In Germany itself, too, Hitler hoped for a return to normality. The hundreds of thousands of Germans who had been temporarily evacuated from western territories after the Allied declaration of war were permitted to reclaim their homes. ‘Now the moment of return has come,’ he proclaimed with much fanfare in late June 1940.200 Hitler also used the victory to bind the Wehrmacht leadership more closely to himself, by lavishing honours and gifts–in cash or kind–on them as a reward for service.201 The Führer was particularly forthcoming towards commanders who were not yet enthusiastic National Socialists.202 His aim seems to have been to create a military aristocracy, similar to the imperial nobility established by Napoleon: a meritocracy personally loyal to and complicit with the Führer. These men could be trusted to support him in his next adventure. The rewards scheme also militated against the Hohenzollern threat–which resurfaced after the fall of France when the former Kaiser Wilhelm II requested to return home. Hitler refused angrily, exclaiming ‘that might just suit reactionary circles’.203 Wilhelm remained in his Dutch exile at Doorn, where he died a year later. The generals showed little interest in his case. They now had a new more successful and more generous monarch.
If the summer of 1940 saw widespread rejoicing in Germany, there was one man not celebrating, and that was Hitler himself. During his imperial procession through Berlin there was no slave whispering warnings about the passing nature of glory in his ear, but none was needed. Hitler knew better than anyone else, not only his own mortality–which had long obsessed him–but also the enduring strength of Anglo-American power, which had dominated his political thinking from the start. What was striking about his rhetoric and demeanour during this period, surface bluster notwithstanding, was its caution and hesitation. In early June 1940, with victory in the west clear, the Italian ambassador had expected to find Hitler ‘light-hearted, contented, exhilarated’; instead, he was ‘tired and abstracted’ with a ‘confused expression’ and a ‘careworn, anxious, preoccupied look’.204 Far from devoting his attention to domestic matters now that peace was imminent, the Führer decreed that all domestic initiatives which were ‘not connected to the defence of the Reich’ should be paused.205 Much as he would have liked to have distributed one, there was to be no peace dividend. Hitler’s mood did not lift in the course of the month. When he came back to Berlin so triumphantly in early July 1940 he insisted that there be no suggestion that he had returned for good.206
The reason for Hitler’s concern was threefold. Firstly, despite her drubbing in northern France, Britain showed no signs of coming to terms. Churchill rallied the population in a series of dramatic speeches. Like Hitler, the prime minister was a word warrior; the American reporter Ed Murrow said that he ‘mobilized the English language and sent it into battle’. In June 1940, Churchill famously vowed not just to ‘go on to the end’, not merely to fight on the beaches, in the cities and the hills, but also to carry on the fight overseas if the home island fell to invasion.207 All this was very much not what Hitler, who was paying close attention, wanted to hear. ‘He read Churchill’s passionate wartime speeches against Germany,’ his press chief Otto Dietrich recalled, ‘which I supplied him with not merely in extracts but verbatim.’ Dietrich opined that, ‘measured by his outwardly irrational reaction… he secretly admired them’.208 On 3 July, the British determination to fight on was underlined by its ruthless destruction of the French squadron at Oran in Northern Africa, reluctantly carried out to ensure that these ships did not fall into Nazi hands.
Secondly, Hitler feared the ‘racial’ cost of continued war. ‘It is always the best, the bravest and those most willing to sacrifice themselves who fall,’ he lamented to Giesler during their trip to Paris, costing the Reich men ‘whose job it would be to embody and to lead the nation’.209 While Britain posed no immediate challenge on the ground, Hitler was profoundly anxious about the threat from the air. It had been one of the main considerations behind the entire French campaign. Now, if the Führer was to pursue that strategy to its logical conclusion, the British refusal to negotiate would have to be followed by a massive air campaign against the home islands. Hitler hesitated, because he feared Britain’s capacity to retaliate. ‘My tactics,’ he told the Italian ambassador, ‘have always been to throw the responsibility on the shoulders of my enemies’. The problem was, Hitler went on, that ‘[t]otal air warfare is an extremely bloody business, and for that reason it is necessary to make the civilian population believe that everything possible has been done to avoid it’. In other words, Hitler wanted to spare the German population any British retaliatory action. Besides, he concluded, the Luftwaffe had suffered considerable ‘wear and tear’ in France. It would take time to refit units and to bring the reinforcements necessary to attack Britain.210 An immediate assault on Britain after Dunkirk, in short, would not have been possible anyway.
