Chapter 1
1 Hitler and Kubizek were reunited in April 1938 in Linz. They met for the last time in July 1940. Shortly after the end of World War II, Kubizek was briefly incarcerated by the Americans. He died in October 1956.
2 Hanisch swindled Hitler over the sale of two paintings and, subsequently, was jailed for a short time by the police on an unrelated charge. Hitler never got the money nor did he see Hanisch again. Reinhold Hanisch is not to be confused with Karl Hönisch.
3 Technically, in 1914 Germany overall did not possess an army, but fielded the four separate armies of the kingdoms of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg. There was no German Army until after the armistice of 1918.
4 The Allied high command shared Hitler’s point of view and issued strict orders that the Christmas Truce was not to be repeated and that anyone attempting to fraternize with the enemy would be shot.
5 Hitler might have been expected to rise higher and was nominated for promotion by his staff sergeant, Max Amann. He was also considered for promotion by the staff of the Linz regiment, who decided that he lacked leadership qualities. It was also clear that, throughout the war, Hitler was quite happy where he was.
Chapter 2
6 The swastika is an ancient symbol dating from the Neolithic period and often carrying religious connotations. It is significant in the iconography of Eastern religions, among them Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. It occurs in many cultures of many different periods, including that of the North American Indians.
7 On several occasions Drexler had offered Hitler the Party chairmanship but had been turned down. In the spring of 1921, Drexler had written to Feder: ‘ … each revolutionary movement must have a dictatorial head, and therefore I also think our Hitler is the most suitable for our movement, without wanting to be pushed into the background myself.’ Hitler, however, recognized his own limitations as an organizer and administrator, tasks he would later leave to others.
8 Hanfstaengl left Hitler’s staff in 1933, fell out with the Führer, and was denounced by the British Fascist Unity Mitford. In 1937 he fled to Switzerland and then to England. In World War II he was interned by the British as an enemy alien but later became an intelligence asset for the Americans, compiling an exhaustive psychological dossier on Hitler for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He died in 1975.
9 The Pour le Mérite was Prussia’s highest military decoration until November 1918. In World War I its most famous recipients were fighter aces like Max Immelmann, after whom the term ‘Blue Max’ was coined, and Baron Manfred von Richthofen. Holders of the decoration were required to wear it when in uniform. Recipients included Hindenburg and Ludendorff, Ferdinand Schörner and Robert Ritter von Greim.
10 A currency, pegged to the US dollar, which was issued in Germany in 1922–23 to combat hyperinflation. The last Rentenmark notes remained valid until 1948.
11 A British-born author, long resident in Germany, whose book Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) is a hymn to the Aryan race, of which the Teutonic peoples were the finest examples. It became a key text for followers of the Pan-German movement and for Nazi racial philosophers.
12 Gauleiter were the Nazi leaders who from 1933 dominated local government. By 1938, Germany was divided into some thirty Gaue, or regions. The title was established in 1925 in the wake of the failed Munich putsch, and ceased to exist after the Third Reich. By the end of the 1920s the Gauleiter also had a paramilitary function, ranking second to that of Reichleiter (National leader).
13 From 1933 to 1939, Hitler attended the Bayreuth summer festival as a guest of the Wagner family. In Mein Kampf he wrote, ‘At the age of twelve, I saw the first opera of my life, Lohengrin. In one instant I was addicted. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew no bounds.’
14 The candidate of the bourgeois Right was Theodor Duesterberg, deputy leader of the Steel Helmets (Stahlhelm). On the Left, the Communist KPD nominated its leader, Ernst Thalmann. Thalmann was subsequently arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and held in solitary confinement before being shot, on Hitler’s orders, in Buchenwald in 1944.
15 Solmitz’s husband was a World War I veteran and a Jewish convert to Protestantism who, along with his wife, welcomed Hitler’s accession to power. However, his status as a citizen fell foul of the Nuremberg Laws and in 1938, during the Czech crisis, he was turned away when he tried to volunteer for military service. Racism had triumphed over nationalism, as it always did in Nazi Germany.
16 Von Papen was later ambassador to Turkey from 1939 to 1944. His last meeting with Hitler was in 1944. At the end of the war he was captured by the Americans and tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. He was acquitted and died in 1969 at the age of eighty-nine.
Chapter 3
17 The Gestapo was the German secret police, an internal police force created in 1933 under Göring, then Minister-President of Prussia, to replace the existing state police. In 1934 Reinhard Heydrich assumed command under the general direction of Himmler. In the process, the Gestapo became a totally independent arm of the Nazi Party. No appeal was permitted against its decisions and it possessed sweeping powers to deal with any act which it considered inimical to the interests of the state. In 1939 it was combined with the criminal police to form the Sicherheitspolizei (State Security Police, or ‘Sipo’ under the control of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Office, or RHSA) commanded by Heydrich. Rudolf Diels, the Göring protégé who headed the precursor body to the Gestapo in Prussia and was van der Lubbe’s chief interrogator after the Reichstag fire, made an enemy of Heydrich and narrowly escaped execution in the Night of the Long Knives. He was dismissed in 1934 but turned up at the Nuremberg trials, at which he was a defence witness for Göring.
