by Ian Kershaw
It looks as if the Americans cannot withstand our important push. Today we overtook a fleeing column and finished it… It was a glorious bloodbath, vengeance for our destroyed homeland. Our soldiers still have the same old zip. Always advancing and smashing everything. The snow must turn red with American blood. Victory was never as close as it is now. The decision will soon be reached. We will throw them into the ocean, the arrogant, big-mouthed apes from the New World. They will not get into our Germany. We will protect our wives and children from all enemy domination. If we are to preserve all tender and beautiful aspects of our lives, we cannot be too brutal in the deciding moments of this struggle.102
Such extreme attitudes (encouraged by propaganda concoctions on the terror of American ‘negro soldiers’, including the base calumny that ‘drunken niggers murder German children’103) were almost certainly no rarity, but conceivably less representative than the contrasting views entered in the diary of a soldier, killed in January, whose unwillingness to fight was coloured by the destruction of his home in Hamburg and the blame he attached for this personal tragedy and the wider calamity of the war to Hitler and the Nazis. ‘On the 16th December, about 05.30 in the morning, we attacked,’ he wrote. ‘I shall march once more through Belgium and France, but I don’t have the smallest desire to do so… If [only] this idiotic war would end. Why should I fight? It only goes for the existence of the Nazis. The superiority of our enemy is so great that it is senseless to fight against it.’104
How most soldiers felt as they advanced into the Ardennes is impossible to assess. Their main consideration was probably survival – living to tell the tale – coupled with daring to hope that this offensive might indeed prove a turning point on the way to a peace. Letters and diary jottings from soldiers serving in the Ardennes and on other fronts suggest that such hopes were widespread. ‘I think the war in the west is again turning,’ wrote a corporal from the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division on 17 December. ‘The main thing is that the war will soon be decided and I’ll be coming home again to my dear wife and we can again build a new home. The radio is now playing bells from the homeland.’105 Another corporal learnt of the attack when Field-Marshal Model’s proclamation to his soldiers was read out in the barracks. ‘Hopefully, the change will now come for Germany to a successful final struggle and peace in the foreseeable future,’ he jotted in his diary.106 An NCO based in the Courland echoed the sentiment. ‘The news from yesterday’s OKW report, that the offensive in the west has begun, will certainly have filled you with great joy,’ he wrote. ‘We were all thrilled here. No one had reckoned with that before Christmas. Let’s hope that it will bring the decision and with it the end of the war in the west.’107
At home, the mood was also suddenly lifted at the news of the offensive. The first the public heard was through the brief OKW report on 18 December. Goebbels was personally elated and more than ready to take the credit for making the offensive possible by raising troops to take part through his ruthless total-war drive. It showed, he thought, what could be done through toughness, resilience and refusal to capitulate in the face of difficulties or be discouraged through ‘minor setbacks’. He nevertheless advocated caution in the reportage in order not to arouse exaggerated expectations.108 Newspapers publicized the offensive for the first time on 19 December, and, following Goebbels’ instructions, without trumpet-blowing.109 The response to the German attack was, even so, immediate and hugely enthusiastic. ‘Great surprise’ and a ‘deep inner joy’ were recorded by propaganda offices as early reactions to the OKW news. There was a sense of being ‘freed from a nightmare’. ‘What a lovely Christmas present’ was a sentiment frequently heard. That such an offensive could be launched had in itself significantly raised confidence in the leadership and the strength of the Reich, even if it was abundantly plain ‘that the whole of France and Belgium would not be reconquered immediately’.110 A day later, Goebbels was convinced that the impact on morale within the Reich was unquestionably successful. ‘The few sentences in the OKW report on Monday [18 December] have prompted a mood in the country which recalls the great times of our offensives,’ he recorded. ‘In Berlin that evening the entire Christmas schnapps rations were consumed. The people are deeply joyous that we have again gained the initiative, especially since no one in the public, other than the few in the know, had expected that. The surprise is all the greater as a result.’111
The Wehrmacht’s own propaganda agents, secretly taking soundings in Berlin, acknowledged the ‘very good mood’, despite trying to dampen the excessive optimism of the ‘hurrah-patriots’. Some thought the French and Belgians would this time welcome German troops with open arms after they had had the chance to experience ‘Anglo-American occupation’.112 A positive impression was also gleaned by those outside the German propaganda apparatus. A Swedish correspondent in Berlin reported great enthusiasm at the news of the offensive, exhilaration and confidence among soldiers and a lifting of the gloom that had earlier prevailed.113 But the euphoria could not last. Already by Christmas it was fading.
