The Wehrmacht and Army High Commands did not contradict the strategic priority. In any case, they had no better alternative to recommend. And the lack of a coordinated command structure meant, as before, competition for Hitler’s approval — a military version of ‘working towards the Führer’.108 It was not a matter of Hitler imposing a dictat on his military leaders. Despite his full recognition of the gravity of the German losses over the winter, Halder entirely backed the decision for an all-out offensive to destroy the basis of the Soviet economy.109 The April directive for ‘Blue’ bore his clear imprint.110 And despite the magnitude of their miscalculation the previous year, operational planners, fed by highly flawed intelligence, far from working on the basis of a ‘worst-case-scenario’, backed the optimism about the military and economic weakness of the Soviet Union.111
Whatever the presumptions of Soviet losses — on which German intelligence remained woefully weak — the Wehrmacht’s own strength, as Halder knew only too well, had been drastically weakened. Over a million of the 3.2 million men who had attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 were by now dead, captured, or missing.112 At the end of March, only 5 per cent of army divisions were fully operational.113 The figures that Halder gave Hitler on 21 April were chilling in the extreme. Some 900,000 men had been lost since the autumn, only 50 per cent replaced (including the call-up of all available twenty-year-olds, and serious inroads into the labour-force at home). Only around 10 per cent of the vehicles lost had been replaced (though most of the losses of tracked vehicles could be made good). Losses of weapons were also massive. At the beginning of the spring offensive, the eastern front was short of around 625,000 men.114 Given such massive shortages, everything was poured into bolstering the southern offensive in the Soviet Union. Of the sixty-eight divisions established on this part of the front, forty-eight had been entirely, and seventeen at least partly, reconstituted.115
Poor Soviet intelligence meant the Red Army was again unprepared for the German assault when it came.116 By 19 May, the Kerch offensive was largely over, with the capture of 150,000 prisoners and a great deal of booty. A heavy Soviet counter on Kharkhov had been, if with difficulty, successfully fended off.117 By the end of May, the battle at Kharkhov had also resulted in a notable victory, with three Soviet armies destroyed, and over 200,000 men and a huge quantity of booty captured.118 This was in no small measure owing to Hitler’s refusal, fully endorsed by Halder, to allow Field-Marshal Bock, since mid-January Commander of Army Group South, to break off the planned offensive and take up a defensive position.119
Hitler had reason to feel pleased with himself when he spoke for two hours behind closed doors in the Reich Chancellery to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter on the afternoon of 23 May. He had come to Berlin for the funeral of Carl Rover, Gauleiter of Weser-Ems, which had taken place the previous day.120 After a difficult period, also on the home front, he evidently could not miss the opportunity to bolster the solidarity and loyalty of his long-standing Party stalwarts, a vital part of his power-base. And in such company, he was prepared to speak with some candour about his aims.
One of these was the Party’s own work. The death of such a valued comrade as Rover was an indication that successors for Party leaders of his generation, now aged between forty-five and sixty years old (the dead Gauleiter had been born in 1889), needed to be cultivated. But they would not be able to tackle problems which the ‘sworn community’ of the original Party leadership had eschewed. It was his usual fixation with the question of time and mortality. They had been destined
