Hitler. Part 18

After overcoming some early tenacious resistance, the dual campaign against Yugoslavia and Greece had made unexpectedly rapid progress. In fact, German operational planning had grossly overestimated the weak enemy forces. Of the twenty-nine German divisions engaged in the Balkans, only ten were in action for more than six days. On 10 April Zagreb was reached, and an independent Croatian state proclaimed, resting on the slaughterous anti-Serb Ustasha Movement. Two days later Belgrade was reached. On 17 April the Yugoslav army surrendered unconditionally. Around 344,000 men entered German captivity. Losses on the victors' side were a mere 151 dead with 392 wounded and fifteen missing.

In contrast to the punitive attack on Yugoslavia, Hitler's interest in the conquest of Greece was purely strategic. He forbade the bombing of Athens, and regretted having to fight against the Greeks. If the British had not intervened there (sending troops in early March to a.s.sist the Greek struggle against Mussolini's forces), he would never have had to hasten to the help of the Italians, he told Goebbels. Meanwhile, the German 12th Army had rapidly advanced over Yugoslav territory on Salonika, which fell on 9 April. The bulk of the Greek forces capitulated on 21 April. A brief diplomatic farce followed. The blow to Mussolini's prestige demanded that the surrender to the Germans, which had in fact already taken place, be accompanied by a surrender to the Italians. To avoid alienating Mussolini, Hitler was forced to comply. The agreement signed by General List was disowned. Jodl was sent to Salonika with a new armistice. This time the Italians were party to it. This was finally signed, amid Greek protests, on 23 April. Greeks taken prisoner numbered 218,000, British 12,000, against 100 dead and 3,500 wounded or missing on the German side. In a minor 'Dunkirk', the British managed to evacuate 50,000 men around four-fifths of its Expeditionary Force, which had to leave behind or destroy its heavy equipment. The whole campaign had been completed in under a month.

A follow-up operation to take Crete by landing parachutists was, while he was in Monichkirchen, somewhat unenthusiastically conceded by Hitler under pressure from Goring, himself being pushed by the commander of the parachutist division, General Kurt Student. By the end of May, this too had proved successful. But it had been hazardous. And the German losses of 2,071 dead, 2,594 wounded, and 1,888 missing from a deployment of around 22,000 men were far higher than in the entire Balkan campaign. 'Operation Mercury' the attack on Crete convinced Hitler that ma.s.s paratroop landings had had their day. He did not contemplate using them in the a.s.sault the following year on Malta. Potentially, the occupation of Crete offered the prospect of intensified a.s.sault on the British position in the Middle East. Naval High Command tried to persuade Hitler of this. But his eyes were now turned only in one direction: towards the East.

On 28 April, Hitler had arrived back in Berlin for the last time the warlord returning in triumph from a lightning victory achieved at minimal cost. Though people in Germany responded in more muted fashion than they had done to the remarkable victories in the west, the Balkan campaign appeared to prove once again that their Leader was a military strategist of genius. His popularity was undiminished. But there were clouds on the horizon. People in their vast majority wanted, as they had done all along, peace: victorious peace, of course, but above all, peace. Their ears p.r.i.c.ked up when Hitler spoke of 'a hard year of struggle ahead of us' and, in his triumphant report to the Reichstag on the Balkan campaign on 4 May, of providing even better weapons for German soldiers 'next year'. Their worries were magnified by disturbing rumours of a deterioration in relations with the Soviet Union and of troops a.s.sembling on the eastern borders of the Reich.

What the ma.s.s of the people had, of course, no inkling of was that Hitler had already put out the directive for the invasion of the Soviet Union almost five months earlier. That directive, of 18 December, had laid down that preparations requiring longer than eight weeks should be completed by 15 May. But it had not stipulated a date for the actual attack. In his speech to military leaders on 27 March, immediately following news of the Yugoslav coup, Hitler had spoken of a delay of up to four weeks as a consequence of the need to take action in the Balkans. Back in Berlin after his stay in Monichkirchen, he lost no time a.s.sured by Halder of transport availability to take the troops to the east in arranging a new date for the start of 'Barbarossa' with Jodl: 22 June.

Towards the end of the war, casting round for scapegoats, Hitler looked back on the fateful delay as decisive in the failure of the Russian campaign. 'If we had attacked Russia already from 15 May onwards,' he claimed, '... we would have been in a position to conclude the eastern campaign before the onset of winter.' This was simplistic in the extreme as well as exaggerating the inroads made by the Balkan campaign on the timing of 'Barbarossa'. Weather conditions in an unusually wet spring in central Europe would almost certainly have ruled out a major attack before June perhaps even mid-June. Moreover, the major wear and tear on the German divisions engaged on the Balkan campaign came less from the belated inclusion of Yugoslavia than from the invasion of Greece planned over many months in conjunction with the planning for 'Barbarossa'. What did disadvantage the opening of 'Barbarossa' was the need for the redeployment at breakneck speed of divisions that had pushed on as far as southern Greece and now, without recovery time, had rapidly to be transported to their eastern positions. In addition, the damage caused to tanks by rutted and pot-holed roads in the Balkan hills required a huge effort to equip them again for the eastern campaign, and probably contributed to the high rate of mechanical failure during the invasion of Russia. Probably the most serious effect of the Balkan campaign on planning for 'Barbarossa' was the reduction of German forces on the southern flank, to the south of the Pripet marshes. But we have already seen that Hitler took the decision to that effect on 17 March, before the coup in Yugoslavia.

The weaknesses of the plan to invade the Soviet Union could not be laid at the door of the Italians, for their failure in Greece, or the Yugoslavs, for what Hitler saw as their treachery. The calamity, as it emerged, of 'Barbarossa' was located squarely in the nature of German war aims and ambitions. These were by no means solely a product of Hitler's ideological obsessiveness, megalomania, and indomitable willpower. Certainly, he had provided the driving-force. But he had met no resistance to speak of in the higher echelons of the regime. The army, in particular, had fully supported him in the turn to the east. And if Hitler's underestimation of Soviet military power was cra.s.s, it was an underestimation shared with his military leaders, who had lost none of their confidence that the war in the Soviet Union would be over long before winter.

V.

Meanwhile, Hitler was once more forced by events outside his control, this time close to home, to divert his attention from 'Barbarossa'.

When he stepped down from the rostrum at the end of his speech to Reichstag deputies on 4 May, he took his place, as usual, next to the Deputy Leader of the party, his most slavishly subservient follower, Rudolf He. Only a few days later, while Hitler was on the Obersalzberg, the astonishing news came through that his Deputy had taken a Messerschmitt 110 from Augsburg, flown off on his own en route for Britain, and disappeared. The news struck the Berghof like a bombsh.e.l.l. The first wish was that he was dead. 'It's to be hoped he's crashed into the sea,' Hitler was heard to say. Then came the announcement from London by then not unexpected that He had landed in Scotland and been taken captive. With the Russian campaign looming, Hitler was now faced with a domestic crisis.

