Hitler

The Generalissimo

Well before the end of October, 1939, Hitler began moving his victorious divisions to the West and deploying them in new positions. As always, whenever he had arrived at a decision, a feverish urge for action had gripped him. Certainly the concept of sitzkrieg, as the phony war was called in contrast to blitzkrieg, did not apply to Hitler’s behavior. Even before the Western powers had reacted to his “peace appeal” of October 6, he summoned the three commanders of the services, together with Keitel and Halder, and read them a memorandum on the military situation. It began with a historical review of France’s hostility toward Germany, going back as far as the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, on which grounds he justified his determination to attack at once in the West. His aim, he declared, was “annihilation of the strength and ability of the Western powers to once more oppose the… further development of the German nation in Europe.”¹ Yet the war in the West, he went on, was only the requisite detour to eliminate the menace in the rear before the great march of conquest to the East began. He next went into a detailed discussion of the methods of mobile warfare that had been applied in Poland, and recommended these for the campaign in the West. The crucial thing, he declared, was the massive commitment of tanks to keep the operative forward movement of the army in flux and to avoid trench warfare like that of 1914–18. This was the approach that proved so strikingly successful in May and June of the following year.

Like Directive Number 6 on the conduct of the war, which was presented at the same time, the memorandum was meant to overcome the halfheartedness of the top-ranking officers. “The main thing is the will to defeat the enemy,” Hitler exhorted his audience. In fact a number of the generals considered Hitler’s plan to “bring the French and British to the battlefield and to rout them,” both wrong and risky, and instead recommended putting the war “to sleep” by assuming a consistent defensive posture. One of the generals spoke of the “insanity of an attack.” Generals von Brauchitsch and Halder, and above all General Thomas, chief of the Armaments Office, and General von Stulpnagel, Quartermaster General, offered specific objections. They pointed to the scanty stocks of raw materials, the exhausted reserves of ammunition, the dangers of a winter campaign, and the enemy’s strength. In fact the accumulation of political, military, and sometimes even moral scruples was once more impelling the officers into active resistance. General Jodi told Halder that the intrigues of the military officers indicated “a crisis of the worst sort” and that Hitler was “embittered that the soldiers are not following him.”²

The more reluctance the generals showed, the more impatiently Hitler pressed for the beginning of the offensive. He had originally set the date between November 15 and 20, then advanced it to November 12 and thus forced the military to make a decision. As in September, 1938, they confronted the choice of either preparing a war they regarded as fatal or overthrowing Hitler; again, von Brauchitsch was half ready to go over to the opposition, while in the background the same actors operated: Colonel Oster, General Beck, now retired, Admiral Canaris, Carl Goerdeler, Ulrich von Hassell, the former ambassador in Rome, and others. The center of their activities was army general headquarters in Zossen, and early in November the conspirators decided on a coup d’état if Hitler continued to insist on his order for an offensive. Von Brauchitsch offered to make a last attempt to change Hitler’s mind in a conference already scheduled for November 5. That was the day on which the German contingents were to occupy their starting positions for the advance upon Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

The conference in the Berlin chancellery led to a dramatic clash. At first Hitler listened with seeming calm to the objections that the commander in chief had summed up in a kind of “countermemorandum.” Hitler disposed of the reference to unfavorable weather conditions by remarking that the weather would also be bad for the enemy. As for the generals’ concern about inadequate training, he answered that this could hardly be amended in four weeks. When von Brauchitsch finally criticized the conduct of the troops in the Polish campaign and spoke of breaches of discipline, Hitler leaped at the chance for one of his great outbursts. Raging—as Halder put it in his notes of the episode—he demanded documents. He wanted to know where, in what units, the alleged events had occurred, what had been done about them, whether death sentences had been imposed. He declared that he personally would look into the matter on the spot and went on to say that in reality it was only the army leadership that had not wanted to fight and therefore had for so long retarded the tempo of rearmament. But now he was going to “eliminate the spirit of Zossen,” that is, the slackness of the army General Staff. Bluntly, he forbade von Brauchitsch to go on with his report. Stunned, his face pale, the commander in chief left the chancellery. “Br[auchitsch] has completely collapsed,” one of the participants noted. That same evening Hitler once more explicitly confirmed the order for attack on November 12.

Although this meant that the condition for a coup d’etat was met, the conspirators did nothing. The mere threat against the “spirit of Zossen” had sufficed to reveal their weakness and indecisiveness. “Everything is too late and gone totally awry,” one of Oster’s confidants, Colonel Groscurth, wrote in his diary. With self-betraying haste Halder burned all incriminating material and called an immediate halt to the preparations for a coup. Three days later in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich Hitler barely escaped an attempted assassination that was obviously the work of a lone individual. Thereafter, fear of a large-scale probe by the Gestapo smothered the last remaining plans for a coup.

Moreover, chance was kind to the conspirators and saved them from their own resolutions; for on November 7 the date for the offensive had to be postponed because of weather conditions. Hitler, however, granted a postponement of only a few days. How set he was against the long-term postponement the military men demanded is evident from the fact that up to May, 1940, when the attack finally began, the process of on-again-off-again was repeated a total of twenty-nine times. During the second half of November the commanders were called to Berlin for ideological morale building. Göring and Goebbels delivered bracing speeches; then Hitler himself appeared before them on November 23, and in three speeches given within the course of seven hours tried at once to convince and to intimidate the officers.³ Looking back upon the preceding years, he charged them with lack of faith. He professed to be profoundly offended. “I cannot endure anyone’s telling me the troops are not all right.” Threateningly, he added: “A revolution at home is not possible, either with you or without you.” His determination to launch an immediate assault upon the West was irrevocable, he said, and answered the objections of several officers to the violation of Dutch and Belgian neutrality by declaring it inconsequential. (“Nobody will question it when we have won.”) Balefully he told them: “I shall shrink from nothing and destroy everyone who is against me,” and ended his speech with the following ringing words:

At dawn on May 10, 1940, the long-awaited offensive in the West began at last. The night before, Colonel Oster, through his friend Colonel G. J. Sas, the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, had informed the other side. But when the din of artillery and the drone of bombers began in the morning, the skeptical Allied general staffs were taken completely by surprise. They had thought the warning a trap. By committing large British and French forces hastily brought up from northern France, they finally managed to check the German advance through Belgium east of Brussels. They gave no thought to the fact that their counteraction was scarcely opposed by the German air force. For this was the real trap. Walking into it had already cost them the victory.

The original German plan of campaign, a variant of the old Schliffen Plan, called for bypassing the French lines of fortifications by a massed assault through Belgium and a descent upon northwestern France. The German leadership was well aware of what was wrong with this plan: it lacked the element of surprise, so that the offensive was liable to be brought to a standstill and freeze into trench warfare even sooner than in the First World War. Moreover, it required the commitment of large tank formations in terrain cut up by many rivers and canals. All this would seem to imperil the rapid decision upon which Hitler’s whole strategy was based. But there appeared to be no alternative. Another plan presented in October, 1939, by General von Manstein, chief of staff of Army Group A, had been rejected by Brauchitsch and Halder, and ultimately Manstein had been relieved of his command. He had argued for shifting the main weight of the German advance from the right wing to the center, thus regaining the element of surprise, since it was generally held that the Ardennes would not permit extensive tank operations. The French leadership had therefore placed relatively weak forces on this sector of its front, and Manstein’s plan was founded on this fact. Once the German tanks had overcome the problems of the mountainous and wooded terrain, he argued, they could roll almost unhindered across the plains of northern France to the sea, and cut off the Allied armies that had been marched into Belgium.

What had vexed the army High Command was precisely what instantly fascinated Hitler: the bold and unexpected character of this plan. It is said that he had already been occupied with similar notions at the time he learned of Manstein’s proposal. By mid-February, 1940, therefore, after a talk with the general, he ordered a reformulation of the plan of campaign. That decision was to prove crucial.

It was by no means numerical advantage or technological superiority that made the war in the West such a breath-taking victory. The forces that confronted one another on May 10 were nearly equal in strength; in fact the Allied side had a slight edge in numbers. Besides the 137 divisions of the Western powers, there were 34 Dutch and Belgian divisions. These confronted 136 German divisions. The Allied air forces had some 2,800 planes, the German air force barely 1,000 more than that. On the Allied side approximately 3,000 tanks and armored vehicles faced 2,500 on the German side, although most of the latter were organized in special armored divisions. But the decisive factor was the remarkable German plan of operations, which Churchill aptly called the strategy of the “scythe-cut”⁴ and forced the opponent to a “battle with reversed fronts.”

The German attack once again began with an onslaught against Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. No declaration of war was made, and the enemy air forces were destroyed on the ground. “Fortress Holland” fell in five days. Hitler himself had developed the idea of dropping small, highly trained units of parachute troops at strategically important points behind the front; this proved a decisive factor in the rapid victory. Similarly, the center of the Belgian system of defense collapsed when Fort Eben Emael, the key to the system of fortifications guarding Liège, was eliminated by one such unit, which landed inside the fort area in gliders. Meanwhile, the advance through Luxembourg and the Ardennes, again a complete surprise to the enemy, made rapid progress. By May 13 the tank formations were able to cross the Meuse at Dinant and Sedan. On May 16 Laon fell, on May 20 Amiens; and that same night the first formations reached the Channel coast. At times the advance proceeded so rapidly that the main units lost contact with the vanguard, and Hitler, suspicious as always, distrusted his own triumph. “The Führer is frightfully nervous,” Halder noted on May 17. “He is alarmed by his own success, doesn’t want to risk anything, and consequently would prefer to stop us.” And on the following day: “The Führer is unaccountably fearful about the southern flank. He rages and shouts that we are on the point of ruining the whole operation and exposing ourselves to the dangers of defeat.”⁵

In fact there was no danger. When Britain’s new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, alarmed by the situation at the front, flew to Paris, General. Gamelin admitted to him that the majority of his mobile forces had already, fallen into the German trap. Gamelin, commander in chief of the Allied armies, tried to conjure up memories of past glories. In an Order of the Day for May 17 he repeated word for word General Joffre’s proclamation before the first Battle of the Marne in September, 1914, calling upon the soldiers not to yield a foot of soil. But the Allied leaders did not succeed in collecting their retreating armies, building new lines, and organizing a counterattack. The Allied defeat would have been complete if General Guderian’s tank spearhead had not received the order, on May 24, to stop in its tracks. It was at this time only a few miles south of Dunkirk and not in contact with the enemy. The German slowdown for forty-eight hours left the Allies a port and thus the chance to escape. Within a week, in one of the most daring improvisations of the war, with the aid of some 900 largely small ships, fishing boats, excursion steamers, and private yachts, nearly 340,000 men—the greater part of the Allied formations—were ferried to England.

The responsibility for the order to halt before Dunkirk has since been the object of extensive investigation. Some have held that Hitler himself deliberately let the majority of the British Expeditionary Corps escape in order to keep open the way for the compromise with England that he continued to hope for. But such a decision would have contradicted the war aim formulated in his memorandum. It would also have contradicted Directive Number 13 of May 24, which began: “Next goal of operations is the annihilation of the French, British and Belgian forces encircled in Artois and in Flanders by the concentric attack of our northern wing…. During this operation the task of the Air Force is to break all enemy resistance in the encircled parts and to prevent the escape of the British forces across the Channel.” Hitler’s order to halt met with vehement opposition within the army High Command, but was approved by General von Rundstedt, the commander of Army Group A. Its underlying intention was rather to give a respite to the tank formations, exhausted by two weeks of fighting, and enable them to recoup their strength for the impending battle for France. Göring’s boasts that his Luftwaffe would transform the port of Dunkirk into a sea of flames and sink every ship that tried to dock there reinforced Hitler in his decision. When the city, which had been undefended and within Guderian’s reach ten days earlier, at last fell into German hands on June 4, Halder noted tersely: “Dunkirk taken, coast reached. Even the French are gone.”

Yet the superior operational plan was not alone responsible for the German successes. When Hitler’s armies turned south, after completing the encirclement maneuver at the Channel coast, they encountered a discouraged, broken enemy whose defeatism had been only magnified by the debacle in the north. The French command was operating with formations that had already been beaten, with divisions that had been dispersed, had deserted, or had simply passed into dissolution. As early as the end of May a British general called the French army a rabble without the slightest discipline.⁶ Millions of refugees aimlessly tramped the roads, dragging carts heaped high with possessions, blocking the movements of their own troops, carrying them along into the confusion, overtaken by German tanks, driven into panic by the bombs and the screams of the Stukas. Every step toward organized military resistance was submerged in the indescribable chaos. The country had been prepared for defeat but not for collapse. From the French headquarters in Briare there was only a single telephone link to the troops and to the outside world, and that was not in operation between twelve and two o’clock in the afternoon because the postmistress went to lunch at this time. When General Brooke, commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force, asked about the divisions assigned for the defense of “Fortress Brittany,” General Weygand, the newly appointed supreme commander, shrugged resignedly: “I know they’re a pure figment of the imagination.” Many commanding generals stared at their maps as if these were a blank wall. It was in fact as if the sky were falling down upon France.

Although the German planning for the Battle of France had provided for scarcely any reactions on the enemy’s part, and although the directives seemed to suggest extensive marching drills rather than a campaign, Hitler was nevertheless surprised by the speed of the advance. On June 14 his troops marched through the Porte Maillot into Paris and lowered the tricolor from the Eiffel Tower. Three days later Rommel covered 150 miles in a single day. And when Guderian on the same day reported that he had reached Pontarlier with his tanks, Hitler wired back to ask whether it was not a mistake: “You probably mean Pontailler-sur-Saone.” But Guderian reported back: “No mistake. I am myself in Pontarlier on the Swiss border.” From there he advanced northeast and broke into the Maginot Line from the rear. The defensive line that had dominated France’s strategy and all her thinking fell almost without a fight.

With the German victory now tangible, Italy rushed in to help. Mussolini hated, as he was wont to say, the reputation of unreliability that clung to his country, and he wanted to banish it by “a policy as straight as a sword blade.” But the matter was not so simple. His decision to stay out of the war for the present had started to waver in October, in view of the German triumphs in Poland. In November he had regarded the idea that Hitler might win the war as “utterly intolerable.” In December he had said to Ciano that he “openly wished for a German defeat.” He had informed the Dutch and the Belgians of the date set for the German attack. Early in January, 1940, he wrote to Hitler, advising him against his present course. As the “dean of dictators” Mussolini tried to turn Hitler’s momentum toward the East:⁷

But at a conference at the Brenner Pass on March 18, 1940, Hitler succeeded without any special effort in dispelling Mussolini’s disgruntlement and in rekindling his partner’s old admiration and lust for loot. “Neither can it be denied that the Duce is fascinated by Hitler,” Ciano wrote, “a fascination which involves something deeply rooted in his makeup.”

From that point on, Mussolini’s determination to take part in the war grew steadily. It would be humiliating, he said, “to remain with our hands folded while others write history. It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants.”⁸ Against the will of the King, of industry, of the army, even against the will of some of his influential fellow Fascists in the Grand Council, he began working toward Italy’s entry into the war. Early in June, 1940, Marshal Badoglio opposed the order to begin offensive operations. His soldiers, he said, “did not even have a sufficient number of shirts.” Mussolini dismissed the argument: “I assure you that it will all be over with by September. I need several thousand casualties to be able to take my place at the peace table as a belligerent.” On June 10 the Italian army launched its attack but quickly ground to a halt on the outskirts of the border town of Menton. Indignantly, the Italian dictator declared: “It is the material I lack. Even Michelangelo had need of marble to make statues. If he had had only clay, he would have become a potter.”⁹ Only a week later events overtook his ambitions, when President Lebrun entrusted Marshal Petain with the formation of a new French government. As his first official act, Petain transmitted to the German High Command, through the Spanish government, his request for an armistice.

Hitler received the news in the small Belgian village of Bruly-le-Pêche, near the French border, where he had set up his headquarters. A famous photograph has preserved his reaction: his right foot raised as he danced a joyful jig, laughing, slapping his thigh. And it was here, in the context of an exuberant toast, that Keitel for the first time hailed him as the “greatest generalissimo of all times.”

There is no denying that the successes were unprecedented. In three weeks the Wehrmacht had overrun Poland; in something more than two months it had overwhelmed Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, driven the British back to their island, and effectively challenged the British fleet. And all this was accomplished with comparatively small casualties. The campaign in the West had cost the German side 27,000 lives, compared with 135,000 dead on the enemy side.

The successes of the campaign cannot be attributed solely to Hitler’s personal merits as a commander; but they were also not entirely the product of luck, shrewd counsel, or the enemy’s failures. The importance of armored formations had been recognized in. France and elsewhere during the thirties, but only Hitler had drawn the necessary conclusion and equipped the Wehrmacht with ten armored divisions—against some resistance. He had recognized France’s weakness and demoralized impotence far more acutely than his generals, who were still caught up in outmoded notions. And no matter how small his personal contribution to Manstein’s plan of campaign may have been, he immediately grasped its importance and changed the whole concept of German operations accordingly. He showed that he had an eye for unconventional possibilities, all the keener because of his lack of background and hence of bias. He had studied military literature long and intensively; his bedside reading throughout almost the whole of the war consisted of naval records and manuals of military science. He used his stupendous memory of matters military for purposes of self-display. The almost lunatic sureness with which he could rattle off tonnages, calibers, ranges, or specifications of various weapons systems frequently staggered and irritated his entourage.

At the same time, he was also able to apply such knowledge imaginatively. He had a keen sense of the potentialities of modern weapons, he knew where to commit them and where they would be most effective. This was coupled with remarkable insight into the psychology of the enemy. All these qualities found expression in the accurately placed surprise strokes, in the correct predictions of tactical countermeasures, and in the lightning grasp of favorable opportunities. The plan for the coup against Fort Eben Emael came from Hitler, as did the idea of equipping dive bombers with sirens whose scream was devastating.¹⁰ Similarly, in defiance of the views of many experts, he insisted on providing tanks with long cannon. With some justice he has been called the “most informed and versatile specialist in military technology of his age.”¹¹ Unquestionably, he was not just the “commanding corporal” that some of the haughty apologists for the German generals have depicted.

Ultimately his weaknesses began to cancel out his strengths, when operative boldness became absurd self-inflation, energy became rigidity, and courage the gambler’s love of risks. But that time was still some distance in the future. In the meantime, he had conquered his own generals. In the light of his brilliant success over the feared enemy, France, even the reluctant generals acknowledged his “genius” and admitted that he had analyzed the situation far better than they. He had obviously considered not only the military factor but also matters beyond the limited horizon of their expertise. This was one of the reasons for the sometimes almost incomprehensible trust, the misguided confidence in victory, of the later years. Those early victories encouraged the repeated rebuilding of new houses of cards, the cherishing of ever-new deceptive hopes. For Hitler himself the triumphant conclusion of the campaign in France brought a magnification of his already unbridled arrogance. It provided the maximum corroboration of his sense that he was a man of destiny.

