins,’ he said contemptuously. ‘They can certainly beat their colonial subjects with whips, but on the battlefield they are miserable cowards.’ He also made a brief visit to Paris. ‘F. talked again about trip to Paris,’ noted Gerhard Engel, ‘which had impressed him deeply; praised Napoleon and French kings, who had really thought and planned on the grand scale.’
But what was the world’s greatest warlord going to do about Britain? The war was not over – not until Britain gave up the fight as well. He felt sure she would sue for peace, and in the flush of victory he was feeling generous. He told Mussolini he had no intention of breaking up the British Empire and said he would offer generous terms – a few possessions and an acceptance of the German position in Europe. Yet he was also clearly worried about a risky invasion. On 17 June, the day before his meeting with Mussolini, the OKW had told the Operations Staff of the Kriegsmarine that the Führer had not yet expressed any intention to make a landing in Britain, ‘as he fully appreciates the unusual difficulties of such an operation’.
Three days later, he was feeling more bullish. Von Brauchitsch had met with him at the Wolf ’s Ravine, as the Führer Headquarters was known, to discuss winding-down operations. He advised the Führer that it was absolutely necessary to negotiate a peace with Britain or prepare to invade and quickly so. Hitler, however, was sceptical. He considered Britain was now so weak that major operations on land would hardly be necessary after the Luftwaffe had bombed her into submission. The army would then cross the Channel merely as an occupation force. Out at sea, ready to pounce on Allied shipping in the Western Approaches, were Admiral Dönitz’s wolfpacks. Soon, his fast, agile motor torpedo boats, his Schnellboote, would be operating from along the Channel coast too. One way or another, he told von Brauchitsch, Britain would back down.
That same day, Gerhard Hartmann, a young soldier in the Grossdeutschland Panzer Grenadier Division on guard duty at the Wolf ’s Ravine, overheard a conversation between Hitler and Göring as the two men strolled through the woods outside the Headquarters. The young man could not help but hear; the two men paused just yards away from him. Göring told Hitler that the Luftwaffe was already prepared to attack England, at which the Führer began talking about an invasion. ‘What he has in mind,’ recorded Gerhard, ‘is a fifty-kilometre strip of land that can be secured by the Luftwaffe.’ As they moved on again, Gerhard moved so that he was hidden by a tree and then surreptitiously took a photograph of these two giant figures plotting the course of history.
Also on that day, Hitler told his secretary, Christa Schroeder, that he intended to address the Reichstag and in the speech make an appeal to the British. ‘If they will not quit, he said, he would go ahead ruthlessly!’ she wrote in a letter. ‘I believe that he is sorry to have to wrestle the British to the ground; he would apparently find it preferable if they would be reasonable about it.’ Of course he would – it was far easier to conclude a peace treaty without having to go to the trouble of mounting an assault by air and sea.
He believed he had already done enough to bring Britain to the peace table. Britain’s army had been trounced and her ally crushed, and Germany had proved that its army and air force were superior in almost every way. Britain stood alone. It did not make sense for her to continue the fight.
Only Britain now stood in the way of Hitler pursuing his bigger agenda, the showdown with the Soviet Union. It is easy to think that Germany started the war largely because the megalomaniac Hitler craved power and land, and because the German people, cowed and humiliated after the First World War and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, were prepared to go along with a man who seemed to be literally offering them the world. It was, of course, a lot more complicated than that.
Hitler viewed Stalin and the Soviet state as an evil, blood-stained tyranny that had deliberate aims of spreading westwards. In this, he was largely correct.
At the heart of his ideology – as outlined in his book, Mein Kampf – was the struggle against the Jewish-Bolshevik. World Jewry was a malevolent force that needed to be crushed, but so too was Bolshevism. Indeed, Communism in Germany was painted in much the same way as Nazism was portrayed in Britain, that is, something dangerous that had to be stopped. Hitler’s hatred of Bolshevism was shared by the military aristocratic elite, who still believed that the Kiel Mutiny in 1918, which had hastened the end of the First World War, had been led by communist elements. It had ensured that in the post-war army it was only aristocrats who had reached the highest command. It was for this reason that the Wehrmacht of 1940 still had so many men from traditional German military families in key positions – men such as von Rundstedt, von Brauchitsch, von Kleist, von Kluge, von Richthofen and even von Manstein. These men allied themselves to Hitler and the Nazis partly because he represented the antithesis of Bolshevism, but also because he promised massive military rearmament, which was felt to be necessary if Germany was to protect herself.
