David Irving THE WAR PATH HITLER’S GERMANY – F FOCAL POINT Copyright © by David Irving Electronic version copyright © by Parforce UK Ltd. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. Copies may be downloaded from our website for research purposes only. No part of this publication may be commercially reproduced, copied, or transmitted without written permission 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. 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. PROLOGUE 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 demobilized foot-soldier and agitator of the beerhalls of Bavaria. Excellent sources survive, even before Mein Kampf. The confidential police reports on twenty of Hitler’s early speeches, delivered in smoky, crowded halls in the revolu- tionary Soviet Munich of and , provide a series of glimpses at the outer shell of his beliefs, which he was still adapting to accommodate whichever views he found to be most loudly acclaimed by the two or three thousand listen- ers he attracted on each occasion.