Hitler had been so enraged by what he had read on the Schlitt case – which matched all his prejudices about lawyers and fell precisely at the time when the judicial system was being made the scapegoat for the difficulties on the home front – that he had privately threatened, should other ‘excessively lenient’ sentences be produced, ‘to send the Justice Ministry to the devil through a Reichstag law’. As it was, the Schlitt case was brought into service as a pretext to demand from the Reichstag absolute powers over the law itself.
Hitler rang Goebbels on 23 April to tell him that he had now decided to deliver the speech to the Reichstag he had for long had in mind. Goebbels undertook to make the necessary arrangements to summon the Reichstag for 3 p.m. on Sunday, 26 April.
In a shortened lunch just before Hitler’s Reichstag speech, a good deal of the talk revolved around the devastation of Rostock in a renewed British raid – the heaviest so far. Much of the housing in the centre of the Baltic harbour-town had been destroyed. But the Heinkel factory had lost only an estimated 10 per cent of its productive capacity. German retaliation to British raids had consisted of attacks on Exeter and Bath. Goebbels favoured the complete devastation of English ‘cultural centres’. Hitler, furious at the new attack on Rostock, agreed, according to Goebbels’s account. Terror had to be answered with terror. English ‘cultural centres’, seaside resorts, and ‘bourgeois towns’ would be razed to the ground. The psychological impact of this – and that was the key thing – would be far greater than that achieved through mostly unsuccessful attempts to hit armaments factories. German bombing would now begin in a big way. He had already given out the directive to prepare a lengthy plan of attack on such lines.
What turned out to be the last ever session of the Great German Reichstag began punctually. Hitler was nervous at the beginning, starting hesitantly, then speaking so fast that parts of his speech were scarcely intelligible. He implied that transport, administration, and justice had been found lacking. There was a side-swipe (without naming names) at Colonel-General Hoepner: ‘no one can stand on their well-earned rights’, but had to know ‘that today there are only duties’. He requested from the Reichstag, therefore, the legal authorization ‘to hold each one to fulfilment of his duties’ and to dismiss from office without respect to ‘acquired rights’. Using the Schlitt case as his example, he launched into a savage attack on the failings of the judiciary. From now on, he said, he would intervene in such cases and dismiss judges ‘who visibly fail to recognize the demands of the hour’.
As soon as Hitler had finished speaking, Göring read out the ‘Resolution’ of the Reichstag, empowering Hitler ‘without being bound to existing legal precepts’, in his capacity as ‘Leader of the Nation, Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, Head of Government and supreme occupant of executive power, as supreme law-lord and as Leader of the Party’, to remove from office and punish anyone, of whatever status, failing to carry out his duty, without respect to pensionable rights, and without any stipulated formal proceedings.
Naturally, the ‘Resolution’ was unanimously approved. The last shreds of constitutionality had been torn apart. Hitler now was the law.
Many people were surprised that Hitler needed any extension of his powers. They wondered what had gone on that had prompted his scathing attacks on the internal administration. Disappointment was soon registered that no immediate actions appeared to follow his strong words. Lawyers, judges, and civil servants were not unnaturally dismayed by the assault on their professions and standing. What had caused it was in their eyes a mystery. The Führer had evidently, they thought, been crassly misinformed. The consequences were, however, unmistakable. As the head of the judiciary in Dresden pointed out, with the ending of all judicial autonomy Germany had now become a ‘true Führer state’.
Hitler’s populist instincts had not deserted him. Less elevated sections of the population enthused over his assault on rank and privilege. This had successfully allowed him to divert attention from more fundamental questions about the failures of the previous winter and to provide a much-needed morale-booster through easy attacks on cheap targets.
For the mass of the German people, however, only the prospect of the peace that final victory would bring could sustain morale for any length of time. Many ‘despondent souls’, ran one party report on the popular mood, were ‘struck only by one part of the Führer’s speech: where he spoke of the preparations for the winter campaign of 1942–3. The more the homeland has become aware of the cruelty and hardship of the winter struggle in the east, the more the longing for an end to it has increased. But now the end is still not in sight.’
