By 18 June, 200,000 pamphlets had been printed for distribution to the troops.271 On 21 June Hitler dictated the proclamation to the German people to be read out the next day.272 Hitler was by this time looking over-tired, and was in a highly nervous state, pacing up and down, apprehensive, involving himself in the minutiae of propaganda such as the fanfares that were to be played over the radio to announce German victories.273 Goebbels was called to see him in the evening. They discussed the proclamation, to which Goebbels added a few suggestions. They marched up and down his rooms for three hours. They tried out the new fanfares for an hour. Hitler gradually relaxed somewhat. ‘The Führer is freed from a nightmare the closer the decision comes,’ noted Goebbels. ‘It’s always so with him.’ Once more Goebbels returned to the inner necessity of the coming conflict, of which Hitler had convinced himself: ‘There is nothing for it than to attack,’ he wrote, summing up Hitler’s thoughts. ‘This cancerous growth has to be burned out. Stalin will fall.’ Since July the previous year, Hitler indicated, he had worked on the preparations for what was about to take place. Now the moment had arrived. Everything had been done which could have been done. ‘The fortune of war must now decide.’ At 2.30a.m., Hitler finally decided it was time to snatch a few hours’ sleep.274 ‘Barbarossa’ was due to begin within the next hour.275
Goebbels was too nervous to follow his example. At 5.30a.m., just over two hours after the German guns had opened fire on all borders, the new Liszt fanfares sounded over German radios. Goebbels read out Hitler’s proclamation.276 It amounted to a lengthy pseudo-historical justification for German preventive action. The Jewish-Bolshevik rulers in Moscow had sought for two decades to destroy not only Germany, but the whole of Europe. Hitler had been forced, he claimed, through British encirclement policy to take the bitter step of entering the 1939 Pact.277 But since then the Soviet threat had magnified. At present there were 160 Russian divisions massed on the German borders. ‘The hour has now therefore arrived,’ Hitler declared, ‘to counter this conspiracy of the Jewish-Anglo-Saxon warmongers and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevik headquarters in Moscow.’278 A slightly amended proclamation went out to the soldiers swarming over the border and marching into Russia.279
On 21 June, Hitler had at last composed a letter to his chief ally, Benito Mussolini, belatedly explaining and justifying his reasons for attacking the Soviet Union. The letter was delivered to Ciano at 3a.m. next morning, just as the attack was about to begin. Ciano had to disturb Mussolini to convey the news to him — greatly to the annoyance of the Italian dictator, who complained that the Germans told him nothing then broke his sleep to announce a
The most destructive and barbaric war in the history of mankind was beginning. It was the war that Hitler had wanted since the 1920s — the war against Bolshevism. It was the showdown. He had come to it by a roundabout route. But, finally, Hitler’s war was there: a reality.
