The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

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 obvious in Berlin that it would not accept the puppet status for Yugoslavia which the Fuehrer had assigned. During the delirious celebrations in Belgrade, in which a crowd spat on the German minister’s car, the Serbs had shown where their sympathies lay.

The Belgrade coup, he said, had endangered both Marita and, even more, Barbarossa. He was therefore determined, “without waiting for possible declarations of loyalty of the new government, to destroy Yugoslavia militarily and as a nation. No diplomatic inquiries will be made,” he ordered, “and no ultimatums presented.” Yugoslavia, he added, would be crushed with “unmerciful harshness.”

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. It is hardly too much to say that by making it that March afternoon in the Chancellery in Berlin during a moment of convulsive rage he tossed away his last golden opportunity to win the war and to make of the Third Reich, which he had created with such stunning if barbarous genius, the greatest empire in German history and himself the master of Europe.

Belgrade itself, as Hitler ordered, was razed to the ground. For three successive days and nights Goering’s bombers ranged over the little capital at rooftop level—for the city had no antiaircraft guns—killing 17,000 civilians, wounding many more and reducing the place to a mass of smoldering rubble. “Operation Punishment,” Hitler called it, and he obviously was satisfied that his commands had been so effectively carried out. The Yugoslavs, who had not had time to mobilize their tough little army and whose General Staff made the mistake of trying to defend the whole country, were overwhelmed.

Four days later Nazi tanks rattled into Athens and hoisted the swastika over the Acropolis.

Where Mussolini had failed so miserably all winter, Hitler had succeeded in a few days in the spring. Though the Duce was relieved to be pulled off the hook, he was humiliated that it had to be done by the Germans.

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.

The destruction of the Soviet Union came first; all else must wait. This, we can now see, was a staggering blunder.

The war against Russia [Hitler said] will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the comprehension of you generals but… I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction.

The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated. German soldiers guilty of breaking international law… will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and therefore has no rights under it.

Punishable offenses committed by enemy civilians [in Russia] do not, until further notice, come any longer under the jurisdiction of the courts-martial… Persons suspected of criminal action will be brought at once before an officer. This officer will decide whether they are to be shot.

We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of that surplus territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity, bare of any feelings… The future will hold very hard years in store for the Russians.

Any attempt to save the population there from death by starvation by importing surpluses from the black-soil zone would be at the expense of supplies to Europe. It would reduce Germany’s staying power in the war, and would undermine Germany’s and Europe’s power to resist the blockade. This must be clearly and absolutely understood.

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.

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. By starvation, in this case.

Finally, the beetle-browed deputy leader, like some of the other Nazi bigwigs—Hitler himself and Himmler—had come to have an abiding belief in astrology. At Nuremberg he confided to the American prison psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, that late in 1940 one of his astrologers had read in the stars that he was ordained to bring about peace.

There is, however, something unreal, almost unbelievable, quite grotesque, in the diplomatic exchanges between Moscow and Berlin in these spring weeks (exhaustively recorded in the captured Nazi documents), in which the Germans tried clumsily to deceive the Kremlin to the last and the Soviet leaders seemed unable to fully grasp reality and act on it in time.

“Great difficulties are created,” he complained, “by the countless rumors of an imminent German–Russian conflict,” for which he blamed German official sources. 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.

Despite the strained relations then existing between the American and Soviet governments Hull decided to inform the Russians, requesting Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to communicate the substance of the report to Ambassador Constantine Oumansky. This was done on March 20. Mr. Oumansky turned very white [Welles later wrote]. He was silent for a moment and then merely said: “I fully realize the gravity of the message you have given me. My government will be grateful for your confidence and I will inform it immediately of our conversation.”

The main theme was that this was the decisive battle between two ideologies and that the practices which we knew as soldiers—the only correct ones under international law—had to be measured by completely different standards. Hitler thereupon, said Keitel, gave various orders for carrying out an unprecedented terror in Russia by “brutal means.” “Did you, or did any other generals, raise objections to these orders?” asked Keitel’s own attorney. “No. I personally made no remonstrances,” the General replied. Nor did any of the other generals, he added.*

The Soviet Government was unable to understand the reasons for Germany’s dissatisfaction… He would appreciate it if I could tell him what had brought about the present situation in German–Soviet relations. I replied [Schulenburg added] that I could not answer his questions, as I lacked the pertinent information.

What could the shaken and disillusioned Schulenburg, who had devoted the best years of his life to improving German–Russian relations and who knew that the attack on the Soviet Union was unprovoked and without justification, say? Arriving back at the Kremlin just as dawn was breaking, he contented himself with reading the German declaration.* Molotov, stunned at last, listened in silence to the end and then said: “It is war. Do you believe that we deserved that?”

The situation in England itself is bad; the provision of food and raw materials is growing steadily more difficult. The martial spirit to make war, after all, lives only on hopes. These hopes are based solely on two assumptions: Russia and America. We have no chance of eliminating America. But it does lie in our power to exclude Russia. The elimination of Russia means, at the same time, a tremendous relief for Japan in East Asia, and thereby the possibility of a much stronger threat to American activities through Japanese intervention.

“Not even I disturb my servants at night,” Mussolini fretted to Ciano, “but the Germans make me jump out of bed at any hour without the least consideration.”

“Brauchitsch and Halder have already agreed to Hitler’s tactics [in Russia]. Thus the Army must assume the onus of the murders and burnings which up to now have been confined to the S.S.”

Thus ended the veteran ambassador’s diplomatic career. Returning to Germany and forced to retire, he joined the opposition circle led by General Beck, Goerdeler, Hassell and others and for a time was marked to become Foreign Minister of an anti-Hitler regime. Hassell reported Schulenburg in 1943 as being willing to cross the Russian lines in order to talk with Stalin about a negotiated peace with an anti-Nazi government in Germany. (The Von Hassell Diaries, pp. 321–22.) Schulenburg was arrested and imprisoned after the July 1944 plot against Hitler and executed by the Gestapo on November 10.

