Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  On 17 December, Hitler assigned Goebbels the task of organizing a ‘collection of woollen articles for the troops on the eastern front’, which the Propaganda Minister had in fact already discussed with the OKH a few days earlier.96 On 20 December, Goebbels announced the collection in a radio broadcast. After his speech,97 he read an appeal from Hitler: ‘If the German people want to give their soldiers a Christmas present then they should give up all the warm clothing they can do without during the war and which can in any case be replaced during peacetime’.98

  To emphasize the seriousness of the scheme Hitler also issued a Führer decree imposing the death penalty on anyone who dared to steal any of the ‘winter items’ that had been collected.99 On Hitler’s suggestion,100 at the beginning of January Goebbels extended the collection period once again by another week, so that they would have a ‘positive’ propaganda topic until the middle of what was the most critical winter month. According to the result, announced with a fanfare of propaganda, in a Reich-wide ‘major action’ lasting a little over three weeks, the Party had managed to collect scarves, socks, pullovers, and ear muffs, in all a total of 67 million ‘winter items and woollens’.101

  The fact that, as a result of the lack of winter clothing for the troops, Hitler and Goebbels were forced to embark on an improvised campaign appealing to their own population represented, in reality, an incredible declaration of bankruptcy by the regime, which was used to making proud claims for its efficiency. According to the SD reports, the population was indeed initially shocked by the announcement.102 The campaign was extremely dubious from a practical point of view as well, and in fact prompted speculation among the population about its effectiveness. For there was already adequate winter clothing for the troops. The main problem was the difficulty of transporting it to them, and that applied equally to the items that had been collected. After the conclusion of the collection Hitler judged that it had been a purely ‘political measure’. They had been clear all along that ‘nothing from the collection of woollens would get to the front’ and that ‘the things would have to be mothballed’.103

  However, from the point of view of the regime it was not the practical aspects but rather propaganda considerations that were decisive. The aim was to emphasize the strong link between front and homeland during the emotionally critical Christmas period by mobilizing the population through a ‘major action’ organized by the Party and thereby taking their minds off their worries. Goebbels wrote that, with the collection of winter clothing, ‘the people are at least engaged in a positive task and the Party also has something to do and won’t have to spend its time indulging in speculation about the situation’.104 Thus, it was not surprising that, despite the initial shock, during these weeks the SD reports focused on the overwhelming impact of the winter clothing campaign rather than on the population’s concerns.105

  The collection of woollens became the pilot project for a fundamental adjustment of propaganda to take account of the seriousness of the war situation. The period of Blitzkrieg victories was finally over; now they were engaged in a world war whose length could not be foreseen and which would demand exceptional efforts from both the front and the homeland. During the course of autumn 1941 and the following winter, the national mood had changed from a semi-intoxicated triumphalism to a gloomy pessimism. Propaganda now focused on getting the population used to the altered war situation, to the ‘toughness of the war’, to a struggle for existence that in the final analysis was about the very survival of the German people.106

  During January, German propaganda had remarkably little to say about the situation on the eastern front.107 Instead, it was dominated by the Axis successes in East Asia. After Hong Kong had fallen on 25 September, on 2 January the Japanese succeeded in conquering Manila and, by the end of January, they had completely occupied British Malaya.108 However, for the German population whose husbands, fathers, and sons were fighting on the eastern front, Luxor and Kuala Lumpur were far away. And on this subject the Wehrmacht reports had little to say. Only occasionally were battles mentioned that could be located through place names.109

  From the end of January, the situation in North Africa once again moved in favour of the Axis and this gave some comfort. On 30 January the Wehrmacht report was able to announce the taking of Benghazi.110 Propaganda now set about turning Rommel into a war hero in order to divert attention from the situation on the eastern front.111

