23

Beleaguered

I

‘The English claim that the German people have lost their trust in the Führer,’ Goebbels declared. It was the opening to the fifth of his ten rhetorical questions towards the end of his two-hour speech proclaiming ‘total war’ on the evening of 18 February 1943. The hand-picked audience in Berlin’s Sportpalast rose as one man to denounce such an outrageous allegation. A chorus of voices arose: ‘Führer command, we will obey!’ The tumult lasted for what seemed an age. Orchestrating the frenzied mood to perfection, the propaganda maestro eventually broke in to ask: ‘Is your trust in the Führer greater, more faithful, and more unshakeable than ever? Is your readiness to follow him in all his ways and to do everything necessary to bring the war to a triumphant end absolute and unrestricted?’ Fourteen thousand voices hysterically cried out in unison the answer invited by Goebbels in his bid to quell doubters at home and to relay to the outside world the futility of any hope of inner collapse in Germany. Goebbels ended his morale-boosting peroration – which had been interrupted more than 200 times by clapping, cheering, shouts of approbation, or thunderous applause – with the words of Theodor Körner, the patriotic poet from the time of Prussia’s struggle against Napoleon: ‘Now people, arise – and storm burst forth!’ The great hall erupted. Amid the wild cheering the national anthem ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ and the party’s ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ rang out. The spectacle ended with cries of ‘the great German Leader Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil’.

The speech was intended to demonstrate the complete solidarity of people and leader, conveying Germany’s utter determination to carry on, and even intensify, the fight until victory was attained. But the solidarity, despite the impression temporarily left by Goebbels’s publicity spectacular, was by this time shrinking fast, the belief in Hitler among the mass of the population seriously undermined. What Goebbels did, in fact, was to solicit from his audience ‘a kind of plebiscitary “Ja” to self-destruction’ in a war which Germany could by now neither win nor end through a negotiated peace.

Goebbels’s hopes that the speech would bring him Hitler’s authorization to concentrate the direction of ‘total war’ in his own hands were swiftly dashed. The Propaganda Minister had long pressed for practical measures to radicalize the war effort. Hitler, shored up by Göring, had, however, resisted imposing increased hardship and material sacrifice on the civilian population. He was conscious as ever of the collapse of morale on the home front during the First World War, certain that this had undermined the military effort and paved the way for revolution. Nevertheless, during the Stalingrad crisis he had finally conceded the aim of the complete mobilization of all conceivable labour and resources of the home front, and some initial measures had been introduced.

Goebbels had, however, miscalculated. Direction of the ‘total war’ effort largely bypassed him. His ambitions to take control of the home front were ignored. Unable to adjudicate in any rational or systematic fashion in the inevitable conflicts arising from overlapping and sometimes contradictory spheres of competence, but careful as always to protect his own power, Hitler never allowed Goebbels the authority the latter craved on the home front. The ‘total war’ effort juddered on to partial successes in individual areas. But the absence of strong, consistent leadership from the top on the home front produced what Goebbels lamented as ‘a complete lack of direction in German domestic policy’.

The results of Goebbels’s big speech, therefore, in terms of his own ambitions to take control of the ‘total war’ effort, were disappointing. Goebbels was soon to learn anew that he remained only one player in the power-games to try to secure the backing of Hitler’s unqualified authority. He would also rapidly realize again that although the Dictator’s own authority was undiminished, his physical absence, preoccupation with military matters, and sporadic, semi-detached involvement in the day-to-day governance of the Reich meant that he was more than ever exposed to the influence of those in his presence – ‘the entire baggage of court-idiots and irresponsible agitators’ – incapable of reconciling or overriding the competing interests of his feuding barons. Even had he been willing, therefore, he was completely unable to impose clear strands of authority to combat the already advanced signs of disintegration in government and administration.

For Hitler, the months after Stalingrad intensified the familiar, ingrained character-traits. The façade of often absurd optimism remained largely intact, even among his inner circle. The show of indomitable will continued. The flights of fantasy, detached from reality, took on new dimensions. But the mask slipped from time to time in remarks revealing deep depression and fatalism. It was fleeting recognition of what he already inwardly acknowledged: he had lost the initiative for ever. The recognition invariably brought new torrents of rage, lashing any who might bear the brunt of the blame – most of all, as ever, his military leaders. They were all liars, disloyal, opposed to National Socialism, reactionaries, and lacking in any cultural appreciation, he ranted. He yearned to have nothing more to do with them. Ultimately, he would blame the German people themselves, whom he would see as too weak to survive and unworthy of him in the great struggle. As setback followed setback, so the beleaguered Führer resorted ever more readily to the search for ruthless revenge and retaliation, both on his external enemies – behind whom, as always, he saw the demonic figure of the Jew – and on any within who might dare to show defeatism, let alone ‘betray’ him. There were no personal influences that might have moderated his fundamental inhumanity. The man who had been idolized by millions was friendless – apart from (as he himself commented) Eva Braun and his dog, Blondi.

The war, and the hatreds Hitler had invested in it, consumed him ever more. Outside the war and his buildings mania, he could rouse little interest. He was by now in many respects an empty, burnt-out shell of an individual. But his resilience and strength of will remained extraordinary. And in the strangely shapeless regime over which he presided, his power was still immense, unrestricted, and uncontested.

As the war that Hitler had unleashed ‘came home to the Reich’, the Dictator – now rapidly ageing, becoming increasingly a physical wreck, and showing pronounced signs of intense nervous strain – distanced himself ever more from his people. It was as if he could not face them now that there were no more triumphs to report, and he had to take the responsibility for the mounting losses and misery. Even before the Stalingrad calamity, in early November 1942, when his train had by chance stopped directly alongside a troop train returning from the east carrying dejected-looking, battle-weary soldiers, his only reaction had been to ask one of his manservants to pull down the blinds. As Germany’s war fortunes plummeted between 1943 and 1945, the former corporal from an earlier great war never sought to experience at first hand the feelings of ordinary soldiers.

The number of big public speeches he delivered constituted a plain indicator of the widening gulf between Führer and people. In 1940 Hitler had given nine big public addresses, in 1941 seven, in 1942 five. In 1943 he gave only two (apart from a radio broadcast on 10 September). The bulk of his time was spent well away from the government ministries in Berlin’s Wilhelmstraße – and well away from the German people – at his field headquarters, or at his mountain eyrie above Berchtesgaden. He spent no more than a few days in Berlin during the whole of 1943. For some three months in all he was at the Berghof. During the rest of the time he was cooped up in his headquarters in East Prussia, leaving aside a number of short visits to the Ukraine.

Goebbels lamented in July 1943 the way Hitler had cut himself off from the masses. These, commented the Propaganda Minister, had provided the acclaim on which his unique authority had rested. He had given them the belief and trust that had been the focal point of the regime’s support. But now, in Goebbels’s eyes, that relationship was seriously endangered – and with it the stability of the regime. He pointed to the large number and critical tone of the letters – half of them anonymous – arriving at the Propaganda Ministry. ‘Above all, the question is again and again raised in these letters,’ he went on, ‘why the Führer never visits the areas which have suffered from air-raids … but especially why the Führer does not even speak to the German people to explain the current situation. I regard it as most necessary that the Führer does that, despite his burden through the events in the military sector. One can’t neglect the people too long. Ultimately, they are the heart of our war effort. If the people were once to lose their strength of resistance and belief in the German leadership, then the most serious leadership crisis which ever faced us would have been created.’

II

The move to ‘total war’, introduced during the Stalingrad crisis, provided the final demonstration that no semblance of collective government and rational decision-making within the Reich was compatible with Hitler’s personal rule.

The drive to mobilize all remaining reserves from the home front – what came to be proclaimed as ‘total war’ – had its roots in the need to plug the huge gap in military manpower left by the high losses suffered by the Wehrmacht during the first months of ‘Barbarossa’.

At Christmas 1942, Hitler had given the orders for more radical measures to raise manpower for the front and the armaments industries. Martin Bormann was commissioned to undertake the coordination of the efforts, in collaboration with Head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich Lammers. Goebbels and Fritz Sauckel (Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment) were immediately informed. The aim was to close down all businesses whose trade was in ‘luxury’ items or was otherwise not necessary for the war effort, and to redeploy the personnel in the army or in arms production. Women were to be subject to conscription for work. Releasing men for front-service was impossible, it was agreed, unless women could replace them in a variety of forms of work. According to the Propaganda Ministry, the number of women working had dropped by some 147,000 since the start of the war. And of 8.6 million women in employment at the end of 1942, only 968,000 worked in armaments.

