Beyond the military possibilities, a grand political perspective opened before Hitler one more time in this summer of 1940. Never had a Fascist Europe been closer, never German hegemony more within reach. For a while is almost seemed that he was grasping the opportunity being offered to him. At any rate, in the autumn of 1940 Hitler once more plunged into intense activity in the realm of foreign policy. He negotiated several times with the Spanish Foreign Minister, and in the second half of October went to Hendaye to meet Franco. Then he met Petain and his deputy, Laval, in Montoire. But aside from the Tripartite Pact, which was concluded on September 27 with Japan and Italy, his diplomatic efforts came to naught. A notable failure was the attempt made in the middle of November during a visit by Molotov in Berlin to include the Soviet Union within the Tripartite Pact and, by steering her to the British-dominated areas on the Indian Ocean, make her a partner in fresh plans for partitioning the world.
That all these overtures were without effect was no doubt because of that contempt for political action now dominating Hitler and which his new sense of triumphant achievement had only strengthened. As most of the preserved minutes demonstrate, his onetime skill at negotiation had yielded to conceited imperiousness, his former circumspect groping had given way to crude dishonesty; and instead of the finespun reasons with their persuasive half-truths of earlier years, his interlocutors more and more encountered the transparent egotism of one whose only argument was his superior power. But in the negotiations as in the parallel military plans such as Operation Felix (Gibraltar), Attila (preventive occupation of the remainder of France), and others, the impression remains that he took up such matters in a singularly distracted fashion and with divided interest. Sometimes he actually seemed inclined to abate all military activities against Great Britain and rest content with the purely chimerical effect of the continental bloc. For this seemed the only way to keep the United States from entering the war. Given his unswerving goal of eastward expansion, that possibility appeared an ever-growing threat which would wipe out all efforts, sacrifices, and designs.22
The fear of American intervention lent a new and menacing color to all considerations in the summer of 1940 and, above all, reinforced Hitler’s fear of the passing of time. Since the subjugation of France he had squandered his energy in curiously indecisive diplomatic and military actions. German troops were garrisoned from Narvik to Sicily, and from the beginning of 1941 on, called upon for help by a hapless Italian partner, they were also stationed in North Africa. But there was no guiding idea behind all the activity; the war was running away in undesired directions. This was what came of the war’s having been begun with reversed fronts, virtually for its own sake, and with no general plan. “Führer is obviously depressed,” his army adjutant noted about this time after a comprehensive situation report given by Hitler. “Impression that at the moment he does not know how the war ought to continue.”23
In the autumn, while the war was thus threatening to slip from his grasp, Hitler began to think it out afresh and to bring it back to a scheme. He had two alternatives. He might attempt after all to build a mighty bloc of powers which, by including the Soviet Union and Japan, might at the eleventh hour force a reversal of the United States’ position. That would involve considerable concessions in several directions and would also postpone for years the planned eastward expansion. On the other hand, he might seize the first possible moment to strike eastward, defeat the Soviet Union in a blitzkrieg, and form the bloc of powers not with a partner, but with a vassal.
For several months Hitler wavered. In the summer of 1940 he had been full of impatience to get the senseless and bothersome Western war over with. As early as June 2, during the assault upon Dunkirk, he had predicted that England would now be ready for a “reasonable conclusion of peace” so that he would have his “hands free at last” for his “great and proper task: the conflict with Bolshevism.”24 A few weeks later, on July 21, he called upon Brauchitsch to make “mental preparations” for the war against Russia. In the intoxication of victory during this period he had even considered making his assault on Russia in the autumn of that same year. It took a memorandum from the OKW and the Wehrmachtführungsstab to convince him of the unfeasibility of the plan. Nevertheless, since that time he had clearly abandoned his original idea of two confrontations at separate times. He was now of a mind to combine the war in the West with eastward expansion: the concept had widened to that of a single world war. On July 31 he explained this conception to General Halder:
England’s hope is Russia and America. If the hope of Russia is eliminated, America is eliminated also, because elimination of Russia will be followed by an enormous increase in the importance of Japan in the Far East…. Russia need tell England no more than that she does not want to have Germany great, and England will hope like a drowning man that in six or eight months the whole situation will be changed. But if Russia is smashed, England’s last hope is wiped out. Then Germany is the master of Europe and of the Balkans.
Decision: In the course of this war Russia must be finished off. Spring 1941.
In September, however, and once again early in November, Hitler appeared to waver another time and to prefer the idea of alliance. “Führer hopes to be able to incorporate Russia into the front against England,” Halder noted on November 1. But another entry only three days later pointed to the opposite: Hitler had said that Russia was going to remain “the whole problem of Europe. Everything must be done in order to prepare for the great reckoning.”
These vacillations appear to have come to a stop in the course of December, when Hitler seems to have made the decision that so thoroughly accorded with his nature, with his lifelong design, and with his present overestimation of himself: to begin the war with the Soviet Union as soon as possible. The re-election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President of the United States, and his conversation with Molotov, had evidently speeded the decision. At any rate, only a day after the Soviet Foreign Minister’s departure he commented that this would “not even remain a marriage of convenience.” He thereupon issued the order to scout out suitable terrain for a Führer’s headquarters in the East and for three command posts in the North, the Center and the South, and to build these “with maximum haste.” On December 17 he expatiated to General Jodi on his operational ideas for the campaign, and concluded with the remark that “we must solve all Continental European problems in 1941, since from 1942 on the United States would be in a position to intervene.”25 The decision to attack the Soviet Union even before the war in the West was decided has often been viewed as one of Hitler’s “blind,” “puzzling,” or “hardly comprehensible” resolves. Yet it contained more rationality, and at the same time more desperation, than is evident at first glance. Hitler himself ranked this order to attack as one of the many “most difficult decisions” he had to make. In the reflections that he dictated early in 1945 to Martin Bormann in the bunker beneath the chancellery, he declared:
During the war I had no more difficult decision to make than the attack upon Russia. I had always said that we must avoid a two-front war at all costs, and moreover no one will doubt that I more than anyone else had reflected upon Napoleon’s Russian experience. Then why this war against Russia, and why at the time I chose?