Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  What followed was the most vicious anti-Semitic campaign since the start of the regime. On 14 April, the whole of the press reported the opening of the mass graves with banner headlines, and the massacre was described as the work of Jewish NKVD commissars. After a few days, propaganda had adopted the slogan of ‘Jewish mass murder’ (as in Der Angriff on 16 April) and continued to pursue this topic relentlessly.120 The regime considered the breach between the Polish exile government in London and the Soviet Union as a result of the Katyn murders as the first concrete success of this campaign.121 The Warsaw ghetto uprising, which began on 19 April, also fitted into the picture of a Jewish threat, which was blown up massively by propaganda. The Katyn propaganda campaign was expanded further and its statements became more extreme. According to Goebbels in a leading article in Das Reich on 9 May, the Jews were ‘the glue that is holding the enemy coalition together’.122 Their war aim was to destroy the German people and so the Jews had to be destroyed before they could achieve their goal.

  The start of the Katyn campaign occurred in the middle of a series of meetings, taking place at the Berghof or at Schloss Klessheim near Salzburg, which Hitler used to try to put some backbone into his remaining vassals, or to exert pressure on them. He considered that Jewish policy was an excellent way of achieving this, particularly in the case of his south-east European retinue.123

  The first visitor was King Boris of Bulgaria, who was told by Ribbentrop – the minutes of Hitler’s meeting with Boris have not survived – that, in Germany’s opinion, ‘in dealing with the Jewish question the most radical solution is the only right one’.124 Up until then, the Bulgarian government had not been prepared to adopt it. Shortly beforehand, it had agreed to the deportation of the Jews from its occupied territories in Greece and Yugoslavia, but had firmly resisted handing over its own Jews to Germany. And, despite increased German pressure, it was to stick to this position.125 However, after the meeting with Hitler the Sofia Jews were compulsorily resettled in the countryside.126

  After King Boris, Benito Mussolini arrived. He was severely depressed and, once again, suggested that Hitler should seek a compromise peace with the Soviet Union.127 This would put him in a better position to fight the western powers, given that defeat in North Africa was on the horizon. The ‘Duce’ was then forced to listen to a lengthy monologue that stretched over several days, and, on leaving Salzburg, appeared to have overcome his doubts. However, in a few months’ time, Hitler’s refusal to end the war in the East or to support his Italian ally against the threat of an impending Allied invasion of southern Europe was to have far-reaching consequences for Italian politics.128 While in Salzburg, the Italian delegation also brought up the question of a ‘European declaration’, but the Germans did not want to make any commitments about their planned ‘New Order’. Also, possibly while under German pressure in Salzburg, Mussolini conceded the prospect of interning the Jews in his country, a request that he had hitherto always resisted.129

  Romania’s dictator, Antonescu, who appeared at Hitler’s court on 12 and 13 April, was subjected to severe reproaches on account of alleged peace feelers put out by Romanian diplomats to the western powers and lectured on the link between a radical Jewish policy and commitment to the war effort. ‘Having solved the Jewish question, we in Germany have at our disposal a united people with no opposition.’130 That was a clear reference to the fact that the Romanian government had reneged on its promise of July 1942 to deport the Romanian Jews to German concentration camps.131

  On 16 April – meanwhile, the Katyn campaign was in full swing – Hungary’s Reich governor, Admiral Horthy, was next in line. Hitler tried to get him to deport the Hungarian Jews to German death camps, but Horthy refused. Hitler told him that ‘he simply couldn’t understand Hungary’s pro-Jewish attitude’. Once again it was left up to Ribbentrop to spell out the link between Hungary’s doubtful loyalty as an ally and the lack of activity on the ‘Jewish question’: ‘Every Hungarian Jew should be regarded as a British agent’, the German foreign minister remarked.132 The Jews, continued Hitler the following day, were ‘pure parasites’. But ‘in Poland they had dealt thoroughly with this situation. If the Jews there wouldn’t work, they were shot. If they couldn’t work, they starved. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli that could infect a healthy body. . . . Nations that don’t protect themselves from Jews become degenerate.’133 Horthy was also reproached for the fact that Hungarian individuals abroad had put out peace feelers.