  Thus there were signs that the crisis was being overcome when, on the afternoon of 30 January, Hitler gave a speech in the Sportpalast to mark the ninth anniversary of the take-over of power. It is clear from the SD reports, however, that the population was only partly reassured by his appearance following the uncertainty caused by his silence over the past weeks.112 Hitler attacked Winston Churchill, his main opponent in the West, subjecting him to crude insults. He described him as a ‘windbag and drunkard’, ‘this mendacious creature’, this ‘sluggard of the first order’, one of the ‘most miserable Herostratic characters in world history’, ‘incapable of doing or achieving anything positive, capable only of destruction’. ‘I don’t even want to mention his philistine comrade in the White House, for he is simply a pathetic imbecile’. He never subjected Stalin, whom he respected as a brutally efficient dictator, to similar abuse.

  Hitler’s speech highlighted the toughness of the winter war, while at the same time emphasizing that the crisis had almost been overcome. ‘These fronts are firmly held and wherever, at certain points, the Russians have broken through, and wherever they thought they had succeeded in capturing places, they were in fact no longer places, but simply piles of rubble. . . . God give us the strength with which to retain our people’s, our children’s and grandchildren’s freedom, and not only that of our German people but also that of the other peoples of Europe.’ For they were engaged in a ‘fight for the whole of Europe and, thereby, for the whole of civilized humanity’. At the same time, in his speech he had declared the war to be a decisive battle between ‘Jews’ and ‘Aryans’, referring once again to his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939: ‘We are clear that the war can only end either with the extermination of the Aryan peoples or with the disappearance of the Jews from Europe.’ ‘The hour will come, when the most evil enemy of the world of all time will have played his last part in Europe for at least a thousand years.’113 This passage was given due emphasis by the press and, according to the SD reports, was understood by the public to mean that ‘the Führer’s fight against the Jews is being fought mercilessly to the end, and that soon the last Jews will have been driven from European soil’.114 Hitler had once again made clear that, in his view, the further course of the war was inextricably bound up with the fate of the Jews under his regime.

  On 20 January 1942, a few days before Hitler’s speech, Heydrich had invited state secretaries, senior officials, and SS functionaries to an SS villa on the Wannsee lake in Berlin to discuss in detail the current state and further development of Jewish persecution. It is clear from the minutes of the so-called Wannsee Conference that two versions of the ‘Final Solution’ were discussed. On the one hand, there was Heydrich’s old plan, which had emerged during 1941 and had been approved by Hitler, of deporting the European Jews to the German-occupied Soviet Union and murdering them there. On the other hand, representatives of the occupation authorities in the General Government and the occupied eastern territories at the conference put forward an alternative plan of killing the largest Jewish population in German-occupied Europe, namely that in the General Government, on the spot. This ‘new plan’ was based on the preliminary work done by the SS and Police Leader, Globocnik, in his district of Lublin. Here, in autumn 1941, construction of the first death camp had started, although initially it was only intended to kill the local Jews. However, a final decision to replace the ‘old’ plan with the ‘new’ one was not taken either at the Wannsee conference or during the following weeks. The reason for this was that Hitler had approved the old plan and Heydrich
had referred to this authorization during his address at the conference. The new plan, on the other hand, had not yet been approved.115

  During the following weeks, however, Hitler made it clear in a number of statements that he was not prepared to allow the prolongation of the war to result in the postponement of the ‘Final Solution’ to the distant future. On 14 February, he told Goebbels that ‘Jewry will undoubtedly suffer its great catastrophe along with Bolshevism’. He was ‘determined . . . to deal ruthlessly with the Jews in Europe’.116 Also, at the celebration of the founding of the Party on 24 February, which for the first time he did not attend himself, he had Gauleiter Wagner read out a statement announcing that ‘my prophecy will be fulfilled, namely that through this war it will not be Aryan humanity but rather Jewry that will be exterminated’.117 The ‘Führer’ was evidently interested in a ‘solution’ that was as radical and rapid as possible.

