In the meantime, Hitler summoned his military leaders to the Berghof for talks about the possibility of an invasion of Great Britain should his peace offer be rejected. On the eleventh, Admiral Raeder insisted that a landing could be attempted only if the Luftwaffe secured aerial superiority over southern England, while, the next day, Jodl laid out operational planning for any such invasion. The following day, Franz Halder, chief of the Army General Staff, journeyed to the mountaintop to brief the Führer, where he too discovered that Hitler regarded a landing as a last resort. “The Führer is greatly puzzled by Britain’s persistent unwillingness to make peace,” he noted in his diary on 13 July. “He sees the answer as we do in Britain’s hope on Russia, and therefore counts on having to compel her by main force to agree to peace. Actually that is much against his grain… [since] a military defeat of Britain will bring about the disintegration of the British Empire. This would not be of any benefit to Germany. German blood would be shed to accomplish something that would benefit only Japan, the United States, and others.”6
This halfheartedness revealed itself again on the sixteenth when Hitler issued Directive No. 16, “Preparations for a Landing Operation against England,” a document that contained so many qualifications that it convinced many of his top commanders that he never seriously intended an invasion. Indeed, Hitler told Goering in confidence that he never meant to carry out the operation. In order to launch an invasion of Britain, Germany needed control of the Channel both by air and by sea. To those around him, it seemed clear that, given the strength of the British navy and the crippling of the already weak German navy by the Norwegian operation in April, Hitler regarded the risk of an invasion as unacceptably high. Instead, he would put his hopes in his peace proposal.7
Perhaps Hitler never really expected the British to accept his offer, vague and imprecise as it was. The greatest part of a very long speech, over two hours, was, in fact, devoted to boasting about German military triumphs and praising the accomplishments of German commanders, a number of whom gained promotions. This latter was just as disingenuous as his peace proposal since Hitler believed that the army leadership had been found seriously wanting and that his own judgment had once more been proved correct. Only at the end did he make his brief appeal to common sense, declaring that his conscience forced him to offer the British one last chance to end a war that had no purpose. William Shirer, observing Hitler, thought it one of his best speeches:
The Hitler we saw in the Reichstag tonight was the conqueror, and conscious of it…. [H]e mixed superbly the full confidence of the conqueror with the humbleness which always goes down so well with the masses…. His voice was lower tonight; he rarely shouted as he usually does…. I’ve often admired the way he uses his hands…. Tonight he used those hands beautifully, seemed to express himself almost as much with his hands… as he did with his words…. I noticed too his gift for using his face and eyes… and the turn of his head for irony, of which there was considerable in tonight’s speech.
The great irony, which Shirer understood very well, was that Hitler offered peace not in the expectation that Churchill would accept, but to justify to the German people, who longed for it, the continuation of the war. He had given the British the choice; if they now rejected his offer, the war would go on, and it would be England’s fault.8
The British rejection came swiftly, within the hour, although even now Hitler seemed puzzled by the English attitude and could not quite bring himself to accept it. Although the British had acquiesced in German expansion in 1938, the situation in 1940 differed markedly: making peace on Hitler’s terms now meant recognition of German hegemony on the Continent and the likely end of Britain as a major power. Still, as Goebbels noted, “At the moment the Führer cannot bring himself to accept the British answer.”9 Once again, a British decision had confounded Hitler and confronted him with a dilemma. After he had blundered into war in 1939, the brilliant German military victories had seemed to offer a way out of his strategic, economic, and political impasse. The Germans, however, had only conquered their way into a strategic cul-de-sac, as their victories in 1940 had not secured hegemony in Europe. Now, faced with mounting time pressures from the Anglo-American powers in the west and growing concerns over German dependence on the Soviet Union in the east, Hitler had once more to make a decision.
The key question to be answered regarding Hitler’s decision for war with the Soviet Union is not so much why he chose to attack the Soviet Union—Lebensraum in the east, after all, formed the linchpin of his ideology—as why he chose to attack when he did. Why risk a two-front war at a time when the pact with the Soviet Union had essentially made Germany blockade proof? Why not dispose of Great Britain first, leaving his rear secured for any future action against Russia? And why the seeming urgency in the last week of July, after the failure of his peace overture, to come to a decision? Certainly, his underlying motivation, as it had been since the mid-1920s, was ideological. His entire program depended on securing living space in the east and dealing a death blow to the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy allegedly threatening Germany’s existence. A successful attack on the Soviet Union would not only destroy the power of the Jews but also procure for Germany the resources necessary ultimately to challenge the United States for world supremacy. Additionally, a Nazi-dominated Europe would allow Hitler the utopian opportunity to create a racially purified empire and solve the Jewish question for all time.
Originally, Hitler had expected to accomplish this task with Britain as an ally, but, even though British obstinacy forced him to make a detour through Western Europe, he retained a consistent focus on the east. As numerous conversations with Goebbels illustrated, Soviet actions in Poland and in the Winter War against Finland confirmed his racist hatreds, contempt, and determination to prevent the spread of the “Jewish virus” into Western Europe. When in a January 1940 letter Mussolini chastised him for losing sight of his anti-Bolshevik mission, Hitler replied that “only a bitter compulsion” had caused him to cooperate “with this country.” The pact with Russia, Hitler reminded the duce, was merely a tactical and economic necessity until he had safeguarded his rear in the west. For the rest, “Germany and Russia were two [alien] worlds.” Indeed, since late October 1939, Hitler had made no secret of his intention to turn German forces eastward. Above all, he was preoccupied with his two great tasks: achieving space for the German nation and the final confrontation with Bolshevism. Within days of the armistice with France, Hitler told his Wehrmacht adjutant, Colonel Schmundt, and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop that he was playing “with the idea of leading a war against Russia.”10