The news from the front remained positive for some days. Hitler himself was in high spirits, like a man rejuvenated.114 The small town of Saint-Vith on the north of the front was taken on the 21st, but, further south, the more important Bastogne, heavily besieged (and tying down three German divisions in the process), still held out. Manteuffel’s troops, from the 5th Panzer Army, bogged down in mud as well as facing fierce resistance, could make only slow progress. On 23 December they reached Buissonville and Celles, about 7 kilometres from the Meuse, east of Dinant. But that was as far as they got. The high point of the offensive had already passed.
Rundstedt had expressed doubts on 20 December about the chances of crossing the Meuse (though Model was at this time still more optimistic).115 Karl Otto Saur, close to supplanting Speer as Hitler’s blue-eyed boy in the Armaments Ministry, said after the war that he had realized the offensive had failed as early as 19 December (implying that this was the date at which he knew the war was lost).116 Model told Speer on 23 December that the offensive had failed.117 It was plain to any perceptive soldier by 24 December, General Guderian later commented, that the offensive had finally broken down.118 By Christmas, the American and British reinforcements rushed to the area had shored up Allied defences. On 26 December, armoured units from Patton’s 3rd US Army, which had hastened northwards, finally broke through to the encircled American troops in Bastogne and ended the siege.119 Model still vainly hoped for a regrouping of forces to regain the initiative near Bastogne, and at least cement more limited goals than Antwerp, which he acknowledged was now out of reach. But Manteuffel’s advance was at an end. It had been spectacular while it lasted, but could go no further.
Meanwhile, the weather had cleared and Allied aircraft were now fully able to exert their superiority as their ceaseless attacks – the Allies flew six times more sorties during the offensive than Göring’s crippled Luftwaffe – pounded German supply lines. Reinforcements of men and matériel were, as Rundstedt admitted on 27 December, impossible under these circumstances.120 Allied losses of 76,890 men killed, wounded or captured actually outnumbered the 67,461 on the German side. But the German losses could not be made good, nor could the 600 tanks which the Allies had destroyed. Whatever gloss was put upon it, the last great German offensive had failed.
The failure only gradually became apparent to the German public. Goebbels soon began to hint at setbacks in the offensive and accepted by 29 December that the advance could go no further, that the Germans would be happy to hold on to their territorial gains. But there was a time lag in popular recognition. As the end of the year approached, with the offensive stalled, many people, noted Goebbels, still had high hopes, nourished by soldiers returning from the west and talking of getting to Paris before New Year. It was ‘naturally absolute rubbish’, he remarked, but added: ‘Large parts of the German people are convinced that the war in the west could be ended in the forseeable future.’121 Yet only two days l
ater, on the very last day of 1944, he offered a contradictory assessment, on the basis of reports from the regional propaganda offices. ‘The German people attaches no exaggerated illusions to the western offensive,’ he now stated, and had in mind only ‘smaller aims, though naturally everyone earnestly wishes that we will come to a decisive blow in the west’.122 The bubble had burst. It was a sobering return to realities. One officer, based in the west, drew his own conclusion from Field-Marshal Model’s New Year proclamation to his soldiers, in which he had declared: ‘You have withstood the tests of the year 1944. You have held watch on the Rhine.’ This meant, the officer concluded, that after being forced to give up ‘fortress Europe’, holding on to ‘fortress Germany’ would indeed prove a success.123
VI
After the failure of the Ardennes offensive, it was as good as impossible – apart from the incorrigible optimists who insisted on the coming ‘wonder weapons’ or a split among the Allies – to hold out any further realistic hope of a positive end to the war for Germany. The regime, almost all Germans could see, was utterly doomed. No one beneath Hitler, who as always ruled out any alternative to fighting on, was, however, either able or willing to do anything about it. So nothing changed internally.
