Hitler. Part 21

Snow still lay on the ground at the Wolf 's Lair. An icy wind gave no respite from the cold. But, at the end of February 1942, there were the first signs that spring was not far away. Hitler could not wait for the awful winter to pa.s.s. He felt he had been let down by his military leaders, his logistical planners, his transport organizers; that his army commanders had been faint-hearts, not tough enough when faced with crisis; that his own strength of will and determination had alone staved off catastrophe. The winter crisis had sharpened his sense, never far from the surface, that he had to struggle not just against external enemies, but against those who were inadequate, incapable, or even disloyal, in his own ranks. But the crisis had been surmounted. This in itself was a psychological blow to the enemy, which had also suffered grievously. It was necessary now to attack again as soon as possible; to destroy this mortally weakened enemy in one final great heave. This was how his thoughts ran. In the insomniac nights in his bunker, he was not just wanting to erase the memories of the crisis-ridden cold, dark months. He could hardly wait for the new offensive in the east to start the push to the Caucasus, Leningrad, and Moscow, which would wrestle back the initiative once more. It would be a colossal gamble. Should it fail, the consequences would be unthinkable.

For those in the Fuhrer Headquarters not preoccupied with military planning, life was dull and monotonous. Hitler's secretaries would go for a daily walk to the next village and back. Otherwise, they whiled away the hours. Chatting, a film in the evenings, and the obligatory gathering each afternoon in the Tea House and late at night again for tea made up the day. 'Since the tea-party always consists of the same people, there is no stimulation from outside, and n.o.body experiences anything on a personal level,' Christa Schroeder wrote to a friend in February 1942, 'the conversation is often apathetic and tedious, wearying, and irksome. Talk always runs along the same lines.' Hitler's monologues outlining his expansive vision of the world were reserved for lunch or the twilight hours. At the afternoon tea-gatherings, politics were never discussed. Anything connected with the war was taboo. There was nothing but small-talk. Those present either had no independent views, or kept them to themselves. Hitler's presence dominated. But it seldom now did much to animate. He was invariably tired, but found it hard to sleep. His insomnia made him reluctant to go to bed. His entourage often wished he would do so. The tedium for those around him seemed at times incessant. Occasionally, it was relieved in the evenings by listening to records Beethoven symphonies, selections from Wagner, or Hugo Wolf 's Lieder Lieder. Hitler would listen with closed eyes. But he alwayswanted the same records. His entourage knew the numbers off by heart. He would call out: 'Aida, last act,' and someone would shout to one of the manservants: 'Number hundred-and-something.'

The war was all that mattered to Hitler. Yet, coc.o.o.ned in the strange world of the Wolf 's Lair, he was increasingly severed from its realities, both at the front and at home. Detachment ruled out all vestiges of humanity. Even towards those in his own entourage who had been with him for many years, there was nothing resembling real affection, let alone friendship; genuine fondness was reserved only for his young Alsatian. Human life and suffering were of no consequence to him. He never visited a field-hospital, nor the homeless after bomb-raids. He saw no ma.s.sacres, went near no concentration camp, viewed no compound of starving prisoners-of-war. His enemies were in his eyes like vermin to be stamped out. But his profound contempt for human existence extended to his own people. Decisions costing the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers were made perhaps it was only thus possible to make them without consideration for any human plight. The hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed were merely an abstraction, the suffering a necessary and justified sacrifice in the 'heroic struggle' for the survival of the people.

Hitler was by now becoming a remote figure for the German people, a distant warlord. His image had to be refashioned by Goebbels to match the change which the Russian campaign had brought about. The premiere of the lavish new film The Great King The Great King in early 1942 allowed Goebbels to stylize Hitler by a.s.sociation as a latter-day Frederick the Great, isolated in his majesty, conducting a heroic struggle for his people against mighty enemies and ultimately overcoming crisis and calamity to emerge triumphant. It was a portrayal which increasingly matched Hitler's self-image during the last years of the war. in early 1942 allowed Goebbels to stylize Hitler by a.s.sociation as a latter-day Frederick the Great, isolated in his majesty, conducting a heroic struggle for his people against mighty enemies and ultimately overcoming crisis and calamity to emerge triumphant. It was a portrayal which increasingly matched Hitler's self-image during the last years of the war.

But the changed image could do nothing to alter reality: the German people's bonds with Hitler were starting to loosen. And as the war turned inexorably against Germany, Hitler cast around all the more for scapegoats.

An early complication in 1942 arose with the loss of his armaments minister, Dr Fritz Todt, in a fatal air-crash on the morning of 8 February, soon after taking off from the airfield at the Fuhrer Headquarters.

Todt had masterminded the building of the motorways and the Westwall for Hitler. In March 1940 he had been given the task, as a Reich Minister, of coordinating the production of weapons and munitions. Yet a further major office had come his way in July 1941 with the centralization in his hands of control over energy and waterways. In the second half of the year, as the first signs of serious labour shortage in German industry became evident, Todt was commissioned with organizing the ma.s.s deployment within Germany of Soviet prisoners-of-war and civilian forced labourers. The acc.u.mulation of offices pivotal to the war economy was an indication of Hitler's high esteem for Todt. This was reciprocated. Todt was a convinced National Socialist. But by late 1941, fully aware of the ma.s.sive armaments potential of the USA and appalled at the logistical incompetence of the Wehrmacht's economic planning during the eastern campaign, he had become deeply pessimistic, certain that the war could not be won.

On the morning of 7 February, Todt had flown to Rastenburg to put to Hitler proposals which had arisen from his meeting a few days earlier with representatives of the armaments industries. The meeting that afternoon was plainly anything but harmonious. In depressed mood, and after a restless night, Todt left next morning to head for Munich in a twin-engined Heinkel 111. Shortly after leaving the runway, the plane turned abruptly, headed to land again, burst into flames, and crashed. The bodies of Todt and four others on board were yanked with long poles from the burning wreckage. An official inquiry ruled out sabotage. But suspicion was never fully allayed. What caused the crash remained a mystery.

Hitler, according to witnesses who saw him at close quarters, was deeply moved by the loss of Todt, whom, it was said, he still greatly admired and needed for the war economy. Even if, as was later often claimed, the breach between him and Todt had become irreparable on account of the Armaments Minister's forcefully expressed conviction that the war could not be won, it is not altogether obvious why Hitler would have been so desperate as to resort to having Todt killed in an arranged air-crash at his own headquarters in circ.u.mstances guaranteed to prompt suspicion. Had he been insistent upon dispensing with Todt's services, 'retirement' on ill-health grounds would have offered a simpler solution. The only obvious beneficiary from Todt's demise was the successor Hitler now appointed with remarkable haste: his highly ambitious court architect, Albert Speer. But the only 'evidence' later used to hint at any involvement by Speer was his presence in the Fuhrer Headquarters at the time of the crash and his rejection, a few hours before the planned departure, of an offer of a lift in Todt's aeroplane. Whatever the cause of the crash that killed Todt, it brought Albert Speer, till then in the second rank of n.a.z.i leaders and known only as. .h.i.tler's court architect and a personal favourite of the Fuhrer, into the foreground.

