Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

telephoned Fuhrer Headquarters to give an estimate of 250-300 bombers taking part.¹⁶⁸ Hitler was enraged at the failure of the Luftwaffe to defend the Reich, blaming Goring personally for neglecting the construction of sufficient flak installations.¹⁶⁹

Despite the bombing of Cologne, the military situation put Hitler and his entourage in excellent mood in early June. On the first day of the month Hitler was flown in his ‘Fuhrer Machine’ — a spacious, four-engined Focke-Wulf, with simple interior and few special features other than a writing desk in front of his own seat — to Army Group South’s headquarters at Poltava to discuss with Field-Marshal Bock the timing and tactics of the coming offensive. Apart from Manstein, all the commanders were present as Hitler agreed to Bock’s proposal to delay the start of ‘Operation Blue’ for some days in order to take full advantage of the victory at Kharkov to destroy Soviet forces in adjacent areas. Hitler informed the commanders that the outcome of ‘Blue’ would be decisive for the war.¹⁷⁰ Back in the Wolf’s Lair, he told his lunchtime gathering next day that the number of blue- eyed, blonde women he had seen in Poltava had slightly shaken his racial views.¹⁷¹ He had been astonished at how well-fed and –clothed the people of the area were. There could be no talk there of famine.¹⁷²

On 4 June, Hitler paid a surprise visit — it had been arranged only the previous day — to Finland. Officially, the visit was to mark the seventy-fifth birthday of the Finnish military hero, Marshal Baron Carl Gustaf von Mannerheim, supreme commander of the Finnish armed forces. How pleased Mannerheim was to have his birthday party hijacked by Hitler can only be surmised. But the Finns had little choice other than to comply. Despite their growing unease at the alliance with Germany, which they had entered into prior to ‘Barbarossa’ in the expectation of a swift and comprehensive victory of the Wehrmacht,¹⁷³ no current alternative to German tutelage was available. For Hitler, some sense of the significance he attached to the meeting can be judged from the fact that, apart from a number of trips to Italy and his meetings in southern France with Petain and Franco in 1940, it was the only time he had travelled to an area outside direct German control.¹⁷⁴

The aim of the informal visit was to bolster Finnish solidarity with Germany through underlining for Mannerheim — a veteran of struggles with the Red Army — the immensity of the threat of Bolshevism. The Finns would at the same time be warned about any possible considerations of leaving German ‘protection’ and putting out feelers to the Soviet Union. In addition, the visit would head off any possible ties of Finland with the western Allies.¹⁷⁵

The meeting took place in Mannerheim’s special train in the middle of woods near the air-field at Immola.¹⁷⁶ First came the ceremonials — Hitler presented Mannerheim with the Great Golden Cross of the German Order of the Eagle — followed by lunch. Then the main participants withdrew for a confidential meeting. For an hour and a half, Hitler ran through his usual account of the war for his almost entirely silent small audience of Mannerheim, State President Risto Ryti, and Keitel. Shorn of its usual hectoring and guttural tone, his Austrian accent helped to make his rhetoric on the tape-recorded first eleven minutes — a unique survival of political comments recorded without Hitler’s knowledge — sound more lively and engaged than a written precis might make it appear.¹⁷⁷ His main concern was to emphasize the growing danger from the Soviet Union — far greater than had been imagined even at the start of ‘Barbarossa’ — and the inevitability of the conflict. He underscored the consistency of German policy.¹⁷⁸ Of course, he held to the version that Germany had been forced to act through a preventive war to head off imminent Soviet aggression.¹⁷⁹ Hitler’s monologue amounted by that point to no more than a broad survey of the war. He had no intention of entering into any discussion of future military plans. He never once, for instance, mentioned the coming offensive. The Finns were only informed of that one day before it began, during Mannerheim’s return visit.¹⁸⁰

The meeting had no concrete results. That was not its aim. For now, Hitler had reassured himself that he had the Finns’ continued support. He was well satisfied with the visit.¹⁸¹ For their part, the Finns maintained their superficially good relations with Germany, while keeping a watchful eye on events. The course of the war over the next six months conveyed its own clear message to them to begin looking for alternative loyalties.¹⁸²

