To make matters worse, the collapse of the Mussolini regime was accompanied by the worst Allied bombing raids yet. For three days and three nights between 25 and 27 July 1943, the Americans pounded the port of Hamburg by day, and the RAF bombarded the residential areas by night. The resulting firestorm cost the lives of about 30,000 civilians. Industrial and harbour facilities were wrecked. The emergency services were overwhelmed. Hitler was devastated. Dönitz, who witnessed his reaction, recalled that he was ‘then just a human being full of, and bowed down by, pain’.298 Studying the photographs of incinerated women and children, he attributed a ‘brutal annihilatory will’ to the Anglo-Americans, and vowed that he would show no ‘mercy’ in future.299 His motivation here was also political. The Allied bombing campaign was putting the German home front under unbearable pressure. It would have to be stopped, Hitler warned, ‘otherwise people will eventually go mad’. The Führer was convinced that retaliation alone would force the Allies to back off. ‘The Briton will only stop,’ Hitler insisted, ‘when his cities are destroyed, otherwise not.’ ‘I can only win this war,’ he concluded, ‘by destroying more of the enemy than he can destroy on our side,’ or ‘at least’ by ‘teaching him the horrors of war’.300 In Hitler’s mind, the air war had thus become an attritional war of annihilation with the Anglo-Americans.
The Italian collapse and the cataclysmic turn in the bombing war triggered a severe crisis of the regime in the autumn of 1943. At a popular level, the air-raids were interpreted by many as the retaliation of Jewish plutocrats against Nazi policies. This hardened opinion against the Allies and ‘the Jews’ among segments of the population, but it also damaged the standing of the regime, particularly as the general military situation declined. NSDAP officials were abused and jostled in the street after raids.301 In Nuremberg, the local leadership reported in September 1943 that party members were concealing their badges when out on the street, that the greeting ‘Heil Hitler’ was becoming less common, and that the leadership was not enforcing conformity for fear of a backlash.302 Despite the severity of the attacks, opposition to mass evacuations did not abate. On the contrary, city dwellers were increasingly defying the party. When the Gauleiter of Westphalia South, Albert Hoffmann, tried to withdraw ration cards from people who had returned to the area without permission, there was a mass demonstration by hundreds of women on the Adolf Hitler Platz in the city of Witten. The police refused to intervene.303
These events placed Hitler in a quandary. If he did not respond, there was a risk that the authority of the Nazi regime as a whole would be undermined. If he clamped down too vigorously, there was the danger that unrest would grow, and that it would be exploited by the BBC. As we have seen, the deteriorating situation abroad and at home also took its toll on Hitler’s health. This may be the reason why Hitler was increasingly unwilling to show himself in public. Not only did he refuse to visit the bombed-out cities, but he also made fewer and fewer public speeches. There were only three in the whole of 1943, and just two the following year.304 The charisma of the Führer was waning fast.
The multiple challenges also provoked a high-political crisis in the Third Reich. Rosenberg lamented that there was actually ‘no [proper] government’ in the Third Reich. Its relentless focus on the overworked Führer meant that important matters were not decided or even discussed. The lack of direction was leading to the emergence of ‘warlord-style groups’ in the Nazi elite. This, Rosenberg acknowledged, was a structural problem to do with access to Hitler, which was often impossible to secure. Meanwhile, the usual polycratic squabbles continued. The Führer-state, which was meant to represent the essence of decision, in fact resulted in perpetual tergiversation. Given Hitler’s longstanding critique of the failures of parliamentary democracy to act, this was very ironic, as leading Nazis were well aware. ‘Even in authoritarian states,’ Rosenberg mused ruefully, ‘it is not easy to reach decisions.’305
If this was problematic in civil affairs, it was potentially fatal in military matters. Critics felt that Hitler was neglecting the east, that he was the only man with an overview of the war as a whole, and that he was making the wrong resource allocation between the fronts. For this reason, the commanders of Army Groups South and Centre in Russia, Manstein and Kluge, tried in early September 1943 to persuade Hitler to give up the OKW theatres of conflict and turn the running of the entire war over to Zeitzler. If not, he should at least appoint an overall commander on the eastern front.306 Either way, the request amounted to the removal of Hitler from operational command.