In the spring of 1942, Hitler had rejected outright the conscription of women to work in war industries. But by early 1943, the labour situation had worsened to the extent that he was compelled to concede that the conscription of women could no longer be avoided. Even the forced labour of, by this time, approaching 6 million foreign workers and prisoners-of-war could not compensate for the 11 million or so men who had been called up to the Wehrmacht. In an unpublished Führer Decree of 13 January 1943, women between seventeen and fifty years old were ordered to report for deployment in the war effort.

Even before Hitler signed the decree, the wrangling over spheres of competence had begun in earnest. In order to retain a firm grip on the ‘total war’ measures and prevent the dissipation of centralized control, Lammers, backed by the leading civil servants in the Reich Chancellery, Leo Killy and Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, suggested to Hitler that all measures should be taken ‘under the authority of the Führer’, and that a special body be set up to handle them. The idea was to create a type of small ‘war cabinet’. Lammers thought the most appropriate arrangement would be for the heads of the three main executive arms of the Führer’s authority – the High Command of the Wehrmacht, the Reich Chancellery, and the Party Chancellery – to act in close collaboration, meeting frequently, keeping regular contact with Hitler himself, and standing above the particularist interests of individual ministries. Hitler agreed. He evidently saw no possible threat to his position from such an arrangement. On the contrary: the three persons involved – Keitel, Lammers, and Bormann – could be guaranteed to uphold his own interests at the expense of any possible over-mighty subjects. An indication that this was, indeed, Hitler’s thinking was the exclusion of Göring, Goebbels, and Speer from the coordinating body – soon known as the ‘Committee of Three’ (Dreierausschuß).

From the very outset, the Committee was only empowered to issue enabling ordinances in accordance with the general guidelines Hitler had laid down. It was given no autonomy. Hitler reserved, as always, the final decision on anything of significance to himself. The ‘Committee of Three’ had, in all, eleven formal meetings between January and August 1943, but rapidly ran up against deeply ingrained vested interests both in government ministries and in party regional offices concerned to hold on to their personnel and to their spheres of competence which might have been threatened in any move to centralize and simplify the regime’s tangled lines of administration. It had little chance of breaking down the fiefdoms on which Nazi rule rested, and soon revealed that any hopes of bringing order to the Third Reich’s endemic administrative chaos were utterly illusory.

Nevertheless, Hitler’s mightiest subjects were determined to do everything they could to sabotage a development which they saw as inimical to their own power-positions – and from which they had been excluded. The first notions of a challenge to the role of the ‘Committee of Three’ were intimated during the reception in Goebbels’s residence following his ‘total war’ speech on 18 February. Nine days later, Walther Funk (Reich Minister of Economics), Robert Ley (head of the huge German Labour Front), and Albert Speer, the powerful armaments minister, met again over cognac and tea in Goebbels’s stately apartments – gloomy now that the light-bulbs had been removed to comply with the new ‘total war’ demands – to see what could be done. Soon afterwards, at the beginning of March, Goebbels travelled from Berlin down to Berchtesgaden to plot with Göring a way of sidelining the Committee. Speer had already sounded him out. In talks lasting five hours at Göring’s palatial villa on the Obersalzberg, partly with Speer present, the Reich Marshal, dressed in ‘somewhat baroque clothes’, was quickly won over.

The Propaganda Minister’s plan – actually it had initally been suggested by Speer – was to revive the Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich (established under Göring’s chairmanship just before the outbreak of war but long fallen into desuetude), and to give it the membership to turn it into an effective body to rule the Reich, leaving Hitler free to concentrate on the direction of military affairs. He reminded Göring of what threatened if the war were lost: ‘Above all as regards the Jewish Question, we are in it so deeply that there is no getting out any longer. And that’s good. A Movement and a people that have burnt their boats fight, from experience, with fewer constraints than those that still have a chance of retreat.’ The party needed revitalizing. And if Göring could now reactivate the Ministerial Council and put it in the hands of Hitler’s most loyal followers, argued Goebbels, the Führer would surely be in agreement. They would choose their moment to put the proposition to Hitler. This would, they knew, not be easy.

The problem, however, especially as Goebbels saw it, went beyond the ‘Committee of Three’: it was a problem of Hitler himself. To rescue the war effort, stronger leadership at home was needed. Goebbels remained utterly loyal to the person he had for years regarded as an almost deified father-figure. But he saw in Hitler’s leadership style – his absence from Berlin, his detachment from the people, his almost total preoccupation with military matters, and, above all, his increasing reliance on Bormann for everything concerning domestic matters – a fundamental weakness in the governance of the Reich.

In his diary, Goebbels complained of a ‘leadership crisis’. He thought the problems among the subordinate leaders were so grave that the Führer ought to sweep through them with an iron broom. The Führer carried, indeed, a crushing burden through the war. But that was because he would take no decisions to alter the personnel so that he would not need bothering with every trivial matter. Goebbels thought – though he expressed it discreetly – that Hitler was too weak to do anything. ‘When a matter is put to him from the most varied sides,’ he wrote, ‘the Führer is sometimes somewhat vacillating in his decisions. He also doesn’t always react correctly to people. A bit of help is needed there.’

When he had spoken privately in his residence to Speer, Funk, and Ley just over a week after his ‘total war’ speech, he had gone further. According to Speer’s later account, Goebbels had said on that occasion: ‘We have not only a “leadership crisis”, but strictly speaking a “Leader crisis”!’ The others agreed with him. ‘We are sitting here in Berlin. Hitler does not hear what we have to say about the situation. I can’t influence him politically,’ Goebbels bemoaned. ‘I can’t even report to him about the most urgent measures in my area. Everything goes through Bormann. Hitler must be persuaded to come more often to Berlin.’ Goebbels added that Hitler had lost his grip on domestic politics, which Bormann controlled by conveying the impression to the Führer that he still held the reins tightly in his grasp. With Bormann given the title, on 12 April, of ‘Secretary of the Führer’, the sense, acutely felt by Goebbels, that the Party Chancellery chief was ‘managing’ Hitler was even further enhanced.

Goebbels and Speer might lament that Hitler’s hold on domestic affairs had weakened. But when they saw him in early March, intending to put their proposition to him that Göring should head a revamped Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich to direct the home front, it was they who proved weak. Speer had flown to Hitler’s headquarters, temporarily moved back to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, on 5 March to pave the way for a visit by Goebbels. The Propaganda Minister arrived in Vinnitsa three days later. Straight away, Speer urged caution. The continued, almost unhindered, bombing raids on German towns had left Hitler in a foul mood towards Göring and the inadequacies of the Luftwaffe. It was hardly a propitious moment to broach the subject of reinstating the Reich Marshal to the central role in the direction of domestic affairs. Goebbels thought nonetheless that they had to make the attempt.

At their first meeting, over lunch, Hitler, looking tired but otherwise well, and more lively than of late, launched as usual into a bitter onslaught on the generals who, he claimed, were cheating him wherever they could do so. He carried on in the same vein during a private four-hour discussion alone with Goebbels that afternoon. He was furious at Göring, and at the entire Luftwaffe leadership with the exception of the Chief of the General Staff Hans Jeschonnek. Characteristically, Hitler thought the best way of preventing German cities being reduced to heaps of rubble was by responding with ‘terror from our side’. Despite his insistence to Speer that they had to go ahead with their proposal, Goebbels evidently concluded during his discussion with Hitler that it would be fruitless to do so. ‘In view of the general mood,’ he noted, ‘I regard it as inopportune to put to the Führer the question of Göring’s political leadership; it’s at present an unsuitable moment. We must defer the business until somewhat later.’ Any hope of raising the matter, even obliquely, when Goebbels and Speer sat with Hitler by the fireside until late in the night was dashed when news came in of a heavy air-raid on Nuremberg. Hitler fell into a towering rage about Göring and the Luftwaffe leadership. Speer and Goebbels, calming Hitler only with difficulty, postponed their plans. They were never resurrected.

Goebbels and Speer had failed at the first hurdle. Face to face with Hitler, they felt unable to confront him. Hitler’s fury over Göring was enough to veto even the prospect of any rational discussion about restructuring Reich government.

Goebbels was still talking as late as September of finding enough support to block Lammers’s attempt (as the Propaganda Minister saw it) to arrogate authority to himself on the back of a Führer decree empowering him to review any disputes between ministers and decide whether they should be taken to Hitler. But by that time, there was scant need of intrigue to stymie the ‘Committee of Three’. It had already atrophied into insignificance.

