by Ian Kershaw
Within the armed forces, leading officers of Schörner’s kind needed no encouragement. But the change in mentalities went beyond soldier fanatics. Belief in victory, commitment to the last reserves of will to hold out, rejection of anything that smacked of the slightest doubt in the struggle, became more than ever incontrovertible tenets of all public parlance, constantly reinforced by the more widely deployed NSFOs. Private doubts were best not aired. At whatever rank, anyone voicing criticism of the war effort was taking a risk. Even close circles of friends and comrades had to take care lest any comment that could be seen as subversive should reach prying ears. From the top downwards in every division, every battalion, every company, officers felt the need to demonstrate loyalty and clamp down on the slightest sign of dissent. It was little wonder that the numbers of executions in the military, as in the civilian sphere, started to soar.
The failed uprising also brought the changes we have examined to the structures of rule. Some of these changes had already been initiated, in the light of the intensified pressures of the war, when Stauffenberg’s bomb went off.114 The extended role of the RVKs, and, with that, the increased scope for intervention by the Party into state bureaucracy and spheres of military responsibility offers one example. Goebbels saw this as a further sharp incision into the power of the generals.115 But even where developments were already in train, the events of 20 July and their aftermath served as a sharp accelerator. Radicalization along the line acutely intensified. It was as if the dam had broken and now, finally, a revolutionary war could be fought, on truly National Socialist lines.116
The pillars of the regime had been shaken by the events of 20 July, but were left not only standing, but buttressed. Hitler’s charismatic appeal had long since been weakened, but had been temporarily revived by the attempt on his life. More importantly, his hold over the regime was undiluted. The major wielders of power were divided among themselves but united in their dependence upon Hitler’s favour. Each general of the Wehrmacht, too, knew his command lasted only until Hitler took it away. Beneath Hitler, the regime’s grip had been strengthened. The key controls of the regime were in the hands of Nazi leaders with nothing to lose: they knew, and had participated in, its crimes against humanity, most obviously the extermination of the Jews.
Himmler’s empire extended into the Wehrmacht itself. His ruthless repression, now increasingly against members of the ‘people’s community’, as well as conquered ‘Untermenschen’ and ‘racial enemies’, plumbed new depths. Mobilization for total war underwent a frenzied phase of activity under Goebbels, who at the same time cranked up the propaganda machine into overdrive for the backs-to-the-wall effort. Bormann revitalized the Party, finally offering it the prospect of the social and political revolution its fanatical activist core had always sought. And Speer defied adversity in new exploits of mobilizing the armaments industry.
Military power, too, had been consolidated in the hands of loyalists. As fortunes on the battlefield worsened, the military leadership had bound itself to Hitler more tightly than ever. In the process, it had cut off any possibility of extricating itself from those bonds. It had committed itself to the very dualism that Hitler himself embodied: victory or downfall. Since victory was increasingly out of the question, and Hitler invariably and repeatedly ruled out any attempt at a negotiated settlement, that left downfall. Possibilities had changed. There was now no exit route.
From the comfortable distance of imprisonment just outside London, the recently captured Luftwaffe officer Lieutenant Freiherr von Richthofen said in early August in a conversation secretly bugged by British intelligence that he was glad the assassination attempt on Hitler had failed. If it had succeeded, he claimed, there would have been a ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend such as had bedevilled German politics after 1918. This time, he added, it was politically necessary for the nation to go down the road to the bitter end.117 This assessment was to leave out of the equation the millions of lives that would have been saved had the bomb plot succeeded and the war been rapidly ended. But it was surely correct in its assumption that a new ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend would have arisen, posing a threat to any post-Hitler settlement. And it was undoubtedly correct in its assumption that the failure of the attempt to topple Hitler from within in July 1944 meant that the regime could from now on be overthrown only by total military defeat. Just how the regime might sustain its war effort until that point – as it turned out, still over eight months away – was a question, however, that Richthofen did not pose.
2
Collapse in the West
We want to build a new Europe, we, the young people facing the old! But what are we? Famished, exhausted, and drained by madmen. Poor and tired, worn out and nerve-ridden. No, no, no! It’s not on any more.
An officer on the western front, September 1944
‘Victory must be ours…. One does one’s duty and it would be cowardice not to fight to the end.’ ‘We don’t give up hope. It is all up to the leaders. Something quite different will happen from what everybody expects.’ ‘If we don’t win, Germany ceases. Therefore we shall win.’
Views of captured German soldiers on the western front, September 1944
I
At the time of the attempted uprising on 20 July, the progress of the American and British armies in Normandy had, from an Allied viewpoint, remained disappointingly slow and arduous. They had still not broken out of a relatively constricted area of north-western France. From the German perspective, it still looked in mid-July as if the Allies could be held at bay. By winning time, new possibilities could open up. All was far from lost.