Hitler’s worry about British air attacks was fuelled by Royal Air Force activity in the summer of 1940.211 Western German towns and cities were beginning to hear the sirens more and more frequently. Even if many of these were false alarms, there were some fatalities, and the cost to civilian nerves was considerable. In mid June 1940, for example, Fritz Weitzel, the Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer West, was killed in a British raid on Düsseldorf; a week later, Hitler himself issued an order that the SS unit in that town be renamed in the dead man’s honour.212 Hamm in Westphalia, a vital railway junction and marshalling yards, was hit particularly badly. Children were breaking down crying and shouting or were convulsed by epileptic fits for days afterwards. Men suffered heart failure due to shock. Hysterical women who had hitherto been silenced by fear of sterilization relapsed, or so it was reported.213 These attacks were of very little military importance, but their psychological impact was significant.214 They subverted Hitler’s domestic narrative that the war was under control and victory or a negotiated peace with Britain was imminent.
Thirdly, Hitler was anxious about American intentions.215 The French defeat had struck the Roosevelt administration like a thunderbolt. Public opinion polls suggested a widespread expectation that if Hitler defeated Britain he would strike next across the Atlantic. The same month as Hitler entered Paris, Roosevelt both appointed the pro-Allied Republican Henry Stimson as secretary of war and introduced a bill for the first peacetime draft in American history to Congress. US spending on the air force and navy, already substantial, surged even higher. To make matters worse, the Nazi advance fundamentally changed Republican Party politics. At its dramatic convention in Philadelphia in late June 1940, the strongly pro-British Wendell Willkie prevailed over the (then) isolationists Tom Dewey, Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg. Willkie had the backing not only of Time publisher Henry Luce, but also of Wall Street, especially Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan. It did not greatly matter to Hitler, therefore, who prevailed in the November 1940 presidential election. Both options across the water were bad.
If the Führer saw London and Washington as increasingly aligned, this was because in his eyes malevolent Jewish and other German-hating forces had manipulated the elites and public opinion in that direction. Hitler’s plan since the 1920s had been to divide Britain and the United States and triangulate between them. In the early 1930s, he had looked forward to an 1866 moment in which a defeated Britain entered into an alliance with Germany just as Austria had done after the Battle of Sadowa. The fall of France was potentially such a moment, when Britain could accept her extrusion from Europe, in the same way as Austria had yielded to Prussia in Germany, with Britain then becoming a junior partner in a new dual alliance directed against the United States, and possibly the Soviet Union as well. When Britain continued to resist, Hitler was faced with a dilemma. ‘If I crush Britain militarily,’ he told Halder, ‘the British Empire will collapse–that will be of no benefit to Germany.’ ‘We would achieve something with German blood,’ he continued, ‘which would profit only America and others.’216 Hitler was again thinking ahead to the new multi-polar world he had conceived some twe
nty years earlier.
On 19 July, Hitler finally gave his much-heralded and frequently postponed ‘peace’ speech to the German Reichstag. This was framed as a riposte to Churchill and a ‘last appeal to general reason’. ‘I see no cause,’ Hitler said, which required ‘the continuation of the struggle.’ He warned that it would lead to the ‘destruction’ of the British Empire, something he had never intended. Hitler also expressed the desire to spare not only Britain but also Germany the resulting casualties, and the pain it would cause ‘many women and mothers at home’.217 Hitler flanked these overtures with other confidence-building measures. The British monarchy was exempted from the vitriolic attacks on other members of the British elite. In the Channel Islands, occupied on 30 June 1940, prayers were said for the Royal Family, ‘God save the King’ could be sung by prior permission and the unchanged local administration issued German instructions in the name of His Majesty George VI.218 The islands were thus a laboratory of Anglo-German cooperation under the new order.