The failed experiment of the ‘Committee of Three’ showed conclusively that, however weak their structures, all forms of collective government were doomed by the need to protect the arbitrary ‘will of the Führer’. But it was increasingly impossible for this ‘will’ to be exercised in ways conducive to the functioning of a modern state, let alone one operating under the crisis conditions of a major war. As a system of government, Hitler’s dictatorship had no future.

III

Matters at home were far from Hitler’s primary concern in the spring and summer of 1943. He was, in fact, almost solely preoccupied with the course of the war. The strain of this had left its mark on him. Guderian, back in favour after a long absence, was struck at their first meeting, on 20 February 1943, by the change in Hitler’s physical appearance since the last time he had seen him, back in mid-December 1941: ‘In the intervening fourteen months he had aged greatly. His manner was less assured than it had been and his speech was hesitant; his left hand trembled.’

When President Roosevelt, at the end of his meeting to discuss war strategy with Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff at Casablanca in French Morocco between 14 and 24 January 1943, had – to the British Prime Minister’s surprise – announced at a concluding press conference that the Allies would impose ‘unconditional surrender’ on their enemies, it had matched Hitler’s Valhalla mentality entirely. For him, the demand altered nothing. It merely added further confirmation that his uncompromising stance was right. As he told his party leaders in early February, he felt liberated as a result from any attempts to persuade him to look for a negotiated peace settlement. It had become, as he had always asserted it would, a clear matter of victory or destruction. Few, even of his closest followers, as Goebbels admitted, could still inwardly believe in the former. But compromises were ruled out. The road to destruction was opening up ever more plainly. For Hitler, closing off escape routes had distinct advantages. Fear of destruction was a strong motivator.

Some of Hitler’s leading generals, most notably Manstein, had tried to persuade him immediately after Stalingrad that he should, if not give up the command of the army, at least appoint a supremo on the eastern front who had his trust. Hitler was having none of it. After the bitter conflicts over the previous months, he preferred the compliancy of a Keitel to the sharply couched counter-arguments of a Manstein. It meant a further weakening of Germany’s military potential.

Manstein’s push to retake Kharkhov and reach the Donets by mid-March had been a much-needed success. Over 50,000 Soviet troops had perished. It had suggested yet again to Hitler that Stalin’s reserves must be drying up. Immediately, he wanted to go on the offensive. It was important to strike while the Red Army was still smarting from the reversal at Kharkhov. It was also necessary to send a signal to the German population, deeply embittered by Stalingrad, and to the Reich’s allies, that any doubts in final victory were wholly misplaced.

At this point, the split in military planning between the army’s General Staff, directly responsible for the eastern front, and the operations branch of Wehrmacht High Command (in charge of all other theatres) surfaced once more. The planners in the High Command of the Wehrmacht favoured a defensive ploy on all fronts to allow the gradual build-up and mobilization of resources throughout Europe for a later grand offensive. The Army High Command thought differently. It wanted a limited but early offensive. Chief of the Army General Staff Kurt Zeitzler had devised an operation involving the envelopment and destruction of a large number of Soviet divisions on a big salient west of Kursk, an important rail junction some 300 miles south of Moscow. Five Soviet armies were located within the westward bulge in the front, around 120 miles wide and 90 miles deep, left from the winter campaign of 1942–3. If victorious, the operation would gravely weaken the Soviet offensive potential.

There was no question which strategy would appeal to Hitler. He swiftly supported the army’s plan for a decisive strike on a greatly shortened front – about 150 kilometres compared with 2,000 kilometres in the ‘Barbarossa’ invasion of 1941. The limited scope of the operation reflected the reduction in German ambitions in the east since June 1941. Even so, a tactical victory would have been of great importance. It would, in all likelihood, have eliminated the prospect of any further Soviet offensive in 1943, thereby freeing German troops for redeployment in the increasingly threatening Mediterranean theatre. The order for what was to become ‘Operation Citadel’, issued on 13 March, foresaw a pincer attack by part of Manstein’s Army Group from the south and Kluge’s from the north, enveloping the Soviet troops in the bulge. In his confirmation order of 15 April, Hitler declared: ‘This attack is of decisive importance. It must be a quick and conclusive success. It must give us the initiative for this spring and summer … Every officer, every soldier must be convinced of the decisive importance of this attack. The victory of Kursk must shine like a beacon to the world.’ It was to do so. But hardly as Hitler had imagined.

‘Citadel’ was scheduled to begin in mid-May. As in the previous two years, however, significant delays set in which were damaging to the operation’s success. These were not directly of Hitler’s making. But they did again reveal the serious problems in the military command-structure and process of decision-making. They arose from disputes about timing among the leading generals involved. On 4 May, Hitler met them in Munich to discuss ‘Citadel’. Manstein and Kluge wanted to press ahead as soon as possible. This was the only chance of imposing serious losses on the enemy. Otherwise, they argued, it was better to call off the operation altogether. They were seriously worried about losing the advantage of surprise and about the build-up of Soviet forces should there be any postponement. The heavy defeat at Stalingrad and weakness of the southern flank deterred other generals from wishing to undertake a new large-scale offensive so quickly. Colonel-General Walter Model – known as an especially tough and capable commander, a reputation which had helped make him one of Hitler’s favourites, and detailed to lead the 9th Army’s assault from the north – recommended a delay until reinforcements were available. He picked up on the belief of Zeitzler, also high in favour with Hitler, that the heavy Tiger tank, just rolling off the production lines, and the new, lighter, Panther would provide Germany with the decisive breakthrough necessary to regaining the initiative. Hitler had great hopes of both tanks. He gave Model his backing.

On 4 May, he postponed ‘Citadel’ until mid-June. It was then further postponed, eventually getting under way only in early July. Even by that date, fewer Tigers and Panthers were available than had been envisaged. And the Soviets, tipped off by British intelligence and by a source within the Wehrmacht High Command, had built up their defences and were ready and waiting.

Meanwhile, the situation in North Africa was giving grounds for the gravest concern. Some of Hitler’s closest military advisers, Jodl among them, had been quietly resigned to the complete loss of North Africa as early as December 1942. Hitler himself had hinted at one point that he was contemplating the evacuation of German troops. But no action had followed. He was much influenced by the views of the Commander-in-Chief South, Field-Marshal Kesselring, one of nature’s optimists and, like most in high places in the Third Reich, compelled in any case to exude optimism whatever his true sentiments and however bleak the situation was in reality. Hitler needed optimists to pander to him – yet another form of ‘working towards the Führer’. In the military arena, this reinforced the chances of serious strategic blunders.

In March, buoyed by Manstein’s success at Kharkhov, Hitler had declared that the holding of Tunis would be decisive for the outcome of the war. It was, therefore, a top priority. With the refusal to contemplate any withdrawal, the next military disaster beckoned. When Below flew south at the end of the month to view the North African front and report back to Hitler, even Kesselring was unable to hide the fact that Tunis could not be held. Colonel-General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, who had taken over the North African command from the exhausted and dispirited Rommel, was of the same opinion. Kesselring’s staff were even more pessimistic: they saw no chance of successfully fending off an Allied crossing from Tunis to Sicily once – which they regarded as a certainty – North Africa had fallen. When Below reported back, Hitler said little. It seemed to his Luftwaffe adjutant that he had already written off North Africa and was inwardly preparing himself for the eventual defection of his Italian partners to the enemy.

In early April, Hitler had spent the best part of four days at the restored baroque palace of Klessheim, near Salzburg, shoring up Mussolini’s battered morale – half urging, half browbeating the Duce to keep up the fight, knowing how weakened he would be through the massive blow soon to descend in North Africa. Worn down by the strain of war and depression, Mussolini, stepping down from his train with assistance, looked a ‘broken old man’ to Hitler. The Duce also made a subdued impression on interpreter Dr Paul Schmidt as he pleaded forlornly for a compromise peace in the east in order to bolster defences in the west, ruling out the possibility of defeating the USSR. Dismissing such a notion out of hand, Hitler reminded Mussolini of the threat that the fall of Tunis would pose for Fascism in Italy. He left him with the impression ‘that there can be no other salvation for him than to achieve victory with us or to die’. He exhorted him to do the utmost to use the Italian navy to provide supplies for the forces there. The remainder of the visit consisted largely of monologues by Hitler – including long digressions about Prussian history – aimed at stiffening Mussolini’s resistance. Hitler was subsequently satisfied that this had been achieved.

