The undoubted fanaticism of the Military SS, as well as the tendency of military commanders to put its units into the front line, led to heavy losses among its troops. A total of 900,000 Military SS men served in the war, of whom more than a third - 34 per cent - were killed.
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On 15 November 1941 the ‘Death’s Head’ division reported losses of 60 per cent amongst officers and NCOs. Its backbone was gone, a report complained. The general view of the Military SS among the German people was, as the Security Service of the SS reported in March 1942, that it was poorly trained and its men were often ‘recklessly sacrificed’. Its men were thrown into battle because it wanted to show itself better than the army.
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Moreover, parents were beginning to try to stop their sons from enlisting because of the anti-Christian indoctrination to which they would be subjected in the Military SS. ‘Influence of parents and Church negative,’ reported one recruitment centre in February 1943. ‘Parents generally anti-Military SS,’ reported another. In Vienna one man told the recruiting officer: ‘The priest told us that the SS was atheist and if we joined it we should go to hell.’
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Volunteers from Flanders, Denmark, Norway and Holland began to apply to be discharged, complaining of the arrogant and overbearing treatment of foreign recruits by German SS officers. Recruiting officers began to go to Labour Service camps and force young men to ‘volunteer’. Relatives complained about such actions, while Military SS officers soon declared themselves dissatisfied with the results, as many of the new recruits were ‘intellectually sub-standard’ and ‘inclined to insubordination and malingering’. The Military SS was rapidly deteriorating in quality towards the end of the war. But in this, it was doing no more than following the course taken by the regular armed forces themselves.
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A NEW ‘TIME OF STRUGGLE’
I
On 7 November 1942 Albert Speer was travelling with Hitler to Munich on the Leader’s own train. ‘In earlier years,’ Speer recalled, ‘Hitler had made a habit of showing himself at the window of his special train whenever it stopped. Now these encounters with the outside world seemed undesirable to him; instead, the blinds on the station side of the train would be lowered.’ Late that evening, the train was halted in a siding and Hitler and the rest of the Leader’s entourage sat down to dinner. Speer reported what happened next:
The table was elegantly set with silver cutlery, cut glass, good china and flower arrangements. As we began our ample meal, none of us at first saw that a freight train was stopped on the adjacent track. From the cattle wagon, bedraggled, starved, and in some cases wounded German soldiers, just returning from the east, stared at the diners. With a start, Hitler noticed the sombre scene two metres from his window. Without as much as a gesture of greeting in their direction, he peremptorily ordered his servant to draw the blinds. This, then, in the second half of the war, was how Hitler handled a meeting with ordinary front-line soldiers such as he himself had once been.
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Hitler, indeed, withdrew increasingly from public view from 1942 onwards. Goebbels and Speer both tried to persuade him to visit bombed-out areas of German cities to boost morale, but without success.
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There were rumours that he had fallen ill or been wounded. Yet when he did speak, it no longer had the effect it had once been able to produce on popular opinion. A speech broadcast on 21 March 1943, for example - his first public address since Stalingrad - was so brief, and delivered at such speed and in such a dull monotone, that people wondered whether he had been racing to get it finished in case it was interrupted by an air raid, or indeed whether it had been spoken by a stand-in.
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Even to his intimates, Hitler became less openly friendly. From the autumn of 1943 onwards, Speer thought that lunch with him was ‘an ordeal’. His dog, an Alsatian, was, Speer noted, ‘the only living creature at headquarters who aroused any flicker of human feeling in Hitler’. His distaste for bad news meant that his subordinates played up positive reports and presented insignificant, temporary successes as if they were major victories. He did not visit the front, and had no contact with the harsh realities of the fighting. He always assumed that the divisions marked on the maps he used to direct strategy were up to full strength. Equipped with the latest technology, with telephone and two-way radio, he was able to communicate with the generals on the ground, but the real communication was all one-way; if any generals objected, or tried to bring him back to reality, he would bawl them out and, in some instances, dismiss them. He bullied and browbeat the General Staff officers at his headquarters, and lost his temper when bad news was presented to him. The generals were cowards, he would rage, ‘the training of the General Staff is a school of lying and deception’, the information the army was conveying to it was false, ‘the situation is deliberately being represented as unfavourable - that’s how they want to force me to authorize retreats!’
