Hitler

up in 1940). The Red Army, joined by Romanian units, was now free to sweep across the Danube. The Wehrmacht, meanwhile, had lost 3 80,000 indispensable troops within a fortnight.
    Bulgaria, a country which since 1941 had played a careful diplomatic hand, was by this time hopelessly exposed. Soviet troops crossed its borders on 8 September (the USSR having declared war three days earlier), and on the same day Bulgaria rapidly switched sides and declared war on Germany. The German control over the entire Balkan region now held by the most slender of threads. The collapse of Romania and Bulgaria, followed by rapid Soviet occupation, meant the urgent withdrawal of German troops from Greece was imperative. This began in September. In mid-October British airborne troops were able to occupy Athens. By then, Tito’s partisan army was on the verge of entry into Belgrade. German troops were meanwhile engaged in the brutal suppression, finally accomplished by the end of October, of a rising, undertaken in the main by Soviet-inspired indigenous partisans alongside a sizeable minority of the 60,000-strong army, in the puppet state of Slovakia. Most important of all, from Hitler’s point of view, in thegathering mayhem in south-eastern Europe, Hungary, his chief ally but long wavering, had immediately following the volte-face in Romania begun urgent soundings for peace with the Soviet Union.
    In these same critical weeks, Hitler was also losing a vital ally in northern Europe. The danger signals about Finland’s position had been flashing brightly for months. On 2 September, State President Mannerheim informed Hitler that Finland was unable to continue the struggle. Relations were to be broken off immediately. German troops were to leave the country by 15 September. On 19 September, Finland signed an armistice with the Soviet Union.
    In these same momentous months, throughout the whole of August and September, the German leadership was also faced with suppressing the dangerous rising in Warsaw, which had begun on 1 August, two days after tanks of the Red Army had pushed into the suburbs of Warsaw on the east of the Vistula and Soviet radio had encouraged the city’s inhabitants to rise against their occupiers. The Poles were aware that they could reckon with little help from the western powers. But they were unprepared to be left in the lurch by the Soviet Union. However, the Red Army halted at the Vistula and did not enter the city while Stalin – cynically conscious of containing hopes of Polish independence in a post-war order – neither aided the Poles nor, until it was too late, facilitated attempts by the British and Americans to supply the insurgents with weapons and munitions.
    Unaware of Stalin’s ploy, the German Chief of Staff Guderian, fearing cooperation between the insurgents and the Red Army, asked Hitler to include Warsaw – still under the aegis of Hans Frank as Governor General – in the military zone of operations and place it thereby under Wehrmacht control. Hitler refused. Instead, he handed over full responsibility for the crushing of the rising to SS chief Himmler, who ordered the total destruction of Warsaw. Men, women, and children were slaughtered in their thousands while Warsaw burned. By the time General Bor-Komorowski, head of the Polish underground army, surrendered on 2 October, the savage repression had left Polish civilian victims numbering around 200,000. German losses amounted to some 26,000 men killed, wounded, or missing. On 11 October, Hans Frank received notification that all raw materials, textiles, and furniture left in Warsaw were to be removed before the smouldering remains of the city were razed to the ground.
    IV
    As the news from all parts of his empire turned from appalling to disastrous, Hitler fell ill. On 8 September, he complained to Morell, his doctor, of pressure around his right eye. In his notes, Morell indicated blood-pressure. Six days later, he recorded fluctuating blood-pressure ‘following great agitation’. Next day, 15 September, Morell noted: ‘Complains of dizziness, throbbing head, and return of the tremor to his legs, particularly the left, and hands.’ His left ankle was swollen. Again, ‘much agitation’ was registered by Morell. Hitler’s blood-pressure was regularly too high, sometimes worryingly so. It was an indication that he had a cardiac problem, and an electrocardiogram on 24 September did indicate progressive arteriosclerosis (though no