by Ian Kershaw
By 7 November, when Hitler travelled to Munich to give his traditional address in the Löwenbräukeller to the marchers in the 1923 Putsch, the news from the Mediterranean had dramatically worsened. En route from Berlin to Munich, his special train was halted at a small station in the Thuringian Forest for him to receive a message from the Foreign Office: the Allied armada assembled at Gibraltar, which had for days given rise to speculation about a probable landing in Libya, was disembarking in Algiers and Oran. It would bring the first commitment of American ground-troops to the war in Europe.
Hitler immediately gave orders for the defence of Tunis. But the landing had caught him and his military advisers off-guard. And Oran was out of reach of German bombers, which gave rise to a new torrent of rage at the incompetence of the Luftwaffe’s lack of planning. Further down the track, at Bamberg, Ribbentrop joined the train. He pleaded with Hitler to let him put out peace feelers to Stalin via the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm with an offer of far-reaching concessions in the east. Hitler brusquely dismissed the suggestion: a moment of weakness was not the time for negotiations with an enemy. In his speech to the party’s ‘Old Guard’ on the evening of 8 November, Hitler then publicly ruled out any prospect of a negotiated peace. With reference to his earlier ‘peace offers’, he declared: ‘From now on there will be no more offer of peace.’
It was hardly the atmosphere which Hitler would have chosen for a big speech. Not only had he nothing positive to report; the speech had to take place in the midst of a military crisis. But if the party’s ‘Old Fighters’ expected any enlightenment from Hitler on the situation, they were to be disappointed. The usual verbal assaults on Allied leaders and blustering parallels with the internal situation before the ‘seizure of power’ were all he had to offer. Refusal to compromise, the will to fight, determination to overcome the enemy, the lack of any alternative than complete success, and the certainty of final victory in a war for the very existence of the German people formed the basis of the message. Unlike the Kaiser, who had capitulated in the First World War at ‘quarter to twelve’, he ended, so he stated, ‘in principle always at five past twelve’. And for the fourth and last time in the year, Hitler invoked his ‘prophecy’ about the Jews.
The speech was not one of Hitler’s best. He had been a compelling speaker when he had been able to twist reality in plausible fashion for his audience. But now, he was ignoring unpalatable facts, or turning them on their head. The gap between rhetoric and reality had become too wide. To most Germans, as SD reports were making apparent, Hitler’s speeches could no longer have more than a superficial impact. The news of the Allied landing in North Africa cast a deep pall of gloom about mighty forces stacked against Germany in a war whose end seemed even farther away than ever. This came on top of growing unease about Stalingrad. Criticism of the German leadership for embroiling people in such a war was now more commonplace (if necessarily for the most part carefully couched), and often implicitly included Hitler – no longer detached, as he used to be, from the negative side of the regime.
But Hitler’s key audience had, primarily, been not the millions glued to their radio-sets, but his oldest party loyalists inside the hall. It was essential to reinforce this backbone of Hitler’s personal power, and of the will to hold together the home front. Here, among this audience, Hitler could still tap much of the enthusiasm, commitment, and fanaticism of old. He knew the chords to play. The music was a familiar tune. But everyone there must have recognized – and in some measure shared – a sense of self-deception in the lyrics.
Hitler’s real concern that evening was the reaction of the French to the events in North Africa. He decided upon a meeting in Munich with Laval and Mussolini. By then, news was coming in that the initial resistance was crumbling in French North Africa. The landing had been secured.
By the time Ciano arrived in Munich – Mussolini felt unwell and declined to go – Hitler had heard that General Henri Giraud had put himself at the service of the Allies and been smuggled out of France and transported to North Africa. Commander of the French 7th Army before the debacle of 1940 and imprisoned since that time, Giraud had escaped captivity and fled to unoccupied France earlier in the year. The danger was that he would now provide a figurehead for French resistance in North Africa and a focus of support for the Allies. Suspicion, which soon proved justified, was also mounting by the hour that Admiral Jean François Darlan, too, head of the French armed forces, was preparing to change sides. The Americans had won Darlan over just before the ‘Torch’ landings with an offer to recognize him as head of the French government. Inevitable conflict with the British, who favoured General Charles de Gaulle (the leader of ‘Free France’, exiled in London), was to be obviated when a young French monarchist assassinated Darlan just before Christmas.
