Hitler. Part 19

Halder's own nerves were by this point also frayed. He now thought the time had come to confront Hitler once and for all with the imperative need to destroy the enemy forces around Moscow. On 18 August Brauchitsch sent Halder's memorandum on to Hitler. It argued that Army Groups North and South would have to attain their objectives from within their own resources, but that the main effort must be the immediate offensive against Moscow, since Army Group Centre would be unable to continue its operations after October on account of weather conditions.

Halder's memorandum had been prepared by Colonel Heusinger, the army's Chief of Operations Department. Two days after its submission, Heusinger discussed the memorandum with Jodl. Hitler's closest military adviser suggested psychological motives behind the Dictator's strategic choices. Heusinger recalled Jodl saying that Hitler had 'an instinctive aversion to treading the same path as Napoleon. Moscow gives him a sinister feeling.' When Heusinger reaffirmed the need to defeat the enemy forces at Moscow, Jodl replied: 'That's what you say. Now I will tell you what the Fuhrer's answer will be: There is at the moment a much better possibility of beating the Russian forces. Their main grouping is now east of Kiev.' Heusinger pressed Jodl to support the memorandum. Jodl finally remarked: 'I will do what I can. But you must admit that the Fuhrer's reasons are well thought out and cannot be pushed aside just like that. We must not try to compel him to do something which goes against his inner convictions. His intuition has generally been right. You can't deny that!' The Fuhrer myth still prevailed and among those closest to Hitler.

Predictably, Hitler's reply was not long in coming and was a devastating riposte to Army High Command. On 21 August, Army High Command was told that Hitler rejected its proposals as out of line with his intentions. Instead, he ordered: 'The princ.i.p.al object that must still be achieved before the onset of winter is not the capture of Moscow, but rather, in the South, the occupation of the Crimea and the industrial and coal region of the Donets, together with isolation of the Russian oil regions in the Caucasus and, in the North, the encirclement of Leningrad and junction with the Finns.' The immediate key step was the encirclement and destruction of the exposed Soviet Fifth Army in the region of Kiev through a pincer movement from Army Groups Centre and South. This would open the path for Army Group South to advance south-eastwards towards Rostov and Kharkhov. The capture of the Crimea, Hitler added, was 'of paramount importance for safeguarding our oil supply from Romania'. All means had to be deployed, therefore, to cross the Dnieper quickly to reach the Crimea before the enemy could call up new forces.

Hitler developed his arguments the following day in a 'Study' blaming Army High Command for failing to carry out his operational plan, reaffirming the necessity of shifting the main weight of the attack to the north and south, and relegating Moscow to a secondary target. Brauchitsch was accused of lack of leadership in allowing himself to be swayed by the special interests of the individual army groups. And particularly wounding was the praise, in contrast, handed out to Goring's firm leadership of the Luftwaffe.

In this 'Study' of 22 August, Hitler rehea.r.s.ed once more the objective of eliminating the Soviet Union as a continental ally of Britain, thereby removing from Britain hope of changing the course of events in Europe. This objective, he claimed, could only be attained through annihilation of Soviet forces and the occupation or destruction of the economic basis for continuing the war, with special emphasis on sources of raw materials. He rea.s.serted the need to concentrate on destroying the Soviet position in the Baltic and on occupying the Ukraine and Black Sea region, which were vital in terms of raw materials for the Soviet war economy. He also underlined the need to protect German oil supplies in Romania. Army High Command was to blame for ignoring his orders to press home the advance on Leningrad. He insisted that the three divisions from Army Group Centre, intended from the beginning of the campaign to a.s.sist the numerically weaker Army Group North, should be rapidly supplied, and that the objective of capturing Leningrad would then be met. Once this was done, the motorized units supplied by Army Group Centre could be used to concentrate on their sole remaining objective, the advance on Moscow. In the south, too, there was to be no diversion from original plans. Once the destruction of the Soviet forces east and west of Kiev which threatened the flank of Army Group Centre was accomplished, he argued, the advance on Moscow would be significantly eased. He rejected, therefore, the Army High Command's proposals for the further conduct of operations.

In the privacy of his diary notes, Halder could not contain himself. 'I regard the situation created by the Fuhrer's interference unendurable for the OKH,' he wrote. 'No other but the Fuhrer himself is to blame for the zigzag course caused by his successive orders.' The treatment of Brauchitsch, Halder went on, was 'absolutely outrageous'. Halder had proposed to the Commander-in-Chief that both should offer their resignation. But Brauchitsch had refused such a step 'on the grounds that the resignations would not be accepted and so nothing would be changed'.

Deeply upset, Halder flew next day to Army Group Centre headquarters. The a.s.sembled commanders predictably backed his preference for resuming the offensive on Moscow. They were agreed that to move on Kiev would mean a winter campaign. Field-Marshal von Bock suggested that General Heinz Guderian, one of Hitler's favourite commanders, and particularly outspoken at the meeting, should accompany Halder to Fuhrer Headquarters in an attempt to persuade the dictator to change his mind and agree to Army High Command's plan.

It was getting dark as Halder and Guderian arrived in East Prussia. According to Guderian's later account naturally aimed at reflecting himself in the best light Brauchitsch forbade him to raise the question of Moscow. The southern operation had been ordered, the Army Commander-in-Chief declared, so the problem was merely one of how to carry it out. Discussion was pointless. Neither Brauchitsch nor Halder accompanied Guderian when he went in to see Hitler, who was flanked by a large entourage including Keitel, Jodl, and Schmundt. Hitler himself raised the issue of Moscow, according to Guderian, and then, without interruption, let him unfold the arguments for making the advance on the Russian capital the priority. When Guderian had finished, Hitler started. Keeping his temper, he put the alternative case. The raw materials and agricultural base of the Ukraine were vital for the continuation of the war, he stated. The Crimea had to be neutralized to rule out attacks on the Romanian oil-fields. 'My generals know nothing about the economic aspects of war,' Guderian heard him say for the first time. Hitler was adamant. He had already given strict orders for an attack on Kiev as the immediate strategic objective. Action had to be carried out with that in mind. All those present nodded at every sentence that Hitler spoke. The OKW representatives were entirely behind him. Guderian felt isolated. He avoided all further argument. He took the view, so he remarked much later, that since the decision to attack the Ukraine was confirmed, it was now his task to ensure that it was carried out as effectively as possible to ensure victory before the autumn rains.

