Late in the evening of 21 June, Hitler summoned Goebbels, who had spent the day looking after a completely unsuspecting delegation led by his Italian colleague, Pavolini. Goebbels left his guests to their own devices and hurried to the Reich Chancellery. Here, he and Hitler walked up and down for three hours in the drawing room while the ‘Führer’ informed him about the latest arrangements for the attack on the Soviet Union, which had been planned for months. The time of attack was fixed for 3.00 a.m. They both agreed that, for propaganda purposes, they should claim ‘that Russia’s ambiguous attitude has hitherto prevented us from defeating England’. At 2.30 a.m., Hitler dismissed Goebbels, who now informed his colleagues, whom he had summoned to the Propaganda Ministry, about the forthcoming attack. In the early morning, Goebbels read out a proclamation, drafted by Hitler, over the radio. It was introduced by an excerpt from ‘Les Préludes’ by Franz Liszt, which he had just agreed with Hitler should be the music played before special announcements from this new theatre of war.1
In this proclamation Hitler gave a lengthy review of German–Soviet relations, providing an elaborate justification for his decision to make an alliance with Stalin in August 1939. He claimed that there had been increasing signs that the Soviet Union wanted to use the agreement to strengthen its position at the expense of Germany. He cited the Soviet claim to Lithuania in September 1939, the attack on Finland, as well as the occupation of the Baltic States in June 1940. He, of course, kept quiet about the fact that all these ‘violations’ corresponded to the ‘demarcation of spheres of influence’ agreed with Stalin in 1939. He knew that the Soviet Union had no interest in revealing the secret agreement that had been reached at the time, in which the two dictators had cold-bloodedly overridden the sovereignty of a total of six states.2 Above all, according to Hitler, it had become increasingly clear that the Soviet Union was secretly cooperating with Britain. Thus, by mobilizing large numbers of troops in 1940, it had tied up large German forces in the East, with the result that Germany had been unable to achieve a final military victory over Britain. Continuing his catalogue of the Soviet Union’s sins, he claimed that, with some difficulty, he had managed to prevent the Soviet Union from absorbing Romania by agreeing to the latter’s cession of Bessarabia; in reality, he had already ordered Ribbentrop to agree to this annexation in 1939.
At the Berlin meeting with Molotov in December 1940, Hitler continued, the former had clearly revealed Soviet ambitions in Romania, Finland, Bulgaria, and the Bosphorus. He wisely concealed the fact that, during these meetings, he himself had offered the Soviet Union the opportunity of helping itself to parts of the ‘bankrupt’ British Empire, if it cooperated with Germany. Both the Romanian coup of January 1941 and the Yugoslav putsch in March had, according to Hitler, been engineered by Moscow with far-reaching intentions. For it was only the victory of the Axis powers in the Balkans that had prevented Germany from becoming bogged down in months-long campaigns in the Balkans during the summer. This would have allowed the Soviets to complete the mobilization of their armies, increasing their readiness for war. Then, together with Britain, and supported by supplies from the United States, they would have been able to throttle and crush the German Reich and Italy. This was not a description of the imminent Soviet attack that he later repeatedly alleged as his justification for war, but rather of a Soviet strategy of attrition, forcing Germany to maintain increasingly large forces in eastern and south-eastern Europe. The massive Soviet mobilization and the allegedly repeated frontier violations had now made it necessary ‘to confront this plot by the Jewish-Anglo-Saxon warmongers and the equally Jewish rulers in the Bolshevik headquarters in Moscow’.3
Ribbentrop summoned the Soviet ambassador to the Foreign Ministry for 4.00 a.m., in order to inform him officially of the start of hostilities, shortly before the official proclamation, but an hour after the war had actually begun.4 Half an hour later, Schulenburg, the German ambassador in Moscow, met Molotov to hand over the official German note.5 His previous visit to the Soviet Foreign Minister had been only a few hours earlier. On the evening of 21 June, Molotov had invited him in order to find out the reasons for Germany’s possible ‘dissatisfaction’ with Soviet policy; there were, he said, even rumours of war flying about. Schulenburg, who only found out about the attack on the morning of 22 June, replied that he was unable to answer the question.6 Hitler informed his main ally about the ‘toughest decision of my life’ in a letter that a German diplomat delivered to Ciano at 3.00 a.m.7 Despite his annoyance, Mussolini, who was informed of the contents of the letter by Ciano in a telephone call to his holiday resort, Riccione, decided to declare war on the Soviet Union as well. In the meantime, he had become so dependent on his German ally that he had little choice other than to take this risky step.8
At a conference within the ministry on 23 June, Goebbels told his most important colleagues the essential reasons for the expansion of the war that were to be emphasized in propaganda. In the first place, as Hitler had pointed out in his proclamation, the military potential of the Soviet Union in Germany’s rear prevented Germany from ‘mounting a major offensive against England’. Secondly, the attack provided the opportunity of acquiring a huge ‘increase in supplies of petrol, petroleum, and grain’. This was, however, such a blatant admission of plunder as a motive, that even Goebbels thought it was ‘more suitable for word-of-mouth propaganda than for the media’. Thirdly, the fundamental ‘conflict with Russia’ could not be avoided, as ‘in a Europe that had been pacified for decades, Bolshevism [could] not exist side by side with National Socialism’. Given this premise, it was better to have ‘the confrontation now’ rather than wait until the Soviet Union had completely rearmed.9 These comments reflected the statements Hitler had made to Goebbels on 15 June, although with the important difference that he made no reference to continuing the war against the United States.
