Hitler
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From now onwards, he restricted his daily contacts with the military to what was necessary. He justified this almost total self-isolation on the grounds of his anger with the generals, who had allegedly let him down; but this was almost certainly a façade to shield him from the intolerable realization that his military entourage had lost all respect for him. This produced a ludicrous situation. He refused to shake hands with his generals and no longer appeared at lunch or dinner. Instead, he barely left his windowless barracks. The military briefings took place in an ‘icy atmosphere’ and, as Halder later recalled, Hitler was often in a state of white hot fury.19
Hitler now ordered a group of shorthand typists from the Reichstag to his headquarters with the job of noting down every word that was spoken.20 In the middle of September, he was for a time determined not only to dismiss Halder, but Jodl and Keitel as well.21 However, his pent-up rage finally exploded at Halder, whom he dismissed on 24 September under ‘humiliating circumstances’, as Engel put it.22 Hitler justified it to Halder on the grounds that the latter’s nerves were shot. There was also the ‘need to inculcate in the general staff a fanatical belief in our ideology’. He, Hitler, was determined ‘to impose his will even on the army’.23 Halder was replaced by Major-General Kurt Zeitzler, hitherto the chief of staff of the commander-in-chief of the forces in the West, eleven years younger than Halder, and known to be absolutely loyal to Hitler.24
Shortly afterwards, Hitler left the oppressive atmosphere of his headquarters for a few days and travelled to Berlin. On 28 September, he once again gave a speech to army officer recruits in the Sportpalast, and two days later spoke at a ‘people’s demonstration’ there to mark the start of the Winter Aid programme, his first public engagement since the end of April.25 In this speech he described in detail the successes of the summer offensive and announced the impending capture of Stalingrad; he had already permitted an announcement to be made at the official Berlin press conference on 15 September that the city was about to fall.26 Hitler told the Sportpalast audience that, for the time being, he did not wish to comment further on his military objectives. Instead, he spoke at length on his plans for the ‘organization of this gigantic space’,27 and about the need to get transport, agriculture, and industrial production going again. There was no more talk of defeating the Soviet Union before the end of the year.
On 25 October, however, in addition to the critical situation on the eastern front, where the 6th Army was still fighting its way into the centre of Stalingrad, Hitler had once more actively to engage with developments in the North African theatre. For, on that day, British forces began their counter-attack on Rommel,28 whom, shortly before, during a meeting in the Reich Chancellery, Hitler had honoured with a field-marshal’s baton.29 On 2 November, the British managed to achieve a breakthrough at El Alamein; some of Rommel’s forces were surrounded and destroyed, the majority having to retreat westwards along the Mediterranean coast.30
On 8 November, Hitler was preparing as usual to commemorate the failed Munich putsch when news arrived of the large-scale landing of Allied forces on the coasts of Algeria and Morocco.31 During his speech that evening to the ‘old fighters’ in the Munich Löwenbräukeller, Hitler did not, however, refer to these reports from Africa.32 Instead, he once again announced the capture of Stalingrad, saying that as far as he was concerned the actual timing of it was ‘irrelevant’. He was relaxed about possible Soviet counter-offensives. And he did not forget to remind his audience about his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939, although he no longer spoke of the ‘annihilation’ but rather of the ‘extermination of European Jewry’. ‘Of those who laughed then countless numbers are no longer laughing now, and before long those who are still laughing may no longer be doing so.’33
As in autumn 1940, Hitler was now trying to persuade the Vichy government to join in the war on the side of Germany.34 He had Prime Minister Laval flown in during the night of 9/10 November. It was already becoming clear, however, that the military resistance to the Allies being put up by the French in their North African colonies was going to be merely symbolic.35 In response, on 11 November, Hitler ordered the occupation of the south of France, which was completed in a few days.36 Although the Wehrmacht managed to build a bridgehead37 on the new western front of the African theatre, Rommel was at the same time forced to continue his retreat towards the Tunisian border, and Tobruk surrendered on 13 November.38
Stalingrad
In the meantime, the 6th Army’s offensive had clearly begun to slacken, as it fought its way through the rubble wasteland of Stalingrad towards the Volga. The troops were exhausted. For Hitler, however, the conquest of the city that bore the name of his Kremlin opponent, had become a matter of prestige.39 Thus, on 17 November, he issued an order to the commanders of the forces engaged in Stalingrad to put all their energy into securing some at least of their goals within the city; it sounded like an admission of the collapse of his ambitious plans for more conquests.40
On 19 November, the Red Army opened its massive winter offensive against the southern sector of the German front. Within a few days, using a pincer movement, it had managed to encircle the 6th Army, based in the Stalingrad area, and large parts of the adjacent 4th Panzer Army.41 Even before the encirclement of the 6th Army was complete, Hitler had ordered it to stand its ground, come what may.42 When the 6th Army’s commander, Friedrich Paulus, kept requesting permission to abandon the existing front line and break through towards the south, the ‘Führer’, who, responding to the news from the eastern front, had returned to his headquarters in East Prussia from the Obersalzberg on 23 November, kept rejecting these requests. Instead, he was determined to supply the troops in the Stalingrad pocket from the air, despite the fact that the Luftwaffe’s experts were highly dubious about Göring’s assurances on the feasibility of that plan.43 On 20 November, Hitler had already assigned Field-Marshal von Manstein the task of taking over a newly created Army Group Don, made up of the troops that were already surrounded, the parts of the 4th Panzer Army outside the pocket, and two Romanian armies. Manstein rapidly concluded that, during any relief operation, the 6th Army must have the option if necessary of abandoning its positions in Stalingrad and making an orderly move back towards its own front line. Hitler approved this plan at the beginning of December.44 However, he continued to believe that the abandonment of Stalingrad could be avoided, for otherwise this would mean ‘giving up the most significant success of this year’s offensive’.45
Thus Hitler continued to stick rigidly to the original goal of the summer offensive: to cut off the Soviet Union from its sources of raw materials in the Caucasus, for which the blocking of the most important transport link, the Volga, was a decisive prerequisite. For him these fundamental considerations outweighed the concerns of his generals, who, for operational reasons, advocated abandoning Stalingrad.