When he reported to Halder next day, 24 August, the Chief of the Army General Staff fell into a rage at Guderian's complete volte-face on being confronted by Hitler at first hand. Halder's dismay was all the greater since Guderian, whom he had considered as a possible future Army Commander-in-Chief, had been among the most vehement critics of Hitler during the meeting at Army Group Centre Headquarters the previous day. Bock shared Halder's contempt for the way the outspoken and forthright Guderian had caved in under Hitler's pressure. In reality, whatever the opprobrium now heaped on him by his superiors, there had been little prospect of Guderian changing Hitler's mind. At any rate, the die was cast. The great battle for Kiev and mastery of the Ukraine was about to begin.

By the time the 'Battle of Kiev' was over on 25 September the city of Kiev itself had fallen six days earlier the Soviet south-west front was totally destroyed. Hitler's insistence on sending Guderian's Panzer Group south to bring about the encirclement had led to an extraordinary victory. An astonishing number of Soviet prisoners around 665,000 were taken. The enormous booty captured included 884 tanks and 3,018 artillery pieces. The victory paved the way for Rundstedt to go on to occupy the Ukraine, much of the Crimea, and the Donets Basin, with further huge losses of men and material for the Red Army. In the light of the immense scale of the Soviet losses in the three months since the beginning of 'Barbarossa', the German military leadership now concluded that the thrust to Moscow given the name 'Operation Typhoon' could still succeed despite starting so late in the year.

It was scarcely any wonder, basking in the glow of the great victory at Kiev, that Hitler was in ebullient mood when Goebbels spoke alone with him in the Fuhrer Headquarters on 23 September. Hitler's reported comments afford a notable insight into his thinking at this juncture. After bitterly complaining about the difficulties in getting his way with the 'experts' in the General Staff, Hitler expressed the view that the defeats imposed on the Red Army in the Ukraine marked the breakthrough. 'The spell is broken,' Goebbels recorded. Things would now unfold quickly on other parts of the front. New great victories could be expected in the next three to four weeks. By mid-October, the Bolsheviks would be in full retreat. The next thrust was towards Kharkov, which would be reached within days, then to Stalingrad and the Don. Once this industrial area was in German hands, and the Bolsheviks were cut off from their coal supplies and the basis of their armaments production, the war was lost for them.

Leningrad, birthplace of Bolshevism, Hitler repeated, would be destroyed street by street and razed to the ground. Its 5 million population could not be fed. The plough would one day once more pa.s.s over the site of the city. Bolshevism began in hunger, blood, and tears. It would end the same way. Asia's entry-gate to Europe would be closed, the Asiatics forced back to where they belonged. A similar fate to Leningrad, he reiterated, might also befall Moscow. The attack on the capital would follow the capture of the industrial basin. The operation to surround the city should be completed by 15 October. And once German troops reached the Caucasus Stalin was lost. Hitler was sure that in such a situation, j.a.pan would not miss the opportunity to make gains in the east of the Soviet Union. What then happened would be up to Stalin. He might capitulate. Or he might seek a 'special peace', which Hitler would naturally take up. With its military power broken, Bolshevism would represent no further danger.

He returned to a familiar theme. With the defeat of Bolshevism, England would have lost its last hope on the Continent. Its final chance of victory would disappear. And the increasing successes by U-boats in the Atlantic which would follow in the next weeks would put further pressure on a Churchill who was betraying signs of nervous strain. Hitler did not rule out Britain removing Churchill in order to seek peace. Hitler's terms would be as they always were: he was prepared to leave the Empire alone, but Britain would have to get out of Europe. The British would probably grant Germany a free hand in the east, but try to retain hegemony in western Europe. That, he would not allow. 'England had always felt itself to be an insular power. It is alien to Europe, or even hostile to Europe. It has no future in Europe.'

All in all, the prospects at this point, in Hitler's eyes, were rosy. One remark indicated, however, that an early end to the conflict was not in sight. Hitler told Goebbels in pa.s.sing his a.s.sumption would soon prove disastrously misplaced that all necessary precautions had been made for wintering the troops in the east.

By this time, in fact, Hitler and the Wehrmacht leaders had already arrived at the conclusion that the war in the east would not be over in 1941. The collapse of the Soviet Union, declared an OKW memorandum of 27 August, approved by Hitler, was the next and decisive war aim. But, the memorandum ran, 'if it proves impossible to realize this objective completely during 1941, the continuation of the eastern campaign has top priority for 1942'. The military successes over the summer had been remarkable. But the aim of the quick knock-out blow at the heart of the 'Barbarossa' plan had not been realized. In spite of their vast losses, the Soviet forces had been far from comprehensively destroyed. They continued to be replenished from an apparently limitless reservoir of men and resources, and to fight tooth and nail. German losses were themselves not negligible. Already before the 'Battle of Kiev', casualties numbered almost 400,000, or over 11 per cent of the eastern army. Replacements were becoming more difficult to find. By the end of September, half of the tanks were out of action or in different stages of repair. And by now the autumn rains were already beginning to turn the roads into impa.s.sable quagmires. Whatever the successes of the summer, objective grounds for continued optimism had to be strongly qualified. The drive to Moscow that began on 2 October, seeking the decisive victory before the onset of winter, rested on hope more than expectation. It was a desperate last attempt to force the conclusive defeat of the Soviet Union before winter. It amounted to an improvisation marking the failure of the original 'Barbarossa' plan rather than its crowning glory.

Hitler's own responsibility for the difficulties now faced by the German army is evident. Whereas Stalin learnt from the calamities of 1941 and came to leave military matters increasingly to the experts, Hitler's interference in tactical detail as well as grand strategy, arising from his chronic and intensifying distrust of the Army High Command, was, as Halder's difficulties indicated, intensely damaging. The tenacity and stubbornness with which he refused to concede the priority of an attack on Moscow, even when for a while, at the end of July, not just the army leadership but his own closest military adviser, Jodl, had accepted the argument, was quite remarkable. After the glorious victories of 1940, Hitler believed his own military judgement was superior to that of any of his generals. His contempt for Brauchitsch and Halder was reinforced on every occasion that their views on tactics differed from his. Conversely, the weeks of conflict, and the bewildering way in July and August in which directives were arrived at, then amended, undermined the confidence in Hitler not just of the hopelessly supine Brauchitsch and of Halder's Army General Staff, but also of the field commanders.

But the problem was not one-sided. The tension between the conflicting conceptions of the eastern campaign had still been unresolved as far as Halder was concerned when Hitler's Directive No. 21 on 18 December 1940 had indicated Moscow as a secondary rather than primary objective, prefiguring the dispute of the coming summer months. If reluctantly, Army High Command had apparently accepted the alternative strategy which Hitler favoured. Strategic planning of the attack in subsequent months followed from this premiss.

