In the days before September 1, Hitler sought to give Britain a way out of its guarantee by offering a negotiated solution to the Danzig crisis if Warsaw would send a plenipotentiary in twenty-four hours to Berlin. Henderson believed the offer was sincere. Whether it was or not, it showed that Hitler desperately wanted to avoid war with Great Britain.
In his directive of August 31 ordering the invasion of Poland, Hitler instructed his army not to cross any western frontier, his navy not to attack any Allied ships, and his Luftwaffe not to fire on any Allied plane, except in defense of the Fatherland.
After Warsaw fell, “Hitler made peace overtures to London and Paris on 6 October. These overtures were rejected on 12 October.”36 After the fall of France in June 1940, Hitler again took the initiative to end the war:
On 19 July, he delivered, at last, a direct appeal; he had previously hoped that Great Britain would need no prompting. “In this hour,” he declared in a speech to the Reichstag, “I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Great Britain…. I can see no reason why this war need go on….” The speech was followed by diplomatic approaches to [Britain] through Sweden, the United States and the Vatican.37
“There is no doubt that Hitler was anxious for the result and serious in the attempt,” writes Hinsley. “‘A speedy termination of the War,’ he told Raeder on July 21, ‘is in the interests of the German people.’”38
Alan Clark, defense aide to Margaret Thatcher, believes that only Churchill’s “single-minded determination to keep the war going,” his “obsession” with Hitler, prevented his accepting Germany’s offer to end the war in 1940.
There were several occasions when a rational leader could have got, first reasonable, then excellent terms from Germany. Hitler actually offered peace in July 1940 before the Battle of Britain started. After the RAF victory, the German terms were still available, now weighted more in Britain’s favor.39
But Hitler’s offer was “at once rejected by the British Government and Press, its rejection being officially confirmed on 22 July by the British foreign secretary.”40
From May 1940 to June 1941, Hitler would cast about for a way to end the war he had never wanted. Lukacs and Hinsley document Hitler’s search for some path to peace with the British Empire.
On May 20, 1940, after the Ardennes breakthrough, Alfred Jodl wrote in his diary, “The Fuhrer is beside himself with joy…. The British can get a separate peace any time, after restoration of the colonies.”41
After Dunkirk, Ribbentrop wrote that he had wondered if Hitler could make a quick peace with England. “The Fuhrer was enthused with the idea himself,” and proceeded to lay out to Ribbentrop the peace terms he was prepared to offer the British:
It will only be a few points, and the first point is that nothing must be done between England and Germany which would in any way violate the prestige of Great Britain. Secondly, Great Britain must give us back one or two of our old colonies. That is the only thing we want.42
As Churchill rejected peace with Germany, Hitler, fearing defeat if the war were not concluded soon, explored military options. He ordered up various plans—for an invasion of England; of Iceland; of Ireland; seizure of the Azores, the Cape Verdes, the Canary Islands, and Gibraltar; a sweep through Turkey and Syria to Suez. By mid-1940, writes Hinsley, Hitler was coming to the conclusion that crushing Russia was “the only solution for the problems created by the British refusal to collapse.”43
Lukacs agrees. Hitler’s ultimate purpose in invading Russia in 1941, Lukacs writes, was not Lebensraum, or eradicating “Jewish-Bolshevism,” or preempting a Soviet attack. The June 1941 invasion of Russia was a preemptive strike to remove Britain’s last hope of winning the war. Lukacs quotes Hitler in the summer of 1940, as the Battle of Britain was getting under way:
If results of the air war are not satisfactory, [invasion] preparations will be halted…. England’s hope is Russia and America. If hope on Russia is eliminated, America is also eliminated…. Russia [is] the factor on which England is mainly betting. Should Russia, however, be smashed, then England’s last hope is extinguished…. Decision: in the course of this context, Russia must be disposed of. Spring ’41.44
Lukacs and Hinsley, in their contention that Hitler invaded Russia to remove Britain’s last hope of winning the war, are supported by Kershaw, biographer of Hitler, and Michael Bloch, biographer of Ribbentrop.
