That summer of 1941 Hitler fell ill for the first time in five years . The stress of the Russian campaign, coupled with the hot, malarial climate in which the Wolf’s Lair had been sited, told severely on the dictator . Worse, the brackish waters of Masuria had infected him with dysentery, and as the crucial strategic controversy developed between Hitler and his generals, his ability to overrule them was impaired by his own physical weakness ; his own grand strategy, which was to set up a vast encircling movement by Army Groups North and South, enveloping Moscow from the rear, was opposed and circumvented by Brauchitsch and his staff, who favoured a direct assault on Moscow by Field Marshal von Bock’s Army Group Centre . Brauchitsch stayed in Berlin and ignored Hitler’s orders ; Hitler was confined by circumstances to his field headquarters . When the army Commander in Chief did pay a rare visit to the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler vainly warned that the way things were going the fronts would inevitably become static, as they had in World War I .
At the Wolf’s Lair Hitler began holding war conferences each morning and evening ; they were theatrical performances dominated by his insistent monologues . They lasted for hours on end, sapping the energy of his generals, who were grimly aware that they had more urgent business elsewhere . Individual generals hesitated to speak their minds in front of such a large and compliant audience . But a few commanders found that in private Hitler could be frankly spoken to ; among them were Rundstedt, Reichenau, Guderian, Manstein, and later Milch, Zeitzler, and Ferdinand Schörner . On August 6, visiting Rundstedt and General Antonescu at Army Group South headquarters in the dreary Ukrainian town of Berdichev, Hitler’s mind had seemed all but made up : Moscow would be left for last ; Leningrad and the southern front would be dealt with first — the meteorologists had assured him that the current dry spell would last longer in the centre than the south anyway.
Before he could issue the necessary directive, however, Hitler was struck down . On August 7 Hewel would write cryptically in his diary, ‘Führer sakit [ill] .’ (The diplomat Hewel had been a rubber planter in Java.) That morning, as Dr. Morell’s diary reveals, Hitler had been sitting down when he suddenly felt dizzy and began to throw up . Morell noted, ‘This bunker atmosphere has been getting him down for five or six weeks now . Then [Hans] Junge [an SS orderly] suddenly telephoned for me to come immediately to the Führer .’ The doctor found Hitler deathly white . ‘I feel very bad now,’ gasped the Führer . ‘Much worse than earlier . . . . Up here,’ he added, pointing to his left temple, ‘I feel so strange . A short while ago I had a terrific row [with Ribbentrop] ; I got immensely worked up and since that time I’ve been feeling rotten .’ Morell was baffled . He found that Hitler’s eyebrows were tender, his hands trembled now when extended ; panicking, the doctor bent the hypodermic needle as he frantically injected some multivitamins and carefully wrote down every word Hitler spoke to him ; to be on the safe side he gave him a Yatren pill — a medication useful in fact only against amoebic dysentery, which is confined almost entirely to the tropics . Hitler’s blood pressure was alarmingly high — 170 mm — and there was a loud buzzing in his ears . Morell diagnosed vaguely : ‘Vascular spasms with rush of blood to temples for various reasons .’ He allowed Hitler a supper of one soft boiled egg, mashed potato, and strawberries .
It seemed a typical attack of bacillic dysentery . On the morning of the eighth Hitler sent his valet over to Dr. Morell to declare that he had ‘never had a day in bed since being gassed in the World War .’ Proud of this record, he staggered out of bed at eleven a.m. ‘I went over,’ recorded Morell in his pencil notes, ‘without being sent for . Führer was very irritable, is feeling a lot worse than yesterday, hasn’t slept a wink, but has no intention of lying in that confined space, he’s got to get up and about.’
Hitler refused to allow any more injections for the time being ; the places where Morell had spiked him the day before hurt so badly, he groaned, that they put all else in the shade . His ears still buzzing, he dressed and went over to the map room . Morell sent word that he should have only tea and a biscuit for lunch . ‘He ordered spaghetti and strawberries,’ he recorded .
The generals were delighted that the Führer had been laid low, although General Halder did record this day : ‘Despite his medical indisposition the Führer has given the Commander in Chief [von Brauchitsch] the closest instructions on how he wants the air force squadrons used .’ The generals began to go their own way, disregarding Hitler’s strategic intentions.
‘I think it’s okay again, doctor,’ Hitler said to Morell urgently on August 9 . ‘Let’s keep the check-up short, shall we ? Because I want to go over to the map room .’ During the war conference however the buzzing suddenly returned in his ears . He sent for Morell to inquire about using leeches to lower his blood pressure . Morell was already planning to use his multivitamins, Tonophosphan, electric heating pads, and other panaceas — he saw no reason not to try leeches too . Heinz Linge, the valet, later : described‘Hitler sat in front of a mirror and watched fascinated as the leeches quenched their thirst on his blood.’