The talks with Mussolini amounted to one of a series of meetings with his allies that Hitler conducted during April, while staying at the Berghof. King Boris of Bulgaria, Marshal Antonescu of Romania, Admiral Horthy of Hungary, Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling of Norway, President Tiso of Slovakia, ‘Poglavnik’ (Leader) Ante Pavelic of Croatia, and Prime Minister Pierre Laval from Vichy France all visited the Berghof or Klessheim by the end of the month. In each case, the purpose was to stiffen resolve – partly by cajoling, partly by scarcely veiled threats – and to keep faint-hearts or waverers tied to the Axis cause.

Hitler let Antonescu know that he was aware of tentative approaches made by Romanian ministers to the Allies. He posed, as usual, a stark choice of outright victory or ‘complete destruction’ in a fight to the end for ‘living space’ in the east. Part of Hitler’s implicit argument, increasingly, in attempting to prevent support from seeping away was to play on complicity in the persecution of the Jews. His own paranoia about the responsibility of the Jews for the war and all its evils easily led into the suggestive threat that boats had been burned, there was no way out, and retribution in the event of a lost war would be terrible. The hint of this was implicit in his disapproval of Antonescu’s treatment of the Jews as too mild, declaring that the more radical the measures the better it was when tackling the Jews.

In his meetings with Horthy at Klessheim on 16–17 April, Hitler was more brusque. Horthy was berated for feelers to the enemy secretly put out by prominent Hungarian sources but tapped by German intelligence. He was told that ‘Germany and its allies were in the same boat on a stormy sea. It was obvious that in this situation anyone wanting to get off would drown immediately.’ As he had done with Antonescu, though in far harsher terms, Hitler criticized what he saw as an over-mild policy towards the Jews. Horthy had mentioned that, despite tough measures, criminality and the black market were still flourishing in Hungary. Hitler replied that the Jews were to blame. Horthy asked what he was expected to do with the Jews. He had taken away their economic livelihood; he could scarcely have them all killed. Ribbentrop intervened at this point to say that the Jews must be ‘annihilated’ or locked up in concentration camps. There was no other way. Hitler regaled Horthy with statistics aimed at showing the strength of former Jewish influence in Germany. He compared the ‘German’ city of Nuremberg with the neighbouring ‘Jewish’ town of Fürth. Wherever Jews had been left to themselves, he said, they had produced only misery and dereliction. They were pure parasites. He put forward Poland as a model. There, things had been ‘thoroughly cleaned up’. If Jews did not want to work ‘then they would be shot. If they could not work, then they would have to rot.’ As so often, he deployed a favourite bacterial simile. ‘They would have to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli from which a healthy body could become infected. This would not be cruel if it were considered that even innocent creatures, like hares and deer, had to be killed. Why should the beasts that want to bring us Bolshevism be spared?’

Hitler’s emphasis on the Jews as germ-bacilli, and as responsible for the war and the spread of Bolshevism, was of course nothing new. And his deep-seated belief in the demonic power still purportedly in the hands of the Jews as they were being decimated needs no underlining. But this was the first time that he had used the ‘Jewish Question’ in diplomatic discussions to put heads of state under pressure to introduce more draconian anti-Jewish measures. What prompted this?

He would have been particularly alerted to the ‘Jewish Question’ in April 1943. The previous month, he had finally agreed to have what was left of Berlin’s Jewish community deported. In April, he was sent the breakdown prepared by the SS’s statistician Richard Korherr of almost a million and a half Jews ‘evacuated’ and ‘channelled through’ Polish camps. From the middle of the month, he was increasingly frustrated by accounts of the battle raging in the Warsaw ghetto, where the Waffen-SS, sent in to raze it to the ground, were encountering desperate and brave resistance from the inhabitants. Not least, only days before his meeting with Horthy, mass graves containing the remains of thousands of Polish officers, murdered in 1940 by the Soviet Security Police, the NKVD, had been discovered in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. Hitler immediately gave Goebbels permission to make maximum propaganda capital out of the issue. He also instructed Goebbels to put the ‘Jewish Question’ at the forefront of propaganda. Goebbels seized upon the Katyn case as an excellent opportunity to do just this.

Hitler’s directive to Goebbels to amplify the propaganda treatment of the persecution of the Jews, and his explicit usage of the ‘Jewish Question’ in his meetings with foreign dignitaries, plainly indicate instrumental motives. He believed, as he always had done, unquestioningly in the propaganda value of antisemitism. He told his Gauleiter in early May that antisemitism, as propagated by the party in earlier years, had once more to become the core message. He held out hopes of its spread in Britain. Antisemitic propaganda had, he said, to begin from the premiss that the Jews were the leaders of Bolshevism and prominent in western plutocracy. The Jews had to get out of Europe. This had constantly to be repeated in the political conflict built into the war. In his meetings with Antonescu and Horthy, Hitler was speaking, as always, for effect. As we have noted, he hoped to bind his wavering Axis partners closer to the Reich through complicity in the persecution of the Jews.

Though satisfied with the outcome of his talks with Antonescu, Hitler felt he had failed to make an impact on Horthy. Horthy had put forward what Hitler described – only from his perspective could they be seen as such – as ‘humanitarian counter-arguments’. Hitler naturally dismissed them. As Goebbels summarized it, Hitler said: ‘Towards Jewry there can be no talk of humanity. Jewry must be cast down to the ground.’

Earlier in the spring, Ribbentrop, picking up on fears expressed by Axis partners about their future under German domination, had put to Hitler loose notions of a future European federation. How little ice this cut with the Dictator can be seen from his reactions to his April meetings with heads of state and government – particularly the unsatisfactory discussion with Horthy. He drew the conclusion, he told the Gauleiter in early May, that the ‘small-state rubbish’ should be ‘liquidated as soon as possible’. Europe must have a new form – but this could only be under German leadership. ‘We live today,’ he went on, ‘in a world of destroying and being destroyed.’ He expressed his certainty ‘that the Reich will one day be master of the whole of Europe’, paving the way for world domination. He hinted at the alternative. ‘The Führer paints a shocking picture for the Reichs- and Gauleiter of the possibilities facing the Reich in the event of a German defeat. Such a defeat must therefore never find a place in our thoughts. We must regard it from the outset as impossible and determine to fight it to the last breath.’

Speaking to Goebbels on 6 May in Berlin, where he had come to attend the state funeral of SA-Chief Viktor Lutze (who had been killed in a car accident), Hitler accepted that the situation in Tunis was ‘fairly hopeless’. The inability to get supplies to the troops meant there was no way out. Goebbels summarized the way Hitler was thinking: ‘When you think that 150,000 of our best young people are still in Tunis, you rapidly get an idea of the catastrophe threatening us there. It’ll be on the scale of Stalingrad, and certainly also produce the harshest criticism among the German people.’ But when he spoke the next day to the Reichs- and Gauleiter, Hitler never mentioned Tunis, making no reference at all to the latest news that Allied troops had penetrated as far as the outskirts of the city and that the harbour was already in British hands.

Axis troops were, in fact, by then giving themselves up in droves. Within a week, on 13 May, almost a quarter of a million of them – the largest number taken so far by the Allies, around half of them German, the remainder Italian – surrendered. Only about 800 managed to escape. North Africa was lost. The catastrophe left the Italian Axis partner reeling. For Mussolini, the writing was on the wall. But for Hitler, too, the defeat was nothing short of calamitous. One short step across the Straits of Sicily by the Allies would mean that the fortress of Europe was breached through its southern underbelly.

In the Atlantic, meanwhile, the battle was in reality lost, even if it took some months for this to become fully apparent. The resignation on 30 January 1943 as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of Grand-Admiral Raeder, exponent of what Hitler had come to recognize as an outmoded naval strategy based upon a big surface battle fleet, and his replacement by Karl Dönitz, protagonist of the U-boat, had signalled an important shift in priorities. Hitler told his Gauleiter on 7 May that the U-boat was the weapon to cut through the arteries of the enemy. But, in fact, that very month forty-one U-boats carrying 1,336 men had been lost in the Atlantic – the highest losses in any single month during the war – and the number of vessels in operation at any one time had already passed its peak. The deciphering of German codes by British intelligence, using the ‘Ultra’ decoder, was allowing U-boat signals to be read. It was possible to know with some precision where the U-boats were operating. The use of long-range Liberators, equipped with radar, and able to cover ‘the Atlantic Gap’ – the 600-mile-wide stretch of the ocean from Greenland to the Azores, previously out of range of aircraft flying from both British and American shores – was a second strand of the mounting Allied success against the U-boat menace. The crucial supplies between North America and Britain, gravely imperilled over the previous two years, could flow with increasing security. Nothing could hinder the Reich’s increasing disadvantage against the material might of the western Allies.

