The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

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  Throughout the summer the Allied air forces escalated their assault on the German homeland. Although the Anglo-American bombing campaign had had an undeniable effect on German morale in 1943, its impact on German war production was less obvious. In fact, German munitions production actually increased in 1942–43, especially after Hitler’s appointment of Albert Speer to head the Ministry of Armaments and Munitions in February 1942. In an effort to rationalize German production, Speer, using his access to Hitler as leverage, was able to supplant Göring’s Four Year Plan and the Wehrmacht’s War Economy and Armaments Office, headed by General Georg Thomas. He launched a drive to standardize production, tighten control over the uses of raw materials, factory, and labor, and to reduce the number of different types of weapons. Rationalization of production did not begin with Speer, but working with the powerful Erhard Milch, in charge of Luftwaffe production, as well as industrialists and local officials, he was able to bring the disparate elements of war production under something that approached central control. By 1943 this strategy was paying huge dividends, and by early 1944 Germany was producing twice as many rifles as in 1941, over three times as many hand grenades, over seven times as many howitzers, and more than three times as many aircraft. Speer was a star, his achievements touted as the “Speer miracle.” At a time when the Nazis had few military triumphs to parade before the public, the striking upward curve of munitions production served as a propaganda tool to demonstrate to the German people that the war could still be won. In the process, Speer, already a Hitler favorite, became a public darling.

  But Speer’s reputation—and German war production—peaked in the first half of 1944 and began a drastic slide thereafter. Following the invasion of France, the Allies were at last able to execute a sustained air assault against German industry, especially oil and transportation, staging raids of five, six, seven hundred planes against synthetic fuel complexes, railyards, and other related targets. Over half the bomb tonnage dropped by the Allies on Germany fell between D-Day and the end of the war, and German industrial output plunged precipitously in every important category—aircraft production by 62 percent; armor by 54 percent; motor vehicles by 72 percent; ammunition by 62 percent; and weapons by 42 percent. From its peak in 1944 to March 1945, total munitions production fell by 55 percent.

  The main thrust of the Allied air campaign between May and September 1944 was directed against Germany’s synthetic oil installations, which produced 90 percent of the Reich’s aviation fuel and 30 percent of its motor gasoline. As a result of the bombing, synthetic oil production plummeted from an average of 359,000 tons in the four months preceding the onset of the raids to 24,000 tons in September. The output of aviation fuel from these plants tumbled from 175,000 tons in April to 5,000 tons in the same period, while oil and aviation fuel stocks fell by two thirds. By the close of the year, the German war machine was literally running on empty.

  After September 1944, the focus of the air offensive shifted to Germany’s transportation and communication system. Raids on rail, road, and water transport were, in many respects, more effective than the assault on oil, reducing traffic by 50 percent during the last year of the war. Since 1943, much of German production had been dispersed to different sites to prevent a single blow from destroying a key industrial choke point. By the close of 1944, however, even if crucial parts or weapons were produced, they could not reach assembly areas or soldiers at the front. With the transportation system in tatters, the national economy dissolved into a handful of relatively isolated regional economic zones. The Ruhr was largely severed from the remainder of Germany, and total coal shipments, on which so much of German industry depended, were reduced from 75,000 carloads in June 1944 to 39,000 in January 1945, to 28,000 in March. “Our entire military trouble can be traced back to the enemy’s air superiority,” Goebbels noted forlornly in his diary in March 1945. “In practice a coordinated conduct [of the war] is no longer possible in the Reich. We no longer have control over transportation and communication links. Not only our cities, but also our industries are for the most part destroyed. The result is a deep break in Germany’s war morale.”

  Resentment against the Nazi authorities, especially Göring and the Luftwaffe, simmered. With a cynicism born of bitter experience, many Germans recalled that there was a time early in the war when the bombing actually seemed to have bonded the people with the regime. Party and state agencies rushed to provide all sorts of services, collecting relief, distributing food and blankets, finding shelter for families whose homes were destroyed in the raids. Even the skeptics, and there were many, had to admit that life beneath the bombs created a sense of communal closeness, of shared hardship, as people found themselves increasingly thrown back on one another, on family and neighbors. But as the bombing escalated to almost apocalyptic proportions that sense of solidarity with the regime was steadily eroded by mass suffering and the increasingly obvious failure of the regime to protect its people.

  By the end of 1944 German air defenses were simply overwhelmed. The flak continued to shoot down bombers in large numbers—and sometimes the Luftwaffe, starved for fuel, mustered the new jet fighters, the Me 262 Dusenjäger—to attack the formations. After almost every raid the charred fuselages and rudders and wings of enemy bombers were scattered among the boughs of trees or jutted from devastated buildings, bits of bodies strewn among the debris. Children played in the wreckage; scavengers stripped away boots or heavy jackets from the dead; they took parachutes for the silk. But always the bombers came back, more and more of them.

