Victor and Vanquished
Torn this way and that
between choleric elation and exhaustion, Hitler lashed out savagely in all
directions, threw his armies over ever new frontiers, ceaselessly conquering
fresh territories, none of which was large enough to satisfy his egomania.
Anyone probing the root cause of the war and the manner of waging it is continually
led back to considerations of Hitler’s character; for, much as the war looks
like a predatory excursion necessitated by the Third Reich’s ruinous economic
policy, great as was the influence of outdated nationalist, ideological or
missionary motives, it was the purely hegemonic aims that overlay all others. The
urge to dominate Europe, and ultimately the world, although backed by ideological
and racial arguments, was at bottom nothing more nor less than the desire to
exercise sovereignty. “The question,” Hitler himself once laconically put it,
“is not the fate of National Socialist Germany, but who is to dominate Europe
in the future.”
Once it had been
discovered, the recipe for success remained almost unvaried, based chiefly on
the advance of massed tanks straight through the enemy lines, followed by a
pincer movement and encirclement. The German superiority lay less in a preponderance
of men or materials than in unswerving application of the principle of the
rapid mobile operation which, combined with sudden air attacks and commando and
paratroop assaults behind the front, had the effect not so much of `defeating'
the enemy in the classical sense as of so confusing him that he became
incapable of fighting and ready to capitulate.
"The idea of
treating wars as anything other than the harshest means of settling questions
of very existence," he once said, "is ridiculous. Every war costs
blood, and the smell of blood arouses in man all the instincts which have lain
within us since the beginning of the world: deeds of violence, the intoxication
of murder, and many other things. Everything else is empty babble. A humane war
exists only in bloodless brains." In such maxims the primitive fascination
of a consciousness stuck fast in its own formative period survives in crude
analogies of the right of the stronger. Their effect was to ensure approval in
the highest quarters for the policy of suppression now being practiced with
increasing savagery. They also lent support to demands for the ruthless use of
the German forces themselves. When the loss of young officers was pointed out
to Hitler, he replied uncomprehendingly, "But that's what the young men are
for!"
While his foes, who
since the active intervention of the United States had over 75 percent of the
world’s manpower, industrial capacity and sources of raw materials at their disposal,
overran the outer bastions of his empire - North Africa, Sicily and the Ukraine
- gained mastery of the air, and forced the collapse of the German U-boat campaign,
Hitler buried himself in the solitude of his headquarters. There in almost manic
impersonality, with security zones, barbed-wire and lines of outposts which on both
Jodl and Goebbels produced the impression of a concentration camp, an embittered
man, visibly deteriorating physically and in his own words tortured by melancholy,
ever more deeply entangled in the hatreds and complexes of his early years,
organized between attacks of compulsive screaming and pathological rage the continued
prosecution of the war and the frenzied murder of whole peoples.
Soon after the
unsuccessful Ardennes offensive, which had come to grief in a thousand incompetencies,
Hitler returned to Berlin, to the bunker under the Reich Chancellery. Here,
protected by twenty-six feet of concrete as much from reality as from enemy bombs,
to the accompaniment of attacks of rage, senseless orders to attack, and convulsive
weeping, he once more constructed his world of delusions, which included miracle
weapons, ultimate victory, and great buildings to go up after the war. His body
ruined by drugs, at the mercy of the storms of his temperament, and tortured by
distrust, he looked by all accounts like a figure from the kingdom of the
shades. He gestured wildly over maps, planned attacks, directed with a trembling
hand armies that no longer existed, and as an encirclement began described to
his entourage the joy of the battle before the gates of Berlin which was going
to decide the war. During the night-long brooding monologues, which reflected
both the final stage of his intellectual decay and his bitterness at the
“cowardly failure” of the German people, he spoke “almost exclusively of the
training of dogs, questions of diet, and the stupidity and wickedness of the
world.” Almost daily he took counsel from the horoscopes of an astrologer, and while
attacking Russian armies were already clashing with the hastily assembled remnants
of the shattered German forces, fantastic hopes flickered again from the conjunction
of planets, ascendants and transits in the square. Only when the ring had closed
around the government district, and he ruled over nothing but a few million cubic
yards of rubble, did he begin to give in.
On the night of 29
April, after he had begun the process of ending his existence with a scene of
macabre pedantry and married his companion of many years, Eva Braun, he dictated
his political testament. It contained protestations of his own innocence, accusations
of foreign treachery and of undeserved disloyalty, and in its repetition of the
old formulas demonstrated his lifelong inability to learn. He had never
outgrown his first prejudices, hatreds and complexes, and remained to the end
fixed in a monotonous sameness of thought and feeling. . . .
The following
afternoon, with Russian troops only a few blocks from the Reich Chancellery,
Hitler prepared to take his life. “He sat there,” an orderly officer wrote later,
“apathetic and distractedly brooding, indifferent to everything going on around
him, tormented, lifeless, a man dying slowly and with difficulty who was bound indissolubly
to his destiny and was now being strangled by it. Then I knew that this was the
end!” Shortly after 3 p.m. he retired with Eva Braun to his private rooms. . .
. A single shot rang out. The commander of the SS guard, Rattenhuber, who had
been waiting with a few others in the corridor, went in and found Hitler lying
on the sofa, which was soaked in blood. Beside him lay Eva Braun, an unused
revolver in her lap; she had taken poison. Rattenhuber had the two bodies taken
into the garden, and petrol poured over them, then sent for the mourners:
Goebbels, Bormann, General Burgdorf, Hitler’s valet Linge, and a few others. A
burst of Russian firing drove them back into the bunker, and one of those
present threw a burning rag on the bodies. As the flames shot up they all stood
to attention with hands raised in the Nazi salute. A member of the guard who
passed the spot half an hour after the ceremony couldn't recognize Hitler
because he was already pretty burnt. pp 101-102
Only respect for the
dead and the ruins he left behind forbid us to dismiss this life as no more
than a nauseating, vulgar and bloody horror story, which fundamentally is all it
amounts to; not without justice the epoch of his rise and power has been called
“the age of the demonic nonentities.” The historian who studies this figure is
continually up against the difficulty “of making the catastrophic magnitude of
the events tally with the inconceivable commonplaceness of the individual who
set them in motion.”
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