On June 21 the Franco-German armistice negotiations began. Three days before, Hitler had gone to Munich to see Mussolini. During that meeting his major aim was to repress his Italian ally’s craving for laurels. For in return for his extra’s role on the battlefield the Duce was demanding nothing less than Nice, Corsica, Tunisia, and Jibuti, also Syria, bases in Algeria, Italian occupation of France as far as the Rhone, surrender to him of the entire French fleet, and, when the time came, Malta and transfer to Italy of British rights in Egypt and the Sudan. But Hitler, his mind already busy with the next stage of the war, contrived to make it clear to Mussolini that Italy’s ambitions would only delay the victory over England. The terms of the armistice were bound to have a considerable psychological influence on England’s determination to continue the struggle, he said. Hitler also feared that the completely updated French fleet, which had escaped his grasp and now lay at anchor in various parts in North Africa and England, might be prompted by excessively hard terms to go over to the enemy or even to continue the fight from the colonies in the name of France. Finally, it may be that he was stirred by a fleeting emotion of magnanimity. At any rate, he convinced Mussolini that it was crucially important to entice a French government into accepting the armistice. The Italians were acutely disappointed by the result of the negotiations; but Hitler’s manner as well as his arguments did not fail to make their impression. The cynical Ciano noted: “He speaks today with a moderation and clearsightedness that are really surprising after such a victory as he has had. I cannot be said to hold especially tender feelings for him, but at this moment I really admire him.”¹²

However, Hitler showed far less magnanimity in his arrangements for the armistice ceremony. To drive the humiliating lesson home, he had the signing held in the forest of Compiégne, northeast of Paris, where on November 11, 1918, the armistice terms were presented to the German delegation. The railroad car in which the historic meeting had taken place was removed from its museum and installed in the clearing in which it had stood in 1918. Flags were draped over the monument with its fallen German eagle. The French text of the draft treaty had been prepared by candlelight only the night before in the small village church of Bruly-le-Péche; from time to time Hitler had gone over to the church in person and asked the translators how the work was progressing.

The meeting itself also underlined the elements of symbolic compensation. When Hitler, followed by a large retinue, got out of his car shortly before 3 P.M., he walked straight up to the granite block in the middle of the clearing. The inscription spoke of the “criminal pride of the German Empire” that had been vanquished at this spot. Feet planted wide apart, he placed his hands on his hips in a gesture of defiance and contempt for this place and all it signified.¹³ After he had given the order to raze the monument, he entered the railroad car and took the chair in which Marshal Foch had sat in 1918. Shortly afterward, the French delegation entered.

General Keitel then read the preamble of the treaty to the French. It once more evoked history: the breach of solemn promises, “the German people’s period of suffering,” its “dishonoring and humiliation,” which had begun in this place. Now, on this same spot, the “profoundest disgrace of all times” was being wiped out. Even before the text of the treaty itself was handed over, Hitler rose, saluted with outstretched arm, and left the car. Outside, a military band played the German national anthem and the Horst Wessel song. Then he walked to his car, parked in one of the lanes of beech that radiated starlike from the clearing.

On that day, June 21, 1940, he had reached the peak of his career. Once, in the days of its beginning, he had vowed not to rest until the injustice of November, 1918, was rectified. With that vow, he had won a hearing and a following. Now he had reached the goal. The old resentment once more proved its force. The Germans themselves, pointless though they had felt the war to be at first, regarded the scene at Compiégne as an act of metapolitical justice and celebrated with considerable emotion the moment of “restored right.”¹⁴ During this period many doubts evaporated or swung around to respect and devotion. Those who hated him were isolated. Seldom in the preceding years had thé nation emotionally subscribed to a regime with such complete lack of reservations. Even the liberal historian Friedrich Meinecke wrote: “I intend… to relearn many though not all things.”¹⁵ Something of this deep emotion surrounding the events was also expressed in Hitler’s own conduct. On the night of June 24–25, shortly before the armistice took effect, he ordered the lights to be put out and the windows opened in his farmhouse in Bruly-le-Pêche. Then for several minutes he stared into the night.

Three days later he went to Paris. He had summoned a retinue of art experts, including Albert Speer, Arno Breker, and the architect Hermann Giessler. From the airfield he went directly to the Opera. Knowledgeably rhapsodizing, he took it upon himself to guide the party. He then drove down the Champs-Elysées, stopped at the Eiffel Tower, lingered for a long time at the tomb of Napoleon in the Invalides, and waxed enthusiastic about the majestic backdrop of the Place de la Concorde. Finally he drove to Montmartre, where he found Sacré Coeur dreadful. After three hours he was done, but he declared that the “dream of his life” had been fulfilled. Afterward, accompanied by two old cronies, he went on a tour of several days over the battlefields of the First World War and visited Alsace. At the beginning of July, amid cheers, torrents of flowers, and the pealing of bells, he entered Berlin. That was the last triumphal entry of his life.

The grand military parade, with which he had wanted literally to take possession of the French capital, was canceled, partly to spare the feelings of the French, partly because Göring was unable to guarantee safety from British air raids. In fact Hitler was still uncertain about the reaction of the British and was closely watching each of their steps. He had smuggled into the Franco-German armistice agreement a clause that was intended as a quiet offer to London.¹⁶ And when Ciano came to Berlin at the beginning of July and again presented the Italian demands, Hitler put him off on the grounds that they must avoid anything that might strengthen the will to resist across the Channel. The Foreign Office was already drafting detailed proposals for a peace treaty, and Hitler himself was preparing for an appearance in the Reichstag, at which he was going to make a “generous offer.” But he also spoke of his determination, in case of rejection, “to loose a storm of fire and iron upon the English.”

Meanwhile, the expected countersignal once again did not come. On May 10, when the Wehrmacht launched its attack in the West, Great Britain had replaced Prime Minister Chamberlain with the man who for many years had been his fiercest opponent, Winston Churchill. The new chief of state declared in his inaugural speech that he had nothing to offer the nation “but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”¹⁷ It was as if a deeply defeatist Europe enmeshed in its complicated concessions to Hitler regained in Winston Churchill its standards, its language, and its will to selfpreservation. Beyond all political issues, Churchill gave to the conflict its grand moral element, the simple and instantly appealing meaning of a storybook legend. If it is true that no match for Hitler had appeared in the thirties, it is also true that one must know the measure of an era in order to take the measure of the man who dominated it. In Churchill Hitler found something more than an antagonist. To a panic-stricken Europe the German dictator had appeared almost like invincible fate. Churchill reduced him to a conquerable power.

As early as June 18, a day after the French government had taken what Churchill called its “melancholy decision” to surrender, Churchill had come before the Lower House and reasserted his resolve to go on fighting. “If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say: ‘This was their finest hour.’ ” Feverishly, he organized the defense of the British Isles against the feared invasion. On July 3, while Hitler was still waiting for a signal of compromise, he demonstrated his refusal to yield by ordering the navy to open fire upon yesterday’s allies, the French fleet in the port of Oran. Surprised and disappointed, Hitler postponed indefinitely the speech to the Reichstag that he had announced for July 8. In the exultation of victory he had firmly counted on the British to abandon the hopeless struggle, all the more so since he still had no intention of damaging their Empire. But once again Churchill ostentatiously made it plain that there would be no negotiations. Over London radio he declared on July 14:

Thereupon Hitler summoned the Reichstag to meet in the Kroll Opera House at 7 P.M. on July 19. In a speech of several hours he answered Churchill and the British government:

Contrary to general expectations, Hitler’s speech did not contain his grand offer of peace but merely a highly general “appeal to reason.” This change was a first manifestation of his loss of hope, in the face of Churchill’s intransigence, of ever making peace with England. In order not to betray any sign of weakness, Hitler combined his appearance with a display of military power by appointing Göring Reichsmarshal and twelve generals field marshals. He also announced a large number of other promotions. But the principal indication of his real state of mind was the order he had already given three days before his address to the Reichstag: “Directive Number 16 on the preparation of a landing operation in England.” The code name Sea Lion was selected for this project.

Significantly, up to this point he had developed no ideas on the continuation of the war against England because this war did not fit into his design, and the changed situation had not prompted him to revise his strategy. Spoiled by luck and by the weakness of his enemies hitherto, he trusted in his genius, in fortune, in those fleeting opportunities he had learned to utilize so instantaneously. Directive Number 16 was rather evidence of chagrin than of definite operational intentions. The introductory sentence pointed clearly to that: “Since England, in spite of her militarily hopeless situation, as yet shows no signs of readiness for a rapprochement, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and if necessary to carry it out.”

It remains a possibility, therefore, that Hitler never seriously considered the landing in England but employed the project merely as a weapon in the war qf nerves. From the autumn of 1939 on, the military authorities, especially the commander in chief of the navy, Admiral Raeder, had repeatedly but vainly tried to interest him in the problems of a landing operation. And, in fact, as soon as Hitler assented to the plan he began introducing reservations and mentioning difficulties of the sort he had never previously recognized. Only five days after he had launched Sea Lion he spoke of the difficulties of the operation in extremely pessimistic terms. He demanded forty army divisions, a solution of the supply problem, complete mastery of the air, the establishment of an extensive system of heavy artillery along the Channel, and a large-scale mining operation; all this was to be accomplished in no more than six weeks. “If it is not certain that preparations can be completed by the beginning of September, other plans must be considered.”

Hitler’s qualms were not connected solely with his complexes about England. Rather, he well understood the type of resistance Churchill had alluded to. A world power with remote overseas bases had all sorts of ways of holding out. Invasion or conquest of the motherland was not necessarily defeat. For example, England could go on fighting from Canada, could draw him deeper and deeper into the conflict in the wrong area, and finally involve him in the dreaded war with the United States. Even if he succeeded in destroying the British Empire, Germany would not gain from that, as he commented in a conference on July 13, 1940, but “only Japan, America and others.” Consequently, with every step he took to intensify the war against England he was undermining his own position. Not only sentimental but also political reasons argued for his seeking England’s assistance rather than her defeat.

Out of such considerations Hitler, though with signs of embarrassment, developed his strategy of the following months: gradually to force England, by political maneuvering and by restricted military action, to make peace. Then he would after all be able, with his rear position secured, to undertake his march to the East. It was the old dream on which he was still fixated, the ideal constellation that he had pursued for so long by political means and which he now, undeterred, sought in open conflict.

The military means of applying pressure included the “siege” of the British Isles by the German submarine fleet and, above all, the air war against England. The paradoxes of his design emerged in the curiously halfhearted manner with which Hitler waged the struggle. Disregarding all the arguments of his military advisers, he refused to go over to the concept of “total” air or naval warfare. The Battle of Britain, the by now legendary air battle over England that began on August 13, 1940 (“Eagle Day”), with the first major raids on airfields and radar stations in the south of England, had to be broken off on September 16 after heavy losses because of bad weather conditions. The Luftwaffe had failed to achieve any one of its goals. British industrial potential had not been struck a really heavy blow, nor had the populace been psychologically crushed, nor had the Luftwaffe won air superiority. And although Admiral Raeder had reported a few days before that the navy was ready for the landing operation, Hitler postponed the project “for the present.” A directive from the High Command of the armed forces dated October 12 specified “that the preparations for the landing in England are from now until spring to be maintained solely as a means of political and military pressure upon England.”²⁰ Operation Sea Lion had been abandoned.

The military actions were accompanied by an attempt to force England by political means to yield—by forming a “continental bloc” embracing all of Europe. This project seemed easily realizable. Part of Europe was already Fascist, another part allied to the Reich by sympathy or treaties, still another part conquered or vanquished; and the defeats had for the most part brought to the fore an imitative Fascism which so far had scarcely any following but still held power and the lure that went with power. His military triumphs had magnified the hypnotic aura emanating from Hitler and his regime. He was not only the awe-inspiring dictator of the Continent; he also seemed to embody power itself, the current of history and the wave of the future. The defeat of France, on the other hand, was felt to be proof of the impotence and approaching end of the democratic system. Petain expressed the prevailing disenchantment with democracy after the collapse of France by saying that his country “had been morally corrupted by politics.”²¹

The great continental coalition was to embrace all of Europe, including the Soviet Union, Spain, Portugal, and the remnant of unoccupied France that was ruled from Vichy. Alongside this project there were plans for attacking Great Britain on the periphery: taking up the conflict in the Mediterranean by conquering the two gateways to that area: Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. In this way England’s imperial position in North Africa and the Near East would be cracked open. There were other contingency plans hinging upon the occupation of Portugal’s Cape Verde and the Canary Islands, also the Azores and Madeira. Contacts were made with the government in Dublin; the Irish might well be interested in an alliance, and air bases there would be highly useful for the attack on England.

Beyond the military possibilities, a grand political perspective opened before Hitler one more time in this summer of 1940. Never had a Fascist Europe been closer, never German hegemony more within reach. For a while is almost seemed that he was grasping the opportunity being offered to him. At any rate, in the autumn of 1940 Hitler once more plunged into intense activity in the realm of foreign policy. He negotiated several times with the Spanish Foreign Minister, and in the second half of October went to Hendaye to meet Franco. Then he met Petain and his deputy, Laval, in Montoire. But aside from the Tripartite Pact, which was concluded on September 27 with Japan and Italy, his diplomatic efforts came to naught. A notable failure was the attempt made in the middle of November during a visit by Molotov in Berlin to include the Soviet Union within the Tripartite Pact and, by steering her to the British-dominated areas on the Indian Ocean, make her a partner in fresh plans for partitioning the world.

That all these overtures were without effect was no doubt because of that contempt for political action now dominating Hitler and which his new sense of triumphant achievement had only strengthened. As most of the preserved minutes demonstrate, his onetime skill at negotiation had yielded to conceited imperiousness, his former circumspect groping had given way to crude dishonesty; and instead of the finespun reasons with their persuasive half-truths of earlier years, his interlocutors more and more encountered the transparent egotism of one whose only argument was his superior power. But in the negotiations as in the parallel military plans such as Operation Felix (Gibraltar), Attila (preventive occupation of the remainder of France), and others, the impression remains that he took up such matters in a singularly distracted fashion and with divided interest. Sometimes he actually seemed inclined to abate all military activities against Great Britain and rest content with the purely chimerical effect of the continental bloc. For this seemed the only way to keep the United States from entering the war. Given his unswerving goal of eastward expansion, that possibility appeared an ever-growing threat which would wipe out all efforts, sacrifices, and designs.²²

The fear of American intervention lent a new and menacing color to all considerations in the summer of 1940 and, above all, reinforced Hitler’s fear of the passing of time. Since the subjugation of France he had squandered his energy in curiously indecisive diplomatic and military actions. German troops were garrisoned from Narvik to Sicily, and from the beginning of 1941 on, called upon for help by a hapless Italian partner, they were also stationed in North Africa. But there was no guiding idea behind all the activity; the war was running away in undesired directions. This was what came of the war’s having been begun with reversed fronts, virtually for its own sake, and with no general plan. “Führer is obviously depressed,” his army adjutant noted about this time after a comprehensive situation report given by Hitler. “Impression that at the moment he does not know how the war ought to continue.”²³

In the autumn, while the war was thus threatening to slip from his grasp, Hitler began to think it out afresh and to bring it back to a scheme. He had two alternatives. He might attempt after all to build a mighty bloc of powers which, by including the Soviet Union and Japan, might at the eleventh hour force a reversal of the United States’ position. That would involve considerable concessions in several directions and would also postpone for years the planned eastward expansion. On the other hand, he might seize the first possible moment to strike eastward, defeat the Soviet Union in a blitzkrieg, and form the bloc of powers not with a partner, but with a vassal.

For several months Hitler wavered. In the summer of 1940 he had been full of impatience to get the senseless and bothersome Western war over with. As early as June 2, during the assault upon Dunkirk, he had predicted that England would now be ready for a “reasonable conclusion of peace” so that he would have his “hands free at last” for his “great and proper task: the conflict with Bolshevism.”²⁴ A few weeks later, on July 21, he called upon Brauchitsch to make “mental preparations” for the war against Russia. In the intoxication of victory during this period he had even considered making his assault on Russia in the autumn of that same year. It took a memorandum from the OKW and the Wehrmachtführungsstab to convince him of the unfeasibility of the plan. Nevertheless, since that time he had clearly abandoned his original idea of two confrontations at separate times. He was now of a mind to combine the war in the West with eastward expansion: the concept had widened to that of a single world war. On July 31 he explained this conception to General Halder:

In September, however, and once again early in November, Hitler appeared to waver another time and to prefer the idea of alliance. “Führer hopes to be able to incorporate Russia into the front against England,” Halder noted on November 1. But another entry only three days later pointed to the opposite: Hitler had said that Russia was going to remain “the whole problem of Europe. Everything must be done in order to prepare for the great reckoning.”

These vacillations appear to have come to a stop in the course of December, when Hitler seems to have made the decision that so thoroughly accorded with his nature, with his lifelong design, and with his present overestimation of himself: to begin the war with the Soviet Union as soon as possible. The re-election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President of the United States, and his conversation with Molotov, had evidently speeded the decision. At any rate, only a day after the Soviet Foreign Minister’s departure he commented that this would “not even remain a marriage of convenience.” He thereupon issued the order to scout out suitable terrain for a Führer’s headquarters in the East and for three command posts in the North, the Center and the South, and to build these “with maximum haste.” On December 17 he expatiated to General Jodi on his operational ideas for the campaign, and concluded with the remark that “we must solve all Continental European problems in 1941, since from 1942 on the United States would be in a position to intervene.”²⁵ The decision to attack the Soviet Union even before the war in the West was decided has often been viewed as one of Hitler’s “blind,” “puzzling,” or “hardly comprehensible” resolves. Yet it contained more rationality, and at the same time more desperation, than is evident at first glance. Hitler himself ranked this order to attack as one of the many “most difficult decisions” he had to make. In the reflections that he dictated early in 1945 to Martin Bormann in the bunker beneath the chancellery, he declared:

All of Hitler’s cogitations in the summer and fall of 1940 were linked by the secret hope of remedying the stalled and misdirected military situation by a sudden, surprising sally of the sort that had often saved him from his various plights in the past. At the same time, such a sally might help him achieve his larger victory. In his fantasies the campaign against Russia was transformed into the unexpected turning point which like a touch from a magic wand would solve all difficulties and open the way to world dominion. Germany, he raved to his generals on January 9, 1941, would be “invulnerable. The gigantic spaces of Russia conceal immeasurable riches. Germany must dominate them economically and politically, but not annex them.” In that way she would have at her disposal all the potentialities for waging war against whole continents in the future. Then she could never again be defeated by anyone.

