Hitler

also favoured an early strike, he went on. Revolution from within was impossible. And behind the army stood the strongest armaments industry in the world. Hitler said he was now gambling all he had achieved on victory. At stake was who was to dominate Europe in the future. His decision was unalterable, Hitler went on. ‘I shall attack France and England at the most favourable and earliest moment. Breach of the neutrality of Belgium and Holland is of no importance. No one will question that when we have won …’ His final point was the psychological readiness of the German people. With an eye on the possible deterioration of the backing he had from the German people, he now told the military: ‘I want to annihilate the enemy. Behind me stands the German people, whose morale can only grow worse.’
    Hitler had been right in his speech: no revolution could be expected from within. Heydrich’s police-state ruled that out. But it was not only a matter of repression. Alongside the ruthlessness of the regime towards internal opponents stood the widespread basic consensus reaching across most of society behind much of what the regime had undertaken and, in particular, what were taken to be the remarkable achievements of Hitler himself. Elser’s bomb had merely brought a renewed demonstration of his popularity. Meanwhile, the internal opposition was resigned to being unable to act. The navy and Luftwaffe were behind Hitler. The army leadership would, whatever its reservations, fulfil its duty. The division of the generals, coupled with their pronounced sense of duty even when they held a course of action to be disastrous, was Hitler’s strength.
    Nothing could stop the western offensive. Hitler was by now obsessed with ‘beating England’. It was purely a matter of when, not if, the attack on the West would take place. After further short-term postponements, on 16 January 1940 Hitler finally put it off until the spring.
    The war was set to continue, and to widen. Also set to escalate was the barbarism that was an intrinsic part of it. At home the killings in the asylums were mounting into a full-scale programme of mass murder. In Poland, the grandiose resettlement schemes presided over by Himmler and Heydrich were seeing the brutal uprooting and deportation of tens of thousands of Poles and Jews into the ‘dumping-ground’ of the GeneralGovernment. Not least, the centre-point of the ‘racial cleansing’ mania, the ‘removal’ of the Jews, was farther from solution than ever now that over 2 million Polish Jews had fallen into the hands of the Nazis. In December Goebbels reported to Hitler on his recent visit to Poland. The Führer, he recorded, listened carefully to his account and agreed with his views on the ‘Jewish and Polish question’. ‘The Jewish danger must be banished from us. But in a few generations it will reappear. There’s no panacea.’
    Evidently, no ‘complete solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ was yet in sight. The constant quest to find such a ‘panacea’ by Nazi underlings working directly or indirectly ‘towards the Führer’ would nevertheless ensure that, in the conquered and subjugated territories of the east, a ‘solution’ would gradually begin to emerge before long.

18
Zenith of Power
    I
    Hitler had placed the Reich in a quandary. The war could not be ended. That was now a decision out of Germany’s control, unless Britain could be forced to the conference table or militarily defeated. But neither militarily, as the chiefs of the armed forces made plain, nor economically, as every indicator demonstrated, was Germany equipped at this stage to fight the long war with which, it was known, the British were already reckoning. The Wehrmacht had entered into hostilities in autumn 1939 with no well-laid plans for a major war, and no strategy at all for an offensive in the West. Nothing at all had been clearly thought through. The Luftwaffe was the best equipped of the three branches of the armed forces. But even here, the armaments programme had been targeted at 1942, not 1939. The navy’s operational planning was based upon a fleet that could not be ready before 1943. In fact, the 1939 Z-Plan – halted at the start of the war – would leave Germany with severe limitations at sea until 1946. And within the confines of that plan, the building of U-boats necessary for an economic blockade of Britain was deliberately neglected by Hitler in favour of the interests of the