Death of a Nation
Page 60
clxxiv One German historian has derided his colleagues who claim Hitler and the Nazis were devoid of any ideas or vision of their own by saying, ‘Where does it say state that Weltanschauung is only that when it has achieved a specific intellectual or a moral level?’(11)
clxxv The Nazis eliminated the remaining elements of opposition within their own ranks, conservative elites and on the left during the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, including the head of the SA (Sturm Abteilung – paramilitary ‘Brown Shirt’ wing of the Nazi movement) Ernst Röhm and former conservative Reich’s Chancellor, Kurt von Schleicher. Hitler’s aim was to win favour with the public and the military, by removing the ‘hooligan’ element within the party’s own ranks, and by demonstrating that he had ‘put his own house in order’ and averted the threat of a second revolution.
clxxvi The index of consumption goods stood at 97.0 in 1929 before the crash; by 1938 it had surpassed this level to reach 107.4. Military investment in Germany between 1933–38 stood at RM 41.8 billion (Reichsmarks), the total investment in industry and transport at RM 25.4 billion and investment in the civilian economy at RM 38.7 billion, emphasising that the consumer industry also played a major role in the recovery of the German economy under the Nazis. Other studies have sought to highlight the disparity been the emphasis on investment in heavy industry which increased 200 per cent from 1933–38, whilst consumer industries increased at 38 per cent, which was still more than 6 per cent per year.(16)
clxxvii In the intervening years since the signing of Versailles, a consensus had emerged even among many of the leaders who had been at the conference and those that subsequently took office, from Lloyd George, to Maynard Keynes, Ramsay MacDonald to Lord Halifax and Chamberlain, that the Treaty of Versailles had been too harsh, that it had failed to honour the avowed principle of self-determination and that corrections were inevitable. France had suffered the greatest loss of life on the Allied side, but her arrogant and overbearing attitude fostered the impression that ‘she alone had won the war’. Her former allies became bitter at what they regarded as a lack of gratitude for the way in which the Anglo-Americans had saved France. They became ever more isolationist and more sympathetic toward the plight of the Germans. These attitudes underpinned the policy of appeasement that flourished during the 1930s and created the space in which Hitler abused their good intentions. In the United States, many Americans were simply disillusioned by the whole post-First World War peace process. The US public’s extreme reluctance to get embroiled in another European civil war endured right up to the bombing of Pearl Harbour at the end of 1941.(4)
clxxviii The Anti Comintern Pact, better known as the Axis, was an alliance of mainly fascist and authoritarian states that was established by Germany and directed against the communist Soviet Union. It provided for military assistance in case any of its members were to find themselves attacked or at war with Soviet Russia. Germany broke the Axis by signing the Non Aggression Pact with Russia on 23rd August 1939 to free its back and fight the Anglo-French Alliance in the West. Hitler reconstituted the alliance in 1941, following operation Barbarossa and his invasion of the Soviet Union. The Anti Comintern Pact then came to include the following countries sending troops to fight the Red Army: Germany, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovakia. Other member nations included Spain, Denmark, China, Manchukuo and of course, Japan.
clxxix Expecting the Italians to remain loyal and not change sides was as forlorn a hope during the Second World War, as it had been during the First. Hitler’s loyalty to Mussolini played an enormous role in bringing Germany to her knees. Hitler had little or no interest in the areas which Mussolini invaded, each new ‘Italian Conquest’ proving to be one unmitigated disaster after another, requiring Hitler to send much-needed German troops and material to support his hopeless ally’s failed invasions of Yugoslavia, Greece and North Africa. Even the Albanians managed to give the Italian military a kicking. This policy stretched German forces wafer thin across the Balkans, Greece and North Africa at a time when she needed to concentrate all her forces for the war in the East. When Mussolini was deposed by his Fascist council, soon after the Allies set foot in southern Italy, Hitler again rescued his ally, who had been locked up in a mountain fortress. German parachute troops succeeded in making a daring rescue of Il Duce and set him up with his own puppet government in northern Italy. Hitler would be no less loyal to his Japanese allies in declaring war with them on the United States, incurring the bulk of America’s wrath, also transferring German military and missile technology to the Japanese right to the very end of the war — getting absolutely nothing in return.
