The Nazis- a Warning From History

by Laurence Rees

  None the less, not even the Red Army could completely conceal the build-up during May and June 1944 of the 1.4 million soldiers who were about to take part in Operation Bagration. Whilst the intelligence gathered by the German Army Command (OKH) did lead them, falsely, to believe that the Soviets were planning an attack in the south towards the Balkans, by the end of May some units within Army Group Centre believed correctly that the main offensive would be directed against them. Hitler was not convinced. He ordered Army Group Centre to stand firm and, if attacked, to concentrate their defence around key Feste Plätze or fortified towns. In a directive of 8 March that year Hitler had stated that these Feste Plätze would ‘fulfil the function of fortresses in former historical times. They will ensure that the enemy does not occupy these areas of decisive operational importance. They will allow themselves to be surrounded, thereby holding down the largest possible numbers of enemy forces, and establishing conditions favourable for counter attacks.’4

  The discontent felt by Army Group Centre at such orders from the Führer is evident from these words, written by the commander of the German 9th Army, General Jordan, in June 1944: ‘Ninth Army stands on the eve of another great battle, unpredictable in extent and duration . . . the Army believes that, even under the present conditions, it would be possible to stop the enemy offensive, but not under the present directives which require an absolutely rigid defence . . . The Army considers the orders establishing “Feste Plätze” particularly dangerous. The Army therefore looks ahead to the coming battle with bitterness, knowing that it is bound by orders to tactical measures which it cannot in good conscience accept as correct and which in our earlier victorious campaigns were the causes of the enemy defeats . . .’5

  ‘In 1944 we were advancing like the Germans used to advance in 1941,’ says Veniamin Fyodorov, a Red Army soldier who took part in the initial assault of Operation Bagration on 22 June 1944, three years to the day since the German invasion. ‘The German behaviour in their fortified areas was stupid . . . Our shelling broke them down. Huge amounts of shells flew towards them and you couldn’t hear anything; only this – booming! The fortified area could be smashed completely. It was death . . . The Germans held the ground to the last man – they were all doomed to death.’

  Heinz Fiedler was one of the German soldiers of the 9th Army ordered to hold the Fester Platz of Bobruisk in the face of the Soviet advance. Previous battle experience had made him cynical about such ‘nonsensical’ orders from the High Command: ‘I remember once that one position had definitely to be taken back again, and the second lieutenant had refused to attack once more because more than half of his men had already died. And then they did attack, and they were all just sacrificed. They attacked again and again until the very last one died, and that of course makes you wonder. But those were the men of the General Staff. They had their little flags and they put them on the map and then they say, “This absolutely has to be restored, no matter what the sacrifices are.”’

  Harsh as Heinz Fiedler’s past experience of the war had been, it was as nothing compared to life inside the besieged Feste Plätze: ‘Everywhere dead bodies were lying – dead bodies, wounded people, people screaming. You didn’t have any feeling for warmth or coldness or light or darkness or thirst or hunger. You didn’t need to go to the toilet. I can’t explain it. It’s such a tension you’re under . . . We were encircled, and in front of us were Russian tanks dug into the ground so that all you could see were their round turrets. They were shooting like mad. They must have had so much ammunition it was incredible. And from our back you heard [from the Germans], “We don’t have any fuel, we don’t have any ammunition left.” And that’s what you heard all the time . . . You have to think of the psychological burden on the individuals. I did not get married on purpose because – well, a widow with children will have difficulties in finding a new man when they already have limited means. But those who were married and who had two or three little children at home on the one hand, and on the other hand to fulfil this order [to stand fast] as an integral part of the unit – this psychological burden you cannot measure.’ Heinz Fiedler admits he felt ‘abandoned’ and ‘betrayed’ by the High Command of the Army: ‘Those in the Führer Headquarters have easy talking – it’s easy to be clever when you’re there, that’s what you’re thinking . . . On the other hand you had this obedience that nowadays we are reproached with as being the obedience of carcasses, but the way the German Wehrmacht was you will never ever find again. You will never find such an Army again in this world.’