On the afternoon of Sat.u.r.day, 10 May, He had said goodbye to his wife, Ilse, and young son, Wolf Rudiger, saying he would be back by Monday evening. From Munich he had travelled in his Mercedes to the Messerschmitt works in Augsburg. There, he changed into a fur-lined flying suit and Luftwaffe captain's jacket. (His alias on his mission was to be Hauptmann Alfred Horn.) Shortly before 6 p.m. on a clear, sunlit evening, his Messerschmitt 110 taxied on to the runway and took off. Shortly after 11 p.m., after navigating himself through Germany, across the North Sea, and over the Scottish Lowlands, He wriggled out of the c.o.c.kpit, abandoning his plane not far from Glasgow, and parachuted something he had never practised to the ground, injuring his leg as he left the plane.

Air defence had picked up the flight path, and observers had seen the plane's occupant bale out before it exploded in flames. A local Scottish farmhand, Donald McLean, was, however, first on the scene. He quickly established that the parachutist, struggling to get out of his harness, was unarmed. Asked whether he was British or German, He replied that he was German; his name was Hauptmann Alfred Horn, and he had an important message to give to the Duke of Hamilton. When Hamilton was informed in the early hours that a captured German pilot was demanding to speak to him, there was no reference to He, and the name of Hauptmann Alfred Horn meant nothing to the Duke. Puzzled, and very tired, Hamilton made arrangements to interview the mysterious airman next day, and went to bed.

The Duke, a wing-commander in the RAF, did eventually arrive from his base to talk to the German captive by mid-morning on 11 May. 'Hauptmann Horn' admitted that his true name was Rudolf He. The discussion was inconsequential, but convinced Hamilton that he was indeed face to face with He. By the evening he had flown south, summoned to report to Churchill at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, frequently used by the British Prime Minister as a weekend headquarters. By the following day, Monday 12 May, the professionals from the Foreign Office were involved. It was decided to send Ivone Kirkpatrick, from 1933 to 1938 First Secretary at the British Emba.s.sy in Berlin and a strong opponent of Appeas.e.m.e.nt, to interrogate He. Kirkpatrick and Hamilton left to fly to Scotland in the early evening. It was after midnight by the time they arrived at Buchanan Castle, near Loch Lomond, to confront the prisoner.

The first Hitler knew of He's disappearance was in the late morning of Sunday, 11 May, when Karl-Heinz Pintsch, one of the Deputy Fuhrer's adjutants, turned up at the Berghof. He was carrying an envelope containing a letter which He had given him shortly before taking off, entrusting him to deliver it personally to Hitler. With some difficulty, Pintsch managed to make plain to Hitler's adjutants that it was a matter of the utmost urgency, and that he had to speak personally to the Fuhrer. When Hitler read He's letter, the colour drained from his face. Albert Speer, busying himself with architectural sketches at the time, suddenly heard an 'almost animal-like scream'. Then Hitler bellowed, 'Bormann immediately! Where is Bormann?!'

In his letter, He had outlined his motives for flying to meet the Duke of Hamilton, and aspects of a plan for peace between Germany and Britain to be put before 'Barbarossa' was launched. He claimed he had made three previous attempts to reach Scotland, but had been forced to abort them because of mechanical problems with the aircraft. His aim was to bring about, through his own person, the realization of Hitler's long-standing idea of friendship with Britain which the Fuhrer himself, despite all efforts, had not succeeded in achieving. If the Fuhrer were not in agreement, then he could have him declared insane.

Goring residing at the time in his castle at Veldenstein near Nuremberg was telephoned straight away. Hitler was in no mood for small-talk. 'Goring, get here immediately,' he barked into the telephone. 'Something dreadful has happened.' Ribbentrop was also summoned. Hitler, meanwhile, had ordered Pintsch, the hapless bearer of ill tidings, and He's other adjutant, Alfred Leitgen, arrested, and spent his time marching up and down the hall in a rage. The mood in the Berghof was one of high tension and speculation. Amid the turmoil, Hitler was clear-sighted enough to act quickly to rule out any possible power-vacuum in the party leadership arising from He's defection. Next day, 12 May, he issued a terse edict stipulating that the former Office of the Deputy Leader would now be termed the Party Chancellery, and be subordinated to him personally. It would be led, as before, by Party Comrade Martin Bormann.

Hitler persuaded himself taking his lead from what He himself in his letter had suggested that the Deputy Fuhrer was indeed suffering from mental delusion, and insisted on making his 'madness' the centre-point of the extremely awkward communique which had to be put out to the German people. There was still no word of He's whereabouts when the communique was broadcast at 8 p.m. that evening. The communique mentioned the letter which had been left behind, showing 'in its confusion unfortunately the traces of a mental derangement', giving rise to fears that he had been the 'victim of hallucinations'. 'Under these circ.u.mstances,' the communique ended, it had to be presumed that 'Party Comrade He had somewhere on his journey crashed, that is, met with an accident.'

Goebbels, overlooked in the first round of Hitler's consultations, had by then also been summoned to the Obersalzberg. 'The Fuhrer is completely crushed,' the Propaganda Minister noted in his diary. 'Whata spectacle for the world: a mentally-deranged second man after the Fuhrer.' Meanwhile, early on 13 May, the BBC in London had brought the official announcement that He indeed found himself in British captivity.

The first German communique composed by Hitler the previous day would plainly no longer suffice. The new communique of 13 May acknowledged He's flight to Scotland, and capture. It held open the possibility that he had been entrapped by the British Secret Service. Affected by delusions, he had undertaken the action of an idealist without any notion of the consequences. His action, the communique ended, would alter nothing in the struggle against Britain.

The two communiques, forced ultimately to concede that the Deputy Fuhrer had flown to the enemy, and attributing the action to his mental state, bore all the hallmarks of a hasty and ill-judged attempt to play down the enormity of the scandal. Remarkably, Hitler had not turned to Goebbels for propaganda advice on how to present the debacle, but had relied instead at first on Otto Dietrich, the press chief. Goebbels was highly critical from the outset about the 'mental illness' explanation. A real difficulty had to be faced: how to explain that a man recognized for many years as mentally unbalanced had been left in such an important position in the running of the Reich. 'It's rightly asked how such an idiot could be the second man after the Fuhrer,' Goebbels remarked.

Goebbels felt the blow to prestige so deeply that he wanted to avoid being seen in public. 'It's like an awful dream,' he remarked. 'The Party will have to chew on it for a long time.' Hitler himself was occasionally caught in the line of fire of popular criticism. But, generally, much sympathy was voiced for the Fuhrer who now had this, on top of all his other worries, to contend with. As ever, it was presumed that, while he was working tirelessly on behalf of the nation, he was kept in the dark, let down, or betrayed by some of his most trusted chieftains.

