Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

tempt the opponents of Churchill, who could have formed a peace-lobby.¹⁴¹ Ciano, who met Hitler the day after the speech, was told that British reactions had ruled out any possibility of an understanding being reached. Hitler said he was preparing to strike at Britain, whose resistance would collapse under the first blows.¹⁴² This was meant for the Italians, but indirectly — through the known leaks — for British ears, to help concentrate their minds. To Goebbels, Hitler had a different line. He still did not want to accept England’s answer at face-value. ‘He thinks of still waiting a bit.’¹⁴³

He left the matter open when he met the Commanders-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht on 21 July.¹⁴⁴ ‘No clear picture on what is happening in England,’ Brauchitsch recorded Hitler as saying, when he reported back to Halder next day. ‘Preparations for a decision by arms must be completed as quickly as possible.’ Hitler would not allow the military initiative to be lost. But he was evidently still hoping for a diplomatic solution. ‘Crossing of Channel appears very hazardous to the Fuhrer. On that account, invasion is to be undertaken only if no other way is left to bring terms with England,’ Halder reported. ‘England’s position is hopeless. The war is won by us,’ Hitler stated.

But Britain still put her hopes in America, and in Russia. There was the possibility, said Hitler, referring to rumours of crisis in London, that a cabinet including Lloyd George, Chamberlain, and Halifax might come to power and seek peace terms.¹⁴⁵ But, failing that, Britain would have to be reduced by an air-offensive combined with intensified submarine warfare to the state, by mid-September, when an invasion could be carried out. Hitler would decide within days, after hearing Raeder’s report in mid-week on naval operational logistics, whether the invasion would be carried out by autumn. Otherwise, it would be before the following May. The final decision on the intensity of submarine and air attacks would be left until the beginning of August. There was the possibility that the invasion might begin as early as 25 August.

Hitler turned finally to the issue which had already started to bother him: the position of Russia. Stalin, he pointed out, had his own agenda. He was flirting with Britain to keep her in the war, to tie down Germany, and to exploit the situation to undertake his own expansionist policy. There were no indications of any Russian aggression towards Germany. ‘But,’ went on Hitler, ‘our attention must be turned to tackling the Russian problem and prepare planning.’ It would take four to six weeks to assemble the German military force. Its object would be ‘to crush the Russian army or at least take as much Russian territory as is necessary to bar enemy air raids on Berlin and Silesian industries’. He also mentioned the need to protect the Romanian oil-fields. Eighty to 100 divisions would be required. He contemplated attacking Russia that very autumn, to relieve the pressure of the air war on Britain.¹⁴⁶ Compared with what had been achieved in the West, Hitler had remarked to Jodl and Keitel already at the time of the French capitulation ‘a campaign against Russia would be child’s play (Sandkastenspiel)’.¹⁴⁷

It was an astonishing prospect that Hitler held out to his army leaders. He was, of course, not yet committing himself to anything. But the two-front war which had always been anathema was now being entertained. Paradoxically, having advocated since the 1920s a showdown with the Soviet Union to destroy Bolshevism and win ‘Lebensraum’, Hitler had now come back to the idea of a war against Russia for strategic reasons: to force his erstwhile would-be friend, Britain, now stubbornly holding out against the odds, to terms. The ideological aim of smashing Bolshevism, though apparently invoked by Hitler as part of his reasoning, was at this point secondary to the strategic need to get Britain out of the war.¹⁴⁸ It was a sign of the difficulties that Hitler had manoeuvred himself into. Britain would not play his game. But the military lesson he kept saying she would have to be taught, and which the German public now awaited, would be, he knew, a hazardous affair. So he was now moving to a step he — and most of his generals did not disagree — thought less dangerous: an attack on the Soviet Union.

In fact, the army command, worried about the build-up of Soviet troops in southern Russia in connection with Stalin’s increasing pressure on the Balkan states, had already, in mid-June, added a further nine motorized divisions to the fifteen divisions previously designated for transfer to the east.¹⁴⁹ And on 3 July Halder, without any orders from Hitler but following indications evidently passed on to him by Weizsacker, in the Foreign Office, showed himself ready to anticipate the change in direction, to ‘work towards the Fuhrer’, when he deemed it appropriate to have the possibilities of a campaign against the Soviet Union tested. The Chief of Staff, ahead of Hitler at this point, raised with his operational planners ‘the requirements of a military intervention which will compel Russia to recognize Germany’s dominant position in Europe’.¹⁵⁰

Hitler was still avoiding a final decision on Britain.¹⁵¹ But it was with the impression that Lord Halifax’s official spurning of his ‘peace offer’ in a broadcast speech on the evening of 22 July amounted to ‘England’s final rejection’ that he left, for what was to prove the last time, for Bayreuth, to see next day a performance of Gotterdammerung. ‘The die is cast,’ wrote Goebbels. ‘We’re tuning press and radio to a fight.’¹⁵² In fact, the die had not been finally cast. Hitler remained unsure how to proceed.

