Mussolini was trying to solve these problems, though without much success, when he received news of the Nazi–Soviet pact. Mussolini rejoiced at the diplomatic coup, until Ciano made it clear to him that the move meant an attack on Poland was imminent. Realising this would involve Italy in war, Mussolini sent a desperate message to Hitler. Rather than admit his army was not up to scratch, Mussolini claimed that the campaigns in Ethiopia and Albania had cost a lot of equipment. Italy, Mussolini told Hitler, could not possibly go to war against France and Britain without new supplies of military hardware, which he proceeded to list at length.
When Hitler received the letter he was furious. He sent the Italian ambassador packing, then raged at his aides at Italian treachery and the fact that they could never be relied upon in a war. But time was precious and for once Hitler calmed down quickly. He summoned the Italian ambassador back again and asked him that, if Mussolini would not actually go to war, at least to mobilise his forces along the French frontier. This, Hitler hoped, would tie down French forces and weaken any French attack into Germany. Mussolini agreed.
The Italian let-down aside, Hitler’s network of alliances and agreements worked well when he invaded Poland. The Slovaks sent troops to help the invasion and, once Polish defeat was assured, the Soviets attacked from the East. Four countries ceased to exist: Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Hitler was the sole arbiter of events in eastern Europe.
Later in June 1940 having conquered Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, Hitler became temporarily concerned with his relations in western Europe.
NEUTRAL COUNTRIES
Sweden was providing Germany with the bulk of her iron ore, though French supplies were now available. With German troops in Norway, Sweden was in no real position to defy Hitler, but the Germans wanted more. They wanted Sweden to transport the iron ore in Swedish ships and for Swedish fighter aircraft to attack any Allied bombers which strayed over Swedish air space. The Swedes readily agreed.
Next Hitler turned his attention to Spain, now in the hands of the right wing dictator General Francisco Franco. Hitler had sent German panzers, aircraft and men to help Franco win the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1938. Now Hitler wanted to extract the price for that help. He asked Franco to join the war against Britain on Germany’s side, promising to give him Gibraltar as soon as the British were defeated.
Franco knew that Spain was exhausted after the civil war and needed all her energies to rebuild the economy and heal the internal divisions. On the other hand, Hitler seemed to be winning the war and German troops were stationed on the Spanish border with occupied France. Franco decided to opt for friendship with Germany, but not to join the war. He changed Spain’s official position from neutrality to ‘nonbelligerence’, promising to do what he could to help Germany.
By October 1940, Hitler was losing his patience. He wanted permission for German troops to go through Spain to attack Gibraltar, but Franco was refusing. He wanted German warships to have access to Spanish naval facilities, again Franco refused. On 23 October the two dictators met at the Franco-Spanish border to discuss their differences. The talks dragged on for nine hours as Hitler alternately expounded his world views, or asked for practical help from Spain. Franco was charm itself, but insisted on outrageous concessions if Spain were to enter the war, which entry, he added, must be some months away at least. The meeting ended with virtually nothing having been agreed, leading Hitler later angrily to remark that he would ‘rather have several teeth pulled than go through that again’. That was the last time he and Franco met.
After the abortive meeting with Franco, Hitler travelled to meet Marshal Pétain, the new leader of defeated France. Installed in the small town of Vichy, the French government knew that German troops were to occupy much of northern and western France, but waited anxiously to learn what else Hitler wanted. What he wanted, they learned, was for France to join the war against Britain. Pétain demurred. He could not, he said, declare war on anyone without summoning the French parliament and that would open a whole can of worms about the German occupation and the ways in which Pétain was already supplying raw materials to Hitler. Pétain could, however, promise to keep the powerful French Navy neutral and block British access to the many ports and airfields in the French colonies. Again, Hitler had to be satisfied with less than what he wanted.
Meanwhile, Mussolini was again causing Hitler problems. In June 1940, with the war apparently won by Germany, Mussolini had finally declared war on France and Britain. His troops marched into southern France, as French resistance was collapsing, and invaded British-occupied Egypt from Italian Libya. The attack in North Africa came to a halt, though Italian troops were deep within Egypt and were fortifying their positions.
Then, on 28 October as Hitler travelled back from his meeting with Pétain, Mussolini started a war all of his own. He invaded Greece from Albania. Hitler was annoyed and predicted that the Italian attack would soon get bogged down in the autumn rains and winter snows, which it did. At first Hitler seemed content to let his ally suffer humiliation and losses, but in January the Italians lost Bardia, Tobruk and 130,000 prisoners to the British in North Africa. This sudden British success worried Hitler deeply. If the Italians were defeated in North Africa, Hitler believed, then the British forces in Egypt would be free to repeat their strategic coup of 1918 and invade the Balkans via Greece. In 1918 this move had knocked Austria out of the war: in 1941, it might capture the vital Rumanian oilfields.
In February Hitler took the decisive step of agreeing to help Italy. He sent Rommel and the Afrika Korps to North Africa and ordered Field Marshal List to take the Twelfth Army through Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria to conquer Greece. This move not only delayed the attack on Russia by a fatal six weeks, but it also upset Hitler’s delicate balance of alliances in eastern Europe.
