The summer offensive
Meanwhile, since January Rommel had been gradually moving onto the offensive in North Africa and, by the beginning of February, had conquered Cyrenaica. At the end of May, he launched an attack on the British position in Gazala and, using an enveloping movement, forced the British to retreat. In June, he advanced on the port of Tobruk, capturing it on 21 June125 and, in view of these successes, Hitler promoted him to field-marshal.126 By the end of June, he had reached a point around a hundred kilometres from Alexandria;127 during the so-called first battle of El Alamein, which lasted the whole of July, he was, however, unable to break through the British lines.128 In fact, his resources had already become overstretched.
In the meantime, by the end of June, considerable progress was being made on the eastern front. On 28 June, Army Group South launched the real summer offensive. By the beginning of July, it had reached the River Don and, at the end of the month, had established a broad front along the river. However, although the first goal of the operations had been reached, the underlying intention of destroying the enemy forces west of the Don had not been achieved. The Red Army had managed to avoid being surrounded by retreating to the south-east.129
At the beginning of July, Hitler divided Army Group South into two independent Army Groups, A and B, and then, on the 13th, dismissed Field-Marshal von Bock, whom he blamed for what he considered the unnecessary delay in the advance of Army Group B. The dismissal of the independent-minded and self-confident Bock was a foretaste of the major confrontations between Hitler and his generals that were to occur during the course of the campaign.130
Based on the reports of success from the front, on 16 July, Hitler moved his headquarters to a new location around 10 kilometres north of Vinnitza in the Ukraine. The relatively extensive complex, with the codename Werwolf, was in a dark forest and basically consisted of simple wooden houses and a few bunkers. It was from here, in the middle of conquered enemy territory, that, during the coming weeks, Hitler intended to inflict a decisive defeat on the Soviet Union. This would then open the way for the creation of his racial empire and enable him to fight a global war against the western powers. The base was more than 1,500 kilometers from Berlin; its residents were out of touch with the realities of wartime life in the Reich, suffering from the summer heat, and subjected to a plague of flies and mosquitos and the monotony of daily routine. Its remoteness and seclusion created a surreal atmosphere and, during the coming weeks, encouraged Hitler’s growing illusions about the prospects for victory. As his military advisors did not share this optimism, there was growing tension, and, because there were no distractions or ways of avoiding each other, this increasingly led to aggressive confrontations. Hitler remained in Vinnitza until 31 October 1942, a stay broken only by a visit to Berlin for several days between the end of September and the beginning of October.131
Initial success in the advance toward the Caucasus had convinced Hitler that the Soviet Union would soon be cut off from its sources of oil, and from supplies from the west via Iran, and he now set about trying to block its northern supply route. His Directive No. 44 of 21 July ordered preparations to be made for an attack on the Murman railway in the far north of Russia, in order to cut off transports from the port of Murmansk. He was working on the assumption that a renewed assault on Leningrad would lead to its capture at the latest by September. To achieve this he transferred the 11th Army under Erwin von Manstein, which had played a major part in the conquest of Sebastapol, to the Leningrad front. He had not changed his mind about the city’s future. He told the commander of Army Group North at the end of August that, right from the start, the attack must focus on its ‘destruction’. However, Soviet counterattacks in the Leningrad sector frustrated Hitler’s wide-ranging plans in the north.132
The division of Army Group South into two Army Groups (A under Field-Marshal Wilhelm von List and B under Bock) at the beginning of July was the product of an increasing diversification of the operational goals of the summer offensive. In the middle of July, Hitler forced the army leadership to agree to Army Group A sending strong panzer forces south in order to envelop a large concentration of enemy forces round Rostov. Rostov was indeed taken on 23 July, but the majority of enemy units once again evaded capture. While Halder believed that the enemy was withdrawing intentionally in order to avoid a decisive battle, Hitler assumed the enemy forces were at the end of their tether and urged that they should be rapidly pursued.133
Hitler’s over-optimism was reflected in his Directive No. 45 of 23 July, in which he divided further operations between the two groups.134 Army Group A, which now became the main focus of the offensive, was ordered to envelop and destroy the enemy forces withdrawing over the Don in the Rostov area, and then, in a wide-ranging operation to the south, capture the east coast of the Black Sea, thereby securing the sea route for further operations. Finally, a group of light infantry and mountain infantry divisions were to advance through the Caucasus to Baku on the Caspian Sea. Meanwhile, Army Group B was to take Stalingrad and then advance along the Volga towards Astrakhan.
