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President Roosevelt’s message to the Marshal was stern and toughly worded and warned him of the dire consequences of Vichy France’s betraying Britain.
By this time a ramshackle British desert force of one armored division, an Indian infantry division, two infantry brigades and a Royal Tank regiment—31,000 men in all—had driven an Italian force three times as large out of Egypt and captured 38,000 prisoners at a cost of 133 killed, 387 wounded and 8 missing.
Charles A. Lindbergh, the hero flyer, who had seemed to this writer to have fallen with startling naïveté, during his visits to Germany, to Nazi propaganda boasts, was already consigning Britain to defeat in his speeches to large and enthusiastic audiences in America.
Apparently it did not occur to this man that Yugoslavia and Greece, which Hitler had just crushed, were brutally attacked without provocation, and that they had instinctively tried to defend themselves because they had a sense of honor and because they had courage even in the face of hopeless odds.
But copies of both survived and turned up at Nuremberg to haunt the High Command.
Sam Woods, a genial extrovert whose grasp of world politics and history was not striking, seems to those of us who knew him and liked him the last man in the American Embassy in Berlin likely to have come by such crucial intelligence.
Woods, the late Secretary of State relates, had a German friend, an anti-Nazi, who had contacts high in the ministries, the Reichsbank and the Nazi Party.
At first the anti-Nazi “conspirators” had naively believed that Hitler’s terror orders for Russia might shock the generals into joining an anti-Nazi revolt.
Schulenburg was arrested and imprisoned after the July 1944 plot against Hitler and executed by the Gestapo on November 10.
Moscow lay but 200 miles farther east along the high road which Napoleon had taken in 1812.
Requests that the city be taken over will be turned down, for the problem of the survival of the population and of supplying it with food is one which cannot and should not be solved by us.
In reality the Russians, despite the surprise with which they were taken on June 22, their subsequent heavy losses in men and equipment, their rapid withdrawal and the entrapment of some of their best armies, had begun in July to put up a mounting resistance such as the Wehrmacht had never encountered before.
The conduct of the Russian troops,” General Blumentritt wrote later, “even in this first battle [for Minsk] was in striking contrast to the behavior of the Poles and the Western Allies in defeat.
“It is becoming ever clearer,” Halder wrote in his diary on August 11, “that we underestimated the strength of the Russian colossus not only in the economic and transportation sphere but above all in the military.
Too high hopes were built on the belief that Stalin would be overthrown by his own people if he suffered heavy defeats.
Moscow, they pointed out to Hitler, was a vital source of armament production and, even more important, the center of the Russian transportation and communications system.
Hitler had his hungry eyes on the food belt and industrial areas of the Ukraine and on the Russian oil fields just beyond in the Caucasus.
Halder copied it out word for word in his diary the next day.
He said that the raw materials and agriculture of the Ukraine were vitally necessary for the future prosecution of the war.
For the first time I heard him use the phrase: “My generals know nothing about the economic aspects of war.”…
Rasputitza, the period of mud, set in.
Now, Blumentritt remembered, the ghosts of the Grand Army, which had taken this same road to Moscow, and the memory of Napoleon’s fate began to haunt the dreams of the Nazi conquerors. The German generals began to read, or reread, Caulaincourt’s grim account of the French conqueror’s disastrous winter in Russia in 1812.
The cold made the telescopic sights useless.
Those events may now be briefly narrated, but not without first stressing one point: terrible as the Russian winter was and granted that the Soviet troops were naturally better prepared for it than the German, the main factor in what is now to be set down was not the weather but the fierce fighting of the Red Army troops and their indomitable will not to give up.
The Nazi generals could not understand why the Russians, considering the nature of their tyrannical regime and the disastrous effects of the first German blows, did not collapse, as had the French and so many others with less excuse.
On the telephone to Halder on November 22, Field Marshal von Bock, directing Army Group Center in its final push for Moscow, compared the situation to the Battle of the Marne, “where the last battalion thrown in decided the battle.”
By December 2 a reconnaissance battalion of the 258th Infantry Division had penetrated to Khimki, a suburb of Moscow, within sight of the spires of the Kremlin, but was driven out the next morning by a few Russian tanks and a motley force of hastily mobilized workers from the city’s factories.
