Hitler's Charisma (37 page)

These contrasting experiences at the hands of the German occupiers of Kharkov illustrate a broader issue—for it was one thing to meet in a warm office in Berlin and demand that 30 million people be left to starve in the Soviet Union, and quite another to witness personally the suffering of dying women and children. Many German soldiers were able to accept the reasons why these people had to die in this way, but some were not. The starvation plan took no account of the feelings of the people who were supposed to implement it. And, demonstrably, not every German was heartless. This was an issue that Hitler failed to recognise. At the core of his speeches and his orders—indeed, at the core of his nature—was a lack of compassion. A belief that individuals did not matter but a
“Volk”
—a “people”—did. He assumed that he could persuade millions of Germans to pursue his policies with the same brutality that he possessed. Often he succeeded—but sometimes he didn’t.

The forthcoming war with the Soviet Union also offered the Nazis other possible “solutions” to their self-created Jewish “problem.” Hitler met Hans Frank, ruler of the General Government, on 17 March 1941 and told him that far from being the dumping ground of the Reich, his goal was to make the General Government “free” of Jews, “with the aim of this area becoming a purely German land over the course of 15 to 20 years.”
⁷⁵
Other related documents around this period make it clear that the Jews were to be sent into conquered Soviet territory once the war against
Stalin—which Hitler thought would only last a few weeks—was won.
⁷⁶
The Nisko plan had failed, the Madagascar plan had failed, but now the prospect of controlling the wastelands of the Soviet Union offered a way for the Nazis to remove the Jews from the Reich.

Such a deportation would—like the other wartime plans that preceded it—almost certainly have had genocidal consequences. Not only had the Nazis already planned for 30 million Soviet citizens to die of hunger in the territory into which they intended to send the Jews, but Hitler told General Jodl on 3 March 1941, in the context of the forthcoming invasion, that “The Jewish–Bolshevik intelligentsia, hitherto the oppressor of the people, must be eliminated.”
⁷⁷
Moreover, special
Einsatzgruppen
units under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich were formed to operate immediately behind the advancing German troops, tasked with fomenting pogroms against the Soviet Jews and shooting “Jews in the service of the party or the state.”
⁷⁸
At this planning stage, the majority of the army leadership accepted not just the existence of the
Einsatzgruppen
, but all of the various practical consequences of this “war of annihilation”—from the decision to kill Soviet political officers and the immediate shooting of partisan fighters, to the imposition of mass reprisals against whole communities in case of civilian resistance.

Hitler was about to get the war he had always desired: a fight to the death against what he believed was the most dangerous regime in the world. That he wanted to conquer territory in the west of the Soviet Union is not surprising—he had stated as much in
Mein Kampf
in 1924. What is more surprising is that he had reached a point in the spring of 1941 that he was able to bring so many people with him on this bloody journey. As we have seen, there were a whole host of reasons why he was able to achieve this end—from the practical to the ideological. But the one overarching reason why so many millions of Germans accepted this new war in the East was their faith in the judgement of Adolf Hitler—a faith based on a combination of his past successes and his charismatic leadership. Yet even during the planning stage this new conflict looked risky in the extreme. It was obvious early in 1941, for example, from the work of General Georg Thomas,
⁷⁹
that the German Army scarcely had enough fuel for two months’ warfare in the Soviet Union, and only if they reached the oil of the Caucasus—more than two thousand miles from Berlin—could the army obtain the necessary fuel needed in the future.
Yet even if the Germans managed to get to the Caucasus swiftly enough, which was doubtful, there remained the problem of transporting that oil back to where it was needed within the German empire.

In a proclamation to the German people on 22 June 1941, Hitler claimed that he had been forced to order an attack on the Soviet Union because the Western Allies had secretly been plotting Germany’s destruction with Stalin and the Soviet leadership: “It has become necessary to oppose this conspiracy of the Jewish–Anglo-Saxon warmongers and likewise the Jewish ruling powers in the Bolshevik control station at Moscow.”
⁸⁰
But it was a shallow pretence—an obvious part of what Churchill called “his usual formalities of perfidy.”
⁸¹
The truth was that Hitler had initiated what he himself called the “greatest struggle in the history of the world”
⁸²
because he wanted it to happen. And this one decision would do more than anything else to hasten the defeat of Germany and the destruction of his charismatic leadership.

As the first soldiers of the Wehrmacht crossed into Soviet territory in the early hours of Sunday, 22 June 1941, they initiated not only the largest and bloodiest invasion in history, but the greatest test yet in Hitler’s leadership—one that would ultimately reveal the brittleness of his charismatic rule.

The consensus amongst the Germans—and not only the Germans—was that the Soviet Union would be swiftly defeated. As Professor Sir Ian Kershaw says, “At the time Hitler thought five months would do it, Goebbels thought four months, some of the generals thought less than that. This was a collective German lunacy, if you want to see it in that sense. But the American intelligence forces thought that this would be [over in] between three and six weeks, they reckoned that the Red Army was in no position to withstand the Wehrmacht. And British intelligence also thought this was a foregone conclusion and the Germans would win in the Soviet Union.”
¹

With hindsight, knowing as we do the immense industrial and human resources which the Soviet Union was able to mobilise for this
war, it seems almost incomprehensible that there was such a widespread view—amongst the Allies as well as the Germans—that Stalin’s regime would crumble. But this confidence in a swift German victory was based on what appeared to be rational calculation. As we have seen, it was widely thought that Stalin had gravely weakened the Red Army by the purges of the 1930s and that this had contributed to the poor Soviet showing during the recent Finnish war. This was then seen against the seemingly miraculous German victory in little more than six weeks against France. But underlying each of these apparently rational views were elements of prejudice. A number of senior figures in the West despised the regime in the Soviet Union and were prepared to think the worst of it. Conveniently forgotten by many in the Alliance by the time of the “Big Three” conferences at Tehran and Yalta, was the lacklustre rhetoric President Roosevelt had initially used in support of Stalin in June 1941. One American senator—Bennett Clark of Missouri—had even said, “It’s a case of dog eat dog. Stalin is as bloody-handed as Hitler. I don’t think we should help either one.”
²
Whilst a senior British general wrote in his diary on 29 June 1941, “I avoid the expression ‘Allies,’ for the Russians are a dirty lot of murdering thieves themselves, and double crossers of the deepest dye.”
³