Halder, on the other hand, wanted to concentrate the offensive initially on Stalingrad, as Hitler had originally intended, and to postpone the advance on the Caucasus. However, Hitler, who, in the light of the overall war situation, was seeking a rapid victory in the East, thought he could achieve both war aims – Stalingrad and the Caucasus – simultaneously.135
On 23 July, after Hitler had ‘ranted and raved, heaping serious reproaches on the military leadership’, Halder noted bitterly: ‘This chronic tendency to underestimate the enemy’s capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions and becoming dangerous. The situation is increasingly intolerable. Serious work is no longer taking place. This so-called “leadership” is marked by pathological responses to impressions of the moment and a complete lack of judgement when it comes to the military command and its potential.’136
The reorganization of the judicial system
In August 1942, at the climax of the summer offensive, Hitler brought to an end the crisis in the judicial system he had initiated in the spring. On 20 August, he appointed the President of the People’s Court, Otto Georg Thierack, Reich Minister of Justice and state secretary Schlegelberger, who had been acting Justice Minister, was retired. Hitler had already contemplated replacing him with a hard-line Nazi the previous February.137 At the same time, the previous President of the Hanseatic High Court in Hamburg, Curt Rothenberger, became a state secretary in the Justice Ministry,138 while the previous incumbent, Roland Freisler, was appointed President of the People’s Court.
Hitler also appointed Thierack to succeed Hans Frank as President of the Academy for German Law and leader of the Nazi Lawyers’ Association. Frank also resigned as head of the Nazi Party’s Reich Legal Office, which was dissolved. According to the official explanation of these changes, Frank had requested to be relieved of these offices so that he could devote himself ‘entirely to his duties as Governor General’. Frank’s removal as head of the Nazi Lawyers’ Association was in fact the result not only of his involvement in a corruption affair, but also because, in a number of speeches, he had spoken out in favour of the independence of the judiciary and the ‘upholding of the law’. In the light of Hitler’s Reichstag speech, this represented a direct provocation of the ‘Führer’.139 At the same time, Hitler authorized the new Justice Minister, Thierack, ‘to develop a new National Socialist legal system and to take all necessary measures to secure it’. It was expressly stated that, in doing so, he was permitted ‘to depart from established law’.140
On the day of Thierack’s appointment Hitler received him, Rothenberger, and Schlegelberger in his headquarters in order to spell out once again his views on the tasks of the judicial system.141 He displayed a purely utilitarian understanding of the law. According to him, the judge was in the first instance ‘an agent for ethnic self-preservation’. The war was inevitably leading to a process of ‘negative selection’ sinc
e the bravest were the ones killed at the front, while the law-breakers were conserved because of the relatively light prison sentences they received. If one did not ‘ruthlessly exterminate the scum then one day there will be a crisis. I’m definitely not a brutal person but on this matter I’m a rational one.’
