Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

‘You are now the master race here. Nothing was yet built up through softness and weakness… That’s why I expect, just as our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler expects from you, that you are disciplined, but stand together hard as Krupp steel. Don’t be soft, be merciless, and clear out everything that is not German and could hinder us in the work of construction.’

Ludolf von Alvensleben, head of the ‘Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz’(‘Ethnic German Self-Protection’) militia squads in West Prussia, 16 October 1939

‘It was immaterial to him if some time in the future it were established that the methods to win this territory were not pretty or open to legal objection.’

Note by Martin Bormann, 20 November 1940, on Hitler’s comments to the Gauleiter of incorporated territories

In war Nazism came into its own.¹ The Nazi Movement had been born out of a lost war. The experience of that war and erasing the stain of that defeat were at its heart. ‘National renewal’ and preparation for another war to establish the dominance in Europe which the first great war had failed to attain drove it forwards. Mobilizing the people in an attempt at perpetual re-creation of the ‘spirit of 1914’ was essential preparation for the new conflict.² The keynote of the message was ‘struggle’. National survival — the future of the German people — its Leader had preached for fifteen years or more, could only be assured through acquiring ‘living-space’. And this could only be gained, he had repeatedly stated, ‘through the sword’.

Six years of Nazi rule had brought the ‘world-view’ that Hitler stood for into much sharper focus. Almost imperceptibly at first, restoration of territory taken away from Germany at Versailles had been transformed into a drive for expansion. Hitler had done more than any other individual to bring about this transformation. But it could not have been accomplished without the avid involvement of all ruling groups, but quite especially the armed forces’ leadership, in the push for massive and rapid rearmament. And all sections of the regime’s elites had supported expansion, baulking only at its speed and what were seen as the unnecessary dangers of conflict with the western powers. Meanwhile, with remarkably little direction from Hitler, other than — though this was crucial — to provide the green light for action at key moments, and sanction for what had been done, the aim of ‘racial purification’ had been greatly advanced. Traditional social prejudice and resentment had played its part. Widespread denunciation of fellow-citizens by ordinary Germans had kept the mill of discrimination and persecution turning. Obsession with ‘law and order’ easily slipped into an obsession with the exclusion of ‘troublemakers’ and ‘social outsiders’. Social hygiene fetishism translated readily into pressure for measures to improve ‘racial hygiene’.

Victims of social prejudice far from confined to inter-war Germany were readily to hand: prostitutes, homosexuals, Gypsies, habitual criminals, and others seen as sullying the image of the new society by begging, refusing work, or any sort of ‘antisocial’ behaviour. Beyond these, of course, were the Number One racial and social enemy: the Jews. Where Germany differed from other countries with regard to such ‘outsider’ groups was that licence was provided from the highest leadership in the land to every agency of control and power to look for radical solutions to ‘cleanse’ society, offering the widest scope for increasingly inhumane initiatives that could ignore, override, or bypass the constraints of legality. To serve their own organizational vested interests, those agencies most directly involved — the medical and health bureaucracy, legal authorities, and criminal police — did not hesitate to exploit the general remit of the Nazi state’s philosophy to lead the drive to rid society of ‘racial undesirables’, ‘elements harmful to the people’, and ‘community aliens’. Sterilization and eugenics programmes gained in attraction. Not least, as we have seen, the relentless persecution of the Jews, the foremost racial target, had produced even before the war distinct signs of the mentality which would lead to the gas chambers.

The war now brought the circumstances and opportunities for the dramatic radicalization of Nazism’s ideological crusade. Long-term goals seemed almost overnight to become attainable policy objectives. Persecution which had targeted usually disliked social minorities was now directed at an entire conquered and subjugated people. The Jews, a tiny proportion of the German population, were not only far more numerous in Poland, but were despised by many within their native land and were now the lowest of the low in the eyes of the brutal occupiers of the country.

As before the war, Hitler set the tone for the escalating barbarism, approved of it, and sanctioned it. But his own actions provide an inadequate explanation of such escalation. The accelerated disintegration of any semblance of collective government, the undermining of legality by an ever-encroaching and ever-expanding police executive, and the power-ambitions of an increasingly autonomous SS leadership all played important parts. These processes had developed between 1933 and 1939 in the Reich itself. They were now, once the occupation of Poland opened up new vistas, to acquire a new momentum altogether. The planners and organizers, theoreticians of domination, and technocrats of power in the SS leadership saw Poland as an experimental playground. They were granted a tabula rasa to undertake more or less what they wanted. The Fuhrer’s ‘vision’ served as the legitimation they needed. Party leaders put in to run the civilian administration of the parts of Poland annexed to the Reich, backed by thrusting and ‘inventive’ civil servants, also saw themselves as ‘working towards the Fuhrer’ in their efforts to bring about the speediest possible ‘Germanization’ of their territories. And the occupying army — officers and rank-and-file — imbued with deep-seated anti-Polish prejudice, also needed little encouragement in the ruthlessness with which the conquered Poles were subjugated.

The ideological radicalization fed back into the home front — one important manifestation being the unfolding of a ‘euthanasia action’ to eliminate the incurably sick, something which had been put on ice during the peacetime years, but which could now be attempted. And as the war went on in its early stages to produce almost unbelievable military triumphs in the West, so the options for ‘solving the Jewish Question’ and for tackling the still unresolved ‘Church struggle’ (which Hitler had wanted dampened down at the start of the war) appeared to open up.

But the key area was Poland. The ideological radicalization which took place there in the eighteen months following the German invasion was an essential precursor to the plans which unfolded in spring 1941 as preparation for the war which Hitler knew at some time he would fight: the war against Bolshevik Russia.

I

Towards nine o’clock on the evening of 3 September, Hitler boarded his special armoured train in Berlin’s Stettiner Bahnhof and left for the front. ³ For much of the following three weeks, the train — standing initially in Pomerania (Hinterpommern), then later in Upper Silesia — formed the first wartime ‘Fuhrer Headquarters’. ⁴ Among Hitler’s accompaniment were two personal adjutants, for the most part Wilhelm Bruckner and Julius Schaub, two secretaries (Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski), two man-servants, his doctor, Karl Brandt (or sometimes his deputy, Hans-Karl von Hasselbach), and his four military adjutants (Rudolf Schmundt, Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, Gerhard Engel, and Nicolaus von Below). ⁵ Behind Hitler’s carriage, the first on the train, containing his spacious ‘living-room’, sleeping compartment, and bathroom, together with compartments for his adjutants, was the command carriage that held communications equipment and a conference room for meetings with military leaders. In the next carriage Martin Bormann had his quarters.⁶ On the day of the invasion of Poland, he had informed Lammers that he would ‘continue permanently to belong to the Fuhrer’s entourage’.⁷ From now on, he was never far from Hitler’s side — echoing the Fuhrer’s wishes, and constantly reminding him of the need to keep up the ideological drive of the regime.

The Polish troops, ill-equipped for modern warfare, were from the outset no match for the invaders.⁸ Within the first two days, most aerodromes and almost the whole of the Polish air-force were wiped out.⁹ The Polish defences were rapidly overrun, the army swiftly in disarray. Already on 5 September Chief of Staff Haider noted: ‘Enemy practically defeated.’¹⁰ By the second week of fighting, German forces had advanced to the outskirts of Warsaw.¹¹ Hitler seldom intervened in the