by Ian Kershaw
The rest of his address comprised the usual parade of historical parallels of the triumph of will over adversity – inevitably again including Frederick the Great – and, as always, an optimistic assessment of the chances of military success. As so often, he emphasized the importance of time, of striking without waiting for supposedly optimal conditions, and the dangers of waiting, seeing the moment pass, and conditions deteriorate. Again, he ruled out the impossibility of Germany fighting indefinitely a defensive war. For strategic and psychological reasons it was essential to return to the offensive, and to seize the initiative. The operation would be decisive, he claimed. Its success would automatically remove the threat to the southern part of the Ardennes offensive, and with that the Wehrmacht would have forced the enemy out of a half of the western front. ‘Then we’ll want to have a further look,’ he added.314
One slip of the tongue seemed to reveal, however, his realization that the ambitious aim he had placed in the Ardennes offensive could no longer be attained; that he knew he could no longer force the Allies off the Continent; and that, therefore, defensive operations would have to continue in the west as in the east. He spoke at one point of ‘the unshakeable (das unverrückbäre) aim’ of the operation as producing merely ‘in part (halbwegs)’ a ‘cleansing (Bereinigung)’ of the situation in the west.315 It implied that his speech to the commanders had been little more than the elevation of hope over reason.
‘North Wind’ began on New Year’s Day. It was Hitler’s last offensive – and his least effective. German troops were able to advance no more than about twenty kilometres, making a few minor gains and causing Eisenhower to pull back forces in the Strasbourg area for a time. But the offensive was too weak to have much effect. It proved possible to halt it without the Americans having to withdraw troops from the Ardennes. ‘North Wind’ had proved to be little more than a momentary stiff breeze.316
Even more devastating was the death-blow to the Luftwaffe, imparted on 1 January, the same day that ‘North Wind’ had commenced. It had finally proved possible to launch a German air-offensive – though with disastrous consequences. Around 800 German fighters and bombers engaged in mass attacks on Allied airfields in Northern France, Belgium, and Holland. They succeeded in destroying or seriously damaging almost 300 planes, limiting Allied air-power for a week or more. But 277 German planes were also lost – a good number to flak from their own batteries around the V2 launch-sites, There was no possibility of the Luftwaffe recovering from such losses. It was effectively at an end.317
On New Year’s Day 1945, German radios broadcast Hitler’s traditional address to the German People. It held nothing new for them.318 Hitler offered them not a sentence on the effect of ‘wonder weapons’, steps to counter the terror from the skies, or anything specific on military progress on the fronts. Above all, he gave no hint that the end of the war was near. He spoke only of its continuation in 1945 and until a final victory – which by now only dreamers could imagine – was attained. His audience had heard it all many times before: the reaffirmation that ‘a 9 November in the German Reich will never repeat itself’;319 that Germany’s enemies, led by ‘the Jewish-international world conspiracy’ intended to ‘eradicate (auszurotten)’ its people;320 that Germany’s plight had been caused by the weakness of its allies; that the combined effort of front and homeland showed the ‘essence of our social community’ and an indomitable spirit, incapable of destruction; and that ‘the Jewish-international world enemy’ would not only fail in its attempt ‘to destroy (vernichten) Europe and eradicate (auszurotten) its peoples, but would bring about its own destruction (Vernichtung)’.321
Few remained convinced. Many, like some observers in the Stuttgart area, were probably ready to acknowledge that ‘the Führer has worked for war from the very beginning’.322 Far from being the genius of Goebbels’s propaganda, such observers remarked, Hitler had ‘intentionally unleashed this world conflagration in order to be proclaimed as the great “transformer of mankind”’.323 It was belated recognition of the catastrophic impact of the leader they had earlier supported, cheered, eulogized. Their backing had helped to put him in the position where his power over the German state was total. By now, in the absence of either the ability or the readiness – especially since the events of 20 July – of those with access to the corridors of power to defy his authority, let alone oust him, this man quite simply held the fate of the German people in his own hands. He had again avowed, as he always had done, his adamant refusal to contemplate capitulation in any event. This meant that the suffering of the German people – and of the countless victims of the regime they had at one time so enthusiastically supported – had to go on. It would cease, it was abundantly clear, only when Hitler himself ceased to exist. And that could only mean Germany’s total defeat, ruin, and occupation.