Speer's meteoric rise in the 1930s had rested on shrewd exploitation of the would-be architect Hitler's building mania, coupled with his own driving ambition and undoubted organizational talent. Hitler liked Speer. 'He is an artist and has a spirit akin to mine,' he said. 'He is a building-person like me, intelligent, modest, and not an obstinate military-head.' Speer later remarked that he was the nearest Hitler came to having a friend. Now, Speer was in exactly the right place close to Hitler when a successor to Todt was needed. Six hours after the Reich Minister's sudden death, Speer was appointed to replace him in all his offices. The appointment came as a surprise to many including, if we are to take his own version of accounts at face value, Speer himself. But Speer was certainly antic.i.p.ating succeeding Todt in construction work and possibly more. At any rate, he lost no time in using Hitler's authority to establish for himself more extensive powers than Todt had ever enjoyed. Speer would soon enough have to battle his way through the jungle of rivalries and intrigues which const.i.tuted the governance of the Third Reich. But once Hitler, the day after returning to Berlin for Todt's state funeral on 12 February (at which he himself delivered the oration as his eyes welled with, perhaps crocodile, tears), had publicly backed Speer's supremacy in armaments production in a speech to leaders of the armaments industries, the new minister, still not quite thirty-eight years of age, found that 'I could do within the widest limits practically what I wanted'. Building on the changes his predecessor had initiated, adding his own organizational flair and ruthless drive, and drawing on his favoured standing with Hitler, Speer proved an inspired choice. Over the next two years, despite intensified Allied bombing and the fortunes of war ebbing strongly away from Germany, he presided over a doubling of armaments output.

Hitler was full of confidence when Goebbels had chance to speak at length with him during his stay in Berlin following Todt's funeral. After the travails of the winter, the Dictator had reason to feel as if the corner was turned. During the very days that he was in Berlin the British were suffering two mighty blows to their prestige. Two German battleships, Gneisenau Gneisenau and and Scharnhorst Scharnhorst, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen Prinz Eugen, had steamed out of Brest and, under the very noses of the British, pa.s.sed through the English Channel with minimal damage, heading for safer moorings at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel. Hitler could scarcely contain his delight. At the same time, the news was coming in from the Far East of the imminent fall of Singapore. Most of all, Hitler was content about the prospects in the east. The problems of winter had been overcome, and important lessons learned. 'Troops who can cope with such a winter are unbeatable,' Goebbels noted. Now the great thaw had set in. 'The Fuhrer is planning a few very hard and crushing offensive thrusts, which are already in good measure prepared and will doubtless lead gradually to the smashing of Bolshevism.'

II.

On 15 March, Hitler was back again in Berlin. The serious losses over the winter made it essential that he attend the midday ceremony on Heroes' Memorial Day. In his speech, he portrayed the previous months as a struggle above all against the elements in a winter the like of which had not been seen for almost a century and a half. 'But one thing we know today,' he declared. 'The Bolshevik hordes, which were unable to defeat the German soldiers and their allies this winter, will be beaten by us into annihilation this coming summer.'

Many people were too concerned about the rumoured reductions in food rations to pay much attention to the speech. Goebbels was well aware that food supplies had reached a critical point and that it would need a 'work of art' to put across to the people the reasons for the reductions. He acknowledged that the cuts would lead to a 'crisis in the internal mood'. Hitler, in full recognition of the sensitivity of the situation, had summoned the Propaganda Minister to his headquarters to discuss the issue before ration-cuts were announced. Goebbels's view was that the deterioration in morale at home demanded tough measures to counter it. He was determined to take the matter to the Fuhrer, and hoped for the support of Bormann and the party in getting Hitler to intervene to back more radical measures. He felt that, as things were, a radical approach to the law, necessary in total war, was being sabotaged by representatives of the formal legal system. He approved of Bormann's demands for tougher sentences for black-marketeering. And he took it upon himself to press. .h.i.tler to change the leadership of the Justice Ministry, which since Gurtner's death the previous year had been run by the State Secretary, Franz Schlegelberger. 'The bourgeois elements still dominate there,' he commented, 'and since the heavens are high and the Fuhrer far away, it's extraordinarily difficult to succeed against these stubborn and listlessly working authorities.' It was in this mood determined to persuade Hitler to support radical measures, attack privilege, and castigate the state bureaucracy (above all judges and lawyers) that Goebbels arrived at the Wolf 's Lair on the ice-cold morning of 19 March.

He met a Hitler showing clear signs of the strain he had been under during the past months, in a state of mind that left him more than open to Goebbels's radical suggestions. He needed no instruction about the mood in Germany, and the impact the reduction in food rations would have. Lack of transport prevented food being brought from the Ukraine, he complained. The Transport Ministry was blamed for the shortage of locomotives. He was determined to take tough measures. Goebbels then lost no time in berating the 'failure' of the judicial system. Hitler did not demur. Here, too, he was determined to proceed with 'the toughest measures'. Goebbels paraded before Hitler his suggestion for a new comprehensive law to punish offenders against the 'principles of National Socialist leadership of the people'. He wanted the Reich Ministry of Justice placing in new hands, and pressed for Otto Thierack, 'a real National Socialist', an SA-Gruppenfuhrer, and currently President of the notorious People's Court responsible for dealing with cases of treason and other serious offences against the regime to take the place left by Gurtner. Five months later, Hitler would make the appointment that Goebbels had wanted, and, in Thierack's hands, the capitulation of the judicial system to the police state would become complete.

For now, Hitler placated Goebbels with a suggestion to prepare the ground for a radical a.s.sault on social privilege by recalling the Reichstag and having it bestow upon him 'a special plenipotentiary power' so that 'the evil-doers know that he is covered in every way by the people's community'. Given the powers which Hitler already possessed, the motive was purely populist. An attack on the civil servants and judges, and upon the privileged in society or, as. .h.i.tler put it, 'saboteurs' and 'neglecters of duty in public functions' could not fail to be popular with the ma.s.ses. Up to this point, judges could not be dismissed not even by the Fuhrer. There were limits, too, to his rights of intervention in the military sphere. The case of Colonel-General Erich Hoepner still rankled deeply. Hitler had sacked Hoepner in January and dismissed him from the army in disgrace for retreating in disobedience to his 'Halt Order'. Hoepner had then inst.i.tuted a law-suit against the Reich over the loss of his pension rights and won. With Hitler's new powers, this could never happen again. Examples could be set in the military and civilian sector to serve as deterrents to others and 'clear the air'.