The landing in early June had by now been fully consolidated. The Americans had pushed westwards that month to take the important port of Cherbourg, but it had taken twenty-three, not the expected fifteen, days and they found the harbour so wrecked that it was six weeks before it could be opened up to Allied cargoes. The city of Caen had been a D-Day objective but its environs were fully secured by the Allies, in the teeth of fierce German resistance, only in mid-July. Then as the British pushed southwards towards Falaise, they became embroiled in further heavy fighting before their advance in the ill-fated ‘Operation Goodwood’ was called off, amid torrential rain and heavy losses of men and tanks, on the very day that Stauffenberg’s bomb had exploded in Hitler’s headquarters. Five days later, the big offensive ‘Operation Cobra’, starting with a huge carpet-bombing assault on German lines, aimed at a strong thrust by American troops to punch through numerically inferior German defences, further pulverized from the air, south-westwards to Avranches, near the French coast. By 30 July the offensive had succeeded. Late that night Avranches was in Allied hands.1 A major breakthrough was now possible. The road westward to the coastal ports of Brittany lay exposed (though it was to be weeks before stiff German resistance was overcome and the ports captured). To the south lay the Loire. Eastwards, towards Paris itself, only weakened German forces now stood in the way of the Allies.
Hitler’s thinking so far had been to play for time. He had reckoned that further dogged German resistance would ensure that the Allies continued to make only slow progress. His priority in the west was to hold the U-boat bases on the French coast, essential for the war in the Atlantic on which so much still hinged, in his view, and fanatical defence of the harbours to deny the Allies the possibility of large-scale troop reinforcements. Containing the Allies in north-western France and gaining time would allow defences to be strengthened and preparations made for a major German offensive, an idea already germinating in Hitler’s mind. Inflicting a defeat on the western Allies and halting their presumed march to victory would then force them into armistice negotiations.2
He was now faced, however, with the implications of the Allied capture of Avranches. It was an ominous development. Characteristically, he chose not to respond by withdrawing German troops to new lines to the east. Instead, he commissioned Field-Marshal Hans Günther von Kluge – whose idea it had originally been – to lau
nch a quick counter-offensive westwards through Mortain, aimed at retaking Avranches, splitting the American forces and re-establishing the German lines. Kluge’s attack took place in the early hours of 7 August, but was effectively over after a single day. German troops did succeed in regaining Mortain and advancing about 11 kilometres. But, subjected to ceaseless bombardment, they could get no further. By insisting on Kluge continuing the attack long after wisdom dictated swift withdrawal, Hitler invited disaster. Since Kluge faced increasing danger of encirclement by American forces, Hitler eventually allowed a retreat from the Mortain area on 11 August, but as late as 15 August refused Kluge’s entreaty to withdraw 100,000 troops in great peril near Falaise.
Hitler’s suspicions of his field-marshal boiled over when he could not reach him by radio that day, and he peremptorily dismissed him from his command, replacing him by the trusted troubleshooter, the tough and unyielding Field-Marshal Model. Soon afterwards, correctly fearful that he would be put on trial before the dreaded People’s Court for his connection with the conspiracy against Hitler (even though he had been careful not to join the plot), Kluge committed suicide. Model eventually extricated around 50,000 men from the rapidly tightening ‘Falaise pocket’. But roughly the same number were captured and another 10,000 men killed, while huge quantities of armaments and equipment had to be abandoned. During August, the German army in western Europe had in all lost over 200,000 men killed, injured or captured.3
It had been a disaster. A full-scale German retreat turned into little short of a rout. It could even have been worse had the Allies pressed home their advantage, closed the pocket enveloping the German troops, and prevented so many hardened warriors and seasoned officers from escaping to fight again another day. Even so, the Allies could now race northwards and eastwards. German morale seemed on the verge of collapse.4 When Paris fell on 25 August, it was without a fight. Withdrawal was also under way from parts of Belgium and Luxemburg. By the end of August, some 2 million Allied soldiers were already in France, others rapidly adding to that number. To the north, the Allies could drive on to the Channel ports. The Allied push into Belgium brought the liberation of Brussels on 3 September and, next day, the capture of Antwerp. Meanwhile, American and French troops had landed on the coast of southern France on 15 August. By late that month they had taken Marseilles and advanced on Lyons. It was little wonder, then, that Allied optimism peaked around this time. The Germans, it seemed, could not last through the winter. The war was approaching its final stages. It would all soon be over.
Unexpectedly, however, the Allied advance stalled. The aim evinced at the beginning of September by the Allies’ supreme commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, of pressing forward to the Reich borders on a broad front before German defences could be consolidated soon proved an impossibility.
