The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (164 page)

“
The beginning of the Barbarossa operation
” he told his generals, “
will have to be postponed up to four weeks.
”
†

This postponement of the attack on Russia in order that the Nazi warlord might vent his personal spite against a small Balkan country which had dared to defy him was probably the most catastrophic single decision in Hitler’s career. It is hardly too much to say that by making it that March afternoon in the Chancellery in Berlin during a moment of convulsive rage he tossed away his last golden opportunity to win the war and to make of the Third Reich, which he had created with such stunning if barbarous genius, the greatest empire in German history and himself the master of Europe. Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the German Army, and General Halder, the gifted Chief of the General Staff, were to recall it with deep bitterness but also with more understanding of its consequences than they showed at the moment of its making, when later the deep snow and subzero temperatures of Russia hit them three or four weeks short of what they thought they needed for final
victory. For ever afterward they and their fellow generals would blame that hasty, ill-advised decision of a vain and infuriated man for all the disasters that ensued.

Military Directive No. 25, which the Supreme Commander issued to his generals before the meeting broke up, was a typical Hitlerian document.

Jodl
, as Chief of the Operations Staff of OKW, was told to prepare the plans that very night. “I worked the whole night at the Reich Chancellery,” Jodl later told the Nuremberg tribunal. “At four o’clock in the morning of March 28, I put an
aide-mémoire
into the hand of General von Rintelen, our liaison officer with the Italian High Command.”
⁶³

For Mussolini, whose sagging armies in
Albania
were in danger of being taken in the rear by the Yugoslavs, had to be told immediately of the German operational plans and asked to co-operate with them. To make sure that the Duce understood what was expected of him and without waiting for General Jodl to concoct the military plans, Hitler dashed off a letter at midnight of the twenty-seventh and ordered it wired to Rome immediately so that it would reach Mussolini that same night.
⁶⁴

For this short-range objective, the Nazi warlord was again right in his prediction, but he seems to have had no inkling how costly his successful revenge on
Yugoslavia
would be in the long run. At dawn on April 6, his armies in overwhelming strength fell on Yugoslavia and Greece, smashing across the frontiers of
Bulgaria
,
Hungary
and Germany itself with all their armor and advancing rapidly against poorly armed defenders dazed by the usual preliminary bombing from the Luftwaffe.

Belgrade itself, as Hitler ordered, was razed to the ground. For three successive days and nights Goering’s bombers ranged over the little capital at rooftop level—for the city had no antiaircraft guns—killing 17,000 civilians, wounding many more and reducing the place to a mass of smoldering rubble. “Operation
Punishment
,” Hitler called it, and he obviously was satisfied that his commands had been so effectively carried out. The Yugoslavs, who had not had time to mobilize their tough little army and whose General Staff made the mistake of trying to defend the whole country, were overwhelmed. On April 13 German and Hungarian troops entered what was left of Belgrade and on the seventeenth the remnants of the Yugoslav Army, still twenty-eight divisions strong, surrendered at
Sarajevo
, the King and the Prime Minister escaping by plane to Greece.

The Greeks, who had humiliated the Italians in six months of fighting, could not stand up to Field Marshal List’s
Twelfth
Army of fifteen divisions, four of which were armored. The British had hurriedly sent to Greece some four divisions from
Libya
—53,000 men in all—but they, like the Greeks, were overwhelmed by the German panzers and by the murderous strikes of the Luftwaffe. The northern Greek armies surrendered to the Germans and—bitter pill—to the Italians on April 23. Four days later Nazi tanks rattled into
Athens
and hoisted the swastika over the Acropolis. By this time the British were desperately trying once again to evacuate their troops by sea—a minor Dunkirk and almost as successful.

By the end of April—in three weeks—it was all over except for Crete, which was taken by the Germans from the British in an airborne assault toward the end of May. Where Mussolini had failed so miserably all winter, Hitler had succeeded in a few days in the spring. Though the Duce was relieved to be pulled off the hook, he was humiliated that it had to be done by the Germans. Nor were his feelings assuaged by Italy’s disappointing share in the Yugoslav spoils, which Hitler now began to divide up.
*

The Balkans was not the only place where the Fuehrer pulled his muddling junior partner off the hook. After the annihilation of the Italian armies in
Libya
Hitler, although reluctantly, had finally consented to sending a light armored division and some Luftwaffe units to
North Africa
, where he arranged for General Erwin Rommel to be in over-all command of the Italo–German forces. Rommel, a dashing, resourceful tank officer, who had distinguished himself as commander of a panzer division in the Battle of France, was a type of general whom the British had not previously met in the North African desert and he was to prove an immense problem to them for two years. But he was not the only problem. The sizable army and air force which the British had sent to Greece from Libya had greatly weakened them in the desert. At first they were not unduly worried, not even after their intelligence reported the arrival of German armored units in
Tripolitania
at the end of February. But they should have been.

