encirclements of the double battle of Brjansk and Viaz’ma in the first half of October.227 It was hardly any wonder that the mood in the Fuhrer Headquarters and among the military leadership was buoyant. Jodl thought the victory at Viaz’ma the most decisive day of the Russian war, comparable with Koniggratz.228 Quartermaster Eduard Wagner imagined the Soviet Union to be on the verge of collapse. In a letter to his wife on 5 October, he wrote: ‘At present the Moscow operation is under way. We have the impression that the last great collapse is imminent… Operational aims are set that would once have made one’s hair stand on end. Eastwards of Moscow! Then, I estimate, the war will be largely over and perhaps there will then indeed be the collapse of the system. That’ll take us on a good stretch in the war against England. Over and again, I’m amazed at the Fuhrer’s military judgement. He is intervening this time, one could say decisively, in the course of the operations, and up to now he has always been right.’229
On the evening of 8 October, Hitler spoke of the decisive turn in the military situation over the previous three days. Werner Koeppen, Rosenberg’s liaison at Fuhrer Headquarters, reported to his boss that ‘the Russian army can essentially be seen as annihilated’.230 Hitler’s view — he would soon have to revise it drastically — was that Bolshevism was heading for ruin through lack of tank defences.231 ‘The rapid collapse of Russia would have a disastrous impact on England,’ he asserted. Churchill had placed all his hopes in the Russian war-machine. ‘Now that too is past.’232
Hitler had been in an unusually good mood at the meal table on the evening of 4 October, having just returned from a visit to Army High Command’s headquarters to congratulate Brauchitsch on his sixtieth birthday. Not for the first time, he gazed into the future in the ‘German East’. Within the next half-century, he foresaw 5 million farms settled there by former soldiers who would hold down the Continent through military force. He placed no value in colonies, he said, and could quickly come to terms with England on that score. Germany needed only a little colonial territory for coffee and tea plantations. Everything else it could produce on the Continent. Cameroon and a part of French Equatorial Africa or the Belgian Congo would suffice for Germany’s needs. ‘Our Mississippi must be the Volga, not the Niger,’ he concluded.233
Next evening, after Himmler had regaled those round the dinner table with his impressions of Kiev, and how 80–90 per cent of the impoverished population there could be ‘dispensed with’, Hitler came round to the subject of German dialects. It started with his dislike of the Saxon accent and spread to a rejection of all German dialects. They made the learning of German for foreigners more difficult. And German now had to be made into the general form of communication in Europe.234
Hitler was still in expansive frame of mind when Reich Economics Minister Walther Funk visited him on 13 October. The eastern territories would mean the end of unemployment in Europe, he claimed. He envisaged river links from the Don and the Dnieper between the Black Sea and the Danube, bringing oil and grain to Germany. ‘Europe — and not America — will be the land of unlimited possibilities.’235
Four days later, the presence of Fritz Todt prompted Hitler to an even more grandiose vision of new roads stretching through the conquered territories. Motorways would now run not just to the Crimea, but to the Caucasus, as well as more northerly areas. German cities would be established as administrative centres on the river crossings. Three million prisoners-of-war would be available to supply the labour for the next twenty years. German farmsteads would line the roads. ‘The monotonous Asiaticlike steppe would soon offer a totally different appearance.’ He now spoke of 10 million Germans, as well as settlers from Scandinavia, Holland, Flanders, and even America putting down roots there. The Slav population would ‘have to vegetate further in their own dirt away from the big roads’. Knowing how to read the road-signs would be quite sufficient education. Those eating German bread today, he said, did not get worked up about the regaining of the East Elbian granaries with the sword in the twelfth century. ‘Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.’ Hitler wished he were ten to fifteen years younger to experience what was going to happen.236
But by this time weather conditions alone meant the chances of Hitler’s vision ever materializing were sharply diminishing. The weather was already bad. By mid-October, military operations had stalled as heavy rains swept over the front. Units were stranded. The vehicles of Army Group Centre were bogged down on impassable roads. Away from the choked roads, nothing could move. ‘The Russians are impeding us far less than the wet and the mud,’ commented Field-Marshal Bock.237 Everywhere, it was a ‘struggle with the mud’.238 On top of that, there were serious shortages of fuel and munitions.239
