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November 30, 2023 - March 3, 2024
At Lillehammer, north of Hamar, the first engagement of the war between British and German troops took place on April 21, but it was no match.
France was now destined to become a German vassal, as Pétain, Weygand and Laval apparently believed—and accepted.
On June 12, for example, he cabled Berlin in code “most urgent, top secret” that a “well-known Republican Congressman,” who was working “closely” with the German Embassy, had offered, for $3,000, to invite fifty isolationist Republican Congressmen to the Republican convention “so that they may work on the delegates in favor of an isolationist foreign policy.”
British hopes in Russia and America, Hitler said, had not materialized. Russia was not going to bleed for Britain.
The skill of British Fighter Command in committing its planes to battle against vastly superior attacking forces was based on its shrewd use of radar. From the moment they took off from their bases in Western Europe the German aircraft were spotted on British radar screens, and their course so accurately plotted that Fighter Command knew exactly where and when they could best be attacked. This was something new in warfare and it puzzled the Germans, who were far behind the British in the development and use of this electronic device.
A second key to the successful defense of the skies over southern England was the sector station. This was the underground nerve center from which the Hurricanes and Spitfires were guided by radiotelephone into battle on the basis of the latest intelligence from radar, from ground observation posts and from pilots in the air.
But the effect on German morale was tremendous. For this was the first time that bombs had ever fallen on Berlin.
On the surface all was friendly between the two great dictatorships. Molotov, acting for Stalin, lost no opportunity to praise and flatter the Germans on every occasion of a new act of aggression or a fresh conquest. When Germany invaded Norway and Denmark on April 9, 1940, the Soviet Foreign Commissar hastened to tell Ambassador von der Schulenburg in Moscow that very morning that “the Soviet Government understood the measures which were forced on Germany.”
Stalin could be as crude and as ruthless in these matters as Hitler—and even more cynical. The press having been suppressed, the political leaders arrested and all parties but the Communist declared illegal, “elections” were staged by the Russians in all three countries on July 14, and after the respective parliaments thus “elected” had voted for the incorporation of their lands into the Soviet Union, the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) of Russia “admitted” them into the motherland: Lithuania on August 3, Latvia on August 5, Estonia on August 6.
Toward the end of June Churchill had tried to warn Stalin in a personal letter of the danger of the German conquests to Russia as well as to Britain.5 The Soviet dictator did not bother to answer; probably, like almost everyone else, he thought Britain was finished.
The thieves, as is almost inevitable in such cases, had begun to quarrel over the spoils.
It must be set down here that the Soviet dictator, his subsequent claims to the contrary notwithstanding, now accepted Hitler’s offer to join the fascist camp, though at a stiffer price than had been offered in Berlin. On November 26, scarcely two weeks after Molotov had returned from Germany, he informed the German ambassador in Moscow that Russia was prepared to join the four-power pact,
“In view of present political developments and especially Russia’s interference in Balkan affairs,” Hitler said, “it is necessary to eliminate at all costs the last enemy remaining on the Continent before coming to grips with Britain.” From now on to the bitter end he would stick fanatically to this fundamental strategy.
On the night of February 28 German Army units crossed the Danube from Rumania and took up strategic positions in Bulgaria, which the next day joined the Tripartite Pact.
The hardier Yugoslavs were not quite so accommodating. But their stubbornness only spurred on the Germans to bring them into camp too. On March 4–5, the Regent, Prince Paul, was summoned in great secrecy to the Berghof by the Fuehrer, given the usual threats and, in addition, offered the bribe of Salonika. On March 25, the Yugoslav Premier, Dragisha Cvetković, and Foreign Minister Aleksander Cincar-Marković, having slipped surreptitiously out of Belgrade the night before to avoid hostile demonstrations or even kidnapping, arrived at Vienna, where in the presence of Hitler and Ribbentrop they
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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.
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 coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages of his entire life. 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.
The Belgrade coup, he said, had endangered both Marita and, even more, Barbarossa.