Hitler had stressed the need to be ready to occupy southern France in his talks with Mussolini at the end of April. When Ciano met Hitler on the evening of 9 November, he had made up his mind. Laval’s input would be irrelevant. Hitler would not ‘modify his already definite point of view: the total occupation of France, landing in Corsica, a bridgehead in Tunisia’. When he eventually arrived, Laval was treated with scarcely more than contempt. Hitler demanded landing points in Tunisia. Laval tried to wring concessions from Italy. Hitler refused to waste time on such deliberations.
While Laval was in the next room having a smoke, Hitler gave the order to occupy the remainder of France next day – 11 November, and the anniversary of the Armistice of 1918. Laval was to be informed next morning. In a letter to Marshal Pétain and a proclamation to the French people, Hitler justified the occupation through the necessity to defend the coast of southern France and Corsica against Allied invasion from the new base in North Africa. That morning, German troops occupied southern France without military resistance, in accordance with the plans for ‘Operation Anton’ which had been laid down in May.
At the Berghof for a few days, Hitler’s mask of ebullience slipped a little. Below found him deeply worried about the Anglo-American actions. He was also concerned about supplies difficulties in the Mediterranean, which British submarines had intensified. His trust in the Italians had disappeared. He was sure that they were leaking intelligence about the movement of German supply ships to the British. The deficiencies of the Luftwaffe also preoccupied him. As regards the eastern front, he was hoping for ‘no new surprises’, but feared a large-scale Soviet offensive was imminent.
VII
On 19 November, Zeitzler told Hitler that the Soviet offensive had begun. Immediately, the Soviet forces to the north-west and west of Stalingrad broke through the weak part of the front held by the Romanian 3rd Army. General Ferdinand Heim’s 48th Panzer Corps was sent in, but failed to heal the breach. Furious, Hitler dismissed Heim. He later ordered him to be sentenced to death – a sentence not carried out only through the intervention of Schmundt. The next day the Red Army’s ‘Stalingrad Front’ broke through the divisions of the Romanian 4th Army south of the city and met up on 22 November with the Soviet forces that had penetrated from north and west. With that, the 220,000 men of the 6th Army were completely encircled.
Hitler had decided to return to the Wolf ’s Lair that evening. His train journey back from Berchtesgaden to East Prussia took over twenty hours, owing to repeated lengthy stops to telephone Zeitzler. The new Chief of the General Staff insisted on permission being granted to the 6th Army to fight their way out of Stalingrad. Hitler did not give an inch. Already on 21 November he had sent an order to Paulus: ‘6th Army to hold, despite danger of temporary encirclement.’ On the evening of 22 November, he ordered: ‘The army is temporarily encircled by Russian forces. I know the 6th Army and its Commander-in-Chief and know that it will conduct itself bravely in this difficult situation. The 6th Army must know that I am doing everything to help it and to relieve it.’ He thought the position could be remedied. Relief could be organized to enable a break-out. But this could not be done overnight. A plan was hastily devised
to deploy Colonel-General Hermann Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army, south-west of Stalingrad, to prepare an attack to relieve the 6th Army. But it would take about ten days before it could be attempted. In the meantime, Paulus had to hold out, while the troops were supplied by air-lift. It was a major, and highly risky operation. But Göring assured Hitler that it could be done. The Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Hans Jeschonnek did not contradict him. Zeitzler, however, vehemently disagreed. And from within the Luftwaffe itself, Colonel-General Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, who normally had Hitler’s ear, raised the gravest doubts both on grounds of the weather (with temperatures already plummeting, icy mists, and freezing rain icing up the wings of the planes) and of the numbers of available aircraft. Hitler chose to believe Göring.
