This did not change after Russia invaded Finland on 30 November 1939. True to the spirit of the pact with Stalin, Hitler imposed an arms embargo on the Finns. His only concern was that trouble in Scandinavia might give Britain a pretext to intervene there and cut Germany off from her source of Swedish raw materials.119 The Kriegsmarine, which wanted bases in Norway to attack Britain, brought Hitler to a meeting with the former Norwegian defence minister and extreme right-wing politician Vidkun Quisling on 12 December in Berlin. Soon after, Hitler gave orders to plan the invasion of Norway. The operation was conceived not as an extension of German Lebensraum or the recovery of a Nordic ‘fraternal people’, but rather as a pre-emptive strike against any British attempt to interfere with his supplies of iron ore.
Hitler was much more concerned about the United States, at least in the medium and long term. The naval leadership warned him not long after Chamberlain finally rejected the peace overtures that the American position would be decisive. They also argued, and Hitler agreed, that it was vital to pursue the ‘siege of Britain’ with all possible vigour even at the risk of bringing the United States into the war. The sooner radical measures were taken at sea, the argument went, the shorter the war.120 It was clear to both the navy and Hitler that American belligerency was not merely possible but likely; it was not a question of whether, but of when. He let it be known that he believed that the war would be over before the Americans were ready to enter it.121 In late 1939, Hitler was mildly reassured by the reports from his Washington military attaché, Boetticher, that the United States needed another year or so for its military preparations to be complete.122 Time, however, was not Germany’s friend, and the Führer knew it. ‘Thanks to her neutrality laws,’ Hitler told his generals, America was ‘not yet a threat. The strengthening of the enemy through America was not yet substantial.’123 There was a lot in that double ‘not yet’.
The Führer’s anxiety about the United States went beyond just military considerations. He continued to be exercised about the American cultural challenge. Hitler knew that the Germans still hankered after Hollywood, even or especially after the outbreak of war. ‘I understand you didn’t like the movie last night,’ he teased Eva Braun on the terrace of the Berghof, ‘I know what you want. You want Gone with the Wind.’124 This reference to a film released in December 1939 shows Hitler’s consciousness of the enduring power of American popular culture. Yet his preoccupation with the United States went deeper still. In mid December 1939, despite all the pressures of war, Hitler received the American racial theorist Lothrop Stoddard in the Imperial Chancellery. Stoddard’s book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy had been published in 1920 with a preface by none other than Madison Grant; the German translation appeared five years later. By prior agreement, the content of their discussion was kept completely confidential, but Stoddard spoke freely of his other exchanges. He registered with astonishment that many German racial theorists, like Hitler, did not consider the German people as ‘Nordic’ but as a mixture of races.125 The task of creating an actual Nordic race in Germany, therefore, still lay ahead.
Hitler’s preoccupation with Anglo-America dominated his Lebensraum rhetoric during this period, no less than it had in the past. ‘I am stepping for the first time on soil,’ he announced in his speech on 19 September 1939 in Danzig, ‘which German settlers took possession of half a millennium before the first whites settled in today’s state of New York.’126 Two months later, Hitler lamented to his generals that German history was characterized by ‘the adjustment of the number of inhabitants to the lack of space through emigration’. The trauma of losing so many millions of Germans to Anglo-America clearly persisted. Failure to address the lack of space, Hitler argued, would lead to ‘national death’ through further ‘haemorrhaging’. ‘I have decided to take a different path,’ he concluded, which was ‘the adjustment of living space to the number of inhabitants.’ This, he averred, could only be done ‘by the sword’. Unlike earlier contests this would be a ‘racial struggle’ for ‘oilfields, rubber, minerals, etc.’ The ultimate enemy here–‘Britain has been against us since 1870’–was not Jewry or Slavdom, but the rival Nordics who controlled these resources. The racial struggle he was referring to, in other words, was an inter-Nordic civil war, the second titanic clash of the Aryans in two decades.
