Around the same time, Hitler authorized two of Germany’s most powerful ships, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and the battleship Bismarck, to set sail from the Norwegian port of Bergen to strike at Allied shipping in the Atlantic. The initiative here had come from the Kriegsmarine; Hitler, who was well aware of their vulnerability to air attack and feared the propaganda effect of the loss of these vessels, only agreed with reluctance. He and the commander of the task force, Admiral Lütjens, were both of the opinion that the greatest threat came from the torpedo-bombers of the British Fleet Air Arm. Hitler was also anxious about the increased likelihood of a confrontation with the United States. Relations were already bad enough on account of the U-boat war, but the appearance of German surface ships in the Atlantic might precipitate a crisis. For all these reasons, Hitler asked whether the Bismarck could be recalled even after the mission had begun, though he did not press the point.116 As ever, anxiety and audacity coexisted in Hitler’s mind.
On 20 May, Hitler launched the attack on Crete. General Student’s airborne force ran into heavy resistance from the garrison, which included a large Australian and New Zealand contingent. The British theatre commander, General Bernard Freyberg, was (as his name suggested) of partial German-Austrian descent. His divisional commander, Howard Karl [sic] Kippenberger, was descended from a German couple who emigrated to New Zealand in 1862. The Royal Navy intercepted and largely scattered the seaborne force, but within a few days Student’s men prevailed and the British withdrew. Despite the uncertainty of the opening phase, Hitler hardly interfered in the direction of operations. He was aghast, however, at the cost of the victory, which claimed nearly 20 per cent of the force and nearly 50 per cent of the transport fleet, including irreplaceable pilot instructors. Hitler resolved never again to undertake a large-scale airborne landing. The enemy, he explained, were now on their guard. If Hitler’s willingness to gamble had once more paid off, the British had again extracted a high price for their defeat.117
In retrospect, we can see that Crete marked the German imperial meridian, the last ‘easy’ success. Britain had once again been humiliated. The Nazi Wochenschau, perhaps using music suggested by Hitler, choreographed the arrival of the airborne forces over the water to the strains of Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. German public opinion exulted in yet another spectacular victory. That said, neither Hitler nor the Nazi leadership shared this euphoria, which they regarded as not merely premature but potentially dangerous. The Wehrmacht, too, was under no illusions. On 26 May, Goebbels passed on complaints from frontline soldiers about stories suggesting British cowardice. ‘The British,’ he reported them as saying, were ‘fighting very bravely.’118
There was every reason for caution. Hitler’s other initiatives ended in abject failure. Britain crushed the Iraqi government and swept aside the German military mission. The Luftwaffe planes there were destroyed. A British occupation of Vichy Syria was only a matter of time. Negotiations with Vichy over the use of the Tunisian port of Bizerta to supply the Afrika Korps collapsed. Hitler feared that if he put too much pressure on Pétain, French North Africa would defect to de Gaulle (French central Africa had already done so the previous summer),119 blowing his southern flank wide open. German diplomacy also made little headway in Iran. Despite the Shah’s personal admiration for Hitler, close trading connections and hope that the Third Reich would provide a third way between Anglo-American capitalist imperialism and Soviet communism, he refused, for example, to support the pro-German putschists in Iraq.120 Too much of the world was now too far away. The Middle East, as Hitler had always said, would have to wait for Barbarossa. Things were no better at sea. Towards the end of May, the Bismarck, the pride of the German surface fleet, was crippled by Fleet Air Arm torpedo-bombers and eventually sunk by the Royal Navy after a dramatic pursuit.