As for the reasons behind the German victory in France, this was ascribed by the Allies to the brilliance of the Wehrmacht—this “terrible military machine” as Churchill described the German army in his speech on 22 June 1941—rather than to the incompetence of the British and French. Churchill in that same speech talked of the “mechanised armies” that Hitler had launched on the Soviet Union, but as we have seen the truth was that the British and French armies were more mechanised than the Germans at the time of the invasion of France. It was understandable, of course, that the Allied leadership preferred to focus on the strength of their enemy rather than their own previous ineptness, but the consequence was to exaggerate the material strength of the German army.

In the first days of the war, as the Germans pushed through into the Soviet Union in three great thrusts—from Army Groups North, Centre and South—it seemed as if the prophecy of an easy victory over the Red Army had been correct. Peter von der Groeben, then a young major, recalls that “We thought that it would all be over by Christmas.”
⁴
Carlheinz Behnke, with the SS-Panzer Division Wiking, “assumed” together with his comrades that victory “would all happen quite quickly, as had
been the case throughout France, that we would definitely manage the stretch up to the Caucasus so as to then fight against Turkey and Syria. That’s what we believed at the time … And we were longing to be deployed, and on 22 June we said, now we’ll get our chance, and now we’ll be able to prove ourselves too, now in the East we’ll be able to carry on what our comrades started earlier, at the beginning of the war. So a Blitzkrieg, that’s what we expected. At the time we were 17, 18 years old, young, and we entered this war in a rather carefree way … we now had the chance to prove ourselves as soldiers and we wanted to demonstrate that we were every bit as capable as our predecessors … Well, we thought that we’d have things under control by the onset of winter, which gave us four to five months. That was the general feeling. And the initial successes proved us right. And right at the beginning, once the border fortifications had been broken through, we took hundreds of thousands of Russians prisoner, and then it was clear that, as far as we were concerned, it was a question of weeks or months until this huge empire would crumble and we would have achieved our goal.”
⁵

Within a week the Germans were poised to take Minsk, capital of Belorussia. Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group appeared to be recreating the success of France—in fact, exceeding it, since within just five days they had travelled nearly two hundred miles into the Soviet Union. Back home in Germany this all seemed to be confirmation that victory would be easy and swift. “In the weekly newsreels we would see glorious pictures of the German army with all the soldiers singing and waving and cheering,” remembers Maria Mauth, then a student, “and that was infectious, of course, it must have been a doddle! We thought about it in these terms and believed it for a long time too. Whatever the Führer said was true. And I am convinced that 90 per cent of people believed it. I did too for a long time. I also believed, gosh, he has achieved so much already! And that was it. He had achieved so much.”
⁶

General Franz Halder, in his diary on 3 July 1941, was equally as enthusiastic, writing, “It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.”
⁷
But even in an entry suffused with hubris as much as this one, Halder felt compelled to add that it was still important to deny “the enemy possession of his production centres and so prevent his raising a new army with the aid of his gigantic industrial potential and his inexhaustible manpower resources.”

The Germans knew that they had not only to achieve victory over the Soviet Union, but victory in a hurry. They needed to snatch the industrial resources of the Soviet state in order to support their own effort against their increasingly well-armed opponents in the West. On 26 June 1941, just over a week before Halder’s vainglorious boast that the “Russian campaign has been won,” Field Marshal Erhard Milch, a close associate of Göring’s and “Air Inspector General,” revealed at a meeting with other senior military commanders that, “The combined production [of aircraft engines] in England and the U.S.A. surpassed the overall production of Germany and Italy as early as 1 May 1941, and would, at the current state of German production, be twice as much as German production in late 1942.”
⁸
And Milch gave this pessimistic assessment, remember, before America had formally entered the war.

By the summer of 1941 Hitler and his generals were beginning to realise that their over-confidence in the wake of the victory over France had made them blind to the difficulties they would encounter in their struggle against the Red Army. On 11 August, Halder wrote, “The whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus … The time factor favours them, as they are near their own resources, while we are moving farther and farther away from ours.”
⁹
The supply problem grew so bad that by the end of August the Germans had suffered more than 400,000 casualties and yet had little more than half that number immediately available to fill their shoes.
¹⁰

The situation was exacerbated by a dispute that had rumbled on between Hitler and his generals since almost the first moment of the decision to move on the Soviet Union. The controversy focused on the extent to which the advance on Moscow was a priority for the Wehrmacht. Halder and many of his colleagues thought it ought to be an absolute priority, whilst Hitler favoured the destruction of Leningrad and the advance towards the Crimea and then the Caucasus over any attack on the Soviet capital. In the middle of August Halder submitted a memorandum forcefully calling for Army Group Centre to push on to Moscow. But General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff at OKW (officers of the supreme command of the armed forces), felt it was important to have continued faith in Hitler’s judgement. When on 20 August 1941 one of Halder’s officers argued that he should support the advance on Moscow, Jodl replied, “We must not try to compel him [i.e., Hitler] to do something
which goes against his inner convictions. His intuition has generally been right.”
¹¹
(Reliance on a leader’s “inner convictions” and “intuition” is, of course, axiomatic of a reliance on charismatic leadership.)