Hitler’s planned western offensive was hugely controversial among the Wehrmacht High Command. Most of them had experienced the British and French during the First World War. They had doubts about the quality of the new army and also about the resilience of the home front. An all-or-nothing attack would be a huge gamble. Despite the authoritarian nature of the Third Reich, Hitler’s growing authority, and their ingrained sense of obedience, many generals protested vocally. Not long after Hitler’s intentions became known, Brauchitsch was given the task of ‘talking the Führer out of his plans’.127 Several generals wrote to express their reservations. Halder, Oster and Stülpnagel even began to plot Hitler’s removal, at least if he ordered a disastrous attack in the west. Mutiny was in the air.128
The Führer was incensed. He inveighed against the ‘spirit of Zossen’, an allusion to the supreme headquarters of the army, and accused the generals, especially Brauchitsch, of cowardice.129 Nevertheless, he showed willingness to compromise on some important issues. The operational plan remained a subject of furious debate throughout the winter, with constant interference from the Führer, and was by no means finalized.130 Hitler was also prepared to yield on the date. He had originally wanted to attack by 12 November 1939, which would have given the Wehrmacht only three weeks to prepare. Brauchitsch succeeded in persuading him to delay. Early in the following month, Hitler decreed a further postponement of a week, finally agreeing to wait until the following year. In the end, the date of the attack was to be postponed twenty-nine times.
On the main issue, however, Hitler was absolutely unyielding. He would launch a decisive attack in the west, come what may. The Führer concluded his speech to the generals in late November with a vow. ‘I will stand or fall in this battle,’ he proclaimed. ‘I will not survive the defeat of my people. No capitulation towards the outside and no revolution from within.’131 The generals had their answer. Hitler would grapple with Britain, which he defined a few days later as ‘bearer of the fighting spirit and the leading enemy power’. ‘Beating Britain,’ he insisted, ‘is the precondition for final victory.’132 The question was no longer whether Hitler would attack in the west, but how and when.
In his 1940 New Year’s Day address Hitler asserted that the aim of the ‘Jewish-capitalist world enemy’ was to ‘destroy Germany’ and ‘the German people’. This was because the Third Reich represented a youthful, dynamic and popular challenge to the international ruling elite, which he understood in national and generational rather than in class terms. The Germans, Hitler claimed in late January 1940, were one of the ‘young peoples’ of the world. They were challenging the ‘so-called propertied classes among the people’ who had ‘robbed’ Germany and were simply sitting on their ill-gotten gains. On this reading, the Germans were, so to speak, at best the poor whites of the international system. In this spirit, Hitler professed sympathy with the other wretched of the earth who groaned under the weight of imperialism and capitalism, particularly that of the British Empire. His empathy extended to not merely the Nordic Boers, but also the decidedly non-Aryan Arabs. Hitler reminded his listeners again that it was the British who ‘invented the concentration camp’,133 and argued that the blockade of Germany was simply the latest version of age-old method of waging war against women and children. Once again, Hitler was far more exercised about the earlier British than the current Soviet camps.
The Führer was also worried by Allied propaganda. The Allies hit back, trying to fragment Germans. Instead of bombing the Ruhr as Hitler had feared, British and French aircraft dropped millions of leaflets on Germany, calling on the population to rise up against the Nazis. This strategy has been much d
erided since, but it struck fear into Hitler’s heart. He had seen the colossal effect of Allied propaganda on German morale during the First World War. Hitler claimed that the success of National Socialism over the previous six years had inoculated German society against the Franco-British poison. Never again, he vowed, would Germans be gulled by Allied disinformation into launching an internal revolution like in 1918.134 Hitler was in fact very far from believing German unity to be beyond question, which explains the frequency and vehemence with which he asserted the opposite.
If the war seemed becalmed on the surface, there was frenetic activity behind the scenes in Berlin. By now, the generals had accepted the need to attack in the west, and internalized the Führer’s view that the main thrust should be against Britain.135 On 10 January 1940, Hitler set an attack date for a week later. That same day, however, a German aircraft with the plans for Fall Gelb on board crash-landed near Mechelen on the Belgian side of the border. The weather was in any case too inclement to permit an attack. On 16 January, Hitler postponed the attack to the spring and went back to the drawing board. A month later, Erich von Manstein presented an audacious plan to send German armour through the rugged Ardennes to divide the British and French armies and force them back to the sea. Hitler was enthusiastic. On 24 February 1940, what has become known to history as the Sichelschnitt plan was formally adopted.
