Hitler (120 page)

Within the framework of his larger design, Hitler had acted with total consistency. Although he would have welcomed a once more neutralized West, Stalin's offer, at last provided him with a common border with the Soviet Union. And, after all, he had begun the war against Poland to achieve just that. As early as October 17 he had issued a significant order to General Keitel, chief of the High Command of the armed forces. Keitel had been instructed to consider, in future planning, that the occupied Polish region “has military importance for us as an advanced glacis and can be utilized for deployment. To that end the railroads, road and communications must be kept in order and exploited for our purpose. Any signs of consolidation of conditions in Poland must be stamped out.”

Morally, too, he now crossed the boundary that made the war irrevocable. In the same conversation he demanded the repression of any sign “that a Polish intelligentsia is coming forward as a class of leaders. The country is to continue under a low standard of living; we want to draw only labor forces from it.” Territory that went far beyond the borders of 1914 was incorporated into the Reich. The remainder was set up as a general government under the administration of Hans Frank; one part was subjected to a ruthless process of Germanization, the other to an unprecedented campaign of enslavement and annihilation. And while the commandos, the
Einsatzgruppen,
commenced their reign of terror, arresting, resettling, expelling, and liquidating—so that one German army officer wrote in a horrified letter of a “band of murderers, robbers and plunderers”—Hans Frank extolled the “epoch of the East” that was now beginning for Germany, a period, as he described it in his own peculiar brand of bombastic jargon, “of the most tremendous reshaping of colonizing and resettlement implementation.”

With the intensified stress on ideology, Heinrich Himmler was now visibly gaining more power. Hitler had occasionally remarked in private that Himmler did not shrink from proceeding “with reprehensible methods” and by doing so not only established order but also created accomplices. It would seem that this motive, quite aside from all expansionist plans, contributed to the more and more undisguised criminalization of the system. The idea was to bind the entire nation to the regime by complicity in an enormous crime, to engender the feeling that all the ships had been burned, that Salamis feeling of which Hitler had spoken. This, too, like his relinquishing the means of politics, was an attempt to cut off all avenues of retreat. In nearly every speech Hitler delivered after the beginning of the war the formula recurs: a November, 1918, will not be repeated. No doubt he sensed what General Ritter von Leeb wrote in his diary on October 3, 1939: “Poor mood of the population, no enthusiasm at all, no flags flying from the houses. Everyone waiting for peace. The people sense the needlessness of the war.” The annihilation policy in the East, which began immediately, was one of the ways of making the war irrevocable.

Now Hitler again no longer had a way out; once more, reliving old excitements, he stood with his back to the wall. The conflict would have to be, as he habitually phrased it, “fought out to the end.” To United States Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who called on him on March 2, 1940, he said that it was “not a question of whether Germany would be annihilated.” Germany would defend herself to the utmost; “at the very worst, all will be annihilated.”

 

 

 

 

Only a genius can do that!

Wilhelm Keitel

 

Since last September I have thought of Hitler as a dead man.

Georges Bernanos

 

Well before the end of October, 1939, Hitler began moving his victorious divisions to the West and deploying them in new positions. As always, whenever he had arrived at a decision, a feverish urge for action had gripped him. Certainly the concept of sitzkrieg, as the phony war was called in contrast to blitzkrieg, did not apply to Hitler's behavior. Even before the Western powers had reacted to his “peace appeal” of October 6, he summoned the three commanders of the services, together with Keitel and Halder, and read them a memorandum on the military situation. It began with a historical review of France's hostility toward Germany, going back as far as the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, on which grounds he justified his determination to attack at once in the West. His aim, he declared, was “annihilation of the strength and ability of the Western powers to once more oppose the... further development of the German nation in Europe.”
¹
Yet the war in the West, he went on, was only the requisite detour to eliminate the menace in the rear before the great march of conquest to the East began. He next went into a detailed discussion of the methods of mobile warfare that had been applied in Poland, and recommended these for the campaign in the West. The crucial thing, he declared, was the massive commitment of tanks to keep the operative forward movement of the army in flux and to avoid trench warfare like that of 1914–18. This was the approach that proved so strikingly successful in May and June of the following year.