For a few weeks during the rest of that cold and bitter December and on into January it seemed that the beaten and retreating German armies, their front continually pierced by Soviet breakthroughs, might disintegrate and perish in the Russian snows, as had Napoleon’s Grand Army just 130 years before.
Hitler’s power had reached its zenith; from now on it was to decline, sapped by the growing counterblows of the nations against which he had chosen to make aggressive war.
There was some speculation in Army circles as to who would succeed Brauchitsch, but it was as wide of the mark as the speculation years before as to who would succeed Hindenburg.
But from now on, Hitler made it clear, he was personally running the Army, as he ran almost everything else in Germany.
On April 26, 1942, he had his rubber-stamp Reichstag pass a law which gave him absolute power of life and death over every German and simply suspended any laws which might stand in the way of this.
Truly Adolf Hitler had become not only the Leader of Germany but the Law. Not even in medieval times nor further back in the barbarous tribal days had any German arrogated such tyrannical power, nominal and legal as well as actual, to himself.
Ruthlessly he moved that bitter winter to stem the retreat of his beaten armies and to save them from the fate of Napoleon’s troops along the same frozen, snowbound roads back from Moscow.
The German generals have long debated the merits of his stubborn stand—whether it saved the troops from complete disaster or whether it compounded the inevitable heavy losses.
At that critical moment the troops were remembering what they had heard about Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, and living under the shadow of it.
“Very difficult day!” he begins his journal on Christmas Day, 1941, and thereafter into the new year he repeats the words at the head of many a day’s entry as he describes each fresh Russian breakthrough and the serious situation of the various armies.
Hitler could force the German troops to stand fast and die, but he could no more stop the Soviet advance than King Canute could prevent the tides from coming in.
The next day, Sunday, December 7, 1941, an event occurred on the other side of the round earth that transformed the European war, which he had so lightly provoked, into a world war, which, though he could not know it, would seal his fate and that of the Third Reich.
It is obvious that if humanity is condemned to die of hunger, the last to die will be our two peoples…
as premature, however, as the warnings of the American General Staff, which in July had confidentially informed American editors and Washington correspondents that the collapse of the Soviet Union was only a matter of a few weeks.
Halder, in his diary of August 24, gives quite a different version.
He was not executed until after the July 1944 plot against Hitler, in which he was in no way involved.
They and other Nazi documents of the period show the Fuehrer too ignorant, Goering too arrogant and Ribbentrop too stupid to comprehend the potential military strength of the United States—a blunder which had been made in Germany during the First World War by Wilhelm II, Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
This, as we have seen, was the main task of the German Embassy in Washington, which went to great lengths, including the bribing of Congressmen, attempting to subsidize writers and aiding the America First Committee, to support the American isolationists and thus help to keep America from joining Germany’s enemies in the war.
The turn of America would come, but only after Great Britain and the Soviet Union had been struck down. Then, with the aid of Japan and Italy, he would deal with the upstart Americans, who, isolated and alone, would easily succumb to the power of the victorious Axis.
Ribbentrop saw him in the morning, playing over, so to speak, the old gramophone records reserved for such guests on such occasions, though managing to be even more fatuous than usual and not allowing the dapper little Matsuoka to get in a word.
But Hitler, being absolute dictator, could make a pledge and he made it to Japan—quite casually and without being asked to—on April 4, after Matsuoka had returned to Berlin from seeing Mussolini.
This boast led him to make the fateful pledge. Schmidt recorded it in his minutes: If Japan got into a conflict with the United States, Germany on her part would take the necessary steps at once. From Schmidt’s notes it is evident that Matsuoka did not quite grasp the significance of what the Fuehrer was promising, so Hitler said it again. Germany, as he had said, would promptly take part in case of a conflict between Japan and America.
But as soon as the Nipponese Foreign Minister was back in Moscow on his trip home, he signed a treaty of neutrality with Stalin which, as Ambassador von der Schulenburg, who foresaw its consequences, wired Berlin, provided for each country to remain neutral in case the other got involved in the war.