clxxx After Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were dismembered, the puppet states of Slovakia and Croatia were also pressed into the service of the Third Reich.
clxxxi There was no shortage of establishment figures in Britain who were ready to open negotiations with Hitler’s Germany. They included Lord Halifax, Lloyd George, who no doubt saw himself in a future role not unlike that of Marshal Petain in France, and the former king, Edward VIII (then the Duke of Windsor), who were key among them.
clxxxii There were circa 42,000 German Pragers living in the Czech capital at the time of the invasion. But Hitler’s occupation of the rump of the Czech state in April 1939 now, for the first time, brought millions of non-German Czech citizens under the control of the Reich.
clxxxiii This is one of the key points used to argue that Stalin did not want war, because he argued in favour of the Western powers seeking a negotiated settlement with Germany over Poland. However, the Anglo-French allies had run out of patience and had lost all faith in Hitler’s commitments. The greatest beneficiary of this war was Russia, having gained the Baltic States and eastern Finland and Poland, none of which they would have been willing to give up in 1939, any more than they were in 1945. One has to ask therefore how seriously one can take the notion that Stalin and Molotov’s pleas for peace in the West were genuine, as it would have necessitated their having to make much greater concessions in terms of their gains than Nazi Germany would have needed to make.
clxxxiv They could have done considerably more. At Nuremberg, Generaloberst Alfred Jodl stated that during the German invasion of Poland they had massed 110 divisions in the East, but only had 23 in the West facing the Anglo-French armies. This view was supported by General Siegfried Westphal (Staff Officer on the Western Front) who stated, ‘German forces could stand no more than one or two weeks,’ had the French attacked in force.(9)
clxxxv In fact Nazi Germany had huge stockpiles of steel for its armaments production, which were supplemented with the stockpiles it had taken control of in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, therefore the notion that controlling these iron ore regions would have brought the German armaments industry to its knees in 1940 was wishful thinking.(10)
clxxxvi Speculation existed at the time that Chamberlain asked the King to call Churchill because he believed Churchill would make a hash of being prime minister and that this might reopen the door for Chamberlain to resume the leadership.
clxxxvii They all had good reason to believe a German attack in the West might stall. First because of the German General’s unimaginative plan for the Battle of France — until Manstein’s input undoubtedly saved it from disaster — and also because German forces were hugely outnumbered by the Anglo-French allies in virtually every significant sphere of armour. Attacking forces usually require at least twice the forces to overcome defenders, three times the forces if they are heavily dug in, as they were along the Maginot Line. In terms of divisions, the Allies had 144, the Germans 141. But the shortfall in German armour was far more acute in artillery where the Allies had 13.974 guns opposed to the Germans’ 7,378. The Allies had a third more tanks than the German army with 3,384 against 2,445. Only in terms of aircraft did the Luftwaffe possess superiority in numbers at 5,638 against 2,935. If Blitzkrieg did not succeed, the war of production was one the Allies would win hands down. In the first
six months of 1940 the Allies produced three times as many tanks as the Germans (1,412 Allied against 558 German), and more than twice the number of aircraft.(13)
clxxxviii The BEF (British Expeditionary Force) got bottled up along the French coast. Manstein and other generals claimed the delayed assault on the beaches of Dunkirk and the successful evacuation of many of the Anglo-French forces was the only failure of the battle for France. Some historians have speculated that this was a conscious decision by Hitler who did not wish to make it more difficult for Britain to come to terms with Germany, which it certainly would have been had he just ordered the slaughter of their young men on the beaches of the Pas de Calais. The other more probable reason for the delayed assault was that the German military, including Hitler, never fully appreciated what naval forces could accomplish. When the Wehrmacht reached the coast, they thought that was it; the Brits have reached the end of the road, they were going nowhere. Not so, and of course Churchill was able to make some propaganda capital out of the unmitigated disaster of the Fall of France and the ignominious role the BEF had played in it, hyping up the huge superiority of German forces, which we know now to have been a complete fallacy. The only consolation was in managing to get such a vast number of troops out of the jaws of the approaching Wehrmacht. All in all, the armada of little boats and the Royal Navy performed an incredible feat, rescuing 338,000 men, 198,000 Brits and 140,000 French soldiers, who would live to fight another day.