This key element of the 'Fuhrer myth' was one that Hitler himself played to when, on 13 May, he addressed a rapidly arranged meeting of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter at the Berghof. There was an air of tension when Goring and Bormann, both grim-faced, entered the hall before Hitler made his appearance. Bormann read out He's final letter to Hitler. The feeling of shock and anger among those listening was palpable. Then Hitler came into the room. Much as in the last great crisis within the party leadership, in December 1932, he played masterfully on the theme of loyalty and betrayal. He had betrayed him, he stated. He appealed to the loyalty of his most trusted 'old fighters'. He declared that He had acted without his knowledge, was mentally ill, and had put the Reich in an impossible position with regard to its Axis partners. He had sent Ribbentrop to Rome to placate the Duce. He stressed once more He's long-standing odd behaviour (his dealings with astrologists and the like). He castigated the former Deputy Fuhrer's opposition to his own orders in continuing to practise flying. A few days before He's defection, he went on, the Deputy Fuhrer had come to see him and asked him pointedly whether he still stood to the programme of cooperation with England that he had laid out in Mein Kampf Mein Kampf. Hitler said he had, of course, reaffirmed this position.

When he had finished speaking, Hitler leaned against the big table near the window. According to one account, he was 'in tears and looked ten years older'. 'I have never seen the Fuhrer so deeply shocked,' Hans Frank told a gathering of his subordinates in the General Government a few days later. As he stood near the window, gradually all the sixty or seventy persons present rose from their chairs and gathered round him in a semi-circle. No one spoke a word. Then Goring provided an effusive statement of the devotion of all present. The intense anger was reserved only for He. The 'core' following had once more rallied around their Leader, as in the 'time of struggle', at a moment of crisis. The regime had suffered a ma.s.sive jolt; but the party leadership, its backbone, was still holding together.

All who saw Hitler in the days after the news of He's defection broke registered his profound shock, dismay, and anger at what he saw as betrayal. This has sometimes been interpreted, as it was also by a number of contemporaries, as clever acting on Hitler's part, concealing a plot which only he and He knew about. Hitler was indeed capable, as we have noted on more than one occasion, of putting on a theatrical performance. But if this was acting, it was of Hollywood-Oscar calibre.

That the Deputy Fuhrer had been captured in Britain was something that shook the regime to its foundations. As Goebbels sarcastically pointed out, it never appears to have occurred to He that this could be the outcome of his 'mission'. It is hard to imagine that it would not have crossed Hitler's mind, had he been engaged in a plot. But it would have been entirely out of character for Hitler to have involved himself in such a hare-brained scheme. His own acute sensitivity towards any potential threat to his own prestige, towards being made to look foolish in the eyes of his people and the outside world, would itself have been sufficient to have ruled out the notion of sending He on a one-man peace-mission to Britain. Moreover, there was every reason, from his own point of view, not not to have become involved and to have most categorically prohibited what He had in mind. to have become involved and to have most categorically prohibited what He had in mind.

The chances of the He flight succeeding were so remote that Hitler would not conceivably have entertained the prospect. And had he done so, it is hard to believe that he would have settled on He as his emissary. He had not been party to the planning of 'Barbarossa'. He had been little in Hitler's presence over the previous months. His competence was confined strictly to party matters. He had no experience in foreign affairs. And he had never been entrusted previously with any delicate diplomatic negotiations.

In any case, Hitler's motive for contemplating a secret mission such as He attempted to carry out would be difficult to grasp. For months. .h.i.tler had been single-mindedly preparing to attack and destroy the Soviet Union precisely in order to force Britain out of the war. He and his generals were confident that the Soviet Union would be comprehensively defeated by the autumn. The timetable for the attack left no room for manoeuvre. The last thing Hitler wanted was any hold-up through diplomatic complications arising from the intercession by He a few weeks before the invasion was to be launched. Had 'Barbarossa' not taken place before the end of June, it would have had to be postponed to the following year. For Hitler, this would have been unthinkable. He was well aware that there were those in the British establishment who would still prefer to sue for peace. He expected them to do so after after, not before before, 'Barbarossa'.

Rudolf He at no time, whether during his interrogations after landing in Scotland, in discussions with his fellow-captives while awaiting trial in Nuremberg, or during his long internment in Spandau, implicated Hitler. His story never wavered from the one he gave to Ivone Kirkpatrick at his first interrogation on 13 May 1941. 'He had come here,' so Kirkpatrick summed up in his report, 'without the knowledge of Hitler in order to convince responsible persons that since England could not win the war, the wisest course was to make peace now.'

He's British interlocutors rapidly reached the conclusion that he had nothing to offer which went beyond Hitler's public statements, notably his 'peace appeal' before the Reichstag on 19 July 1940. Kirkpatrick concluded his report: 'He does not seem ... to be in the near counsels of the German government as regards operations; and he is not likely to possess more secret information than he could glean in the course of conversations with Hitler and others.' If, in the light of this, He was following out orders from Hitler himself, he would have had to be as supreme an actor and to have continued to be so for the next four decades as was, reputedly, the Leader he so revered. But, then, to what end? He said nothing that Hitler had not publicly on a number of occasions stated himself. He brought no new negotiating position. It was as if he presumed that the mere fact of the Deputy Fuhrer voluntarily through an act involving personal courage putting himself in the hands of the enemy was enough to have made the British government see the good will of the Fuhrer, the earnest intentions behind his aim of cooperation with Britain against Bolshevism, and the need to overthrow the Churchill 'war-faction' and settle amicably. The naivety of such thinking points heavily in the direction of an attempt inspired by no one but the idealistic, other-worldly, and muddle-headed He.

His own motives were not more mysterious or profound than they appeared. He had seen over a number of years, but especially since the war had begun, his access to Hitler strongly reduced. His nominal subordinate, Martin Bormann, had in effect been usurping his position, always in the Fuhrer's company, always able to put in a word here or there, always able to translate his wishes into action. A spectacular action to accomplish what the Fuhrer had been striving for over many years would transform his status overnight, turning 'Fraulein Anna', as he was disparagingly dubbed by some in the party, into a national hero.

