40

With His Back to the Wall

Following Italy’s exit from the Axis, the Wehrmacht had occupied a large part of Italian territory, as well as the Italian occupation zones in France and south-east Europe. Hitler had thus succeeded, at least for the time being, in securing the southern flank of ‘Fortress Europe’. After Italy’s defection, as a precaution, he had military plans prepared for the occupation of Hungary and Romania under the code names ‘Margarethe I’ and ‘Margarethe II’.¹

This increase in the territory directly controlled by Germany in late summer 1943 led to an increase in repression throughout its sphere of influence. Not only in Italy, but a few months later in France, and, during spring 1944, finally in Hungary as well, radical indigenous forces came to the fore under German protection and became willing assistants in implementing German policies, employing terror above all in the process. Hitler’s regime thus acquired accomplices whose fates were tied irrevocably to that of their German masters. In the course of this radicalization of their occupation policy and their relationship with their allies, the Germans managed, once again, to extend their systematic murder of the Jews to several new areas. From Hitler’s point of view, a further increase in mass murder and terror appeared to be the most effective means of preventing the German ‘bloc’ from disintegrating. By implicating indigenous forces in this terror regime he could compel the absolute ‘loyalty’ of his remaining allies. His personal interventions in the further development of Jewish policy were motivated not only by his vitriolic anti-Semitism and destructive impulses, they were also intended to secure the survival of his regime. In other words, he was less concerned about dragging his arch-enemies down with him to what was now almost inevitable destruction, than that their violent deaths should serve to extend the period of his rule. Thus, by continuing to murder the Jews in the last phase of the war, Hitler was not least pursuing political goals. It was precisely those four states that successfully resisted the most extreme form of German Jewish policy (Badoglio’s Italy, Romania, Finland, and Bulgaria)² that managed, between September 1943 and 1944, to escape from their alliance with Germany by securing separate armistices. This inevitably confirmed the German government in its determination not to make any compromises in their Jewish policy.

On Hitler’s orders, the ‘Social Republic of Italy’, proclaimed by Mussolini on 15 September, whose government was based at Salo on Lake Garda, was to be supervised by a Plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich, the envoy Rudolf Rahn.³ In addition, a German military government, branches of various economic agencies, and an SS and police apparatus were established. Thus, the Social Republic was firmly under Germany’s thumb. The Italian troops remained interned, Italian civilians were deported to Germany as forced labour, and a strike movement, which had spread through northern Italy from August onwards, was suppressed with the aid of Fascist forces. Hitler intervened personally and, in March 1944, ordered that 20 per cent of the striking workers be immediately deported to Germany and placed at the disposal of the SS as forced labour.⁴ However, the order was then withdrawn and, instead, 1,200 alleged ring leaders were deported to concentration camps in Germany.⁵ In addition, the occupiers used terror to combat the partisan movement that was now springing up everywhere in opposition to the new Fascist republic.⁶

Above all, however, the Reich Security Head Office was now determined ruthlessly to deport the over 33,000 Jews living in this part of the country.⁷ The first stage was the deportation of the Jews in Rome. In October 1943, Ribbentrop told the Foreign Ministry that ‘in accordance with a Führer directive, the 8,000 Jews living in Rome are to be moved to Mauthausen (upper Danube) as hostages’.⁸ This Führer directive eventually led on 16 October to a round-up in the Italian capital that the majority of Rome’s Jews managed to evade; even so, more than 1,000 of them were deported to Auschwitz. Up to the end of 1944 a total of 6,000 Jews from Italy arrived there. They were initially deported by Germans, but by the beginning of the following year the Italian authorities were also assisting. Thus, the Fascist state was drawn into complicity in murder with the Third Reich. After the Wehrmacht moved into the Italian-occupied zones in Greece, Croatia, Albania, Montenegro, and the Dodecanese (a group of islands in the eastern Aegean in Italy’s possession since 1912), around 10,000 Jews were deported during 1944 from these territories to Auschwitz and murdered there.⁹

When German troops moved into the Italian-occupied zone in the south of France, on 8 September, following the Italian–Allied armistice, German special units immediately began to pursue the Jews who had hitherto been living there in safety.¹⁰ They concentrated above all on Nice, where between 20,000 and 25,000 Jews, mostly refugees, were living. However, without the support of the French authorities, in three months the special units managed to catch only a small proportion of them, deporting 800 to the camp in Drancy.¹¹

However, the removal of the Italian occupation regime in the south of France, which had been established in 1940, provided the security police with the opportunity of radicalizing Jewish persecution throughout the whole of France. Since August 1943, the Gestapo had been increasingly getting the French police to arrest Jews throughout the country for alleged breaches of France’s anti-Semitic laws, and then deporting them.¹² However, the French authorities were not prepared to take part in systematic and comprehensive persecution of French Jews. The political preconditions had to be created for this stance to change.

At the end of 1943, Hitler once again made a massive personal intervention in the French situation. Marshall Pétain, the French President, was planning a constitutional reform, according to which the French National Assembly, which had not met since 1940, would appoint his successor. Via Ribbentrop, Hitler informed Pétain that this was ruled out. Moreover, the French government would have to be reshuffled in accordance with Germany’s views, the Vichy civil service had to be purged, and future French legislation would be subject to a German veto.¹³ In fact, at the beginning of 1944, the Laval government was substantially reshuffled under considerable German pressure, and degraded into becoming merely an executive arm of the occupying power.¹⁴ This had a direct impact on the persecution of the Jews. From now onwards, under instructions from the security police, the French police increasingly took part in arresting French Jews in the provinces.¹⁵ On 14 April 1944, the commander of the security police in France, Helmut Knochen, ordered the arrest of all Jews irrespective of their citizenship, with the exception of those living in ‘mixed marriages’. During the four months before the deportations stopped in August 1944, more than 6,000 people were deported.¹⁶

The fact that the Nazi empire had begun to crumble on its southern flank, while the eastern front was in retreat and a landing was expected in western Europe, encouraged resistance in the north.¹⁷ Thus, during the summer of 1943, acts of sabotage, strikes, and disturbances began to proliferate in Denmark. In August Hitler decided to declare martial law there.¹⁸ In view of this, the Reich Plenipotentiary, Werner Best, a former Reich Security Head Office official, decided that the best solution would be to allow the situation to deteriorate in a controlled fashion, in order to justify abandoning the previous cooperation with the Danish government. Then, in line with the general tightening of German occupation policy in Europe, the occupation administration should be transformed into a police regime under his leadership.¹⁹ He thus proposed to his superiors in the Foreign Ministry that the Danish Jews be deported,²⁰ in order to demonstrate the general change in German policy towards Denmark.

