Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

In the crucial area of war strategy, where his own active involvement was unquestionably crucial, Hitler’s old obsession about ‘living space’ had returned via the difficulties he encountered in trying to force Britain out of the conflict. Now, in the first half of 1941, the practical preparations for the showdown that Hitler had always wanted could be made. In these months the twin obsessions would merge into each other. The decisive steps into genocidal war were about to be taken.

8. DESIGNING A ‘WAR OF ANNIHILATION’

‘The forthcoming campaign is more than just an armed conflict; it will lead, too, to a showdown of two different ideologies… The Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, the “oppressor” of the people up to now, must be eliminated.’

Operational guidelines for ‘Barbarossa’, 3 March 1941

‘We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. A Communist is no comrade before or after the battle. This is a war of annihilation.’

Hitler, addressing senior officers, 30 March 1941

‘Whether right or wrong, we must win… And when we have won, who will ask us about the method?’

Hitler, speaking to Goebbels, 16 June 1941

With the decision to invade the Soviet Union, confirmed in the directive of 18 December 1940, Hitler had closed off his strategic options. In his anxiety not to concede the initiative in the war, he had shifted the entire focus of the German war effort to the aim of inflicting comprehensive military defeat on the Soviet Union — and obliterating it as a political entity — within a matter of months. He was backed by his military leaders, who, even if some had private reservations, at no point raised serious objections to his proposed course of action. In retrospect, it seems sheer idiocy. At the time, Hitler’s generals did not for the most part demur because they, like he, grossly underestimated Soviet military strength and capacity. Remarkable though it seems from a later perspective, the real anxiety from their point of view was directed not towards the Soviet Union but towards Great Britain — backed by its world empire and, it seemed increasingly likely, in due course by the untold resources of the USA. The gamble, which most military advisers — Admiral Raeder was an exception, Goring’s early reservations were soon dispelled¹ — acceded to, rested on knocking out the USSR within a matter of four or five months to attain hegemony in Europe. Britain, her hand forced by Japanese action against Imperial territory in south-eastern Asia, would then have no choice but to come to terms. America, confronted in the Pacific by Japan, would keep out of the European arena. Germany would have won the war. Domination throughout Europe would be hers. Subsequent, and ultimately inevitable, confrontation with the USA could be contemplated from a position of strength.

Hitler had committed himself to action from which there was no turning back. Did he have a real choice? Grand-Admiral Raeder thought so. Some of the generals thought so. Ribbentrop thought so. Hitler himself, however, had only flirted in autumn 1940 with the ‘peripheral strategy’. Having mooted immediately after the victory in the West a campaign against the Soviet Union, the war he had for long advocated as the ultimate necessity, he became increasingly wedded to the idea. The attempt to erode British strength in the Mediterranean through balancing the interests of Italy, Spain, and Vichy France was abandoned at the first sign of self-evident difficulties. Probably, Hitler’s best strategy in autumn 1940 would have been to sit tight and await developments. Japan was playing her own game. As spring 1941 would show, she was willing to look to a rapprochement with the Soviet Union in order to have a free hand to the south. Direct conflict with Britain and the USA, as Japanese territorial ambitions insatiably grew, was almost inevitable. Had Hitler waited, the difficulties for both countries would without doubt have mounted sharply in the Pacific and the Far East. The Soviet Union and Germany, as Molotov’s visit had demonstrated, faced undoubted clashes in Scandinavia and in the Balkans. Russian expansionist aims conflicted directly with German interests in these regions. But the USSR posed no direct threat to Germany at this time. Himmler, probably echoing Hitler’s own views, had expressly rejected the notion of such a threat at a speech to Party functionaries around the time of Molotov’s visit to Berlin in November 1940. Russia, he stated, was ‘militarily harmless (militarisch ungefahrlich)’. With a poor officer corps and badly equipped and trained, the Russian army ‘cannot pose any danger to us at all (Sie kann uns uberhaupt nicht gefahrlich werden)’.² Had the will been there to co-exist and carve up continental Europe between them — effectively the basis of Ribbentrop’s thinking — it is hard to see which power could have prevented it, given the global commitments of Britain and the threat posed by Japan in the Pacific. But none of these scenarios fitted Hitler’s mentality — nor, ultimately, that of his military and Party leaders. From Hitler’s perspective, Germany could not afford to wait. Russia posed, in his eyes, a threat which could only mount in the following year or so. An immediate German strike would both remove that threat, and destroy the British hopes that hinged on American intervention. On the other hand, to lose the initiative meant, from Hitler’s point of view, to put himself and Germany in a strait-jacket that could only tighten. The war would then be lost. Germany’s chance would have gone. And such was the international enmity towards Germany which he and the National Socialist regime had prompted that any concessions from weakness would most likely mean the demise of his regime and his own ousting from power.

Moreover, to refrain from the bold move, to remain passive, would be — as seen by Hitler — to forfeit the psychological impetus that the war had built up. Sustaining the dynamism of the National Socialist Movement required the continuation of expansion, the conquest of new territories, the setting of new goals, the relentless pursuit of the millennium. The vision could not be limited; the quest could not be permanently halted through conventional territorial settlements that would leave — in Hitler’s eyes and those of his followers — the grail of a new society built upon racial purity and racial domination still unattained. If Nazism were to sustain and reinvigorate itself, were not to lose its ideological edge, the war had to continue. There could be no subsiding into sterility — a point which Hitler had emphasized as long ago as the Ho?bach meeting in November 1937.³

Such considerations predominated in Hitler’s mind. But there were, too, economic pressures, of which he was far from unaware. Germany had since 1939 become increasingly dependent upon the vast supplies of raw materials coming from the USSR. Under an agreement signed in January 1941, improving on that of February 1940, the Russians promised delivery of 2? million tons of grain and 1 million tons of oil by May 1942, in return for German capital goods — in increasingly high demand in the war effort — whose delivery was scheduled to start in the summer of 1941. Problems in German supplies, given its overstretched war economy, were already causing tensions and difficulties in summer 1940. The economic problems in Germany were foreseen by planning experts as mounting in 1941. The dependence on Russia — anathema to all who put their faith in variants of autarkic policies resting on economic hegemony in Europe (Gro?raumwirtschaft) — was accordingly set to grow, not diminish. The Soviet threat to the Ploesti oil-fields in Romania posed real danger to the Axis war effort. Not for nothing did Hitler use this as an argument in remarking that the Russian air-force could turn these oil-fields into ‘an expanse of smoking ruins… and the life of the Axis depends on those oil-fields’.⁴

Economic, military, strategic, and ideological motives were not separable in Hitler’s thinking on the Soviet Union. They blended together, and were used by him with different strength at different times in persuading those in his company of the correctness and inevitability of his course of action. The cement holding them in place was, as it had been for nearly two decades, doubtless the imperative to destroy once and for all ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ — an aim which would at the same time provide the necessary security in ‘living-space’ and give Germany political and military dominance over the continent of Europe. But it was not until March 1941 that Hitler began to emphasize the overriding ideological objective of ‘Operation Barbarossa’. For Heydrich and Himmler, the chance to push for such an objective had already been recognized by that time.⁵

In the event, Hitler’s attempt to avoid being pinioned in a strait-jacket through retaining the strategic