Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

The peace-overtures had failed. The battle for the skies had failed. Meanwhile, on 3 September the grant of fifty destroyers to Britain by the USA — a deal which Roosevelt had eventually pushed through, initially against much opposition from the isolationists — was, despite the limited use of the elderly warships, the plainest indication to date that Britain might in the foreseeable future be able to reckon with the still dormant military might of the USA.¹⁸⁰ It was increasingly urgent to get Britain out of the war. Hitler’s options were, in autumn 1940, still not closed off. There was the possibility of forcing Britain to come to terms through a strategy of attacks on her Mediterranean and Near Eastern strongholds. But once that option also faded Hitler was left with only one possibility: the one that was in his view not only strategically indispensable but embodied one of his most long-standing ideological obsessions. This point would not finally be reached until December 1940. By then it would be time to prepare for the crusade against Bolshevism.

Hitler did not have the power to bring the war to the conclusion he wanted. And, within Germany, he was powerless to prevent the governance of the Reich from slipping increasingly out of control. The tendencies already plainly evident before the war — unresolved Party-State dualism, unclear or overlapping spheres of competence, proliferation of ad hoc establishment of improvised ‘special authorities’ (Sonderbehörden) empowered to handle specific policy areas, administrative anarchy — were now sharply magnified. It was not that Hitler was a ‘weak dictator’.¹⁸¹ His power was recognized and acknowledged on all fronts. Nothing of significance was undertaken in contradiction to his known wishes. His popular support was immense. Opponents were demoralized and without hope. There was no conceivable challenge that could be mounted. The slippage from control did not mean a decline in Hitler’s authority. But it did mean that the very nature of that authority had built into it the erosion and undermining of regular patterns of government and, at the same time, the inability to keep in view all aspects of rule of an increasingly expanding and complex Reich. Even someone more able, energetic, and industrious when it came to administration than Hitler could not have done it. And during the first months of the war, as we have seen, Hitler was for lengthy stretches away from Berlin and overwhelmingly preoccupied with military events. It was impossible for him to stay completely in touch with and be competently involved in the running of the Reich. But in the absence of any organ of collective government to replace the cabinet, which had not met since February 1938, or any genuine delegation of powers (which Hitler constantly shied away from, seeing it as a potentially dangerous dilution of his authority), the disintegration of anything resembling a coherent ‘system’ of administration inevitably accelerated. Far from diminishing Hitler’s power, the continued erosion of any semblance of collective government actually enhanced it. Since, however, this disintegration went hand in hand — part cause, part effect — with the Darwinian struggle carried out through recourse to Hitler’s ideological goals, the radicalization entailed in the process of ‘working towards the Führer’ equally inevitably accelerated.¹⁸²

Little systematic planning for the practicalities of Reich government during a war had been carried out before the invasion of Poland in September 1939. As usual, much was improvised.¹⁸³ Arising as a type of ‘standing committee’ from the Reich Defence Council (Reichsverteidigungsrat), established in 1938 (which had met on only two occasions, each time to hear lengthy speeches by Göring), a Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich (Ministerrat für die Reichsverteidigung) was set up at the end of August 1939. This seems to have been Göring’s idea, on the look-out, as always, for power aggrandizement. Hitler, for his part, was ready to make what amounted in practice to no great concession of power in order to offload some of his own administrative burden and speedily push through legislation necessary for the war effort. Not least, by pandering to the vanity of his designated successor and compensating him at the same time for his known objections to the war with Britain, he could at the same time deepen Göring’s sense of loyalty and thereby invest in a small insurance policy. No preparations had been made for such a body when Hitler gave out verbal instructions, which civil servants from the Reich Chancellery turned into a decree within a couple of hours. The head of the glaringly pointless Constitutional Department (Verfassungsabteilung) in the Reich Ministry of the Interior learnt of the existence of the new body from the newspapers. No one in his Department had been consulted.