Hitler's Charisma (33 page)

But, on the other hand, the charismatic warlord who had led Germany
to these military achievements could not end the war with Britain as he wished. Britain—as Hitler saw it—whose puny, ineffective army had collapsed and then run away from the beaches of Dunkirk.

Why wouldn’t the British now admit defeat? The evidence points to Hitler’s genuine bewilderment at Britain’s intransigence. As Halder recorded on 13 July, Hitler remained “greatly puzzled”
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by Britain’s “persistent unwillingness” to make peace. Hitler might have been received with rapture by Berliners on 6 July, he might have led Germany to the “greatest and most glorious victory of all time” but he could not make Britain leave the conflict. This, notwithstanding the fact that Lord Halifax, in a radio broadcast on 22 July, made Britain’s reasons for the rejection of Hitler’s “appeal for peace” clear. “He [i.e., Hitler] says he has no desire to destroy the British Empire, but there was in his speech no suggestion that peace must be based on justice, no word of recognition that the other nations of Europe had any right to self-determination, the principle which he has so often invoked for Germans. His only appeal was to the base instinct of fear, and his only arguments were threats … Nor has any one any doubt that if Hitler were to succeed it would be the end, for many besides ourselves, of all those things which, as we say, make life worth living. We realise that the struggle may cost us everything, but just because the things we are defending are worth any sacrifice, it is a noble privilege to be the defenders of things so precious.”
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Hitler was to spend the rest of the war wondering why the British did not make peace at this moment. He could not grasp that there were those in Britain who genuinely believed that “the things we are defending are worth any sacrifice.” His attitude is all the more surprising since he himself so embraced the “all or nothing” approach the British were adopting. It is as if he ascribed to himself the motives of principle and honour and expected others to behave with base pragmatism.

Hitler’s actions in the summer of 1940 also illustrate a gigantic weakness in the way his leadership operated in practical terms. By relying on his “inner conviction,” Hitler made little attempt to understand the developing views of his enemies. He did not grasp that British resistance had its roots in the destruction of the belief that the German leader could be trusted to keep his word. This was the basis on which Churchill could say, in March 1940, when still First Lord of the Admiralty, “There are thoughtless, dilettante or purblind worldlings who sometimes ask us,
‘What is it that Britain and France are fighting for?’ To this I make the answer, ‘If we left off fighting, you would soon find out.’ ”
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There were also worrying signs for Hitler that Britain would be supported by America in the forthcoming struggle. “It is not an ordinary war,” said President Franklin Roosevelt, speaking on 19 July 1940 at the Democratic National Convention. “It is a revolution imposed by force of arms which threatens all men everywhere. It is a revolution which proposes not to set men free but to reduce them to slavery, to reduce them to slavery in the interests of a dictatorship which has already shown the nature and the extent of the advantage which it hopes to obtain. That is the fact which dominates our world and which dominates the lives of all of us, each and every one of us. In the face of the danger which confronts our time, no individual retains or can hope to retain the right of personal choice which free men enjoy in times of peace.”

The contrast is thus striking between the immense faith that many Germans now placed in Hitler’s ability to lead them to victory, and his complete inability to convince the British, and their friends the Americans, that Germany had already won the war. As a result, the pressure on Hitler was enormous. He and he alone would have to decide the way out of this new situation. The German High Command, basking in the success of the historic victory over France—Hitler had recently rewarded eight generals for their role in the campaign by raising them to the rank of Field Marshal—now needed to be told what to do next.