First [wrote Morell in his diary on August 11], I had made a small prick under the ear, but the skin was like leather . I had to push very hard to draw even the tiniest drops of blood... . Führer himself shook the leeches out of the jar . I had to apply them with my fingers, as they slithered out of the forceps . The first one sucked much faster, the rear one only slowly . The front one dropped off first, letting go at the bottom and dangling . The rear one continued sucking for another half hour then it too let go at the bottom ; I had to rip it off at the top .
Afterward Hitler’s head bled for two hours ; Morell applied bandages. Hitler decided not to show himself at supper on account of them, but he turned up for the usual war conference and tea session afterward : ‘His ears had stopped buzzing !’ noted Morell .
Over the next days the Führer’s blood pressure dropped to more normal levels . ‘Some throbbing in left head,’ wrote Morell on the twelfth . ‘Has had a lot of arguments and tension .’ On the fourteenth, he persuaded Hitler to permit a white and red blood-corpuscle count and a cardiogram .
The blood serology results came back on the sixteenth : as was to be expected in a man getting so little fresh air and sunshine the red corpuscle count was low . ‘Moreover,’ recorded Morell on the eighteenth, ‘the bunker is damp and unhealthy, the temperature just right for growing fungi ; once, my boots were mouldy after being left two days, and my clothes got clammy in the bedroom . New bunker walls always sweat quantities of water at first . . . . Then there are the colds caused by the draught of the extractor fans . I pointed out all that after just four days here in the bunker. . . . People got chest constrictions, anaemia, and general bunker psychosis . Reminded him that I had initially recommended more frequent motor journeys or five days in his special train, a change of scenery to somewhere at a greater altitude . At that time the Führer declared that this wasn’t on because of the centralisation of his signals equipment, etc . I also suggested he spend fourteen days at the Berghof .’ Hitler told him that he had taken a mild sedative, but did not want to make a habit of it . He felt well, but Goebbels, visiting him that day, August 18, wrote afterward that he looked somewhat strained and sickly . ‘This is probably a result of his dysentery, and perhaps also of the drain on his strength of these last few weeks.’
The cardiogram had immediately revealed a depression of the T-wave. Alarmed, Morell had sent the traces to a leading authority on heart conditions, Professor Karl Weber, director of the heart institute at Bad Nauheim, instructing him only that they were of a ‘very busy diplomat.’
Weber’s report confirmed ‘a considerable flattening of S—TI and S—TII .’ He added, ‘If these are not the consequence of taking digitalis or an infection, we must assume primarily that the cause is coronary sclerosis .’ He recommended performing electrocardiograms at fourteen-day intervals.
The ultimate diagnosis, rapid progressive coronary sclerosis, showed that Morell’s illustrious ‘Patient A’ was now suffering a virtually incurable heart disease . In a man of Hitler’s age it was not abnormal, but from now on there would always be the danger of angina pectoris or of an embolism with possibly fatal consequences . For the present Morell kept the truth from him (apart from a brief reference on August 18) ; in the Führer’s presence he insisted that his heart and other organs were working well.
In private, however, Morell began to study textbooks on the heart, and additional medicines were added to Hitler’s already overflowing cabinet. Hitler passively accepted his portly physician’s explanations . ‘Morell,’ he said to another doctor, ‘told me my energy consumption is as high as in the tropics, because of my uninterrupted intensive work.’
on august 18, 1941, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch submitted to him an obstinate written argument for the immediate resumption of the attack on Moscow, as the city’s capture would take at least two months . Hitler rejected it outright . It was most urgent in his view to deprive Stalin of his raw materials and arms industry . Besides, a rapid advance southward would encourage Iran to resist the Anglo-Russian invasion which he already knew was in the cards ; in any case, he wanted the Crimea in German hands : it was from Crimean airfields that Russia bombers had recently attacked Romania . He was plagued at night by a recurring nightmare — the petroleum fields of Ploesti, ablaze from end to end . His panzer generals Hoth and Guderian were most unenthusiastic about his plans . They lamented that their tanks were in need of overhaul . Hitler did not believe them . He had heard the same story before Dunkirk . The two generals, he said, were obviously just trying to conceal their own arrogant disapproval of his grand strategy.
The army high command continued stubbornly with its plans to attack Moscow . Only later was it realised that Hitler’s strategy would have offered the better prospects . Bock’s armies would still be stalled outside Moscow when winter set in, and Hitler’s illness bore the blame . ‘Today I still believe, ’ Göring was to tell his captors, ‘that had Hitler’s original plan of genius not been diluted like that, the eastern campaign would have been decided by early 1942 at the latest.’
life within Security Zone One revolved around Hitler . When he was away it was as though the dynamo had been wrenched bodily out of the power-house. Favoured indeed were those with special passes to this holy compound . The presence of his women staff was frowned upon :
It’s a thorn in some people’s side [wrote Christa Schroeder in one letter] that even in wartime the Chief has his personal staff around him, and particularly of course that we two females are included .