He had remained highly influenced by Karl Haushofer his former teacher and the leading exponent of geopolitical theories which had influenced the formation of Hitler's ideas of Lebensraum Lebensraum and his son Albrecht (who later became closely involved with resistance groups). Their views had reinforced his belief that everything must be done to prevent the undermining of the 'mission' that Hitler had laid out almost two decades earlier: the attack on Bolshevism and his son Albrecht (who later became closely involved with resistance groups). Their views had reinforced his belief that everything must be done to prevent the undermining of the 'mission' that Hitler had laid out almost two decades earlier: the attack on Bolshevism together with together with, not in opposition to, Great Britain. Albrecht Haushofer had made several attempts to contact the Duke of Hamilton, whom he had met in Berlin in 1936, but had received no replies to his letters. Hamilton himself strenuously denied, with justification it seems, receiving the letters, and also denied He's claim to have met him at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

By August 1940, when he began to plan his own intervention, He was deeply disappointed in the British response to the 'peace-terms' that Hitler had offered. He was aware, too, that Hitler was by this time thinking of attacking the Soviet Union even before Britain was willing to 'see sense' and agree to terms. The original strategy lay thus in tatters. He saw his role as that of the Fuhrer's most faithful paladin, now destined to restore through his personal intervention the opportunity to save Europe from Bolshevism a unique chance wantonly cast away by Churchill's 'warmongering' clique which had taken over the British government. He acted without Hitler's knowledge, but in deep (if confused) belief that he was carrying out his wishes.

VI.

By the middle of May, after a week preoccupied by the He affair, Hitler could begin to turn his attention back to 'Barbarossa'. But the end of what had been a troubled month brought further gloom to the Berghof with the news on 27 May of the loss of the powerful battleship Bismarck Bismarck, sunk in the Atlantic after a fierce clash with British warships and planes. Some 2,300 sailors went down with the ship. Hitler did not brood on the human loss. His fury was directed at the naval leadership for unnecessarily exposing the vessel to enemy attack a huge risk, he had thought, for potentially little gain.

Meanwhile, the ideological preparations for 'Barbarossa' were now rapidly taking concrete shape. Hitler needed to do nothing more in this regard. He had laid down the guidelines in March. It was during May that Heydrich a.s.sembled the four Einsatzgruppen ('task groups') which would accompany the army into the Soviet Union. Each of the Einsatzgruppen comprised between 600 and 1,000 men (drawn largely from varying branches of the police organization, augmented by the Waffen-SS) and was divided into four or five Einsatzkommandos ('task forces') or Sonderkommandos ('special forces'). The middle-ranking commanders for the most part had an educated background. Highly qualified academics, civil servants, lawyers, a Protestant pastor, and even an opera singer, were among them. The top leadership was drawn almost exclusively from the Security Police and SD. Like the leaders of the Reich Security Head Office, they were in the main well-educated men, of the generation, just too young to have fought in the First World War, that had sucked in volkisch volkisch ideals in German universities during the 1920s. During the second half of May, the 3,000 or so men selected for the Einsatzgruppen gathered in Pretzsch, north-east of Leipzig, where the Border Police School served as their base for the ideological training that would last until the launch of 'Barbarossa'. Heydrich addressed them on a number of occasions. He avoided narrow precision in describing their target-groups when they entered the Soviet Union. But his meaning was, nevertheless, plain. He mentioned that Jewry was the source of Bolshevism in the East and had to be eradicated in accordance with the Fuhrer's aims. And he told them that Communist functionaries and activists, Jews, Gypsies, saboteurs, and agents endangered the security of the troops and were to be executed forthwith. By 22 June the genocidal whirlwind was ready to blow. ideals in German universities during the 1920s. During the second half of May, the 3,000 or so men selected for the Einsatzgruppen gathered in Pretzsch, north-east of Leipzig, where the Border Police School served as their base for the ideological training that would last until the launch of 'Barbarossa'. Heydrich addressed them on a number of occasions. He avoided narrow precision in describing their target-groups when they entered the Soviet Union. But his meaning was, nevertheless, plain. He mentioned that Jewry was the source of Bolshevism in the East and had to be eradicated in accordance with the Fuhrer's aims. And he told them that Communist functionaries and activists, Jews, Gypsies, saboteurs, and agents endangered the security of the troops and were to be executed forthwith. By 22 June the genocidal whirlwind was ready to blow.

'Operation Barbarossa rolls on further,' recorded Goebbels in his diary on 31 May. 'Now the first big wave of camouflage goes into action. The entire state and military apparatus is being mobilized. Only a few people are informed about the true background.' Apart from Goebbels and Ribbentrop, ministers of government departments were kept in the dark. Goebbels's own ministry had to play up the theme of invasion of Britain. Fourteen army divisions were to be moved westwards to give some semblance of reality to the charade.

As part of the subterfuge that action was to be expected in the West in the West while preparations for 'Barbarossa' were moving into top gear, Hitler hurriedly arranged another meeting with Mussolini on the Brenner Pa.s.s for 2 June. It was little wonder that the Duce could not understand the reason for the hastily devised talks. Hitler's closest Axis partner was unwittingly playing his part in an elaborate game of bluff. while preparations for 'Barbarossa' were moving into top gear, Hitler hurriedly arranged another meeting with Mussolini on the Brenner Pa.s.s for 2 June. It was little wonder that the Duce could not understand the reason for the hastily devised talks. Hitler's closest Axis partner was unwittingly playing his part in an elaborate game of bluff.

Hitler did not mention a word of 'Barbarossa' to his Italian friends. The published communique simply stated that the Fuhrer and Duce had held friendly discussions lasting several hours on the political situation. The deception had been successful. When he met the j.a.panese Amba.s.sador Oshima the day after his talks with Mussolini, Hitler dropped a broad hint which was correctly understood that conflict with the Soviet Union in the near future was unavoidable. But the only foreign statesman to whom he was prepared to divulge more than hints was the Romanian leader Marshal Antonescu, when Hitler met him in Munich on 12 June. Antonescu had to be put broadly in the picture. After all, Hitler was relying on Romanian troops for support on the southern flank. Antonescu was more than happy to comply. He volunteered his forces without Hitler having to ask. When 22 June arrived, he would proclaim to his people a 'holy war' against the Soviet Union. The bait of recovering Bessarabia and North Bukovina, together with the acquisition of parts of the Ukraine, was sufficiently tempting to the Romanian dictator.

On 14 June Hitler held his last major military conference before the start of 'Barbarossa'. The generals arrived at staggered times at the Reich Chancellery to allay suspicion that something major was afoot. Hitler went over the reasons for attacking Russia. Once again, he avowed his confidence that the collapse of the Soviet Union would induce Britain to come to terms. He emphasized that the war was a war against Bolshevism. The Russians would fight hard and put up tough resistance. Heavy air-raids had to be expected. But the Luftwaffe would attain quick successes and smooth the advance of the land forces. The worst of the fighting would be over in about six weeks. But every soldier had to know what he was fighting for: the destruction of Bolshevism. If the war were to be lost, then Europe would be bolshevized. Most of the generals had concerns about opening up the two-front war, the avoidance of which had been a premiss of military planning. But they did not voice any objections. Brauchitsch and Halder did not speak a word.

