Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals Read Online Free PDF Page B

believed that it would ultimately collapse because of its own internal contradictions. Yet although there was certainly a chaotic quality to the Reich as it expanded eastwards, the radicalisation of policy on the Eastern Front was in no way a harbinger of self-destruction. On the contrary, the rise of Himmler and his effective takeover of occupation policy gave the conquered empire a unique and terrible energy. In fact, what really doomed the Third Reich was simply the death of Hitler on 20 July 1944 - killed by a bomb planted inside his Eastern Front headquarters by an aristocratic army officer named von Stauffenberg. The subsequent coup d‘état was resisted ferociously by Himmler’s SS and sections of the army which believed Goebbels’s claim that Hitler was still alive. But there was sufficient popular war-weariness for an apathetic acceptance of the new regime in most parts of the German Empire. Indeed, those who had remained faithful to their traditional religious faiths positively welcomed Helmuth von Moltke’s new ‘Kreisau’ constitution, named after the place where the ideas were first drafted, the most important clauses of which restored the old federal system of the pre-Hitler Reich. Moltke’s decision to seek a negotiated peace with Anglo-America was popular, despite the opposition of some of his older co-conspirators, notably von Hassell.
    Von Hassell’s fear was of a Russian recovery - the traditional ‘threat from the East’. However, in 1944 such fears seemed exaggerated. The wave of religious fundamentalism which had overthrown the last Tsar the previous year looked more like the last phase of complete Russian collapse than the beginning of a military recovery. As recent research has shown, however, this was to be the beginning of a dramatic reversal in European politics. Once again, Churchill made the right decision in arguing for American recognition and financial support of the new theocratic regime. Once Djugashvili had been installed as patriarch and had consolidated his grip on Muscovy and Siberia, he and his advisers agreed on a policy of cooperation with the Anglo-Americans which promised exactly the division of the world into ‘spheres of influence’ - at Germany’s expense - which Churchill had always desired. And although it was not until 1950 that the Russians were willing to launch their offensive against the German Empire, it is hard to imagine troops of the old Tsarist regime fighting with the near-suicidal fervour with which the ‘Holy Army’ fought from then on.
    Realising too late that von Hassell’s warnings had been justified, the German government turned to Hitler’s unused - but now completed - secret weapon. As the Holy Army advanced into Belorussia and Poland, the Germans issued a threat: if Djugashvili did not pull his men back, the city of Volgograd would be destroyed. But the Germans exaggerated the deterrent power of their new weapon. As far as Djugashvili was concerned, Jonathan Haslam has shown, the bomb was merely ‘designed to terrify those with weak nerves’. There had already been enough devastation in Eastern Europe to make the bomb seem like a bluff which could be called. The Patriarch ordered his troops to advance.
    The explosion of the world’s first atomic bomb and the destruction of Volgograd was without doubt a historic turning-point ; for it not only revealed a new and unprecedented weapon of destruction, but also exposed its limitations in the face of numerous and highly motivated conventional forces. As Djugashvili saw, the Germans could drop at most two bombs on Russia; but they would not dare drop bombs on their own territory. When the first Russian troops crossed the Oder into Germany, the war was as good as over. Terrified civilians fled westwards in advance of what Goebbels had called, shortly before his suicide, the ‘Asiatic horde’.
    Meanwhile, Churchill and Roosevelt had at last opened the agreed ‘second front’. The Anglo-American