Hitler also made serious attempts to head off American intervention. His hope, albeit a dwindling one, was that the United States would recognize its true interest in accepting German domination of Europe in return for the unchallenged American hegemony in the western hemisphere. In an interview with the prominent German-American journalist Karl von Wiegand, Hitler returned to his old notion of a Monroe Doctrine-style division of spheres. He repeated his lack of interest not only in North America but also in South America. In return he asked only that ‘America would not interfere in European matters’, appealing to none other than George Washington’s remarks (in his 1796 ‘Farewell Address’) on the subject. ‘America for the Americans,’ he demanded, ‘Europe for the Europeans.’219
The fall of France gave Hitler an opportunity to ‘solve’ the Jewish question and deter the United States at the same time. In the summer of 1940, he seriously considered deporting the Jews under his control to the French colony of Madagascar off the East African coast. This plan, which Himmler first suggested to Hitler in late May 1940,220 was discussed by the Führer with Ciano on 17–18 June, and two days later with Admiral Raeder, whose cooperation would obviously be essential. In the middle of July, Hitler ordered that Jews should no longer be deported eastwards, as they would now be sent to Africa. There they would not only be quarantined in Madagascar and pose no threat to Nazi Germany, but serve as hostages for the good behaviour of the United States. After the war, they could then be sent to the United States.221 Britain’s decision to fight on, which closed the sea lanes to Madagascar, made the whole plan impracticable and it was eventually dropped later in the year.222
However chimerical the scheme may seem in retrospect, Hitler does not seem to have conceived the Madagascar Plan as a cover for extermination.223 On the contrary, when Himmler first suggested it, he did so as an alternative to ‘physical extirpation’, which the Reichsführer-SS rejected ‘out of an inner conviction’ as ‘un-German and impossible’. Hitler regarded this view as ‘very good and correct’.224 Besides, if Jews were to serve as hostages against Roosevelt, then it was necessary to keep them alive. For this reason, Hitler stuck with the spirit of the plan, if not the letter, for the moment. In early August 1940, he told Otto Abetz that there would be an evacuation of ‘all Jews from Europe’ but only ‘after the war’.225 This was because there was no prospect of transporting anyone anywhere without the permission of the Royal Navy. At this point, therefore, ‘deportation’ was not just code for murder, and ‘destruction’ was still largely a metaphor which denoted something short of physical extermination. Soon, however, the reverse would be true as a more anodyne rhetoric became the cloak for a much darker reality.
Hitler’s obsession with Jewry is thrown into stark relief by the relatively mild treatment of the approximately 120,000 black French soldiers captured in May and June 1940; it was an issue in which he showed virtually no interest. To be sure a large number were massacred out of hand during and immediately after the French campaign, but not at the Führer’s behest.226 Thereafter, treatment was better not least because the Germans hoped to use some of them as auxiliary forces in their future colonial empire. African prisoners were held in POW, not concentration, camps. The only recorded intervention by Hitler in this question was an OKW directive requiring the transfer of non-white French captives to the unoccupied zone.227 His concern, which dated from the occupation of the Rhineland in the 1920s, was to prevent any ‘contamination’ of the German population.228 The general trend was that while conditions for blacks in the camps generally improved over time, those of Jews radically worsened. Hitler’s racial war was not primarily one of white against black, but of Aryan against Jew.