The rapid collapse of the Soviet Union, as he imagined it, would give Japan the signal for her long-envisaged “southern expansion,” which she had hitherto postponed chiefly because of the Soviet threat to her rear. That expansion in turn would tie down the United States in the Pacific area and consequently draw the Americans away from Europe, so that Great Britain would be forced to surrender. By a far-flung threefold pincers movement over North Africa, the Near East, and the Caucasus, in conjunction with the conquest of Russia, he would push forward to Afghanistan. That country would then be used as a base from which to strike the stubborn British Empire at its heart, in India. Rule of the world was, as he saw it, within his grasp.

The weaknesses in this conception were vast, and Hitler must have recognized at least some of them. Hitherto he had always made security in the West a prerequisite for the attack upon the Soviet Union and had viewed avoidance of a two-front conflict as a kind of fundamental law for German foreign policy. Now he was trying to obtain this security by a preventive blow and plunging into the adventure of a two-front war in order to anticipate having to fight a war on two fronts. He also underestimated the enemy just as he overestimated himself. “In three weeks we shall be in Petersburg,” he declared at the beginning of December. He told Bulgarian Ambassador Dragonoff that the Soviet Army was “no more than a joke.”

But above all, what once more emerged was his inability to think a thought through to the end while retaining his hold on reality. Once he had conceived the first steps, he invariably at some point soared off into fantasy and brought his speculations to a visionary rather than a rational conclusion. A prime instance of this was the carelessness with which he considered the developments in the East that might follow the expected victory. It was the same mistake he had made in attacking Poland and then after the campaign in France. Even if he succeeded in another blitz campaign, in advancing to Moscow or even the Urals before the descent of winter, the war was by no means over, as he ought to have told himself. For beyond Moscow, beyond the Urals, lay vast spaces, where Russia’s remaining forces could be mustered and organized.

At any rate, powerful German contingents would necessarily be tied down on the more or less open frontier where he planned to stop, and this factor would surely have some bearing on England’s and America’s determination to fight. But Hitler never thought things through in this way. He contented himself euphorically with such vague formulas as “collapse” or “reduction to rubble.” When Field Marshal von Bock, who was to receive the appointment of commander in chief of the Army Group Center, told him early in February that he thought a military victory over the Red Army possible but could not conceive of “how the Soviets are to be forced to make peace,” Hitler answered vaguely that “after the conquest of the Ukraine, Moscow and Leningrad… the Soviets will certainly consent to a compromise.” The remark revealed the whole shallowness of his ideas.

However, he would now no longer hear of any objections. Undeterred by arguments or opposition, he prepared the attack. In October, 1940, on the night after his meeting with Petain, he received a letter from Mussolini informing him of Italy’s intention to invade Greece. Foreseeing the complications that this unexpected step was bound to have for the German flank in the Balkans, Hitler changed his travel plans and went to Florence for a hastily arranged meeting. But Mussolini, eager to pay the Germans back for the many similar surprises they had inflicted on him, as well as for their many victories, had hurried through the operation a few hours before Hitler’s arrival. But the necessity of sending German contingents to Greece when the Italian ally blundered into the expected trouble, did not keep Hitler from continuing the planning and the deployment for the campaign in the East. The same was true when Mussolini ran into trouble in Albania and in December, 1940, finally saw the North African front collapse. In every case Hitler met the disasters with equanimity and dispatched more and more fresh divisions to the threatened scenes without for a moment being distracted from his principal goal.

On February 28, 1941, he considered himself forced to anticipate the Russians by marching into Bulgaria from the territory of his ally Rumania. A month or so later he had to conquer Yugoslavia, which under a group of rebellious officers had attempted to withdraw from German influence. But in spite of these new engagements he did not lose sight of the campaign against the Soviet Union. He merely postponed it by four possibly fateful weeks. On April 17 he received the capitulation of the Yugoslav army; six days later the Greeks surrendered, after having so long and so effectively resisted Mussolini’s soldiers. The German corps sent to North Africa under General Rommel needed only twelve days to recover all the territory the Italians had lost. Shortly afterward, between May 20 and 27, 1941, German parachute troops captured the island of Crete, and for a moment the entire British position in the Mediterranean seemed in deadly peril. With growing emphasis Raeder and the heads of the navy called for a grand offensive against the British Near Eastern positions by the autumn of 1941. That would, they promised, strike the Empire “a deadlier blow than the taking of London.” The anxieties of the Allied side, which were published after the war, largely confirmed this view. But Hitler once more refused to deviate from the obsession of eastward expansion. Some members of his entourage tried to change his mind, but in vain.²⁷ In the West, the material weight of the United States was making itself felt more and more. The air war was already lost, and the U-boat war threatening to be lost. But not even this increasingly acute situation could check Hitler’s plans.

There can be no doubt that Hitler saw and considered the many drawbacks of his new design: the risk of the two fronts, the experience of Napoleon with the insuperable spaces of Russia, the weakness of his Italian ally, and the squandering of his own forces in a manner that completely belied the whole idea of blitzkrieg. The obstinacy with which he ignored the counterarguments was not principally due to fixation on his central idea. Rather, he was becoming more and more aware that this summer of 1941 offered him the last remaining chance to carry out that concept. He was, as he himself said, in the situation of a man who has only one bullet left in his gun. And the special nature of his situation was that the effectiveness of the charge was steadily diminishing. For, as he knew, the war could not be won if it assumed the character of a war of matériel and attrition. Such a war would necessarily put Germany into a position of increasing dependence on the Soviet Union, while in the end inevitably confirming the superiority of the United States.

It is conceivable that in the background of his thoughts the vague hope still lurked that such a strike might regain the neutrality of the conservative powers whose assistance he had had and gambled away. For he would be restoring the onetime enemy to his proper place as an enemy. This, at any rate, was the hope that prompted his old admirer Rudolf Hess to fly to England on May 10, 1941, on a self-appointed mission to put an end at last to the “wrong war.” The disdain with which he was received made it plain that this opportunity, too, had been squandered and that Hitler really had no choice. His decision to launch the war in the East at this particular time resembled an act of desperation.

A great many of Hitler’s remarks from the autumn of 1940 on indicate how clearly he grasped his dilemma. His talks with diplomats, generals, and politicians, quite aside from their function in the given instance, constitute in toto a document showing a continual process of self-persuasion. His belittling of the enemy served the same purpose as his excoriation of that same enemy. The Soviet Union was on the one hand a “clay colossus without a head,” and on the other hand a “bolshevized wasteland,” “simple gruesome,” “a mighty national and ideological onslaught that threatens all of Europe”; and the pact he had concluded with that country not so long ago had suddenly become “very painful.” Then again he tried to pretend that he was not waging a two-front war: “Now the possibility exists,” he told his generals on March 30, 1941, “to strike Russia with our rear safe; that chance will not soon come again. I would be committing a crime against the future of the German people if I did not seize it!”

His contentions were sustained by the certainty, which he claimed with ever-increasing impatience, that Providence presided over all his decisions. This growing effort to invoke irrational support strikingly reflected his state of uneasiness. Quite often his gestures of magical self-reassurance occurred as abrupt interjections in matter-of-fact conversations. For example, in a conversation with a Hungarian diplomat in March, 1941, after making a comparison between the armaments of Germany and the United States, he declared: “Thinking over my courses and proposals of the past, I have arrived at the conviction that Providence has arranged all this. For what I originally sought would have been, if I had attained it by peaceful means, merely a partial solution which sooner or later would have given rise to new conflict. My only special wish is for an improvement in our relationship with Turkey.”

Ever since the summer of 1940 there had been a number of diplomatic contretemps between Germany and the Soviet Union. Some had arisen through Moscow’s ruthless attempts to secure her own perimeter against the by now formidable power of the Reich. With this aim the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic countries and parts of Rumania, and tenaciously opposed German efforts to obtain greater influence in the Balkans. Nevertheless, Sir Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador in Moscow, predicted in the spring of 1941 that the Soviet Union would “with absolute certainty” resist all efforts to involve her in the war against Germany unless Hitler himself decided to attack the Soviet Union; but he was afraid that Hitler would not do his enemies this favor.

And then he did that very thing. It was the last and most serious example of his suicidal impulse to double his stake once the game was going against him. The significant aspect of his present reckoning was that it balanced only on the negative side. If he lost the campaign against the Soviet Union, the war as a whole was lost. But if he won in the East, the whole war was by no means won, however he might delude himself about that.

But in still another respect Hitler’s decision to attack revealed a significant consistency. The Moscow Pact dated back to what had still been the “political” phase of his life. It had been a tactically motivated act of betrayal of his own ideological principles. Consequently, since he had now gone beyond his political phase, the pact had become an anachronism. “The Pact never was honestly intended,” Hitler now confessed to one of his adjutants. “For the ideological abysses are too deep.” What counted now was the honesty of his radical philosophy.

Shortly after three o’clock in the morning of June 22, 1941, Mussolini was roused from sleep by a message from Hitler. “At night I don’t even disturb my servants, but the Germans make me jump out of bed without the slightest consideration,” he grumbled. The message began with a reference to “months of anxious pondering” and then informed Mussolini of the impending attack. “Since I have won through to this decision,” Hitler assured him, “I again feel inwardly free. Despite all the sincerity of my efforts to bring about a final détente, collaboration with the Soviet Union has nevertheless often been a heavy burden for me; for somehow it seemed to me a breach with my whole background, my views and my former obligations. I am happy to be rid of these spiritual torments.”²⁸

The feeling of relief was undoubtedly there but accompanied by a note of anxiety. Granted that the entourage, and especially the top military leaders, expressed extraordinary optimism. “For the German soldier nothing is impossible,” the Wehrmacht communiqué of June 11, 1941, had concluded, summing up the fighting in the Balkans and in North Africa. Only Hitler himself showed signs of depression and nervousness. But he was not the man to be deterred from realizing his life’s dream when only a few weeks’ fighting separated him from it. Then vast spaces in the East would be won, England would bow, and America yield. The world would pay homage to him. The risk increased the allure of the goal. On the night before the assault, in the midst of the bustle of preparations all around him, he said: “I feel as if I am pushing open the door to a dark room never seen before, without knowing what lies behind the door.”²⁹

The Third World War

Before dawn, about 3:15 A.M. on June 22, 1941, Hitler launched the offensive against the Soviet Union with 153 divisions, 600,000 motorized vehicles, 3,580 tanks, 7,184 artillery pieces, and 2,740 airplanes. It was the mightiest military force concentrated on a single theater of war in history. Alongside the German formations there were twelve divisions and ten brigades of Rumanian troops, eighteen Finnish divisions, three Hungarian divisions, and two and one-half Slovak divisions. Later this force was joined by three Italian divisions and the Spanish “Blue Division.” True to the pattern of most of the preceding campaigns, the attack started without a declaration of war. Once again the Luftwaffe took the lead with a massed surprise assault, which at one blow wiped out half of the approximately 10,000 Soviet Russian military planes. And, as had already been done in Poland and in the West, the attackers pushed massed wedges of tanks deep into the enemy territory, then closed the pincers thus formed to yield vast battles of encirclement. In the preceding years Hitler had steadily maintained that he was not planning any “Argonauts’ expedition” to Russia;³⁰ now he set out on one.

A second wave, following hard upon the military formations, consisted of the notorious Einsatzgruppen: special squads to whom Hitler had issued the assignment—as early as March 3—to exterminate “the Jewish-Bolshevistic intelligentsia” in the field of operations.³¹ From the outset these commandos gave the conflict its frightful, totally unexampled character. And for all that the campaign was strategically linked with the war as a whole, in its nature and in its morality it signified something else entirely. It was, so to speak, the Third World War.

At any rate, it dropped out of the framework of the “normal” European war, the rules of which had hitherto governed the conflict, although in Poland there had been glimmerings of a new and more radical practice. But the SS’s reign of terror in the conquered Polish territories had evoked opposition among the local military commanders. It was his experience with this reaction on the part of the regular army that now prompted Hitler to introduce his ideologically motivated extermination campaigns in the very zone of active operations. For after so many complications, detours, and reversed fronts, this war in Russia was in every sense his war. He waged it mercilessly, obsessively, and became increasingly neglectful of all other theaters. He made no tactical concessions. In particular, he abandoned his previous practice of seeking the military decision first, with the aid of seductive slogans of liberation, only to begin the work of enslavement and destruction after the military victory had been won. Here in Russia he was seeking nothing but “final solutions.” On March 30, 1941, he had summoned to the Berlin chancellery nearly 250 high-ranking officers of all branches of the service. He lectured them for two and a half hours on the novel nature of the impending war. Halder’s diary recorded the following statements:

Although none of those present took issue with what he was telling them, Hitler distrusted his generals. He thought them biased in favor of the traditional standards of their class and therefore did not content himself with mere slogans calling for harshness. Rather, his whole effort was bent toward abolishing the distinction of his special commandos; he wanted to fuse these elements into a totality that would make criminals of all by having all participate in waging his war of annihilation. In a succession of preparatory directives, administration of the rear areas was detached from the army and assigned to special Reich commissioners. Heinrich Himmler in his capacity of Reichsführer-SS was assigned to take over “special tasks” in the theater of operations. He had at his disposal four Einsatzgruppen (task forces) of security police and SD men, a total strength of 3,000 men, to carry out the tasks “arising from the conflict of two opposed political systems which is to be carried out on a basis of finality.”

In May, 1941, at a meeting in Pretzsch, Reinhard Heydrich orally gave the leaders of these groups, the order to murder all Jews, “Asiatic inferiors,” Communist functionaries, and gypsies.³³ A “Führer’s decree” of the same period made members of the armed forces immune to prosecution for crimes against enemy civilians. Another directive, the so-called Commissar Order of June 6, 1941, specified that the political commissars of the Red Army, being “the authors of barbarously Asiatic methods of fighting… when captured in battle or in resistance are on principle to be disposed of by gunshot immediately.” And a “guideline” of the High Command of the armed forces, which was issued to the more than 3 million soldiers of the Eastern armies immediately before the beginning of the attack, called for “ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevistic agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, Jews, and total elimination of all active and passive resistance.”³⁴ A strident campaign against the “Slavic subhumans” supplemented these measures. It conjured up images of the “Mongol onslaught” and defined Bolshevism as the contemporary form of the Asiatic scourge represented by Attila and Genghis Khan.

These elements gave the war in the East its unusual dual character. It was undoubtedly an ideological war against Communism, and the offensive was sustained by a crusading mood. But simultaneously, and to a considerably greater degree, it was a colonial war of conquest in the style of the nineteenth century, though directed against one of the old European great powers and aimed at wiping out that Power. Hitler himself exposed the lie of the ideological justifications whose strident propaganda dominated the foreground. In the middle of July, speaking to a group of the topmost leaders, he irritably rejected the formula of a “war of Europe against Bolshevism.” He clarified his view as follows: “Fundamentally, therefore, what matters is conveniently dividing up the gigantic cake so that we can first control it, secondly administer it, and thirdly exploit it.” But such annexation plans were to be kept secret for the present. “Nevertheless we can and will carry out all necessary measures—shooting, resettlement, and so on.”³⁵

While the army plunged tempestuously ahead, reaching the Dnieper in two weeks and a week later thrusting to Smolensk, the Einsatzgruppen set up their reign of terror in the occupied territories. They combed cities and towns, herded together Jews, Communist functionaries, intellectuals, and in general all potential leaders of society, and liquidated them. Otto Ohlendorf, one of the task-force commanders, testified in Nuremberg that in the course of the first year his unit murdered approximately 90,000 men, women, and children. The Jewish population of western Russia was especially affected; during this same period it is conservatively estimated that about half a million Jews were killed.³⁶ Unmoved, Hitler pushed the extermination program forward. Over and beyond all the aims of conquest and exploitation, his statements of that period manifest the old, deep ideological hatred, once more as extreme as in his early years. “The Jews are the scourge of humanity,” he told Croatian Foreign Minister Kvaternik on July 21, 1941. “If the Jews were given their way, as they are in the Soviet paradise, they would carry out the maddest plans. That is how Russia has become a plague center for humanity…. If only one country for whatever reasons tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If there were no longer any Jews in Europe, the unity of the countries of Europe would no longer be disturbed.”

In spite of their rapid advance, the German armies were able to start their pincers movement only in the central sector. On the other fronts they merely managed to roll the enemy back. “No enemy in front of us and no supplies behind us”: that was the quip for the special problems of this campaign. Nevertheless, by July 11 nearly 600,000 Russian prisoners were in German hands, including more than 70,000 deserters. Both Hitler and the army High Command thought the collapse of the Red Army was near. As early as July 3 Halder had noted: “It is probably not saying too much if I assert that the campaign against Russia was won within two weeks.” But he recognized that stubborn resistance based on the vastness of the area would occupy the German forces for many weeks to come.

Hitler himself declared several days later that he did not believe resistance in European Russia would last much longer than six weeks. He did not know where the Russians would go then. “Perhaps the Urals or beyond the Urals. But we will follow them.” He would not shrink from pushing even beyond the Urals. He would pursue Stalin wherever he fled. But he did not think he would have to be fighting after the middle of September; in six weeks or so it would be pretty much all over.³⁷ In the middle of July the emphasis in the armaments program was shifted to submarines and aircraft, and planning was begun for the return march of the German divisions, since this was expected to take place in two weeks. When General Kûstring, the last military attaché in Moscow, appeared at the Führer’s headquarters at this time to report, Hitler led him to a military map, gestured at the conquered territories, and declared: “No pig will ever eject me from here.”³⁸

The relapse into the coarseness of his early years corresponded to the satisfaction Hitler evidently felt in showing what he was capable of. He described the battles in the East to Spanish Ambassador Espinosa as sheer “massacres of human beings.” Sometimes, he said, the enemy had attacked in waves twelve or thirteen rows deep and had simply been cut down, “the people reduced to chopped meat.” The Russian soldiers, he said, were “partly in a state of torpor, partly of sighs and groans. The commissars are devils and… were being shot down.” Simultaneously, he indulged in long hate-filled fantasies. He conceived of starving out Moscow and Leningrad and thus bringing about an “ethnic catastrophe” that would “deprive not only Bolshevism of its centers, but wipe out the Moscovites.” Then he wanted to raze both cities to the ground. A gigantic reservoir would be created on the spot where Moscow had once stood, to extinguish all memory of the city and everything it had been. As a precautionary measure, he ordered that the expected offers of surrender be turned down, and justified this measure to his intimates: “Probably some people will clap their hands to their heads and ask: How can the Führer destroy a city like St. Petersburg? By nature I belong to an entirely different genus. But when I see that the species is in danger, my feelings give way to ice-cold resolution.”³⁹

In the course of August the German armies, after breaking through the “Stalin Line,” succeeded after all in impressive pincers movements on all the sectors of the front. Nevertheless, it became apparent that the optimistic reckonings of the previous month had been deceptive. However great the number of prisoners, the hordes of reserves that the enemy continually brought up to the front seemed even greater. Moreover, the Russians fought far more bitterly than had the Poles or Allied troops; and their determination to resist increased, after initial crises, as they recognized the annihilating nature of the war Hitler was waging. Moreover, the attrition of matériel in the dust and mud of the Russian steppes was greater than had been expected, and every victory drew the army more deeply into the endless spaces. In addition, the German war machine for the first time seemed to be reaching the limits of its capacity. Industry, for example, was producing only a third of the required 600 tanks a month. The infantry was obviously inadequately motorized for a campaign involving distances vaster than any hitherto conceived. The Luftwaffe could not handle a two-front war. And supplies of fuel at times shrank to the demand for a single month. In the face of all this, the question of where the remaining reserves could most effectively be applied became paramount. On what sector of the front could a blow be delivered that might decide the war?