Hitler’s greatest worry, once Tunis had fallen, was the condition of his longest-standing ally. By the time he heard a report on the situation in Italy in mid-May from Konstantin Alexander Freiherr von Neurath, son of the former Foreign Minister, and one-time Foreign Office liaison to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, Hitler was deeply gloomy. He thought the monarchists and aristocracy had sabotaged the war-effort in Italy from the beginning, despite the Duce’s personal strength of will. Hitler was sure that the reactionary forces associated with the King, Victor Emmanuel III – whose nominal powers as head of state had nevertheless still left him as the focus of a potential alternative source of loyalty – would triumph over the revolutionary forces of Fascism. A collapse had to be reckoned with. Plans must be made to defend the Mediterranean without Italy. How this was to be done with an offensive imminent in the east and no troops to spare, he did not say.

Hitler had intended around this time to move back to Vinnitsa. But the postponement of ‘Citadel’, the precarious situation in the Mediterranean, and problems with his own health made him decide suddenly to return from a short stay at the Wolf ’s Lair to the Obersalzberg. He remained there until the end of June. During his weeks in the Bavarian Alps, the Ruhr district, Germany’s industrial heartland, continued to suffer devastation from the skies. In May there had been spectacular attacks on the big dams that supplied the area’s water. Had they been sustained, the damage done would have been incalculable. As it was, the dams could be repaired. Since the ‘dam-buster’ raids, the major cities of Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Bochum, Dortmund, and Wuppertal-Barmen had been laid waste in intensive night bombardment. The inadequacy of the air-defences was all too apparent. Hitler continued to vent his bile on Göring and the Luftwaffe. But his own powerlessness to do anything about it was exposed. Goebbels at least showed his face, touring the bombed-out cities, speaking at a memorial service in his home town of Elberfeld, and at a big rally in Dortmund. Hitler stayed in his alpine idyll. The Propaganda Minister thought a visit by the Führer psychologically important for the population of the Ruhr. Though Goebbels had been impressed by the positive response he had encountered during his staged tour, more realistic impressions of morale provided in SD reports painted a different picture. Anger at the regime’s failure to protect them was widespread. The ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting had almost disappeared. Hostile remarks about the regime, and about Hitler personally, were commonplace.

Hitler promised Goebbels towards the end of June that he would pay an extended visit to the devastated area. It was to take place ‘the next week, or the week after that’. Hitler knew only too well that this was out of the question. He had by then scheduled the beginning of ‘Citadel’ for the first week in July. And he expected the Allied landing off the Italian coast at any time. The human suffering of the Ruhr population had, ultimately, little meaning for him. ‘As regrettable as the personal losses are,’ he told Goebbels, ‘they have unfortunately to be taken on board in the interest of a superior war-effort.’

While on the Obersalzberg, Hitler was chiefly preoccupied with the prospect of an imminent invasion by the Allies in the south, and the approaching ‘Citadel’ offensive in the east.

He thought that the Allied landing would come in Sardinia. Sicily was in his view secure enough, and could be held. He thought the Italians more likely to give in bit by bit in deals with the enemy than to capitulate outright. His confidence in Mussolini had finally evaporated. It would be different, he thought, were the Duce still young and fit. But he was old and worn out. The royal family could not be trusted an inch. And – he added a characteristic last reflection – the Jews had not been done away with in Italy, whereas in Germany (as Goebbels summarized) ‘we can be very glad that we have followed a radical policy. There are no Jews behind us who could inherit from us.’

As the war had turned remorselessly against Germany, the beleaguered Führer had reverted ever more to his obsession with Jewish responsibility for the conflagration. In his Manichean world-view, the fight to the finish between the forces of good and evil – the aryan race and the Jews – was reaching its climax. There could be no relenting in the struggle to wipe out Jewry.

Little over a month earlier, Hitler had talked at length, prompted by Goebbels, about the ‘Jewish Question’. The Propaganda Minister thought it one of the most interesting discussions he had ever had with the Führer. Goebbels had being re-reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the crude Russian forgery purporting to outline a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world – with an eye on its use in current propaganda. He raised the matter over lunch. Hitler was certain of the ‘absolute authenticity’ of the Protocols. The Jews, he thought, were not working to a fixed programme; they were following, as always, their ‘racial instinct’. The Jews were the same all over the world, Goebbels noted him as saying, whether in the ghettos of the east ‘or in the bank palaces of the City [of London] or Wall Street’, and would instinctively follow the same aims and use the same methods without the need to work them out together. The question could well be posed, he went on (according to Goebbels’s summary of his comments), as to why there were Jews at all. It was the same question – again the familiar insect analogy – as why there were Colorado beetles. His most basic belief – life as struggle – provided, as always, his answer. ‘Nature is ruled by the law of struggle. There will always be parasitic forms of existence to accelerate the struggle and intensify the process of selection between the strong and the weak … In nature, life always works immediately against parasites; in the existence of peoples that is not exclusively the case. From that results the Jewish danger. So there is nothing else open to modern peoples than to exterminate the Jews.’

The Jews would use all means to defend themselves against this ‘gradual process of annihilation’. One of its methods was war. It was the same warped vision embodied in Hitler’s ‘prophecy’: Jews unleashing war, but bringing about their own destruction in the process. World Jewry, in Hitler’s view, was on the verge of a historic downfall. This would take time. He was presumably alluding to Jews out of German reach, especially in the USA, when he commented that some decades would be needed ‘to cast them out of their power. That is our historic mission, which can not be held up, but only accelerated, by the war. World Jewry thinks it is on the verge of a world victory. This world victory will not come. Instead there will be a world downfall. The peoples who have earliest recognized and fought the Jew will instead accede to world domination.’

Four days after this conversation, on 16 May, SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop telexed the news: ‘The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more! The grand operation terminated at 20.15 hours when the Warsaw synagogue was blown up … The total number of Jews apprehended and destroyed, according to record, is 56,065 …’ A force of around 3,000 men, the vast majority from the SS, had used a tank, armoured vehicles, heavy machine-guns, and artillery to blow up and set fire to buildings which the Jews were fiercely defending and to combat the courageous resistance put up by the ghetto’s inhabitants, armed with little more than pistols, grenades, and Molotov cocktails. Hitler’s long-standing readiness to link Jews with subversive or partisan actions made him all the keener to hasten their destruction. After Himmler had discussed the matter with him on 19 June, he noted that ‘the Führer declared, after my report, that the evacuation of the Jews, despite the unrest that would thereby still arise in the next 3 to 4 months, was to be radically carried out and had to be seen through’.

Such discussions were always private. Hitler still did not speak of the fate of the Jews, except in the most generalized fashion, even among his inner circle. It was a topic which all in his company knew to avoid. To think of criticizing the treatment of the Jews was, of course, anathema. The only time the issue was raised occurred unexpectedly during the two-day visit to the Berghof in late June of Baldur von Schirach, Gauleiter of Vienna, and his wife, Henriette. The daughter of his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, Henriette had known Hitler since she was a child. She thought she could speak openly to him. Her husband had, however, fallen from favour somewhat, partly following Hitler’s disapproval of the modern paintings on show in an art exhibition which Schirach had staged in Vienna earlier in the year. Henriette told Baldur on the way to Berchtesgaden that she wanted to let Hitler know what she had witnessed recently in Amsterdam, where she had seen a group of Jewish women brutally herded together and deported. An SS man had offered her valuables taken from the Jews at a knock-down price. Her husband told her not to mention it. Hitler’s reactions were unpredictable. And – a typical response at the time – in any case she could not change anything.

Already during the first day of their visit, 23 June, Schirach had managed to prompt an angry riposte from Hitler with a suggestion that a different policy in the Ukraine might have paid dividends. Next afternoon, Hitler was in an irritable mood during the statutory visit to the Tea House. The atmosphere was icy. It remained tense in the evening when they gathered around the fire in the hall of the Berghof. Henriette was sitting next to Hitler, nervously rubbing her hands, speaking quietly. All at once, Hitler jumped up, marched up and down the room, and fumed: ‘That’s all I need, you coming to me with this sentimental twaddle. What concern are these Jewish women to you?’ The other guests did not know where to look. There was a protracted, embarrassed silence. The logs could be heard crackling in the fireplace.

