In the air war, too, the whole picture now changed. At the beginning of January, 1941, the British cabinet had issued a strategic plan for the air war that aimed at eliminating Germany’s synthetic fuel industry in a series of purposeful air raids and thus, by “paralyzing vital segments of industry” numb the entire war-making ability of the Reich.47 But the concept, which undoubtedly would have given the events of the war a very different course if it had been implemented immediately, was not carried out until more than three years later. In the meantime, other views prevailed, principally the idea of area bombing, terror bombing of the civilian population. The new phase was initiated on the night of March 28, 1942, with a major raid by the Royal Air Force on Lübeck. The historic city of patricians “burned like kindling,” according to the official report. In response Hitler called in two bomber groups of approximately one hundred planes from Sicily. In the following weeks they carried out reprisal attacks, so-called Baedeker raids, against the artistic treasures of old English cities. The vast proportional difference in strength that had meanwhile developed became apparent when the British on May 30, 1942, responded with the first 1,000-bomber raid of the war. During the second half of the year the Americans joined them, and from 1943 on, Germany was exposed to an incessant air offensive, “round-the-clock” bombing. Taking account of the changed situation, Churchill declared in a speech in London’s Mansion House: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”48
Events on the fronts confirmed this dictum. On November 2 General Montgomery, after preparatory massed artillery fire lasting for ten days, broke through the German-Italian positions at El Alamein with overwhelmingly superior forces. Shortly afterward, in the early morning hours of November 8, British and American troops landed on the coasts of Morocco and Algeria and occupied French North Africa as far as the Tunisian border. Some ten days later, on November 19, two Soviet army groups launched—in a raging snowstorm—the counteroffensive at Stalingrad. After successfully breaking through the Rumanian sector of the front they encircled some 220,000 men with 100 tanks, 1,800 guns and 10,000 vehicles between the Volga and the Don. When General Paulus reported the encirclement, Hitler ordered him to move his headquarters into the city and form a defense perimeter, a so-called hedgehog position. Only a few days before, Hitler had telegraphed to Rommel, in response to his request for permission to retreat: “In your present situation there can be no other thought but to persevere, to yield not a step, and to throw into the battle every weapon and every soldier that can still be freed for service…. It would not be the first time in history that a stronger will triumphed over the enemy’s stronger battalions. But you can show your troops no other way but the one that leads to victory or to death.”
The three November offensives of 1942 marked the turning point of the war. The initiative had finally passed to the opposite side. As if he wanted one more stab at playing generalissimo, Hitler on November 11 ordered his troops to march into the unoccupied part of France. And in his annual speech delivered in commemoration of the putsch of November, 1923, he struck one of those rigid poses whose basis can only be the willingness to let the worst happen. “There will no longer be any peace offers coming from us,” he cried. In contrast to imperial Germany, he continued, there now stood at the head of the Reich a man who “has always known nothing but struggle and with it only one principle: Strike, strike, and strike again!”
In me they… are facing an opponent who does not even think of the word capitulate. It was always my habit, even as a boy—perhaps it was naughtiness then, but on the whole it must have been a virtue after all—to have the last word. And let all our enemies take note: The Germany of the past laid down its arms before the clock struck twelve. I make it a principle not to stop until the clock strikes thirteen!49
This principle now became his new strategy, replacing all other concepts : Hold out! When the defeat of the Afrika Korps was already sealed, in his fixation on holding out he ordered several units, which he had hitherto withheld from Rommel, sent to the by now lost cause in Tunis. He curtly rejected Mussolini’s pleas that he try for another understanding with Stalin. He rejected all proposals to shorten the Eastern front by drawing in the lines. He wanted to stay in North Africa, hold Tunis, advance in Algeria, defend Crete, keep twenty-four European countries occupied, defeat the Soviet Union plus England and the United States. And with all that, his basic emotion intruding more and more frequently upon all rational thought, he wanted to guarantee that now at last—as he put it in the midst of retreat, flight, and nemesis—“international Jewry is recognized in all its diabolic dangerousness.”50
The symptoms of his intellectual decay were accompanied by a process of organizational dissolution that could be felt everywhere. The night after the beginning of the Allied landing in North Africa Hitler delivered the above-mentioned speech in Munich. Then, accompanied by his adjutants and personal intimates, he went to the Berghof in Berchtesgaden. Keitel and Jodi stayed in a building on the edge of town. The armed forces operations staff (Wehrmachtsführungsstab) was quartered in a special train at the Salzburg railroad station, while the General Staff of the army, which was really in charge of things, was far away in its headquarters near Angerburg in East Prussia. During the following days Hitler remained in Berchtesgaden. Instead of consulting and organizing defensive measures, he merely took satisfaction in the fact that it was he against whom all this gigantic armada had been assembled. He became intoxicated with the far-reaching operations of the kind he could no longer mount and criticized the enemy’s deliberate procedures. He himself, he said, would have acted more directly, and psychologically more effectively, by landing just outside Rome, in this way cutting off the Axis troops in North Africa and southern Italy.51
Meanwhile, the ring around Stalingrad was closing ever more tightly. Hitler did not return to Rastenburg until the evening of November 23, and it cannot be definitely ascertained whether he underestimated the seriousness of the situation or was attempting by a display of composure to conceal it from himself and his entourage. At any rate, when General Zeitzler asked to see him in connection with several overdue decisions, Hitler attempted to put him off until the following day. The chief of staff insisted on a meeting and proposed that immediate orders go to the Sixth Army to break out of the pocket. The result was one of those disputes that flared up repeatedly until the early part of February, when Hitler’s hold-the-line strategy ended in a debacle. By about two o’clock in the morning Zeitzler apparently thought he had convinced Hitler. At any rate, he informed the headquarters of Army Group B that he expected to obtain the signature to the break-out order early in the morning. The truth was that Hitler had evidently made one of his pseudoconcessions. But the quarrel went on into the following weeks. It took a wealth of variant forms. Hitler mustered all his arts of persuasion: long, seemingly reasonable silences, endless talking about trivialities, yielding on other points, firing an overwhelming barrage of figures. But through it all, with growing obstinacy, Hitler held to his resolve. Contrary to his usual habit, he even tried on occasion to strengthen it by enlisting the support of others. With psychological adroitness he had Göring—whose prestige had taken such a beating and who now seemed only to be waiting for a chance to exude optimism once more—issue an assurance that the Luftwaffe would be able to supply the encircled army. In the course of an argument with Zeitzler he summoned Generals Keitel and Jodi; at this time these three held the posts of chief of staff, chief of the High Command of the armed forces, and chief of the armed forces operations staff. Standing, his expression solemn, Hitler formally asked them their views: “I have a very grave decision to make. Before I make it, I should like to hear your opinions. Should I abandon Stalingrad or not?”