  There is no information on Quisling’s visit on 19 April, but one can assume that the Norwegian prime minister was acutely disappointed at the inadequate response to his wish for Norway to be treated as a junior partner in a future Greater Germanic Reich.

  On 22 April, Hitler received the Slovakian president, Josef Tiso, and began by outlining ‘how little action the Hungarians had taken against the Jews’. He then described to Tiso in detail the ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’ in Germany and concluded that ‘every country that did not defend itself against the Jews would be ruined by them’. Tiso was expected to apply these comments to his own country, since his government had provisionally halted the Jewish deportations in October 1942.134

  On 27 April, the Croatian head of state, Pavelic´, was the next in the queue, Hitler subjecting him to a lengthy anti-Semitic tirade while at table. The audience that followed was relatively unimportant politically, as Pavelic´ was a submissive ally, who had put himself completely at Hitler’s mercy by agreeing to the deportation of Croatia’s Jews in the summer of 1942.135

  Two days later, Hitler also received the French prime minister, Pierre Laval. A few weeks before, the latter had requested Hitler to make ‘a magnanimous statement about France’. What he meant was a guarantee of France’s future place in Hitler’s Europe, for Laval a precondition for a closer association between France and Germany. However, Hitler rejected this request, for, in his view, such a declaration would only strengthen the resistance of the anti-German elements in France. In the end, they agreed on a formula in the communiqué to the effect that an assessment would be made of the ‘contribution that would be expected of France to the effort and sacrifice the Axis Powers had committed themselves to in order to construct the new Europe’ and ‘what advantages France would receive from this participation’. This was hardly a ‘magnanimous’ statement. To make clear his contempt for the French, on the day before Laval’s departure, Hitler informed President Pétain, via the French embassy, that he was strongly opposed to a reconstruction of the French government and the possible dismissal of Laval. This was clearly a warning not to exploit Laval’s absence for a palace revolution.136

  Reviewing Hitler’s attitude to his allies in the light of these meetings, on the one hand, it is clear that he rejected any attempt, whether in the shape of Mussolini’s peace proposals or of the wishes of the Italians, the French, or the Norwegians in regard to the planning of the post-war order, to impose restrictions on his future political freedom of action; on the other hand, he put massive pressure on his south-east European vassals (and possibly on Mussolini) in relation to the ‘Jewish question’, in order to bind these countries closer to him. He had already turned Laval and Quisling into accomplices in the murder of the Jews; for the deportations from Vichy France and from Norway (from where in October 1942 over 700 Jews had been deported) committed the two leaders irrevocably to remaining ‘loyal allies’.

  It was clear from these meetings that, for Hitler, anti-Semitism was much more important than merely propaganda. He regarded his radical Jewish policy as the basis of his political hold over Europe. For by creating an alliance system that was founded on complicity in a crime against humanity, he had burnt all his bridges. He was no longer prepared to consider alternative ways of motivating his allies to give more support to the war effort; peace feelers, pledges about a post-war order (such as requested by France), and an easing of the occupation regimes were all rejected.

  Immediately after he ha
d made this clear to his ‘allies’, he made the same point to the leaders of the Nazi Party. This occurred when the Reichsleiters and Gauleiters met on 7 May to attend the memorial ceremony held in Berlin for the SA leader, Viktor Lutze, who had been killed in a car crash. After the ceremony Hitler gave a speech to the Party leaders in which he stated that he had a growing respect for, and felt a degree of envy of, Stalin and his ruthless methods. As far as the ‘intellectual basis of the fight against the Soviet Union’ was concerned, ‘anti-Semitism, as the Party used to practise and propagate it in the time of struggle, [must] once again be at the heart of our intellectual confrontation with our enemies.’ Citing the example of Horthy, who had in fact used ‘perfectly humane counter-arguments’, Hitler made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, refusal to compromise on the ‘Jewish question’ was in future to be an essential criterion for judging the reliability of his allies. Horthy’s soft attitude had confirmed him in his view ‘that the mass of petty states that still exists in Europe must be got rid of as quickly as possible’. This was a remarkable statement, once again underlining the hollowness of his ‘European’ policy. Hitler used this opportunity to make clear to the Party leadership the centrality of his ‘Jewish policy’: ‘The fact that eastern Bolshevism is now largely led by Jews and that Jews also have a significant presence in western plutocracies must form the core of our anti-Semitic propaganda. The Jews must get out of Europe.’137