  Of the Nazi leaders, only Goebbels toured the devastated city neighborhoods. He talked to the thousands left homeless by the bombs. The Führer was nowhere to be seen. People still heard his voice on rare occasions, rasping through the static of the Volksempfänger, but he avoided the bombed-out cities. Even the great war criminal Churchill had gone out among the people of London during the Blitz, people noted. They had seen it in the newsreels. But Hitler had vanished. He appeared rarely in public and he spoke only rarely on the radio. When on November 9 he did not give his annual speech on the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, the disappointed public worried that he was ill, or dead, or held captive by the SS. Goebbels begged him to speak to the people, to show himself; it would be a tremendous boost to morale. But he would not, and his absence was deeply felt. He was safe, many assumed, deep in a bunker in Berlin or in the Alps or in his secret headquarters in East Prussia, directing the war. “The Greatest General of All Times,” people whispered in scorn.

  For a time in the summer and fall of 1944, with the war sliding unmistakably toward catastrophe on all fronts, spirits were briefly raised by the prospect of new “wonder weapons” that would turn the tide of the war. The regime sought to boost sagging morale by promising retaliation with new, secret weapons. The V-1 rockets, the first of the “vengeance weapons,” began landing in England in June 1944, and their use was closely followed by the German public. But within weeks it became obvious that the new wonder weapons had no deterrent effect on the Anglo-American air forces and could not impede the Allied advance in the West. The much heralded introduction of the V-2 rocket in the fall was again met with great anticipation, but by December Nazi regional officials had to report that “it has had as yet no real effect on morale. The people have also grown skeptical about the introduction of more weapons.” The general feeling was that it was simply too late.

  As the bombing intensified and the regime proved itself helpless to protect the populace, uneasiness, fatigue, and resentment against the Nazis mounted. The RAF’s nighttime raids were more unnerving than the American daylight attacks, but the sight of large formations of enemy bombers sweeping across the midday sky, apparently unmolested by the Luftwaffe, had a particularly demoralizing effect. An SD report of July 14, 1944, sounded what would become a characteristic refrain: “The fact that the Terror Fliers could make their way in broad daylight to their targets in important war industries witho
ut being hindered by German fighters . . . has had quite a negative impact on morale and strengthened the feeling that we are delivered over to the whims of the enemy.”

  By the close of 1944 reports from regional districts were punctuated with worries about the debilitating effects of the bombing in cities and strafing in the countryside. “Signs of war weariness and apathy concerning the course of the war can be detected,” the authorities commented in December 1944, “especially in the rural population.” There was widespread fear that “the small towns and villages will soon be sought out by terror fliers.” By spring of 1945 that fear had become a grim reality. Commenting on the mood of the people in early 1945, a similar report concluded that “an upswing in general morale will only come about if success can be attained in breaking the enemy’s air superiority, thus . . . protecting the homeland from the actions of the enemy air forces.” The reasons given for the military defeats were “everywhere attributed to Russian tank superiority as well as enemy air superiority. Especially the air superiority of the enemy leads again and again to the sharpest condemnation of the German Luftwaffe, in which the person of the supreme commander of the Luftwaffe himself has increasingly come in for criticism.”

  “The people are beginning to suffer from what is called Bunker fever and inability to work,” the Wuppertal Gestapo reported in January 1945. “The faith in our leading men, including the Führer, is rapidly disappearing. They are thoroughly fed up with Goebbels’ articles and speeches and say that he too often has lied to the German people and talked too big. The attitude towards National Socialism is characterized by the following saying: ‘If we have not yet collapsed, it is not because of National Socialism but in spite of National Socialism.’ ” An elderly Hamburg woman who worked with her husband as a hotel manager remembered that “the most remarkable thing one noticed when one sat in the air raid shelter was how the people cursed the Nazis more and more as time went on, without inhibitions or reservations. . . . Never was the cursing about England or America. Always it was about the Nazis. And it got worse and worse.” Watching his city consumed in flames, a Lübeck man and his neighbors “were all of the opinion that we had Hitler to thank for all this misery.”

  Earlier in the war, the regime organized evacuations of children from the cities to small towns and rural retreats. Bewildered children from Munich and Nuremberg or as far away as Hamburg appeared in the streets of bucolic villages, sometimes accompanied by a teacher and an official from the Reich Air Defense League. No longer. In the spring of 1945, low-flying Allied fighters were everywhere. Day and night Thunderbolts and Mustangs and twin-engine Lightnings would roar in just above the treetops, strafing the roads and rail lines. They fired at farmers plowing their fields, at tractors and horse-drawn wagons on nearly deserted country lanes. No one was safe.

