was beyond question that we could never give up once we had become involved in it.”
As to what the most favorable moment might have been, Hitler manifested far less certainty. The excitement with which he returned to this theme on several evenings, examining its tactical and strategic aspects and finding justifying arguments, indicates that he considered his choice of the moment his gravest error. Characteristically, he presented the situation as one without alternatives:
It is the nemesis of this war that it began for Germany too soon on the one hand, somewhat too late on the other hand. From the military point of view it was to our interest to begin it a year earlier. In 1938 I ought to have seized the initiative, instead of letting it be thrust upon me in 1939, since it was inevitable in any case. But I couldn’t do anything since the British and French accepted all my demands at Munich.
To that extent, then, the war came some time too late. In regard to the preparation of our morale, however, it came far too soon. I had not yet had time to shape the people to the measure of my policies. I would have needed twenty years to bring a new elite to maturity, an elite which so to speak had imbibed the National Socialist way of thinking with its mother’s milk. It is the Germans’ tragedy never to have enough time. Circumstances are always forcing us. And if we lack time, that is chiefly due to our lack of space. The Russians, in their tremendous plains, can afford the luxury of not being hurried. Time is working for them. It is working against us….
Fatefully, I have to complete everything during the brief span of one human life…. Where the others have an eternity at their disposal, I have only a few miserable years. The others know that they will have successors who will take up their work just where they have left it, who will make the same furrows with the same plow. I ask myself whether the man will be found among my immediate successors who is destined to take up the torch that is slipping from my hand.
It is my other nemesis that I have been serving a nation with a tragic past, a nation so inconstant, so fickle as the Germans, falling with a strange calm according to circumstances from one extreme to the other.67
These were the premises whose prisoner he was, the fundamental obstacles in situation and material that he had been forced to accept as he found them. But he had also made mistakes, he concluded, fateful acts of thoughtlessness. He had made all sorts of unnecessary concessions. And it is exceedingly illuminating that now, in his searching retrospect, he disavowed one of the few intact human relationships of his life:
When I regard events soberly and stripped of all sentimentality, I must admit that my immutable friendship with Italy and with the Duce can be placed on the debit side of the ledger, as one of my errors. One might even say that the Italian alliance proved more useful to our enemies than to ourselves… and in the end it will contribute to our—if the victory proves not to be ours after all—our losing the war….
Our Italian ally hampered us almost everywhere. For example, he prevented us from employing revolutionary policies in North Africa… for our Islamic friends suddenly saw in us voluntary or involuntary accomplices of their oppressors. The memory of the barbarous reprisals against the Senoussis is still very much alive among them. Moreover, the Duce’s ridiculous claim to be regarded as the “sword of Islam” arouses just as much laughter today as it did before the war. This title belongs by rights to Mohammed and to a great conqueror like Omar. Mussolini had it conferred on himself by a few poor devils whom he paid or terrorized. There was a chance for us to pursue a grand policy toward Islam. But we missed that opportunity, like so much else, because of our loyalty to the Italian alliance….
From the military point of view it is hardly any better. Italy’s entry into the war almost immediately enabled our enemies to have their first victories, and made it possible for Churchill to inspire his countrymen with fresh courage and the Anglophiles all over the world with new hope. Although the Italians had already shown themselves incapable of holding Abyssinia and Cyrenaica, they had the nerve to plunge into the totally senseless campaign against Greece without asking us, without even informing us…. That forced us, contrary to all our plans, to intervene in the Balkans, which in turn resulted in a catastrophic delay for the beginning of the war against Russia…. We should have been able to attack Russia starting with May 15, 1941 and… end the campaign before the winter. Then everything would have turned out differently!
Out of gratitude, because I could not forget the Duce’s attitude during the Anschluss, I always refrained from criticizing and condemning Italy. On the contrary, I tried to treat her as our equal. Unfortunately the laws of life show that it is a mistake to treat as equals those who are not really equal…. I regret that I did not follow the dictates of reason, which prescribed to me a brutal friendship in regard to Italy.68
On the whole, to his mind it was his soft-heartedness, his lack of toughness and implacability, which led to his failure after he had been so close to triumph. In this last document, too, he revealed his own unmistakable brand of radicalism. “I fought against the Jews with open vizard; before the war started, I gave them fair warning….”69 He regretted not having ruthlessly eliminated the German conservatives from public life, of having supported Franco, the nobility, and the church in Spain rather than the Communists, and, in France, of having failed to liberate the working class from the hands of a “bourgeoisie of fossils.” Everywhere, he now thought, he should have fostered the uprising of the colonial peoples, the awakening of the oppressed and exploited nations. The Arabs, the Iraqis, the entire Near East, which had hailed the German victories, should have been incited to revolt. The German Reich was now collapsing not because of its bellicosity and sins against moderation, but because of its incapacity for radicalism, its fixation on morality. “What might we have done!” he grieved. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper has commented on the remarkable lucidity with which Hitler in these soliloquies analyzed-the strengths and weaknesses of his concept of world power. He was in no doubt about the principle. He realized that Europe could be dominated by a continental power that controlled western Russia, drew upon the reserves of Asia, and simultaneously presented itself as the advocate of the colonial nations by linking political revolution with slogans of social liberation. He also knew that he had gone to war with the Soviet Union over the question of who would assume this part. The issue had gone against him, he believed, because he had not been able to fight on consistently revolutionary principles. He had entered the war with the fuss-and-feathers diplomats and generals of the old school, additionally hampered by his friendship with Mussolini, and had not been able to free himself from these burdens. His radicalism had not been sufficient; he had revealed too many bourgeois sentiments, too much bourgeois halfheartedness. He, too, had been split—this was the conclusion of his meditations. “Life forgives no weakness!”70
His decision to call it quits came on the night of April 28 and in the early hours of the morning of April 29. Shortly before 10 P.M., in the midst of a conversation with Ritter von Greim, Hitler was interrupted by his valet, Heinz Linge. Linge handed him a Reuter’s report that Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler had made contact with the Swedish diplomat Count Bernadotte in order to negotiate a surrender in the West.
The shock that followed this report was more violent than all the emotions of the past week. Hitler had always regarded Goring as opportunistic and corrupt; thus the Reich Marshal’s betrayal came as no surprise. But Himmler had always made loyalty his watchword and prided himself on his incorruptibility. His conduct now signified the breach of a principle. For Hitler it was the gravest imaginable blow. “He raged like a madman,” Hanna Reitsch described the ensuing scene. “He turned purple, and his face was almost unrecognizable.” In contrast to the preceding outbursts, however, this time his strength gave out after a short time, and he withdrew with Goebbels and Bormann for a conversation behind closed doors.
Once more, his single decision brought all the others in its wake. As part of his revenge Hitler had Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison man, subjected to a short, sharp interrogation, then shot in the chancellery by members of his escort squad. He then sought out Greim and ordered him to attempt to get out of Berlin in order to arrest Himmler. He would not hear of any objections. “A traitor must never be my successor as Fuhrer,” he said. “See to it that he does not!”
Hastily, he had the small conference room prepared for a civil wedding ceremony. A district magistrate named Walter Wagner, who was serving in a nearby militia unit, was fetched and asked to marry the Fuhrer and Eva Braun. Goebbels and Bormann were the witnesses. Because of the special circumstances both parties requested a war wedding, which could be performed without delay. They attested that they were of pure Aryan descent and free of hereditary diseases. The record noted that the applications had been accepted, the banns “examined and found in order.” Then Wagner, according to the record, turned to the parties :
