Hitler as Commander in Chief

Throughout 1943 the determined efforts of the SS to capture, inter, transport, and murder the Jews of the whole of Europe continued apace. To this end vast resources of the machinery needed to fight the war and to run Germany itself were utilized. As the tide of the war turned irrevocably toward victory for the Allies after the German defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa, these resources were not relocated to aid the army. The vast railway complex built and utilized to transport prisoners to Auschwitz and the other death camps, for example, might better have been used to supply German troops stranded in their battles in Russia with the winter clothing, food, and weaponry needed to sustain themselves. Hundreds of thousands of Germans died or were taken captive by the Soviets as a result of poor planning and support.

Ian Kershaw’s three volume study of Hitler provides some understanding of the sheer irrationality of this deployment of resources. Early in the war Hitler took over personal command of his army. His early successes before and after the outbreak of armed conflict as well as the unflagging sycophancy of his close associates bred an unrealistic confidence in his own powers. For the first two years of the war he had things much his own way. Throughout he pursued his dual goals of conquering Europe and of destroying the Jews. He maintained the conviction that once France and the other Western European countries had fallen, that England would seek peace with Germany. As England, aided by Roosevelt’s “lend-lease” program continued its struggle and the war moved into areas of North Africa and Southern Europe, shortages of food and fuel became more acute in Germany itself. Hitler needed the “bread basket” of the Ukraine and the oil of the Caucuses. Gambling that the British would ultimately sue for peace, he decided to invade the USSR, despite his 1939 agreement with Stalin.

From the beginning of his ascendancy within the groups which eventually became the Nazi party, Hitler had used his considerable power to manipulate the emotions of his listeners, drawing to himself a core of followers who saw their own futures reflected in his. The relations among these adherents were those of a dysfunctional family. All power resided in Hitler. He encouraged competition and suspicion within the group. Each depended entirely upon his favour for their preference. Total loyalty and obedience to Hitler himself was the only guarantee of success. To each he gave a fiefdom, an area of governance within which they could further his goals while enriching themselves in power and in wealth. Because the focus of these men was upon pleasing Hitler and promoting their own careers, no one of them had an overview or a practical concern for the good of the country.

Leaders of the army were not necessarily Nazi party members or part of the SS. Still they were entirely subject to Hitler’s orders and like their men took their oaths of allegiance not to their country but directly to the Fuhrer, Hitler. In his assumption of direct control of the army, Hitler became its chief strategist and commander. Over time he succumbed more and more to a fanatical belief in his own judgement. Officers who resisted his commands or who had the courage to contradict him would find themselves replaced, sometimes imprisoned or sent to places of terrible stress like the Russian front. Despite the realities of losses obtained, for example, in 1942-43 on the eastern front, Hitler ordered his commanders to maintain their positions “to the last man,” refusing their requests to withdraw or to surrender. Many followed these orders despite the inevitable loss of life and in the face of their knowledge that their orders were irrational and destructive.

In the meantime the SS, in command of the concentration, labour, and death camps continued their programs. At all levels the SS profited from goods stolen from Jewish prisoners at their homes, in transit, and at the death camps. With no co-ordination or sympathy between the leaders of the SS and those of the army, no reorganization of the railways could occur that would have helped the troops to fight and survive the tasks given to them. As the Soviet forces began to move westward in the summer of 1943, efforts were intensified to continue the destruction of Jews still alive in their path as well as in Western Europe. The mental state of troops at any levels in the German army throughout this period and up to the end of the war must have been something close to a split consciousness. Many realized that the war could not be won as the Allies began to close in from the east, from the south through Italy, and from the west after the landing of the Allied forces at Normandy in mid-1944. Still the incessant harangue from Hitler and Goebbels, and parroting them, leaders at all civil and military levels, insisted that all was well, that secret weapons were being constructed that would turn the tide of the war. The grip of the Gestapo and the SS tightened on soldiers and civilians alike, as any word of “defeatism” could lead to a summary execution. The official word that Germany would be triumphant reigned on the surface of the army and the society as a whole despite the realities of collapse that intensified to the very conclusion of the war on May 8, 1945.

In the next post I will write about efforts made in the final year of the war to simultaneously "finish the job" of exterminating the Jews of Europe, and, of eradicating evidence of this massive crime.