The sixth war Christmas was a muted affair, with much talk of striving further for the yearned-for peace and even more of holding out against mighty enemies. At the most miserable New Year celebrations in memory, Hitler’s exhortations offered few hopes of major change in 1945. Amid the routinely effusive outpourings of the propaganda offices about the revitalizing effect of the ‘Führer speech’, it was impossible to conceal the widespread disappointment that Hitler had no reassurance to offer on the deployment of new weapons, the status of the offensive in the west (which he did not even mention), and, most crucially, the breaking of the terror from the air. Many people, it was said (without a trace of irony) were left with tears in their eyes at the end of the speech. Some, in fact, were unable to hear it because they were without electricity.124 For all its bombast and the usual bile poured out on the ‘Jewish-international world conspiracy’ that was bent on destroying Germany, Hitler’s speech could promise no more than further hardship, suffering and bloodshed without an end in sight.125 Whatever the miserable prospects, for ordinary people at the base of society, civilian and military, there was little to be done other than struggle on with their daily existence.
The Nazi regime remained an immensely strong dictatorship, holding together in the mounting adversity and prepared to use increasingly brutal force in controlling and regimenting German society at more or less every point. It left little room for opposition – recognizably as suicidal as it was futile. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, ranging from the hundred-percenter hold-out-to-the-last contingent down to the majority simply going through the motions, officialdom – high and low – continued to do its duty. Here, too, most civil servants could not see any alternative. So the bureaucratic wheels kept turning, and with them the attritional grind of controls was sustained. No matter, however trivial, was beneath their attention. Amid the myriad concerns of local civil servants, as they tried to cope with huge social dislocation after air raids, refugee problems, housing shortages, food rationing and many other issues, they never lost sight of the need to complete forms and have them officially stamped for approval. Officials in the Munich police department spent time and energy (as well as using reams of precious paper) in December 1944 making sure that five cleaning-buckets were ordered to replace those lost in the recent air raid, deciding how to obtain copies of official periodicals that regulations said had to come from post offices (even though these were now destroyed), or obtaining permission for a usable iron heater to be taken to police headquarters, left without heating after the last bombing.126 At the top of the bureaucratic tree, the head of the Reich Chancellery, Lammers, his powers meanwhile largely usurped by Bormann, had little more to do than remind Reich authorities of the Führer’s wish that the sending of Christmas and New Year greetings should be greatly restricted to minimize the burden on transport and postal services.127
The overlapping, often competing, bureaucracy of the Party was equally cumbersome and even more oppressive for ordinary citizens. Practically every aspect of civil defence was now orchestrated by the Party. The frequent whine of the sirens produced frenetic attempts to usher people into air-raid shelters, organize the clearance of damage after the devastation, try to provide welfare and accommodation for those without homes (with the help of the hopelessly overstretched NSV) and arrange emergency food distribution (still holding up remarkably well, in contrast to the near famine towards the end of the First World War), among an array of other tasks. In a different society, such efforts might have met with gratitude and approval. By now, however, few beyond the ranks of the diehards could find much else than feelings of anger and bitterness towards the Party functionaries who, even at this stage, combined their attempts at welfare with ceaseless hectoring and haranguing through pointless propaganda and with the surveillance and monitoring that could have dire consequences for any who stepped out of line.
At a higher level of the Party, the Gauleiter, whatever their mounting inner despair at the ever deteriorating situation following the short-lived raising of hopes, had little option but to stick with Hitler. In their own provinces, they were still figures of real power, capable of ferocious repression against any lesser mortals who appeared to pose a threat. Beyond their own domain, however, they were a divided group, and incapable of any unified positive action to avoid the gathering maelstrom of self-destruction, certain only that their own destinies were bound up with the inevitable demise of the regime.
