Hitler's Gamble
Historian and scholar now teaching at Christ Church, Oxford, H. TREVOR-ROPERhas established himself as a leading British authority on the Nazi regime and especially on those fateful final months. He has made a thorough study of the captured German documents as the author of The Last Days of Hitler and Hitler’s Secret Conversations. In this essay he discusses the most deep-seated of the Führer’s resolutions, a course of action towards which Hitler’s thoughts had been pointing ever since his imprisonment in 1923.
by H. TREVOR-ROPER
1
ON June 22, 1941, suddenly, without, warning, Adolf Hitler hurled his armies across the borders of his ally and accomplice in crime, Soviet Russia. It was the high moment of his career: the long-awaited, long-prepared, long-postponed— but no longer postponable — adventure whose success, he thought, would give stability and significance as nothing else could to the New Order in Europe, but whose failure was, more than any other cause, to spell the final, costly ruin of his vast ambitions. If any single moment in Hitler’s career is to be isolated as crucial, it is surely this.
There had been other moments of bold decision in that career of hazardous gambling and brilliant coups: the seizure of power in 1933, the purge of Roehm and the SA in June, 1934, the seizure of the Rhineland in 1936, the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, the Munich crisis, the attack on Poland; but these were all, in a sense, subordinate crises. Failure in any of them might indeed have spelled ruin to Hitler’s career, but success would not have been, and was not, final: it merely marked the turning of another corner, the passing of another milestone, on the road to the New Order.
The invasion of Russia was far more than this: it was the last great decision, the culmination of a whole career, the inauguration of a new era. Had Hitler succeeded in that desperate gamble, all future decisions would have been, in his eyes, minor, almost routine matters; indeed, his declaration of war on America six months later, in the wake of his Japanese allies, was announced as a mere routine matter, like the renewal or the nonrenewal of a treaty. As it was, he failed, and all his decisions thereafter were of a defensive nature. His philosophy left no room, after such a decision, for anything but mopping-up operations — or disaster.
But first, before I elaborate such a theme, let me state clearly my position, for some will certainly contest it. Indeed, they have already done so. It has been said that Hitler’s real war was against the West; that he declared war against Russia only in order to break the blockade imposed upon Germany by the West; that the war against Russia was in fact an irrelevant, perhaps even an unwelcome, tactical necessity in that more serious struggle against the West to which, after the swift completion of this diversionary Eastern campaign, Hitler intended to return with renewed vigor and refreshed supplies. And if it is pointed out that Hitler in 1941 did openly declare that this was the crucial moment of his career, indeed of modern history, then other critics will reply that, in those circumstances, it would be surprising if he had not done so. Had he not earlier spoken of the decisive struggle with France? Would he not later speak of the decisive struggle with America? In fact, is it not possible that Hitler had a series of interchangeable philosophies, each to be paraded before his hearers as the opportunism of his policy required?
I do not think that either of these theories is valid. I do not think either that Hitler’s real struggle was against the West or that he was a pure opportunist; but I think that such theories ought to be examined before they are dismissed.
We cannot reject all of Hitler’s statements as false. Our task therefore is to discover a criterion of selection. I believe that such a criterion can be found. I suggest that Hitler’s statements concerning his policy and philosophy are to be believed, provided that they are not only explicable by the tactical circumstances in which they were uttered but are also consistent both with a general philosophy regularly expressed even in adverse circumstances, and with practical long-term preparations which he can be shown to have made. Now if we apply this criterion, I believe that all the other philosophies and programs which Hitler from time to time uttered are found to be temporary tactical expedients only, while the philosophy and program of Eastern conquest proves to be the permanent message and ultimate aim of his career.
2
TAKE France. In 1923, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he declared summarily that “France must be annihilated,” and much play has been made with that — for Hitler— hackneyed phrase. But what were the circumstances in which those words were written? In 1923 France dominated Europe; by its Eastern alliance, the Little Entente, it enclosed Germany not only on the west but on the east, blocking any expansion. As Göring explained to the American ambassador in 1937, “the sole cause of friction between Germany and France” was France’s “policy of building up alliances in Eastern Europe to prevent Germany from achieving her legitimate aims.” Once that system of alliances was broken, Hitler would be almost indulgent to France, for France would then be merely a nuisance in his rear when he faced to the East. As such it was conquered in 1940, but it was not “annihilated.”It became a satellite, not a victim, of Germany.