He ordered Goering then and there to “destroy Belgrade in attacks by waves,” with bombers operating from Hungarian air bases. He issued Directive No. 2561 for the immediate invasion of Yugoslavia and told Keitel and Jodl to work out that very evening the military plans. He instructed Ribbentrop to advise Hungary, Rumania and Italy that they would all get a slice of Yugoslavia, which would be divided up among them, except for a small Croatian puppet state.
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.
At dawn on April 6, his armies in overwhelming strength fell on Yugoslavia and Greece, smashing across the frontiers of Bulgaria, Hungary and Germany itself with all their armor and advancing rapidly against poorly armed defenders dazed by the usual preliminary bombing from the Luftwaffe.
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.
His blindness is all the more incomprehensible because his Balkan campaign had delayed the commencement of Barbarossa by several weeks and thereby jeopardized it. The conquest of Russia would have to be accomplished in a shorter space of time than originally planned. For there was an inexorable deadline: the Russian winter, which had defeated Charles XII and Napoleon.
At any rate, on April 30, when his armies had completed their conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece, Hitler set the new date for Barbarossa. It was to begin on June 22, 1941.
German soldiers guilty of breaking international law… will be excused.
Thus was the so-called “Commissar Order” issued;
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. With regard to offenses committed against enemy civilians by members of the Wehrmacht, prosecution is not obligatory even where the deed is at the same time a military crime or offense.
The first report late that evening of May 10 that Rudolf Hess had taken off alone for Scotland in a Messerschmitt-110 fighter plane hit Hitler, as Dr. Schmidt recalled, “as though a bomb had struck the Berghof.”
The Nazi–Soviet honeymoon was over. 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.
…Let me say one more thing, Duce. Since I struggled through to this decision, I again feel spiritually free. The partnership with the Soviet Union, in spite of the complete sincerity of our efforts to bring about a final conciliation, was nevertheless often very irksome to me, for in some way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts and my former obligations. I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.
It was not the first time that the Duce had been wakened from his sleep in the middle of the night by a message from his Axis partner, and he resented it. “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.”
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.
“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.
Several generals, Guderian, Blumentritt and Sepp Dietrich among them, have left reports expressing 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.
“Hopes of victory,” Kleist said, “were largely built on the prospect that the invasion would produce a political upheaval in Russia… Too high hopes were built on the belief that Stalin would be overthrown by his own people if he suffered heavy defeats. The belief was fostered by the Fuehrer’s political advisers.”
For the first time in more than two years of unbroken military victories the armies of Hitler were retreating before a superior force.
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. The words of the law have to be read to be believed.
By the end of that freezing month Halder was noting in his diary the cost in men of the misfired Russian adventure. 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.)
The Japanese onslaught on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor at 7:30 A.M. (local time) on Sunday, December 7, 1941, caught Berlin as completely by surprise as it did Washington.
Silence at last settled on the snow-covered, blood-spattered shambles of the battlefield. At 2:46 P.M. on February 2 a German reconnaissance plane flew high over the city and radioed back: “No sign of any fighting at Stalingrad.”
Except for some 20,000 Rumanians and the 29,000 wounded who had been evacuated by air they were all that was left of a conquering army that had numbered 285,000 men two months before. The rest had been slaughtered. And of those 91,000 Germans who began the weary march into captivity that winter day, only 5,000 were destined ever to see the Fatherland again.
What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the Nation.
Stalingrad, wrote Walter Goerlitz, the German historian, in his work on the General Staff, “was a second Jena and was certainly the greatest defeat that a German army had ever undergone.”
But it was more than that. Coupled with El Alamein and the British-American landings in North Africa it marked the great turning point in World War II.
NO COMPREHENSIVE BLUEPRINT for the New Order was ever drawn up, but it is clear from the captured documents and from what took place that Hitler knew very well what he wanted it to be: a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people would be made the slaves of the German master race and whose “undesirable elements”—above all, the Jews, but also many Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them—would be exterminated.
What the nations [Himmler continued] can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves to our Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only in so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished…
We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here.
When the German troops first entered Russia they were in many places hailed as liberators by a population long ground down and terrorized by Stalin’s tyranny.
He did not mind, he said, that the Russians had ordered partisan warfare behind the German lines; “it enables us to eradicate everyone who opposes us.”
