Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Wolf’s Lair. Hitler was frank about his imperialist aims. The Reich would massively extend its land in the east, gaining coal, grain, oil, and above all national security. In the west, too, the Reich would have to be strengthened. The French would ‘have to bleed for that’. But there it was a strategic, not an ethnic, question. ‘We must solve the ethnic (volkischen) questions in the east.’ Once the territory needed for the consolidation of Europe was in German hands, it was his intention to build a gigantic fortification, like the limes of Roman times, to separate Asia from Europe. He went on with his vision of a countryside settled by farmer-soldiers, building up a population of 250 million within seventy or eighty years. Then Germany would be safe against all future threats. It should not be difficult, he claimed, to preserve the ethnic- German (volkisch) character of the conquered territories. ‘That would also be the actual meaning of this war. For the serious sacrifice of blood could only be justified through later generations gaining from it the blessing of waving cornfields.’ Nice though it would be to acquire a few colonies to provide rubber or coffee, ‘our colonial territory is in the east. There are to be found fertile black earth and iron, the bases of our future wealth.’ He ended his vision of the future with the vaguest notion of what he understood as a social revolution. The National Socialist Movement, he said, had to make sure that the war did not end in a capitalist victory, but in a victory of the people. A new society would have to be constructed out of the victory, one resting not on money, status, or name, but on courage and test of character (Bewahrung). He was confident that victory would be Germany’s. Once the ‘business in the east’ was finished — in the summer, it was to be hoped — ‘then the war is practically won for us. Then we will be in the position of conducting a large-scale pirate- war against the Anglo-Saxon powers, which in the long run they will not be able to withstand.’¹³⁰

Little over a week later, Hitler was back in Berlin again, this time to address around 10,000 young officers in the Sportpalast on 30 May. Naturally, he struck a different tone. But essentially it offered the same images of the dire spectre of a Bolshevik victory and the power and prosperity of imperialist conquest. Kerch and Kharkov were, he told them, merely the ‘prelude’ to what was to follow in the summer. Germany would — and must — succeed, he declared. If the enemy proved victorious, then ‘Our German people would be exterminated (ausgerottet). Asiatic barbarity would plant itself in Europe. The German woman would be fair game for these beasts. The intelligentsia would be slaughtered. Whatever gives us the characteristic features of a higher form of mankind would be exterminated and annihilated (vernichtet).’ Victory for the Reich, on the other hand, and the acquisition of ‘living-space’, would give future generations grain, iron, coal, oil, flax, rubber, and wood in abundance.¹³¹

Hitler had been in ebullient mood when Goebbels saw him at lunchtime in the Reich Chancellery on the day before his speech to the officers. With the advance to the Caucasus, he told his Propaganda Minister, ‘we’ll be pressing the Soviet system so to say on its Adam’s Apple.’¹³² He thought the new Soviet losses at Kerch and Kharkov were not reparable; Stalin was reaching the end of his resources; there were major difficulties with food-supplies in the Soviet Union; morale there was poor.¹³³ He had concrete plans for the extension of the Reich borders also in the West. He took it as a matter of course that Belgium, with its ancient Germanic provinces of Flanders and Brabant, would be split into German Reichsgaue. So would, whatever the views of Dutch National Socialist leader Anton Mussert, the Netherlands.¹³⁴

Two days earlier, on 27 May, one of Hitler’s most important henchmen, Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and since the previous autumn Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, had been fatally wounded in an assassination attempt carried out by patriotic Czech exiles who had been flown from London — with the aid of the British subversive warfare agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) — and parachuted into the vicinity of Prague. Heydrich’s own security had become lax. That morning, he left his palatial residence at Panenske Brezany, around twelve miles from Prague, to drive to his headquarters at the Hradcany Castle in the capital without bodyguard, in an open Mercedes, alone with his chauffeur. He always took the same route. The two assassins, and their comrade who would serve as the look-out, had observed him regularly. Heydrich was a little late leaving that morning. It was just after 10.30a.m. when the look-out flashed the signal by mirror that his car was approaching the hairpin bend where it would be forced to slow down, and where the attempt would be made. As the car slowed, the first Czech agent, Josef Gabcik, stepped out, pulled a sten-gun from under his coat, and pressed the trigger. The gun jammed. But Gabcik’s companion, Jan Kubis, ran towards the car and lobbed his grenade at it. The bomb hit the back wheel and exploded. Heydrich, injured in the blast, tried to pursue his assailant, before collapsing. Kubis, also wounded by the explosion, escaped on a bicycle. Gabcik disappeared on a crowded tram after shooting Heydrich’s chauffeur in both legs. The look-out walked away quietly. By the wrecked Mercedes, one of the most powerful men in Hitler’s Reich lay mortally injured.¹³⁵

Hitler always favoured brutal reprisals. There could be no doubt that the attack on one of the key representatives of his power would provoke a ferocious response.

