A World at Arms (93 page)

The difficulty of reaching much of German-controlled Europe from air bases in Britain and North Africa, at a time when the effective range of Allied bombers was only about 600 miles, made the strategic advantage of a landing in Italy and the seizure of the airfields in the Foggia area there appear increasingly important.
¹⁷⁹
But here one already moves to strategic planning for operations after the invasion of Sicily. In any case, the summer of 1943 would, as far as the Western Allies were concerned, combine the exploitation of victory in North Africa with the new “Pointblank” bombing offensive .
¹⁸⁰
If the three great allies could only hold together, the road ahead was sure to be hard, but the prospects were certainly more encouraging than in the dark days a year earlier.

^a
On August 5,1942, Hitler was to comment that the war in the East would be won if Germany cut the ties to Russia’s allies in the north and south and seized the oil wells, while thereafter the war in the West could be won by sending 50 percent of the strength in the East there. Jochmann,
Hitler, Monologe,
pp. 328–29.

^b
The Germans quickly built new ones and formed a bridgehead on the south bank.

^c
The evidence on this issue is reviewed in Ziemke,
Moscow to Stalingrad,
p. 343. it may be, but this is pure speculation, that the initial reaction of Stalin, which was to take the attack toward Voronezh as the first step of what he had anticipated, namely an offensive toward Moscow, made him more amenable to advice when the German spearheads turned south, not north, and it became increasingly obvious that the German offensive was concentrated on an area where the Soviets could give ground, if they had to, more easily than before Moscow.

^d
It should be pointed out that in 1941 Manstein had been a corps commander in the first German offensive toward Leningrad.

^e
The sending of troops and supplies by the Axis was very much hampered by friction between the Germans and Italians as well as by the extraordinarily high level of conflict between the German army, navy and air force–always greater in the Mediterranean theater than elsewhere. For an account which stresses these troubles, see Salewski,
Seekriegsleitung,
2: 251–68.

^f
Only the Axis satellites were excluded from this requirement in Roosevelt’s view. He tried to have the Hungarians, Romanians, and Bulgarians recall their declarations of war until June 1942.

^g
it must be pointed out that Kesselring and Rommel were of different minds about almost every strategic issue, not just at this time but during all of 1942 and 1943. They appear to have had such a perpetual series of conflicts that it is difficult to imagine them agreeing on anything. And they were much less successful at working things out than British and American commanders.

^h
Patton took over command of II Corps with Bradley as his deputy until the south Tunisian operations were completed. Then Bradley became commanding general of II Corps while Patton was preparing for command of the American army which would take part in the invasion of Sicily.

ⁱ
One American division was already in the north; the other three and all corps troops were moved.

^j
The German decision–making process in the winter crisis was complicated by Hitler’s absence from his headquarters from November 7 to 23, 1942, first in Munich for his annual speech to the Nazi Party faithful on the anniversary of the 1923 coup attempt, and thereafter at Berchtesgaden on vacation. German communications were therefore especially strained while Rommel was being beaten in North Africa, the Western Allies were landing in Northwest Africa, and the Soviet “Uranus” operation was getting under way.

^k
There were a few German units behind the northern front and more in the south, but in neither case did this make a great deal of difference. The endless debate in Hitler’s headquarters about how best to employ these units in the developing battle merely reflects the extent of the Axis defeat. The most dramatic example is the argument about General Heim’s 48th Panzer Corps, which has had more pages written about it than it had tanks at the time. See Kehrig,
Stalingrad,
passim. Heim was jailed on Hitler’s order for some months and ended up in command of Boulogne!

^l
Hitler also finally appointed a new commander for Army Group A which he himself had been nominally running since the dismissal of Field Marshal List.

^m
The Soviet original estimate was that 85–90,000 Axis soldiers had been encircled, not three times that number. There is here an interesting reflection on Soviet intelligence.

ⁿ
Surely the celebration of a forthcoming German-Soviet armistice by members of the Soviet embassy in Tokyo on October 23, 1942, was ordered from Moscow and designed to come to the attention of the United States and Britain (as it did). Tokyo Circular 1957 of 26 October 1942, U.S. intercept in NA, RG 457, SRDJ 27500.

^o
Montgomery also wanted the Americans under his own command, but that was turned down. Montgomery to Brooke, 6 May, 1943, Liddell Hart Centre, Alanbrooke Papers, 14/24/13.

9

The early portion of World War II had a curiously bifurcated impact on internal affairs in the Third Reich. On the one hand, the desire of the government to avoid at all costs any repetition of the collapse at home which it believed responsible for the defeat of 1918 made the regime most reluctant to ask for too high a level of sacrifices. While rationing was introduced at the end of August, 1939, every effort was made to keep rations high; and, partly at the expense of looting most of the rest of Europe, German rations were the highest among the European belligerents until the last months of the war.

Similarly, there was no total mobilization of either the population or the material resources of the country. While millions of men served in the armed forces, there was a high level of deferments to work in industry and in the administration, a policy which did not change until early 1942 when the disastrous defeats in the East meant greater priority of the manpower needs of the armed forces over the political preferences of the government. Furthermore, within the realm of German industry, a high level of consumer goods production continued well into the war, so that neither industrial facilities nor raw materials were directed overwhelmingly into war production until 1942.
¹

If Germany did not draw into military service all able–bodied men, the country was even less inclined to mobilize the labor potential of its women. In the first year of war, in fact, the relatively high level of support payments made to dependents of men in the military had the effect of leading many women to withdraw from employment in industry, offices, or shops–they could do better living at home on their allowance. Of those women who were gainfully employed outside the home, farm, or family enterprise, millions were working as maids for middle and upper class households well into the war. Only from 1943 on would this picture
begin to change, but until the last stages of the war Germany did not draw its women in to the same extent as Britain and the Soviet Union did; by then the bombing had brought them into the war in a very different way.

