The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  On the morning of January 8, 1943, three young Red Army officers, bearing a white flag, entered the German lines on the northern perimeter of Stalingrad and presented General Paulus with an ultimatum from General Rokossovski, commander of the Soviet forces on the Don front. After reminding him that his army was cut off and could not be relieved or kept supplied from the air, the note said:

  The situation of your troops is desperate. They are suffering from hunger, sickness and cold. The cruel Russian winter has scarcely yet begun. Hard frosts, cold winds and blizzards still lie ahead. Your soldiers are unprovided with winter clothing and are living in appalling sanitary conditions … Your situation is hopeless, and any further resistance senseless.

  In view of [this] and in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, we propose that you accept the following terms of surrender …

  They were honorable terms. All prisoners would be given “normal rations.” The wounded, sick and frostbitten would receive medical treatment. All prisoners could retain their badges of rank, decorations and personal belongings. Paulus was given twenty-four hours to reply.

  He immediately radioed the text of the ultimatum to Hitler and asked for freedom of action. His request was curtly dismissed by the Supreme warlord. Twenty-four hours after the expiration of the time limit on the demand for surrender, on the morning of January 10, the Russians opened the last phase of the Battle of Stalingrad with an artillery bombardment from five thousand guns.

  The fighting was bitter and bloody. Both sides fought with incredible bravery and recklessness over the frozen wasteland of the city’s rubble—but not for long. Within six days the German pocket had been reduced by half, to an area fifteen miles long and nine miles deep at its widest. By January 24 it had been split in two and the last small emergency airstrip lost. The planes which had brought in some supplies, especially medicines for the sick and wounded, and which had flown out 29,000 hospital cases, could no longer land.

  Once more the Russians gave their courageous enemy a chance to surrender. Soviet emissaries arrived at the German lines on January 24 with a new offer. Again Paulus, torn between his duty to obey the mad Fuehrer and his obligation to save his own surviving troops from annihilation, appealed to Hitler.

  Troops without ammunition [he radioed on the twenty-fourth] or food … Effective command no longer possible … 18,000 wounded without any supplies or dressings or drugs … Further defense senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops.

  Hitler’s answer has been preserved.

  Surrender is forbidden. Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last round and by their heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution toward the establishment of a defensive front and the salvation of the Western world.

  The Western world! It was a bitter pill for the men of the Sixth Army who had fought against that world in France and Flanders but a short time ago.

  Further resistance was not only senseless and futile but impossible, and as the month of January 1943 approached its end the epic battle wore itself out, expiring like the flame of an expended candle which sputters and dies. By January 28 what was left of a once great army was split into three small pockets, in the southern one of which General Paulus had his headquarters in the cellar of the ruins of the once thriving Univermag department store. According to one eyewitness the commander in chief sat on his camp bed in a darkened corner in a state of near collapse.

  He was scarcely in the mood, nor were his soldiers, to appreciate the flood of congratulatory radiograms that now began to pour in. Goering, who had whiled away a good part of the winter in sunny Italy, strutting about in his great fur coat and fingering his jewels, sent a radio message on January 28.

  The fight put up by the Sixth Army will go down in history, and future generations will speak proudly of a Langemarck of daredeviltry, an Alcázar of tenacity, a Narvik of courage and a Stalingrad of self-sacrifice.

  Nor were they cheered when on the last evening, January 30, 1943, the tenth anniversary of the Nazis’ coming to power, they listened to the fat Reich Marshal’s bombastic broadcast.

  A thousand years hence Germans will speak of this battle [of Stalingrad] with reverence and awe, and will remember that in spite of everything Germany’s ultimate victory was decided there … In years to come it will be said of the heroic battle on the Volga: When you come to Germany, say that you have seen us lying at Stalingrad, as our honor and our leaders ordained that we should, for the greater glory of Germany.

  The glory and the horrible agony of the Sixth Army had now come to an end. On January 30, Paulus radioed Hitler: “Final collapse cannot be delayed more than twenty-four hours.”

  This signal prompted the Supreme Commander to shower a series of promotions on the doomed officers in Stalingrad, apparently in the hope that such honors would strengthen their resolve to die gloriously at their bloody posts. “There is no record in military history of a German Field Marshal being taken prisoner,” Hitler remarked to Jodl, and thereupon conferred on Paulus, by radio, the coveted marshal’s baton. Some 117 other officers were jumped up a grade. It was a macabre gesture.

  The end itself was anticlimactic. Late on the last day of January Paulus got off his final message to headquarters.

  The Sixth Army, true to their oath and conscious of the lofty importance of their mission, have held their position to the last man and the last round for Fuehrer and Fatherland unto the end.

  At 7:45 P.M. the radio operator at Sixth Army headquarters sent a last message on his own: “The Russians are at the door of our bunker. We are destroying our equipment.” He added the letters “CL”—the international wireless code signifying “This station will no longer transmit.”

