Hitler

the afternoons. Around 5 p.m. he would call in his secretaries for coffee. A special word of praise was bestowed on the one who could eat most cakes. The second military briefing, given by Jodl, followed at 6 p.m. The evening meal took place at 7.30 p.m., often lasting two hours. Afterwards there were films. The final part of the routine was the gathering of secretaries, adjutants, and guests for tea, to the accompaniment of Hitler’s late-night monologues. Those who could snatched a nap some time during the afternoon so they could keep their eyes open in the early hours. Sometimes, it was daylight by the time the nocturnal discussions came to an end.
    Hitler always sat in the same place at meals, with his back to the window, flanked by Press Chief Dietrich and Jodl, with Keitel, Bormann, and General Karl Heinrich Bodenschatz, Göring’s liaison officer, opposite him. Generals, staff officers, adjutants, Hitler’s doctors, and any guests visiting the Führer Headquarters made up the rest of the complement. The atmosphere was good in these early days, and not too formal. The mood at this time was still generally optimistic. Life in the FHQ had not yet reached the stage where it could be described by Jodl as half-way ‘between a monastery and a concentration camp’.
    Two of Hitler’s secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, had also accompanied him to his field headquarters. They had as good as nothing to do. Sleeping, eating, drinking, and chatting filled up most of their day. Much of their energy was spent trying to swat away a constant plague of midges. Hitler complained that his advisers who had picked the spot had chosen ‘the most swampy, midge-infested, and climatically unfavourable area for him’, and joked that he would have to send in the Luftwaffe on the midge-hunt. But ‘the chief ’ was generally in a good mood during the first part of the Russian campaign.
    As in Berlin or at the Berghof, a word during meals on one of Hitler’s favourite topics could easily trigger an hour-long monologue. In these early days, he usually faced a big map of the Soviet Union pinned to the wall. At the drop of a hat, he would launch into yet another harangue about the danger that Bolshevism signified for Europe, and how to wait another year would have been too late. On one occasion, his secretaries heard Hitler, as he stood in front of a big map of Europe, point to theRussian capital and say: ‘In four weeks we’ll be in Moscow. Moscow will be razed to the ground.’ Everything had gone much better than could have been imagined, he remarked. They had been lucky that the Russians had placed their troops on the borders and not pulled the German armies deep into their country, which would have caused difficulties with supplies. Two-thirds of the Bolshevik armed forces and five-sixths of the tanks and aircraft were destroyed or severely damaged, he told Goebbels, on the Propaganda Minister’s first visit to Führer Headquarters on 8 July. After assessing the military situation in detail with his Wehrmacht advisers, Goebbels noted, the Führer’s conclusion was ‘that the war in the East was in the main already won’. There could be no notion of peace terms with the Kremlin. (He would think differently about this only a month later.) Bolshevism would be wiped out and Russia broken up into its component parts, deprived of any intellectual, political, or economic centre. Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the east in a matter of weeks. He foresaw England’s fall ‘with a sleepwalker’s certainty’.
    News came in of 3,500 aircraft and over 1,000 Soviet tanks destroyed. But there was other news of fanatical fighting by Soviet soldiers who feared the worst if they surrendered. Hitler was to tell the Japanese Ambassador Oshima on 14 July that ‘our enemies are not human beings any more, they are beasts’. It was, then, doubtless echoing her ‘chief’ and the general atmosphere in FHQ, when Christa Schroeder remarked to a friend that ‘from all previous experience it can be said to be a fight against wild animals’.
    Hitler had permitted no Wehrmacht reports during the very first days of the campaign. But Sunday, 29 June – a week after the attack had started – was, as Goebbels described it, ‘the day of the special announcements’. Twelve of them altogether, each introduced by the ‘Russian Fanfare’ based on Liszt’s ‘Les Préludes’, were broadcast, beginning at 11 a.m. that