Best’s proposal coincided with the announcement of the Italian armistice, and Hitler’s consent to the transformation of the Danish occupation into a police regime coincided with the period when the ‘Führer’ was implementing measures to occupy Italy and its occupation zones. These measures, in turn, were motivated by his desire to eliminate once and for all the pernicious ‘Jewish influence’ prevalent there. However, it soon became clear that the preparations for the deportation of the Danish Jews could not be kept secret, and that Best did not have the numbers of police troops required to carry out the arrests ‘at a stroke’. Meanwhile, he had become convinced that he did not need a dramatic event such as an anti-Jewish ‘action’ in order to be able to transform the occupation regime.²¹ After he had failed to convince the German leadership of his misgivings,²² and with the planned arrests threatening to turn into a fiasco, Best decided to leak the timing.²³ The flight of the great majority of Jews living in Denmark to Sweden, made possible through a remarkable rescue operation mounted by the Danish population, seemed to him the preferable option.²⁴ Thus he claimed to the Foreign Ministry that the flight of the Jews had been a success, as, one way or the other, Denmark had been ‘dejewified’.²⁵

Hitler (also Ribbentrop and Himmler) did not regard Best as having sabotaged their Jewish policy, but, in the end, accepted it. Although it contradicted Hitler’s radical ideas about the ‘annihilation’ of the European Jews, during this phase of the war Jewish persecution had become for him, above all, a function of occupation and alliance policy. The collaboration of indigenous forces in the countries under German control in this matter was intended to increase the resilience of his ‘Fortress Europe’. If an occupation regime in a small country like Denmark could, as an exception, be stabilized by allowing the flight of a few thousand Jews then this was evidently acceptable.

Power struggles

In the meantime, Hitler made a number of changes in the regime’s power structure. On 20 August 1943, he appointed Himmler as the new Interior Minister; his predecessor, Wilhelm Frick, whom Hitler had long regarded as burnt out, was given the insignificant, and purely ceremonial, post of Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.²⁶ Appointing Himmler a minister was intended further to strengthen his authority as the central figure in the apparatus of repression; at the same time, it was a sign that the internal administration of the state was now finally under the control of the Party.

In terms of domestic politics, Himmler’s appointment marked the end of the influence of the ‘Committee of Three’, the alliance of the powerful heads of Hitler’s most important chancelleries, Lammers, Keitel, and Bormann. Bormann was the only one who managed to retain his position of power under the new circumstances, and indeed, if anything, to extend it. The particular position of trust that he enjoyed with Hitler is reflected in his appointment as ‘Secretary to the Führer’ in April 1943. The new title makes it clear that Bormann, even apart from his position as head of the Party Chancellery, had the right to pass on ‘Führer directives and opinions to leading and senior figures of the state, as well as to state agencies, on behalf of the Führer’.²⁷ As a result, Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, lost influence, as from now on he rarely met Hitler and, on occasions, had to wait weeks for an interview.²⁸ In his new post of Interior Minister Himmler refrained from carrying out a comprehensive reform of the administrative structure, which many, particularly in the Party, were hoping for and had anticipated. Speculation that Himmler might use his new position to subordinate the Gauleiters in their role as Reich Defence Commissioners (who were already subject to ‘official supervision’ by the Reich Interior Minister) unequivocally to the authority of the Reich [i.e the state] also proved incorrect.²⁹ Himmler was acting cautiously and no doubt realized that Hitler was not prepared to support far-reaching administrative reorganization during the war. As a result, right up until the end of the regime, the Party’s ‘territorial princes’ remained in an intermediate position politically between Party and state and this, in many respects, unclear status, requiring frequent decisions by the ‘Führer’, had the effect of strengthening Bormann’s position.

Apart from Himmler’s appointment, the second major change in the regime with which Hitler responded to the crisis in the summer of 1943 was the increase in Speer’s authority in the armaments sector. From June 1943 onwards, Speer had been trying to take over the Reich Economics Ministry’s responsibility for the production of consumer goods, which made up over 50 per cent of Germany’s total production. To achieve this he had secured the cooperation of Hans Kehrl, the official in the Economics Ministry responsible for industry.³⁰

At the beginning of September, Hitler signed a Führer edict ‘concerning the concentration of the war economy’,³¹ and, by the end of October, the responsibilities of Speer’s ministry had been reorganized and its title changed from ‘Ministry for Weapons and Munitions’ to ‘Ministry for Armaments and War Production’. A new planning office, ‘Central Planning’, was established under Kehrl with extensive powers,³² and the responsibility for industries producing consumer goods, hitherto exercised by the Reich Economics Ministry, was transferred to Speer’s system of rings and committees.³³

While Goebbels considered that his own plans for ‘making the war total’ were being realized through these measures, and he backed the ‘organizational genius’ Speer,³⁴ the Armaments Minister made an alliance with the other beneficiary of the summer 1943 crisis, Heinrich Himmler.³⁵ This became clear at the Reichsleiters’ and Gauleiters’ conference in Posen on 6 October, where Speer gave a tough warning to the Gauleiters not to continue obstructing his total war measures, in particular the extensive closing down of factories geared to civilian production. He referred specifically to the arrangement he had made the previous day for the SD to provide him with the requisite information about the production of goods that were not essential to the war effort. He announced that, if necessary and with Himmler’s support, he would intervene ruthlessly in their Gaus.³⁶ The meeting was marked by Himmler using the opportunity, as the new Interior Minister, to talk ‘quite openly’ about the murder of the Jews. He also specifically justified the systematic murder of Jewish children, since he did not want them to grow up as ‘avengers’.

In a comment, meant ironically, Himmler drew a parallel between the forced closing down of production in the Warsaw ghetto after the crushing of the April uprising and the closure programme Speer had been referring to. This powerful demonstration of the collaboration between Speer and Himmler made it clear that Speer’s warning to the Gauleiters was not simply an empty threat.³⁷ The Gauleiters were furious about Speer’s statements and the added weight given to them by Himmler’s comments, and complained to Hitler via Bormann. They claimed Speer had threatened them with police intervention and concentration camp.³⁸

Speer responded by turning Hitler’s attention to the area that formed the real basis of their personal relationship – architecture and town planning. Five days after the Posen speech, Speer persuaded Hitler to issue an edict, entitling him, even during the war, to start planning for the rebuilding of bombed cities ‘by preparing plans for urban reconstruction’.³⁹ Speer was given extensive special powers, imposing significant restrictions on the ambitions of the Gauleiters in this sphere, a deliberate demonstration of his power and one that anticipated the position he was hoping to acquire after the war. A circular of November 1943, containing his Posen speech to the Gauleiters, and once again emphasizing their responsibility for implementing the measures to ensure increased armaments production, reinforced the message. It underlined once more his claim to leadership on the home front.⁴⁰

Hitler also set boundaries to Speer’s ambitions, however. For example, at a meeting about the labour shortage in the German war economy on 4 January 1944,⁴¹ Hitler opposed his armaments minister, who wanted to solve the problem by reallocating orders to France. Speer had already held talks with the French in September 1943, which he had got Hitler to approve.⁴² However, Hitler now decided to support Sauckel’s solution to the labour problem through forced recruitment, and, during the coming months, the latter did what he could to try to get hold of workers from the French firms that Speer had wanted reserved for German contracts.