  There was no last-minute fighting at headquarters. Paulus and his staff did not hold out to the last man. A squad of Russians led by a junior officer peered into the commander in chief’s darkened hole in the cellar. The Russians demanded surrender and the Sixth Army’s chief of staff, General Schmidt, accepted. Paulus sat dejected on his camp bed. When Schmidt addressed him—“May I ask the Field Marshal if there is anything more to be said?”—Paulus was too weary to answer.

  Farther north a small German pocket, containing all that was left of two panzer and four infantry divisions, still held out in the ruins of a tractor factory. On the night of February 1 it received a message from Hitler’s headquarters.

  The German people expect you to do your duty exactly as did the troops holding the southern fortress. Every day and every hour that you continue to fight facilitates the building of a new front.

  Just before noon on February 2, this group surrendered after a last message to the Supreme Commander: “… Have fought to the last man against vastly superior forces. Long live Germany!”

  Silence at last settled on the snow-covered, blood-spattered shambles of the battlefield. At 2:46 P.M. on February 2 a German reconnaissance plane flew high over the city and radioed back: “No sign of any fighting at Stalingrad.”

  By that time 91,000 German soldiers, including twenty-four generals, half-starved, frostbitten, many of them wounded, all of them dazed and broken, were hobbling over the ice and snow, clutching their blood-caked blankets over their heads against the 24-degrees-below-zero cold toward the dreary, frozen prisoner-of-war camps of Siberia. Except for some 20,000 Rumanians and the 29,000 wounded who had been evacuated by air they were all that was left of a conquering army that had numbered 285,000 men two months before. The rest had been slaughtered. And of those 91,000 Germans who began the weary march into captivity that winter day, only 5,000 were destined ever to see the Fatherland again.*

  Meanwhile back in the well-heated headquarters in East Prussia the Nazi warlord, whose stubbornness and stupidity were responsible for this disaster, berated his generals at Stalingrad for not knowing how and when to die. The records of a conference held by Hitler at OKW with his generals on February 1 surviv
e and shed enlightenment on the nature of the German dictator at this trying period in his life and that of his Army and country.

  They have surrendered there—formally and absolutely. Otherwise they would have closed ranks, formed a hedgehog, and shot themselves with their last bullet … The man [Paulus] should have shot himself just as the old commanders who threw themselves on their swords when they saw that the cause was lost … Even Varus gave his slave the order: “Now kill me!”

  Hitler’s venom toward Paulus for deciding to live became more poisonous as he ranted on.

  You have to imagine: he’ll be brought to Moscow—and imagine that rat-trap there. There he will sign anything. He’ll make confessions, make proclamations—you’ll see. They will now walk down the slope of spiritual bankruptcy to its lowest depths … You’ll see—it won’t be a week before Seydlitz and Schmidt and even Paulus are talking over the radio† … They are going to be put into the Liublanka, and there the rats will eat them. How can one be so cowardly? I don’t understand it …

  What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the Nation. But how can anyone be afraid of this moment of death, with which he can free himself from this misery, if his duty doesn’t chain him to this Vale of Tears. Na!

  … So many people have to die, and then a man like that besmirches the heroism of so many others at the last minute. He could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow! …

  What hurts me most, personally, is that I still promoted him to field marshal. I wanted to give him this final satisfaction. That’s the last field marshal I shall appoint in this war. You mustn’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.27

  There followed a brief exchange between Hitler and General Zeitzler on how to break the news of the surrender to the German people. On February 3, three days after the act, OKW issued a special communiqué:

  The battle of Stalingrad has ended. True to their oath to fight to the last breath, the Sixth Army under the exemplary leadership of Field Marshal Paulus has been overcome by the superiority of the enemy and by the unfavorable circumstances confronting our forces.

  The reading of the communiqué over the German radio was preceded by the roll of muffled drums and followed by the playing of the second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Hitler proclaimed four days of national mourning. All theaters, movies and variety halls were closed until it was over.

  Stalingrad, wrote Walter Goerlitz, the German historian, in his work on the General Staff, “was a second Jena and was certainly the greatest defeat that a German army had ever undergone.”28

  But it was more than that. Coupled with El Alamein and the British-American landings in North Africa it marked the great turning point in World War II. The high tide of Nazi conquest which had rolled over most of Europe to the frontier of Asia on the Volga and in Africa almost to the Nile had now begun to ebb and it would never flow back again. The time of the great Nazi blitz offensives, with thousands of tanks and planes spreading terror in the ranks of the enemy armies and cutting them to pieces, had come to an end. There would be, to be sure, desperate local thrusts—at Kharkov in the spring of 1943, in the Ardennes at Christmas time in 1944—but they formed part of a defensive struggle which the Germans were to carry out with great tenacity and valor during the next two—and last—years of the war. The initiative had passed from Hitler’s hands, never to return. It was his enemies who seized it now, and held it. And not only on land but in the air. Already on the night of May 30, 1942, the British had carried out their first one-thousand-plane bombing of Cologne, and more followed on other cities during the eventful summer. For the first time the civilian German people, like the German soldiers at Stalingrad and El Alamein, were to experience the horrors which their armed forces had inflicted on others up to now.

