Hitler's Charisma (38 page)

Hitler’s verdict on the dispute, in a directive on 21 August, was to reaffirm that the capture of Moscow before winter should not be the “principal” object of the campaign, but rather the focus should be on the occupation of the Crimea and the advance towards the oil fields of the Caucasus. Halder was furious, writing that Hitler was to “blame”
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for the way the campaign was going and that the high command of the army was being treated in an “absolutely outrageous” way. But Halder was behaving disingenuously. He had been prepared to share credit back in early July when he thought the campaign had been “won” in a matter of a few weeks, yet now took none of the responsibility for “underestimating” his opponent. Hitler was an obvious and easy target for blame when events did not go as expected—but the responsibility for failure was not his alone.

Heinz Guderian, commander of 2nd Panzer Group—also known as Panzergroup Guderian—was also angry at Hitler’s decision not to push on to Moscow but to turn south instead. He saw Hitler on 23 August and forcefully put his case for carrying on the attack to the Soviet capital. He used every argument he could think of to persuade Hitler. But it was useless. Having allowed Guderian to speak at length, Hitler then simply explained to him why he was wrong. Economic considerations were paramount and conquering the Ukraine was more important than attacking Moscow. “I here saw for the first time a spectacle with which I was later to become very familiar,” wrote Guderian after the war. “All those present nodded in agreement with every sentence that Hitler uttered, while I was left alone with my point of view … In view of the OKW’s unanimous opposition to my remarks, I avoided all further argument on that occasion …”
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Neither Brauchitsch nor Halder—the senior figures in the OKH, the Army high command—were present at the meeting, and Guderian’s sense of isolation was total. Hitler had created the structure of the OKW in the wake of the Blomberg/Fritsch crisis three years before, and this system, plus his own charismatic dominance of the staff of the OKW, made his position at the time all but impregnable. Leading figures in the OKW, like Jodl, had become little more than cheerleaders.

But the strain of the war was still getting to Hitler. When Goebbels
visited Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia that August he thought the Führer “looks a little worn out and sick. This is probably due to his dysentery, and probably also to the fact that the last few weeks have worn him out so harshly. This is not surprising. Today the responsibility for a whole continent rests on his shoulders.”
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However, despite the difficulties of the war against the Soviet Union, Hitler’s love of conflict and bloodshed had not been quashed. During his after-dinner monologues that autumn he called for a war “every 15 or 20 years”
¹⁵
and demanded the “sacrifice” (i.e., death) of 10 per cent of Germans in battle. The death of so many Germans on the Eastern Front meant nothing to him. Pressure merely stirred his desire for greater carnage and greater vengeance. His fundamental nihilism was on show once again a few weeks later when he said, “The earth continues to go round, whether it’s the man who kills the tiger or the tiger who eats the man. The stronger asserts his will, it’s the law of nature. The world doesn’t change; its laws are eternal.”
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It was an attitude—a way of seeing the world free of all moral or ethical responsibility to other nations or people—which was, as we have seen, at the core of the reason why so many of his followers could feel “intoxicated” by the possibilities the war offered. What few people who embraced Hitler’s vision seem to have thought through—at least until events started to go against them—was the full logic of this philosophy: if you don’t win then you “deserve” to be exterminated yourself. However, Hitler was one of the small number of Nazis who had fully accepted this reasoning from the beginning. He had even built a life or death commitment into the party programme of the Nazis as far back as February 1920, ending the document with the words, “The leaders of the Party promise to work ruthlessly—if necessary at the cost of their own lives—to implement this programme.”
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Now, by calling for a war of “annihilation” against the Soviet Union, Hitler understood that by his own logic this also meant a similar fate for Germany if the war was lost. Indeed, he privately said as much in January 1942, calling for the German people to “disappear” unless they were prepared to give their “body and soul in order to survive.”
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Hitler hid none of his potentially apocalyptic beliefs from those around him. But as long as success seemed assured it was not necessary for them to dwell on the consequences of failure. And after the anxieties of August 1941 it did seem as if all might come right for the Germans in the
autumn, when Guderian—despite his belief that strategically this action was a mistake—led his 2nd Panzer Group south from Army Group Centre to join forces with units from Rundstedt’s Army Group South. The result, by the end of September, was the largest encirclement action in history as 650,000 Red Army soldiers were trapped during the Battle for Kiev. It seemed to be another triumph for Hitler’s judgement.

Hitler watched the newsreels of the destruction of so many Soviet soldiers and said he was “thrilled”
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by the sight. All this carnage reminded him of the First World War. That conflict, he said, had been responsible for the death of his “idealism” about war. Trench warfare, he reiterated, had taught him that life is a “cruel struggle” and had no other purpose than “the preservation of the species.” He proceeded to apply that lesson to the war in the east by ordering that Leningrad should vanish from the surface of the earth. The German Army was told not to accept the surrender of the inhabitants of the encircled city, since feeding and housing these people was not considered a German responsibility.
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Hitler then returned briefly to Berlin to give a speech at the Sportpalast on 3 October 1941. Here he once again repeated his fantasy of how Germany had been forced into a war against the Soviet Union because of a secret conspiracy by Stalin to attack the Reich. But he reassured the German people that “everything” since 22 June “has gone according to plan.”
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Even more than that, he announced that “this opponent has already broken down and will never rise again.” Six days later, on 9 October, in the light of news that five Soviet armies had been encircled in the twin battle of Vyazma/Bryansk, the Reich press chief, Otto Dietrich, announced that “the campaign in the east has been decided.”
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Over the next few days the German press followed suit: the
Münchener Zeitung
’s (Munich News) headline was “Soviets Defeated!”; the
Hannoverscher Kurier’
s (Hanover Courier): “Europe is saved: Freed from Stalin by the Führer’s military genius”; and the
Völkischer Beobachter
boasted “Success of the Eastern Campaign assured!”
²³