There was also, not before time, concern now about winter provisions for the troops. Hitler directly asked Quartermaster-General Wagner, on a visit to Fuhrer Headquarters, about this on 26 October. Wagner promised that Army Groups North and South would have a half of their necessary provisions by the end of the month but Army Group Centre, the largest of the three, would only have a third. Supplying the south was especially difficult since the Soviets had destroyed part of the railway track along the Sea of Azov.240 A few days later, on 1 November, Hitler paid a visit to the headquarters of the Army High Command to look at the exhibition of winter clothing which Wagner had assembled. Once more the Quartermaster-General assured Hitler that provision of the troops with sufficient clothing was in hand. Hitler accepted the assurance.241 When Wagner spoke to Goebbels, he gave the Propaganda Minister the impression that ‘everything had been thought of and nothing forgotten’.242
In fact, Wagner appears to have become seriously concerned by this vital matter only with the rapid deterioration of the weather in mid-October, while Halder had been aware as early as August that the problem of transport of winter clothing and equipment to the eastern front could only be solved by the defeat of the Red Army before the worst of the weather set in.243 Brauchitsch was still claiming, when he had lengthy talks with Goebbels on 1 November, that an advance to Stalingrad was possible before the snows arrived and that by the time the troops took up their winter quarters Moscow would be cut off.244 By now this was wild optimism. Brauchitsch was forced to acknowledge the existing weather problems, the impassable roads, transport difficulties, and the concern about the winter provisioning of the troops.245 In truth, whatever the unrealism of the Army and Wehrmacht High Commands about what was attainable in their view before the depths of winter, the last two weeks of October had had a highly sobering effect on the front-line commanders and the initial exaggerated hopes of the success of ‘Operation Typhoon’.246 By the end of the month the offensive of Army Group Centre’s exhausted troops had ground temporarily to a halt.247
The impression which Hitler gave, however, in his traditional speech to the Party’s old guard, assembled in the Lowenbraukeller in Munich on the late afternoon of 8 November, the anniversary of the 1923 Putsch, was quite different.248 The speech was intended primarily for domestic consumption.249 It aimed to boost morale, and to rally round the oldest and most loyal members of Hitler’s retinue after the difficult months of summer and autumn. Hitler paraded once more before his audience the victories in earlier campaigns and why he had felt compelled to attack the Soviet Union. He went on to describe the scale of the Soviet losses. ‘My Party Comrades,’ he declared, ‘no army in the world, including the Russian, recovers from those.’250 ‘Never before,’ he went on, ‘has a giant empire been smashed and struck down in a shorter time than Soviet Russia.’251 He remarked on enemy claims that the war would last into 1942. ‘It can last as long as it wants,’ he retorted. ‘The last battalion in this field will be a German one.’252 Despite the triumphalism, it was the strongest hint yet that the war was far from over.
The next day, after the usual ceremony at the ‘Temples of Honour’ of the Putsch ‘heroes’ on the Konigsplatz in Munich, Hitler addressed his Reichsleiter and Gauleiter. The speech was in effect an appeal for unconditional loyalty to the very backbone of the Party, Hitler’s essential hardcore body of diehard support. His way of doing this, as usual, was a mixture of veiled threat and pathos. Those who stepped out of line, showed themselves weak, or conspired against him would be ruthlessly dealt with, was the first part of his message. He referred to the dismissal (in the previous year) of Josef Wagner from his position as Gauleiter of Westphalia-South and of Silesia. Wagner’s pro-Catholic sympathies (and those of his wife) were declared incompatible with the post of a Gauleiter. He had actually been the victim of inner-party intrigues. But the last straw for Hitler had been a letter from Frau Wagner (apparently with her husband’s backing), forbidding their daughter to marry a non-Christian SS-man. Hitler spoke darkly of the conspiratorial behaviour of Wagner and former SA chief Captain Franz Pfeffer von Salomon — now lodged in a concentration camp.253 Both were said to have had close relations with Rudolf He?. Hitler stressed what a blow for him the He? affair had been, and how thankful he was that British propaganda had missed the opportunity to portray the Deputy Fuhrer as his ambassador carrying a peace-offer. Germany would have lost its allies as a result, Hitler imagined — something which even now stopped the blood in the veins.
He moved to pathos. There could never be any thought of capitulation. He would continue the war until it finished in victory. ‘And should a serious crisis afflict the Fatherland,’ he said with no sense of an apparent
