Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

^{flown in from Britain, at the state funeral of the Security Police Chief in the Mosaic Salon of the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin on 9 June 1942.}

^{47. Hitler comforts Heydrich’s sons at the state funeral. Privately, he was critical of Heydrich’s carelessness in regard to his own security. Other Nazi leaders in the photo are, Kurt Daluege (head of the Ordnungspolizei); Bernhard Rust (Reich Minister for Education); Alfred Rosenberg (Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories); Viktor Lutze (SA Chief of Staff); Baldur von Schirach (Reich Governor and Gauleiter of Vienna); Robert Ley (Nazi Party Organization Leader and head of the German Labour Front); Himmler; Wilhelm Frick (Reich Minister of the Interior); and Goring.}

^{48. Hitler addresses 12,000 officers and officer-candidates in the Sportpalast in Berlin on 28 September 1942.}

^{49. Some of the assembled young officers cheering Hitler at the meeting.}

^{50. Field-Marshal Fedor von Bock in 1942, as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group South. During the second half of 1941 he had commanded Army Group Centre, which had spearheaded the thrust to Moscow. Though increasingly critical of Hitler’s military leadership, he remained a loyalist.}

^{51. Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein, possibly Hitler’s most gifted military commander. Despite his growing differences with Hitler, he refused to join the conspiracy against him, stating: ‘Prussian field-marshals do not mutiny.’}

^{52. Hitler speaking on ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’, 15 March 1942, in the Ehrenhof (‘courtyard of honour’) of the Arsenal on Unter den Linden in Berlin.}

^{53. The Eastern Front, July 1942. Motorized troops drive away from a blazing Russian village they have destroyed.}

^{54. Hitler’s ‘clients’: entertaining the heads of satellite states. Hitler greets the Croatian head of state, Dr Ante Pavelic, in the Wolf’s Lair on 27 April 1943}

^{55. Hitler on his way to discussions with the Romanian leader, Marshal Antonescu at Fuhrer Head-quarters on II February 1942. Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt is on the left.}

^{56. Hitler greets King Boris III of Bulgaria in the Wolf’s Lair on 24 March 1942. Little over a week after a subsequent tense visit, on 15 August 1943, King Boris died suddenly of a heart attack, giving rise to rumours abroad that Hitler had had him poisoned.}

^{57. The turn of the Slovakian President, Monsignor Dr Josef Tiso, to visit Hitler on 22 April 1943 at the restored baroque palace of Klessheim, near Salzburg.}

^{58. Hitler greets the Finnish leader Marshal Mannerheim at the Wolf’s Lair on 27 June 1942. Keitel is in the background.}

^{59. Admiral Horthy, Hungarian head of state, speaks with Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Martin Bormann during a visit to the Wolf’s Lair on 8–10 September 1941. Later visits, as the fortunes of war deteriorated, proved less harmonious than this one.}

^{60. The Over-extended Front. By 1942 demands for men and equipment across a vast range of fronts and conditions had generated just the strategic incoherence Hitler had always feared. Norway: A ‘Do 24’ flying boat is deposited on land by the crane of a salvage vessel, to be towed to a repair hangar.}

^{61. The Over-extended Front. Leningrad: A huge cannon, mounted on a train, fires on the besieged city. The gun weighed 145 tons, had a barrel 16.4 metres long, and had a range of 46.6 kilometres.}

^{62. The Over-extended Front. Libya: German tanks rolling along the front in Cyrenaica.}

^{63. The Over-extended Front. Bosnia: An expedition to hunt down partisans.}

^{64. An exhausted German soldier on the Eastern Front.}

^{65. Hitler viewing the Wehrmacht parade after laying a wreath at the cenotaph on Unter den Linden on ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’, 21 March 1943. Behind Hitler are Goring, Keitel, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy Karl Donitz, and Himmler. Shortly beforehand, a planned attempt to kill Hitler by opponents from within Army Group Centre had had to be aborted when the dictator’s usual timetable on the day was altered without notice.}

^{66. Hitler is saluted by the Party’s ‘Old Guard’ in the Lowenbraukeller in Munich on 8 November 1943, the twentieth anniversary of the Beerhall Putsch. Goring is to Hitler’s right. It was to be the last time that Hitler would appear in person at this symbolic ritual, a high point in the Nazi calendar.}

^{67. Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery (following the flight of Rudolf He? to Scotland in May 1941). From the beginning of the war onwards he was invariably at Hitler’s side, and in April 1943 was officially appointed Secretary to the Fuhrer. This proximity, together with his control of the Party, gave him great power.}

^{68. Hitler and Goebbels, still capable of raising a smile despite military disasters and mounting domestic problems, photographed during a walk on the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden in June 1943.}

^{69. The Eastern Front in spring and autumn. A German vehicle bogged down in heavy mud.}

^{70. The Eastern Front in winter. Tanks and armoured vehicles, unusable in the conditions, had to be dug in at strategic points to secure them against Soviet attacks.}

^{71. The Eastern Front in summer. Limitless space. A Waffen-SS unit treks across seemingly unending fields.}

^{72. The ‘Final Solution’. French Jews being deported in 1942. Frightened faces peer out from behind the barbed-wire covering the slats of the railway-wagon.}

^{73. The ‘Final Solution’. Polish Jews forced to dig their own grave, 1942.}

^{74. The ‘Final Solution’. Incinerators at Majdanek with skeletons of camp-prisoners murdered on the approach of the Red Army and liberation of the camp on 27 July 1944.}