In future judges must represent a ‘select cadre of the nation’, who will receive from the ‘highest authority’ ‘an insight into the aims and intentions of legislation and into the whole policy background that must inform their sentencing’. They must ‘get rid of the idea that the judge is there to deliver justice, whatever the cost’. Rather ‘the primary task . . . is to preserve the social order’. For this purpose the current detailed penal code should instead be replaced by framework legislation, within which judges, having been politically instructed, could make uniform judgments.142
Thierack got the Reich Chancellery to send him the minutes of this table talk and used Hitler’s statements, in some cases word for word, in his address to the presidents of the regional high courts on 29 September 1942.143 Less than a month after his appointment, Thierack was already applying Hitler’s idea of a negative selection occurring during the war in the most brutal fashion. On 18 September, Thierack and Rothenberger agreed with Himmler that, in future, all ‘inadequate sentences’ should be ‘corrected’ by ‘police special treatment’. All ‘asocial elements serving prison sentences’, in particular, all prisoners in preventive detention, all Jews, Gypsies, Russian, Ukrainians, Poles sentenced to more than three years, Czechs, and Germans sentenced to more than eight years who were still in prison should be transferred to concentration camps to be ‘liquidated through labour’. Moreover, it was agreed that, in future, Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, and Ukrainians should no longer be tried in the normal courts; rather they should be ‘dispatched by the Reichsführer SS’.144
Thus, in summer 1942, Hitler pushed through a ‘reform’ of the penal system, according to which ‘racial inferiors’ were now no longer to be taken to court, and those already sentenced were no longer to be kept in prison, while the remaining criminal justice system was to be subordinated to political priorities. Together with his ‘authorization’ of April 1942, enabling him in future to call anybody to account for failure to fulfil their wartime duties, irrespective of legal provisions, these actions inflicted significant damage on those elements of the rule of law that were still operating in the ‘Third Reich’. They also represented a clear signal that, in future, his rule would be based even more on the Party, the SS, and special commissioners and was in the process of finally abandoning traditional forms of state authority.
As we have seen, it was not by chance that these changes occurred during a period in which Hitler was seeking to achieve a decision in the East that would enable him to free up substantial military forces in order to prevent a British–American invasion in the West and to wage a global war alongside his successful Japanese partner. He now aimed to order his nascent empire in such a way that it could provide the basis for a successful continuation of the war. The decision forcibly to recruit millions of slave workers from abroad belongs in this context, as does the extension of the systematic murder of Jews throughout his whole territory. Hitler was making it clear that his war was a racial war, that he was waging it systematically, and from it there was no way back either for him or for all those who were supporting him. A few days after the fateful agreement between Thierack and Himmler, during the armaments meeting of 20–22 September, Hitler ordered Speer to complete ‘the removal of Jews from the armaments plants in the Reich’ in order substantially to conclude the deportation of German Jews to the death camps. In doing so, he was once again clearly reinforcing this approach.145
38
Hitler’s Empire
In June 1942, in other words at the moment when Hitler was launching the great eastern offensive intended to decide the outcome of the war, Himmler gave his settlement planners the task of producing an ‘overall settlement plan’ for continental Europe. He outlined the basic principles underlying it to SS functionaries in two important speeches given in his headquarters during August and September 1942. German settlement policy was to embrace not only occupied Poland, but also parts of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Estonia and Latvia, the Crimea, the ‘Ingermanland’ (in other words the region round Leningrad), but also Alsace and Lorraine, Upper Carniola and South Styria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In his August speech, in relation to the occupied eastern territories, he referred specifically to a Führer command. However, we can naturally assume that the other settlement programmes had also been discussed with the ‘Führer’.1
These plans represented the core of the future ‘Greater Germanic Reich’. As far as the further ‘reorganization of Europe’ was concerned, Hitler himself only made extremely vague comments about the future arrangement of this extended empire, concerned not to tie himself to any commitments about the post-war order that might result in future claims or prove contradictory. However, two models can be reconstructed from his comments and from the preliminary plans of his entourage. On the one hand, there was the idea of uniting under German leadership all ‘Germanic’ European nations in a ‘Greater Germanic Reich’, which would have included Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Flanders, perhaps also Switzerland, in addition to the territories involved in Himmler’s settlement policy. Hitler did not commit himself as to what form the integration of these states into the Greater Germanic Reich would have taken, whether they would have been allowed to keep some form of sovereignty or would simply have become ‘Reich Gaus’ as in the case of the Austrian, Czech, and Polish territories. The two leaders of the fascist movements in Norway and the Netherlands, Quisling and Mussert, did not get very far in their attempts to gain some kind of commitment for the post-war order. Quisling was bluntly informed that Hitler was unable to discuss his proposed peace treaty while the war was still going on,2 and Mussert’s proposal of a ‘Germanic confederation’ was given equally short shrift.3 Hitler also did not wish to make any firm decision about the future of Belgium. The question of whether Flanders was to become a ‘Reich Gau’ and the future status of Wallonia, in which Nazi racial ‘experts’ increasingly claimed to be discovering ‘Germanic elements’, remained equally unclear.4