It was not until July that Goebbels changed the propaganda line in accordance with new instructions from Hitler. The attack, according to Hitler’s new justification for it,10 had occurred in order to preempt an imminent Soviet invasion. The Wehrmacht’s initial major military successes suggested something quite different, however, namely that, in summer 1941, the Red Army was in no fit state for a war.11
From 23 June 1941 onwards, Hitler stayed in his East Prussian headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair. This was a series of secluded bunkers and barracks in a remote and thickly wooded area near the small town of Rastenburg. From here he directed the war in the East.12 The Wehrmacht entered the ‘Eastern Campaign’ with over three million soldiers, 600,000 motor vehicles, 3,350 tanks, over 7,000 guns, and 3,900 aircraft. In addition, the Romanian, Finnish, and Hungarian allies had, between them, some 500,000 men, although with a relatively limited amount of heavy weaponry. This force was confronted on the Soviet Union’s western border by around three million members of the Red Army, which was far superior to the aggressors in tanks, artillery, and aircraft, but was not combat ready.13
The German offensive was carried out by three Army Groups with, initially, seven armies and four panzer groups. Two of the panzer groups, in which the army’s panzer divisions and motorized units were concentrated, in other words the spearheads of the German offensive, were assigned to Army Group Centre, while one each was attached to the Army Groups North and South. This arrangement corresponded to Hitler’s Barbarossa directive of December 1940, according to which the main thrust was initially to be in the centre, in order to destroy the enemy forces in White Russia; after that, the panzer units were intended to move north and, together with Army Group North, defeat the enemy in the Baltic region. Although the army had implemented this directive in its deployment arrangements in January 1941,14 since the summer of 1940, Halder, the Chief of the General Staff, had been working on another plan. He wanted to win the war through a thrust by Army Group Centre towards Moscow and, having failed to get his way, hoped that, after the major successes that were anticipated in the initial phase of the campaign, he would still be able to win Hitler over to his point of view.15 This basic conflict between Hitler and Halder was to determine the first stage of the war in the East. It now became clear that, whereas during the war in the West, Hitler had intervened only sporadically in military operations, he was now insisting on running them on a daily basis.
By the end of June, with two pincer movements, first near Bialystock and then near Minsk, Army Group Centre had succeeded in surrounding and then destroying or taking prisoner substantial Soviet forces. In the meantime, Army Group North had advanced rapidly through Lithuania and Latvia: Dünaburg (Daugavpils) and Riga were captured by the end of June. Army Group South, which had been weakened by the withdrawal of the 12th Army to Greece, at first only attacked on its northern flank, making slow progress because of relatively strong resistance from the Red Army.16 While Halder was pressing for Army Group Centre to continue the rapid advance towards Smolensk and thus in the direction of Moscow, Hitler hesitated, wanting to clear the pocket between Bialystock and Minsk completely and protect the flanks of the panzer units. This resulted in differences over the planning of operations, leading to quite absurd situations. Thus, in accordance with Hitler’s wishes, the commander-in-chief of the army ordered Army Group Centre merely to secure the strategically important city of Brobujsk, whereas Halder was hoping that Guderian’s panzer group, deployed there, would take the initiative to capture the city, and then advance to the river Dnieper, which was only about 50 kilometres away. ‘We must hope’, Halder noted on 29 June, ‘that the mid-level commanders will do the right thing on their own initiative without having received specific orders, which we are unable to give them because of the Führer’s instruction to the C-in-C Army.’17
Thus Halder was aiming to bypass the Supreme Commander’s directives by issuing broadly framed orders and hinting at what he wanted. He relied on the commanders at the front intuitively acting in tune with the basic intentions of the general staff. When, a few days later, Hitler wanted to intervene once again in the conduct of operations, Halder noted critically that resolving matters of detail should be left to army and corps commanders. However, ‘people at the top don’t understand the need to place their trust in the people on the ground, though that is one of the most valuable features of our style of leadership. This is because they’re unaware of the value of the education and training that our leadership corps has gone through together.’18
In the end, during July, this conflict came out into the open, as both continued to pursue their different approaches. Halder remained committed to capturing Moscow, whereas Hitler considered Leningrad and Kiev to be the more important goals. Hitler was concerned, on the one hand, to destroy the Soviet Union’s main military forces,19 and, on the other with economic issues affecting the war. Leningrad had to be captured in order to prevent the Soviet fleet from blocking Germany’s access to iron ore through the Baltic, while in the Ukraine he wanted to seize the Donets basin, a centre of Soviet heavy industry, and cut off oil supplies from the Caucasus. On 30 June, he told Halder that, to begin with, he wanted ‘to make a clean sweep’ in the north with panzer units and that he reckoned that ‘Moscow could wait until August and then be taken with infantry units’.20 Halder responded on the same day by getting Brauchitsch to sign off a memorandum setting out the opposite point of view, namely that a rapid thrust towards Moscow would prove decisive in ending the war. 21 Essentially, this dispute during the summer of 1941 involved the deployment of the panzer groups 2 and 3, which Halder wanted to continue to use in Army Group Centre’s advance on Moscow, whereas Hitler intended to deploy them to support the operations of Army Groups North and South. In any case, in early July, both Hitler and Halder believed that the war in the East had already been won.22
On 4 July, Hitler was still preoccupied with the question of the future deployment of the panzer units, without being able to reach a decision: ‘It will be the most difficult decision of this campaign’.23 After a presentation by Halder and Brauchitsch, on 8 July he decided that Army Group Centre should carry out another pincer movement in order to clear the way for the advance on Moscow. However, the two panzer units should then remain behind so that they could take on tasks in the north and south. Leningrad and Moscow should be ‘razed to the ground, to prevent people from continuing to live there whom we would then have to feed during the winter’. That would be the task of the Luftwaffe.24
