Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

The army was, therefore, already in good measure supportive of the strategic aim and the ideological objective of ruthlessly uprooting and destroying the ‘jewish-Bolshevik’ base of the Soviet regime when, on 30 March, in a speech in the Reich Chancellery to over 200 senior officers lasting almost two and a half hours, Hitler stated with unmistakable clarity his views of the coming war with the Bolshevik arch-foe, and what he expected of his army. This was not the time for talk of strategy and tactics. It was to outline to generals in whom he still had little confidence the nature of the conflict that they were entering. He rehearsed once more his familiar arguments. England’s hopes had been placed in the United States and Russia. The Russian problem had to be settled without delay. This was the key to Germany’s accomplishment of its other tasks. Manpower and matériel would then be at her disposal. In Russia, the aim had to be to crush the armed forces and break up the state. Hitler repeated his disparaging comments about Russian armaments — numerically superior but in quality poor. His confidence was undimmed. The Russians, he stated, would collapse under the combined onslaught of German tanks and planes. Once the military tasks had been achieved, no more than about sixty divisions would be needed in the east, releasing the rest for action elsewhere.

He went on to the most striking part of his speech — the ideological aims of the war. He was forthright: ‘Clash of two ideologies. Crushing denunciation of Bolshevism, identified with a social criminality. Communism is an enormous danger for our future. We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. A Communist is no comrade before or after the battle. This is a war of annihilation. If we do not grasp this, we shall still beat the enemy, but thirty years later we shall again have to fight the Communist foe. We do not wage war to preserve the enemy.’ He went on to stipulate the ‘extermination of the Bolshevist commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia’. ‘We must fight against the poison of disintegration,’ he continued. ‘This is no job for military courts. The individual troop commanders must know the issues at stake. They must be the leaders in this fight’… ‘Commissars and GPU men,’ he declared, ‘are criminals and must be dealt with as such.’ The war would be very different to that in the West. ‘In the East, harshness today means lenience in the future.’ Commanders had to overcome any personal scruples.⁷³

Brauchitsch claimed after the war that he had been surrounded by outraged generals when Hitler had finished speaking.⁷⁴ Had this been the case, it would merely have prompted the question why they (or Brauchitsch on their behalf) did not express their outrage to Hitler. However, General Warlimont, who was present, recalled ‘that none of those present availed themselves of the opportunity even to mention the demands made by Hitler during the morning’.⁷⁵ When serving as a witness in a trial sixteen years after the end of the war, Warlimont, explaining the silence of the generals, declared that some had been persuaded by Hitler that Soviet Commissars were not soldiers but ‘criminal villains (kriminelle Verbrecher)’. Others — himself included — had, he claimed, followed the officers’ traditional view that as Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht Hitler ‘could do nothing unlawful’.⁷⁶

The day after Hitler’s speech to the generals, 31 March 1941, the order was given to prepare, in accordance with the intended conduct of the coming campaign, as he had outlined it, guidelines for the ‘treatment of political functionaries (Hoheitsträger)’. Exactly how this order was given, and by whom, is unclear. Halder presumed, when questioned after the war, that it came from Keitel.