Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Turkey would be inflamed. That had to be prevented. The war against the Serbs would be carried out ‘without mercy’.

The time seemed to drag. Goebbels drank tea with Hitler and, as a diversion, they talked about matters other than the war. Hitler turned to one of his favourite topics: making Linz into a cultural capital greater than Vienna. Goebbels said he would help as far as possible, in the first instance by setting up film studios there.¹³⁸ Another hour passed. Then 5.20a.m. came. The attack had started. Hitler felt he could now go to bed.¹³⁹

Shortly afterwards, Goebbels read out on the radio the proclamation Hitler had dictated.¹⁴⁰ By then, hundreds of Luftwaffe bombers were turning Belgrade into a heap of smoking ruins. Hitler justified the action to the German people as retaliation against a ‘Serbian criminal clique’ in Belgrade which, in the pay of the British Secret Service, was attempting, as in 1914, to spread the war in the Balkans. The German troops would end their action once the ‘Belgrade conspirators’ had been overthrown and the last British soldiers had been forced out of the region.¹⁴¹ What could, of course, not be revealed was that the invasion of Yugoslavia would, in at least one important respect, be a trial-run for ‘Barbarossa’. Hitler had spoken privately about the campaign being ‘merciless (ohne Gnade)’.¹⁴² On 2 April, Chief of Staff General Halder — presumably acceding to a request from Heydrich — added two new target-groups alongside ‘Emigrants, Saboteurs, Terrorists’ to be dealt with by the Security Police and SD in the Balkan campaign: Communists and Jews.¹⁴³

With the campaign in its early stages, Hitler left Berlin on the evening of 10 April, en route for his improvised field headquarters. These were located in his Special Train Amerika, stationed at the entrance to a tunnel beneath the Alps on a single-track section of the line from Vienna to Graz, in a wooded area near Monichkirchen. The Wehrmacht Operational Staff, apart from Hitler’s closest advisers, were accommodated in a nearby inn. The tunnel was to offer protection in the event of danger from the air.¹⁴⁴ The day before he left Berlin, Hitler had experienced the worst British air-raid yet over the Reich capital. Some of the historic buildings on Unter den Linden — including the State Opera House, the University, the State Library, and the Crown Prince’s Palace — were damaged. Hitler was furious with Goring at the failure of the Luftwaffe. He immediately commissioned Speer with the rebuilding of the Opera House.¹⁴⁵

Hitler remained in his secluded, heavily guarded field headquarters for a fortnight. He was visited there by King Boris of Bulgaria, Admiral Horthy, the regent of Hungary, and Count Ciano — vultures gathering at the corpse of Yugoslavia.¹⁴⁶ His fifty-second birthday on 20 April was bizarrely celebrated with a concert in front of the Special Train, after Goring had eulogized the Fuhrer’s genius as a military commander, and Hitler had shaken the hand of each of his armed forces’ chiefs.¹⁴⁷ While there Hitler heard the news of the capitulation of both Yugoslavia and Greece.¹⁴⁸

After overcoming some early tenacious resistance, the dual campaign against Yugoslavia and Greece had made unexpectedly rapid progress.¹⁴⁹ In fact, German operational planning had grossly overestimated the weak enemy forces. Of the twenty-nine German divisions engaged in the Balkans, only ten were in action for more than six days.¹⁵⁰ On 10 April Zagreb was reached, and an independent Croatian State proclaimed, resting on the slaughterous anti-Serb Ustasha Movement. Two days later Belgrade was reached. On 17 April the Yugoslav army surrendered unconditionally. Around 344,000 men entered German captivity. Losses on the victors’ side were a mere 151 dead with 392 wounded and fifteen missing.¹⁵¹

In contrast to the punitive attack on Yugoslavia, Hitler’s interest in the conquest of Greece was purely strategic. He forbade the bombing of Athens, and regretted having to fight against the Greeks. If the British had not intervened there (sending troops in early March to assist the Greek struggle against Mussolini’s forces), he would never have had to hasten to the help of the Italians, he told Goebbels.¹⁵² Meanwhile, the German 12th Army had rapidly advanced over Yugoslav territory on Salonika, which fell on 9 April. The bulk of the Greek forces capitulated on 21 April. A brief diplomatic farce followed. The blow to Mussolini’s prestige demanded that the surrender to the Germans, which had in fact already taken place, be accompanied by a surrender to the Italians. To avoid alienating Mussolini, Hitler was forced to comply. The agreement signed by General List was disowned. Jodl was sent to Salonika with a new armistice. This time the Italians were party to it. This was finally signed, amid Greek protests, on 23 April.¹⁵³ Greeks taken prisoner numbered 218,000, British 12,000, against 100 dead and 3,500 wounded or missing on the German side. In a minor ‘Dunkirk’, the British managed to evacuate 50,000 men — around four-fifths of their Expeditionary Force, which had to leave behind or destroy its heavy equipment.¹⁵⁴ The whole campaign had been completed in under a month.¹⁵⁵