One option was to invade Britain. But not only was such an action considered risky in the extreme, but Hitler was unsure whether it was wise to destroy the British Empire, which he saw as a useful counterweight to American or Asian dominance of the seas, or to occupy Britain which—like Germany—was a relatively overpopulated nation which could not feed itself without importing food. Another option was to engage British forces in the Mediterranean by capturing Gibraltar and the Suez canal, at the same time as U-boat attacks in the Atlantic on convoys from America were increased in an attempt to starve the British to the negotiating table. And then there was the final option, at first sight the most bizarre of all: break the non-aggression pact and turn on Stalin. “Hitler had this notion,” says Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, “which sounds really odd today, but the idea that he put forward: we defeat London via Moscow, knock out the Soviet Union in a quick
blitzkrieg
war, take about
four or five months, by the end of the year we’ll destroy the Soviet Union, Britain will then be bereft of its only potential ally in Europe and the Americans will now keep back to their own hemisphere. So by another route we will have won the war.”
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It was this option that, of course, the Germans finally adopted when they marched into the Soviet Union in the largest invasion in history on Sunday, 22 June 1941. And it is this decision that is still often seen as the most powerful example of Hitler’s charismatic rule. How else, the popular argument goes, could Hitler have convinced his generals to do something as crazy as declare war on Stalin? After all, as Field Marshal Montgomery famously said, “Rule One” of warfare is “don’t march on Moscow.”
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General Halder also fuelled this idea when he said after the war that he had held a meeting with Brauchitsch in July 1940 and said that Hitler was a “fool”
¹⁵
for wanting a conflict against the Soviet Union. But this does not properly represent the thinking at the time. Whatever private misgivings Halder may or may not have possessed in 1940, far from protesting about the invasion of the Soviet Union, as he had protested about the invasion of France the year before, he had begun considering on his own initiative the merits of just such an adventure only days after the end of the campaign in France.
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Nor did the Germans necessarily believe that it was a “rule” of warfare not to march on Moscow. For Montgomery’s grasp of history was sketchy. Whilst it was true that Napoleon’s campaign had ended in disaster, there had been previous successful invasions of Russia. Tokhtamysh, for example, a descendant of Hitler’s hero Genghis Khan, had entered Moscow in 1382 and presided over the death of more than twenty thousand Muscovites. And Hitler’s generals knew that there was an example in their own lifetimes that could serve as a model for how a war against the Soviet Union could be managed. The treaty of Brest–Litovsk between the Germans and the nascent Soviet state in March 1918 gave Germany huge tracts of land in the east including Belorussia, the Ukraine and the Baltic States. The Germans had lost this territory in the wider settlements at the end of the First World War, but the memory of this successful land grab into Soviet territory remained. As German historian Golo Mann put it, “Brest–Litovsk has been called the forgotten peace, but the Germans have not forgotten it. They know that they defeated Russia and sometimes they look upon this proudly as the real, if unrewarded, achievement of the war.”
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Hitler’s decision to consider an invasion of the Soviet Union made all the more sense to his military commanders when compared with the various other options open to them. Hitler discussed all this with them at a meeting on 31 July 1940 at the Berghof.
¹⁸
The first half of the conference was taken up with a lengthy and gloomy report from Grand Admiral Raeder about the prospects of an invasion of Great Britain. Raeder dared, in front of Hitler, to propose postponing any invasion until the following year—this even before the results of a concerted Luftwaffe attack on the British were known. Hitler, normally made furious by lack of enthusiasm from his military leaders, then voiced his own “scepticism” about the feasibility of an invasion. He went on to say that if a decision was taken not to mount an invasion of Britain then “our action must be directed to eliminate all factors that let England hope for a change in the situation.” And this, in turn, meant that Russia—Hitler persistently called the Soviet Union “Russia” although Russia was only one of more than a dozen Soviet republics—must be “smashed.” Planning for an offensive against the Soviet Union now proceeded in parallel with half-hearted attempts to pull together a coherent plan to invade Britain, stopping only when “Operation Sea Lion” was finally postponed in September 1940.

The idea of an invasion of the Soviet Union made practical sense to many of those who worked for Hitler. Not least because there was evidence from the poor performance of the Red Army during their invasion of Finland the previous winter that Soviet forces were anything but first rate, weakened as they were by the purges of the 1930s. As we have seen, Hitler never attempted a similar widespread removal of army officers who were not outright supporters of the Nazis. Indeed, according to Goebbels, Hitler thought Stalin was “probably sick in the brain”
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for killing or otherwise dismissing some of the Red Army’s most experienced officers on the merest suspicion of political unreliability.