In 1940, Hitler had redrawn the map of eastern Europe by forcing Rumania to give up some of the extensive territories given to her by the Versailles Treaty. Transylvania with its 1.5 million Magyars was given to Hungary, Dobruja with its 300,000 Bulgars was handed to Bulgaria and Bessarabia with 750,000 Russians was given to Stalin.
In the spring of 1941, Hitler began building up a network of alliances in the new eastern Europe for his war against Russia. The Slovaks agreed readily, the entire existence of their state depending on Hitler. Further north, the Finns were also willing allies. They had lost territory to Russia in the war of 1939 and were eager to regain it. They agreed to send their entire army, small though it was, to attack Leningrad from the north.
Admiral Horthy, grateful for the large expansion of Hungary, agreed to lend Hitler two mechanised brigades and one brigade of cavalry. This commitment was to be enlarged in 1942 to include eleven divisions. Hitler hoped that Bulgaria would be similarly grateful, and so was amazed when King Boris flatly refused to declare war on Russia. He did, however, declare war on Britain.
In Rumania King Carol had been forced to abdicate after accepting the dismemberment of his country and was replaced by his young son, King Michael. Power was, however, in the hands of the army council, led by General Ion Antonescu. Antonescu’s first move was to ban the pro-Nazi political party, the Iron Guard, and throw its leaders into prison. But when Hitler asked for Rumanian support in the war on Russia, Antonescu agreed readily. He demanded the return of Bessarabia, to which Hitler agreed. Rumania sent two entire Armies north to join the Germans.
That left only Yugoslavia, the most pro-western of all the eastern European states. Prince Paul had been devastated by the collapse of France and the apparent defeat of Britain, but he was not yet ready to join his country to Germany. After much cajolery by Hitler and smooth offers from Ribbentrop, Prince Paul finally agreed to sign a treaty with Germany. He specified, however, that Yugoslavia would not go to war with any other country, nor would German troops be stationed in Yugoslavia. It was less than Hitler wanted, but it was enough.
On 25 March Prince Paul signed the treaty. Next day
a quarter of his government resigned in protest and there were massive public demonstrations. At dawn on 27 March the military launched a coup which ousted Prince Paul, repudiated the treaty with Germany and put King Peter, now aged 17, in power.
Hitler was furious and ordered that the invasion of Greece, scheduled for 6 April, be expanded to include Yugoslavia. The hurriedly revised plans were put into effect and the panzers rolled forwards as planned. Yugoslavia capitulated on 17 April, Greece on 23 April.
There has been much discussion as to why Hitler diverted his forces into the Balkans and North Africa when preparing for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. The move is widely believed to have delayed the invasion of Russia by six weeks, thus shortening the time available to the Germans to crush the Soviets before winter set in.
Some have suggested Hitler made the move to support his ally Mussolini. Certainly Hitler and Ribbentrop gave the Italians this impression, emphasising the importance of the Pact of Steel to the Führer. But Hitler had made no move to help the Italians when they first got into difficulties. It is more likely that it was hard military realities that brought the panzers to the Balkans. Hitler was terrified that a British landing would take his invasion forces in the flank and rear as they drove into Russia. Such a move could be confounded only by securing the Balkans and strengthening the Italian effort in North Africa.
In any case, Hitler’s original plans for the Balkan campaign timetabled the panzers to be back on the Soviet frontier in time for Barbarossa to begin at the end of May. It was the diversion into Yugoslavia that caused extra wear and tear on the panzers, requiring them to undergo an overhaul before being thrown into battle again. It was this that made the delay and for that Hitler’s temper was solely to blame. While the invasion of Yugoslavia may have been politically desirable, from a purely military point of view, given the realities of a Russian war, it was a mistake.
So long as the war in Russia went well for Germany, Hitler’s military allies remained loyal. But after Stalingrad things changed rapidly. By February 1943 the Hungarians had lost over 60,000 dead and many more injured. Horthy withdrew his men from the front line, informing Hitler that the Hungarians could be used only to guard supply lines and rear area bases. He did, however, allow SS recruiting officers to contact ethnic Germans in Hungary, and over 30,000 joined up. Later in 1943 Horthy came under increasing pressure to move his men back into the front line, but again he refused. To calm Hitler’s anger he agreed to arrest Hungary’s Jewish population and send them off to ‘slave labour camps’. Horthy probably knew by this date that the Jews were being murdered at death camps, but coldly calculated it was better to lose Jews to the Nazis than Hungarians to the Soviets.
The Finns made peace with Russia in September 1944, when they could gain good terms. They had to hand over their military hardware and some slices of territory, but the country remained intact.
The Italians had sent some troops to help the Germans in Russia, but most of their military effort went into the Mediterranean area. Their army occupied Greece and Yugoslavia, as well as fighting in North Africa, while the navy and air force battled the British Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. By May 1943 the Italians, along with the Afrika Korps, had evacuated North Africa and in July the Allies landed in Sicily. A few days later Mussolini was ousted from power by his own Fascist Party acting with the agreement of King Victor Emmanuel III. In August, Italy surrendered to the Allies, although German troops in Italy ensured the Allies could not capture the country without months of hard fighting.