Rommel, with his German panzer division and two Italian divisions, one of which was armored, struck suddenly at
Cyrenaica
on the last day of March. In twelve days he recaptured the province, invested
Tobruk
and reached
Bardia
, a few miles from the Egyptian border. The entire British position in Egypt and the Suez was again threatened; in fact, with the Germans and Italians
in Greece
the British hold on the eastern
Mediterranean
had become gravely endangered.

Another spring, the second of the war, had brought more dazzling German victories, and the predicament of Britain, which now held out alone, battered at home by nightly Luftwaffe bombings, its armies overseas chased out of Greece and Cyrenaica, seemed darker and more hopeless than ever before. Its prestige, so important in a life-and-death struggle where propaganda was so potent a weapon, especially in influencing the United States and Russia, had sunk to a new low point.
*

Hitler was not slow or backward in taking advantage of this in a victory
speech to the Reichstag in Berlin on May 4. It consisted mostly of a venomous and sarcastic personal attack on Churchill as the instigator (along with the
Jews
) of the war and as the man who was masterminding the losing of it.

As to the Yugoslavian coup which had provoked him to such fury, Hitler made no attempt to hide his true feelings.

Arrogant though he was over his spring victories and especially those over the British, Hitler did not fully realize what a blow they had been to Britain nor how desperate was the predicament of the Empire. On the very day he was addressing the Reichstag, Churchill was writing President Roosevelt about the grave consequences of the loss of Egypt and the
Middle East
and pleading for America to enter the war. The Prime Minister was in one of the darkest moods he was to know throughout the war.

The German Navy urged the Fuehrer to make the most of this situation. To further improve matters for the Axis, the newly appointed premier of
Iraq
,
Rashid Ali
, who was pro-German, had led an attack against the British airbase of Habbaniya, outside
Bagdad
, and appealed to Hitler for aid in driving the British out of the country. This was at the beginning of May. With Crete conquered by May 27, Admiral Raeder, who had always been lukewarm to Barbarossa, appealed to Hitler on May 30 to prepare a decisive offensive against Egypt and Suez, and Rommel, eager to continue his advance as soon as he had received reinforcements, sent
similar pleas from
North Africa
. “This stroke,” Raeder told the Fuehrer, “would be more deadly to the
British Empire
than the capture of London!” A week later the Admiral handed Hitler a memorandum prepared by the Operations Division of the
Naval War Staff
which warned that, while
Barbarossa
“naturally stands in the foreground of the OKW leadership, it must under no circumstances lead to the abandonment of, or to delay in, the conduct of the war in the
Mediterranean
.”
⁶⁷

But the Fuehrer already had made up his mind; in fact, he had not changed it since the Christmas holidays when he had promulgated Barbarossa and told Admiral Raeder that Russia must be “eliminated first.” His landlocked mind simply did not comprehend the larger strategy advocated by the Navy. Even before Raeder and the Naval Staff pleaded with him at the end of May he laid down the law in Directive No. 30 issued on May 25.
⁶⁸
He ordered a military mission, a few planes and some arms to be dispatched to
Bagdad
to help
Iraq
. “I have decided,” he said, “to encourage developments in the
Middle East
by supporting Iraq.” But he saw no further than this small, inadequate step. As for the larger, bold strategy championed by the admirals and Rommel, he declared:

The destruction of the
Soviet Union
came first; all else must wait. This, we can now see, was a staggering blunder. At this moment, the end of May 1941, Hitler, with the use of only a fraction of his forces, could have dealt the British Empire a crushing blow, perhaps a fatal one. No one realized this better than the hard-pressed Churchill. In his message to President Roosevelt on May 4, he had admitted that, were Egypt and the Middle East to be lost, the continuation of the war “would be a hard, long and bleak proposition,” even if the United States entered the conflict. But Hitler did not understand this. His blindness is all the more incomprehensible because his Balkan campaign had delayed the commencement of Barbarossa by several weeks and thereby jeopardized it. The conquest of Russia would have to be accomplished in a shorter space of time than originally planned. For there was an inexorable deadline: the Russian winter, which had defeated
Charles XII
and
Napoleon
. That gave the Germans only six months to overrun, before the onset of winter, an immense country that had never been conquered from the west. And though June had arrived, the vast army which had been turned southeast into Yugoslavia and Greece had to be brought back great distances to the Soviet frontier over unpaved roads and run-down single-track railway lines that were woefully inadequate to handle so swarming a traffic.