The further the German forces advanced, the more urgent became the question of the future deployment of the panzer units. This inevitably sharpened the disagreement between Hitler and the army leadership over the main focus of the operations.25 Halder’s diary entries for 14 July show that, at this point, the growing discontent with Hitler’s interventions in matters of detail in the military operations was reaching a critical stage: ‘Hitler’s endless interventions in matters he does not properly understand are turning into a real menace, which is becoming intolerable.’26
In his Directive No. 33 of 19 July Hitler left no doubt about his determination to get his way on the conduct of the war. It emphasized the need to ‘continue to prevent substantial enemy forces from escaping into the depths of Russia and to destroy them’.27 His message was that in cases of doubt he was not interested in engaging in operations deep into enemy territory, but rather in eliminating Soviet units that were contained in small pockets in front of the German lines. After Brauchitsch had spoken to Hitler on 22 July, he supplemented Directive No. 33. After the situation in the south had been sorted out, Army Group Centre was now ordered to ‘capture Moscow’ and no longer simply to continue its march on Moscow, as had been stated in Directive No. 19 of 19 July. However, this was merely an apparent concession to the army leadership, as at the same time he removed the panzer units from Army Group Centre for this operation.28
After a further vain approach to Hitler, undertaken together with Brauchitsch,29 Halder now tried to get the general staffs of the army groups to modify Hitler’s directive so that its application was more in tune with his own approach.30 When, on 26 July, Hitler had the idea of deploying the tanks of Army Group Centre against an enemy concentration near Gomel, Halder rejected it on the grounds that it represented a ‘move from strategic to tactical operations’. If they were going systematically to eliminate all the pockets lying between the various thrusts, this would restrict movement and they would end up engaging in static warfare.31 However, Hitler insisted on the destruction of this enemy group, telling Halder during a meeting on 26 July that ‘Russians couldn’t be defeated by operational successes, because they simply didn’t recognize them. So they had to be smashed piecemeal in what might be considered small tactical envelopments.’ Halder was prepared to admit that this point had ‘some merit’, but with this kind of thinking they were ‘leaving the initiative to the enemy’; ‘what had hitherto been a dynamic operation would start becoming bogged down’.32 Although Brauchitsch succeeded in mobilizing Bock and Jodl in his support,33 on 28 July, Hitler once again insisted ‘that the industrial area round Kharkov is more important to him than Moscow’. Expansive operations had to be subordinated to ‘the elimination of enemy forces ahead of the front line’.34 Thus, in his Directive No. 34 of 30 July he ordered that Army Group Centre should temporarily go on the defensive, thereby postponing for the time being the decision on the main focus of future German operations.35 In short, the German armies had within a few weeks penetrated deep into Soviet territory without the political–military leadership being able to agree on what their further military goals should be.
At the beginning of August, Halder’s method of working on the generals in the field behind Hitler’s back and getting them to follow his line began to pay off. Hitler was increasingly confronted with requests from his generals to begin an offensive on Moscow, in some cases cleverly using his own arguments to persuade him to adopt the army leadership’s approach.36 On 12 August, Hitler finally issued his supplement to Directive No. 34: Army Group Centre’s ‘aim must be to deprive the enemy of the whole of the political, armaments, and transport hub around Moscow before the onset of winter’. However, he made this objective dependent on a set of preconditions that could hardly be met. In the first place, Army Group Centre had to remove the threat that Hitler believed existed on its two flanks, and re-equip its panzer units. In addition, he insisted that, before the offensive against Moscow could begin, ‘the operations against Leningrad must be concluded’.37 On 14 August, he appeared to be ‘seriously disturbed’ about an enemy breakthrough near Staraja Russa in the area of Army Group North, demanding that Halder deploy a panzer corps made up of elements from Army Group Centre. This prompted the latter to note that ‘responding in this way to pinpricks undermines any attempt at producing an operational plan and focusing on strategic targets’.38
The conflict was now coming to a head, although, during this period, Hitler was partly out of action as a result of contracting dysentery.39 After a presentation by Brauchitsch, on 15 August he ordered that Army Group Centre should, for the time being, cease any further offensives in the direction of Moscow. First of all, the offensive by Army Group North had to be brought to a rapid and successful conclusion and, for this purpose, powerful elements of Panzer Group 3 were to be transferred to it. The advance on Moscow could be continued only after the successful conclusion of the northern operations.40 Halder responded by preparing a proposal for the advance by Army Group Centre to continue alongside those of Army Groups North and South,41 which Brauchitsch adopted, and which was further supported by an assessment from the OKW.42 According to Halder, Army Group Centre had to secure the ‘destruction of the strong enemy forces in front of it’ and ‘capture the industrial area round Moscow’. This would ‘prevent the enemy from re-equipping its armed forces and from building up military units capable of mounting serious offensives against us’. Hitler, now recovered, responded on 21 August with a new Führer Directive in which he definitively stated that the ‘Army leadership’s proposal is not in accord with my views’. The most important goal to be achieved before the onset of winter was ‘not the capture of Moscow’, but the conquest of the Crimea and the Donets basin, the cutting off of the Soviet oil supplies from the Caucasus, as well as the isolation of Leningrad. The next task for Army Group Centre was, together with Army Group South, to surround and destroy the 5th Soviet Army.43 Hitler justified his rejection of Halder’s proposal in more detail the following day by arguing that more important than the conquest of industrial sites was the ‘destruction or rather removal of essential sources of raw materials’ and ‘to deal the enemy a knock-out blow’. He made a detailed critique of the army leadership’s conduct of operations hitherto, telling them in no uncertain terms that the motorized units could ‘under no circumstances be considered integral parts of a particular army group or army’; they were at the exclusive disposal of the Supreme Command.44
