Death of a Nation
Page 52
The Sixth Army and the ‘League of Nations’ of Axis allies — including the Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Slovakians and Ukrainian ‘Hiwis’ — were all sacrificed to help pin down 107 Soviet divisions and thirteen tank regiments.(32) The Axis forces were now spread paper-thin along a 2,000-mile front from Leningrad in the Baltic, to Rostov and the Black Sea. Blitzkrieg was over, but the Russians were not exhausted. The battle of attrition was just beginning and it was one that Germany did not have the manpower and resources to win. Hitler became increasingly delusional about Germany’s prospects for victory in a war engaged against the enormous and previously untapped resources of the Soviet Union, the United States and the British Empire. Hitler’s strengths now became his weaknesses. Willpower, when you had the tactical advantage and still presided over enormous resources is one thing, but the Wehrmacht no longer had either surprise or a tactical advantage, let alone a numerical advantage at its disposal. Neither Hitler, nor any one man, would have been capable of coordinating a modern industrial war on an unprecedented scale along such enormous fronts.
By 1943, Germany was facing an escalating war at sea in the Atlantic, in the air over Germany, and against a massively reinforced Anglo-American army in North Africa, whilst the Russians were demonstrating that they were not only capable of winning the war of production but of learning from past mistakes. Hitler persisted in trying to oversee the minutiae of decisions in armaments as well as the day-to-day military decisions at the fronts. When the war became too big for him, his own personal failings became pivotal. He became paranoid and blamed everyone but himself for the disasters that followed. His physical and mental health deteriorated substantially with the defeat at Stalingrad. The drafty conditions in the huts at forward command headquarters in Russia had given him influenza; his doctor diagnosed that extreme mental strain had caused him a brain inflammation, which gave him splitting headaches; and his arm developed a tremor. The coming disasters only worsened his physical and mental state. Some might say Hitler was a genius in victory and a fool in defeat. Just as a gambler begins to lose his winning streak, Hitler lost perspective and made ever grander and more irrational bets until he lost everything.
HITLER’S WAR
Leading German historians have been keen to warn us against focusing on ‘Hitlerism’, as a dangerous over-simplification. One leading exponent has argued, ‘The problem with the post-war view of Hitler is that the Messiah-Hitler’s positive attributes were turned overnight into negative ones, he became the alibi of the nation — evil incarnate — but the Übermensch remained.’(1) In other words, it was too easy for all the Mitläufer (fellow travellers) to pin their misdeeds on the Führer. This may be true, but that does not detract from the fact that Hitler’s actions and miscalculations were the primary forces in the commencement of the Second World War and all that flowed from it. He undoubtedly had a determination for armed conflict that was not matched by even his most ardent followers, let alone the majority of the German people. His desire for war in 1938 during the protracted crisis over Czechoslovakia not only unnerved his generals, a number of whom planned to attempt to assassinate him if it came to war,cxcvii but also raised the hackles of leading Nazis who wanted to build on the achievements of the regime, rather than risk all by war. Even the ever-loyal Joseph Goebbels commented in his diary:
Our campaign against Prague is beginning to tire the public a little. One cannot draw out a crisis for months on end… More importantly there is a growing sense of panic about war in the nation, people believe that war has become inevitable. No one is happy with that, it was the same in July 1914. We have to be more careful. Otherwise we will slide into a catastrophe that no one wants but will come all the same.(3)
There are two main schools of thought on Hitler’s role within the Third Reich, and particularly on his role in the lead up to the war. Historians of the Functionalist school argue that Hitler’s war aims were not fully thought out and that he hoped to achieve the main thrust of his territorial revisions by rearmament and intimidation rather than through war; that what he hoped for throughout was an alliance with England, and that he had only envisaged limited, small-scale wars along the lines of those fought in the Balkans before the First World War. They argue that, even over Poland, Hitler’s actions were contradictory and not clearly thought out. He had after all signed a non-aggression pact with Poland in 1934, offering to settle remaining territorial disputes with them if they joined the Anti-Comintern Pact (Axis) against the Soviet Union, an objective that would have made a mess of his grand design for a contiguous German Empire to the east. Above all they argue that Hitler certainly did not expect a world war, nor was German rearmament ready for anything like a world war in 1939.
The second school of thought, proffered by Intentionalists, points to the memo Hitler sent to Goering in 1936 initiating the Four Year Plan, and to the Hossbach Memorandum of November 1937. They argue that these support their thesis that Hitler never deviated from his desire for a full-blown European war, which would inevitably develop into a world war. This memorandum that started the Four Year Plan sought for German rearmament to be ready for war by 1940 and was prophetic in its realisation of the threat posed by the Soviet Union. In it, Hitler wrote, ‘I only want… to set down my conviction that this crisis cannot and will not fail to arrive and that it is Germany’s duty to secure her own existence by every means in the face of this catastrophe… For a victory of the Bolsheviks over Germany would not lead to a Versailles treaty, but to the final destruction, indeed the annihilation of the German people…’(4) The Hossbach Memorandum, written up five days after a meeting between Hitler and his generals, displayed his paranoia about his own premature death, stating that in the event of his passing the content of the meeting should be seen as his political testament. In this memo, Hitler focused first on a step-by-step approach to war, with the incorporation of Austria and Czechoslovakia into the Reich, and then spoke of a ‘settling of accounts’ with Britain and France within five to six years — in other words sometime between 1942–44; with a conquest of the East coming after that. Intentionalists highlight the fact that the core objectives for both scenarios were the same: Anschluß with Austria and Bohemia, the inevitability of war with Bolshevik Russia, and the need to conquer territory in the East. They see this as evidence of Hitler’s desire and intention for a major European war. However, they also have to accept that the means and the timeline of achieving these objectives were not the same and that inconsistencies remained. Right through until the late 1930s, an inner conflict continued as to what to do with Poland, ally or annihilate her, as indeed there remained the vain hope of an alliance with Great Britain.