III
Hours after his Reichstag speech, Hitler left for Munich, en route to the Berghof and a meeting with Mussolini. He was in expansive mood next lunchtime at his favourite Munich restaurant, the Osteria. He held forth to Hermann Giesler, one of his favoured architects, and his companion-in-arms from the old days of the party’s early struggles in Munich Hermann Esser, on his plans for double-decker express trains to run at 200 kilometres an hour on four-metre-wide tracks between Upper Silesia and the Donets Basin. Two days later, at a snow-covered Berghof with Eva Braun acting as hostess, he was regaling his supper guests with complaints about the lack of top Wagnerian tenors in Germany, and the deficiencies of leading conductors Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch. Walter, a Jew who had become renowned as the director of the Bavarian State Opera and Leipziger Gewandhaus before being forced out by the Nazis in 1933 and emigrating to America, was an ‘absolute nonentity’, claimed Hitler, who had ruined the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera to the extent that it was capable only of playing ‘beer music’. Although Walter’s arch-rival Knappertsbusch, tall, blond, blue-eyed, had the appearance of a model ‘aryan’ male, listening to him conduct an opera was ‘a punishment’ to Hitler’s mind, as the orchestra drowned out the singing and the conductor performed such gyrations that it was painful to look at him. Only Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had turned the Berlin Philharmonic into such a magnificent orchestra, one of the regime’s most important cultural ambassadors, and acknowledged maestro in conducting the Führer’s own favourite Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner, met with his unqualified approval.
Between monologues, he had had ‘discussions’ with Mussolini in the baroque Klessheim Castle, once a residence of the Prince Bishops of Salzburg, now luxuriously refurbished with furniture and carpets removed from France to make a Nazi guest-house and conference-centre. The atmosphere was cordial. Hitler looked tired to Ciano, and bearing the signs of the strains of the winter. His hair, Ciano noticed, was turning grey. Hitler’s primary aim was to convey optimism to Mussolini about the war in the east. Ribbentrop’s message to Ciano, in their separate meeting, was no different: the ‘genius of the Führer’ had mastered the evils of the Russian winter; a coming offensive towards the Caucasus would deprive Russia of fuel, bring the conflict to an end, and force Britain to terms; British hopes from America amounted to ‘a colossal bluff’.
The talks continued the next day, now with military leaders present, at the Berghof. How much of a genuine discussion there was is plain from Ciano’s description: ‘Hitler talks, talks, talks, talks’, non-stop for an hour and forty minutes. Mussolini, used himself to dominating all conversation, had to suffer in silence, occasionally casting a surreptitious glance at his watch. Ciano switched off and thought of other things. Keitel yawned and struggled to keep awake. Jodl did not manage it: ‘after an epic struggle’, he finally fell asleep on a sofa. Mussolini, overawed as always by Hitler, was, apparently, satisfied with the meetings.
A week later, on 8 May, the Wehrmacht began its planned spring offensive. The first targets for Manstein’s 11th Army, as laid down in Hitler’s directive of 5 April, were the Kerch peninsula and Sevastopol in the Crimea. The directive stipulated the drive on the Caucasus, to capture the oil-fields and occupy the mountain-passes that opened the route to the Persian Gulf, as the main goal of the summer offensive to follow, c
ode-named ‘Blue’. The removal of the basis of the Soviet war-economy and the destruction of remaining military forces thought catastrophically weakened over the winter would, it was presumed, bring victory in the east. There, Hitler had reasserted in planning the summer operations, the war would be decided. The key factor was no longer ‘living space’, but oil. ‘If I don’t get the oil of Maykop and Grozny,’ Hitler admitted, ‘then I must finish this war.’
