The War Path. Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939

338 Pages·1978·56.574 MB·English

by  David Irving

HITLER'S GERMANY 1933-1939
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WAR
THE PATH
Also by David Irving
\
The Destruction of Dresden '
The Mare's Nest
J
The Virus House (in US: The German Atomic Bomb)
.
The Destruction of Convoy PQ.17
]
Accident - The Death of General Sikorski
,
The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe i
Hitler's War '
The Trail of the Fox - The Life of Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel
Translations
;
The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Keitel
;
Breach of Security
The Service - The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen
]
i
WAR
THE PATH
GERMANY
HITLER'S 1933-1939
David Irving
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THE VIKING PRESS NEW YORK
bURLINGAME PUBLIC LIBRARY
BURLINGAME. CA 94010
344-7107
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©
Copyright David Irving, 1978
All rights reserved
Published in 1978 by The Viking Press
625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022
Published simultaneously in Canadaby
Penguin Books Canada Limited
LibraryofCongress Cataloging in Publication Data
Irving, David John Cawdell, 1938-
The war path.
Includes index.
-^ 1. Germany—History—1933-1945. \ 2. Hitler,
Adolf, 1889-1945. I. Title.
DD256.5.178 944.086 78-15824
ISBN 0-670-74971-0
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
Set in VIPTimes Roman
340398
Author* Foreword
s
—
This book narrates one man's path to war Adolf Hitler's. The narrative ends at
the precise moment when the companion volume, Hitler s War,"^ begins: the eve-
ning of 3 September 1939, as he leaves his Berlin Chancellery for the Polish war-
front. Like that volume. The War Path also tries to describe events from behind
the Fiihrer's desk, and to see and understand each episode through his eyes. The
technique necessarily narrows the viewpoint, but it does help to explain otherwise
inexplicable decisions. Nobody that I know ofhas attempted this before, but to me
it seemed worth all the effort: after all, Hitler's war sucked in one country after an-
other, 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 chronologi—cal sequence. How
Hitler actually came to power in 1933 is merely outlined here the topic has been
proficiently covered by others, particularly Karl Dietrich Bracher and Wolfgang
Sauer. The focus of my research fell on his years of power, and from 3 February
1933, when Hitler tells his generals in secret of his ambition to launch a war of
imperial conquest in the east as soon as Germany is able, the detail thickens and
the colour becomes enriched.
Field-work can be expensive and unrewarding, though it always carries with it
the exhilarating hope of sudden revelation. It is an acquired taste. It means bar-
gaining for years with governments like that of East Germany for permission 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 ofthousands ofpages of filthy
paper in remote and chilly archives, intuitively registering egregious facts in the
hope that some ofthem 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 little-known but authentic
*Hitler's War, published in 1977 by The Viking Press (New York), Hodder & Stoughton (London)
and in othercountries.
—
vi Author's Foreword
diaries of people in Hitler's entourage, including an unpublished segment of
OKW
Alfred Jodl's diary; the official diary kept for chief Wilhelm Keitel by his
adjutant Wolf Eberhard, and Eberhard's own diary, 1936-9; the diary ofNikolaus
von Vormann, army liaison officer to Hitler during August and September 1939;
and diaries kept by Martin Bormann and by Hitler's personal adjutant, Max
Wiinsche, relating to the Fiihrer's movements. In addition I have used the unpub-
lished diaries of Fedor von Bock, Erhard Milch, Wilhelm Leeb, Ernst von
Weizacker, Erwin Lahousen and Eduard Wagner. Many of these men wrote re-
—
vealing private letters, too Frau Elisabeth Wagner gave me some 2,000 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 fam-
ily 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 au-
tobahns and his first munitions minister, through the kindness of his daughter,
Ilsebill Todt.
Some of the most revealing documents used exclusively here in The War Path
are the private manuscripts written by General von Fritsch, which I obtained from
a Soviet source; they relate the entire Blomberg/Fritsch crisis of 1938 through
Fritsch's own eyes. No former Hider employee whom I approached declined to
grant me interviews; from the various government archives I obtained detailed
interrogation reports on many of them, too. All these records are now part of the
Irving Collection in the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, available
with some exceptions to other researchers. There, too, researchers will find the
line-by-line annotations originally prepared for this book (some 1,500 pages of
source-notes!); these were dispensed with in this volume for reasons of space,—but
where I anticipate that the reader will d—efinitely want to know more, I do point at
the back of the book, from page 267 to some of the more noteworthy sources
that I have tapped. Second World War researchers will find that many of the
special microfilms ofmaterials that I prepared while researching this book are now
available through E. P. Microforms 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 picture of Adolf Hitler. The
post-war 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 authe—ntic records ofthe era is bound to enhance history's view ofhim in
some respects although it will detract from it in many others. I have tried to
acco—rd 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.
Contents
Author's Foreword v
Prologue: The Nugget xi
Part 1: Approach to Absolute Power 1
First Lady 3
Dictator by Consent 21
Triumph of the Will 41
"One Day, the World" 54
Goddess of Fortune 68
"Green" 89
-The Other Side of Hitler 104
Whetting the Blade 116
Munich 129
One Step along a Long Path 152
Part 2: Towards the Promised Land 177
^ In Hitler's Chancellery 179
198
Fifty
- Extreme Unction 215
^ The Major Solution 224
240
-Pact with the Devil
Epilogue: His First Silesian War 261
Abbreviations used in notes 267
Notes 269
Index 285
VII