The generals were deciding the fate of a huge city. Among their concerns were the possibility of ground or air counter-attacks and the strength of the Soviet anti-aircraft defences. They were also concerned about the opinion of Berlin: How would their respective achievements be assessed by the General Staff?
“You and your air corps,” said Paulus, “provided magnificent support for the 6th Army two years ago, when it was under the command of the late Reichenau during the invasion of Belgium. I hope that your support for my Stalingrad breakthrough will be no less successful.”
His apparent solemnity was belied by his eyes, where there was a hint of mockery.
Richthofen looked at him and said bluntly, “Support? Who do you think supported whom? Most likely, it was Reichenau supporting me. And as for Stalingrad, who knows? It may be your breakthrough, or it may be mine.”
24
IN THE morning Colonel Forster came to say goodbye to General Weller before flying back to Berlin. This corpulent, grey-haired staff officer, now aged about sixty, had known Weller for many years. They had first met when Lieutenant Colonel Forster was in command of a regiment and a young Lieutenant Weller was on his staff.
Weller was attentive and welcoming, wanting to emphasize the respect he still felt for this colonel who had once been his senior. He knew that Forster had left active service for some time and that he had shared the views of Ludwig Beck, the now disgraced former chief of the General Staff, and that he had even helped draft Beck’s memorandum about how catastrophic it would be for Germany to engage in another war. Beck’s most emphatic warning had been about the dangers of a war with Russia; he had made out that Germany was certain to be defeated. Only in September 1939 had Forster written to the higher authorities, asking them to make use once again of his considerable experience. Thanks to the support of Brauchitsch he had been recalled from the reserves.
“What impressions will you be taking back to Berlin with you?” Weller asked. “You know how much I value your opinion.”
Forster looked at Weller with his cool, pale blue eyes and said, “It’s a shame I’m leaving today. It would be better, I think, to be arriving today. But what I have seen leaves me in no doubt: we are about to achieve our strategic aim.” Visibly moved, he ran his hand over his grey Hindenburg crew cut, went up to Weller and said with solemn emphasis, “Let me just say, as straightforwardly as I would have said eighteen years ago, well done, Franz!”
“They’re fine soldiers,” said Weller, touched by these words.
“I’m not talking only about the soldiers,” said Forster, and smiled. With Weller, he did not feel even a trace of the burdensome irritation he felt in the presence of most other up-and-coming young officers.
Once, in 1933, at a critical moment for Germany, the two officers had met at a seaside resort. They had talked about how disgusted they both felt with the leaders of the new party. They had called Göring a glutton and drug addict, and Hitler a psychopath. They had talked about his hysterical bloodlust, his laughable “intuition,” his insane ambitiousness—which somehow went hand in hand with cowardice—and the doubtful provenance of his Iron Cross. Forster had spoken at length about the inevitable failure of any attempt at a military vengeance for the shame of Versailles; he had spoken about the ignorance of political charlatans who think that demagogic bluster can substitute for military logic and who choose to ignore everything that German generals had learned in the course of a lost war. Neither man had forgotten any of this, but the Reich’s unwritten code did not allow even close friends openly to recall conversations so dangerous and misguided.
But now, a hundred kilometres from the Volga, on the eve of a victory unprecedented in world history, Weller suddenly asked, “Do you remember those long-ago conversations of ours in the park, not far from the sea?”
“Grey hair and age do not always judge right,” Forster said slowly. “I shall always regret that I did not realize my mistake sooner. Time has proved me wrong.”
“Yes, thanks to this war there are new factors that military strategy must take into account,” said Weller. “Beck argued that Russia’s breadth, its vast spaces, would afford us an advantage in the first stages of a war—but that the country’s depth would then prove our undoing. He has been proved wrong.”
“That is now clear to everyone.”
“If you come back in two weeks, you’ll find me here,” said Weller, pointing to a house marked with a cross on a plan of Stalingrad. “Though Richthofen has, admittedly, told Paulus that he will be asking for the operation to be postponed by a week rather than by five days. He will be taking personal responsibility for that request.”
As he saw Forster to the door, he said, “You told me you were looking for a relative of yours, a lieutenant. Did you find him?”
“I found out his whereabouts,” Forster replied. “Lieutenant Bach, my future son-in-law—but I didn’t get to see him. He’s already on the east bank of the Don, on the bridgehead.”
“A fortunate young man,” said Weller. “He’ll get to see Stalingrad before me.”
25
IN THE summer of 1942, after the fall of Kerch, Sevastopol and Rostov-on-Don, the Berlin press changed its tone; grim restraint gave way to joyful fanfares. The successes of the ambitious Don offensive put an end to articles about the severity of the Russian winter, about the size of the Red Army and the power of its artillery, about the fanaticism of the partisans and the stubborn resistance of Soviet forces in Sevastopol, Moscow and Leningrad. These successes displaced the memory of terrible losses, of crosses on soldiers’ graves, of the alarming urgency of the last Winter Relief campaign, and of how train after train, day and night, had brought back wounded and frostbitten soldiers from the Eastern front. These successes silenced those who saw the whole eastern campaign as an act of madness, those who worried about the strength of the Red Army and were still troubled by the Führer’s failure to keep his promise to capture Moscow and Leningrad by mid-November 1941 and so bring the war to a swift, victorious conclusion.
