jubilation that had accompanied them. This acclaim, building upon the already existent massive popular support that he had gained through his ‘triumphs’ of the pre-war years, had helped to make Hitler’s authority unassailable. His authority, most now plainly saw, had been used to follow disastrous policies which had directed the path to Germany’s ruin.
How this could have come about was given to few, at this point, fully to comprehend. The same soldier, doubtless speaking once more for vast inarticulate masses, had a simple answer: ‘The biggest mistake was the war with Russia. Whatever the courage and readiness for sacrifice, you can’t take on an entire world… We just bit off too much to chew. Above all our leadership.’2
Disastrous policy it had certainly been that had taken Germany into war against the Soviet Union. But it had been no simple mistake, Rather, it had been deeply embedded as an objective since the 1920s in Hitler’s own psyche and ideological drive. Germany could only survive by expanding eastwards, attaining ‘living space’ at the expense of the Soviet Union, winning it ‘by the sword’, and destroying the mortal danger of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’: that had been repeatedly his message since the mid-1920s. The destruction of Bolshevism had, beyond the obsession of a single individual, been transformed during the 1930s into the state ideology of the Nazi regime, a goal enthusiastically backed by the Nazi Party, the bulk of the state apparatus, and the leadership of the armed forces. Most ordinary Germans would have agreed, while fearing war, that Bolshevism marked the greatest threat to the nation’s future. By the end of that decade, Hitler’s ideological vision that had existed unchangingly from the time of
The second part of the soldier’s simple explanation was closer to the mark. It had indeed been a goal pursued from the arrogance of power and the conceit of presumed innate superiority. It had amounted in reality to a colossal gamble with Germany’s future as the stake. That Britain had still not been forced to terms and that the USA was a menacing presence in the wings, together with the perceived certainty that the USSR would prove an altogether more dangerous foe within a few years, meant — given Hitler’s mentality — that the gamble could not be postponed. The military and political leaders of the Reich largely agreed. Most rational observers would have been careful not to stake much on the outcome. The peril ought to have seemed daunting. But, in the backwash of the triumph over France, and under the illusion that the ‘inferiors’ of the Soviet Union would be incapable of holding out for more than a few months against the might of the invincible Wehrmacht, not just Hitler, but the German army leadership, too, thought European hegemony was theirs for the taking. The hubris which had enveloped Hitler during the 1930s and had fed his quest for European domination was, however, now to meet its nemesis.
By the winter of 1941, it was obvious that the gamble had not paid off. By the following winter the winter of Stalingrad — the consequences were already seen to be catastrophic. Germany had permanently lost the initiative. There was no longer any possibility of repeating the incisive, lightning campaigns that had brought the astonishing triumphs between 1939 and 1941. Instead, a bitter and attritional defensive war, which Hitler was both temperamentally and in terms of military skill singularly ill-equipped to direct, had to be fought — and with increasingly stretched manpower and resources. Meanwhile, relentless bombing was reducing Germany’s cities to ashes. And once the western Allies had established a firm hold on Continental soil in the summer of 1944, the writing was well and truly on the wall — at least for all who applied conventional military logic to the increasingly uneven contest.
The failure of the conspiracy in July 1944 to overthrow Hitler removed the last realistic hope within Germany of a negotiated end to a war which was by now inexorably leading to the eventual destruction of the German Reich. Thereafter, there was no possibility of altering the structures of power from within. Despite signs that they were starting to disintegrate, these structures — at their centre the undisputed authority of Hitler — remained intact until the final stages of the regime’s death-agony. As a consequence, Hitler’s power remained absolute and undiminished even as the regime staggered towards oblivion. And as long as Hitler survived, and until Germany was totally crushed, the war would continue.
This meant in turn that there was no possibility of an alternative to the calamitous escalation of death and destruction as Germany fell in ruins. It was not that alternatives were left uncontemplated. At one point or another, almost all the Nazi leaders below Hitler — Goebbels, Goring, Ribbentrop, and Himmler among them — entertained notions of exploring avenues for a separate peace with either the Russians or with the western Allies. Hitler dismissed all such ideas out of hand. He would only negotiate from a position of strength, following a military success, he repeatedly stated. The chances of such an option being open to him were, however, as good as non- existent. So, instead, he spoke tirelessly and incessantly of will overcoming adversity; of refusal to capitulate, of holding out until ‘five minutes past midnight’. Meanwhile, Germany burned.