  37

  The Pinnacle of Power

  In the middle of February, Hitler was already reassuring Goebbels that the crisis of winter 1941/42 had in essence been overcome. On the eastern front ‘the worst aspects of the winter had been dealt with’. Given the continuing bitter cold in the east, this was a distinctly optimistic assessment; his propaganda minister, was, however, happy to hear it. The situation in North Africa was also under control, Hitler said, and he considered that the Japanese military successes in East Asia were a harbinger of a serious crisis for the British empire.1 During the night of 11/12 February, the battleships ‘Scharnhorst’ and ‘Gneisenau’ and the heavy cruiser, ‘Prinz Eugen’, managed to sail from Brest through the English Channel to the North Sea without the Royal Navy and the RAF being able to prevent them. The aim was to strengthen the German naval forces in Norway against the threat of an invasion. Hitler, who was receiving a visit from the recently appointed Norwegian Prime Minister, Quisling, at the time, considered it ‘a tremendous boost to Germany’s prestige and a corresponding blow to Britain’s reputation’.2 Hitler felt all the more triumphant because he had insisted on the risky operation against the advice of the navy.3

  In fact, from the middle of February onwards, the situation on the eastern front began to improve.4 On 18 February, Hitler discussed the ‘overall situation’ with Halder and with the commanders of the Army Groups North and Centre. He issued the watchword ‘not a yard back’; the most important goal was to maintain the siege of Leningrad. He confidently told his generals that the threat of a panic, similar to that during Napoleon’s retreat of 1812, had now been averted.5 After the German press had remained silent for weeks about the situation on the eastern front, on 22 February it was told to focus once more on the performance of the German Army on the eastern front.6 These reports and the news about Japanese advances in East Asia ensured that the regime’s assessments of the national mood during February and March provided a somewhat more positive picture.7 This situation continued during April, despite difficulties in the supply of food and consumer goods8 and an increase in the number of British air raids.9 In his speech on 15 March, on the occasion of Heroes’ Memorial Day, Hitler not only emphasized that the winter crisis was now over, but solemnly announced that ‘this summer we shall annihilate the Bolshevik hordes’.10

  However, the crisis had in fact left its mark on Hitler. Thus, on a visit to Führer headquarters on 19 March Goebbels found him showing clear signs of strain. The ‘Führer’ commented that ‘recently he had been feeling rather ill’ and, from time to time, had had to cope ‘with serious attacks of dizziness’. According to Goebbels, the long winter ‘had had such an effect on his spirits, that it had left its mark on him. . . . I notice that he has become very grey and simply talking about the concerns he’d had during the winter made him look much older.’ Had he ‘given way to a moment of weakness’, Hitler told Goebbels, ‘the front would have begun to collapse, causing such a catastrophe as would have put that of Napoleon in the shade’. Goebbels, at any rate, was convinced ‘that during this winter it was the Führer who alone saved the eastern front’.

  However, it was above all Hitler himself who believed in the myth that he spread to the effect that he alone was responsible for preventing the collapse of the front through his iron determination to hold the army’s positions, despite opposition from his incompetent generals. Indeed, he was to keep returning to this key point.11 This perspective was to have far-reaching consequences for his influence on the operational conduct of the war. For if, in his view, it had only been possible to hold the front line because he himself had taken over the day-to-day leadership of the army in the East, then it stood to reason that he would have to control the tactics and not just the strategy of the future offensive.

  Hitler told Goebbels that his further objectives for ‘the coming spring and summer’ were ‘the Caucasus, Leningrad, and Moscow. If we can achieve these goals, by the beginning of next October he definitely wants to call it a day and go into winter quarters. He may possibly construct a massive defensive line and call a halt to the eastern campaign.’ In any event, there was not going to be another winter crisis. It might come ‘to a hundred years’ war’ in the East: ‘We shall then be in the same position vis-à-vis Russia as England is in relation to India. . . . It will then be our task to keep preventing the creation of any new state beyond our defensive line.’ In effect, Hitler was admitting that he no longer considered it feasible to complete the ‘annihilation of the Bolshevik arch enemy’, which he had announced in his Heroes’ Memorial Day speech. Some kind of rump state would remain, and he tried to project a positive future in terms of the need to be continually fighting this ‘remnant of Russia’, in order to prevent the emergence of a new power. In the course of the conversation Hitler admitted having ‘a certain respect’ for the Soviet enemy and described Stalin as a model: ‘Stalin’s brutal measures saved the Russian front. We must use similar methods in our conduct of the war . . .’12