Hitler reacted vigorously to all of these challenges. Within twenty-four hours of hearing of the arrest of Mussolini, he vowed to ‘free [him] immediately through an airborne operation’ once he had identified where he was being held.307 Six weeks later, in a daring operation, a commando force rescued Mussolini from a hotel in the central Italian Apennine mountain range and brought him to see Hitler. A fortnight later, the Führer installed the Duce at the head of the Republic of Salò, an Italian puppet state, which nominally controlled the entire top half of the country. The Allied forces which landed at Salerno were quickly hemmed in, and the relatively narrow front between the Adriatic and the Mediterranean was fortified. Hitler would make the Allies fight their way every step up the Italian boot. He was absolutely in his element here: he would turn, not just the peninsula, but the entire continent into a ‘Fortress Europe’.308
Despite the deteriorating situation, Hitler would not believe that a separate peace with the west was possible, because he believed that Churchill’s enmity towards him was personal.309 He was still very hesitant about the establishment of a Russian liberation army.310 Hitler also rejected the idea of a separate peace with Russia, which was being strongly pushed by Tokyo and Ribbentrop so that Germany could turn its full attention against the Anglo-Americans.311 His objection was not primarily ideological, but territorial. Hitler warned the Japanese ambassador that he could not accept any terms that would require the return of the Ukraine to Stalin. Its retention, he stressed, was essential for the prosecution of the war against the western powers.312 In short, Hitler’s thinking on these subjects had not changed. He was wary of anything that might tend to encourage Slav nationalism, or to weaken his chances of holding on to a slice of Russian Lebensraum large enough to secure the future of the Reich, and to make it a plausible rival to Anglo-America. The war in east was still mainly about the west.
Nor did the decline in his strategic position make the Führer any more inclined to accept the ‘European’ vision of the Foreign Office. In early September 1943, it proposed the establishment of a European ‘confederation’ to keep out the ‘Anglo-Saxons’.313 Once again, Hitler showed no interest in any such arrangement, not even with the more ‘Nordic’ peoples of Europe. Hitler’s scepticism about the value of European allies, especially among the supposedly cognate Scandinavian peoples, was demonstrated by his meeting with the famous Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun in late June 1943, which soon degenerated into a shouting match.314 He told the Dutch fascist leader Anton Mussert towards the end of the year that he had no intention of ‘de-Netherlanding’ the Dutch, that he wanted to preserve the Netherlands as they were, with all their ‘peculiarities and customs’. Hitler also made clear that he had no ‘intention’ of pursuing a one-size-fits-all approach to the ‘small states’. Instead, Hitler planned to conclude treaties with each of these entities ‘individually’.315 In fact, Hitler rejected the idea of a European ‘standard last’ or a ‘unitary constitution’. ‘We must not take from the peoples all the freedom we can,’ he argued, but rather leave them ‘as much freedom as possible’. One should only try to ‘solve in conjunction with the other Germanic peoples’ those matters which ‘must be solved together’.316 Hitler, in other words, favoured a form of European subsidiarity.