In some respects, therefore, what was called the “Phony War” did not dramatically impinge on German life quickly, and the victory over Poland was especially popular in a country where anti-Polish sentiments were very strong. At the same time, there is good evidence that the British and French declarations of war produced a shock in the thinking of many Germans, in part because of memories of World War I, in part because many had come to believe the propaganda of the regime’s earlier years that Germany wanted peace, not war, with the Western Powers. The very bad weather conditions of the winter of 1939–40, with the canals freezing so that coal transport lagged, and all sorts of related difficulties, accentuated a feeling of unease in Germany during the first half year of war.
²

That feeling of unease would have been more widespread had the public known of the massive program for the killing of the elderly, the very sick, people with mental illness, and others, inaugurated in the first weeks of the war but only gradually coming to people’s attention. The so-called euthanasia program has been reviewed in
Chapter 2
; it was an integral portion of waging war as Hitler and his associates saw it. The points to be made in this context are two: first, the regime quickly found that it could count on the enthusiastic, willing, or reluctant support of thousands of doctors, nurses, administrators and other people in a program which cost over one hundred and perhaps two hundred thousand people their lives. Secondly, in this process the regime developed the techniques for selecting categories of people out of a society for killing, carrying out the murders, and disposing of the bodies, while simultaneously acquiring a corps of individuals ready, willing, and experienced at the task of murdering others as a “regular job” on a day after day after day basis. All societies harbor individuals who for any number of reasons kill another person or even act as serial killers who murder repeatedly; people who engage in killing vast numbers of other human beings as a full–time occupation have to be located and trained. Any who found this an uncongenial profession could, as we now know, ask to be transferred or reassigned with no significant risk to themselves, and a few did that.
³
But there was never a shortage of personnel.

During 1940 and the first half of 1941, there was a slow but steady rise in popular unrest over this murder program, culminating in a public denunciation of it by Clemens August Count von Galen, the Bishop of
Münster, in August 1941.
⁴
Such appeals had an impact inside and outside the country: inside they led Hitler to defer at least part of the euthanasia program until after the war, when the noisy bishop himself could be included. The suggestion that wounded veterans of World War II would be killed by their own government as “useless mouths”-something which had already happened to many disabled World War I veterans–was just too dangerous to have floating around just as the campaign against the Soviet Union was getting under way. Outside Germany, the killing program had become known, and President Roosevelt referred to Galen’s sermon as, “a splendid and brave thing.”
⁵

The summer of 1941, when the “euthanasia” program was somewhat reduced, was a time when the systematic murder of Jews, first in the newly occupied portions of the U.S.S.R. and then in the rest of German-controlled Europe, was initiated. The first mass deportations of Jews from Germany to places in the East where they were murdered began in October 1941. In the following years, the vast majority of those Jews who had not been able to leave pre-war Germany were deported and killed; their emptied homes turned over to others even as the welfare organization distributed their furniture and vast quantities of confiscated clothes–often blood-stained-to the German population. Word soon seeped back of the mass killings in the East; and while the army repeatedly instructed soldiers to stop sending pictures of mass shootings to their folks at home, Goebbels was distributing a letter from a soldier reporting on the mass killings in a propaganda collection of letters from the front.
⁶
In public, Hitler repeatedly boasted that his promise, that in a new war the Jews of Europe would be exterminated, was now being carried out.
⁷
There was some unease over all this, and a few brave individuals helped a small number hide and survive, often at great risk to themselves, but most turned aside.

A major concern of the government apparatus from the fall of 1941 on was to obtain the cooperation of the various governments allied with and subordinate to Germany in turning over their Jewish citizens to the Germans for deportation and killing. In this activity, the Germans obtained considerable help from the government of Vichy France,
⁸
the puppet regimes of Slovakia and Croatia, and, at least for a while, the government of Romania. The Italians were most definite in their refusal to cooperate, sheltering Jews not only in Italy itself but in the portions of France, Yugoslavia, and Greece occupied by the Italian army.
⁹
To the outrage of the Germans, who saw this as one more sign of Italian incompetence as allies, most Jews in these areas survived until after the Italian surrender of September 1943 opened them to German control and hence to the application of the by then well–established routines of
collection, deportation, and murder. Only in the immediate vicinity of Rome was minimal attention paid to possible objections from the Vatican.
¹⁰

As the tide of war turned against the Axis, Romania began to resist German pressure for the turning over of its Jews, while Bulgaria had resisted from the start, and the Danes had helped evacuate their Jewish neighbors to Sweden when the Germans intended to round them up. Until 1944, Hungary had also resisted German demands, including those voiced personally by Hitler and von Ribbentrop, that its well over half a million Jewish citizens be given up. It was again after the occupation of the country by German troops that the process of deportation to the murder factories began. The international uproar occasioned by these events in the summer and fall of 1944 led to a delay which saved the lives of many; it was in this context that the Swedish emissary Raoul Wallenberg played an important role.
¹¹