Above all, the fundamental imbalance between the Reich and Anglo-America and the malevolence of the Roosevelt administration had not changed. Right at the start of June 1941, the US navy established a ‘South Greenland Patrol’ to protect convoys, thus virtually ensuring clashes with German submarines. At his meeting with Mussolini and Ciano at the Brenner Pass on 2 June, Hitler discussed whether to respond and thought better of it for fear of escalating matters. Roosevelt, the Führer remarked, was just jealous: he ‘hated’ the two dictators because they had ‘solved problems which had defeated him’. Despite all the deficits run up, and Roosevelt’s vaunted ‘brain trust’, Hitler claimed, there were still 11–12 million unemployed and mass poverty in cities like New York. American claims about their productive power and capacity to aid Britain were not so easily ignored and absorbed much of Hitler’s attention during the encounter. He affected to disbelieve the statistics, but thanks to Bötticher’s reports from Washington, the Führer was aware that the British were already receiving an extraordinary 300–400 planes a month from the United States.121 He may also have known of the Empire Air Training Scheme, his ultimate nightmare of large numbers of ‘high-value’ whites being trained in the invulnerable spaces of Canada, Australasia and South Africa, in order to carry the war to the Reich.
Hitler’s reaction to the growing American threat continued to follow the long-established pattern. Nazi propaganda pushed back vigorously throughout the spring and early summer of 1941. The magazine Signal, which was directed at an international audience, accused Roosevelt in April of preparing to attack the Reich by sending arms to Britain under Lend-Lease.122 Nazi media tried to divide Anglo-America. In late May 1941 the Propaganda Ministry announced at one of its press conferences ‘that the warmongers were not the Anglo-Saxons [sic] but the government of the United States and the Jews which stood behind it’.123 Behind the scenes, Hitler reinforced this message in his meetings with Americans. He told John Cudahy, a strong isolationist and former ambassador to Belgium, that the US drift to war was driven by a false ‘business interest’ and mendacious claims of German hostile intent. ‘To declare that Europe wanted to conquer America,’ Hitler explained, ‘was tantamount to asserting that America wanted to conquer the moon.’124
The other tactic Hitler used was to avoid direct confrontation for as long as possible. As the US navy stepped up its activities in the North Atlantic this became ever more difficult. Clashes between the U-boats and American escorts were inevitable; the key was to prevent these from escalating out of control and give Roosevelt the pretext he needed to enter the war. With Barbarossa imminent, Hitler gave strict orders to avoid US warships and to disengage when attacked by the Americans. On 20 June 1941, for example, a U-boat came close to launching its torpedoes at the battleship USS Texas, but was stood down. The next day, which was the eve of the invasion of Russia, Hitler repeated his instructions to the Kriegsmarine. ‘The Führer absolutely wishes to avoid any incidents with the United States,’ Raeder noted, ‘at least until the effects of Barbarossa have become clear,’ that is, ‘for several weeks’.125 The message was clear: the confrontation with America would have to wait until Russia had been sorted out.
The extent to which Hitler was already thinking ahead, to the confrontation with Anglo-America, was demonstrated by his Draft Directive 32, entitled ‘Preparations for the Time after Barbarossa’, issued eleven days before the attack.126 Following the defeat of the Soviet Union, he claimed, the Axis would dominate all of mainland Europe outside of the Iberian Peninsula. It could then shift the focus of armaments production from the army to the air force and navy (which were already absorbing the preponderance of the German war economy),127 that is, against Britain and the United States. There would have to be closer cooperation with France. Iran, Turkey and Spain would have to be brought into the Axis orbit, again with a view to intimidating Britain. There would be an intensive economic exploitation of the new territories in the east, watched over by a large holding force of about sixty divisions. The next military steps would be the capture of Gibraltar, Tobruk and Malta, and an attack on the Suez Canal. Meanwhile Iraq would be approached from the Caucasus. The Arab freed
om movement would be exploited ‘at the right moment’. Then the siege of the British islands would be resumed and an invasion planned.
