The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  But Hitler would not listen to any withdrawal being made. On the evening of December 28 he held a full-dress military conference. Instead of heeding the advice of Rundstedt and Manteuffel to pull out the German forces in the Bulge in time, he ordered the offensive to be resumed, Bastogne to be stormed and the push to the Meuse renewed. Moreover, he insisted on a new offensive being started immediately to the south in Alsace, where the American line had been thinned out by the sending of several of Patton’s divisions north to the Ardennes. To the protests of the generals that they lacked sufficient forces either to continue the offensive in the Ardennes or to attack in Alsace he remained deaf.

  Gentlemen, I have been in this business for eleven years, and … I have never heard anybody report that everything was completely ready … You are never entirely ready. That is plain.

  He talked on and on.* It must have been obvious to the generals long before he finished that their Commander in Chief had become blinded to reality and had lost himself in the clouds.

  The question is … whether Germany has the will to remain in existence or whether it will be destroyed … The loss of this war will destroy the German people.

  There followed a long dissertation on the history of Rome and of Prussia in the Seven Years’ War. Finally he returned to the immediate problems at hand. Although he admitted that the Ardennes offensive had not “resulted in the decisive success which might have been expected,” he claimed that it had brought about “a transformation of the entire situation such as nobody would have believed possible a fortnight ago.”

  The enemy has had to abandon all his plans for attack … He has had to throw in units that were fatigued. His operational plans have been completely upset. He is enormously criticized at home. It is a bad psychological moment for him. Already he has had to admit that there is no chance of the war being decided before August, perhaps not before the end of next year …

  Was this last phrase an admission of ultimate defeat? Hitler quickly tried to correct any such impression.

  I hasten to add, gentlemen, that … you are not to conclude that even remotely I envisage the loss of this war … I have never learned to know the word “capitulation” … For me the situation today is nothing new. I have been in very much worse situations. I mention this only because I want you to understand why I pursue my aim with such fanaticism and why nothing can wear me down. As much as I may be tormented by worries and even physically shaken by them, nothing will make the slightest change in my decision to fight on till at last the scales tip to our side.

  Whereupon he appealed to the generals to support the new attacks “with all your fire.”

  We shall then … smash the Americans completely … Then we shall see what happens. I do not believe that in the long run the enemy will be able to resist forty-five German divisions … We shall yet master fate!

  It was too late. Germany lacked the military force to make good his words.

  On New Year’s Day Hitler threw eight German divisions into an attack in the Saar and followed it with a thrust from the bridgehead on the Upper Rhine by an army under the command of—to the German generals this was a bad joke—Heinrich Himmler. Neither drive got very far. Nor did an all-out assault on Bastogne beginning on January 3 by no less than two corps of nine divisions which led to the most severe fighting of the Ardennes campaign. By January 5 the Germans abandoned hope of taking this key town. They were now faced with being cut off by a British-American counteroffensive from the north which had begun on January 3. On January 8 Model, whose armies were in danger of being entrapped at Houffalize, northeast of Bastogne, finally received permission to withdraw. By January 16, just a month after the beginning of the offensive on which Hitler had staked his last reserves in men and guns and ammunition, the German forces were back to the line from which they had set out.

  They had lost some 120,000 men, killed, wounded and missing, 600 tanks and assault guns, 1,600 planes and 6,000 vehicles. American losses were also severe—8,000 killed, 48,000 wounded, 21,000 captured or missing, and 733 tanks and tank destroyers.* But the Americans could make good their losses; the Germans could not. They had shot their last bolt. This was the last major offensive of the German Army in World War II. Its failure not only made defeat inevitable in the West, it doomed the German armies in the East, where the effect of Hitler’s throwing his last reserves into the Ardennes became immediately felt.

  In his long lecture to the generals in the West three days after Christmas Hitler had been quite optimistic about the Russian front, where, though the Balkans was being lost, the German armies had held firmly on the Vistula in Poland and in East Prussia since October.

  Unfortunately [Hitler said] because of the treachery of our dear allies we are forced to retire gradually … Yet despite all this it has been possible on the whole to hold the Eastern front.

  But for how long? On Christmas Eve, after the Russians had surrounded Budapest, and again on New Year’s morning Guderian had pleaded in vain with Hitler for reinforcements to meet the Russian threat in Hungary and to counter the Soviet offensive in Poland which he expected to begin the middle of January.

  I pointed out [Guderian says] that the Ruhr had already been paralyzed by the Western Allies’ bombing attacks…. on the other hand, I said, the industrial area of Upper Silesia could still work at full pressure, the center of the German armament industry was already in the East, and the loss of Upper Silesia must lead to our defeat in a very few weeks. All this was of no avail. I was rebuffed and I spent a grim and tragic Christmas Eve in those most unchristian surroundings.