The assassins themselves were betrayed, for a large money reward, by another Czech SOE agent. Eventually trapped by the SS, they committed suicide after engaging in a gun-battle. But their deaths contributed little towards satiating the Nazi blood-lust. To this end, over 1,300 Czechs, some 200 of them women, were eventually rounded up by the SS and executed. On 10 June the entire village of Lidice — the name had been found on a Czech SOE agent arrested earlier — was to be destroyed, the male inhabitants shot, the women taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp, the children removed.¹³⁶

Hitler’s mood was ripe for Goebbels to bring up once more the question of the deportation of Berlin’s remaining Jews. The involvement of a number of young Jews (associated with a Communist-linked resistance group led by Herbert Baum) in the arson attempt at the anti-Bolshevik exhibition ‘The Soviet Paradise’ in Berlin’s Lustgarten on 18 May enabled the Propaganda Minister to emphasize the security dangers if the 40,000 or so Jews he reckoned were still in the Reich capital were not deported.¹³⁷ He had been doing his best, he had noted a day earlier, to have as many Jews as possible from his domain ‘shipped off to the east’.¹³⁸ Goebbels now pleaded for ‘a more radical Jewish policy’ and, he said, ‘I push at an open door with the Fuhrer,’ who told Speer to find replacements for the Jews in the armaments industry with ‘foreign workers’ as soon as possible.¹³⁹

Talk moved to the dangers of possible internal revolt in the event of a critical situation in the war, something Hitler had touched upon in his speech to the Gauleiter a few days earlier.¹⁴⁰ If the danger became acute, he now repeated, the prisons ‘would be emptied through liquidations’ to prevent the possibility of the gates being opened to let the ‘revolting mob’ loose on the people.¹⁴¹ But in contrast to 1917 there was nothing to fear from the German workers, remarked Hitler. All German workers desired victory. They had most to lose by defeat and would not contemplate stabbing him in the back. ‘The Germans take part in subversive movements only when the Jews lure them into it,’ Goebbels had Hitler saying. ‘Therefore one must liquidate the Jewish danger, cost what it takes.’ West-European civilization only provided a facade of assimilation. Back in the ghetto, Jews soon returned to type. But there were elements among them who operated ‘with dangerous brutality and thirst for revenge (Rachsucht)’. ‘Therefore,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘the Fuhrer does not wish at all that the Jews be evacuated to Siberia. There, under the hardest living conditions, they would doubtless again represent a vigorous element. He would most like to see them resettled in Central Africa. There they would live in a climate that would certainly not make them strong and capable of resistence. At any rate, it is the aim of the Fuhrer to make Western Europe entirely free of Jews. Here they can no longer have any home.’¹⁴²

Did such remarks mean that Hitler was unaware that the ‘Final Solution’ was under way, that Jews had already been slaughtered in their thousands in Russia and were now being murdered by poison gas in industrialized mass-killing centres already operating in Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-Birkenau (with Treblinka and Maidanek soon to follow)? That seems inconceivable, even if he did not need to be informed of the fine detail of what was taking place, or for that matter of the very names of the extermination camps. As we have noted, reports of the slaughter by the Einsatzgruppen in the USSR had been requested to be sent to Hitler on a regular basis. In December 1941, he had explicitly affirmed to Himmler that Jews — meaning, certainly, those in the east — were to be ‘exterminated as partisans’. And in March 1942, Goebbels had referred to Hitler as the inspiration behind the most ‘radical solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’, in referring to the liquidation of the Jews from the Lublin district.

On 9 April 1942, a time when the deportations from western European countries to the gas-chambers of Poland were also getting under way, Hans Frank told his underlings in the General Government that orders for the