18 The Enabling Act was renewed in 1937 and 1941. In 1942 the Reichstag passed a law giving Hitler the power of life and death over every citizen, effectively extending the provisions of the Act for the duration of the war. It was finally renewed, ‘by order of the Führer’, in 1943.
19 Hitler lied. Blomberg spent World War II in obscurity and re-emerged to give evidence at Nuremberg, where he died in detention.
20 Seyss-Inquart became the Austrian chancellor after the Anschluss. In October 1939 he was appointed governor-general of those areas in Poland which had not been absorbed into either Germany or the Soviet Union. In May 1940 he became the Reich Commissioner of the Netherlands with almost absolute power, being responsible only to Hitler for his actions. During his time in office he imposed fines and confiscations, inflicted reprisals, compelled five million Dutch citizens to work for Germany, and deported some hundred and twenty thousand Jews. He was captured in 1945 and executed for war crimes the following year.
21 Beck subsequently was at the centre of the group of German officers disaffected with the Nazi Party and allied himself with Stauffenberg and the bomb plot in 1944. After the failure of the plot, Beck was promptly arrested and forced to commit suicide.
22 Heydrich oversaw the staging of a fake Polish attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, a mile from the Polish border.
Chapter 4
23 After declaring war, the British moved an expeditionary force (BEF) across the Channel to France. By May 1940 it consisted of ten infantry divisions, one under-strength tank brigade and an RAF component of five hundred fighters and light bombers.
24 Hitler’s Directives of World War II run from the plans to attack Poland (31 August 1939) to his last orders to German troops on the Eastern Front (15 April 1945) to choke the Red Army in a ‘bath of blood’. They reveal the state of Hitler’s mind throughout the war, from Germany’s initial triumphs to stalemate, retreat and imminent disaster.
25 In the action the British First Army’s Tank Brigade had lost all but twenty-six of its Matilda Mark 1 infantry tanks and all but two of its Matilda Mark 11s. The tracks of the remaining tanks were breaking with wear, and they fell back under heavy attack from dive-bombers. Nevertheless, the shock they had delivered to Seventh Panzer Division on 21 May, and the subsequent delay in the German drive to the coast, contributed materially to the success of the Dunkirk operation.
26 General Maxime Weygand succeeded Gamelin as the Supreme Allied Commander on 20 May 1941. He was seventy-three years old and in his long career had never commanded troops in action. He later served as commander of the Vichy French troops in North Africa, was arrested during the German occupation of Vichy in 1942 and was imprisoned in Germany for the rest of the war. The taint of 1940 still clung to him at the end of the war, and in 1948 he was tried and acquitted of treason. He died in 1965 at the age of ninety-eight.
27 The Maginot Line was a French fortification system built between 1929 and 1940. It was intended to provide a fixed defensive line along three hundred and eighty-five miles of the Franco-German border, behind which manoeuvre armies could form and deploy. In 1940 it had been simply bypassed by the main thrust of the German invasion, driving through the Ardennes and Sedan. The garrison of the Maginot Line was some four hundred thousand strong, and only one section of blockhouses fell to German attack. It was named after André Maginot, Minister of War 1929–32, who authorised its construction.
28 Alfonso fled Spain in 1931 after the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. He settled in Rome, where he died in 1941.
29 Frederick Barbarossa was the twelfth-century Holy Roman Emperor who led the Third Crusade.
30 Stalin was able to act because of information supplied by Richard Sorge, a German journalist based in Japan, who was an active and highly effective Soviet agent with high-ranking Japanese contacts and privy to many secrets. He was able to confirm that Japan had no plans to acquire Soviet territory in the Far East, enabling Stalin to release the Siberian divisions.
31 Hitler had the Devil’s own luck and avoided assassination on numerous occasions, often because of a sudden change of schedule. On 8 November 1939, George Elser planned to kill him with a bomb at the Burgerbräukeller celebrations to mark the anniversary of the beer-hall putsch. The bomb was planted and duly exploded at the time at which it was set. It would have killed Hitler but for the fact that he had left the hall thirteen minutes earlier. In the early months of 1944 plans were made by suicide bombers to kill Hitler while he was inspecting a new design of army overcoat. The first attempt was stillborn as the overcoats were destroyed in a bombing raid. The second attempt was thwarted when another raid caused the cancellation of the inspection.