On the other hand, the regime began using the slogan, the ‘New Europe’, in order to suggest to its allies the vague prospect of some participation in the post-war order. Thus, in November 1941, Hitler had ceremoniously admitted several countries to the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact, which he extended by five years, even though they had been unwilling to join the Tripartite Pact or enter a military pact with Germany. Apart from Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Manchukuo, and Spain, now Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Croatia, Slovakia, and the Japanese puppet government in Nanking all signed the agreement ‘against the Communist International’.5 However, the agreement did not contain any concrete arrangements for the post-war order.6 However much German propaganda bandied about the slogan ‘New Europe’, Hitler continued to insist that there should be no public discussion of the details of this European concept. In November 1942, he banned all European ‘demonstrations’, such as ‘congresses’ or inter-state associations.7 At the end of 1942, Ribbentrop presented him with a plan for a European peace settlement prepared by his ministry, according to which, among other things, Czechs and Poles would regain their independence; but Hitler rejected such efforts as superfluous.8 While Hitler gave Goebbels permission in January 1943 to prepare a ‘Programme for Europe’, he later cut a passage from a Goebbels speech dealing with the subject,9 and was equally unwilling to pursue an idea put forward by Ribbentrop in March 1943 for a ‘European confederation’.10
The relationship between the two concepts, the ‘Greater Germanic Reich’ and the ‘New Europe’, also remained completely obscure, as did that between the ‘non-Germanic’ nations and ‘Greater Germania’. Thus, for example, Hitler intentionally left the role that France would play i
n a future Europe unresolved; it was made clear to the French that this would depend on their behaviour towards the German occupation. Although Hitler was aware that substantial support by the Vichy regime for the Reich, ideally participation in the war against the western powers, would require reciprocation, in particular a peace treaty, he was not prepared to make any such commitment.11 At the same time, it was made clear in no uncertain terms to Germany’s ‘allies’ in south-east Europe that, when it came to the crunch, ‘Greater Germanic’ policy had priority over recognition of their sovereignty. Thus, from 1941/42 onwards, Himmler compulsorily recruited tens of thousands of so-called ethnic Germans in Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania for the Waffen SS, despite the fact that these men were citizens of the countries concerned; their governments simply had to put up with it.12
Despite Hitler’s failure to create uniformity in his empire – significantly, there was no central authority for the occupied territories, for final decisions rested with him – certain basic distinctions can be discerned. Territories that were considered to be part of the future ‘Greater Germanic Reich’ were subjected to civilian administration, that is to say the Party and SS wielded considerable influence and they were directly subordinate to Hitler via a Reich Commissioner. In the west this applied to the Reich Commissariats in the Netherlands and Norway, where an attempt was already being made during the war to begin the process of ‘Germanization’ with the aid of allied fascist movements. In the case of Denmark, which the Nazis considered ‘Germanic’, a special arrangement was made. To maintain the fiction of a ‘peaceful’ occupation of the country and to protect its resources, the German ambassador was appointed ‘Reich Plenipotentiary’, who, aided by a small staff, then informed the Danish government of his ‘wishes’. The General Government and the occupied former Soviet territories were also subjected to civilian administrations. However, here there was no interest in involving indigenous elements except at local level. These administrations acted as exploitative and repressive colonial-type regimes. Here, during the war, extensive ‘resettlement’ programmes were initiated in order to prepare for the post-war order. The territories outside the sphere of the future Greater Germanic Reich remained under military administration. Hitler’s idea of treating the various occupied territories on the basis of racial criteria was thus clearly reflected in the types of their occupation administrations. He was primarily concerned to prevent the emergence of established supranational structures, which, in the form of an occupation or alliance ‘system’, would bind him to promises, commitments, and obligations. Instead, he wanted to keep things fluid, responding to problems in the occupied territories on a case-by-case basis.
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