And it was this vulnerability, this insecurity about Germany’s central geographical position in Europe, which was the nub of Hitler’s ability to drive such an aggressive foreign policy. In the 1930s, Germany was still a very young state that had been created only in 1871. As such, it remained a nation of German peoples rather than the German nation. It was also a part of Europe that had a long history of bloody wars, from the terrible Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century, to the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century, to the catastrophic First World War. With a comparatively small coastline along only her northern border, Germany was vulnerable to attack from all other sides. After Versailles, she was more vulnerable than she had ever been.
There was another factor in Germany’s geographical position, however. The Reich lacked oil and sufficient supplies of iron and other key ores, and had only comparatively small coal seams. These could be gained either by foreign trade agreements or by expansion. If Hitler could attack and destroy the Soviet Union, then he would kill two birds with one stone. First, he would eliminate the Soviet threat to Germany, and with it Bolshevism, and, second, he would have vast lands that could supply the Reich with all the minerals, farmland, and manpower he needed to ensure Germany’s long-term future. This was his Lebensraum policy. It was not an original idea; the concept had been around in Germany since the end of the nineteenth century. Another word for it was colonization, and that was as old as the stars.
Before he turned to Russia, however, there was expansion closer to home to attend to. In many ways, Hitler’s massive rearmament policy and early territorial expansionism were entirely understandable. Certainly, megalomania played a part, but he also believed, like most Germans, that those German-speaking territories were rightly part of Germany. Furthermore, he needed to make Germany more secure, by creating a greater protective ring around the country – a kind of buffer. The stronger the Reich, the less vulnerable it would be to foreign aggression.
And his early expansionism was phenomenally successful, which gained him ever more popular support. The Rhineland was reoccupied; Austria was absorbed; so too was the Sudetenland; and then, in March 1939, so was the rest of Czechoslovakia. And all without firing a shot. No wonder the Germans loved him. He had given them pride, jobs, prosperity and nearly all the land stripped from them in 1919, and all peacefully. It was nothing short of a miracle.
Nearly all, but not quite. The last remaining piece of pre-1919 German territory now lay in Poland, and it was to this new country that Hitler turned his attention in the spring of 1939. In 1919, the new Polish state had been granted a strip of land between the German province of East Prussia and the rest of Germany that gave them access to the Baltic Sea. Hitler wanted this largely German-peopled strip of land returned and had assumed that Poland could be threatened and bullied into ceding the Danzig ‘corridor’ back to Germany. This done, he believed Poland would then become a virtual German satellite and ally when he eventually launched an attack on the Soviet Union.
The Poles, however, had no intention of being bullied and flatly rejected German proposals to cede the corridor despite threats of military action. It was at this point that Britain, and then France, made their pledge to honour Poland’s territorial rights. Few countries involve themselves in the affairs of others purely for the wider good. Foreign intervention is always rooted in self-interest, albeit this self-interest might be shared with a number of other states. Thus Britain, under the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, had in March 1939 given a public guarantee of Poland’s territorial rights, not because they were feeling altruistic towards Poland but because they thought this would be the best way to deter Hitler from ideas of further expansion. They assumed that Hitler, with his despicable totalitarian Nazi ideology, would, if encouraged, slowly try to conquer all of Europe and then even the world, in which case Nazi Germany was clearly a threat to Britain too. Thus he had to be stopped. That might well have happened in the long term, but in 1939 Hitler’s aims were still ultimately directed towards the Jewish-Bolshevik menace in the east.
Since Hitler ignored this threat and invaded Poland anyway, the policy was clearly a failure. What might have been more effective would have been an alliance with the Soviet Union, which both Britain and France actively pursued at the same time as von Ribbentrop. Ironically, however, Britain and France’s Polish guarantee had already ensured that a deal with Russia was out of the question, because Stalin wanted his hands on Poland just as much as Hitler did.