We aren’t here on an outing but because the Chief wants us and maintains that he can’t work without us .
More than once he has stressed in these gentlemen’s presence that without us . . . he would be in a hopeless mess . . . . It cannot have been a very pleasant situation when the Chief asked his Wehrmacht adjutant [Schmundt] whether a tent has been laid on for his ladies at the next headquarters . The reply was in the negative, so the Führer angrily ordered that accommodation was to be provided for us . ‘Oh, they had imagined they were only going to stay there in a tent encampment a few days, so we would not be needed !’
All of these excuses show how much they want to get rid of us .
Three weeks later the same secretary was complaining of the monotony. ‘We have now been here nine weeks, and the rumour is we shall stay here until the end of October . . . . I am so sick of inactivity that I recently tried to convince the Chief he needs only one secretary. . . .’ Her other writings unmistakably reflect Hitler’s inner thoughts . Thus on August 20 we find her recording :
A few days ago we saw here a British newsreel that reached us via America, showing the horrifying devastation of entire streets in London : all the big department stores, Parliament, and so on are in ruins . The camera showed the huge fires raging, as it panned across whole sections of the city, with warehouse after warehouse forming one sea of fire . The commentary says that the British are sticking it out in the knowledge that Berlin looks just the same . Oh, if the poor British could only guess ! . . .
I long for nothing more fervently than that the British should come forward with peace proposals once we have dealt with Russia . This war with Britain can only result in us smashing each other’s cities to smithereens. And Mr. Roosevelt chuckles in gleeful anticipation of the day he will inherit Britain’s legacy . I really cannot understand why the British won’t listen to the voice of reason . Now that we are expanding to the east, we have no need for their colonies .
I find it all so much more practical that everything will be right on our doorstep : the Ukraine and Crimea are so fertile we can plant everything we need there, and the rest (coffee, tea, cocoa, etc.) we can obtain by barter from South America . It is all so simple and obvious .
Those in authority in London and Washington were, however, bent on Hitler’s extinction . In the second week of August, Churchill and Roosevelt met off Newfoundland, and proclaimed the eight-point Atlantic Charter, affirming that they sought no territorial aggrandisement, that they frowned on all territorial changes that did not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned, and that all nations should enjoy equal access to the raw materials of the earth and to its oceans . (Russia, which had lost the European territories it had annexed in 1940, subscribed to the Charter in 1942 along with some twenty nations that were then at war with Germany.) On August 25, Britain and Russia invaded Iran ; the United States took over the naval watch of the Denmark Straits (south of Iceland) and undertook escort duties on North Atlantic convoys .
Clearly the distinction between neutrality and belligerency was being increasingly blurred .
Hitler approved Goebbels’s mischievous idea of immediately following Clement Attlee’s broadcast on the Atlantic talks (as Churchill’s deputy) with two special communiqués, announcing that the Black Sea ports of Odessa and Nikolaiev were now under siege and that the Soviet iron-ore fields were in German hands .
Hitler had asked Goebbels to come and see him on August 18 . Apparently he was prompted by the growing Catholic clamour against the Nazi euthanasia program . This ‘covert liquidation of the mentally ill,’ as Goebbels frankly termed it in his diary, had proceeded without friction until now . As its manager Philipp Bouhler had told him on January 30, 1941, they had already quietly got rid of eighty thousand, and had only sixty thousand more to go . ‘Hard work, but necessary too,’ Goebbels commented in his diary. Early in July however the Bishop of Munster, Count von Galen, had blown the lid off the scandal in a pastoral letter, and on the twenty-seventh he had instituted private criminal proceedings against persons unknown . For the Nazi party and government alike it was acutely embarrassing : Hitler’s arbitrary 1939 law authorising euthanasia had never been published.*
Bormann submitted to Hitler a memorandum on the desirability of executing the bishop for sedition . Goebbels supported Bormann, arguing that Galen had spiced his sermon with wholly unfounded charges . Hitler sagely disregarded Goebbels’s advice, but on August 24 he ordered the entire euthanasia operation shut down immediately . The latter continued nonetheless.** Immersed in ‘Barbarossa,’ Hitler remained unaware that Martin Bormann was already waging open war on the Church . On one occasion Hitler said, ‘If my mother were still alive, she’d definitely be a churchgoer and I wouldn’t want to hinder her . On the contrary, you’ve got to respect the simple faith of the people .’ Hitler assured Goebbels and Rosenberg that he would not easily forgive the German church leaders their behaviour during this emergency . But until the war was won the Party must proceed slowly against the Church . On July 30, 1941, Bormann personally circularised all the gauleiters, on Hitler’s orders, instructing them to refrain from any persecution of the religious communities, since this would only divide the nation which Hitler had so arduously united .
nor was Hitler the mainspring behind the ‘Jewish question .’ There is now no doubt that Dr. Goebbels was . ‘In the eastern campaign,’ a Goebbels memorandum read, ‘the German soldier has seen the Jew in all his cruelty and repulsiveness . Clearly when the soldier comes home from the wars, he must not find any Jews here waiting for him .’ Ever since the summer of 1940 Goebbels had prepared for the rapid deportation of Berlin’s seventy thousand Jews to Poland ; but the war needs for transport overrode his ambitions . They could not begin the big roundup until the war was over .