With the petering out of the Ardennes offensive, all hope of repelling the relentless advance from the west was gone. And in the east, the Red Army was waiting for the moment to launch its winter offensive. Hitler was compelled by 3 January to accept that ‘continuation of the originally planned operation [in the Ardennes] no longer has any prospect of success’.324 Five days later came the tacit acknowledgement that his last gamble had been a losing throw of the dice with his approval of the withdrawal of the 6th Panzer Army to the north-west of Bastogne, and next day, his order to pull back his SS panzer divisions from the front.325 On 14 January, the day before Hitler left his headquarters on the western front to return to Berlin, the High Command of the Wehrmacht acknowledged that ‘the initiative in the area of the offensive has passed to the enemy’.326
Hitler had stated categorically in his briefings before the Ardennes and Alsace offensives that Germany could not indefinitely sustain a defensive war. By now, he had used up his last precious reserves of manpower, lost untold quantities of weaponry, and exhausted his remaining divisions in an offensive that had cost the lives of about 80,000 German soldiers (at the same time weakening the eastern front and paving the way for the rapid inroads of the Red Army in the coming weeks).327 He had also seen the remnants of the Luftwaffe devastated to the point of no return; while rapidly dwindling supplies of fuel and other supplies essential for the war effort held out in any case the prospect of continuing the struggle only for a few more months. The logic was plain: the last faint glimmer of hope had been extinguished, the last exit route cut off. Defeat was inevitable. Hitler had not lost touch with reality. He realized this. Below found him one evening after the failure of the offensive in his bunker after air-raid sirens had sounded, deeply depressed. He spoke of taking his own life since the last chance of success had evaporated. He was savage in his criticism of the failure of the Luftwaffe, and of the ‘traitors’ in the army. According to Below’s later recollection, Hitler said: ‘I know the war is lost. The superior power is too great. I’ve been betrayed. Since 20 July everything has come out that I didn’t think possible. Precisely those were against me who have profited most from National Socialism. I spoilt them all and decorated them. That’s the thanks. I’d like most of all to put a bullet through my head.’ But, as so often, Hitler rapidly pulled himself together, saying: ‘We’ll not capitulate. Never. We can go down. But we’ll take a world with us.’328
This was what kept him going. It had underpinned his political ‘career’ since the beginning. There would be no repeat of 1918: no stab-in-the-back; no capitulation. That – and his place in history as a German hero brought down by weakness and betrayal – was all that was left to him.
16
INTO THE ABYSS
‘Then a man comes by on horseback, shouting in a loud voice. “Save yourselves, you who can. The Russians will be here in half an hour.” We’re overcome by a paralysing fear.’
Recollection of a German refugee in
East Prussia, referring to events of January 1945
‘It was as if they were shooting at stray dogs… They didn’t care and shot in every direction, without any consideration. We saw
the blood on the white snow and carried on walking.’
Recollection of a Jewish prisoner on the forced
march from Auschwitz-Birkenau, January 1945
‘It must be our ambition also in our times to set an example for later generations to look to in similar crises and anxieties, just as we today have to look to the past heroes of history. The year 1918 will therefore not repeat itself.’
Hitler, speaking to Goebbels, 11 March 1945
‘For the last time, the Jewish-Bolshevik mortal enemy has set out with its masses on the attack. He is attempting to demolish Germany and to exterminate our people.’
