The War Path - David Irving

505 Pages·2003·2.42 MB·English

David Irving
THE WAR PATH
HITLER’S GERMANY
 
–
F
FOCAL POINT
Copyright ©  by David Irving
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
David Irving is the son of a Royal Navy
commander. Imperfectly educated at
London's Imperial College of Science &
Technology and at University College, he
subsequently spent a year in Germany
working in a steel mill and perfecting his
fluency in the language. In  he pub-
lished The Destruction of Dresden. This became a bestseller
in many countries. 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; and Nuremberg: The Last
Battle. The second volume of his Churchill's War appeared
in ; a third volume is in preparation. Many of his works
are available as free downloads at www.fpp.co.uk/books.

Contents
Author’s Foreword v
PROLOGUE — The Nugget 
PART I : Approach to Absolute Power
First Lady 
Dictator by Consent 
Triumph of the Will 
“One Day, the World” 
Goddess of Fortune 
“Green” 
The Other Side of Hitler 
Whetting the Blade 
Munich 
One Step along a Long Path 
PART II : Toward the Promised Land
In Hitler’s Chancellery 
Fifty 
Extreme Unction 
The Major Solution 
Pact with the Devil 
EPILOGUE — His First Silesian War 
Abbreviations Used in Source Notes 
Source Notes 
Index 

Author’s Foreword
This book narrates one man’s path to war – Adolf Hitler’s.
The narrative ends at the precise moment when the com-
panion volume, Hitler’s War,* begins: the evening of  Sep-
tember , as he leaves his Berlin Chancellery for the Pol-
ish warfront. Like that volume, The War Path also tries to
describe events from behind the Führer’s desk, and to see
and understand each episode through his eyes. The tech-
nique necessarily narrows the viewpoint, but it does help to
explain otherwise inexplicable decisions. Nobody that I
know of has attempted this before, but to me it seemed
worth all the effort: after all, Hitler’s war sucked in one
country after another, left forty million dead and caused all
Europe and half of Asia to be wasted by fire and explosives;
it destroyed Hitler’s Third Reich, bankrupted Britain and
lost her her empire, and brought lasting disorder to the
world’s affairs; it saw the entrenchment of communism in
one continent, and its emergence in another.
I have approached the main narrative in logical chron-
ological sequence. How Hitler actually came to power in
 is merely outlined here – the topic has been profi-
ciently covered by others, particularly Karl Dietrich Bracher
and Wolfgang Sauer. The focus of my research fell on his
years of power, and from  February , when Hitler tells
his generals in secret of his ambition to launch a war of im-
perial conquest in the east as soon as Germany is able, the
detail thickens and the colour becomes enriched.
Fieldwork can be expensive and unrewarding, though
it always carries with it the exhilarating hope of sudden

* Hitler’s War, published in  by The Viking Press (New York), Hod-
der & Stoughton (London) and in other countries.

revelation. It is an acquired taste. It means bargaining for
years with governments like that of East Germany for per-
mission to search for buried documents; it means long
separations from wife and family, sleeping on overnight
trains, and haggling with retired generals and politicians or
their widows, to part them temporarily from their carefully
guarded caches of diaries or letters. It means leafing
through hundreds of thousands of pages of filthy paper in
remote and chilly archives, intuitively registering egregious
facts in the hope that some of them may, perhaps, click
with facts found years later in another file five thousand
miles away.
In writing this volume I have obtained a number of lit-
tle-known but authentic diaries of people in Hitler’s entou-
rage, including an unpublished segment of Alfred Jodl’s di-
ary; the official diary kept for OKW chief Wilhelm Keitel by
his adjutant Wolf Eberhard, and Eberhard’s own diary,
–; the diary of Nikolaus von Vormann, army liaison
officer to Hitler during August and September ; and
diaries kept by Martin Bormann and by Hitler’s personal
adjutant, Max Wünsche, relating to the Führer’s move-
ments. In addition I have used the unpublished diaries of
Fedor von Bock, Erhard Milch, Wilhelm Leeb, Ernst von
Weizsäcker, Erwin Lahousen and Eduard Wagner. Many of
these men wrote revealing private letters, too – Frau Elisa-
beth Wagner gave me some two thousand pages of Eduard
Wagner’s letters, significant sections of which turned out to
have been omitted from their published version. Christa
Schroeder, Hitler’s secretary, also made available to me
important contemporary papers, while Julius Schaub’s
family let me copy all his manuscripts and writings about
his twenty years as Hitler’s senior aide. I believe I am the
first biographer to have used the papers of Herbert Backe, a

state secretary in the Nazi government; I am certainly the
first to have explored the diaries, notebooks and papers of
Fritz Todt, builder of Hitler’s autobahns and his first muni-
tions minister, through the kindness of his daughter, Ilsebill
Todt.
Some of the most revealing documents used exclu-
sively here in The War Path are the private manuscripts
written by General von Fritsch, which I obtained from a So-
viet source; they relate the entire Blomberg–Fritsch crisis of
 through Fritsch’s own eyes. No former Hitler employee
whom I approached declined to grant me interviews; from
the various government archives I obtained detailed inter-
rogation reports on many of them, too. All these records are
now part of the Irving Collection in the Institute of Con-
temporary History in Munich, available with some excep-
tions to other researchers. There, too, researchers will find
the line-by-line annotations originally prepared for this
book (some , pages of source notes!); these were dis-
pensed with in this volume for reasons of space, but where I
anticipate that the reader will definitely want to know
more, I do point – at the back of the book, from page  –
to some of the more noteworthy sources that I have tapped.
Second World War researchers will find that many of the
special microfilms of materials that I prepared while re-
searching this book are now available through E. P. Micro-
forms Ltd., East Ardsley, Wakefield, Yorkshire, England.
There have been sceptics who questioned whether the
heavy reliance on – inevitably angled – private sources is
any better as a method of investigating Hitler’s career than
the more traditional quarries of information. My reply is
that it would, equally, be wrong to deny the value of such
private sources altogether.

I make no apology for having revised the existing pic-
ture of Adolf Hitler. The postwar world’s view of him has
been so conditioned by our own propaganda against him
that only the cartoon caricature of him prevails; hence any
account based on authentic records of the era is bound to
enhance history’s view of him in some respects – although
it will detract from it in many others. I have tried to accord
him the kind of hearing that he would have got in an Eng-
lish court of law – where the normal rules of evidence ap-
ply, but also where a measure of insight is appropriate.

P R O L O G U E
The Nugget
How can we ever learn what Hitler’s real ambitions were?
No doubt an unrefined black nugget of ambition did
nestle deep within him, but it was well hidden beneath a
thousand shrouds, and repressed by his own personal fears
of baring his innermost intentions even to the most inti-
mate of his friends.
One of the men closest to him, who served him as air
force adjutant from  to the very end, has emphasized
that even when we read of some startling outburst by Hitler
to his henchmen, and we feel we are getting closer to the
truth, we must always ask ourselves: was that the real Hit-
ler, or was it still just an image that he wished to impose on
that particular audience of the moment? Were those his
authentic aims, or was he just seeking to jolt his compla-
cent satraps out of a dangerous lethargy?
So we must go prospecting deep down into the bed-
rock of his history before we can trace to its origins that
consistent seam of secret, consuming ambition of which
the last six years of his life were just the violent expression.
Mein Kampf, written in prison in  and afterward, cer-
tainly reveals some of these secrets, and in later years he
regretted having published it for just that reason; because
the Hitler of the Chancellery in Berlin was more circum-
spect than the Hitler of the barricades, and the Hitler in the
first foothills of power was more subtle of tongue than the
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