The army High Command and the commanders of the Army Group Center unanimously demanded that they be allowed to concentrate all formations for the attack on Moscow. The enemy, they assumed, would assemble all available forces outside the capital for the great decisive battle. Thus the campaign could be concluded within the schedule, and the rules of blitzkrieg could be abided by. Hitler, on the contrary, called for attacking in the north, in order to cut the Russians off from access to the Baltic. Simultaneously, he wanted an advance on a broad front in the south, with the aim of seizing the rich agricultural and industrial regions of the Ukraine and the Donetz Basin and the oil supplies of the Caucasus. This plan was a prime sample both of his arrogance and his dilemma. Although he pretended that in his certainty of victory he could afford to ignore the capital, he was actually trying to relieve the economic strain, which was becoming more and more evident. “My generals know nothing about a war economy,” he repeatedly declared. The obstinate dispute, which once again revealed the divisions between Hitler and the generals, was finally ended by a directive ordering the Army Group Center to place its motorized formations at the disposal of the commanders in the north and south. “Unacceptable,” “outrageous,” Halder noted, and proposed to Brauchitsch that they hand in a joint resignation. But the commander in chief refused.

The great victory in the Battle of Kiev, which netted the German side approximately 665,000 prisoners and enormous quantities of matériel, seemed once again to confirm Hitler’s military genius—especially since this success also ended the flank threat to the central sector and thus truly opened the way to Moscow. In fact Hitler now consented to the offensive against the capital. But blinded by the unbroken succession of triumphs, spoiled by fortune in war, he thought he could simultaneously continue to pursue his far-flung aims in the north and in the south as well: cutting the Murmansk railroad line, capturing Rostov and the oil region of Maikop, and advancing the more than 375 miles to Stalingrad. As if he had forgotten the old rule about concentrating all forces at one place at a time, he thus made his troops draw farther and farther apart. On October 2, 1941, Field Marshal von Bock, with reduced forces, at last opened the offensive against Moscow, after a delay of nearly two months. On the following day Hitler made a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, in which he surpassed himself in vulgar boasting. He described Germany’s enemies as “democratic nonentities,” “louts,” “animals and beasts,” and announced that “this enemy is already broken and will never rise again.”

Four days later the autumnal rains began. Fighting superior enemy forces, the German armies opened their offensive on a hopeful note, achieving two great encirclements near Vyasma and Bryansk. But then the deepening morass crippled all operations. The movement of supplies slowed; fuel in particular grew short; more and more vehicles and guns became stuck in the mud. The halted offensive did not begin moving forward again until the middle of November, when mild frost ensued. The tank troops assigned to complete the northern encirclement at last came within almost twenty miles of the Soviet capital near Krasnaya Polyana, while the units attacking from the west approached to within more than thirty miles of the city’s center. Then the Russian winter descended abruptly. The temperature dropped to twenty degrees below and later sometimes even to sixty below zero.

The onset of intense cold found the German armies completely unprepared. Certain that the campaign would be over in three to four months, Hitler in one of his characteristic gestures had again placed his back against the wall and ordered no winter equipment for the troops. “For there will be no winter campaign,” he had rebuked General Paulus when the commander recommended precautionary measures for the coming winter. At the front thousands died of cold. Vehicles and automatic weapons failed. The wounded froze to death in the hospitals, and soon the casualties from cold exceeded those lost in the fighting. “There was panic here,” Guderian declared, and at the end of November he reported that his troops were “done for.” A few days later, in temperatures of twenty below zero, the formations outside Moscow made a last desperate attempt to break through the Russian lines. A few units penetrated as far as the suburbs of the capital. Through their field glasses they could see the towers of the Kremlin and observe movements in the streets. Then the offensive ground to a halt.

Meanwhile, altogether unexpectedly, a Soviet counteroffensive began with freshly introduced Siberian elite divisions. The German troops were thrown back with heavy losses. For a few days the front appeared to waver and be on the point of vanishing into the Russian snow. Hitler unyieldingly rejected all appeals by the generals to avoid the disaster by tactical withdrawals. He feared the loss of weapons and gear, and dreaded the enormous psychological effects that would necessarily follow the shattering of his image of personal invincibility.⁴⁰ On December 16 he issued an order demanding of every soldier “fanatical resistance” in their present positions, “without regard for enemy breakthroughs on the flank and rear.” When Guderian remonstrated against the senseless sacrifices this order entailed, Hitler asked whether the general believed that Frederick the Great’s grenadiers had died gladly. “You stand too close to the events,” he charged Guderian. “You have too much pity for the soldiers. You ought to disengage yourself more.”

To this day it is widely believed that the “stand” order outside Moscow, and Hitler’s obstinate determination, stabilized the crumbling front. But the armies’ loss of substance and the longer supply lines canceled out all conceivable advantages. Moreover, the decision also suggested Hitler’s growing incapacity to react flexibly. The process of stylizing himself into a monument, which he had undergone for so many years, was now obviously affecting his temperament and locking him into a sort of monumental rigidity. But no matter what he decided in the face of this crisis, there could no longer be any doubt that much more than his projected blitzkrieg, Operation Barbarossa, ground to a halt before the Soviet capital. Clearly, his entire plan for the war had foundered.

This was his first severe setback after nearly twenty years of unremitting political and military triumphs. His decision to hold the positions outside Moscow at all costs sprang from his consciousness of being at a turning point. His gamble had been carried to such a pitch that it had to collapse at the first defeat, and all its premises went down with it. By the middle of November, at any rate, he seems to have been filled with forebodings. He spoke to a small group about the idea of a “negotiated peace” and once again voiced vague hopes that the conservative ruling class of England would see the light.⁴¹ It was as though he wanted to forget that it was he who had betrayed the principle of his successes and would never again be in a position to fight one main enemy with the aid of the other. Ten days later, when the disastrous cold descended, he seemed for the first time to have an intimation that he was facing more than an isolated failure. In a military conference held toward the end of the war General Jodi stated that already then, in view of the calamity of the Russian winter, Hitler as well as he realized that “victory could no longer be achieved.”⁴² On November 27 Quartermaster General Wagner tendered a report at the Führer’s headquarters whose gist Halder summed up in one sentence: “We have reached the end of our human and material forces.” And that same evening, in one of those bleak, misanthropic moods that so often assailed him during the crises of his life, Hitler told a foreign visitor: “If the German people are no longer so strong and ready for sacrifice that they will stake their own blood on their existence, they deserve to pass away and be annihilated by another, stronger power.” In a second conversation, later that night and again with a foreign visitor, he voiced the same idea and added the remark: “If that is the case I would not shed a tear for the German people.”⁴³

Recognition that his design for the war as a whole had failed also lurked behind Hitler’s decision, on December 11, 1941, to declare war on the United States—the war he had dreaded all along. Four days before, 350 Japanese carrier planes had attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and the airfields on Oahu with a hail of bombs, thus initiating the conflict in the Far East. In Berlin Ambassador Oshima requested that the Reich immediately enter the war on his country’s side. And although Hitler had repeatedly pressed his Far Eastern ally to attack the Soviet Union or the British Empire in Southeast Asia and had made it plain how inopportune a war against the United States would be for Germany, he instantly acted on the Japanese request. He did not even blame the Japanese for their insulting secrecy—though at bottom he thought he alone had the right to such secrecy. And he brushed aside Ribbentrop’s objection that, according to the letter of the Tripartite Pact, Germany was by no means obligated to give aid. The spectacular surprise attack with which Japan had begun the war had deeply impressed him, and by now he had reached the point of being carried away by such dramatics. “My heart swelled when I heard of the first Japanese operations,” he said to Oshima.

There were some advantages in beginning the war with thè United States immediately. The German naval forces were now free to conduct the war at sea without restriction, whereas they had previously had to put up with all provocations by the American side. Moreover, the Japanese strikes came at the right moment to veil the crisis in Russia. And, finally, defiance also played a part in Hitler’s decision, bitterness at the way the war had gone off the rails, so that in mockery of all his plans he had not been able to win it in a series of lightning blows.

All these arguments, however, were not very convincing and could not conceal the fact that Hitler was entering the new conflict with America without a major motive. In little more than two years he had gambled away a dominant political position and united the most powerful countries in the world, despite all their previous enmities, in an “unnatural alliance.” The decision to go to war against the United States was even less free, even more coerced, than the decision to attack the Soviet Union. In fact, it was really no longer an act of his own volition but a gesture governed by a sudden awareness of his own impotence. That gesture was Hitler’s last strategic initiative of any importance.

The effect of American participation in the war instantly became apparent in a stiffening and extension of Allied efforts. On the day of the German attack upon the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill had declared in a radio address that he would not retract anything he had said against Communism for twenty-five years, but that in the face of the drama beginning in the East “the past with its crimes, it follies and tragedies” faded. Churchill always tried to preserve an awareness of the distance that separated him from his new ally, but President Roosevelt threw himself into the support of the Soviet Union with the total commitment that the moment and the enemy required. Some time before the American entry into the war, he had included the Soviet Union along with Britain in the LendLease program of material support. But now he mobilized the entire potential of the country. Within a single year he increased the number of tanks built to 24,000, the production of planes to 48,000. By 1943 he had twice doubled the strength of the American army to a total of 7 million men, and by the end of the first year of the war had raised American armaments production to the same level as that of the three Axis powers taken together. By 1944 he had doubled it once more.

On American initiative the Allies now began co-ordinating their strategy. Unlike the Tripartite Pact powers, which were never able to develop unified military planning, the Allied commissions and staffs that were immediately established held more than 200 conferences and consistently arranged for joint measures. They were aided by the fact that they agreed on a distinct goal—to defeat the enemy—whereas Germany, Italy, and Japan were pursuing extremely vague and at the same time excessive aims, each by itself in different parts of the world. The three great have-not powers were as fascinated as they were driven by their own dynamism. Mussolini commented on their vast appetite for territory in a remark he made at the end of August, 1941, when he joined Hitler in inspecting the ruins of the fortress of Brest-Litowsk. The German dictator was going on in his usual way about his plans for carving up the world. Utilizing a pause, Mussolini, the story goes, interjected with ironic mildness that when the partitioning was over there would be “nothing left but the moon.”

Otherwise that meeting was chiefly intended as a reply to the enemy alliance, whose outlines could already be discerned. Some two weeks before, Roosevelt and Churchill, after meeting off the coast of Newfoundland, had formulated their war aims in the Atlantic Charter. The Axis partners now countered with Hitler’s slogans of a “New Order for Europe” and “European solidarity.” Taking up the watchword of a “Pan-European crusade against Bolshevism,” they tried to rouse that type of internationalism (an unexamined inner contradiction) that was peculiar to all the Fascist movements. But in this matter, too, the consequences of Hitler’s renunciation of politics soon made themselves felt. It was exactly as if he had not been the man who had used the principle of tactical duality to supreme advantage—that form of courtship which inextricably combined intimidation with promises. For now he seemed to count only the principle of crude domination. “If I conquer a free country only to give it back its freedom, what’s the point?” he asked early in 1942. “One who has spilled blood has the right to exercise rule.” And he said he could only smile when “the blabbermouths claim that union can be brought about by talking.

… Union can only be created and preserved by force.” Even later, under the impact of continual defeats, he rejected all the proposals by members of his entourage that would have relaxed the stupid pattern of crushing the rest of Europe and instituted relations more akin to partnerships. It drove him “mad,” he declared, when people kept coming at him all the time about the alleged honor of these “stinking little countries” that existed only because “a few European powers could not agree on devouring them.” Nowadays all he could think of was the stark and uninspired concept of mustering all one’s force and stubbornly holding out.

The same tendency, sharpened by moods of panic, meanwhile led at the front to his first serious disagreement with the generals. As long as the German armies had been successful, differences of opinions could be covered over and recurrent mistrust drowned out in ringing toasts to victory. But when the tide began to turn, the long repressed resentment came to the fore with redoubled force. Hitler now intervened more and more frequently in operations; he issued direct instructions to army groups and sector staffs, and quite often even interfered in the tactical decisions on the divisional and regimental levels. The commander in chief of the army was “hardly more than a letter-carrier,” Halder noted on December 7, 1941. Twelve days later, in conjunction with the disputes over the “hold-the-line” order, Brauchitsch was allowed to resign—in disfavor. In keeping with the prime solution he had found for all previous crises in the leadership, Hitler himself assumed the role of commander in chief of the army. It was only one more proof of the totally chaotic organization on all planes that he thus became his own subordinate twice over. For, in 1934, after Hindenburg’s death, he had assumed the (predominantly ceremonial) office of supreme commander of the armed forces. And, in 1938, after Blomberg’s resignation, he had taken over the (actual) High Command of the armed forces. Now he justified his decision in a remark that, along with expressing his deep distrust of the army people, announced his intention to heighten the role of ideology: “Anybody can handle operational leadership—that’s easy,” he declared. “The task of the commander in chief of the army is to give the army National Socialist training. I know no general of the army who could perform this task the way I would have it. Therefore I have decided to take over the command of the army myself.”

Along with von Brauchitsch, the commander in chief of Army Group Center, von Bock, was relieved and replaced by Field Marshal von Kluge; von Rundstedt, commander in chief of Army Group South, was replaced by Field Marshal von Reichenau. General Guderian was relieved of his command for infractions of the “hold-the-line” order; General Hoepner was actually cashiered and General von Sponeck condemned to death. Field Marshal von Leeb, commander in chief of Army Group North, voluntarily resigned. Many other generals and divisional commanders were recalled. The “expressions of contempt” Hitler had applied to von Brauchitsch since the end of 1941 now represented his opinion of the high-ranking officers as a whole: “A vain, cowardly scoundrel—who has completely ruined the whole campaign plan in the East by his continual interference and his continual disobedience.” Half a year earlier, in the jubilant days of the Battle of Smolensk, he had said that he had “marshals of historic stature and a unique corps of officers.”⁴⁴

During the early months of 1942 the grim defensive battles on all sectors of the front continued. Again and again war diaries note “undesirable developments,” “awful mess,” “day of savage fighting,” “deep penetrations,” or “dramatic scene with the Führer.” At the end of February Moscow was once again more than sixty-two miles from the front. At this time total German casualties came to something over 1 million, or 31.4 per cent of the Eastern army. The heavy fighting did not ebb until the spring, with the beginning of the thaw; by then both sides were exhausted. Visibly scarred by what had happened, Hitler admitted to his table companions that the winter disaster had virtually stunned him for a moment; no one could imagine what energy these three months had cost him and what a terrible toll they had taken of his nerves. Goebbels, visiting him at the Führer’s headquarters, was shocked by his appearance. He found him “very much aged”; he did not recall ever having seen him “so serious and so subdued.” Hitler complained of spells of dizziness and declared that the mere sight of snow gave him physical pain. When he went to Berchtesgaden for a few days at the end of April and was caught by a belated snowstorm there, he hurriedly departed again. “It’s a kind of flight from the snow,” Goebbels noted.

But when “this winter of our discontent,” as Guderian called it, was over and the German advance began moving once more with the coming of spring, Hitler regained his confidence. Sometimes, in moods of elation, he would even grumble that fate was letting him wage war only against second-class enemies. But his self-confidence was brittle and his nerves unstable. One of Chief of Staff von Halder’s diary entries makes that clear: “His underestimation of the enemy potentialities, always his shortcoming, is now gradually assuming grotesque forms. There is no longer any question of serious work. Morbid reaction to momentary impressions and complete incomprehension of the apparatus of leadership and its possibilities are characteristic of this so-called ‘leadership.’ ”

From the plan of operations for the summer of 1942 it might appear that Hitler had learned from the experiences of the preceding year. Instead of being distributed among three spearheads as heretofore, all offensive forces were to be massed in the south in order “finally to annihilate what vital defensive strength the Soviets have left and to remove from their grasp as far as possible the principal sources of energy for their war economy.” It was also planned to cease operations in good time, prepare winter quarters, and, if need be, build a defensive line corresponding to the west wall (Ost-wall), which in itself would allow Germany to wage a hundred years’ war. “But in that case it would no longer cause us any special concern.”⁴⁵

But when the German troops reached the Don, during the second half of July, 1942, and had not yet been able to throw the projected pincers around the enemy forces, Hitler once more fell victim to his impatience and his nerves and forgot all the lessons of the past summer. On July 23 he gave orders to divide the offensive into two simultaneous, separating operations. Army Group B was to advance through Stalingrad to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Army Group A was to annihilate the enemy armies near Rostov, then reach the eastern coast of the Black Sea and, march toward Baku. The forces that at the beginning of the offensive had occupied a front of about 500 miles would, at the end of the operations, have to cover a line more than 2,500 miles long against an enemy whom they had been unable to engage in battle, let alone defeat.

Hitler’s euphoric judgment of what the German army could do was presumably based on the illusory look of the map. In the late summer of 1942 his power had reached the point of its greatest extension. German troops stood on the North Cape and along the Atlantic Coast, in Finland, and throughout the Balkans. In North Africa General Rommel, whom the Allies had thought already beaten, had with inferior forces thrown the British back across the Egyptian border as far as El Alamein. In the East Wehrmacht soldiers crossed the border into Asia at the end of July. In the south they reached the burning, shattered refineries of Maikop at the beginning of August. But Hitler obtained hardly any of the oil that had served, during the cruel struggles of the preceding weeks, as the reason for the offensive. On August 21 German soldiers raised the swastika flag on the Elbrus, the highest mountain in the Caucasus. Two days later the Sixth Army reached the Volga at Stalingrad.

But appearances were misleading. For the rapidly spreading war on three continents, on the seas and in the air, the men, the armaments, the transport, the raw materials and the leadership were lacking. By the time Hitler reached his zenith, he had long been a defeated man. The abrupt succession of crises and setbacks that now descended, their effects worsened by his rigidity, revealed the unreal nature of this enormously expanded power.