Goebbels brought with him to Hitler’s headquarters on August 18 a series of harsh measures designed to hound and intimidate the Jews . Afterward, he noted : ‘One only needs to imagine what the Jews would do if they had us in their power, to know what we must do now that we are on top . . . . I manage to get my way completely with the Führer on the Jewish matter. He agrees we can introduce a large, visible badge for all the Jews in the Reich, to be worn by all Jews in public, so as to obviate the danger that the Jews will act as grumblers and defeatists without being detected . And in future we will allocate to Jews who don’t work smaller food rations than to Germans . . . . Incidentally, the Führer agrees that as soon as the first transport possibilities arise, the Berlin Jews will be deported from Berlin to the east .’ Hitler may have reminded Goebbels of his January 1939 Reichstag speech .
The Führer is convinced that the prophecy he uttered then in the Reichstag — that if the Jews once more succeeded in provoking a world war, it would end with the destruction of the Jews — is coming true . It is coming true these weeks and months with a dread certainty that is almost uncanny . In the east the Jews will have to square accounts ; they have already footed part of the bill in Germany . . . . At any rate in the coming world the Jews will have little cause for mirth .
August 18 was a beautiful summer day at the Führer’s headquarters. Probably in response to Dr. Morell’s prompting, Hitler spent the four hours of his talk with Goebbels strolling in the woods — the first time he had done so in five weeks . He asked Goebbels about the mood in Berlin, which had recently undergone small-scale Russian air attacks . He had no worries about the morale of his people as a whole . The Wehrmacht’s big push southward would shortly begin . ‘The Führer is not concerned with occupying particular regions or cities,’ wrote Goebbels . ‘He wants to avoid casualties if at all possible . Therefore he does not intend to take Petersburg [Leningrad] or Kiev by force of arms, but to starve them into submission ; once Petersburg has been cut off, his plan is to destroy the city’s lifeline with his Luftwaffe and artillery . . . Our first Luftwaffe attacks will hit the water, power, and gas plants .’ Perhaps, mused Hitler wistfully to Goebbels, Stalin might even now sue for peace . ‘He has of course little in common with the plutocrats in London ; . . . the moment he sees that the Bolshevik system itself is on the verge of collapse and can only be salvaged by surrender, then he will certainly be willing to do so . . . . The Führer is convinced that Moscow and London were in the same line of business long before June,’ wrote Goebbels .
Their aim had been identical, the destruction of the Reich . Stalin had been on the brink of attacking Germany : German division commanders found the enemy had better large-scale maps of Germany, Austria, and Silesia than they did themselves . Air reconnaissance revealed that Stalin had established a huge complex of arms factories beyond the Urals . The Russians had also built several completely unpublicised highways along which they advanced, while the Wehrmacht adhered to the only roads they were aware of . In Red Army barracks were found dummy German soldiers that had been manufactured for target practice long before June 1941 . Most of Hitler’s commanders — including Bock, Kluge, Halder, and Richard Ruoff — agreed that he had selected the proper time to strike .
As he repeatedly remarked, he was not going to make the mistakes that ‘a certain other famous man’ — meaning Napoleon — had made . Aided by thousands of prisoners, his army engineers laboured around the clock to repair the demolished Russian railroad tracks and re-lay them on the different German gauge . By mid-August a twin track extended as far as Smolensk.
Once, on the seventeenth, he educated his private staff on the dangers of over-optimism . ‘Always credit the enemy with doing just what you least want,’ he told Hewel . For example, he tried to envisage what Stalin would do if the Pripyet Marshes did not exist . On August 1 Martin Bormann quoted Hitler as remarking, ‘Through my activities so far the German nation has already gained over two and a half million people . Even if I ask 10 percent of this as a sacrifice, I shall still have given ninety percent.’
on that day Dr. Morell had recorded, ‘Did not give the Führer a check-up today as he felt fine .’ But the next day Hitler was still feeling low . ‘After working a lot yesterday,’ noted Morell, ‘he was a bit jumpy . His hands were shaking and his head swimming .’ He was planning to invite Mussolini to the eastern front, but there was still a slight buzzing in his ears . On the twenty-first he burst out at Morell : ‘The meal repertoire [here] is very limited .’ (‘Trouble is,’ recorded the doctor, ‘he turns down so many things we suggest, and it’s very difficult to make suggestions, what with his being a vegetarian.’) Hitler wanted ‘that pleasant treatment’ with the leeches again, but all but one of those used on him before had died, the Führer’s blood evidently having been to their distaste . ‘I was hoping,’ wrote Morell on August 22, ‘to apply leeches once more before Mussolini gets here so his [Hitler’s] head will be completely clear .’ ‘But I can’t find the time yet,’ said Hitler . ‘Right now I’m up to my eyes in work . Of course I want it too.’