  The Soviet 65th Army threatened to engulf not just the German forces holding out in Bobruisk but also other German units to the east. General Jordan of the German 9th Army, of which Heinz Fiedler’s unit was part, raged at his superiors’ stupidity: ‘HQ 9th Army is fully aware of the disastrous consequences of all these orders,’ says the 9th Army war diary. ‘It is a bitter pill to swallow, though, when one feels that behind these Army Group instructions, which so utterly ignore one’s own pressing suggestions, and behind the answers given by the Field Marshal and his Chief of Staff, one can see no sign of a commander showing any purposeful will to do his utmost, but just the execution of orders whose basis has long since been overtaken by events.’6

  Hitler, unhappy about the way General Jordan had deployed the 20th Panzer division during the battle and no doubt classing him as a typical ‘cowardly wretch’, relieved him of his command and appointed General Nikolaus von Vormann to take control of what remained of the 9th Army. But a change of command could not change the bare facts – which were that the Führer’s own policy of Feste Platz had proved disastrous. In Bobruisk the defenders were hindered by German troops, who had retreated into the town seeking refuge, leaving their heavy weapons behind. Permission was finally granted to attempt a break-out – but one division was still ordered to stay behind and fight to the last. ‘Then the last command arrived,’ says Heinz Fiedler. ‘Destroy vehicles, shoot horses, take as much hand ammunition and rations with you as you can carry. Every man for himself – go on and rescue yourself!’

  Few of those who attempted to break through the encirclement managed to reach the safety of the new German line further to the west. Most were either killed by strafing from Soviet warplanes or by the Red Army on the ground in the kind of slaughter reminiscent of the massive German encirclements of 1941. ‘We tried to break out but we were getting fired on and then there was panic,’ says Heinz Fiedler. ‘There was a private, a young boy, who sat by a birch tree with his intestines streaming from his stomach, crying “Shoot me!” and everybody just ran past him. I had to stop but I could not shoot him. And then a young second lieutenant from the sappers came and gave him the coup de grace with a pistol to his temple. And that’s when I had to cry bitterly. I thought if his mother knew how her boy ended . . . instead she gets a letter from the squadron saying, “Your son fell on the field of honour for Great Germany.”’

  Heinz Fiedler was one of the handful who made it through the Red Army lines, but the mighty 9th Army was all but eliminated. In total Army Group Centre completely lost 17 divisions, with another 50 suffering losses of 50 per cent.

  Fear and hatred of Bolshevism had been at the core of Nazi ideology since the days of the Räterepublik in Munich in 1919. How much greater that fear and hatred were when there seemed the likelihood that the hated Bolsheviks would soon be on German soil. So great was the perceived danger that hundreds of thousands of non-Germans joined the fight against the Red Army. Contrary to popular belief, recruits did not have to be German to be ideologically committed members of Himmler’s SS. Jacques Leroy was a young Belgian who had been impressed with the ‘nice behaviour’ of the occupying German forces and who resolved to join the Waffen-SS because he ‘wanted to fight Communism and Bolshevism’. We asked him if he was not, therefore, a traitor. ‘What is a traitor?’ he angrily replied. ‘What is a traitor, sir? Can you be a traitor at the age of sixteen? I didn’t wear a Belgian uniform. You are a traitor when y
ou fight ideas which are not those of Europe, which are not popular. When you take on ideas from abroad, you are a traitor. The word traitor never once came into my mind . . . I was fighting Communism.’

  More than fifty years after the end of the war, Jacques Leroy is still openly racist. Even today he retains many of the views that his colleagues in the Waffen-SS held so dear. ‘The difference between the people whom you call Übermenschen [superior races] and the ones whom you call Untermenschen [inferior races] is that the people who are the Übermenschen are the white race. That’s why at the moment so many foreigners want to come to white race countries . . . In those days we were proud to belong to the white race.’

