Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

his obsession with Jewish responsibility for the conflagration. In his Manichean world-view, the fight to the finish between the forces of good and evil — the Aryan race and the Jews — was reaching its climax. There could be no relenting in the struggle to wipe out Jewry.

Little over a month earlier, Hitler had talked at length, prompted by Goebbels, about the ‘Jewish Question’. The Propaganda Minister thought it one of the most interesting discussions he had ever had with the Fuhrer.¹⁴⁵ Goebbels had been re-reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the crude Russian forgery purporting to outline a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world — with an eye on its use in current propaganda. He raised the matter over lunch. Hitler thought antisemitic propaganda would play an important part in the war effort, particularly in its impact on the British. He was certain of the ‘absolute authenticity’ of the Protocols. The Jews, he thought, were not working to a fixed programme; they were following, as always, their ‘racial instinct’.¹⁴⁶ The Jews were the same all over the world, Goebbels noted him as saying, whether in the ghettos of the east ‘or in the bank palaces of the City [of London] or Wall Street’, and would instinctively follow the same aims and use the same methods without the need to work them out together. The question could well be posed, he went on (according to Goebbels’s summary of his comments), as to why there were Jews at all. It was the same question — again the familiar insect analogy — as why there were Colorado beetles (Kartoffelkafer). His most basic belief — life as struggle — provided, as always, his answer. ‘Nature is ruled by the law of struggle. There will always be parasitic forms of existence to accelerate the struggle and intensify the process of selection between the strong and the weak… In nature, life always works immediately against parasites; in the existence of peoples that is not exclusively the case. From that results the Jewish danger. So there is nothing else open to modern peoples than to exterminate the Jews (Es bleibt also den modernen Volkern nichts anderes ubrig, als die Juden auszurotten).’¹⁴⁷

The Jews would use all means to defend themselves against this ‘gradual process of annihilation (allmahlichen Vernichtungsproze?)’. One of its methods was war.¹⁴⁸ It was the same warped vision embodied in Hitler’s ‘prophecy’: Jews unleashing war, but bringing about their own destruction in the process. World Jewry, in Hitler’s view, was on the verge of a historic downfall (geschichtlichen Sturz). This would take time. He was presumably alluding to Jews out of German reach, especially in the USA, when he commented that some decades would be needed ‘to cast them out of their power. That is our historic mission, which cannot be held up, but only accelerated, by the war. World Jewry thinks it is on the verge of a world victory. This world victory will not come. Instead there will be a world downfall. The peoples who have earliest recognized and fought the Jew will instead accede to world domination.’¹⁴⁹

Four days after this conversation, on 16 May, SS-Brigadefuhrer Jurgen Stroop telexed the news: ‘The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more! The grand operation terminated at 20.15 hours when the Warsaw synagogue was blown up… The total number of Jews apprehended and destroyed, according to record, is 56,065…’¹⁵⁰ A force of around 3,000 men, the vast majority from the SS, had used a tank, armoured vehicles, heavy machine-guns, and artillery to blow up and set fire to buildings which the Jews were fiercely defending and to combat the courageous resistance put up by the ghetto’s inhabitants, armed with little more than pistols, grenades, and Molotov cocktails. The month-long ghetto uprising had exacerbated Hitler’s mounting frustration with Hans Frank’s inability to maintain order in the General Government amid increasing unrest caused by SS attempts to uproot and deport 108,000 Poles from the Zamosc district in the Lublin area in order to resettle it with Germans.¹⁵¹ His long-standing readiness to link Jews with subversive or partisan actions made Hitler all the keener to hasten their destruction. After Himmler had discussed the matter with him on 19 June, he noted that ‘the Fuhrer declared, after my report (Vortrag), that the evacuation of the Jews, despite the unrest that would thereby still arise in the next 3 to 4 months, was to be radically carried out and had to be seen through’.¹⁵²