Set three leeches [recorded Morell in his diary of August 23], two behind the ear, one in front . The latter sucked well and strong . Head clearer and lighter . Says he found their sucking not at all unpleasant.
Restored to health, Hitler began to fight back against the general staff .
On August 21 he dictated a brusque letter to Brauchitsch beginning with the words, ‘The army’s proposal for continuing the operations in the east does not accord with my intentions . I order the following’ — and he re-stated the objectives he had been demanding since December 1940 : In the north, the isolation of Leningrad ; and in the south, the capture of the Crimea, the Donets industrial and coal regions, and the Caucasus oil fields. Field Marshal von Bock’s Army Group Centre, facing Moscow, was to remain on the defensive .
This rude rebuff caused uproar in the army . Brauchitsch suffered his first mild heart attack . Halder literally wept over Hitler’s ‘pamphleteering .’ ‘Tortured days lie behind me,’ he wrote to his wife on August 23 . ‘Again I offered my resignation to stave off an act of folly . The outcome was completely unsatisfactory . . . . The objective I set myself — namely to finish off the Russians once for all before the year is out — will not be achieved . . . . History will level at us the gravest accusation that can be made of a High Command, namely that for fear of undue risk we did not exploit the attacking impetus of our troops . It was the same in the western campaign. But there the enemy’s internal collapse cast a merciful veil over our errors.’
Bock’s diary bespoke an equally anguished heart . ‘I don’t want to "capture Moscow" ! I want to destroy the enemy’s army, and the bulk of that army is in front of me !’ He telephoned Colonel Schmundt asking that the Führer at least give a hearing to Guderian . Guderian was granted a midnight conference with Hitler on August 23 . After hearing Hitler’s case for the main thrust to continue now toward the south, Guderian decided that the Führer was right . ‘I returned,’ he wrote afterward, ‘on the twenty-fourth, well satisfied and with high hopes.’
Bock’s wrath and Halder’s indignation at Guderian’s ‘sell-out’ were immense. Halder confiscated his most powerful corps, the Forty-Sixth panzer, and assigned it to the Fourth Army on the Moscow front . With only two corps, Guderian’s offensive limped and stumbled . ‘Since the twenty-seventh I’ve been fighting for reinforcements, but they are granted me only in driblets and too late,’ he wrote in one letter . His Chief of Staff observed in his diary that Guderian ‘has the impression that [Bock and Halder] are still hanging on to their old plan — the advance on Moscow .’ By early September it was clear, as bad weather arrived, that the Red Army north of the Desna River had eluded him .
The Duce arrived at the Wolf’s Lair on August 25 . Hewel noted : ‘War conference, then a communal meal in the dining bunker and a talk with my Chief [Ribbentrop] . In the evening a cold buffet in the garden . Vittorio Mussolini is particularly unattractive and dumb . . . .’
The next day Hitler showed Mussolini over the battlefield at Brest-Litovsk, where the two-ton projectiles of his 620-millimetre mortars had reduced the citadel to ruins . He admitted that his military Intelligence had grossly misinformed him about the Soviet powers of resistance, but he predicted that final victory would he his by the spring of 1942 .
That evening both dictators left for the Führer’s southern headquarters site in Galicia . Mussolini joined Hitler for a confidential talk — pouring his heart out for the first time about the very real difficulties his Fascist revolution was in.(3) In 1943 Hitler would recall him as lamenting : ‘Tell me, what can you do if you have got officers with reservations about the regime and about its ideologies . . . who say — the moment you talk of your ideology or of raison d’état — “We are monarchists : we owe our allegiance to the King !”’
This admission of impotence in face of the Italian monarchy was a shock to Hitler, and he never forgot Mussolini’s words .
The next day, August 28, both dictators flew across the fertile Ukrainian countryside for hours until they reached Rundstedt’s command post at Uman . ‘His face was sunburnt to a brilliant red,’ wrote Morell guiltily, ‘and his forehead was very painful with large burnt patches, so he was very grumpy .’ Keitel had eyes only for the countryside . ‘One could sense the virginity of the soil,’ he recalled .
Three months later Hitler described his own vivid impressions . ‘I must have seen thousands of women there, but not one of them was wearing even the cheapest ornaments . In their wretched hovels there was neither cutlery nor other household goods . And this misery prevailed in a region whose soil was capable of the biggest harvest imaginable . . . . Only when this terrified, scared mass of people saw with their own eyes the commissars being shot did they gradually turn back into human beings again.’
