Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

For almost a year this war had been consciously worked towards and prepared by the German leadership. Hitler’s inability to bring Britain to the conference table had provided the spur to contemplate the bold move of a strike in the East even while the contest in the West remained unsettled. The perceived shortage of time, given the looming threat of the USA and the near-certainty of at least indirect involvement in the war through massive supplies of material if the war dragged into a further year, was the driving-force. The need to secure unlimited sources of raw materials from Soviet territory and to ensure that there would be no interruption to oil supplies from Romania was an additional central motive. Ideological considerations — the need to eradicate Bolshevism once and for all — deeply embedded in Hitler’s psyche for almost two decades, had not been the primary determinant of the timing of the showdown. But they gave it its indelible colouring, its sense not just of war, but of crusade.

Had Britain been ready to come to terms, the war against the Soviet Union would nonetheless have still gone ahead at some point — in the conditions Hitler had always hoped for. Hitler had sought the conflict. He was the main author of a war which had been a central element in his thinking for almost two decades. But when it came actually to planning, not just imagining, the showdown, the Wehrmacht leadership, including the leaders of the army, the key branch of the armed forces as regards the war in the east, had gone along with every step. They had let Hitler dictate the course of events. At no point had they seriously attempted to discourage him. On the contrary, the combination of anti-Bolshevism and gross underestimation of Soviet military capabilities had prompted army chiefs to be no less optimistic than Hitler himself about the ease with which the USSR would be defeated.

If the initial aims had been forged by strategic consideration, the ideological input had not been long in coming. Himmler and Heydrich, rapidly spotting a chance to extend their own empire and to create an entire new vast area for their racial experiments, had no difficulty in exploiting Hitler’s long-established paranoia about ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ to advance new schemes for solving ‘the Jewish problem’. By March, Hitler had laid down the parameters of a genocidal war which willing agents in the Wehrmacht as well as the SS leadership were only too ready to translate into firm guidelines for action.

The war in the East, which would decide the future of the Continent of Europe, was indeed Hitler’s war. But it was more than that. It was not inflicted by a tyrannical dictator on an unwilling country. It was acceded to, even welcomed (if in different measure and for different reasons), by all sections of the German élite, non-Nazi as well as Nazi. Large sections of the ordinary German population, too, including the millions who would fight in lowly ranks in the army, would — once they had got over their initial shock — go along with the meaning Nazi propaganda imparted to the conflict, that of a ‘crusade against Bolshevism’. The more ideologically committed pro-Nazis would entirely swallow the interpretation of the war as a preventive one to avoid the destruction of western culture by the Bolshevik hordes. They fervently believed that Europe would never be liberated before ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was utterly and completely rooted out. The path to the Holocaust, intertwined with the showdown with Bolshevism, was prefigured in such notions. The legacy of over two decades of deeply rooted, often fanatically held, feelings of hatred towards Bolshevism, fully interlaced with antisemitism, was about to be revealed in its full ferocity.