The strategy of first gaining control over the Baltic and cutting off essential Soviet economic heartlands in the south, while at the same time protecting German oil supplies in Romania, before attacking Moscow was not in itself senseless. And the fear that a frontal a.s.sault on Moscow would simply drive back instead of enveloping Soviet forces was a real one. Army High Command's preference to deviate from the plan of 'Barbarossa' once the campaign was under way was not a self-evident improvement. The reversion to Halder's originally preferred strategy was tempting because Army Group Centre had advanced faster and more spectacularly than antic.i.p.ated, and was pressing hard to be allowed to continue and, as it thought, finish the job by taking Moscow. But even more it now followed from the realization that the army's intelligence on Soviet military strength had been woeful. The attack on Moscow, though favoured in the OKH's thinking from an early stage, had in fact come to be a subst.i.tute for the 'Barbarossa' plan, which had gone ma.s.sively awry not simply because of Hitler's interference, but also because of the inadequacy and failures of the army leadership.

Since Hitler had placed the key men, Brauchitsch and Halder, in their posts, he must take a good deal of the blame for their failings. But as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Brauchitsch was irredeemably weak and ineffectual. His contribution to strategic planning appears to have been minimal. Torn between pressures from his field commanders and bullying from Hitler, he offered a black hole where clear-sighted and determined military leadership was essential. Long before the crisis which would ultimately bring his removal from office, Brauchitsch was a broken reed. The contempt with which Hitler treated him was not without justification.

Halder, partly through his own post-war apologetics and his flirtations (though they came to nothing) with groups opposed to Hitler, has been more generously viewed by posterity. As Chief of the General Staff, responsibility for the planning of army operations was his. The chequered relations with the High Command of the Wehrmacht, in large measure Hitler's own mouthpiece, of course gravely weakened Halder's position. But the Chief of the General Staff failed to highlight difficulties in the original 'Barbarossa' plan. The northward swing of Army Group Centre forces was not fully worked out. The problems that motorized forces would face in the terrain between Leningrad and Moscow were not taken into account. Halder was lukewarm from the outset about the concentration on the Baltic and would have preferred the frontal a.s.sault on Moscow. But instead of being settled beforehand, the dispute was left to fester once the campaign was under way.

Moreover, the all-out attack on Moscow that Halder and Commander of Army Group Centre von Bock were urging, would itself have been a highly risky venture. It would then almost certainly have been impossible to eliminate the large Soviet forces on the flanks (as happened in the 'Battle of Kiev'). And the Russians were expecting the attack on the capital. Had the Wehrmacht reached the city, in the absence of a Luftwaffe capable of razing Moscow to the ground (as. .h.i.tler wanted), the result would probably have been a preview of what was eventually to happen at Stalingrad.

That the eastern campaign was blown off course already by late summer of 1941 cannot solely, or even mainly, be put down to Hitler's meddling in matters which should have been left to the military professionals. The implication, encountered in some post-war memoirs, that, left to their own devices, the military would have won the war in the east for Germany was both a self-defensive and an arrogant claim. The escalating problems of 'Barbarossa' were ultimately a consequence of the calamitous miscalculation that the Soviet Union would collapse like a pack of cards in the wake of a Blitzkrieg Blitzkrieg resting on some highly optimistic a.s.sumptions, gross underestimation of the enemy, and extremely limited resources. This was. .h.i.tler's miscalculation. But it was shared by his military planners. resting on some highly optimistic a.s.sumptions, gross underestimation of the enemy, and extremely limited resources. This was. .h.i.tler's miscalculation. But it was shared by his military planners.

IV.

In his lengthy talk with Hitler on 23 September, Goebbels took the opportunity to describe the state of morale within Germany. Hitler, remarked the Propaganda Minister, was well aware of the 'serious psychological test' to which the German people had been subjected over the past weeks. Goebbels pressed Hitler, who had not appeared in public since the start of the Russian campaign and had last spoken to the German people on 4 May, following the victorious Balkan campaign, to come to Berlin to address the nation. Hitler agreed that the time was ripe, and asked Goebbels to prepare a ma.s.s meeting to open the Winter Aid campaign at the end of the following week. The date of the speech was fixed for 3 October.

Around 1 p.m. that day, Hitler's train pulled into Berlin. Goebbels was immediately summoned to the Reich Chancellery. He found Hitler looking well and full of optimism. In the privacy of Hitler's room, he was given an overview of the situation at the front. The advance on Moscow, which had begun the previous day, was proceeding beyond expectations. Big successes were being attained. 'The Fuhrer is convinced,' commented Goebbels, 'that if the weather stays moderately favourable the Soviet army will be essentially smashed within a fortnight.'

Cheering crowds, which the party never had any trouble in mobilizing, lined the streets as. .h.i.tler was driven in the afternoon to the Sportpalast. A rapturous reception awaited him in the cavernous hall. Goebbels compared it with the ma.s.s meetings in the run-up to power. Hitler justified the attack on the Soviet Union as preventive. He said German precautions had been incomplete on only one thing: 'We had no idea how gigantic the preparations of this enemy were against Germany and Europe, and how immense the danger was, how by a hair's breadth we have escaped the annihilation not only of Germany, but of the whole of Europe.' He claimed, at last coming out with the words that his audience were anxious to hear: 'I can say today that this enemy is already broken and will not rise up again.'

Almost every sentence towards the end was interrupted by storms of applause. Hitler, despite the lengthy break, had not lost his touch. The audience in the Sportpalast rose as one in an ecstatic ovation at the end. Hitler was thrilled with his reception. But he was in a hurry to get away. He was driven straight back to the station. By 7 p.m., a mere six hours after he had arrived, he was on his way back to his headquarters in East Prussia.

Goebbels had been with Hitler on the way to the station as the latest news came in from the front. The advance was going even better than expected. Halder purred, soon after its start, that Operation Typhoon was 'making pleasing progress' and pursuing 'an absolutely cla.s.sical course'. The German army had thrown seventy-eight divisions, comprising almost 2 million men, and nearly 2,000 tanks, supported by a large proportion of the Luftwaffe, against Marshal Timoshenko's forces. Once more, the Wehrmacht seemed invincible. Once more, vast numbers of prisoners 673,000 of them fell into German hands, along with immeasurable amounts of booty, this time in the great encirclements of the double battle of Brjansk and Viaz'ma in the first half of October. It was hardly any wonder that the mood in the Fuhrer Headquarters and among the military leadership was buoyant. On the evening of 8 October, Hitler spoke of the decisive turn in the military situation over the previous three days. Werner Koeppen, Rosenberg's liaison at Fuhrer Headquarters, reported to his boss that 'the Russian army can essentially be seen as annihilated'.

