Hitler’s two under-employed secretaries in the military complex was quite superfluous.23 Much of the secretaries’ energy was spent trying to swat away a constant plague of midges. Hitler complained that his advisers who had picked the spot had chosen ‘the most swampy, midge-infested, and climatically unfavourable area for him’, and joked that he would have to send in the Luftwaffe on the midge-hunt.24 ‘The chief, as those in his daily company called him, was generally in a good mood during the first part of the Russian campaign. He enjoyed light banter with his secretaries. When Christa Schroeder could not find her torch one night, as she emerged into the dark compound, Hitler remarked that she should not think he had stolen it. ‘I’m a country
How monochrome life in the confines of the Fuhrer Headquarters rapidly became for Hitler’s secretaries was indicated in Christa Schroeder’s comments in a letter to a friend at the end of August: ‘We are permanently cut off from the world wherever we are — in Berlin, on the Mountain [at the Berghof], or on travels. It’s always the same limited group of people, always the same routine inside the fence.’ The danger was, she went on, ‘of losing contact with the real world’. Only the common life of the Wolfsschanze’s inhabitants, revolving around ‘the Chief, held the group together, she wrote. But should Hitler be absent, things immediately fell apart.26
As in Berlin or at the Berghof, a word during meals on one of Hitler’s favourite topics could easily trigger an hour-long monologue.27 In these early days, he usually faced a big map of the Soviet Union pinned to the wall. At the drop of a hat, he would launch into yet another harangue about the danger that Bolshevism signified for Europe, and how to wait another year would have been too late. On one occasion, his secretaries heard Hitler, as he stood in front of a big map of Europe, point to the Russian capital and say: ‘In four weeks we’ll be in Moscow. Moscow will be razed to the ground.’28 Everything had gone much better than could have been imagined, he remarked. They had been lucky that the Russians had placed their troops on the borders and not pulled the German armies deep into their country, which would have caused difficulties with supplies.29 Two-thirds of the Bolshevik armed forces and five-sixths of the tanks and aircraft were destroyed or severely damaged, he told Goebbels, on the Propaganda Minister’s first visit to Fuhrer Headquarters on 8 July.30 After assessing the military situation in detail with his Wehrmacht advisers, Goebbels noted, the Fuhrer’s conclusion was ‘that the war in the East was in the main already won’.31 There could be no notion of peace-terms with the Kremlin. (He would think differently about this only a month later.) Bolshevism would be wiped out and Russia broken up into its component parts, deprived of any intellectual, political, or economic centre. Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the east in a matter of weeks. He foresaw England’s fall ‘with a sleepwalker’s certainty’. Whether he would take up any offer of a compromise peace from London he could not say.32 On other occasions, even at this early stage, Hitler was less ebullient, betraying signs of uncertainty about the Soviet Union, about which, he said, they knew so little.33
News came in of 3,500 aircraft and over 1,000 Soviet tanks destroyed. But there was other news of fanatical fighting by Soviet soldiers who feared the worst if they surrendered. Hitler was to tell the Japanese Ambassador Oshima on 14 July that ‘our enemies are not human beings any more, they are beasts’.34 It was, then, doubtless echoing her ‘chief and the general atmosphere in FHQ when Christa Schroeder remarked to her friend that ‘from all previous experience it can be said to be a fight against wild animals’.35
Hitler had permitted no Wehrmacht reports during the very first days of the campaign.36 But Sunday, 29 June — a week after the attack had started — was, as Goebbels described it, ‘the day of the special announcements’. Twelve of them altogether, each introduced by the ‘Russian Fanfare’ based on Liszt’s ‘Les Preludes’, were broadcast, beginning at 11a.m. that morning.37 Dominance in the air had been attained, the reports proclaimed. Grodno, Brest-Litowsk, Vilna, Kowno, and Dunaburg were in German hands. Two Soviet armies were encircled at Bialystok. Minsk had been taken. The Russians had lost, it was announced, 2,233 tanks and 4,107 aircraft. Enormous quantities of
The invasion of the Soviet Union, for which, as we have seen, there had in contrast to previous campaigns been of necessity no prior manipulation of popular opinion, was presented to the German public as a preventive war. This had been undertaken by the Fuhrer, so Goebbels’s directives to the press ran, to head off at the last minute the threat to the Reich and the entire western culture through the treachery of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. At any moment the Bolsheviks had been planning to strike against the Reich and to overrun and destroy Europe. Only the Fuhrer’s bold action had prevented this.39 More extraordinary than this propaganda lie is the fact that Hitler and Goebbels had convinced themselves of its truth.40 Fully aware of its falseness, they had to play out a fiction even among themselves to justify the unprovoked decision to attack and utterly destroy the Soviet Union.
By the end of June the German encirclements at Bialystok and Minsk had produced the astonishing toll of 324,000 Red Army prisoners, 3,300 tanks, and 1,800 artillery pieces captured or destroyed. Little over a fortnight later the end of the battle for Smolensk doubled these figures.41 Already by the second day of the campaign, German estimates put numbers of aircraft shot down or destroyed on the ground at 2,500. When Goring expressed doubts at the figures they were checked and found to be 200–300 below the actual total.42 After a month of fighting, the figure for aircraft destroyed had reached 7,564.43 By early July it was estimated that eighty-nine out of 164 Soviet divisions had been entirely or partially destroyed, and that only nine out of twenty-nine tank divisions of the Red Army were still fit for combat.44
The scale of underestimation of Soviet fighting potential would soon come as a severe shock. But in early July it was hardly surprising if the feeling in the German military leadership was that ‘Barbarossa’ was on course for complete victory, that the campaign would be over, as predicted, before the winter. On 3 July Halder summed up his verdict in words which would come to haunt him: ‘It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.’ He did at least have the foresight to acknowledge that this did not mean that it was over: ‘The sheer geographical vastness of the country and the stubbornness of the resistance, which is carried on with all means, will claim our efforts for many more weeks to come.’45
II
The territorial gains brought about by the spectacular successes of the Wehrmacht in the first phase of ‘Barbarossa’ gave Hitler command over a greater extent of the European continent than any ruler since Napoleon. His power and might were at their peak. In his lunchtime or late-night monologues to his regular retinue in the Fuhrer Headquarters, he revealed few, if any, signs of the wear and tear on his nerves which growing conflict with his army leaders and shifting fortunes at the front would cause during the coming weeks. His rambling, discursive outpourings were the purest expression of unbounded, megalomaniac power and breathtaking inhumanity. They were the face of the future in the vast new eastern empire, as he saw it.
‘The beauty of the Crimea,’ he rhapsodized late at night on 5 July 1941, would be made accessible to Germans through a motorway. It would be their version of the Italian or French riviera.46 Every German, after the war, he remarked, had to have the chance with his ‘People’s Car’
He was asked whether it would be enough to stretch the conquests to the Urals. ‘Initially’, that would suffice, he replied. But Bolshevism had to be exterminated, and it would be necessary to carry out expeditions from there to eradicate any new centres that might develop. ‘St Petersburg’ — as he called Leningrad — ‘was as a city incomparably more beautiful than Moscow.’48 But its fate, he decided, was to be identical to that of the capital. ‘An example was to be made here, and the city will disappear completely from the earth.’ It was to be sealed off, bombarded, and starved out.49 He imagined, too, that little would ultimately be left of
