The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (169 page)

* Halder uses the English word “down” here in the German text.

† The emphasis in the report is Halder’s.

* In his report on this Thomas stresses how punctual Soviet deliveries of goods to Germany were at this time. In fact, he says, they continued to be “right up to the start of the attack,” and observes, not without amusement, that “even during the last few days, shipments of India rubber from the Far East were completed [by the Russians] over express transit trains”—presumably over the Trans-Siberian Railway.
¹²

† The Germans had kept only seven divisions in Poland, two of which were transferred to the West during the spring campaign. The troops there, Halder cracked, were scarcely enough to maintain the customs service. If Stalin had attacked Germany in June 1940, the Red Army probably could have got to Berlin before any serious resistance was organized.

* It cost King Carol his throne. On September 6 he abdicated in favor of his eighteen-year-old son, Michael, and fled with his red-haired mistress, Magda Lupescu, in a ten-car special train filled with what might be described as “loot” across Yugoslavia to Switzerland. General Ion Antonescu, chief of the fascist “Iron Guard” and a friend of Hitler, became dictator.

* Minus southern Dobrudja, which Rumania was forced to cede to Bulgaria.

* It was signed in Berlin on September 27, 1940, in a comic-opera setting and ceremony which I have described elsewhere (
Berlin Diary
, pp. 532–37). In Articles 1 and 2, respectively, Japan recognized “the leadership of Germany and Italy in the establishment of a new order in Europe,” and the two countries recognized Japan’s leadership for the same in Greater East Asia. Article 3 provided for mutual assistance should any one of the powers be attacked by the United States, though America was not specifically mentioned, only defined. To me, as I wrote in my diary that day in Berlin, the most significant thing about the pact was that it meant that Hitler was now reconciled to a long war. Ciano, who signed the pact for Italy, came to the same conclusion (
Ciano Diaries
, p. 296). Also, despite the disclaimer, the pact was, and was meant to be, a warning to the Soviet Union.

* Their accuracy on this occasion was later confirmed by Stalin, though not intentionally. Churchill says he received an account of Molotov’s talks in Berlin from Stalin in August 1942 “which in no essential differs from the German record,” though it was “more pithy.” (Churchill,
Their Finest Hour
, pp. 585–86.)

* Churchill says the air raid was timed for this occasion. “We had heard of the conference beforehand,” he later wrote, “and though not invited to join in the discussion did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.” (Churchill,
Their Finest Hour
, p. 584.)

* Molotov’s parting shot is given by Churchill, to whom it was related by Stalin later in the war. (Churchill,
Their Finest Hour
, p. 586.)

* Sweden, which had refused transit to the Allies during the Russo–Finnish War, permitted this fully armed division to pass through. Hungary, of course, later joined in the war against Russia.

† The italics are Hitler’s.

* A good many historians have contended that Hitler in this first Barbarossa directive did not go into detail, a misunderstanding due probably to the extremely abbreviated version given in English translation in the
NCA
volumes. But the complete German text given in
TMWC
, XXVI, pp. 47–52 discloses the full details, thus revealing how far advanced the German military plans were at this early date.
³⁶

* Although they did not learn the contents of the secret accord at Montoire, both Churchill and Roosevelt suspected the worst. The King of England sent through American channels a personal appeal to Pétain asking him not to take sides against Britain. President Roosevelt’s message to the Marshal was stern and toughly worded and warned him of the dire consequences of Vichy France’s betraying Britain. (See William L. Langer,
Our Vichy Gamble
, p. 97. To write this book, Professor Langer had access to German documents that eleven years later have not been released by the British and American governments.)

* The Navy’s italics.