  Nonetheless Guderian returned to Hitler’s headquarters for a third time on January 9. He took with him his Chief of Intelligence in the East, General Gehlen, who with maps and diagrams tried to explain to the Fuehrer the precarious German position on the eve of the expected renewal of the Russian offensive in the north.

  Hitler [Guderian says] completely lost his temper … declaring the maps and diagrams to be “completely idiotic” and ordering that I have the man who had made them shut up in a lunatic asylum. I then lost my temper and said … “If you want General Gehlen sent to a lunatic asylum then you had better have me certified as well.”

  When Hitler argued that the Eastern front had “never before possessed such a strong reserve as now,” Guderian retorted, “The Eastern front is like a house of cards. If the front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse.”12

  And that is what happened. On January 12, 1945, Konev’s Russian army group broke out of its bridgehead at Baranov on the upper Vistula south of Warsaw and headed for Silesia. Farther north Zhukov’s armies crossed the Vistula north and south of Warsaw, which fell on January 17. Farther north still, two Russian armies overran half of East Prussia and drove to the Gulf of Danzig.

  This was the greatest Russian offensive of the war. Stalin was throwing in 180 divisions, a surprisingly large part of them armored, in Poland and East Prussia alone. There was no stopping them.

  “By January 27 [only fifteen days after the Soviet drive began] the Russian tidal wave,” says Guderian, “was rapidly assuming for us the proportions of a complete disaster.”13 By that date East and West Prussia were cut off from the Reich. Zhukov that very day crossed the Oder near Lueben after an advance of 220 miles in a fortnight, reaching German soil only 100 miles from Berlin. Most catastrophic of all, the Russians had overrun the Silesian industrial basin.

  Albert Speer, in charge of armament production, drew up a memorandum to Hitler on January 30—the twelfth anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power—pointing out the significance of the loss of Silesia. “The war is lost,” his report began, and he went on in his cool and objective manner to explain why. The Silesian mines, ever since the intensive bombing of the Ruhr, had supplied 60 per cent of Germany’s coal. There was only two weeks’ supply of coal for the German railways, power plants and factories. Henceforth, now that Silesia was lost, Speer could supply, he said, only one quarter of the coal an
d one sixth of the steel which Germany had been producing in 1944.14 This augured disaster for 1945.

  The Fuehrer, Guderian later related, glanced at Speer’s report, read the first sentence and then ordered it filed away in his safe. He refused to see Speer alone, saying to Guderian:

  “… I refuse to see anyone alone any more … [He] always has something unpleasant to say to me. I can’t bear that.”15

  On the afternoon of January 27, the day Zhukov’s troops crossed the Oder a hundred miles from Berlin, there was an interesting reaction at Hitler’s headquarters, which had now been transferred to the Chancellery in Berlin, where it was to remain until the end. On the twenty-fifth the desperate Guderian had called on Ribbentrop and urged him to try to get an immediate armistice in the West so that what was left of the German armies could be concentrated in the East against the Russians. The Foreign Minister had quickly tattled to the Fuehrer, who that evening up braided his General Staff Chief and accused him of committing “high treason.”

  But two nights later, under the impact of the disaster in the East, Hitler, Goering and Jodl were in such a state that they thought it would not be necessary to ask the West for an armistice. They were sure the Western Allies would come running to them in their fear of the consequences of the Bolshevik victories. A fragment of the Fuehrer conference of January 27 has preserved part of the scene.

  HITLER: Do you think the English are enthusiastic about all the Russian developments?

  GOERING: They certainly didn’t plan that we hold them off while the Russians conquer all of Germany … They had not counted on our … holding them off like madmen while the Russians drive deeper and deeper into Germany, and practically have all of Germany now …

  JODL: They have always regarded the Russians with suspicion.

  GOERING: If this goes on we will get a telegram [from the English] in a few days.16

  On such a slender thread the leaders of the Third Reich began to pin their last hopes. In the end these German architects of the Nazi–Soviet Pact against the West would reach a point where they could not understand why the British and Americans did not join them in repelling the Russian invaders.

  THE COLLAPSE OF THE GERMAN ARMIES

  The end came quickly for the Third Reich in the spring of 1945.

  The death throes began in March. By February, with the Ruhr largely in ruins and Upper Silesia lost, coal production was down to one fifth of what it had been the year before and very little of this could be moved because of the dislocation of rail and water transport by Anglo–American bombing. The Fuehrer conferences became dominated by talk of the coal shortage, Doenitz complaining that many of his ships had to lie idle because of lack of fuel and Speer explaining patiently that the power plants and armament factories were in a similar situation for the same reason. The loss of the Rumanian and Hungarian oil fields and the bombing of the synthetic-oil plants in Germany caused such an acute shortage of gasoline that a good part of the desperately needed fighter planes had to be grounded and were destroyed on the fields by Allied air attacks. Many panzer divisions could not move for lack of fuel for their tanks.