  Jacques Leroy fought in some of the bloodiest battles on the Eastern Front, motivated by his racism and his hatred of Communism. At the battle of Teklino on 14 January 1945 his Waffen-SS unit came upon more than three Soviet regiments hidden in a forest. The SS attacked and lost 60 per cent of their men. At one point Leroy saw a Russian kneeling behind a birch tree and then suddenly he felt ‘an electric shock’ through his body. He dropped his rifle and ‘at that moment I saw blood dripping on to the snow. I was bleeding, it was my eye which had been hit by a bullet.’ Leroy’s injuries cost him an eye and an arm, but after a few weeks in hospital, he pleaded to rejoin the SS, and was allowed to do so: ‘Of course I had lost an arm and an eye but you know, when you’re very young, one isn’t affected by troubles in the same way that an older person might be.’ When we asked why he wanted to rejoin the SS he replied, ‘So as not to fall into mediocrity and to stay with my comrades . . . I don’t like mediocrity, I don’t like doing nothing, being idle and not having any aim in life . . . otherwise, what is your life for? Life is not about watching television all the time! You have to think, you have to see, you must have a goal.’

  The Waffen-SS soldiers who fought the Russians for every step of territory as they advanced into the Reich included Bernd Linn, who was to take part in an engagement that in many ways symbolizes both the bravery and the futility of the Nazi armed resistance – the Battle of Halbe, fought on 29 April 1945, just days before the end of the war. Linn’s unit was ordered to ‘break through regardless of losses’ – a futile order given that everyone knew that the war was lost.

  ‘There was the sound of gunfire from every side,’ says Linn, talking of the ‘Hell of Halbe’. In the heart of the battle he came across a German tiger tank, damaged so that it was unable to move and yet still firing its machine-gun. ‘Behind it was a lieutenant with a leg missing, but he wasn’t dead yet. I went to him and said, “Is there something that you want?” And the lieutenant said, “Yes, please put my leg next to me.” I wanted to take him with us in the vehicle and he said, “We have been ordered to break through regardless of losses. Please put my leg next to me.”’ As the men fell dead, German Red Cross nurses took up arms. Bernd Linn handed one a bazooka. ‘Then the Russians shouted, “Surrender!” “Certainly not!” I said, “We’re breaking through.”’ We pressed Linn to say why he fought on till the last. The nearest he came to making us understand was when he said that as a committed Nazi he thought it was simply his fate.

  Conditioned as they were by Nazi propaganda about ‘sub-human’ Russians and the barbaric atrocities the Communists were allegedly capable of committing as they came west, the German troops’ resistance is perhaps not so surprising. After all, what alternative did they have? Only surrender to a group who, they had been told, would treat them appallingly, and to whom the Germans had already done terrible things themselves. Since every soldier had been told from the beginning of hostilities against Russia that this was a war like no other, now, to surrender must be to experience a suffering as a Prisoner of War like no other. But it was more than fear which kept the Germans fighting in the east – hope also played a part. The dream that Britain, the United States and France would ask Germany to join them in a crusade against Communism was one that persisted in the face of all evidence to the contrary and the Allies’ continued insistence on unconditional surrender.

  Yet these cannot be the only reasons why German soldiers continued fighting to the end. In Italy, the country that opted out of the war in 1943, German troops continued fighting fiercely until the official surrender in May 1945. Facing their so-called ‘honourable’ adversaries – the Americans and the British – they could have deserted in droves if they had wished. And lest one imagines that desertion was considered ‘un-German’, it is worth remembering that one estimate is that as many as a million German soldiers deserted during World War I. Yet this didn’t happen, even in Italy, during World War II.

  The Nazis were born out of World War I and the pain of what they saw as a shameful defeat: one cannot overestimate the German desire not to see a repetition of November 1918. The German soldiers in Italy, just as much as the German soldiers fighting the ideological enemy in the east, were vividly aware of the circumstances of defeat in 1918. The Nazi élite themselves had an overwhelming desire not to relive these circumstances. Indeed, it is not too extreme to imagine that the decision to proceed with the Holocaust might have been partly inspired by a desire to ensure that Jews were not able to ‘profit’ from World War II as they had ‘profited’ from World War I. Ludicrous as these beliefs about the Jews were, they were clearly held by many Nazis and were, almost unbelievably, occasionally expressed to us even today. The German Army may not have been able to prevent the Allies advancing, may not even have been able to prevent them defeating Germany, but what was in their power was to ensure that the manner of their defeat in no way resembled the humiliation of World War I. This time German soldiers would not be surprised to hear the announcement of the surrender.