In the light of Britain’s continuing belligerence and escalating American hostility, Hitler revisited the question of an attack on the Soviet Union. This was driven not by the expectation of a rapid peace or victory over Britain, but rather by its absence. On 21 July 1940, Hitler told Brauchitsch to begin planning for the invasion of Russia, or authorized him to continue doing so; it is unclear from whom the initiative stemmed. Most likely, the plans from 1939 were dusted off.229 Hitler was motivated here by the demands of the war with Britain, still very much the immediate enemy. Britain’s ‘hope’, he told the generals, was ‘Russia’ and ‘America.’ For this reason, the Führer concluded, ‘Russia must be dealt with,’ and ‘intellectual preparations’ to do so must begin.230 One way or the other, two things are clear. Firstly, the decision to attack Russia was driven primarily by the dictates of the confrontation with Anglo-America; ideological antipathy to the Soviet regime played no role at this stage. Secondly, there was as yet no firm date for the operation or even a formal directive. War on Russia was no done deal, at least not in the immediate future.231
In the course of July 1940, Hitler increasingly realized that Britain would not come to terms, and would have to be coerced militarily.232 He had always hoped that this could be done by the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine, but he was also realistic about the limitations of air power.233 No doubt, with this in mind, Hitler issued Directive 16 for the invasion of Britain, which was to be a combined army and navy operation. Its language was entirely conditional. There was none of the usual bombast, or talk of an ‘irrevocable decision’.234
On 22 July, the British rejected Hitler’s ‘appeal’. There was nothing for it. The Luftwaffe would have to be unleashed on Britain, and if that did not work, a landing would be attempted or at least threatened. On 1 August 1940, Hitler issued a directive for a full-scale air assault on Britain.235 The Luftwaffe was given the task of crushing the RAF, which was to involve the destruction of not merely British planes in the air and on the ground, but also their airfields and supply systems, as well as the aviation and anti-aircraft artillery industries. Once a ‘temporary or local air superiority’ had been achieved, attention should shift to attacks on Britain’s ports to cut off the supply of foodstuffs. ‘Retaliatory terror attacks,’ Hitler stressed, ‘can only be authorized by me.’ A week later he agreed with Raeder that a landing could only be ‘a last resort’ if Britain could not be forced to make peace ‘through other means’, for example through air attacks. He added that a ‘failure’ would mean a ‘large prestige victory’ for Britain.236 In late August, Hitler declared ‘Sealion’ the priority for equipment, but only for a ‘limited period of time’.237 A motley invasion fleet of ships and modified barges was assembled in the Channel ports.238 Infantry and tanks practised opposed landings.
Hitler was under no illusion about the magnitude of the task ahead. Unlike in Poland or western Europe, he now faced an enemy which was by his own reckoning racially superior, and economically more advanced. British war production was growing by the day. Britain had the immense resources not only of the Empire, but also of the United States at its back. The Royal Navy had easily absorbed its losses in Norway, and was many multiples stronger than the Kriegsmarine. By contrast, the Wehrmacht, whose infantry casualties had been relatively low so far, had l
ost many ships and aircraft in Norway and France, precisely the assets needed to combat Britain. Above all, Britain’s will to resist was completely unbroken. The Luftwaffe’s prospects against the Royal Air Force were doubtful, but if even air superiority could be attained, translating that into dominance over the vastly superior Royal Navy in the Narrow Sea, engaged on the most important mission in its history, would not be straightforward. The Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine planners doubted that it could be done.239 Even if somehow a force could be got across the Channel, it was not clear that it would be able to do so in sufficient strength to defeat the much larger and increasingly well-equipped British field army.
As it turned out, Hitler fell at the first hurdle. The Luftwaffe pounded RAF bases in the south and east of the country. Honours were at first even, and for a moment it seemed as if the Germans might be gaining the upper hand. On the very last day of August, the Luftwaffe succeeded in inflicting heavy losses on the RAF, but suffered grievously itself in turn. Soon, however, technology and the metrics began to tell. Britain could replace aircraft, and–with more difficulty–pilots, more quickly than Göring. Valuable momentum was lost when the Luftwaffe was instructed to attack London in retaliation for RAF raids on Berlin. Throughout all this the British, military and civilian, were probably less united than they claimed at the time or fondly imagined afterwards. Be that as it may, Hitler was deeply impressed and depressed by their unbroken spirit. His original plan to destroy Britain’s will to resist had failed. Tempers frayed in the Führer’s Headquarters. Hitler exploded at the failure of the Luftwaffe. Witnesses recorded ‘heavy diatribes’ and ‘temper-tantrums’.240
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