  Hitler, however, had not changed his view that the planned major offensive in the east would be decisive for the future of the war. For the construction of a defensive position far in the East against a greatly weakened Soviet Union would enable him to divert considerable resources to the war against the Western Allies. He appears to have become convinced that a successful offensive in the East would, after all, allow him to realize the strategic concept with which he had entered the war with the Soviet Union in June 1941. This was to establish a position in the East, enabling him to continue the war against the British Empire and the United States for years ahead. Following a major military success in the East, he would not only have the option, which he had been pursuing since 1940, of driving Britain out of the Mediterranean, but the entry of Japan into the war even opened up further perspectives: a weakening of the American position in the Atlantic on the assumption of Japanese naval superiority in the Pacific, and combined operations with Japan against British positions in the Near and Middle East. In spring 1942, Hitler envisaged the construction of an empire dominating the continent not as the final result of the war but rather as the decisive precondition for its continuation. The end of this global conflict would see a new partitioning of the world. However, all these far-reaching plans had one precondition: a decisive victory on the eastern front by autumn 1942.

  These premises determined a series of important decisions Hitler took during the next few months. His military plans required, on the one hand, a rapid reorganization of the armaments sector, which was by no means fully efficient. This, in turn, involved finding a solution to the labour shortage through the forced recruitment of millions of workers from the occupied territories. Secondly, he wanted to increase his power at home by reducing the influence of the state bureaucracy, which he loathed, even further. By removing the remaining independence of the judiciary, he aimed to turn it into an arbitrary tool of his racial policies and an agent in realizing the core of his project: the creation of an empire spanning the whole of Europe and organized along racial lines. Only on this basis
would the new colossus be capable of successfully conducting global warfare. This would inevitably have fateful consequences for the regime’s Jewish policy, which had already become a campaign of mass murder.

  The development of rearmament

  Hitler’s efforts in July 1941 to switch the main focus of armaments production to support the Luftwaffe and tank production, on the assumption that Barbarossa would soon be successfully concluded, rapidly turned out to be unrealistic. During the summer and autumn of 1941, it proved impossible to increase aircraft production. From November onwards, it even proved impossible to replace the planes that were being lost in the East. During autumn 1941, industry had also been unable to meet the army’s armaments’ priorities. The main reason for this was a shortage of raw materials. The regime was unable to realize its plans to exploit the resources of the Soviet Union on a large scale while the war was continuing. Here too Hitler’s assumptions were proving false.13 In view of this situation, in his edict of 3 December concerning ‘the rationalization and improvement of the performance of our armaments production’ Hitler had demanded that ‘mass production should be introduced and manufacturing processes be organized accordingly’.14 However, in view of the winter crisis, even Hitler soon realized that such rationalization measures were insufficient to deal with the problem.

  Hitler’s plan for dealing with the second major obstacle for increasing armaments production, the shortage of workers, by employing millions of Soviet prisoners also proved unsuccessful. On 15 October, he had decided to use Soviet prisoners for road works and other forms of heavy labour and, on 31 October, he agreed to their ‘extensive deployment’ in the war industries.15 Millions of ‘racially inferior’ slave workers were to be brought into the Reich to make up for the war-induced shortage of males. Given Hitler’s racial views, this was a remarkable decision. However, the scheme came to naught, for systematic undernourishment and appalling treatment resulted in the death of large numbers of prisoners of war. The survivors had to be gradually ‘given a boost’ in order to restore their strength. In March 1942, of the 3.3 million prisoners only 5 per cent were in work.16