Time and again, his generals exhorted him to make tactical retreats, or to shore up key sectors of the fronts by giving up other areas for former conquest and withdrawing much-needed troops. Again, Hitler was invariably uncompromising in his refusal. The clashes with his military commanders — most of all with Chief of the General Staff Heinz Guderian — became ever more bitter. His stubborn unreasonableness appeared to confound all military logic. He seemed to have lost his grip on reality. It was as if he had a death-wish — not just for himself, but for Germany and its people; an invitation to nemesis.
That, indeed, was central to Hitler’s own warped brand of logic. From his bitter experience of the last years of the First World War — encountering defeatism, sensing subversion at home, traumatized as he lay in the military hospital at Pasewalk by the news of unexpected defeat and revolution perpetrated by the hated Social Democrats, when all that had meaning for him had been shattered — he had been obsessed by treachery and betrayal. He had made it his life’s mission to upturn the effects of that perceived ‘stab-in-the-back’ in 1918 and the national humiliation inflicted on the German nation by those he insisted on calling ‘November criminals’. And he had staked his political existence on eliminating, whatever might come, any potential for a repeat of 1918, a recurrence of what he saw as a cowardly capitulation and consequent impotent exposure to the dictates of foreign powers. To this end, and based on a crude philosophy that will would overcome any obstacle, he felt justified in demanding total sacrifice from the German people under his rule. Again, according to his own view of the world, defeat would this time bring not another ‘Diktat of Versailles’ — however repulsive that had been — but the total destruction of Germany. There was, therefore, from this optic, no point in surrender. If victory could not be attained, then struggle to the last was all that was left. A place in history, to be recognized by future generations if not by the present for its heroic, epic qualities, was its imagined virtue.
Incapable of finding fault in himself — in his judgement, his strategy, his leadership — Hitler turned the blame for what had gone wrong more and more on the military professionals, the army leaders whom he had never fully trusted, who had never been fully imbued with the National Socialist spirit. And once some of these officers had tried to do away with him in the summer of 1944, his obsession with treachery reached paranoid levels. Attempts to reason with him on military or strategic grounds were increasingly futile — likely only to prompt furious outbursts about the worthlessness and betrayal of his army leaders. Only generals such as Schorner or Model, who combined high military skills with something approaching Hitler’s own philosophy and acceptance of his ruthless and unbending demands of his troops, met with his favour. His refusal to accept that willpower alone could not overcome massive superiority of the enemy in numbers and equipment would cost countless thousands of his soldiers’ lives in needless sacrifice. It mattered not to him. According to his remorselessly cruel logic, their weakness had condemned them. Their individual loss meant nothing in the nation’s struggle for its very existence. And when the German people, despite heroic efforts, showed themselves, too, to be incapable of withstanding superior enemy might, he was prepared to accept that they deserved to go under. They had ultimately proved themselves weak; they had not matched up to his demands of them; they had been, as he told one of his generals, in the end, unworthy of him.3
This leadership, which had taken Germany into such a reckless gamble, which had stunned the world through triumphs derived from boldness, ruthlessness, and lack of compromise as long as it had held the whip-hand, and which had been founded on principles of ‘all-or-nothing’ struggle, was, therefore, not the leadership to seek or entertain a diplomatic way out once backs were to the wall. Indeed, as Hitler — less distant from reality than has often been presumed — fully realized, his own person was an outright obstacle to any form of negotiated armistice. His own days were numbered in the event both of a negotiated peace or total defeat. With nothing at stake for him personally, therefore, the principle of ‘no capitulation’ — meaning self-destruction for him, for the regime, and for the German Reich — was easy to uphold. When, almost two years earlier, Baldur von Schirach, the Gauleiter of Vienna, had expressed in frank terms his view that the war somehow had to be ended, an enraged Hitler had asked:
