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“The long and short of the tedious Spanish rigmarole,” he wrote Mussolini, “is that Spain does not want to enter the war and will not enter it. This is extremely tiresome since it means that for the moment the possibility of striking at Britain in the simplest manner, in her Mediterranean possessions, is eliminated.”
The parentheses are Halder’s and their enclosure is significant. This is the first mention in the captured German records that Hitler—at the beginning of 1941—is facing up to the possibility of the entry of the United States into the war against him.
He does not wish to inform the Italians of our plans. There is great danger that the Royal Family is transmitting intelligence to Britain!!
And though General Halder, who outlined the Army General Staff’s plans, contended later in his book56 that he and Brauchitsch raised doubts about their own assessment of Soviet military strength and in general opposed Barbarossa as an “adventure,” there is not a word in his own diary entry made the same evening or in the highly secret OKW memorandum of the meeting57 that supports this contention.
Later, when catastrophe set in, Halder and his fellow generals realized that their intelligence on the Red Army had been fantastically faulty.
Bulgaria, whose wrong guess as to the victors in the first war had cost her dearly, now made a similar miscalculation.
Both agreements were broken by Hitler in what even for him was record time. The Yugoslav ministers had no sooner returned to Belgrade than they, the government and the Prince Regent were overthrown on the night of March 26–27, by a popular uprising led by a number of top Air Force officers and supported by most of the Army. The youthful heir to the throne, Peter, who had escaped from the surveillance of regency officials by sliding down a rain pipe, was declared King, and though the new regime of General Dušan Simović immediately offered to sign a nonaggression pact with Germany, it was
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He took it as a personal affront and in his fury made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the fortunes of the Third Reich.
This postponement of the attack on Russia in order that the Nazi warlord might vent his personal spite against a small Balkan country which had dared to defy him was probably the most catastrophic single decision in Hitler’s career.
On April 13 German and Hungarian troops entered what was left of Belgrade and on the seventeenth the remnants of the Yugoslav Army, still twenty-eight divisions strong, surrendered at Sarajevo, the King and the Prime Minister escaping by plane to Greece.
By this time the British were desperately trying once again to evacuate their troops by sea—a minor Dunkirk and almost as successful.
Another spring, the second of the war, had brought more dazzling German victories, and the predicament of Britain, which now held out alone, battered at home by nightly Luftwaffe bombings, its armies overseas chased out of Greece and Cyrenaica, seemed darker and more hopeless than ever before. Its prestige, so important in a life-and-death struggle where propaganda was so potent a weapon, especially in influencing the United States and Russia, had sunk to a new low point.
His landlocked mind simply did not comprehend the larger strategy advocated by the Navy.
At this moment, the end of May 1941, Hitler, with the use of only a fraction of his forces, could have dealt the British Empire a crushing blow, perhaps a fatal one.
In his message to President Roosevelt on May 4, he had admitted that, were Egypt and the Middle East to be lost, the continuation of the war “would be a hard, long and bleak proposition,” even if the United States entered the conflict.
For there was an inexorable deadline: the Russian winter, which had defeated Charles XII and Napoleon.
This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness.
What the head of the Army did, he told the tribunal, was to issue a written order that “discipline in the Army was to be strictly observed along the lines and regulations that applied in the past.”
The Army was told to go easy on such offenders, remembering in each case all the harm done to Germany since 1918 by the “Bolsheviki.”
The generals well knew what the designation of Himmler for “special tasks” meant, though they denied that they did when they took the stand at Nuremberg.
The same directive named Goering for the “exploitation of the country and the securing of its economic assets for use by German industry.”
Rosenberg’s voluminous files were captured intact; like his books, they make dreary reading and will not be allowed to impede this narrative, though occasionally they must be referred to because they disclose some of Hitler’s plans for Russia.
White Russia
In all the memoranda concerning the German directives for the spoliation of Russia, there is no mention of anyone’s objecting—as at least some of the generals did in regard to the Commissar Order.
For weeks and months, it is evident from the records, hundreds of German officials toiled away at their desks in the cheerful light of the warm spring days, adding up figures and composing memoranda which coldly calculated the massacre of millions.
Messerschmitt, from whose company airfield Hess had taken off, was ordered arrested, as were dozens of men on the deputy leader’s staff.
He had met the Duke of Hamilton at the Olympic games in Berlin in 1936, and it was within twelve miles of the Duke’s home in Scotland—so efficient was his navigation—that he baled out of his Messerschmitt, parachuted safely to the ground and asked a farmer to take him to the Scottish lord.