Halder considered the situation resulting from Hitler’s intervention as ‘intolerable’ and his treatment of Brauchitsch as ‘unheard of’. He suggested to the commander-in-chief that they should both resign, which Brauchitsch, however, declined to do.45 At the end of the month, a conversation took place between Hitler and Brauchitsch, in which the ‘Führer’ told his army commander-in-chief that ‘he hadn’t meant it like that’, thereby apparently putting an end to the dispute for the time being.46 During a visit to Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Centre, on 23 August, he and Halder agreed that the offensive should be continued towards the east, in the direction of Moscow, and not to the south. Heinz Guderian, the commander of Panzer Group 2, who was brought into the discussion, stated that his troops were simply not in a position to carry out the offensive ordered by Hitler.47 On the same day, at Halder’s and Bock’s suggestion, Guderian went to see Hitler in order to press the arguments for an advance on Moscow. However, Hitler was not prepared to change his priorities and, in the end, Guderian suppressed his concerns and acquiesced – much to Halder’s and Bock’s disappointment.48
In the end, however hard the army leadership had tried to bypass Hitler’s directives by issuing flexible orders or by dressing up their aims as, in reality, identical to his own goals, by continually intervening, the ‘Führer’ had managed to get his way in this major dispute over strategic objectives. It was inevitable that these disagreements had damaged the basis of trust between the political and military leadership. The army believed that Hitler’s constant interventions were hampering a bold military operation, while from Hitler’s perspective the army was showing no awareness of the requirements of the war economy. What lay behind this dispute was the basic problem posed by Germany’s ‘Eastern Campaign’, for, despite its remarkable success, during the first weeks it was already becoming apparent that Germany had underestimated both the quality and quantity of the Soviet armed forces. In the middle of August, Hitler told Goebbels that he had ‘estimated the number of Soviet tanks as 5,000, whereas in reality they had around 20,000. We thought they had about 10,000 aircraft, in fact they had over 20,000 . . .’49 In the meantime, his opponent, Halder, had reached the same conclusion: they had ‘underestimated . . . the Russian colossus. At the start of the war we reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Up to now we have already counted 360.’50 Despite its heavy losses in the pockets produced by encirclements, the Red Army had nonetheless succeeded in withdrawing a large part of its forces, and in managing to mobilize and re-equip new units. Behind the dispute about strategic objectives lay the unspoken realization that the Soviet Union could not be defeated before the onset of winter. Neither offensives by the flanks towards Leningrad and Kiev, nor an advance on Moscow in the centre could achieve this goal.51
During the first phase of this war, Hitler was already energetically pursuing his goals, as summed up on 11 June, for the period after Barbarossa.52 To facilitate further conquests he was even prepared to withdraw troops, which in reality were urgently needed in the eastern theatre. On 8 July, he ordered brand new tanks to be kept in reserve in Germany, in order to have new units ready for action outside Russia.53 Six days later, he issued guidelines in the form of a Führer Directive for a reduction in the size of the army. It began with the statement: ‘After the defeat of Russia our military control of the European area will shortly enable us significantly to reduce the size of the army.’ The panzer arm was, however, to be expanded (among other things by ‘4 more tropical panzer divisions’), while the main focus of rearmament was to be shifted from the army to the Luftwaffe. Naval rearmament was to be limited to those measures that ‘directly apply to the war against England and the United States, assuming it enters the war’.54 With this restriction of naval rearmament largely to U-boat construction – in June he had been treating the navy on a par with the Luftwaffe – he was taking account of the setbacks that the German navy had been increasingly suffering in the Atlantic since the sinking of the ‘Bismarck’ in May.55 Big capital ships were no longer an option for ‘besieging’ Great Britain. On 4 August, during a visit to Army Group Centre, Hitler announced that, in order to deal with a possible British invasion of the Iberian peninsula, or landing in West Africa, but also to meet ‘other eventualities’, a ‘mobile reserve’ must be created in the Reich. This required retaining two panzer divisions and the creation of new panzer units in Germany.56
At the end of August, Hitler approved the OKW memorandum ‘Concerning the Strategic Situation in the Late Summer of 1941 as the Basis for Further Political and Military Goals’ and had it sent to the chiefs of the Wehrmacht branches and the Foreign Minister. This was an indirect admission that his original plan of bringing the whole of the Mediterranean under his control and establishing bases on the Atlantic coast, following a rapid victory over the Soviet Union, was no longer feasible, at least during 1941. For in the memorandum, albeit discreetly expressed, the OKW was no longer assuming that the war in the East could be won during that year.57 The detailed memorandum made it clear that, without this victory, almost all further German war plans, such as had been developed during the first half of 1941 – the cutting off of the Mediterranean with Spanish and French assistance, the ‘besieging’ of Britain through an intensification of the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, the offensive through Turkey, and the advance through North Africa towards the Suez Canal – could not be carried out. These options were still kept in view, but they could not now be realized before spring 1942 at the earliest. The only way of threatening Britain’s position in the Near East before complete victory over the Soviet Union would be to mount a successful offensive via the Caucasus.58 The earliest this could start would be May 1942, as a continuation of a successful offensive in the south of the eastern front. An invasion of Britain would not be possible before autumn 1942, as a final option in case the ‘siege’ of the island did not prove decisive.
