Hitler was confident that his armies could hold on the Dnieper and on the fortified positions south of Zaporozhe which together formed the so-called “Winter Line.” But the Russians did not pause even for regrouping. In the first week of October they crossed the Dnieper north and southeast of Kiev, which fell on November 6. By the end of the fateful year of 1943 the Soviet armies in the south were approaching the Polish and Rumanian frontiers past the battlefields where the soldiers of Hitler had achieved their early victories in the summer of 1941 as they romped toward the interior of the Russian land.
This was not all.
There were two other setbacks to Hitler’s fortunes that year which also marked the turning of the tide: the loss of the Battle of the Atlantic and the intensification of the devastating air war day and night over Germany itself.
In 1942, as we have seen, German submarines sank 6,250,000 tons of Allied shipping, most of it bound for Britain or the Mediterranean, a tonnage which far outstripped the capacity of the shipyards in the West to make good. But by the beginning of 1943 the Allies had gained the upper hand over the U-boats, thanks to an improved technique of using long-range aircraft and aircraft carriers and, above all, of equipping their surface vessels with radar which spotted the enemy submarines before the latter could sight them. Doenitz, the new commander of the Navy and the top U-boat man in the service, at first suspected treason when so many of his underwater craft were ambushed and destroyed before they could even approach the Allied convoys. He quickly learned that it was not treason but radar which was causing the disastrous losses. In the three months of February, March and April they had amounted to exactly fifty vessels; in May alone, thirty-seven U-boats were sunk. This was a rate of loss which the German Navy could not long sustain, and before the end of May Doenitz, on his own authority, withdrew all submarines from the North Atlantic.
They returned in September but in the last four months of the year sank only sixty-seven Allied vessels against the loss of sixty-four more submarines—a ratio which spelled the doom of U-boat warfare and definitely settled the Battle of the Atlantic. In 1917 in the First World War, when her armies had become stalled, Germany’s submarines had almost brought Britain to her knees. They were threatening to accomplish this in 1942, when Hitler’s armies in Russia and North Africa had also been stopped, and when the United States and Great Britain were straining themselves not only to halt the drive of the Japanese in Southeast Asia but to assemble men and arms and supplies for the invasion of Hitler’s European empire in the West.
Their failure to seriously disrupt the North Atlantic shipping lanes during 1943 was a bigger disaster than was realized at Hitler’s headquarters, depressing though the actual news was.* For it was during the twelve months of that crucial year that the vast stocks of weapons and supplies were ferried almost unmolested across the Atlantic which made the assault of Fortress Europe possible in the following year.
And it was during that period too that the horrors of modern war were brought home to the German people—brought home to them on their own doorsteps. The public knew little of how the U-boats were doing. And though the news from Russia, the Mediterranean and Italy grew increasingly bad, it dealt after all with events that were transpiring hundreds or thousands of miles distant from the homeland. But the bombs from the British planes by night and the American planes by day were now beginning to destroy a German’s home, and the office or factory where he worked.
Hitler himself declined ever to visit a bombed-out city; it was a duty which seemed simply too painful for him to endure. Goebbels was much distressed at this, complaining that he was being flooded with letters “asking why the Fuehrer does not visit the distressed air areas and why Goering isn’t to be seen anywhere.” The Propaganda Minister’s diary authoritatively describes the growing damage to German cities and industries from the air.
May 16, 1943…. The day raids by American bombers are creating extraordinary difficulties. At Kiel … very serious damage to military and technical installations of the Navy … If this continues we shall have to face serious consequences which in the long run will prove unbearable …
May 25. The night raid of the English on Dortmund was extraordinarily heavy, probably the worst ever directed against a German city … Reports from Dortmund are pretty horrible … Industrial and munition plants have been hit very hard … Some eighty to one hundred thousand inhabitants without shelter … The people in the West are gradually beginning to lose courage. Hell like that is hard to bear … In the evening I received a [further] report on Dortmund. Destruction is virtually total. Hardly a house is habitable …
July 26. During the night a heavy raid on Hamburg … with most serious consequences both for the civilian population and for armaments production … It is a real catastrophe …
July 29. During the night we had the heaviest raid yet made on Hamburg … with 800 to 1,000 bombers … Kaufmann [the local Gauleiter] gave me a first report … He spoke of a catastrophe the extent of which simply staggers the imagination. A city of a million inhabitants has been destroyed in a manner unparalleled in history. We are faced with problems that are almost impossible of solution. Food must be found for this population of a million. Shelter must be secured. The people must be evacuated as far as possible. They must be given clothing. In short, we are facing problems there of which we had no conception even a few weeks ago … Kaufmann spoke of some 800,000 homeless people who are wandering up and down the streets not knowing what to do …
Although considerable damage was done to specific German war plants, especially to those turning out fighter planes, ball bearings, naval ships, steel, and fuel for the new jets, and to the vital rocket experimental station at Peenemunde on which Hitler had set such high hopes,* and though rail and canal transport were continually disrupted, over-all German armament production was not materially reduced during the stepped-up Anglo–American bombings of 1943. This was partly due to the increased output of factories in the occupied zones—above all, those in Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium and northern Italy, which escaped bombing.