A follow-up operation to take Crete by landing parachutists was, while he was in Monichkirchen, somewhat unenthusiastically conceded by Hitler under pressure from Goring, himself being pushed by the commander of the parachutist division, General Kurt Student.¹⁵⁶ By the end of May, this too had proved successful. But it had been hazardous. And the German losses of 2,071 dead, 2,594 wounded, and 1,888 missing from a deployment of around 22,000 men were far higher than in the entire Balkan campaign. ‘Operation Mercury’ — the attack on Crete — convinced Hitler that mass paratroop landings had had their day. He did not contemplate using them in the assault the following year on Malta.¹⁵⁷ Potentially, the occupation of Crete offered the prospect of intensified assault on the British position in the Middle East. Naval High Command tried to persuade Hitler of this.¹⁵⁸ But his eyes were now turned only in one direction: towards the East.

On 28 April, Hitler had arrived back in Berlin — for the last time the warlord returning in triumph from a lightning victory achieved at minimal cost. Though people in Germany responded in more muted fashion than they had done to the remarkable victories in the West, the Balkan campaign appeared to prove once again that their Leader was a military strategist of genius. His popularity was undiminished. But there were clouds on the horizon. People in their vast majority wanted, as they had done all along, peace: victorious peace, of course, but above all, peace. Their ears pricked up when Hitler spoke of ‘a hard year of struggle ahead of us’ and, in his triumphant report to the Reichstag on the Balkan campaign on 4 May, of providing even better weapons for German soldiers ‘next year’. Their worries were magnified by disturbing rumours of a deterioration in relations with the Soviet Union and of troops assembling on the eastern borders of the Reich.¹⁵⁹

What the mass of the people had, of course, no inkling of was that Hitler had already put out the directive to prepare ‘Operation Barbarossa’ — the invasion of the Soviet Union — almost five months earlier. That directive, of 18 December, had laid down that preparations requiring longer than eight weeks should be completed by 15 May.¹⁶⁰ But it had not stipulated a date for the actual attack. (In one of the military conferences preceding the directive, on 5 December, Hitler had envisaged the end of May as the time to strike. But, so far in advance of a campaign which would be dependent upon weather conditions for the vital initial advantage, this was no more than a date to aim at.¹⁶¹) In his speech to military leaders on 27 March, immediately following news of the Yugoslav coup, Hitler had spoken of a delay of up to four weeks as a consequence of the need to take action in the Balkans.¹⁶² Back in Berlin after his stay in Monichkirchen, he lost no time — assured by Halder of transport availability to take the troops to the East — in arranging a new date for the start of ‘Barbarossa’ with Jodl: 22 June.¹⁶³

Towards the end of the war, casting round for scapegoats, Hitler looked back on the fateful delay as decisive in the failure of the Russian campaign. ‘If we had attacked Russia already from 15 May onwards,’ he claimed, ‘… we would have been in a position to conclude the eastern campaign before the onset of winter.’¹⁶⁴ This was simplistic in the extreme — as well as exaggerating the inroads made by the Balkan campaign on the timing of ‘Barbarossa’.¹⁶⁵ Weather conditions in an unusually wet spring in central Europe would almost certainly have ruled out a major attack before June — perhaps even mid-June.¹⁶⁶ Moreover, the major wear and tear on the German divisions engaged on the Balkan campaign came less from the belated inclusion of Yugoslavia than from the invasion of Greece — planned over many months in conjunction with the planning for ‘Barbarossa’.¹⁶⁷ What did disadvantage the opening of ‘Barbarossa’ was the need for the redeployment at breakneck speed of divisions that had pushed on as far as southern Greece and now, without recovery time, had rapidly to be transported to their eastern positions.¹⁶⁸ In addition, the damage caused to tanks by rutted and pot-holed roads in the Balkan hills required a huge effort to equip them again for the eastern campaign, and probably contributed to the high rate of mechanical failure during the invasion of Russia.¹⁶⁹ Probably the most serious effect of the Balkan campaign on planning for ‘Barbarossa’ was the reduction of German forces on the southern flank, to the south of the Pripet Marshes.¹⁷⁰ But we have already seen that Hitler took the decision to that effect on 17 March, before the coup in Yugoslavia.