The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [103]
In his table-talk at Berchtesgaden, Hitler let drop a number of remarks that might provide a clue to why he had not sufficiently concerned himself with his men’s welfare when it came to the great Russian freeze. ‘One can’t put any trust in the meteorological forecasts,’ he told Bormann and others on the night of 14 October 1941, arguing that the weathermen ‘ought to be separated from the Army’. Although he considered that Lufthansa had a first-class meteorological service, the military organization was ‘not nearly as good’. Believing himself to be an expert in meteorology as much as he was in everything else, this world-class know-all went on to state:
Weather prediction is not a science that can be learnt mechanically. What we need are men gifted with a sixth sense, who live in nature and with nature – whether or not they know anything about isotherms and isobars. As a rule, obviously, these men are not particularly suited to the wearing of uniforms. One of them will have a humped back, another will be bandy-legged, a third paralytic. Similarly, one doesn’t expect them to live like bureaucrats.106
These ‘human barometers’, as Hitler dubbed them – who don’t much sound like exemplars of the master race – would have telephones installed in their homes free of charge and would predict the weather for the Reich and ‘be flattered to have people relying on [their] knowledge’. They would be people ‘who understand the flights of midges and swallows, who can read the signs, who feel the wind, to whom the movements of the sky are familiar. Elements are involved in that kind of thing that are beyond mathematics,’ said Hitler. Or indeed parody.
Hitler was certainly proud of his own hardiness in the cold, boasting on 12 August 1942:
Having to change into long trousers was always a misery to me. Even with a temperature of 10 below zero I used to go about in lederhosen. The feeling of freedom they give you is wonderful. Abandoning my shorts was one of the biggest sacrifices I had to make… Anything up to five degrees below zero I don’t even notice. Quite a number of young people of today already wear shorts all the year round; it is just a question of habit. In the future I shall have an SS Highland Brigade in lederhosen!107
If Hitler was under the impression that the Wehrmacht could withstand sub-zero temperatures in sub-standard winter clothing, he was soon proved wrong. In some areas the Germans were well prepared for Barbarossa; they had printed a German–Russian phrasebook, for example, with questions such as ‘Where is the collective farm chairman?’ and ‘Are you a Communist?’ (It was inadvisable to answer the latter in the affirmative.) Yet when it came to something as basic as proper clothing in a winter campaign in one of the world’s coldest countries, there was simply not enough, and what they did provide was often not warm enough either. All this springs directly from Hitler’s belief that the campaign would be over in three months, by late September 1941, before the weather turned.
The consequences of this lack of warm clothing were often horrific. The Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte recalled in his novel Kaputt how he had been in the Europeiski Café in Warsaw when he watched German troops returning from the Eastern Front:
Suddenly I was struck with horror and realized that they had no eyelids. I had already seen soldiers with lidless eyes, on the platform of the Minsk station a