The first symptoms of crisis appeared in the East. Since the beginning of the 1942 summer offensive Hitler had transferred his headquarters from Rastenburg to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine; and here, in the daily strategy conferences, he defended his decision to conquer both the Caucasus and Stalingrad. His defense grew increasingly vehement, although possession of the city on the Volga had meanwhile become virtually meaningless so long as the German armies could check traffic on the river. On August 21 there was an angry dispute when Halder argued that German effective strength was not sufficient for two such wearing offensives. The chief of staff implied that Hitler’s military decisions ignored the limits of what was possible and, as he later put it, gave “full power to wishful thinking.” When in the course of the argument he pointed out that the Russians were producing 1,200 tanks monthly, Hitler, almost beside himself, forbade him to utter “such idiotic nonsense.”⁴⁶

Approximately two weeks later the slowing of the advance on the Caucasus front gave rise to another clash in the Führer’s headquarters. This time the submissive General Jodi dared to defend Field Marshal List, commander of Army Group A. Moreover, Jodi quoted Hitler’s own words to prove that List was only obeying the instructions he had received. In a rage, Hitler broke off the conversation. On September 9 he demanded that the field marshal resign, and that same evening he himself took over the command of Army Group A. From this point on he suspended almost all contact with the generals attached to the Führer’s headquarters. For several months he even refused to shake hands with Jodi; he avoided the conference room. Conferences took place in very restricted groups, the atmosphere permanently icy, in his own small blockhouse, and precise minutes were taken. Hitler left his blockhouse only after dark, and by concealed paths. Henceforth he also took his meals alone, only his Alsatian dog keeping him company; he rarely asked visitors to join him. Thus the evening gathering at table dropped out of his life, and with it ended all that petty bourgeois sociability and cozy social intercourse in the Führer’s headquarters. At the end of September Hitler finally relieved Halder of his duties also. For some time he had been impressed by the reports from General Zeitzler, chief of staff to the commander in chief, West. They were distinguished by a wealth of tactical ideas and an optimistic attitude. Hitler said he now wanted “a man like this Zeitzler” at his side, and he appointed him the new army chief of staff.

Meanwhile, with increasing casualties, more and more units of the Sixth Army had reached Stalingrad and occupied positions in the north and the south of the city. To all appearances the Russians were determined this time not to evade but to give battle. An order of the day from Stalin had fallen into German hands. In it he informed his people in the tone of a concerned father of his country that from now on the Soviet Union could no longer surrender territory. Every foot of soil must be defended to the utmost. As though he felt personally challenged by this order, Hitler now demanded, against the advice both of Zeitzler and of General Paulus, the commander of the Sixth Army, the capture of Stalingrad. The city became a prestige item, its capture “urgently necessary for psychological reasons,” as Hitler declared on October 2. A week later he added that Communism must be “deprived of its shrine.” The bloody struggle for houses, residential areas, and factories which then began caused high casualties on both sides. Yet everyone momentarily expected news of the fall of Stalingrad.

Since the winter disaster, when the specter of defeat had first appeared to him, Hitler had been giving all his energy to the Russian campaign. It became more and more obvious that he was neglecting all the other theaters of war. He still preferred thinking in terms of vast spans of time and distances, in eons and continents; but North Africa, for example, was too remote for him. In any case, he never adequately recognized the strategic importance of the Mediterranean area and thus once again demonstrated how nonpolitical and abstract, how essentially “literary” his thinking was. Lacking supplies and reserves, the Afrika Korps wasted its offensive strength. Submarine warfare, too, suffered from Hitler’s bias. Up to the end of 1941 no more than sixty U-boats were available for assignment. A year later the complement of approximately one hundred units, which had been called for at the beginning of the war, was at last attained. But by then the enemy, having felt the brunt of the U-boat warfare, had devised defensive measures that swung the balance the other way.

In the air war, too, the whole picture now changed. At the beginning of January, 1941, the British cabinet had issued a strategic plan for the air war that aimed at eliminating Germany’s synthetic fuel industry in a series of purposeful air raids and thus, by “paralyzing vital segments of industry” numb the entire war-making ability of the Reich.⁴⁷ But the concept, which undoubtedly would have given the events of the war a very different course if it had been implemented immediately, was not carried out until more than three years later. In the meantime, other views prevailed, principally the idea of area bombing, terror bombing of the civilian population. The new phase was initiated on the night of March 28, 1942, with a major raid by the Royal Air Force on Lübeck. The historic city of patricians “burned like kindling,” according to the official report. In response Hitler called in two bomber groups of approximately one hundred planes from Sicily. In the following weeks they carried out reprisal attacks, so-called Baedeker raids, against the artistic treasures of old English cities. The vast proportional difference in strength that had meanwhile developed became apparent when the British on May 30, 1942, responded with the first 1,000-bomber raid of the war. During the second half of the year the Americans joined them, and from 1943 on, Germany was exposed to an incessant air offensive, “round-the-clock” bombing. Taking account of the changed situation, Churchill declared in a speech in London’s Mansion House: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”⁴⁸

Events on the fronts confirmed this dictum. On November 2 General Montgomery, after preparatory massed artillery fire lasting for ten days, broke through the German-Italian positions at El Alamein with overwhelmingly superior forces. Shortly afterward, in the early morning hours of November 8, British and American troops landed on the coasts of Morocco and Algeria and occupied French North Africa as far as the Tunisian border. Some ten days later, on November 19, two Soviet army groups launched—in a raging snowstorm—the counteroffensive at Stalingrad. After successfully breaking through the Rumanian sector of the front they encircled some 220,000 men with 100 tanks, 1,800 guns and 10,000 vehicles between the Volga and the Don. When General Paulus reported the encirclement, Hitler ordered him to move his headquarters into the city and form a defense perimeter, a so-called hedgehog position. Only a few days before, Hitler had telegraphed to Rommel, in response to his request for permission to retreat: “In your present situation there can be no other thought but to persevere, to yield not a step, and to throw into the battle every weapon and every soldier that can still be freed for service…. It would not be the first time in history that a stronger will triumphed over the enemy’s stronger battalions. But you can show your troops no other way but the one that leads to victory or to death.”

The three November offensives of 1942 marked the turning point of the war. The initiative had finally passed to the opposite side. As if he wanted one more stab at playing generalissimo, Hitler on November 11 ordered his troops to march into the unoccupied part of France. And in his annual speech delivered in commemoration of the putsch of November, 1923, he struck one of those rigid poses whose basis can only be the willingness to let the worst happen. “There will no longer be any peace offers coming from us,” he cried. In contrast to imperial Germany, he continued, there now stood at the head of the Reich a man who “has always known nothing but struggle and with it only one principle: Strike, strike, and strike again!”

This principle now became his new strategy, replacing all other concepts : Hold out! When the defeat of the Afrika Korps was already sealed, in his fixation on holding out he ordered several units, which he had hitherto withheld from Rommel, sent to the by now lost cause in Tunis. He curtly rejected Mussolini’s pleas that he try for another understanding with Stalin. He rejected all proposals to shorten the Eastern front by drawing in the lines. He wanted to stay in North Africa, hold Tunis, advance in Algeria, defend Crete, keep twenty-four European countries occupied, defeat the Soviet Union plus England and the United States. And with all that, his basic emotion intruding more and more frequently upon all rational thought, he wanted to guarantee that now at last—as he put it in the midst of retreat, flight, and nemesis—“international Jewry is recognized in all its diabolic dangerousness.”⁵⁰

The symptoms of his intellectual decay were accompanied by a process of organizational dissolution that could be felt everywhere. The night after the beginning of the Allied landing in North Africa Hitler delivered the above-mentioned speech in Munich. Then, accompanied by his adjutants and personal intimates, he went to the Berghof in Berchtesgaden. Keitel and Jodi stayed in a building on the edge of town. The armed forces operations staff (Wehrmachtsführungsstab) was quartered in a special train at the Salzburg railroad station, while the General Staff of the army, which was really in charge of things, was far away in its headquarters near Angerburg in East Prussia. During the following days Hitler remained in Berchtesgaden. Instead of consulting and organizing defensive measures, he merely took satisfaction in the fact that it was he against whom all this gigantic armada had been assembled. He became intoxicated with the far-reaching operations of the kind he could no longer mount and criticized the enemy’s deliberate procedures. He himself, he said, would have acted more directly, and psychologically more effectively, by landing just outside Rome, in this way cutting off the Axis troops in North Africa and southern Italy.⁵¹

Meanwhile, the ring around Stalingrad was closing ever more tightly. Hitler did not return to Rastenburg until the evening of November 23, and it cannot be definitely ascertained whether he underestimated the seriousness of the situation or was attempting by a display of composure to conceal it from himself and his entourage. At any rate, when General Zeitzler asked to see him in connection with several overdue decisions, Hitler attempted to put him off until the following day. The chief of staff insisted on a meeting and proposed that immediate orders go to the Sixth Army to break out of the pocket. The result was one of those disputes that flared up repeatedly until the early part of February, when Hitler’s hold-the-line strategy ended in a debacle. By about two o’clock in the morning Zeitzler apparently thought he had convinced Hitler. At any rate, he informed the headquarters of Army Group B that he expected to obtain the signature to the break-out order early in the morning. The truth was that Hitler had evidently made one of his pseudoconcessions. But the quarrel went on into the following weeks. It took a wealth of variant forms. Hitler mustered all his arts of persuasion: long, seemingly reasonable silences, endless talking about trivialities, yielding on other points, firing an overwhelming barrage of figures. But through it all, with growing obstinacy, Hitler held to his resolve. Contrary to his usual habit, he even tried on occasion to strengthen it by enlisting the support of others. With psychological adroitness he had Göring—whose prestige had taken such a beating and who now seemed only to be waiting for a chance to exude optimism once more—issue an assurance that the Luftwaffe would be able to supply the encircled army. In the course of an argument with Zeitzler he summoned Generals Keitel and Jodi; at this time these three held the posts of chief of staff, chief of the High Command of the armed forces, and chief of the armed forces operations staff. Standing, his expression solemn, Hitler formally asked them their views: “I have a very grave decision to make. Before I make it, I should like to hear your opinions. Should I abandon Stalingrad or not?”

As always, Keitel abjectly confirmed his wishes: “With flashing eyes he exclaimed: ‘Mein Führer, stand at the Volga!’ ” And Jodi recommended waiting and seeing. Zeitzler alone once again pleaded for a break-out. Hitler was thus able to sum up the results of the conference: “You see, Herr General, I am not alone in my opinion. It is shared by both of these officers, whose rank is higher than yours. I will therefore abide by my previous decisions.” Sometimes one has the impression that Hitler, after so many partial, inadequate successes, had come to an ultimate decision that in Stalingrad he would challenge not only Stalin, not only his enemies in this sprawling, multifront war, but fate itself. The ever more patent crisis did not deter him; rather, in a curious way he put his trust in it. For his oldest recipe for success, repeatedly confirmed ever since the party conflict of the summer of 1921, had been to seek out crises in order to derive new impetus and confidence in victory from overcoming them. From the military point of view the Battle of Stalingrad was not really the turning point of the entire war; but it was that for Hitler. “If we abandon it—Stalingrad—we are really abandoning the whole meaning of the campaign,” he declared. With his passion for mythologizing, he surely felt it as a sign that this city bore the name of one of his great symbolic enemies. Here he wanted to win or go down to his doom.

By the end of January, the Sixth Army was in a hopeless position, the soldiers totally exhausted and demoralized by cold, epidemics, and hunger. But when General Paulus asked permission to surrender on the ground that the collapse was inescapable, Hitler telegraphed back: “Forbid surrender. The army will hold its position to the last soldier and the last cartridge, and by its heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution to the building of the defensive front and the salvation of Western civilization.” Speaking to the Italian ambassador, he compared the Sixth Army to the 300 Greeks at Thermopylae. And Göring made a similar comparison in a speech on January 30, when resistance died in the ruins of Stalingrad and only a few desperate and isolated remnants continued to defend themselves: “In future days this will be said of the heroic battle on the Volga: If thou comest to Germany, say thou sawest us lying at Stalingrad, as the law of honor and warfare hath commanded for Germany.”

Three days later, on February 2, the last remnants of the Sixth Army surrendered. A few days before, Hitler had appointed General Paulus a field marshal and promoted 117 other officers to the next higher rank. Shortly before 3 P.M. a German reconnaissance plane flying high above the city radioed that “no more fighting” could be observed in Stalingrad. Ninety-one thousand German soldiers were taken prisoner; 5,000 of them returned home years later.

Hitler’s indignation at Paulus for not having the greatness to cope with disaster and for capitulating prematurely was discharged at the military conference in the Führer’s headquarters:

In its psychological though not its military aspect Stalingrad was in fact one of the great turning points of the war. Both in the Soviet Union and among the: Allies the victory produced a tangible change of mood and awoke hopes that afterward were, often disappointed. At the same time, among Germany’s allies and in the neutral countries, faith in Hitler’s superiority suffered a distinct blow. In Germany, too, confidence in Hitler’s skill as a leader, already weakened, visibly faded. At his daily conference with his associates Goebbels issued instructions to exploit the defeat “psychologically for strengthening our people.” He declared that “every word about this heroic struggle would go down in history” and required that the armed forces communiqué in particular be “so phrased… that down the centuries it will continue to stir hearts.” As models he recommended Caesar’s addresses to his soldiers, Frederick the Great’s appeal to his soldiers before the Battle of Leuthen, and Napoleon’s proclamations to his Guard. “Only now, perhaps,” a special message from the office of the Reich propaganda chief read, “have we entered the Frederician era of this mighty and decisive conflict. The Battles of Kolin, Hochkirch, Kunersdorf, all three names signify grave defeats for Frederick the Great, veritable catastrophes, far worse in their effects than anything that has taken place in recent weeks on the Eastern front. But Kolin was followed by a Leuthen, Hochkirch and Kunersdorf by a Liegnitz, a Torgau and a Burkersdorf—and at last by ultimate victory….’’Yet despite such inspiring parallels, which henceforth right down to the end of the war were repeatedly cited in ever more hortatory terms, a Sicherheitsdienst report stated : “The conviction is general that Stalingrad means a turning point in the war…. Our fickle racial comrades are inclined to regard Stalingrad as the beginning of the end.”

For Hitler the debacle of Stalingrad meant a fresh thrust into mythological realms. From that time on, his imagination was captivated by images of catastrophic collapse. The Casablanca Conference, at which Churchill and Roosevelt at the end of January proclaimed the principle of unconditional surrender, and thus on their part burned all bridges behind them, reinforced these fantasies. Starting with the strategy of holding firm at any price, which dominated all of 1943, as the end drew nearer Hitler more and more categorically developed the strategy of a flamboyant downfall.

Lost Reality

From the beginning of the Russian campaign on, Hitler led a retired life. His headquarters, which also housed the High Command of the armed forces, was once again located in the extensive woods beyond Rastenburg in East Prussia. A system of walls, barbed wire, and mines protected the grouping of bunkers and buildings. The prevailing atmosphere was peculiarly gloomy and monotonous. Visitors have described the place as a blending of monastery and concentration camp. The small, unadorned rooms with their plain deal furniture formed a striking contrast to the pomp of past years, the spacious halls, the grand perspectives and all the theatrical lavishness of Berlin, Munich, and Berchtesgaden. Sometimes it seemed as if Hitler had retreated back to the cave. Italian Foreign Minister Ciano compared the inhabitants of the headquarters with troglodytes, and found the atmosphere depressing: “One does not see a single colorful spot, not a single lively touch. The anterooms are full of people smoking, eating and chatting. Smell of kitchens, uniforms, heavy boots.”⁵³

During the early months of the war Hitler had taken occasional trips to the front, and visited battlefields, headquarters, or military hospitals. But after the first failures he began to shun reality and withdraw into the abstract world of map tables and military conferences. From that time on, his experience of the war was almost exclusively as lines and figures on paper landscapes. He faced the public less and less often; he shrank from the onetime grand appearances. With the defeats he lost the energy he needed for striking poses. Once he had dropped his monumental attitudes, the changes in him showed all too plainly: he moved through the scenery of headquarters wearily, with hunched shoulders, one foot dragging, eyes staring dully out of a pasty face. His left hand had a slight tremble. Here was a man obviously on the physical downgrade, a bitter man, who admitted that he was plagued by melancholia. And he plunged ever deeper into the complexes and hatreds of his early years. To be sure, Hitler’s personality had always been marked by rigid, static features. But with this phase it is clear we are witnessing a galloping process of regression. At the same time it seems as if this regression were once more revealing his true, unvarnished nature.

The isolation into which Hitler had retreated after the quarrel with the generals increased after Stalingrad. He often sat brooding, sunk in deep depression. Or else, with inward turned gaze, he would take a few aimless steps at the side of his Alsatian through the headquarters terrain. A tense awkwardness hung over all relationships: “Faces froze into masks,” one of the participants wrote. “Often we stood about in silence.” Goebbels noted in his diary:

In fact Hitler began more and more palpably to suffer from his selfchosen isolation. In contrast to his youth, he complained, he could “no longer stand being alone.” His life style, already marked by a spartan note during the first years of the war, became plainer and plainer. The meals at the Führer’s table were notorious for their simplicity. Only once more did he attend a performance of Götterdämmerung in Bayreuth, and after the second Russian winter he no longer wanted even to hear music. From 1941 on, it had been his task, he later declared, “in all circumstances not to lose my nerve, but where there is a breakdown anywhere constantly to find escapes and remedies in order somehow to fix matters up…. For five years I have been cut off from the outer world; I have not gone to the theater, not heard a concert, no longer see any movies. I live solely for the task of leading this struggle because I know that unless a person of iron will stands in the background, the struggle cannot be won.” The question remains, however, whether the very sacrifices he imposed on himself in his maniacal insistence on the exercise of will, whether this single-minded concentration upon the war, did not constrict his mind and rob him of all inner freedom.

The tensions he underwent were discharged, more powerfully than ever before, in an unquenchable urge to launch into tirades. He found a new audience in his secretaries, for whom he tried in vain to provide a “congenial atmosphere” by offerings of cake and a fireplace fire. Sometimes he had his adjutants, his doctors, Bormann, or some chance guest join them. As his insomnia grew worse, he steadily extended his monologues. By 1944 the members of the circle would be desperately forcing their eyes to stay open until the graying dawn. Only then, as Guderian reports, would Hitler “lie down for a brief slumber, from which the pushing brooms of the scrubwomen at his bedroom door would awaken him by nine o’clock at the latest.”

He continued to stick to the themes which had been part of the repertory of earlier years, and which are recorded in the table talk: his youth in Vienna, the First World War and the years of struggle, history, prehistory, nutrition, women, art, the fight for survival. He grew exercised over the “hopping around” of the dancer Gret Palucca, over the “stunted smears” of modern art, over Conductor Knappertsbusch’s fortissimi, which forced opera singers to shriek so that they “looked like tadpoles.” He spoke of his disgust with the “idiotic bourgeoisie,” with the “herd of swine” in the Vatican or with the “insipid Christian heaven.” Along with ruminations about the imperial racial state, Hannibal’s elephants, Ice Age catastrophes, Caesar’s wife, or “the gang of jurists” came recommendations for a vegetarian diet, a prospectus for a popular Sunday newspaper that would carry “lots of pictures,” and serialized fiction “so that the gals can get something ou\ of it.”⁵⁵ Stunned by the unending torrent of words, the Italian Foreign Minister commented that Hitler was probably very happy to be Hitler because it permitted him to talk eternally.

