by A. N. Wilson
As if the disaster of Barbarossa was not enough, and almost as if he wanted to make his defeat an ineluctable conclusion to his violent career, Hitler had declared war on the United States of America.
The victory over the Germans, however, was not easy, nor even perhaps inevitable, not least because the Wehrmacht, the German army, was a superbly trained fighting force, with some outstanding military commanders. One of the most brilliant was Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel. He was the most esteemed general, of whatever country, during the entire war. The British felt him to be a decent man and an admirable soldier. Some thought Churchill would lose a vote of confidence in the House of Commons after the Socialist MP Nye Bevan asked the House whether anyone believed that Rommel – were he an Englishman – would have risen above the rank of sergeant. He was making the point that England was still class-bound. Rommel, a brilliant man of the people, had won fame in the First World War as a young lieutenant at the Battle of Caporetto when he captured over eighty Italian guns and 9,000 men. In the Second World War, he was the mastermind behind the Blitzkrieg idea – that is, that sudden attack was the most effective war strategy. He was largely responsible for the defeat of France, and in 1941, Hitler put Rommel in charge of the Afrika Korps where, as the legendary Desert Fox, he looked as if he was going to secure North Africa, and hence the entire Mediterranean, for the Axis. Had he done so, it would have made Churchill’s plan for the invasion of Europe – through Sicily and Italy – an impossibility. The Allies would have invaded the French coast without the backup of the Eighth Army in Italy, and this would have been a risky undertaking. As D-Day in 1944 revealed, the landings were not easy and heavy losses were to be inevitable.
By 1941, Churchill had peaked as a war leader and was making blunder after blunder, with consequent enormous loss of life: the failure to wrest Greece and Crete from the Germans was only one of them. The Germans retained command of the Balkans. Belgrade was flattened by German bombs.
Rommel was able to recapture North African strongholds, such as Tobruk, taken from the Italians by the Australians. When Tobruk fell in June 1942 he took 30,000 prisoners. In the course of that summer, however, Rommel became ill and flew back to Germany, suffering from a combination of stomach and liver complaints and high blood pressure. He left the Afrika Korps in the charge of the obese General Georg Stumme. On the British side, General Montgomery had recently taken over command of the Eighth Army and defeated the Germans by a combination of tactical ingenuity and sheer force of numbers. He built up a huge force of Commonwealth soldiers – 195,000 compared to the 50,000 Germans and 54,000 Italians. With two to one superiority, he defeated Rommel, who had returned to Africa, sixty miles from Alexandria at El Alamein. The Germans fought with superb courage and determination, but they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Thereafter, the Eighth Army was in a position, eventually, to invade Sicily and begin the long, painful slog up Italy in appalling conditions.
Two things about Hitler manifested themselves as the war turned into the last two years of painful blood-letting. One was that the condition of his health was rapidly declining. The other was that, far from being depressed by the levels of slaughter, he positively gloried in it.
