Similar sentiments to these, entrusted to his diary on 28 January 1945 by a young German soldier living in hiding in Hungary in daily fear of being retaken by the Russians from whom he had escaped the previous autumn, were shared by millions of ordinary Germans in the last months of the Third Reich. Without hope of the victory so long promised, often without hope of seeing homes and loved ones again, and in trepidation of a future in the hands of merciless conquerors, they now held Hitler, once their idol, personally to blame for the untold misery which had befallen them. What they had seen as such glorious triumphs of the years 1939–41 were long forgotten. So was the jubilation that had accompanied them. This acclaim, building upon the already existent massive popular support that he had gained through his ‘triumphs’ of the pre-war years, had helped to make Hitler’s authority unassailable. His authority, most now plainly saw, had been used to follow disastrous policies which had directed the path to Germany’s ruin.
How this could have come about was given to few, at this point, fully to comprehend. The same soldier, doubtless speaking once more for vast inarticulate masses, had a simple answer: ‘The biggest mistake was the war with Russia. Whatever the courage and readiness for sacrifice, you can’t take on an entire world… We just bit off too much to chew. Above all our leadership.’2
Disastrous policy it had certainly been that had taken Germany into war against the Soviet Union. But it had been no simple mistake, Rather, it had been deeply embedded as an objective since the 1920s in Hitler’s own psyche and ideological drive. Germany could only survive by expanding eastwards, attaining ‘living space’ at the expense of the Soviet Union, winning it ‘by the sword’, and destroying the mortal danger of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’: that had been repeatedly his message since the mid-1920s. The destruction of Bolshevism had, beyond the obsession of a single individual, been transformed during the 1930s into the state ideology of the Nazi regime, a goal enthusiastically backed by the Nazi Party, the bulk of the state apparatus, and the leadership of the armed forces. Most ordinary Germans would have agreed, while fearing war, that Bolshevism marked the greatest threat to the nation’s future. By the end of that decade, Hitler’s ideological vision that had existed unchangingly from the time of
The second part of the soldier’s simple explanation was closer to the mark. It had indeed been a goal pursued from the arrogance of power and the conceit of presumed innate superiority. It had amounted in reality to a colossal gamble with Germany’s future as the stake. That Britain had still not been forced to terms and that the USA was a menacing presence in the wings, together with the perceived certainty that the USSR would prove an altogether more dangerous foe within a few years, meant — given Hitler’s mentality — that the gamble could not be postponed. The military and political leaders of the Reich largely agreed. Most rational observers would have been careful not to stake much on the outcome. The peril ought to have seemed daunting. But, in the backwash of the triumph over France, and under the illusion that the ‘inferiors’ of the Soviet Union would be incapable of holding out for more than a few months against the might of the invincible Wehrmacht, not just Hitler, but the German army leadership, too, thought European hegemony was theirs for the taking. The hubris which had enveloped Hitler during the 1930s and had fed his quest for European domination was, however, now to meet its nemesis.
By the winter of 1941, it was obvious that the gamble had not paid off. By the following winter the winter of Stalingrad — the consequences were already seen to be catastrophic. Germany had permanently lost the initiative. There was no longer any possibility of repeating the incisive, lightning campaigns that had brought the astonishing triumphs between 1939 and 1941. Instead, a bitter and attritional defensive war, which Hitler was both temperamentally and in terms of military skill singularly ill-equipped to direct, had to be fought — and with increasingly stretched manpower and resources. Meanwhile, relentless bombing was reducing Germany’s cities to ashes. And once the western Allies had established a firm hold on Continental soil in the summer of 1944, the writing was well and truly on the wall — at least for all who applied conventional military logic to the increasingly uneven contest.