Such discussions were always private. Hitler still did not speak of the fate of the Jews, except in the most generalized fashion, even among his inner circle. It was a topic which all in his company knew to avoid. To think of criticizing the treatment of the Jews was, of course, anathema. The only time the issue was raised occurred unexpectedly during the two-day visit to the Berghof in late June of Baldur von Schirach, Gauleiter of Vienna, and his wife, Henriette. The daughter of his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, Henriette had known Hitler since she was a child. She thought she could speak openly to him. Her husband had, however, fallen from favour somewhat, partly following Hitler’s disapproval of the modern paintings on show in an art exhibition which Schirach had staged in Vienna earlier in the year.¹⁵³ Henriette told Baldur on the way to Berchtesgaden that she wanted to let Hitler know what she had witnessed recently in Amsterdam, where she had seen a group of Jewish women brutally herded together and deported. An SS man had offered her valuables taken from the Jews at a knock-down price. Her husband told her not to mention it. Hitler’s reactions were unpredictable. And — a typical response at the time — in any case she could not change anything.¹⁵⁴

Already during the first day of their visit, 23 June, Schirach had managed to prompt an angry riposte from Hitler with a suggestion that a different policy in the Ukraine might have paid dividends.¹⁵⁵ Next afternoon, Hitler was in an irritable mood during the statutory afternoon visit to the Tea House. The atmosphere was icy.¹⁵⁶ It remained tense in the evening, when they gathered around the fire in the hall of the Berghof. Henriette was sitting next to Hitler, nervously rubbing her hands, speaking quietly. All at once, Hitler jumped up, marched up and down the room, and fumed: ‘That’s all I need, you coming to me with this sentimental twaddle. What concern are these Jewish women to you?’ The other guests did not know where to look. There was a protracted, embarrassed silence. The logs could be heard crackling in the fireplace.

When Goebbels arrived, he turned the scene to his advantage by playing on Hitler’s aversion to Vienna. Hitler rounded on the hapless Schirach, praising the achievements of Berlin — Goebbels’s domain, of course — and castigating his Gauleiter’s work in Vienna. Beside himself with anger, Hitler said it was a mistake ever to have sent Schirach to Vienna at all, or to have taken the Viennese into the Reich. Schirach offered to resign. ‘That’s not for you to decide. You are staying where you are,’ was Hitler’s response. By then it was four in the morning. Bormann let it be known to the Schirachs that it would be best if they left. They did so without saying their goodbyes, and in high disgrace.¹⁵⁷

The week before the Schirach incident, Hitler had finally decided to press ahead with the ‘Citadel’ offensive. His misgivings can only have been increased by Guderian’s reports that the ‘Panther’ tank still had major weaknesses and was not ready for front-line action.¹⁵⁸ And in the middle of the month, he was presented with the OKW’s recommendation that ‘Citadel’ should be cancelled. It was now running so late that there was an increasing chance that it would clash with the expected Allied offensive in the Mediterranean. Jodl, just back from leave, agreed that it was dangerous and foolhardy to commit troops to the east in the interests of, at best, a limited success when the chief danger at that time lay elsewhere. Again, the split between the OKW and army leadership came into play. Zeitzler, the army’s Chief of the General Staff, objected to what he regarded as interference. Guderian suspected that Zeitzler’s influence was decisive in persuading Hitler to go ahead.¹⁵⁹ At any rate, Hitler rejected the advice of the Wehrmacht’s Operations Staff. Citadel’s opening was scheduled for 3 July, then postponed one last time for two more days.¹⁶⁰

Despite Guderian’s warnings, Hitler confidently told Goebbels in late June that the Wehrmacht had not been so strong in the east since 1941, and that if they were to wait ‘for a few more weeks yet’ they would have the new ‘Panthers’ and a good number of the ‘Tiger’, ‘the best tank in the world at present’. He had given up his plans for the Caucasus and Middle East. There could be no dreams of pushing ahead to the Urals. The unreliability of Germany’s allies, especially the Italians, had forced this. If they had held out, the Caucasus would have been occupied and the loss of North Africa would then probably have been avoided. But Hitler thought the Soviet Union would one day collapse through starvation. The east remained for him the ‘decisive front’.¹⁶¹

At the end of June, Hitler returned to the Wolf’s Lair for the beginning of ‘Citadel’. On 1 July, he addressed his commanders. He explained the delay partly by the need to await the panzer reinforcements which, he claimed, now offered for the first time superiority over the Soviets, and partly (if unconvincingly) by the danger of a successful Allied landing in the Mediterranean had the offensive come earlier. The decision to go ahead was determined, he stated, by the need to forestall a Soviet offensive later in the year. A military success would also have a salutary effect on Axis partners, and on morale at home.¹⁶² Four days later, the last German offensive in the east was finally launched. It was the beginning of a disastrous month.