The condition of his health alone rendered him quite unsuited as the war leader of a great world power. By this stage of the war, Dr Morell was pumping Hitler with at least twenty-eight different drug-mixtures (excluding the morphia and hypnotics which were sometimes needed to calm him down). These included the proprietary narcotic ‘Ultraseptyl’, condemned by decent pharmacologists, as well as various fake medicines, quack stimulants and aphrodisiacs. When we use the word ‘pumping’, this is no less than the truth. Professor Karl Brandt, Hitler’s surgeon, testified that ‘Morell took more and more to treatment by injections until by the end he was doing all his work by this method. For instance, he would give large doses of sulphonamides for slight colds, and gave them to everyone at Hitler’s headquarters. Morell and I had many disputes about this. Morell then took to giving injections that had dextrose, hormones, vitamins, etc. So that the patient immediately felt better; and this type of treatment seemed to impress Hitler. Whenever he felt a cold coming on, he would have three to six injections daily, and thus prevent any real development of the infection. Therapeutically this was satisfactory. Then Morell used it as a prophylactic. If Hitler had to deliver a speech on a cold or rainy day, he would have injections the day before, the day of the speech and the day after. The normal resistance of the body was thus replaced by an artificial medium. When the war began, Hitler thought himself indispensable, and throughout the war he received almost continual injections. During the last two years he was injected daily. When I asked Dr Morell to name the drugs employed, he refused. Hitler depended more and more on these injections; his dependence became very obvious during the last year.’1
From 1943 onwards, Hitler, though scarcely in his mid-fifties, had many of the characteristics of a sick old man. He could no longer read without spectacles. His extremities trembled, especially the left arm and the left leg. His left foot dragged along the ground. He stooped. Some doctors believe that he had developed Parkinson’s disease. Others have attributed the tremors to hysterical origins. After the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942–3, Hitler only made two major public speeches. He led an increasingly eremitic existence, travelling through Germany with the train-carriage blinds down. Hans Fallada’s haunting novel Jeder Stirbt für Sich Allein, translated as Alone in Berlin, tells of a late middle-aged couple’s feeling of total disillusionment with Hitler after their son is killed during the invasion of France. They are not especially political. They cannot join up with a resistance movement. But in their desperation they take to leaving postcards, dotted around Berlin – in stair-wells, on pavements and walls – denouncing the regime. There is an obvious authenticity in Fallada’s depiction of how ruthlessly (and how inefficiently) the secret police attempt to discover who has been placing these damaging attacks on the great Leader. Fallada’s record, by a man who lived through those terrible years, shows how difficult even minimal resistance was in Germany. The decision, long before the Nazis came to power, to build up an unbending party machine, with a system of snooping, bullying and relentless interference in the lives of others, meant that, however stupid the individual officers, a system was in place which made resistance extremely hard.
Pastor Bonhoeffer, one of the most articulate of the anti-Nazi voices since the rise of the Third Reich, tried to send word to his friend in England, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, that there was indeed a resistance movement in Germany, that not all Germans supported the insane Hitler or his repellent life-view. For this reason, Bell vociferously opposed the carpet bombing of German cities and urged upon Churchill and his government a policy which sought to make peace with the enlightened part of Germany, rather than punish a whole country for the sins of the Nazis. His wish for a negotiated peace rather than unconditional surrender earned Bell much vilification in Britain which, like the rest of the world, was gripped with war fever.
It was true that there was resistance in Germany, but it lacked organization and leadership. In 1943, Sophie Scholl, a Munich student, together with her brother and his friends, distributed anti-Nazi leaflets on the campus of the university. She, her brother and another student were all beheaded in February 1943. At the same time, her father was in prison for making an uncomplimentary remark about Hitler which had been repeated to a colleague at work.
There were Germans in plenty who had always detested National Socialism. And by the turning-point of the war, and the disastrous Russian campaign, there were many who had previously believed in Hitler who were now disillusioned, aware that he had lied to his people about wanting peace, and was insatiable in his bloodlust. But the recognition that Germany was lost until it got rid of Hitler and the Nazis did not make it easier to achieve the desired goal.
Sophie Scholl was a Christian pacifist. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a complicated, highly intelligent Luthe
ran, who had once considered pacifism a sine qua non of Christianity, but who, in his book Ethics, worked out what he conceived as the essential self-indulgence of such a position. To say that one would never kill, while hoping that Hitler would somehow be removed from the scene, was to ask other people to do one’s dirty work. Bonhoeffer (whose psychiatrist father, it will be remembered, had given it as his opinion that Hitler was insane) came to believe that it was a Christian as well as his moral duty to support the assassination of the Leader.
Bonhoeffer worked for the Abwehr, the German army’s intelligence organization, many of whose members were involved with a series of conspiracies throughout 1943 to assassinate Hitler. When the Gestapo became aware of this, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned. He was eventually hanged with piano wire for his distant connection to the most famous conspiracy of all, and the one which stood the greatest chance of succeeding, that of the aristocratic Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg in July 1944.