More or less the entire Wehrmacht was deployed to the west; only small screening units remained in the east. Hitler took a keen interest in details, such as the airborne operation against the Belgian fort Eben-Emael, which covered the approaches to Liège, and in the passage of the panzers through the difficult terrain of the Ardennes.136 He generally favoured the most audacious solution. His confidence in the plan was absolute, promising the architect Hermann Giesler that he would soon be able to show him Paris.137 All the same, neither Hitler nor the German High Command was envisaging a quick end to the war, but at best a devastating blow against the Allies in Belgium, followed by an aerial campaign against Britain, and a war of attrition against the remaining French forces either somewhere around the Somme or further south.
The expectation of a longer war and concern about the growing British presence in France were reflected in the renewed stress on greater armaments production; Hitler was in no sense expecting a ‘lightning victory’.138 ‘The increasing strength of the enemy forces, especially of the British Army,’ Hitler proclaimed in a directive on 17 January 1940, ‘requires that the German Wehrmacht, especially the army and Luftwaffe, be strengthened both numerically and in terms of the quality of its equipment.’139 His priorities were also revealing. Hitler’s emphasis was on artillery, ammunition, barbed wire and machine tools rather than tank production, which consumed only 5 per cent of the steel allocation. This put a premium on the increased mobilization of the German economy, which was already seriously overstretched. In mid March 1940, Hitler appointed Fritz Todt as the new munitions minister. He oversaw the biggest increase in German armaments production yet: it doubled between January and July 1940.140 The demands of the war economy had important consequences for domestic, occupation and foreign policy. At home, the retreat from consumption continued. Instead of civilian Volkswagen for the Volksgenossen, the factory at Fallersleben began from 1940 to mass-produce vehicles for the Wehrmacht. The promise of universal motorization was delayed until after the war.141
The need of the German war economy for raw materials and foodstuffs greatly increased Hitler’s reliance on the Soviet Union. On 11 February 1940, he concluded a comprehensive economic agreement with Moscow.142 Stalin supplied him with grain, animal feed and metals, such as phosphates, asbestos, chrome and nickel.143 Many of the bullets later fired at the British at Dunkirk were coated with Russian-mined cupro-nickel. Hitler bragged that he was safe from the British blockade. To that extent, the Hitler–Stalin Pact gave him the defence in depth and the fruits of Lebensraum without actually having to fight for it.144 His view of the pact remained largely instrumental, but there was genuine strategic and ideological common ground between the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Kremlin cleaved to the pact not merely out of false consciousness or as a desperate expedient in the absence of a common front against Nazism but because it regarded the British Empire as its main enemy.145 So did Hitler. Stalin saw global capitalism as a mortal threat. So did Hitler.
The other strategic consequence of the needs of the German war economy was Hitler’s increased determination to pre-empt any British strike against his supply of Swedish iron ore through Norway.146 On 27 January, moving beyond hypothetical ruminations about Scandinavia, he requested that the OKW draw up a detailed plan for the occupation of Norway and Denmark. In late February 1940, Hitler appointed General von Falkenhorst to command the operation. This was followed on 1 March 1940 by a directive under the codename Weserübung. As with Fall Gelb, the planned Norwegian operation was hugely controversial both strategically and tactically. Raeder warned that it ‘violated all laws of naval warfare’, because the operation was theoretically only feasible with control of the sea.147 Hitler sought to mitigate the risk through surprise, speed and audacity. He told the assembled commanders that the operation would be ‘one of the “cheekiest” enterprises in modern military history’.148 There were also furious disagreements about individual ship deployments, in particular with regard to that of the destroyers, which he insisted should stay in the exposed waters off Narvik in order to maintain the morale of the landing parties.149 A week later, Hitler set the date for the attack on Norway as 9 April 1940.
