Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

letters to their loved ones of how bad the impact of the supplies crisis was on morale, both at the front and at home.³³⁶ But Hitler’s eyes were already set on the big spring offensive in 1942.³³⁷ And, as always when faced with setbacks, he pointed to the ‘struggle for power’, and how difficulties had at that time been overcome.³³⁸

The need to boost morale, in the first instance among those he held responsible for upholding it on the home front, undoubtedly lay behind Hitler’s address — the second in little over a month — to his Gauleiter on the afternoon of 12 December.

He began with the consequences of Pearl Harbor. If Japan had not entered the war, he would have at some point had to declare war on the USA. ‘Now the East-Asia conflict falls to us like a present in the lap,’ Goebbels reported him saying. The pyschological significance should not be underrated. Without the conflict between Japan and the USA, a declaration of war on the Americans would have been difficult to accept by the German people. As it was, it was taken as a matter of course. The extension to the conflict also had positive consequences for the U- boat war in the Atlantic. Freed of restraint, he expected the tonnage sunk now to increase greatly — and this would probably be decisive in winning the war. Aware of objections that the alliance with the Japanese stood opposed to ‘the interests of the white man in East Asia’, Hitler was frank, forthright, and pragmatic: ‘Interests of the white race must at present give place to the interests of the German people. We are fighting for our life. What use is a fine theory if the basis of life (Lebensboden) is taken away?… In a life-and-death struggle, all means available to a people are right. We would ally ourselves with anyone if we could weaken the Anglo-Saxon position.’³³⁹

He turned to the war in the east. Both tone and content were much as they had been with Goebbels in private. He acknowledged that the troops had had for the time being to be pulled back to a defensible line, but, given the supplies problems, saw this as far better than standing some 300 kilometres further east. The troops were now being saved for the coming spring and summer offensive. A new panzer army in preparation within Germany would be ready by then. He also alluded to the difficulties in defending against the Russian tanks, but pointed out that a new anti-tank gun was well in preparation. He viewed the general situation very favourably. The North African campaign, he misleadingly stated, was well provided for, and an Allied landing on the Continent for the time being out of the question. The difficulties faced at present were determined by the elements (naturbedingt).³⁴⁰

It was his firm intention, he declared, in the following year to finish off (erledigen) Soviet Russia at least as far as the Urals. ‘Then it would perhaps be possible to reach a point of stabilization in Europe through a sort of half-peace’, by which he appeared to mean that Europe would exist as a self-sufficient, heavily armed fortress, leaving the remaining belligerent powers to fight it out in other theatres of war. An attack on the European Continent, he claimed, would then be much less possible than at present. And given the progress made in German anti-aircraft weapons, he was ‘extraordinarily sceptical’ about the impact, which, he thought, would become ever more limited, of British air-raids. If this turned out to be the case, he claimed, Britain would be in a quandary.³⁴¹

He outlined his vision of the future. His National Socialist conviction, he said, had become even stronger during the war. It was essential after the war was over to undertake a huge social programme embracing workers and farmers. The German people had deserved this. And it would provide — always the political reasoning behind the aim of material improvement — the ‘most secure basis of our state system (unseres staatlichen Gefuges)’. The enormous housing programme he had in mind would, he stated openly, be made possible through cheap labour — through depressing wages. The work would be done by the forced labour of the defeated peoples. He pointed out that the prisoners-of-war were now being fully employed in the war economy. This was as it should be, he stated, and had been the case in antiquity, giving rise in the first place to slave labour. German war debts would doubtless be 200–300 billion Marks. These had to be covered through the work ‘in the main of the people who had lost the war’. The cheap labour would allow houses to be built and sold at a substantial profit which would go towards paying off the war-debts within ten to fifteen years.³⁴²