At the end of 1943, Himmler too was on a collision course with Speer. He ensured that in the course of the reorganization of the Reich Economics Ministry, from which Speer removed certain important responsibilities, two of his closest colleagues were given key positions. Otto Ohlendorf, the head of the SD’s Home Department, took over the important Main Department II of the Economics Ministry, and Franz Hayler, head of the Reich Group Commerce, became the new state secretary. This intervention was designed to ensure that, in preparing for the post-war economy, the Economics Ministry would be in a position to impose limits on the kind of economic planning Speer was introducing.⁴³

It now became clear that Speer had overplayed his hand. He had alienated the Gauleiters, Sauckel, and Bormann; the alliance with Himmler had failed, indeed the latter had built up a counterweight to him within the Economics Ministry; and Goebbels too began to distance himself.⁴⁴ Moreover, Hitler was bound to regard the fact that Speer was on his way to becoming the second most powerful man in the regime as a challenge to start thinking again about his successor. Although Hitler had declared Göring to be his deputy in 1939, and had confirmed this decision in 1941,⁴⁵ the latter’s growing weakness and declining prestige meant this settlement of the succession now appeared highly problematic. Any further strengthening of Speer’s position might compel Hitler to appoint a new deputy. This would involve disavowing Göring as well as having to make clear to other candidates, such as Himmler or Goebbels, why they were not qualified to become ‘Führer’. There was thus something to be said for leaving open the question of succession, and for putting Speer, who was making such efforts to become the second man in the regime, in his place.

The opportunity arrived very soon. On 18 January, Speer had to undergo a knee operation. However, during his stay in the Hohenlychen clinic, which was run by Professor Gebhardt, an intimate of Himmler’s, his health rapidly deteriorated. While Speer believed that he was the victim of deliberately poor treatment by Gebhardt, and thought that Himmler had been trying to have him killed, it is more plausible that it was in fact years of stress and overwork that had led to his physical and psychological collapse.⁴⁶

During his absence from the ministry, Speer’s opponents, both within and outside his ministry, set about trying to destroy the crown prince’s position, and Hitler did not back him. Already during the autumn, and increasingly after Speer became ill, Bormann passed on to Hitler complaints about the closing down of particular businesses and about other measures taken by the Armaments Ministry, with the aim of damaging Speer’s reputation. Ley and Göring intrigued against him, and, within his ministry, a growing number of colleagues wanted to settle scores with their often arrogant boss.⁴⁷ A few days after his operation, Speer sent several memoranda to Hitler, in which, above all, he asked for more responsibilities in the armaments sphere at the expense of the Gauleiters and the Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization. He was no doubt intending to demonstrate his undiminished commitment and to counteract what he feared was Hitler’s loss of trust in him. Significantly, however, Hitler did not respond to these initiatives.⁴⁸ When, after more than three months, Speer returned to the political stage, regaining his previous position of power was to cost him considerable effort.

How to proceed?

During the autumn of 1943 Hitler had succeeded in consolidating his regime once more, both internally and externally, after the loss of his main ally, and indeed had even significantly extended the territory under his direct rule. It was nevertheless obvious that, if a war on two fronts continued or a third front opened up in western Europe, military defeat was inevitable.

During September and October 1943 Goebbels spoke to Hitler on several occasions about the possibility of making separate peace deals. Although Hitler clearly agreed, he nevertheless dismissed any concrete steps at the present time. On 9 September he came out with the conjecture that it would be ‘easier to do something with the British than with the Soviets’. He also said he was sure that the British would be unwilling to surrender their conquests in the Mediterranean – Sicily, Calabria (Corsica and Sardinia would no doubt be added) – and on the basis of these territorial gains ‘might be more open to an arrangement’. The tensions between the Soviet Union and the Anglo–Americans were, however, not yet developed enough to be successfully exploited, he said, and so they had to go on waiting, although a crucial factor would be ‘to restore order to our fronts’. When Goebbels once again brought up the subject of separate peace deals on 27 October – in the meantime Badoglio’s Italy had declared war on Germany – Hitler explained to him that he was now tending ‘more to the Soviet side’. Allegedly, both sides, the Soviets and the Western Allies, had made ‘secret overtures’, he said, but Hitler had not responded to them because, as he confided to Goebbels, ‘we must not negotiate when things are going so badly for us’.⁴⁹ This change of attitude on Hitler’s part in favour of possible talks with the Soviet Union was in fact based on real events: In September there had been tentative contacts (but not talks or official meetings) in Stockholm involving German and Soviet go-betweens.⁵⁰

But if regaining the military initiative was the precondition for peace talks, how might that be achieved? In the winter of 1943/44 Hitler set his mind to it, focusing above all on the Allies’ landing in western Europe, which was feared to be imminent. He was convinced that this constituted the greatest threat, but that it also offered opportunities to bring about a decisive turn in the entire war situation.⁵¹ For militarily the failure of a large-scale landing in western Europe would set the Allies back years. It was possible, as he had explained to Goebbels in September, that Britain would settle for its strengthened position in the Mediterranean and be prepared to make a separate peace.

That prospect made him willing to accept setbacks on the eastern front, which was still more than 500 kilometres from the old Reich border, although these setbacks could not be allowed to jeopardize his strategic position in eastern and southern Europe. Since the winter of 1942/43 there could be no more talk of ‘annihilating’ the Soviet Union or of forcing it back behind a secure frontier established far to the east, and, by discontinuing the Battle of Kursk offensive in the summer of 1943, the Wehrmacht had surrendered its last chance of regaining the initiative on at least part of the front. What remained was a defensive battle that had to be continued until the hoped for decisive turn in the West. Only then, on Hitler’s reckoning, could he send reinforcements to the East and in this way possibly force a draw with Stalin. This was the background to the comment he made to Goebbels in October about possible approaches to the Soviet Union.

For the time being, however, he had to accept the Soviet advance. By late September/early October Army Groups Centre and South had withdrawn to the so-called Panther line, which meant among other things the loss of Smolensk and the Donbas. Only Army Group North remained in its old position outside Leningrad, thus forming a curved front that protruded dangerously far eastwards.⁵²

In October the Red Army began its attack on Army Group South, positioned on the far side of the Dnieper; on 6 November it took Kiev. To the south of the Dnieper the Red Army attacked Army Group A reaching the Black Sea by 5 November and cutting off the Crimea from the north. Army Group South was holding the Dnieper line in only two areas between these successful Soviet thrusts, the wedge stretching far to the east on the lower Dnieper being particularly precarious.⁵³

When Field-Marshal von Manstein, the commander-in-chief of the army group, met with Hitler on 7 November, he told him plainly that the Kiev situation was already irretrievable. Instead it was crucial that they secured the ‘victory that could be won on the lower Dnieper’. What in the eyes of the military was a salient that could no longer be defended, in Hitler’s deluded mind had to be held, whatever the cost. His explanation was that it was absolutely necessary to safeguard access to the sources of manganese ore in Nikopol and from there to re-conquer the gateway to the Crimea. The enemy must on no account take possession of the peninsula, which might then be used as the base for air attacks on the Romanian oilfields.⁵⁴

Hitler was not prepared to follow the military logic of army professionals; instead, his view of how to conduct the war as a totality was to gear it to political and strategic objectives, to give it an ideological foundation, and, not least, to include economic factors. The day after his meeting with Manstein, Hitler underlined this position in his customary speech to mark 8 November. This time he was less concerned to project confidence in victory, concentrating instead on the allegedly small band of ‘criminals’ who did not have faith in Germany’s victory and threatening to ‘do away with them’: ‘What happened in 1918 will not happen a second time in Germany.’ Hitler was making it clear that any ‘stab in the back’ delivered to the army at the front, such as had caused Germany’s defeat in the First World War (and he was not alone in holding this view), would be prevented in this war because of his decisive, politically and ideologically solid leadership. The speech was recorded on magnetic tape and broadcast that evening, after Goebbels, with Hitler’s consent, had had ‘a very few slightly awkward formulations’ cut.⁵⁵ Goebbels was relieved that after months Hitler was once again being heard in public.