Hitler had been in an unusually good mood at the meal table on the evening of 4 October, having just returned from a visit to Army High Command's headquarters to congratulate Brauchitsch on his sixtieth birthday. Not for the first time, he gazed into the future in the 'German East'. Within the next half-century, he foresaw 5 million farms settled there by former soldiers who would hold down the Continent through military force. He placed no value in colonies, he said, and could quickly come to terms with England on that score. Germany needed only a little colonial territory for coffee and tea plantations. Everything else it could produce on the Continent. Cameroon and a part of French Equatorial Africa or the Belgian Congo would suffice for Germany's needs. 'Our Mississippi must be the Volga, not the Niger,' he concluded.

Next evening, after Himmler had regaled those round the dinner table with his impressions of Kiev, and how 8090 per cent of the impoverished population there could be 'dispensed with', Hitler came round to the subject of German dialects. It started with his dislike of the Saxon accent and spread to a rejection of all German dialects. They made the learning of German for foreigners more difficult. And German now had to be made into the general form of communication in Europe.

Hitler was still in expansive frame of mind when Reich Economics Minister Walther Funk visited him on 13 October. The eastern territories would mean the end of unemployment in Europe, he claimed. He envisaged river links from the Don and the Dnieper between the Black Sea and the Danube, bringing oil and grain to Germany. 'Europe and not America will be the land of unlimited possibilities.'

Four days later, the presence of Fritz Todt prompted Hitler to an even more grandiose vision of new roads stretching through the conquered territories. Motorways would now run not just to the Crimea, but to the Caucasus, as well as more northerly areas. German cities would be established as administrative centres on the river-crossings. Three million prisoners-of-war would be available to supply the labour for the next twenty years. German farmsteads would line the roads. 'The monotonous Asiatic-like steppe would soon offer a totally different appearance.' He now spoke of 10 million Germans, as well as settlers from Scandinavia, Holland, Flanders, and even America putting down roots there. The Slav population would 'have to vegetate further in their own dirt away from the big roads'. Knowing how to read the road-signs would be quite sufficient education. Those eating German bread today, he said, did not get worked up about the regaining of the East Elbian granaries with the sword in the twelfth century. 'Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.' Hitler wished he were ten to fifteen years younger to experience what was going to happen.

But by this time weather conditions alone meant the chances of Hitler's vision ever materializing were sharply diminishing. The weather was already bad. By mid-October, military operations had stalled as heavy rains swept over the front. Units were stranded. The vehicles of Army Group Centre were bogged down on impa.s.sable roads. Away from the choked roads, nothing could move. 'The Russians are impeding us far less than the wet and the mud,' commented Field-Marshal Bock. Everywhere, it was a 'struggle with the mud'. On top of that, there were serious shortages of fuel and munitions.

There was also, not before time, concern now about winter provisions for the troops. Hitler directly asked Quartermaster-General Wagner, on a visit to Fuhrer Headquarters, about this on 26 October. Wagner promised that Army Groups North and South would have a half of their necessary provisions by the end of the month, though Army Group Centre, the largest of the three, would only have a third. Supplying the south was especially difficult since the Soviets had destroyed part of the railway track along the Sea of Azov. Even so, when Wagner spoke to Goebbels, he gave the Propaganda Minister the impression that 'everything had been thought of and nothing forgotten'.

In fact, Wagner appears to have become seriously concerned by this vital matter only with the rapid deterioration of the weather in mid-October, while Halder had been aware as early as August that the problem of transport of winter clothing and equipment to the eastern front could only be solved by the defeat of the Red Army before the worst of the weather set in. Brauchitsch was still claiming, when he had lengthy talks with Goebbels on 1 November, that an advance to Stalingrad was possible before the snows arrived and that by the time the troops took up their winter quarters Moscow would be cut off. By now this was wild optimism. Brauchitsch was forced to acknowledge the existing weather problems, the impa.s.sable roads, transport difficulties, and the concern about the winter provisioning of the troops. In truth, whatever the unrealism of the Army and Wehrmacht High Commands about what was attainable in their view before the depths of winter, the last two weeks of October had had a highly sobering effect on the front-line commanders and the initial exaggerated hopes of the success of 'Operation Typhoon'. By the end of the month the offensive of Army Group Centre's exhausted troops had ground temporarily to a halt.

The impression which Hitler gave, however, in his traditional speech to the party's old guard, a.s.sembled in the Lowenbraukeller in Munich on the late afternoon of 8 November, the anniversary of the 1923 Putsch, was quite different. The speech was intended primarily for domestic consumption. It aimed to boost morale, and to rally round the oldest and most loyal members of Hitler's retinue after the difficult months of summer and autumn. Hitler described the scale of the Soviet losses. 'My Party Comrades,' he declared, 'no army in the world, including the Russian, recovers from those.' 'Never before,' he went on, 'has a giant empire been smashed and struck down in a shorter time than Soviet Russia.' He remarked on enemy claims that the war would last into 1942. 'It can last as long as it wants,' he retorted. 'The last battalion in this field will be a German one.' Despite the triumphalism, it was the strongest hint yet that the war was far from over.

Next day, Hitler was again on his way back to East Prussia, arriving in the Wolf 's Lair that evening. In the east, by this time, the snow was falling. Torrential rain had given way to ice and temperatures well below zero Fahrenheit. Even tanks were often unable to cope with ice-covered slopes. For the men, conditions were worsening by the day. There was already an acute shortage of warm clothing to protect them. Severe cases of frostbite were becoming widespread. The combat-strength of the infantry had sunk drastically. Army Group Centre alone had lost by this time approaching 300,000 men, with replacements of little more than half that number available.