But the success of the Eastern Campaign was most certainly not assured, and Hitler had risked a great deal by making the speech he did at the Sportpalast. “Pure charisma,” Max Weber wrote, “does not know any ‘legitimacy’ other than that flowing from personal strength, that is, one which is constantly being proved”
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—and it was potentially damaging for Hitler to assert that a victory had taken place when in fact it had
not. Moreover, Hitler spoke those words knowing that the war in the east could well continue into the following year—as Halder makes explicit in his diary on 13 September 1941.
²⁵

Hitler now agreed that the German army could at last advance directly on Moscow in
Unternehmen Taifun
(Operation Typhoon) and the Wehrmacht managed to launch almost two million men against the Red Army in front of the Soviet capital in a last attempt to deliver a decisive blow before winter came. As German Army Group Centre pushed forward that October, Hitler himself became intoxicated by the vision of what could now be achieved in the Soviet Union. His after-dinner monologues delivered that month to his followers at his headquarters in East Prussia show Hitler at his most authentic: in his determination to destroy the lives of millions of Soviet citizens (“there’s only one duty: to Germanise this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins”
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); his desire to lay waste to cities (“I have no feelings about the idea of wiping out Kiev, Moscow or St. Petersburg”
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); the intensity of his hatred of the Jews (“let nobody tell me that all the same we can’t park them in the marshy parts of Russia!”
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). But Hitler did not confine his rants only to the war in the east, he also discoursed on Christianity (“taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure”
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); on the construction of bathroom appliances (“what’s the point of having a hundred different models for wash-basins?”
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); on his love of bearing grudges and seeking vengeance (“I have numerous accounts to settle, about which I cannot think today. But that doesn’t mean I forgot them”
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). It all reveals Hitler, as Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, as the “coarsest, cruelest, least magnanimous conqueror the world has ever known.”
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But it also demonstrates once again core elements of his charismatic leadership—his certainty, his liberation from conventional morals, and his excitement and exhilaration at the vastness of the possibilities ahead. And despite his almost daily interference with the details of the military campaign—something that infuriated Halder—Hitler still claimed in October 1941 that his best subordinates took 95 per cent of his decisions for him,
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intuitively knowing what he would like.

As Hitler spoke these words, there was growing panic in Moscow. Stalin even contemplated fleeing the city but eventually decided to stay and impose a state of siege on the capital. But the success of the German army was not sustainable. Not only were their supply lines overstretched
but soon new Red Army units would arrive, released from bases in Siberia because of intelligence reaching Stalin that Japan, Hitler’s ally, had no plans to attack the Soviet Union from the Far East.

By the start of December 1941 German soldiers were just twelve miles from the Kremlin. But this was as close to the centre of Moscow as they would ever get, as on 5 December 1941 the Soviets launched a counterattack with around seventy divisions—more than a million Red Army troops—committed to the fight. The Germans, already weakened by lack of supplies—particularly lack of proper clothing and cold-weather protection for their weapons and vehicles—struggled to contain the Soviet offensive.

It was perhaps the single most decisive moment in the history of the war. For Professor Adam Tooze this is “an absolutely crucial turning point … It’s the first battle defeat suffered by the German army in quite a long time, since the end of the First World War”
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; for Sir Ian Kershaw it’s the “first major setback” for the Germans, one which means that “war is going to be prolonged indefinitely”
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; and for Professor Richard Evans, it’s “the first time the Germans are actually stopped in their tracks and they don’t know what to do.”
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As a result the German leadership were placed in a position where they feel “completely clueless.”

Ulrich de Maizière, then a Wehrmacht officer serving on the Eastern Front, describes it as a devastating time: “You have to imagine what goes on in the mind of a young general staff officer of 29 years of age, who is convinced in August [1941] that it will be all over in September, who thinks it will take longer in October and in December realises it will last at least three more years.”
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And, for de Maizière, the events of December 1941 also demonstrated the appalling lack of preparation that had been made by the German leadership for a winter war. “In one night we lost five hundred men in the division, they froze to death …” Those same harsh winter conditions also showed the resilience of the Soviets, who were “very capable of bearing hardship, very modest in terms of their own requirements. They were very courageous, but not very imaginative. They were uncommonly hardy and had a capacity to bear suffering. They could survive two or three winter nights out in the open with a few sunflower seeds in their pockets or a few grains of corn. They got their fluid intake from the snow. I myself have witnessed that a young woman gave birth one night to a child on a woollen blanket and heap of straw in a wooden
hut and then went to work in the stable the following day … One saw the primitive accommodation, the primitive villages, the way they lived, and one did have the feeling that this is a people that cannot compare with central and western European countries in terms of their level of development.”

But now these “not very imaginative” people living in “primitive” circumstances were fighting back successfully against the Germans. Soldiers Nazi propaganda described as “subhuman” appeared to be defeating the supermen of the “master race.” More than that, German newspapers—sanctioned by the state—had only a few weeks before declared that the Soviets were “defeated” and Hitler had said unequivocally that the Red Army would “never rise again.” The unreasoned, almost hysterical optimism in these statements had also been reflected in the orders given to Heinz Guderian on 13 November, just three weeks before the launch of the offensive against the Soviet capital. He had been told to take his Panzers more than two hundred miles east of Moscow to cut off the city from reinforcements. It was an impossible request that reflected none of the reality on the ground—as achievable as an order to invade the moon. The fantasy nature of life in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin in the last days of the war has often been remarked upon. The fantasy nature of life in the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia in the autumn and early winter of 1941 has received less attention, but is at least as revealing.