Similarly England. In 1940, when he was seeking to draw Spain into complicity in his Mediterranean campaign, Hitler did indeed represent England as his ultimate enemy and the British Empire as the ultimate booty to be shared. The visiting Spanish Foreign Minister was treated to discourse about “Eurafrica” as the new continental unit to be dominated, in part, by the Latin powers. A little later, when he was seeking to lull Russia into quiescence, Hitler dangled before Molotov other morsels of this gigantic quarry. “After the conquest of England,” he said, “the British Empire would be apportioned as a huge world-wide estate in bankruptcy of forty million square kilometres. . . . All
the countries which could possibly be interested in this bankrupt estate would have to stop all controversies among themselves and concentrate on the partition of the British Empire.” Germany’s ambitions, Molotov was assured, lay exclusively in Central Africa “in the region of the former German colonies.” Would Russia care for India?
The next year, when the German armies invaded not Africa but Russia, Hitler naturally explained to Mussolini and to the German naval command — both dismayed at this enormous diversion — that the invasion was actually the quickest way to defeat the real enemy, Britain. But all these can be regarded as special arguments for special occasions. Is there any evidence that Hitler had long-term plans for the conquest of the British Empire?
The answer is, none at all. Throughout his career — except when he was advancing these special arguments—Hitler regarded Britain as irrelevant to his designs. That does not mean that he could ignore Britain, for there was always the danger that Britain would choose to intervene between him and those designs; but he constantly hoped that Britain could be persuaded, or frightened, into nonintervention. Would not Britain be content with a maritime empire? Hitler was prepared to “guarantee” such an empire. What interest had Britain, he asked, in Eastern Europe? What hope of effectively interfering there?
In Mein Kampf, and again in the lost book on foreign policy which he wrote in 1925, Hitler expressed his dream of a British alliance which would neutralize French opposition and make possible the German conquest of the East. The war which broke out in the West in 1939 was declared by Britain. Hitler would have done anything to avoid this tedious diversion in his rear. To the last minute he had offered to “accept the British Empire,” and often afterwards he declared himself ready to repeat that offer. Britain and Germany, he always declared, were compatible powers. The war in the West in 1939 was, as far as Hitler was concerned, an unwanted war.
Further, although Hitler sometimes spoke largely about the dismemberment of the British Empire, there is no evidence that he had ever made any specific plans concerning it. Like Bismarck, he despised colonies. It was the crime and folly of the Kaiser’s ministers, he said in 1923, “instead of a sound policy of territorial expansion in Europe,” to have chased the mirage of overseas colonies. “We will not copy liberal capitalist policies which rely on exploiting colonies,” he said in 1937. If he occasionally seemed to claim colonies from Britain, it was only in order to be a nuisance — in order, like Bismarck, to be paid for abandoning such claims.
How different was Hitler’s attitude to Russia! There was a period of agreement, of course—in 1939-1941 — but it was a reluctant and treacherous agreement, and it was with a cry of relief that Hitler finally jettisoned this irksome expedient, so contrary to “my whole past, my ideas, and my previous obligations.”
The policy of agreement with Russia over the dead body of Poland had a respectable history in Germany, but it had always been the policy of the Army, the monarchists, the Prussians, never of the South German nationalists from whose ranks Hitler had sprung. It entailed a revival of the old imperial frontiers, the frontiers of 1914; but to be content with those frontiers, Hitler had declared in Mein Kampf, was “a glaring political absurdity, positively criminal in its consequences.” And in 1934 he stated: “I am not in the least interested in the former frontiers of the Reich. The re-creation of the pre-war Germany is not a task worthy of our revolution.” Therefore, except in the period of tactical necessity between 1939 and 1941, Hitler had consistently repudiated it. His constant message had been that Germany must transcend those ridiculous, accidental, dynastic boundaries in order to conquer and colonize Western Russia: there lay Germany’s “colonies,” there its “living-space.”
It was not only in the years of triumph — in 1941-1942, when fulfillment seemed possible — that he had uttered this doctrine. He had uttered it in 1920, when Germany was defeated and dismembered. Then he had publicly praised (in comparison with the cruel Diktat of Versailles.) the “infinite humanity” of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, whereby Germany had seized the richest provinces and some 50 per cent of the productive capacity of Russia. He had uttered it again from his Bavarian prison, in 1923, when the German Communists came nearest to making Germany a Russian province. And he would utter it once more as his valedictory message to the world before taking his own life in his underground bunker while the Russians stormed their way into the ruins of Berlin.