Thus, by the end of August, Hitler was having to face the fact that not only his idea of a ‘lightning war’ against the Soviet Union, but also the rapid realization of his other war plans – to undermine Britain’s position in the Mediterranean during 1941, to bring Britain to its knees through an increase in naval warfare, and to establish a position from North Africa through the Near East to the Urals, from which he could calmly face the prospect of a war with the United States – were all doomed to failure. Now that he had been unable to consolidate his future empire he had to fear that the United States, whose entry into the war appeared from month to month more likely, would be able to build a base in the Mediterranean, from which, together with Britain, it could mount an attack on the weak southern flank of the Axis. During the first months of the war in the East, as relations with the United States rapidly deteriorated, Hitler had placed great emphasis on trying to delay its entry into the war for at least some months. When, on 9 July, during one of his presentations, Raeder had asked him whether the recent occupation of Iceland by the United States meant its ‘entry into the war’, Hitler replied that ‘he was extremely anxious to postpone the entry of the United States for one or two more months’. For one thing, he needed the whole of the Luftwaffe for the war in the East, while ‘the success of the eastern campaign would have an enormous effect on the whole situation, including on the attitude of the United States’.59
Whereas during the visit of the Japanese foreign minister to Berlin at the end of March/beginning of April 1941, Hitler and Ribbentrop had been putting huge pressure on Japan to attack Singapore,60 now their concern was to prevent the Japanese from precipitately going to war with the United States. In the medium term, after the victory over the Soviet Union, such a war would of course be very welcome. Thus Berlin was wary of a potential American–Japanese rapprochement.61 This set of aims formed the background to Hitler’s meeting with Oshima on 15 July. ‘We shall not’, he told Oshima, ‘be able to avoid a conflict with America’. And then he came to the point: ‘The only way of keeping the United States out of the war would be by defeating Russia, and only then if Japan and Germany act with clear and ice-cold determination.’62 He added: ‘And if there was going to be war with the United States then he would be leading it’. By this he did not mean the global war deploying the ‘Z fleet’ and long-range bombers, which he considered the task of his successors.63 Instead, he was thinking of a European continent under German rule being able successfully to defend itself against an American invasion. However, this must not occur during the next few months; first of all, the Soviet Union had to be defeated. The United States was not ready for war, Hitler opined in August.64 In the middle of September, he instructed Raeder that, ‘incidents must not be allowed to occur in the trade war’ before the middle of October, since, at the end of September, ‘the Russian campaign would reach a major turning point’.65 At that stage he was already aware that his post-Barbarossa plans could no longer be realized before the middle of 1942. He nevertheless gave the appearance of being confident of victory and, on several occasions when speaking to Goebbels, played down the threat of the United States entering the war.66 He must, however, have been fully aware that he was running out of time.
While the entry of Japan into a war with the United States was now to be postponed in order to prevent the latter from becoming engaged in Europe, Hitler became all the more desperate for a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union. This would have immediately eased the situation on the eastern front, opened a realistic prospect of victory over the Soviet Union and, in the process, increased the likelihood of preventing American intervention. Immediately after the start of the war with the Soviet Union, Ribbentrop had put the Japanese under huge pressure to take this step.67 But month after month went by and the Japanese government failed to act; on the contrary, it had decided in August to stay out of the war with the Soviet Union.68 At this time, Hitler still behaved as though he was convinced that Japan would enter the war with the Soviet Union.69 In contrast to the Foreign Ministry, he did not want to put any pressure on Japan because that could appear a sign of weakness.70 By September, he was only hoping for such an intervention; in November he believed it might come about ‘in certain circumstances’.71
In a series of endless monologues while at his headquarters in East Prussia during the summer and autumn of 1941, Hitler developed his vision of a German-dominated ‘eastern area’. His audiences were members of his intimate entourage or visitors who were present at lunch or dinner; often these monologues lasted late into the evening. He invariably began by emphasizing the ‘racial inferiority’ of the indigenous population. He was convinced that ‘the Russian does not naturally seek to create a higher form of society’. Russia only managed to establish a ‘state form’ by using compulsion. It was only possible to get Russians, who were by nature work-shy, to work ‘by creating a really tough organization’. The Russian was ‘incapable of organizing himself; he can only be organized’.72 The Ukrainians were ‘just as lazy, disorganized and, nihilistic–anarchistic’.73 In short, ‘the Slavs are a mass of born slaves crying out for a master’.74 The fact that Stalin had managed ‘to forge a state out of this Slav rabble’ [lit. ‘rabbit family’], albeit ‘only by using the toughest form of compulsion and with the aid of the Jews’, made him in Hitler’s eyes ‘one of the greatest men alive’.75
Given these opinions, Hitler’s views on how to rule this newly conquered territory were appropriately barbaric. No military power, no ‘Bolshevist form of state must be allowed to exist on this side of the Urals, not even an urban power centre’.76 He kept describing in detail how the great Soviet cities were to be destroyed. In August, he announced that he did not even intend ‘to take Petersburg and Kiev by force of arms, but to starve them out’. He wanted to surround St Petersburg, in those days Leningrad, and then ‘smash’ it with the Luftwaffe and artillery.77 In fact, the total destruction of Leningrad became one of Hitler’s favourite topics.78 It was necessary, he told Goebbels, for this city ‘totally to disappear’.79 They could not feed the ‘mass of 5 million people squashed together there. Thus, it’s very much in our interest if Leningrad resists for a time. We can then destroy this city of millions street by street, quarter by quarter, and then, when we occupy it, the ruins that remain can be blown up until it has been razed to the ground. The most gruesome urban drama that history has ever known is developing here. Bolshevism, which began with hunger, blood, and tears will perish in hunger, blood, and tears. Though it is a cruel nemesis, historically it is a just one.’ The significance of the destruction of the city for the future should not be underestimated. ‘The plough must once again pass over this city. It was conceived by Asiatic Slavs as a gate of entry to Europe. This gate of entry must be closed.’80 In November, he committed himself to the destruction of the city in a speech broadcast by the media.81 He ignored the navy’s interest in using its docks and armaments facilities.82