Life in Berlin was now all bustle and noise.
The telegraph, the radio and the newspapers constantly reported new victories on the Eastern front and in Africa. London was now half-destroyed; U-boats had paralyzed America’s war effort; Japan was winning victory after victory. There was excitement in the air—an expectation of new, still greater victories, heralding a final peace. Every day trains and aeroplanes arrived with yet more of Europe’s high and mighty: industrialists, kings, crown princes, generals and prime ministers from all the continent’s capitals: Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Madrid, Copenhagen, Prague, Vienna, Bucharest, Lisbon, Athens, Belgrade and Budapest. The Berliners watched all this with amusement, studying the faces of the Führer’s voluntary and involuntary guests. As their cars drew up outside the grey facade of the New Reich Chancellery, these important figures became like trembling schoolboys, frowning, fidgeting, glancing from side to side. There were endless newspaper reports of diplomatic receptions; of lunches and dinners; of military and trade treaties and accords; of meetings held in the Reich Chancellery, Salzburg, Berchtesgaden or Hitler’s field HQ. Now that German troops were approaching the lower reaches of the Volga and the Caspian Sea, Berliners had begun to talk about Baku oil; about a future link-up between the Wehrmacht and the Japanese army; about Subhas Chandra Bose, India’s future gauleiter.30
Trains from Slav and Latin countries arrived hour after hour, bringing more workers to Germany, along with cereal grains, wood, granite, marble, sardines, wine, iron ore, oil and butter, and a variety of metals.
There was a sense of victory, a hum of triumph in the Berlin air. Even the green of the ivy and vine leaves, of the lindens and chestnuts in the parks and on the streets looked more splendid than usual.
This was a time of illusion, a time when many were taken in by the fantasy that ordinary people and a supposedly all-conquering totalitarian state shared a single destiny. Many believed what Hitler proclaimed as truth: that th
e blood flowing in Aryan veins united all Germans under the banner of riches and glory, of power over the entire world. This was a time of contempt for the blood of others, a time of the official justification of unimaginable atrocities. It was a time when losses of every kind—the deaths of countless soldiers, the many children made orphans—were justified by the prospect of the imminent and total victory of the German nation. At the close of each day, another life would begin; hidden monsters would make their presence felt. Night was a time of fear and weakness, of lonely thoughts, of exhaustion and longing, of whispered conversations with your closest friends and immediate family, a time of tears for those killed on the Eastern front, of complaints about hunger and need, about backbreaking labour and the arbitrary power of officials. It was a time of doubts, of subversive thoughts, of horror at the implacable power of the Reich, a time of troubled premonitions and the howl of English bombs.
These two streams flowed through the life of the German nation as a whole, and through the lives of all the individual Germans—whether they were minor officials, workers, professors, young women or kindergarten children. The split was complete and extraordinary; it was difficult to imagine what it might lead to. Would new, unprecedented forms of life come into being? Would this split be annulled after the victory, or would it endure?
26
IN THE New Reich Chancellery the working day was beginning. Early though it was, the sun was already warming the building’s grey walls and the stone slabs of the pavement. Afraid of being late, employees were hurrying in: typists, stenographers, clerks, archivists, receptionists, the women who worked in the canteen and the café, and junior officials from the adjutant’s office and the Reich Ministers’ Secretariat. Big-boned Nazi women strode down the corridors, swinging their arms, keeping up with the young men in military uniform; this was a time when the Chancellery’s female employees were the only women in Berlin ever to be seen without a shopping bag for provisions. They had been ordered not to bring any large bags or packages to their workplace, since it was imperative that the staff of so august an institution should maintain their dignity. People said that this order had been issued after a collision between Goebbels and a librarian carrying bags full of cabbage and jars of pickled beans and cucumbers. In her confusion, the librarian had dropped her handbag and a paper bag full of peas, and Goebbels, in spite of the pain in his leg, had squatted down, placed his files of papers on the floor beside him and begun to gather up the scattered peas, saying that this reminded him of his childhood. The librarian had thanked him and promised to preserve the peas as a keepsake, as a reminder of the kindness and straightforwardness of the lame doctor, of the fact that he was truly a man of the people.31
Chancellery employees coming from Charlottenburg or from the direction of Friedrichstrasse understood at once, as soon as they left their tram or U-Bahn station, that Hitler was in Berlin and would be going to the Reich Chancellery. White-haired senior officials walked on with poker faces, as if to show they had no wish to see anything they weren’t meant to see. But the young exchanged winks as they walked past the additional military and police posts and saw the many men in civilian dress, all with oddly similar expressions, each with a gaze that could penetrate the leather of a briefcase as swiftly and easily as an X-ray. For the young, all this was amusing and entertaining—Hitler had seldom visited Berlin during the last few months. He was now spending most of his time either in Berchtesgaden or in his field HQ five hundred kilometres from the combat zone.
