Hitler's Private Library Page 21
In the final chapter of Mein Kampf, when Hitler writes about the fall of Carthage, he invokes the Clausewitzian notions of the “stain of cowardly submission” and of rebirth through an “honorable struggle.” He had not only imbibed the wisdom of Clausewitz, Moltke, and Schlieffen verbatim, but he had also gleaned vast quantities of technical data from the annual “almanachs” of military equipment. “He had an exceptional knowledge of weaponry,” Otto Dietrich, his press secretary, once observed. “For example he knew all the warships in the world in so far as they were listed in . . . reference works. He could give in detail from memory their age, their displacement and speed, their armor strength, their towers and weaponry. He was thoroughly informed about the most modern artillery and tank construction from every country.” Even a critic as harsh as Halder grudgingly conceded to Hitler’s exceptional recall. “A reference to the material strength of the Russian army, in particular the high number of 10,000 tanks, unleashed a more than quarter-hour retort from Hitler, in which he cited from memory the Russians’ annual production for the last twenty years,” Halder remembered.
Hitler had also mastered the writings of Karl May. Unlike his generals, he had studied May’s adventure stories of the American West, taking close note of the tactical skills and cunning of Winnetou, May’s Native American hero, who combined stealth and surprise to outwit and overcome his opponents. Weary of his generals’ “eternal doubts” about his “great ideas,” and struck by their own dearth of imagination and boldness, Hitler recommended to them May’s books as a means of sharpening their battlefield prowess, and issued a special field edition for the soldiers at the front. “Hitler was wont to say that he had always been deeply impressed by the tactical finesse and circumspection that May conferred upon his character Winnetou,” Albert Speer later noted. “And he would add that during his reading hours at night, when faced by seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for those stories, that they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people.”
When kannenberg inscribed the Rochs biography to Hitler nine days into the blitzkrieg against the West, he indicated those passages he wanted Hitler to read. On the opening page of chapter four, Kannenberg has framed the chapter title, “The Schlieffen Battle Plan for the Two-Front War,” which warns of the dangers to Germany of fighting on dual fronts, with one vertical and one angled line, like a mansard roof. Kannenberg bracketed the following passage with a thick line:
But then again: as long as Schlieffen stood at the head of the general staff, the defense of the Reich lay in good hands. Schlieffen believed that he and his army were equal to any coalition. Rightfully so! As [Adjutant Otto von] Gottberg emphasizes, behind his mask of controlled self-discipline, his fiery spirit hid the recipe for the success of his yet unknown plan. Schlieffen possesses the rare faith in victory that derived from the irresistible, invincible force that is shaped by the effect of a true leader—Führer—who, like a force of nature, crushes all resistance.
In the right-hand margin, Kannenberg has highlighted the following sentence with a second, smaller bracket: “What are the missteps and mistakes of a few subordinate officers in the context of his expansive plan that in itself is a guarantee of victory?” Hitler followed Kannenberg’s lead. In a series of marginalia, Hitler ambles through the text, his pencil catching and marking individual sentences or entire paragraphs. One would think he read the book within days of Kannenberg’s inscribing it, because what he chose to focus on informed the very issues he was then grappling with on the battlefield.
Here we see Hitler gathering the “mosaic” pieces to help justify ex post facto his invasion of the Low Countries. “Since the French eastern front was considered too strong, as was confirmed in the war against France, the route through Luxembourg and Belgium needed to be taken,” he marks on page 47. On page 52: “Schlieffen’s plan to go through Belgium was simply a commandment for self-preservation if one did not want to face defeat of the campaign from the outset.” There are other markings on page 53, where Rochs talks of English conspiracies against the Continent.
“But the [First World War] had further shown that Great Britain, in agreement with the Belgian government, had long prepared for military occupation of Belgium; for military purposes this came too late,” Rochs wrote, with Hitler’s pencil following attentively. “Thus, for anyone who has seen the harbor facility at Zeebrugge with the adjacent roads and the extensive railway network, it was clear that this massive facility in the proximity of Antwerp could only have been built with the intention not of trade but for the military purpose of an English landing.”
