Meanwhile, Hitler did not neglect his long-term strategy against Anglo-America. With the advance into Russia, the establishment of a vast autarchic German empire in the Ukraine and Caucasus, settled by soldier-farmers in the first instance, seemed to him on the verge of realization.251 Hitler now had the space to further his longstanding settlement plans, designed to create a US-style settler colony which would absorb Germany’s demographic surplus, rather than allowing it to emigrate, as had been the case in the past. Indeed, he hoped over time to bring back some of those emigrants as well as attract high-value colonists from across Europe. ‘In ten years,’ Hitler predicted in mid October 1941, 4 million Germans would settle there and in twenty years it would be ‘at least 10 million’, coming ‘not just from the Reich, but especially from America, but also from Scandinavia, Holland and Flanders’. ‘Here in the east,’ he explained, ‘there will be a repeat of the process of the conquest of America.’252
What Hitler was planning here was by no means a reactionary agrarian utopia. He looked forward to a modern American-style German east, not back to a traditional rural idyll. Hitler specifically ruled out settling German city-dwellers in the Ukrainian countryside. To be sure, a sturdy grain-producing German peasantry was central to his vision for Lebensraum, but so were roads and railways linking the new lands with the metropolitan centres of industry. Henceforth, railways would be used only to move goods; most other travel would be by car. Hitler envisaged the Reich as being criss-crossed by two huge motorway arteries, one leading to the new Germanized city of Trondheim in Norway, the other to the Crimea. After the war, the German Volksgenosse would be able to use his Volkswagen to see the conquered territories, which might better dispose him to defend them. Hitler saw motorways as an instrument not merely of transportation but also of integration. Just as the original Autobahnen had been the ‘best surmounter of the smaller German states’, so ‘the new motorways’ would bind the ‘smaller states of Europe to the German Reich’.253 ‘The railways bypass a space,’ he pronounced, ‘but roads open it up.’
Hitler’s thinking on the fate of the native population fluctuated between the softer British and the more brutal American solutions. On the one hand, he was rapidly moving away from the idea of any sort of statehood for the Ukrainians and other peoples. In a revealing phrase, Hitler spoke of the Slav population privately as Indians, by which he meant a comparison with those ‘Indians’ of America rather than the subcontinent.254 Rosenberg’s man at the Führer’s Headquarters realized and resented this, warning that there was a danger that the Ostministerium would be left to encourage ‘the Slavs crowded into reservations [sic] to emigrate or to die out as soon as possible’. Those who were in the way of German settlement plans, such as the Crimean Tartars, Hitler explained in early October 1941, were to be expelled. The rest should be left to vegetate in their cities, without the benefit of education or any other services.255 For them, the Führer explained, ‘British rule in India’ was ‘the desired aim of our administration in the east’.256
In late September 1941, Hitler approved guidelines for policy towards Ukraine, which were largely driven by the desire to ensure that sowing and reaping for the next harvest proceeded smoothly.257 So long as the non-Jewish Ukrainians collaborated in agricultural matters the German administration would maintain ‘a benevolent attitude’. The ‘long-term economic goal’ was the ‘natural development of the Ukraine into the granary of Europe’, while ‘the entire eastern space’ should become ‘the principal market for west European industry’, to be paid for by the sale of foodstuffs and raw materials. What Hitler ultimately envisaged, in other words, was not simply a system of violent extraction, but rather an unequal system of exchange in which he set the terms of trade. While Nazi planners drew on many inspirations from European colonialism when conceiving the new ‘east’,258 Hitler himself remained resolutely focused on the Anglo-American example. His treatment of the Slav population was inspired not by the German, or any other European, colonial experience in Africa, but by British India, the mandate system and the Anglo-American extermination of the Indians in North America. Even in autumn 1941, therefore, the British ‘Indian’ solution for the post-Soviet space remained in tension with the ‘American’ one.