  German morale did not crack under this onslaught—given the oppressive nature of the National Socialist state, serious unrest was unlikely, an uprising hardly possible—but the bombing did have a corrosive, demoralizing effect on civilian attitudes. Repeated heavy bombardment did not engender feelings of rebellion but a mood of sullen apathy and a devouring absorption with the basic task of survival. Deeply ingrained work habits, Nazi propaganda, and fear of the regime all played a role to keep weary Germans at their jobs. “During the last months of the war,” a woman from Wetzlar explained, “my only thought was to keep alive, to keep safe in the cellar, and to get a little food cooked.” Survival was the order of the day—a sentiment reflected in the common Berlin farewell of 1944–45: “Bleib übrig!” (Survive!)

  By fall 1944 Germany’s strategic situation was desperate. Allied troops had penetrated the border territory of the Reich in both the East and West and were poised for a drive into the heart of the Third Reich. Hitler decided that one last dramatic stroke in the West might yet save the situation. His plan called for a massive counterattack in the Ardennes area, then sending armored spearheads dashing across the Meuse to Antwerp, depriving the Allies of their most important port and driving a wedge between the British forces in the north and the Americans farther south. To accomplish this he would deploy thirty new and rebuilt divisions, including two reoutfitted panzer armies—a larger force than 1940. Guderian, now chief of the General Staff, objected to the entire undertaking, which, he argued, would waste Germany’s last armored reserves for a dubious objective in the West when all available forces were desperately needed in the East as the Soviets prepared a major winter offensive. Both Rundstedt and General Alfred Model, Rommel’s replacement, were also wary of deploying these important armored formations in the West and preferred a more limited operation. They were overruled by Hitler.

  On December 16, under overcast skies, the Germans launched Operation Autumn Fog. Two hundred thousand German troops and six hundred tanks were thrown into the offensive against approximately eighty thousand unsuspecting American troops backed by four hundred tanks. The surprise was complete. German troops sliced through the overmatched Americans along a seventy-mile front and headed for the Meuse River, creating a bulge in Allied lines sixty-five miles deep and forty miles wide. Fighting was intense and conditions terrible—a heavy, wet snow fell as the coldest winter in half a century settled over Western Europe. Among the forces marshaled for the attack were SS units that had been transferred from the Eastern Front, and on December 17 the First SS Panzer Division brought a taste of the Russian campaign to the West. In what had been a common procedure in Russia, the SS massacred eighty-six American prisoners in a field at Malmedy. Until then the Wehrmacht had for the most part fought what one historian has called “a war with rules” against Anglo-American forces, largely adhering to the Geneva Conventions. But in the East, the Germans had engaged in a vicious “war without rules.” At Malmedy that distinction was erased.

  Much of the early success of the German offensive came as a result of bad weather that neutralized Allied airpower, but on Christmas Eve the skies cleared, and Allied aircraft decimated the German spearheads. The German thrust was also slowed by stiffening American resistance and a serious shortage of fuel. Military planners had counted on seizing American oil depots, but that proved impossible. The panzers literally ran out of gas. The offensive was a total failure. The Germans had failed to reach the Meuse, and Antwerp, the main objective of the offensive, was still more than a hundred miles away. By mid-January, the Allies had eliminated the “bulge” in their lines. Casualties on both sides were heavy, roughly 80,000 Germans and 70,000 Americans, but Hitler had exhausted the last of the Wehrmacht’s reserves on a wildly ambitious project that from the start virtually all the High Command thought had little chance of success. In the process, it desperately weakened the German defensive position in the East on the eve of a massive Russian offensive in Poland. It was the last desperate gasp of the Third Reich.

  In the aftermath of the catastrophic Ardennes offensive, Hitler realized that the war could not be won militarily. “I know the war is lost,” he confided to his military aide Nicolaus von Below. But, he added, “We’ll not capitulate. Never. We can go down. But we’ll take a world with us.” His only hope was to achieve a political settlement, which he thought might be possible by inflicting such devastating losses on the Western Allies that they would seek a separate peace or even agree to join Germany in its “heroic struggle to save Western Civilization from the ravages of Bolshevism.” But even that fanciful hope was extinguished by the failure of the Ardennes offensive.

  The drumbeat of bad news continued into February and March. On February 13, Allied aircraft dropped 2,658 tons of bombs on Dresden, 1,181 of which were incendiaries, turning that beautiful Renaissance city into an inferno and killing 25,000 civilians. Among those in the city that night was the Jewish philologist Viktor Klemperer. As he and his wife made their way through the burning city trying to reach the Elbe, he saw that “fires were still burning in many of the buildings on the road above.” The dead, “small, and no more than a bundle of clothes . . . were scattered across our pa
th. The skull of one had been torn away, the top of the head was a dark red bowl. Once an arm lay there with a pale, quite fine hand, like a model made of wax.” Crowds streamed unceasingly between “the corpses and smashed vehicles, up and down the Elbe, a silent, agitated procession.” At one point his wife wanted to light a cigarette but had no matches. “Something was glowing on the ground, she wanted to use it—it was a burning corpse.” The city was not a major industrial center, but the Allies claimed that it was an important transit center for German troops moving east and so they attacked as a sign of the West’s willingness to help the advance of Stalin’s forces.