He had long since convinced himself of what German propaganda was trumpeting. It was he who wanted peace. Churchill, backed by the ‘Jewish plutocracy’, was the warmonger — the obstacle to the triumph. While in Bayreuth, Hitler saw the friend of his youth days, August Kubizek, for the last time. Hitler told Kubizek, as gullible as ever, that the war had hindered all his great plans for rebuilding Germany. ‘I did not become Chancellor of the Great German Reich in order to wage war,’ he said. Kubizek believed him.¹⁵³ Probably Hitler believed himself.

He went from Bayreuth to the Obersalzberg. While he was there, the army leadership learnt from Raeder that the navy could not be ready for operations against England before 15 September. The earliest date for an invasion, depending on the moon and tides, was the 26th of that month. If that date proved impossible, the invasion would have to be put off until the following May.¹⁵⁴ Brauchitsch was sceptical that the navy could provide the basis for an invasion in the autumn. (In fact, the navy had concluded that it was highly inadvisable to attempt to invade at any point that year, and was highly sceptical about the prospects of an invasion at any time.¹⁵⁵) Halder agreed with Brauchitsch in eliminating the notion of an operation during bad weather. But they foresaw disadvantages, military and political, in a postponement to the following year. They considered possibilities of weakening Britain’s overseas position through attacks on Gibraltar, Haifa, and Suez, support for the Italians in Egypt, and inciting the Russians to move on the Persian Gulf. An attack on Russia was rejected in favour of the maintenance of friendly relations.¹⁵⁶

Hitler, meantime, had been privately consulting jodl. On 29 July he asked the Chief of the Wehrmacht Directional Staff about deploying the army in the east, and whether it might be possible to attack and defeat Russia that very autumn. Jodl totally ruled it out on practical grounds. In that case, Hitler said, absolute confidence was needed. Feasibility studies were to be undertaken, but knowledge confined to only a few staff officers. Remarkably, in fact, the Wehrmacht had not waited for Hitler’s order. ‘The army,’ Jodl was later to remark, ‘had already learnt of the Fuhrer’s intentions at the stage when these were still being weighed up. An operational plan was therefore drawn up even before the order for this was given.’ And already in July, as he later put it ‘on his own initiative (aus eigenem Antrieb)’, Lieutenant-Colonel Bernhard von Lo?berg, from the ‘National Defence Department’ (Abteilung Landesverteidigung), headed by Major-General Walter Warlimont, had begun work on an ‘operational study for a Russian campaign (an die Bearbeitung einer Operationsstudie fur einen Ru?landfeldzug)’.¹⁵⁷ The draft plan was at this stage merely intended to be held in readiness for the point at which it might be needed. Hitler’s discussion with Jodl indicated that this point had arrived.

Lo?berg, two other members of Warlimont’s staff, and Warlimont himself, were sitting in the restaurant car of the special train Atlas, in the station at Bad Reichenhall, when Jodl came down from the Berghof to report on his discussion with Hitler.¹⁵⁸ According to Warlimont, the consternation at what they heard — meaning the dreaded war on two fronts — gave rise to an hour of bitter argument. Jodl countered by stating Hitler’s opinion that it was better to have the inevitable war against Bolshevism now, with German power at its height, than later; and that by autumn 1941 victory in the East would have brought the Luftwaffe to its peak for deployment against Britain.¹⁵⁹ Whatever the objections — it is impossible to know whether Warlimont was exaggerating them in his post-war account — the feasibility studies under the code- name ‘Aufbau-Ost’ (Build-Up in the East) were now undertaken with a greater sense of urgency.¹⁶⁰

Two days later, on 31 July, Hitler met his military leaders at the Berghof. Raeder repeated the conclusion his naval planners had reached that the earliest date for an invasion of Britain could be no earlier than 15 September,