Like Directive Number 6 on the conduct of the war, which was presented at the same time, the memorandum was meant to overcome the halfheartedness of the top-ranking officers. “The main thing is the will to defeat the enemy,” Hitler exhorted his audience. In fact a number of the generals considered Hitler's plan to “bring the French and British to the battlefield and to rout them,” both wrong and risky, and instead recommended putting the war “to sleep” by assuming a consistent defensive posture. One of the generals spoke of the “insanity of an attack.” Generals von Brauchitsch and Halder, and above all General Thomas, chief of the Armaments Office, and General von Stulpnagel, Quartermaster General, offered specific objections. They pointed to the scanty stocks of raw materials, the exhausted reserves of ammunition, the dangers of a winter campaign, and the enemy's strength. In fact the accumulation of political, military, and sometimes even moral scruples was once more impelling the officers into active resistance. General Jodi told Halder that the intrigues of the military officers indicated “a crisis of the worst sort” and that Hitler was “embittered that the soldiers are not following him.”
²

The more reluctance the generals showed, the more impatiently Hitler pressed for the beginning of the offensive. He had originally set the date between November 15 and 20, then advanced it to November 12 and thus forced the military to make a decision. As in September, 1938, they confronted the choice of either preparing a war they regarded as fatal or overthrowing Hitler; again, von Brauchitsch was half ready to go over to the opposition, while in the background the same actors operated: Colonel Oster, General Beck, now retired, Admiral Canaris, Carl Goerdeler, Ulrich von Hassell, the former ambassador in Rome, and others. The center of their activities was army general headquarters in Zossen, and early in November the conspirators decided on a
coup d'état
if Hitler continued to insist on his order for an offensive. Von Brauchitsch offered to make a last attempt to change Hitler's mind in a conference already scheduled for November 5. That was the day on which the German contingents were to occupy their starting positions for the advance upon Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

The conference in the Berlin chancellery led to a dramatic clash. At first Hitler listened with seeming calm to the objections that the commander in chief had summed up in a kind of “countermemorandum.” Hitler disposed of the reference to unfavorable weather conditions by remarking that the weather would also be bad for the enemy. As for the generals' concern about inadequate training, he answered that this could hardly be amended in four weeks. When von Brauchitsch finally criticized the conduct of the troops in the Polish campaign and spoke of breaches of discipline, Hitler leaped at the chance for one of his great outbursts. Raging—as Halder put it in his notes of the episode—he demanded documents. He wanted to know where, in what units, the alleged events had occurred, what had been done about them, whether death sentences had been imposed. He declared that he personally would look into the matter on the spot and went on to say that in reality it was only the army leadership that had not wanted to fight and therefore had for so long retarded the tempo of rearmament. But now he was going to “eliminate the spirit of Zossen,” that is, the slackness of the army General Staff. Bluntly, he forbade von Brauchitsch to go on with his report. Stunned, his face pale, the commander in chief left the chancellery. “Br[auchitsch] has completely collapsed,” one of the participants noted. That same evening Hitler once more explicitly confirmed the order for attack on November 12.

Although this meant that the condition for a
coup d'etat
was met, the conspirators did nothing. The mere threat against the “spirit of Zossen” had sufficed to reveal their weakness and indecisiveness. “Everything is too late and gone totally awry,” one of Oster's confidants, Colonel Groscurth, wrote in his diary. With self-betraying haste Halder burned all incriminating material and called an immediate halt to the preparations for a coup. Three days later in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich Hitler barely escaped an attempted assassination that was obviously the work of a lone individual. Thereafter, fear of a large-scale probe by the Gestapo smothered the last remaining plans for a coup.

