One dark cloud on an otherwise sunny horizon was, however, the damage being caused to towns in western Germany by British bombing raids. On 30 May, Hitler had said that he did not think much of the RAF’s threats of heavy air-raids. Precautions, he claimed, had been taken. The Luftwaffe had so many squadrons stationed in the west that destruction from the air would be doubly repaid.167 That very night, the city centre of Cologne was devastated by the first 1,000-bomber raid. The Luftwaffe’s own claims that only seventy British bombers were involved, of which forty-four had been shot down, were regarded even by the Nazi leadership as absurd. Hitler believed the more realistic reports from the Party regional office in Cologne. Goebbels had himself telephoned Führer Headquarters to give an estimate of 250-300 bombers taking part.168 Hitler was enraged at the failure of the Luftwaffe to defend the Reich, blaming Göring personally for neglecting the construction of sufficient flak installations.169
Despite the bombing of Cologne, the military situation put Hitler and his entourage in excellent mood in early June. On the first day of the month Hitler was flown in his ‘Führer Machine’ — a spacious, four-engined Focke-Wulf, with simple interior and few special features other than a writing desk in front of his own seat — to Army Group South’s headquarters at Poltava to discuss with Field-Marshal Bock the timing and tactics of the coming offensive. Apart from Manstein, all the commanders were present as Hitler agreed to Bock’s proposal to delay the start of ‘Operation Blue’ for some days in order to take full advantage of the victory at Kharkov to destroy Soviet forces in adjacent areas. Hitler informed the commanders that the outcome of ‘Blue’ would be decisive for the war.170 Back in the Wolf’s Lair, he told his lunchtime gathering next day that the number of blue-eyed, blonde women he had seen in Poltava had slightly shaken his racial views.171 He had been astonished at how well-fed and –clothed the people of the area were. There could be no talk there of famine.172
On 4 June, Hitler paid a surprise visit — it had been arranged only the previous day — to Finland. Officially, the visit was to mark the seventy-fifth birthday of the Finnish military hero, Marshal Baron Carl Gustaf von Mannerheim, supreme commander of the Finnish armed forces. How pleased Mannerheim was to have his birthday party hijacked by Hitler can only be surmised. But the Finns had little choice other than to comply. Despite their growing unease at the alliance with Germany, which they had entered into prior to ‘Barbarossa’ in the expectation of a swift and comprehensive victory of the Wehrmacht,173 no current alternative to German tutelage was available. For Hitler, some sense of the significance he attached to the meeting can be judged from the fact that, apart from a number of trips to Italy and his meetings in southern France with Pétain and Franco in 1940, it was the only time he had travelled to an area outside direct German control.174
The aim of the informal visit was to bolster Finnish solidarity with Germany through underlining for Mannerheim — a veteran of struggles with the Red Army — the immensity of the threat of Bolshevism. The Finns would at the same time be warned about any possible considerations of leaving German ‘protection’ and putting out feelers to the Soviet Union. In addition, the visit would head off any possible ties of Finland with the western Allies.175
