Ostkrieg (7 page)

Despite this growing determination and enormous effort to engineer a New Order through vast demographic reorganization, Nazi
policymakers faced an impasse by the spring of 1940. Hitler's frustration was evident by mid-March 1940. According to Walther Hewel, the Foreign Office liaison to Führer Headquarters: “The Jewish question really was a space question which was difficult to solve, particularly . . . since he had no space at his disposal.” After dismissing the Lublin project as unsuitable, Hitler intimated that he “would welcome a positive solution to the Jewish question, if only he could indicate a solution. This, however, was not possible under present conditions when he had not even sufficient space for his own people.”
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Conditions were about to change, however, and in the stunning military triumph over France beckoned a possible “final solution” to the Jewish question. Ironically, however, just as the earlier victory over Poland had promised more, in demographic terms, than it delivered, similar frustrations were to follow the even more glorious victory over France.

In the event, however, beginning to realize the magnitude of their developing triumph, and intoxicated with success, top Nazis once again engaged in wild flights of imagination. The first to act was Himmler, always alert for possibilities to please his master and expand his own power. In mid-May 1940, he produced a manuscript, “Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East,” that again illustrated the connections in Nazi thinking between living space for Germans and a solution to the Jewish problem. Although much of his memo was a rehashing of Nazi plans for reclaiming and racially reordering Eastern Europe, in turning to the Jews Himmler expressed his “hope that the concept of Jews will be completely extinguished through the possibility of a large emigration of all Jews to Africa or some other colony.” He then concluded that, however “cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best one if, out of inner conviction, one rejects as un-German and impossible the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people.” Having penned his statement of intent, Himmler waited for the proper moment to approach the Führer. This he did on 25 May, as the magnitude of German success in the western campaign was just sinking in, recording with great satisfaction, “The Führer read the six pages and considered them very good and correct.”
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This document and this episode are instructive not only because they reveal something of the way racial policy was made: Hitler simply approved an initiative from Himmler, informed him with whom he should make contact, and then left the details of implementation to his subordinates. It is significant as well because it confirms that top Nazis such as Himmler were aware of the brutal methods of Stalin in the Soviet Union but that they themselves had not yet crossed the threshold to
outright mass murder. The Nazis were grappling for a solution to their growing Jewish problem, but Himmler at least could not yet envisage one that entailed physical extermination. Still, his knowledge of these as yet unacceptable Bolshevik methods left open the possibility that, if other options failed, there remained the ultimate Final Solution.

With the triumph over France in sight, in early June 1940 Nazi planners in both the SS and the Foreign Office busied themselves with working out the details of what came to be known as the Madagascar Plan. As early as 3 June, an ambitious young official in the Foreign Office, Franz Rademacher, sought to clarify the key question, “Whereto with the Jews?” Rademacher essentially answered his own question by pointing to the island of Madagascar as a possible destination for a Jewish reservation. Since Nazi racial demographic plans in Poland had been stymied, Madagascar now loomed as a
Verlegenheitslösung
, a makeshift way out of a dilemma. When on 20 June Hitler indicated his intention to resettle European Jews in Madagascar, planning took on a furious intensity. The seriousness with which the operation was regarded can be seen in the swift move that Heydrich made to assert control of it for the SS. On 24 June, he wrote Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to remind him in no uncertain terms that in January 1939 Goering had placed him in charge of Jewish emigration from all German territory, a mandate that the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) meant to preserve. As word spread of the latest solution to their self-imposed Jewish problem, planners and bureaucrats throughout the Nazi Empire set to work sorting out the implications and details of the plan.
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Nor was this merely an empty planning exercise. Goebbels recorded in his diary on 26 July 1940, “[A] great plan for the evacuation of the Jews from Berlin has been approved. For the rest, all remaining Jews of Europe are to be deported after the war to Madagascar.” As late as 17 August, Goebbels still believed this solution to be operative, first noting harsh measures to be taken against enemies of the state, then remarking, “Later we will ship the Jews off to Madagascar. There they can build their own state.”
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For all the Nazis' hopes and expectations, however, by the late summer it had become clear that the Madagascar Plan had foundered on an insurmountable hurdle: as long as Great Britain remained in the war, the Germans had neither the means nor the opportunity to deport millions of Jews to the distant island. Once again, military triumphs had compounded the Jewish problem by adding more Jews to the German Empire and raised the possibility of a territorial solution, only to result in a frustrating dead end.

