Morally, too, he now crossed the boundary that made the war irrevocable. In the same conversation he demanded the repression of any sign “that a Polish intelligentsia is coming forward as a class of leaders. The country is to continue under a low standard of living; we want to draw only labor forces from it.” Territory that went far beyond the borders of 1914 was incorporated into the Reich. The remainder was set up as a general government under the administration of Hans Frank; one part was subjected to a ruthless process of Germanization, the other to an unprecedented campaign of enslavement and annihilation. And while the commandos, the Einsatzgruppen, commenced their reign of terror, arresting, resettling, expelling, and liquidating—so that one German army officer wrote in a horrified letter of a “band of murderers, robbers and plunderers”—Hans Frank extolled the “epoch of the East” that was now beginning for Germany, a period, as he described it in his own peculiar brand of bombastic jargon, “of the most tremendous reshaping of colonizing and resettlement implementation.”
With the intensified stress on ideology, Heinrich Himmler was now visibly gaining more power. Hitler had occasionally remarked in private that Himmler did not shrink from proceeding “with reprehensible methods” and by doing so not only established order but also created accomplices. It would seem that this motive, quite aside from all expansionist plans, contributed to the more and more undisguised criminalization of the system. The idea was to bind the entire nation to the regime by complicity in an enormous crime, to engender the feeling that all the ships had been burned, that Salamis feeling of which Hitler had spoken. This, too, like his relinquishing the means of politics, was an attempt to cut off all avenues of retreat. In nearly every speech Hitler delivered after the beginning of the war the formula recurs: a November, 1918, will not be repeated. No doubt he sensed what General Ritter von Leeb wrote in his diary on October 3, 1939: “Poor mood of the population, no enthusiasm at all, no flags flying from the houses. Everyone waiting for peace. The people sense the needlessness of the war.” The annihilation policy in the East, which began immediately, was one of the ways of making the war irrevocable.
Now Hitler again no longer had a way out; once more, reliving old excitements, he stood with his back to the wall. The conflict would have to be, as he habitually phrased it, “fought out to the end.” To United States Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who called on him on March 2, 1940, he said that it was “not a question of whether Germany would be annihilated.” Germany would defend herself to the utmost; “at the very worst, all will be annihilated.”
VII. VICTORS AND VANQUISHED
The Generalissimo
Only a genius can do that!
Since last September I have thought of Hitler as a dead man.
Well before the end of October, 1939, Hitler began moving his victorious divisions to the West and deploying them in new positions. As always, whenever he had arrived at a decision, a feverish urge for action had gripped him. Certainly the concept of sitzkrieg, as the phony war was called in contrast to blitzkrieg, did not apply to Hitler’s behavior. Even before the Western powers had reacted to his “peace appeal” of October 6, he summoned the three commanders of the services, together with Keitel and Halder, and read them a memorandum on the military situation. It began with a historical review of France’s hostility toward Germany, going back as far as the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, on which grounds he justified his determination to attack at once in the West. His aim, he declared, was “annihilation of the strength and ability of the Western powers to once more oppose the… further development of the German nation in Europe.”1 Yet the war in the West, he went on, was only the requisite detour to eliminate the menace in the rear before the great march of conquest to the East began. He next went into a detailed discussion of the methods of mobile warfare that had been applied in Poland, and recommended these for the campaign in the West. The crucial thing, he declared, was the massive commitment of tanks to keep the operative forward movement of the army in flux and to avoid trench warfare like that of 1914–18. This was the approach that proved so strikingly successful in May and June of the following year.
Like Directive Number 6 on the conduct of the war, which was presented at the same time, the memorandum was meant to overcome the halfheartedness of the top-ranking officers. “The main thing is the will to defeat the enemy,” Hitler exhorted his audience. In fact a number of the generals considered Hitler’s plan to “bring the French and British to the battlefield and to rout them,” both wrong and risky, and instead recommended putting the war “to sleep” by assuming a consistent defensive posture. One of the generals spoke of the “insanity of an attack.” Generals von Brauchitsch and Halder, and above all General Thomas, chief of the Armaments Office, and General von Stulpnagel, Quartermaster General, offered specific objections. They pointed to the scanty stocks of raw materials, the exhausted reserves of ammunition, the dangers of a winter campaign, and the enemy’s strength. In fact the accumulation of political, military, and sometimes even moral scruples was once more impelling the officers into active resistance. General Jodi told Halder that the intrigues of the military officers indicated “a crisis of the worst sort” and that Hitler was “embittered that the soldiers are not following him.”2
The more reluctance the generals showed, the more impatiently Hitler pressed for the beginning of the offensive. He had originally set the date between November 15 and 20, then advanced it to November 12 and thus forced the military to make a decision. As in September, 1938, they confronted the choice of either preparing a war they regarded as fatal or overthrowing Hitler; again, von Brauchitsch was half ready to go over to the opposition, while in the background the same actors operated: Colonel Oster, General Beck, now retired, Admiral Canaris, Carl Goerdeler, Ulrich von Hassell, the former ambassador in Rome, and others. The center of their activities was army general headquarters in Zossen, and early in November the conspirators decided on a coup d’état if Hitler continued to insist on his order for an offensive. Von Brauchitsch offered to make a last attempt to change Hitler’s mind in a conference already scheduled for November 5. That was the day on which the German contingents were to occupy their starting positions for the advance upon Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
The conference in the Berlin chancellery led to a dramatic clash. At first Hitler listened with seeming calm to the objections that the commander in chief had summed up in a kind of “countermemorandum.” Hitler disposed of the reference to unfavorable weather conditions by remarking that the weather would also be bad for the enemy. As for the generals’ concern about inadequate training, he answered that this could hardly be amended in four weeks. When von Brauchitsch finally criticized the conduct of the troops in the Polish campaign and spoke of breaches of discipline, Hitler leaped at the chance for one of his great outbursts. Raging—as Halder put it in his notes of the episode—he demanded documents. He wanted to know where, in what units, the alleged events had occurred, what had been done about them, whether death sentences had been imposed. He declared that he personally would look into the matter on the spot and went on to say that in reality it was only the army leadership that had not wanted to fight and therefore had for so long retarded the tempo of rearmament. But now he was going to “eliminate the spirit of Zossen,” that is, the slackness of the army General Staff. Bluntly, he forbade von Brauchitsch to go on with his report. Stunned, his face pale, the commander in chief left the chancellery. “Br[auchitsch] has completely collapsed,” one of the participants noted. That same evening Hitler once more explicitly confirmed the order for attack on November 12.