The summer would soon be over and still Russia had not been defeated . At the end of August, Christa Schroeder wrote :
Our stay here at the headquarters gets longer and longer . First we thought we would be back in Berlin by the end of July, then they talked of mid-October ; and now they are already saying we will not get away before the end of October, if even then .
It is already quite cool here, like autumn, and if it occurs to the Chief to spend the winter here we shall all be frozen . This protracted bunker existence can’t be doing us any good . The Chief does not look too well either, he gets too little fresh air and now he is oversensitive to sun and wind the moment he goes out in his car for a few hours .
I would have loved to stay in Galicia — we were all in favour of it — but security there is not good enough . . . .
The whole countryside there is freer . Here in the forest it all crowds in on you after a while . Besides, there you didn’t have the feeling that you were locked in : you saw the peasants working in the fields and it made you feel free, while here we keep stumbling on sentries and are forever showing our identity cards .
Well, I suppose that wherever we are we’re always cut off from the world — in Berlin, at the Berghof, or on our travels . It is always the same sharply defined circle, always the same circuit inside the fence .
Just what Hitler’s New Order would be in Europe was a secret that he closely kept . That Slavs and Bolsheviks — particularly if they were Jewish — would not prosper under it was obvious ; but the positions of countries like Italy, France, Hungary, and even Russia were still undefined . Hitler’s naval adjutant, Puttkamer, wrote revealingly on August 11 :
At lunch yesterday the Führer spoke about our relationship with France. This elicited for the first time the reason why he doesn’t take up any of the proposals made about it . He said he thought that a man like Darlan is being perfectly honest and that it was quite possible to achieve a bearable relationship with France by progressing from armistice to a preliminary peace . This was absolutely possible, in his view, even if we made stiff demands : France expected them, would uphold them, and would join the war at our side . So — if we were alone — everything could be attained .
The decisive obstacle is however Italy’s claims — Tunis and Corsica. No French government could uphold these . But he couldn’t persuade the Italians to drop them ; he had to associate himself with these claims too . He couldn’t barter our ally Italy against France, he said .
So that’s the real reason, which was news to both me and Jodl, with whom I discussed it .
On September 8, referring to Hungary, Hitler told Hewel : ‘These are all just alliances of expediency . For example, the German people know that our alliance with Italy is only an alliance between Mussolini and myself . We Germans have sympathies only with Finland ; we could find some sympathy for Sweden, and of course with Britain .’ Here he must have sighed, for he added : ‘A German-British alliance would be an alliance from people to people ! The British would only have to keep their hands off the Continent. They could keep their empire — and the world if they wanted !’
Hitler’s conquest of the Ukraine would mean that he no longer needed the raw-material regions of France . As he explained to his ambassador in France, Otto Abetz, on September 16, the Soviet iron-ore fields at Krivoi Rog alone would yield a million tons of ore a month . Hitler would insist on retaining only Alsace and Lorraine, and the Channel coast facing England. Given what he saw as such modest claims, Hitler assured Abetz that France would certainly have a share of the pickings from the New Order .
In his diary of September 15, 1941, Weizsäcker described Hitler’s foreign policy in these words : ‘The quasi-depression of four weeks ago has been cured, probably the physical malaise too . An autobahn is being planned to the Crimean peninsula . There is speculation as to the probable manner of Stalin’s departure . If he withdraws into Asia, he might even be granted a peace treaty.’
The next day, Papen also raised Stalin’s future with Hitler, and the Führer repeated what he had told Goebbels a month before — that once the Wehrmacht had occupied a certain forward line in Russia, it might be possible to find common ground with the Red dictator, who was after all a man of enormous achievements . As another diplomat — Hasso von Etzdorf — noted : ‘[Hitler] sees two possibilities as to Stalin’s fate ; either he gets bumped off by his own people, or he tries to make peace with us . Because, he says, Stalin as the greatest living statesman must realise that at sixty-six you can’t begin your life’s work all over again if it will take a lifetime to complete it ; so he’ll try to salvage what he can, with our acquiescence . And in this we should meet him halfway . If Stalin could only decide to seek expansion for Russia toward the south, the Persian Gulf, as he [Hitler] recommended to him once [November 1940], then peaceful co-existence between Russia and Germany would be conceivable.’
Papen for his part impressed on Hitler the need to promote a ‘constructive peace plan’ after Russia’s overthrow, a plan capable of inspiring all Europeans .
‘The Führer then turned to his plans for the east,’ relates the only existing record of Hitler’s conversation with Abetz on September 16 :
Petersburg [Leningrad], the ‘poisonous nest’ from which for so long Asiatic venom has ‘spewed forth’ into the Baltic, must vanish from the earth’s surface . The city is already cut off . . . . The Asiatics and the Bolsheviks must be hounded out of Europe, this ‘episode of two hundred fifty years of Asiatic pestilence’ is at an end . The Urals will be the frontier beyond which Stalin and his like can do as they please . But he [Hitler], by launching occasional expeditions across the Urals, will also ensure that Stalin gets no respite there either .