Two days later Hitler summoned Goebbels to the Reich Chancellery he was told to enter through a back door in order not to raise suspicions to explain the situation. The attack on the Soviet Union would be the most ma.s.sive history had ever seen, he stated. There would be no repeat of Napoleon (a comment perhaps betraying precisely those subconscious fears of history indeed repeating itself ). The Russians had around 180200 divisions, about as many as the Germans, he said, though there was no comparison in quality. And the fact that they were ma.s.sed on the Reich borders was a great advantage. 'They would be smoothly rolled up.' Hitler thought 'the action' would take about four months. Goebbels estimated even less time would be needed: 'Bolshevism will collapse like a house of cards,' he thought.

On 21 June Hitler dictated the proclamation to the German people to be read out the next day. He was by this time looking over-tired, and was in a highly nervous state, pacing up and down, apprehensive, involving himself in the minutiae of propaganda such as the fanfares that were to be played over the radio to announce German victories. Goebbels was called to see him in the evening. They discussed the proclamation, to which Goebbels added a few suggestions. They marched up and down his rooms for three hours. They tried out the new fanfares for an hour. Hitler gradually relaxed somewhat. 'The Fuhrer is freed from a nightmare the closer the decision comes,' noted Goebbels. 'It's always so with him.' Once more Goebbels returned to the inner necessity of the coming conflict, of which Hitler had convinced himself: 'There is nothing for it than to attack,' he wrote, summing up Hitler's thoughts. 'This cancerous growth has to be burned out. Stalin will fall.' Since July the previous year, Hitler indicated, he had worked on the preparations for what was about to take place. Now the moment had arrived. Everything had been done which could have been done. 'The fortune of war must now decide.' At 2.30 a.m., Hitler finally decided it was time to s.n.a.t.c.h a few hours' sleep. 'Barbarossa' was due to begin within the next hour.

Goebbels was too nervous to follow his example. At 5.30 a.m., just over two hours after the German guns had opened fire on all borders, the new fanfares sounded over German radios. Goebbels read out Hitler's proclamation. It amounted to a lengthy pseudo-historical justification for German preventive action. The Jewish-Bolshevik rulers in Moscow had sought for two decades to destroy not only Germany, but the whole of Europe. Hitler had been forced, he claimed, through British encirclement policy to take the bitter step of entering the 1939 Pact. But since then the Soviet threat had magnified. At present there were 160 Russian divisions ma.s.sed on the German borders. 'The hour has now therefore arrived,' Hitler declared, 'to counter this conspiracy of the Jewish-Anglo-Saxon warmongers and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevik headquarters in Moscow.' A slightly amended proclamation went out to the soldiers swarming over the border and marching into Russia.

On 21 June, Hitler had at last composed a letter to his chief ally, Benito Mussolini, belatedly explaining and justifying his reasons for attacking the Soviet Union. Hitler ended his letter with sentences which, as with his comments to Goebbels, give insight into his mentality on the eve of the t.i.tanic contest: 'In conclusion, let me say one more thing, Duce. Since I struggled through to this decision, I again feel spiritually free. The partnership with the Soviet Union, in spite of the complete sincerity of the efforts to bring about a final conciliation, was nevertheless often very irksome to me, for in some way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts, and my former obligations. I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.'

The most destructive and barbaric war in the history of mankind was beginning. It was the war that Hitler had wanted since the 1920s the war against Bolshevism. It was the showdown. He had come to it by a roundabout route. But, finally, Hitler's war was there: a reality.

20.

Showdown

I.

At dawn on 22 June over 3 million German troops advanced over the borders and into Soviet territory. By a quirk of history, as Goebbels noted somewhat uneasily, it was exactly the same date on which Napoleon's Grand Army had marched on Russia 129 years earlier. The modern invaders deployed over 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motorized vehicles (including armoured cars), 7,000 artillery pieces, and 2,500 aircraft. Not all their transport was mechanized; as in Napoleon's day, they also made use of horses 625,000 of them. Facing the invading armies, arrayed on the western frontiers of the USSR, were nearly 3 million Soviet soldiers, backed by a number of tanks now estimated to have been as many as 1415,000 (almost 2,000 of them the most modern designs), over 34,000 artillery pieces, and 89,000 fighter-planes. The scale of the t.i.tanic clash now beginning, which would chiefly determine the outcome of the Second World War and, beyond that, the shape of Europe for nearly half a century, almost defies the imagination.

Despite the numerical advantage in weaponry of the defending Soviet armies, the early stages of the attack appeared to endorse all the optimism of Hitler and his General Staff about the inferiority of their Bolshevik enemies and the speed with which complete victory could be attained. The three-p.r.o.nged attack led by Field-Marshals Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb in the north, Fedor von Bock in the centre, and Gerd von Rundstedt in the south initially made astonishing advances. By the end of the first week of July Lithuania and Latvia were in German hands. Leeb's advance in the north, with Leningrad as the target, had reached as far as Ostrov. Army Group Centre had pushed even farther. Much of White Russia had been taken. Minsk was encircled. Bock's advancing armies already had the city of Smolensk in their sights. Further south, by mid-July Rundstedt's troops had captured Zitomir and Berdicev.

The Soviet calamity was immense and avoidable. Even as the German tanks were rolling forwards, Stalin still thought Hitler was bluffing, that he would not dare attack the Soviet Union until he had finished with Britain. He had antic.i.p.ated some German territorial demands but was confident that, if necessary, negotiations could stave off an attack in 1941 at least. Stalin's bungling interference and military incompetence had combined with the fear and servility of his generals and the limitations of the inflexible Soviet strategic concept to rule out undertaking the necessary precautions to create defensive dispositions and fight a rearguard action. Instead, whole armies were left in exposed positions, easy prey for the pincer movements of the rapidly advancing panzer armies. In a whole series of huge encirclements, the Red Army suffered staggering losses of men and equipment. By the autumn, some 3 million soldiers had trudged in long, dismal columns into German captivity. A high proportion would suffer terrible inhumanity in the hands of their captors, and not return. Roughly the same number had by then been wounded or killed. The barbaric character of the conflict, evident from its first day, had been determined, as we have seen, by the German plans for a 'war of annihilation' that had taken shape since March. Soviet captives were not treated as soldierly comrades, Geneva conventions were regarded as non-applicable, political commissars a category interpreted in the widest sense were peremptorily shot, the civilian population subjected to the cruellest reprisals. Atrocities were not confined to the actions of the Wehrmacht. On the Soviet side, Stalin recovered sufficiently from his trauma at the invasion to proclaim that the conflict was no ordinary war, but a 'great patriotic war' against the invaders. It was necessary, he declared, to form partisan groups to organize 'merciless battle'. Mutual fear of capture fed rapidly and directly into the spiralling barbarization on the eastern front. But it did not cause the barbarization in the first place. The driving-force was the n.a.z.i ideological drive to extirpate 'Jewish-Bolshevism'.