These marked passages either complemented or completed his vision of reality and history, but in other pages, we also find him highlighting issues of more immediacy, as on page 63, where Rochs talks about the strategic importance of a small coastal town near the Franco-Belgian border. “Schlieffen frequently noted with particular pleasure that even Frederick the Great, though in a somewhat different context,” Rochs writes, “had spoken, in his proposals for a war against France, of the idea of a northern encirclement and siege of Dunkirk with the right wing over Abbeville.” Hitler has drawn a thick line beside this passage.
That Dunkirk should attract Hitler’s attention in these days is not surprising since, as we’ve seen, on May 17 he had ordered the Twelfth Panzer Division to halt its advance toward Dunkirk at Abbeville. The German military leadership knew he had made a mistake.1 Hitler offered another explanation. “When the news came that the enemy had launched an attack along the entire front, I could have wept for joy,” Hitler later recalled. “They had fallen into the trap! It was right to let the attack begin in Luttich. They were led to believe that we were sticking to the old Schlieffen Plan. Two days after arriving at Abbeville the offensive could be directed southward.” While the Germans idled, more than three hundred thousand Allied troops were evacuated.
By my count, there are thirty-two penciled intrusions on the twenty pages that constitute chapter four of the Schlieffen biography, most of which reflect in one way or another on the campaign in France. While these markings suggest some of the historical and strategic issues that occupied Hitler’s thoughts in those days, they are virtually all retrospective in nature. If there is any marginalia of potentially historical significance it would be several marked passages on pages 60 and 61 where Rochs discusses a two-front war.
Excerpt from Schlieffen, with marginalia marking a passage cautioning against Germany’s fighting a two-front war.
Schlieffen saw Germany caught between two major military threats: France and England to the west, and Russia to the east. He felt that Germany needed first to secure its western borders before dealing with Russia. For Schlieffen, the defeat of England and France was of such paramount importance that he was willing to make strategic territorial sacrifices in the east, and invoked the memory of Frederick the Great to bolster his argument: “In the end one will have to sacrifice, as the great king taught us, even a province as rich as East Prussia in order to concentrate all one’s strength where a decisive victory is needed.” There are two parallel strikes accompanied by an exclamation point beside this passage, and a series of underscorings of individual phrases in the paragraphs that follow: “reckon with the entire Russian army as an additional enemy” and “political and sentimental emotions” and “in the face of a Russian deluge,” before the pencil finally drove down hard on the margin to highlight the following paragraph:
If the lands east of the Weichsel [River] could not be retained in the face of overwhelming force, Schlieffen was willing to sacrifice these areas temporarily, as was repeatedly emphasized above. Once the situation in France has been decided, the French-English army destroyed, and Germany stands victorious on the Seine, everything else will—according to Schlieffen—follow on its own accord.
Though Hitler had long talked about expansion to the east and the need for Lebensraum, he had never addressed the issue of a war with Russia. These ma
rkings represent the earliest recorded evidence of Hitler’s plan to invade the Soviet Union. Keitel recalls that Hitler first spoke to him of a major offensive in the east in late July 1940, an intention he repeated to Halder and his senior military staff the following month. By that autumn, Hitler had his generals drafting a plan of attack. The following June, Hitler would unleash Operation Barbarossa on the eastern front. By this time, Hitler had taken complete operational control of every decision relating to the planning and implementation of the military operation. The propaganda machine trumpeted Keitel’s claim of Hitler as the “greatest field marshal of all time.”
Hitler’s pencil seems to have strayed only once from the parameters of chapter four, to a footnote at the bottom of page 41, at the end of the preceding chapter. The footnote refers to a passage in which Rochs discusses Kaiser Wilhelm II’s infamous dismissal of Bismarck in 1890, a radical decision taken on poor counsel that abruptly ended the career of Germany’s legendary statesman. Schlieffen observes that Wilhelm was blinded not only by his youth and arrogance and court intrigue but also by his inability to see into the true nature of his advisers. “Insight into the human being and other things, into the very heart of a matter, into the very essence of existence—that was the kaiser’s great failing,” Rochs writes. “The result was not only the frequently incomprehensible choice of the individuals in his closest circle but the constant vacillating in his decision-making and his actions.” To underscore his point, Rochs wrote the following footnote:
That Wilhelm II could bear to hear the truth and also valued it is evident from a statement he made on the deathbed of his long-time general adjutant, Field Marshal Wilhelm von Hahnke, on February 8, 1912. “The only man who always told me the truth.” A statement that honors the master as well as the servant, but sounds remarkably bitter in the mouth of a monarch after nearly 24 years of rule.
Beside this passage, Hitler has placed a single emphatic exclamation point.
* * *
1 General Halder suspected that Hitler wanted to deprive the army of the victory to spite his generals, and hand the job of destroying the encircled British Expeditionary Force to his crony Hermann Göring’s air force as a propaganda ploy.
BOOK NINE
Hitler’s History of the Second World War
This war will go down in history as President Roosevelt’s war.
SVEN HEDIN, America in the Battle of the Continents
HITLER’S COPY OF sven hedin’s America in the Battle of the Continents has vanished, but its intellectual shadow can be found in a three-page letter Hitler sent to the author on October 30, 1942, after having read the two-hundred-page political treatise the previous night. Hitler signed the letter in the increasingly abbreviated form he began using after 1933, a stylized capital A for his given name, and an embellished H for his surname, with the remaining letters trailing off in a scribbled downward line, like unraveling thread, an orthographic idiosyncrasy strikingly similar to his father’s signature a half century before.
The letter is typed on Hitler’s personal letterhead, with his name in the upper left-hand corner in bold caps beneath a Nazi eagle clutching a swastika wrapped in a laurel wreath. Unlike the eagle on Hitler’s ex libris, this one is more formal and stylized, a product of the steel plate of the modern era rather than the soft-edged primitivism of the woodcut. The letter is addressed to “Professor Dr. Sven von Hedin” at Norr Mälarstrand 66 in Stockholm, Sweden, with the return address and date typed in the upper right-hand corner: Führerhauptquartier, den 30.10.1942.
Unlike Hitler’s official Reich Chancellery office at 77 Wilhelm Street in Berlin, or his private office in the Nazi Party headquarters in Brown House at 45 Brienner Street in Munich, the Führerhauptquartier was a “place” without a permanent locus. During the invasion of Poland, the Führerhauptquartier moved from battlefront to battlefront in a specially equipped train. For the blitzkrieg in the west, it was of course first located at the Felsennest; then a few weeks later in a cluster of brick farm buildings near Brûly-de-Pesche, south of Brussels; and during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler commuted between the military headquarters called the Wolf’s Lair, in the north, and the Wehrwolf, a thousand miles to the south. The Führerhauptquartier was by its very nature as much temporal as geographic. It followed Hitler’s itinerary. The date was the address.
Hitler’s letter to Sven Hedin, dated October 30, 1942.
When Hitler dictated his three-page letter to Hedin, he was recovering from a head cold so severe that it left him bedridden, his mind so blurred that he later told Otto Dietrich that his memory no longer seemed to be fully intact. He was fifty-three years old but felt a decade older. Adding to his misery was his self-imposed isolation following a series of bitter confrontations with his general staff.
Since late summer, he had been living in Ukraine at the Wehrwolf headquarters, a cluster of concrete bunkers and one-story wooden huts from which he had commanded the German offensives along the eastern front. In the heat-soaked, mosquito-infested woods that August, Hitler had grown ever more irritated with his chronically skeptical and increasingly belligerent generals, in particular, Franz Halder.