3
IF Hitler’s program of Russian conquest and colonization thus represents not a temporary, makeshift manifesto of 1941 but a constant purt of his philosophy, it corresponds, as his other more opportunist declarations of policy do not, to the long-term practical organization of the Third Reich. For whereas, when Hitler received the declaration of war by Britain or perfunctorily announced his declaration of war on America, he had no clear plans or machinery for the conquest or disposal of those countries, for the conquest of Russia he had not only an army and a policy but also a specially indoctrinated elite, the SS.
To us in the West the SS appeared merely as a particularly brutal kind of police; the basis and purpose of this brutality eluded us. But the more the organization of the SS and the personality of its leader, Heinrich Himmler, are studied, the more obvious it becomes that the SS was not a mere engine of coercion at home: it was also the special formation destined to push the new Germanic Empire to the Urals and hold it there forever. The SS were Hitler s crusaders; they were a religious order, like the Teutonic Knights of the Middle Ages. Himmler himself, the mystical apostle of Eastern conquest, was described by Hitler as “our Ignatius de Loyola.” It was with Himmler, he said, that the SS, from being mere toughs, became “that extraordinary body of men, devoted to an idea, loyal unto death"; and the idea to which they were devoted was the idea of the German Empire in the East. Hence the numerous departments of the SS whose concern was with colonization: the Lebensborn, or Fountain of Life, which sought by sponsored procreation to increase the supply of colonists; the SS Race and Settlement Office; the “cultural” departments which collected evidence of such German colonization in the past to justify its repetition in the future.
This crusading quality of the SS was recognized even by its enemies. In its body, declared Ulrich von Hassell, the diarist of the conservative opposition, there lurked, in strange confusion, two souls: on the one hand an idealism, a hatred of Bolshevism abroad and the corruption of the Party bureaucracy at home; on the other hand a sectarian barbarism. This barbarism, this cruelty of the SS, was moreover inseparable from its Eastern mission. Hitler’s war in the West was, comparatively speaking, a gentlemanly war; there the laws and conventions of war were observed. But the war in the East, he always insisted, was different; it was an “ideological” war, a war of extermination. And behind the German armies there advanced, independent, uncontrolled by the General Staff, responsible only to Himmler, the exterminating forces of the SS. The SS outrages which we saw and shuddered at, at Lidice or Oradour-sur-Glane, were merely the intrusions into our “gentlemanly” war of the regular features of the ideological Eastern struggle. Publicly, of course, the idealism of the SS was directed against Bolshevism, just as the idealism of the medieval crusaders was directed against Islam; but ultimately, in both cases, it aimed or was directed at the conquest of territory. Hitler had no fundamental hatred of Bolshevism; he admired the “genius” of Stalin, whom he recognized as a worthy rival in tyranny, and he openly expressed his preference for Communists over aristocrats, for Spanish Reds over the renegade Fascist Franco. His real hatred was not for Communism but for Russians, and the real crime of the Russians was not their doctrine but their occupation of the “living-space” which he coveted for Germany.
Thus the war against Russia, unlike the war against England or France or America, had behind it not merely a manifesto but a plan, a program, a policy. It also had a philosophy. For Hitler in his crude, half-baked, imperious way was a philosopher, forcing arbitrarily chosen, half-digested facts into a rigid totalitarian system as ruthlessly and tyrannically as he forced recalcitrant but overborne nations into his New Order. The roots of this philosophy lay scattered and various in the intellectual soil of Germany: its taproot in the theory of the will of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, the geopolitics of Haushofer, the cyclical history of Spengler; its casual suckers in the nationalist froth of Viennese and Bavarian journalism, the cynical anticlericalism of Frederick the Great, and the decomposing litter of miscellaneous pseudoscientific dogmas. But by the time it had been through Hitler’s crude, powerful mind, it had acquired a grim, systematic simplicity, and from the first record that we have of it, in Mein Kampf, to the last and fullest expression of it, nearly twenty years later in the record of his Table-Talk, it never changed.
Hitler, like Spengler, saw history as a series of almost geological ages, each characterized by a special “culture” and separated from the others by crucial periods of transition in which the old era, the old culture, gave way to the new. There had been the ancient era of Mediterranean culture, the medieval era of frustrated Germanic culture, the post-Renaissance era of wicked capitalist culture dominated by the maritime powers; and now at last—did not all the omens show it? — that era had in turn reached its fatal period and must be replaced by a new. But what would this new era be? Whose culture would dominate it? How would it be brought to birth out of the dying convulsions of the old?