Moreover, chance was kind to the conspirators and saved them from their own resolutions; for on November 7 the date for the offensive had to be postponed because of weather conditions. Hitler, however, granted a postponement of only a few days. How set he was against the long-term postponement the military men demanded is evident from the fact that up to May, 1940, when the attack finally began, the process of on-again-off-again was repeated a total of twenty-nine times. During the second half of November the commanders were called to Berlin for ideological morale building. Göring and Goebbels delivered bracing speeches; then Hitler himself appeared before them on November 23, and in three speeches given within the course of seven hours tried at once to convince and to intimidate the officers.
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Looking back upon the preceding years, he charged them with lack of faith. He professed to be profoundly offended. “I cannot endure anyone's telling me the troops are not all right.” Threateningly, he added: “A revolution at home is not possible, either with you or without you.” His determination to launch an immediate assault upon the West was irrevocable, he said, and answered the objections of several officers to the violation of Dutch and Belgian neutrality by declaring it inconsequential. (“Nobody will question it when we have won.”) Balefully he told them: “I shall shrink from nothing and destroy everyone who is against me,” and ended his speech with the following ringing words:

 

I am determined to lead my life in such a way that I can meet death with equanimity when my time comes. Behind me stands the German people, whose morale can only deteriorate.... If we meet the test of this struggle successfully—and we will meet it—our times will go down in the history of our people. In this struggle I shall stand or fall. I will not survive the defeat of my people. Abroad, no capitulation; at home, no revolution. The crisis among the officers in the fall of 1939 had far-reaching consequences. Insisting as he did on total commitments, Hitler henceforth distrusted not only his generals' loyalty but also their professional advice. The peremptory way in which he himself now assumed the role of generalissimo had its origins in these events. On the other hand, the renewed evidence of the weakness and compliance of the generals, especially of the OKH (Army High Command), suited his desire to reduce the organs of military leadership to purely instrumental functions. In preparing the strike against Denmark and Norway, which was meant to assure him Swedish iron ore and win an operational base for the struggle against England, he completely excluded the OKH. Instead, he transferred the planning to a special staff within the OKW (High Command of the Armed Forces). Thus he managed to install within the military hierarchy the system of rival authorities so fundamental to his practice of government. He thought his decision brilliantly confirmed when the risky enterprise begun in April, 1940, which ran counter to all the principles of naval warfare and had been regarded by the Allied staffs as almost inconceivable, proved a total success. Thereafter he no longer met with open opposition from the generals. The full weakness of those generals had already been exposed during the autumn crisis when Halder approached State Secretary von Weizsäcker and asked whether bringing in a soothsayer might not have some influence on Hitler; he could obtain a million marks for the purpose, he said. Commander in Chief von Brauchitsch, on the other hand, gave a visitor the impression that he was “completely done for, isolated.”

 

At dawn on May 10, 1940, the long-awaited offensive in the West began at last. The night before, Colonel Oster, through his friend Colonel G. J. Sas, the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, had informed the other side. But when the din of artillery and the drone of bombers began in the morning, the skeptical Allied general staffs were taken completely by surprise. They had thought the warning a trap. By committing large British and French forces hastily brought up from northern France, they finally managed to check the German advance through Belgium east of Brussels. They gave no thought to the fact that their counteraction was scarcely opposed by the German air force. For this was the real trap. Walking into it had already cost them the victory.

The original German plan of campaign, a variant of the old Schliffen Plan, called for bypassing the French lines of fortifications by a massed assault through Belgium and a descent upon northwestern France. The German leadership was well aware of what was wrong with this plan: it lacked the element of surprise, so that the offensive was liable to be brought to a standstill and freeze into trench warfare even sooner than in the First World War. Moreover, it required the commitment of large tank formations in terrain cut up by many rivers and canals. All this would seem to imperil the rapid decision upon which Hitler's whole strategy was based. But there appeared to be no alternative. Another plan presented in October, 1939, by General von Manstein, chief of staff of Army Group A, had been rejected by Brauchitsch and Halder, and ultimately Manstein had been relieved of his command. He had argued for shifting the main weight of the German advance from the right wing to the center, thus regaining the element of surprise, since it was generally held that the Ardennes would not permit extensive tank operations. The French leadership had therefore placed relatively weak forces on this sector of its front, and Manstein's plan was founded on this fact. Once the German tanks had overcome the problems of the mountainous and wooded terrain, he argued, they could roll almost unhindered across the plains of northern France to the sea, and cut off the Allied armies that had been marched into Belgium.