While there were parallels between the foreign policy objectives of Wilhelmian Germany and those of the Third Reich, these were never more than the starting point for much more grandiose geopolitical goals, which emanated directly from Hitler himself. And in contrast to a picture of a united Nazi hierarchy hell-bent on world war and world domination, even the second most powerful figure in the Reich, Hermann Goering, was loath to see the looming conflict with Poland lead to war with Great Britain, and risk a European war. In fact as late as 29th August 1939, three days before the outbreak of the war, Goering pleaded with Hitler not to ‘gamble everything’, to which Hitler replied, ‘In my life I have always put my whole stake on the table.’(5)
Hitler’s pivotal role in driving Germany to war and risking everything that had been achieved in the first six years of his dictatorship is inescapable. Goering, Goebbels and other leading figures in the Nazi hierarchy would have preferred to have built on the achievements of restoring full employment and Germany’s economic and political power; while at the same time bringing Austria and the Sudetenland into the Reich, working towards a gradual revision of the existing territorial disputes with Poland, and building up the Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union. But Hitler was driven by one all-consuming obsession: the need for Lebensraum (living space for the German people)
. He returned to this subject time and time again in his public speeches, and in his private conversations, stating, ‘But Germany’s population growth is six hundred thousand new heads every year. That’s six million in ten years. How can Germany continue to feed her people? That is only possible if we acquire new territory — and we must get that by brute force.’(6) Between his autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), and his second unpublished book, two elements of his essential Weltanschauung (world view) remained unchanged. His desire to rid Germany of her ‘mortal enemies, the Jews’, and in particular destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, was inexorably linked to the need for Lebensraum and a German Empire in the East — and that meant war with Soviet Russia.
Hitler wrote the following, with regard to his thinking on Russia:
Reasons which induce me to a special examination of the relation of Germany and Russia… Here we are dealing with perhaps the most decisive question of German foreign affairs… If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states. Her fate itself seems desirous of giving us a sign, by handing Russia to Bolshevism… Our task and the mission of the National Socialist movement is to bring our own people to the political insight… (of the need for) the industrious work of the German plough, to which the sword need only give soil.(7)
Those who cite Hitler’s invasion of Russia as his ultimate folly fail to recognise that this was his ultimate and overriding ambition. They also fail to take into account Stalin’s ambition to re-establish the borders of the Old Russian Empire and carry forward the struggle for world revolution. Beyond that, the horrors of the war have overshadowed the pre-war belief that a war between Communist Russia and Fascist Germany not only appeared to be inevitable, but even desirable, on the part of many in the West for much of the 1930s.(8) Speaking to his generals, only four days after becoming Reich Chancellor in 1933, Hitler stated, ‘We might fight for new export markets; or we might — and this would be better — conquer new Lebensraum in the east and Germanise it ruthlessly. A peace-loving public cannot stomach objectives like these. Thus it must be prepared for them… Marxism must be eliminated root and branch…’(9)
In the 1936 memorandum regarding the Four Year Plan that Hitler sent to Hermann Goering, he stated that war with Russia was inevitable. He wrote, ‘This crisis (war with Russia) cannot and will not fail to occur.’(10) In an after dinner speech he gave to senior generals and admirals at his new Reich Chancellery on 25th January 1939, Hitler stated:
All the world empires have been won by deeds of daring and lost through pacifism. If, in all the centuries of its existence, the British Empire had been governed by the force and trends that it is now claiming to preserve, the empire would never have been won in the first place. The British say the same, they say, ‘of course in those days we were brutal — we admit it, they are the stains on our escutcheon, we were blood thirsty and vengeful and cruel. But we’re not like that at all now. Today we are quite different.’ If the British really have turned over a new leaf, then in the long run they won’t be able to hang on to what they won with their other qualities.(11)
Time appeared to be of the essence. Hitler was a man in a hurry. He said, ‘It is one of my greatest fears that something may befall me personally, before I can put the necessary decisions into effect.’ German rearmament might have been incomplete but there was no such thing as complete rearmament. Time was running out; Germany had to strike before Britain, France and Russia closed the gap on German rearmament, if Hitler’s dreams of a great new eastern German Empire were to be realised.(12) A new kind of empire, one founded on principles of strict racial imperialism, born of Hitler’s deeply-held conviction that all races and nations were involved in a timeless struggle for supremacy. Where the foreign policy aspirations of Imperial Wilhelmian Germany had seen the Germans as the Kulturtraeger, the bearers of Christian and Western civilisation to the East, these notions were replaced by Hitler’s new ideology of a völkisch racial struggle for conquest, based purely on exploitation, enslavement and extermination of ‘inferior races’. Heinrich Himmler, the man who would seek to impose Hitler’s genocidal vision of a new racial order in the East, made it clear when he addressed the leaders of the SS Einsatzgruppen, (‘Task Forces’ — in practice, special death squads) stating, ‘Now only people of German blood will dwell in the east… we are not bringing these people civilisation.’(13)