'In such a mood,' wrote Goebbels the next day, 'my suggestions for the radicalization of our war-leadership naturally had an absolutely positive effect on the Fuhrer. I only need to touch a topic and I have already got my way. Everything that I put forward individually is accepted piece for piece by the Fuhrer without contradiction.'

The encouragement of Hitler to back the radicalization of the home front continued after Goebbels's return from the Wolf 's Lair. Apart from the Propaganda Minister, it came in particular from Bormann and Himmler. On 26 March, the SD reported on a 'crisis of confidence' resulting from the failure of the state to take a tough enough stance against black-marketeers and their corrupt customers among the well-placed and privileged. Himmler, it seems, had directly prompted the report; Bormann made Hitler aware of it. Three days later, Goebbels castigated black-marketeering in Das Reich Das Reich, publicizing two instances of the death-penalty being imposed on profiteers.

It was on this same evening, that of 29 March, that Hitler treated his small audience in the Wolf 's Lair to a prolonged diatribe on lawyers and the deficiencies of the legal system, concluding that 'every jurist must be defective by nature, or would become so in time'.

This was only a few days after he had personally intervened in a blind rage with acting Justice Minister Schlegelberger and, when he proved dilatory, with the more eagerly compliant Roland Freisler (later the infamous President of the People's Court as successor to Thierack but at this time Second State Secretary in the Justice Ministry), to insist on the death-penalty for a man named Ewald Schlitt. This was on no more solid basis than the reading of a sensationalized account in a Berlin evening paper of how an Oldenburg court had sentenced Schlitt to only five years in a penitentiary for a horrific physical a.s.sault according to the newspaper account that had led to the death of his wife in an asylum. The court had been lenient because it took the view that Schlitt had been temporarily deranged. Schlegelberger lacked the courage to present the case fully to Hitler, and to defend the judges at the same time. Instead, he promised to improve the severity of sentencing. Freisler had no compunction in meeting Hitler's wishes. The original sentence was overturned. In a new hearing, Schlitt was duly sentenced to death, and guillotined on 2 April.

Hitler had been so enraged by what he had read on the Schlitt case which matched all his prejudices about lawyers and fell precisely at the time when the judicial system was being made the scapegoat for the difficulties on the home front that he had privately threatened, should other 'excessively lenient' sentences be produced, 'to send the Justice Ministry to the devil through a Reichstag law'. As it was, the Schlitt case was brought into service as a pretext to demand from the Reichstag absolute powers over the law itself.

Hitler rang Goebbels on 23 April to tell him that he had now decided to deliver the speech to the Reichstag he had for long had in mind. Goebbels undertook to make the necessary arrangements to summon the Reichstag for 3 p.m. on Sunday, 26 April.

In a shortened lunch just before Hitler's Reichstag speech, a good deal of the talk revolved around the devastation of Rostock in a renewed British raid the heaviest so far. Much of the housing in the centre of the Baltic harbour-town had been destroyed. But the Heinkel factory had lost only an estimated 10 per cent of its productive capacity. German retaliation to British raids had consisted of attacks on Exeter and Bath. Goebbels favoured the complete devastation of English 'cultural centres'. Hitler, furious at the new attack on Rostock, agreed, according to Goebbels's account. Terror had to be answered with terror. English 'cultural centres', seaside resorts, and 'bourgeois towns' would be razed to the ground. The psychological impact of this and that was the key thing would be far greater than that achieved through mostly unsuccessful attempts to hit armaments factories. German bombing would now begin in a big way. He had already given out the directive to prepare a lengthy plan of attack on such lines.

What turned out to be the last ever session of the Great German Reichstag began punctually. Hitler was nervous at the beginning, starting hesitantly, then speaking so fast that parts of his speech were scarcely intelligible. He implied that transport, administration, and justice had been found lacking. There was a side-swipe (without naming names) at Colonel-General Hoepner: 'no one can stand on their well-earned rights', but had to know 'that today there are only duties'. He requested from the Reichstag, therefore, the legal authorization 'to hold each one to fulfilment of his duties' and to dismiss from office without respect to 'acquired rights'. Using the Schlitt case as his example, he launched into a savage attack on the failings of the judiciary. From now on, he said, he would intervene in such cases and dismiss judges 'who visibly fail to recognize the demands of the hour'.

As soon as. .h.i.tler had finished speaking, Goring read out the 'Resolution' of the Reichstag, empowering Hitler 'without being bound to existing legal precepts', in his capacity as 'Leader of the Nation, Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, Head of Government and supreme occupant of executive power, as supreme law-lord and as Leader of the Party', to remove from office and punish anyone, of whatever status, failing to carry out his duty, without respect to pensionable rights, and without any stipulated formal proceedings.

Naturally, the 'Resolution' was unanimously approved. The last shreds of const.i.tutionality had been torn apart. Hitler now was was the law. the law.

Many people were surprised that Hitler needed any extension of his powers. They wondered what had gone on that had prompted his scathing attacks on the internal administration. Disappointment was soon registered that no immediate actions appeared to follow his strong words. Lawyers, judges, and civil servants were not unnaturally dismayed by the a.s.sault on their professions and standing. What had caused it was in their eyes a mystery. The Fuhrer had evidently, they thought, been cra.s.sly misinformed. The consequences were, however, unmistakable. As the head of the judiciary in Dresden pointed out, with the ending of all judicial autonomy Germany had now become a 'true Fuhrer state'.

Hitler's populist instincts had not deserted him. Less elevated sections of the population enthused over his a.s.sault on rank and privilege. This had successfully allowed him to divert attention from more fundamental questions about the failures of the previous winter and to provide a much-needed morale-booster through easy attacks on cheap targets.

For the ma.s.s of the German people, however, only the prospect of the peace that final victory would bring could sustain morale for any length of time. Many 'despondent souls', ran one party report on the popular mood, were 'struck only by one part of the Fuhrer's speech: where he spoke of the preparations for the winter campaign of 19423. The more the homeland has become aware of the cruelty and hardship of the winter struggle in the east, the more the longing for an end to it has increased. But now the end is still not in sight.'

III.

