cruise.74 He criticized the distinctions between different classes of passengers on such cruise ships. And he approved of the introduction of the same food for both officers and men in the army.75 Hitler might appear to have been promoting ideas of a modern, mobile, classless society, abolishing privilege and resting solely upon achievement. But the central tenet remained race, to which all else was subordinated. Thus, in the east, he said, all Germans would travel in the upholstered first- or second-class railway carriages — to separate them from the native population.76 It was a social vision which could have obvious attractions for many members of the would-be master-race. The image was of a cornucopia of wealth flowing into the Reich from the east. The Reich would be linked to the new frontiers by motorways cutting through the endless steppes and the enormous Russian spaces. Prosperity and power would be secured through the new breed of supermen who lorded it over the downtrodden Slav masses.
The vision, to those who heard Hitler describe it, appeared excitingly modern: a break with traditional class- and status-bound hierarchies to a society where talent had its reward and there was prosperity for all — for all Germans, that is. Indeed, elements of Hitler’s thinking were unquestionably modern.77 He looked, for instance, to the benefits of modern technology, envisaging steam-heated greenhouses giving German cities a regular supply of fresh fruit and vegetables all through the winter.78 He looked, too, to modern transport to open up the east. While the bounty of the east pouring into Germany would be brought by train, the car for Hitler was the vital transport means of the future.79 But for all its apparent modernity, the social vision was in essence atavistic. The colonial conquests of the nineteenth century provided its inspiration. What Hitler was offering was a modernized version of old-fashioned imperialist conquest, now translated to the ethnically mixed terrain of eastern Europe where the Slavs would provide the German equivalent of the conquered native populations of India and Africa in the British Empire.
By mid-July, the key steps had been taken to translate the horrendous vision into reality. At an important five-hour meeting in the Fuhrer Headquarters on 16 July attended by Goring, Rosenberg, Lammers, Keitel, and Bormann, Hitler established the basic guidelines of policy and practical arrangements for administering and exploiting the new conquests. Once more, the underlying premiss was the social-Darwinist justification that the strong deserved to inherit the earth. But the sense that what they were doing was morally objectionable nevertheless ran through Hitler’s opening comments, as reported by Bormann. ‘The motivation of our steps in the eyes of the world must be directed by tactical viewpoints. We must proceed here exactly as in the cases of Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium. In these cases, too, we had said nothing about our intentions and we will sensibly continue not to do so,’ Bormann recorded. ‘We will then again emphasize that we were compelled to occupy an area to bring order, and to impose security. In the interest of the native population we had to see to providing calm, food, transport etc. etc. Therefore our settlement. It should then not be recognizable that a final settlement is beginning! All necessary measures — shooting, deportation etc. — we will and can do anyway. We don’t want to make premature and unnecessary enemies. We will simply act, therefore, as if we wish to carry out a mandate. But it must be clear to us that we will never again leave these territories,’ Hitler’s blunt statement continued. ‘Accordingly, it is a matter of: 1. doing nothing to hinder the final settlement but rather preparing this in secret; 2. emphasizing that we are the liberators… Basically, it’s a matter of dividing up the giant cake so that we can first rule it, secondly administer it, and thirdly exploit it. The Russians have now given out the order for a partisan war behind our front. This partisan war again has its advantage: it gives us the possibility of exterminating anything opposing us. As a basic principle: the construction of a military power west of the Urals must never again be possible, even if as a consequence we have to wage war for a hundred years.’80
Hitler proceeded to make appointments to the key positions in the occupied east. Rosenberg was confirmed next day as head of what appeared on the surface to be the all-powerful Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.81 But nothing was as it seemed in the Third Reich. Rosenberg’s authority, as Hitler’s decree made clear, did not touch the respective spheres of competence of the army, Goring’s Four-Year Plan organization, and the SS. The big guns, in other words, were outside Rosenberg’s control. More than that, Rosenberg’s own conception of winning certain nationalities as allies, under German tutelage, against Greater Russia — notions which he and his staff had been working on since the spring — fell foul of Himmler’s policy of maximum repression and brutal resettlement and Goring’s aims of total economic exploitation. Himmler was within weeks in receipt of plans for deporting in the coming twenty-five years or so over 30 million people into far more inhospitable climes further eastward. Goring was envisaging the starvation in Russia of 20–30 million persons — a prospect advanced even before the German invasion by the Agricultural Group of the Economic Staff for the East.82 All three — Rosenberg, Himmler, and Goring — could find a common denominator in Hitler’s goal of destroying Bolshevism and acquiring ‘living space’. But beyond that minimum, Rosenberg’s concept — no less ruthless, but more pragmatic — had no chance when opposed to the contrary idea, backed, as we have seen, by Hitler’s own vision, of absolute rapaciousness and repression.83
Opposing Rosenberg’s wishes, Hitler had yielded in the conference of
In contrast to the tyrant, Koch, who continued to prefer his old East Prussian domain to his new fiefdom, Hinrich Lohse, appointed as Reich Commissar in the Baltic, now renamed the Ostland, made himself a subject of ridicule among the German occupying forces in his own territory with his fanatical and often petty bureaucratization, unleashed in torrents of decrees and directives. For all that, he was weak in the face of the power of the SS, and other competing agencies.86 Similarly, Wilhelm Kube, appointed at the suggestion of Goring and Rosenberg as General Commissar in Belorussia, proved not only corrupt and incompetent on a grandiose scale, but another weak petty dictator in his province, his instructions often ignored by his own subordinates, and forced repeatedly to yield to the superior power of the SS.87
The course was set, therefore, for a ‘New Order’ in the east which belied the very name. Nothing resembled order. Everything resembled the war of all against all, built into the Nazi system in the Reich itself, massively extended in occupied Poland, and now taken to its logical denouement in the conquered lands of the Soviet Union.
III
In fact, despite the extraordinary gains made by the advancing Wehrmacht, July would bring recognition that the operational plan of ‘Barbarossa’ had failed. And for all the air of confidence that Hitler displayed to his entourage in the Wolf’s Lair, these weeks also produced early indications of the tensions and conflicts in military leadership and decision-making that would continue to bedevil the German war effort. Hitler intervened in tactical matters from the outset. As early as 24 June he had told Brauchitsch of his worries that the encirclement at Bialystok was not tight enough.88 The following day he was expressing concern that Army Groups Centre and South were operating too far in depth. Halder dismissed the worry. ‘The old refrain!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘But that is not going to change anything in our plans.’89 On 27, 29, and 30 June and again on 2 and 3 July Halder recorded worried queries or interventions by Hitler in tactical deployments of troops.90 ‘Again the whole place is in a state of jitters,’ Halder remarked about FHQ on 3 July, ‘because the Fuhrer is afraid that the wedge of Army Group South now advancing eastward might be threatened by flank attacks from north and south.’ Halder admitted that in tactical terms the fear was not unwarranted. But he resented the interference. ‘What is lacking on top level,’ he confided to his diary notes, ‘is that confidence in the executive commands which is one of the most essential features of our command organization, and that is so because it fails to grasp the coordinating force that comes from the common schooling and education of our Leader Corps.’91
Halder’s irritation at Hitler’s interference was understandable. But the errors and misjudgements, even in the first, seemingly so successful, phase of ‘Barbarossa’, were as much those of the professionals in Army High Command as of the former First World War corporal who now thought he was the greatest warlord of all time.