At the main entrance to the Chancellery, senior guards were checking passes and documents. Behind them stood members of the Führer’s personal bodyguard, looking slowly and searchingly at everyone who passed through.
The office had tall French windows looking onto the garden. These were now half-open and there was a smell of freshly watered greenery. The office was huge, and it took some time to walk from the fireplace at the far end, beside which stood a writing desk and an armchair upholstered in pink silk, to the anteroom door. In the course of this walk one would pass a terrestrial globe the size of a beer keg, a long marble table covered in maps, and the French windows opening onto the terrace and garden.
Out in the garden, thrushes were calling to one another with quiet restraint, as if afraid of expending too soon the strength they would need for a long summer’s day. Inside the office, now walking past the French windows, was a man in a grey trench coat and breeches. On his chest—over a simple white shirt with a turndown collar and a tightly knotted black tie—were an Iron Cross, a wounded-in-action medal, and a special Party badge with a gold border around the swastika. His rather feeble, drooping shoulders, which seemed all the narrower in comparison with the almost womanly breadth of his hips, had been skilfully padded. There was something discordant about his general appearance—he seemed somehow to be both thin and plump. His bony face, sunken temples and long neck belonged to a thin man, while his bottom and thighs seemed to have been borrowed from someone stout and well nourished.
His suit, his Iron Cross testifying to military courage, his war-wounds medal testifying to the suffering he had undergone, the Nazi badge with a swastika that symbolized the racial and state unity of the New Germany—all this was familiar from dozens of photographs, drawings, newsreels, stamps, badges, posters and leaflets, bas-reliefs in plaster and marble, and cartoons by David Low and the Kukryniksy.32
Yet even someone who had seen hundreds of different images of this man might have been slow to recognize the real Hitler, with his sickly face, his pale, narrow forehead, his inflamed, protruding eyes with swollen lids, and his broad, fleshy nostrils.
That night, the Führer had slept little and woken early. His morning bath had not restored his spirits. It may have been the exhausted look in his eyes that made his face seem so very different now from how it appeared in pictures and photographs.
While he was asleep, lying in his long nightshirt under a blanket, mumbling, snoring, chewing his lips, grinding his large teeth, turning from side to side, drawing his knees up to his chest—while he was asleep, this man in his fifties had much in common with any other middle-aged man with a shattered nervous system, an impaired metabolism and heart palpitations. It was indeed during these hours of ugly, troubled sleep that Hitler was closest to being human. He grew less and less human when he woke, got out of bed with a shiver, bathed, put on his underwear and military breeches—already laid out by his staff—combed his dark hair from right to left and checked in the mirror to make sure that the entire image—hair, face, bags under the eyes and all—was in accord with the sacrosanct model now as obligatory for the Führer himself as for his photographers.
Hitler went out through the French windows and leaned his shoulder against the wall, which was already being warmed by the sun. He seemed to enjoy the feel of the warm stone, and he pressed his cheek and his thigh against the wall too, wanting to absorb from it some of the sun’s warmth.
He stood there for a while, obeying the instinctive desire of any cold-blooded creature to warm itself in the sun. His facial muscles relaxed into a sleepy, contented smile; there was something about this pose, which he thought rather girlish, that he found pleasurable.
His grey trench coat and breeches blended with the pale grey of the Chancellery stone. Now that it was at rest, there was something indescribably horrible about this weak, ugly creature with its thin neck and drooping shoulders.
Hearing quiet steps, Hitler quickly turned round.
But the man approaching was a friend. He was tall, well built, and he had a distinct paunch. He had rosy cheeks, plump, slightly protruding lips and a small chin.
The two men went back into the office. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, walked with his head bowed, as if embarrassed at being visibly taller than the Chancellor.
Articulating each word clearly, and raising his pale, moist hand, Hitler said, “I don’t want any explanations. I want to hear the simple words operation completed.”
He sat
down at the table and gestured brusquely to Himmler to sit opposite him. Narrowing his eyes behind the thick lenses of his pince-nez, Himmler began to speak. His voice was calm and gentle.
Himmler was well aware of the bitterness inherent in any friendship between those standing at the summit of a granite state. He knew that it was not any particular knowledge, intelligence or other gift that had elevated him—a poultry-farm manager and employee of a company that produced synthetic nitrogen—to such heights.
His terrible power sprang from only one source—his passion to execute the will of the man whom, as if they were both still students, he had just been addressing as du. The more blind and unquestioning his obedience within this office, the more limitless his power outside it.33 Such a relationship, however, was not easy to maintain. Only by means of constant alertness could Himmler demonstrate the appropriate flexible, emotionally committed obedience. He needed to avoid all suspicion of freedom of thought, but it was equally important to avoid any suspicion of obsequiousness, that sister of hypocrisy and betrayal.
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