The fear of American intervention lent a new and menacing color to all considerations in the summer of 1940 and, above all, reinforced Hitler’s fear of the passing of time. Since the subjugation of France he had squandered his energy in curiously indecisive diplomatic and military actions. German troops were garrisoned from Narvik to Sicily, and from the beginning of 1941 on, called upon for help by a hapless Italian partner, they were also stationed in North Africa. But there was no guiding idea behind all the activity; the war was running away in undesired directions. This was what came of the war’s having been begun with reversed fronts, virtually for its own sake, and with no general plan. “Fuhrer is obviously depressed,” his army adjutant noted about this time after a comprehensive situation report given by Hitler. “Impression that at the moment he does not know how the war ought to continue.”23
In the autumn, while the war was thus threatening to slip from his grasp, Hitler began to think it out afresh and to bring it back to a scheme. He had two alternatives. He might attempt after all to build a mighty bloc of powers which, by including the Soviet Union and Japan, might at the eleventh hour force a reversal of the United States’ position. That would involve considerable concessions in several directions and would also postpone for years the planned eastward expansion. On the other hand, he might seize the first possible moment to strike eastward, defeat the Soviet Union in a blitzkrieg, and form the bloc of powers not with a partner, but with a vassal.
For several months Hitler wavered. In the summer of 1940 he had been full of impatience to get the senseless and bothersome Western war over with. As early as June 2, during the assault upon Dunkirk, he had predicted that England would now be ready for a “reasonable conclusion of peace” so that he would have his “hands free at last” for his “great and proper task: the conflict with Bolshevism.”24 A few weeks later, on July 21, he called upon Brauchitsch to make “mental preparations” for the war against Russia. In the intoxication of victory during this period he had even considered making his assault on Russia in the autumn of that same year. It took a memorandum from the OKW and the Wehrmachtfuhrungsstab to convince him of the unfeasibility of the plan. Nevertheless, since that time he had clearly abandoned his original idea of two confrontations at separate times. He was now of a mind to combine the war in the West with eastward expansion: the concept had widened to that of a single world war. On July 31 he explained this conception to General Halder:
England’s hope is Russia and America. If the hope of Russia is eliminated, America is eliminated also, because elimination of Russia will be followed by an enormous increase in the importance of Japan in the Far East…. Russia need tell England no more than that she does not want to have Germany great, and England will hope like a drowning man that in six or eight months the whole situation will be changed. But if Russia is smashed, England’s last hope is wiped out. Then Germany is the master of Europe and of the Balkans.
Decision: In the course of this war Russia must be finished off. Spring 1941.
In September, however, and once again early in November, Hitler appeared to waver another time and to prefer the idea of alliance. “Fuhrer hopes to be able to incorporate Russia into the front against England,” Halder noted on November 1. But another entry only three days later pointed to the opposite: Hitler had said that Russia was going to remain “the whole problem of Europe. Everything must be done in order to prepare for the great reckoning.”
These vacillations appear to have come to a stop in the course of December, when Hitler seems to have made the decision that so thoroughly accorded with his nature, with his lifelong design, and with his present overestimation of himself: to begin the war with the Soviet Union as soon as possible. The re-election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President of the United States, and his conversation with Molotov, had evidently speeded the decision. At any rate, only a day after the Soviet Foreign Minister’s departure he commented that this would “not even remain a marriage of convenience.” He thereupon issued the order to scout out suitable terrain for a Fuhrer’s headquarters in the East and for three command posts in the North, the Center and the South, and to build these “with maximum haste.” On December 17 he expatiated to General Jodi on his operational ideas for the campaign, and concluded with the remark that “we must solve all Continental European problems in 1941, since from 1942 on the United States would be in a position to intervene.”25 The decision to attack the Soviet Union even before the war in the West was decided has often been viewed as one of Hitler’s “blind,” “puzzling,” or “hardly comprehensible” resolves. Yet it contained more rationality, and at the same time more desperation, than is evident at first glance. Hitler himself ranked this order to attack as one of the many “most difficult decisions” he had to make. In the reflections that he dictated early in 1945 to Martin Bormann in the bunker beneath the chancellery, he declared:
During the war I had no more difficult decision to make than the attack upon Russia. I had always said that we must avoid a two-front war at all costs, and moreover no one will doubt that I more than anyone else had reflected upon Napoleon’s Russian experience. Then why this war against Russia, and why at the time I chose?
We had lost hope of being able to end the war by a successful invasion on English soil. For this country, ruled by stupid leaders, had refused to grant our hegemony in Europe and would not conclude a peace without victory with us as long as there was a Great Power on the Continent which in principle confronted the Reich as an adversary. Consequently the war would have to go on forever, with moreover increasingly active participation of the Americans. The importance of the American potential, the ceaseless rearmament… the closeness of the English coasts—all that meant that we rationally should not allow ourselves to be drawn into a war of long duration. For time—it is always a matter of time!—would necessarily be working more and more against us. In order to persuade the English to surrender, in order to compel them to make peace, we consequently had to dispel their hope of confronting us on the Continent with an enemy of our own class, that is, the Red Army. We had no choice; for us it was an inescapable compulsion to remove the Russian piece from the European chessboard. But there was also a second, equally cogent reason which would have been sufficient: the tremendous danger that Russia meant for us by the mere fact of her existence. It would necessarily be fatal for us if some day she attacked us.
Our sole chance to defeat Russia consisted in anticipating her…. We must not offer the Red Army any advantage of terrain, place our Autobahnen at her disposal for the deployment of her motorized formations, allow her the use of our railroad network to move men and materials. If we seized the initiative we could defeat her in her own country, in her swamps and moors, but not on the soil of so civilized a country as ours. That would have given them a springboard for the onslaught upon Europe.
Why 1941?… Because we could allow ourselves as little delay as possible, since our enemies in the West were steadily increasing their fighting power. Moreover, Stalin himself was by no means remaining inactive. Consequently, time was working against us on both fronts. The question therefore is not: “Why as early as June 22, 1941?” but “Why not earlier?”… In the course of the last weeks I was obsessed with the fear that Stalin might forestall me.26
All of Hitler’s cogitations in the summer and fall of 1940 were linked by the secret hope of remedying the stalled and misdirected military situation by a sudden, surprising sally of the sort that had often saved him from his various plights in the past. At the same time, such a sally might help him achieve his larger victory. In his fantasies the campaign against Russia was transformed into the unexpected turning point which like a touch from a magic wand would solve all difficulties and open the way to world dominion. Germany, he raved to his generals on January 9, 1941, would be “invulnerable. The gigantic spaces of Russia conceal immeasurable riches. Germany must dominate them economically and politically, but not annex them.” In that way she would have at her disposal all the potentialities for waging war against whole continents in the future. Then she could never again be defeated by anyone.
The rapid collapse of the Soviet Union, as he imagined it, would give Japan the signal for her long- envisaged “southern expansion,” which she had hitherto postponed chiefly because of the Soviet threat to her rear. That expansion in turn would tie down the United States in the Pacific area and consequently draw the Americans away from Europe, so that Great Britain would be forced to surrender. By a far-flung threefold pincers movement over North Africa, the Near East, and the Caucasus, in conjunction with the conquest of Russia, he would push forward to Afghanistan. That country would then be used as a base from which to strike the stubborn British