Hours after his Reichstag speech, Hitler left for Munich, en route en route to the Berghof and a meeting with Mussolini. He was in expansive mood next lunchtime at his favourite Munich restaurant, the Osteria. He held forth to Hermann Giesler, one of his favoured architects, and his companion-in-arms from the old days of the party's early struggles in Munich Hermann Esser, on his plans for double-decker express trains to run at 200 kilometres an hour on four-metre-wide tracks between Upper Silesia and the Donets Basin. Two days later, at a snow-covered Berghof with Eva Braun acting as hostess, he was regaling his supper guests with complaints about the lack of top Wagnerian tenors in Germany, and the deficiencies of leading conductors Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch. Walter, a Jew who had become renowned as the director of the Bavarian State Opera and Leipziger Gewandhaus before being forced out by the n.a.z.is in 1933 and emigrating to America, was an 'absolute nonent.i.ty', claimed Hitler, who had ruined the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera to the extent that it was capable only of playing 'beer music'. Although Walter's arch-rival Knappertsbusch, tall, blond, blue-eyed, had the appearance of a model 'aryan' male, listening to him conduct an opera was 'a punishment' to Hitler's mind, as the orchestra drowned out the singing and the conductor performed such gyrations that it was painful to look at him. Only Wilhelm Furtw.a.n.gler, who had turned the Berlin Philharmonic into such a magnificent orchestra, one of the regime's most important cultural amba.s.sadors, and acknowledged maestro in conducting the Fuhrer's own favourite Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner, met with his unqualified approval. to the Berghof and a meeting with Mussolini. He was in expansive mood next lunchtime at his favourite Munich restaurant, the Osteria. He held forth to Hermann Giesler, one of his favoured architects, and his companion-in-arms from the old days of the party's early struggles in Munich Hermann Esser, on his plans for double-decker express trains to run at 200 kilometres an hour on four-metre-wide tracks between Upper Silesia and the Donets Basin. Two days later, at a snow-covered Berghof with Eva Braun acting as hostess, he was regaling his supper guests with complaints about the lack of top Wagnerian tenors in Germany, and the deficiencies of leading conductors Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch. Walter, a Jew who had become renowned as the director of the Bavarian State Opera and Leipziger Gewandhaus before being forced out by the n.a.z.is in 1933 and emigrating to America, was an 'absolute nonent.i.ty', claimed Hitler, who had ruined the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera to the extent that it was capable only of playing 'beer music'. Although Walter's arch-rival Knappertsbusch, tall, blond, blue-eyed, had the appearance of a model 'aryan' male, listening to him conduct an opera was 'a punishment' to Hitler's mind, as the orchestra drowned out the singing and the conductor performed such gyrations that it was painful to look at him. Only Wilhelm Furtw.a.n.gler, who had turned the Berlin Philharmonic into such a magnificent orchestra, one of the regime's most important cultural amba.s.sadors, and acknowledged maestro in conducting the Fuhrer's own favourite Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner, met with his unqualified approval.

Between monologues, he had had 'discussions' with Mussolini in the baroque Klessheim Castle, once a residence of the Prince Bishops of Salzburg, now luxuriously refurbished with furniture and carpets removed from France to make a n.a.z.i guest-house and conference-centre. The atmosphere was cordial. Hitler looked tired to Ciano, and bearing the signs of the strains of the winter. His hair, Ciano noticed, was turning grey. Hitler's primary aim was to convey optimism to Mussolini about the war in the east. Ribbentrop's message to Ciano, in their separate meeting, was no different: the 'genius of the Fuhrer' had mastered the evils of the Russian winter; a coming offensive towards the Caucasus would deprive Russia of fuel, bring the conflict to an end, and force Britain to terms; British hopes from America amounted to 'a colossal bluff'.

The talks continued the next day, now with military leaders present, at the Berghof. How much of a genuine discussion there was is plain from Ciano's description: 'Hitler talks, talks, talks, talks', non-stop for an hour and forty minutes. Mussolini, used himself to dominating all conversation, had to suffer in silence, occasionally casting a surrept.i.tious glance at his watch. Ciano switched off and thought of other things. Keitel yawned and struggled to keep awake. Jodl did not manage it: 'after an epic struggle', he finally fell asleep on a sofa. Mussolini, overawed as always by Hitler, was, apparently, satisfied with the meetings.

A week later, on 8 May, the Wehrmacht began its planned spring offensive. The first targets for Manstein's 11th Army, as laid down in Hitler's directive of 5 April, were the Kerch peninsula and Sevastopol in the Crimea. The directive stipulated the drive on the Caucasus, to capture the oil-fields and occupy the mountain-pa.s.ses that opened the route to the Persian Gulf, as the main goal of the summer offensive to follow, code-named 'Blue'. The removal of the basis of the Soviet war-economy and the destruction of remaining military forces thought catastrophically weakened over the winter would, it was presumed, bring victory in the east. There, Hitler had rea.s.serted in planning the summer operations, the war would be decided. The key factor was no longer 'living s.p.a.ce', but oil. 'If I don't get the oil of Maykop and Grozny,' Hitler admitted, 'then I must finish this war.'

The Wehrmacht and Army High Commands did not contradict the strategic priority. In any case, they had no better alternative to recommend. And the lack of a coordinated command structure meant, as before, compet.i.tion for Hitler's approval a military version of 'working towards the Fuhrer'. It was not a matter of Hitler imposing a diktat on his military leaders. Despite his full recognition of the gravity of the German losses over the winter, Halder entirely backed the decision for an all-out offensive to destroy the basis of the Soviet economy. The April directive for 'Blue' bore his clear imprint. And despite the magnitude of their miscalculation the previous year, operational planners, fed by highly flawed intelligence, far from working on the basis of a 'worst-case scenario', backed the optimism about the military and economic weakness of the Soviet Union.

Whatever the presumptions of Soviet losses on which German intelligence remained woefully weak the Wehrmacht's own strength, as Halder knew only too well, had been drastically weakened. Over a million of the 3.2 million men who had attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 were by now dead, captured, or missing. At the end of March, only 5 per cent of army divisions were fully operational. The figures that Halder gave Hitler on 21 April were chilling in the extreme. Some 900,000 men had been lost since the autumn, only 50 per cent replaced (including the call-up of all available twenty-year-olds, and serious inroads into the labour-force at home). Only around 10 per cent of the vehicles lost had been replaced. Losses of weapons were also ma.s.sive. At the beginning of the spring offensive, the eastern front was short of around 625,000 men. Given such ma.s.sive shortages, everything was poured into bolstering the southern offensive in the Soviet Union. Of the sixty-eight divisions established on this part of the front, forty-eight had been entirely, and seventeen at least partly, reconst.i.tuted.

Poor Soviet intelligence meant the Red Army was again unprepared for the German a.s.sault when it came. By 19 May, the Kerch offensive was largely over, with the capture of 150,000 prisoners and a great deal of booty. A heavy Soviet counter on Kharkhov had been, if with difficulty, successfully fended off. By the end of May, the battle at Kharkhov had also resulted in a notable victory, with three Soviet armies destroyed, and over 200,000 men and a huge quant.i.ty of booty captured. This was in no small measure owing to Hitler's refusal, fully endorsed by Halder, to allow Field-Marshal Bock, since mid-January Commander of Army Group South, to break off the planned offensive and take up a defensive position.

