The Third Reich at War (29 page)

OPERATION BARBAROSSA

I

As preparations for the invasion were intensifying in Berlin, Hitler’s official deputy, Rudolf Hess, became increasingly worried at the prospect of a war on two fronts, a war for which ominous historical precedents, above all in 1914-18, were ever present in the minds of the leading Nazis. Slavishly devoted to Hitler, Hess was convinced, not without reason, that the Nazi Leader’s main objective in the west since the conquest of France had been to bring Britain to the negotiating table. Over the past few years, Hess, never the sharpest of the Nazi minds, had lost influence steadily; his access to Hitler had been seriously reduced since the outbreak of the war in September 1939, and the considerable powers of his office had been increasingly wielded by his ambitious deputy, Martin Bormann. Hess had not been involved in the planning for Operation Barbarossa and indeed he had never played any role in foreign policy at all. Yet he considered himself well qualified to do so. Hess’s teacher, the geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer, had instilled in him a belief that it was Britain’s destiny to join in the world struggle against Bolshevism on Germany’s side. In the resentful and befuddled mind of the Deputy Leader there took shape a daring plan. He himself would fly to Britain to negotiate peace. Delivering an agreement would restore him to Hitler’s favour and secure Germany’s rear for the forthcoming attack on the Soviet Union. Despite Hitler’s explicit orders to the contrary, Hess continued to hone his flying skills in secret. He had a Messerschmitt Me110 specially prepared for his use, and he obtained maps and weather charts for Germany, the North Sea and northern Britain. At six in the evening on 10 May 1941, he put on a fur-lined flying-suit, took off from the airfield of the Messerschmitt works in Augsburg and headed north-west, in the direction of the British Isles.
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Five hours later, Hess parachuted out of the plane near Glasgow, leaving it to continue, pilotless, until eventually it burst into flames and crashed. He landed, somewhat awkwardly, in a field. Approached by a local farmhand, he said his name was Alfred Horn, and he had a message for the Duke of Hamilton, whose home was in the vicinity. The aristocrat had been a member of the Anglo-German Society before the war, and Haushofer’s son Albrecht had told Hess that he would be an important addressee for peace overtures. The advice showed both Haushofer’s ignorance and Hess’s gullibility. In fact, Hamilton was not a particularly significant political figure in British politics. By this time a wing-commander in the Royal Air Force, he was extremely unlikely to act as a willing conduit for German peace overtures. Summoned in response to Hess’s request, Hamilton arrived at the Home Guard hut where Hess had been taken and was quickly convinced that he was face-to-face with the Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party. After the stress of his daring flight, Hess’s mental confusion was such that he made no real attempt to discuss a separate peace with the Duke, and indeed he could think of nothing more than to repeat Hitler’s vague ‘peace offer’ made the previous July. The diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick, who had served in the Berlin Embassy from 1933 to 1938 and spoke good German, was sent to Scotland to interrogate Hess, and managed to extract a bit more information. Hess, he said in his report, ‘had come here without the knowledge of Hitler in order to convince responsible persons that since England could not win the war, the wisest course was to make peace now.’ Hess knew Hitler better than most, and he could assure Kirkpatrick that the German Leader had no designs on the British Empire. This was feeble stuff. ‘Hess,’ concluded Kirkpatrick, ‘does not seem . . . to be in the near counsels of the German government as regards operations.’
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For the rest of the war, Hess was kept imprisoned in various places, including the Tower of London. His self-imposed ‘mission’ had been completely pointless. It reflected nothing but his own mental confusion and lack of realism.