  When, on 12 May, Goebbels referred to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, doubting the authenticity of this propaganda piece, Hitler contradicted him. On the contrary, they could ‘claim absolute authenticity . . . nobody could describe the Jewish drive for world power so brilliantly as the Jews themselves’. He continued with a long disquisition on the ‘Jewish race’ and its ‘world conspiracy’. Hitler only allowed for one solution: ‘Modern nations have no other alternative than to exterminate the Jews. They will do all they can to oppose this gradual process of annihilation. One of these methods is war. Thus, we must be clear that, in this confrontation between Aryan humanity and the Jewish race, we shall face very difficult struggles because Jewry has managed, whether consciously or unconsciously, to recruit major Aryan nations into its service.’138 It is important to note that behind this paranoid tour de force and apocalyptic vision lay a clear political calculation. Hitler was convinced that, if rigorous anti-Jewish policies were extended to the whole of Europe, this would inevitably have the effect of binding Germany’s empire together. As he had already explained to Antonescu, there was ‘no way back from the path once it has been embarked upon’.139 In the process, Nazism and its leader had acquired political resources that had not hitherto been tapped: ‘Those nations that were the first to recognize the Jews for what they are and have been the first to combat them will replace them as rulers of the world.’140

  Meanwhile, in accordance with Hitler’s specific instructions, the anti-Semitic campaign was continuing with full force in all the media.141 The Katyn issue was played down in the second half of May,142 but was replaced by other anti-Semitic attacks, for example the assertion that the Allied air raids were, above all, the work of Jews,143 or that the Allied plans for the post-war period had been designed by Jews to ruin Germany.144 Thus, in the light of these threats, the annihilation of the Jews was an act of self-defence.145

  However, this propaganda, implying that, in the event of defeat, the German people would be faced with ‘Jewish retaliation’, failed to achieve its object of mobilizing the last reserves. On the contrary, the fact that so much was being made of enemy ‘atrocities’ – Katyn and the bombing of German cities – produced, if anything, incomprehension among the population, which was more or less well informed about the crimes of its own regime. In addition, there were worries about the POWs in the Soviet Union, as well as horror and despair at the idea that they themselves were going to be slaughtered in the event of defeat.146 The negative response was so great that not only was the campaign phased out at the end of May 1943, but Goebbels felt obliged to defend his propaganda against criticism from the Party in a circular147 to the Gauleiters.148

  Hitler’s attempt in his speech of 7 May once again to convince the Party elite of the importance of his Jewish policy as a political instrument within the context of alliance and occupation policy, the remarks to his foreign guests, as well as the anti-Semitic spin he gave to the Katyn campaign, all inevitably led to a radicalization of anti-Jewish policy.

  After the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942, the Germans had already responded by stepping up Jewish persecution in the territories they controlled in the south of Europe. From the beginning of 1943, there is evidence of preparations that led shortly afterwards to a new wave of deportations to the death camps. From February 1943 onwards, Jews from the recently occupied south of France were affected (but also from other parts of the country),149 and, from March, the Jews in Saloniki150 as well as from the areas of Greece and Yugoslavia occupied by Bulgaria.151

  Only a short time later, in April 1943, Hitler used Katyn and the Warsaw ghetto uprising to reemphasize the ‘Jewish threat’, with the result that, during the following weeks, he unleashed a further Europe-wide radicalization of Jewish persecution. This had an impact during the spring and early summer above all in Poland, where ghettos and labour camps were increasingly ‘cleared’, but there was also an increase in persecution in western and south-east Europe. In the Netherlands the deportations were expanded and now included, among others, a thousand children. The Reich Security Head Office also demanded that they should now start deporting Jews with Belgian citizenship, and implemented Himmler’s order of 8 June to deport Jews who had lost their French citizenship by 15 July. In May 1943, the Germans pressed for the Croatian deportations to be concluded, and in Slovakia they began a new initiative during spring 1943 to get the government to restart deportations.152

