It was in the context of the failure to mobilize Europe against Anglo-America that Hitler finally turned east.283 His July directive on Russia had not been followed by concrete preparations, but the idea of attacking the Soviet Union resurfaced with a vengeance immediately after the disastrous Molotov visit in mid November. On 15 November 1940, Hitler demanded the construction of an eastern headquarters, the subsequent Wolf’s Lair.284 On 27 November 1940, Raeder failed to dissuade Hitler from attacking Russia before Britain had been beaten. During the first week of December, Hitler admitted that the attempts to bring Franco into the war had failed, and that Sealion was on the back burner. It would be left to the navy and the Luftwaffe to subdue Britain. He announced that he had intelligence of secret agreements in the making between Britain, America and the Soviet Union. For this reason, Hitler argued, it was necessary to deal with Russia first, which would deprive Britain of all hope. He expected that US intervention would be ‘made more difficult’ by Japan, which ‘had Germany’s back’.285 On 17 December Roosevelt announced a plan for a ‘Lend-Lease’ programme to supply Britain with more war material. That same day, Hitler told the OKW that the United States would have to be sorted out during 1941, because it would be capable of intervening in Europe from 1942. The day after, on 18 December 1940, Hitler issued his fateful directive for Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union.286 On 28 December, Hitler headed to the Berghof for Christmas. He had made his decision. He would roll the dice again in the year to come.
PART SIX
Annihilation
In 1941, Hitler embarked on two wars of annihilation. The first, in June 1941, was against the Soviet Union, and was primarily intended to secure the resources and living space Germany ‘needed’ to balance the power of Anglo-America. The second was the conflict with the United States and ‘world Jewry’, which had begun much earlier but erupted into open warfare with the Americans at the end of the year. In Russia, Hitler began with plans for the wholescale murder of tens of millions of Slavs, from which he soon retreated. By contrast, Hitler’s initially limited and calibrated campaign against ‘the Jews’ escalated into full-scale genocide, beginning with the mass killings at the start of the invasion of the Soviet Union and culminating in the ‘final solution’ across Nazi-occupied Europe. Hitler understood both wars as pre-emptive acts of self-defence forced upon him by a circling coalition. The result is well known. Hitler famously failed to overrun the Soviet Union, and he was vastly outproduced by the United States. The ‘annihilation’ he had planned for his enemies was visited–albeit in a milder but still extremely painful form–on German cities, the German economy, the Wehrmacht, the refugees from the eastern territories, and ultimately on the Third Reich itself.
16
Facing West, Striking East
In early 1941, Hitler appeared to be at the zenith of his power. He dominated the European mainland. Most of the pre-war European economy was now at his disposal, at least in theory. The two neutral powers of the Iberian Peninsula leaned to his side, even if they showed little inclination to become belligerents themselves. Above all, by virtue of the Hitler–Stalin Pact, the Third Reich enjoyed economic defence in depth, enabling her to mitigate the effects of the British blockade. This crucial reliance on the immense resources of Russia masked the essential weakness of the economy of German-occupied Europe. Relations with Moscow were consolidated by the signing of a big economic treaty on 10 January 1941, which increased the supply of Soviet grain, oil, cotton and other raw materials to Germany.1 Whatever Stalin’s actual intentions,2 and German worries about his ambitions in the Balkans, Hitler did not fear an imminent Russian attack. Even though Moscow was deeply unhappy with the great German successes, the Führer told the Seekriegsleitung, ‘it does not itself desire to enter into the war against Germany’.3
At home, Hitler’s standing was high. His bombastic set-piece speeches on 30 January 1941, the anniversary of the takeover of power, and 24 February, the anniversary of the original party programme, were generally well received.4 Though the demands of the war meant that Hitler was less ubiquitous than before, he still cut a very dynamic figure, who looked younger than his fifty-one years. The Wochenschau newsreels at the start of 1941 show a man completely in control, with no visible signs of wear and tear compared to the 1930s.5 To be sure, he suffered from some persistent ailments, especially toothache and flatulence, and his doctor, Theo Morell, was already treating him with a large number of questionable substances.6 But to the world at large, the German public and even his entourage, Hitler’s health was reasonably robust and would remain so until the middle of the year.