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Underneath it all, Hitler was aware that the military situation was deteriorating, but outwardly he always presented a fac¸ade of optimism. His will had triumphed before: it would triumph again. With his concentration of power in military affairs, he now, for the first time in his life, had to work extremely hard, abandoning the casual and chaotic lifestyle of his earlier years as dictator, with its social evenings listening to music, watching old movies or playing with the architectural models created by Speer. Now he spent his time conferring with, or rather arguing with and browbeating, his generals, poring over military maps and thinking out military plans, often down to the last detail. Convinced more than ever of his own infallible genius, he became increasingly consumed by suspicion and distrust of his subordinates, expecially in military matters. No major decisions could be taken without him. Never one to take physical exercise, he relied increasingly on pills and remedies prescribed him by Dr Theo Morell, his personal physician since 1936: over twenty-eight different pills a day by the later stages of the war, and so many injections that Göring dubbed Morell ‘The Reich Master of Injections’. Morell controlled Hitler’s diet as well as he could in the face of his patient’s vegetarianism and his liking for foods such as pea soup, which caused him indigestion. Morell was a qualified physician, and no quack, and all the medicines he prescribed Hitler were clinically approved. His bedside manner enabled him to deal effectively with his patient, who relied on him increasingly as the war went on, and indeed he kept Hitler on his feet for virtually the whole time, apart from one bout of illness in early August 1941. But he was unable to deal effectively with Hitler’s physical deterioration under the strain to which he was now subjecting himself. From 1941 onwards electrocardiograms began to show progressive heart disease, probably caused by sclerosis of the coronary arteries. Beginning in the spring of 1943 Hitler suffered from chronic indigestion, with periodic stomach cramps (at least twenty-four bouts by the end of 1944), which may have been made worse by Morell’s treatment. A tremor began in his left hand, becoming markedly worse from the end of 1942, and accompanied by a growing stoop and jerking movements in his left leg. By 1944 he was shuffling rather than walking, and the symptoms of a mild but generally worsening case of Parkinson’s disease were becoming clear for all medically informed observers to note. Even Morell, whose preference was for psychosomatic diagnoses, accepted this early in 1945 and began applying the standard treatment available at the time. More generally, observers began to note how rapidly Hitler was ageing, with his hair turning grey and his appearance no longer that of a vigorous and energetic middle-aged man, but - thanks not least to his Parkinsonism - of an elderly, increasingly debilitated one. Hesitation about revealing this to the outside world may have been an important factor in his growing refusal to appear in public.
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Hitler gave nine public addresses in 1940, seven in 1941, five in 1942, and only two in 1943. On 30 January 1944, the eleventh anniversary of his appointment as Reich Chancellor, he delivered a radio broadcast, and on 24 February, the anniversary of the promulgation of the Nazi Party programme, he spoke in Munich to ‘Old Fighters’ of the Party, but he declined Goebbels’s offer to broadcast this speech, and it was not even reported in the newspapers. After this he was heard no more in public, except briefly, under special circumstances (as we shall see) on 21 July 1944. Otherwise, he made no attempt to communicate directly with the German people by word of mouth, and even his traditional speech in Munich on 8 November 1944 was read out to the ‘Old Fighters’ by Heinrich Himmler. Most of his time he spent at his field headquarters, almost entirely preoccupied with the conduct of the war, repairing to his mountain retreat on the Berghof, in the Bavarian Alps, for three months in 1943 and again from late February to mid-July 1944.
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Letters began arriving in growing numbers at the Propaganda Ministry asking, as Goebbels noted on 25 July 1943, ‘why the Leader does not even speak to the German people to explain the current situation. I regard it,’ the Propaganda Minister confided to his diary, ‘as most necessary that the Leader does that.’ Otherwise, thought Goebbels, the people would cease to believe in him.
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Hitler’s admirers amongst ordinary Germans became impatient too. Why didn’t Hitler speak on the ‘dramatic’ military situation in September 1944, asked one supporter in a letter to the Propaganda Ministry.
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Goebbels became increasingly critical of Hitler’s preoccupation with military affairs to the evident neglect of domestic politics. His absence from Berlin was creating a ‘leadership crisis’, he complained. ‘I can’t influence him politically. I can’t even report to him about the most urgent measures in my area. Everything goes through Bormann.’
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The shadowy Bormann’s power became even greater when, on 12 April 1943, he was given the title of ‘Secretary of the Leader’. Goebbels began to feel that Hitler had largely lost his grip on domestic affairs.
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Superficially, at least, it seemed as if the gap might be filled by the ‘second man in the Reich’, Hermann Go ̈ring. On 30 August 1939 Göring had succeeded in persuading Hitler to set up a Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich, whose role was to co-ordinate the civil administration. Hitler retained the power of veto over its orders, but in effect he had largely handed over control of domestic affairs to G̈ring, who became the Council’s chairman. The Council’s obvious importance attracted a number of key figures to its meetings, including Goebbels, Himmler, Ley and Darre’, and by February 1940 it was beginning to look like a kind of substitute cabinet. Alarmed, Hitler ordered that it should not meet again, and it never did. G̈ring did not attempt to revive it: the right he had acquired to append his signature to laws and decrees after Hitler’s was enough to satisfy his vanity. Despite his wide-ranging powers as head of the Four-Year Plan, G̈ring was becoming less energetic and decisive, perhaps under the influence of his morphine addiction.
He spent more and more time in his various hunting lodges and castles, and devoted a good deal of what energy he had left to building an opulent, extravagant mode of life for himself. In March 1943 a visitor who spent a day with G̈ring at Carinhall reported on the Reich Marshal’s now ‘grotesque’ lifestyle:
He appeared early in a Bavarian leather jacket with full white shirt sleeves. He changed his costume often during the day, and appeared at the dinner table in a blue or violet kimono with fur-trimmed bedroom slippers. Even in the morning he wore at his side a golden dagger which was also changed frequently. In his tiepin he wore a variety of precious stones, and around his fat body a wide girdle, set with many stones - not to mention the splendour and number of his rings.
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In these circumstances, there was no chance of G̈ring taking over the day-to-day management of domestic affairs in the Reich. In addition, the poor performance of the air force, of which he was the head, caused a sharp fall in his reputation from 1942 onwards, not only with the general public, but also with Hitler himself.
The Third Reich was clearly becoming increasingly leaderless on the home front. Yet somehow the machinery of government continued to function. The civil administration, staffed largely by traditional, conscientious and hard-working bureaucrats, carried on business on its own right up to the end of the war, ministers and state secretaries implemented policies the broad lines of which had been laid down by Hitler before the war, and responded to changes initiated by him when they came. They did not dare to formulate policies on major issues without his express approval. As before, Hitler’s own interventions in policy were intermittent, arbitrary and often contradictory. Finding it increasingly difficult to gain access to him, ministers, beginning with Goebbels, started sending him regular briefing papers on matters of importance. Hitler sometimes took note of them, more often not; it is very unlikely that he actually read all the 500 or so briefing papers sent to him by the Propaganda Ministry, for example, or every one of the 191 that reached him from the Reich Ministry of Justice during the war. Conscious, perhaps, of the fact that he had less time than before to intervene in the conduct of domestic affairs, he issued orders in May 1942 and again in June 1943 that he was to be known exclusively as the ‘Leader’ and not ‘Leader and Reich Chancellor’, even when signing official laws and decrees. Hitler was unable to provide any kind of overall direction of domestic affairs, so that government departments found it increasingly necessary to issue their own regulations on matters of detail, often without consulting other departments about their contents. In 1941, for example, 12 formal laws were passed, after consultation with ministries, 33 decrees were issued by Hitler, 27 decrees were ordered by the Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich, and 373 regulations and orders were issued by individual government departments. In the absence either of a formal cabinet or of any consistent direction by Hitler, government was becoming more and more fragmented. ‘Everybody does and leaves undone what he pleases,’ complained Goebbels in his diary on 2 March 1943, ‘because there’s no strong authority anywhere.’
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A co-ordinating ‘Committee of Three’ (Bormann, Keitel and Lammers) was, as we have seen, established early in 1943, but it ran up against the hostility of powerful figures like Goebbels and Speer, and ceased to meet after August.
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