According to Kershaw, on July 13, 1940, Franz Halder, chief of the German army General Staff, wrote in his diary:
The Fuhrer is greatly puzzled by Britain’s persisting unwillingness to make peace. He sees the answer (as we do) in Britain’s hope in Russia, and therefore counts on having to compel her by main force to agree to peace.45
On July 22, 1940, when Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax spurned his peace offer, Hitler, anticipating British rejection, had already, on July 21, “raised with his commanders-in-chief the prospect of invading the Soviet Union that very autumn.”46 Realizing the impracticality of an invasion so soon and in the fall, Hitler, on July 29, told General Jodl the attack would come in May.47 Bloch says Hitler informed Jodl three days earlier:
On the 26th [of July 1940] he [Hitler] told Jodl that he had decided to launch such an invasion [of Russia] the following spring; and on the 31st, in a military conference at the Berghof, he confided to his service chiefs the extraordinary thinking which lay behind this decision. England, he said, continued to resist only because secretly encouraged to do so by the Russians, and to expect eventual Russian aid. Thus if Germany could knock out Russia, England would immediately come to terms.48
Thus, six weeks after France’s surrender, before the Battle of Britain had begun, Hitler had made and revealed the decision that would seal the fate of tens of millions. Meeting at his Alpine retreat, the Berghof, Hitler announced to his generals:
With Russia smashed, Britain’s last hope would be shattered. Germany then will be master of Europe and the Balkans. Decision: Russia’s destruction must therefore be made part of this struggle. Spring 1941…If we start in May 1941, we would have five months to finish the job.49
On December 7, Hitler informed Admiral Raeder it was “necessary to eliminate at all costs the last remaining enemy on the continent before she can collaborate with Great Britain.”50
On December 18, Hitler issued the directive for Operation Barbarossa. Thus, writes Kershaw, “by the late autumn it was clear that [Hitler] had returned to the chosen path from which he had never seriously wandered: attacking the Soviet Union at the earliest opportunity with the strategic aim of attaining final victory in the war by conquering London via Moscow.”51
On January 8, 1941, Hitler clarified and expanded upon his reasoning for attacking Russia:
Britain is sustained in this struggle by hopes placed in U.S.A. and Russia…. Britain’s aim for some time to come will be to set Russia’s strength in motion against us. If the U.S.A. and Russia should enter the war against Germany the situation would become very complicated. Hence any possibility for such a threat to develop must be eliminated at the very outset.52
In November, Roosevelt had been reelected and had begun swiftly to maneuver the United States toward a collision with Germany.
On May 29, 1941, Hitler told his confidant Walter Hewel, who would take his life twenty-four hours after Hitler, that once Russia was defeated “this will force England to make peace. Hope this year.”53
In early June, Hitler spoke to General Fritz Halder, who wrote in a diary entry of June 14: Hitler “calculates ‘that the collapse of Russia will induce England to give up the struggle. The main enemy is still Britain.’”54
On June 21, Hitler spoke again with Hewel, who wrote, “The Fuhrer expects a lot from the Russian campaign…. He thinks that England will have to give in.”55 Hitler then wrote to Mussolini: “[T]he situation in England itself is bad…. [They have only] hopes. These hopes are based solely on one assumption: Russia and America. We have no ch
ance of eliminating America. But it does lie in our power to eliminate Russia.”56
On July 25, as the eastern campaign appeared certain to end in swift victory, Hitler predicted: “Great Britain will not continue to fight if she sees there is no longer a chance of winning.”57
On August 18, he told Field Marshal Keitel, “The ultimate objective of the Reich is the defeat of Great Britain.”58
On August 22, Hitler told Halder his aim was “to finally eliminate Russia as England’s allied power on the continent and thereby deprive England of any hope of change in her fortunes.”59
On October 28, Hitler told Admiral Kurt Fricke, “The fall of Moscow might even force England to make peace at once.”60
To deprive England of its last hope for victory, Hitler invaded the one nation that more than any other would bring the Reich down. Hitler’s invasion of Russia truly met Bismarck’s definition of preventive war: “Committing suicide—out of fear of death.”