It was at this point, on 13 November, that, at a top-level conference of Army Group Centre, in a temperature of -8 degrees Fahrenheit, Guderian's panzer army, as part of the orders for the renewed offensive, was a.s.signed the objective of cutting off Moscow from its eastward communications by taking Gorki, 250 miles to the east east of the Soviet capital. The astonishing lack of realism in the army's orders derived from the perverse obstinacy with which the General Staff continued to persist in the view that the Red Army was on the point of collapse, and was greatly inferior to the Wehrmacht in fighting-power and leadership. Such views, despite all the evidence to the contrary, still prevailing with Halder (and, indeed, largely shared by the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, Bock), underlay the memorandum, presented by the General Staff on 7 November, for the second offensive. The hopelessly optimistic goals laid down the occupation of Maykop (a main source of oil from the Caucasus), Stalingrad, and Gorki were on the wish-list were the work of Halder and his staff. There was no pressure by Hitler on Halder. In fact, quite the reverse: Halder pressed for acceptance of his operational goals. These corresponded in good measure with goals. .h.i.tler had foreseen as attainable only in the following year. Had Hitler been more a.s.sertive at this stage in rejecting Halder's proposals, the disasters of the coming weeks might have been avoided. As it was, Hitler's uncertainty, hesitancy, and lack of clarity allowed Army High Command the scope for catastrophic errors of judgement. of the Soviet capital. The astonishing lack of realism in the army's orders derived from the perverse obstinacy with which the General Staff continued to persist in the view that the Red Army was on the point of collapse, and was greatly inferior to the Wehrmacht in fighting-power and leadership. Such views, despite all the evidence to the contrary, still prevailing with Halder (and, indeed, largely shared by the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, Bock), underlay the memorandum, presented by the General Staff on 7 November, for the second offensive. The hopelessly optimistic goals laid down the occupation of Maykop (a main source of oil from the Caucasus), Stalingrad, and Gorki were on the wish-list were the work of Halder and his staff. There was no pressure by Hitler on Halder. In fact, quite the reverse: Halder pressed for acceptance of his operational goals. These corresponded in good measure with goals. .h.i.tler had foreseen as attainable only in the following year. Had Hitler been more a.s.sertive at this stage in rejecting Halder's proposals, the disasters of the coming weeks might have been avoided. As it was, Hitler's uncertainty, hesitancy, and lack of clarity allowed Army High Command the scope for catastrophic errors of judgement.

The opposition which Halder's plans encountered at the conference on 13 November then resulted in a restriction of the goals to a direct a.s.sault on Moscow. This was pushed through in full recognition of the insoluble logistical problems and immense dangers of an advance in near-arctic conditions without any possibility of securing supplies. Even the goal was not clear. The breach of Soviet communications to the east could not possibly be attained. Forward positions in the vicinity of Moscow were utterly exposed. Only the capture of the city itself, bringing it was presumed the collapse and capitulation of the Soviet regime and the end of the war, could justify the risk. But with insufficient air-power to bomb the city into submission before the ground-troops arrived, entry into Moscow would have meant street-by-street fighting. With the forces available, and in the prevailing conditions, it is difficult to see how the German army could have proved victorious.

Nevertheless, in mid-November the drive on Moscow recommenced. Hitler was by now distinctly uneasy about the new offensive. On the evening of 25 November he expressed, according to the recollection of his Army Adjutant, Major Gerhard Engel, his 'great concern about the Russian winter and weather'. 'We started a month too late,' he went on, ending, characteristically, by remarking that time was 'his greatest nightmare'.

A few days earlier, Hitler had been more outwardly optimistic in a three-hour conversation with Goebbels. 'If the weather stays favourable, he still wants to make the attempt to encircle Moscow and thereby abandon it to hunger and devastation,' the Propaganda Minister noted. Hitler played down the difficulties; they occurred in every war. 'World history was not made by weather,' he added.

On 29 November, with Hitler once again briefly in Berlin, Goebbels had a further chance to speak with him at length. Hitler appeared full of optimism and confidence, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with energy, in excellent health. He professed still to be positive, despite the reversal in Rostov, where General Ewald von Kleist's panzer army had been forced back the previous day after initially taking the city. Hitler now intended to withdraw sufficiently far from the city to allow ma.s.sive air-raids which would bomb it to oblivion as a 'b.l.o.o.d.y example'. The Fuhrer had never favoured, wrote Goebbels, taking any of the Soviet major cities. There were no practical advantages in it, and it simply left the problem of feeding the women and children. There was no doubt, Hitler went on, that the enemy had lost most of their great armaments centres. That, he claimed, had been the aim of the war, and had been largely achieved. He hoped to advance further on Moscow. But he acknowledged that a great encirclement was impossible at present. The weather uncertainty meant any attempt to advance a further 200 kilometres to the east, without secure supplies, would be madness. The front-line troops would be cut off and would have to be withdrawn with a great loss of prestige which, at the current time, could not be afforded. So the offensive had to take place on a smaller scale. Hitler still expected Moscow to fall. When it did, there would be little left of it but ruins. In the following year, there would be an expansion of the offensive to the Caucasus to gain possession of Soviet oil supplies or at least deny them to the Bolsheviks. The Crimea would be turned into a huge German settlement area for the best ethnic types, to be incorporated into the Reich territory as a Gau named the 'Ostrogoth Gau' as a reminder of the oldest Germanic traditions and the very origins of Germandom. 'What cannot be achieved now, will be achieved in the coming summer,' were Hitler's sentiments, according to Goebbels's notes.

Hitler's show of optimism was put on to delude Goebbels or himself. On the very same day that he spoke with the Propaganda Minister, he was told by Walter Rohland in charge of tank production and just back from a visit to the front in the presence of Keitel, Jodl, Brauchitsch, and other military leaders, of the superiority of the Soviet panzer production. Rohland also warned, in the light of his own experience gleaned from a trip to the USA in 1930, of the immense armaments potential which would be ranged against Germany should America enter the war. The war would then be lost for Germany. Fritz Todt, one of Hitler's most trusted and gifted ministers, who had arranged the meeting about armaments, followed up Rohland's comments with a statement on German armaments production. Whether in the meeting, or more privately afterwards, Todt added: 'This war can no longer be won militarily.' Hitler listened without interruption, then asked: 'How, then, should I end this war?' Todt replied that the war could only be concluded politically. Hitler retorted: 'I can scarcely still see a way of coming politically to an end.'

As. .h.i.tler was returning to East Prussia on the evening of 29 November, the news coming in from the front was not good. Over the next days things were to worsen markedly.

Immediately on his return to the Wolf 's Lair, Hitler fell into 'a state of extreme agitation' about the position of Kleist's panzer army, thrown back from Rostov. Kleist wanted to move back to a secure defensive position at the mouth of the Bakhmut River. Hitler forbade this and demanded the retreat be halted further east. Brauchitsch was summoned to Fuhrer Headquarters and subjected to a torrent of abuse. Browbeaten, the Commander-in-Chief, an ill and severely depressed man, pa.s.sed on the order to the Commander of Army Group South, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt. The reply came from Rundstedt, evidently not realizing that the order had come from Hitler himself, that he could not obey it, and that either the order must be changed or he be relieved of his post. This reply was pa.s.sed directly to Hitler. In the early hours of the following morning, Rundstedt, one of Hitler's most outstanding and loyal generals, was sacked the scapegoat for the setback at Rostov and the command given to Field-Marshal Walter von Reichenau. Later that day, Reichenau telephoned to say the enemy had broken through the line ordered by Hitler and requested permission to retreat to the line Rundstedt had demanded. Hitler concurred.

On 2 December, Hitler flew south to view Kleist's position for himself. He was put fully in the picture about the reports, which he had not seen, from the Army Group prior to the attack on Rostov. The outcome had been accurately forecast. He exonerated the Army Group and the panzer army from blame. But he did not reinstate Rundstedt. That would have amounted to a public acceptance of his own error.