Hitler’s European policy was driven not only by political and military considerations but also by the demands of the German war economy. In mid September 1943, he agreed to Speer’s suggestion that
there should be overall ‘European production planning’, and perhaps also the establishment of a European ‘production bureau’.317 This was to include France as an ‘equal’ member, whatever that meant. At around the same time, Speer was put in charge of Italian industry.318 Hitler stated that it was ‘self-evident’ that, as ‘the leading power in Europe’, Germany would ‘retain the absolute leadership of production planning’.319 The predominance of the Reich in this new European system was axiomatic. For this reason, the Reichsmark, which was intended to become the leading fully convertible currency on the continent after the war, was occasionally referred to as the ‘Euro-Mark’ in the Third Reich’s internal planning documents.320
These moves were flanked by measures to maintain morale and increase ideological and racial cohesion. In mid September 1943, Stalin had set up the National Committee for a Free Germany, a group of captured officers opposed to Hitler.321 The Führer was sensitive to the threat they posed to his legitimacy, and began to give speeches to the military leadership, and to force them to reaffirm their loyalty to him.322 He also speeded up his efforts to improve the political consciousness of the officer corps more generally. In October 1943, Hitler summoned the commanders of the home military districts and the Reserve Army to the Führer Headquarters. Here he harangued them on the need to transcend pure professionalism in favour of political commitment. He specifically did not want a Soviet-style commissar, however, but someone who could motivate those who ‘spiritually cannot keep up’. The slogan should be ‘Here officer, there politruk [Soviet political officer]’.323 In late December 1943, Hitler decreed that ‘in the fifth year of the war, the political-ideological leadership and education of the armed forces should be intensified’. This was to be done through the establishment of a ‘National Socialist Leadership Staff’ in the OKW itself, whose head was to coordinate with the NSDAP as ‘bearer of the political will’.324
Hitler was also concerned to stiffen the political spine of German society more generally. In August 1943, he appointed Himmler minister of the interior. His job was to prevent a repetition of the Italian fiasco in Germany.325 The racial war was a key theatre, both in the ‘negative’ and in the ‘positive’ sense. On 6 October 1943, the Reichsführer gave a secret speech to the Gauleiter at Posen in which he explained that the Jews had been killed in order to maintain the coherence of the home front. That was ‘negative eugenics’. Four days later, Hitler issued a decree on the treatment of children born to German fathers and local mothers in the occupied eastern territories. ‘Children who are born illegitimately to native women in the occupied eastern territories, and whose fathers are Germans,’ he announced, were to be ‘registered’. ‘The Reich,’ he continued, ‘will take over responsibility for the children if they are racially valuable.’326 That was ‘positive eugenics’.
If Hitler took the most radical measures against the Jews, and the ‘unfit’, and was willing to take on the officer corps ever more directly, he was still very reluctant to confront some of the other structures of German society. For example, while willing to recruit female ‘anti-aircraft crew’, he insisted that there be no public advertisement of the effort. Instead he wanted news of the possibilities to serve to be spread by word of mouth among the party’s women’s organizations. This most likely reflected his fear of resistance in the more conservative parts of the country.327 Hitler was also wary of taking on the Roman Catholic church, partly because of its power domestically and partly because of the possible international repercussions. In early December 1943, he remarked–echoing Frederick the Great–‘that he was of the opinion that everyone should seek salvation in his own way’, and that ‘he did not want to exercise any compulsion’, and that ‘in the area under his control’ anybody could be a member of the church’. Hitler went on to emphasize that he was open not only to the main Christian denominations, but also to Deists and even non-Christians. ‘We even have Muslims here with us,’ Hitler added,328 and it is perfectly true that he brought more Muslims to Germany than ever before.329
In the autumn and winter of 1943, Hitler was still pursuing a clear military-political strategy. He had always seen the Anglo-Americans as the main enemy; now the Führer saw them as the most immediate operational threat as well. On 3 November 1943, Hitler issued a far-reaching Directive 51 on the conduct of the war.330 Though the ‘danger in the east’ remained unchanged, he warned of ‘a greater one in the west–the Anglo-Saxon landing!’ In the east, Hitler continued, the ‘greater [availability of] space’ allowed ‘the loss of even larger amounts of territory without striking a deadly blow against the vital nerve centres’ of the Reich. ‘Not so in the west!’ he exclaimed. If the enemy secured a breakthrough on a broad front there it would quickly be fatal. He expected that the Allies would attack within the next few months ‘at the latest in the spring, but perhaps also earlier’. If the enemy did manage to land, Hitler went on, they should be counter-attacked immediately before they had a chance to consolidate their position. In many ways this directive simply ratified a shift in the centre of gravity of the German war effort which had been going on for some time.331
