Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Simultaneously, the production of armaments once again reached the highest figures since the beginning of the war. The retreats and incessant air raids constantly caused new difficulties, but Albert Speer repeatedly succeeded in overcoming these by vigorous and ingenious improvisations. The production of artillery pieces was increased from 27,000 in 1943 to more than 40,000, the number of tanks from 20,000 to 27,000, of planes from 25,000 to nearly 38,000. But these extreme increases ruthlessly used up all reserves of strength, as if in preparation for the last battle. There was no way of replacing the resources consumed by such production; the feat could not be maintained, let alone repeated. Consequently, it only accelerated the collapse—all the more so when the Allies began those systematic attacks on refineries that they had once before planned and then rejected. The production of airplane fuel, for example, dropped from 156,000 metric tons in May, 1944, to 52,000 metric tons in June to 10,000 tons in September, 1944, and finally to 1,000 tons in February, 1945.

  Thus the means for continuing the war were beginning to cancel one another out. The retreats and bombings resulted in serious losses of raw materials; these in turn reduced the production of weapons and the ability to use the weapons produced, so that new losses of territory followed, which in turn enabled the enemy to base its air forces closer and closer to German territory. From this point on, almost every operational decision was influenced by considerations of armaments; every military conference revolved around reserves of raw materials, transportation difficulties, shortages. From August, 1944, explosives had to be stretched by the use of up to 20 per cent salt. On the airfields readied fighter planes stood with empty tanks. And in a memorandum of that same period Speer came to the conclusion: “Considering the time needed by the processing industries, the production dependent on chromium, which means the entire production of armaments, will cease on January 1, 1946.”25

  Meanwhile, the Russians had advanced through the shattered front in the central sector as far as the Vistula. Thanks to Hitler’s obstinate refusal to yield ground, they had been able to cut off and encircle more and more German divisions. The situation in the West developed in similar fashion, a series of breakthroughs and encirclements, once the Allies initiated the war of movement at the end of July. Hitler, who in the past had so successfully employed this very operational method, found himself increasingly incapable of responding to it. He continued to reject all proposals for a mobile defense, such as the newly appointed Chief of Staff Guderian was constantly making. Instead, as if compulsively fixated upon his offensive ideas, he continually developed new plans for attack that prescribed to the local commanders the sectors and even the details of the villages, bridges, and roads over which they were to advance.

  The Wehrmacht at this time still comprised more than 9 million men. But these forces were deployed over half the continent, from Scandinavia to the Balkans. Hitler’s determination to hold lost positions for the sake of prestige, and the necessity of protecting the vanishing base of raw materials, strangled all operational freedom. In August, 1944, Rumania with her oil fields was lost to the Red Army, in September, Bulgaria; and while the German position in the Balkans was cracked open almost without opposition, exhausted Finland withdrew from the war. About the same time the British landed in Greece and captured Athens. By the end of August the Allies had also taken northern France, sweeping up gigantic quantities of material and armaments as well as an army of prisoners. In the early days of September their tank forces reached the Moselle, and a week later, on September 11, an American patrol for the first time crossed the western boundary of Germany. Shortly afterward, a Russian thrust into East Prussia was beaten off. But there could now be no doubt about it: the war was coming home to Germany.

  Nevertheless Hitler did not even think of surrender. He met the first signs of disintegration in the Wehrmacht with drastic measures; at the beginning of September, for example, he had Himmler threaten deserters with arrest of kin. He was counting on dissension among the Allies, on the intervention of “Providence,” which he saw confirmed again by the events of July 20, and on a sudden turn of affairs. “They are stumbling into their ruin,” he declared in the course of a conversation in the Führer’s headquarters, and made clear his resolve to continue the war under all circumstances:

