rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

768 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHThe intention is to close in on the city and raze it to the ground byartillery and by continuous air attack . . .Requests that the city be taken over will be turned down, for theproblem of the survival of the population and of supplying it withfood is one which cannot and should not be solved by us. In this warfor existence we have no interest in keeping even part of this greatcity’s population. ∗1053That same week, on October 3, Hitler returned to Berlin and in an addressto the German people proclaimed the collapse of the Soviet Union. ”I declaretoday, and I declare it without any reservation,” he said, ”that the enemy inthe East has been struck down and will never rise again . . . Behind our troopsthere already lies a territory twice the size of the German Reich when I cameto power in 1933.”When on October 8, Orel, a key city south of Moscow, fell, Hitler sent hispress chief, Otto Dietrich, flying back to Berlin, to tell the correspondents ofthe world’s leading newspapers there the next day that the last intact Sovietarmies, those of Marshal Timoshenko, defending Moscow, were locked in twosteel German pockets before the capital; that the southern armies of MarshalBudenny were routed and dispersed; and that sixty to seventy divisions of MarshalVoroshilov’s army were surrounded in Leningrad.”For all military purposes,” Dietrich concluded smugly, ”Soviet Russia isdone with. The British dream of a two-front war is dead.”These public boasts of Hitler and Dietrich were, to say the least, premature. †In reality the Russians, despite the surprise with which they were taken on June22, their subsequent heavy losses in men and equipment, their rapid withdrawaland the entrapment of some of their best armies, had begun in July to put upa mounting resistance such as the Wehrmacht had never encountered before.Haider’s diary and the reports of such front-line commanders as General Guderian,who led a large panzer group on the central front, began to be peppered– and then laden – with accounts of severe righting, desperate Russian standsand counterattacks and heavy casualties to German as well as Soviet troops.”The conduct of the Russian troops,” General Blumentritt wrote later, ”evenin this first battle [for Minsk] was in striking contrast to the behavior of thePoles and the Western Allies in defeat. Even when encircled the Russians stoodtheir ground and fought. 1054 And there proved to be more of them, and withbetter equipment, than Adolf Hitler had dreamed was possible. Fresh Sovietdivisions which German intelligence had no inkling of were continually beingthrown into battle. ”It is becoming ever clearer,” Haider wrote in his diary onAugust 11, ”that we underestimated the strength of the Russian colossus not∗ A few weeks later Goering told Ciano, ”This year between twenty and thirty millionpersons will die of hunger in Russia. Perhaps it is well that it should be so, for certain nationsmust be decimated. But even if it were not, nothing can be done about it. It is obvious thatif humanity is condemned to die of hunger, the last to die will be our two peoples . . . In thecamps for Russian prisoners they have begun to eat each other.” (Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers,pp. 464-65.)† Not as premature, however, as the warnings of the American General Staff, which inJuly had confidentially informed American editors and Washington correspondents that thecollapse of the Soviet Union was only a matter of a few weeks. It is not surprising that thedeclarations of Hitler and Dr. Dietrich early in October 1941 were widely believed in theUnited States and Britain as well as in Germany and elsewhere.