Hitler had reason to feel pleased with himself when he spoke for two hours behind closed doors in the Reich Chancellery to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter on the afternoon of 23 May. He had come to Berlin for the funeral of Carl Rover, Gauleiter of Weser-Ems, which had taken place the previous day. After a difficult period, also on the home front, he evidently could not miss the opportunity to bolster the solidarity and loyalty of his long-standing party stalwarts, a vital part of his power-base. And in such company, he was prepared to speak with some candour about his aims.

Hitler emphasized that the war in the east was not comparable with any war in the past. It was not a simple matter of victory or defeat, but of 'triumph or destruction'. He was aware of the enormous capacity of the American armaments programme. But the scale of output claimed by Roosevelt 'could in no way be right'. And he had good information on the scale of j.a.panese naval construction. He reckoned on serious losses for the American navy when it clashed with the j.a.panese fleet. He took the view 'that in the past winter we have won the war'. Preparations were now in place to launch the offensive in the south of the Soviet Union to cut off the enemy's oil-supplies. He was determined to finish off the Soviets in the coming summer.

He looked to the future. The Reich would ma.s.sively extend its land in the east, gaining coal, grain, oil, and above all national security. In the west, too, the Reich would have to be strengthened. The French would 'have to bleed for that'. But there it was a strategic, not an ethnic, question. 'We must solve the ethnic questions in the east.' Once the territory needed for the consolidation of Europe was in German hands, it was his intention to build a gigantic fortification, like the limes limes of Roman times, to separate Asia from Europe. He went on with his vision of a countryside settled by farmer-soldiers, building up a population of 250 millions within seventy or eighty years. Then Germany would be safe against all future threats. It should not be difficult, he claimed, to preserve the ethnic-German character of the conquered territories. 'That would also be the actual meaning of this war. For the serious sacrifice of blood could only be justified through later generations gaining from it the blessing of waving cornfields.' Nice though it would be to acquire a few colonies to provide rubber or coffee, 'our colonial territory is in the east. There are to be found fertile black earth and iron, the bases of our future wealth.' He ended his vision of the future with the vaguest notion of what he understood as a social revolution. The National Socialist Movement, he said, had to make sure that the war did not end in a capitalist victory, but in a victory of the people. A new society would have to be constructed out of the victory, one resting not on money, status, or name, but on courage and test of character. He was confident that victory would be Germany's. Once the 'business in the east' was finished in the summer, it was to be hoped 'the war is practically won for us. Then we will be in the position of conducting a large-scale pirate-war against the Anglo-Saxon powers, which in the long run they will not be able to withstand.' of Roman times, to separate Asia from Europe. He went on with his vision of a countryside settled by farmer-soldiers, building up a population of 250 millions within seventy or eighty years. Then Germany would be safe against all future threats. It should not be difficult, he claimed, to preserve the ethnic-German character of the conquered territories. 'That would also be the actual meaning of this war. For the serious sacrifice of blood could only be justified through later generations gaining from it the blessing of waving cornfields.' Nice though it would be to acquire a few colonies to provide rubber or coffee, 'our colonial territory is in the east. There are to be found fertile black earth and iron, the bases of our future wealth.' He ended his vision of the future with the vaguest notion of what he understood as a social revolution. The National Socialist Movement, he said, had to make sure that the war did not end in a capitalist victory, but in a victory of the people. A new society would have to be constructed out of the victory, one resting not on money, status, or name, but on courage and test of character. He was confident that victory would be Germany's. Once the 'business in the east' was finished in the summer, it was to be hoped 'the war is practically won for us. Then we will be in the position of conducting a large-scale pirate-war against the Anglo-Saxon powers, which in the long run they will not be able to withstand.'

Hitler was in ebullient mood when Goebbels saw him at lunchtime in the Reich Chancellery on 29 May. With the advance to the Caucasus, he told his Propaganda Minister, 'we'll be pressing the Soviet system so to say on its Adam's Apple'. He thought the new Soviet losses at Kerch and Kharkhov were not reparable; Stalin was reaching the end of his resources; there were major difficulties with food-supplies in the Soviet Union; morale there was poor. He had concrete plans for the extension of the Reich borders also in the west. He took it as a matter of course that Belgium, with its ancient Germanic provinces of Flanders and Brabant, would be split into German Reichsgaue. Reichsgaue. So would, whatever the views of Dutch National Socialist leader Anton Mussert, the Netherlands. So would, whatever the views of Dutch National Socialist leader Anton Mussert, the Netherlands.

Two days earlier, one of Hitler's most important henchmen, Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and since the previous autumn Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, had been fatally wounded in an a.s.sa.s.sination attempt carried out by patriotic Czech exiles who had been flown from London with the aid of the British subversive warfare agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and parachuted into the vicinity of Prague. Hitler always favoured brutal reprisals. There could be no doubt that the attack on one of the key representatives of his power would provoke a ferocious response. Over 1,300 Czechs, some 200 of them women, were eventually rounded up by the SS and executed. On 10 June the entire village of Lidice the name had been found on a Czech SOE agent arrested earlier would be destroyed, the male inhabitants shot, the women taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp, the children removed.

Hitler's mood was ripe for Goebbels to bring up once more the question of the deportation of Berlin's remaining Jews. The involvement of a number of young Jews (a.s.sociated with a Communist-linked resistance group led by Herbert Baum) in the arson attempt at the anti-Bolshevik exhibition 'The Soviet Paradise' in Berlin's l.u.s.tgarten on 18 May enabled the Propaganda Minister to emphasize the security dangers if the 40,000 or so Jews he reckoned were still in the Reich capital were not deported. He had been doing his best, he had noted a day earlier, to have as many Jews as possible from his domain 'shipped off to the east'. Goebbels now pleaded for 'a more radical Jewish policy' and, he said, 'I push at an open door with the Fuhrer,' who told Speer to find replacements for the Jews in the armaments industry with 'foreign workers' as soon as possible.

Talk moved to the dangers of possible internal revolt in the event of a critical situation in the war. If the danger became acute, Hitler stated, the prisons 'would be emptied through liquidations' to prevent the possibility of the gates being opened to let the 'revolting mob' loose on the people. But in contrast to 1917 there was nothing to fear from the German workers, remarked Hitler. All German workers desired victory. They had most to lose by defeat and would not contemplate stabbing him in the back. 'The Germans take part in subversive movements only when the Jews lure them into it,' Goebbels had Hitler saying. 'Therefore one must liquidate the Jewish danger, cost what it takes.' West-European civilization only provided a facade of a.s.similation. Back in the ghetto, Jews soon returned to type. But there were elements among them who operated 'with dangerous brutality and thirst for revenge'. 'Therefore,' recorded Goebbels, 'the Fuhrer does not wish at all that the Jews be evacuated to Siberia. There, under the hardest living conditions, they would doubtless again represent a vigorous element. He would most like to see them resettled in Central Africa. There they would live in a climate that would certainly not make them strong and capable of resistance. At any rate, it is the aim of the Fuhrer to make Western Europe entirely free of Jews. Here they can no longer have any home.'

