Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

transport organizers; that his army commanders had been faint-hearts, not tough enough when faced with crisis; that his own strength of will and determination had alone staved off catastrophe. Every crisis in his own mind amounted to a contest of will. The winter crisis had been no different. Coming through it had been yet another ‘triumph of the will’, comparable as he saw it with winning power against the odds in 1933. That the gamble of knocking out the Soviet Union within a few months had been absurd, or that the overall strategy of ‘Barbarossa’ had been flawed from the outset, never entered his head; nor that his own constant interference had compounded the problems of military command. The winter crisis had sharpened his sense, never far from the surface, that he had to struggle not just against external enemies, but against those who were inadequate, incapable, or even disloyal, in his own ranks. But the crisis had been surmounted. His leadership, he believed, had saved his army from the fate of Napoleon’s troops. They had survived the Russian winter. This in itself was a psychological blow to the enemy, which had also suffered grievously. It was necessary now to attack again as soon as possible; to destroy this mortally weakened enemy in one final great heave. This was how his thoughts ran. In the insomniac nights in his bunker, he was not just wanting to erase the memories of the crisis-ridden cold, dark months. He could hardly wait for the new offensive in the east to start — the push to the Caucasus, Leningrad, and Moscow, which would wrestle back the initiative once more.³ It would be a colossal gamble. Should it fail, the consequences would be unthinkable.

For those in the Fuhrer Headquarters not preoccupied with military planning, life was dull and monotonous. Hitler’s secretaries would go for a daily walk to the next village and back. Otherwise, they whiled away the hours. Chatting, a film in the evenings, and the obligatory gathering each afternoon in the Tea House and late at night again for tea made up the day. ‘Since the tea-party always consists of the same people, there is no stimulation from outside, and nobody experiences anything on a personal level,’ Christa Schroeder wrote to a friend in February 1942, ‘the conversation is often apathetic and tedious, wearying, and irksome. Talk always runs along the same lines.’ Hitler’s monologues — outlining his expansive vision of the world — were reserved for lunch or the twilight hours. At the afternoon tea-gatherings, politics were never discussed. Anything connected with the war was taboo. There was nothing but small-talk. Those present either had no independent views, or kept them to themselves. Hitler’s presence dominated. But it seldom now did much to animate. He was invariably tired, but found it hard to sleep. His insomnia made him reluctant to go to bed. His entourage often wished he would do so. The tedium for those around him seemed at times incessant. Occasionally, it was relieved in the evenings by listening to records — Beethoven symphonies, selections from Wagner, or Hugo Wolf’s Lieder. Hitler would listen with closed eyes. But he always wanted the same records. His entourage knew the numbers off by heart. He would call out: ‘Aida, last act,’ and someone would shout to one of the manservants: ‘Number hundred-and-something.’⁴

The war was all that mattered to Hitler. Yet, cocooned in the strange world of the Wolf’s Lair, he was increasingly severed from its realities, both at the front and at home. Detachment ruled out all vestiges of humanity. Even towards those in his own entourage who had been with him for many years, there was nothing resembling real affection, let alone friendship; genuine fondness was reserved only for his young Alsatian.⁵ He had described the human being the previous autumn as no more than ‘a ridiculous “cosmic bacterium” (eine lacherliche “Weltraumbakterie”)’.⁶ Human life and suffering was, thus, of no consequence to him. He never visited a field-hospital, nor the homeless after bomb- raids. He saw no massacres, went near no concentration camp, viewed no compound of starving pris-oners-of-war. His enemies were in his eyes like vermin to be stamped out. But his profound contempt for human existence extended to his own people. Decisions costing the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers were made — perhaps it was only thus possible to make them — without consideration for any human plight. As he had told Guderian during the winter crisis, feelings of sympathy and pity for the suffering of his soldiers had to be shut out.⁷ For Hitler, the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed were merely an abstraction, the suffering a necessary and justified sacrifice in the ‘heroic struggle’ for the survival of the people.

