Exorcising Hitler (2 page)

That pre-war, authoritarian core regained more and more control as the Depression took hold in the 1930s and the democracy set up in 1918 correspondingly lost support to both extreme left and extreme right. It was this elite’s representatives, especially the clique surrounding the senile President (and former First World War field marshal) Paul von Hindenburg, who handed over the reins of government to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party on 30 January 1933.

Many Germans, even non-Nazis, refused to admit that their armies had been vanquished in 1918. These restless millions also saw the ceasefire and the consequent harsh peace as due to treachery by the democratic government that had supplanted the monarchy after the November revolution. Their stubborn opposition, married with the Weimar Republic’s recurrent economic difficulties, had kept the new democracy permanently weak.

In 1918 the Reich had been allowed to retain not just its own government but even its army, which had withdrawn across the country’s borders when peace came, marching back through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin almost like returning victors. True, under the Treaty of Versailles, the size of the army was drastically reduced, but, now called the
Reichswehr
, it nevertheless remained a key state player. The deadly bacillus (as many foreigners saw it) of German authoritarianism and militarism had thus been permitted to survive, then to recover and thrive.

The result, according to this interpretation, was that a little over twenty years after Germany’s defeat the infection had begun once more to spread its horrors throughout Europe – this time in an even more virulent National Socialist form, which included the added toxicity of racism, and especially a murderous anti-Semitism.

By the time the Allies approached the borders of Hitler’s Germany in the autumn of 1944, they had already prepared for what lay ahead. First, of course, the invasion of Germany itself. Fanatical resistance was expected from many Germans, soldiers and civilians alike, both during the coming battles and even after the fighting within the borders of the Reich concluded. As a consequence, it was even more important that the German nation see itself as comprehensively defeated. The relentless and often indiscriminate bombing of German cities, continuing almost until the very end of the war, although primarily undertaken for military-industrial reasons, was also intended to induce this sense of inevitable and final national collapse and thus help prevent a repeat of what had happened after 1918.

Above all, there were to be no negotiations with the Nazis. Unlike in 1918, Germany must surrender unconditionally, placing its fate and the future shape of its government wholly in the control of the victorious powers. No refuge for the evil bacillus this time.

The unconditional surrender policy seems to have been suggested by a sub-committee within the American State Department and to have been presented by Roosevelt to his initially reluctant British ally during the bilateral conference held in Casablanca, Morocco, between 14 and 24 January 1943.
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Roosevelt himself had already put the case succinctly in his New Year message to Congress a week or so earlier, when he told the American people’s representatives that he ‘shuddered to think what will happen to mankind, ourselves included, if this war ends with incomplete victory’.
²

In any case, what could the Allies, collectively or individually, have offered, in the case of a negotiated peace agreement? And to whom? If the Nazi regime remained in place, would they have talked terms to Hitler, or to a putative Nazi successor, such as Himmler or Goebbels or Goering? After all the bloodshed and suffering, this was surely unacceptable. Moreover, it would leave an inherently warlike political system intact. And if the Nazi regime had been overthrown, say by the 20 July conspirators? Were these not the men (and a few women) who had for the most part supported Hitler until things started to go wrong? Though personally often decent, did they not represent the same classes of landowners, officers and industrialists who had formed, most Allied thinkers agreed, the root of the ‘German problem’ even before Hitler vaulted into power in 1933?

From the Allied coalition’s point of view, the logic of unconditional surrender was strong, but like all decisions of this kind it caused almost as many problems as it solved. It provided a propaganda bonus for the Nazi regime, whose propagandists could tell the German people, with literal truth, that the Allies planned to dismantle the German nation state. Aware of this drawback, the Allies were keen to emphasise that the policy did not necessarily foreshadow harsh treatment. At the press conference at the end of the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Roosevelt himself said: ‘Unconditional Surrender does not mean the destruction of the German population but does mean the destruction of a philosophy in Germany, Italy and Japan which is based on the conquest and subjugation of other peoples.’ ‘Peace,’ he added, ‘can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power.’
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Despite his initial misgivings, Churchill publicly supported unconditional surrender, realising that for all its disadvantages it also forestalled possible sources of division among the disparate Allies. All the final, detailed decisions about how to handle post-war Germany could await the Reich’s defeat. The British Prime Minister’s attempts to minimise the German population’s fears were, however, not entirely successful. Speaking in the House of Commons in London, he said:

Unconditional surrender means that the victors have a free hand. It does not mean that they are entitled to behave in a barbarous manner nor that they wish to blot out Germany from among the nations of Europe. If we are bound, we are bound by our own consciences to civilisation. We are not to be bound to the Germans as the result of a bargain struck. That is the meaning of ‘unconditional surrender’.
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Such clumsy half-assurances were not frequently repeated, perhaps with good reason, for even when couched in ringing Churchillian phrases they were at best useless, at worst counter-productive.

It was no coincidence that the other major strategic agreement that emerged from Casablanca in January 1943 was for the so-called joint air offensive, a coordinated Anglo-American bombing campaign designed to bring Germany to its knees – or at least to persuade a hard-pressed Stalin, in the absence of an immediate Western invasion of continental Europe, that his allies were establishing another ‘front’, albeit in the air. During the following year, massive, increasingly indiscriminate air raids against German cities cost the lives of around 40,000 civilians in Hamburg and up to 10,000 in Kassel, with 10,000 more deaths caused by the systematic British bombing campaign against Berlin between November 1943 and March 1944. Altogether, in excess of half a million would die in these Anglo-American raids before the campaign was halted towards the end of April 1945. The level of destruction was apocalyptic.