  I think I can say this, that it is impossible to imagine a greater crisis than the one we have already experienced in the East this year. When Field Marshal Model went there, Army Group Center was actually nothing but a hole. There was more hole than front, but then at last there was more front than hole…. We will fight even on the Rhine if need be. That doesn’t matter in the least. Come what may we will continue this struggle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our accursed enemies tires of continuing to fight, and until we obtain a peace which will guarantee the life of the German nation for the next fifty or a hundred years, and which above all does not sully our honor a second time, as happened in 1918…. If my life had been ended fon July 20], that would have been for me personally—I believe I may say this—only a liberation from anxieties, sleepless nights, and a severe nervous disease. It is only a fraction of a second; then one is released from all that and has one’s rest and eternal peace. Nevertheless I am grateful to Providence that I was left alive.26

  All the same his body seemed to be reacting violently to the incessant overstrain. After July 20 Hitler hardly left the bunker. He avoided the open air, fearing infections and assassins. His doctors urged him to leave the musty, confined rooms with their depressing atmosphere, but he refused. Instead, disillusioned and bitterly misanthropic, he buried himself more and more deeply in the world of the bunker. In August he began complaining about constant headaches; in September he suffered an attack of jaundice. Along with this, he was tormented by dental troubles. And in the middle of the month, shortly after the Allied troops had penetrated the territory of the Reich in force, he collapsed with a heart attack.

  For some time he lay torpid on his cot, his voice low and quivering, and at times all desire to live seemed to have ebbed out of him. Attacks of dizziness, sudden sweating, and stomach cramps followed in quick succession, all connected, with a severe infection. That this bout of illness was of hysterical origin, or at any rate psychosomatic, seems all too likely; and the hypothesis is reinforced by the fact that just now, as had happened in the autumn of 1935, an operation on his vocal chords was necessary. On October 1, while being treated by one of his doctors, Hitler briefly fainted. Shortly afterward, the illnesses began to diminish; only the trembling in the limbs persisted, stronger than ever now. He also had spells of disturbed equilibrium, and, occasionally, during one of his rare walks, when he finally let himself be persuaded to take one, he would suddenly veer to one side as if directed by an alien hand. But his recuperation was on the whole quite surprising. Possibly he was pulling himself together for those fundamental decisions that had to be made in view of the impending final phase of the war.

  Strategically, he was left with only two options. Returning to the old theory of the bulwark, he could gather the greater part of Germany’s remaining forces in the East and thus reinforce the long defensive front. Or else he could once more muster his forces for a blow against the West. Ever since the summer of 1943 the question had been asked whether it would be better to look for the way out of the quandary in the East or in the West. Now this question was being put in military terms—weak and fundamentally untenable though it was. Early in 1944 Hitler, in a radio address, had tried to revamp his old claim to being Europe’s rescuer from “Bolshevist chaos.” Comparing his mission to that of ancient Greece and Rome, he declared that this war would achieve its higher meaning when it was seen as a decisive struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union, that it was fending off a new invasion by the Huns, which menaced all of Western Europe and America. If Soviet Russia were to win, “within ten years the continent of the most ancient culture will have lost the essential features of its life. The scene so dear to all of us of mille
nnial artistic and material evolution would be wiped out. The peoples who stand as the representatives of this culture… would die wretchedly somewhere in the forests or marshes of Siberia, those of them who had not been finished off by a shot in the nape of the neck.”27 But now, only a few months later, he decided on an offensive against the West, at the cost of weakening the hard-pressed Eastern front.

  This decision has frequently been viewed as a last great unmasking, as the self-revelation of an unprincipled cynic. And it does almost seem to rend a veil and expose him as the nihilistic revolutionary Hermann Rauschning had pictured: a man without a concept, a program, a goal, who merely used concepts, goals, and programs for the accumulation of power and the cranking up of actions. Undeniably, the predicament in which he found himself at this time brought to light some basic elements of this character: his faithlessness toward ideas and convictions, his contempt for principles. And certainly the decision casts a peculiar light upon the already tattered banner of “struggle against Bolshevism.” It was, strictly speaking, more compromising than the Moscow Pact, which Hitler in any case could justify as a detour and tactical maneuver. For now there were no more detours left.

