The strains of the winter crisis had left their mark on Hitler. He was now showing unmistakable signs of physical wear and tear. Goebbels was shocked when he saw him in March. Hitler looked grey, and much aged. He admitted to his Propaganda Minister that he had for some time felt ill and often faint. The winter, he acknowledged, had also affected him psychologically.394 But he appeared to have withstood the worst. His confidence was, certainly to all outward appearances, undiminished. Hints, given in the autumn, of doubts at the outcome of the war, were no longer heard.395 He told his entourage in the Führer Headquarters that the entry of Japan had been a turning-point in history, which would denote ‘the loss of a whole continent’ — regrettable, because the loss would be that of the ‘white race’.396 The British would not be able to prevail against Japan once Singapore had been lost.397 The question would then be whether Britain could hold on to India. He was sure that, offered the chance of keeping India (and preventing the complete disintegration of the Empire) while abandoning Europe to Germany, almost the entire British population would be in favour.398
Against what had seemed in the depths of the winter crisis almost insuperable odds, Germany was ready by spring to launch another offensive in the east. The war still had a long way to go.399 Certainly, the balance of forces at this juncture was by no means one-sided. And the course of events would undergo many vagaries before defeat for Germany appeared inexorable. But the winter of 1941–2 can nevertheless, in retrospect, be seen to be not merely a turning-point, but the beginning of the end.400
The aim advanced by Hitler since the summer of 1940, with the backing of his military strategists, had been to force Britain to come to terms and keep America out of the war through inflicting a swift and comprehensive defeat upon the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941, Germany had failed to defeat the Soviet Union and was now embroiled in a long, enormously bitter and costly, war in the east. Britain had not only been uninterested in coming to terms, but was now fighting alongside the USA and, since concluding a mutual assistance agreement in Moscow on 12 July 1941, allied — whatever the continuing frictions — with the Soviet Union.401 Not least, Germany was now at war with America. Whatever Hitler’s contempt, he knew no ways of defeating the USA.402 And if final victory over the Soviet Union could not rapidly be achieved, America’s mighty resources would soon weigh in the contest. Hitler now had to place his hopes in the Japanese, who might seriously weaken the British and lock the USA into conflict in the Pacific. But he could no longer depend upon the power of German arms alone. Germany no longer held the initiative. He had always predicted that time was running against Germany in its bid for supremacy. His own actions more than those of anyone else had ensured that this was indeed now proving to be the case. Though it would not become fully plain for some months, Hitler’s gamble, on which he had staked nothing less than the future of the nation, had disastrously failed.
‘I already stated on 1 September 1939 in the German Reichstag — and I refrain from over-hasty prophecies — that this war will not come to an end as the Jews imagine, with the extermination of the European–Aryan peoples, but that the result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry. For the first time the old Jewish law will now be applied: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’
‘A judgement is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric, but fully deserved. The prophecy which the Führer gave them along the way for bringing about a new world war is beginning to become true in the most terrible fashion… Here, too, the Führer is the unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution.’
