Towards the end of the war, casting round for scapegoats, Hitler looked back on the fateful delay as decisive in the failure of the Russian campaign. ‘If we had attacked Russia already from 15 May onwards,’ he claimed, ‘… we would have been in a position to conclude the eastern campaign before the onset of winter.’164 This was simplistic in the extreme — as well as exaggerating the inroads made by the Balkan campaign on the timing of ‘Barbarossa’.165 Weather conditions in an unusually wet spring in central Europe would almost certainly have ruled out a major attack before June — perhaps even mid-June.166 Moreover, the major wear and tear on the German divisions engaged on the Balkan campaign came less from the belated inclusion of Yugoslavia than from the invasion of Greece — planned over many months in conjunction with the planning for ‘Barbarossa’.167 What did disadvantage the opening of ‘Barbarossa’ was the need for the redeployment at breakneck speed of divisions that had pushed on as far as southern Greece and now, without recovery time, had rapidly to be transported to their eastern positions.168 In addition, the damage caused to tanks by rutted and pot-holed roads in the Balkan hills required a huge effort to equip them again for the eastern campaign, and probably contributed to the high rate of mechanical failure during the invasion of Russia.169 Probably the most serious effect of the Balkan campaign on planning for ‘Barbarossa’ was the reduction of German forces on the southern flank, to the south of the Pripet Marshes.170 But we have already seen that Hitler took the decision to that effect on 17 March, before the coup in Yugoslavia.
The weaknesses of the plan to invade the Soviet Union could not be laid at the door of the Italians, for their failure in Greece, or the Yugoslavs, for what Hitler saw as their treachery. The calamity, as it emerged, of ‘Barbarossa’ was located squarely in the nature of German war aims and ambitions. These were by no means solely a product of Hitler’s ideological obsessiveness, megalomania, and indomitable willpower. Certainly, he had provided the driving-force. But he had met no resistance to speak of in the higher echelons of the regime. The army, in particular, had fully supported him in the turn to the East. And if Hitler’s underestimation of Soviet military power was crass, it was an underestimation shared with his military leaders, who had lost none of their confidence that the war in the Soviet Union would be over long before winter.
Meanwhile, Hitler was once more forced by events outside his control, this time close to home, to divert his attention from ‘Barbarossa’.
When he stepped down from the rostrum at the end of his speech to Reichstag deputies on 4 May, he took his place, as usual, next to the Deputy Leader of the Party, his most slavishly subservient follower, Rudolf Heß.171 Only a few days later, while Hitler was on the Obersalzberg, the astonishing news came through that his Deputy had taken a Messerschmitt 110 from Augsburg, flown off on his own
On the afternoon of Saturday, 10 May, Heß had said goodbye to his wife, Ilse, and young son, Wolf Rüdiger, saying he would be back by Monday evening. From Munich he had travelled in his Mercedes to the Messerschmitt works in Augsburg. There, he changed into a fur-lined flying suit and Luftwaffe captain’s jacket. (His alias on his mission was to be Hauptmann Alfred Horn.) Shortly before 6p.m. on a clear, sunlit evening, his Messerschmitt 110 taxied on to the runway and took off. Shortly after 11p.m., after navigating himself through Germany, across the North Sea, and over the Scottish Lowlands, Heß wriggled out of the cockpit, abandoning his plane not far from Glasgow, and parachuted — something he had never practised — to the ground, injuring his leg as he left the plane.