Within three weeks of the opening of the campaign, Field Marshal von Bock’s Army Group Center, with thirty infantry divisions and fifteen panzer or motorized divisions, had pushed 450 miles from Bialystok to Smolensk.

“A capitulation of Leningrad or Moscow is not to be accepted, even if offered.”3 What was to happen to them he made clear to his commanders in a directive of September 29: The Fuehrer has decided to have St. Petersburg [Leningrad] wiped off the face of the earth* The further existence of this large city is of no interest once Soviet Russia is overthrown… The intention is to close in on the city and raze it to the ground by artillery and by continuous air attack… 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 this war for existence we have no interest in keeping even part of this great city’s population.

“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. Even when encircled the Russians stood their ground and fought.”

we underestimated the strength of the Russian colossus not only in the economic and transportation sphere but above all in the military. At the beginning we reckoned with some 200 enemy divisions and we have already identified 360. When a dozen of them are destroyed the Russians throw in another dozen.

“I realized,” he said, “soon after the attack was begun that everything that had been written about Russia was nonsense.”

astonishment at their first encounter with the Russian T-34 tank, of which they had not previously heard and which was so heavily armored that the shells from the German antitank guns bounced harmlessly off it. The appearance of this panzer, Blumentritt said later, marked the beginning of what came to be called the “tank terror.”

“Winter,” he says, “was about to begin, but there was no sign of winter clothing…

“Our misfortunes began with Rostov,” Guderian afterward commented; “that was the writing on the wall.”

This mania for ordering distant troops to stand fast no matter what their peril perhaps saved the German Army from complete collapse in the shattering months ahead, though many generals dispute it, but it was to lead to Stalingrad and other disasters and to help seal Hitler’s fate.

Heavy snows and subzero temperatures came early that winter in Russia. Guderian noted the first snow on the night of October 6–7, just as the drive on Moscow was being resumed.

Ice was causing a lot of trouble [Guderian wrote] since the calks for the tank tracks had not yet arrived. The cold made the telescopic sights useless. In order to start the engines of the tanks fires had to be lit beneath them. Fuel was freezing on occasions and the oil became viscous… Each regiment [of the 112th Infantry Division] had already lost some 500 men from frostbite. As a result of the cold the machine guns were no longer able to fire and our 37-mm. antitank guns had proved ineffective against the [Russian] T-34 tank.

The icy cold, the lack of shelter, the shortage of clothing, the heavy losses of men and equipment, the wretched state of our fuel supplies—all this makes the duties of a commander a misery, and the longer it goes on the more I am crushed by the enormous responsibility I have to bear.13 In retrospect Guderian added: Only he who saw the endless expanse of Russian snow during this winter of our misery and felt the icy wind that blew across it, burying in snow every object in its path; who drove for hour after hour through that no-man’s land only at last to find too thin shelter with insufficiently clothed, half-starved men; and who also saw by contrast the well-fed, warmly clad and fresh Siberians, fully equipped for winter fighting… can truly judge the events which now occurred.

“With amazement and disappointment,” Blumentritt wrote, “we discovered in late October and early November that the beaten Russians seemed quite unaware that as a military force they had almost ceased to exist.”

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. This was the nearest the German troops ever got to Moscow; it was their first and last glimpse of the Kremlin.

The blow which this relatively unknown general now delivered with such a formidable force of infantry, artillery, tanks, cavalry and planes, which Hitler had not faintly suspected existed, was so sudden and so shattering that the German Army and the Third Reich never fully recovered from it.

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. At several crucial moments it came very close to that. Perhaps it was Hitler’s granite will and determination and certainly it was the fortitude of the German soldier that saved the armies of the Third Reich from a complete debacle.

Even the obsequious Keitel was in trouble with the Supreme Commander. Even he had enough sense to see during the first days of December that a general withdrawal around Moscow was necessary in order to avert disaster. But when he got up enough courage to say so to Hitler the latter turned on him and gave him a tongue-lashing, shouting that he was a “blockhead.” Jodl found the unhappy OKW Chief a little later sitting at a desk writing out his resignation, a revolver at one side. Jodl quietly removed the weapon and persuaded Keitel—apparently without too much difficulty—to stay on and to continue to swallow the Fuehrer’s insults, which he did, with amazing endurance, to the very end.

This little matter of operational command [Hitler told him] is something anyone can do. The task of the Commander in Chief of the Army is to train the Army in a National Socialist way. I know of no general who could do that, as I want it done. Consequently, I’ve decided to take over command of the Army myself.

Actually the megalomaniacal dictator soon would make himself something even greater, legalizing a power never before held by any man—emperor, king or president—in the experience of the German Reichs. 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.

Kuebler* and Bock very excited and demand withdrawal on the north front, which is crumbling. Again a dramatic scene by Fuehrer, who doubts courage of generals to make hard decisions. But troops simply don’t hold their ground when it’s 30 below zero.

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.

Total losses up to February 28, he wrote down, were 1,005,636, or 31 per cent of his entire force. Of these 202,251 had been killed, 725,642 wounded and 46,511 were missing. (Casualties from frostbite were 112,627.)

A few weeks later Goering told Ciano, “This year between twenty and thirty million persons will die of hunger in Russia. Perhaps it is well that it should be so, for certain nations must be decimated. But even if it were not, nothing can be done about it. It is obvious that if humanity is condemned to die of hunger, the last to die will be our two peoples… In the camps for Russian prisoners they have begun to eat each other.”

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