The people of Germany might therefore have been less than fully convinced of the value of the Allied leaders’ ‘consciences to civilisation’. And, of course, those who knew about the full extent of the Nazi atrocities in occupied Europe and Russia had even less reason to trust in the kindness of the enemy strangers beating at the door of the German homeland.

All the same, after Stalingrad many – perhaps most – Germans had become disillusioned with Hitler. It was the final change of mood among several.

It was true that, even in the half-free elections of March 1933, held soon after the Führer came to power, the majority of the country still didn’t vote for him, although with his coalition partner, the conservative-nationalist DNVP, he scraped together a touch under 52 per cent of the total.

Hitler’s urgent action programme, immediately tackling unemployment and the industrial crisis, led to a further surge in popularity that increased even more spectacularly when he succeeded in remilitarising the Rhineland and organising the incorporation of Austria and the Sudetenland into the Reich – all without war. Then, when he pushed his luck too far and war came, not just with Poland but with Britain and France, the mood of his people was subdued, even sullen. Most Germans would tolerate dictatorship, were grateful for full employment and a foreign policy that gave the country back its lost self-respect. But they knew enough – in the case of the older generation remembered enough – to fear another European war above all things.

Then, however, Hitler presented his countrymen with a series of victories they had scarcely dared hope for. Poland was subjugated and divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Wehrmacht took Denmark and Norway, then crushed France, the old enemy, and the armies of the Low Countries. Under Hitler’s leadership, the nation avenged the shame of Versailles, and drove the British into the sea.

By the summer of 1940 Hitler was, for most, the nation’s hero; the greatest statesman since Bismarck, the ‘greatest military commander of all time’. That last laurel had been awarded to the Führer by his Chief of Staff, General Keitel, after the victory over France.

Cunningly amended, this classic little slice of courtier’s flattery would spread itself around in a virus-like fashion after the attack on Russia failed, German troops began to die or surrender in their hundreds of thousands, and the great retreat back into the Reich began. From 1943, Hitler would be referred to sarcastically by ordinary Germans as ‘Gröfaz’ – a play on the regime’s addiction to acronyms – standing for
Grösster Feldherr aller Zeiten
(greatest military commander of all time). Thus began Hitler’s final slump in the estimate of his compatriots, the one that ended only with his death on 30 April 1945. So, whatever the reality, before Stalingrad Hitler seemed self-evidently a genius. After Stalingrad, and especially by the beginning of 1945, to all except a tiny, fanatical minority, the Führer looked like a loser.

Another Nazi leader commonly referred to by a nickname at street level was Hermann Goering, the Reich Marshal and Commander of the Luftwaffe. He had famously commented, when the war began, that if the British ever managed to drop bombs on German soil, then ‘my name is Mayer’.
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Sure enough, as the British, later Anglo-American bombing offensive intensified over the next five years, and Germany’s cities were reduced to ruins, the plump and deceptively jolly-looking Goering became in popular parlance ‘Mayer’.

As with the Führer’s Gröfaz soubriquet, Goering’s transformation into Mayer represented a serious loss of trust in the regime of which he was a prominent figurehead. After 1943, Hitler was clearly losing the war on land, while the once-admired creator of the Luftwaffe could do nothing to stop the Allied bomber fleets laying waste to the cities of the Reich, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of ordinary civilians and making many more homeless.

For a regime such as the Nazi one, whose entire ideology embodied the worship of strength and superior force, the one unimaginable, unforgivable fault was failure. In fact, such failure, according to the movement’s racist, socially Darwinist precepts, should have been impossible. The German race represented the very pinnacle of humanity and therefore, if led by the perfect leader (Hitler) and organised in the perfect (Nazi) state, they must triumph. It became clear to most in 1943–4 that this would not be the case. Barring a miracle, at least.

And what might this ‘miracle’ be?

First, there remained the vague hope for some diehards that Germany’s armies, supplied by the Reich’s efficient war industries – which until late 1944 had survived the Allied bombing onslaught disrupted but still surprisingly productive – might yet find it in themselves to withstand the enemy. This hope diminished to almost nothing after the successful Anglo-American landing in Normandy and the rapid advance that followed.

Second, the regime’s talk of ‘miracle weapons’ that would turn the tables at the last moment remained a straw at which a surprisingly large number of Germans clutched. The V1 flying bomb, and then the V2 rocket, while certainly wonders of German technology, proved disappointingly limited in their effects on Allied morale and industrial and architectural substance alike. Despite Goebbels-inspired propaganda reports of the apocalyptic damage wrought by these new weapons on British cities, ordinary German citizens’ hopes quickly faded there, too. The same went for the remarkable Type XXI submarine, the so-called ‘Elektroboot’ – only a few of which were ready to put to sea before the end of the war – and the revolutionary Messerschmitt jet fighter, which again was produced in numbers too small to make a real difference.

And third, many Germans – from Hitler and Goebbels down – hoped and believed that the unlikely coalition of plutocrats and communists formed by Britain, America and the Soviet Union could not last the distance; that this coalition of convenience would somehow falter and crack in the face of impending Allied victory, reflecting the deep and ultimately irreconcilable ideological and political conflicts that lay beneath its surface. There were, of course, many who recalled the even more bizarre compact between Hitler and Stalin in August 1939, which had endured less than two years and ended in the epic and savage bloodshed of Operation Barbarossa.

What seemed like just such a possible turning point presented itself when President Roosevelt died suddenly in mid-April 1945. Goebbels rushed to Hitler’s bunker and excitedly informed the Führer: ‘The Tsarina is dead.’ To Hitler, a keen student of the career of Prussia’s greatest monarch, Frederick the Great, Goebbels’ words would have instantly conjured up hope.