We had lost hope of being able to end the war by a successful invasion on English soil. For this country, ruled by stupid leaders, had refused to grant our hegemony in Europe and would not conclude a peace without victory with us as long as there was a Great Power on the Continent which in principle confronted the Reich as an adversary. Consequently the war would have to go on forever, with moreover increasingly active participation of the Americans. The importance of the American potential, the ceaseless rearmament… the closeness of the English coasts—all that meant that we rationally should not allow ourselves to be drawn into a war of long duration. For time—it is always a matter of time!—would necessarily be working more and more against us. In order to persuade the English to surrender, in order to compel them to make peace, we consequently had to dispel their hope of confronting us on the Continent with an enemy of our own class, that is, the Red Army. We had no choice; for us it was an inescapable compulsion to remove the Russian piece from the European chessboard. But there was also a second, equally cogent reason which would have been sufficient: the tremendous danger that Russia meant for us by the mere fact of her existence. It would necessarily be fatal for us if some day she attacked us.
Our sole chance to defeat Russia consisted in anticipating her…. We must not offer the Red Army any advantage of terrain, place our Autobahnen at her disposal for the deployment of her motorized formations, allow her the use of our railroad network to move men and materials. If we seized the initiative we could defeat her in her own country, in her swamps and moors, but not on the soil of so civilized a country as ours. That would have given them a springboard for the onslaught upon Europe.
Why 1941?… Because we could allow ourselves as little delay as possible, since our enemies in the West were steadily increasing their fighting power. Moreover, Stalin himself was by no means remaining inactive. Consequently, time was working against us on both fronts. The question therefore is not: “Why as early as June 22, 1941?” but “Why not earlier?”… In the course of the last weeks I was obsessed with the fear that Stalin might forestall me.26
All of Hitler’s cogitations in the summer and fall of 1940 were linked by the secret hope of remedying the stalled and misdirected military situation by a sudden, surprising sally of the sort that had often saved him from his various plights in the past. At the same time, such a sally might help him achieve his larger victory. In his fantasies the campaign against Russia was transformed into the unexpected turning point which like a touch from a magic wand would solve all difficulties and open the way to world dominion. Germany, he raved to his generals on January 9, 1941, would be “invulnerable. The gigantic spaces of Russia conceal immeasurable riches. Germany must dominate them economically and politically, but not annex them.” In that way she would have at her disposal all the potentialities for waging war against whole continents in the future. Then she could never again be defeated by anyone.
The rapid collapse of the Soviet Union, as he imagined it, would give Japan the signal for her long-envisaged “southern expansion,” which she had hitherto postponed chiefly because of the Soviet threat to her rear. That expansion in turn would tie down the United States in the Pacific area and consequently draw the Americans away from Europe, so that Great Britain would be forced to surrender. By a far-flung threefold pincers movement over North Africa, the Near East, and the Caucasus, in conjunction with the conquest of Russia, he would push forward to Afghanistan. That country would then be used as a base from which to strike the stubborn British Empire at its heart, in India. Rule of the world was, as he saw it, within his grasp.
The weaknesses in this conception were vast, and Hitler must have recognized at least some of them. Hitherto he had always made security in the West a prerequisite for the attack upon the Soviet Union and had viewed avoidance of a two-front conflict as a kind of fundamental law for German foreign policy. Now he was trying to obtain this security by a preventive blow and plunging into the adventure of a two-front war in order to anticipate having to fight a war on two fronts. He also underestimated the enemy just as he overestimated himself. “In three weeks we shall be in Petersburg,” he declared at the beginning of December. He told Bulgarian Ambassador Dragonoff that the Soviet Army was “no more than a joke.”
But above all, what once more emerged was his inability to think a thought through to the end while retaining his hold on reality. Once he had conceived the first steps, he invariably at some point soared off into fantasy and brought his speculations to a visionary rather than a rational conclusion. A prime instance of this was the carelessness with which he considered the developments in the East that might follow the expected victory. It was the same mistake he had made in attacking Poland and then after the campaign in France. Even if he succeeded in another blitz campaign, in advancing to Moscow or even the Urals before the descent of winter, the war was by no means over, as he ought to have told himself. For beyond Moscow, beyond the Urals, lay vast spaces, where Russia’s remaining forces could be mustered and organized.
At any rate, powerful German contingents would necessarily be tied down on the more or less open frontier where he planned to stop, and this factor would surely have some bearing on England’s and America’s determination to fight. But Hitler never thought things through in this way. He contented himself euphorically with such vague formulas as “collapse” or “reduction to rubble.” When Field Marshal von Bock, who was to receive the appointment of commander in chief of the Army Group Center, told him early in February that he thought a military victory over the Red Army possible but could not conceive of “how the Soviets are to be forced to make peace,” Hitler answered vaguely that “after the conquest of the Ukraine, Moscow and Leningrad… the Soviets will certainly consent to a compromise.” The remark revealed the whole shallowness of his ideas.
However, he would now no longer hear of any objections. Undeterred by arguments or opposition, he prepared the attack. In October, 1940, on the night after his meeting with Petain, he received a letter from Mussolini informing him of Italy’s intention to invade Greece. Foreseeing the complications that this unexpected step was bound to have for the German flank in the Balkans, Hitler changed his travel plans and went to Florence for a hastily arranged meeting. But Mussolini, eager to pay the Germans back for the many similar surprises they had inflicted on him, as well as for their many victories, had hurried through the operation a few hours before Hitler’s arrival. But the necessity of sending German contingents to Greece when the Italian ally blundered into the expected trouble, did not keep Hitler from continuing the planning and the deployment for the campaign in the East. The same was true when Mussolini ran into trouble in Albania and in December, 1940, finally saw the North African front collapse. In every case Hitler met the disasters with equanimity and dispatched more and more fresh divisions to the threatened scenes without for a moment being distracted from his principal goal.
On February 28, 1941, he considered himself forced to anticipate the Russians by marching into Bulgaria from the territory of his ally Rumania. A month or so later he had to conquer Yugoslavia, which under a group of rebellious officers had attempted to withdraw from German influence. But in spite of these new engagements he did not lose sight of the campaign against the Soviet Union. He merely postponed it by four possibly fateful weeks. On April 17 he received the capitulation of the Yugoslav army; six days later the Greeks surrendered, after having so long and so effectively resisted Mussolini’s soldiers. The German corps sent to North Africa under General Rommel needed only twelve days to recover all the territory the Italians had lost. Shortly afterward, between May 20 and 27, 1941, German parachute troops captured the island of Crete, and for a moment the entire British position in the Mediterranean seemed in deadly peril. With growing emphasis Raeder and the heads of the navy called for a grand offensive against the British Near Eastern positions by the autumn of 1941. That would, they promised, strike the Empire “a deadlier blow than the taking of London.” The anxieties of the Allied side, which were published after the war, largely confirmed this view. But Hitler once more refused to deviate from the obsession of eastward expansion. Some members of his entourage tried to change his mind, but in vain.27 In the West, the material weight of the United States was making itself felt more and more. The air war was already lost, and the U-boat war threatening to be lost. But not even this increasingly acute situation could check Hitler’s plans.