While Hitler was en route to Finland, news came through from Prague that Reinhard Heydrich had died of the wounds he had suffered in the attack on 27 May.¹⁸³ Back in his headquarters, Hitler put it down to ‘stupidity or pure dimwittedness (reinen Stumpfsinn)’ that ‘such an irreplaceable man as Heydrich should expose himself to the danger’ of assassins, by driving without adequate bodyguard in an open-top car, and insisted that Nazi leaders comply with proper security precautions.¹⁸⁴ Hitler was in reflective mood at the state funeral in Berlin on 9 June. So soon after the loss of Todt, it seemed to him — and, in fact, was not far from the truth — as if the Party and state leadership only assembled for state funerals.¹⁸⁵ He spent time in the evening reminiscing with Goebbels about the early days of the Party, how hard it had been to book a hall in Munich, the difficulties in filling the Circus Krone, his relief at speaking for the first time in the Sportpalast to an audience that neither smoked nor drank, and paid attention. ‘The Fuhrer is very happy in these memories,’ remarked Goebbels. ‘He lives from the past, which seems to him like a lost paradise.’¹⁸⁶

V

‘Operation Blue’, the great summer offensive in the south, began on 28 June.¹⁸⁷ A week earlier, a German plane carrying operational plans for ‘Blue’ had crashed behind enemy lines.¹⁸⁸ Stalin thought it was deliberate disinformation and ignored it, as he did warnings from Britain.¹⁸⁹ The offensive, carried out by five armies in two groups against the weakest part of the Soviet front, between Kursk in the north and Taganrog on the Sea of Azov in the south, was able — as ‘Barbarossa’ had done the previous year — to use the element of surprise to make impressive early gains.¹⁹⁰ Meanwhile, on 1 July, finally, the fall of Sevastopol brought immediate promotion to Field-Marshal for Manstein.¹⁹¹

After the initial break through the Russian lines, the rapid advance on Voronezh ended in the capture of the city on 6 July. This brought, however, the first confrontation of the new campaign between Hitler and his generals. Voronezh itself was an unimportant target. But a Soviet counter-attack had tied down two armoured divisions in the city for two days. This slowed the south-eastern advance along the Don and allowed enemy forces to escape. Hitler was enraged that Bock had ignored his instructions that the advance of the panzer divisions was to proceed without any hold-ups to the Volga in order to allow maximum destruction of the Soviet forces. In fact, when he had flown to Bock’s headquarters at Poltava on 3 July, Hitler had been far less dogmatic and clear in face-to-face discussion with the field-marshal than he was in the map-room of the Wolf’s Lair.¹⁹² But that did not save Bock. Hitler said he was not going to have his plans spoiled by field- marshals as they had been in autumn 1941. Bock was dismissed and replaced by Colonel-General Freiherr Maximilian von Weichs.¹⁹³

To be closer to the southern front, Hitler moved his headquarters on 16 July to a new location, given the name ‘Werwolf, near Vinnitsa in the Ukraine.¹⁹⁴ Sixteen planes, their engines already whirring, waited on the runway at the Wolf’s Lair that day for Hitler and his entourage to take them on a three-hour flight to their new surrounds. After a car-ride along rutted roads, they finally arrived at the damp, mosquito-infested huts that were to be their homes for the next three and a half months.¹⁹⁵ Even the Wolf’s Lair began to seem idyllic. At the ‘Werwolf, the days were stiflingly hot, the nights, even in high summer, distinctly chilly. The mosquitoes were an even greater plague than they had been in East Prussia. Everyone had to take each day a bitter-tasting medicine called Atibrin as a precaution against malaria. Halder was pleased enough with the layout of the new headquarters. Hitler’s secretaries were less happy with their cramped quarters. As at Rastenburg, they had little to do and were bored. A visit to a local abattoir and meat-processing plant, collective farm, or decrepit theatre in the nearby town was, apart from watching old films, the closest thing to escapism.¹⁹⁶ For Hitler, the daily routine was unchanged from that in the Wolf’s Lair. At meals — his own often consisted of no more than a plate of vegetables with apples to follow — he could still appear open, relaxed, engaged.¹⁹⁷ As always, he monopolized dinner-table topics of conversation on a wide variety of topics that touched on his interests or obsessions. These included the evils of smoking, the construction of a motorway system throughout the eastern territories, the deficiencies of the legal system, the achievements of Stalin as a latter-day Ghengis Khan, keeping the standard of living low among the subjugated peoples, the need to