In June of that year, the Western Allies, with terrible loss of life on all sides, had accomplished the invasion of northern France on the beaches of Normandy. Germany was now faced with the combined might of the British and American armies and air forces in the west. To the east, the Red Army, with its apparently limitless numbers and its apparently inexhaustible hardware, had emerged victorious from the Barbarossa campaign and was fighting hard on the Eastern Front.
A crisis had been reached and Germany was faced with an unavoidable defeat. A group of senior army officers, many of whom were old Prussian nobility, felt that the time had obviously come to stage a coup d’état, and to negotiate some kind of dignified peace with the British, Russians and Americans. On 17 June, Hitler, after repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to persuade him to come near the theatre of war, finally agreed to meet Rommel and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt in Margival, north of Soissons. Only four years before, it had been the headquarters set up for the invasion of England. Now the generals were trying to make their Leader see that the game was up. The officers all stood while the Leader, pale, sleepless, agitated, sat hunched on a stool, and played with his spectacles or fumbled with pencils with shaking hands. Hitler was clearly in no mood to face reality. He spoke of the invincible secret ‘V’ weapons and the innumerable turbo-jet fighters which would appear in the skies and bring England to her knees. Rommel tried to tell him that the time had come to bring the war to an end. ‘Don’t you worry about the continuance of the war’, Hitler told him, ‘but about your invasion front.’ Meanwhile, as everyone in the room knew, the Allies had landed a million men and half a million tons of matériel in France.
Hitler’s next move was to sack Rundstedt and replace him with Field Marshal Günther von Kluge. It was at this point that Stauffenberg, who had returned from the Eastern Front and seen the successes inflicted on German troops by the Red Army, decided upon his assassination attempt. He made two visits to the Berghof in Berchtesgaden but on each occasion he had held back from planting a bomb because Göring and Himmler, who had been expected to be present, had failed to show. Stauffenberg hoped to take out not merely Hitler but these two fellow-criminals if it were at all possible.
On 20 July the Leader’s headquarters were moved from Berchtesgaden to Rastenburg in East Prussia – the settlement known as the Wolf’s Lair. At the last minute, the venue for the military conference was changed, from one army hut to another. Stauffenberg, who had almost been surprised by fellow-officers, with pliers and wires actually in his hand, hastily planted a bomb, concealed in a briefcase, under the map table where the Leader was due to outline his latest catastrophic plans. It turned out to be a marble-topped table. Stauffenberg withdrew to a different part of the barracks, and after the huge, highly satisfying explosion, he assumed that he had at last been successful in achieving the end for which all sane Germans, and indeed men and women throughout the world, had been yearning: Hitler’s death. Following the explosion came the smoke. Wood and paper were hurled into the air. Stauffenberg left the barracks hastily and flew to Berlin, telling his friends that the Leader was no more.
He was not correct. As so often happened in Hitler’s life, there was a strong element of farce, unrecognized as such – of course – by the central participants. The Leader staggered out of the smoke and rubble alive. His trousers were in tatters. He afterwards seemed to regard these trousers as something in the order of a sacred relic, holding them up as evidence that Providence, or whatever cruel god in whom he half-believed, had yet again spared him to continue inflicting unhappiness on everyone else on the planet. Mussolini sent a message saying that this was ‘a sign from Heaven’.
For the first half of the day after the explosion, Hitler was in a state of miraculous calm, quietly sucking various coloured lozenges supplied by Dr Morell. Then, towards 5 p.m. in the afternoon, back in the Leader’s bunker, the raving mania surfaced. A group had assembled around him, and they were beginning to bicker among themselves. Admiral Dönitz said it revealed the treachery of the army. Göring said it betrayed the pitiful foreign policy of the Reich. Göring took offence at Dönitz’s implied attack on the Air Force. Ribbentrop took offence at the attack on his Foreign Ministry. Suddenly, through their bickering voices there broke the sound of Hitler shouting. It was one of his most unrestrained pieces of anger. Those responsible for trying to defy Providence would be punished. So would their wives. So would their children. As he bayed and yelled, calling for deaths and more deaths, white-clad SS servants moved about serving tea and refilling china cups.
