Hitler’s Circle of Evil

I just finished watching a well done docudrama on Netflix called Hitler’s Circle of Evil. I highly recommend it. It’s definitely a good binge watch (10 episodes) for a weekend rainy day—if you like history. (If you don’t have Netflix, you’re in luck. Someone has uploaded the whole series to Youtube.)

I’ve read a lot about Hitler, the Nazis in general, the Holocaust, and, of course, the 2nd World War, but my knowledge of Hitler’s inner circle of power and how they interacted and related to der Führer (German for “The Leader”) was rather thin and incomplete as I enjoyably discovered.

These are just a few, among the many, interesting takeaways I got from the series:

1. Joseph Goebbels was true believer to the bitter end. I’d read this about him to some degree, but this Netflix series really showed just how critical Goebbels was in building the Nazi party and, more nefariously, in pushing the hatred of the Jews as one of the core beliefs of the Nazis. It was Goebbels who was behind the infamous Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) in 1938, named “from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.” Kristallnacht marked the first steps toward the Final Solution. Over two nights hundreds of Jews were killed and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps as a result of Kristallnacht. The day following the pogrom Hermann Göring said, “The Jewish problem will reach its solution if, in anytime soon, we will be drawn into war beyond our border—then it is obvious that we will have to manage a final account with the Jews.” While Göring and Himmler would ultimately abandon Hitler at the end, Goebbels remained loyal to the very end. Sadly, I had forgotten, Goebbels had brought his family to Hitler’s bunker and after Hitler committed suicide Goebbels had his wife poison all three of their young children and then he and her took poison pills.
2. Hermann Göring seem less fanatical and more pragmatic. He didn’t think invading Russia, for example, while the British were still not pacified, a good strategy. Likely thinking of WWI, he didn’t think a two front war was a winnable situation for Germany. But he couldn’t get Hitler to listen. He was angry and confronted Goebbels about Kristallnacht, complaining the violence and destruction bad for the German economy. And “who was going to pay for all the damage” Göring demanded to know from Goebbels. Of course the answer, from Goebbels and agreed to by Hitler, was that the Jews would pay for it.
3. Albert Speer, who’s memoirs I read many years ago, is one of those characters who doesn’t seem so much a committed Nazis as much as a committed German. He is the young architect who Hitler took under his wing and was ultimately made Minister of Armaments and War Production. It’s really in following Speer’s path that you see one of the most fatal flaws (that surely Speer mentioned in his book but I’d forgotten) in Hitler’s approach to war. Even as the Russian front and Operation Barbarossa began to look grim for Germany, the German Economy was still not in full war mode. Hitler wanted the home-front affected as little as possible by the war. As late as 1942, with German soldiers occupying most of Europe, Britain still in the war and America now a member of the allied forces, and a raging war in Russia, a number of German factories were still producing common household goods instead of war materials for troops in the field. It was Speer and Goebbels who pushed Hitler to approve a plan of “total war.” This plan called for ALL Germans to be directly involved in supporting the war. All factories had to be retooled to produce war materials and even German women (which Hitler resisted at first) needed to be working in those factories in support of the war effort. Of course in Britain and America this was the situation pretty much from the beginning. Germany had been at war since 1939, and here they were three years later just getting around to a total war economy. My theory is success blinded Hitler to the need to transform his economy. His victories had been swift against the allies in the beginning. The tempo of his economy was sufficient for the task up to that point, so he didn’t see a need to transform all his industries and bring the war home. It was Speer who realized this fatal flaw, but by then it was really too late.