In the year since the beginning of the war, Nazi planners had sought
to engineer a demographic reorganization of the German sphere based on racial principles, only to be stymied by circumstances. The connection between the war and developing racial policy was clear, if frustrating: military triumphs brought the possibility of Lebensraum along with the nightmare of millions of “alien peoples” under German occupation. Moreover, the Jewish problem had mushroomed in scale. Where his original intent had been to free Germany from the alleged Jewish yoke, Hitler now perceived the need for a European-wide solution. The Nazis, however, increasingly came to understand that they could not effect a final solution to the Jewish problem because they could not end the war, and every effort at a suitable interim solution ended in frustration. These false starts with possible interim solutions, however, provided valuable practical experience in matters such as transportation, logistics, and deception that would later be applied in a more sinister environment. The clear trend in Nazi racial policy was in the direction of a steady radicalization. While Hitler provided the general direction and aims, his subordinates scrambled in a frantic example of “institutional Darwinism” to win his favor, with each impasse prompting the consideration of ever more radical schemes. The Nazis were clearly feeling their way in a process of trial and error, but each successive stage resulted in more ruthless and expansive racial plans than the one before. As summer 1940 gave way to autumn, Rademacher's earlier question, “Whereto with the Jews?” remained as vexing as ever.

“What now?” That had been Hitler's comment on hearing the news of the British declaration of war on 3 September. The German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact of 23 August—that pact “with Satan in order to drive the devil out”—had failed in its central purpose of preventing an Anglo-French intervention, but it had provided Hitler the protection and resources he needed to make quick work of Poland. After a desultory peace offer to Britain and France on 6 October, which he likely never expected to succeed, Hitler answered his own question with an insistence on an attack in the west as soon as possible since Germany could proceed in the east only when its borders in the west had been secured. “Time,” Hitler asserted in late September, “will in general work against us when we do not use it effectively. The economic means of the other side are stronger. . . . Time does not work for us in the military sense either.” In making this judgment, Hitler looked to the east as well as the west, for he now found himself in the uncomfortable position of economic and strategic dependence on the one state whose destruction was key to his ideology. Russia, he remarked to his top commanders a few weeks later,
would remain “dangerous in the future.” While “shocking reports” of Soviet actions in Poland confirmed Hitler's belief in the destructiveness of Jewish-Bolshevism, the manifest deficiencies of the Red Army in the autumn of 1939 seemed to make apparent the “catastrophic condition” of this “gigantic colossus.” Germany, therefore, had a brief window of opportunity that had to be exploited. What Hitler had in mind in October 1939, however, in no way resembled what eventually resulted: a rapid and brilliant blitzkrieg rout of his Western enemies. Instead, he envisioned simply a limited operation to push the western armies out of the Low Countries and northeastern France, seize the Channel ports, and make Germany less vulnerable to Allied counterattack.
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This would then allow him to turn his attention back to the east.