Despite all this, Hitler remained an anxious man. His most immediate concern in early 1941 was still the British Empire. ‘Britain,’ he remarked to his generals, ‘continues to remain intractable’; all talk of a landing there had ceased.7 Politically, with the total ascendancy of Churchill, hopes of a compromise peace were fading. Militarily, the Reich was locked in a desperate struggle with the British Empire, at sea and in the air. In the Atlantic, the U-boats sought with some success in the first months of the year to cut the home islands off from the foodstuffs and raw materials they needed to continue the war. Casualty rates there varied throughout the conflict, but the German submariners would lose about 75 per cent of their number by its end, the highest rate of any force on any side.8 Likewise, the war in the air was already perceived as an existential struggle; by its close the highest level of casualties of any British service had been suffered by Bomber Command. On 1 January 1941, a good year before it actually became British policy, Hitler claimed that Churchill was a promoter of an ‘unlimited air war’.9 At the end of the following month, he was so worried about this that he ordered state and party dignitaries to visit the affected areas after major attacks in order to reassure the population.10 The Führer refused to undertake this task himself, perhaps in order to avoid angry scenes. Throughout the first four months of the year, in any case, he observed the attacks of Bomber Command with increasing anxiety, issuing instructions for air defence and damage limitation.11
The British also posed a direct military threat to Hitler’s position in Europe. In early 1941, he observed the advance of the 8th Army in North Africa with alarm. The fall of the Libyan port of Bardia on 5 January forced him to concede that ‘the whole of North Africa will be lost without German help’.12 The Italians were also being clobbered in Greece, where British forces had already landed on Crete and Lemnos and whose large-scale deployment on the mainland was only a matter of time. Hitler feared that a total collapse would bring down Mussolini and open a new front to the south. The Führer was afraid that the British would use their new bases in Greece to attack the Romanian oil fields, whose production was vital for the German war economy, and that the British would link up with the Vichy French in North Africa.13 Hitler was also worried about his northern flanks. In early March 1941, Royal Navy commandos raided the Lofoten Islands off Norway, exposing the weakness of German defences there. Hitler ordered the dispatch of coastal artillery and reinforcements, the start of a debilitating obsession with the British threat to Norway which lasted until the end of the war.14
Meanwhile, the American challenge loomed ever larger. On 3 January 1941, President Roosevelt spoke of a ‘world at war’, and eight weeks later he referred to ‘the Second World War’ beginning ‘a year and a half ago’.15 On 11 March 1941, Roosevelt finally signed the Lend-Lease Act into law. There were also more and more signs of a forthcoming direct American intervention. Towards the end of the month the British and Americans secretly agreed that in the event of a world war involving Japan they would nonetheless pursue a ‘Germany first’ strategy. If Hitler was unaware of this meeting, he could not mistake the meaning of the seizure of all German and Italian ships in US harbours ordered by Roosevelt three days later.
Worse still, London and Washington were articulating more and more openly the idea of a joint management of the world, based on their Anglo-Saxon kinship and co
mmitment to democratic values. ‘Tyrannies may require a large amount of living space,’ Henry Luce, the legendary publisher of Life magazine, wrote in a much-discussed February 1941 article, ‘[b]ut Freedom requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny.’ ‘Peace cannot endure,’ he continued, ‘unless it prevails over a very large part of the world.’16 A clash of two ordering concepts, Nazi Lebensraum and Anglo-American liberty, the one even more limitless than the other, was inevitable. The message from Roosevelt and his supporters in the American public sphere could not have been clearer. There was no room in their universe for the Third Reich, and Hitler knew it. If the Americans were securing the western hemisphere today, tomorrow it would be the world.17
Hitler was under no illusions about the magnitude of the danger. In early 1941, the German war economy was already geared towards the expected confrontation with Anglo-America. Hitler saw himself in a battle of production not only with the formidable British Empire, but also with the United States. It was a war that he expected to fight, in the first instance, at sea and in the air. The main emphasis in early 1941 was thus not on immediate output for the planned attack on Russia, but greater investment to enable subsequent increases in aerial and naval production to fight Britain and America.18 There would be temporary priorities awarded to armoured fighting vehicles in the two years ahead, but the general emphasis on the navy, air force and anti-aircraft artillery was to remain unchanged until the end of the war.19 Given the immense potential of the United States, despite her nominal non-belligerence, Hitler was at pains to stress, as he told a public audience in the first half of 1941, that he was ‘in a position today to deploy more than half of the European labour force in this struggle’.20
In fact, the combined economies of the British Empire and America–now mobilized against Hitler through Lend-Lease–considerably exceeded that of the German area of control. Besides, pre-war figures were inflated, because the British blockade unplugged the continental economies not merely from many of their traditional markets but also from their supply of raw materials. Worse still, Hitler’s victories in 1940 had brought him no substantial new sources of energy or foodstuffs, just millions of new mouths to feed. He was also desperately short of energy supplies, as stocks were running dangerously low.21 The Reich of 1940–41 was full of people, but desperately short of resources. Starvation was not the answer here, as the workers employed in factories producing for Germany, and their families, would have to be nourished. Hitler had broken Europe. Now he owned it.