As the showdown with the Western Allies approached, Hitler was anxious to avoid both confrontation with the United States and any American diplomatic intervention. When Roosevelt made another speech critical of the Third Reich on 3 January 1940, the Führer instructed that it should be given only brief mention in the German press.150 Towards the end of March, the head of the War Economics Office, General Thomas, recorded that ‘the Führer has again emphasized energetically that everything is to be done so that the war can be ended in 1940 with a great military victory. From 1941 onwards, time works against us (USA-Potential).’151 It was surely with this in mind, that the Propaganda Ministry–at Hitler’s request–was shortly afterwards given explicit instructions not to attack either Roosevelt or the US government directly.152
The most pressing issue for Hitler with regard to America, however, was the question of how to respond to the visit of the US undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles. Though contemporaries and subsequent historians have often referred to a ‘peace mission’, there is no doubt that it was effectively an intervention on the Allied side driven by the president’s hostility to the Axis, designed to divide the Führer and the Duce and even to promote regime change in Germany.153 While Hitler may not have known the detail of Roosevelt’s intentions he certainly intuited them.154 Hitler instructed German diplomats to tell Welles that just as the United States rejected European interference in the western hemisphere in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, so did ‘Germany regard the eastern European space as its sphere of interest’. His own encounter with Welles was not a success. He unleashed a torrent of complaints against the Franco-British intention to ‘destroy’ Germany, the American boycott of German goods and the Monroe Doctrine.155 The only good thing about the visit, the Führer subsequently remarked, was that Roosevelt ‘would certainly hear from his emissary that America would have to pay dearly for any entry into the war’.156
On 9 April 1940, Hitler struck at Denmark and Norway.157 The Danes folded as quickly as expected. Norway, by contrast, was no walkover. The Norwegians put up a much stronger fight than Hitler had foreseen. Oslo and most of the main ports in the south of the country were occupied quickly, but then the fight started in earnest. Over the next three weeks or so, a confused and often desperate battle raged across central and northern Norway. Its outcome was long in the balance. The Allies drove the Germans out of Narvik, the port whose capture had been the main purpose of the operati
on. Hitler briefly lost his nerve and drafted a radio order instructing the local commander, Dietl, to withdraw, and he also seems to have considered telling him to retreat to Sweden, preferring internment to capture. After a short flap, Jodl succeeded in having the order changed. Dietl was to stand fast, which he did. Hitler let out a sigh of relief; ‘the Führer has calmed down again,’ Jodl recorded.158 It took until the middle of the following month before the Wehrmacht had the situation completely under control. Hitler’s gamble had paid off. He had defied the principles of naval warfare, against the Royal Navy of all enemies. He coordinated not just the political but all the military moving parts as a combined operation through the OKW. Norway, in short, was Hitler’s first military Gesamtkunstwerk.
The Führer had prevailed in his first serious encounter with the dreaded Engländer, whisking an invasion fleet across the North Sea beneath their very noses. He had waged a brutal campaign against the British, demanding the complete destruction of villages and towns occupied by them. Britain, as the new propaganda magazine Signal proclaimed in April 1940, was ‘the main enemy of the Reich in this war’.159 It had extracted a high price, however. The army’s losses had been relatively small and those of the Luftwaffe, though not trivial, had been manageable.160 The Kriegsmarine, by contrast, had been crucified. It had lost one heavy and two light cruisers, ten destroyers, a torpedo boat, six submarines and fifteen smaller vessels. Many other ships were damaged, some very seriously. This was close to a third of the entire fighting strength of the German navy. Raeder’s warnings had been vindicated, because nearly all of these vessels were lost not en route on the high seas, but immediately off the Norwegian coast or in the fjords. To be sure, the Royal Navy had also suffered heavily, about the same number of ships, but it was much larger and therefore better able to absorb losses. The Kriegsmarine could not afford another such victory. Its missing destroyers, in particular, were seriously to hamper Hitler’s prospects later in the summer.
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