On 24 December the Red Army in the Kiev area again launched a large-scale offensive on the northern flank of Army Group South.⁵⁶ Manstein once more felt he must press Hitler to surrender not only the Dnieper salient, which stretched far to the east, but also the Crimea, in order to free up troops for a counterattack in the north of his army group. When on 4 January he presented this view to Hitler at the latter’s headquarters, Hitler flatly refused.⁵⁷

During this visit Manstein tried one more time to introduce his proposal for a change to the military leadership structure, in other words to find one in which Hitler was to a greater extent ‘relieved of the burden’ of operational leadership of the army in the east. Manstein recalled after the war that he had hardly mentioned the subject before Hitler began to fix him with his stare:

He stared at me with a look that gave me the feeling that he intended to crush my will to say anything further to him. I cannot remember ever having seen a look on someone’s face that so strongly expressed the power of his will. . . . Suddenly the notion of an Indian snake charmer flashed across my mind. It was a sort of wordless battle that took place between us within the space of a few seconds. I realised that he must have used that look in his eyes to intimidate a good many people, or to use a vulgar but in this case fitting expression, to ‘break them’.

When Manstein, according to his account, stood his ground, Hitler declared that he alone had the authority to decide what troops should be made available for individual theatres of war.

Colonel General Guderian, who had been dismissed by Hitler in the winter crisis of 1941/42 but had been brought back in the spring of 1943 as General Inspector of panzer divisions, also attempted in January to raise with Hitler the appointment of a Wehrmacht Chief of the General Staff (he had already put the same proposal to Jodl in November 1943), but Hitler stonewalled.⁵⁸

The controversies involving Manstein and Guderian showed that during this winter of crises the tensions between Hitler and his top military men increased still further. However, whereas in the previous two winter crises military and strategic issues relating to the conduct of the war in the East had been dominant, this time Hitler was determined to subordinate the military to the primacy of his political leadership and to the ideological premises underpinning it. For him this was the crucial precondition for surviving this critical juncture, until they could regain the initiative in the war.

This improvement in troop morale was to be achieved by propagating a ‘fighting will’ unequivocally inspired by Nazism at all levels of the military hierarchy.⁵⁹ To this end Hitler, responding to proposals from Bormann, had decided to give the officers hitherto responsible for ‘leadership in military values’ at divisional level and with the higher-ranking staff officers the new title of ‘National Socialist Leadership Officers’,⁶⁰ as he rejected the old term as a relic of a pre-Nazi army that was still dependent on bourgeois values.⁶¹

In a Führer decree of 22 December Hitler ordered the creation of a National Socialist Leadership Staff within the OKW that, ‘taking instructions directly from me’ (in other words, over Keitel’s head) and working in concert with the Party Chancellery, was to guarantee ‘that the troops received the necessary political training and motivation’.⁶² Further National Socialist Leadership Staffs were created in the three Wehrmacht branches, and in addition to the already existing full-time National Socialist Leadership Officers they covered the whole of the military hierarchy down to battalion level with a network of part-time National Socialist Leadership Officers. As the involvement of the Party Chancellery suggests, the aim was less to increase the Party’s influence on the Wehrmacht but rather a new structure was supposed to ensure that the commanding officers showed no uncertainty or laxity as far as ideology was concerned.⁶³

As Hitler explained at a briefing in January, the whole business was worthwhile only if it was clear ‘that all complaints about and criticisms of directives involving ideology will be punished in exactly the same way as criticisms of tactical or other military matters and that it will cost the officer in question his rank and his neck. . . . He must not criticize any order he receives, particularly not in the presence of subordinates.’⁶⁴ In this briefing Hitler made detailed use of his experiences as an ‘education officer’ in 1919, for as far as he was concerned ‘the gradual saturation of the whole army with National Socialist ideas’ was ‘the most important thing of all’. Accordingly, he considered the propaganda activities of the League of German Officers, which had been formed in September 1943 under General Walther von Seydlitz from officers who were prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, to be the ‘most dangerous thing occurring at the front at the moment’.⁶⁵

On 27 January Hitler received his field-marshals and senior commanders at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters.⁶⁶ His address to them there was the first in a series in which he aimed to demonstrate ‘National Socialist leadership’ of the army by instructing his commanders on ideological matters.⁶⁷ He was convinced that only if the military leaders focused on the primacy of political leadership would it be possible to conduct the war in such a way as to enable them to regain the initiative in the medium term. In addition, they were, he said, engaged in a ‘struggle’ that would ‘end in the annihilation of the German nation if we do not prevail’. He also expressed the expectation that if his regime should find itself in a serious crisis the entire officer corps would stand before him to protect him, ‘with their swords drawn’.⁶⁸

Manstein took Hitler’s call to mean he doubted the loyalty of his officer corps and was provoked by this ‘deliberate affront’ to interject, ‘And that is what we will do, my Führer!’ Hitler seemed to be slightly rattled by this, he recalled, and replied with an icy stare, ‘Thank you, Field-Marshal von Manstein!’ After the meeting he told him he would not tolerate such interruptions. Manstein, who had clearly intended to convey his annoyance at Hitler’s long-winded ‘ideological’ lecture, was thus marked down by Hitler to lose his command.⁶⁹

In the meantime the military situation around Army Group South was becoming more critical. After Hitler’s refusal to withdraw forces from the Dnieper bend, in January 1944 Manstein had at first succeeded in blocking the Soviet assault on Uman,⁷⁰ but an extremely dangerous situation then developed in the Cerkassy area, where Army Group South held a stretch of terrain about forty kilometres long along the Dnieper, whereas it had been pushed back a long way from the river on other sectors of the front. Thus a ‘balcony’ extending for a hundred kilometres had formed, which, the military agreed, practically invited the Red Army to encircle the German forces positioned there. Yet Hitler was not prepared to abandon this salient, the sad remnant of the ‘Dnieper Line’, for he clung to the idea of launching an offensive from here in the coming spring aimed at Kiev.⁷¹ At the end of January the Red Army did in fact employ a pincer movement to encircle the German troops, consisting of two German corps, in the front of the salient. Yet even in this new situation Hitler refused to surrender this territory, in his eyes a ‘fortress on the Dnieper’, and forbade the troops to break out of the encirclement. Eventually, however, Manstein succeeded in getting his way: in the end the encircled German troops were able to break out of the pocket, supported by a relief operation from outside, and a second Stalingrad was prevented.⁷²

In the meantime it had been impossible to halt the Soviet advance on the northern flank of Army Group South at the interface with Army Group Centre.⁷³ In January the Red Army reached the former Polish–Soviet border. A situation began to emerge there that had the potential to determine the fate of the whole of Army Group South, the northern flank of which was now positioned more than 500 kilometres further west than the units on the most southerly sector of the front.⁷⁴ A further Red Army offensive in February forced Army Group A to abandon the second position on the Dnieper still held by the Wehrmacht, the Nikopol bridgehead in the south of the front. Thus any hope of restoring a connection with the German troops cut off in the Crimea had become illusory.⁷⁵

