Hitler had been in an unusually good mood at the meal table on the evening of 4 October, having just returned from a visit to Army High Command’s headquarters to congratulate Brauchitsch on his sixtieth birthday. Not for the first time, he gazed into the future in the ‘German East’. Within the next half-century, he foresaw 5 million farms settled there by former soldiers who would hold down the Continent through military force. He placed no value in colonies, he said, and could quickly come to terms with England on that score. Germany needed only a little colonial territory for coffee and tea plantations. Everything else it could produce on the Continent. Cameroon and a part of French Equatorial Africa or the Belgian Congo would suffice for Germany’s needs. ‘Our Mississippi must be the Volga, not the Niger,’ he concluded.233
Next evening, after Himmler had regaled those round the dinner table with his impressions of Kiev, and how 80–90 per cent of the impoverished population there could be ‘dispensed with’, Hitler came round to the subject of German dialects. It started with his dislike of the Saxon accent and spread to a rejection of all German dialects. They made the learning of German for foreigners more difficult. And German now had to be made into the general form of communication in Europe.234
Hitler was still in expansive frame of mind when Reich Economics Minister Walther Funk visited him on 13 October. The eastern territories would mean the end of unemployment in Europe, he claimed. He envisaged river links from the Don and the Dnieper between the Black Sea and the Danube, bringing oil and grain to Germany. ‘Europe — and not America — will be the land of unlimited possibilities.’235
Four days later, the presence of Fritz Todt prompted Hitler to an even more grandiose vision of new roads stretching through the conquered territories. Motorways would now run not just to the Crimea, but to the Caucasus, as well as more northerly areas. German cities would be established as administrative centres on the river crossings. Three million prisoners-of-war would be available to supply the labour for the next twenty years. German farmsteads would line the roads. ‘The monotonous Asiaticlike steppe would soon offer a totally different appearance.’ He now spoke of 10 million Germans, as well as settlers from Scandinavia, Holland, Flanders, and even America putting down roots there. The Slav population would ‘have to vegetate further in their own dirt away from the big roads’. Knowing how to read the road-signs would be quite sufficient education. Those eating German bread today, he said, did not get worked up about the regaining of the East Elbian granaries with the sword in the twelfth century. ‘Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.’ Hitler wished he were ten to fifteen years younger to experience what was going to happen.236
But by this time weather conditions alone meant the chances of Hitler’s vision ever materializing were sharply diminishing. The weather was already bad. By mid-October, military operations had stalled as heavy rains swept over the front. Units were stranded. The vehicles of Army Group Centre were bogged down on impassable roads. Away from the choked roads, nothing could move. ‘The Russians are impeding us far less than the wet and the mud,’ commented Field-Marshal Bock.237 Everywhere, it was a ‘struggle with the mud’.238 On top of that, there were serious shortages of fuel and munitions.239
There was also, not before time, concern now about winter provisions for the troops. Hitler directly asked Quartermaster-General Wagner, on a visit to Führer Headquarters, about this on 26 October. Wagner promised that Army Groups North and South would have a half of their necessary provisions by the end of the month but Army Group Centre, the largest of the three, would only have a third. Supplying the south was especially difficult since the Soviets had destroyed part of the railway track along the Sea of Azov.240 A few days later, on 1 November, Hitler paid a visit to the headquarters of the Army High Command to look at the exhibition of winter clothing which Wagner had assembled. Once more the Quartermaster-General assured Hitler that provision of the troops with sufficient clothing was in hand. Hitler accepted the assurance.241 When Wagner spoke to Goebbels, he gave the Propaganda Minister the impression that ‘everything had been thought of and nothing forgotten’.242