‘Operation Typhoon’, the attack on the central front preparatory to a drive on Moscow, began on 2 October 1941. Hitler’s accompanying proclamation reminded the Wehrmacht of the nature and purpose of the campaign. They were fighting a horde of ‘beasts’ who were defending a Soviet regime which had turned the riches of Russia into poverty and hunger.259 ‘This is the result,’ he claimed, ‘of a now twenty-five-year Jewish rule, which as Bolshevism is really just the general form of capitalism.’ ‘The bearers of this system,’ Hitler continued, were in fact ‘the same in both cases’, namely ‘Jews and only Jews’.260 It was not so much communism that Hitler was fighting in Russia, in other words, as the bestial puppets of capitalism and world Jewry. Above all, the Führer continued, the offensive was a ‘decisive battle’ designed ‘to strike a fatal blow against the instigator of the war, Britain itself’. ‘Because in smashing this enemy,’ he explained to the troops, ‘we will eliminate Britain’s last ally on the continent.’261 Here Hitler was simply rehearsing the original rationale of Barbarossa, which was primarily directed not against the Soviet Union, but against the British Empire.
At first, all went well. German units smashed through the Soviet defences on the central front.262 Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were taken in great battles of encirclement at Briansk and Vyasma. In the south, the Wehrmacht surged forward once more. All of the Crimea was overrun, with the exception of Sebastopol; SS units soon reached Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. German troops crossed the Mius river, and towards the end of the following month, they took Rostov, the gateway to the Caucasus. A week into the offensive, Hitler moved to claim victory. The Führer hoped, as he remarked privately, to capitalize on the ‘effect of this news on world public opinion’.263 On 8 October 1941, he summoned his press secretary, Otto Dietrich, and told him to announce the following day to the world press that the Soviet Union had been beaten.264 Hitler’s move did not reflect any delusions on his part, but rather a determination to depress Britain, deter the United States265 and encourage Japan.266 This message was intended not for domestic but for external consumption, which is why it was communicated via Dietrich rather than Josef Goebbels. Its success depended not so much on the actual conduct of military operations as on the achievement–however temporary–of narratival ascendancy.
For a few weeks in October and early November it seemed as if Hitler’s strategy might succeed. The Wehrmacht advanced closer to Moscow in apparent vindication of Dietrich’s announcement. There was consternation in London and Washington, which was widely registered by Germany. In mid October, Hitler predicted that ‘the rapid collapse of Russia will have a devastating effect on Britain’.267
But in the course of November, it became clear that things were not going to plan. Churchill showed no sign of giving way. In early November, the RAF attacked Cologne, Mannheim and Berlin in strength, while the British 8th Army surged forward in North Africa. The Italian position looked more rickety than ever. Far from being intimidated by the German successes in Russia, Roosevelt used them to warn Americans that they would be next. Meanwhile, Soviet resistance stiffened. Hitler remarked that the Red Army was fighting with ‘animalistic fanatical madness’.268 Snow and rain turned the primitive Russian roads into swamps; then the cold and ice immobilized armoured and mechanized units. Resupply became increasingly difficult. The advance slowed. In late November, the Red Army recaptured Rostov and shut the gate to the Caucasus. The day after, there was more bad news. Hitler met with his armaments minister Fritz Todt and Walter Rohland, the head of tank production. The latter told him that the war could not be won; Todt agreed that military victory was now impossible and that the war needed to be ended ‘politically’.269 On 5 December 1941, the Russians launched a large-scale counter-attack
before the gates of Moscow. Army Group Centre began to fall back, although it was to be about a week until Hitler became fully aware of the severity of the situation.270
Hitler was already convinced that he was stalemated, not just in Russia but globally. With his mechanized forces largely bogged down, the Führer began to lose faith in armoured warfare. ‘I have never used the word Blitzkrieg,’ he insisted on 8 November 1941, ‘because it is a completely stupid word.’271 In the headquarters at Rastenburg, the recriminations flew fast and thick. On 16 November, Hitler vented his frustration at the dire supply situation and railway bottlenecks with a tirade against the quartermaster general, Eduard Wagner, whom he dubbed a ‘ridiculous theoretician’. As the attack stalled, he also accused the generals, especially Bock, of talking him into an assault on Moscow that he had never wanted.272 On 19 November 1941, two days after the start of the British offensive in North Africa, and against the background of the increasingly deadlocked situation in Russia, Hitler had conceded that Britain and the Reich could not defeat each other.273 A week later, Hitler went a big step further when he remarked to a visitor that ‘if the German people should ever be no longer strong and sacrificial enough to commit its own blood for its existence, then it should pass away and be destroyed by a stronger power’.274 For the first time in the war, a good week before the great Russian counter-offensive in front of Moscow, and at least a fortnight before the US entry into the war, Hitler was contemplating Germany’s defeat and annihilation.