Among ordinary soldiers, amid the brutality and barbarization, less heroic views of war could be encountered. One soldier on the eastern front who, in peacetime, had attended the Party rallies at Nuremberg, mourned the death of a comrade at the end of January. ‘Why must it always be: sacrifice, struggle, victory, death!’ he lamented. ‘Is the heroic death then the ideal of this globe?.’⁸ A young recruit from Cologne, by no means opposed to the regime, wrote in his diary a few weeks later, while in training in East Prussia before being sent to the eastern front: ‘I’m convinced that, if I knew that all this really had a meaning, I could and would voluntarily achieve much more. But for what? I ask myself. For what and for whom must we perish? For what and for whom be a slave? For what starve, freeze, and then finally croak? For what? For what? A thousand questions — no answer.’⁹

The ties which had bound a high proportion of the German population to Hitler since 1933 were starting to loosen. SD reports from early 1942 still declared that people craved shots of Hitler in the newsreels. ‘A smile of the Fuhrer. His look itself gives us strength and courage again.’ Such effusions were mentioned as commonplace remarks.¹⁰ But Hitler was becoming a remote figure, a distant warlord. His image had to be refashioned by Goebbels to match the change which the Russian campaign had brought about. The premiere of his lavish new film, The Great King, in early 1942 allowed Goebbels to stylize Hitler by association as a latter-day Frederick the Great, isolated in his majesty, conducting a heroic struggle for his people against mighty enemies and ultimately overcoming crisis and calamity to emerge triumphant.¹¹ It was a portrayal which increasingly matched Hitler’s self-image during the last years of the war.¹²

But the changed image could do nothing to alter reality: the German people’s bonds with Hitler were to weaken immeasurably as victories turned into defeats, advances into retreats, expansion into contraction, as the death-toll mounted catastrophically, allies deserted, and the war came to be widely recognized as leading to inevitable disaster. And as the war turned inexorably against Germany, Hitler cast around all the more for scapegoats.

I

An early complication in 1942 arose with the loss of his armaments minister, Dr Fritz Todt, in a fatal air- crash on the morning of 8 February, soon after taking off from the airfield at the Fuhrer Headquarters.

Todt had masterminded the building of the motorways and the Westwall for Hitler.¹³ In March 1940 he had been been given the task, as a Reich Minister, of coordinating the production of weapons and munitions.¹⁴ Yet a further major office had come his way in July 1941 with the centralization in his hands of control over energy and waterways.¹⁵ In the second half of the year, as the first signs of serious labour shortage in German industry became evident, Todt was commissioned with organizing the mass deployment within Germany of Soviet prisoners-of-war and civilian forced labourers.¹⁶ The accumulation of offices pivotal to the war economy was an indication of Hitler’s high esteem for Todt. This was reciprocated. Todt was a convinced National Socialist. But by late 1941, fully aware of the massive armaments potential of the USA and appalled at the logistical incompetence of the Wehrmacht’s economic planning during the eastern campaign, he had become deeply pessimistic, certain that the war could not be won.¹⁷

His public statements naturally betrayed none of his private doubts. And during December and January, he had taken the vital steps in conjunction with industry in drastically rationalizing and concentrating armaments production. Hitler, who had been made aware of the gross inefficiencies in the production of weaponry and was anxious to maximize the turn-out of armaments during 1942, backed the changes.¹⁸ The decisive alteration was to give greater scope and incentive to industry to improve its own efficiency as well as freeing armaments production from intervention from the military and Four-Year Plan Organization and some of the stifling bureaucratic controls which had been imposed on it.¹⁹ At the same time, the priorities that had been accorded the Luftwaffe and navy, when it was presumed the war in the east would easily and quickly be won, were reversed to favour the army.²⁰

On the morning of 7 February, Todt flew to Rastenburg to put to Hitler proposals which had arisen from his meeting a few days earlier with representatives of the armaments industries.²¹ What else transpired during his meeting with Hitler that afternoon is not known. No one else was present, and no notes or minutes were