More striking than the endless flow of his monologues was, at least in the recorded material, the crudity of expression, in which he unmistakably relapsed back to his origins. The ideas themselves, the anxieties, wishes and aims, were unchanged from his early days. What is more, he now laid aside all the disguises and statesmanlike poses, and fell back on the vehement and vulgar phrases of the beer-hall demagogue, not to say the denizen of the flophouse. With a good deal of zest he discussed cannibalism among the partisans or in besieged Leningrad. He called Roosevelt a “cracked fool,” Churchill’s speeches “a souse’s bullshit,” and irritably denounced von Manstein as a “pisspot strategist.” He praised the Soviet system for forgoing all the “humanitarian blather,” and imagined how he would meet a mutiny in Germany by “shooting a batch of a few hundred thousand people.” One of his favorite, “constantly repeated” maxims was the sentence: “A dead man can no longer put up a fight.”⁵⁶

Among those symptoms of decline must be included the intellectual narrowing that threw him back to the viewpoint of a local party leader. From the third winter on, he could see the war in no other light than that of a “seizure of power” expanded to global dimensions. In the “period of struggle,” too, he comforted himself, he had faced overwhelmingly superior forces—“a single man with a small band of followers.” The war was nothing but a “gigantic repetition” of earlier experiences. The record of one of the table talks reads: “At lunch… the chief pointed out that this war was a faithful copy of the conditions of the period of struggle. What took place among us then as a struggle of parties in the domestic realm is taking place today as the struggle of nations in the foreign realm.”⁵⁷

In keeping with the precipitate aging of his appearance, he occasionally complained that the years were robbing him of all his gambler’s pleasure in taking risks. Intellectually, too, he more and more lived in the past. The garrulous reviews of matters long past, with which he filled his nocturnal monologues, had the sound of an old man’s nostalgias. In his military decisions he frequently referred to the experiences of the First World War, while his interest in armaments became more and more restricted to the traditional weapons systems. He neither grasped the crucial importance of radar and the splitting of the atom nor the value of a heat-seeking ground-to-air rocket or a sound-guided torpedo. He also blocked the large-scale production of the first jet plane, the Messerschmitt 262. With senile obstinacy he insisted on far-fetched objections, reversed or changed decisions, confounded his entourage with hastily reeled-off statistics, or took refuge in broad psychological generalizations. When on the basis of a newspaper report of British experiments with jet planes he was at last persuaded early in 1944 to permit the manufacture of the Me 262, he tried to hedge by ordering that the plane not be built as a fighter against the Allied air raiders. Instead, contrary to the advice of the experts, it was to be employed as a fast bomber. The physical strain on the pilots would be intolerable, he decided, and also argued that the faster planes were really slower in air combat. In fact, he snatched at anything for an argument; and while Germany’s cities were reduced to rubble, he refused even to permit a few experimental uses of the plane as a fighter. Finally he banned any further discussion of the subject.

Naturally these struggles with his own people increased his usual abnormal suspiciousness. Often he obtained information from staff headquarters over the heads of his closest military advisers, and occasionally he sent his army adjutant, Major Engel, to the front by plane to check the actual situation. Officers who came from the battle areas were not allowed to speak on military matters with anyone, especially not with the chief of staff, before they had been received in the Führer’s bunker. With his obsession for checking up, Hitler praised his organization for one of its crucial defects. On the whole vast Eastern front, he declared, there was “not a regiment and not a battalion whose position was not followed up three times a day in the Führer’s headquarters here.” One major reason so many officers came to grief was this paralyzing paranoia, which undermined every relationship. Eventually he quarreled with all the commanders in chief of the army, all the chiefs of staff, eleven of the eighteen field marshals, twenty-one of nearly forty full generals, and nearly all the commanders of the three sectors of the Eastern front. The space around him grew increasingly emptier. As long as Hitler remained in headquarters, Goebbels declared, his dog Blondi was closer to him than any human being.

After Stalingrad his nerves were plainly giving out. Up to then Hitler had rarely lost his stoic bearing which, he believed, was among the attributes of great commanders. Even in critical situations he had maintained an ostentatious calm. But now that pose was accompanied by signs of fatigue, and his violent fits of rage revealed the price that years of overtaxing his strength had cost. When General Staff officers delivered their situation reports, he railed at them as “idiots,” “cowards,” and “liars.” Guderian, who at this time saw him again after a long interval, noted in astonishment Hitler’s “irascibility, and the unpredictability of his words and decisions.” He was also subject to unwonted sentimental lapses. When Bormann told him of his wife’s confinement, Hitler reacted with tears in his eyes. More often than ever, he spoke of his retirement and how he would give himself up to meditating, reading, and running a museum.

There is some evidence that from the end of 1942 on, the entire stabilization system of his nerves gave way. He concealed this only by a tremendous act of desperate self-discipline. The generals attached to the Führer’s headquarters felt the symptoms of the crisis, although the later descriptions of a Hitler continually raging, totally subject to the explosions of an unrestrained temperament, belong in the category of apologetic exaggeration. The minutes of the military conferences, some of which have been preserved, indicate instead that he made strong efforts to fit the image he had chosen for himself. On the whole, he succeeded.

The very stringency of the daily schedule at headquarters helped. Immediately after awakening, Hitler studied the news. Toward noon the grand conference was held. Then followed more conferences, dictation, reception of guests, and discussions until the evening conference, which usually took place during the night. All this regular attention to duties did violence to his nature and was in deliberate opposition to his inveterate yearning for passivity and indolence. As late as December, 1944, he sketched, in a casual remark, the image of a genius saved by steady purpose; with difficulty and occasional deviations he was trying to conform to that image:

Genius is something will-o-the-wispy if it is not sustained by perseverance and fanatical tenacity. That is the most important thing there is in human life. People who have only inspirations, ideas, and so on, but who do not have firmness of character, who lack tenacity and perseverance, will amount to nothing in spite of all. They are adventurers. If things go well, they climb; when things go badly, they immediately slump down and give up everything. But you can’t make world history with that kind of attitude.⁵⁸

In its functionalism and gloom the Führer’s headquarters was not unlike that “state cage” into which his father had once led him and where the people, according to young Hitler, had “sat crouching on one another close as monkeys.” The mechanism into which he forced his life was so antipathetic to his nature that it could only be maintained artificially. Medication and druglike preparations enabled him to meet the unaccustomed demands upon his nature. Until the end of 1940 the drugs do not seem to have influenced his health significantly. Ribbentrop, it is true, reported a heated dispute in the summer of 1940, in the course of which Hitler dropped into a chair and began groaning that he had a feeling of dissolution and sensed he was on the verge of a stroke.⁵⁹ But the description suggests that this scene should be reckoned among those half-hysterical, half-histrionic displays that Hitler used as a method of coercive argumentation. His medical checkups at the beginning and the end of the year merely showed slightly increased blood pressure and those gastric and intestinal disturbances from which he had always suffered.⁶⁰

With hypochondriacal pedantry Hitler noted every deviation in the findings of his checkups. He was constantly observing himself, taking his pulse, reading medical books, and taking medicines “literally in quantity”: sleeping and kola pills, digestives, cold pills, vitamins. Even the eucalyptus candies that were always on hand gave him the sense of looking after his health. If a medicine were prescribed for him without an exact dosage, he took it from morning to night almost incessantly. Professor Morell, the onetime fashionable Berlin doctor for skin and venereal diseases, had advanced through the good offices of Heinrich Hoffmann to the rank of one of Hitler’s personal physicians. For all his devotion to medicine, Professor Morell was not without traces of quackery. He gave Hitler injections almost daily: sulfanilamide, glandular preparations, glucose, or hormones that were supposed to improve or regenerate his circulation, his intestinal flora, or the state of his nerves. Göring sarcastically called him “Reich Injection Master.”

As time went on, Morell naturally had to resort to stronger drugs and shorter intervals in order to maintain Hitler’s performance. On top of this, he had to prescribe sedatives to calm the jangled nerves, so that Hitler was exposed to a permanent process of physiological stress. The consequences of this constant interference with his body processes by at times as many as twenty-eight different drugs became evident during the war, when the strain of events, the loss of sleep, the monotony of the vegetarian diet, and his troglodyte’s existence in the bunker world of headquarters, intensified the effects of the medicines. In August, 1941, Hitler complained of bouts of weakness, nausea and chills and fever. Swellings formed on his leg, quite possibly a reaction against the years of artificial regulation of his body. From this time on, at any rate, spells of exhaustion appeared with greater frequency. After Stalingrad he took a drug against depressive moods every other day.⁶¹ Thereafter, he could no longer endure bright light, and for this reason had a cap with a greatly enlarged vizor made for his walks outdoors. Sometimes he complained about disturbed balance: “I always have the feeling of tipping to the right.”⁶²

In spite of the visible changes in his exterior, his bowed back, his rapidly graying hair, he retained to the end an unusual capacity for work. Quite rightly, he himself attributed his remarkable energy to Morell’s efforts, overlooking the extent to which he was consuming his physical reserves. After the war, Professor Karl Brandt, who was a member of Hitler’s medical staff, said that the effect of Morell’s treatment was to “draw on what one might call life for years in advance” and that it had seemed as if Hitler “every year aged not a year but four or five years.” Hence the sudden and premature graying and his shattered appearance. In the euphorias produced by his drugs he seemed to glow like a wraith.

It would therefore be a mistake to attribute the symptoms of degeneration, the crises and fitful outbursts on Hitler’s part, to structural changes in his personality. The abuse of his physical potential and the consumption of his reserves partly covered over and partly intensified the existing elements, but did not cause—as has sometimes been asserted—the destruction of a hitherto intact personality.⁶³ This is the qualification that must be placed on all the disputes over the effects of the strychnine contained in some of Morell’s drugs, or whether Hitler suffered from Parkinson’s disease (paralysis agitans), or whether the trembling of his left arm, the stooped posture, and his locomotive difficulties were of psychosomatic origin. However shadowy he looked outwardly, masklike in his rigidity, leaning on a cane as he moved about headquarters, he was still the man he had once been. What is so staggering in his appearance during those last years is not so much his rapid aging as the consistency—bordering on paralysis—with which he took up and carried out his early obsessions.

He was a person who continually needed artificial charging. In a sense Morell’s drugs and medicines replaced the old stimulus of mass ovations. As noted above, Hitler shrank from the public after Stalingrad and in fact delivered only two more major speeches. Soon after the beginning of the war, he had begun this withdrawal, and all the propaganda efforts to create a mythology out of his remoteness was a poor substitute for the former sense cf his omnipresence, by which the regime had been able to tap a vein of energy, spontaneity, and spirit of sacrifice in the German people. Now this potential for affecting the masses was gone. For fear of losing his aura of invincibility, Hitler would not set foot in the shattered cities; for the same reason he would not face the masses after the defeats, although he presumably sensed that this shrinking could lose him not only power over men’s minds but also the source of his own energies. “Everything I am, I am through you alone,” he occasionally had cried to the masses. Beyond all the aspects of techniques of power, he had thereby been affirming a constitutional, almost a physiological dependency. For the rhetorical excesses in which he had indulged from the first, uncertain appearances in Munich beer halls all the way to the painful, determined efforts of the last two years, never had as their sole purpose the rousing of the energies of others. They served also to rally his own forces and were, beyond all political occasions and ends, a means of self-preservation. In one of his last great speeches he prepared the country for his coming silence by pointing to the momentousness of the events at the front: “What need is there for me to do much talking now?” But among his intimates he later complained that he no longer trusted himself to speak before 10,000 persons and declared that he probably would never again be able to deliver a major speech. The conception of the end of his career as an orator was associated with the idea of the end in general, of death.⁶⁴

Along with this retreat from the public, Hitler’s peculiar weakness as a leader became apparent for the first time. Ever since the days of his rise he had always maintained his superiority by the charisma of the demagogue and by tactical ingenuity. But in this stage of the war he had to meet other demands on leadership. The principle of rival authorities—the domestic intrigues and struggles, this whole chaos of powers that he had constructed around him in preceding years and manipulated with Machiavellian skill—was scarcely appropriate for the struggle against a resolute enemy. It turned out to be one of the fateful weaknesses of the regime. For it consumed the energies that the fight against the outside antagonist required and finally led to a condition approaching total anarchy. In the military field alone there were the theaters of war under the parallel authority of the High Command of the armed forces (OKW) and High Command of the army (OKH), the undefined special position of Göring, the authority of Hitler and the SS, which cut across all other channels of command, the confusion of all kinds of army divisions, grenadier units, air force infantry formations, the SS-in-arms, and the militia, each accessible to various official channels. On top of all this, finally, there was the relationship to the troops of allied countries, a relationship undermined by mutual distrust. The administrative structure in occupied Europe was similarly confused; new forms of domination were constantly being developed, from outright annexation through protectorate, government general, and civil administration. Hardly ever has a centering of all power in a single person ended in such total and blatant disorganization.

It is by no means clear, however, whether Hitler ever really recognized the ruinous effects of his style of leadership. Rational classifications, structural arrangements, any kind of quiet authority, were fundamentally so alien to him that until literally the last days of the war he repeatedly encouraged his entourage to feud over positions, competences, and ridiculous questions of rank. There are indications that he had more confidence in the hunger for power and the egotism manifested in such quarrels than in all possible unselfish attitudes, because they comported with his view of the world. The very objectivity of specialists made him suspicious of them. And so he tried to wage the war as far as possible without their help, without consultation, without the relevant documentation, without logistical calculations; he tried to wage the war in the anachronistic style of the solitary commanders of antiquity—and lost it.

Hitler’s weakness in leadership emerged most sharply in the course of 1943, when he had as yet developed no strategic conception of the further course of the war. He was uncertain, reluctant to make decisions, vacillating; and Goebbels spoke unequivocally of a “Leader crisis.” The propaganda chief repeatedly urged the hesitant Hitler to regain the initiative in the war by rigorously mobilizing all reserves. In conjunction with Albert Speer, who had been appointed Armaments Minister the previous year, and with Robert Ley and Walther Funk, Goebbels elaborated plans for an overall simplification of the administration, a drastic cutback in consumption for the privileged classes, an increase in armament production, and other similar measures. He was to notice, however, that the gauleiters and the top SA and party officials had long since lost their sacrificial devotion and veered toward becoming a parasitical ruling class. On February 18, 1943, Goebbels addressed a band of invited followers in the Sportpalast and posed his famous ten rhetorical questions. “In an uproar of wild enthusiasm,” as he put it, he obtained their consent to “total war.” This speech was aimed chiefly at breaking resistance among the higher functionaries, whose luxurious living would be affected. But it was intended also to overcome Hitler’s indecisiveness by a radicalizing appeal to the masses.⁶⁵

Hitler’s reluctance to impose the austerities of total war on the nation was partly the result of another memory, the shock of the November revolution of 1918. But it was also colored by his deep distrust of the inert and fickle masses. It is almost as if he realized how brittle and temporary his rule was and knew how much stood in the way of his intention of “compelling to greatness,” as he once put it, a shrinking and unwilling German people. England, in its war effort, was able to lower the level of private comfort far more drastically than the Reich, and England also employed far more women in the armaments industries than did Germany.⁶⁶

But there was still another factor in Hitler’s holding back from total war: the intrigues of Martin Bormann, who scented in the effort by Goebbels and Speer all sorts of dangers to his own position. By adaptability, diligence, and craftiness Bormann had worked his way upward in the preceding years to the post of “Führer’s secretary.” And behind that unassuming title he had established one of the strongest power bases within the regime. His short, stocky figure in the ill-fitting party functionary’s uniform was a fixed feature in all pictures of the Führer’s headquarters. He was always there, keeping watch, pondering, a cunning expression on his peasant face. The undetermined sphere of his authority, which he steadily enlarged by referring to the Führer’s alleged desires, assured him powers that in fact raised him to the status of the man who “secretly ran Germany.” Hitler, for his part, seemed happy to be freed of the burden of routine administrative work by this seemingly unassertive secretary. It was soon Bormann who granted or withdrew both authority and the Führer’s favor, who pushed through appointments and promotions, who praised, pestered, or eliminated people in government, but who all the while kept well in the background and could always come up with one slander or one flattery more than even his most powerful adversaries. By means of the visitor lists he controlled Hitler’s contacts with the outside world, and according to the testimony of one observer erected “a veritable Chinese wall” around Hitler.

He was helped in this by a growing desire for isolation from reality on Hitler’s part. Just as the onetime flophouse inmate had in imagination lived in palaces, the generalissimo who was having to retreat on all fronts constructed more and more magnificent imaginary worlds that he rapturously inhabited. Hitler’s tendency to reject reality took an increasingly pathological form after the turning point of the war. This is evidenced in much of his behavior, such as his habit of traveling across the country in a curtained parlor car, and if possible by night. He would keep the windows of the conference room at the Führer’s headquarters closed, and sometimes even blacked out, even in the most beautiful weather. Significantly, he began the day by looking over the prepared excerpts from the press; only then would he examine the latest data. His entourage has reported that he accepted the event itself more calmly than its echo in the press; reality irked him less than its image.

Hitler’s conversational style, constantly degenerating into monologue, his inability to listen or to register objections, and his growing insistence on columns of figures, his rage du nombre, must be reckoned a part of this syndrome. As late as the end of 1943 he was still speaking with total scorn of a study by General Thomas that presented the Russian potential as a serious danger. He bluntly declared that he wanted to see no more memoranda of this sort. At the same time he refused to visit the front or the staff headquarters behind the front. His last visit to the headquarters of an army group took place on September 8, 1943.⁶⁷ Many disastrous decisions resulted from this ignorance of the reality, for marks on maps told nothing about the climate, the degree of exhaustion of the soldiers, or the extent of their psychological reserves. And in the curiously abstract atmosphere of the conference room, realistic data on the state of equipment or supplies were hard to come by. The preserved minutes of conferences, moreover, have recorded the truckling attitude of the military chiefs, their undignified flatteries. Once Halder had departed, this tone took over completely, so that ultimately all military conferences became no more than “show sits” as the jargon of the Führer’s headquarters described those fraudulent lectures to the statesmen of Germany’s allies. An attempt by Speer to have Hitler meet some of the younger front-line officers came to nothing; neither did the effort to persuade him to visit bombed cities. Goebbels jealously pointed to the much more impressive example of Churchill. Once, when the Führer’s special train on its way to Berchtesgaden with blinds raised by mistake stopped beside a hospital train full of wounded men, Hitler became very agitated and ordered the blinds to be drawn at once.⁶⁸

It is true that, in the preceding years contempt for reality had been his strength. How else could he have risen out of nothingness and put across his bold triumphs in statesmanship? His early military successes may also have been partly based on that. But now that the tide had turned, disregard of reality drastically multiplied the effects of every defeat. On those occasions when reality forced itself all too painfully on him, he once more raised his old laments that he had become a politician against his will and was sorely burdened by the necessities of office which kept him from immortalizing himself with his cultural projects. “It’s a pity,” he would say, “that I have to wage war on account of a drunken fellow [Churchill], instead of serving the works of peace, like art.” He said he was longing to go to the theater or the Wintergarten in Berlin and “be human again.” Or he spoke bitterly of deception and treachery all around him, of the way the generals were always misleading him, and gave way more and more to an unwonted tone of lachrymose misanthropy: “I meet nothing but betrayal!”