Did such remarks mean that Hitler was unaware that the 'Final Solution' was under way, that Jews had already been slaughtered in their thousands in Russia and were now being murdered by poison gas in industrialized ma.s.s-killing centres already operating in Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-Birkenau (with Treblinka and Maidanek soon to follow)? That seems inconceivable.

On 9 April 1942, a time when the deportations from western European countries to the gas-chambers of Poland were also getting under way, Hans Frank told his underlings in the General Government that orders for the liquidation of the Jews came 'from higher authority'. Himmler himself was to claim explicitly in an internal, top-secret, letter to SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Gottlob Berger, Chief of the SS Main Office, on 28 July 1942, that he was operating explicitly under Hitler's authority: 'The occupied Eastern territories are being made free of Jews. The Fuhrer has placed the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders.'

How much detail Hitler asked for, or was given, cannot be known. According to the post-war testimony of his valet, Heinz Linge, and his personal adjutant, Otto Gunsche, extracted by their Soviet captors, Hitler showed a direct interest in the development of gas-chambers and spoke to Himmler about the use of gas-vans. One indication, at the very least, that he was aware of the slaughter of huge numbers of Jews is provided by a report which Himmler had had drawn up for him at the end of 1942 providing statistics on Jews 'executed' in southern Russia on account of alleged connection with 'bandit' activity. Having ordered in mid-December that partisan 'bands' were to be combated 'by the most brutal means', also to be used against women and children, Hitler was presented by Himmler with statistics for southern Russia and the Ukraine on the number of 'bandits' liquidated in the three months of September, October, and November 1942. The figures for those helping the 'bands' or under suspicion of being connected with them listed 363,211 'Jews executed'. The connection with subversive activity was an obvious sham. Others in the same category 'executed' totalled 'only' 14,257.

Four months after this, in April 1943, Himmler would have an abbreviated statistical report on 'the Final Solution of the Jewish Question' sent to Hitler. Aware of the taboo in Hitler's entourge on explicit reference to the ma.s.s killing of the Jews, Himmler had the statistical report presented in camouflage-language. The fiction had to be maintained. Himmler ordered the term 'Special Treatment' (itself a euphemism for killing) deleted from the shortened version to be sent to Hitler. His statistician, Dr Richard Korherr, was ordered simply to refer to the 'transport of Jews'. There was reference to Jews being 'sluiced through' unnamed camps. The camouflage-language was there to serve a specific purpose. Hitler would understand what it meant, and recognize the Reichsfuhrer-SS's 'achievement'.

When he spoke at lunchtime on 29 May 1942 to Goebbels and to his other guests at his meal-table about his preference for the 'evacuation' of the Jews to Central Africa, Hitler was sustaining the fiction which had to be upheld even in his 'court circle' that the Jews were being resettled and put to work in the east. Goebbels himself, in his diary entry, went along with the fiction, though he knew only too well what was happening to the Jews in Poland. Hitler had by now internalized his authorization of the killing of the Jews. It was typical of his way of dealing with the 'Final Solution' that he spoke of it either by repeating what he knew had long since ceased to be the case; or by alluding to the removal of Jews from Europe (often in the context of his 'prophecy') at some distant point in the future.

Why was. .h.i.tler so anxious to maintain the fiction of resettlement, and uphold the 'terrible secret' even among his inner circle? A partial explanation is doubtless to be found in Hitler's acute personal inclination to extreme secrecy which he translated into a general mode of rule, as laid down in his 'Basic Order' of January 1940, that information should only be available on a 'need-to-know' basis. Knowledge of extermination could provide a propaganda gift to enemies, and perhaps stir up unrest and internal difficulties in the occupied territories, particularly in western Europe. Not least, as regards public opinion in the Reich itself, the n.a.z.i leadership believed that the German people were not ready for the gross inhumanity of the extermination of the Jews. Hitler had agreed with Rosenberg in mid-December 1941, directly following the declaration of war on the USA, that it would be inappropriate to speak of extermination in public. Late in 1942, Bormann was keen to quell rumours circulating about the 'Final Solution' in the east. Himmler would later, speaking to SS leaders, refer to it as 'a never to be written glorious page of our history'. Evidently, it was a secret to be carried to the grave.

In his public statements referring to his 1939 'prophecy', Hitler could now lay claim to his place in 'the glorious page of our history' while still detaching himself from the sordid and horrific realities of ma.s.s killing. Beyond that, a further incentive to secrecy was that Hitler wanted no bureaucratic and legal interference. He had experienced this in the 'euthanasia action', necessitating his unique written authorization, and the problems which subsequently arose from it. His tirades about the judicial system and bureaucracy in the spring of 1942 were a further indicator of his sensitivity towards such interference. To avoid any legalistic meddling, Himmler explicitly refused in the summer of 1942 to entertain attempts to define 'a Jew'.

IV.

Manstein's difficulties in taking Sevastopol held up the start of 'Operation Blue' the push to the Caucasus until the end of June. But at this point, Hitler needed have no doubts that the war was going well. In the Atlantic, the U-boats had met with unprecedented success. In the first six months of 1942, they had sunk almost a third more shipping tonnage than during the whole of 1941, and far fewer U-boats had been lost in the process. And on the evening of 21 June came the stunning news that Rommel had taken Tobruk. Through brilliant tactical manoeuvring during the previous three weeks, Rommel had outwitted the ineffectively led and poorly equipped British 8th Army and was then able to inflict a serious defeat on the Allied cause by seizing the stronghold of Tobruk, on the Libyan coast, capturing 33,000 British and Allied soldiers (many of them South African) and a huge amount of booty. It was a spectacular German victory and a disaster for the British. The doorway to German dominance of Egypt was wide open. All at once there was a glimmering prospect in view of an enormous pincer of Rommel's troops pushing eastwards through Egypt and the Caucasus army sweeping down through the Middle East linking forces to wipe out the British presence in this crucial region. Hitler, overjoyed, immediately promoted Rommel to Field-Marshal. Italian hopes of German support for an invasion of Malta were now finally shelved until later in the year. Hitler backed instead Rommel's plans to advance to the Nile. Within days, German troops were in striking distance of Alexandria.

One dark cloud on an otherwise sunny horizon was, however, the damage being caused to towns in western Germany by British bombing raids. On 30 May, Hitler had said that he did not think much of the RAF's threats of heavy air-raids. Precautions, he claimed, had been taken. The Luftwaffe had so many squadrons stationed in the west that destruction from the air would be doubly repaid. That very night, the city centre of Cologne was devastated by the first 1,000-bomber raid. Hitler was enraged at the failure of the Luftwaffe to defend the Reich, blaming Goring personally for neglecting the construction of sufficient flak installations.