  As the war drew to a close, Hitler remained a crucial presence in the German soldier’s mind. During the last months Walter Fernau became a National Socialist Guidance Officer (NSFO) and gave propaganda speeches to soldiers in Germany, telling them why they should fight on. ‘It was my task to address the troop at the company level, no bigger, to call on them to see it through,’ he says. ‘This accordion player appeared before the troop and then songs were sung, seamen shanties, and this created a wonderful atmosphere. And then I said, “Men, we haven’t come together just to sing songs here. I have to tell you something about this entire situation in which we find ourselves. If we take a look at the military situation as it is at the moment, then we know that the Americans or the English are at our border. We know that the Russians are marching towards Berlin and we know that in the south the Americans have passed Rome. And furthermore, masses of planes are flying day and night over our country and dropping bombs on our cities. And none of us knows at this moment whether his family has already fallen victim or if his house is standing. If we are to judge the overall situation now, then I can only express it in simple soldier’s language: ‘It’s all shit!’ But in exactly the same way that we judge the military situation, so too must our Führer see it as the supreme commander. Perhaps he knows that it is even worse than we know today. But perhaps he knows that it is better. And he still demands of us today, however, that we continue to do our duty, that is, some of us must perhaps even be prepared to die or to be heavily wounded. And he can only demand that of us if he can expect a good end to the war.” And then I said to the soldiers, “Do you want to chuck your rifles in the corner today and go home? And then when the war is over and Hitler comes and says, ‘Well, you’ve thrown away your weapons! I wanted to find a good ending!’ We do not want to expose ourselves to this reproach.”’ His view of Hitler at the time was simple. ‘For us the Führer was, let us say, an idol.’ This leads Walter Fernau to give a simple answer to the question – why did German soldiers desert in droves in World War I yet fight to the end in World War II? ‘In the First World War there was no Hitler.’

  The fact that German soldiers continued fighting to the end, though tragic in terms of human loss, may have had one positive benefit, according to Hans von Herwarth: ‘The new Dolchstosslegende (stab-in-the-back legend)
would otherwise have come true . . . Many of the women in Germany had lost their sons or their brothers and they couldn’t imagine that all this was in vain, that they were killed for the wrong reason, they couldn’t believe it.’ If Hitler had been assassinated in 1944 and peace had immediately followed, in later years it would have been possible to argue that Germany would not necessarily have lost the war if she had fought on. Counterfactual history is by definition unprovable and the speculation would have been intense. In that last year of the war would the Western Allies have finally turned on the Russians? Would the Germans have developed their ‘wonder weapons’, including the V1 and V2 rockets, to a point where they could have made a real difference? The debate would still be raging, especially in ultra-right-wing circles. Ironically, the fight to the end may have prevented another Hitler being born from this war, albeit a new Hitler justly burdened with the legacy of the Holocaust.

  Yet the benefits to Germany of peace in 1944 would have been immense, not just in terms of soldiers spared from death at the hands of the enemy, but in terms of German civilians who would have been saved from death at the hands of the Nazis. In that last year of the war, Nazi terror inside Germany spiralled out of control. One shocking case from the Wurzburg archive illustrates how the Nazis turned on ordinary Germans as the war seemed lost.7 Karl Weiglein, a farmer in Zellingen, a village a few kilometres from Würzburg, was fifty-nine years old in 1945 when he was called up to fight in the Volkssturm, the local defence force. He was assigned to a company led by a local teacher, Alfons Schmiedel, a fanatical Nazi who also led the local Hitler Youth. On 25 March, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, the whole battalion lined up for a roll-call in the village square and listened to a short speech from Dr Mühl-Kühner, the battalion commander, who said that with the war coming closer, regulations would be tighter and anyone who didn’t obey orders would be shot. A group in the first battalion, including Karl Weiglein, replied ‘Oh-oho!’ Around the same time some anti-tank obstacles were removed from a nearby road, and a false rumour went around that Kurt Weiglein had something to do with it. On Tuesday 27 March the Nazis blew up a bridge connecting Zellingen with the neighbouring village of Retzbach in order to prevent the advance of American troops. Weiglein, whose house was near the bridge, said to one of his neighbours, ‘Those idiots who have done this, Schmiedel and Mühl-Kühner, ought to be hanged!’ Schmiedel overheard the remark and reported it to Mühl-Kühner.