The Wehrmacht and Army High Commands did not contradict the strategic priority. In any case, they had no better alternative to recommend. And the lack of a coordinated command structure meant, as before, competition for Hitler’s approval – a military version of ‘working towards the Führer’. It was not a matter of Hitler imposing a diktat on his military leaders. Despite his full recognition of the gravity of the German losses over the winter, Halder entirely backed the decision for an all-out offensive to destroy the basis of the Soviet economy. The April directive for ‘Blue’ bore his clear imprint. And despite the magnitude of their miscalculation the previous year, operational planners, fed by highly flawed intelligence, far from working on the basis of a ‘worst-case scenario’, backed the optimism about the military and economic weakness of the Soviet Union.
Whatever the presumptions of Soviet losses – on which German intelligence remained woefully weak – the Wehrmacht’s own strength, as Halder knew only too well, had been drastically weakened. Over a million of the 3.2 million men who had attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 were by now dead, captured, or missing. At the end of March, only 5 per cent of army divisions were fully operational. The figures that Halder gave Hitler on 21 April were chilling in the extreme. Some 900,000 men had been lost since the autumn, only 50 per cent replaced (including the call-up of all available twenty-year-olds, and serious inroads into the labour-force at home). Only around 10 per cent of the vehicles lost had been replaced. Losses of weapons were also massive. At the beginning of the spring offensive, the eastern front was short of around 625,000 men. Given such massive shortages, everything was poured into bolstering the southern offensive in the Soviet Union. Of the sixty-eight divisions established on this part of the front, forty-eight had been entirely, and seventeen at least partly, reconstituted.
Poor Soviet intelligence meant the Red Army was again unprepared for the German assault when it came. By 19 May, the Kerch offensive was largely over, with the capture of 150,000 prisoners and a great deal of booty. A heavy Soviet counter on Kharkhov had been, if with difficulty, successfully fended off. By the end of May, the battle at Kharkhov had also resulted in a notable victory, with three Soviet armies destroyed, and over 200,000 men and a huge quantity of booty captured. This was in no small measure owing to Hitler’s refusal, fully endorsed by Halder, to allow Field-Marshal Bock, since mid-January Commander of Army Group South, to break off the planned offensive and take up a defensive position.
Hitler had reason to feel pleased with himself when he spoke for two hours behind closed doors in the Reich Chancellery to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter on the afternoon of 23 May. He had come to Berlin for the funeral of Carl Röver, Gauleiter of Weser-Ems, which had taken place the previous day. After a difficult period, also on the home front, he evidently could not miss the opportunity to bolster the solidarity and loyalty of his long-standing party stalwarts, a vital part of his power-base. And in such company, he was prepared to speak with some candour about his aims.
Hitler emphasized that the war in the east was not comparable with any war in the past. It was not a simple matter of victory or defeat, but of ‘triumph or destruction’. He was aware of the enormous capacity of the American armaments programme. But the scale of output claimed by Roosevelt ‘could in no way be right’. And he had good information on the scale of Japanese naval construction. He reckoned on serious losses for the American navy when it clashed with the Japanese fleet. He took the view ‘that in the past winter we have won the war’. Preparations were now in place to launch the offensive in the south of the Soviet Union to cut off the enemy’s oil-supplies. He was determined to finish off the Soviets in the coming summer.
He looked to the future. The Reich would massively extend its land in the east, gaining coal, grain, oil, and above all national security. In the west, too, the Reich would have to be strengthened. The French would ‘have to bleed for that’. But there it was a strategic, not an ethnic, question. ‘We must solve the ethnic questions in the east.’ Once the territory needed for the consolidation of Europe was in German hands, it was his intention to build a gigantic fortification, like the limes of Roman times, to separate Asia from Europe. He went on with his vision of a countryside settled by farmer-soldiers, building up a population of 250 millions within seventy or eighty years. Then Germany would be safe against all future threats. It should not be difficult, he claimed, to preserve the ethnic-German character of the conquered territories. ‘That would also be the actual meaning of this war. For the serious sacrifice of blood could only be justified through later generations gaining from it the blessing of waving cornfields.’ Nice though it would be to acquire a few colonies to provide rubber or coffee, ‘our colonial territory is in the east. There are to be found fertile black earth and iron, the bases of our future wealth.’ He ended his vision of the future with the vaguest notion of what he understood as a social revolution. The National Socialist Movement, he said, had to make sure that the war did not end in a capitalist victory, but in a victory of the people. A new society would have to be constructed out of the victory, one resting not on money, status, or name, but on courage and test of character. He was confident that victory would be Germany’s. Once the ‘business in the east’ was finished – in the summer, it was to be hoped – ‘the war is practically won for us. Then we will be in the position of conducting a large-scale pirate-war against the Anglo-Saxon powers, which in the long run they will not be able to withstand.’