† By this time a ramshackle British desert force of one armored division, an Indian infantry division, two infantry brigades and a Royal Tank regiment—31,000 men in all—had driven an Italian force three times as large out of Egypt and captured 38,000 prisoners at a cost of 133 killed, 387 wounded and 8 missing. The British counteroffensive, under the over-all command of General Sir Archibald Wavell, had begun on December 7 and in four days Marshal Graziani’s army was routed. What had started as a five-day limited counterattack continued until February 7, by which time the British had pushed clear across Cyrenaica, a distance of 500 miles, annihilated the entire Italian army of ten divisions in Libya, taken 130,000 prisoners, 1,240 guns and 500 tanks and lost themselves 500 killed, 1,373 wounded and 55 missing. To the skeptical British military writer General J. F. Fuller it was “one of the most audacious campaigns ever fought.” (Fuller,
The Second World War
, p. 98.)

The Italian Navy had also been dealt a lethal blow. On the night of November 11–12, bombers from the British carrier
Illustrious
(which the Luftwaffe claimed to have sunk) attacked the Italian fleet at anchor at Taranto and put out of action for many months three battleships and two cruisers. “A black day,” Ciano began his diary on November 12. “The British, without warning, have sunk the dreadnought
Cavour
and seriously damaged the battleships
Littorio
and
Duilio.
”

* The italics and double exclamation points are Raeder’s.

† Operation Marita was promulgated in Directive No. 20 on December 13, 1940. It called for an army of twenty-four divisions to be assembled in Rumania and to descend on Greece through Bulgaria as soon as favorable weather set in. It was signed by Hitler.
⁵³

* The strategy was essentially that laid down in Directive No. 21 of December 18, 1940. Again in comments to Brauchitsch and Halder, Hitler emphasized the importance of “wiping out large sections of the enemy” instead of forcing them to retreat. And he stressed that “the
main aim
[his emphasis] is to gain possession of the Baltic States and Leningrad.”

* “The war against Yugoslavia should be very popular in Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria,” Hitler sneered. He said he would give the Banat to Hungary, Macedonia to Bulgaria and the Adriatic coast to Italy.

† It had originally been set for May 15 in the first Barbarossa directive of December 18, 1940.

* On April 12, 1941, six days after the launching of his attack, Hitler issued a secret directive dividing up Yugoslavia among Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. Croatia was created as. an autonomous puppet state. The Fuehrer helped himself liberally, Germany taking territory contiguous to the old Austria and keeping under its occupation all of old Serbia as well as the copper- and coal-mining districts. Italy’s grab was left somewhat vague, but it did not amount to much.
⁶⁵

* Charles A. Lindbergh, the hero flyer, who had seemed to this writer to have fallen with startling naïveté, during his visits to Germany, to Nazi propaganda boasts, was already consigning Britain to defeat in his speeches to large and enthusiastic audiences in America. On April 23, 1941, at the moment of the Nazi victories in the Balkans and North Africa, he addressed 30,000 persons in New York at the first mass meeting of the newly formed America First Committee. “The British government,” he said, “has one last desperate plan: … To persuade us to send another American Expeditionary Force to Europe and to share with England militarily, as well as financially, the fiasco of this war.” He condemned England for having “encouraged the smaller nations of Europe to fight against hopeless odds.” Apparently it did not occur to this man that Yugoslavia and Greece, which Hitler had just crushed, were brutally attacked without provocation, and that they had instinctively tried to defend themselves because they had a sense of honor and because they had courage even in the face of hopeless odds. On April 28 Lindbergh resigned his commission as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve after President Roosevelt on the twenty-fifth had publicly branded him as a defeatist and an appeaser. The Secretary of War accepted the resignation.

* “It was the first time I found myself involved in a conflict between my soldierly conceptions and my duty to obey,” Field Marshal von Manstein declared on the stand at Nuremberg in discussing the Commissar Order. “Actually, I ought to have obeyed, but I said to myself that as a soldier I could not possibly co-operate in a thing like that. I told the Commander of the Army Group under which I served at that time … that I would not carry out such an order, which was against the honor of a soldier.”
⁷⁴

As a matter of record, the order, of course, was carried out on a large scale.