By that same date, 2 December, German troops, despite the atrocious weather, had advanced almost to Moscow. Reconnaissance troops reached a point only some twelve miles from the city centre. But the offensive had become hopeless. In intense cold the temperature outside Moscow on 4 December had dropped to 32 degrees Fahrenheit and without adequate support, Guderian decided on the evening of 5 December to pull back his troops to more secure defensive positions. Hoepner's 4th Panzer Army and Reinhardt's 3rd, some twenty miles north of the Kremlin, were forced to do the same. On 5 December, the same day that the German offensive irredeemably broke down, the Soviet counter-attack began. By the following day, 100 divisions along a 200-mile stretch of the front fell upon the exhausted soldiers of Army Group Centre.

V.

Amid the deepening gloom in the Fuhrer Headquarters over events in the east, the best news. .h.i.tler could have wished for arrived. Reports came in during the evening of Sunday, 7 December that the j.a.panese had attacked the American fleet anch.o.r.ed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Early accounts indicated that two battleships and an aircraft carrier had been sunk, and four others and four cruisers severely damaged. The following morning President Roosevelt received the backing of the US Congress to declare war on j.a.pan. Winston Churchill, overjoyed now to have the Americans 'in the same boat' (as Roosevelt had put it to him), had no difficulty in obtaining authorization from the War Cabinet for an immediate British declaration of war.

Hitler thought he had good reason to be delighted. 'We can't lose the war at all,' he exclaimed. 'We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years.' This rash a.s.sumption was predicated on the view which Hitler had long held: that j.a.pan's intervention would both tie the United States down in the Pacific theatre, and seriously weaken Britain through an a.s.sault on its possessions in the Far East.

Relations between j.a.pan and the USA had been sharply deteriorating throughout the autumn. Though kept in the dark about details, the German Amba.s.sador in Tokyo, General Eugen Ott, informed Berlin early in November of his impressions that war between j.a.pan and the USA and Britain was likely. He had also learned that the j.a.panese administration was about to ask for an a.s.surance that Germany would go to j.a.pan's aid in the event of her becoming engaged in war with the USA.

The j.a.panese leadership had, in fact, taken the decision on 12 November that, should war with the USA become inevitable, an attempt would be made to reach agreement with Germany on partic.i.p.ation in the war against America, and on a commitment to avoid a separate peace. On 21 November Ribbentrop had laid down the Reich's policy to Ott: Berlin regarded it as self-evident that if either country, Germany or j.a.pan, found itself at war with the USA, the other country would not sign a separate peace. Two days later, General Okamoto, the head of the section of the j.a.panese General Staff dealing with foreign armies, went a stage further. He asked Amba.s.sador Ott whether Germany would regard itself as at war with the USA if j.a.pan were to open hostilities. There is no record of Ribbentrop's replying to Ott's telegram, which arrived on 24 November. But when he met Amba.s.sador Oshima in Berlin on the evening of 28 November, Ribbentrop a.s.sured him that Germany would come to j.a.pan's aid if she were to be at war with the USA. And there was no possibility of a separate peace between Germany and the USA under any circ.u.mstances. The Fuhrer was determined on this point. Already two days before Ribbentrop met Oshima, j.a.panese air and naval forces had set out for Hawaii. And on 1 December, the order had been given to attack on the 7th.

Ribbentrop's a.s.surances were fully in line with Hitler's remarks during Matsuoka's visit to Berlin in the spring, that Germany would immediately draw the consequences should j.a.pan get into conflict with the USA. But at this point, before entering any formal agreement with the j.a.panese, Ribbentrop evidently deemed it necessary to consult Hitler. He told Oshima this on the evening of 1 December. The next day, Hitler flew, as we saw, to visit Army Group South following the setback at Rostov. Bad weather forced him to stay overnight in Poltava on the way back, where he was apparently cut off from communications. He was able to return to his headquarters only on 4 December. Ribbentrop reached him there and gained approval for what amounted to a new tripart.i.te pact which the German Foreign Minister rapidly agreed with Ciano stipulating that should war break out between any one of the partners and the USA, the other two states would immediately regard themselves as also at war with America. Already before Pearl Harbor, therefore, Germany had effectively committed itself to war with the USA should j.a.pan as now seemed inevitable become involved in hostilities.

The agreement was still unsigned when the j.a.panese attacked Pearl Harbor. This unprovoked j.a.panese aggression gave Hitler what he wanted without having already committed himself formally to any action from the German side. However, he was keen to have a revised agreement completed on 11 December, and now stipulating only an obligation not to conclude an armistice or peace treaty with the USA without mutual consent for propaganda reasons: to include in his big speech to the Reichstag that afternoon.

As soon as he had heard the news of the j.a.panese attack, Hitler had telephoned Goebbels, expressing his delight, and ordering the summoning of the Reichstag for Wednesday, 10 December, 'to make the German stance clear'. Goebbels commented: 'We will, on the basis of the Tripart.i.te Pact, probably not avoid a declaration of war on the United States. But that's now not so bad. We're now to a certain extent protected on the flanks. The United States will no longer be so rashly able to provide England with aircraft, weapons, and transport-s.p.a.ce, since it can be presumed that they will need all that for their own war with j.a.pan.'

From a propaganda point of view, the j.a.panese attack at Pearl Harbor was most timely for Hitler. Given the crisis on the eastern front, he had little favourable to include in a progress report to the German people. But now the j.a.panese attack gave him a positive angle. On 8 December, Ribbentrop told Amba.s.sador Oshima that the Fuhrer was contemplating the best way, from the psychological point of view, of declaring war on the United States. Since he wanted time to prepare carefully such an important speech, Hitler had the a.s.sembling of the Reichstag postponed by a day, to 11 December. At least, Goebbels remarked, the time of the speech, three o'clock in the afternoon, though scarcely good for the German public, would allow the j.a.panese and Americans to hear it.

