HITLER'S GERMANY 1933-1939 v :^r* y ^'•^:*'^ , 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 ^T^ THE VIKING PRESS NEW YORK bURLINGAME PUBLIC LIBRARY BURLINGAME. CA 94010 344-7107 0^^ © 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