  The hopes in the promised “miracle weapons,” which had for a time sustained not only the masses of the people and the soldiers but even such hardheaded generals as Guderian, were finally abandoned. The launching sites for the V-l flying bombs and the V-2 rockets directed against Britain were almost entirely lost when Eisenhower’s forces reconquered the French and Belgian coasts, though a few remained in Holland. Nearly eight thousand of the two V bombs were hurled against Antwerp and other military targets after the British-American armies reached the German frontier, but the damage they did was negligible.

  Hitler and Goering had counted on the new jet fighters driving the Allied air forces from the skies, and well they might have—for the Germans succeeded in producing more than a thousand of them—had the Anglo–American flyers, who lacked this plane, not taken successful counteraction. The conventional Allied fighter was no match for the German jet in the air, but few ever got off the ground. The refineries producing the special fuel for them were bombed and destroyed and the extended runways which had to be constructed for them were easily detected by Allied pilots, who destroyed the jets on the ground.

  Grand Admiral Doenitz had promised the Fuehrer that the new electro-U-boats would provide a miracle at sea, once more wreaking havoc on the British-American lifelines in the North Atlantic. But by the middle of February 1945 only two of the 126 new craft commissioned had put to sea.

  As for the German atom bomb project, which had given London and Washington much worry, it had made little progress due to Hitler’s lack of interest in it and Himmler’s practice of arresting the atom scientists for suspected disloyalty or pulling them off to work on some of his pet nonsensical “scientific” experiments which he deemed more important. Before the end of 1944 the American and British governments had learned, to their great relief, that the Germans would not have an atom bomb in this war.*

  On February 8 Eisenhower’s armies, now eighty-five divisions strong, began to close in on the Rhine. They had expected that the Germans would fight only a delaying action and, conserving their strength, retire behind the formidable water barrier of the wide and swift-flowing river. Rundstedt counseled this. But here, as elsewhere throughout the years of his defeats, Hitler would not listen to a withdrawal. It would merely mean, he told Rundstedt, “moving the catastrophe from one place to another.” So the German armies, at Hitler’s insistence, stood and fought—but not for long. By the end of the month the British and Americans had reached the Rhine at several places north of Duesseldorf, and a fortnight later they had firm possession of the left bank from the Moselle River northward. The Germans had lost another 350,000 men killed, wounded or captured (the prisoners numbered 293,000) and most of their arms and equipment.

  Hitler was in a fine fury. He sacked Rundstedt for the last time on March 10, replacing him with Field Marshal Kesselring, who had held out so stubbornly and long in Italy. Already in February the Fuehrer, in a fit of rage, had considered denouncing the Geneva Convention in order, he said at a conference on the nineteenth, “to make the enemy realize that we are determined to fight for our existence with all the means at our disposal.” He had been urged to take this step by Dr. Goebbels, the bloodthirsty noncombatant, who suggested that all captured airmen be shot summarily in reprisal for their terrible bombing of the German cities. When some of the officers present raised legal objections Hitler retorted angrily:

  To hell with that! … If I make it clear that I show no consideration for prisoners but that I treat enemy prisoners without any consideration for their rights, regardless of reprisals, then quite a few [Germans] will think twice before they desert.17

  This was one of the first indications to his followers that Hitler, his mission as world conqueror having failed, was determined to go down, like Wotan at Valhalla, in a holocaust of blood—not only the enemy’s but that of his own people. At the close of the discussion he asked Admiral Doenitz “to consider the pros and cons of this step and to report as soon as possible.”

  Doenitz came back with his answer on the following day and it was typical of the man.

  The disadvantages would outweigh the advantages … It would be better in any case to keep up outside appearances and carry out the measures believed necessary without announcing them beforehand.18

  Hitler reluctantly agreed and while, as we have seen,* there was no general massacre of captured flyers or of other prisoners of war (except the Russians) several were done to death and the civil population was incited to lynch Allied air crews who parachuted to the ground. One captive French general, Mesny, was deliberately murdered on the orders of Hitler, and a good many Allied POWs perished when they were forced to make long marches without food or water on roads strafed by British, American and Russian flyers as the Germans herded them toward the interior of the country to prevent them from being liberated by the advancing Allied armie
s.

  Hitler’s concern to make German soldiers “think twice before they desert” was not ungrounded. In the West the number of deserters, or at least of those who gave themselves up as quickly as possible in the wake of the British-American advances, became staggering. On February 12 Keitel issued an order “in the name of the Fuehrer” stating that any soldier “who deceitfully obtains leave papers, or who travels with false papers, will … be punished by death.” And on March 5 General Blaskowitz, commanding Army Group H in the West, issued this order: