392. The most thorough analysis of the winter crisis, Klaus Reinhardt, Die Wende vor Moskau. Das Scheitern der Strategie Hitler im Winter 1941/42, Stuttgart, 1972, 221–2, acknowledges that Hitler’s decision corresponded with the views of Bock and his subordinate commanders, and that ‘the claim that Hitler’s order initially saved the eastern front is as such correct (die Behauptung, daβ Hitlers Befehl die Ostfront zunächst gerettet habe, an sich richtig [ist])’. He adds, however, that the inability to provide reinforcements meant that the rigidity of the order, given the existing troop placements, also proved a weakness, and that more flexibility would have allowed the consolidation of a more defensible position.
393. William Carr, Hitler. A Study in Personality and Politics, London, 1978, 96.
394. TBJG, II/3, 501, 509, 512 (20 March 1942).
395. Hitler had said on 27 November to the Danish Foreign Minister, Erik Scavenius, that if the German people was not strong enough, then it deserved to be destroyed ‘by another, stronger power’. It was the first of a number of occasions on which he would use such characteristic social-Darwinist phraseology, offering to his own mind justification for a German defeat. (See Staatsmänner I, 329 and n.7.)
396. Monologe, 179 (5 January 1942).
397. Monologe, 183–4 (7 January 1942).
398. Monologe, 193 (10 January 1942).
399. Indeed, it has been suggested that ‘no rational man in early 1942 would have guessed at the eventual outcome of the war’ (Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, London, 1995, 15).
400. See Klaus Reinhardt, ‘Moscow 1941. The Turning-Point’, in John Erikson and David Dilks (eds.), Barbarossa. The Axis and the Allies, Edinburgh, 1994, 207–24.
401. See Churchill, iii.341–2; Weinberg III, 284–5.
402. See Monologe, 184 (7 January 1942) for Hitler’s expression of contempt.
<p>CHAPTER 10: FULFILLING THE ‘PROPHECY’</p>1. See also the remarks in Mommsen, ‘Realisierung’, 417–18.
2. Klee, Dreßen, and Rieß, ‘Schöne Zeiten’, 148, cit. a letter of Gendarmerie-Meister Fritz Jacob, 29 October 1941, on his keenness to be sent to the east.
3. DTB Frank, 386 (entry for 17 July 1941, referring to a statement by Hitler of 19 June).
4. TBJG, iv.705 (20 June 1941).
5. See Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews. The Genesis of the Holocaust, (1989), London, 1994, 98–100, for evidence that a ‘territorial solution’ was what was envisaged at this time.
6. Müller, 96. See Heiber, ‘Der Generalplan Ost’, 297–324, especially 299–301, 307–9; Czeslaw Madajczyk, ‘Generalplan Ost’, Polish Western Affairs, 3 (1962), 3–54, here especially 3. In his lengthy memorandum of 27 April 1942, assessing the plan that had been drawn up in autumn 1941 in the RSHA, Dr Erhard Wetzel, head (Dezernent) of the department of racial policy in the Ostministerium, thought the figure of 31 million too low, and reckoned that 46–51 million would have to be removed. Himmler had initially wanted the ‘construction of the east (Ostaufbau)’ completed in twenty years (Heiber, 298 n.16). For the date of the commissioning of the Plan (24 June 1941), see the letter of 15 July 1941 from Prof. Dr Konrad Meyer, SS-Standartenführer and head of the planning department of the Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom, to Himmler in Dietrich Eichholtz, ‘Der “Generalplan Ost”. Über eine Ausgeburt imperialistischer Denkart und Politik (mit Dokumenten)’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte, 26 (1982), 217–74, here 256. See also Robert L. Koehl, RKFDV: German Resettlement and Population Policy 1939–1945. A History of the Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom, Cambridge, Mass., 1957, 147–51.
7. Warlimont, 150.
8. Longerich, Ermordung 116–18; Krausnick/Wilhelm, 164.
9. Alfred Streim, Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener im ‘Fall Barbarossa’, Heidelberg/Karlsruhe, 1981, 89 n.333.
10. Krausnick/Wilhelm, 163; Klee, Dreßen, and Rieß, ‘Schöne Zeiten’, 52.
11. Osobyi Arkhiv, Moscow, 500–1–25, Fols.119–20: ‘Gesamtaufstellung der im Bereich des EK.3 bis zum 1.Dez.1941 durchgeführten Exekutionen’. Of the total of 138,272 persons ‘executed’ by the same Einsatzkommando (including 55,556 women, and 34,464 children), registered by the same Einsatzkommando in a handwritten summary (in the same file, Fol.128) of 9 February 1942, no fewer than 136, 421 were Jews.
12. See Krausnick/Wilhelm, 627; Streim, 88–9.
