keep awake. Jodl did not manage it: ‘after an epic struggle’, he finally fell asleep on a sofa.99 Mussolini, overawed as always by Hitler, was, apparently, satisfied with the meetings.100
In reality, they had no concrete results. Hitler had, as usual, begun with a rosy-hued account of the war in the east, giving the impression that Soviet industrial capacity had fallen sharply and that the military calibre of the Red Army had also diminished. He drew the conclusion, typically, that ‘it can therefore in no way become worse, but only better’.101 He repeated his assumption that if Russia were defeated, Britain’s hopes would have gone. But he went on to indicate the dangers of a British landing in the west, or in North Africa. With either eventuality in mind, there was need, he urged, for great caution in dealing with France, whose collaboration was merely opportunistic. In North Africa, it had to be reckoned that the French colonies would support an Allied invasion. The Axis powers had therefore to be ready, he stressed to Mussolini, to seize unoccupied France at any critical moment. Hitler was half-hearted about the Italians’ plans for an early assault on Malta. As far as the Mediterranean was concerned, his own priority was to provide what limited support he could to Rommel’s forthcoming North African offensive, soon to be launched. This had to precede an attack on Malta.102 His eyes were, however, on the east. That is where the war on land would be decided, he declared.103
Back at the Berghof, after the Italian party had left, Hitler told his lunchtime ensemble how impressed he had been by Hermann Giesler’s spacious refurbishment of Klessheim. ‘Generous ideas’ about spaciousness needed to be incorporated by architects into town-planning in Germany. Then the higgledy-piggledy housing complexes of Zwickau, Gelsenkirchen, Bitterfeld and other towns ‘without any culture’ could be avoided. ‘It was, therefore, his firm resolution,’ he was recorded as stating, ‘to see to it that a bit of culture comes even into the smallest town and that as a result the appearance of our towns slowly reaches an ever-higher level.’104
A week later, on 8 May, the Wehrmacht began its planned spring offensive. The first targets for Manstein’s nth Army, as laid down in Hitler’s directive of 5 April, were the Kerch peninsula and Sevastopol in the Crimea.105 The directive stipulated the drive on the Caucasus, to capture the oil-fields and occupy the mountain passes that opened the route to the Persian Gulf, as the main goal of the summer offensive to follow, code-named ‘Blue’. The removal of the basis of the Soviet war-economy and the destruction of remaining military forces — thought catastrophically weakened over the winter — would, it was presumed, bring victory in the east. There, Hitler had reasserted in planning the summer operations, the war would be decided.106 The key factor was no longer ‘living space’, but oil. ‘If I don’t get the oil of Maykop and Grozny,’ Hitler admitted, ‘then I must finish
The Wehrmacht and Army High Commands did not contradict the strategic priority. In any case, they had no better alternative to recommend. And the lack of a coordinated command structure meant, as before, competition for Hitler’s approval — a military version of ‘working towards the Fuhrer’.108 It was not a matter of Hitler imposing a dictat on his military leaders. Despite his full recognition of the gravity of the German losses over the winter, Halder entirely backed the decision for an all-out offensive to destroy the basis of the Soviet economy.109 The April directive for ‘Blue’ bore his clear imprint.110 And despite the magnitude of their miscalculation the previous year, operational planners, fed by highly flawed intelligence, far from working on the basis of a ‘worst-case-scenario’, backed the optimism about the military and economic weakness of the Soviet Union.111
Whatever the presumptions of Soviet losses — on which German intelligence remained woefully weak — the Wehrmacht’s own strength, as Halder knew only too well, had been drastically weakened. Over a million of the 3.2 million men who had attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 were by now dead, captured, or missing.112 At the end of March, only 5 per cent of army divisions were fully operational.113 The figures that Halder gave Hitler on 21 April were chilling in the extreme. Some 900,000 men had been lost since the autumn, only 50 per cent replaced (including the call-up of all available twenty-year-olds, and serious inroads into the labour-force at home). Only around 10 per cent of the vehicles lost had been replaced (though most of the losses of tracked vehicles could be made good). Losses of weapons were also massive. At the beginning of the spring offensive, the eastern front was short of around 625,000 men.114 Given such massive shortages, everything was poured into bolstering the southern offensive in the Soviet Union. Of the sixty-eight divisions established on this part of the front, forty-eight had been entirely, and seventeen at least partly, reconstituted.115
Poor Soviet intelligence meant the Red Army was again unprepared for the German assault when it came.116 By 19 May, the Kerch offensive was largely over, with the capture of 150,000 prisoners and a great deal of booty. A heavy Soviet counter on Kharkhov had been, if with difficulty, successfully fended off.117 By the end of May, the battle at Kharkhov had also resulted in a notable victory, with three Soviet armies destroyed, and over 200,000 men and a huge quantity of booty captured.118 This was in no small measure owing to Hitler’s refusal, fully endorsed by Halder, to allow Field-Marshal Bock, since mid- January Commander of Army Group South, to break off the planned offensive and take up a defensive position.119
Hitler had reason to feel pleased with himself when he spoke for two hours behind closed doors in the Reich Chancellery to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter on the afternoon of 23 May. He had come to Berlin for the funeral of Carl Rover, Gauleiter of Weser-Ems, which had taken place the previous day.120 After a difficult period, also on the home front, he evidently could not miss the opportunity to bolster the solidarity and loyalty of his long-standing Party stalwarts, a vital part of his power-base. And in such company, he was prepared to speak with some candour about his aims.
One of these was the Party’s own work. The death of such a valued comrade as Rover was an indication that successors for Party leaders of his generation, now aged between forty-five and sixty years old (the dead Gauleiter had been born in 1889), needed to be cultivated. But they would not be able to tackle problems which the ‘sworn community’ of the original Party leadership had eschewed. It was his usual fixation with the question of time and mortality. They had been destined
Hitler turned to the war in the east. He described the winter crisis, castigating the failings of the leaders of the Wehrmacht, the organizers of transport, the judiciary, and the civil service.122 Japan’s intervention had been a blessing, at a time when Germany was facing catastrophe. Some established army leaders had lost their nerve in this situation. He alone — this was the gist of his remarks — had, through his unyielding refusal of requests to retreat, prevented ‘a Napoleonic debacle’.123 He had praise for the Waffen-SS in the east, and for the Party as the backbone of the home front, the counter to doubts and pessimism.124 He was determined, after their ‘insidious’ behaviour during the winter, he said, doubtless playing here on the many complaints fed to him by Goebbels and the other Gauleiter, to destroy the Christian Churches after the war.125 A revolution against the regime would never occur, he declared, if rebellious elements were dealt with in time. He had given Himmler express orders, should there be a danger of the Reich ‘sinking into chaos’, to ‘shoot the criminals in all concentration camps’.126
Hitler said he recognized in Stalin a ‘man of stature who towered above the democratic figures of the Anglo-Saxon powers’. He naturally knew, Goebbels reported him as saying, ‘that the Jews are determined under all circumstances to bring this war to victory for them, since they know that defeat also means for them personal liquidation’. It was a more forthright version of his ‘prophecy’ — on this occasion unmistakably and explicitly linking it, in Goebbels’s understanding of what was intended, with the physical liquidation of the Jews.127
Hitler emphasized that the war in the east was not comparable with any war in the past. It was not a simple matter of victory or defeat, but of ‘triumph or destruction
He looked to the future. His vision was very familiar to those who had been his lunch or supper guests in the