The war Hitler initiated against the Soviet Union was a war of annihilation and enslavement, fought between two of the most barbarous totalitarian regimes in history, where no quarter was expected, or given, and where little if any distinction was drawn between military combatants and civilians. The Soviets paid scant regard to the consequences of the scorched earth policies of their headlong retreat upon the sustainability of the population they deprived of crops and harvests in 1941. The Germans likewise were callously indifferent in their scorched earth retreat in 1943–44, condemning millions to starvation. SS Einsatzgruppen with the assistance of elements of the German Wehrmacht destroyed 1,710 Soviet towns, and as many as 70,000 villages, along with the major cities in their advance, and in their retreat. They also orchestrated a ruthlessly murderous campaign against Soviet partisans, often executing 100 partisans against the death of just one German solider. Soviet political commissars were attached to all units of the Red Army and mercilessly shot their own men who retreated in the heat of battle and they went on to kill Red Army soliders who had ‘allowed’ themselves to be taken prisoner. Some estimates put the Soviet civilian death toll at twice the number of its staggering military casualties. The figures are so enormous that the true cost in human terms of the war for the Soviet Union will never be known, but estimates for civilian deaths range from 9 to 19 million. Soviet military casualties including Soviet POWs who were worked, or starved to death, range from 9 to 13 million deaths.(14)
What made the war against the Soviet Union different was that it was both ideological and racial at the same time — ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, the two were inseparable in Hitler’s mind — and both had to be exterminated. There was no distinction in priority given between exterminating the Jews and winning the war. They were put on an equal footing right to the very end. Not even the German war machine’s insatiable need for labour, to feed its armaments production, or the rolling stock required to move men and equipment received precedence over the need to keep the machinery of racial extermination grinding remorselessly on. In fact, as Nazi Germany’s prospects of winning the war faded, steps to increase the industrial extermination of Europe’s Jews stepped up a gear.(15) Beyond this, the war in the endless expanses of the Soviet Russia was never really supposed to end. Hitler’s racial war of colonisation of the East was meant to instil a permanent militaristic ethos into the German people, never to let them rest, or become too comfortable and fall back into fat, contented, peaceful decadence. It was a war without end, in a frontier without end, designed to keep the German soldier and farmer tough. In Hitler’s eyes this would inspire a new creed of racial militarism.cxcviii
STALIN’S WAR
Lenin established the International Comintern in Moscow in 1919. Its aim was to establish a ‘World Soviet Socialist State’. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) specifically did not name a country in its title — it did not even mention Russia — because it aimed at never-ending expansion that would ultimately encompass all the nations of the world. The Comintern helped set up new communist parties, and/or strengthened existing ones, in every major country in the world. Communist parties around the globe were funded by and followed the dictates of Moscow. The Chief of the Political Directorate of the Red Army, Jan Gamarnik, in a speech made on 15th March 1937 to the National Committee for Defense of the USSR, stated, ‘The Red Army will consider its Bolshevik mission complete when it achieves control of the entire globe.’ It is important to note here that no one contradicted the line that Stalin set, and lived. Furthermore, the International Comintern for the Spread of World Re
volution was not formerly ‘dissolved’ until early 1943 and then only because Stalin was desperate to appear more amenable to his Western Allies when he needed them to open a second front against Nazi Germany at the earliest possible opportunity. Even then, the activities of the Comintern were not wound up, nor did the philosophy of the Soviet Union change. There are those who argue that Stalin had initially simply wanted to reinstate the symbiotic relationship established between Germany and the Soviet Union under the Treaty of Rapallo, whereby Germany sought Russia’s raw materials and Russia gained access to German technology and modern machinery. However, Soviet Russia never missed an opportunity to expand; whether under the pact it made with Nazi Germany, or the alliance it made with the Western Allies.(16) Whether one chooses to believe the evidence to suggest that Stalin ordered advanced preparations for a military strike against Nazi Germany, or not, most historians agree that war between these two totalitarian, yet diametrically opposed regimes was inevitable. The notion that Stalin set aside the goals and endeavours of the International Comintern for the Spread of World Revolution, in favour of revolution in one country, is not supported by his statements or actions before, in the lead-up to, during, or after the war. As early as 1925, he declared, ‘Struggles, conflicts and wars among our enemies… (are) our great ally… and the greatest supporter of our government and our Revolution… If war breaks out, we will not sit with folded arms, we will have to take the field, but we will be the last to do so. And we shall do so in order to throw the decisive load on the scale.’(17)