The greatest damage inflicted by the Anglo–American air forces, as Goebbels makes clear in his diary, was to the homes and the morale of the German people. In the first war years they had been buoyed up, as this writer remembers, by the lurid reports of what Luftwaffe bombing had done to the enemy, especially to the British. They were sure it would help bring the war to an early—and victorious—end. Now, in 1943, they themselves began to bear the full brunt of air warfare far more devastating than any the Luftwaffe had dealt to others, even to the populace of London in 1940–41. The German people endured it as bravely and as stoically as the British people had done. But after four years of war it was all the more a severe strain, and it is not surprising that as 1943 approached its end, with all its blasted hopes in Russia, in North Africa and in Italy, and with their own cities from one end of the Reich to the other being pulverized from the air, the German people began to despair and to realize that this was the beginning of the end that could only spell their defeat.
“Toward the end of 1943 at the latest,” the now unemployed General Halder would later write, “it had become unmistakably clear that the war was militarily lost.”9
General Jodl, in a gloomy off-the-record lecture to the Nazi gauleiters in Munich on November 7, 1943—the eve of the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch—did not go quite so far. But the picture he painted of the situation at the beginning of the fifth year of the war was dark enough.
What weighs most heavily today on the home front and consequently by reaction on the front line [he said] is the enemy terror raids from the air on our homes and so on our wives and children. In this respect … the war has assumed forms solely through the fault of England such as were believed to be no longer possible since the days of the racial and religious wars.
The effect of these terror raids, psychological, moral and material, is such that they must be relieved if they cannot be made to cease c
ompletely.
The state of German morale as the result of the defeats and the bombings of 1943 was vividly described by this authoritative source, who on this occasion was speaking for the Fuehrer.
Up and down the country the devil of subversion strides. All the cowards are seeking a way out, or—as they call it—a political solution. They say we must negotiate while there is still something in hand …*
It wasn’t only the “cowards.” Dr. Goebbels himself, the most loyal and faithful—and fanatical—of Hitler’s followers, was, as his diary reveals, seeking a way out before this year of 1943 was ended, racking his brains not over whether Germany should negotiate for peace but with whom—with Russia or with the West. He did not talk behind Hitler’s back about the necessity of searching for peace, as certain others had begun to do. He was courageous and open enough to pour out his thoughts directly to the Leader. On September 10, 1943, while at the Fuehrer’s headquarters at Rastenburg, whither he had been summoned on the news of Italy’s capitulation, Goebbels broached the subject of possible peace negotiations for the first time in his diary.
The problem begins to present itself as to which side we ought to turn to first—the Muscovite or the Anglo–American. Somehow we must realize clearly that it will be very difficult to wage war successfully against both sides.
He found Hitler “somewhat worried” over the prospect of an Allied invasion in the West and the “critical” situation on the Russian front.
The depressing thing is that we haven’t the faintest idea as to what Stalin has left in the way of reserves. I doubt very much whether under these conditions we shall be able to transfer divisions from the East to the other European theaters of war.
Having put down some of his own ideas—which would have seemed treasonably defeatist to him a few months before—in his confidential diary, Goebbels then approached Hitler.
I asked the Fuehrer whether anything might be done with Stalin sooner or later. He said not for the moment … And anyway, the Fuehrer believes it would be easier to make a deal with the English than with the Soviets. At a given moment, the Fuehrer believes, the English would come to their senses … I am rather inclined to regard Stalin as more approachable, for Stalin is more of a practical politician than Churchill. Churchill is a romantic adventurer, with whom one can’t talk sensibly.
It was at this dark moment in their affairs that Hitler and his lieutenants began to clutch at a straw of hope: that the Allies would fall out, that Britain and America would become frightened of the prospect of the Red armies overrunning Europe and in the end join Germany to protect the old Continent from Bolshevism. Hitler had dealt at some length on this possibility in a conference with Doenitz in August, and now in September he and Goebbels discussed it.
The English [Goebbels added in his diary] don’t want a Bolshevik Europe under any circumstances … Once they realize that … they have a choice only between Bolshevism or relaxing somewhat toward National Socialism they will no doubt show an inclination toward a compromise with us … Churchill himself is an old anti-Bolshevik and his collaboration with Moscow today is only a matter of expediency.
Both Hitler and Goebbels seemed to have forgotten who collaborated with Moscow in the first place and who forced Russia into the war. Summing up the discussion of a possible peace with Hitler, Goebbels concluded:
Sooner or later we shall have to face the question of inclining toward one enemy side or the other. Germany has never yet had luck with a two-front war; it won’t be able to stand this one in the long run either.