To all these questions Hitler had thought out his answer. The new era would be a “geopolitical" era, for the conquest of space had rendered the old maritime empires obsolete— that was why he could afford to “guarantee” the irrelevant British Empire. It would be dominated—the geopoliticians had said so — by whoever dominated the mass of Central and Eastern Europe. That might, of course, mean the Russians, who were more numerous, powerfully organized under a totalitarian genius whom he admired, and already there. But Hitler did not want it to be the Russians: he wanted it to be the Germans; therefore, in answer to the third question, he declared that it would come about not by a natural economic process but by a violent change, a crusading war of conquest and colonization, a war of giants in which he, the demiurge of the new age, would by sheer human will power reverse the seeming inevitability of history and plant upon conquered Eurasia that German culture which would dominate the world for the next thousand years.
Such was the vast, crude vision which inspired Hitler’s demonic career — the vision for the sake of which he had revolutionized and rearmed Germany, ruthlessly and cunningly solved all intervening problems, created an elite of mystical crusaders, and now, in June, 1941, suddenly launched what would be for him the ultimate, the only relevant campaign: the Armageddon that was to decide, not petty questions of frontiers or governments, but the whole next era of human history.
4
BUT why, we may ask, did Hitler choose to launch his campaign at that time? Why, in particular, did he challenge Russia while Britain was still unconquered? Often before he had stated that he would never, like “the fools of 1914-1918,” involve Germany in a war on two fronts: yet this is what he did, and did deliberately, in 1941. Why did he do it?
The answer is, I think, that Hitler had miscalculated. His miscalculation was not in respect of Russia; indeed, the invasion of Russia was carried out according to plan. His miscalculation was in respect of Britain. His error was not in 1941: it was in 1939.
For to Hitler, obsessed by the great crusade which he was to launch against Russia — the be-all and end-all of his policy — and negligent of the West, which he underrated and failed to understand, the timing of the Eastern Armageddon was of crucial importance. Convinced that only he was capable of reversing the course of history, of carrying through “the Cyclopean task which the building of an Empire means for a single man,”he was determined that the Russian war must come quickly, in his own lifetime, before chance or the assassin round the corner—“some idiot" with a bomb — should, by removing him from control, ruin forever the prospect of a millennial Reich.
Moreover, there were other reasons for haste — reasons of finance and population. The huge German armed forces were expensive to maintain, their weapons would become obsolete with delay; the Nazi movement and its leadership were aging, the birth rate declining. On the other hand, the Russian population was increasing, Russian industry was expanding; in ten or fifteen years Russia would be “the mightiest state in the world,” invincible for centuries. Therefore, Hitler had declared in 1937, “it is certain that we can wait no longer. . . . If the Füthrer is still living, then it will be his irrevocable decision to solve the German space-problem no later than 1943-5. . . . After that date we can only expect a change for the worse.” If Hitler had merely contemplated war against the West, which he supposed was in decay, then there would have been no such hurry, no such pressing timetable; it was the Eastern war which had its fixed, essential hour and could not wait.
Unfortunately for Hitler, East and West were not so easily separable. It was all very well to say that the West was irrelevant, or secondary, or could wait; but suppose the Western powers did not choose to wait? Hitler could not attack Russia without first crossing the lesser countries of Eastern Europe, the client-states of France. How would France and England react to that German conquest of Poland and Czechoslovakia which must precede the attack on Russia?
In 1938 and 1939 Hitler had wrestled with this problem. At Munich he seemed to have solved it, but still the British position seemed ambiguous; Czechoslovakia, the ally of France, had gone, but Poland now had a British guarantee. Nevertheless, in 1939 Hitler decided he could wait no longer.
Hitler did not (as has so often been said) rely on British neutrality; he never blinded himself as Ribbentrop did. “The Führer,” he declared in May, 1939, “doubts the possibility of a peaceful settlement with England. We must prepare ourselves for the conflict. . . . England is the driving force against Germany,” and he enumerated grimly the strength of the British people, a people “proud, courageous, tenacious, firm in resistance, gifted as organisers,”lovers of adventure, accustomed to power, rich in financial sources, protected by “strong sea-power and a courageous air-force.” Naturally he hoped for British neutrality; for if Britain could be frightened into neutrality, then the road to the East lay wide-open to him; but if not — if Britain challenged him over Poland— then the challenge must be accepted and both Britain and France be crushed so quickly that the essential Eastern timetable could still be kept and Russia still be conquered in the brief period before it was too late. This was the risk which Hitler took when, in September, 1939, he threw his armies into Poland and left the Western Powers to make up their minds whether they would declare war or not.