32 Kallay had been encouraged by Winston Churchill’s proposal to the Turkish government that a Balkan League be formed, comprising Turkey, Hungary and Romania, as a future counterweight to Soviet power.
33 Nor did OKW have any control over the navy and Luftwaffe high commands OKM and OKL, whose chiefs reported directly to Hitler.
34 The Soviet mole was John Cairncross, a British Army officer and Communist who, in 1943, briefly worked at Bletchley, where the German Enigma code and its successors had been broken. He collected raw decrypts and handed them over to his Soviet controller in London. During the long build-up to Kursk, which generated a huge volume of Enigma traffic, Cairncross played an important, albeit baleful, role in keeping Soviet intelligence abreast of the intelligence aspects of the coming battle. For this and other services he was given a medal by Stalin.
35 The Soviet high command used the term ‘front’ not only to designate a zone of deployment of troops and the line of battle but also a distinct operational organization of armed forces. Roughly equivalent to a German army group, a front consisted of some five to seven armies, with one or two tactical air armies, and special armoured and artillery formations in support. An entire front could total up to one million men and extend over a battle frontage of up to one hundred and fifty miles, with a depth – if one includes the rear zones of operations – of up to two hundred and fifty miles.
36 A 2007 study by the German Historical Institute in London has suggested that Soviet losses at Prokhorovka were not the result of an armoured battle but a catastrophic muddle. Most of Red Army’s T-34s, according to the study, drove into a huge anti-tank ditch which had been dug several days earlier by its own infantry.
37 Stauffenberg and his brother had been members of the circle around the poet Stefan George, who wished to restore German medieval greatness. George and his followers propagated the notion of a unique Deutschstum, or German-ness. On George’s death in 1933, Stauffenberg and his brother were made George’s heirs and organized candlelit readings of his poetry.
38 Stülpnagel had long been an opponent of the Nazi regime. In 1939 he had planned a coup which had to be abandoned for lack of support, but he continued to recruit like-minded officers. In May 1944 he was planning to conclude an armistice with the Western Allies but Rundstedt, the C-in-C West, refused to participate. Kluge, Rundstedt’s successor, later offered his support but only if Hitler was killed. When Hitler survived Stauffenberg’s bomb Stulpnagel was doomed, and got no help from Kluge. He failed in a suicide attempt, was tried with fellow conspirators and hanged.
39 The Panzergrenadier divisions had evolved within the German Army as a motorized infantry formation to augment the true Panzer division. As the war progressed, however, the distinction between the two became increasingly blurred, particularly within the SS as their allocation of armoured fighting vehicles grew larger. The Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, which achieved divisional status in 1942, fielded two tank battalions, one of Tigers and one of Mark IVs, two Panzergrenadier regiments, and mobile anti-tank and assault-gun detachments
40 Himmler’s command of Army Group Vistula lasted until mid-March 1945. He was in no way fitted for military command and, thanks to his insatiable appetite for empire-building, was already overburdened with multifarious responsibilities. He was not dismissed by Hitler but was finally persuaded to step down by Guderian. Himmler was replaced by the experienced General Gotthard Heinrici, the German Army’s leading expert on defensive warfare.
41 The Waffen-SS was now added to the long list of those who had disappointed the Führer. Hitler ordered the officers of Sixth SS Panzer Army to be stripped of their decorations and their men to hand over their prized divisional armbands. Himmler was sent to the front to ensure that the orders were carried out, but even he bridled at this, telling Hitler, ‘I would have to drive to Lake Balaton to take the crosses off the dead. A German SS man cannot give more than his life to you, my Führer.’
42 Wagner’s early work Rienzi or, to give it its full title, Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes, was a monumentally long ‘grand opera’. The original manuscript score remains missing and is reputed by musicologists to have been in Hitler’s possession at the end of the war. The work’s doomed hero is a charismatic revolutionary and idealist who overthrows the nobility in fourteenth-century Rome, only to suffer betrayal, and death by fire.
43 The German equivalent of the British Home Guard, established in September 1944 under the direct control of the Nazi Party. All males between the ages of sixteen and sixty who were not in the armed services but capable of bearing arms were liable for service. Although organized and trained on military lines, the political nature of its leadership and the severe shortage of arms severely limited its military effectiveness. At the end of January 1945, Hitler ordered that, whenever it was possible, Volkssturm units were to be combined with regular troops into mixed battle groups under a unified command.
44 A concentration camp in Mecklenburg, Ravensbruck was established in 1934 and used for the imprisonment of female political prisoners. Medical experiments on gas gangrene were carried out there on Polish women, and it was also the place of execution for Allied female secret agents
45 Hitler’s death was verified by Marshal Vasiliy Sokolovsky, Zhukov’s deputy, who compared the charred body with the Führer’s dental records.