Already on the first day of the invasion reports began reaching Berlin of up to 1,000 Soviet planes destroyed and Brest-Litowsk taken by the advancing trooops. 'We'll soon pull it off,' wrote Goebbels in his diary. He immediately added: 'We must soon pull it off. Among the people there's a somewhat depressed mood. The people want peace ... Every new theatre of war causes concern and worry.'

The main author of the most deadly clash of the century, which in almost four years of its duration would produce an unimaginable harvest of sorrow for families throughout central and eastern Europe and a level of destruction never experienced in human history, left Berlin around midday on 23 June. Hitler was setting out with his entourage for his new field headquarters in East Prussia. The presumption was, as it had been in earlier campaigns, that he would be there a few weeks, make a tour of newly conquered areas, then return to Berlin. This was only one of his miscalculations. The 'Wolf 's Lair' (Wolfsschanze) was to be his home in the main for the next three and a half years. He would finally leave it a broken man in a broken country.

The Wolf 's Lair another play on Hitler's favourite pseudonym from the 1920s, when he liked to call himself 'Wolf' (allegedly the meaning of 'Adolf', and implying strength) was hidden away in the gloomy Masurian woods, about eight kilometres from the small town of Rastenburg. Hitler and his accompaniment arrived there late in the evening of 23 June. The new surroundings were not greatly welcoming. The centre-point consisted of ten bunkers, erected over the winter, camouflaged and in parts protected against air-raids by two metres thickness of concrete. Hitler's bunker was at the northern end of the complex. All its windows faced north so that he could avoid the sun streaming in. There were rooms big enough for military conferences in Hitler's and Keitel's bunkers, and a barracks with a dining-hall for around twenty people. Another complex known as HQ Area 2 a little distance away, surrounded by barbed wire and hardly visible from the road, housed the Wehrmacht Operations Staff under Warlimont. The army headquarters, where Brauchitsch and Halder were based, were situated a few kilometres to the north-east. Goring designated by Hitler on 29 June to be his successor in the event of his death and the Luftwaffe staff stayed in their special trains.

Hitler's part of the Fuhrer Headquarters, known as 'Security Zone One', swiftly developed its own daily rhythm. The central event was the 'situation briefing' at noon in the bunker shared by Keitel and Jodl. This frequently ran on as long as two hours. Brauchitsch, Halder, and Colonel Adolf Heusinger, chief of the army's Operations Department, attended once or twice a week. The briefing was followed by a lengthy lunch, beginning in these days for the most part punctually at 2 p.m., Hitler confining himself as always strictly to a non-meat diet. Any audiences that he had on non-military matters were arranged for the afternoons. Around 5 p.m. he would call in his secretaries for coffee. A special word of praise was bestowed on the one who could eat most cakes. The second military briefing, given by Jodl, followed at 6 p.m. The evening meal took place at 7.30 p.m., often lasting two hours. Afterwards there were films. The final part of the routine was the gathering of secretaries, adjutants, and guests for tea, to the accompaniment of Hitler's late-night monologues. Those who could s.n.a.t.c.hed a nap some time during the afternoon so they could keep their eyes open in the early hours. Sometimes, it was daylight by the time the nocturnal discussions came to an end.

Hitler always sat in the same place at meals, with his back to the window, flanked by Press Chief Dietrich and Jodl, with Keitel, Bormann, and General Karl Heinrich Bodenschatz, Goring's liaison officer, opposite him. Generals, staff officers, adjutants, Hitler's doctors, and any guests visiting the Fuhrer Headquarters made up the rest of the complement. The atmosphere was good in these early days, and not too formal. The mood at this time was still generally optimistic. Life in the FHQ had not yet reached the stage where it could be described by Jodl as half-way 'between a monastery and a concentration camp'.

Two of Hitler's secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, had also accompanied him to his field headquarters. They had as good as nothing to do. Sleeping, eating, drinking, and chatting filled up most of their day. Much of their energy was spent trying to swat away a constant plague of midges. Hitler complained that his advisers who had picked the spot had chosen 'the most swampy, midge-infested, and climatically unfavourable area for him', and joked that he would have to send in the Luftwaffe on the midge-hunt. But 'the chief ' was generally in a good mood during the first part of the Russian campaign.

As in Berlin or at the Berghof, a word during meals on one of Hitler's favourite topics could easily trigger an hour-long monologue. In these early days, he usually faced a big map of the Soviet Union pinned to the wall. At the drop of a hat, he would launch into yet another harangue about the danger that Bolshevism signified for Europe, and how to wait another year would have been too late. On one occasion, his secretaries heard Hitler, as he stood in front of a big map of Europe, point to the Russian capital and say: 'In four weeks we'll be in Moscow. Moscow will be razed to the ground.' Everything had gone much better than could have been imagined, he remarked. They had been lucky that the Russians had placed their troops on the borders and not pulled the German armies deep into their country, which would have caused difficulties with supplies. Two-thirds of the Bolshevik armed forces and five-sixths of the tanks and aircraft were destroyed or severely damaged, he told Goebbels, on the Propaganda Minister's first visit to Fuhrer Headquarters on 8 July. After a.s.sessing the military situation in detail with his Wehrmacht advisers, Goebbels noted, the Fuhrer's conclusion was 'that the war in the East was in the main already won'. There could be no notion of peace terms with the Kremlin. (He would think differently about this only a month later.) Bolshevism would be wiped out and Russia broken up into its component parts, deprived of any intellectual, political, or economic centre. j.a.pan would attack the Soviet Union from the east in a matter of weeks. He foresaw England's fall 'with a sleepwalker's certainty'.

News came in of 3,500 aircraft and over 1,000 Soviet tanks destroyed. But there was other news of fanatical fighting by Soviet soldiers who feared the worst if they surrendered. Hitler was to tell the j.a.panese Amba.s.sador Oshima on 14 July that 'our enemies are not human beings any more, they are beasts'. It was, then, doubtless echoing her 'chief' and the general atmosphere in FHQ, when Christa Schroeder remarked to a friend that 'from all previous experience it can be said to be a fight against wild animals'.