Survival strategies varied, though they usually involved some refusal to accept reality. Göring was probably among the more realistic in recognizing the irredeemable destruction of the Luftwaffe, though he still paid frequent visits to airfields to spur on his demoralized air crews. He retreated as much as he could to the luxury of his palatial country residence at Carinhall, in the Schorfheide 65 kilometres north of Berlin, well away from Hitler’s proximity and the malign influence of Bormann. There he could surround himself with fawning friends and relatives, dress in outlandish garb, pop his codeine pills and bemoan the failings of Luftwaffe generals.128 He had long been a spent force. Ribbentrop was still insisting, a week into January, that the Ardennes offensive had been a success and telling the Japanese ambassador, Oshima Hiroshi, that ‘Germany now holds the initiative everywhere’. He was adamant that the Allied coalition was bound to split if Germany and Japan could hold out until the end of 1945 and harboured illusions that peace could even at this late hour be negotiated.129 Robert Ley, when he was sober, fell into reveries about a coming social revolution, remaining at the same time one of Hitler’s most fanatical lieutenants in advocating an all or nothing showdown with the enemy.130
Bormann was another with flights of fancy, as, evidently, was his wife, Gerda. Writing to her on 26 December, as the Ardennes offensive was petering out and with it Germany’s last military hope of success, he referred to her ‘ideas about things to come’ as ‘by no means extravagant’, and outlined his own future scenario.
There is no doubt that in the future we shall be compelled to build important factories and the like deep beneath the earth’s surface. Wherever towns and villages are built on a slope it will be necessary at once to dig deep shafts into the hill or mountainside, with special cellars – storerooms – for all inhabitants. In the new manor farms which we are going to build in the north, the buildings will have to be constructed with three or four basements, and collective shelters must be built at various points for the whole village community from the start.
Gerda found the plans for post-war construction intriguing, but was ‘boundlessly furious at the thought that we, with our innate longing for light and sunshine, should be compelled by the Jews to make our abodes as if we were beings of the underworld’.131
Himmler, who in mid-December, when h
e was temporarily based in the Black Forest as Commander-in-Chief of the newly formed Army Group Upper Rhine, was rumoured to have fallen into disgrace at Führer Headquarters, cherished the belief that Britain would come to see that its interests lay in joining forces with Germany to combat advancing Soviet power on the Continent. He thought of himself as an essential element of that continued fight.132 Goebbels remained among the more clear-sighted Nazi leaders, cautious from the outset about the chances of a major triumph in the Ardennes. He too, however, ended the year in good spirits, convinced that the offensive had widened the conflict between the Allies, that the Germans had won back the initiative in the west and reduced the pressure on the western front.133 The enigmatic Speer was the least given to fanciful illusions among Nazi leaders. He knew the full extent of Germany’s economic plight. And he had seen at first hand the realities of the Ardennes offensive, the hopelessness, despite the initial successes, of the attempt to break the stranglehold of mightily superior enemy forces. For Speer, so he later claimed, ‘with the Ardennes offensive the war was at an end’, apart from the drawn-out process of enemy occupation of Germany.134 But Speer’s desire for power and influence, as well as ambitions, even now, to play some part in a world after Hitler, kept him going. However resigned he was to Germany’s impending defeat, he saw no way out – and no course of action other than doing all he could to sustain the German war effort.
Among the generals – beyond the leadership of the OKW where, in Hitler’s direct proximity, illusions still held sway – there was widespread recognition that defences were now desperately overstretched, resources as good as at an end, the chances of staving off powerful enemies minimal. General of the Waffen-SS Karl Wolff, formerly chief of Himmler’s personal staff and now ‘Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht’ in Italy, became finally convinced that the war was irretrievably lost through conversations with young SS officers who had been part of the spearhead of the Ardennes offensive.135 Guderian probably spoke for most generals in his frustration with Hitler’s leadership and the crass inflexibility which had worsened Germany’s position. He acknowledged the size of the odds stacked against the Wehrmacht, given the immense disproportion in military might of the enemy. He felt, nevertheless, that it was necessary to continue to strain every sinew in the struggle to fend off the assault on the Reich, and to gain time – perhaps for the Allied coalition to crack, perhaps for some negotiated end to the nightmare, perhaps… who knew for what?