clxxxix Britain was not quite ‘alone’. The British Empire and Commonwealth, which encompassed a quarter of the world’s population and a fifth of her territory, mobilised over 6 million service men and women for the defence of the realm; 2.5 million from India, 1 million from the Dominions and more than half a million from the colonies and dependencies. The vast quantities of raw materials, food and manufactured goods sent from the empire allowed Britain to survive the period from May 1940 to Dec 1941.(14)
cxc When Field Marshal Rundstedt was interviewed after the war by the Russians and they gleefully asked him what Hitler’s greatest mistake had been during the war, they fully expected him to say his decision to invade Russia. They were more than a little taken aback when he answered that it was his failure to take out Britain, without which America could not have entered the war in any effective way.
cxci No one had paid too much attention to the crushing victory a young Soviet general by the name of Zhukov had inflicted on the Japanese army in August 1939, at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in Mongolia, when forces of the Soviet Union and the Imperial Japanese army’s occupying forces from Manchuria in China engaged in a border dispute. The Red Army gave the Japanese a perfect display of Blitzkrieg, encirclement tactics, coordinated air and ground assault. The Red Army proved they were far from an ineffective force crippled by Stalin’s purges. They also proved they were capable of a well coordinated surprise attack.(16)
cxcii Hitler was not overly concerned that America might enter the war in 1940, being fully informed that the overwhelming mass of Americans were against getting embroiled in another European war. Public opinion polls in the run-up to the US presidential elections showed that 67 per cent of Americans were against going to war. Only 12 per cent were for sending aid and only 2 per cent wanted to fight the Dictators.(19) Charles Lindbergh — the first man to have single-handedly flown his Spirit of St Louis airplane across the Atlantic — spearheaded the anti-war ‘America First’ movement and in keeping with American public opinion, was opposed to getting involved in another war. Only after the bombing of Pearl Harbour by Japan on 7th December 1941 did this mood change; Lindbergh himself then volunteered and flew combat missions in the Pacific.
cxciii This offensive had been made possible through one of the most vital pieces of intelligence work of the Second World War: the Soviet Sorge spy ring in Tokyo reliably established that the Japanese had no intention of launching a second front against Russia in the east until they had three to one superiority and only after the Germans had taken Moscow. In other words no time soon, if at all. Stalin was then able to switch over a 100 fresh Siberian divisions from the east to the defence of Moscow at the crucial moment and catch the Wehrmacht completely off guard. This, coupled with the massive industrialisation that Stalin’s five-year plans had established behind the Ural Mountains to the east, out of the range of German bombers, was going to be vital in turning the war around.
cxciv President Roosevelt was venomously anti-German from an early age. He had been to Germany eight times and even met the Kaiser. He had inherited much of his hatred of Germans from his mother, who regularly called them ‘swine’. Their initial trips to Germany had started in 1891 after his father went to the health resort of Bad Nauheim, north of Frankfurt, for treatment after suffering a heart attack. Roosevelt actually took part of his honeymoon with Eleanor at another German health spa, from where he wrote to his mother that he sat as far away as possible from where the Germans dined from ‘four long pigsties’. He even claimed to have assaulted a German soldier for repeatedly closing a window on a train, for which he had supposedly been arrested. In January 1919 on visiting the ancient fortress of Ehrenbreitstein above the Rhine-Mosel river valley at Koblenz, he was outraged that it was not flying the American flag. He contacted the US commander General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, who then ordered the Stars and Stripes hoisted ‘within the hour’. Until 1940 he had to play down his desire to aid Britain in her war against Nazi Germany because the overwhelming mood of the American public was against intervening in another European war.(25) His insistence on Germany’s unconditional surrender, about which Churchill and Stalin, as well as many of his own government, had severe reservations, gave ordinary Germans and the German resistance to the Nazi dictatorship nothing to hope for and no incentive to overthrow the Nazi regime. It undoubtedly prolonged the war and cost countless lives.
cxcv The bombing of Stalingrad by some estimates is said to have cost as many as 40,000 civilian lives, in a city which Stalin had refused to be evacuated, ‘to staunch’ their resistance against the invaders.