But was it not late in the day to ponder this? Goebbels returned to headquarters on September 23 and in the course of a morning stroll with the Nazi leader found him much more pessimistic than a fortnight before about the possibility of negotiating for peace with one side so that he could enjoy a one-front war.
The Fuehrer does not believe that anything can be achieved at present by negotiation. England is not yet groggy enough … In the East, naturally, the present moment is quite unfavorable … At present Stalin has the advantage.
That evening Goebbels dined with Hitler alone.
I asked the Fuehrer whether he would be ready to negotiate with Churchill … He does not believe that negotiations with Churchill would lead to any result as he is too deeply wedded to his hostile views and, besides, is guided by hatred and not by reason. The Fuehrer would prefer negotiations with Stalin, but he does not believe they would be successful …
Whatever may be the situation, I told the Fuehrer that we must come to an arrangement with one side or the other. The Reich has never yet won a two-front war. We must therefore see how we can somehow or other get out of a two-front war.
This was a task far more difficult than they seem to have realized, they who had so lightly plunged Germany into a two-front war. But on that September evening of 1943, at least for a few moments, the Nazi warlord finally shed his pessimism and ruminated on how sweet peace would taste. According to Goebbels, he even said he “yearned” for peace.
He said he would be happy to have contact with artistic circles again, to go to the theater in the evening and to visit the Artists’ Club.11
Hitler and Goebbels were not the only ones in Germany who, as the war entered its fifth year, speculated on the chances and means of procuring peace. The frustrated, talkative anti-Nazi conspirators, their numbers somewhat larger now but still pitifully small, were again giving the problem some thought, now that they saw the war was lost though Hitler’s armies still fought on foreign soil. Most of them, but by no means all, had come reluctantly, and only after overcoming the greatest qualms of conscience, to the conclusion that to get a peace for Germany which would leave the Fatherland with some prospect for decent survival they would have to remove Hitler by killing him and at the same time wipe out National Socialism.
As 1944 came, with the certainty that the Anglo–American armies would launch an invasion across the Channel before the year was very far along and that the Red armies would be approaching the frontiers of the Reich itself and that the great and ancient cities of Germany would soon be reduced to utter rubble by the Allied bombing,* the plotters in their desperation girded themselves to make one final attempt to murder the Nazi dictator and overthrow his regime before it dragged Germany over the precipice to complete disaster. They knew there was not much time.
* “I was completely free of any forebodings,” Mussolini wrote later in describing his state of mind as he set out for the palace. King Victor Emmanuel lost no time in bringing him down to earth.
“My dear Duce,” Mussolini quotes him as saying at the outset, “it’s no longer any good. Italy has gone to bits … The soldiers don’t want to fight any more … At this moment you are the most hated man in Italy …”
“You are making an extremely grave decision,” Mussolini says he replied. But even by his own account he made little attempt to induce the monarch to change his mind. He ended by “wishing luck” to his successor. (Mussolini, Memoirs, 1942–1943, pp. 80–81.)
* Hitler had become furious with Raeder, who had commanded the German Navy since 1928, for the Navy’s failure to destroy Allied convoys to Russia in the Arctic Ocean and for heavy losses suffered there. In a hysterical outburst at headquarters on January 1, the warlord had ordered the immediate decommissioning of the German High Seas Fleet. The vessels were to be broken up for scrap. On January 6 there was a stormy showdown between Hitler and Raeder at the Wolfsschanze headquarters. The Fuehrer accused the Navy of inaction and lack of the will to fight and take risks. Raeder thereupon asked to be relieved of his command, and his resignation was formally and publicly accepted on January 30. Doenitz, the new Commander in Chief, had been commander of U-boats, knew little of the problems of surface vessels and henceforth concentrated on submarine warfare.
* According to Captain Harry C. Butcher, Eisenhower’s naval aide, both the American and British chiefs of staff, General George C. Marshall and Field Marshal Sir John G. Dill, complained that Eise
nhower was not showing sufficient initiative in pressing forward in Italy. Butcher points out, in defense of his chief, that insufficient landing craft limited Eisenhower’s plans and that to have launched a seaborne invasion as far north as the vicinity of Rome would have put the operation beyond the range of Allied fighter planes, which had to take off from Sicily. Eisenhower himself points out that after the capture of Sicily he was ordered to return seven divisions, four American and three British, to England in preparation for the Channel invasion, which left him woefully short of troops. Butcher also states that Eisenhower originally planned to drop airborne troops on the Rome airfields to help the Italians defend the capital against the Germans, but that at the last minute Badoglio begged that this operation be “suspended temporarily.” General Maxwell D. Taylor, who at great personal risk had secretly gone to Rome to confer with Badoglio, reported that because of Italian defeatism and German strength the dropping of an American airborne division there appeared to be suicidal. (See Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, p. 189, and Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower, pp. 407–25.)
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Page 160