We know the result: they did. And having conquered Poland, it was essential for Hitler to defeat them quickly and reduce them to terms; for the East was calling. Already the Russians were advancing into Eastern Poland, hammering at the gates of Finland, swallowing up the Baltic states. Hitler crushed France quickly, but England he could not crush. Irreducible by sea or from the air, the obstinate island remained unconquerable and irreconcilable. Hitler tried force, he tried threats, he tried bribes. He offered peace terms, he menaced ruin. He tried direct invasion in the Mediterranean. He tried to enlist Spain, dangling before it the visionary prospect of Gibraltar; he tried to make his next victims his accomplices, dangling before the Russians the rich bait of India; he tried to enlist the Japanese, dangling before them the Eastern Gibraltar, Singapore. He was even prepared to put at the disposal of the Japanese his unique military knowledge: “the Führer,” they were informed by Ribbentrop, “who must certainly be considered the greatest strategist of modern times, would advise Japan on the best method of attacking Singapore.” All was of no avail. Neither the Spaniards nor the Russians nor the Japanese would oblige; the British remained undefeated. Yet the Eastern campaign could not wait. Already, from August, 1940, the German Army General Staff had been working on the plans. Hitler could postpone it no longer. If he waited to conquer England, it might be too late. Had not Winston Churchill said that England would go on fighting, “possibly for months, possibly for years”? What was Hitler to do?
There was one thing he could do: he could behave as if England were already conquered. If the German Army, for all its strength, could not reach England, equally there was no immediate danger that the British Army, defeated and disarmed, could invade the Continent. Therefore, after his failure to defeat England in 1940, Hitler felt that he could safely keep to his plans. It would not really be a two-front war, for the Western front was in abeyance and would be in abeyance for a long time. During that long time, the great Russian crusade could be launched and the conquest of Eurasia completed. After that, England would surely recognize the futility of further resistance and wind up the irrelevant Western war. After all, Hitler did not want anything from England. He would give generous terms. “If the British were to come to me tomorrow,” he said in August, 1942, “and propose peace on the basis that each of us bore his own costs, I should most probably agree. . . .”The conquest of the East would already have given Germany all that it required. The ultimate purpose of his life would have been attained. “Gains in the West may add a measure of charm to our possessions . . . but our Eastern conquests are infinitely more precious, for they are the foundations of our very existence.”
This was the line of reasoning Hitler adopted. Rather than postpone the unpostponable war with Russia, he preferred to leave unterminated the interminable war with England. On November 12, 1940—the same day on which he was receiving
Molotov in Berlin and seeking to chloroform him with vague promises—he gave orders to “continue all preparations already verbally ordered for the East.”Plan Barbarossa, the crusade, was to begin.
5
ONCE this great decision of policy had been reached, only the details had to be arranged. One detail was the date. Hitler originally hoped to launch his attack on May 15, but here an unfortunate incident intervened. To Mussolini, Hitler’s Russian projects were of course of no interest; he only wanted pickings out of the British Empire in the Mediterranean and a suzerainty over the Balkans. Although he was kept in the dark about Plan Barbarossa, he was extremely chagrined by some heavy-handed German interventions in the Balkans which were preliminaries to it. He decided to take his revenge on Hitler by a show of independence. “Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli,” he told Ciano; “this time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the papers that I have occupied Greece.”
Unfortunately what Hitler was to find out was not that Mussolini had occupied Greece but that he was being roundly defeated by the Greeks. The whole Balkan Peninsula, which Hitler thought that he had firmly settled as a necessary preliminary to Barbarossa, was in flames; worse still, the Western enemy, Britain, driven out of the Continent at Dunkirk, might now creep hack through the Piraeus. Hitler had no time for long recriminations; it was essential to liquidate the new theater quickly.