Rumania, in contrast, kept her men in the front line. By the summer of 1943, the Rumanians had lost over 200,000 men, having been hit particularly badly at Stalingrad. Throughout the following winter the Rumanians continued to fight, but when the end came it came very quickly. On 22 August 1944, King Michael made a radio broadcast in which he announced that he was asking Stalin for peace terms and ordered all Germans to leave Rumania. A week later, Rumania declared war on Germany and entered the fight again as allies of Russia.
Bulgaria, which had never declared war on Russia, helped Germany occupy parts of Greece and Yugoslavia but otherwise stayed out of the fighting. In 1943 King Boris had died and the government passed into civilian hands. When Soviet troops reached the Bulgarian border in August 1944, the Bulgarians declared war on Germany. This was not good enough for Stalin, who declared war on Bulgaria and only agreed to peace when a new Communist regime took power in Sofia.
In contrast the Hungarian army went back into the front line when the Soviets reached the Hungarian border in September 1944. The battle for Budapest that winter was long and hard, but in March 1945 the Hungarian army simply collapsed.
In the end Hitler’s Germany was battling alone. All the allies that Hitler had courted so assiduously before and during the war, the majority of whom had had little choice but to enter into alliance with him, in the face of the Nazi military machine, abandoned him as the remorseless might of the Allied war effort ground the Germans down to defeat.
CHAPTER FOUR
Corporal Hitler
The Great War was a defining experience for Hitler. He later said of this period that it was ‘the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence’. His experiences as a soldier shaped his political views, his abilities and ultimately propelled him into the political arena. His undoubted bravery and exemplary war record gave him the status of a war hero that was to be so useful when seeking votes.
The years in the trenches were Hitler’s only real experience of soldiering before he became commander of the armed forces of the Third Reich. As such, these experiences had a decisive impact on his later career as a military commander. Although fighting conditions changed greatly between 1918 and 1939, Hitler frequently justified the decisions he took in the Second World War by referring back to his experiences of fighting in the trenches. Nor was this mere bluster. Fritz Wiedemann was a junior officer in Hitler’s regiment during much of the first war and then served for four years on Hitler’s staff when he became Führer. ‘His memory of the war was excellent,’ recorded Wiedemann later, ‘I never heard him lying or exaggerating when he told of his war experiences’. If anyone is to understand Hitler as a commander, they must look to Hitler as the commanded.
When war broke out in August 1914 Hitler was enthusiastic. He had recovered from some years of destitution in his native Austria and was earning a living as a freelance artist in Munich. He was already holding forth on political subjects at meetings, but had no burning interests beyond keeping up to date with current affairs. Hitler, at this time, had no intention of becoming a politician, though he was deeply interested in politics, rather he aimed to be an artist or architect.
The declaration of war overwhelmed Hitler. ‘I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time,’ he wrote later. On 5 August Hitler sat down and wrote to the Bavarian King Ludwig III asking permission to serve in the regiment of his adopted city, Munich, rather than the forces of his own nation, Austria. This request was never actually answered, but Hitler was summoned to report to the Bavarian 16th Infantry Regiment on 16 August.
One of the most important, but often overlooked, features of Hitler’s service in the First World War is that he joined up in Bavaria. In 1914 the German Empire, ruled by the Kaiser, was composed of a number of smaller kingdoms and states, each with its own government and powers. The Kingdom of Bavaria, ruled by King Ludwig III, had its own army but, lacking a coastline, no navy.
As a result, Hitler’s enthusiasm for the war and desire to play a part in it was channelled into the army. One long term result of this on Hitler’s future career as a military commander was that he was totally ignorant of naval affairs until he became Führer and was forced to take account of them. Even then, Hitler’s interest in naval matters was restricted largely to a knowledge of facts and figures. He knew, for instance, the range and weight of the guns on the
major ships of the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy, and of those on many British ships as well.
A youthful Hitler among the crowd celebrating the outbreak of the First World War on Munich’s Odeonsplatz
But Hitler never really understood naval strategy. Like Napoleon before him, Hitler looked on the navy as being able to support the actions of the army, but as having no real independent value of its own. Nor did he care about the crucial importance of the naval war in the task of defeating Britain. Once it became clear in the late summer of 1940 that the army would not be able to land in Britain and that attempts to weaken her would be relegated to a naval affair in the Atlantic, Hitler lost interest in the project. The task of defeating Britain was to a large extent, dismissed from Hitler’s mind. There were other reasons for this, but Hitler’s four years in the trenches undoubtedly helped to concentrate his mind on the army at the expense of the navy.
When he reported for duty in 1914, Hitler found himself in a regiment with the ranks composed almost entirely of new recruits, though the officers and many NCOs had seen previous service. The men were drilled relentlessly for two months, then told they were to board train on 21 October for active service. Hitler wrote to his landlady in Munich that he was looking forward to seeing action and, ironically given what was to happen later, that he and his comrades were anticipating a landing in England.
Hitler: Military Commander Page 6