All this meant that German officers like Peter von der Groeben felt not only that they could approach any conflict with the Soviet Union with some confidence, but the fundamental reasoning behind the attack was sound. “From my perspective, it [the German invasion of the Soviet Union] was in some way—above all from a military point of view—almost inevitable. What was the situation? France had been defeated. The attempt to wrestle England to the ground with the famous Operation Sea Lion had failed, because it had not been possible to gain air supremacy—on
the contrary, losses against the English Air Force had been incurred. It was clear that in the foreseeable future, within two years, America would enter the war on the side of our opponents. It is known that Roosevelt was determined to wage this war from the outset. And so the question arose of what could be done to be able to stand up to them, to this threat. And on the other side there was the extremely unstable Russia, which made increasingly big demands … hence the—in my view—absolute necessity arose to remove the Russian threat before America could go into action … People thought, and the military leaders were among them, that it would be relatively easy to eliminate the Russian army with one short, forceful blow. Based on the information I knew about, which we had about the Russian army, I also believed that it would not be much of a problem.”
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Invading the Soviet Union would also, of course, allow Hitler the opportunity to pursue the basic aim of
Lebensraum
he had outlined in
Mein Kampf
sixteen years before. Gone would be the ties of the pragmatic non-aggression pact with Stalin. At last Hitler could lead the Germans against the “headquarters,” as he saw it, of the “Judaeo–Bolshevist world conspiracy.”
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And, not surprisingly, those SS men like Walter Traphöner who had always believed this Nazi propaganda, welcomed the idea of conflict with the Soviet Union. “We wanted to prevent Bolshevism from ruling the world, you see … And we were committed to preventing them from flooding still further into Europe.”
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But even though, as far as Hitler and his comrades were concerned, there were both practical and ideological reasons why it now made sense to consider an attack on the Soviet Union, there was an obvious flaw in their logic. Hitler said on 31 July that “Russia is the factor on which Britain is relying the most”—but this assertion was simply not true. Key figures in the British government had always been suspicious of the Soviet Union and most certainly were not relying on Stalin. Chamberlain, Lord Halifax and Churchill had all expressed dislike for the Communists. As recently as 31 March 1940, Churchill had stated publicly that he felt the Soviets had just demonstrated in Finland the “ravages” which Communism—“that deadly mental and moral disease”—makes “upon the fibre of any nation.”
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Moreover, Stalin’s strategy had up to now been to keep out of the war in order to let the Germans and the Western Allies bleed each other dry. And whilst it was true that there were growing
strains in the Nazis’ relationship with Stalin—not least over the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States in the summer of 1940—there were still no signs that Stalin wanted war with Germany.

It was not Russia that Britain relied upon to carry on fighting the war, but America. On 20 May 1940, one of the grimmest days during the Battle for France, Churchill had written to President Roosevelt saying, “If this country was left by the United States to its fate, no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants.”
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Churchill, as Professor David Reynolds reminds us, “always had the United States in his frame of reference. He was half American and he had long argued that Britain should form an alliance with the United States and draw America into European affairs, so that was something that mattered to him in a way it didn’t instinctively to Halifax or to Chamberlain. Having said that, given the way the war changes so dramatically in the summer of 1940, any British leader would have had to start looking to America in a new way because it was the only source of significant support.”
²⁵

The Americans, long before they entered the war in December 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, were offering military support to the British. Most famously, in December 1940 after his re-election as President, Roosevelt committed the United States to Lend–Lease and thus to provide equipment to the British and not expect immediate payment in return. But even before that date the Americans were supporting the British war effort. Indeed, in July 1940 Churchill knew that the Americans planned to provide the British with more than 10,000 aircraft within a year and a half.
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That, plus the 15,000 planes the British were making themselves in the same period, meant that the British were expanding the RAF faster than the Germans were growing the Luftwaffe.