Hitler’s comments clearly show that his determination to conquer the city had less to do with the economic motives with which he was always trying to justify it, such as protecting iron ore supplies from the Gulf of Finland from the Red Army, and more to do with his desire to destroy the city that bore the name of the founder of the Soviet Union. Prestige and visceral hatred determined his attitude. The same was true of Moscow, which also ‘had to disappear from the face of the earth’.83 In principle, he told his audience, there should be no fixed boundary to Germany’s living space in the east; even the Urals were not the final frontier with Asia, but rather ‘the place where settlements of Germanic-type people will cease and pure Slavdom begins. It is our task to push this frontier as far as possible to the east and, if necessary, beyond the Urals.’84 West of the Urals ‘no organized Russian state can be allowed to exist!’85 He was even prepared to make a peace treaty with the remnant of the Soviet Union that would be left in Asia, but only after the Red Army had been completely crushed.86
This ruthless colonial policy was justified by ‘nature’s eternal law of the stronger, which gives Germany the right before history to subjugate these racially inferior peoples, to rule them, and to force them to undertake productive labour. Although this is a long way from Christian ethics, the very fact that it corresponds to the older and more tried and tested laws of nature ensures its permanence.’87 ‘After all, the great migrations . . . came from the East and, with us begins the ebb tide flooding from the West back to the East. . . . The laws of nature require uninterrupted killing in order for the superior to survive.’88 Seen in a longer-term historical perspective, his aims were not ‘exorbitant’, for they only involved ‘territories where Germanic peoples had been settled in the past’.89
He developed practical ideas for settling the conquered territories,90 which he delighted in elaborating on to his audience. Priority was to be given to the construction of great transport networks: big canal projects,91 autobahns, as well as a broad-gauge railway of three metres, which he was particularly interested in.92 As centres of settlement, ‘German cities’ would be linked together along these arterial roads ‘as in a pearl necklace’. The ‘German agencies and authorities will be housed in splendid buildings, the governors in palaces. . . . Around the cities to a depth of thirty to forty kilometres we shall have a belt of attractive villages, linked together by high quality roads.’93 The ‘monotonous appearance of the Russian Steppe’ would be gradually transformed into a cultural landscape on the Central European model. In ten years’ time, four, in twenty years, at least ten, perhaps even twenty, million ‘Germans’ would settle there,94 not only from the Reich, but also from America, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Flanders. The Swiss, however, could only be used as hotel managers.95
The main focus of the German settlement programme was to be the southern Ukraine; he wanted to turn the Crimea, whose attractive landscape he praised,96 into an Eastern Goths’ Gau, with the best ‘human material’ from all the ‘Nordic-type’ nations.97 In his fantasies he had pictured life in the new eastern territories down to the last detail. Thus he kept talking about installing retired NCOs, discharged after twelve years’ service, as peasant settlers. They would be given fully-equipped farms, but would have to commit to marrying ‘country girls not town girls’.98
The model for all these visions of the future, which he kept coming back to, was British rule in India, as he understood it. He remarked in admiration that 250,000 Englishmen ruled 400 million Indians without having to exercise a tight control over the lives of the inhabitants.99 He considered this way of ruling the ‘colonial territory’ in the East, in which there was no intention of introducing civilized Central European standards, absolutely ideal.100 The main aim, after all, was to keep the indigenous population in a primitive state. The ‘natives’ would be ‘screened’. ‘We shall get rid of all the dangerous Jews.’ He did not want to be bothered with the Russian cities; they ‘must all die out’. There was no need to have ‘pangs of conscience’ about it; they had ‘absolutely no responsibility for the people involved’. It was enough for them ‘to recognise the traffic signs, so that they don’t get in the way of our vehicles!’ The main task was ‘Germanization, by bringing in Germans and treating the natives like Red Indians’.101
Given the extensive ground their colonial rule would cover, their methods were bound to be draconian. ‘Of course the police there will have to be trigger-happy. Party officials will know what to do.’ ‘A new type of man will emerge, ruler-types, though we shan’t of course be able to use them in the West: Viceroys.’102 If the natives started a revolution ‘then we only need to drop a few bombs on their cities and that will be that. Once a year we shall take a group of Kyrgizes through the capital in order to impress them with the grandeur of its monuments.’103
He was approaching this matter with an ‘ice-cold attitude. I feel I am merely the executor of the will of history. I don’t care in the least what people think of me at the moment. Law is an invention of human beings. Nature can’t be contained by human planning or statutes. The heavens only acknowledge strength. The idea that everybody should love one another is a theory that has actually been most effectively refuted by those who believe it.’ ‘The German people [have] now secured . . . what they need to be of world importance’. He was very pleased ‘that, as a result of this development, we have been drawn away from the Mediterranean’ and in future would be living in a ‘Northland’. The Ukraine and then the Volga basin would one day be the ‘granaries of Europe’.104 The Crimea had citrus fruits and they would plant rubber plants and cotton on a large scale. They would get reeds from the Pripet marshes. ‘We’ll supply the Ukrainians with scarves, glass beads, and whatever else colonial peoples like.’ The Germans living in the east would have to ‘form a closed society, like a fortress; the least of our stable lads must be superior to any native’.105 On the railways Germans would have to travel in ‘the first or second class’ to distinguish themselves from the ‘natives’.106
Possession of the vast eastern space would enable Europe under German leadership to practise autarky, making it independent of world trade and secure against blockade. ‘When we’re the masters of Europe we shall dominate the world.’107 In future, in addition to the ‘130 million’ in the Reich there would be ninety million in the Ukraine, as well as the other states of the ‘new Europe’, altogether 400 million people. With their characteristic mixture of megalomaniacal building projects, romantic ideas about colonial settlement, and brutal methods of rule, Hitler’s extravagant fantasies about future life in ‘Germany’s eastern area’ were not merely pipe dreams. Within a short time, he was taking steps to turn them into reality.
On 16 July, three and a half weeks after the start of the war, at a meeting in his headquarters, Hitler took the vital decisions affecting the direction and structure of future occupation policy in the east; Göring, Keitel, Rosenberg, and Bormann were present. To begin with, Hitler explained that the occupation phase would enable them to carry out certain measures – he referred to ‘shootings, resettlement etc.’ – designed to prepare for the final domination of the territory, without revealing Germany’s long-term aims. It was, however, already clear that they would never give up the conquered territories. ‘Basically’, Hitler continued, ‘we now have the task of cutting up the giant cake according to our needs, in order to be able, first, to dominate it, second, to administer it, and, third, to exploit it.’ According to Hitler, Stalin’s call for partisan warfare had an advantage: ‘It enables us to exterminate everyone who opposes us’. He also declared: this ‘huge area’ could best be ‘pacified’ if ‘we shoot everybody who even looks askance’. ‘It must never again be possible to construct a military power west of the Urals, even if we have to wage war for a hundred years.’ They must never permit anybody but Germans to carry arms, as otherwise Germany would inevitably one day become the target.