The wooing of their sworn enemy was an extraordinary success that had followed on from a series of failures. For some time before, von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, had tried to bind both Italy and Japan into a military alliance. An Axis coalition that ran through the heart of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Far East would have been a nightmare for Britain and may well have deterred her from declaring war. However, Japan and Italy were not prepared to go to war with the Western powers – not at that time, at any rate. So Germany had turned to the Soviet Union instead.
Hitler suspected Britain and France’s pledge to Poland was nothing more than bluff. However, in case it was not, it was clear that he had to avoid an alliance between France and Britain in the west and Russia in the east, because as he moved to Poland, it would be easy for Stalin to start becoming nervous about German intentions. In 1939, Germany’s armed forces were big enough to risk war with Poland, but not the Soviet Union.
It was von Ribbentrop who was the prime mover in approaching the Russians and securing a non-aggression pact, eventually signed on 23 August 1939. That Germany was prepared to sign a treaty with an implacable enemy was certainly cynical in the extreme, but hardly unique. It meant Hitler could invade Poland and secure the corridor in the safe knowledge that the Soviet Union, at any rate, would not object.
Despite the German military might carefully depicted on the newsreels, Germany was only just strong enough to attack humble Poland in September 1939. Her air force was her biggest asset, but the army was under-trained and, worst of all, she faced a massive ammunition shortage. Yet Hitler was in a hurry; time, he believed, was not on Germany’s side, because her economy was faltering and, thanks to the inherent shortages of fuel and, especially, iron ore, his rearmaments programme had almost ground to a halt.
It was after Munich that Hitler had begun to realize that a showdown with the West was probably inevitable. His long-term strategy was still very much the establishment of Lebensraum in the east and the conquest of the Soviet Union, but the threat of the Western powers would clearly have to be dealt with first. In September, Generalmajor Georg Thomas, the Wehrmacht chief economist, was told to prepare for war against Britain in 1942. A fortnight later, on 14 October 1938, Göring announced a further rearmament programme that was to dwarf the earlier, yet still considerable, military growth. The Luftwaffe was to increase fivefold to some 21,750 planes, including 7,000 Ju 88s and more than 800 He 177 heavy b
ombers. The navy was to begin a fleet-building programme, called the Z Plan, which would include six new battleships and hundreds of U-boats and other vessels that would make it comparable in size to the Royal Navy within six years. The army, too, was to expand yet further with large numbers of new guns and panzers and the production of new explosives.
These plans were the stuff of make-believe, however. To start with, the Germans did not have the industrial capacity or raw materials to build so many aircraft or ships. Entire dockyards and naval bases, for example, would need to be built before they could even begin. Even if built, they would never have the fuel needed to operate such a gigantic air force or fleet.
And nor did they have the cash. The existing rearmament programme had already pushed Germany to her economic limits. Indeed, by the end of 1938, Germany was facing a massive cash squeeze and something of an economic crisis. The German market had briefly rallied after Munich in the belief that long-term peace had been assured. The announcement of even greater rearmament, however, ensured that confidence fell. When the Reichsbank tried to raise another vast loan, it was unable to find the necessary investment. There was a further problem. So much energy had been spent on rearmament that foreign exports were massively down. There was little foreign exchange coming into the country and what there was had already been spent. Financially, Germany was in trouble by the beginning of 1939.
In May that year, Generalmajor Thomas presented a clear analysis of the balance of forces between Germany and the Western powers. Thomas was against any premature war against Britain and France but nonetheless his figures were alarming. In 1939, Germany was spending 23 per cent of its national income on rearmament, whereas France was spending 17 per cent, Britain 12 per cent and the USA just 2 per cent. On top of that, Britain could count on the entire Empire for raw materials as well as on the USA thanks to the 1938 trade agreement between the two countries. Since Britain had a similar-sized economy to Germany’s, there was clearly scope for Britain to expand her rearmament. As for the USA, it was a country that with its vast industrial power could be in a league of its own should it so choose.
The Battle of Britain Page 37