From comparable observations during the twenties one of his early followers had drawn the conclusion that Hitler needed self-deception in order to be able to act at all.⁶⁹ He craved vastly overblown sham worlds, against whose background all obstacles became insignificant and all problems trivial. He was capable of acting only on the basis of false pretenses. That note of fantastical overexcitement associated with his personality derived from this disturbed relationship to reality. We might say: only unreality made him real. In his comments to his entourage, even in those weary, toneless monologues in the last phase of the war. his voice became animated only when he spoke of the “gigantic tasks,” the “enormous plans” for the future. Those were his real reality.

It was a monstrous prospect that opened before the favored group who sat deep into the night about the Führer’s table whenever he vouchsafed it “insights through the side door into paradise.” An entire continent was to be transformed by mass annihilation, extensive resettlements, assimilations and redistribution of the vacated areas. The program called for the conscious destruction of the past and the reshaping of all structures according to a plan without regard for historical tradition. True to his intellectual tendency, Hitler moved in spheres of vast proportions. Centuries shrank before his eyes, which saw only eternity; the world was reduced, and nothing was left of the Mediterranean but a mere, as he put it, “briny puddle.” The innocent age was approaching its end, and the millennium of a new way of thinking was dawning, a way founded upon science and artistic prophecy, and demanding gigantic projects. Its central idea was the salvation of the world from centuries-old infection in an eschatological struggle between pure and inferior blood.

His mission was to provide the good blood with an imperial basis: an empire dominated by Germany, comprising the greater part of Europe as well as vast areas in Asia, which a century hence would be “the most compact and the most colossal power bloc” that had ever existed. Unlike Himmler and the SS, Hitler was free of all romanticism about the East. “I’d rather tramp on foot to Flanders,” he commented, and bewailed the need to conquer territory in an easterly direction. Russia, he said, was “a dreadful country… the end of the world.” He associated Russia with images of Dante’s inferno. “Only reason bids us go to the East.”

Presiding over this power bloc would be a racially homogeneous master race described by Hitler as “creatively Aryan humanity of the Atalantine-Aryan-Nordic type.” It would be divided into a social hierarchy of three strata: the National Socialist “high nobility,” veterans of the struggle; the party members, who would form a kind of “new middle class”; and “the great anonymous masses… the collective of those who serve, those who never come of age,” as Hitler explained it. But these would still be called to rule over the “class of subject alien nationals… let us not flinch at calling them the modern slave class.” And however repellent this picture may seem to us, it had the sound of an ideal order, at least for the ideological vanguard of National Socialism. As Communism preached the utopia of a consistently egalitarian society, this was the utopia of a consistently hierarchic society. The difference was that the historically determined destiny of a class to rule was replaced by the “natural” destiny of a race to rule.

The prewar years had seen a host of measures to purify the race, such as the SS marriage regulations and the genetic point system introduced by the Race and Settlement Bureau of the SS. Now, in the conquered regions of the East, a new, far more comprehensive and radical campaign was launched. Once again Hitler and the executives of the new order proceeded with a combination of positive and negative measures, linking endeavors to select good blood with extermination of those of inferior race. “They will fall like flies,” the SS announced in one of its widely disseminated propaganda releases. And from Hitler’s monologues there emerged a picture of, as he phrased it, a biological “process of mucking out” all contaminants of alien races, with subsequent Germanization.

As always he displayed extraordinary energy for destruction. On October 7, 1939, in a secret decree he had appointed the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to the new post of Reich Commissioner for Consolidation of German Racialism, commissioned to undertake a racial “clean-up” in the East and prepare the region for an extensive resettlement program. Nevertheless, in this field, too, there soon developed that confusion of authorities and intentions that the regime engendered wherever it took action. The conquered Eastern territories became the testing ground for a multiplicity of genetic theories, which never progressed beyond their amateurish beginnings; and similarly, no more than a few confused outlines of the new order ever came into being.

In annihilation, on the other hand, the regime displayed the greatest effectiveness. The special vocabulary surrounding the extermination program was a good indication of how closely the regime identified its nature and its destiny with these activities. For this was the “world-historical task,” the “glorious page in our history,” the “supreme stress test,” in the course of which the followers were being trained to a new kind of heroism and toughness. “It is considerably easier in many cases,” Himmler declared, “to go into battle with a company than with the same company in some area to hold down an antagonistic population of culturally lower type, to carry out executions, transport people out of the area, take away howling and weeping women… this quiet compulsion to act, this quiet activity, this standing guard over our Weltanschauung, this need to be consistent, to be uncompromising—in many ways that is much, much harder.”⁷⁰ He defined his task: What was above all involved was “a perfectly clear solution” of the Jewish question. What was involved was the decision “to make this race disappear from the earth.” But since the majority of the German people were still not sufficiently enlightened about racial matters, the SS “has borne that for our people; we have taken the responsibility upon ourselves… and will then take the secret with us to our graves.”⁷¹

We still do not know when Hitler made the decision on the “final solution” of the Jewish question, for no document on the matter exists. Much earlier than his closest followers, evidently, he understood such words as “elimination” or “extermination” not merely metaphorically, but as acts of physical annihilation, because such thoughts held no terrors for him. “Here too,” Goebbels wrote with an undertone of admiration, “the Führer has been the fearless vanguard and spokesman of a radical solution.” Even at the beginning of the thirties Hitler had, among his intimates, called for the development of a “technique of depopulation” and explicitly added that by that he meant the elimination of entire races. “Nature is cruel; therefore we also are entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the coming war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin.”⁷²

Even the procedure of killing the victims by poison gas, first applied in an old, remote castle in the forest near Kulmhof, in December, 1941, can be traced back to Hitler’s own experiences in the First World War. At any rate, a passage in Mein Kampf expresses the wish that “twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas” as happened to hundreds of thousands of German soldiers at the front.⁷³ In any case, whenever the decision for the final solution was made, it had nothing to do with the deteriorating military situation. It would be a crude misunderstanding of Hitler’s fundamental intentions to represent the massacre in the East as the expression of growing bitterness at the development of the war, as an act of revenge upon the ancient symbolic enemy. Rather, that act was fully consistent with Hitler’s thinking and was, given his premises, absolutely inevitable. On the other hand, the plan, temporarily considered in the Race and Settlement Bureau of the SS and in the Foreign Office as well, to establish the island of Madagascar as a kind of great ghetto for some 15 million Jews, negated Hitler’s intentions on a crucial point. For if Jewry really was, as he had repeatedly stated and written, the infectious agent of the great world disease, then to his apocalyptic mind there could be no thought of providing a homeland for that agent, no course but to destroy its biological substance.

As early as the end of 1939 the first deportations to the ghettos of the Government General (Poland) began. But Hitler’s specific decision for mass extermination apparently was made during the period of active preparation for the Russian campaign. The speech of March 31, 1941, which informed a sizable group of higher-ranking officers about Himmler’s “special tasks” in the rear area, represents the first concrete reference to plans for mass killings. Two days later Alfred Rosenberg, after a two-hour talk with Hitler, confided with a shudder to his diary. “Which I do not want to write down today, but will never forget.” Finally, on July 31, 1941, Göring issued to SD Chief Reinhard Heydrich the directive concerning the “desired final solution of the Jewish question.”⁷⁴

Efforts at concealment characterized the operation from the start. Beginning in January, 1942, the Jews were systematically rounded up throughout Europe, but the endless stream of trains that transported them started off toward unknown destinations. Deliberately spread rumors spoke of newly built, beautiful cities in the conquered East. The killer squads were given ever-changing reasons as justifications for their activities, the Jews being alternately presented as ringleaders of resistance and carriers of plagues. Even the ideological vanguards of National Socialism seemed to be unable to face the consequences of their own doctrines.

Hitler’s own striking silence lends some support to this conjecture. For in the table talk, the speeches, the documents or the recollections of participants from all those years not a single concrete reference of his to the practice of annihilation has come down to us. No one can say how Hitler reacted to the reports of the Einsatzgruppen, whether he asked for or saw films or photos of their work, and whether he intervened with suggestions, praise, or blame. When we consider that he ordinarily transformed everything that preoccupied him into rampant speechmaking, that he never concealed his radicalism, his vulgarity, his readiness to go to extremes, this silence about the central concern of his life—involving, as it did in his mind, the salvation of the world—seems all the stranger. We can only guess about his motives: his characteristic mania for secrecy, a remnant of bourgeois morality, the desire to keep what was happening abstract and not weaken his own passion by letting himself see what it led to. Nevertheless, we are left with the disturbing picture of a savior who buries his great redeeming act deep in the charnel house of his heart. Of the entire top leadership, only Heinrich Himmler once attended a mass execution, at the end of August, 1942. He nearly fainted, and subsequently suffered a hysterical fit.⁷⁵

The SS bureaucracy ultimately invented a special terminology, full of words like “emigration,” “special treatment,” “sanitary measures,” “change of residence,” or “natural diminution.” Translated back into reality, such terms meant the following:

That was the reality. Gradually, however, by the establishment of a string of highly organized murder factories the work of annihilation was removed from the eyes of the populace, rationalized, and changed over to poison gas. On March 17, 1942, the camp of Belzec, with a daily kill capacity of 15,000 persons, began functioning. It was followed in April by Sobinor, close to the Ukrainian border, capacity 20,000; then Treblinka and Maidanek, with approximately 25,000, and above all Auschwitz, which became “the greatest institution for human annihilation of all times,” as its commandant, Rudolf Höss, boasted at his trial with a note of crazed pride. Here the entire killing process, from the selection of the new arrivals and the gassing of them to the elimination of the corpses and the exploitation of whatever remained, had been elaborated into a smooth system of interlocking procedures. The annihilation was carried out hastily, with increasing acceleration “so that we don’t find ourselves stuck in the middle of it some day,” as the SS chief of Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, explained. Many eyewitnesses have described the resignation with which people went to their deaths: in Kulmhof more than 152,000 Jews; in Belzec 600,000; in Sobinor 250,000; in Treblinka 700,000; in Maidanek 200,000; and in Auschwitz more than 1 million. And the shootings continued alongside the mass gassings. According to the exaggerated estimate of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt,[16] annihilation was to be extended to approximately 11 million Jews.⁷⁷ More than 5 million were murdered.

Hitler and his Lebensraum commissioners regarded the Eastern part of Europe as vacant territory without a history. Its Slavic inhabitants were to be in part exterminated, in part retained to serve the German master race as a helot population. One hundred million persons were eventually to be transplanted to the Eastern plains; millions must be brought there, Hitler explained, until “our settlers are numerically far superior to the natives.” European emigration must no longer go to America, but only to the East. “In ten years at the latest,” he wanted to receive a report of “at least twenty million Germans living in the Eastern territories.”⁷⁸

The “gigantic cake” was to be divided into four Reich commissariats (Eastland, Ukraine, Caucasia, and Moscovia). Alfred Rosenberg, the former leading ideologue of the party, who in recent years had been repeatedly outmaneuvered and who had been knocking around without employment before his significant appointment as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, vainly urged partitioning of the Soviet Union into politically autonomous nationalities. Hitler rejected the concept because he considered it dangerous to shape new political units on an ethnic or historical basis. Everything depended, he said, on “avoiding any political organization and thus keeping the members of these nationalities on the lowest possible cultural level.” He was even prepared, he declared, to grant these peoples a certain degree of individual liberty, because all liberty had a reactionary effect, since it negated the supreme form of human organization, the state.

With unflagging enthusiasm, he drafted the details of his imperial daydream: Germanic masters and Slavic serfs together filling the vast Eastern spaces with bustling activity, though with the racially based class distinctions emphasized vividly in every conceivable way. Before his mind’s eye arose German cities with gleaming governors’ palaces, towering cultural and administrative structures, while the settlements of the native population would deliberately be kept inconspicuous. These were by no means to be “in any way refurbished let alone embellished.” Even the “mud stucco” or the thatched roofs would not be permitted to show uniformity, he said.

He insisted on a low educational standard for the Slavic populace. They would be allowed to learn the meaning of traffic signs, the name of the capital of the Reich, and a few words of German, but no arithmetic, for example. General Jodi, he added on one occasion, had quite rightly objected to a poster in Ukrainian forbidding crossing of a railroad embankment, for “it can well be a matter of indifference to us whether a native more or less is run over.” In that facetious Machiavellianism that he fell into in relaxed moments, he added that it would be best to teach the Slavic nationals “nothing but a sign language” and use the radio to present them with “what they can digest: music without limit…. For gay music promotes joy in labor.” He regarded all concern for the health of the subject populations, all hygiene, as “sheer madness,” and recommended spreading the superstition “that inoculation and so on is a very dangerous business.” When he discovered in a memorandum a proposal to ban the sale and use of abortifacients in the occupied eastern territories, he became wildly excited and declared that he would “personally shoot down… the idiots” responsible for this idea. On the contrary, he went on, it seemed to him essential to promote a “vigorous business in contraceptives.” And becoming facetious once more: “But I supposed we’d have to get the help of the Jews to get such things into lively circulation.”⁷⁹

A system of broad roads and lines of communication (“the beginning of all civilization”) was to make the territory governable and help to open up its natural resources. One of Hitler’s favorite ideas was a railroad to the Donetz Basin with a track width of twelve feet, on which two-story trains would travel back and forth at a speed of 125 miles per hour. At the intersections of the principal arteries of communication there would arise cities conceived as great military bases. These would hold sizable units of mobile military forces, and would be secured at a radius of twenty or twenty-five miles by a “circuit of beautiful villages” with a well-armed rural population. In a memorandum dated November 26, 1940, Himmler had already issued guidelines for rural reconstruction in the conquered Polish territories; he fixed the social hierarchy among the German settlers, from hired man to the representative of an “autochthonous leadership,” with just as much pendantry as the layout of the villages and farms (“wall thicknesses… less than 38 centimeters will not be permitted”). Above all the “provision for greenery” was to help express the German tribes’ inherited love of trees, shrubs, and flowers and give the landscape as a whole a German imprint. The planting of village oaks and village lindens was therefore just as important as bringing “the electric lines… as inconspicuously as possible up to the buildings.” The same romantic idyl was also planned for the rural defense areas of Russia: small, well-garrisoned settlements in the midst of hostile surroundings would preserve the primal situation of the permanent fight for survival, and would thus prove their viability.

Meanwhile, however, it soon became apparent that the vastness of the area presented something of a problem. Those who had been primarily designated as new settlers were the Volksdeutsche, the Germans living in the countries of southeastern Europe and overseas, and also decorated soldiers, sailors, or airmen, and members of the SS. The East belonged to the SS, declared Otto Hofmann, chief of the Race and Settlement Office of the SS. According to the calculations of the planners, however, there were no more than 5 million of such settlers. Assuming extremely favorable circumstances, according to a memorandum dated April 27, 1942, “we can count on a figure of eight million Germans in these areas in about thirty years.”⁸⁰ For the first time a certain degree of agorphobia seemed to be current.

A whole list of measures was devised to overcome this unexpected dilemma. Thus someone thought of “reawakening in the German people the urge toward settlement in the East” and also allowing the racially valuable neighboring peoples to participate in the colonization. A memorandum of Rosenberg’s considered not only the settlement of Danes, Norwegians, and Dutch, but “after the victorious termination of the war also Englishmen.” All would be “members of the Reich,” Hitler declared, and boasted that this procedure would have a significance similar to the inclusion of several German states in the Customs Union a hundred years earlier. Simultaneously, according to the recommendations of a memorandum issued by Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 31 million of the 45 million inhabitants of western Russia were to be expatriated or killed. Furthermore, it was intended to introduce rival sects and, if this measure should prove insufficient, it would be only necessary, Hitler suggested, “to drop a few bombs on their cities and the job will be done.”

The greatest hopes were placed in the measures for recovery of good blood. Hitler compared his activity during the so-called time of struggle with the effect of a magnet that had drawn all the metallic element, all the iron content, of the German people. “Now we must also proceed in this way in building the new Reich,” he declared at the beginning of February, 1942, speaking in the Führer’s headquarters. “Wherever Germanic blood is to be found anywhere in the world, we will take what is good to ourselves. With what the others have left they will be unable to oppose the Germanic Empire.” In Poland “race commissions” had investigated the “Germanism” of large numbers of selected persons and in some cases brought them back to Germany for Umvolkung (restoration to the race), whether they wished it or not. Minors in particular were taken. Henceforth, Himmler declared at the evening meal in Rastenburg, they would institute annual “fishing parties for bloodlines,” throughout France, and he proposed that the children taken should be removed to German boarding schools in order to teach them the accidental nature of their French nationality and make them conscious of their Germanic blood. “For we will recuperate the good blood, which we can make use of, and incorporate it among us, or else, gentlemen—you may call this cruel, but nature is cruel—we will destroy this blood.”⁸¹

Behind these proposals for “broadening the blood base” there once again cropped up that old fear of the extinction of the Aryan, of the second “expulsion from paradise” that Hitler had conjured up in Mein Kampf.⁸² But if it should prove possible, he ranted, to keep the Reich “racially high and pure, it would gain a crystalline hardness and be unassailable.” Then the Germans’ greater force, boldness, and barbaric vitality would once again come into their own, all false religions of reason and humanity would go down to destruction, and natural order would triumph. As the “most gluttonous predator in world history” National Socialism had Nature and her promises on its side. And with that strangely distorted sense of reality he had, so that his own visions always seemed already within his grasp, he saw growing up in a few years, within those Eastern “nurseries of Germanic blood,” the longed-for type of human being, “regular master personalities,” as he enthusiastically described them, “viceroys.”

Simultaneously, he backed the efforts sponsored chiefly by Himmler and Bormann to establish new legislation concerning marriage. Their argument ran that the population shortage after the war would tend to get more serious, since 3 or 4 million women would necessarily have to remain unmarried. As Hitler remarked, such losses translated into divisions “are intolerable for our people.” In order to make it possible for these women to have children, and at the same time to provide “decent, physically and psychically healthy men of strong character” with the opportunity for increased reproduction, special arrangements would have to be made. A procedure for application and selection would enable such men “to enter a firm marital relationship not only with one woman, but with an additional one.”