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Hitler himself knew nothing about Hess’s flight until one of the Deputy Leader’s adjutants, Karl-Heinz Pintsch, arrived at the Berghof towards midday on 11 May 1941 to deliver a letter in which Hess told the Nazi Leader of his intentions and informed him that he would be in England by the time he read it. If he disapproved of the venture, Hess wrote, then Hitler could simply write him off as a madman. No news had yet leaked out from the British. Appalled, Hitler immediately summoned Bormann and told G̈ring over the telephone to come straight away from his castle near Nuremberg. ‘Something dreadful has happened,’ he said.
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Desperately worried in case the British should break the news first, thus suggesting to Mussolini and Germany’s other allies that he was trying to make a separate peace with Britain behind their backs, Hitler sanctioned a radio announcement that was broadcast at eight in the evening on 11 May 1941, taking up Hess’s own suggestion and ascribing the flight to the Deputy Leader’s mental derangement and hallucination. The broadcast told the German people that Hess had flown off towards the British Isles but had probably crashed en route. On 13 May 1941, the BBC reported Hess’s arrival in Scotland and his subsequent capture. In the meantime, on the advice of Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press chief, a second announcement had been put out over German radio underlining Hess’s delusional state and mental confusion. Goebbels, arriving at the Berghof later in the day, thought this only compounded the disaster. ‘At the moment,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘the whole thing is still really confused.’ ‘The Leader is completely crushed,’ he added. ‘What a spectacle for the world: a mentally deranged second man after the Leader.’
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As soon as he received the news of Hess’s defection, Hitler abolished the post of Deputy Leader and renamed Hess’s office the Party Chancellery, to be led as before by Bormann, but now under the formal supervision of Hess’s former
’minence grise
. This move considerably enhanced Bormann’s power. There remained the problem of what spin to put on the event. Hitler had already summoned all the Reich Leaders and Regional Party Leaders to the Berghof. On 13 May 1941 he repeated to them that Hess was mentally ill. In an emotional appeal to their loyalty, he declared that Hess had betrayed and deceived him. At the end of the speech, as Hans Frank, who was present, told his staff in the General Government a few days later: ‘The Leader was more completely shattered than I have ever experienced him to have been.’
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As Goebbels had thought, the idea that his deputy had been mentally deranged for many years did not cast a particularly favourable light upon either him or his regime. Many Party members refused to believe the news at first. ‘Depression and uncertainty’ were the prevailing feelings noted by Nazi surveillance operatives.
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‘Nobody believes he was ill,’ reported a local official in the rural Bavarian district of Ebermannstadt.
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No one to whom Field Marshal Fedor von Bock spoke about the ‘mysterious story’ believed the official account either.
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‘Why doesn’t the Leader say anything about the Hess affair?’, asked Victor Klemperer’s friend Annemarie K̈hler. ‘He really ought to say something. What excuse will he use - Hess has been sick for years? But then he shouldn’t be Hitler’s deputy.’
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Lore Walb, now studying history at Heidelberg University, agreed. ‘If he had really been ill for a long time before (mentally ill, from time to time?), then why did he keep his leading position?’ she asked.
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Most people seem to have felt sympathy for Hitler at his deputy’s betrayal.
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They relieved their anxiety, bewilderment and disorientation by telling jokes. ‘So you’re the madman?’ one joke had Churchill saying to Hess as he arrives in the Prime Minister’s office for an interview. ‘No,’ Hess replies, ‘only his deputy.’ ‘British Press Notice: “Today we learned that Hess is indeed insane - he wants to go back to Germany.” ’ ‘That our government is mad is something we’ve known for a long time,’ Berliners were reported as saying, ‘but that they admit it - that’s something new!’
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II