Hitler put forward once more his vision of the east as Germany’s ‘future India’, which would become within three or four generations ‘absolutely German’.³⁴³ There would, he made clear, be no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches. After the trouble of the summer, he had to take a line which both appeased the Party hotheads but also restrained their instincts. For the time being, he ordered slow progression in the ‘Church Question’. ‘But it is clear,’ noted Goebbels, himself numbering among the most aggressive anti-Church radicals, ‘that after the war it has to find a general solution… There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world-view.’³⁴⁴

Pressing engagements in Berlin — particularly the audience next day with Ambassador Oshima to award him the Great Golden Cross of the Order of the German Eagle — prevented Hitler from returning that evening, as he had intended, to the Wolf’s Lair.³⁴⁵ When he eventually reached his headquarters again, in the morning of 16 December, it was back to a reality starkly different from the rosy picture he had painted to his Gauleiter.³⁴⁶ A potentially catastrophic military crisis was unfolding.

VII

Already before Hitler had left for Berlin, Field-Marshal von Bock had outlined the weakness of his Army Group against a concentrated attack, and stated the danger of serious defeat if no reserves were sent.³⁴⁷ Then, while Hitler was in the Reich capital, as the Soviet counter-offensive penetrated German lines, driving a dangerous wedge between the 2nd and 4th Armies, Guderian reported the desperate position of his troops and a serious ‘crisis in confidence’ of the field commands.³⁴⁸ After Schmundt had been sent to Army Group Centre on 14 December to discuss the situation at first hand, Hitler responded immediately, neither awaiting the report from Brauchitsch, who had accompanied Schmundt, nor involving Halder.³⁴⁹ Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm, Commander of the Reserve Army, was summoned and asked for a report on the divisions that could be sent straight away to the eastern front. Goring and the head of the Wehrmacht transport, Lieutenant- General Rudolf Gercke, were told to arrange the transport.³⁵⁰ Four and a half divisions of reserves, assembled throughout Germany at breakneck speed, were rushed to the haemorrhaging front. Another nine divisions were drummed up from the western front and the Balkans.³⁵¹ On 15 December Jodl passed on to Halder Hitler’s order that there must be no retreat where the front could possibly be held. But where the position was untenable, and once preparations for an orderly withdrawal had been made, retreat to a more defensible line was permitted.³⁵² This matched the recommendations of Bock and of the man who would soon replace him as Commander of Army Group Centre, at this time still commanding the 4th Army, Field- Marshal Gunther von Kluge.³⁵³ That evening, Brauchitsch, deeply depressed, told Halder that he saw no way out for the army from its current position.³⁵⁴ Hitler had by this time long since ceased listening to his broken Army Commander-in-Chief — by now, as Halder put it, ‘scarcely any longer even a postman (kaum mehr Brieftrager)’ — and was dealing directly with his Army Group Commanders.³⁵⁵

Bock had, in fact, already recommended to Brauchitsch on 13 December that Hitler should make a decision on whether the Army Group Centre should stand fast and fight its ground, or retreat. In either eventuality, Bock had openly stated, there was the danger that the Army Group would collapse ‘in ruins (in Trummer)’. Bock advanced no firm recommendation. But he indicated the disadvantages of retreat: the discipline of the troops might give way, and the order to stand-fast at the new line be disobeyed.³⁵⁶ The implication was plain. The retreat might turn into a rout. Bock’s evaluation of the situation, remarkably, had not been passed on to Hitler at the time. He only received it on 16 December, when Bock told Schmundt what he had reported to Brauchitsch three days earlier.³⁵⁷

That night, Guderian, who two days earlier had struggled through a blizzard for twenty-two hours to meet Brauchitsch at Roslavl and put his case for a withdrawal, was telephoned on a crackly line by Hitler: there was to be no withdrawal; the line was to be held; replacements would be sent.³⁵⁸ Army Group North was told the same day, 16 December, that it had to defend the front to the last man. Army Group South had also to hold the front and would be sent reserves from the Crimea after the imminent fall of Sevastopol. Army Group Centre was