Despite the bombing of Cologne, the military situation put Hitler and his entourage in excellent mood in early June. On the first day of the month Hitler flew to Army Group South's headquarters at Poltava to discuss with Field-Marshal Bock the timing and tactics of the coming offensive. Apart from Manstein, all the commanders were present, as. .h.i.tler agreed to Bock's proposal to delay the start of 'Operation Blue' for some days in order to take full advantage of the victory at Kharkhov to destroy Soviet forces in adjacent areas. Hitler informed the commanders that the outcome of 'Blue' would be decisive for the war.

On 4 June, Hitler paid a surprise visit it had been arranged only the previous day to Finland. Officially, the visit was to mark the seventy-fifth birthday of the Finnish military hero, Marshal Baron Carl Gustaf von Mannerheim, supreme commander of the Finnish armed forces. The aim was to bolster Finnish solidarity with Germany through underlining for Mannerheim a veteran of struggles with the Red Army the immensity of the threat of Bolshevism. The Finns would at the same time be warned about any possible considerations of leaving German 'protection' and putting out feelers to the Soviet Union. In addition, the visit would head off any possible ties of Finland with the western Allies.

The meeting had no concrete results. That was not its aim. For now, Hitler had rea.s.sured himself that he had the Finns' continued support. He was well satisfied with the visit. For their part, the Finns maintained their superficially good relations with Germany, while keeping a watchful eye on events. The course of the war over the next six months conveyed its own clear message to them to begin looking for alternative loyalties.

While Hitler was en route en route to Finland, news came through from Prague that Reinhard Heydrich had died of the wounds he had suffered in the attack on 27 May. Back in his headquarters, Hitler put it down to 'stupidity or pure dimwittedness' that 'such an irreplaceable man as Heydrich should expose himself to the danger' of a.s.sa.s.sins, by driving without adequate bodyguard in an open-top car, and insisted that n.a.z.i leaders comply with proper security precautions. Hitler was in reflective mood at the state funeral in Berlin on 9 June. So soon after the loss of Todt, it seemed to him and, in fact, was not far from the truth as if the party and state leadership only a.s.sembled for state funerals. He spent time in the evening reminiscing with Goebbels about the early days of the party. 'The Fuhrer is very happy in these memories,' remarked Goebbels. 'He lives from the past, which seems to him like a lost paradise.' to Finland, news came through from Prague that Reinhard Heydrich had died of the wounds he had suffered in the attack on 27 May. Back in his headquarters, Hitler put it down to 'stupidity or pure dimwittedness' that 'such an irreplaceable man as Heydrich should expose himself to the danger' of a.s.sa.s.sins, by driving without adequate bodyguard in an open-top car, and insisted that n.a.z.i leaders comply with proper security precautions. Hitler was in reflective mood at the state funeral in Berlin on 9 June. So soon after the loss of Todt, it seemed to him and, in fact, was not far from the truth as if the party and state leadership only a.s.sembled for state funerals. He spent time in the evening reminiscing with Goebbels about the early days of the party. 'The Fuhrer is very happy in these memories,' remarked Goebbels. 'He lives from the past, which seems to him like a lost paradise.'

V.

'Operation Blue', the great summer offensive in the south, began on 28 June. The offensive, carried out by five armies in two groups against the weakest part of the Soviet front, between Kursk in the north and Taganrog on the Sea of Azov in the south, was able as Barbarossa had done the previous year to use the element of surprise to make impressive early gains. Meanwhile, on 1 July, finally, the fall of Sevastopol brought immediate promotion to Field-Marshal for Manstein.

After the initial break through the Russian lines, the rapid advance on Voronezh ended in the capture of the city on 6 July. This brought, however, the first confrontation of the new campaign between Hitler and his generals. Voronezh itself was an unimportant target. But a Soviet counter-attack had tied down two armoured divisions in the city for two days. This slowed the south-eastern advance along the Don and allowed enemy forces to escape. Hitler was enraged that Bock had ignored his instructions that the advance of the panzer divisions was to proceed without any hold-ups to the Volga in order to allow maximum destruction of the Soviet forces. In fact, when he had flown to Bock's headquarters at Poltava on 3 July, Hitler had been far less dogmatic and clear in face-to-face discussion with the field-marshal than he was in the map-room of the Wolf 's Lair. But that did not save Bock. Hitler said he was not going to have his plans spoiled by field-marshals as they had been in autumn 1941. Bock was dismissed and replaced by Colonel-General Freiherr Maximilian von Weichs.

To be closer to the southern front, Hitler moved his headquarters on 16 July to a new location, given the name 'Werwolf ', near Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. Sixteen planes, their engines already whirring, waited on the runway at the Wolf 's Lair that day for Hitler and his entourage to take them on a three-hour flight to their new surrounds. After a car-ride along rutted roads, they finally arrived at the damp, mosquito-infested huts that were to be their homes for the next three and a half months. Even the Wolf 's Lair began to seem idyllic. Halder was pleased enough with the layout of the new headquarters. Hitler's secretaries were less happy with their cramped quarters. As at Rastenburg, they had little to do and were bored. For Hitler, the daily routine was unchanged from that in the Wolf 's Lair. At meals his own often consisted of no more than a plate of vegetables with apples to follow he could still appear open, relaxed, engaged. As always, he monopolized dinner-table topics of conversation on a wide variety of topics that touched on his interests or obsessions. These included the evils of smoking, the construction of a motorway-system throughout the eastern territories, the deficiencies of the legal system, the achievements of Stalin as a latter-day Ghengis Khan, keeping the standard of living low among the subjugated peoples, the need to remove the last Jews from German cities, and the promotion of private initiative rather than a state-controlled economy.

Away from the supper soliloquies, however, tension mounted once more between Hitler and his military leaders. The military advance continued to make ground. But the numbers of Soviet prisoners captured steadily diminished. This was endlessly discussed at FHQ. Hitler's military advisers were worried. They took it that the Soviets were pulling back their forces in preparation for a big counter-offensive, probably on the Volga, in the Stalingrad region. Halder had warned as early as 12 July of concern at the front that the enemy, recognizing German envelopment tactics, was avoiding direct fight and withdrawing to the south. Hitler's view was, however, that the Red Army was close to the end of its tether. He pressed all the more for a speedy advance.

