The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [104]
This was the pass to which its ludicrous failure to prepare had brought the Wehrmacht. The title of the autobiography of Ribbentrop’s private secretary, Reinhard Spitzy, was How We Squandered the Reich. For the Germans to be defeated in the field of battle was one thing – and it took another year for it to happen on any significant scale – but for them to have been improperly provided for by their own leadership and General Staff was quite another.
Churchill used the opportunity of the second anniversary of his taking the premiership to mock Hitler over his ‘first blunder’ of invading Russia, for ‘There is a winter, you know, in Russia. For a good many months the temperature is apt to fall very low. There is snow, there is frost, and all that. Hitler forgot about this Russian winter. He must have been very loosely educated. We all heard about it at school; but he forgot it. I have never made such a bad mistake as that.’109 As well as hearing of it at school, Hitler owned a library with many books on Napoleon and his campaigns, which were covered in extensive marginalia in his own handwriting, as well as several biographies of generals of the Napoleonic era.110 Although the only time that Hitler ever mentioned Napoleon at his Führer-conferences was when he complained of the Wehrmacht’s slow promotion policy – ‘If a Napoleon could become a First Consul at the age of 27 [sic], I don’t see why a 30-year-old man here can’t be a general or lieutenant-general: that’s ridiculous’ – there is plenty of evidence that he thought a great deal about the man who had preceded him as Russia’s scourge.111
When he captured Paris in 1940, Hitler hastened to pay his respects at Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides, and ordered the remains of the King of Rome to be disinterred from Vienna and laid to rest with those of his father. ‘A gesture that will arouse a grateful response,’ thought Goebbels, though without much evidence for it.112 At the Berghof, Hitler often spoke of ‘that unique military genius, the Corsican Napoleon’, and discussed Napoleon’s supposed lack of threat to Britain, his error in assuming the imperial purple, his leadership qualities, and so on. Yet after his remark to the Croatian Defence Minister of July 1941, Hitler tended to stay off the subject of the glaring parallels between his own and the earlier invasion of Russia by Napoleon (and incidentally also that of Charles xii of Sweden which had ended in a similar disaster at Poltava in 1709).113 On 19 July 1942, at the Berghof, Hitler complained that ‘Just when our difficulties of the eastern winter campaign had reached their height, some imbecile pointed out that Napoleon, like ourselves, had started his Russian campaign on 22nd June. Thank God, I was able to counter that drivel with the authoritative statement of historians of repute that Napoleon’s campaign did not, in fact, begin until 23rd June.’114 Hitler’s historians were correct; it was at 22.00 hours on 23 June 1812 that Napoleon’s army began crossing the River Niemen.115 Yet the unnamed imbecile’s point was made, and he might also have mentioned that, unlike Hitler, the Corsican Ogre won a battle outside Moscow and captured the city – in the era before motorization too.
Hitler took over personal command of the Wehrmacht from Brauchitsch on 19 December 1941, in addition to his role as supreme commander of the armed forces. Although Brauchitsch had opposed the weakening of Army Group Centre and had been overruled by Hitler, he was made to accept responsibility for the resulting failure to seize Moscow. Yet from the moment Hitler assumed the commandership-in-chief of the Wehrmacht,