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Introduction i Version: Last updated Friday, April 13, 2001 Endnotes will be found from page 842 Hitler’s War and The War Path Website download edition © Parforce UK Ltd This Adobe .pdf (Portable Document Format) edition is uploaded onto the FPP website as a tool for students and academics. It can be downloaded for reading and study purposes only, and is not to be commercially distributed in any form. Readers are invited to submit any typographical errors they spot to David Irving at the address below, or to submit them via email direct to him at [email protected]. Rewards are paid for each error found and accepted. The website edition will be constantly updated and corrected. Informed comments and corrections on historical points are also welcomed. David Irving Focal Point Publications Duke Street London phone: fax: email: [email protected] ii Introduction David Irving is the son of a Royal Navy commander. Educated at Imperial College of Science & Technology and at University College London, he subsequently spent a year in Germany working in a steel mill and perfecting his fluency in the German language. Among his thirty books, the best-known include Hitler’s War; The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field Marshal Rommel; Accident, the Death of General Sikorski; The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe; Göring: a Biography, and Nuremberg, the Last Battle. He has translated several works by other authors. He lives in Grosvenor Square, London, and has raised five daughters. In he published The Destruction of Dresden. This became a best-seller in many countries. In he issued a revised edition, Apocalypse 1945, as well as his important biography, Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich. A second volume of Churchill’s War will appear shortly. Introduction iii David Irving Hitler’s War and The War Path ‘Two books in English stand out from the vast literature of the Second World War: Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe, published in 1952, and David Irving’s Hitler’s War’ JOHN KEEGAN, Times Literary Supplement, F FOCAL POINT iv Introduction Josephine ‒ in memoriam copyright © Parforce (UK) Ltd All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, or transmitted save with written permission of the author in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. Hitler’s War was first published by The Viking Press (New York) and Hodder & Stoughton (London) in ; The War Path was published by The Viking Press and Michael Joseph Ltd in . Macmillan Ltd continued to publish these volumes until . We published a revised edition of both volumes in . Hitler’s War and The War Path has been considerably revised and expanded on the basis of materials available since then. The volume is also available as a free download in PDF format from our website at www.fpp.co.uk/books. FOCAL POINT PUBLICATIONS Duke Street, London wk pe British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddle & Co. Ltd, Guildford Introduction v Contents vii Introduction 1 Prologue:The Nugget 13 Dictator by Consent 33 Triumph of the Will 43 ‘One Day, the World’ 53 First Lady 67 Goddess of Fortune 83 ‘Green’ 95 The Other Side of Hitler 103 Whetting the Blade 113 Munich 131 One Step Along a Long Path 153 In Hitler’s Chancellery 169 Fifty 181 Extreme Unction 187 The Major Solution 199 Pact with the Devil 215 Entr’acte: His First Silesian War 223 ‘White’ 237 Overtures 249 Incidents 261 Clearing the Decks 271 ‘We Must Destroy Them Too!’ 281 Hors d’Œuvre 295 The Warlord at the Western Front 309 The Big Decision 323 The Dilemma 335 Molotov 345 The ‘Barbarossa’ Directive 353 Let Europe Hold its Breath 363 Behind the Door 373 A Bitter Victory 383 Hess and Bormann 399 Pricking the Bubble 411 The Country Poacher vi Introduction 425 Kiev 443 Cold Harvest 461 A Test of Endurance 473 Hitler Takes Command 485 Hitler’s Word is Law 501 ‘Blue’ 511 The Black Spot for Halder 523 Africa and Stalingrad 539 Trauma and Tragedy 553 Retreat 567 Silence of the Tomb 579 Clutching at Straws 593 Correcting the Front Line 607 ‘Axis’ 623 Feelers to Stalin 635 ‘And So It Will Be, Mein Führer!’ 649 Trouble from Providence 663 The Most Reviled 681 Man with a Yellow Leather Briefcase 697 ‘Do You Recognise My Voice?’ 715 He Who Rides a Tiger 731 Rommel Gets a Choice 747 On the Brink of a Volcano 767 The Gamble 779 Waiting for a Telegram 795 Hitler Goes to Ground 811 ‘Eclipse’ 839 Author’s Notes 842 Author’s notes and sources Introduction vii Introduction T o historians is granted a talent that even the gods are denied – to alter what has already happened!’ I bore this scornful saying in mind when I embarked on this study of Adolf Hitler’s twelve years of absolute power. I saw myself as a stone-cleaner – less concerned with architectural appraisal than with scrub- bing years of grime and discoloration from the facade of a silent and forbidding monument. I set out to describe events from behind the Führer’s desk, seeing each episode through his eyes. The technique necessarily nar- fi rows the eld of view, but it does help to explain decisions that are otherwise inexplicable. Nobody that I knew of had attempted this before, but it seemed ff worth the e ort: after all, Hitler’s war left forty million dead and caused all fi of Europe and half of Asia to be wasted by re and explosives; it destroyed Hitler’s ‘Third Reich,’ bankrupted Britain and lost her the Empire, and it ff brought lasting disorder to the world’s a airs; it saw the entrenchment of communism in one continent, and its emergence in another. In earlier books I had relied on the primary records of the period rather than published literature, which contained too many pitfalls for the histo- rian. I naïvely supposed that the same primary-sources technique could fi within ve years be applied to a study of Hitler. In fact it would be thirteen fi years before the rst volume, Hitler’s W ar, was published in and twenty fi years later I was still indexing and adding to my documentary les. I re- member, in , driving down to Tilbury Docks to collect a crate of fi micro lms ordered from the U.S. government for this study; the liner that brought the crate has long been scrapped, the dockyard itself levelled to the ground. I suppose I took it all at a far too leisurely pace. I hope however that this biography, now updated and revised, will outlive its rivals, and that fi more and more future writers nd themselves compelled to consult it for vii viii Introduction materials that are contained in none of the others. Travelling around the world I have found that it has split the community of academic historians from top to bottom, particularly in the controversy around ‘the Holocaust.’ In Australia alone, students from the universities of New South Wales and Western Australia have told me that there they are penalised for citing Hit- ler’s War; at the universities of Wollongong and Canberra students are ffi disciplined if they don’t. The biography was required reading for o cers at military academies from Sandhurst to West Point, New York, and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, until special-interest groups applied pressure to the com- ffi manding o cers of those seats of learning; in its time it attracted critical praise from the experts behind the Iron Curtain and from the denizens of the Far Right. Not everybody was content. As the author of this work I have had my home smashed into by thugs, my family terrorised, my name smeared, my fi printers rebombed, and myself arrested and deported by tiny, democratic Austria – an illegal act, their courts decided, for which the ministerial cul- ff fl prits were punished; at the behest of disa ected academics and in uential citizens, in subsequent years, I was deported from Canada (in ), and refused entry to Australia, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa, and other civi- lised countries around the world (in ). In my absence, internationally ffi a liated groups circulated letters to librarians, pleading for this book to be ff taken o their shelves. From time to time copies of these letters were shown to me. A journalist for Time magazine dining with me in New York in fi remarked, ‘Before coming over I read the clippings les on you. Until Hit- ler’s War you couldn’t put a foot wrong, you were the darling of the media; but after it...’ ff I o er no apology for having revised the existing picture of the man. I have tried to accord to him the kind of hearing that he would have got in an English court of law – where the normal rules of evidence apply, but also where a measure of insight is appropriate. There have been sceptics who questioned whether the heavy reliance on – inevitably angled – private sources is any better as a method of investigation than the more traditional quarries of information. My reply is that we certainly cannot deny the value of private sources altogether. As the Washington Post noted in its review of fi the rst edition in , ‘British historians have always been more objec- tive toward Hitler than either German or American writers.’ Introduction ix my conclusions on completing the manuscript startled even me. Hitler was a far less omnipotent Führer than had been believed, and his grip on his subordinates had weakened with each passing year. Three episodes – the ff aftermath of the Ernst Röhm a air of June , , the Dollfuss assassina- tion a month later, and the anti-Jewish outrages of November – show how his powers had been pre-empted by men to whom he felt himself in one way or another indebted. While my Hitler’s central and guiding pre- war ambition always remains constant, his methods and tactics were fi fl profoundly opportunistic. Hitler rmly believed in grasping at eeting op- portunities. ‘There is but one moment when the Goddess of Fortune wafts by,’ he lectured his adjutants in , ‘and if you don’t grab her then by the hem you won’t get a second chance!’ The manner in which he seized upon the double scandal in January to divest himself of the over-conservative army Commander in Chief, Werner von Fritsch, and to become his own Supreme Commander too, is a good example. His geographical ambitions remained unchanged. He had no ambitions against Britain or her Empire at all, and all the captured records solidly bear this out. He had certainly built the wrong air force and the wrong navy for a sustained campaign against the British Isles; and subtle indications, like his instructions to Fritz Todt (page ) to erect huge monuments on the Reich’s western frontiers, suggest that for Hitler these frontiers were of a lasting nature. There is equally solid proof of his plans to invade the east – his secret speech of February (page ), his memorandum of Au- gust (pages – ), his June instructions for the expansion of Pillau as a Baltic naval base (page ), and his remarks to Mussolini in May (page ), that ‘Germany will step out along the ancient Teutonic path, toward the east.’ Not until later that month, it turns out (page ), fi did Hitler nally resign himself to the likelihood that Britain and France would probably not stand aside. These last pre-war years saw Hitler’s intensive reliance on psychologi- cal warfare techniques. The principle was not new: Napoleon himself had fi de ned it thus: ‘The reputation of one’s arms in war is everything, and equivalent to real forces.’ By using the records of the propaganda ministry ffi and various editorial o ces I have tried to illustrate how advanced the Na- zis were in these ‘cold war’ techniques. Related to this theme is my emphasis on Hitler’s foreign Intelligence sources. The Nazis’ wiretapping and code-breaking agency, the Forschungsamt, which destroyed all its records in , holds the key to many of his successes. The agency eavesdropped x Introduction fi on foreign diplomats in Berlin and – even more signi cantly – it fed to Hitler hour-by-hour transcripts of the lurid and incautious telephone con- versations conducted between an embattled Prague and the Czech diplomats in London and Paris during September (pages – ). From the time of Munich until the outbreak of war with Britain Hitler could follow virtually hourly how his enemies were reacting to each Nazi ploy, and he rightly deduced by August , , that while the western powers might fi fi well formally declare war they would not actually ght – not at rst, that is. The war years saw Hitler as a powerful and relentless military com- mander, the inspiration behind great victories like the Battle of France in May and the Battle of Kharkov in May ; even Marshal Zhukov later privately admitted that Hitler’s summer strategy – rather than ff the general sta ’s frontal assault on Moscow – was unquestionably right. At the same time however Hitler became a lax and indecisive political leader, ff who allowed a airs of state to stagnate. Though often brutal and insensitive, he lacked the ability to be ruthless where it mattered most. He refused to bomb London itself until Mr. Churchill forced the decision on him in late August . He was reluctant to impose the test of total mobilisation on the German ‘master race’ until it was too late to matter, so that with muni- tions factories crying out for manpower, idle German housewives were still employing half a million domestic servants to dust their homes and polish their furniture. Hitler’s military irresolution sometimes showed through, for example in his panicky vacillation at times of crisis like the ff battle for Narvik in . He took ine ectual measures against his enemies ff inside Germany for too long, and seems to have been unable to act e ectively against strong opposition at the very heart of his High Command. In fact he ff su ered incompetent ministers and generals far longer than the Allied lead- ers did. He failed to unite the feuding factions of Party and Wehrmacht for fl the common cause, and he proved incapable of sti ing the corrosive hatred of the War Department (OKH) for the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW). I believe that I show in this book that the more hermetically Hitler locked fi himself away behind the barbed wire and mine elds of his remote military headquarters, the more his Germany became a Führer-Staat without a Führer. Domestic policy was controlled by whoever was most powerful in each sector – by Hermann Göring as head of the powerful economics agency, the Four-Year Plan; by Hans Lammers as chief of the Reich chancellery; or by Martin Bormann, the Nazi Party boss; or by Heinrich Himmler, minis- ter of the interior and Reichsführer of the evil-famed SS.
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