As a result of their offensive against Nevel and Gorodok between October and December 1943 the Red Army had, in addition, succeeded in driving a wedge in the front line between Army Groups Centre and North. In January it moved its main attack further to the north and compelled Army Group North to pull back its front from Leningrad and Novgorod to the Baltic. For Hitler this was reason enough to dismiss the commander-in-chief of Army Group North, Field-Marshal von Küchler, and appoint Colonel General Walter Model as his successor.⁷⁶

The new year also brought further setbacks on the southern front in Italy. In mid-January the Battle of Monte Cassino began; the Allied attack was boosted by a landing behind the German front line in the Anzio area and the Allies were now only forty kilometres from Rome.⁷⁷ Speaking to Goebbels, Hitler blamed the military leaders for not managing to destroy the bridgehead at Anzio, in his view a clear sign ‘that he . . . has to do everything himself’. Yet the German forces lacked the strength to attempt what he wanted, namely to mount a large-scale attack on the bridgehead.⁷⁸

Meanwhile, the Allied landing in the West that Hitler was expecting from February onwards began to dominate his thoughts. In his view it would be decisive for the outcome of the war.⁷⁹ Yet in discussions with his military staff Hitler seemed very uncertain about where the ‘invasion’ would take place.⁸⁰ On the more than 5,000 kilometres of coastline between Norway and the Bay of Biscay, on the French Mediterranean coast, or, as a ‘dummy invasion’, in Spain or Portugal? On 4 March he announced to his generals that he considered Normandy and Brittany to be the most threatened areas.⁸¹ He held to this view in the following months.⁸² In spite of this, the bulk of the German defences were concentrated on the Pas de Calais.⁸³

A sizeable fighting force had been assembled to fend off an Allied landing in western Europe. By 6 June 1944 it had grown to around sixty divisions, even though many of them had already fought in the East and so were battle-weary.⁸⁴ Hitler’s hopes were focused on deploying the bulk of these troops, up to forty divisions, in an offensive in the East, once the Allied landing had been repelled. Uncertainty about where the landing would take place and the Western Allies’ air superiority made it impossible, however, to concentrate these forces in the right place at the right time in order to push the Allied troops quickly back into the sea and shift the main war effort back to the threatened East. Even the ideological ‘orientation’ of the officer corps and Hitler’s insistence on the primacy of his political leadership in the war could do nothing to change that.

The invisible ‘Führer’: Repercussions for the regime

While Hitler concentrated his efforts on regaining the initiative in the war by preventing an Allied landing in the West, and was working to bolster his primacy via-á-vis the Wehrmacht and strengthen it ideologically, his ‘charisma’, already seriously damaged in 1942, was rapidly losing its power. A crucial factor was that during the winter of 1943/44 the Reich was facing an ever-increasing threat from the air. The air raids, against which there was no defence and which were not being halted by ‘retaliation’, however much it was invoked, became the most significant burden affecting the ‘home front’. Between November 1943 and March 1944 the RAF mounted its long-expected bomber offensive against Berlin. The first four raids in November alone killed 4,000 people and destroyed 9,000 buildings.⁸⁵ Hitler consoled Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin, with the words: ‘Berlin would never be able to claim for itself the moral right to lead the Reich in the future, if other cities in the Reich had suffered much more than the capital itself.’⁸⁶ This message gave little comfort, however, to those who had been bombed out.

Shortly after this Hitler appointed Goebbels to head the ‘Reich Inspection of Civilian Air War Measures’ with the role of scrutinizing ‘all local measures taken to prepare for, prevent, and alleviate air war damage’ and of mobilizing suitable local personnel.⁸⁷ Goebbels’s task was to maintain morale in cities affected by bombing by getting the Party involved and employing a mixture of supervision and propaganda.⁸⁸ In allocating him this task, Hitler had transferred to Goebbels yet one more part of his, now almost invisible, domestic leadership role. For his own part, he preferred to maintain silence on the consequences of the bombing war and to avoid the affected areas as far as possible.

In the second half of the war a wide range of developments led to a dissolution of the inner cohesiveness of German society: the bombing with its catastrophic effects; the evacuation of millions of actual or potential bombing victims to ‘bomb-safe’ areas; the years-long separation of many families as a result of the ‘deployment’ of millions of Germans to work far from their homes and of men being called up for military service; the growing problems caused by food shortages and the black market that sprang up as a result; the well-known privileges and corruption of the Party big wigs; the rigorous measures taken to suppress everyday contact with the millions of people deported to Germany as forced labour; the regime’s battle with the emergence of unconventional opposition among young people. The concrete conditions of life in wartime produced in the majority of the population something like a caricature of the Nazi ‘national community’ that was far from developing into a united fighting community battling for its survival. The regime’s attempt to mobilize people’s last reserves of resistance, persuading them to adopt the slogan ‘Victory or Downfall’ by reminding them that Germany’s crimes were widely known had already proved unconvincing in 1943. Although the apparatus of repression and the local Party’s continuing close control of everyday life ensured that wartime society still functioned and the mass of the population obediently fulfilled their obligations, the idea that this was one ‘nation’ united behind the ‘Führer’ could no longer be maintained, not even as a façade.⁸⁹ The Führer propaganda of 1942 had frequently used Hitler’s actual successes to boost the impression of his leadership qualities; however, these images had been exhausted by 1944 at the latest. As the war situation grew ever more critical, Hitler’s absence from the public sphere posed a serious and growing problem of domestic political leadership. During 1944 he was rarely seen or heard in public.

Figure 14. The regime tried to preserve some experience of normality amid the destruction, and the public responded. If, as here in the winter of 1943/44, queues formed outside places of entertainment such as the Tauentzienpalast in Berlin the regime was able to use them in propaganda as evidence of ‘the will to endure’.

Source: bpk / Hanns Hubmann

Goebbels concluded from reports he received from the Reich Propaganda Offices that Hitler’s speech on 30 January 1944, which had been broadcast on the radio, had ‘not quite had the desired impact’.⁹⁰ A speech he made on 24 February to ‘old fighters’ to mark the founding of the Party was judged by Goebbels to be unsuitable for a wider audience ‘because of a series of psychological slips’;⁹¹ on 8 November the previous year he had just about managed to salvage the recording of a Hitler speech for a radio broadcast by making a few cuts, but this time he gave up.

