There can be no doubt that Hitler saw and considered the many drawbacks of his new design: the risk of the two fronts, the experience of Napoleon with the insuperable spaces of Russia, the weakness of his Italian ally, and the squandering of his own forces in a manner that completely belied the whole idea of blitzkrieg. The obstinacy with which he ignored the counterarguments was not principally due to fixation on his central idea. Rather, he was becoming more and more aware that this summer of 1941 offered him the last remaining chance to carry out that concept. He was, as he himself said, in the situation of a man who has only one bullet left in his gun. And the special nature of his situation was that the effectiveness of the charge was steadily diminishing. For, as he knew, the war could not be won if it assumed the character of a war of matériel and attrition. Such a war would necessarily put Germany into a position of increasing dependence on the Soviet Union, while in the end inevitably confirming the superiority of the United States.
It is conceivable that in the background of his thoughts the vague hope still lurked that such a strike might regain the neutrality of the conservative powers whose assistance he had had and gambled away. For he would be restoring the onetime enemy to his proper place as an enemy. This, at any rate, was the hope that prompted his old admirer Rudolf Hess to fly to England on May 10, 1941, on a self-appointed mission to put an end at last to the “wrong war.” The disdain with which he was received made it plain that this opportunity, too, had been squandered and that Hitler really had no choice. His decision to launch the war in the East at this particular time resembled an act of desperation.
A great many of Hitler’s remarks from the autumn of 1940 on indicate how clearly he grasped his dilemma. His talks with diplomats, generals, and politicians, quite aside from their function in the given instance, constitute in toto a document showing a continual process of self-persuasion. His belittling of the enemy served the same purpose as his excoriation of that same enemy. The Soviet Union was on the one hand a “clay colossus without a head,” and on the other hand a “bolshevized wasteland,” “simple gruesome,” “a mighty national and ideological onslaught that threatens all of Europe”; and the pact he had concluded with that country not so long ago had suddenly become “very painful.” Then again he tried to pretend that he was not waging a two-front war: “Now the possibility exists,” he told his generals on March 30, 1941, “to strike Russia with our rear safe; that chance will not soon come again. I would be committing a crime against the future of the German people if I did not seize it!”
His contentions were sustained by the certainty, which he claimed with ever-increasing impatience, that Providence presided over all his decisions. This growing effort to invoke irrational support strikingly reflected his state of uneasiness. Quite often his gestures of magical self-reassurance occurred as abrupt interjections in matter-of-fact conversations. For example, in a conversation with a Hungarian diplomat in March, 1941, after making a comparison between the armaments of Germany and the United States, he declared: “Thinking over my courses and proposals of the past, I have arrived at the conviction that Providence has arranged all this. For what I originally sought would have been, if I had attained it by peaceful means, merely a partial solution which sooner or later would have given rise to new conflict. My only special wish is for an improvement in our relationship with Turkey.”
Ever since the summer of 1940 there had been a number of diplomatic contretemps between Germany and the Soviet Union. Some had arisen through Moscow’s ruthless attempts to secure her own perimeter against the by now formidable power of the Reich. With this aim the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic countries and parts of Rumania, and tenaciously opposed German efforts to obtain greater influence in the Balkans. Nevertheless, Sir Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador in Moscow, predicted in the spring of 1941 that the Soviet Union would “with absolute certainty” resist all efforts to involve her in the war against Germany unless Hitler himself decided to attack the Soviet Union; but he was afraid that Hitler would not do his enemies this favor.
And then he did that very thing. It was the last and most serious example of his suicidal impulse to double his stake once the game was going against him. The significant aspect of his present reckoning was that it balanced only on the negative side. If he lost the campaign against the Soviet Union, the war as a whole was lost. But if he won in the East, the whole war was by no means won, however he might delude himself about that.
But in still another respect Hitler’s decision to attack revealed a significant consistency. The Moscow Pact dated back to what had still been the “political” phase of his life. It had been a tactically motivated act of betrayal of his own ideological principles. Consequently, since he had now gone beyond his political phase, the pact had become an anachronism. “The Pact never was honestly intended,” Hitler now confessed to one of his adjutants. “For the ideological abysses are too deep.” What counted now was the honesty of his radical philosophy.
Shortly after three o’clock in the morning of June 22, 1941, Mussolini was roused from sleep by a message from Hitler. “At night I don’t even disturb my servants, but the Germans make me jump out of bed without the slightest consideration,” he grumbled. The message began with a reference to “months of anxious pondering” and then informed Mussolini of the impending attack. “Since I have won through to this decision,” Hitler assured him, “I again feel inwardly free. Despite all the sincerity of my efforts to bring about a final détente, collaboration with the Soviet Union has nevertheless often been a heavy burden for me; for somehow it seemed to me a breach with my whole background, my views and my former obligations. I am happy to be rid of these spiritual torments.”28
The feeling of relief was undoubtedly there but accompanied by a note of anxiety. Granted that the entourage, and especially the top military leaders, expressed extraordinary optimism. “For the German soldier nothing is impossible,” the Wehrmacht communiqué of June 11, 1941, had concluded, summing up the fighting in the Balkans and in North Africa. Only Hitler himself showed signs of depression and nervousness. But he was not the man to be deterred from realizing his life’s dream when only a few weeks’ fighting separated him from it. Then vast spaces in the East would be won, England would bow, and America yield. The world would pay homage to him. The risk increased the allure of the goal. On the night before the assault, in the midst of the bustle of preparations all around him, he said: “I feel as if I am pushing open the door to a dark room never seen before, without knowing what lies behind the door.”29