  And yet the decision to attack in the West does not contradict Hitler’s lifelong fixation. Close scrutiny reveals its inherent consistency. Naturally defiance and despair influenced it—for he now hated the West, which had destroyed his grand design. And presumably in the radical moods of the last year he discovered once again his greater closeness to Stalin, that “fellow of genius,” as he had often called him, for whom one had to have “unreserved respect.”28 All in all, Hitler was prompted by a higher degree of calculation than we might expect of him on the verge of doom, at the end of his power and his life.

  He believed that his admiration for Stalin gave him certain clues to the Russian’s behavior. Greatness, he knew, was by its nature inexorable; it would have no truck with those shifts that were the business of bourgeois statesmen. A new offensive against the East, therefore, could possibly delay the end, but certainly could not avert it. An offensive in the West, on the other hand, might produce a shock of surprise among the Americans and British, who he believed were easily shaken. Thus he would recapture the initiative and so secure that gain in time which might yet bring about the hoped-for split in the enemy coalition. In this sense the offensive was a kind of last desperate offer to the Western Allies to make common cause with him.

  Above all, however, an offensive seemed possible only in the West; and this consideration virtually decided the matter. There he could advance once again, once again bring to bear his genius as a commander, which had been proved in offensive operations. The vast expanses of the Eastern front, with its gigantic rear areas, where he himself had gone astray even in the days of optimum force, offered far less of an operational base or goal than the West. In the West, moreover, the offensive could take off from the west wall’s system of fortifications. And since it would have shorter distances to cover, less fuel would be needed. Moreover, Hitler also thought that his armies in the East would put up a bitter resistance in any case. In the East fear was on his side, whereas in the West he had to reckon with a growing defeatism. The Morgenthau Plan (so-called after Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Ir.) for the dismemberment and agrarianization of Germany had just become known, and was being exploited by the propaganda specialists to build up anxiety. Though not entirely unsuccessful in this, they did not manage to create anything like the wild terror they had counted on. Consequently, the offensive was to confer upon the war in the West some of the grimness it already had in the East.

  On December 11 and 12, a few days before the attack was started, Hitler summoned the troop commanders of the Western front in two separate groups to meetings in the headquarters of Field Marshal von Rund-stedt. Having first been relieved of weapons and briefcases, they were driven about haphazardly to confuse their sense of orientation until the column of cars at last stopped at the entrance to an extensive system of bunkers that proved to be the Adlerhorst (the Eagle’s Nest) Führer’s headquarters near Bad Nauheim. They were led down a lane formed by SS men to Hitler. One of the participants was stunned to discover “a stooped figure with a pale and puffy face, hunched in his chair, his hands trembling, his left arm subject to a violent twitching which he did his best to conceal.” An armed bodyguard stood behind every chair, and one of the participants later declared: “None of us would have dared so much as to pull out his handkerchief.”29

  In a two-hour speech combining justifications with encouragements, Hitler informed the assembled commanders of Operation Autumn Mists. The attack was to advance through the Ardennes toward Antwerp, the Allies’ most important supply port, and subsequently to annihilate all enemy forces to the north. Hitler admitted that his plan was a gamble and seemed to stand “in a certain disproportion to the forces and their condition.” But the risk acted as a challenge to him; for the last time he was staking everything on a single card. He pointed out the advantages of an offensive strategy, especially within an overall defensive framework. He implored the officers “to make it plain to the enemy that no matter what he does he can never count on a surrender, never, never.” And then he came back to his ever-growing hope:

  Never in the history of the world have there been coalitions like that of our enemies, composed of so many heterogeneous elements with such totally divergent aims…. These are countries that are already bickering with one another over their aims every day. And he who sits like a spider in his web, so to speak, watching this development, can see these antagonisms blowing up more and more with every passing hour. If they are hit by a few more very heavy blows, at any moment this artificially sustained common front may suddenly collapse with a tremendous clap of thunder… provided always that this battle in no circumstances leads to a further weakening of Germany….