In April Hitler admitted to Goebbels that he felt his ‘health was not good enough’ to permit him to ‘speak with total assurance at a public rally’.⁹² He had in fact fallen ill a number of times in the previous weeks and was now becoming positively frail. He had impaired vision in his right eye, the result of bleeding in the vitreous body, and was diagnosed with high blood pressure and progressive arteriosclerosis of the coronary blood vessels. For some time his movements had looked significantly restricted. He dragged his left leg, his left arm had a serious tremor, and his posture was becoming increasingly stooped.⁹³ These are clear symptoms of advanced Parkinson’s disease, although it had not been recognized as such. The cocktail of medicines, tonics, and stimulants that his personal physician, Theodor Morell, provided him with every day assumed bizarre proportions.⁹⁴ In spite of the tense military situation, his worsening condition made Hitler withdraw to the Obersalzberg between mid-March and mid-July 1944 to recover. His already rare public appearances reduced still further. He would make only one more speech during 1944 that was broadcast on the radio, and that was immediately after the assassination attempt of 20 July. He now never appeared at major events.⁹⁵ The very fact that he was no longer a presence as ‘Führer’ in the public sphere was bound to have a seriously negative effect on his political effectiveness, quite apart from the issue of how far his physical frailty had a direct influence on his behaviour or his objectives. What is altogether evident, however, is that his physical decline went hand in hand with the growing rigidity with which he responded to the collapse of his authority. This rigidity was evident in his unbending insistence on ‘holding on, whatever the cost’ (which included his deliberate tactic of prolonging his regime by extending the mass murder of the Jews).⁹⁶

From the second half of 1943 onwards an alliance was emerging between four top functionaries who were prepared by means of a network of agreements to compensate at least partially for Hitler’s personal decline and that of his regime and thus finally to put an end to Göring’s role as Hitler’s deputy. During the winter crisis of 1942/43 the Committee of Three, composed of the ‘Chancellery bosses’, Lammers, Keitel, and Bormann, had attempted to take over this function, while Goebbels, with the partial support of Speer, had opposed their dominance. During the summer of 1943, however, this Committee of Three had ceased to exist. Once Himmler had taken over as Interior Minister (in addition to his many other offices), Speer had further consolidated his position in armaments, Goebbels, in the virtual absence of Hitler, was appearing ever more frequently as the most important public face of the regime, and Bormann had managed to supplant Lammers as the real coordinator and manager in Hitler’s immediate entourage, a loose alliance of these four men, all with multiple responsibilities, began to form. The aim of this ‘Gang of Four’ was to gain control of all the functions within the Reich that were important for the continuation of the war and thus take over the leadership of the ‘home front’, given that Hitler was no longer capable of doing so effectively. The emergence of this alliance was, however, repeatedly overshadowed by rivalries, suspicion, and animosities.

Whereas Speer’s relationship with Bormann and Himmler (with whom he had joined forces in the autumn of 1943 to oppose the Gauleiters) was always strained and he was forced in the early months of 1944 to put up with significant, if only temporary, damage to his position, his relationship with Goebbels worked relatively well, as was shown the previous year when the efforts to bring about ‘total war’ were stepped up.⁹⁷ For his part, Goebbels stated that he had an ‘excellent personal and comradely relationship’ with Himmler.⁹⁸ He had, as he put it, ‘developed a good personal and working relationship’ with Bormann; he valued him, he said, because he had been ‘very useful’ to him ‘by speaking to the Führer directly about a huge number of issues’.⁹⁹ Bormann had complained to him many times that Himmler ‘took charge of too many things’,¹⁰⁰ a clear reference to the rivalry that existed between these two prominent figures. Goebbels was forced, however, to admit that Bormann was right in his opinion. It would not be until the summer of 1944, after further massive military setbacks, that the ‘Gang of Four’ was capable of taking coordinated action.

Crumbling alliances

While Hitler was awaiting the Allied landing in the West in the spring of 1944 and hoping that a defensive victory would bring him a decisive turn in the war situation, he was forced to focus on further military setbacks on the eastern front. His ally Hungary, which was in serious danger from the Red Army’s advance, was threatening to break away. On 12 February Horthy requested that Hitler allow him to pull back his divisions positioned on the eastern front to the Carpathian border.¹⁰¹

Hitler told Goebbels on 3 March that he would now set about ‘resolving the Hungarian question’. The Hungarians engaged in ‘treachery the whole time’. He was therefore determined to depose the government in Budapest, take Horthy, whom he had long mistrusted,¹⁰² into custody, and try to instal a regime using the former Prime Minister Imrédy. If the Hungarian army were disarmed, it would be possible ‘to tackle the issue of the Hungarian aristocracy and above all the Jews of Budapest’, for while ‘the Jews are still in Budapest it is impossible to do anything with this city and with the country and in particular with public opinion’. Another factor was the prospect of significant amounts of plunder: the Hungarian army’s equipment, the country’s oil reserves, ‘not to mention their food stocks’.

In addition, Hitler was convinced that the ‘removal of the threat from Hungary’ would have a positive effect on the Bulgarians, who would then ‘buck up their ideas’. The occupation of Hungary would also give the Romanians hope that closer relations with Germany would sooner or later help them to secure their territorial demands vis-à-vis Hungary. When Hitler raised the matter of Hungary’s unreliability with Antonescu at a meeting at the end of February, Antonescu strongly advocated intervening against his neighbour, agreeing to supply a much greater number of troops for their joint war against the Soviet Union once the ‘Hungarian threat’ was dealt with.¹⁰³

By mid-March the issue of his ally Hungary became acute. On 14 March Hitler informed Goebbels that he had brought forward the move against Hungary ‘because the Hungarians had smelt a rat’.¹⁰⁴ On 18 March Hitler met Horthy and high-ranking representatives of his regime at Schloss Klessheim and heaped reproaches on them, such as that the Hungarian government was involved in negotiations with the Western Allies and the Soviets and intended to get out of the war. Almost a million Jews could move about freely there, he said, which the Germans inevitably regarded as a threat to the eastern and Balkan fronts. There was a risk of another Badoglio emerging. The occupation of the country would therefore begin that very night. When Horthy refused to give his written consent, Hitler announced he would go ahead regardless. Horthy then threatened to resign, to which Hitler responded that in that case he could not guarantee the safety of Horthy’s family. Horthy made to abandon the meeting and could be prevented only by false air raid warnings being put out. In the end Horthy gave in to the occupation and promised not to resist.¹⁰⁵

On 19 March, very early in the morning, German troops crossed the border.¹⁰⁶ Contrary to Hitler’s expectation, Imrédy was not prepared to form a new government and so the Hungarian ambassador in Berlin, Sztójay, was made the new Prime Minister. Edmund Veesenmayer was installed as the new German governor and given the title of Ambassador and Plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich in Hungary.¹⁰⁷

Stand firm, whatever the cost

At the beginning of March the Soviet offensive had begun both on the northern flank and on the completely overstretched southern flank of Army Group South.¹⁰⁸ To stop it Hitler pinned his hopes on holding out at all costs. By doing so he hoped to bridge the relatively short interval that, according to his plan, the army in the East would still have to hold out until the landings in the West were decisively pushed back. To this end he had issued Führer Order 11, which laid down that ‘strongholds’ were in future to form the backbone of the German defence. A ‘specially selected, tough soldier’, if possible a general, was to take over command in each instance and be responsible ‘on his honour as a soldier for the fulfilment of his mission to the end’; if overwhelmed by an enemy attack he was to allow himself to be encircled, pinning down as much of the enemy’s forces as possible and thereby creating the conditions for ‘successful counter-operations’. ‘Strongholds’ were to be surrendered only with Hitler’s express permission.¹⁰⁹

In the area of the 4th Panzer Army the city of Tarnopol, which was being directly attacked by Soviet troops, had been declared a stronghold on 9 March, a decision Hitler would not budge from, in spite of protests from Army Group South that the city was too difficult to defend. On 23 March it was surrounded. The 4,600 men defending it held out for four weeks but by then they were completely worn down. In the end only fifty-five men escaped from the pocket.¹¹⁰ A little further south the Red Army succeeded in encircling the entire 1st Panzer Army by the end of March. Clearly seeing that the army was in danger of being cut off, at a conference on the Obersalzberg on 19 March, Manstein, along with Kleist, commander-in-chief of Army Group A, demanded that the army group be pulled back to the Dniestr, so as to free up troops for Army Group South. Hitler, however, refused.

