Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

In fact, Wagner appears to have become seriously concerned by this vital matter only with the rapid deterioration of the weather in mid-October, while Halder had been aware as early as August that the problem of transport of winter clothing and equipment to the eastern front could only be solved by the defeat of the Red Army before the worst of the weather set in.²⁴³ Brauchitsch was still claiming, when he had lengthy talks with Goebbels on 1 November, that an advance to Stalingrad was possible before the snows arrived and that by the time the troops took up their winter quarters Moscow would be cut off.²⁴⁴ By now this was wild optimism. Brauchitsch was forced to acknowledge the existing weather problems, the impassable roads, transport difficulties, and the concern about the winter provisioning of the troops.²⁴⁵ In truth, whatever the unrealism of the Army and Wehrmacht High Commands about what was attainable in their view before the depths of winter, the last two weeks of October had had a highly sobering effect on the front-line commanders and the initial exaggerated hopes of the success of ‘Operation Typhoon’.²⁴⁶ By the end of the month the offensive of Army Group Centre’s exhausted troops had ground temporarily to a halt.²⁴⁷

The impression which Hitler gave, however, in his traditional speech to the Party’s old guard, assembled in the Löwenbräukeller in Munich on the late afternoon of 8 November, the anniversary of the 1923 Putsch, was quite different.²⁴⁸ The speech was intended primarily for domestic consumption.²⁴⁹ It aimed to boost morale, and to rally round the oldest and most loyal members of Hitler’s retinue after the difficult months of summer and autumn. Hitler paraded once more before his audience the victories in earlier campaigns and why he had felt compelled to attack the Soviet Union. He went on to describe the scale of the Soviet losses. ‘My Party Comrades,’ he declared, ‘no army in the world, including the Russian, recovers from those.’²⁵⁰ ‘Never before,’ he went on, ‘has a giant empire been smashed and struck down in a shorter time than Soviet Russia.’²⁵¹ He remarked on enemy claims that the war would last into 1942. ‘It can last as long as it wants,’ he retorted. ‘The last battalion in this field will be a German one.’²⁵² Despite the triumphalism, it was the strongest hint yet that the war was far from over.

The next day, after the usual ceremony at the ‘Temples of Honour’ of the Putsch ‘heroes’ on the Königsplatz in Munich, Hitler addressed his Reichsleiter and Gauleiter. The speech was in effect an appeal for unconditional loyalty to the very backbone of the Party, Hitler’s essential hardcore body of diehard support. His way of doing this, as usual, was a mixture of veiled threat and pathos. Those who stepped out of line, showed themselves weak, or conspired against him would be ruthlessly dealt with, was the first part of his message. He referred to the dismissal (in the previous year) of Josef Wagner from his position as Gauleiter of Westphalia-South and of Silesia. Wagner’s pro-Catholic sympathies (and those of his wife) were declared incompatible with the post of a Gauleiter. He had actually been the victim of inner-party intrigues. But the last straw for Hitler had been a letter from Frau Wagner (apparently with her husband’s backing), forbidding their daughter to marry a non-Christian SS-man. Hitler spoke darkly of the conspiratorial behaviour of Wagner and former SA chief Captain Franz Pfeffer von Salomon — now lodged in a concentration camp.²⁵³ Both were said to have had close relations with Rudolf Heß. Hitler stressed what a blow for him the Heß affair had been, and how thankful he was that British propaganda had missed the opportunity to portray the Deputy Führer as his ambassador carrying a peace-offer. Germany would have lost its allies as a result, Hitler imagined — something which even now stopped the blood in the veins.

He moved to pathos. There could never be any thought of capitulation. He would continue the war until it finished in victory. ‘And should a serious crisis afflict the Fatherland,’ he said with no sense of an apparent contradiction, ‘he would be seen with the last division.’²⁵⁴ To ensure the morale of the population, he placed his entire trust in the Party and his Reichsleiter and Gauleiter, ‘who must now place themselves around him as a solemnly sworn body (festverschworenes Korps)’.²⁵⁵ The Soviet Union he saw as already defeated, though it was impossible to predict how long resistance would last. He hoped to reach the goals intended before winter within four weeks. Then the troops could take up their winter quarters.