Hitler’s final proclamation to the soldiers
on the eastern front, 15 April 1 945
‘I’ve now finally given up hope that the war will be won. What an enormous guilt Hitler bears. If I can’t see my family again, I don’t want to live any longer. Above all, a quick death would be better for them than to be deported or otherwise tortured. I’ve buried one hope after another in this war. But now is the worst time. What will happen?’1
Similar sentiments to these, entrusted to his diary on 28 January 1945 by a young German soldier living in hiding in Hungary in daily fear of being retaken by the Russians from whom he had escaped the previous autumn, were shared by millions of ordinary Germans in the last months of the Third Reich. Without hope of the victory so long promised, often without hope of seeing homes and loved ones again, and in trepidation of a future in the hands of merciless conquerors, they now held Hitler, once their idol, personally to blame for the untold misery which had befallen them. What they had seen as such glorious triumphs of the years 1939–41 were long forgotten. So was the jubilation that had accompanied them. This acclaim, building upon the already existent massive popular support that he had gained through his ‘triumphs’ of the pre-war years, had helped to make Hitler’s authority unassailable. His authority, most now plainly saw, had been used to follow disastrous policies which had directed the path to Germany’s ruin.
How this could have come about was given to few, at this point, fully to comprehend. The same soldier, doubtless speaking once more for vast inarticulate masses, had a simple answer: ‘The biggest mistake was the war with Russia. Whatever the courage and readiness for sacrifice, you can’t take on an entire world… We just bit off too much to chew. Above all our leadership.’2
Disastrous policy it had certainly been that had taken Germany into war against the Soviet Union. But it had been no simple mistake, Rather, it had been deeply embedded as an objective since the 1920s in Hitler’s own psyche and ideological drive. Germany could only survive by expanding eastwards, attaining ‘living space’ at the expense of the Soviet Union, winning it ‘by the sword’, and destroying the mortal danger of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’: that had been repeatedly his message since the mid-1920s. The destruction of Bolshevism had, beyond the obsession of a single individual, been transformed during the 1930s into the state ideology of the Nazi regime, a goal enthusiastically backed by the Nazi Party, the bulk of the state apparatus, and the leadership of the armed forces. Most ordinary Germans would have agreed, while fearing war, that Bolshevism marked the greatest threat to the nation’s future. By the end of that decade, Hitler’s ideological vision that had existed unchangingly from the time of Mein Kampf onwards had come sharply into focus; it had been transmuted from a distant, Utopian goal into a conceivable, practical objective. As we saw, within weeks of the conquest of France, Hitler’s eyes had turned to the east, to the war he knew he had one day to fight.
The second part of the soldier’s simple explanation was closer to the mark. It had indeed been a goal pursued from the arrogance of power and the conceit of presumed innate superiority. It had amounted in reality to a colossal gamble with Germany’s future as the stake. That Britain had still not been forced to terms and that the USA was a menacing presence in the wings, together with the perceived certainty that the USSR would prove an altogether more dangerous foe within a few years, meant – given Hitler’s mentality – that the gamble could not be postponed. The military and political leaders of the Reich largely agreed. Most rational observers would have been careful not to stake much on the outcome. The peril ought to have seemed daunting. But, in the backwash of the triumph over France, and under the illusion that the ‘inferiors’ of the Soviet Union would be incapable of holding out for more than a few months against the might of the invincible Wehrmacht, not just Hitler, but the German army leadership, too, thought European hegemony was theirs for the taking. The hubris which had enveloped Hitler during the 1930s and had fed his quest for European domination was, however, now to meet its nemesis.
By the winter of 1941, it was obvious that the gamble had not paid off. By the following winter the winter of Stalingrad – the consequences were already seen to be catastrophic. Germany had permanently lost the initiative. There was no longer any possibility of repeating the incisive, lightning campaigns that had brought the astonishing triumphs between 1939 and 1941. Instead, a bitter and attritional defensive war, which Hitler was both temperamentally and in terms of military skill singularly ill-equipped to direct, had to be fought – and with increasingly stretched manpower and resources. Meanwhile, relentless bombing was reducing Germany’s cities to ashes. And once the western Allies had established a firm hold on Continental soil in the summer of 1944, the writing was well and truly on the wall – at least for all who applied conventional military logic to the increasingly uneven contest.