Manstein’s stay at the Berghof took place in the context of a curious event. On 19 March Hitler received the field-marshals and senior commanders; the military elite presented him with a declaration distancing themselves from the propaganda activities against his regime carried on by General von Seydlitz and his League of German Officers based in Moscow, while at the same time pledging unconditional loyalty to their supreme commander. As has already been mentioned, Hitler and the army leadership saw the Seydlitz propaganda as extremely dangerous; in particular, a series of personal letters from Seydlitz to high-ranking commanding officers in the East had alarmed Hitler, prompting him to raise doubts about the loyalty of the officer corps.¹¹¹ The declaration, which was written by Schmundt in consultation with Goebbels,¹¹² was designed to rectify this situation. In fact, it was something of an impertinence towards the most senior officers to hold them collectively responsible for Seydlitz’s actions, even though they had taken an oath of ‘unconditional obedience’ to Hitler. The ceremony was a visible expression of the subordination Hitler required of his commanding officers to his ideologically based absolute claim to leadership. A situation such as the one that had occurred when Hitler had last made a speech to his generals and Manstein had interjected a comment was never to happen again.¹¹³ It was very evident that Hitler was extremely pleased with this demonstration; as far as he was concerned there was complete harmony that day between him and his generals.¹¹⁴ Schmundt for his part quickly set about making the entire officer corps aware of the declaration through a special decree.¹¹⁵

Only a few days later this harmony was again disturbed. The situation of the now almost completely encircled 1st Panzer Army became even more critical in the days that followed. Manstein gave notice that he would ignore Hitler’s order to hold the position and would command the 1st Panzer Army to break out of the pocket that was forming around it on his own authority.¹¹⁶ On 25 March Manstein was summoned once again to headquarters, where he had a heated argument with Hitler. Manstein stuck to his guns, however. Hitler terminated the discussion, whereupon Manstein told Hitler’s chief adjutant that he would resign. By the evening, however, Hitler surprised him by changing his mind and being prepared to listen to Manstein’s proposals. This startling willingness to give way prompted Manstein to put forward his ideas about how the eastern front might be stabilized and to recommend a German chief of the general staff for Antonescu. For ‘political reasons’, however, Hitler was unwilling to agree to that. On 28 March the 1st Panzer Army did finally begin to break out of the Soviet encirclement and after a few days this operation, supported by a relief attack mounted by an assault force hurriedly brought from France, was successful.¹¹⁷

On 27 March Hitler received Field-Marshal Ewald von Kleist at the Berghof, who asked Hitler to consent to his withdrawing with his Army Group A, which was operating to the south of Army Group South, from the River Bug to the lower Dniestr. He was astonished when Hitler agreed to this, although the latter demanded at the same time that, whatever happened, the Crimea should be held.

On two occasions within a short time Hitler had been reluctantly forced to give way to pressure from two of his most senior generals, which for him was an almost unbearable loss of face.¹¹⁸ He therefore decided to dismiss Manstein and Kleist, instructing them to come to the Berghof on 30 March, where he received them individually, telling them they were to be dismissed at the same time as conferring on them the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords.¹¹⁹ In the East, Hitler explained to Manstein, ‘the time for expansive operations’ had come to an end; now what they needed to do was ‘simply to hang on stubbornly’ and for this ‘new type of leadership’ he needed ‘a new name and a new watchword’. Walter Model, now promoted to the rank of field-marshal, was made Manstein’s successor, while Kleist made way for Ferdinand Schörer, who was promoted to the rank of Colonel General; he was considered to be a particularly sound National Socialist.¹²⁰

As Hitler had explained to Manstein, his removal did indeed signify clearly that mobile warfare had been abandoned. This modern concept of war, in which the holding of territory was subordinated to evasive manoeuvres and the rapid formation of foci of attack, had always seemed a little suspect to Hitler. He had always rather mistrusted the brilliant strategies of the officers of the General Staff with their, as he saw it, arrogant bearing and sophisticated jargon. Hitler was more inclined to trust his personal experience of four years of trench warfare.

His idea of doggedly holding on whatever the cost was not, however, primarily motivated by military and operational considerations but rather by political and strategic ones. As he had done the previous winter, he emphasized that he had to hold certain positions in order to be able to use them as bases for future offensives. The change in name of Army Groups South and A to ‘North Ukraine’ and ‘South Ukraine’ was meant to point to the possibility of the Germans going on the offensive in the near future, precisely because the German army was still in control of only the extreme western edge of the Ukraine. Yet even if he had succeeded in repelling a landing by the Western Allies and as a result had prevented them from launching an offensive for years, the German army would have been a long way from having the necessary strength to mount offensives in the East of the kind it had launched in 1941 and 1942.

In Hitler’s view, however, the idea of going on the offensive again against the Red Army after repelling an invasion in the West, and of holding on to as much territory as possible in the East until that point, offered the only chance of escaping imminent defeat. As he had already been expecting an Allied landing in the spring of 1944, the need to hold on doggedly would, he thought, last for only a few months or even weeks. It must surely be possible simply to hang on for that length of time. On the other hand, he feared losing the operational base for the decisive offensive in the East if he were to give in to the ideas of his generals and respond flexibly to the Red Army attacks by shortening the front, surrendering territory, and adopting over all a more mobile approach. His generals were prepared to give up territory they had conquered in order to gain time. Hitler, by contrast, wished to make use of this time by bending every sinew to hold on to territory.

Hitler’s order to stand firm was an expression of the paralysis that had been increasingly affecting the regime since the autumn of the previous year. The rapid and large-scale operation to take control of much of Italy and its zones of occupation had been the last show of strength of which it was capable. Since then the focus externally had been on establishing the defence of ‘Fortress Europe’, and internally on gearing everything to economic exploitation, total repression, and merciless implementation of the programme to murder the Jews. The hope was that by conjuring up a terrifying apocalyptic vision of the total destruction that would come about if Germany were defeated, the regime would be able to mobilize people’s final reserves of stamina. No further allies had in fact jumped ship, enemy forces were still far from Germany’s borders, the air war had not been able to paralyse armaments production, and although resistance and partisan movements had grown to a significant size, they were not capable of posing a threat to Hitler’s empire. Hitler was aware, however, that this defensive position would collapse in the medium term under Allied pressure. Hitler’s watchword ‘Hold out, whatever the cost’, which from a purely military point of view was amateurish, in fact positively absurd, derived from a political and strategic plan to go on the offensive that did indeed have an inner logic and in theory offered a way out of the impasse of the war situation. In the light of the relative strengths of the opposing sides, however, it was unrealistic, and in fact delusional.