  And finally, in the snows of Stalingrad and in the burning sands of the North African desert, a great and terrible Nazi dream was destroyed. Not only was the Third Reich doomed by the disasters to Paulus and Rommel but also the gruesome and grotesque so-called New Order which Hitler and his S.S. thugs had been busy setting up in the conquered lands. Before we turn to the final chapter, the fall of the Third Reich, it might be well to pause and see what this New Order was like—in theory and in barbarous practice—and what this ancient and civilized continent of Europe barely escaped after a brief nightmare of experiencing its first horrors. It must necessarily be for this book, as it was for the good Europeans who lived through it, or were massacred before it ended, the darkest chapter of all in the history of the Third Reich.

  * Among those retired, it will be recalled, were Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the Army, and Field Marshals von Rundstedt and von Bock, who led the southern and central army groups, respectively, and General Guderian, the genius of the panzer corps. The commander of the army group in the north, Field Marshal von Leeb, soon followed, being relieved of his post on January 18, 1942. The day before, Field Marshal von Reichenau, who had taken over Rundstedt’s command, died of a stroke. General Udet of the Luftwaffe shot himself to death on November 17, 1941. Moreover, some thirty-five corps and divisional commanders were replaced during the winter retreat.

  This, of course, was only a beginning. Field Marshal von Manstein summed up at Nuremberg what happened to the generals when they started losing battles or finally got up enough courage to oppose Hitler. “Of seventeen field marshals,” he told the tribunal, “ten were sent home during the war and three lost their lives as a result of July 20, 1944 [the plot against Hitler—W.L.S.]. Only one field marshal managed to get through the war and keep his position. Of thirty-six full generals [Generalobersten] eighteen were sent home, and five died as a result of July 20 or were dishonorably discharged. Only three full generals survived the war in their positions.”1

  * Lehndorff was executed by the Nazis on September 4, 1944.

  * The Prussian King often complained about this malady, which he found hampered his mental facilities as well as his physical activities.

  * Prince Wilhelm, the oldest son, had died of battle wounds in France on May 26, 1940.

  * Jens Peter Jessen, a professor of economics at the University of Berlin, was one of the brains of the circle. He had become an ardent Nazi during the period between 1931 and 1933 and was one of the few genuine intellectuals in the party. He was quickly disillusioned after 1933 and soon became a fanatical anti-Nazi. Arrested for complicity in the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler, he was executed at the Ploetzensee prison in Berlin in November of that year.

  * Goebbels had seen Hitler a month before at headquarters and expressed shock in his diary at his ailing. “1 noted that he has already become quite gray … He told me he has had to fight off severe attacks of giddiness … The Fuehrer this time truly worries me.” He had, Goebbels added, a “physical revulsion against frost and snow … What worries and torments the Fuehrer most is that the country is still covered with snow …” (The Goebbels Diaries, pp. 131–37.)

  * In a savage series of battles with the British in November and December 1941, Rommel’s forces had been driven back clear across Cyrenaica to the El Agheila line at its western borders. But bounding back with his customary resilience in January 1942, Rommel recaptured half of the ground lost, in a swift seventeen-day campaign which brought him back to El Gazala, from where the new drive of the end of May 1942 began.

  * Hitler’s naming Rommel a field marshal the day after the capture of Tobruk caused Mussolini “much pain” because, as Ciano noted, it accentuated “the German character of the battle.” The Duce left immediately for Libya to grab some honors for himself, believing that he could enter Alexandria, Ciano says, “in fifteen days.” On July 2 he contacted Hitler by wire about “the question of the future political government of Egypt,” proposing Rommel as the military commander and an Italian as “civilian delegate.” Hitler replied that he did not con
sider the matter “urgent.” (Ciano Diaries, pp. 502–04.)

  “Mussolini was waiting impatiently in Derna [behind the front],” General Fritz Bayerlein, chief of staff to Rommel, later recalled, “for the day when he might take the salute at a parade of Axis tanks beneath the shadow of the Pyramids.” (The Fatal Decisions, ed. Freidin and Richardson, p. 103.)

  * According to General Bayerlein’s postwar testimony. He probably exaggerated his losses. Allied intelligence gave Rommel 125 tanks.

  * This had taken place on February 11–12, 1942, and had caught the British by surprise. Only weak naval and aircraft forces were rounded up in time to attack the German fleet and they inflicted little damage. “Vice-Admiral Ciliax [who led the dash],” commented the Times of London, “has succeeded where the Duke of Medina Sidonia failed … Nothing more mortifying to the pride of sea power has happened in Home Waters since the 17th Century.”