After the expulsion of the Asiatics, Europe will never again be dependent on an outside power, nor need we ‘care two hoots’ about America .
Europe will meet its own raw material needs, and it will have its own export market in the Russian territories so we shall no longer need the rest of the world’s trade . The new Russia this side of the Urals will be ‘our India,’ but far more handily located than that of Britain . The new Greater German Empire will embrace 135 million people, and it will rule 150 million more .
The backbone of the new empire would be the Wehrmacht and above all the SS . In public Hitler talked with Himmler only of innocuous matters — architecture, the salon of Frau Bruckmann, or the relative nutritive values of the potato and the soya bean . In private they elaborated ways of fighting the multiplying and Hydra-headed partisan movements springing up throughout the Nazi-occupied territories . Hitler linked these movements with Stalin’s July broadcast, and he condemned as far too mild the treatment so far meted out to captured offenders . On September 7 — as Himmler was at the Wolf’s Lair — he ordered that if the murderer of a German NCO in Paris was not found immediately, fifty hostages were to be shot ; and in future the ratio was to be a hundred ‘Communists’ for each German life taken . (The German military commander admittedly protested, and Hitler left the final scale of reprisals to his discretion.)
The siege of Leningrad symbolised the brutalisation of this war . Over the horizon, Leeb’s tank crews could see the glittering gold spires of the admiralty building — so near and yet so far . In a formal directive, Number 35, issued on September 6, Hitler ordered Leningrad to be so thoroughly isolated by his ground forces that by mid-September at the latest he could recover his tanks and Richthofen’s air squadrons for the main assault on Moscow after all . On September the Luftwaffe began around-the-clock bombing operations . Jeschonnek’s deputy wrote in his diary : ‘Food already appears to be short there.’
On the tenth, Rosenberg’s liaison officer reported to him from Hitler’s headquarters :
The entire population has remained and actually been swollen by the evacuation of the surrounding suburbs . Already it’s almost impossible to get bread, sugar, and meat in Leningrad .
The Führer wants to avoid house-to-house fighting, which would cost our troops heavy casualties . The city is to be just shut in, shot to pieces by artillery and starved out . A few days or weeks here or there make no difference, as the besieging army won’t have to be very big .
The Finns have suggested diverting Lake Ladoga into the Gulf of Finland — which lies several metres lower — to wash away the city of Leningrad .
On September 12, General Halder emphasised to Leeb’s army group that his tanks would shortly be pulled back from Leningrad for the attack on Moscow . General Hans Reinhardt protested at the effect this order to halt was having on his men . ‘The city is spread out before them, and nobody is stopping them going right on in !’ But Hitler agreed that the tanks should not be committed ; Leningrad should be destroyed by bombardment instead. Admiral Raeder asked him to spare at least the dockyards ; this too Hitler refused, but as regards the tanks Keitel telephoned Leeb to postpone their withdrawal by forty-eight hours . On the twelfth the Luftwaffe commander, Richthofen, entered in his diary : ‘Colonel Schmundt . . . talked about the problem of Finland and Leningrad . Over L . The “plough shall pass !”’ On September 16 the Nazi tanks were finally halted, and their withdrawal from Leningrad to the Moscow front began .
Kiev at least was in German hands . The news broke at Hitler’s headquarters late on September 1 . For days afterward he spoke of his plans for Europe . Dr. Werner Koeppen, Rosenberg’s liaison officer, recorded these historic conversations :
Lunchtime, September 19 . Dr. Todt related his impressions of his latest journey to Oslo and Trondheim, and of the first ground broken for the major traffic link between Germany and Denmark . The Führer talked about his plan to rebuild Trondheim afresh in terrace-form, so that every house will be in the sun all day long . . . .
The Führer then spoke of the need to build one autobahn up to Trondheim, and another down to the Crimea . After the war the German citizen shall have the chance of taking his Volkswagen and looking over the captured territories in person, so that if need should arise he will also be willing to fight for them . We must never repeat the pre-war error of having the colonial idea the property of only a few capitalists or corporations . . . . The railway traverses distances, but the road opens them up .
Earlier, as he told Seyss-Inquart on the twenty-sixth, it was downright absurd that though a vast, only sparsely populated, empire lay in the east with almost inexhaustible resources and raw materials, western Europe struggled to meet its needs by imports from colonies far overseas . ‘Once we have securely occupied the vitally important European regions of the Soviet Union, the war east of the Urals can go on a hundred years, for all we care .’ Hitler learned that rubber was being grown near Kharkov — he had himself already seen excellent samples of it . ‘The giant farms Stalin has introduced will probably be the best way to use the land in the future too, as they are probably the only way of cultivating the land intensively . . .’ He felt that most Russians had become quite accustomed to being treated like animals .
