His success spurred auto-intoxication not only among the masses, but also in himself. He now believed that he was certain to be remembered as a twentieth-century Napoleon or a German leader on a par with Bismarck. No one inside or outside the government could successfully oppose him or deter him from expanding the war he described as fulfilling Germany’s destiny. His power was now so complete that his control gave new meaning to the term totalitarianism.
Hitler’s manipulation of the masses through nationalist appeals was a case study in the power of modern propaganda techniques. But beyond the use of radio, film, and mass rallies with flags and pageantry that evoked excitement bordering on hysteria was Hitler himself—the Führer, the national hero who provided, as many at the time saw it, “order, authority, greatness and salvation.” The military victories of 1939–40 convinced millions of Germans that Hitler was a modern-day prophet who could do no wrong. The great majority of Germans were ready to follow him wherever he might lead.
Although blind faith in Hitler’s power to rescue Germany from domestic and foreign threats remained for some throughout the war, his hold on a majority of Germans could not outlive the downturn in Nazi battlefield fortunes. The Soviet victory at Stalingrad in early 1943 broke the string of uninterrupted successes and began a downward spiral of defeats that punctured Hitler’s image as invincible. It also marked the onset of a physical and emotional collapse. When one of his generals, who had not seen him for fourteen months, met with Hitler in February 1943, he was shocked by the change in his appearance and demeanor: “His left hand trembled, his back was bent, his gaze was fixed, his eyes protruded but lacked their former luster…. He was more excitable, easily lost his composure and was prone to angry outbursts.”
A failed attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944 that killed some of his associates but inflicted only relatively minor wounds on him renewed convictions that Providence had spared the Führer to lead Germany to victory. Hitler himself believed that he had been shielded from harm in order to save Europe from Bolshevism. He comforted himself with thoughts that even the Western powers would one day come to see that they had fought on the wrong side in the war and that he had rescued them as well.
Nevertheless, the willingness of high military officials to plan a coup for which they paid with their lives raised doubts about Hitler’s absolute control of the army and his government. The brutal executions of some of the conspirators—killed in the most agonizing way possible, hung on meat hooks—suggested that Hitler and his loyalists were venting their rage at all the opponents who were bringing them down. Round-the-clock bombing of German military targets and cities, the successful Allied invasion of France, and the steady advance of Soviet forces across Eastern Europe and into East Prussia and Silesia deepened fears among diehard Nazis and the more general public that Germany was doomed.
In November 1944, one resident of the Stuttgart region may have spoken for many others discouraged by the mounting defeats and largely unopposed air raids when he said, “The Führer was sent to us from God, though not in order to save Germany, but to ruin it. Providence has determined the destruction of the German people, and Hitler is the executor of this will.”
It was not Providence that was punishing Germany; rather, it was the results of the nation’s reckless two-front war against not only Britain and Russia but also the United States, which had been drawn into the fighting by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Although it seems certain that the United States and Germany would eventually have fought each other, it was Hitler, convinced of his invincibility, who declared war on the Americans four days after the Japanese surprise attack.
The last four months of the war in Europe, between February and May, brought home to millions of people everywhere the monstrous price of the conflict. The Allies dropped nearly half a million tons of bombs on Germany, double the amount of 1943, including an incendiary February 14 raid on Dresden, a communications and railway center, that killed as many as 35,000 civilians in a firestorm consuming the city and blanketing it in a haze that made aerial estimates of the damage impossible two days after the attack. Soviet abuse of German civilians, who were now among the millions of refugees fleeing before the Soviet advance, was widespread: notably, rape, plundering, and indiscriminate killing of men, women, and children. No civilized standard can justify the atrocities committed by the Soviets. The Germans were reaping the whirlwind of their crimes in the Soviet Union, which Soviet troops witnessed as they recaptured the devastated cities and towns of their homeland.
On the battlefields, the loss of life and wounded among Allied and German forces in the closing months of the fighting numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The annihilation of Jews in Nazi concentration camps and on death marches to prevent them from being rescued by advancing Allied troops, particularly in the east, where so many of the camps were located, continued at a frenzied pace.
When Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. commander of Allied forces in Europe, visited one of the captured camps, he told his wife, “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world! It was horrible.” He wrote chief of staff General George C. Marshall, “The things I saw beggar description.” A room piled high with naked corpses of inmates who had starved to death was one piece of evidence of the Nazi crimes against humanity. Eisenhower tried to ensure that as many journalists and British and American officials visited the camps as possible to guard against future complaints that the destruction of nearly 6 million Jews was seen as an exaggeration or “propaganda.”
Eisenhower had reason for concern about public acceptance of Nazi crimes. In July 1944, Soviet troops captured Majdanek, the Nazi death camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland. In August Alexander Werth, a Russian-born British journalist, sent the BBC an account of the camp’s “industrial undertaking in which thousands of ‘ordinary’ Germans had made it a full-time job to murder millions of other people in a sort of mass orgy of professional sadism, or, worse still, with the business-like conviction that this was a job like any other” The BBC, Werth noted, “refused to use it; they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt, and it was not until the discovery in the West of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen that they were convinced that Majdanek and Auschwitz were also genuine.” In the 1990s the historian Deborah Lipstadt demonstrated in public and legal battles with David Irving, a Holocaust denier, that Eisenhower’s concern was prophetic.
