The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [344]
The Allied armies furthermore needed to be bloodied in a series of victories before they could possibly meet the main body of the Wehrmacht in open battle, as opposed to the under-resourced Afrika Korps which had nonetheless managed to do so well at Tobruk, the Kasserine Pass and elsewhere. A supreme effort such as the Ardennes offensive, conducted against green Allied troops in 1942 or 1943, might well have succeeded, especially with the fuel and air cover available to the Germans in those years. Until quite late on in the war, therefore, the Allies had their essentially reactive grand strategies imposed on them by Hitler’s force majeure, always responding to the Führer’s iron whim. It is therefore not by chance that this book has tended to concentrate on his thoughts, his actions and his regular, colossal blunders.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust, was central to his Nazism but it did nothing to aid Germany’s chances of winning the war, and possibly a great deal to retard them. The Reich devoted a great amount of effort, especially in terms of transportation, in its effort to render Europe Judenfrei. Quite apart from the sheer moral issue involved, which obviously had no bearing on Hitler, the Holocaust was a military mistake, tying up railway stock and (admittedly relatively few) SS troops, but above all denuding Germany of millions of potentially productive workers and potential soldiers. German Jews who had fought bravely for the Kaiser – Hitler’s own Iron Cross First Class had come because his Jewish regimental adjutant petitioned GHQ hard for it – were not only not called up for the Volkssturm, they were gassed. Between 1939 and 1944 the German labour force shrank from thirty-nine million to twenty-nine million people, a disastrous 26 per cent fall at a time when a massive increase in production was vital for victory.34 When production was being badly hampered by a lack of intelligent, educated, hard-working people, Hitler massacred some six million Europeans Jews, an action that would be self-evidently self-defeating, except in the diseased mind of a Nazi fanatic. Similarly, for ideological reasons the Wehrmacht did not recruit women, while the Red Army called up between 1 million and 1.5 million of them, with the only difference in women’s benefits being that they received 100 grams more soap than the men.
For all the military defeats on the European Continent to both the east and west by 1945, there was one thing that could still have won Hitler a stalemate, or even the war. In June 1942, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg reported to Hitler that an amount of uranium ‘no larger than a pineapple’ would be enough to destroy a city.35 Yet the Jewish and German émigré scientists who had the knowledge and genius necessary to split the atom were by then working in New Mexico, rather than for Heisenberg in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Dahlem. Hitler’s Nazism had also lost him that last, albeit always slim, chance of victory. It was said of Emperor Napoleon III that his name was both his making and his undoing. Similarly, Hitler won his revolution because of his drive, willpower, impulsiveness, philosophy and policies, which seemed – however wrongly – to offer Germany hope in the 1930s. Yet it was precisely these same phenomena that led to his destruction the following decade.
On the evening of 4 February 1942 Adolf Hitler was entertaining Heinrich Himmler at the Berghof when the conversation got round to Shakespeare. It was probably Hamlet and King Lear to which the Führer was referring