of inferiority towards his senior Axis partner would have been sharpened still further by the disastrous news for his Fascist regime that now Tobruk had fallen to the British.24
Popular contempt in Germany for the Italian war effort was matched by the growing disdain of the Nazi leaders for their Fascist counterparts.25 ‘Mussolini has lost a great deal of prestige,’ remarked Goebbels towards the end of January 1941, seeing the Duce’s position weakened through the military debacle in North Africa.26 Whatever the doubts, and his own criticisms of the Italians, Hitler had no option but to stick with his Axis partner.27
In all, during the calamitous month of January the fighting in Libya had seen some 130,000 Italians captured by the British.28 The likelihood of a complete rout for the Italians in North Africa had to be faced. By
Hitler’s hopes of a vital strategic gain in the Mediterranean — notably affecting the situation in North Africa — by the acquisition of Gibraltar were, however, to be dashed again by the obstinacy of General Franco. Already at the end of January, Hitler had been informed by Jodl that ‘Operation Felix’ — the planned assault on Gibraltar — would have to be shelved, since the earliest it could now take place would be in mid-April. The troops and weapons would by then be needed for ‘Barbarossa’, at that time scheduled for a possible start only a month later.30 Hitler still hoped that Mussolini, at his meeting on 12 February with Franco, might persuade the Caudillo to enter the war. The day before the meeting, Hitler sent Franco a personal letter, exhorting him to join forces with the Axis powers and to recognize ‘that in such difficult times not so much wise foresight as a bold heart can rescue the nations’.31 Franco was unimpressed. He repeated Spanish demands on Morocco, as well as Gibraltar. And he put forward in addition, as a price for Spain’s entering the war at some indeterminate date, such extortionate demands for grain supplies — saying the 100,000 tons already promised by the Germans were sufficient for only twenty days — that there was no possibility they would be met.32 Spain, as before, had to be left out of the equation.
III
Hitler confirmed the ‘dreadful conditions’ in Spain which Goebbels reported to him the day after his big speech in the Sportpalast on 30 January 1941, to mark the eighth anniversary of his appointment as Chancellor.33 The Propaganda Minister found Hitler in high spirits, confident that Germany held the strategic initiative, convinced of victory, revitalized as always by the wild enthusiasm — like a drug to him — of the vast crowd of raucous admirers packed into the Sportpalast. ‘I’ve seldom seen him like this in recent times,’ Goebbels remarked.34 ‘The Fuhrer always impresses me afresh,’ he added. ‘He is a true Leader, an inexhaustible giver of strength.’35
In his speech, Hitler had concentrated almost exclusively on attacking Britain. He did not devote a single syllable to Russia; nor did he mention the Soviet Union again in any public speech before 22 June 1941, the day of the invasion.36 When speaking to Goebbels the following day, however, Hitler did refer to a report on Russia compiled on the basis of seven years’ experience of the country by the son of the former prominent KPD member Ernst Torgler. ‘Horrible!’ commented Goebbels (presumably echoing Hitler’s sentiments in recording the gist of their conversation). ‘Everything confirmed what we suspected, believed, and also said.’ Goebbels reinforced such impressions on the basis of a report on the situation in Moscow which he himself had received from a leading figure in his Ministry.37
One other aspect of Hitler’s speech on 30 January was noteworthy. For the first time since the beginning of the war, he reiterated his threat ‘that, if the rest of the world should be plunged into a general war through Jewry, the whole of Jewry will have played out its role in Europe!’ ‘They can still laugh today about it,’ he added, menacingly, ‘just like they used to laugh at my prophecies. The coming months and years will prove that here, too, I’ve seen things correctly.’38 Hitler had made this threat, in similar tones, in his Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939. In repeating it now, he claimed to recall making his ‘prophecy’ in his speech to the Reichstag at the outbreak of war. But, in fact, he had not mentioned the Jews in his Reichstag speech on 1 September, the day of the invasion of Poland. He would make the same mistake in dating on several other occasions in the following two years.39 It was an indication, subconscious or more probably intentional, that he directly associated the war with the destruction of the Jews.
Why did he repeat the threat at this juncture? There was no obvious contextual need for it. He had referred earlier in the speech to ‘a certain Jewish-international capitalist clique’, but otherwise had not played the antisemitic tune.40 Probably the repeated ‘prophecy’ as intended, as was the original in January 1939, as a threat to what Hitler always regarded as a Jewish-run ‘plutocracy’ in Britain and the USA. It was a repeat of the blackmail ploy that he held the Jews in his power as hostages.
But within the few weeks immediately prior to his speech, Hitler had had the fate of the Jews on his mind, commissioning Heydrich at this point with the task of developing a new plan, replacing the defunct Madagascar scheme, to deport the Jews from the German sphere of domination.41 His repeated ‘prophecy’ was presumably a veiled hint at such an intention, vague though any plan still was at this stage.
Perhaps Hitler had harboured his ‘prophecy’ in the recesses of his mind since he had originally made it. Perhaps one of his underlings had reminded him of it. But, most probably, it was the inclusion of the extract from his speech in the propaganda film
According to the account — post-war recollections, resting partly on earlier, lost notes in diary form — of his army adjutant Gerhard Engel, Hitler discussed the ‘Jewish Question’ soon after his speech, on 2 February, with a group of his intimates.43 Keitel, Bormann, Ley, Speer, and Ribbentrop’s right-hand man and liaison officer Walther Hewel were present. Ley brought up the topic of the Jews. This was the trigger for Hitler to expound at length on his thoughts. He envisaged the war accelerating a solution. But it also created additional difficulties. Originally, it had lain within his reach ‘to break the Jewish power at most in Germany’. He had thought at one time, he said, with the assistance of the British of deporting the half a million German Jews to Palestine or Egypt. But that idea had been blocked by diplomatic objections. Now it had to be the aim ‘to exclude Jewish influence in the entire area of power of the Axis’. In some countries, like Poland and Slovakia, the Germans themselves could bring that about. In France, it had become more complicated following the armistice, and was especially important there. He spoke of approaching France and demanding the island of Madagascar to accommodate Jewish resettlement. When an evidently incredulous Bormann — aware, no doubt, that the Madagascar Plan had by now been long since shelved by the Foreign Ministry and, more importantly, by the Reich Security Head Office — asked how this could be done during the war, Hitler replied vaguely that he would like to make the whole ‘Strength through Joy’ fleet available for the task, but feared its exposure to enemy submarines. Then, in somewhat contradictory fashion, he added: ‘He was now thinking about something else, not exactly more friendly.’44
This cryptic comment (assuming that Engels’s account is an accurate representation of what Hitler had said) was, it can reasonably be speculated, a hint that the defeat of the Soviet Union, anticipated to take only a few months, would open up the prospect of wholesale deportation of the Jews to the newly conquered lands in the east — and forced labour under barbarous conditions in the Pripet marshlands (stretching towards White Russia in what were formerly eastern parts of Poland) and in the frozen, arctic wastes in the north of the Soviet Union. Such ideas were being given their first airing around this time by Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann.45 They would not have hesitated in putting their ideas to Hitler. The thinking was now moving way beyond what had been contemplated under the Madagascar Plan, inhumane though that itself had been. In such an inhospitable climate as that now envisaged, the fate of the Jews would be sealed. Within a few years most of them would