The week or so he was forced to spend dealing with the Hess affair was an unwelcome distraction for Hitler. By the middle of May 1941, however, the Nazi Leader was turning his mind back to his plans for the creation of ‘living-space’ in Eastern Europe. His vision for the future of this vast area, stretching through Poland, the Ukraine and Belarus across wide tracts of European Russia and down into the Caucasus, was articulated most unrestrainedly in the monologues to which he subjected his lunch- and dinner-companions. From early July 1941 onwards, they were noted down on Bormann’s orders, and with Hitler’s agreement, by a Party official, Heinrich Heim, sitting unobtrusively in a corner of the room (for some periods he was replaced by another junior official, Henry Picker). The notes were later dictated to a stenographer, then handed to Bormann, who corrected them and filed them away for posterity. When Hitler was dead, they would be published, and his successors in the thousand-year Reich would be able to consult them for guidance on what their great Leader had thought on a whole range of political and ideological issues.
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Despite their tedious repetitiousness, they are indeed valuable as a guide to Hitler’s thinking on broad, general issues of policy and ideology. His views at this level changed little over the years, so what he was saying in the summer of 1941 give a good idea of what he must already have been thinking in the spring.

In July 1941, Hitler amused himself by painting castles in the air for his guests on the subject of the future of Eastern Europe. Once conquest was complete, he said, the Germans would annex vast masses of territory for their own racial survival and expansion. ‘The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest.’
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‘It’s inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilisation, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world.’
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The Crimea and the southern Ukraine would become ‘an exclusively German colony’, he said. The existing inhabitants would be ‘pushed out’.
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As for the rest of the east, a handful of Englishmen had controlled millions of Indians, he said, and so it would be with the Germans in Russia:

The German colonist ought to live on handsome, spacious farms. The German services will be lodged in marvellous buildings, the governors in palaces . . . Around the city, to a depth of thirty to forty kilometres, we shall have a belt of handsome villages connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world, in which we mean to let the Russians live as they like. It is merely necessary that we should rule them. In the event of a revolution, we shall only have to drop a few bombs on their cities, and the affair will be liquidated.
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A dense network of roads would be constructed, he went on, ‘studded along their whole length with German towns’, and around these towns ‘our colonists will settle’. Colonists of German blood would come from all over Western Europe and even America. There would be twenty million of them by the 1960s, while Russian towns would be allowed to ‘fall to pieces’.
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‘In a hundred years,’ Hitler declared, ‘our language will be the language of Europe.’ It was not least for this reason that he had replaced Gothic lettering with Roman lettering in all official correspondence and publications in the autumn of 1940.
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Some months later, he returned to his vision for the new German east. New railways would have to be built to ensure ‘rapid communication’ between major centres all the way to Constantinople:

I envisage through-trains covering the distances at an average speed of two hundred kilometres an hour, and our present rolling-stock is obviously unsuitable for the purpose. Larger carriages will be required - probably double-deckers, which will give the passengers on the upper deck an opportunity of admiring the landscape. This will presumably entail the construction of a very much broader-gauge permanent way than that at present in use, and the number of lines must be doubled in order to be able to cope with any intensification of traffic . . . This alone will enable us to realise our plans for the exploitation of the Eastern territories.
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The new railway system would be augmented by an equally ambitious network of six-lane motorways. ‘Of what importance will the thousand-kilometre stretch to the Crimea be,’ he asked, ‘when we can cover it at eighty kilometres an hour along the motorway and do the whole distance easily in two days!’ He envisaged a time when it would be possible to go ‘from Klagenfurt to Trondheim and from Hamburg to the Crimea along a Reich Motorway’.
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As this scenario developed, Russian society would be left far behind. ‘In comparison with Russia,’ he declared, ‘even Poland looked like a civilised country.’
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The Germans would show ‘no remorse’ towards the indigenous inhabitants. ‘We’re not going to play at children’s nurses; we’re absolutely without obligations as far as these people are concerned. ’ They would not be provided with medical or educational facilities; not only would they be denied inoculation and other preventive measures, but they should be persuaded that vaccinations were positively dangerous to their health.
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Eventually Russian society, these views implied, would wither away and disappear, along with other Slavic societies in Belarus, the Ukraine and Poland. In a hundred years’ time, the Slavic population of Eastern Europe would have been replaced by ‘millions of German peasants’ living on the land.
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What this would mean in more concrete terms was already clear by the beginning of 1941. The aim of the war against the Soviet Union, SS chief Heinrich Himmler told SS leaders at the Wewelsburg Castle in January 1941, was to reduce the Slavic population by 30 million, a figure that was later repeated by other Nazi leaders, including Hermann Göring, who told the Italian Foreign Minister Ciano on 15 November 1941: ‘This year, 20-30 million people in Russia will starve.’
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The 30 million, not just Russians but also other inhabitants of the Soviet Union in areas controlled by the Germans, were to die of hunger, then, and not over the long term, but almost immediately. Soviet cities, many of them created by Stalin’s brutal forced industrialization in the 1930, were to be starved out of existence, while practically the entire food production of the conquered areas was to be used to feed the invading German armies and maintain nutritional standards at home, so that the malnourishment and starvation that (Hitler believed) had played such a baleful part in the collapse of the German home front in the First World War would not be repeated in the Second. This ‘hunger plan’ was developed above all by Herbert Backe, the State Secretary in the Agriculture Ministry, a hardline Nazi who had worked with Reich Agriculture Minister Richard Walther Darre’, the leading Nazi ideologue of the peasantry, for many years and was on good personal terms with Heydrich. But it was also agreed by General Georg Thomas, the leading arms procurement figure in the central administration of the armed forces. Meeting with General Thomas on 2 May 1941, the State Secretaries of the relevant ministries agreed that the armed forces would have to live off the resources of the conquered lands in the east, and concluded that ‘without doubt, umpteen million people will starve if what is necessary for us is taken out of the country’.
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