In his June 18, 1940, speech, as France was falling, Churchill made a prophetic remark: “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.” Churchill was right. If Hitler could not break the British or achieve an armistice or peace with Britain, the war would go on, with a rising probability that the Soviet Union or the United States, or both, would become involved. And if they did, given their size and latent power, Hitler would “lose the war.”
Thus, by his refusal even to consider a negotiated peace, or armistice, Churchill caused Hitler to commit his fatal blunder: invading Russia. This would add four more years to the war and bring death to tens of millions and indescribable ruin to the continent of Europe, but also the downfall of Hitler.
Churchill was thus the indispensable man, both in the destruction of Hitler’s Reich and in the continuation of the war from 1940 to 1945.
Was it worth it? A few British historians say Britain and the world would be a better place had England ended the war in 1940 after victory in the Battle of Britain, or in 1941 after the invasion of Russia. Most yet believe that if the cost of exterminating the Nazi regime of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels was forty or fifty million more dead, the price had to be paid.
THE COSTS OF VICTORY
ASKED HOW HE COULD ally with Stalin, whose crimes he knew so well, Churchill answered “that he had only one single purpose—the destruction of Hitler—and his life was much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell, he would at least have made a favourable reference to the Devil.”61
Yet in his Ahab-like pursuit of Hitler “at all cost,” did Churchill ever reckon the cost of a war to the death—for Britain, the empire, and Europe? For as the war went on for five years after Dunkirk, those costs—financial, strategic, moral—mounted astronomically. Let us begin with the moral cost of Churchill’s appeasement of the greatest mass murderer of the century.
When Hitler turned on Stalin, his accomplice in the rape of Poland, Churchill welcomed Stalin into the camp of the saints, writes conservative scholar Robert Nisbet, “in words that might have been addressed to a Pericles or George Washington”:
Before the whole world Churchill greeted the Soviets as fellow freedom fighters protecting their own liberties and democracy. Reading it today, one becomes slightly nauseated by Churchill’s words…. It was one thing to make the best of things, to accept and even help Stalin in the war against the Nazis…. It was something else and hardly necessary, given Stalin’s then desperate straits, to lavish gratitude upon the cruel, terror-minded despot, who, after all, had helped ignite World War II against the West.62
George Kennan, then in Moscow, wrote back to the State Department that, while “material aid” might be extended to Russia, “I feel strongly” that
we should do nothing at home to make it appear that we are following the course Churchill seems to have entered upon in extending moral support to the Russian cause in the present Russian-German conflict…. It is…no exaggeration to say that in every border country concerned, from Scandinavia—including Norway and Sweden—to the Black Sea, Russia is generally more feared than Germany….63
Indeed, there was no reason to repose any trust in Moscow, for Stalin was now fighting on the side of the Allies only because he had been betrayed by his partner Hitler.