On the eastern front, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to dig in. Even before the failure of the Kursk offensive, he agreed to the construction of large-scale fortifications.332 In mid August 1943, he accepted the idea of an Ostwall using natural obstacles such as the Dnieper.333 The reason why Hitler, despite his overall strategy of holding in the west, and trading space for time in the east, was reluctant to retreat much further in Russia was economic and diplomatic. He had long since given up hope of another assault on the oil-fields of the Caucasus, but he clung to the Kuban bridgehead, and to what he still controlled of the industrial and mining areas of eastern Ukraine, for as long as possible.334 When that was lost in September 1943, his attention shifted to the defence of the Crimea, which was vital for the protection of the Romanian oil-fields and for ensuring the continued loyalty of his Black Sea allies. Besides, its loss might bring Turkey into the war against him.335
Hitler also sought to take the war to the enemy. In the autumn of 1943, the U-boats returned to the Atlantic. In September 1943, Dönitz presented plans for a new and much more formidable submarine, the type XXI, which could ‘live’ underwater for longer periods and move at such speed as to enable it to shake off escort vessels. Three months later, the Führer authorized mass production of these boats.336 In the air, Hitler’s hopes here rested on the ME 262, a pioneering jet aircraft, whose mass production he authorized in December 1943.337 Contrary to the desire of the Luftwaffe commanders defending the Reich, who wanted the new jet to be deployed as a fighter against Allied bombers, Hitler ordered its use as a bomber to retaliate against British cities. ‘I want bombers, bombers, bombers,’ he told the Luftwaffe leadership, ‘your fighters are completely useless.’338 As a result, the ME 262 arrived too late and in too few numbers to make any difference, and at a time when it could hardly even be fuelled.
The Führer’s main hope of deterring Britain, however, rested with the development of rockets capable of striking at London. These were, he remarked, ‘just as important as tank production’.339 In this spirit, Hitler ordered that the ‘Tank Decree’ be modified in favour of a decree for the production of rockets; the necessary workers were to be taken from other tasks.340 He justified the commitment of scarce resources by describing the rocket programme in July 1943 as a ‘decisive measure to relieve the homeland’ which could be ‘carried out with relatively modest means’.341 Hitler laid down that only German labour was to be used, preferably from areas which had been ‘totally destroyed’ by Allied bombing.342 Speer was given the go-ahead for mass production of these weapons with the explicit aim of prosecuting the war against Britain.343 ‘This will be the retaliation against Britain,’ he claimed on 20 August 1943, which would ‘force her to her knees’.344 In early December 1943, Hitler issued orders to the military commanders in the west for the ‘preparation and conduct of the long-range struggle against Britain with a
ll the relevant special weapons’.345
At the heart of Hitler’s strategy in late 1943, in the air, at sea and on the ground, was not war but politics. He conceded in mid October 1943 that his ideal solution, by which he presumably meant total victory, might not be attainable, but that he intended to stay on his feet so as to exploit fortuitous developments as they arose. ‘So long as one lies in wait like a cat,’ he explained, ‘and takes advantage of every opportunity to put one over on the other side, then nothing is lost’. The enemy, he promised, would show such ‘moments of weakness’; all Germany had to do was to exploit them. The key was to show ‘tenacity’ in the knowledge that a sudden internal crisis in one of the coalition states ranged against the Reich could bring about the collapse of the entire enemy front. Besides, he noted, there was the American presidential election scheduled for 1944, which might well bring political change in the United States.346 The defensive measures in the west were thus also intended to impress the Americans, and if necessary to ensure that they suffered a bloody nose when they landed. He reminded the military leadership again in mid December 1943 that Roosevelt was up for re-election and that he might ‘lose’ if he suffered a military reverse.347 Repelling the invasion would also enable Hitler to drive a wedge between London and Washington. In short, Hitler decreed, ‘when they attack in the west, then this attack will decide the war’.348
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