Himmler’s speeches, ensuring that his own subordinates and the Party leadership were fully in the picture about the extermination of the Jews, had been — there can be no doubt about it — carried out with Hitler’s approval. The very next day after listening to Himmler, the Gauleiter were ordered to attend the Wolf’s Lair to hear Hitler himself give an account of the state of the war. That the Führer would speak explicitly on the ‘Final Solution’ was axiomatically ruled out. But he could now take it for granted that they understood that there was no way out. Their knowledge underlined their complicity. Unusually, Goebbels made no diary entry that day. Only the published communiqué on the meeting survives. But it is not unenlightening. ‘The entire German people know,’ Hitler had told the Reichs — and Gauleiter, ‘that it is a matter of whether they exist or do not exist. The bridges have been destroyed behind them. Only the way forward remains.’242
When (for the last time, as it turned out) Hitler addressed the Party’s ‘Old Guard’ in Munich’s Löwenbräukeller on the Putsch anniversary, 8 November, he was as defiant as ever.243 According to SD reports, the speech, broadcast on the radio, went down well — though in the main only among Party fanatics and fervent believers. Their morale was again temporarily lifted, especially by the strong hints of imminent retaliation against Britain for the bombing terror — to be unleashed during the second half of November in five major raids on Berlin itself.244 Few others could find in the empty bombast any consolation for lives of loved ones sacrificed in vain, homes destroyed, cities laid waste, hardship and misery, and a war which they recognized as to all intents and purposes lost.245 But those careless enough to voice such sentiments had to reckon with swift retribution. Their fate had been expressly indicated in Hitler’s speech. There would be no capitulation, no repeat of 1918, he had declared once again — the nightmare of that year indelibly imprinted on his psyche — and no undermining of the front by subversion at home. Any overheard subversive or defeatist remark, it was clear, would cost the person making it his or her head.246
By this time — though of course he made no hint of it in his speech — Hitler was anxious about a looming new grave military threat, one which, if not repulsed, would result in Germany’s destruction: what he took to be the certainty of an invasion in the west during the coming year. ‘The danger in the east remains,’ ran his preamble to his Directive No.51 on 3 November, ‘but a greater danger is looming in the west: the Anglo-Saxon landing!… If the enemy succeeds here in breaking through our defence on a broad front, the consequences within a short time are unforeseeable. Everything suggests that the enemy, at the latest in spring but perhaps even earlier, will move to attack the western front of Europe.’247
To his military advisers, on 20 December, he said he was certain that the invasion would take place some time after mid-February or early March. The next months would be spent in preparation for the coming great assault in the west. This, Hitler remarked, would ‘decide the war’.248
‘There are so many disagreements on the enemy side, that the coalition is bound to fall apart one day.’
‘I wish these prognoses of the Führer were right. We’ve been so often disappointed recently that you feel some scepticism rising up within you.’
‘The Führer did not know whether or when an invasion would occur, but the English had adopted measures which could only be maintained for 6–8 weeks and a serious crisis would break out in England if the invasion did not occur. He would then deploy new technical weapons which were effective within a radius of 250–300 kilometres and would transform London into a heap of ruins.’