But Churchill embraced Britain’s new and gallant ally: “The Russian danger…is our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of the free men and free people in every quarter of the globe.”64
Eighteen months earlier, however, in a January 20, 1940, broadcast, Churchill had hailed the heroism of Finland in resisting Russia’s onslaught in the Winter War and poured out his contempt of Soviet ideology:
The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent…. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled by these fierce weeks of fighting above the Arctic Circle. Everyone can see how Communism rots the soul of a nation; how it makes it abject and hungry in peace and proves it base and abominable in war.65
Now, in his first great act of appeasement, Churchill let Eden persuade him to declare war on Finland, the heroic little country Churchill had praised in January of 1940 for resisting Stalin’s aggression as “superb, nay sublime—in the jaws of peril.”66
When Churchill first met Stalin in Moscow in 1942, he tried to explain to the Man of Steel how the terrible toll on British ships and sailors had forced a pause in convoys to Murmansk. Stalin responded by insulting Churchill to his face:
This is the first time in history that the British navy has ever turned tail and fled from the battle. You British are afraid of fighting. You should not think that the Germans are super-men. You will have to fight sooner or later. You cannot win a war without fighting.67
This abuse exceeded anything Chamberlain had taken from Hitler and came out of the mouth of a Bolshevik butcher who had been Hitler’s willing partner in the rape of Poland and Hitler’s enabler in his attack on the West. When Britain had been fighting alone, Stalin was aiding Nazi Germany and accusing Britain and France of having started the war.
When Stalin brought up Churchill’s role in 1919 as the champion of Allied intervention in Russia, Churchill asked, “Have you forgiven me?”68
The ex-seminarian replied, “All that is in the past. It is not for me to forgive. It is for God to forgive.”69 This scene is almost unimaginable.
On his return from that September 1942 trip to Moscow, Churchill appeared captivated, rising in Parliament to tell his countrymen they were truly fortunate to be allied to so great a man:
This great rugged war chief…. He is a man of massive outstanding personality, suited to the sombre and stormy times in which his life has been cast; a man of inexhaustible courage and will-power, and a man of direct and even blunt speech…. Above all, he is a man with that saving sense of humour which is of high importance to all men and all nations, but particularly to great men and great nations. Stalin left upon me the impression of a deep, cool wisdom, and a complete absence of illusions of any kind.70
To appease his great ally, Churchill would agree to Stalin’s annexation of the Baltic republics, his plunder from the devil’s pact with Hitler, and turn a blind eye to the Katyn massacre. When the Polish government-in-exile asked him to look into the 1940 mass murder of the Polish officer corps in Soviet captivity, fifteen thousand Poles executed in all, Churchill was dismissive: “There is no use prowling round the three year old graves of Smolensk.”71
Churchill’s answer suggests he suspected or knew the truth, that Stalin had perpetrated the Katyn massacre. If he thought an investigation would implicate the Nazis in the mass murder of Poland’s officer corps, Churchill would have pursued it.
At Teheran in 1943, Churchill presented Stalin with a Crusader’s sword.72 In early 1944, “Churchill put pressure on the Poles to accept border changes that made Munich look like a simple frontier adjustment.”73
In September 1944, Churchill crossed the Atlantic for a summit
with FDR at Quebec’s Citadel. At the banquet on September 13, U.S. Treasury Secretary Morgenthau and his deputy, Harry Dexter White, a Soviet spy, were seated at Churchill’s table, where the secretary laid out his Morgenthau Plan. Devised by White to ensure Stalin’s domination of Europe, the plan “envisaged turning the Ruhr into a ‘ghostland.’ The industrial region of the Saar was to be destroyed…. All machinery and factory materials were to be turned over to the Russians.”74 Germany was to be converted into an agricultural nation.
“It is no exaggeration to say that the Morgenthau Plan…if applied in its full rigor, would have been an undiscriminating sentence of death for millions of Germans,” wrote U.S. historian W. H. Chamberlin.75 When one U.S. official pointed out to Morgenthau that Germany’s population could not survive on farming, that millions would starve, Morgenthau suggested the Allies ship the surplus Germans to North Africa. Historian Gregor Dallas describes the initial reaction of Churchill:
Morgenthau had only got through a few sentences when Churchill began fidgeting and muttering. When he got to the end, the Treasury Secretary received a “verbal lashing” such as he had never received in his life. Churchill said the plan—the “Morgenthau Plan” as it has gone down in history—was “unnatural, un-Christian and unnecessary.” “I’m all for disarming Germany, but we ought not to prevent her from living decently,” said Churchill…. “I agree with Burke. You cannot indict a whole nation.”76
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 36