Even that limited scenario, however, horrified his generals. Acutely aware of Germany's economic difficulties, raw materials shortages, and military deficiencies, they had risked everything in throwing virtually all German military force against Poland. That gamble had succeeded thanks to French inaction, but the French certainly would not remain passive in the face of a direct German assault. Having witnessed first-hand in World War I the tough fighting qualities of the French soldier, virtually all German commanders agreed that Hitler's ideas were a recipe for disaster. The army would need months of refitting and retraining before it was again ready for action, almost half of its soldiers were over the age of forty, and a desperate shortage of equipment limited its striking power. To take just one example, motor vehicles were in such short supply that Halder suggested a “demotorization program” that entailed a “drastic and ruthless restriction of motor vehicles in existing and newly activated units.” Amazingly, with the spectacular blitzkrieg success looming, the chief of staff of the German army proposed that the horse take the place of the engine. Nor could the shortages be made good quickly since the German armament and economic mobilization plans had been based on the assumption that the war in the west would be a repeat of the attrition struggle of World War I. Only in October 1940 would a significant increase in production be achieved, with maximum levels of output not projected until the autumn of 1941. Nowhere in these economic plans can one detect a clear tactical or strategic blitzkrieg concept.
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From the German perspective, the situation appeared gloomy in the extreme. One leading expert, in fact, has likened the Wehrmacht in the autumn of 1939 to a “lance whose point consisted of hard steel, but [whose] wooden shaft looked . . . ever more brittle.” Hitler's generals, aware of their inferiority in both quantity and quality of weapons,
numbers of soldiers, and economic preparation, were virtually unanimous in their rejection of an immediate attack in the west, which they considered tantamount to suicide. Colonel-General Walter von Reichenau, widely considered to be a “Nazi general,” called an attack in the autumn of 1939 “just about criminal,” while the head of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), the otherwise obsequious Wilhelm Keitel, regarded the idea as so crazy that he offered his resignation. An autumn attack on France so distressed Halder that he, not for the first time, sounded out like-minded individuals about the possibility of a coup d'état. Following a stormy meeting on 5 November with Brauchitsch, the head of the OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres, or Army High Command), at which Hitler berated the defeatism of his generals and raged against the sabotage emanating from the army command, Halder panicked and had all incriminating plans destroyed. Still, the situation seemed so desperate that he toyed with the idea of assassinating the Führer. “Amid tears,” a close associate noted later in his diary, “Halder said that he had for weeks had a pistol in his pocket every time he went to Emil [the plotters' code name for Hitler] in order possibly to gun him down.”
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In the end, however, Halder lost his nerve and could not bring himself to violate his soldier's oath of personal loyalty.

In the event, a combination of bad weather and Hitler's own doubts about the original plan of attack led to a postponement of the assault on France until the following spring. During the course of the long winter, the so-called Phony War, or
Sitzkrieg
, German plans changed substantially. Despite considerable opposition among top commanders, the audacious idea of General Erich von Manstein, chief of staff of Army Group A, to send motorized units in a surprise attack through the Ardennes in order to cut off the enemy's main body of troops began to gain converts. First General Heinz Guderian, the leading German tank expert, and then Halder himself embraced Manstein's plan. Since Hitler had been thinking, albeit in vague tactical terms, along similar lines, he also proved an enthusiastic supporter of the conception.

The brilliance with which Operation Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut) unfolded in May and June 1940 has obscured several key points that accounted for its success. The decisive German victory resulted not from a premeditated strategy of blitzkrieg eagerly embraced by Wehrmacht leaders, but in spite of their doubts, hesitations, and obstructions. Indeed, the plan worked largely as a result of the calculated insubordination of the leading panzer general, Guderian, and the willingness of Halder to take enormous risks. In operational terms, Sickle Cut depended for success on the all-or-nothing gamble of concentrating all
available German forces at the key
Schwerpunkt
(focal point of an attack) for a decisive knockout blow and counting on the enemy cooperating by doing as he should. In strategic terms, it represented the ultimate risk: the German nightmare of being strangled in a slow war of attrition would be resolved with a single throw of the dice. Win, and Germany would break free of the specter of encirclement and blockade; lose, and the result would be catastrophe. Far from being the result of a rational plan of blitzkrieg strategy that would enable Germany to achieve Lebensraum in a series of small wars, Sickle Cut was an act of operational expediency designed to extract Germany from an economically and strategically desperate situation. The country had gone to war in 1939 seriously short of raw materials and unprepared economically to sustain a long war; success in the west had bought needed time.
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