When Goebbels arrived, he turned the scene to his advantage by playing on Hitler’s aversion to Vienna. Hitler rounded on the hapless Schirach, praising the achievements of Berlin – Goebbels’s domain, of course – and castigating his Gauleiter’s work in Vienna. Beside himself with anger, Hitler said it was a mistake ever to have sent Schirach to Vienna at all, or to have taken the Viennese into the Reich. Schirach offered to resign. ‘That’s not for you to decide. You are staying where you are,’ was Hitler’s response. By then it was four in the morning. Bormann let it be known to the Schirachs that it would be best if they left. They did so without saying their goodbyes, and in high disgrace.

The week before the Schirach incident, Hitler had finally decided to press ahead with the ‘Citadel’ offensive. His misgivings can only have been increased by Guderian’s reports that the Panther still had major weaknesses and was not ready for front-line action. And in the middle of the month, he was presented with the OKW’s recommendation that ‘Citadel’ should be cancelled. It was now running so late that there was an increasing chance that it would clash with the expected Allied offensive in the Mediterranean. Jodl, just back from leave, agreed that it was dangerous and foolhardy to commit troops to the east in the interests of, at best, a limited success when the chief danger at that time lay elsewhere. Again, the split between the OKW and army leadership came into play. Zeitzler objected to what he regarded as interference. Guderian suspected that Zeitzler’s influence was decisive in persuading Hitler to go ahead. At any rate, Hitler rejected the advice of the Wehrmacht’s Operations Staff. The opening of the offensive was scheduled for 3 July, then postponed one last time for two more days.

At the end of June, Hitler returned to the Wolf’s Lair for the beginning of ‘Citadel’. On 1 July, he addressed his commanders. The decision to go ahead was determined, he stated, by the need to forestall a Soviet offensive later in the year. A military success would also have a salutary effect on Axis partners, and on morale at home. Four days later, the last German offensive in the east was finally launched. It was the beginning of a disastrous month.

IV

Bombardment from Soviet heavy artillery just before the offensive began gave a clear indication that the Red Army had been alerted to the timing of ‘Citadel’. At least 2,700 Soviet tanks had been brought in to defend Kursk. They faced a similar number of German tanks. The mightiest tank battle in history raged for over a week. At first both Model and Manstein made good inroads, if with heavy losses. The Luftwaffe also had initial successes. But Guderian proved correct in his warnings of the deficiencies of the Panther. Most broke down. Few remained in action after a week. Manstein’s drive was hindered rather than helped by the tank in which such high hopes had been placed. The ninety Porsche Tigers deployed by Model also revealed major battlefield weaknesses. They had no machine-guns, so were ill-equipped for close-range fighting. They were unable, therefore, to neutralize the enemy. In the middle of the month, the Soviets launched their own offensive against the German bulge around Orel to the north of the ‘Citadel’ battlefields, effectively to Model’s rear. Though Manstein was still advancing, the northern part of the pincer was now endangered.

On 13 July, Hitler summoned Manstein and Kluge, the two Army Group Commanders, to assess the situation. Manstein was for continuing. Kluge stated that Model’s army could not carry on. Reluctantly, Hitler brought ‘Citadel’ to a premature end. The Soviet losses were greater. But ‘Citadel’ had signally failed in its objectives.

Equally dire events were unfolding in the Mediterranean. Overnight from 9–10 July, reports came in of an armada of ships carrying large Allied assault forces from North Africa to Sicily. A landing had been expected – though in Sardinia, not Sicily. The precise timing caught Hitler unawares. The German troops in Sicily – only two divisions – were too few in number to hold the entire coast. Defence relied heavily upon Italian forces. Allied air superiority was soon all too evident. And alarming news came in of Italian soldiers casting away their weapons and fleeing. Though heavy fighting continued throughout July, within two days it was plain that the Allied landing had been successful. On 19 July, Hitler flew to see Mussolini in Feltre, near Belluno, in northern Italy. It was to prove the last time he set foot on Italian soil.

The visit was aimed at bolstering the Duce’s faltering morale and preventing Italy agreeing a separate peace. Hitler’s generals thought the visit had been a wasted effort. Hitler himself – convinced still of the power of his own rhetoric – probably thought he had once more succeeded in stirring Mussolini’s fighting spirits. He was soon disabused. On the very evening after the Feltre talks, he was shown an intelligence report sent on by Himmler that a coup d’état was being planned to replace Mussolini by Marshal Pietro Badoglio.

During the course of Saturday, 24 July, reports started to come in that the Fascist Grand Council had been summoned for the first time since early in the war. The Council’s lengthy deliberations culminated in an astonishing vote to request the King to seek a policy more capable of saving Italy from destruction. Later that morning, the King told Mussolini that, since the war appeared lost and army morale was collapsing, Marshal Badoglio would take over his offices as prime minister. As a stunned Duce left the royal chambers, he was bundled into a waiting ambulance and driven off at speed to house-arrest on the Mediterranean island of Ponza.

By the time of the evening military briefing in the Führer Headquarters, the sensational news from Italy had broken, though there was still not complete clarity. Almost the entire session was taken up with the implications. Since Italy had not pulled out of the war, plans to occupy the country in such an event – code-named ‘Alarich’ – could not be put into operation. But in a highly agitated mood, Hitler demanded immediate action to occupy Rome and depose the new regime. He denounced what had taken place as ‘naked treachery’, describing Badoglio as ‘our grimmest enemy’. He still had belief in Mussolini – so long as he was propped up by German arms. Presuming the Duce still at liberty, he wanted him brought straight away to Germany. He was confident that in that event the situation could still be remedied. He fumed that he would send troops to Rome the next day to arrest the ‘rabble’ – the entire government, the King, the Crown Prince, Badoglio, the ‘whole bunch’. In two or three days there would then be another coup. He had Göring – ‘ice-cold in the most serious crises’, as he had repeatedly stated at midday, the Reich Marshal’s failings as head of the Luftwaffe temporarily forgotten – telephoned and told him to come as quickly as he could to the Wolf ’s Lair. Rommel was located in Salonika and summoned to present himself without delay. Hitler intended to put him in overall command in Italy. He wanted Himmler contacted. Goebbels, too, was telephoned and told to leave immediately for East Prussia. The situation, Goebbels acknowledged, was ‘extraordinarily critical’. Ribbentrop, still not recovered from a chest infection, was ordered up from Fuschl, his residence in the Salzkammergut near Salzburg. Soon after midnight, Hitler met his military leaders for the third time in little over twelve hours, frantically improvising details for the evacuation from Sicily and the planned occupation of Rome, and for the seizure of the members of the new Italian government.

At ten o’clock that morning, 26 July, Hitler met Goebbels and Göring, just arrived in FHQ. Ribbentrop joined them half an hour later. Hitler gave his interpretation of the situation. He presumed that Mussolini had been forced out of power. Whether he was still alive was not known, but he would certainly be unfree. Hitler saw the forces of Italian freemasonry – banned by Mussolini but still at work behind the scenes – behind the plot. Ultimately, he claimed, the coup was directed at Germany since Badoglio would certainly come to an arrangement with the British and Americans to take Italy out of the war. The British would now look for the best moment for a landing in Italy – perhaps in Genoa in order to cut off German troops in the south. Military precautions to anticipate such a move had to be taken.

Hitler explained, too, his intention of transferring a parachute division, currently based in southern France, to Rome as part of the move to occupy the city. The King, Badoglio, and the members of the new government would be arrested and flown to Germany. Once they were in German hands, things would be different. Possibly Roberto Farinacci, the radical Fascist boss of Cremona and former Party Secretary, who had escaped arrest by fleeing to the German Embassy and was now en route to FHQ, could be made head of a puppet government if Mussolini himself could not be rescued. Hitler saw the Vatican, too, as deeply implicated in the plot to oust Mussolini. In the military briefing just after midnight he had talked wildly of occupying the Vatican and ‘getting out the whole lot of swine’. Goebbels and Ribbentrop dissuaded him from such rash action, certain to have damaging international repercussions. Hitler still pressed for rapid action to capture the new Italian government. Rommel, who by then had also arrived in FHQ, opposed the improvised, high-risk, panicky response. He favoured a carefully prepared action; but that would probably take some eight days to put into place. The meeting ended with the way through the crisis still unclear.