For a German who had got so far in the jungle warfare within the Nazi Party and then within the Third Reich, Rudolf Hess, as all who knew him could testify, was singularly naïve.
How better restore his old position with his beloved Leader and in the country than by pulling off a brilliant and daring stroke of statesmanship such as singlehandedly arranging peace between Germany and Britain? Finally,
And so was Joseph Stalin, whose mighty suspicions at this critical time seem to have been concentrated not on Germany, as they should have been, but on Great Britain.
Soon the German press was dutifully publishing brief accounts that this once great star of National Socialism had become “a deluded, deranged and muddled idealist, ridden with hallucinations traceable to World War [I] injuries.”
Amazingly, the “difficulties,” Schnurre explained in a lengthy memorandum to the Foreign Office, did not come from Russia but from German industrial firms, which, he said, were trying “to withdraw” from their contracts with the Russians.
If Stalin was unable to go with England and France in 1939 when both were still strong, he will certainly not make such a decision today, when France is destroyed and England badly battered.
In one case, it said, in a German reconnaissance plane which landed near Rovno on April 15 there was found a camera, rolls of exposed film and a torn topographical map of the western districts of the U.S.S.R., “all of which give evidence of the purpose of the crew of this airplane.”
This was the first time the all-powerful secretary of the Communist Party had taken government office and the general world reaction was that it meant the situation had become so serious for the Soviet Union, especially in its relations with Nazi Germany, that only Stalin could deal with it as the nominal as well as the actual head of government.
Perhaps these instructions only confirmed the ambassador’s uneasiness, since by this time the press throughout the world was beginning to trumpet the German military build-up along the Soviet borders.
Secretary of State Cordell Hull thought at first that Woods had been victim of a German “plant.”
This message, which is among the captured Nazi papers, was recorded in the German Naval Diary on the same day, with an exclamation point added at the end.
Blaming Cripps personally for the “widespread rumors of ‘an impending war between the U.S.S.R. and Germany’ in the English and foreign press,” this official statement of the Soviet government branded them as an “obvious absurdity… a clumsy propaganda maneuver of the forces arrayed against the Soviet Union and Germany.”
The Germans were tipping off the Hungarians, but not their principal ally.
Despite the enormity of the task, not only Hitler but his generals were in a confident mood as they went over last-minute details of the most gigantic military operation in history—an all-out attack on a front stretching some 1,500 miles from the Arctic Ocean at Petsamo to the Black Sea.
It is almost inconceivable but nevertheless true that the men in the Kremlin, for all the reputation they had of being suspicious, crafty and hardheaded, and despite all the evidence and all the warnings that stared them in the face, did not realize right up to the last moment that they were to be hit, and with a force which would almost destroy their nation.
It was a familiar declaration, strewn with all the shopworn lies and fabrications at which Hitler and Ribbentrop had become so expert and which they had concocted so often before to justify each fresh act of unprovoked aggression.
At 3:30 A.M. on June 22, 1941, a half hour before the closing diplomatic formalities in the Kremlin and the Wilhelmstrasse, the roar of Hitler’s guns along hundreds of miles of front had blasted it forever.
His letter is the most revealing and authentic evidence we have of the reasons for his taking this fatal step, which for so long puzzled the outside world and which was to pave the way for his end and that of the Third Reich. The letter, to be sure, is full of Hitler’s customary lies and evasions which he tried to fob off even on his friends.
Spain is irresolute and—I am afraid—will take sides only when the outcome of the war is decided…
Whether or not America enters the war is a matter of indifference, inasmuch as she supports our enemy with all the power she is able to mobilize.
On Sunday morning, June 22, the day Napoleon had crossed the Niemen in 1812 on his way to Moscow, and exactly a year after Napoleon’s country, France, had capitulated at Compiègne, Adolf Hitler’s armored, mechanized and hitherto invincible armies poured across the Niemen and various other rivers and penetrated swiftly into Russia.
On September 6 he abdicated in favor of his eighteen-year-old son, Michael, and fled with his red-haired mistress, Magda Lupescu, in a ten-car special train filled with what might be described as “loot” across Yugoslavia to Switzerland. General Ion Antonescu, chief of the fascist “Iron Guard” and a friend of Hitler, became dictator.
Churchill says the air raid was timed for this occasion. “We had heard of the conference beforehand,” he later wrote, “and though not invited to join in the discussion did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.”