During December and January, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, showed Hitler private letters from the chief of staff of the 6th Army, Arthur Schmidt, in which he provided sober descriptions of the plight of the besieged soldiers, who were not only suffering heavy losses, but whose powers of resistance were being reduced by hunger and the bitter cold. According to Below, Hitler took note of the contents, but did not comment on them. He only once referred darkly to the ‘obligation’ that the fate of the 6th Army represented ‘in the struggle for the freedom of our people’. Below had the impression that Hitler was now aware that they could no longer cope with a war on two fronts.46
In the middle of December, an attempt by the 4th Panzer Army to relieve the besieged troops failed. Hitler rejected Manstein’s request, supported by Zeitzler, for permission for the 6th Army to break out and try to join up with the 4th Army’s Panzer spearheads. Even Manstein’s objection that this was the last chance to save at least the mass of the troops and the army’s mobile weapons failed to sway Hitler.47 This meant that the fate of the 6th Army was finally sealed. A few days later, in this desperate situation, Zeitzle
r at least managed to overcome Hitler’s continuing resistance to the withdrawal of Army Group A from the Caucasus. The threat of a still more extensive envelopment of the German forces, which were in an exposed position far to the east, was simply too great.48 Thus, on 28 December, the ‘Führer’ ordered a gradual withdrawal of Army Group A, which had advanced far into the south-east. However, Army Group Don, which lay west of the besieged 6th Army, was only to withdraw further ‘if it is absolutely necessary’. The Army Groups Don and A were now reunited under Manstein’s command to form Army Group South.
On 18 December, Hitler received the Italian foreign minister, Ciano, in his Wolf’s Lair headquarters, ‘in the gloom of that damp forest’ as Ciano put it in his diary, where the necessity of living together in those barracks produced a seriously depressed mood.49 Hitler told Ciano that they were engaged in a ‘life-and-death struggle’. He did not refer directly to the fact that, immediately prior to their meeting, the Italian army had collapsed in the central sector of the eastern front, but an unspoken reproach for Italy’s military failure hung over the whole meeting. Acting on Mussolini’s instructions, Ciano broached the question of peace with the Soviet Union and, in this connection, referred to Brest–Litovsk, the peace settlement through which, in 1918, Imperial Germany had forced the Soviet Union to accept a substantial loss of territory. However, Hitler explained in great detail why such an arrangement would be pointless. He was not prepared to make do with the Baltic States and Poland, but determined to claim a line further to the east, enabling him to exploit the raw materials there. But the Soviet leadership would not agree to that. Moreover, a peace treaty would not allow him to withdraw significant numbers of troops from the eastern front, as he would have to insure himself against the enemy restarting the conflict.
‘Bearing’
Meanwhile, Goebbels set about preparing the German population for another winter of war. In a lead article in the weekly, Das Reich, he emphasized that, in view of the burdens of war, it was not the ‘mood’ of the population that was important, but its ‘bearing’. ‘Mood is mostly temporary; bearing, however, is sustained’.50 It is clear from this statement that, in future, the population’s support for the regime’s policies was to be judged on the basis of a different set of criteria. The short-term manifestations of the ‘mood barometer’, as recorded in the official reports, were no longer going to be decisive, but rather the population’s fundamental ‘bearing’, expressed above all in the fact that it doggedly continued to carry out its daily tasks and duties. This required a change in the wartime role of the Party machine. Unlike during the first phase of the war, it was no longer to be preoccupied with demonstrating the population’s enthusiastic support for the regime through endless displays of excessive adulation, mass demonstrations, or the collective show of flags; instead, it was to focus entirely on keeping the nation steady through tight control and supervision. This also required an increase in civilian involvement in the war effort.
