Guderian returned to the front empty-handed. Within days, Kluge had requested the tank commander’s removal, and on 26 December, Guderian was informed of his dismissal.383 He was far from the last of the top-line generals to fall from grace during the winter crisis. Within the following three weeks Generals Helmuth Forster, Hans Graf von Sponeck, Erich Hoepner, and Adolf Strau? were sacked, Field-Marshal von Leeb was relieved of his command of Army Group North, and Field-Marshal von Reichenau died of a stroke. Sponeck was sentenced to death — subsequently commuted — for withdrawing his troops from the Kerch peninsula on the Crimean front. Hoepner, also for retreating, was summarily expelled from the army with loss of all his pension rights.384 By the time that the crisis was overcome, in spring, numerous subordinate commanders had also been replaced.385
The crisis lasted into January. On New Year’s Eve, while the newly acquired gramophone blared out
It was mid-January before Hitler was prepared to concede the tactical withdrawal for which Kluge had been pleading.388 By the end of the month, the worst was over. The eastern front, at enormous cost, had been stabilized. Hitler claimed full credit for this. It was, in his eyes, once more a ‘triumph of the will’. Looking back, a few months later, he blamed the winter crisis on an almost complete failure of leadership in the army. One general had come to him, he said, wanting to retreat. He had asked the general whether he really thought it would be less cold fifty kilometres to the rear. He had also asked whether the retreat would only stop at the borders of the Reich. On hearing that it might indeed be necessary to withdraw so far, he immediately dismissed the general, he said, telling him to get back to Germany as quickly as possible. He would himself take over the leadership of the army, and it would stay where it was. It was plain to him, he went on, that a retreat would have meant ‘the fate of Napoleon’. He had ruled out any retreat at all. ‘And I pulled it off! That we overcame this winter and are today in the position again to proceed victoriously… is solely attributable to the bravery of the soldiers at the front and my firm will to hold out, cost what it may.’389
Salvation through the Fuhrer’s genius was, of course, the line adopted (and believed) by Goebbels and other Nazi leaders.390 Their public statements combined pure faith and impure propaganda. But despite Halder’s outright condemnation — after the war — of Hitler’s ‘Halt Order’, not all military experts were so ready to interpret it as a catastrophic mistake. Kluge’s Chief of Staff, General Guenther Blumentritt, for instance, was prepared to acknowledge that the determination to stand fast was both correct and decisive in avoiding a much bigger disaster than actually occurred.391
Hitler’s early recognition of the dangers of a full-scale collapse of the front, and the utterly ruthless determination with which he resisted demands to retreat, probably did play a part in avoiding a calamity of Napoleonic proportions.392 But, had he been less inflexible, and paid greater heed to some of the advice coming from his field commanders, the likelihood is that the same end could have been achieved with far smaller loss of life. Moreover, stabilization was finally achieved only after he had relaxed the ‘Halt Order’ and agreed to a tactical withdrawal to form a new front line.393
The strains of the winter crisis had left their mark on Hitler. He was now showing unmistakable signs of physical wear and tear. Goebbels was shocked when he saw him in March. Hitler looked grey, and much aged. He admitted to his Propaganda Minister that he had for some time felt ill and often faint. The winter, he acknowledged, had also affected him psychologically.394 But he appeared to have withstood the worst. His confidence was, certainly to all outward appearances, undiminished. Hints, given in the autumn, of doubts at the outcome of the war, were no longer heard.395 He told his entourage in the Fuhrer Headquarters that the entry of Japan had been a turning-point in history, which would denote ‘the loss of a whole continent’ — regrettable, because the loss would be that of the ‘white race’.396 The British would not be able to prevail against Japan once Singapore had been lost.397 The question would then be whether Britain could hold on to India. He was sure that, offered the chance of keeping India (and preventing the complete disintegration of the Empire) while abandoning Europe to Germany, almost the entire British population would be in favour.398
Against what had seemed in the depths of the winter crisis almost insuperable odds, Germany was ready by spring to launch another offensive in the east. The war still had a long way to go.399 Certainly, the balance of forces at this juncture was by no means one-sided. And the course of events would undergo many vagaries before defeat for Germany appeared inexorable. But the winter of 1941–2 can nevertheless, in retrospect, be seen to be not merely a turning-point, but the beginning of the end.400
The aim advanced by Hitler since the summer of 1940, with the backing of his military strategists, had been to force Britain to come to terms and keep America out of the war through inflicting a swift and comprehensive defeat upon the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941, Germany had failed to defeat the Soviet Union and was now embroiled in a long, enormously bitter and costly, war in the east. Britain had not only been uninterested in coming to terms, but was now fighting alongside the USA and, since concluding a mutual assistance agreement in Moscow on 12 July 1941, allied — whatever the continuing frictions — with the Soviet Union.401 Not least, Germany was now at war with America. Whatever Hitler’s contempt, he knew no ways of defeating the USA.402 And if final victory over the Soviet Union could not rapidly be achieved, America’s mighty resources would soon weigh in the contest. Hitler now had to place his hopes in the Japanese, who might seriously weaken the British and lock the USA into conflict in the Pacific. But he could no longer depend upon the power of German arms alone. Germany no longer held the initiative. He had always predicted that time was running against Germany in its bid for supremacy. His own actions more than those of anyone else had ensured that this was indeed now proving to be the case. Though it would not become fully plain for some months, Hitler’s gamble, on which he had staked nothing less than the future of the nation, had disastrously failed.
10. FULFILLING THE ‘PROPHECY’
‘I already stated on 1 September 1939 in the German Reichstag — and I refrain from over-hasty prophecies — that this war will not come to an end as the Jews imagine, with the extermination of the European– Aryan peoples, but that the result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry. For the first time the old Jewish law will now be applied: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’
‘A judgement is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric, but fully deserved. The prophecy which the Fuhrer gave them along the way for bringing about a new world war is beginning to become true in the most terrible fashion… Here, too, the Fuhrer is the unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution.’
It was no accident that the war in the east led to genocide. The ideological objective of eradicating ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was central, not peripheral, to what had been deliberately designed as a ‘war of annihilation’. It was inseparably bound up with the military campaign. With the murderous onslaught of the Einsatzgruppen, backed by the Wehrmacht, launched in the first days of the invasion, the genocidal character of the conflict was already established. It would rapidly develop into an all-out genocidal programme, the like of which the world had never