cxcvi Stalin’s first ‘Stavka order’ was made in August 1941: ‘Anyone who removes his insignia during battle and surrenders should be regarded as a malicious deserter, whose family is to be arrested as the family of a breaker of the oath and betrayer of the Motherland. Such deserters are to be shot on the spot.’ The order was renewed on 28th July 1942 with the addition of a new clause and from that moment forward became known as the ‘Not one step backward’ order. It stated, ‘Panicmongers and cowards must be destroyed on the spot. The retreat mentality must be decisively eliminated. Army commanders who have allowed the voluntary abandonment of positions must be removed and sent for immediate trial by military tribunal.’ That was effectively a death sentence. The more sinister element of the directive was the instruction that each army must organise armed detachments behind their own lines to shoot any soldiers who retreated or tried to run away. This policy was put in place as the Germans approached Stalingrad. How many countless hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops were mown down by their own side remains unknown. The ruthlessness of the political officers behind the lines is inescapable; at Stalingrad alone they executed over 13,500 of their own men, more than a division, for being ‘traitors to the Motherland’.(31)
cxcvii Eye-witness reports, whether by the American journalist William Shirer, or the a Jewish maid described by Eva Figes in A Journey to Nowhere, hidden by Germans throughout the war, show a very different picture from Goebbels’ propaganda newsreels or the common view held today that Berliners or Germans as a whole were wildly enthusiastic about Hitler’s war. There were too many who remembered the suffering of the last war, of the 750,000 civilians who had died as a result of the British blockade — and there was hardly a family who had not lost a relative in that conflict — many feared a new war ‘like the plague’, as one diarist recalls in 1938.(2)
cxcviii I wonder if the makers of the film 300 knew that Hitl
er regarded the military ethos of ‘Sparta’ as representing the first truly ‘National Socialist state’.
cxcix The fact that all Politburo meetings were secretive and that there are no written records for a whole range of Stalin’s directives, including the war on Finland, makes one wonder what the fuss is all about. Particularly when Stalin’s biographer, Professor Volkogonov, in an article in Izvestia on 16th January 1993 stated that the meeting had indeed taken place on the date in question, and that he himself had held the minutes in his hands. It is also not as if this were the only thread on which the notion that Stalin planned an aggressive war against Germany hangs.(21)
cc The Soviet Union would not have stopped in Germany but would have used the pretext of ‘liberating Europe’ from Nazi tyranny to push on to the English Channel and the Atlantic coast.
cci The German film Downfall shows a multi-dimensional Hitler, touchingly sensitive towards his secretaries, brutally indifferent to the suffering of his own soldiers and civilians, genocidal in his will to annihilate his enemies and delusional in his desire to keep fighting the war. The series in which the otherwise excellent actor, Robert Carlyle, plays the Hitler caricature of mono-testicular mythology is so bad it is painful to watch.
ccii Some of Stalin’s bloody terror statistics include: 2 million of 10 million Kulaks forcibly resettled after the 1929 forced collectivisation estimated to have died, if not many more; 6 million died in the deliberate famine of 1933 and 1 million arrested and killed in first wave of terror in 1934; 10 million died in labour camps of the 17 to 18 million arrested in second wave of terror by 1937; 22 million died as a result of Stalin’s terror, purges, collectivisation and occupations before the SU was at war with Nazi Germany; 1 million plus died from 1941 onwards, as a result of the forced deportations of ‘treacherous groups’ including the ethnic Germans in Russia, Crimean Tartars and Cossacks and Chechens; 5 to 6 million, mostly former Soviet POWs or Soviet citizens left alive in the areas occupied by the Germans died in the camps of the over 10 million sent there as part of Stalin’s ‘screening’ process, following his order that they should kill themselves rather than be captured or occupied; 1 million victims in his final purge between 1947–53 and 30 to 40 million dead in total (not including war dead) as a result of Stalin’s psychopathic murderous impulses.(4) In Germany during the Third Reich you knew if you were at risk, there was some ‘method’ to the madness. In Stalin’s Russia the knock on the door in the middle of the night could fall upon anyone, for the most arbitrary of reasons. Stalin would regularly look at the lists of those to be executed and write in the margins ‘not enough’. Entire families of those Stalin singled out were imprisoned, tortured, taken into the woods and shot, buried in unmarked graves or given prolonged death sentences in the thousands of Gulags.