Hitler responded to the worsening situation with a combination of military, economic, racial and diplomatic measures. In Russia, Hitler was depressed about the sluggish progress towards Moscow but he reacted violently only to the stagnation of the southern offensive, which was tasked with breaking into the Caucasus. His agitation contrasted with the attitude of the–as yet–relatively relaxed Wehrmacht leadership.275 On 2 December the Führer flew to Army Group South to see the situation for himself. When Rundstedt ordered a retreat in the face of the Soviet counter-attack at Rostov, he was summarily sacked by Hitler. It was the first major crisis in the east, and the first ever to result in a public removal from command. For a few days Hitler maintained the illusion that the advance could be resumed quickly,276 but in fact there would be no further southern offensive that year. The strategic implications of this for Hitler were colossal, much greater than the failure to take Moscow, because all hopes of sweeping down to the very northern oil-fields of the Caucasus had to be abandoned. There would be no energy security for the Reich before Christmas. Barbarossa had failed all along the line: it had not forced the British to sue for peace, it was not deterring Roosevelt, and it had not secured all the resources necessary to face the expected entry of the United States into the war the following year.
The renewed salience of economic considerations, briefly overlain by the military and political priorities of the attack on Moscow, became increasingly obvious from late November 1941. On 22 November, Hitler remarked that ‘all wars’ were initially driven not by ‘racial’ factors but by ‘economic’ ones. They were decided by the ‘production of guns, tanks and ammunition’. For this reason, he would have to boost German ‘armaments’ in such a way as to ‘take away the breath’ of the enemy.277 This is what prompted Hitler’s decree of 3 December 1941 for the ‘Simplification and Increased Output of our Armaments Production’,278 a direct response to the perceived global deadlock. It placed greater emphasis on ‘mass production’, and ‘rationalization’ at the expense of the ‘technically and aesthetically more accomplished equipment of best artisanal quality’. A more direct repudiation of the German Mittelstand and the values of German apprenticeship across the ages, and a more wholehearted embrace of the Fordist model, is hard to imagine. Hitler had finally realized that the war would be won not by German quality but through American quantity.
At around this time, Hitler also escalated his racial policies, though it is not clear whether he did so in response to immediate events or as part of a long-term plan. On 28 November 1941, Hitler received the grand mufti of Jerusalem, a major step directed both against the British Empire and the common enemy of world Jewry.279 The mufti thanked the Führer for his ‘Sympathy for the Arab and especially the Palestinian cause’, and commiserated with him on the sufferings they had both experienced at the hands of ‘Britons and Jews’. Hitler promised not only to pursue an ‘uncompromising battle against the Jews’ but also not to tolerate their presence in Palestine, where they constituted a ‘state central point for the destructive influence of Jewish interests’ in the world more generally. In due course, the mufti would become an enthusiastic supporter of murdering Jews in Palestine and Europe, wherever they were to be found.280 A day later, in a move unrelated to the mufti’s visit, the Reic`h Security Main Office sent a summons for a conference of state secretaries to sort out the bureaucratic detail of the ‘comprehensive solution of the Jewish question’.