Hitler was in ebullient mood when Goebbels saw him at lunchtime in the Reich Chancellery on 29 May. With the advance to the Caucasus, he told his Propaganda Minister, ‘we’ll be pressing the Soviet system so to say on its Adam’s Apple’. He thought the new Soviet losses at Kerch and Kharkhov were not reparable; Stalin was reaching the end of his resources; there were major difficulties with food-supplies in the Soviet Union; morale there was poor. He had concrete plans for the extension of the Reich borders also in the west. He took it as a matter of course that Belgium, with its ancient Germanic provinces of Flanders and Brabant, would be split into German Reichsgaue. So would, whatever the views of Dutch National Socialist leader Anton Mussert, the Netherlands.
Two days earlier, one of Hitler’s most important henchmen, Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and since the previous autumn Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, had been fatally wounded in an assassination attempt carried out by patriotic Czech exiles who had been flown from London – with the aid of the British subversive warfare agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) – and parachuted into the vicinity of Prague. Hitler always favoured brutal reprisals. There could be no doubt that the attack on one of the key representatives of his power would provoke a ferocious response. Over 1,300 Czechs, some 200 of them women, were eventually rounded up by the SS and executed. On 10 June the entire village of Lidice – the name had been found on a Czech SOE agent arrested earlier – would be destroyed, the male inhabitants shot, the women taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp, the children removed.
Hitler’s mood was ripe for Goebbels to bring up once more the question of the deportation of Berlin’s remaining Jews. The involvement of a number of young Jews (associated with a Communist-linked resistance group led by Herbert Baum) in the arson attempt at the anti-Bolshevik exhibition ‘The Soviet Paradise’ in Berlin’s Lustgarten on 18 May enabled the Propaganda Minister to emphasize the security dangers if the 40,000 or so Jews he reckoned were still in the Reich capital were not deported. He had been doing his best, he had noted a day earlier, to have as many Jews
as possible from his domain ‘shipped off to the east’. Goebbels now pleaded for ‘a more radical Jewish policy’ and, he said, ‘I push at an open door with the Führer,’ who told Speer to find replacements for the Jews in the armaments industry with ‘foreign workers’ as soon as possible.
Talk moved to the dangers of possible internal revolt in the event of a critical situation in the war. If the danger became acute, Hitler stated, the prisons ‘would be emptied through liquidations’ to prevent the possibility of the gates being opened to let the ‘revolting mob’ loose on the people. But in contrast to 1917 there was nothing to fear from the German workers, remarked Hitler. All German workers desired victory. They had most to lose by defeat and would not contemplate stabbing him in the back. ‘The Germans take part in subversive movements only when the Jews lure them into it,’ Goebbels had Hitler saying. ‘Therefore one must liquidate the Jewish danger, cost what it takes.’ West-European civilization only provided a façade of assimilation. Back in the ghetto, Jews soon returned to type. But there were elements among them who operated ‘with dangerous brutality and thirst for revenge’. ‘Therefore,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘the Führer does not wish at all that the Jews be evacuated to Siberia. There, under the hardest living conditions, they would doubtless again represent a vigorous element. He would most like to see them resettled in Central Africa. There they would live in a climate that would certainly not make them strong and capable of resistance. At any rate, it is the aim of the Führer to make Western Europe entirely free of Jews. Here they can no longer have any home.’