"Strength lies not in defence, but in attack."

Rank: Fuehrer of Germany and Armed Forces Supreme Commander
Fate: Committed suicide Berlin 1945, aged 56

By 1941, the year of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler had been Germany’s head of state for 8 years. In that time he had overseen the dramatic rearmament of German armed forces, the creation of a totalitarian Nazi state, and the enforcement of brutal racial laws that would culminate in the Holocaust and the murder of 6 million European Jews. In 1939 he had launched a European war that led to the rapid defeat of Poland and France and established complete German dominance of the continent.

Hitler’s greatest ambition had always been to wage a war of conquest against the Soviet Union. His aim was to destroy ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ and establish ‘lebensraum’ (living space) for the German people in the east - in effect, a programme of German colonisation that would entail the brutal subjugation of the ‘inferior’ native Slavic population. The first step to achieving this goal came in 1941 with the launch of Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of the USSR, and the largest military operation in history.

The brilliant German victory against France in 1940 helped to convince Adolf Hitler that he was a gifted military commander. As the war against the Soviet Union progressed, this conviction led him to interfere more and more in the management of the campaign. Increasingly scornful of the professional qualifications of his generals, he surrounded himself with sycophantic officers who rarely questioned his judgement (e.g. Field Marshal Keitel, General Jodl).

Hitler, like all of his generals, was guilty of badly underestimating Soviet military strength in 1941. This, and his attempt to capture Leningrad, Moscow and Ukraine in a single campaign, contributed to the failure of Operation Barbarossa. This failure to attain a rapid knock-out blow against the Soviet Union meant Germany faced a long war in the east. This would always favour Hitler’s enemies (especially after he also declared war on the USA in December 1941) because of their superior resources.

Hitler had some successes in the east as a military leader. In the winter of 1941, in the face of a massive Red Army counteroffensive outside Moscow, he ordered his commanders to stand firm and dig in. This was against the advice of many of his top generals who advocated a full-scale retreat. Most historians acknowledge that Hitler’s stance prevented an even bigger catastrophe.

But such success only fed Hitler’s growing arrogance. He came to believe that military strategy was a question of ‘will’, and that the superior Nazi soldier would prevail as long as cowardice and defeatism were kept at bay. But when Hitler issued more ‘No Retreat’ orders in the face of Soviet counteroffensives (including to General Paulus’s 6th Army trapped at Stalingrad in 1942), no amount of Nazi fanaticism or ‘superior will’ could compensate for the growing superiority of the Red Army.

In 1944 Hitler’s inflexibility over defensive strategy led to bitter disputes with senior German field commanders such as Field Marshal von Manstein, leading to their dismissal.

Another weakness of Hitler’s military leadership was his fixation with ‘miracle weapons’, which he believed would transform the war in the East. These included the Tiger and Panther tanks (which he ordered to be rushed into action at the Battle of Kursk without adequate trials). Although these vehicles proved formidable, they could never be produced in enough numbers to defeat the hordes of T-34s turned out by the Soviet Union.

After the July Bomb Plot of 1944, in which Count von Stauffenberg’s briefcase bomb narrowly failed to assassinate Hitler in his military headquarters, the Fuehrer’s relationship with his army generals broke down almost completely. For the rest of the war, as Nazi Germany faced inevitable defeat, Hitler could only advocate fanatical resistance and order futile, doomed counter-attacks, such as Operation Solstice in Pomerania in February 1945.

In 1945 Hitler’s determination to fight to the bitter end condemned millions to a violent and pointless death. This was never more true than in the final Battle of Berlin, which produced more than half a million casualties and brought incalculable suffering to the civilian population.