The Allies fared worst in the northern sector. Serious tactical errors brought the advance there to a halt. The arrogant British commander, Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery, impatient to exploit the German disarray and press boldly ahead into the Ruhr and on to Berlin, made costly mistakes that vitiated his aims – headstrong and immensely risky as these would have been anyway. The conflict of strategy and personality between Montgomery and Eisenhower was unquestionably damaging to the Allies at this vital time. Montgomery’s failure to exploit the important capture of the undestroyed Antwerp port by pressing forward to secure the Scheldt estuary left the crucial port unusable until the end of November and allowed large numbers of German troops who could have been cut off in the area to escape. This was compounded by the disaster at Arnhem, where Montgomery’s insistence on a daring airborne assault to cross the Rhine resulted in high British losses. The risky offensive ‘Market Garden’ began on 17 September but was in effect already over three days later. From then on, hopes of a rapid advance across the Rhine and into Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr, had to be abandoned.
On the southern sector of the front, the US Third Army under General George Patton had sped eastwards during the second half of August, crossed the Meuse and reached the Mosel. Patton was optimistic that he could drive on into Germany, and that the war could be rapidly won. The first step was to press over the Mosel into Lorraine. The important industrial belt of the Saar beckoned thereafter. But in early September Patton’s advance slowed almost to a halt. His supply line to Cherbourg was almost 650 kilometres long. His tanks were simply running out of fuel. And Eisenhower had given priority for the time being to Montgomery’s intended drive into the Ruhr. A furious Patton was held back. As his rapid advance became almost immobilized, German defences facing his attacking forces were urgently strengthened and placed under the command of the redoubtable General Hermann Balck, battle-hardened from the eastern front and high in Hitler’s favour. The momentum had been lost. It would be a further two months and much hard fighting before fierce German resistance at Metz, the fortress heartland of Lorraine, would be overcome.5
The best prospects lay in the central sector of the front. The US First Army, under General Courtney Hodges, advancing north-eastwards from the Paris area in late August, had destroyed several German panzer divisions, taking 25,000 prisoners, before reaching Mons, in Belgium. Part of the army, the V US Corps, then turned south-east to advance through Luxemburg and almost to the German border near Trier by 11 September, while the VII US Corps drove directly eastwards towards Aachen. Around 6 p.m. on 11 September, the first American troops set foot on German soil, just south of Aachen, a city by now largely free of defending troops and with a panic-stricken population. But the Americans pressed their advance over too wide an area. German forces regrouped and, through tenacious fighting, blocked the larger and stronger American forces. Within five days, reinforced German units had succeeded in repulsing the American attack. German authorities were able – for the time being – to restore their control over Aachen and prevent any American breakthrough in the direction of Cologne. Another chance had been missed. It would take a further five weeks of bitter fighting before Aachen became the first German city to fall into Allied hands, on 21 October. And it would be nearly six months before Cologne, only 90 kilometres or so away, was taken.
Meanwhile, Rundstedt had been recalled as Commander-in-Chief West (in overall command of the army in that theatre) on 5 September, leaving Model, a brilliant defence strategist, to take charge of Army Group B (one of two Army Groups on the western front; the other, Army Group G, was commanded by Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz). Under Model’s command, the German defences, helped by shortened supply lines and hardened reinforcements, both salvaged from Normandy and brought across from the eastern front, had been strengthened. By mid-September the Allies stood close to the German border over a long stretch of the front from Belgium almost to Switzerland. But it was now clear that expectations which the Allies had held for months, drawing on the experiences of the First World War, of the sort of German collapse that had happened in 1918 were misplaced.6 The war was set to drag on.7
The Allies had shown hesitation and made costly errors at crucial junctures. But the Germans had made their own major contribution to prolonging the war. For Germany, despite fierce and courageous fighting by the outnumbered forces of the Wehrmacht, the collapse in France had come as a dreadful shock. Within a little over three months, the Allies had liberated France and reached Germany’s borders. Soon, it was evident, the war would be fought on German soil. Under Model’s able command, however, they had survived the critical, but not fatal, defeat near Falaise. Since then, they had surprised the Allies with the tenacity, even fanaticism, of their fighting. Though outnumbered, they had shown energy and initiative. And they had some technically superior weaponry and tanks – if in insufficient quantities. The main weakness was not on the ground, but in the air, where the Luftwaffe was increasingly paralysed and Allied superiority immense.8 Even so, German defence was stubborn, and not easy to break down. Unlike the Russian army in 1917, the German army the following year, the Italian army in 1943, or other instanc
es where heavy defeats had produced a collapse in morale with devastating political consequences, the German armed forces in late summer and autumn of 1944 were far removed from the point at which they were unwilling to fight on any further. What lay behind the extraordinary tenacity of the fighting front in the west?
II
Had the Allies seen reports that were reaching the German leadership at this time on the demoralization among the German civilian population on the western borders of the Reich and within the Wehrmacht produced by the disastrous military collapse in the west, they might have been encouraged in their ‘collapse theory’ based upon the events of 1918.9 Such reports certainly did not give the impression that Germany was capable of fighting on for a further eight months.