The failure of the conspiracy in July 1944 to overthrow Hitler removed the last realistic hope within Germany of a negotiated end to a war which was by now inexorably leading to the eventual destruction of the German Reich. Thereafter, there was no possibility of altering the structures of power from within. Despite signs that they were starting to disintegrate, these structures – at their centre the undisputed authority of Hitler – remained intact until the final stages of the regime’s death-agony. As a consequence, Hitler’s power remained absolute and undiminished even as the regime staggered towards oblivion. And as long as Hitler survived, and until Germany was totally crushed, the war would continue.
This meant in turn that there was no possibility of an alternative to the calamitous escalation of death and destruction as Germany fell in ruins. It was not that alternatives were left uncontemplated. At one point or another, almost all the Nazi leaders below Hitler – Goebbels, Göring, Ribbentrop, and Himmler among them – entertained notions of exploring avenues for a separate peace with either the Russians or with the western Allies. Hitler dismissed all such ideas out of hand. He would only negotiate from a position of strength, following a military success, he repeatedly stated. The chances of such an option being open to him were, however, as good as non-existent. So, instead, he spoke tirelessly and incessantly of will overcoming adversity; of refusal to capitulate, of holding out until ‘five minutes past midnight’. Meanwhile, Germany burned.
Time and again, his generals exhorted him to make tactical retreats, or to shore up key sectors of the fronts by giving up other areas for former conquest and withdrawing much-needed troops. Again, Hitler was invariably uncompromising in his refusal. The clashes with his military commanders – most of all with Chief of the General Staff Heinz Guderian – became ever more bitter. His stubborn unreasonableness appeared to confound all military logic. He seemed to have lost his grip on reality. It was as if he had a death-wish – not just for himself, but for Germany and its people; an invitation to nemesis.
That, indeed, was central to Hitler’s own warped brand of logic. From his bitter experience of the last years of the First World War – encountering defeatism, sensing subversion at home, traumatized as he lay in the military hospital at Pasewalk by the news of unexpected defeat and revolution perpetrated by the hated Social Democrats, when all that had meaning for him had been shattered – he had been obsessed by treachery and betrayal. He had made it his life’s mission to upturn the effects of that perceived ‘stab-in-the-back�
� in 1918 and the national humiliation inflicted on the German nation by those he insisted on calling ‘November criminals’. And he had staked his political existence on eliminating, whatever might come, any potential for a repeat of 1918, a recurrence of what he saw as a cowardly capitulation and consequent impotent exposure to the dictates of foreign powers. To this end, and based on a crude philosophy that will would overcome any obstacle, he felt justified in demanding total sacrifice from the German people under his rule. Again, according to his own view of the world, defeat would this time bring not another ‘Diktat of Versailles’ – however repulsive that had been – but the total destruction of Germany. There was, therefore, from this optic, no point in surrender. If victory could not be attained, then struggle to the last was all that was left. A place in history, to be recognized by future generations if not by the present for its heroic, epic qualities, was its imagined virtue.
Incapable of finding fault in himself – in his judgement, his strategy, his leadership – Hitler turned the blame for what had gone wrong more and more on the military professionals, the army leaders whom he had never fully trusted, who had never been fully imbued with the National Socialist spirit. And once some of these officers had tried to do away with him in the summer of 1944, his obsession with treachery reached paranoid levels. Attempts to reason with him on military or strategic grounds were increasingly futile – likely only to prompt furious outbursts about the worthlessness and betrayal of his army leaders. Only generals such as Schörner or Model, who combined high military skills with something approaching Hitler’s own philosophy and acceptance of his ruthless and unbending demands of his troops, met with his favour. His refusal to accept that willpower alone could not overcome massive superiority of the enemy in numbers and equipment would cost countless thousands of his soldiers’ lives in needless sacrifice. It mattered not to him. According to his remorselessly cruel logic, their weakness had condemned them. Their individual loss meant nothing in the nation’s struggle for its very existence. And when the German people, despite heroic efforts, showed themselves, too, to be incapable of withstanding superior enemy might, he was prepared to accept that they deserved to go under. They had ultimately proved themselves weak; they had not matched up to his demands of them; they had been, as he told one of his generals, in the end, unworthy of him.3