The ‘newly-won eastern region [Ostraum]’ had to become a ‘Garden of Eden’. A considerable portion of the occupied territories would have to be incorporated into the Reich. This included the whole of the Baltic states, as well as the Crimea (which had to be completely cleared of its indigenous population), together with a substantial hinterland in the north of the peninsula, as well as the Volga colony, in other words the autonomous ‘Soviet Republic of the Volga Germans’ on Russian territory bordering Kazakhstan. The area round Baku was also to become Reich territory, as was the Kola Peninsula with its extensive reserves of nickel. Galicia would be subordinated to Governor General Frank. According to Rosenberg, Hitler even took the trouble to sketch in the new frontiers on a map.108
These plans for annexations were very different from the announcements Hitler had made to his generals on 30 March. At that time, he had still been talking about a protectorate over the ‘Baltic countries’ as well as the acquisition of the Ukraine and White Russia. Indeed, Hitler’s statement of 16 July even exceeded the settlement plans that Himmler as Reich Settlement Commissar had worked out in response to Germany’s rapid advances. Hitler’s new statement had made these plans obsolete and, during the following months, they had to be completely revised.109 These ‘spontaneous’ commitments by Hitler followed a familiar pattern. As with his earlier conquests (Austria, Poland, France, and the Balkans), the ‘Führer’ had decided on his plans for the new order only in the course of, or after, the occupation. Now, once again, in summer 1941, he allowed himself to be carried away by his euphoria at an (apparent) victory and to commit himself to much more ‘elaborate’ plans than he had originally envisaged.
In the middle of June, Hitler was determined to carry out his settlement plans in the ‘eastern region’ by embarking on huge mass expulsions while eliminating potential resistance in the most brutal way. As we have seen, he also wanted to destroy completely the main urban centres of the Soviet Union, to depopulate them, and then do nothing to feed their former populations. This resulted in a policy geared to the systematic starvation of the population of the Soviet cities. A meeting of state secretaries at the beginning of May 1941 had already agreed that the Soviet Union must feed the whole of the Wehrmacht, which would undoubtedly ‘result in the starvation of tens of millions of people’.110 In accordance with his pre-war instructions, the Jewish-Bolshevik leadership, as he envisaged it, was to be liquidated. In addition, at the end of the war he intended to deport Europe’s Jews to the ‘eastern territories’; he had repeatedly ‘prophesied’ their ‘annihilation’. By brutally purging this territory he would create an empty space that could be colonized with Germans and exploited economically. These principles established by Hitler for future occupation policy in the East help explain how those who were to carry out this policy during the coming months set about ‘ruling’ the ‘eastern region’.
On 17 July, the day after the notorious meeting with Göring, Bormann, Keitel, and Rosenberg, Hitler signed the Führer edict concerning the administration of the occupied territories, which contained further conclusions of the previous day’s conference. After the end of military operations, a civil administration was to be established, for which Rosenberg would be responsible as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. The occupied territories were to be divided into Reich commissariats subordinate to Rosenberg.111 A few days later, as had been decided at the meeting of 16 July, Gauleiters Hinrich Lohse (Schleswig-Holstein) and Erich Koch (East Prussia) were appointed Reich Commissars in the Ostland (Baltic states and White Russia) and the Ukraine respectively. By appointing the ‘masterful’ Koch, despite Rosenberg’s objections,112 Hitler ensured that Rosenberg’s idea of limited cooperation with local populations would not apply in the Ukraine.113 The edict also obliged Rosenberg to acknowledge that Göring and Himmler had been assigned special responsibilities for the Four-Year Plan and ‘police security operations’ respectively. The names Göring and Himmler stood for ruthless exploitation and brutal repression.
On the same day, Hitler issued a further edict defining Himmler’s powers.114 For the purpose of carrying out ‘police security operations’ in the Reich commissariats he was authorized to issue instructions to the Reich commissars, to each of whom he was also to assign a Higher SS and Police Leader. With the term ‘police security operations’ Hitler had defined Himmler’s assignment in the occupied East more narrowly than the latter had anticipated. A few weeks earlier, the Reichsführer SS had proposed to Lammers that he should take over ‘police and political security operations’ in the occupied territories, in order, in his role as Reich Settlement Commissar ‘to be able to ensure the pacification and consolidation of the political situation’.115
Himmler was evidently not prepared to put up with this setback. He responded by expanding his ‘police responsibilities’, combining them with those that he claimed in the East in his role as Settlement Commissar. For the assignment he had been given in October 1939 included not only the ‘establishment of new areas for German settlement through a resettlement programme’, but also the ‘elimination of the damaging influence of . . . alien populations’. Himmler now interpreted this assignment, and the edict of 17 July concerning ‘police security operations’,116 as making him responsible for ‘solving the Jewish question’ in the occupied eastern territories and thereby providing him with an important opportunity to extend his power.
During the first days of the ‘Eastern Campaign’, the Einsatzgruppen, operating directly behind the advancing troops, had already started shooting large numbers of Jewish civilians in the conquered territories. This was in response to clear instructions, issued by Hitler and Himmler, before the start of the campaign.117 On the one hand, they initiated pogroms with the aid of members of the local populations, in particular in Lithuania, Latvia, and western Ukraine; on the other, they carried out mass executions themselves. To begin with, the main victims were men belonging to an only vaguely defined Jewish upper class, in some places all men of military age. The justification put forward for the mass murder was the need forcibly to remove the most important support within the population for the Bolshevik system. During 1939/40, tens of thousands of members of the Polish elites had already been shot by special units.