The midday military conference was again taken up with the issue of moving troops to Italy to secure above all the north of the country, and with the hastily devised scheme to capture the Badoglio government. Field-Marshal von Kluge, who had flown in from Army Group Centre – desperately trying to hold the Soviet offensive in the Orel bulge, to the north of Kursk – was abruptly told of the implications of the events in Italy for the eastern front. Hitler said he needed the crack Waffen-SS divisions currently assigned to Manstein in the south of the eastern front to be transferred immediately to Italy. That meant Kluge giving up some of his forces to reinforce Manstein’s weakened front. Kluge forcefully pointed out, though to no avail, that this would make defence in the Orel region impossible. But the positions on the Dnieper being prepared for an orderly retreat by his troops to be taken up before winter were far from ready. What he was being asked to do, protested Kluge, was to undertake ‘an absolutely overhasty evacuation’. ‘Even so, Herr Feldmarshall: we are not master here of our own decisions,’ rejoined Hitler. Kluge was left with no choice.

Meanwhile, Farinacci had arrived. His description of what had happened and his criticism of Mussolini did not endear him to Hitler. Any idea of using him as the figurehead of a German-controlled regime was discarded. Hitler spoke individually to his leading henchmen before, in need of a rest after a hectic twenty-four hours, retiring to his rooms to eat alone. He returned for a lengthy conference that evening, attended by thirty-five persons. But the matter was taken no further. Within a few days, he was forced to concede that any notion of occupying Rome and sending in a raiding party to take the members of the Badoglio government and the Italian royal family captive was both precipitate and wholly impracticable. The plans were called off. Hitler’s attention focused now on discovering the whereabouts of the Duce and bringing him into German hands as soon as possible.

With the Italian crisis still at its height, the disastrous month of July drew to a close amid the heaviest air-raids to date. Between 24 and 30 July, the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, using the release of aluminium strips to blind German radar, unleashed ‘Operation Gomorrha’ – a series of devastating raids on Hamburg, outdoing in death and destruction anything previously experienced in the air-war. Waves of incendiaries whipped up horrific fire-storms, turning the city into a raging inferno, consuming everything and everybody in their path. People suffocated in their thousands in cellars or were burnt to cinders on the streets. An estimated 30,000 people lost their lives; over half a million were left homeless; twenty-four hospitals, fifty-eight churches, and 277 schools lay in ruins; over 50 per cent of the city was completely gutted. As usual, Hitler revealed no sense of remorse at any human losses. He was chiefly concerned about the psychological impact. When he was given news that fifty German planes had mined the Humber estuary, he exploded: ‘You can’t tell the German people in this situation: that’s mined; 50 planes have laid mines! That has no effect at all … You only break terror through terror! We have to have counter-attacks. Everything else is rubbish.’

Hitler mistook the mood of a people with whom he had lost touch. What they wanted, in their vast majority, was less the retaliation that was Hitler’s only thought than proper defence against the terror from the skies and – above all else – an end to the war that was costing them their homes and their lives. But Hitler remained, as he had been throughout the agony of Hamburg, more taken up with events in Italy.

Though he had still rejected any evacuation of Sicily, insistent that the enemy should not set foot on the Italian mainland, Kesselring had taken steps to prepare the ground for what proved a brilliantly planned evacuation on the night of 11 – 12 August, catching the Allies by surprise and allowing 40,000 German and 62,000 Italian troops, with their equipment, to escape to safety. But as August drew on, suspicions mounted that it would not be long before the Italians defected. And at the end of the month, directives for action in the event of an Italian defection, in the drawer for months and now refashioned under the code-name ‘Axis’, were issued.

Under the pressure of the events in Italy, Hitler had finally made one overdue move at home. For months, egged on by Goebbels, he had expressed his dissatisfaction with the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, whom he contemptuously regarded as ‘old and worn-out’. But he could think of no alternative. He continued to defer any decision until the toppling of Mussolini concentrated his mind, persuading him that the time had come to stiffen the grip on the home front and eliminate any prospect of poor morale turning into subversive action. The man he could depend upon to do this was close at hand.

On 20 August he appointed Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler as the new Reich Minister of the Interior. The appointment amounted to Hitler’s tacit recognition that his authority at home now rested on police repression, not the adulation of the masses he had once enjoyed.

On 3 September the first British troops crossed the Straits of Messina to Italy, landing at Reggio di Calabria. That same day, the Italians secretly signed their armistice with the Allies which became public knowledge five days later.

On 8 September Hitler had flown for the second time within a fortnight to Army Group South’s headquarters at Zaporozhye, on the lower Dnieper north of the Sea of Azov, to confer with Manstein about the increasingly critical situation on the southern flank of the eastern front. It was to be the last time he set foot on territory captured from the Soviet Union. A few days earlier, following Soviet breakthroughs, he had been forced to authorize withdrawal from the Donets Basin – so important for its rich coal deposits – and from the Kuban bridgehead over the Straits of Kerch, the gateway to the Crimea. Now the Red Army had breached the thin seam which had knitted together Kluge’s and Manstein’s Army Groups and was pouring through the gap. Retreat was the only possible course of action.

Hitler found a tense atmosphere at the Wolf’s Lair on his return. What he had long anticipated was reality. British and American newspapers had that morning, 8 September, carried reports that the capitulation of the Italian army was imminent. By the afternoon, the news was hardening. At 6 p.m. that evening the stories were confirmed by the BBC in London. Once again, Nazi leaders were summoned to Führer Headquarters for a crisis-meeting next day. The order had meanwhile been given to set ‘Operation Axis’ in motion. ‘The Führer,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘is determined to make a tabula rasa in Italy.’

The BBC’s premature announcement gave the OKW’s Operations Staff a head start. Sixteen German divisions had been moved to the Italian mainland by this time. The battle-hardened SS units withdrawn from the eastern front in late July and early August and troops pulled back from Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia were in position to take control in central Italy. By 10 September, Rome was in German hands. Italian troops were disarmed. Small pockets of resistance were ruthlessly put down; one division that held out until 22 September ended with 6,000 dead. Over 650,000 soldiers entered German captivity. Only the bulk of the small navy and ineffective air-force escaped and were given over to the Allies. Within a few days Italy was occupied by its former Axis partner.

Hours after the Italian capitulation, the Allies had landed in the Gulf of Salerno, thirty miles or so south-east of Naples. The dogged German resistance they encountered for a week before reinforcements enabled them to break out of their threatened beachhead – linking forces with troops from Montgomery’s 8th Army advancing northwards from Reggio di Calabria, and entering Naples on 1 October – was an indicator of what was in store for the Allies during the coming months as the Wehrmacht made them fight for every mile of their northward progression.

It was plain to the German leadership, however, that it would be even more difficult, in the new situation, for the armed forces to cope with the mounting pressures on both the eastern and the southern fronts. Goebbels saw the need looming to seek peace with either the Soviet Union or the western Allies. He suggested the time had come to sound out Stalin. Ribbentrop took the same line. He had tentative feelers put out to see whether the Soviet dictator would bite. But Hitler dismissed the idea. If anything, he said, he preferred to look for an arrangement with Britain – conceivably open to one. But, as always, he would not consider negotiating from a position of weakness. In the absence of the decisive military success he needed, which was receding ever more into the far distance, any hope of persuading him to consider an approach other than the remorseless continuation of the struggle was bound to be illusory.

At least Goebbels, backed by Göring, successfully this time pleaded with Hitler to speak to the German people. To the last minute before recording the broadcast, on 10 September, Hitler showed his reluctance. He wanted to delay, to see how things turned out. Goebbels went through the text with him line by line. Eventually, he got the Führer to the microphone. The speech itself – largely confined to unstinting praise for Mussolini, condemnation of Badoglio and his supporters, the claim that the ‘treachery’ had been foreseen and every necessary step taken, and a call to maintain confidence and sustain the fight – had nothing of substance to offer, other than a hint at coming retaliation for the bombing of German cities. But Goebbels was satisfied. Reports suggested the speech had gone down well, and helped revive morale.

As far as the situation in Italy itself was concerned, Hitler was at this time resigned to losing any hold over the south of the country. His intention was to withdraw to the Apennines, long foreseen by the OKH Operations Staff as the favoured line of defence. However, he worried about the Allies advancing from Italy through the Balkans. By autumn, this concern was to persuade him to change his mind and defend Italy much farther to the south. A consequence was to tie down forces desperately needed elsewhere.