If the occupying authorities controlled the alcohol and tobacco supplies, he had said at lunch a few days earlier, they would have the population eating out of their hands .
‘The frontier between Europe and Asia,’ reflected Hitler over dinner on the twenty-third, ‘is not the Ural Mountains but there where the settlements of Germanically inclined people end and unadulterated Slav settlements begin . It is our task to push this frontier as far east as possible, and if need be far beyond the Urals . It is the eternal law of nature that gives Germany as the stronger power the right before history to subjugate these peoples of inferior race, to dominate them and to coerce them into performing useful labours .’ This project of the ethnic cleansing of Berlin, Vienna, and Prague would also encompass the Jews, but not until the end of Barbarossa . ‘They are all to be transported ultimately to [regions ?] adjacent to the Bolshevik [rump territory ?]’ dictated Goebbels on the twenty-third (the microfiche is only partly decipherable).
in the ‘Protectorate’ of Bohemia-Moravia a wave of opposition had appeared since ‘Barbarossa’ . There were slowdowns and stoppages and terror incidents . Rumour reached Hitler that a full-scale uprising was being plotted . ‘Only now do they realise that there is no escape,’ he said . ‘As long as the great Russia, mother of all Slavs, was there they could still hope.’
Koeppen reported Hitler’s remarks at lunch a few days later : ‘He keeps repeating that he knows the Czechs of old . To them [Reich Protector] Neurath was just a friendly old duffer whose blandness and good humour they rapidly mistook for weakness and stupidity . . . . The Czechs are a nation of “cyclists” — they bow from the waist upward, but the legs still kick !’
One evening at the end of September Otto Bräutigam recorded this remark by Hitler in his diary : ‘We found out that the Czech government had issued orders for a boycott on arms production . Output efficiency had generally declined by about 20 or 30 percent, ammunition was being turned out with bad fuses and even the armourplate processed by Skoda was showing flaws that could only be explained by deliberate sabotage.’
On Bormann’s advice Hitler appointed Heydrich Acting Protector . On September 24, Hitler told him his job would be ‘a combat mission’ of limited duration and gave him carte blanche . Heydrich flew to Prague on September 27 and arrested the rebel ringleaders — among them General Alois Elias, the prime minister . The next day he phoned Himmler : Elias had confessed to being in contact with the Benes; government in London . Elias was condemned to death, but Hitler decided he was of more value as a hostage for the Czechs’ good behaviour, and he survived until May 1942 .
Hitler had briefed Heydrich fully on the future of his Protectorate . Heydrich reported this to his local governors in Prague on October 2 . One day, he said, the Protectorate would be settled by Germans . ‘This does not mean,’ said Heydrich, ‘that we now have to try to Germanise all Czech rabble . . . . For those of good race and good intentions the matter is simple ; they will be Germanised . For the rest, those of inferior racial origin or with hostile intentions, I shall get rid of them — there is plenty of room in the east for them .’ Inferior but well-meaning Czechs would probably be sent to work in the Reich . The more difficult category — those of good racial characteristics but hostile intentions — would have to be liquidated.(4)
Hitler advised Heydrich to introduce the Czech workers to both the carrot and the stick . In any factory where sabotage occurred, ten hostages were to be shot ; but in factories with a good output the workers were to get extra rations . Heydrich went much further, introducing the Czechs for the first time to the full Bismarckian social security program . ‘The Czech workers have accepted the liquidation of the conspirators quite calmly,’ Koeppen noted when Heydrich first reported back from Prague, over dinner on October 2 . ‘The most important thing to them is to have enough food and work . . . . One worker has even written to Heydrich, giving his full name, saying that Czech history has always been like this : each generation has to learn its lesson and then there is peace for a time . He added that nobody would object if another two thousand of them were shot, either .’ The Nazis would rise to the occasion .
* See pages 235—6 where the decree of 1939 is mentioned.
** The euthanasia killings proceeded until February 1945, evidently on the local initiative of gauleiters and doctors.
3 On August 30, 1941, Canaris returned to Berlin from talks with his Italian counterpart, Colonel Cesare Amé, and told his Abwehr staff : ‘A . describes the situation in Italy as very grave . The surprise caused by the eastern campaign has had an extremely unpleasant effect on the Italian people.’
4 Hitler had used the same language to Neurath, State Secretary Karl-Hermann Frank, and the minister of justice in September 1940 : ‘Czechs turned down on racial grounds or anti-Reich in attitude were not to be assimilated . This category was to be eliminated (sei auszumerzen) .’ In conversation over lunch on October 6, 1941 Hitler announced that the Jews in the Protectorate were all to be deported eastward . ‘After this war the Führer proposes to transplant all the racially valueless elements from Bohemia to the east.’