These ideas were set forth in a memorandum by Bormann. Himmler supplemented them, suggesting, for example, that the privileged position of the first wife be secured by conferring upon her the title Domina, and that the right to enter a second marriage be reserved for the time being “as a high distinction for the heroes of the war, the bearers of the German Cross in gold, and the bearers of the Knight’s Cross.” Later, he explained, “it could be extended to the bearers of the Iron Cross First Class and to those who wear the silver and gold bar for close-quarters combat.” For, as Hitler was wont to say, “The greatest fighter deserves the most beautiful woman…. If the German man is to be unreservedly ready to die as a soldier, he must have the freedom to love unreservedly. For struggle and love belong together. The philistine should be glad if he gets whatever is left.”⁸³

Such speculations were carried even further within the top leadership of the SS. There was strong sentiment, for instance, in favor of mandatory divorce for marriages that remained childless for five years. Moreover, “all single and married women who do not yet have four children shall be obliged up to the age of thirty-five years to have four children begotten upon them by racially unexceptionable German men. Whether these men are married is of no consequence. Every family which already has four children must release the husband for this operation.”⁸⁴

The Eastern settlement program was, however, also intended to provide a solution for Europe’s national and ethnic disputes. The Crimea, for example, which was the favorite target of the settlement plans, was to be “completely cleansed,” as Hitler put it, and under the ancient Greek name of Tauria, or even Gotenland (Gothland), was to be incorporated directly into the Reich. Simferopol would be renamed Gotenburg and Sevastopol Theoderichhafen.⁸⁵ According to one of the projects, that attractive peninsula, which over the millennia had attracted Scythians and Huns, Goths and Tatars, was to be transformed into a “great German spa.” Others envisioned a “German Gibraltar” to dominate the Black Sea. As prospective settlers, the 140,000 persons of German blood living in Rumanian Transnistria were considered, and for a while some 2,000 Palestine Germans also haunted memoranda and files. But above all it was the population of South Tyrol on whom the new-order fanatics who were doing the planning for the Crimea lighted. Gauleiter Frauenfeld, who had been appointed commissioner general for the Crimea, suggested transporting the South Tyrolese to the peninsula in a body. Hitler termed that idea “extraordinarily good.” He thought “the Crimea extremely well suited in respect to climate and landscape to South Tyrolean nationals.” Besides, it was “a land of milk and honey compared with the present region settled by the South Tyrolese.” Transportation of the South Tyrolese to the Crimea would not impose any special difficulties physically or psychologically. “They need only sail down a German river, the Danube, and they’re already there.” Frauenfeld also had the idea of building a new metropolis for the peninsula in the Yaila Mountains.

Although a Führer’s directive had been issued as early as the beginning of July, 1942, to evacuate the Russian populace from the Crimea, all the resettlement plans became entangled in the confusion of authorities and the additional chaos produced by the events of the war. Extensive resettlement took place only in Ingria (Ingermanland), the country between Lake Peipus and Lake Onega, which had been designated as the first resettlement area because, according to the Lebensraum specialists, it had preserved a comparatively strong component of Germanic blood in the population. Early in 1942 the Finnish government was informed that it could have “its” Ingers back. And in fact up to the spring of 1944, when the area was lost again, some 65,000 persons were moved to Finland. From this single example we can see in what manner the regime would have carried out its vision of a new order. For it solved a nonexistent minorities problem and created a new one in Finland.⁸⁶

Hitler’s lust for expansion, however, was not directed solely toward the East. He had repeatedly averred, even after the war broke out, that he desired no conquests in the West. But this highmindedness soon came into collision with his inability to give back anything he had once obtained. No one could blame him, he observed during the period when victory seemed very near, if he took the position: he who has, keeps! “For anyone who gives away what he has is committing a sin, since he is alienating that part of this earth that he as the stronger has conquered with effort. For the earth is like a trophy cup and therefore tends always to fall into the hands of the strongest. For tens of thousands of years there has been a tugging back and forth on this earth.”⁸⁷

Soon his ambitions went far beyond all the war aims conceived by völkisch and Pan-German circles. His “Great Germanic Empire of the German Nation” embraced nearly the entire continent of Europe in one unitary, totalitarian, and economically independent imperium. The individual members were to be reduced to vassals whose one purpose was to serve his aspirations for world power. “Old Europe has outlived its usefulness,” Hitler is reported to have said in a conversation with Slovak President Tiso. He saw Germany in the position of Rome poised for the overpowering of the other city-states of Latium. Occasionally he spoke of Europe’s “rubbish heap of small countries” that he intended to clean out. Alongside America, the British Empire, and the Greater East Asian bloc to be formed by Japan, Europe—under the leadership of Germany—would constitute the fourth of those economic empires into which he envisioned the world of the future as divided. For centuries, in his view, the old Continent had been able to solve its overpopulation problems, or at least to cover them up, with the aid of overseas possessions. But with the colonial age coming to its end, only the thinly populated East could offer a way out. “If the Ukraine were administered by European methods,” he declared, “it would be possible to get three times its present production out of it. We could supply Europe without limit with what can be produced there. The East has everything in unlimited quantities: iron, coal, oil, and a soil that can grow everything Europe needs: grain, linseed, rubber, cotton, and so on.”

In his so-called second book, the sequel to Mein Kampf, written in 1928, Hitler had already developed the idea that this Europe was not to arise as the result of federation, but by the racially strongest nation’s subjugating the others. This early view of his determined his style of ruling over both conquered and allied countries. Occasionally he received offers of collaboration within the framework of a Fascist federated Europe; one such offer, for example, came from certain elements in France. But Hitler regarded such offers merely as arrogance and did not even deign to reply. Sometimes, it is true, he was apt to reject the idea of the nation in the name of the “higher concept of race”: “It [race] breaks up the old and affords the possibility of new combinations,” he declared. “Employing the concept of the nation, France carried her great revolution beyond her borders. Employing the concept of race, National Socialism will extend its revolution until the New Order has been achieved all through the world.”

Immediately after the campaign in France, a draft defining the border in the West was worked out under his personal supervision. It provided for the territory of the Reich to include Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, thus extending to the coast of Flanders. “Nothing in the world can prompt us to… give up again the Channel position won by the Western campaign,” he is quoted as saying. From the Channel the new boundary would run “about from the mouth of the Somme eastward to the northern rim of the Paris basin and along Champagne to the Argonnes, there turning southward and passing farther across Burgundy and west of the Franche-Comte to the Lake of Geneva.”⁸⁸ Historical treatises, and measures for Germanization, were to provide a historical base for these annexations. Nancy was henceforth to be known as Nanzig; Besançon would be called Bisanz.

Hitler also declared that he would “never again leave Norway.” He intended to make Trondheim a German city of 250,000 inhabitants and build it up into a great naval base. Early in 1941 he issued orders to this effect to Albert Speer and the heads of the navy. Similar bases to guard the sea routes were to be established along the French Atlantic coast as well as in northwestern Africa. Rotterdam was to become the “largest port in the Germanic area.” There were also plans for organizing the economy in the conquered countries on the pattern and in harmony with the interests of German industry, to accommodate wages and cost of living to the conditions in Germany, to regulate problems of employment and production on a continental scale, and to redistribute markets. The internal frontiers of Europe would soon lose their importance, one of the ideologues of the new order wrote, “except for the Alpine frontier where the Germanic Empire of the North and the Roman Empire of the South” meet.

The wider panorama was of such grandeur that the regime itself was awestricken. At the center of the stage there would be the world capital of Germania, which Hitler meant to transform into a metropolis that would stand comparison with the capitals of ancient empires, “with ancient Egypt, Babylon or Rome… what is London, what is Paris by comparison?” And radiating from it would extend, from the North Cape to the Black Sea, a dense network of garrisons, party citadels, temples of art, camps, and watchtowers, in whose shadôw a generation of master personalities would pursue the Aryan blood cult and the breeding of the new god-man. SS formations would be stationed in the regions with inferior blood, such as the Bavarian Forest or Alsace-Lorraine. “Through them a refreshening of the blood of the population would be provided.” Following old, deeply incised psychic tracks, Hitler combined his vision of the new Europe with the mythology of death. After the end of the war, when the great reckonings with the churches had begun and the pope in tiara and full pontificals had been hanged in St. Peter’s Square, Strassburg Cathedral would be converted into a monument to the Unknown Soldier, while on the borders of the empire, from the rocky capes of the Atlantic to the steppes of Russia, a chain of monumental towers would be built as memorials to the dead.⁸⁹

Projects such as these reveal an unbridled mania for planning, an elemental drive, blind to all obstacles as well as to the rights and claims of others, dictating destinies, trampling down “bastard races,” resettling peoples, or, as the above-mentioned memorandum of the East Ministry curtly put it, “scrapping” them. Yet to Hitler himself the building of the new order was “something wonderfully beautiful.” Here we see once again the strange incongruities of National Socialist philosophy, the combination of stoic objectivity and irrationality, of “ice-coldness” and belief in magic, of modernity and medievalism. Through the supercities of the future would march an ideological vanguard. They would revive the “Cimbrian art of knitting” and plant exotic root. They would propagate themselves, breeding for blond and blue-eyed issue, and begetting largely male children through the practice of abstinence, long hikes and proper nutrition. For along with the sweeping, ruthless dictates of National Socialism there was an element of trivial fantasy play. With “holy earnestness” Nazi philosophers considered the question of oatmeal porridge and organic manure, the possibility of developing a perennial rye, of, steatopygia in the women of primitive tribes, and ravings about the flylike witch of epidemics, Nasav.⁹⁰ They were great at the institutionalization of nonsense; there was a “Special Commissioner of the Reichsführer-SS for the Care of Dogs” and an “Assistant Secretary for Defense against Gnats and Insects.” Even as Hitler made fun of all superstition, he was always extremely subject to it. He inclined toward all sorts of crude theories about falling heavens and moons, saw the Mongoloid origin of the Czechs in their drooping mustaches, and planned—in the empire of the future—to forbid smoking and introduce vegetarianism.⁹¹

The same incongruities pervade his great dream of 200 million racially conscious persons established as masters of the Continent, secure in their rule because monopolizing the military and technological power, planning on a vast scale but personally abstinent, eager soldiers, and bearers of many children while all the other peoples of Europe would have been reduced to slavery, leading “their modest and contented existences beyond good and evil.” The masters themselves fulfilled their historic mission and danced around fires on Midsummer’s Night, honoring the laws of nature, art, and the idea of greatness, and seeking relaxation from the burdens of history in the Strength-Through-Joy mass hotels on the Channel Islands, on the fjords of Norway, or in the Crimea, to the accompaniment of jolly folklore and operetta music. In moments of depression, Hitler would speak of how far off the realization of his visions was, 100 or 200 years; “like Moses” he would see “the Promised Land only in the distance.”

The series of setbacks from the summer of 1943 on pushed the dream even further off. After the failure of the great offensive against the Russian lines near Kursk, the Russians surprisingly went over to the attack in the middle of July, and with apparently inexhaustible reserves threw back the desperately fighting German troops. In the southern sector the ratio of the forces was one to seven, in the north and center army groups about one to four. In addition an army of partisans supported the Soviet offensive by carefully co-ordinated actions. In the course of August alone, for example, they destroyed the railroad tracks in the German rear area in 12,000 places. Early in August the Red Army retook Orel, some three weeks later Kharkov, on September 25 Smolensk, and then the Donets Basin. By mid-October they were at the gates of Kiev.

Meanwhile, the situation in the Mediterranean was also deteriorating. Despite all the encouragements and concessions by the Germans, by the beginning of the spring it had become all too clear that Italy was on the verge of collapse. Mussolini, a tired and sick man, had lost more and more of his power and had become a gesticulating marionette, totally lacking in conviction, tugged from all sides by the contesting parties. In the middle of April he had met Hitler in Salzburg. His entourage had been pressing him to speak up boldly and tell his Axis partner that Italy would continue the war only under certain conditions. In particular, he was to repeat his demand that peace be concluded in the East—a stipulation he had vainly made several weeks before. But once again he succumbed to Hitler’s torrent of words. On arrival the Duce had seemed “like a broken old man,” Hitler summed up the conference. But four days later, when leaving for home again, he had seemed “in fine fettle, eager for action.”

Three months later, on July 19, 1943, the increasingly critical situation brought the two men together in Feltre in northern Italy. For meanwhile the Allies had conquered Tunis and Bizerte. They had taken captive the African forces, which against Rommel’s advice had been reinforced to 250,000 men, and in mid-July had launched their blow against the “soft-underbelly” of the Axis by opening a second front in Sicily. Mussolini now hoped to be released from the alliance and to make Hitler see that it was also in the German interest for Italy to drop out of the war so that the Wehrmacht could concentrate on defending the line of the Alps. But again Hitler would not even listen to arguments. Instead, he tried to convince Mussolini, who had come to the meeting with his generals, that Italy must hold out. For three hours he talked away in German at Mussolini, without calling upon the interpreter at all. The Duce looked pale and seemed not to be concentrating. In fact he was far more concerned with the reports of the first sizable air raid on Rome than with Hitler’s portentous perspectives. Hitler’s one idea, persistently varied but recurring in every phrase and every sentence, was that the only choice was to fight and win or go down to doom. “If anyone tells me that our tasks can be left to another generation, I reply that this is not the case. No one can say that the future generation will be a generation of giants. Germany took thirty years to recover; Rome never rose again. This is the voice of History.”⁹²

But Mussolini merely kept silent. The call of history to which he had been so susceptible a|l his life, seemed no more able to rouse him out of his apathy than the instinct for self-preservation. He remained passive in the following days also, after his return to Rome, although, like everyone else, he sensed that the ground was shaking underfoot and that his fall was impending. Although he knew there was a scheme afoot to strip him of his powers and replace him by a triumvirate of prominent Fascists, he did not prevent the meeting of the Grand Council on the night of July 24. At the last moment one of his followers called upon him to smash the plot; he told the man to shut up. Mutely, with an air of astonishment, he listened to the passionate ten-hour arraignment of himself. The following evening he was arrested. Not a hand was lifted to help him. Noiselessly, after so many paroxysms and theatrical excitements, he and Fascism vanished from public life. Marshal Badoglio, appointed head of government, dissolved the Fascist party and relieved the functionaries of their position.

Although Hitler was not unprepared for the fall of Mussolini, he nevertheless was deeply affected. The Italian dictator was the only statesman for whom he had felt a measure of personal attachment. He was even more disturbed by the political consequences of the event, especially the all too obvious “parallels with Germany,” which according to the reports of the political police the public was well aware of. Significantly, he refused to make a speech, but he ordered massive measures to prevent disturbances. Then he whipped up a plan for the freeing of Mussolini (Operation Oak), the military occupation of Italy (Operation Black), and the arrest of Badoglio and the King, with the aim of restoring the Fascist regime (Operation Student). At the evening conference of July 25 he rejected Jodi’s proposal that they wait for more exact reports:

Later that evening, while he was redistributing the troops in the Italian theater and arranging for reinforcements, Hitler felt an impulse to occupy the Vatican also: “Especially the whole Diplomatic Corps in there,” he commented. He thrust aside all objections: “I don’t give a hang. That rabble is there; we’ll get all those swine out. Later we can apologize.” He finally dropped the idea. Nevertheless, he managed to send in enough additional troops so that when Badoglio shortly afterward arranged an armistice with the Allies the Germans were able to overwhelm the numerically superior Italian forces and occupy all the key positions in the country.

The arrested dictator was moved about for a few days, until a German commando squad liberated him from a mountain hotel on the Gran Sasso. Spiritlessly he let himself be reinstalled in power; he saw that it only meant a different form of imprisonment. In October he had to cede Trieste, Istria, South Tyrol, Trient, and Laibach to Germany; he put up with it without emotion. All he really wanted was to return to the Romagna, his native soil. His thoughts revolved around death. For a woman admirer who asked him for his autograph during this period, he wrote on a picture: “Mussolini defunto.”

These events did not weaken Hitler’s determination; on the contrary. The personal weaknesses, halfway measures, and treacheries he encountered only fed his sense of distance from humankind and produced that grand tragic aura he associated with historical importance. During the years of his rise he had derived his greatest certainties from the periods of crisis. Now, too, his faith in himself increased with every setback; it was part of his fundamentally pessimistic sense of life that he drew strength and vindication from the disasters. “Hitherto every worsening of the situation has ultimately meant an improvement for us,” he told his generals. Part of the effect he went on having upon his entourage, upon the skeptical military men and the wavering functionaries, undoubtedly sprang from this conviction that flew in the face of all reality. Eyewitnesses have described how from the autumn of 1943 on he moved through the dark backdrop of the bunker at the Führer’s headquarters surrounded by a wall of silence and misanthropy, and more than one person who saw him had the impression “of a man whose life was slowly ebbing away.”⁹⁴ But all have emphasized his undiminished magnetism, which he still possessed in strangest contrast to his outward appearance. We may have to discount this account to some extent: those who report it, after all, have to justify their own passivity at a time when there was less and less excuse for it. But no matter how much we subtract, there remains the remarkable phenomenon of energy multiplied by disaster.

The arguments he could still muster were comparatively weak. He preferred to point back to the period of struggle, which he now stylized into the great parable of the triumph of will and tenacity. Then he would speak of the miraculous “secret weapons” with which he was going to retaliate for the Allied terror raids on Germany. He also made much of the rift that was bound to occur in the enemy’s “unnatural coalition.” But, characteristically, he was not prepared even to consider the possibilities of a separate peace with one side or the other. In December, 1942, and once again in the summer of 1943, the Soviet Union had indicated through its representatives in Stockholm that it was willing to negotiate with Hitler over a separate peace. By fall of that year, in growing fear that the Western powers were playing for a war of exhaustion between Germany and Soviet Russia, the U.S.S.R. cautiously mentioned terms. She offered restoration of the Russo-German borders of 1914, a free hand in the Straits question, and extensive economic ties. The Russians kept their deputy Foreign Minister and former ambassador to Berlin, Vladimir Dekanozov, in Stockholm for an exchange of views from September 12 to 16. But Hitler rejected all negotiations. He regarded the Soviet contact as a mere tactical maneuver; and in fact to this day it has remained unclear how serious Moscow’s intentions were. But Hitler’s intentions remained obsessively and rigidly determined by the decision once taken. With a shrug Hitler told his Foreign Minister, who was for responding to the peace feelers: “You know, Ribbentrop, if I came to an agreement with Russia today, I’d attack her again tomorrow—I just can’t help myself.” To Goebbels he remarked in the middle of September that the time for such contacts was “totally unsuitable”; he could negotiate with some prospect of success only after a decisive military victory.⁹⁵

Up to this point decisive military victories had only whetted his appetite for ever more decisive military victories. But a turning point was no longer conceivable. By this time the god of war, as Jodi remarked, had long ago turned away from the German side and moved into the enemy camp. In 1938, at the time the great architectural projects were being conceived, Albert Speer had set up an account to finance the vast buildings for the world capital of Germania. Now, at the end of 1943, he quietly liquidated the account, without mentioning it to Hitler.