Voice from the Fire Pit

HITLER DIRECTS His WAR (187 pp.)--translated and edited by Felix Gilbert --Oxford ($3.25).

On May 10, 1945, five days after the U.S. occupation of Berchtesgaden, a Counter-Intelligence Corps sergeant named George Allen loaded three German male stenographers into a car and drove five miles outside town to the wreckage of a Luftwaffe motor pool. There, after a search, Sergeant Allen found what he was looking for: a big hole in the ground, 20 feet wide and four feet deep, full of charred paper. He began poking around, soon plucked out a sheaf of papers that had escaped the flames. What he held in his hand, said the German stenographers, was a complete shorthand record of one of Hitler's twice-daily wartime conferences with his staff chiefs.

By the time Sergeant Allen and the stenographers had sifted the rest of the trove, they had recovered records of 51 such conferences, some complete, some so badly burned that only a few pages could be made out. What the searchers retrieved amounted only to a tantalizing sample of what the Nazis had committed to their fire pit: the records of several thousand Hitler staff conferences. Even so, as a private, bald-faced recital by Hitler of his philosophy and strategy between December 1942 and March 1945, the sample was a document of major historical importance.

"What Junk?" In Hitler Directs His War, Bryn Mawr History Professor Felix Gilbert has edited the fragments with main attention to the temper and character of Adolf Hitler, reduced many technical and tactical sessions to synopsis treatment in an appendix. One of the first things that struck Editor Gilbert was the way Hitler's personality dominated the conferences--and the vindictive "meanness" of the man's mind. One example: his treatment of hard-pressed Field Marshal von Kluge, whom he called back from the Eastern Front on July 26, 1943, to inform him that some of his Panzer units would have to be sent to other fronts:*

Kluge: But I can't do anything without Panzer divisions!

Hitler: But certainly you don't care about that junk. You can easily spare that.

Kluge: What junk?

Hitler: You yourself said, "That's just junk."

Kluge: I did not say that!

Hitler: Yes, it slipped out. That's why we're going to take them away from you.

Kluge: No, my Fuehrer, I didn't mean that. I have so little left, just a little bit. What I wanted to indicate was that the situation is hardly tenable any more.

Hitler: Yes, you have no Panzers. That is why I say: they can be taken away and refitted in the West . . .

Analyzing the transcripts, Editor Gilbert finds that Hitler "left hardly any freedom to his field commanders" and that his "first reaction to any suggestion of a withdrawal was invariably to suspect that it was motivated by lack of courage, and that his most usual attitude . . was to reject [it] offhand." But his generals' postwar charge that he "acted entirely by intuition . . . was inaccessible to rational considerations and did not brook contradiction ... is [not] borne out by these documents."

What is borne out is the fact that Hitler talked in endless paragraphs, while his advisers replied in single sentences, most of them cut short by the Fuehrer's cantankerous, repetitive arguments urging on them the fruits of his own experience as a corporal in World War I, his certainty that his conception of morale, techniques and political insight were just as important as professional and traditional military strategy.

"Merry Christmas." The flimsiest evidence served as meat for Hitler's resounding generalizations. Having seen the movie of The Grapes of Wrath several times, he confidently summed up the U.S. at one conference in 1943 (when U.S. troops were hammering across North Africa): "That [nation] will never become another Rome . . . Rome was a community of farmers [and U.S.] farmers are terribly run down . . . You can't imagine anything as miserable and as degenerate as the farmers; a completely uprooted mob, wandering all over the place." He was more impressed with the British: "There is no doubt that of the Anglo-Saxons, the English are the best."

As his reverses mounted, Hitler ran his war more & more with the bluster of a cornered bandit. When Mussolini resigned in July 1943 and Badoglio, "our most bitter enemy," took over the government, Hitler made sweeping plans: "Tomorrow I'll send a man down there with orders for the commander of the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division to the effect that he must drive into Rome with a special detail and arrest the whole government, the King and the whole bunch right away . . . the Crown Prince and . . . Badoglio and that entire crew . . . I'll go right into the Vatican. Do you think the Vatican embarrasses me? We'll take that over right away. For one thing, the entire diplomatic corps are in there . . . We'll get that bunch of swine out of there . . . Later we can make apologies." The blacker the war turned, the more vindictively he spoke. "Instead of monkeying around," he said, "let's attack, get ready here, and pick out a target--it doesn't matter what target ... I can only win the war if I destroy more of the enemy's [cities] than he destroys of ours."

The Fuehrer loved flamethrowers."[They are] the most terrifying thing there is," he mused, at one conference in December 1943, devoted to plans for meeting the invasion of France (which Hitler predicted would come in February or March 1944). While his conferees waited, he reached for a phone and called his supply chief :"Saur, how many flamethrowers are you making now per month? ... I need three times that many, and in two months' time . . . Only 1,200? I thought it was 2,400 . . . Well, hurry it up. We need more and more. We need them very urgently. Thank you. Heil! Merry Christmas."

* After being relieved of his command because of his part in the July 20, 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, Kluge committed suicide.

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