ABSTRACT
For much of the time from June 1941 onwards Hitler was absent fromBerlin overseeing military operations either from his headquarters atthe Wolfsschanze in East Prussia or from near Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. He immersed himself in the problems of the war and was cocooned from the real world. Only in November 1944 did he move back to Berlin. In December 1941 he took over the post of Commander-in-Chief of the army from General Brauchitsch, which gave him responsibility for both strategy and detailed military tactics. It was an immense workload and made him directly responsible for all the future defeats, which inevitably shattered his charismatic image. For the first three years of the war this image had survived intact, but it never recovered from the German defeat at Stalingrad in January 1943. From that point on, to quote Kershaw, ‘the German people’s love affair with Hitler was at an end’ (Kershaw, II, 2000: 557), even though considerable pockets of support still remained [Doc. 48, p. 182].
