Hitler

other Nazi leaders. Their public statements combined pure faith and impure propaganda. But despite Halder’s outright condemnation – after the war – of Hitler’s ‘Halt Order’, not all military experts were so ready to interpret it as a catastrophic mistake. Kluge’s Chief of Staff, General Guenther Blumentritt, for instance, was prepared to acknowledge that the determination to stand fast was both correct and decisive in avoiding a much bigger disaster than actually occurred.
    Hitler’s early recognition of the dangers of a full-scale collapse of the front, and the utterly ruthless determination with which he resisted demands to retreat, probably did play a part in avoiding a calamity of Napoleonic proportions. But, had he been less inflexible, and paid greater heed to some of the advice coming from his field commanders, the likelihood is that the same end could have been achieved with far smaller loss of life. Moreover, stabilization was finally achieved only after he had relaxed the ‘Halt Order’ and agreed to a tactical withdrawal to form a new front line.
    The strains of the winter crisis had left their mark on Hitler. He was now showing unmistakable signs of physical wear and tear. Goebbels was shocked when he saw him in March. Hitler looked grey, and much aged. He admitted to his Propaganda Minister that he had for some time felt ill and often faint. The winter, he acknowledged, had also affected him psychologically. But he appeared to have withstood the worst. His confidence was, certainly to all outward appearances, undiminished. Hints, given in the autumn, of doubts at the outcome of the war, were no longer heard. Against what had seemed in the depths of the winter crisis almost insuperable odds, Germany was ready by spring to launch another offensive in the east.
    The war still had a long way to go. Certainly, the balance of forces at this juncture was by no means one-sided. And the course of events would undergo many vagaries before defeat for Germany appeared inexorable. But the winter of 1941–2 can nevertheless, in retrospect, be seen to be not merely a turning-point, but the beginning of the end. Though it would not become fully plain for some months, Hitler’s gamble, on which he had staked nothing less than the future of the nation, had disastrously failed.

21
Fulfilling the ‘Prophecy’
    I
    It was no accident that the war in the east led to genocide. The ideological objective of eradicating ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was central, not peripheral, to what had been deliberately designed as a ‘war of annihilation’. It was inseparably bound up with the military campaign. With the murderous onslaught of the Einsatzgruppen, backed by the Wehrmacht, launched in the first days of the invasion, the genocidal character of the conflict was already established. It would rapidly develop into an all-out genocidal programme, the like of which the world had never seen.
    Hitler spoke a good deal during the summer and autumn of 1941 to his close entourage in the most brutal terms imaginable, about his ideological aims in crushing the Soviet Union. During the same months, he also spoke on numerous occasions in his monologues in the Führer Headquarters – though invariably in barbaric generalizations – about the Jews. These were the months in which, out of the contradictions and lack of clarity of anti-Jewish policy, a programme to kill all the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe began to take concrete shape.
    In contrast to military affairs, where his repeated interference reflected his constant preoccupation with tactical minutiae and his distrust of the army professionals, Hitler’s involvement in ideological matters was less frequent and less direct. He had laid down the guidelines in March 1941. He needed to do little more. Self-combustion would see to it that, once lit, the genocidal fires would rage into a mighty conflagration amid the barbarism of the war to destroy ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. When it came to ideological aims, in contrast to military matters, Hitler had no need to worry that the ‘professionals’ would let him down. He could rest assured that Himmler and Heydrich, above all, would leave no stoneunturned in eliminating the ideological enemy once and for all. And he could be equally certain that they would find willing helpers at all levels among the masters of the new
Imperium
in the east, whether these belonged to the party, the police, or the civilian bureaucracy.