But when “this winter of our discontent,” as Guderian called it, was over and the German advance began moving once more with the coming of spring, Hitler regained his confidence. Sometimes, in moods of elation, he would even grumble that fate was letting him wage war only against second-class enemies. But his self-confidence was brittle and his nerves unstable. One of Chief of Staff von Halder’s diary entries makes that clear: “His underestimation of the enemy potentialities, always his shortcoming, is now gradually assuming grotesque forms. There is no longer any question of serious work. Morbid reaction to momentary impressions and complete incomprehension of the apparatus of leadership and its possibilities are characteristic of this so-called ‘leadership.’ ”
From the plan of operations for the summer of 1942 it might appear that Hitler had learned from the experiences of the preceding year. Instead of being distributed among three spearheads as heretofore, all offensive forces were to be massed in the south in order “finally to annihilate what vital defensive strength the Soviets have left and to remove from their grasp as far as possible the principal sources of energy for their war economy.” It was also planned to cease operations in good time, prepare winter quarters, and, if need be, build a defensive line corresponding to the west wall (Ost-wall), which in itself would allow Germany to wage a hundred years’ war. “But in that case it would no longer cause us any special concern.”45
But when the German troops reached the Don, during the second half of July, 1942, and had not yet been able to throw the projected pincers around the enemy forces, Hitler once more fell victim to his impatience and his nerves and forgot all the lessons of the past summer. On July 23 he gave orders to divide the offensive into two simultaneous, separating operations. Army Group B was to advance through Stalingrad to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Army Group A was to annihilate the enemy armies near Rostov, then reach the eastern coast of the Black Sea and, march toward Baku. The forces that at the beginning of the offensive had occupied a front of about 500 miles would, at the end of the operations, have to cover a line more than 2,500 miles long against an enemy whom they had been unable to engage in battle, let alone defeat.
Hitler’s euphoric judgment of what the German army could do was presumably based on the illusory look of the map. In the late summer of 1942 his power had reached the point of its greatest extension. German troops stood on the North Cape and along the Atlantic Coast, in Finland, and throughout the Balkans. In North Africa General Rommel, whom the Allies had thought already beaten, had with inferior forces thrown the British back across the Egyptian border as far as El Alamein. In the East Wehrmacht soldiers crossed the border into Asia at the end of July. In the south they reached the burning, shattered refineries of Maikop at the beginning of August. But Hitler obtained hardly any of the oil that had served, during the cruel struggles of the preceding weeks, as the reason for the offensive. On August 21 German soldiers raised the swastika flag on the Elbrus, the highest mountain in the Caucasus. Two days later the Sixth Army reached the Volga at Stalingrad.
But appearances were misleading. For the rapidly spreading war on three continents, on the seas and in the air, the men, the armaments, the transport, the raw materials and the leadership were lacking. By the time Hitler reached his zenith, he had long been a defeated man. The abrupt succession of crises and setbacks that now descended, their effects worsened by his rigidity, revealed the unreal nature of this enormously expanded power.
The first symptoms of crisis appeared in the East. Since the beginning of the 1942 summer offensive Hitler had transferred his headquarters from Rastenburg to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine; and here, in the daily strategy conferences, he defended his decision to conquer both the Caucasus and Stalingrad. His defense grew increasingly vehement, although possession of the city on the Volga had meanwhile become virtually meaningless so long as the German armies could check traffic on the river. On August 21 there was an angry dispute when Halder argued that German effective strength was not sufficient for two such wearing offensives. The chief of staff implied that Hitler’s military decisions ignored the limits of what was possible and, as he later put it, gave “full power to wishful thinking.” When in the course of the argument he pointed out that the Russians were producing 1,200 tanks monthly, Hitler, almost beside himself, forbade him to utter “such idiotic nonsense.”46
Approximately two weeks later the slowing of the advance on the Caucasus front gave rise to another clash in the Führer’s headquarters. This time the submissive General Jodi dared to defend Field Marshal List, commander of Army Group A. Moreover, Jodi quoted Hitler’s own words to prove that List was only obeying the instructions he had received. In a rage, Hitler broke off the conversation. On September 9 he demanded that the field marshal resign, and that same evening he himself took over the command of Army Group A. From this point on he suspended almost all contact with the generals attached to the Führer’s headquarters. For several months he even refused to shake hands with Jodi; he avoided the conference room. Conferences took place in very restricted groups, the atmosphere permanently icy, in his own small blockhouse, and precise minutes were taken. Hitler left his blockhouse only after dark, and by concealed paths. Henceforth he also took his meals alone, only his Alsatian dog keeping him company; he rarely asked visitors to join him. Thus the evening gathering at table dropped out of his life, and with it ended all that petty bourgeois sociability and cozy social intercourse in the Führer’s headquarters. At the end of September Hitler finally relieved Halder of his duties also. For some time he had been impressed by the reports from General Zeitzler, chief of staff to the commander in chief, West. They were distinguished by a wealth of tactical ideas and an optimistic attitude. Hitler said he now wanted “a man like this Zeitzler” at his side, and he appointed him the new army chief of staff.
Meanwhile, with increasing casualties, more and more units of the Sixth Army had reached Stalingrad and occupied positions in the north and the south of the city. To all appearances the Russians were determined this time not to evade but to give battle. An order of the day from Stalin had fallen into German hands. In it he informed his people in the tone of a concerned father of his country that from now on the Soviet Union could no longer surrender territory. Every foot of soil must be defended to the utmost. As though he felt personally challenged by this order, Hitler now demanded, against the advice both of Zeitzler and of General Paulus, the commander of the Sixth Army, the capture of Stalingrad. The city became a prestige item, its capture “urgently necessary for psychological reasons,” as Hitler declared on October 2. A week later he added that Communism must be “deprived of its shrine.” The bloody struggle for houses, residential areas, and factories which then began caused high casualties on both sides. Yet everyone momentarily expected news of the fall of Stalingrad.
Since the winter disaster, when the specter of defeat had first appeared to him, Hitler had been giving all his energy to the Russian campaign. It became more and more obvious that he was neglecting all the other theaters of war. He still preferred thinking in terms of vast spans of time and distances, in eons and continents; but North Africa, for example, was too remote for him. In any case, he never adequately recognized the strategic importance of the Mediterranean area and thus once again demonstrated how nonpolitical and abstract, how essentially “literary” his thinking was. Lacking supplies and reserves, the Afrika Korps wasted its offensive strength. Submarine warfare, too, suffered from Hitler’s bias. Up to the end of 1941 no more than sixty U-boats were available for assignment. A year later the complement of approximately one hundred units, which had been called for at the beginning of the war, was at last attained. But by then the enemy, having felt the brunt of the U-boat warfare, had devised defensive measures that swung the balance the other way.