Hitler

value of antisemitism. He told his Gauleiter in early May that antisemitism, as propagated by the party in earlier years, had once more to become the core message. He held out hopes of its spreadin Britain. Antisemitic propaganda had, he said, to begin from the premiss that the Jews were the leaders of Bolshevism and prominent in western plutocracy. The Jews had to get out of Europe. This had constantly to be repeated in the political conflict built into the war. In his meetings with Antonescu and Horthy, Hitler was speaking, as always, for effect. As we have noted, he hoped to bind his wavering Axis partners closer to the Reich through complicity in the persecution of the Jews.
    Though satisfied with the outcome of his talks with Antonescu, Hitler felt he had failed to make an impact on Horthy. Horthy had put forward what Hitler described – only from his perspective could they be seen as such – as ‘humanitarian counter-arguments’. Hitler naturally dismissed them. As Goebbels summarized it, Hitler said: ‘Towards Jewry there can be no talk of humanity. Jewry must be cast down to the ground.’
    Earlier in the spring, Ribbentrop, picking up on fears expressed by Axis partners about their future under German domination, had put to Hitler loose notions of a future European federation. How little ice this cut with the Dictator can be seen from his reactions to his April meetings with heads of state and government – particularly the unsatisfactory discussion with Horthy. He drew the conclusion, he told the Gauleiter in early May, that the ‘small-state rubbish’ should be ‘liquidated as soon as possible’. Europe must have a new form – but this could only be under German leadership. ‘We live today,’ he went on, ‘in a world of destroying and being destroyed.’ He expressed his certainty ‘that the Reich will one day be master of the whole of Europe’, paving the way for world domination. He hinted at the alternative. ‘The Führer paints a shocking picture for the Reichs- and Gauleiter of the possibilities facing the Reich in the event of a German defeat. Such a defeat must therefore never find a place in our thoughts. We must regard it from the outset as impossible and determine to fight it to the last breath.’
    Speaking to Goebbels on 6 May in Berlin, where he had come to attend the state funeral of SA-Chief Viktor Lutze (who had been killed in a car accident), Hitler accepted that the situation in Tunis was ‘fairly hopeless’. The inability to get supplies to the troops meant there was no way out. Goebbels summarized the way Hitler was thinking: ‘When you think that 150,000 of our best young people are still in Tunis, you rapidly get an idea of the catastrophe threatening us there. It’ll be on the scale of Stalingrad, and certainly also produce the harshest criticism among the German people.’ But when he spoke the next day to theReichs- and Gauleiter, Hitler never mentioned Tunis, making no reference at all to the latest news that Allied troops had penetrated as far as the outskirts of the city and that the harbour was already in British hands.
    Axis troops were, in fact, by then giving themselves up in droves. Within a week, on 13 May, almost a quarter of a million of them – the largest number taken so far by the Allies, around half of them German, the remainder Italian – surrendered. Only about 800 managed to escape. North Africa was lost. The catastrophe left the Italian Axis partner reeling. For Mussolini, the writing was on the wall. But for Hitler, too, the defeat was nothing short of calamitous. One short step across the Straits of Sicily by the Allies would mean that the fortress of Europe was breached through its southern underbelly.
    In the Atlantic, meanwhile, the battle was in reality lost, even if it took some months for this to become fully apparent. The resignation on 30 January 1943 as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of Grand-Admiral Raeder, exponent of what Hitler had come to recognize as an outmoded naval strategy based upon a big surface battle fleet, and his replacement by Karl Dönitz, protagonist of the U-boat, had signalled an important shift in priorities. Hitler told his Gauleiter on 7 May that the U-boat was the weapon to cut through the arteries of the enemy. But, in fact, that very month forty-one U-boats carrying 1,336 men had been lost in the Atlantic – the highest losses in any single month during the war – and the number of vessels in