At the end of 1942, Hitler finally decided to put in place the measures that had long been mooted for implementing total war. On 25 December, he discussed with Bormann in the Führer headquarters the preparations for the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the seizure of power, and mentioned the distinctly bleak prospects for the coming year. According to a note by Bormann, it was a question of ‘to be or not to be’, and so they must set about ensuring the ‘total involvement of the German people in this our most decisive struggle for existence’.51 Afterwards, Bormann, who now took on an important role in implementing this demand, travelled to Berlin, at Hitler’s request, for discussions with Lammers and Goebbels on how to boost the war effort.52 Goebbels had for a long time been making suggestions to Hitler, such as labour conscription for women or shutting down industries not important for the war effort. Now, he ordered his ministry to prepare concrete proposals for ‘making the war total’.53
On 1 January 1943, the Party Chancellery received a draft decree from Sauckel, the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization, which envisaged conscripting all men and women not yet engaged in the war effort.54 On 8 January, Goebbels, the head of the Reich Chancellery, Lammers, the head of the Party Chancellery, Bormann, the head of OKW, Keitel, Economics Minister Funk, and Sauckel all agreed on the draft of a Führer edict that went far beyond Sauckel’s proposals.55 The ‘Führer’s’ edict ‘concerning the comprehensive mobilization of men and women for tasks involving the defence of the Reich’, which Hitler signed on 13 January, was designed to redeploy all those engaged in work not essential to the war effort to either the armaments industry or the Wehrmacht. All those who had exemptions from the Wehrmacht were to have their status re-examined; all those who had not yet been ‘mobilized for work’ were obliged to register; and plants not essential to the war effort as well as superfluous administrative agencies were to be shut down.56 On being presented the draft by Lammers and Bormann, Hitler raised the minimum age for registration for women from 16 to 17.57 A few days later, he ordered that the maximum age for the registration of women be reduced from 50 to 45.58 These interventions indicated that Hitler did not wish to push the people’s ‘total involvement in the war’ too far for fear of provoking popular discontent at the burdens being imposed on them.59 According to the edict, a so-called ‘committee of three’ would oversee the implementation of these comprehensive measures. Its members would include Keitel, Lammers, and Bormann, in other words the heads of Hitler’s three key chancelleries, but not Goebbels, who, according to the edict, would maintain ‘close contact’ with the committee.60 Bringing the three chancelleries together established a new body that created the opportunity to overcome at least the most egregious consequences of the existing ‘polycracy of government departments’, and to form the core of a more coordinated and effective government.
To strengthen his influence, Goebbels began a propaganda campaign for total war through which he aimed to bring the more hesitant members of the Nazi leadership around to his point of view. It was also intended to provide a propaganda response to deteriorating morale resulting from the uncertain situation on the eastern front.61
The destruction of the 6th Army
In the meantime, the Stalingrad pocket was being progressively squeezed by the overwhelmingly superior Soviet forces. The relief flights were not remotely capable of covering the needs of the troops, and the wounded were remaining untreated. As a result, the physically exhausted soldiers were becoming increasingly demoralized.62
It was not until 16 January that the OKW report admitted (albeit only indirectly) that the 6th Army had been encircled, despite this having actually occurred nearly two months before.63 However, an observant reader and radio listener could have spotted that, from then on, there had been hardly any reports on the fate of the besieged soldiers and, instead, propaganda had begun to portray the army as engaged in an heroic and epic struggle, a line that was evidently intended to prepare the population for its defeat.64 On 15 January, Hitler had ordered the Luftwaffe’s state secretary, Erhard Milch, to fly 300 tons of supplies daily into the pocket. However, on 23 January, the last airfield was lost,65 so that, from then onwards, it was only possible to drop supply canisters. Moreover, on 23 January, a Soviet thrust split the pocket in two.66 Once again, officially, this was only indirectly admitted; the Wehrmacht report of 31 January now referred to two combat groups in the north and south of the city. On 22 January, Hitler had flatly rejected proposals from both Paulus and Manstein to negotiate a surrender with the Red Army.67
There were only modest celebrations of the ‘seizure of power’ on 30 January and Hitler did not participate. Goebbels had the task of reading a proclamation from the ‘Führer’ to mark its tenth anniversary, in which, significantly, he no longer referred to ‘destiny’ but instead to the ‘Almighty’. ‘It is our task, however, to do our duty in such a way that we are able to stand before Him as the creator of the universe, in fulfilment of his law of the struggle for existence, and such that we will never giv
e up, show no mercy, and shirk no toil in order to preserve the future life of our nation.’68
In the meantime, the situation in Stalingrad was becoming catastrophic. The southern section of the pocket, which contained Paulus’s headquarters, surrendered on 31 January, followed two days later by the northern one.69 On 30 January, Hitler had appointed Paulus field-marshal, in order to confer on the defender of Stalingrad a final honour before he was expected to die a hero’s death by committing suicide. Hitler considered the fact that he had then allowed himself to be taken prisoner by the Red Army a serious blow to the prestige of the Wehrmacht leadership. Thus, at a military briefing on 1 February, he commented: ‘Shooting oneself’ in such a situation was ‘a matter of course’. What sort of a motivation would ordinary soldiers have to go on fighting in the next pocket with Paulus’s example in front of them?70 Over 200,000 soldiers of the 6th Army became POWs.71