Hitler had permitted no Wehrmacht reports during the very first days of the campaign. But Sunday, 29 June a week after the attack had started was, as Goebbels described it, 'the day of the special announcements'. Twelve of them altogether, each introduced by the 'Russian Fanfare' based on Liszt's 'Les Preludes', were broadcast, beginning at 11 a.m. that morning. Dominance in the air had been attained, the reports proclaimed. Grodno, Brest-Litowsk, Vilna, Kowno, and Dunaburg were in German hands. Two Soviet armies were encircled at Bialystok. Minsk had been taken. The Russians had lost, it was announced, 2,233 tanks and 4,107 aircraft. Enormous quant.i.ties of materiel materiel had been captured. Vast numbers of prisoners had been taken. But the popular reception in Germany was less enthusiastic than had been hoped. People rapidly tired of the special announcements, one after the other, and were sceptical about the propaganda. Instead of being excited, their senses were dulled. Goebbels was furious at the OKW's presentation, and vowed that it would never be repeated. had been captured. Vast numbers of prisoners had been taken. But the popular reception in Germany was less enthusiastic than had been hoped. People rapidly tired of the special announcements, one after the other, and were sceptical about the propaganda. Instead of being excited, their senses were dulled. Goebbels was furious at the OKW's presentation, and vowed that it would never be repeated.

The invasion of the Soviet Union was presented to the German public as a preventive war. This had been undertaken by the Fuhrer, so Goebbels's directives to the press ran, to head off at the last minute the threat to the Reich and the entire western culture through the treachery of 'Jewish-Bolshevism'. At any moment the Bolsheviks had been planning to strike against the Reich and to overrun and destroy Europe. Only the Fuhrer's bold action had prevented this. More extraordinary than this propaganda lie is the fact that Hitler and Goebbels had convinced themselves of its truth. Fully aware of its falseness, they had to play out a fiction even among themselves to justify the unprovoked decision to attack and utterly destroy the Soviet Union.

By the end of June the German encirclements at Bialystok and Minsk had produced the astonishing toll of 324,000 Red Army prisoners, 3,300 tanks, and 1,800 artillery pieces captured or destroyed. Little over a fortnight later the end of the battle for Smolensk doubled these figures. Already by the second day of the campaign, German estimates put numbers of aircraft shot down or destroyed on the ground at 2,500. When Goring expressed doubts at the figures they were checked and found to be 2300 below the actual total. After a month of fighting, the figure for aircraft destroyed had reached 7,564. By early July it was estimated that eighty-nine out of 164 Soviet divisions had been entirely or partially destroyed, and that only nine out of twenty-nine tank divisions of the Red Army were still fit for combat.

The scale of underestimation of Soviet fighting potential would soon come as a severe shock. But in early July it was hardly surprising if the feeling in the German military leadership was that 'Barbarossa' was on course for complete victory, that the campaign would be over, as predicted, before the winter. On 3 July Halder summed up his verdict in words which would come to haunt him: 'It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the s.p.a.ce of two weeks.' He did at least have the foresight to acknowledge that this did not mean that it was over: 'The sheer geographical vastness of the country and the stubbornness of the resistance, which is carried on with all means, will claim our efforts for many more weeks to come.'

II.

The territorial gains brought about by the spectacular successes of the Wehrmacht in the first phase of 'Barbarossa' gave Hitler command over a greater extent of the European continent than any ruler since Napoleon. His rambling, discursive outpourings, in his lunchtime or late-night monologues to his regular retinue, were the purest expression of unbounded, megalomaniac power and breathtaking inhumanity. They were the face of the future in the vast new eastern empire, as he saw it.

'The beauty of the Crimea,' he rhapsodized late at night on 5 July 1941, would be made accessible to Germans through a motorway. It would be their version of the Italian or French riviera. Every German, after the war, he remarked, had to have the chance with his 'People's Car' (Volkswagen) personally to see the conquered territories, since he would have 'to be ready if need be to fight for them'. The mistake of the pre-war era of limiting the colonial idea to the property of a few capitalists or companies could not be repeated. Roads would be more important in the future than the railways for pa.s.senger transport. Only through travel by road could a country be known, he a.s.serted.

He was asked whether it would be enough to stretch the conquests to the Urals. 'Initially', that would suffice, he replied. But Bolshevism had to be exterminated, and it would be necessary to carry out expeditions from there to eradicate anynewcentres that might develop. 'St Petersburg' as he called Leningrad 'was as a city incomparably more beautiful than Moscow'. But its fate, he decided, was to be identical to that of the capital. 'An example was to be made here, and the city will disappear completely from the earth.' It was to be sealed off, bombarded, and starved out. He imagined, too, that little would ultimately be left of Kiev. He saw the destruction of Soviet cities as the basis for lasting German power in the conquered territories. No military power was to be tolerated within 300 kilometres east of the Urals. 'The border between Europe and Asia,' he stated, 'is not the Urals but the place where the settlements of Germanic types of people stop and pure Slavdom begins. It is our task to push this border as far as possible to the east, and if necessary beyond the Urals.'

Hitler thought the Russian people fit for nothing but hard work under coercion. Their natural and desired condition was one of general disorganization. 'The Ukrainians,' he remarked on another occasion, 'were every bit as idle, disorganized, and nihilistically asiatic as the Greater Russians.' To speak of any sort of work ethic was pointless. All they understood was 'the whip'. He admired Stalin's brutality. The Soviet dictator, he thought, was 'one of the greatest living human beings since, if only through the harshest compulsion, he had succeeded in welding a state out of this Slavic rabbit-family'. He described 'the sly Caucasian' as 'one of the most extraordinary figures of world history', who scarcely ever left his office but could rule from there through a subservient bureaucracy.

Hitler's model for domination and exploitation remained the British Empire. His inspiration for the future rule of his master-race was the Raj. He voiced his admiration on many occasions for the way such a small country as Great Britain had been able to establish its rule throughout the world in a huge colonial empire. British rule in India in particular showed what Germany could do in Russia. It must be possible to control the eastern territory with quarter of a million men, he stated. With that number the British ruled 400 million Indians. Russia would always be dominated by German rulers. They must see to it that the ma.s.ses were educated to do no more than read road signs, though a reasonable living standard for them was in the German interest. The south of the Ukraine, in particular the Crimea, would be settled by German farmer-soldiers. He would have no worries at all about deporting the existing population somewhere or other to make room for them. The vision was of a latter-day feudal type of settlement: there would be a standing army of 12 million men, providing some 3040,000 every year for use when their twelve-year service was completed. If they were sons of farmers, they would be given a farmstead, fully equipped, by the Reich in return for their twelve years of military service. They would also be provided with weapons. The only condition was that they must marry country-not town-girls. German peasants would live in beautiful settlements, linked by good roads to the nearest town. Beyond this would be 'the other world', where the Russians lived under German subjugation. Should there be a revolution, 'all we need to do is drop a few bombs on their cities and the business will be over'. After ten years, he foresaw, there would be a German elite, to be counted on when there were new tasks to be undertaken. 'A new type of man will come to the fore, real master-types, who of course can't be used in the west: viceroys.' German administrators would be housed in splendid buildings; the governors would live in 'palaces'.