Now, in July 1941, Himmler seized the initiative to expand this terrorist mass murder, accounted for by the need to get rid of the Soviet system and on the grounds of ‘security’, into genocide. At the end of July/beginning of August 1941, the Einsatzgruppen, police battalions, and two SS brigades (which were subordinated to a special Reichsführer SS command staff ) extended the shooting of Jewish civilians to include women and children; within a short time they started making villages, towns, and whole regions ‘free of Jews’, as they put it, in other words murdering the vast majority of the Jewish civilian population. Only a minority was left alive to be confined in specially established ghettos in order to undertake forced labour. By the end of the year, the murder units had already killed well over 500,000 people.118
These murders were undertaken less from ‘police motives’ and more from the belief in a racial hierarchy. The murder of the Jews during the war was intended to be the first step in a gigantic reordering of the new living space on a ‘racial’ basis, as Hitler had outlined in his instructions of 16 July; it was a topic he was to return to on several occasions during the first months of the ‘Eastern Campaign’.119 Himmler recommended himself to Hitler as the man, who, with his SS, possessed the requisite brutality to tackle this task; he clearly carried it out with Hitler’s approval and backing. A radio telegram from Heinrich Müller, the Gestapo chief, dated 1 August 1941, according to which ‘particularly interesting illustrative material’ was to be sent to Berlin, demonstrates the fact that Hitler was being kept continually informed: ‘The Führer is going to receive regular reports from here on the work of the Einsatzgruppen.’120
Apart from conducting military operations in the East and establishing the guidelines for Germany’s future occupation policy, during the summer of 1941 Hitler was preoccupied to a considerable extent with the repercussions of the extension of the war for the ‘home front’. From the very beginning, he kept a careful eye on the development of the ‘mood’ in Germany and maintained personal control over the main themes of propaganda. He was able to do both through more or less continuous contact with Goebbels, his Propaganda Minister. At the start of the campaign, the propaganda machine was in a precarious state. The German population was not in the least prepared for the ‘Eastern Campaign’; to begin with, the unexpected extension of the war provoked anxiety and concern.121 Moreover, for reasons of secrecy, during the first days after the launch of the invasion, the OKW report contained no concrete details about military developments.122 This propaganda blackout soon produced exaggerated rumours about the Wehrmacht’s success.123 After urgent representations from Goebbels, Hitler gave instructions124 that, on Sunday 29 June, a week after the start of the campaign, a series of special announcements should be made about German military successes.125 They did not, however, match up to expectations; many people had assumed that the Wehrmacht’s spearheads had penetrated even further into the Soviet Union.126
On 4 July, Hitler instructed Goebbels ‘to begin the great anti-Bolshevist campaign’.127 The media were told ‘to launch a big attack’, with the ‘conspiracy between Bolshevism and the Jews’ as its main theme.128 This was prompted by the discovery of a massacre of political prisoners and Ukrainian insurgents that the Soviets had carried out in the local prison on their withdrawal from Lemberg [Lvov].129 On 8 July, Hitler received Goebbels in the Führer headquarters for the first time since the start of the campaign against the Soviet Union. The ‘Führer’ told him he was convinced that ‘two thirds of the Bolshevik armed forces had already been destroyed or severely damaged’. He used this opportunity to order his propaganda minister to focus even more on anti-Semitism in his propaganda, ‘to reveal the cooperation between Bolshevism and plutocracy, and also to emphasize more and more the Jewish character of this alliance’.130 On the following day, therefore, Goebbels instructed the press to make ‘the Jews are to blame’ ‘the main theme of the German press’.131 The press, but also the other media, now began a hitherto unexampled chorus of anti-Jewish hatred. As ordered by Hitler, the aim was to include the war against ‘Bolshevik’ Russia and against ‘plutocratic’ Great Britain in a single propaganda slogan, and to portray it as the decisive struggle against the ‘Jewish world conspiracy’.132
The United States was also increasingly described in German propaganda as the puppet of Jewish world domination and prophylactically included among the Reich’s enemies. In this way the leadership thought they had invented a convincing slogan to prepare the German people for the entry of the United States into the war. ‘Churchill – Stalin – Roosevelt : The Pan-Jewish Triple Star’* was, for example, the Völkischer Beobachter’s headline on 13 July. The Atlantic Charter of 14 August, in which Roosevelt and Churchill had established common principles for the peaceful coexistence of nations, following ‘the final destruction of National Socialist tyranny’, provided a further target for propaganda attacks. Although Hitler mocked it as a cheap propaganda trick by the western powers,133 this overt gesture of solidarity by the United States towards Britain was interpreted by German propaganda as confirming its claim of a Jewish world conspiracy. In the summer of 1941, Hitler’s regime was already engaged in a global propaganda ‘war against the Jews’.
In the meantime, as a result of the military successes against the Soviet Union, the German population was coming to expect victory within a matter of weeks, and thus a relatively calm atmosphere prevailed during July. Significantly, during the course of the month the situation on the eastern front took up less and less space in the SD reports on the public mood.134 Instead, complaints about the everyday difficulties of life in wartime took centre-stage. People were worried about problems in the supply of food and about the British air raids on the cities in western Germany,135 while ‘vacation evacuees’ (better-off people escaping the cities and seeking refuge in holiday resorts) damaged the image of a national community totally committed to the war.136 In addition, there was the fear that the war could go on indefinitely.137
Towards the end of the month, when, despite all the military successes, victory was still not yet in sight, the mood deteriorated sharply.138 Goebbels felt obliged to take a ‘tougher’ line in his propaganda.139 Apart from the negative influences on the public mood already referred to,140 the growing concern, in particular among churchgoers, about the arbitrary expropriation of Church property was having a negative impact on morale. In July, therefore, Hitler decided officially to halt the expropriation,141 although in practice this was widely ignored.142 In addition, information and rumours were being spread about the so-called euthanasia programme.143
The situation changed in August when radio broadcast a series of special announcements about important successes on the eastern front, producing a generally very positive picture and resulting in the ‘reports on morale’ once more becoming optimistic in tone. This high point in morale was not, however, destined to last long.144