A few days after the Yugoslav capitulation, Hitler appointed Rosenberg his ‘envoy for the central treatment of questions concerning the eastern European space’.128 The latter, who had already been briefed in detail on the Führer’s vision for the east,129 could now get to work in earnest. In late May 1941, Himmler was formally charged with ensuring security behind the front.130 Preparations for the next stage of the war against the Jews also proceeded apace. They were flanked with the usual public anti-Semitic rhetoric. Hitler spoke of western opposition to the Axis as the product of the ‘purely capitalist-oriented brains of our Jewish democracies’.131 On 7 June 1941, responding to suggestions for new regulations concerning the status of Jews, he let it be known ‘that there would be no more Jews in Germany after the war’.132 A week or so later, Hitler told a visitor ‘that all Jews would have to leave Europe completely after the war’, including the ‘eastern territories’.133 The male Soviet Jews would–in practice–be killed on the spot by the Einsatzgruppen.134 Hitler’s decision to do so was primarily driven not by his hostility to Bolshevism, important though this was, but by his fear of Britain and the United States.135
On 17 June 1941, Hitler issued the final instruction to launch Barbarossa. Millions of men, and thousands of aircraft and vehicles, had been assembled in secrecy, though fewer aircraft than he had fielded against the Western Allies a year earlier due to losses.136 He had corralled a fractious and leaky coalition of the willing into supporting the attack and holding its tongue. Above all, Hitler had gulled Stalin, the most paranoid man in the world,137 despite having advertised his intentions for twenty years, and despite the fact that the German mobilization was known to the Russians in broad outline from their aerial reconnaissance and other intelligence sources, and despite specific and credible warnings from his master spy Richard Sorge in Tokyo. Stalin had studied Hitler’s modus operandi, and believed that he would have ample warning of an attack because it would be preceded by the usual barrage of press obloquy. But Hitler was constantly changing his modus. He had begun with sudden ‘weekend coups’ such as the announcement of German rearmament in 1935, the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 and the annexation of Austria in 1938. Then he had moved on to choreographed crises, as over the Sudetenland in 1938, Poland in 1939 and in the Balkans in early 1941. The lightning strikes against Scandinavia in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, which had come completely out of the blue, had been outliers. It was one of those which was about to hit Stalin. ‘The procedure will be as follows,’ Hitler explained, ‘we will take a completely different path from before’ by ‘putting a new barrel in the organ’. ‘We will not polemicize in the press,’ he continued, but rather ‘stay completely quiet and then simply attack’ when the time was right.138
A few days before the start of the invasion, Goebbels slipped into the Imperial Chancellery through the back door to avoid the foreign journalists loitering at the front.139 Hitler told him that he hoped to seize the Ukrainian harvest largely intact, that the elimination of Russia would free Japan to take on the United States, and that he would then turn to settle accounts with Britain. He professed optimism, and predicted that the campaign would take about four months. That said, Hitler’s insistence that the example of Napoleon would not be repeated–a theme which featured regularly in his discourse–suggested a certain anxiety. Hitler was genuinely confident, much more so than he had been about the projected Operation Sealion, but he also knew that what he was attempting was still a huge gamble based on imperfect intelligence, with an uncertain outcome. ‘I feel,’ the Führer is said to have remarked at 3 a.m. on the morning of 22 June, hours before the attack, ‘as if I am about to push open a door to a dark, unfamiliar room–without knowing what is to be found behind the door.’140
On 22 June 1941, the Wehrmacht kicked in the front entrance to the Soviet Union in the most ferocious act of breaking and entering the world has ever seen.141 The victim was completely dumbstruck; consignments of Soviet oil and grain were still heading west by rail as the Germans invaded. ‘We did not deserve this,’ Molotov remarked to the German ambassador when he took his leave immediately after the attack had begun.142 After some bitter border battles, the Soviet front quickly buckled. In the northern and central sectors, German spearheads drove deep into the Baltic lands and White Russia. Much of the Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground. Sometimes, as at the citadel of Brest-Litovsk, the Red Army put up an effective if futile resistance. More often, it was encircled in large numbers. Hundreds of thousands and then millions of Soviet prisoners of war were herded westwards.
Throughout the first weeks of the campaign, Hitler followed events on the ground closely.143 Three days after the attack started, he became worried that the pockets were too large, with the consequent difficulty of sealing off the enemy, crushing him or forcing him to surrender. Much to his annoyance, the commander of Army Group Centre, Bock, was told to close the pincers earlier than he had intended.144 This set a pattern, with Hitler generally taking a more cautious view than the hawkish generals. The Führer also tended towards scepticism at reports of victories. ‘Where are the prisoners?’ he asked three weeks into the campaign.145 Hitler’s anxiety reflected the limited instruments available to him. He invaded Russia with two armies: one a relatively small modern motorized and armoured force, the other a much larger traditional infantry force, which had to cover vast distances on foot and was supplied from horse-drawn wagons.146 No matter how far the former advanced, it still had to wait for the latter to come up to consolidate the ground seized and guard the haul of prisoners and materiel.