The Leader announced his intention of speaking to the German people at once. In fact, he did not reach the radio microphones until 1 a.m., but there must have been many who stayed up to hear the rasping, violent tones as he addressed them –
German racial comrades! I do not know how many times an assassination attempt against me has been planned and carried out. If I speak to you today I do so for two reasons: first so that you may hear my voice and know that I myself am uninjured and well. Secondly so that you may also learn the details about a crime that has not its like in German history.2
Having named Stauffenberg as the instigator of the treason, and assured the public that those involved in the plot were a ‘ridiculously small’ number of officers, he promised that ‘we will settle accounts the way we National Socialists are accustomed to settle them’.
This was a promise which he found easy to keep. The arrests and executions were still going on in April 1945, when the war was ending. Anyone suspected of being implicated was hauled before a military tribunal. Some 5,000 people were killed for being involved with the plot. They were allowed no chance to plead, no lawyers, no visits from chaplains or religious consolations of any kind before their deaths. ‘I want them to be hanged, strung up like butchered cattle’, Hitler said. And Himmler in a speech in August promised, inaccurately, that ‘the family of Count von Stauffenberg will be wiped out down to the last member’.3
The plot was crushed but it crushed Hitler psychologically. He could no longer trust anyone, even his dearest one. Secretaries overheard him say crossly to his German Shepherd dog, ‘Look me in the eyes, Blondi. Are you also a traitor like the generals of my staff?’4
Only Rommel was spared the gallows. General Wilhelm Burgdorf was sent to the Desert Fox with a revolver and a cyanide capsule. He was informed that if he committed suicide there would be no publicity and no reprisals on his family. This was cynical, not merciful. A public trial of Rommel would have revealed the extent of distrust of Hitler felt by the senior military. Rommel did his Führer a great favour by committing suicide.
During the last months of 1944, the Americans advanced almost to the German border. Though her allies and friends – Vichy France, Finland, Bulgaria, Romania – had by now capitulated to the Anglo-American or Soviet attacks, Germany fought on. About 1.2 million Germans died on the Western Front during this period. When General Alfred Jodl (Chief of Operations Staff of the German High Command) showed Hitler the map of where they were taking th
e heaviest pounding, in the hilly area between Luxembourg and Belgium, Hitler stabbed at the paper. ‘I have made a momentous decision. I am taking the offensive. Here, out of the Ardennes.’
It was a bold stroke. Some 250,000 German troops were moved to the line of departure. The battle raged through late November and December in heavy snows, wild winds and biting sleet. They managed to give the Americans a run for their money but in the event, they could not cross the River Meuse, and by the beginning of 1945 it was evident that General Eisenhower’s troops, badly demoralized as they were, had the advantage over the Germans. Hitler was furious and said that the campaign had only failed because his instructions had not been carried out to the letter. But the truth was, as Jodl put it to the screaming Hitler, ‘My Leader, we cannot force the Meuse.’ Over 75,000 men had been killed in what the Americans, not troubling to acquaint themselves with any of the place-names of the Ardennes forests, called simply the Battle of the Bulge.
As the Americans under the command of General George S. Patton pressed on to victory, Hitler gave a New Year broadcast. Germany, he predicted, would rise like a phoenix from its ruined cities and go on to victory.
ELEVEN
The Bunker
During a nocturnal discussion with Himmler in 1941, Hitler once expressed his ambition to make Berlin the capital of the world. ‘What is ugly in Berlin we shall suppress. Nothing will be too good for the beautification of Berlin. When one enters the Reich Chancellery, one should have the feeling that one is visiting the Master of the World. One will arrive there along long avenues containing the Triumphal Arch, the Pantheon of the Army, the Square of the People – things to take your breath away! It is only thus that we shall succeed in eclipsing our only rival in the world, Rome. Let it be built on such a scale that St Peter’s and its Square will seem like toys in comparison!’1