That Germany would would declare war on the USA was a matter of course. No agreement with the j.a.panese compelled it. But Hitler did not hesitate. A formal declaration might have to wait until the Reichstag could be summoned. But at the earliest opportunity, on the night of 89 December, he had already given the order to U-boats to sink American ships. A formal declaration of war was necessary to ensure as far as possible in accordance with the agreement of 11 December that j.a.pan would remain in the war. And it was also important, from Hitler's point of view, to retain the initiative, and not let this pa.s.s to the United States. Certain, as he had been for many months, that Roosevelt was just looking for the chance to intervene in the European conflict, Hitler thought that his declaration was merely antic.i.p.ating the inevitable and, in any case, formalizing what was in effect already the situation. Not least, for the German public, it was important to demonstrate that he still controlled events. To await a certain declaration of war from America would, from Hitler's standpoint, have been a sign of weakness. Prestige and propaganda, as always, were never far from the centre of Hitler's considerations. 'A great power doesn't let itself have war declared on it, it declares war itself,' Ribbentrop doubtless echoing Hitler's sentiments told Weizsacker. declare war on the USA was a matter of course. No agreement with the j.a.panese compelled it. But Hitler did not hesitate. A formal declaration might have to wait until the Reichstag could be summoned. But at the earliest opportunity, on the night of 89 December, he had already given the order to U-boats to sink American ships. A formal declaration of war was necessary to ensure as far as possible in accordance with the agreement of 11 December that j.a.pan would remain in the war. And it was also important, from Hitler's point of view, to retain the initiative, and not let this pa.s.s to the United States. Certain, as he had been for many months, that Roosevelt was just looking for the chance to intervene in the European conflict, Hitler thought that his declaration was merely antic.i.p.ating the inevitable and, in any case, formalizing what was in effect already the situation. Not least, for the German public, it was important to demonstrate that he still controlled events. To await a certain declaration of war from America would, from Hitler's standpoint, have been a sign of weakness. Prestige and propaganda, as always, were never far from the centre of Hitler's considerations. 'A great power doesn't let itself have war declared on it, it declares war itself,' Ribbentrop doubtless echoing Hitler's sentiments told Weizsacker.

Hitler's speech on the afternoon of Thursday, 11 December, was not one of his best. The first half consisted of no more than the lengthy, triumphalist report on the progress of the war which Hitler had intended to provide long before the events of Pearl Harbor. The rest of the speech was largely taken up with a long-drawn-out, sustained attack on Roosevelt. Hitler built up the image of a President, backed by the 'entire satanic insidiousness' of the Jews, set on war and the destruction of Germany. Eventually he came to the climax of his speech: the provocations up to now unanswered had finally forced Germany and Italy to act. He read out a version of the statement he had had given to the American Charge d'Affaires that afternoon, with a formal declaration of war on the USA. He then announced the new agreement, signed that very day, committing Germany, Italy, and j.a.pan to rejecting a unilateral armistice or peace with Britain or the USA.

In Goebbels's view, Hitler's speech had had a 'fantastic' effect on the German people, to whom the declaration of war had come neither as a surprise, nor a shock. In reality, the speech had been able to do little to raise morale, which, given the certain extension of the war into the indefinite future, and now the opening of aggression against a further powerful adversary, had sunk to its lowest point since the conflict began.

Hitler agreed with Goebbels's wishes to prepare the people for unavoidable setbacks through propaganda more attuned to the realism of the harshness of war and the sacrifices it demanded. Hitler and Goebbels evidently discussed the catastrophic lack of winter clothing for the troops, and the effect this was having on morale. Goebbels was well aware from the bitter criticism in countless soldiers' letters to their loved ones of how bad the impact of the supplies crisis was on morale, both at the front and at home. But Hitler's eyes were already set on the big spring offensive in 1942. And, as always when faced with setbacks, he pointed to the 'struggle for power', and how difficulties had at that time been overcome.

The need to boost morale, in the first instance among those he held responsible for upholding it on the home front, undoubtedly lay behind Hitler's address to his Gauleiter on the afternoon of 12 December.

He began with the consequences of Pearl Harbor. If j.a.pan had not entered the war, he would have at some point had to declare war on the USA. 'Now the East-Asia conflict falls to us like a present in the lap,' Goebbels reported him saying. The psychological significance should not be underrated. Without the conflict between j.a.pan and the USA, a declaration of war on the Americans would have been difficult to accept by the German people. As it was, it was taken as a matter of course. The extension to the conflict also had positive consequences for the U-boat war in the Atlantic. Freed of restraint, he expected the tonnage sunk now to increase greatly and this would probably be decisive in winning the war.

He turned to the war in the east. Both tone and content were much as they had been with Goebbels in private. He acknowledged that the troops had had for the time being to be pulled back to a defensible line, but, given the supplies problems, saw this as far better than standing some 300 kilometres further east. The troops were now being saved for the coming spring and summer offensive. A new panzer army in preparation within Germany would be ready by then.

It was his firm intention, he declared, in the following year to finish off Soviet Russia at least as far as the Urals. 'Then it would perhaps be possible to reach a point of stabilization in Europe through a sort of half-peace', by which he appeared to mean that Europe would exist as a self-sufficient, heavily armed fortress, leaving the remaining belligerent powers to fight it out in other theatres of war.

He outlined his vision of the future. It was essential after the war was over to undertake a huge social programme embracing workers and farmers. The German people had deserved this. And it would provide always the political reasoning behind the aim of material improvement the 'most secure basis of our state system'. The enormous housing programme he had in mind would, he stated openly, be made possible through cheap labour through depressing wages. The work would be done by the forced labour of the defeated peoples. He pointed out that the prisoners-of-war were now being fully employed in the war economy. This was as it should be, he stated, and had been the case in antiquity, giving rise in the first place to slave labour. German war-debts would doubtless be 200300 billion Marks. These had to be covered through the work 'in the main of the people who had lost the war'. The cheap labour would allow houses to be built and sold at a substantial profit which would go towards paying off the war-debts within ten to fifteen years.

Hitler put forward once more his vision of the East as Germany's 'future India', which would become within three or four generations 'absolutely German'. There would, he made clear, be no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches. For the time being, he ordered slow progression in the 'Church Question'. 'But it is clear,' noted Goebbels, himself among the most aggressive anti-Church radicals, 'that after the war it has to be generally solved ... There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world-view.'

Pressing engagements in Berlin prevented Hitler from returning that evening, as he had intended, to the Wolf's Lair. When he eventually reached his headquarters again, in the morning of 16 December, it was back to a reality starkly different from the rosy picture he had painted to his Gauleiter. A potentially catastrophic military crisis was unfolding.

VI.