  Further setbacks

  On 13 May, the German and Italian forces surrounded in Tunis surrendered, a total of 250,000 men.153 Thus, only a little more than three months after Stalingrad, the regime had suffered another catastrophic defeat. A communiqué that was approved by Hitler, but which, on his orders, was not broadcast over the radio,154 stated that the ‘heroic struggle’ had reached an ‘honourable conclusion’. Despite the defeat, it was suggested that the engagement of the Axis troops had not been in vain because they had pinned down the Allied forces for months, and so had enabled the alliance to gain valuable time.155 Hitler did not comment publicly on the defeat. As already mentioned, in order not to damage Rommel’s prestige as a victorious field-marshal, Hitler had recalled him from North Africa two months earlier, but without informing the German public. The press now published a two-month old photograph of Rommel being received at Führer headquarters with the explanation that the field-marshal had been recalled from Africa in March for health reasons and decorated by the ‘Führer’ with the Knight’s Cross with oak leaves, swords, and diamonds. Now he was fit again and ready to be given new tasks.156 As a popular figure, Rommel had hitherto raised people’s spirits,157 and it was hoped the same thing would occur now. But the opposite happened. This all too blatant propaganda trick simply worsened an already depressed atmosphere.

  After the defeat in Africa, Hitler was convinced that the Allies would soon attempt a landing on the European continent. He thought that Sardinia, but also Sicily and the Peloponnese were possible targets. He was convinced that, in any case, he would have to defend the southern borders of his empire and thus must not, under any circumstances, withdraw from Italy. He had very little faith in Italy’s loyalty as an ally, however. He was afraid that the Royalist elements would succeed in getting their way against the Fascists and that, if the Allies attacked, Italy would not mount an effective defence. As a result, he accepted that, in the event of an Allied attack, he would if necessary have to defend Italy or the Balkans without Italian assistance. Thus he appointed an army staff under Rommel to prepare for a German invasion of Italy.1
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  Hitler arrived in Berlin from Rastenburg on 20 March and spent the next two months either there or at Berchtesgaden. On 22 May, he suddenly changed his mind and, instead of returning to East Prussia, retired to Berchtesgaden until the end of June, allegedly for health reasons.159 Among the depressing truths that he was forced to confront there was the realization that, in the meantime, the campaign in the North Atlantic had also been lost. Radar, air support, improvements to the convoy system, the ability to read German naval code messages, and other factors that worked in favour of the Allies forced the German Naval High Command, in view of increasing losses, to halt the deployment of U-boats in the North Atlantic and order them to move to more peaceful waters. On 31 May, Admiral Dönitz, who had taken over from Raeder as naval commander-in-chief, was obliged to inform Hitler about the new situation. They were agreed that the U-boat war should be continued, even if temporarily scaled down. Hitler remarked that the Atlantic ‘is my western glacis and so, even if I’m on the defensive there, it’s better than having to defend the European coastline itself’. They hoped to solve the problem in the medium term through an increase in U-boat production and technical improvements that would compensate for the Allied advantage in defence against U-boat attacks.160

  All these setbacks had a devastating effect on morale in the Reich. And there was more bad news. In May 1943 the regime was forced to announce to the population a massive reduction in the meat ration,161 which as late as March Hitler had been hoping to postpone beyond 1 June.162 Now the meat ration for ordinary consumers amounted to only around half of what they had been eating during the first year of the war. Even if Germans did not starve, with the increasing loss of occupied territory the food situation was to continue to deteriorate until the end of the war.163 Moreover, the ‘air battle over the Ruhr’, which the RAF had launched with a big raid on Essen, had now reached its climax. Almost all the major cities of the Rhine–Ruhr area had been badly hit and the attack on the Möhne and Eder dams, during the night of 16/17 May, had caused serious flooding. The RAF continued this series of raids until the end of July.164 Hitler, however, never carried out the visit to the affected areas that he had promised to Goebbels and Speer.165 He thought that visiting a city that had been turned into rubble and then possibly being photographed or appearing on film would damage his prestige as ‘Führer’.