Why was Hitler so anxious to maintain the fiction of resettlement, and uphold the ‘terrible secret’ even among his inner circle? A partial explanation is doubtless to be found in Hitler’s acute personal inclination to extreme secrecy which he translated into a general mode of rule, as laid down in his ‘Basic Order’ of January 1940, that information should only be available on a ‘need-to-know’ basis.152 Knowledge of extermination could provide a propaganda gift to enemies, and perhaps stir up unrest and internal difficulties in the occupied territories, particularly in western Europe.153 And as regards public opinion in the Reich itself, the Nazi leadership believed that the German people were not ready for the gross inhumanity of the extermination of the Jews.154 Hitler had agreed with Rosenberg in mid-December 1941, directly following the declaration of war on the USA, that it would be inappropriate to speak of extermination in public.155 Late in 1942., Bormann was keen to quell rumours circulating about the ‘Final Solution’ in the east.156 Himmler would later, speaking to SS leaders, refer to it as ‘a never to be written glorious page of our history’.157 Evidently, it was a secret to be carried to the grave.
In his public statements referring to his 1939 ‘prophecy’, Hitler could now lay claim to his place in ‘the glorious secret of our history’ while still detaching himself from the sordid and horrific realities of mass killing.158 Beyond that, a further incentive to secrecy was that Hitler wanted no bureaucratic and legal interference. He had experienced this in the ‘euthanasia action’, necessitating his unique written authorization, and the problems which subsequently arose from it. His tirades about the judicial system and bureaucracy in the spring of 1942 were a further indicator of his sensitivity towards such interference. To avoid any legalistic meddling, Himmler explicitly refused in the summer of 1942 to entertain attempts to define ‘a Jew’.159
In addition, there was probably, however, a deep psychological underlay to Hitler’s obsessive secretiveness about the fate of the Jews. The Third Reich was mighty, but even now perhaps, so his warped thinking must have run, not so mighty as the power of the Jews — the ‘world conspiracy’ in which he still fervently believed. He still had no means of tackling the Jews whom he believed to be behind the war with Britain and, above all, with the USA. Whatever his public optimism, there is the occasional veiled hint that he entertained the thought, in the darkness of his insomniac nights, that he might lose the war, that his enemies might prevail.160 Some ordinary Germans, swallowing Nazi propaganda and betraying their ingrained prejudices, voiced their worries by the middle of the war of the ‘revenge of the Jews’ if Germany were to lose its struggle.161 It seems hardly conceivable that Hitler did not also entertain such a concern in the recesses of his mind. Withholding his knowledge of the ‘Final Solution’, even from his close associates, would ensure that such information could not reach his archenemies.
Manstein’s difficulties in taking Sevastopol held up the start of ‘Operation Blue’ — the push to the Caucasus — until the end of June.162 But at this point, Hitler need have no doubts that the war was going well. In the Atlantic, the U-boats had met with unprecedented success. In the first six months of 1942, they had sunk almost a third more shipping tonnage than during the whole of 1941, and far fewer U-boats had been lost in the process.163 And on the evening of 21 June came the stunning news that Rommel had taken Tobruk. Through brilliant tactical manoeuvring during the previous three weeks, Rommel had outwitted the ineffectively led and poorly equipped British 8th Army and was then able to inflict a serious defeat on the Allied cause by seizing the stronghold of Tobruk, on the Libyan coast, capturing 33,000 British and Allied prisoners-of-war (many of them South African) and a huge amount of booty.164 It was a spectacular German victory and a disaster for the British. The doorway to German dominance of Egypt was wide open. All at once there was a glimmering prospect in view of an enormous pincer of Rommel’s troops pushing eastwards through Egypt and the Caucasus army sweeping down through the Middle East linking forces to wipe out the British presence in this crucial region.165 Hitler, overjoyed, immediately promoted Rommel to Field-Marshal. Italian hopes of German support for an invasion of Malta were now finally shelved until later in the year. Hitler backed instead Rommel’s plans to advance to the Nile. Within days, German troops were in striking distance of Alexandria.166