A brisk reproof to the Duce (“He fairly smacked my fingers,” Mussolini ruefully admitted) and the Führer took charge of Balkan affairs. Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was summoned to Berlin and bought by the offer of spoils from his innocent neighbor; when Yugoslavia revolted against the infamous pact, it was terribly punished. The British were driven out of Greece. And when the peace of the grave had been imposed on the Balkan Peninsula, Mussolini was paid back, as he had tried to pay back Hitler, “in his own coin.” At three o’clock in the morning he was awakened to receive a long letter from Hitler explaining that the German armies were now invading Russia. The Balkan interlude had postponed the attack for five weeks, no more. A year later Hitler looked back and congratulated himself on having forced the Russian war so promptly. “Stalin,” he declared, with that grudging admiration which he could never conceal, “is half beast, half giant ... if we had given him another ten years, Europe would have been swept away, as in the time of the Huns. . . .”
Thus the Wehrmacht rolled into Russia. It rolled, as it seemed, irresistibly. Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev all came into the range of battle: the symbolic city, the evacuated capital, the incomparable riches of the Ukraine. Behind the Wehrmacht came the SS; behind the warriors the priests of the New Order, with their fire and their fagots, their holy books and horrible ritual. “Within the area of operations,” Hitler commanded, “the Reichsführer SS is entrusted, on behalf of the Führer, with special tasks for the preparation of the political administration, tasks arising from the struggle which must be carried out between two opposing systems. Within the range of these tasks, the Reichsführer SS shall act independently and under his own responsibility.” And behind the armies and the SS, at his new Eastern headquarters —first in East Prussia, later in the Ukraine itself — the prophet and war lord who for twenty years had lived for this moment triumphantly envisaged the realization of his dreams. Before the winter, he was confident, all European Russia would be his, and the great work of colonization would begin.
Gleefully, as he sat over his tea and cakes, he outlined the New Order that now at last would be established as the basis, for a thousand years, of the Greater German Reich. Over a native population reduced to hewers of wood and drawers of water, the German Herrenvolk, in sole command of all the resources of the country and proud with “that self-assurance which is born of vast spaces,” would rule in undisputed, indisputable mastery. They alone would control the strategic cities and the fortresses, the communications and the factories, the great new Autobahnen which they would build and the great productive estates which they would seize. And below them the abject natives, unarmed and illiterate, taught only enough German to read road signs and understand orders and to know that Berlin is the capital of the world, taught contraception to reduce the birth rate and denied hospitals or vaccination to increase the death rate, unable to compete, unable to resist, doomed to dwindle, would provide a starved, submissive, scattered supply of Slavonic helots, sustaining the wealth and “culture” of their Teutonic lords. Thus the new German Empire would be a self-contained, self-sufficient continent, “an impregnable fortress, safe from all threat of blockade.” Autarchy would make it unassailable from without, tyranny would make it irreversible from within; it would be “a closed society, like a fortress”; why should it not last forever?
A dreadful millennium! Could it ever have been established? It is easy to say that it could not — that the Russian steppes and the Russian population, even if conquered, would gradually have absorbed their conquerors; that the phase of brutality and the priests of it would have passed with the circumstances that had called them forth. The Israelites settled down among the men of Canaan. Tyrannies soften with time; men cannot live always at fanatical tension, and the most monolithic ruling class is specialized into groups and splits into parties long before a thousand years. On the other hand, is not this what was said of Nazism in its earlier days — that its excesses were the irresponsible excesses of opposition, that it would be mellowed by power, that the old Germany would absorb and tame the new?
We cannot say confidently that Hitler’s New Order could not have been realized in Eastern Europe; all we can say is that it was not. Hitler misjudged the strength of Russia. Confident that he could annihilate its armies and its political structure in a few months, he did not even prepare for a winter campaign. His armies had to struggle for four winters in the Russian snows. After the first of them he told Goebbels that he never wanted to see snow again, it had become “physically repulsive” to him. “Bormann,” he declared on another occasion, “you know I’ve always detested snow, now I know why: it was a presentiment.” Like Napoleon, he was to see enough of the Russian snow. And meanwhile, while his armies struggled year after year in those hideous Russian wastes, the irrelevant West was preparing to return to the Continent in his rear. The two-front war which Hitler had thought by the rapidity of his conquests to dodge had caught him up; he was doomed.
Nevertheless, although it was in the West that he had miscalculated, it was not at the hands of the West that he was prepared to accept defeat. If he must go down, he would go down in the Titanic struggle against the East; in his last weeks of power he would himself vindictively destroy Germany for having failed him in that crucial struggle. “The German people,” he said contemptuously, “has proved itself weak: the future belongs solely to the stronger, Eastern nation.”