On 8 April the Red Army began its offensive to reconquer the Crimea and forced the German 17th Army defending the peninsula to retreat to the fortress of Sebastopol. In spite of the hopeless situation, in mid-April Hitler refused to allow the army to evacuate across the Black Sea, justifying this on the grounds that such a move might drive neutral Turkey into the enemy camp. At the end of April he removed the army’s commander, Erwin Jaenecke, from his command for his negative assessment of the situation. When, in view of the by now catastrophic situation in the Sebastopol area, Hitler finally gave his consent for the evacuation on 9 May, only 30,000 men out of around 60,000 who had made up the force in this final phase could be rescued. On 14 May the Army High Command was obliged to announce the end of the fighting.¹²¹

Hungary: The last chapter in Hitler’s Jewish policy

‘Exterminate, so that you yourself are not exterminated.’ This was the maxim Hitler had impressed on the Reichsleiters and Gauleiters on 17 April after the funeral of Gauleiter Adolf Wagner. The Hungarians were finally to be forced to adopt this ruthless precept. In April the German authorities in occupied Hungary pushed through a set of anti-Jewish laws along German lines. They laid the foundation for large-scale deportations that were organized from Budapest by a special RHSA task force led by Eichmann. As early as mid-April the Hungarian police were gathering the country’s Jews together in ghettos and camps. At the end of April the first deportations to Auschwitz began, and from mid-May these became extensive and systematic. As a rule, four trains set off for Auschwitz daily with 3,000 people in each.¹²² Up to the point when deportations were halted at the beginning of July 437,000 Jews had been deported in this manner to the extermination camp at Auschwitz, where the overwhelming majority were murdered immediately on arrival.

Hitler considered that the new Hungarian government was already so compromised by its involvement in Germany’s policies towards the Jews that it could no longer leave the alliance. ‘At any rate the Hungarians will no longer be able to escape the logic of the Jewish question’, as Goebbels put it in his record of Hitler’s comments on the subject at the end of April. ‘If you say A, you must say B, and now that the Hungarians have got started with anti-Jewish policies they cannot apply the brakes any more. After a certain point these policies acquire their own momentum.’¹²³ This provides another example of the central role played by anti-Jewish policies in Hitler’s efforts to bind his ‘allies’ to him.

Hitler continued to follow events in Hungary with great attention and intervened during the summer to prevent the deportations from stalling. At the beginning of July, in response to world-wide protests, Horthy decreed that the deportations should be halted, immediately before the Jews living in Budapest were also caught up in them. When Prime Minister Sztójay then asked Veesenmayer if they could take up the offers made by several states to permit Jews to immigrate or to transit, Hitler, when consulted, decided that this could be allowed if ‘the deportation of Jews to the Reich, temporarily halted by the Reich Administrator’, were ‘completed immediately with all possible speed’.¹²⁴ Powerful German pressure made the Hungarian government finally agree at the beginning of August to a resumption of the deportations, but the rapidly approaching military defeat of the Axis powers (on 23 August Romania declared it had left the alliance and joined the anti-Hitler coalition) meant that this never happened.

In line with Hitler’s maxim of using anti-Jewish policies as an indicator of the loyalty of those allies he still had, the Nazi regime attempted in the course of 1944 to draw other vassal states into its radical measures following the example of Hungary. Now it was Slovakia, which had halted deportations in October 1942, that was put under pressure: just like the previous year, on 12 May 1944 at Schloss Klessheim the Slovakian delegation under Tiso was browbeaten about ‘the Hungarians’ treachery’ and the ‘Jewification’ of Hungary as a clear warning to the regime in Bratislava.¹²⁵

As far as the regime was concerned, the mass murder of the Hungarian Jews essentially marked the end of the ‘Final Solution’ (even though Jews were hunted down literally right up to the end of the war and hundreds of thousands of Jewish concentration camp inmates were to die by the time it was over). Shortly before the start of the Hungarian deportations Hitler therefore decided to change the focus of propaganda, which up to then had concentrated on creating images of the Jews as the enemy. Since the summer of 1941 the Third Reich had been pursuing the war primarily as a ‘war against the Jews’, in other words conjuring up an enemy that would explain the existence of this unnatural alliance of ‘plutocrats’ and ‘Bolsheviks’. But now that the Third Reich was finally on the defensive, Hitler no longer thought it opportune to go on with propaganda that focused on the distorted image of the Jews as the universal enemy. And given that the last Jewish communities in German-occupied Europe would soon be annihilated, the propaganda cliché of the Jew as the enemy within, who had to be defeated by Germany and her allies so that the foundations for a ‘New Europe’ could be laid, had necessarily reached the end of its useful life.

On 26 April 1944 Hitler told his Propaganda Minister ‘that international Jewry is certainly not as sympathetic to Stalin as people generally suppose. In a number of respects he treats the Jews rather harshly.’ In the same conversation Hitler expressed the view that the emergence of strikes in Britain was probably ‘Trotskyite’ and a sign of ‘opposition to the war and to Stalin’. ‘Jewish influence’ was of course behind it, he said, and this could be ‘very useful for our purposes at the moment’.¹²⁶

These comments suggest that Hitler no longer held to the ideologically motivated dogma that had preoccupied him for twenty-five years, namely that Jewishness and Bolshevism were identical. This astonishing departure from a core element in his world view was the result of the political situation. Now that the Soviet Union was so unmistakably on the offensive, it was no longer important to present it as part of a ‘world-wide Jewish conspiracy’, thereby emphasizing how it could form an alliance with the west. On the contrary, now that Germany was on the defensive, it was vital to emphasize the differences in the enemy camp and bank on such a heterogeneous coalition breaking up. Thus, from then on anti-communist and anti-Semitic propaganda were kept separate. Anti-Semitic propaganda was geared towards American Jews, who were styled as the driving force behind the Western Allies’ war; at the same time the ‘Bolshevik’ peril was evoked with all its terrors.¹²⁷

On 26 May Hitler gave a speech in the Platterhof, the guesthouse on the Obersalzberg, to generals and senior officers who had just completed an indoctrination course in Nazi ideology at a Party college. This speech can be regarded as the culmination of Hitler’s efforts to imbue the army with Nazi doctrine (a process he had begun by introducing National Socialist Leadership Officers). He first went back to 1918, but after the usual Party narrative he became more philosophical. Via discussion of the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems he found a way into his Social Darwinist philosophy, according to which life was ‘an endless struggle’. After discussing the alleged racial superiority of the Germans, he came to the key point of his speech: his policies towards the Jews, a chapter that, significantly, he treated as if already closed.

‘By removing the Jews I have dealt with any possibility in Germany of some kind of revolutionary cell or nucleus forming. People may of course say to me: “Could you not have solved the problem more simply – or not more simply, because any other way would have been more complicated – but more humanely?” Gentlemen, we are engaged in a life and death struggle. If our enemies were to gain victory in this struggle the German nation would be exterminated. Bolshevism would slaughter countless millions of our intellectuals. Anyone who wasn’t shot in the back of the neck would be carted off. The children from more elevated social groups would be separated out and disposed of. . . . Precisely in this situation, as in every other, humane policies would amount to the greatest cruelty to one’s own nation. If I am making the Jews hate me I would at least be loath to miss out on the advantages of their hatred.’ These advantages, Hitler continued, consisted in Germany having ‘a cleanly organized national body, which cannot be influenced by alien forces.’ Hitler had a negative example immediately to hand: Hungary. ‘The whole country disintegrating and corroded, Jews everywhere, nothing but Jews up to the highest positions, and the whole state covered by, it has to be said, a dense network of spies and agents. . . . I have intervened here too and now this problem also will be solved.’¹²⁸