Hitler

subordinates and the party leadership were fully in the picture about the extermination of the Jews, had been – there can be no doubt about it – carried out with Hitler’s approval. The very next day, after listening to Himmler, the Gauleiter were ordered to attend the Wolf ’s Lair to hear Hitler himself give an account of the state of the war. That the Führer would speak explicitly on the ‘Final Solution’ was axiomatically ruled out. But he could now take it for granted that they understood there was no way out. Their knowledge underlined their complicity. ‘The entire German people know,’ Hitler had told the Reichs- and Gauleiter, ‘that it is a matter of whether they exist or do not exist. The bridges have been destroyed behind them. Only the way forward remains.’
    When (for the last time, as it turned out) Hitler addressed the party’s Old Guard in Munich’s Löwenbräukeller on the putsch anniversary, 8 November, he was as defiant as ever. There would be no capitulation, no repeat of 1918, he declared once again – the nightmare of that year indelibly imprinted on his psyche – and no undermining of the front by subversion at home. Any overheard subversive or defeatist remark, it was clear, would cost the person making it his or her head.
    By this time – though of course he made no hint of it in his speech – Hitler was anxious about a looming new grave military threat, one which, if not repulsed, would result in Germany’s destruction: what he took to be the certainty of an invasion in the west during the comingyear. ‘The danger in the east remains,’ ran his preamble to his Directive No. 51 on 3 November, ‘but a greater danger is looming in the west: the Anglo-Saxon landing! … If the enemy succeeds here in breaking through our defence on a broad front, the consequences within a short time are unforeseeable. Everything suggests that the enemy, at the latest in spring but perhaps even earlier, will move to attack the western front of Europe.’
    To his military advisers, on 20 December, he said he was certain that the invasion would take place some time after mid-February or early March. The next months would be spent in preparation for the coming great assault in the west. This, Hitler remarked, would ‘decide the war’.

24
Hoping for Miracles
    I
    ‘The year 1944 will make tough and severe demands of all Germans. The course of the war, in all its enormity, will reach its critical point during this year. We are fully confident that we will successfully surmount it.’ This, and the prospect of new cities rising resplendently after the war from the bombed-out ruins, was all Hitler had to offer readers of his New Year proclamation in 1944. Fewer than ever of them were able to share his confidence. For the embattled soldiers at the front, Hitler’s message was no different. The military crisis of 1943 had been brought about, he told them, by sabotage and treachery by the French in North Africa and the Italians following the overthrow of Mussolini. But the greatest crisis in German history had been triumphantly mastered. However hard the fighting in the east had been, ‘Bolshevism has not achieved its goal.’ He glanced at the western Allies, and at the future: ‘The plutocratic western world can undertake its threatened attempt at a landing where it wants: it will fail!’
    Since Germany had been forced on to the defensive, experiencing only setbacks, Hitler had not changed his tune. His stance had become immobilized, fossilized. In his view, the military disasters had been the consequence of betrayal, incompetence, disobedience of orders, and, above all, weakness. He conceded not a single error or misjudgement on his own part. No capitulation; no surrender; no retreat; no repeat of 1918; hold out at all costs, whatever the odds: this was the unchanging message. Alongside this went the belief – unshakeable (apart, perhaps, from his innermost thoughts and bouts of depression during sleepless nights) but an item of blind faith, not resting on reason – that the strength to hold out would eventually lead to a turning of the tide,and to Germany’s final victory. In public, he expressed his unfounded optimism through references to the grace of Providence. As he put it to his soldiers on 1 January 1944, after overcoming the defensive period then returning to the attack to impose devastating blows on the enemy, ‘Providence will bestow victory on the people that has done most