  Gentlemen, on other fronts I have accepted sacrifices beyond the call of necessity in order to create here the preconditions for another offensive.30

  On December 16, with low-hanging clouds grounding the enemy air force, the offensive began on a front of seventy-five miles. Hitler had withdrawn several battle-hardened divisions from the Eastern front. The enemy was hoodwinked by deceptive radio messages. To avoid attracting attention, some of the heavy equipment was pulled into position by horses. Low-flying planes were assigned the task of drowning out with their motors the noises and clanging in the German positions. The surprise actually succeeded, and enabled the German divisions to break through at many points. But after only a few days it became apparent that the offensive would have been condemned to failure even without the fierce American defense, simply because the German side quickly ran out of energy and reserves. One tank group stopped a mile from an American supply dump containing 3 million gallons of gasoline. Another unit waited in vain on the ridge near Dinant for fuel and reinforcements, so that it could roll on the short distance to the Meuse. Just before Christmas, moreover, the weather changed; dense swarms of Allied planes reappeared in the blue skies and within a few days flew 15,000 sorties, literally smashing to pieces the German supply lines. On December 28 Hitler once more summoned the division commanders to his headquarters to implore and bully them:

  Never in my life have I accepted the idea of surrender, and I am one of those men who have worked their way up from nothing. Our present situation, therefore, is nothing new to me. Once upon a time my own situation was entirely different, and far worse. I say this only so that you can grasp why I pursue my goal with such fanaticism and why nothing can wear me down. No matter how much I might be tormented by worries, even if my health were shaken by them—that would still have not the slightest effect on my decision to fight on….”31

  In the East, meanwhile, the Red Army had begun its preparations for an offensive on a broad front, and on January 9, 1945, Guderian once more called on Hitler to alert him to the threatening danger. But Hitler would not hear of it; he was thinking only of his own offe
nsive, which had once more restored the possibility of planning and operating. He called all warnings to the contrary “completely idiotic” and ordered the chief of Foreign Armies Intelligence, East, who had furnished Guderian with his information, to be “locked up in a lunatic asylum at once.” The Eastern front had never been buttressed by so many reserves as it was at the moment, Hitler stated. The chief of staff retorted: “The Eastern front is a house of cards. If the front is penetrated at a single point, it will collapse.”

  Early in January the troops in the Ardennes made two further attempts to advance to the south. They were thrown back to their starting positions by January 16. But in the meanwhile, on January 12, the first blow of the Russian offensive under Marshal Konev struck at the bridgehead of Baranov and effortlessly crashed through the German lines. A day later the armies of Marshal Zhukov crossed the Vistula on both sides of the Polish capital, while farther north two armies pushed toward East Prussia and the Gulf of Danzig. The entire front between the Baltic and the Carpathians was in motion. A tremendous war machine with infantry superiority of eleven to one, tanks seven to one, and artillery twenty to one, pushing an enormous avalanche of human beings before it, rolled over the scattered German efforts at resistance. By the end of the month Silesia was lost, and the Russians had reached the Oder. The Red Army was only a hundred miles from Berlin. On some nights the inhabitants of the German capital could hear the rumble of heavy artillery.

  On January 30, 1945, twelve years after his appointment as Chancellor of the Reich, Hitler delivered his last speech over the radio. Once again he tried to conjure up the peril of the “Asian tidal wave” and appealed in curiously weary and unconvincing phrases to every individual’s spirit of resistance. “However grave the crisis may be at the moment,” he concluded, “in the end it will be mastered by our unalterable will, by our readiness for sacrifice, and by our abilities. We will overcome this emergency also.”32