As instructed by Hitler, the struggle in the east was waged as a war of annihilation from the very beginning.147 Thousands of commissars were shot on capture or immediately after. So were tens of thousands of other Red Army troops. Millions of Soviet POWs were starved or worked to death.148 Behind the lines, the Einsatzgruppen moved in to murder all male Jews of military age they could find. Women and children were mostly spared, for now.149 They also executed all Comintern functionaries, all Communist Party functionaries, Jews in party and state posts and various other categories such as ‘agitators’, ‘saboteurs’ and ‘assassins’.150 The Wehrmacht was often complicit in these killings. Hitler sought to head off protests from the army through thinly concealed bribes in the form of bonuses and endowments of land for senior officers.151
Barbarossa was conceived as both an anti-colonial and a colonizing enterprise.152 Hitler claimed he was liberating Germany and the world from Anglo-American capitalist imperialism and Jewish manipulation, be it in the guise of plutocracy or of Bolshevism. The resources of the world, so unjustly hoarded by the ‘haves’, would now be redistributed to the ‘have-nots’. Hitler therefore began his proclamation at the start of Barbarossa not by speaking of the Soviet Union, or even the Jews, but by attacking Britain and the balance of power with which it had oppressed Germany and continental Europe for generations. When London had entered the war, he argued, it marked a repeat of the British attempt to ‘prevent’ the ‘consolidation of Europe’ by the strongest European power of the time.153 Hitler inveighed once again against the ‘new, hate-filled encirclement policy’ of the ‘well-known conspiracy between Jews, democracies, Bolsheviks and reactionaries’. It took him ten paragraphs before he actually began to speak about the Soviet Union, listing his gravamina, before circling back to lambast Britain once again.
Barbarossa was clearly a colonial enterprise, because it involved the despoliation and expropriation of the native population. Following close behind the frontline forces, the German administration implemented the long-planned seizure of foodstuffs; this proved to be a far more complicated operation than expected.154 As the Wehrmacht drove ever deeper into Russia, Hitler moved forward on the settlement of the new Lebensraum. Three weeks into the campaign, he summoned Rosenberg to discuss the ‘partition of the eas
tern European space’. Hitler demanded that Crimea and its northern hinterland should be ‘cleared of all aliens and settled by Germans’; he also laid down that all of the Baltic lands should become ‘German’. The area around Baku, with its vital oil-fields, should become a German ‘concession’. ‘We must make a Garden of Eden out of our new eastern territories,’ Hitler said, ‘they are essential to us.’ The key thing, he concluded, was to ‘divide up the enormous cake’ in such a way that we can ‘dominate it, administer it, and exploit it’.155 During this discussion, in which the major stakeholders in the east from the party, economy and Wehrmacht–Bormann, Göring and Keitel–participated, Hitler stressed that ‘the task in the east was not a matter for a generation but one for centuries’.156 Time, which had contracted so quickly over the previous few years, seemed briefly to expand again.
The Führer increasingly argued that he was acting not only for Germany but also on behalf of Europe as a whole. Just as Napoleon had attacked Russia in 1812 with a multinational army of French, Dutch, Italians and Germans from the Confederation of the Rhine, flanked by his uneasy allies Austria and Prussia, so did Hitler invade at the head of a large coalition, which by the end of the year included Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Italy, as well volunteer contingents from Spain and many parts of occupied Europe.157 He went to considerable trouble to manage these allies, many of whom hated each other far more than they did Stalin.158 When a newsreel reference to Italian troops as ‘fast’ provoked widespread merriment on account of the implied cowardice, he immediately ordered the offending passages to be cut so as not to jeopardize relations within the Axis.159 The Führer was particularly solicitous of Antonescu, of whom he spoke with genuine respect.160 When Odessa was about to fall, Hitler disregarded the heavy weather his allies had made of the siege and instructed that the Romanians be allowed to claim the credit.161
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