His impulsive, though sometimes unclear or ambiguous, command-style caused constant difficulties for the operational planners. But the essential problem was more far-reaching. Hitler felt compelled by two imperatives: time, and material resources. The offensive had to be completed before the might of Allied resources came fully into play. And possession of the Caucasian oil-fields would, in his view, both be decisive in bringing the war in the east to a successful conclusion, and provide the necessary platform to continue a lengthy war against the Anglo-Saxon powers. If this oil were not gained, Hitler had said, the war would be lost for Germany within three months. Following his own logic, he had, therefore, no choice but to stake everything on the ambitious strike to the Caucasus in a victorious summer offensive. Even if some sceptical voices could be heard, Halder and the professionals in Army High Command had favoured the offensive. But the gap, already opened up the previous summer, between them and the Dictator was rapidly widening. What Hitler saw as the negativity, pessimism, and timidity of Army High Command's traditional approaches drove him into paroxysms of rage. Army planners for their part had cold feet about what increasingly seemed to them a reckless gamble carried out by dilettante methods, more and more likely to end in disaster. But they could not now pull out of the strategy which they had been party to implementing. The German war-effort had set in train its own self-destructive dynamic.

The risk of military disaster was seriously magnified by Hitler's Directive No.45 of 23 July 1942. Thereafter, a calamity was waiting to happen. Unlike the April directive, in which Halder's hand had been visible, this directive rested squarely on a decision by Hitler, which the General Staff had sought to prevent. The directive for the continuation of 'Blue', now renamed 'Operation Braunschweig', began with a worryingly unrealistic claim: 'In a campaign of little more than three weeks, the broad goals set for the southern flank of the eastern front have been essentially achieved. Only weak enemy forces of the Timoshenko armies have succeeded in escaping envelopment and reaching the southern bank of the Don. We have to reckon with their reinforcement from the Caucasus area.'

Earlier in the month, Hitler had divided Army Group South into a northern sector (Army Group B, originally under Field-Marshal von Bock, then, after his sacking, under Colonel-General Freiherr von Weichs) and a southern sector (Army Group A, under Field-Marshal Wilhelm List). The original intention, under his Directive No.41 of 5 April, had been to advance on the Caucasus following following the encirclement and destruction of Soviet forces in the vicinity of Stalingrad. This was now altered to allow attacks on the Caucasus and Stalingrad (including the taking of the city itself) to proceed the encirclement and destruction of Soviet forces in the vicinity of Stalingrad. This was now altered to allow attacks on the Caucasus and Stalingrad (including the taking of the city itself) to proceed simultaneously. simultaneously. List's stronger Army Group A was left to destroy enemy forces in the Rostov area, then conquer the whole of the Caucasus region alone. This was to include the eastern coast of the Black Sea, crossing the Kuban and occupying the heights around the oil-fields of Maykop, controlling the almost impenetrable Caucasian mountain pa.s.ses, and driving south-eastwards to take the oil-rich region around Grozny, then Baku, far to the south on the Caspian Sea. The attack on Stalingrad was left to the weaker Army Group B, which was expected thereafter to press on along the lower Volga to Astrakhan on the Caspian. The strategy was sheer lunacy. List's stronger Army Group A was left to destroy enemy forces in the Rostov area, then conquer the whole of the Caucasus region alone. This was to include the eastern coast of the Black Sea, crossing the Kuban and occupying the heights around the oil-fields of Maykop, controlling the almost impenetrable Caucasian mountain pa.s.ses, and driving south-eastwards to take the oil-rich region around Grozny, then Baku, far to the south on the Caspian Sea. The attack on Stalingrad was left to the weaker Army Group B, which was expected thereafter to press on along the lower Volga to Astrakhan on the Caspian. The strategy was sheer lunacy.

Only the most incautiously optimistic a.s.sessment of the weakness of the Soviet forces could have justified the scale of the risk involved. But Hitler took precisely such a view of enemy strength. Moreover, he was as always temperamentally predisposed to a risk-all strategy, with alternatives dismissed out of hand and boats burned to leave no fall-back position. As always, his self-justification could be bolstered by the dogmatic view that there was no alternative. Halder, aware of more realistic appraisals of Soviet strength, and the build-up of forces in the Stalingrad area, but unable to exert any influence upon Hitler, was by now both seriously concerned and frustrated at his own impotence. On 23 July, the day that Hitler issued his Directive No.45, Halder had written in his diary: 'This chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually a.s.suming grotesque proportions and develops into a positive danger. The situation is getting more and more intolerable. There is no room for any serious work. This so-called leadership is characterized by a pathological reacting to the impressions of the moment and a total lack of any understanding of the command machinery and its possibilities.' On 15 August, Halder's notes for his situation report began: 'Overall picture: have we extended the risk too far?' The question was well warranted. But the insight had come rather late in the day.

By mid-August, Army Group A had swept some 350 miles to the south, over the north Caucasian plain. It was now far separated from Army Group B, with a lengthy exposed flank, and formidable logistical problems of ensuring supplies. Its advance slowed markedly in the wooded foothills of the northern Caucasus. Maykop was taken, but the oil-refineries were found in ruins, systematically and expertly destroyed by the retreating Soviet forces. The impetus had been lost. Hitler showed little sense of realism when he spoke privately to Goebbels on 19 August. Operations in the Caucasus, he said, were going extremely well. He wanted to take possession of the oil-wells of Maykop, Grozny, and Baku during the summer, securing Germany's oil supplies and destroying those of the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet border had been reached, the breakthrough into the Near East would follow, occupying Asia Minor and overrunning Iraq, Iran, and Palestine, to cut off Britain's oil supplies. Within two or three days, he wanted to commence the big a.s.sault on Stalingrad. He intended to destroy the city completely, leaving no stone on top of another. It was both psychologically and militarily necessary. The forces deployed were reckoned to be sufficient to capture the city within eight days.

The last significant successes of Army Group B, meanwhile, had been in encircling and destroying two Russian armies south-west of Kalac, on the Don due west of Stalingrad, on 8 August. Advancing in punishing heat and hindered through chronic fuel shortage, on 23 August, the 6th Army, under General Friedrich Paulus, succeeded in reaching the Volga, north of Stalingrad. Amid heavy Soviet defences, the advance ground rapidly to a halt. The summer offensive had, as it turned out, run its course in less than two months. As early as 26 August Halder was noting: 'Near Stalingrad, serious tension on account of superior counter-attacks of the enemy. Our divisions are no longer very strong. The command is heavily under nervous strain.' The 6th Army was, however, able to consolidate its position. Over the next weeks, it even gained the advantage. But the nightmare of Stalingrad was only just beginning.

While the southern part of the ma.s.sively extended front was running out of steam, with the 6th Army now bogged down at Stalingrad and List's Army Group A stalled in the Caucasus, Kluge's Army Group Centre had encountered a damaging setback, suffering horrendous casualties in an ill-fated attempt ordered by Hitler to wipe out Russian forces at Sukhinichi, 150 miles west of Moscow, from where it was hoped to establish the basis for a renewed drive on the capital. Kluge, on a visit to