Well after it was clear that Germany was defeated and nothing could be gained by additional fighting, Hitler insisted on last-ditch efforts based on fantasies of some miracle reversal of fortunes. In December 1944, he pressed the case for the Ardennes offensive in Belgium in hopes of recapturing Antwerp, the principal seaport under Allied control, and cutting off the flow of supplies to their front lines. He hoped such a victory might convince the British and Americans to make peace and join with him in preventing Soviet occupation of Germany and the spread of communism across Europe.
In January 1945, after the German offensive in the west failed and the Soviets began a winter campaign in which they massively outnumbered German forces in troops and matériel, Hitler was largely resigned to defeat. But since he planned to kill himself rather than be captured by Soviet troops fighting their way into Berlin, he cared nothing for the fate of his countrymen, who would have to suffer additional losses before he was dead and they could surrender. A debilitated physical and mental condition during the closing months of the war may partly explain Hitler’s irrational determination to fight to the bitter end: exhausted and sickly, he seemed to have aged overnight; his unsteady walk, trembling hands, sickly pallor, and inability to speak coherently for long stretches of time impressed visitors to his bunker that they were witnessing someone suffering from a nervous collapse.
But Hitler’s long-term outlook eclipsed his medical and emotional breakdown in explaining his refusal to concede defeat: he was incapable of acknowledging failure, especially as a consequence of his decisions. He b
lamed Germany’s defeat on traitors in the army, who caused the reverses in Russia, poor leadership by some of his generals, Hermann Göring’s false promises about the Luftwaffe’s capacity to combat the Allied air war and defeat their ground forces, and, above all, the weakness of the German people. If he carried on until the last moment, he imagined, he would be remembered not as a deluded dictator who brought incomparable suffering on his people but “as a German hero brought down by weakness and betrayal.” He said the war would be celebrated as “the most glorious and valiant manifestation of a nation’s will to exist.”
Determined not “to fall into the hands of enemies who, for the amusement of their whipped up masses, will need a spectacle arranged by Jews,” Hitler put a bullet in his brain on April 30, two days before Soviet troops captured his bunker in the heart of Berlin. Slavishly following the Führer’s instructions to the last, aides burned his body in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. When the remnants of the Nazi government announced the Führer’s death on May 1, it described him as having fallen in combat rather than as a suicide. The fiction was meant to prolong troop morale lest they see Hitler as having abandoned them and given up the fight against Bolshevism. The war finally ended on May 8 after, their attempts to surrender only to British and U.S. forces having failed, the Germans agreed to unconditional surrender on all fronts.
The truth about Hitler’s death could not be hidden, just as his hope of some grand historical redemption could not eclipse the horrors he and his regime had perpetrated. He is justifiably remembered as the embodiment of evil, a tyrant whose absolute power allowed him to act upon his maniacal fantasies of conquering all Europe and purifying it by eliminating Jews and “subhuman” Slavs. He had imagined the triumph of a master race—Aryan Germans breeding superior human beings, who would rule the continent for a thousand years. Instead, of course, he caused untold misery across Europe and around the world. The most amazing fact is not the existence of someone with such distorted, madcap ambitions, but his ability to mobilize so many millions of supposedly civilized countrymen to act upon his grandiose imaginings.
In the end, Hitler accurately glimpsed only a bit of the future, which was of no consequence in salvaging his reputation. As he assumed, the Soviet-Western alliance could not outlast the war. There was no chance that he could have exploited Allied tensions to serve his ends. His abuse of civilized standards assured that neither Stalin nor Churchill nor Roosevelt nor Truman would seize any German olive branch to settle for anything but unconditional surrender and the total destruction of the Nazis. The awful destruction Hitler perpetrated in Russia and in bombing raids against Britain’s cities and his reputation in the United States as a ruthless dictator ruled out compromises with him.
Nevertheless, tensions persisted, particularly in the exchanges between Stalin and Roosevelt over the negotiations in Switzerland, which revealed Stalin’s enduring distrust of his Western allies. Despite Roosevelt’s counsel of patience to Churchill about difficulties with Moscow, the prime minister remained skeptical of Stalin’s good intentions. In April, as the Anglo-American and Soviet armies moved toward the destruction of Nazi forces in their respective parts of Germany, Churchill was eager to have Allied armies from the west reach Berlin and Prague before the Soviets did. And British general Bernard Montgomery and American general George Patton were only too ready to contemplate a confrontation with the Soviets, limiting their occupation of Central and Eastern Europe.
Dwight Eisenhower, however, wanted no part of it. Although he would offer a different version of events later, when the Cold War had begun and he had entered politics, in the spring of 1945 he tried to allay Soviet suspicions about collaboration with Germany to inhibit their advance and to give full recognition to their principal part in destroying Hitler’s armies.