The Wehrmacht’s rapid successes in taking hold of Italy so speedily provided some relief. Hitler’s spirits then soared temporarily when the stunning news came through on the evening of 12 September that Mussolini, whose whereabouts had been recently discovered, had been freed from his captors in a ski hotel on the highest mountain in the Abruzzi through an extraordinarily daring raid by parachutists and SS-men carried in by glider and led by the Austrian SS-Hauptsturmführer Otto Skorzeny. The euphoria did not last long. Hitler greeted the ex-Duce warmly when Mussolini, no longer the preening dictator but looking haggard and dressed soberly in a dark suit and black overcoat, was brought to Rastenburg on 14 September. But Mussolini, bereft of the trappings of power, was a broken man. The series of private talks they had left Hitler ‘extraordinarily disappointed’. Three days later, Mussolini was dispatched to Munich to begin forming his new regime. By the end of September he had set up his reconstituted Fascist ‘Repubblica di Salò’ in northern Italy, a repressive, brutish police state run by a combination of cruelty, corruption, and thuggery – but operating unmistakably under the auspices of German masters. The one-time bombastic dictator of Italy was now plainly no more than Hitler’s tame puppet, and living on borrowed time.

As autumn progressed, the situation on the eastern front predictably worsened. The redeployment of troops to Italy weakened the chances of staving off the Soviet offensive. And the failure to erect the ‘eastern wall’ of fortifications along the Dnieper during the two years that it had been in German hands now proved costly. The speed of the Soviet advance gave no opportunity to construct any solid defence line. By the end of September the Red Army had been able to cross the Dnieper and establish important bridgeheads on the west banks of the great river. The German bridgehead at Zaporozhye was lost in early October. By then, the Wehrmacht had been pushed back about 150 miles along the southern front. German and Romanian troops were also cut off on the Crimea, which Hitler refused to evacuate, fearing, as of old, the opportunities it would give for air-attacks on Romanian oil-fields, and concerned about the message it would send to Turkey and Bulgaria. By the end of the month, the Red Army had pushed so far over the big bend of the Dnieper in the south that any notion of the Germans holding their intended defensive line was purely fanciful. To the north, the largest Soviet city in German hands, Kiev, was recaptured on 5–6 November. Manstein wanted to make the attempt to retake it. For Hitler, the lower Dnieper and the Crimea were more important. Control of the lower Dnieper held the key to the protection of the manganese ores of Nikopol, vital for the German steel industry. And should the Red Army again control the Crimea, the Romanian oil-fields would once more be threatened from the air. But, whatever Hitler’s thirst for new military successes, the reality was that by the end of 1943, the limitless granaries of the Ukraine and the industrial heartlands of the northern Caucasus, seen by Hitler on so many occasions as vital to the war effort (as well as the source of future German prosperity in the ‘New Order’), were irredeemably lost.

V

Not lost, however, was the war against the Jews. By autumn 1943, ‘Aktion Reinhard’ was terminated: in the region of 1½ million Jews had been killed in the gas-chambers of extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka in eastern Poland. The SS leadership were now pressing hard for the extension of the ‘Final Solution’ to all remaining corners of the Nazi imperium – even those where the deportations were likely to have diplomatic repercussions. Among these were Denmark and Italy.

In September, Hitler complied with the request of Werner Best, the Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark, to have the Danish Jews deported, dismissing Ribbentrop’s anxieties about a possible general strike and other civil disobedience. Though these did not materialize, the round-up of Danish Jews was a resounding failure. Several hundred – under ten per cent of the Jewish population – were captured and deported to Theresienstadt. Most escaped. Countless Danish citizens helped the overwhelming majority of their Jewish countrymen – in all 7,900 persons, including a few hundred non-Jewish marital partners – to flee across the Sound to safety in neutral Sweden in the most remarkable rescue action of the war.

In October, Hitler accepted Ribbentrop’s recommendation (prompted by the Reich Security Head Office) to have Rome’s 8,000 Jews sent ‘as hostages’ to the Austrian concentration camp at Mauthausen. Again, the ‘action’ to round up the Jews misfired. Most of the Jewish community were able to avoid capture. Some were hidden by disgusted non-Jewish citizens. Thousands found shelter in Rome’s convents and monasteries, or in the Vatican itself. In return, the Papacy was prepared to maintain public silence on the outrage. Despite Hitler’s directive, following his Foreign Minister’s advice, those Jews captured were not, in fact, sent to Mauthausen. Of the 1,259 Jews who fell into German hands, the majority were taken straight to Auschwitz.

Hitler’s compliance with SS demands to speed up and finish off the ‘Final Solution’ was unquestionably driven by his wish to complete the destruction of those he held responsible for the war. He wanted, now as before, to see the ‘prophecy’ he had declared in 1939 and repeatedly referred to fulfilled. But, even more so than in the spring when he had encouraged Goebbels to turn up the volume of antisemitic propaganda, there was also the need, with backs to the wall, to hold together his closest followers in a sworn ‘community of fate’, bonded by their own knowledge of and implication in the extermination of the Jews.

On 4 October, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler spoke openly and frankly about the killing of the Jews to SS leaders gathered in the town hall in Posen, the capital of the Warthegau. He said he was ‘referring to the Jewish evacuation programme, the extermination of the Jewish people’. It was, he went on, ‘a glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and never can be written. For we know how difficult we would have made it for ourselves if, on top of the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war, we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators, and troublemakers. We would now probably have reached the 1916–17 stage when the Jews were still part of the body of the German people.’ The mentality was identical with Hitler’s. ‘We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people,’ Himmler concluded, ‘to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us … We do not want in the end, because we have exterminated a bacillus, to become ill through the bacillus and die.’ The vocabulary, too, was redolent of Hitler’s own. Himmler did not refer to Hitler. There was no need to do so. The key point for the Reichsführer-SS was not to assign responsibility to a single person. The crucial purpose of his speech was to stress their joint responsibility, that they were all in it together.

Two days later, in the same Golden Hall in Posen, Himmler addressed the Reichs- and Gauleiter of the party. The theme was the same one. He gave, as Goebbels recorded, an ‘unvarnished and candid picture’ of the treatment of the Jews. Himmler declared: ‘We faced the question: what should we do with the women and children? I decided here too to find a completely clear solution. I did not regard myself as justified in exterminating the men – that is to say, to kill them or have them killed – and to allow the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the earth.’ Himmler seemed to be indicating that the extension of the killing to women and children had been his initiative. He immediately, however, associated himself and the SS with a ‘commission’ – ‘the most difficult which we have had so far’. The Gauleiter, among them Goebbels who had spoken directly with Hitler on the subject so many times, would have had no difficulty in presuming whose authority lay behind the ‘commission’. Again, the purpose of the remarkably frank disclosures on the taboo subject was plain. Himmler marked on a list those who had not attended his speech or noted its contents.

Himmler’s speeches, ensuring that his own subordinates and the party leadership were fully in the picture about the extermination of the Jews, had been – there can be no doubt about it – carried out with Hitler’s approval. The very next day, after listening to Himmler, the Gauleiter were ordered to attend the Wolf ’s Lair to hear Hitler himself give an account of the state of the war. That the Führer would speak explicitly on the ‘Final Solution’ was axiomatically ruled out. But he could now take it for granted that they understood there was no way out. Their knowledge underlined their complicity. ‘The entire German people know,’ Hitler had told the Reichs- and Gauleiter, ‘that it is a matter of whether they exist or do not exist. The bridges have been destroyed behind them. Only the way forward remains.’

When (for the last time, as it turned out) Hitler addressed the party’s Old Guard in Munich’s Löwenbräukeller on the putsch anniversary, 8 November, he was as defiant as ever. There would be no capitulation, no repeat of 1918, he declared once again – the nightmare of that year indelibly imprinted on his psyche – and no undermining of the front by subversion at home. Any overheard subversive or defeatist remark, it was clear, would cost the person making it his or her head.

By this time – though of course he made no hint of it in his speech – Hitler was anxious about a looming new grave military threat, one which, if not repulsed, would result in Germany’s destruction: what he took to be the certainty of an invasion in the west during the coming year. ‘The danger in the east remains,’ ran his preamble to his Directive No. 51 on 3 November, ‘but a greater danger is looming in the west: the Anglo-Saxon landing! … If the enemy succeeds here in breaking through our defence on a broad front, the consequences within a short time are unforeseeable. Everything suggests that the enemy, at the latest in spring but perhaps even earlier, will move to attack the western front of Europe.’

To his military advisers, on 20 December, he said he was certain that the invasion would take place some time after mid-February or early March. The next months would be spent in preparation for the coming great assault in the west. This, Hitler remarked, would ‘decide the war’.