‘It’s always claimed that the Führer has been sent to us from God. I don’t doubt it. The Führer was sent to us from God, though not in order to save Germany, but to ruin it. Providence has determined the destruction of the German people, and Hitler is the executor of this will.’
‘If it doesn’t succeed, I see no other possibility of bringing the war to a favourable conclusion.’
‘We’ll not capitulate. Never. We can go down. But we’ll take a world with us.’
‘Now I finally have the swine who have been sabotaging my work for years,’ raged Hitler as details of the plot against him started to emerge. ‘Now I have proof: the entire General Staff is contaminated.’1 His long-standing, deep-seated distrust of his army leaders — an inevitable consequence of his ready acceptance of Keitel’s fawning description of him following the triumph in France in 1940 as an unparalleled military genius, the ‘greatest warlord of all time’, together with the inability of the generals, in his eyes, to achieve final victory and, since the first Russian winter, to stave off the endless array of defeats — had found its confirmation. It now seemed blindingly obvious to him why his military plans had encountered such setbacks: they had been sabotaged throughout by the treachery of his army officers. ‘Now I know why all my great plans in Russia had to fail in recent years,’ he ranted. ‘It was all treason! But for those traitors, we would have won long ago. Here is my justification before history’ (an indication, too, that Hitler was consciously looking to his place in the pantheon of Teutonic heroes).2 Goebbels, as so often, echoed Hitler’s sentiments. ‘The generals are not opposed to the Führer because we are experiencing crises at the front,’ he entered in his diary. ‘Rather, we are experiencing crises at the front because the generals are opposed to the Führer.’3 Hitler was convinced of an ‘inner blood-poisoning’. With leading positions occupied by traitors bent on destroying the Reich, he railed, with key figures such as General Eduard Wagner (responsible as Quartermaster-General for army supplies) and General Erich Fellgiebel (chief of signals operations at Führer Headquarters) connected to the conspiracy, it was no wonder that German military tactics had been known in advance by the Red Army. It had been ‘permanent treachery’ all along. It was symptomatic of an underlying ‘crisis in morale’. Action ought to have been taken sooner. It had been known, after all, for one and a half years that there were traitors in the army. But now, an end had to be made. ‘These most base creatures who in the whole of history have worn the soldier’s uniform, this rabble which has preserved itself from bygone times, must be got rid of and driven out.’ Military recovery would follow recovery from the crisis in morale.4 It would be ‘Germany’s salvation.’5
