contemplate any withdrawal, the next military disaster beckoned. When Below flew south at the end of the month to view the North African front and report back to Hitler, even Kesselring was unable to hide the fact that Tunis could not be held. Colonel-General Hans-Jurgen von Arnim, who had taken over the North African command from the exhausted and dispirited Rommel, was of the same opinion. Kesselring’s staff were even more pessimistic: they saw no chance of successfully fending off an Allied crossing from Tunis to Sicily once — which they regarded as a certainty — North Africa had fallen. When Below reported back, Hitler said little. It seemed to his Luftwaffe adjutant that he had already written off North Africa and was inwardly preparing himself for the eventual defection of his Italian partners to the enemy.104
In early April, Hitler had spent the best part of four days at the restored baroque palace of Klessheim, near Salzburg, shoring up Mussolini’s battered morale — half urging, half browbeating the Duce to keep up the fight, knowing how weakened he would be through the massive prestige blow soon to descend in North Africa. Worn down by the strain of war and depression, Mussolini, stepping down from his train with assistance, looked a ‘broken old man’ to Hitler.105 The Duce also made a subdued impression on interpreter Dr Paul Schmidt as he pleaded forlornly for a compromise peace in the east in order to bolster defences in the west, ruling out the possibility of defeating the USSR.106 Dismissing such a notion out of hand, Hitler reminded Mussolini of the threat that the fall of Tunis would pose for Fascism in Italy. He left him with the impression ‘that there can be no other salvation for him than to achieve victory with us or to die’.107 He exhorted him to do the utmost to use the Italian navy to provide supplies for the forces there. The remainder of the visit consisted largely of monologues by Hitler — including long digressions about Prussian history — aimed at stiffening Mussolini’s resistance.108 Hitler was subsequently satisfied that this had been achieved.109
The talks with Mussolini amounted to one of a series of meetings with his allies that Hitler conducted during April, while staying at the Berghof. King Boris of Bulgaria, Marshal Antonescu of Romania, Admiral Horthy of Hungary, Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling of Norway, President Tiso of Slovakia, ‘Poglavnik’ (Leader) Ante Pavelic of Croatia, and Prime Minister Pierre Laval from Vichy France all visited the Berghof or Kiessheim by the end of the month.110 In each case, the purpose was to stiffen resolve — partly by cajoling, partly by scarcely veiled threats — and to keep faint-hearts or waverers tied to the Axis cause.
Hitler let Antonescu know that he was aware of tentative approaches made by Romanian ministers to the Allies. He posed, as usual, a stark choice of outright victory or ‘complete destruction’ in a fight to the end for ‘living space’ in the east. Part of Hitler’s implicit argument, increasingly, in attempting to prevent support from seeping away was to play on complicity in the persecution of the Jews. His own paranoia about the responsibility of the Jews for the war and all its evils easily led into the suggestive threat that boats had been burned, there was no way out, and retribution in the event of a lost war would be terrible. The hint of this was implicit in his disapproval of Antonescu’s treatment of the Jews as too mild, declaring that the more radical the measures the better it was when tackling the Jews.111
In his meetings with Horthy at Klessheim on 16–17 April, Hitler was more brusque. Horthy was berated for feelers to the enemy secretly put out by prominent Hungarian sources but tapped by German intelligence. He was told that ‘Germany and its allies were in the same boat on a stormy sea. It was obvious that in this situation anyone wanting to get off would drown immediately.’112 As he had done with Antonescu, though in far harsher terms, Hitler criticized what he saw as an over-mild policy towards the Jews. Horthy had mentioned that, despite tough measures, criminality and the black market were still flourishing in Hungary. Hitler replied that the Jews were to blame. Horthy asked what he was expected to do with the Jews. He had taken away their economic livelihood; he could scarcely have them all killed. Ribbentrop intervened at this point to say that the Jews must be ‘annihilated
Hitler’s emphasis on the Jews as germ-bacilli, and as responsible for the war and the spread of Bolshevism, was of course nothing new. And his deep-seated belief in the demonic power still purportedly in the hands of the Jews as they were being decimated needs no underlining. But this was the first time that he had used the ‘Jewish Question’ in diplomatic discussions to put heads of state under pressure to introduce more draconian anti-Jewish measures. What prompted this?
He would have been particularly alerted to the ‘Jewish Question’ in April 1943. The previous month, he had finally agreed to have what was left of Berlin’s Jewish community deported.115 In April, he was sent the breakdown, already mentioned, prepared by the SS’s statistician Richard Korherr of almost a million and a half Jews ‘evacuated’ and ‘channelled through
Hitler’s directive to Goebbels to amplify the propaganda treatment of the persecution of the Jews, and his explicit usage of the ‘Jewish Question’ in his meetings with foreign dignitaries, plainly indicate instrumental motives. He believed, as he always had done, unquestioningly in the propaganda value of antisemitism. He told his Gauleiter in early May that antisemitism, as propagated by the Party in earlier years, had once more to become the core message. He held out hopes of its spread in Britain. Antisemitic propaganda had, he said, to begin from the premiss that the Jews were the leaders of Bolshevism and prominent in western plutocracy. The Jews had to get out of Europe. This had constantly to be repeated in the political conflict built into the war.120 In his meetings with Antonescu and Horthy, Hitler was speaking, as always, for effect. As we have noted, he hoped to bind his wavering Axis partners closer to the Reich through complicity in the persecution of the Jews. In the autumn, in speeches held in Posen, Himmler would use the ‘Jewish Question’ in similar, but even more explicit, fashion to hold the Nazi leadership ever more tightly together through their complicity in the mass murder of the Jews.
Though satisfied with the outcome of his talks with Antonescu, Hitler felt he had failed to make an impact on Horthy. Goebbels suspected that Hitler’s harsh tone had not been helpful. The Hungarians, he remarked, recognized Germany’s weak position and knew wars were not won simply with words.121 Hitler told the Gauleiter that he had not succeeded in persuading Horthy of the need for tougher measures against the Jews. Horthy had put forward what Hitler described — only from his perspective could they be seen as such — as ‘humanitarian counter-arguments’. Hitler naturally dismissed them. As Goebbels summarized it, Hitler said: ‘Towards Jewry there can be no talk of humanity. Jewry must be cast down to the ground.’122
Earlier in the spring, Ribbentrop, picking up on fears expressed by Axis partners about their future under German domination, had put to Hitler loose notions of a future European federation.123 How little ice this cut with the Dictator can be seen from his reactions to his April meetings with heads of state and government — particularly the unsatisfactory discussion with Horthy. He drew the consequence, he told the Gauleiter in early May, that the ‘small-state rubbish