His musings on the prospect of a German equivalent of India continued on three successive days and nights from 811 August. India had given the English pride. The vast s.p.a.ces had obliged them to rule millions with only a few men. 'What India was for England, the eastern territory will be for us,' he declared.

For Hitler, India was the heart of an Empire that had brought Britain not only power, but prosperity. Ruthless economic exploitation had always been central to his dream of the German empire in the east. Now, it seemed, that dream would soon become reality. 'The Ukraine and then the Volga basin will one day be the granaries of Europe,' he foresaw. 'And we'll also provide Europe with iron. If Sweden won't supply it one of these days, good, then we'll take it from the east. Belgian industry can exchange its products cheap consumer wares for corn from these areas. From Thuringia and the Harz mountains, for example, we can remove our poor working-cla.s.s families to give them big stretches of land.' 'We'll be an exporter of corn for all in Europe who need it,' he went on, a month later. 'In the Crimea we will have citrus fruits, rubber plants (with 40,000 hectares we'll make ourselves independent), and cotton. The Pripet marches will give us reeds. We will deliver to the Ukrainians head-scarves, gla.s.s chains as jewellery, and whatever else colonial peoples like. We Germans that's the main thing must form a closed community like a fortress. The lowest stable-lad must be superior to any of the natives ...'

Autarky, in Hitler's thinking, was the basis of security. And the conquest of the East, as he had repeatedly stated in the mid-1920s, would now offer Germany that security. 'The struggle for hegemony in the world will be decided for Europe through the occupation of the Russian s.p.a.ce,' he told his entourage in mid-September. 'This makes Europe the firmest place in the world against the threat of blockade.' He returned to the theme a few days later. 'As soon as I recognize a raw material as important for the war, I put every effort into making us independent in it. Iron, coal, oil, corn, livestock, wood we must have them at our disposal ... Today I can say: Europe is self-sufficient, as long as we just prevent another mammoth state existing which could utilize European civilization to mobilize Asia against us.' He compared, as he had frequently done many years earlier, the benefits of autarky with the international market economy and the mistakes, as he saw them, made by Britain and America through their dependence upon exports and overseas markets, bringing cut-throat compet.i.tion, corresponding high tariffs and production costs, and unemployment. Britain had increased unemployment and impoverished its working cla.s.s by the error of industrializing India, he continued. Germany was not tied to exports, and this had meant that it was the only country without unemployment. 'The country that we are now opening up is for us only a raw-material source and marketing area, not a field for industrial production ... We won't need any more to look for an active market in the Far East. Here is our market. We simply need to secure it. We'll deliver cotton goods, cooking-pots, all simple articles for satisfying the demand for the necessities of life. We won't be able to produce anything like so much as can be marketed here. I see there great possibilities for the build-up of a strong Reich, a true world-power ... For the next few hundred years we will have a field of activity without equal.'

Hitler was blunt about his justification for conquering this territory: might was right. A culturally superior people, deprived of 'living s.p.a.ce', needed no further justification. It was for him, as always, a matter of the 'laws of nature'. 'If I harm the Russians now, then for the reason that they would otherwise harm me,' he declared. 'The dear G.o.d, once again, makes it like that. He suddenly casts the ma.s.ses of humanity on to the earth and each one has to look after himself and how he gets through. One person takes something away from the other. And at the end you can only say that the stronger wins. That is after all the most sensible order of things.'

There would be no end of the struggle in the east, that was clear, even after a German victory. Hitler spoke of building an 'Eastern Wall' along the Urals as a barrier against sudden inroads from the 'dangerous human reservoir' in Asia. It would be no conventional fortification, but a live wall built of the soldier-farmers who would form the new eastern settlers. 'A permanent border struggle in the east will produce a solid stock and prevent us from sinking back into the softness of a state system based purely on Europe.' War was for Hitler the essence of human activity. 'What meeting a man means for a girl,' he declared, 'war meant for him.' He referred back frequently in these weeks to his own experiences in the First World War, probably the most formative of his life. Looking at the newsreel of the 'Battle of Kiev', he was completely gripped by 'a heroic epic such as there had never previously been'. 'I'm immensely happy to have experienced the war in this way,' he added. If he could wish the German people one thing, he remarked on another occasion, it would be to have a war every fifteen to twenty years. If reproached for the loss of 200,000 lives, he would reply that he had enlarged the German nation by 2 million, and felt justified in demanding the sacrifice of the lives of a tenth. 'Life is horrible. Coming into being, existing, and pa.s.sing away, there's always a killing. Everything that is born must later die. Whether it's through illness, accident, or war, that remains the same.'

Hitler's notions of a social 'new order' have to be placed in this setting of conquest, ruthless exploitation, the right of the powerful, racial dominance, and more or less permanent war in a world where life was cheap and readily expendable. His ideas often had their roots in the resentment that still smouldered at the way his own 'talents' had been left unrecognized or the disadvantages of his own social status compared with the privileges of the high-born and well-to-do. Thus he advocated free education, funded by the state, for all talented youngsters. Workers would have annual holidays and could expect once or twice in their lives to go on a sea-cruise. He criticizd the distinctions between different cla.s.ses of pa.s.sengers on such cruise ships. And he approved of the introduction of the same food for both officers and men in the army. Hitler might appear to have been promoting ideas of a modern, mobile, cla.s.sless society, abolishing privilege and resting solely upon achievement. But the central tenet remained race, to which all else was subordinated. Thus, in the east, he said, all Germans would travel in the upholstered first- or second-cla.s.s railway carriages to separate them from the native population. It was a social vision which could have obvious attractions for many members of the would-be master-race. The image was of a cornucopia of wealth flowing into the Reich from the east. The Reich would be linked to the new frontiers by motorways cutting through the endless steppes and the enormous Russian s.p.a.ces. Prosperity and power would be secured through the new breed of supermen who lorded it over the downtrodden Slav ma.s.ses.

The vision, to those who heard Hitler describe it, appeared excitingly modern: a break with traditional cla.s.s- and status-bound hierarchies to a society where talent had its reward and there was prosperity for all for all Germans, that is. Indeed, elements of Hitler's thinking were unquestionably modern. He looked, for instance, to the benefits of modern technology, envisaging steam-heated greenhouses giving German cities a regular supply of fresh fruit and vegetables all through the winter. He looked, too, to modern transport to open up the east. While the bounty of the east pouring into Germany would be brought by train, the car for Hitler was the vital transport means of the future. But for all its apparent modernity, the social vision was in essence atavistic. The colonial conquests of the nineteenth century provided its inspiration. What Hitler was offering was a modernized version of old-fashioned imperialist conquest, now translated to the ethnically mixed terrain of eastern Europe where the Slavs would provide the German equivalent of the conquered native populations of India and Africa in the British Empire.

By mid-July, the key step