Already before Hitler had left for Berlin, Field-Marshal von Bock had outlined the weakness of his Army Group against a concentrated attack, and stated the danger of serious defeat if no reserves were sent. Then, while Hitler was in the Reich capital, as the Soviet counter-offensive penetrated German lines, driving a dangerous wedge between the 2nd and 4th Armies, Guderian reported the desperate position of his troops and a serious 'crisis in confidence' of the field commands. After Schmundt had been sent to Army Group Centre on 14 December to discuss the situation at first hand, Hitler responded immediately, neither awaiting the report from Brauchitsch, who had accompanied Schmundt, nor involving Halder. Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm, Commander of the Reserve Army, was summoned and asked for a report on the divisions that could be sent straight away to the eastern front. Goring and the head of the Wehrmacht transport, Lieutenant-General Rudolf Gercke, were told to arrange the transport. Four and a half divisions of reserves, a.s.sembled throughout Germany at breakneck speed, were rushed to the haemorrhaging front. Another nine divisions were drummed up from the western front and the Balkans. On 15 December Jodl pa.s.sed on to Halder Hitler's order that there must be no retreat where the front could possibly be held. But where the position was untenable, and once preparations for an orderly withdrawal had been made, retreat to a more defensible line was permitted. This matched the recommendations of Bock and of the man who would soon replace him as Commander of Army Group Centre, at this time still commanding the 4th Army, Field-Marshal Gunther von Kluge. That evening, Brauchitsch, deeply depressed, told Halder that he saw no way out for the army from its current position. Hitler had by this time long since ceased listening to his broken Army Commander-in-Chief and was dealing directly with his Army Group Commanders.

Bock had, in fact, already recommended to Brauchitsch on 13 December that Hitler should make a decision on whether the Army Group Centre should stand fast and fight its ground, or retreat. In either eventuality, Bock had openly stated, there was the danger that the Army Group would collapse 'in ruins'. Bock advanced no firm recommendation. But he indicated the disadvantages of retreat: the discipline of the troops might give way, and the order to stand-fast at the new line be disobeyed. The implication was plain. The retreat might turn into a rout. Bock's evaluation of the situation, remarkably, had not been pa.s.sed on to Hitler at the time. He only received it on 16 December, when Bock told Schmundt what he had reported to Brauchitsch three days earlier.

That night, Guderian, who two days earlier had struggled through a blizzard for twenty-two hours to meet Brauchitsch at Roslavl and put his case for a withdrawal, was telephoned on a crackly line by Hitler: there was to be no withdrawal; the line was to be held; replacements would be sent. Army Group North was told the same day, 16 December, that it had to defend the front to the last man. Army Group South had also to hold the front and would be sent reserves from the Crimea after the imminent fall of Sevastopol. Army Group Centre was informed that extensive withdrawals could not be countenanced because of the wholesale loss of heavy weapons which would ensue. 'With personal commitment of the Commander, subordinate commanders, and officers, the troops were to be compelled to fanatical resistance in their positions without respect for the enemy breaking through on the flanks or rear.'

Hitler's decision that there should be no retreat, conveyed to Brauchitsch and Halder in the night of 1617 December, was his own. But it seems to have taken Bock's a.s.sessment as the justification for the high-risk tactic of no-retreat. His order stated: 'There can be no question of a withdrawal. Only in some some places has there been deep penetration by the enemy. Setting up rear positions is fantasy. The front is suffering from one thing only: the enemy has more soldiers. It doesn't have more artillery. It's much worse than we are.' places has there been deep penetration by the enemy. Setting up rear positions is fantasy. The front is suffering from one thing only: the enemy has more soldiers. It doesn't have more artillery. It's much worse than we are.'

On 13 December, Field-Marshal von Bock had submitted to Brauchitsch his request to be relieved of his command, since, so he claimed, he had not overcome the consequences of his earlier illness. Five days later, Hitler had Brauchitsch inform Bock that the request for leave was granted. Kluge took over the command of Army Group Centre. On 19 December it was the turn long overdue of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field-Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, to depart.

Brauchitsch's sacking had been on the cards for some time. Hitler's military adjutants had been speculating over his replacement since mid-November. His health had for weeks been very poor. He had suffered a serious heart attack in mid-November. At the beginning of December, his health, Halder noted, was 'again giving cause for concern' under the pressure of constant worrying. Hitler spoke of him even in November as 'a totally sick man, at the end of his tether'. Squeezed in the conflict between Hitler and Halder, Brauchitsch's position was indeed unenviable. But his own feebleness had contributed markedly to his misery. Constantly trying to balance demands from his Army Group Commanders and from Halder with the need to please Hitler, his weakness and compliance had left him ever more exposed in the gathering crisis to a Leader who from the start lacked confidence in his army leadership and was determined to intervene in tactical dispositions. It was recognized by those who saw the way Hitler treated him that Brauchitsch was no longer up to the job. Brauchitsch, for his part, was anxious to resign, and tried to do so immediately following the start of the Soviet counter-offensive in the first week of December. He thought of Kluge or Manstein as possible successors.

Hitler disingenuously told Schmundt at the time (and commented along similar lines to his Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, two days later) that he was clueless about a replacement. Schmundt had for some time favoured Hitler himself taking over as head of the army, to restore confidence, and now put this to him. Hitler said he would think about it. According to Below, it was in the night of 1617 December that Hitler finally decided to take on the supreme command of the army himself. The names of Manstein and Kesselring were thrown momentarily into the ring. But Hitler did not like Manstein, brilliant commander though he was. And Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring, known as a tough and capable organizer, and an eternal optimist, was earmarked for command of the Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean (and, perhaps, was thought to be too much in Goring's pocket). In any case, Hitler had convinced himself by this time that being in charge of the army was no more than a 'little matter of operational command' that 'anyone can do'. Halder, who, it might have been imagined, would have had most to lose by the change-over, in fact appears to have welcomed it. He seems briefly to have deluded himself that through this move, taking him directly into Hitler's presence in decision-making, he might expand his own influence to matters concerning the entire Wehrmacht. Keitel put an early stop to any such pretensions, ensuring that, as before, Halder's responsibilities were confined to strictly army concerns.

Hitler's takeover of the supreme command of the army was formally announced on 19 December. In one sense, since Brauchitsch had been increasingly bypa.s.sed during the deepening crisis, the change was less fundamental than it appeared. But it meant, nevertheless, that Hitler was now taking over direct responsibility for tactics, as well as grand strategy. He was absurdly overloading himself still further. And his takeover of direct command of the army would deprive him, in the eyes of the German public, of scapegoats for future military disasters.

Immediately on the heels of the announcement of Brauchitsch's resignation came an even plainer sign of crisis in the east. On 20 December, Hitler published an appeal to the German people to send warm winter clothing for the troops in the east. Goebbels listed all the items of clothes to be handed in during a lengthy radio broadcast that evening. The population responded with shock and anger astonished and bitter that the leadership had not made proper provision for basic necessities for their loved ones fighting at the front and exposed to a merciless, polar winter.

Also on the day after Brauchitsch's dismissal, Hitler sent a strongly worded directive to Army Group Centre, reaffirming the order issued four days earlier to hold position and fight to the last man. 'The fanatical will to defend the ground on which the troops are standing,' ran the directive, 'must be injected into the troops with every pos