By this point, Eisenhower shared Roosevelt’s hope and that of most Americans that collaboration with Soviet Russia remained not only possible but essential to postwar peace. Having seen the horrors perpetrated by industrial societies fighting a total war, Eisenhower shared the widespread American hope that the murderous consequences of the fighting would result in sober rejection of any future arms race or great power rivalry threatening the outbreak of yet another, even more destructive war. While he could rationalize leaving the conquests of Berlin and Prague to Soviet armies so that U.S. forces could occupy southern Germany, where he feared a rump Nazi government might try to relocate from Berlin, his principal reasons were to satisfy Soviet wishes to capture Germany’s capital and not to inflame Soviet suspicions of their allies as eager to limit their presence in Central Europe.
In the first months of 1945, a majority of Americans shared Roosevelt’s and Eisenhower’s hopes for a benign Soviet Union and a world without war. Fifty-five percent of surveyed Americans said that Russia could be trusted to cooperate with the United States after the fighting. American political leaders—former vice president Henry Wallace and former ambassador to Moscow Joseph E. Davies on the left, and former president Herbert Hoover and Time publisher Henry Luce on the right—forecast the likelihood of lasting friendship with the USSR. In March 1943, Life magazine, another Luce publication, had described the Russians as “one hell of a people … [who] to a remarkable degree … look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans.” The NKVD was “a national police similar to the FBI.” That summer, conservative congressman John Rankin of Mississippi declared communism a dead letter in Russia, where it was being run out of the country.
But it wasn’t only Americans who were so optimistic about postwar developments; great numbers of Soviet citizens dreamed of postwar harmony as well. They imagined that the demise of Russia’s principal European enemy and continuing good relations with the United States and Britain would amount to a more relaxed future in world affairs and higher standards of living at home. Former foreign secretary Maxim Litvinov believed that after the fighting, Russia would be able to “cash in on the goodwill she had accumulated in Britain and the United States” to maintain enduring cooperation, resulting in the rebuilding of Russia’s economy. Relying on numerous conversations in different parts of Russia, where he served as a wartime correspondent, Alexander Werth recalled that “the Russian people in 1944 liked to think that life would soon be easier, and that Russia could ‘relax’ after the war. The ‘lasting alliance’ with Britain and the USA had much to do with it.”
That summer, a Soviet official declared before the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, “When the war is over, life in Russia will become very pleasant…. There will be much coming and going, with a lot of contacts with the West. Everybody will be allowed to read anything he likes. There will be exchanges of students, and foreign travel will be made easy.” Even if the Communist Party was trying to lull the public and westerners with so rosy a picture to keep up wartime morale, it suggests that the government’s highest officials, whatever they really believed, saw a yearning on the part of many Russians for such an outcome and felt compelled to have a Soviet representative give assurances of such better days ahead.
In the spring of 1945, no one could imagine the brave new world coming into existence until Japan joined Germany in unconditional surrender. The Pacific War to that point had been a costly struggle against well-prepared and determined Japanese forces. Despite the American desire to concentrate on Europe first, the Pacific fighting demanded an almost equal share of U.S. men and matériel to contain Japanese advances across the Pacific. In 1942, in the first months of the conflict, the Japanese drove British forces out of Burma, captured Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore, where a British garrison of 85,000 men surrendered in what Churchill later described as “the worst disaster and largest capitulation of British history,” sunk the battleship Prince of Wales and the cruiser Repulse, demonstrating that air forces could sink the most powerful warships afloat, and threatened India. At the same time, the Japanese overwhelmed U.S. forces in Guam and Wake Island, conquered the Philippines, and occupied pa
rts of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific, from which they threatened Australia.
The only satisfactions Americans found among these early defeats were the actions of General Douglas MacArthur and Colonel Jimmy Doolittle. In March, Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to leave the Philippines for Australia, where he was to become commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific area. At sixty-two years of age, MacArthur was already something of a national legend. He had graduated at the top of his class from West Point in 1903, served with great bravery and distinction in World War I, and been army chief of staff in the 1930s.
MacArthur was one of the country’s best known generals, a military leader on a par with the nation’s most respected battlefield officers in the Civil War and World War I. He had a reputation as a man of exceptional intelligence and courage; Chief of Staff George Marshall named him “our most brilliant general.” Having won twenty-two medals in his almost forty-year army career, he was also considered one of the country’s bravest officers. He was celebrated as a soldier who had defied death in combat, deliberately exposing himself to every sort of peril.
MacArthur’s ego was a match for his talents. Clare Boothe Luce, Time publisher Henry Luce’s wife, said that his egotism “demanded obedience not only to his orders, but to his ideas and his person as well. He plainly relished idolatry,” and surrounded himself with sycophants. He consciously aimed to build an image of himself as apart from America’s other World War II commanders. Just as General George C. Patton impressed himself on the nation as the country’s leading tank officer, who distinguished himself by his fierce determination to take the offensive and a pearl-handled revolver strapped to his hip, so MacArthur was notable for his sunglasses, corncob pipe, and staged performances before photo journalists, like his wading through the surf in the invasion of the Philippines in 1944. Although he never hesitated to expose himself to danger on the front lines, his men disliked his posturing and described him as “Dugout Doug” for staying bunkered in Corregidor and visiting besieged troops on the Bataan Peninsula only once during the Japanese siege in 1942.