Despite the fact that the continent was still generally quiescent, Hitler was already anxious about the first signs of organized resistance to his rule.22 Hitler saw these acts as the work of British Intelligence and world Jewry. He was unhappy about the Wehrmacht’s response, and demanded sterner action. More generally, Hitler attributed the continued hostility of Britain to Jewish manipulation. On the very first day of 1941, his ‘Order of the Day’ to the Wehrmacht stated that the war was being carried on at the behest of the ‘democratic warmongers and their Jewish-capitalist backers’.23 Four weeks later, he inveighed once more against ‘a certain Jewish-capitalist clique’.24 Towards the end of the following month, Hitler claimed ‘that in Britain a certain clique, led by Jewry’, was always acting like a ‘bellows’ supporting war.25
The external challenges to the Reich were aggravated by the persistence of domestic weakness and division. Despite the best efforts of the regime, the racial profile of the German people left considerable room for improvement. Hitler’s own misgivings, which had been ventilated more or less openly over the previous two decades, were reflected in an official racial primer for distribution to schools in 1941. By means of a comparison with a bottle of milk, this categorized only 20 per cent of the German people as ‘particularly valuable’, that is, the ‘cream’ and ‘leadership’ layer. 56.4 per cent were classified as ‘average’, that is, ‘skimmed’ or ordinary milk. The bottom quarter was made up of 20 per cent ‘anti-socials’ and 3.6 per cent ‘hereditary ill’, that is, ‘the dregs’ and ‘inferior’.26 This rather bleak view of the German Volk can be explained partly by the supposed failure to filter out the supposed dregs of society, but mostly by the success of Anglo-America in ‘creaming off’ the best of the German people through hundreds of years of emigration. Colin Ross, one of Hitler’s advisers on America, elaborated on this theme, which formed such a staple of the Führer’s own rhetoric, at length in his book Our America: The German Role in the Creation of the United States, which was also published in 1941.27
As if all this were not bad enough, the natural propensity of German bureaucrats to fight each other rather than the common enemy remained unchanged eighteen months into the war. To his frustration, Hitler was still repeatedly called upon to arbitrate turf wars between the various parts of the Nazi hierarchy. As so often, far from encouraging these divides in order to reinforce his authority, the Führer urged the parties to resolve their differences through compromise and then present him with an agreed solution.28 He may have welcomed the emergence of a gatekeeper who could keep these problems at arm’s length. The man who exercised this function throughout the 1930s and the early war years was the chief of the Imperial Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich Lammers, but Hess’s deputy Martin Bormann was already beginning to dominate the antechamber of power around Hitler and thus access to the man himself. One of the first to notice this, several months before Hess’s abrupt departure, was Arthur Rosenberg, who remarked, looking back on the previous year, that Bormann had ‘gradually become the central point person’ through whom everything passed.29
Taken together, all these challenges meant that Hitler was feeling not triumphant but increasingly embattled, and besieged, even at what appeared to be the height of his power.30 Strategically, he believed himself to be on the defensive. He sought not world domination, but world power status, that is parity, or at least a recognized sphere of influence. The Führer did not really expect to defeat Anglo-America, only to outlast it: militarily, economically and mentally. In early 1941, Hitler therefore sought to do two things. Firstly, to deliver sufficient military, diplomatic and psychological effect in order to persuade London to fold its hand before the arrival of the Americans. Secondly, to prepare militarily, diplomatically, economically and emotionally for a long war against Anglo-America in case that strategy failed.
Hitler began with sorting out the mess created by Mussolini, and convened a meeting of military leaders at the Berghof in early January 1941. Treating the Italians as equals was ruled out by the Führer because he did not trust them not to leak confidential information to the British. That said, Hitler was anxious to spare Mussolini’s feelings and urged that military assistance be presented in such a way as to avoid doing anything which would ‘hurt the Duce’s feelings’ and damage the relationship between the two dictators.31 German forces, he stressed, should avoid ‘all hurtful displays of arrogance’.32 Hitler put considerable effort and subtlety into the management of the Italian alliance, far more than his generals and admirals.33 This was primarily a political decision in support of Mussolini and the fascist regime rather than a judgement based on the military value of the Italians, a subject on which he was under no illusions. On 11 January, he issued Directive 22, covering the deployment of forces to the Mediterranean, which–contrary to Wehrmacht wishes–were to be under at least nominal Italian command.34 Hitler wanted them to shore up Italy’s position, and to prevent the establishment of a British springboard on the far side of the Mediterranean and in Greece. There was no mention of Yugoslavia at this point. Hitler was delighted when Rommel’s Afrika Korps, ignoring strict instructions to stay on the defensive, promptly went over to the offensive and drove the British back in disorder.
Next, Hitler took aim at the British war economy in Directive 23 on 6 February 1941.35 The submarine warfare against the British supply lines in the Atlantic was to be intensified. Just over two weeks later, in a speech to mark the anniversary of the founding of the party, he an
nounced a new phase in the U-boat war, partly to boost morale at home and partly to depress the British.36 At this point sinkings were running at about 260,000 tons a month, a respectable figure but not enough to starve out the home islands. The problem was that there were far too few U-boats operational, and while construction had grown to thirteen per month (from a mere two a year earlier), the training of crews took time. The productive capacity devoted to the task was considerable: the Reich could have built about thirty medium tanks for every submarine launched.37 Hitler also stipulated that attacks should be concentrated on ports handling imports. The general purpose of all these operations was to wear down Britain and to prevent her from launching offensives in North Africa and ultimately mainland Europe.
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