Diplomatically Hitler responded to the stalemate by trying to bind Japan more closely to him; he was terrified that Tokyo would leave him in the lurch.281 Hitler did not know that the Japanese carrier strike force had already left to attack Pearl Harbor on 26 November 1941. Tokyo asked that German support in the event of hostilities with the United States, which had already been promised, should be formalized in a treaty. Determined not to allow Japan to face America alone, and convinced that Roosevelt was on the verge of entering the war anyway, the Führer agreed. A treaty was hastily drafted in which Hitler promised that ‘in the case of war between Japan and the United States’ he would himself ‘immediately’ consider himself at war with America; the same would apply for Japan if Germany or Italy found themselves at war with the US.282 The wording of the text made clear that this was not just a defensive but also primarily an offensive treaty.
On 7 December 1941, the Japanese launched a devastating surprise attack on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.283 Hitler reacted to the news with surprise, but also relief.284 Despite the steadily mounting tension with the United States, no serious German operational military measures had been prepared in advance. U-boats were concentrated not on the east coast of America, but in the Mediterranean; the rest were spread across the Atlantic. This reflected partly the exigencies of the war against Britain, and partly the desire not to give Roosevelt a pretext to enter the war before Hitler was ready. That said, Hitler was relieved that Japan would tie down substantial British and American resources in the Far East, and he accepted not merely that he would have to deliver on his treaty commitments to Tokyo, but that it was in his vital interest to prevent his ally from going down to defeat on its own. In any case, the Führer was convinced that he was effectively already at war with America.285 One way or the other, Hitler was determined to anticipate Roosevelt. This time, unlike 1917, the Reich would not wait until attacked by the United States, but would be the first to strike openly. The Führer now scrambled to get from his headquarters in East Prussia to Berlin, to complete the negotiations over the treaty with Japan, to prepare his own declaration of war and to work out an overall strategy to deal with the new situation.
Militarily, Hitler’s response was swift. On 8 December, the day after Pearl Harbor, he issued Directive 39, which ordered the ‘immediate end to all major offensive operations’ in the east and instructed the Wehrmacht to ‘go over to the defensive’.286 He justified this with reference to the ‘unexpectedly early and harsh onset of winter’ and the resulting ‘supply problems’, but that was only part of the story. The directive was primarily a reaction not to the Soviet counter-offensive before Moscow, but to the general sense of stalemate building in the course of the previous month and the new global context created by Japan’s entry into the war. It was Hitler’s free decision, not one forced upon him by Stalin. The winter crisis before Moscow–which was already raging on the front line–had still not registered with him. Hitler was looking west, even before Pearl Harbor, not east.287
On 11 December 1941, Hitler presented the Reichst
ag with his declaration of war on the United States.288 The mood was sombre, and his speech was prefaced by a remarkably downbeat introduction by Göring. Hitler’s tone was measured and grim, even funereal. He stressed the losses of the Russian campaign, which–he told the Reichstag–had so far cost the Wehrmacht 162,314 dead, 571,767 wounded and 33,334 missing. Hitler cast the new war as a generational struggle which had been forced upon him by the perfidy of Roosevelt and the manipulation of the Jews. Hitler then moved to attack his main target, Roosevelt. On the basis of the reports of the Polish ambassador to Washington, Count Potocki, he accused the American president of having encouraged Warsaw to resist justified German demands in 1939. The Führer explained this perfidy with reference to the workings of US capitalism, which, he claimed, the Nye Commission had blamed for the American entry into the First World War. All this, according to Hitler, was happening at the behest of ‘the eternal Jew’, the ‘power’ behind Roosevelt, which sought to reduce Germany to the same chaos and subjection as the Soviet Union. Reprising themes which had formed part of his stock rhetoric over the past couple of years, the Führer framed the struggle as a ‘liberation struggle’ of Japan and the German Reich against Roosevelt’s ambition to establish an ‘unlimited economic dictatorship’ across the world in conjunction with Britain. It was the revolt of the ‘have-nots’ against the ‘American president and his plutocratic clique’.
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