(11 of 11)
On Dec. 1 Hitler ordered the start of an all-out drive on Moscow, which the Wehrmacht now surrounded on three sides, only 20 to 30 miles outside the city. One infantry unit got as far as the suburb of Khimki, from which the Germans could actually see the towers of the Kremlin, but that was as far as they could go before Soviet tanks drove them out again. And all along the front, the Soviet defenders held fast. Then, on Dec. 6, the Soviets somehow produced 100 new divisions and launched a counteroffensive that sent the Germans reeling back 50 miles by the end of the month. Moscow was saved.
Back in Berlin, the Nazi authorities were fretting over another problem. In the early years of Nazism, one of Hitler's goals had been to harass Germany's half a million Jews into leaving. Now he was planning a more extreme policy: rounding up and killing every Jew in all of German-occupied Europe. Himmler's special commandos had shot tens of thousands of Jews in Poland, but the Nazis sought more efficient methods. Himmler's deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, summoned representatives of all major government departments to the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to inform them of what he called "the final solution." This required the creation of six giant extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Maidanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor. The Wannsee conference was called for Dec. 9 but had to be put off for six weeks because of the extraordinary news from the Pacific. On Dec. 7 the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.
One of the few men overjoyed by that news was Churchill. "So we had won after all," he thought on hearing it. "How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long island history, we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious."
FOOTNOTE: *(c) 1940 by W.H. Auden. Reprinted by Permission of Random House