Halder had advised against Hitler’s planned invasion of the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941, and protested Hitler’s intention to attack Leningrad and Stalingrad, the symbolic centers of Bolshevism, rather than seizing Moscow, the center of Soviet communication and industry and a nexus of railway connections. Hitler dismissed Halder’s objection as “technical,” the product of “calcified brains caught in the ideas of past centuries.” Initially, Halder’s caution had proved misplaced. But following Hitler’s initial successes in the summer and autumn of 1941, the German advances stalled in the vicious cold of the Russian winter. Hitler then turned south with a renewed drive on Stalingrad and an ambitious panzer-driven thrust to the rich oil fields of the Caucasus and the Black Sea port of Sebastopol. There was talk of invading Iran, and plans for reaching the Persian Gulf. When the drive into the Caucuses faltered, however, Halder confronted Hitler. He said he could no longer endorse Hitler’s plans in good conscience. There were increasingly ominous signs of impending Soviet counterattacks. Hitler dismissed Halder’s concern.
“The Russian is dead,” he said. “He exhausted his last reserves with the winter offensive. It is just a matter of pushing him a bit harder till he falls.” Hitler spoke of fanaticism and heroism. He quoted from Clausewitz and Nietzsche. Generally, Halder quietly endured the former corporal’s wearisome lectures to his generals, but on this occasion he intervened. He cited statistics indicating that the Soviets were in fact producing twelve hundred tanks per month and had mobilized as many as an additional million and a half men. Hitler looked at Halder, then exploded. With “foam in the corners of [his] mouth,” he went after the generals with “clenched fists,” Halder recalled. He forbade such “idiotic gossip.” But Halder was not going to back down. “It does not require any prophetic gift to predict what will happen if Stalin sends the million and a half soldiers against Stalingrad and the Don [River],” he said.
Hitler grew more furious still. This “constant battle” with his generals, he raged, had cost him half of his emotional reserves. It was no longer worth it. With the challenges that now faced the army, it was not a question of “technical skill,” he insisted; what was needed was the “passion of National Socialist faith.” The meeting ended in a mood of annoyance and discomfort that lingered over the weeks that followed. On September 7, when Hitler was informed of the deteriorating situation in the south, he again exploded. This time, he accused his generals of disobeying his commands. He believed his efforts were being intentionally undermined.
That same day, Hitler ordered a team of stenographers dispatched from Berlin to the Wehrwolf. They were to record every word he spoke in briefings. Afterward he immediately withdrew to his private quarters on the periphery of the Wehrwolf complex, where he ate with his secretaries and select members of his entourage. When weather p
ermitted, they sat at a round table beneath the trees.
To bolster Hitler’s spirits and provide a pleasant distraction, Martin Bormann decided to bring Hermann Giesler for an extended stay. Giesler was an architect whom Hitler had engaged for various projects, including the redesign of his hometown of Linz.1 Giesler had accompanied Hitler, along with Albert Speer, on a tour of Paris monuments in the summer of 1940. “You will build my burial place,” Hitler murmured to Giesler before Napoleon’s tomb.
Hitler welcomed Giesler’s arrival. He spoke to him not only about their architectural plans for Linz and about the residence Hitler intended to build there, but also about the intolerable situation among his general staff. “I live and work in the depressing certainty that I am surrounded by treason,” Hitler confided. “Whom can I trust with any surety, and how can I make decisions, give orders, how can I lead with any certainty when there is such distrust created through deception, falsified reports and obvious betrayal, when with justified caution such uncertainty arises, when I need to be so distrustful from the outset?” In particular, Hitler noted, his relationship with Halder had become intolerable. “It just doesn’t work any longer,” Hitler told Giesler. “I can’t stand it when I look into his face and see such hatred and arrogance, something that is completely unjustified in a man of such mediocre intelligence.”
On September 24, 1942, Hitler relieved Halder of his command. “My nerves are shot, and his are not much better,” Halder scribbled in his diary that night. But Halder’s dismissal did little to remove Hitler’s sense of isolation, his concerns about betrayal and deceit, not to mention unsettling reports about the mounting enemy pressure in the Caucasus, around Stalingrad, and, toward the end of October, at a village in Egypt called El Alamein. “The bitter fighting in Egypt has intensified on this fifth day of the defensive battle,” the log from the German High Command recorded on October 29. “Despite relentless attacks and unusually high expenditure of ammunition the enemy was unable to secure any successes against the courageous German defense.”