* “A man of straw,” Hitler later called him. (
Hitler’s Secret Conversations
, p. 153.)

† The emphasis is in the original order.

‡ On July 27, 1941, Keitel ordered all copies of this directive of May 13 concerning courts-martial destroyed, though “the validity of the directive,” he stipulated, “is not affected by the destruction of the copies.” The July 27 order, he added, “would itself be destroyed.” But copies of both survived and turned up at Nuremberg to haunt the High Command.

Four days before, on July 23, Keitel had issued another order marked “Top Secret”:

* Churchill has graphically described how he received the news late that Saturday night while visiting in the country and how at first he thought it too fantastic to believe. (
The Grand Alliance
, pp. 50–55.)

* At Nuremberg Hess told the tribunal that Lord Simon had introduced himself to him as “Dr. Guthrie” and had declared, “I come with the authority of the Government and I shall be willing to discuss with you as far as seems good anything you would wish to state for the information of the Government.”
⁸⁹

* Hess, a sorry, broken figure at Nuremberg, where for a part of the trial he faked total amnesia (his mind had certainly been shattered), outlived Hitler. He was sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Tribunal, escaping the death sentence largely due to his mental collapse. I have described his appearance there in
End of a Berlin Diary
.

The British treated him as a prisoner of war, releasing him on October 10, 1945, so that he could stand trial at Nuremberg. During his captivity in England, he complained bitterly at being denied “full diplomatic privileges,” which he constantly demanded, and his none too balanced mind began to deteriorate and he had long stretches of amnesia. He told Dr. Kelley, however, that he twice tried to kill himself during his internment. He became convinced, he said, that the British were trying to poison him.

* On April 5, the day before the German attack on Yugoslavia, the Soviet government had hastily concluded a “Treaty of Nonaggression and Friendship” with the new Yugoslav government, apparently in a frantic attempt to head off Hitler. Molotov had informed Schulenburg of it the night before and the ambassador had exclaimed that “the moment was very unfortunate” and had tried, unsuccessfully, to argue the Russians into at least postponing the signing of the treaty.
⁹⁶

* Sam Woods, a genial extrovert whose grasp of world politics and history was not striking, seems to those of us who knew him and liked him the last man in the American Embassy in Berlin likely to have come by such crucial intelligence. Some of his colleagues in the embassy still doubt that he did. But Cordell Hull has confirmed it in his memoirs and disclosed the details. Woods, the late Secretary of State relates, had a German friend, an anti-Nazi, who had contacts high in the ministries, the Reichsbank and the Nazi Party. As early as August 1940, this friend informed Woods of conferences taking place at Hitler’s headquarters concerning preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union. From then on this informant kept the commercial attaché
au courant
of what was transpiring both at the General Staff and among those planning the economic spoliation of Russia. To avoid detection, Woods met his informant in various movie houses in Berlin and in the darkness received scribbled notes from him. (See
The Memoirs of Cordell Hull
, II, pp. 967–68.)

I left Berlin in December 1940. George Kennan, the most brilliant Foreign Service officer at the embassy, who remained there, informs me that the embassy learned from several sources of the coming attack on Russia. Two or three weeks before the assault, he says, our consul at Koenigsberg, Kuykendall, relayed a report specifying correctly the exact day it would begin.

* This is from the last diary entry of Ciano, made on December 23, 1943, in Cell 27 of the Verona jail, a few days before he was executed. He added that the Italian government learned of the German invasion of Russia a half hour after it began. (Ciano Diaries, p. 583.)

* Hassell confirms this. Writing in his diary two days later, June 16, he remarks: “Brauchitsch and Halder have already agreed to Hitler’s tactics [in Russia]. Thus the Army must assume the onus of the murders and burnings which up to now have been confined to the S.S.”

At first the anti-Nazi “conspirators” had naively believed that Hitler’s terror orders for Russia might shock the generals into joining an anti-Nazi revolt. But by June 16 Hassell himself is disillusioned. His diary entry for that date begins: