Halder, partly though his own post-war apologetics and his flirtations (though they came to nothing) with groups opposed to Hitler, has been more generously viewed by posterity. As Chief of the General Staff, responsibility for the planning of army operations was his. The chequered relations with the High Command of the Wehrmacht, in large measure Hitler’s own mouthpiece, of course gravely weakened Halder’s position. But the Chief of the General Staff failed to highlight difficulties in the original ‘Barbarossa’ plan. The northward swing of Army Group Centre forces was not fully worked out. The problems that motorized forces would face in the terrain between Leningrad and Moscow were not taken into account. Halder was lukewarm from the outset about the concentration on the Baltic and would have preferred the frontal assault on Moscow. But instead of being settled beforehand, the dispute, as we have noted, was left to fester once the campaign was under way.148
Moreover, the all-out attack on Moscow that Halder — and Commander of Army Group Centre Bock — were urging, would itself have been a highly risky venture. It would then almost certainly have been impossible to eliminate the large Soviet forces on the flanks (as happened in the ‘Battle of Kiev’). And the Russians were expecting the attack on the capital. Had the Wehrmacht reached the city, in the absence of a Luftwaffe capable of razing Moscow to the ground (as Hitler wanted), the result would probably have been a preview of what was eventually to happen at Stalingrad. And even had the city been captured, the war would not have been won. A Soviet psychological, political, economic, and military collapse as a consequence would have been unlikely.149
Whatever the speculation on this, that the eastern campaign was blown off course already by late summer of 1941 cannot solely, or even mainly, be put down to Hitler’s meddling in matters which should have been left to the military professionals. The implication, encountered in some post-war memoirs, that, left to their own devices, the military would have won the war in the east for Germany was both a self-defensive and an arrogant claim. The escalating problems of ‘Barbarossa’ were ultimately a consequence of the calamitous miscalculation that the Soviet Union would collapse like a pack of cards in the wake of a
IV
While the tumultuous developments on the eastern front unfolded, the Reich was gradually turning into a Fuhrer state with an absentee Fuhrer. During the summer of 1940, Hitler had been away at his headquarters on the western front for approaching two months.151 It had been no more than an interlude. But once the eastern campaign had started, and especially once it was realized that this was to be no repeated rapid military triumph, his absence became prolonged and then, in effect, permanent. Whereas Churchill was concerned to speak to the British people and let himself be seen as often as was practicable, Hitler practically disappeared from the public eye. During the remaining months of 1941, and with the popular mood in the Reich far from buoyant, he scarcely left his field headquarters to appear in public in Germany. Pressed by Goebbels to give a speech to rouse sagging morale, he deigned to spend six hours in Berlin on 3 October. A month later, on 8 November, he travelled to Munich, gave his customary address to the ‘Old Fighters’ of the Movement to commemorate the Putsch, spoke next day to the Reichs — and Gauleiter, and left immediately for the Wolf’s Lair. And he attended on 21 November the funeral in Berlin of General Ernst Udet (the First World War flying-ace in charge of air armaments who had committed suicide after Goring had made him the scapegoat for the Luftwaffe’s failures on the eastern front), returning six days later for the ceremony prolonging the Anti-Comintern Pact and using the occasion to receive a number of foreign dignitaries before departing again for his field headquarters in East Prussia after a stay of two days.152
Otherwise the German people saw him only in occasional newsreel clips, usually in the company of his generals. His continued absence in 1941 was the start of a process which, as the war progressed and final victory became a mirage, would transform the most notable populist leader of the twentieth century, the masterly demagogue whose power base had rested in no small measure on his unrivalled ability to play on the expectations and resentments of the people, into a remote and distant figure.
Hitler’s increasing detachment meant an inevitable acceleration of the existing, strongly developed tendency towards the disintegration of any semblance of coordinated administration of the Reich. The stark figures for governmental legislation provide an indicator. Out of 445 pieces of legislation in 1941, only seventy-two laws, published Fuhrer decrees, and ministerial decrees represented any semblance of inter-ministerial policy formation. The remaining 373 decrees were produced by individual ministries without wider consultation.153
Bormann’s appointment as head of the newly designated Party Chancellery in May 1941 accentuated rather than checked the trend. His proximity to Hitler, bureaucratic energy, ideological commitment, and ruthless drive certainly gave the Party new impetus and scope for intervention, after years of leadership by the weak and ineffectual Rudolf He?. Bormann saw his role, in belonging ‘to the closest staff of the Fuhrer’, as channelling selected information to Hitler and ‘continually informing the Reichsleiter, Gauleiter, and heads of organizations of the decisions and opinions of the Fuhrer’.154 Though, under the influence of events in the east, Bormann’s leadership of the Party now accentuated the ideological tone and radicalization of policy on the home front, it brought no coordination of government. On the contrary: the consequence in practice was to intensify still further intergovernmental conflict and heighten the unresolvable tension built into the Nazi regime between the demands of bureaucratic administration and the anti-bureaucratic pressures of an ideologically driven leadership of the regime.155
Hitler’s role remained, of course, pivotal. He was, as ever, the linchpin of the system (if ‘system’ is an appropriate term for such an administrative free-for-all) and the fount of ideological legitimation. He was also kept informed, though in unsystematic and ill-balanced ways, of, frequently, quite trivial as well as more important issues. But the insistence on retaining all the overriding controls of every significant sphere of rule in his own hands, coupled with his physical absence from the centre of government, almost total preoccupation with the war effort, and complete distaste for bureaucratic methods, meant an inescapable fragmentation of the machinery of government and, accompanying it, an ever-intensifying radicalization of the regime.
Hitler’s ultimate gamble of war in the east to destroy Bolshevism with one swift knock-out blow was also to put his own popularity at risk, and with that the very focus of the regime’s support. Hitler’s immense popularity had been attained during the 1930s through successes, beyond all else through ‘victories without bloodshed’ that had brought territorial expansion and returned national pride and strength to a humiliated country. Once war had begun in 1939, the victories were quick, spectacular and, if not ‘without bloodshed’, then nevertheless relatively painless for the German people. But to retain the heights of popularity reached after the stunning victory over France in 1940, Hitler needed to bring final victory. That had so far eluded him. Sensitive as he was to the fickleness of popular support, and never forgetting how collapsing morale had given way to revolutionary fervour in 1917–18, he knew how much rested on the rapid and complete crushing of the Soviet Union. Victory in the east would produce the material base of lasting power and prosperity — endless bounty from the riches of the new territories to improve living standards at home, and limitless opportunities for upward mobility, wealth, and domination. Failure to deliver the knockout blow would, by contrast, endanger the regime. It meant prolonged war — in its wake, increasing sacrifice and privation, suffering and misery, and with that in due course the conditions in which the regime’s popularity and his own unique authority could be undermined.
Though Nazi loyalists welcomed the showdown with the arch-enemy, following the uneasy period of what they saw as an artificial and purely tactical pact, the initial reactions of the German people to the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’, unprepared as they were for the extension of the war in the east, were for the most part anxiety and dismay.156 As we have already noted, the first ‘special announcements’ of the remarkable advance and military successes of the Wehrmacht had, as Goebbels realized, far from their desired effect. As the triumphalist communiques of the Wehrmacht High Command continued to blare out of their radios, one bulletin after another reporting yet a further grandiose victory, proclaiming the total defeat or annihilation of the enemy, and announcing Stalin’s deployment of his last reserves, hopes were raised of an early end to the conflict. (They were encouraged by the tone of propaganda: Goebbels had told media representatives on 22 June that the war in the
