The Third World War

When “Barbarossa” starts, the world will hold its breath and keep still.

Adolf Hitler

 

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

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

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

 

Our tasks in Russia: smash the armed forces, break up the State. . . . Struggle of two ideologies. Annihilating verdict upon Bolshevism, is equivalent to asocial criminality. Communism tremendous danger for the future. We must abandon the viewpoint of soldierly comradeship. The Communist is no comrade before and no comrade afterwards. What is involved is a struggle of annihilation. . . .

The struggle must be waged against the poison of sedition. That is no question of courts-martial. The commanders of the troops must know what is at stake. They must lead the way into the struggle. . . . Commissars and GPU men are criminals and must be treated as such. . . . The fight will be very different from the fight in the West. In the East harshness is kindness toward the future.

The leaders must demand of themselves the sacrifice of overcoming their scruples.³²

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

In me they. . . are facing an opponent who does not even think of the word capitulate. It was always my habit, even as a boy—perhaps it was naughtiness then, but on the whole it must have been a virtue after all—to have the last word. And let all our enemies take note: The Germany of the past laid down its arms before the clock struck twelve. I make it a principle not to stop until the clock strikes thirteen!⁴⁹

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

How easy he has made it for himself!. . . The man should shoot himself as generals used to fall upon their swords when they saw that their cause was lost. That’s to be taken for granted. Even a Varus commanded the slave: Kill me now!. . . what does ‘life’ mean? Life is the nation; the individual must die. What remains alive beyond the individual is the nation. But how can a man be afraid of it, afraid of this second in which he can free himself from misery, if duty does not hold him in this vale of wretchedness. Paulus. . . will be speaking on the radio in no time—you’ll see. [Generals] Seydlitz and Schmidt will speak on the radio. They’ll lock those men in their rat-infested cellars, and two days later they’ll have them so worn down they’ll talk at once. . . . How can anyone be so cowardly? I don’t understand it. . . . What are we to do about it? What hurts me most personally is that I promoted him to field marshal. I wanted to give him that last pleasure. That’s the last field marshal I appoint in this war. Best not to count your chickens before they’re hatched. . . . That’s as ridiculous as anything can be. So many people have to die, and then one man like that comes along and at the last minute defiles the heroism of so many others. He could free himself from all misery and enter into eternity, into national immortality, and he prefers to go to Moscow. How can there be any choice. There’s something crazy about it.⁵²

 

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

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