Hitler’s decision to air-lift supplies to the 6th Army until relief arrived was taken on 23 November. By then he had heard from Paulus that stores of food and equipment were perilously low and certainly insufficient for a defence of the position. Paulus sought permission to attempt to break out. Weichs, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group B, and Chief of the General Staff Zeitzler also fully backed this as the only realistic option. Zeitzler, evidently acting on the basis of a remarkable misunderstanding, actually informed Weichs at 2 a.m. on 24 November that he had ‘persuaded the Führer that a break-out was the only possibility of saving the army’. Within four hours the General Staff had to transmit exactly the opposite decision by Hitler: the 6th Army had to stand fast and would be supplied from the air until relief could arrive. The fate of almost quarter of a million men was sealed with this order.
Hitler was not totally isolated in military support for his decision. Field-Marshal von Manstein had arrived that morning, 24 November, at Army Group B headquarters to take command, as ordered by Hitler three days earlier, of a new Army Group Don (which included the trapped 6th Army). The main objective was to shore up the weakened front south and west of Stalingrad, to secure the lines to Army Group A in the Caucasus. He also took command of General Hoth’s attempt to relieve the 6th Army. But in contrast to Paulus, Weichs, and Zeitzler, Manstein did not approve an attempt to break out before reinforcements arrived, and took an optimistic view of the chances of an air-lift. Manstein was one of Hitler’s most trusted generals. His assessment can only have strengthened Hitler’s own judgement.
By mid-December, Manstein had changed his view diametrically. Richthofen had persuaded him that, in the atrocious weather conditions, an adequate air-lift was impossible. Even if the weather relented, air supplies could not be sustained for any length of time. Manstein now pressed on numerous occasions for a decision to allow the 6th Army to break out. But by then the chances of a break-out had grossly diminished; in fact, once Hoth’s relief attempt was held up in heavy fighting some fifty kilometres from Stalingrad and some days later finally forced back, they rapidly became non-existent. On 19 December, Hitler once more rejected all pleas to consider a break-out. Military information in any case now indicated that the 6th Army, greatly weakened and surrounded by mighty Soviet forces, would be able to advance a maximum of thirty kilometres to the south-west – not far enough to meet up with Hoth’s relief panzer army. On 21 December, Manstein asked Zeitzler for a final decision on whether the 6th Army should attempt to break out as long as it could still link with the 57th Panzer Corps, or whether the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe could guarantee air-supplies over a lengthy period of time. Zeitzler cabled back that Göring was confident that the Luftwaffe could supply the 6th Army, though Jeschonnek was by now of a different opinion. Hitler allowed an inquiry of the 6th Army Command about the distance it could expect to advance towards the south if the other fronts could be held. The reply came that there was fuel for twenty kilometres, and that it would be unable to hold position for long. Hoth’s army was still fifty-four kilometres away. Still no decision was taken. ‘It’s as if the Führer is no longer capable [of taking one],’ noted the OKW’s war-diarist Helmuth Greiner.
6th Army Command itself described the tactic of a mass break-out without relief from the outside – ‘Operation Thunderclap’ – as ‘a catastrophe-solution’ (‘Katastrophenlösung’). That evening, Hitler dismissed the idea: Paulus only had fuel for a short distance; there was no possibility of breaking out. Two days later, on 23 December, Manstein had to remove units from Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army to hold the crumbling left flank of his Army Group. With that, Hoth had to pull back his weakened forces. The attempt to break the siege of Stalingrad had failed. The 6th Army was doomed.
Paulus still sought permission to break out. But by Christmas Eve, Manstein had given up trying to persuade Hitler to give approval to what by this time could only be seen as a move of sheer desperation, without hope of success. The main priority was now to hold the left flank to prevent an even worse catastrophe. This was essential to enable the retreat of Army Group A from the Caucasus. Zeitzler had put the urgency of this retreat to Hitler on the evening of 27 December. Hitler had reluctantly agreed, then later changed his mind. It was too late. Zeitzler had telephoned through Hitler’s initial approval. The retreat from the Caucasus was under way. Stalingrad had become a lesser priority.
Preoccupied though he was with the eastern front, and in particular with the now inevitable catastrophe in Stalingrad, Hitler could not afford to neglect what was happening in North Africa. And he was increasingly worried about the resolve of his Italian allies.
Montgomery had forced Rommel’s Afrika Corps into headlong retreat, and would drive the German and Italian army out of Libya altogether during January 1943. Encouraged by Göring, Hitler was now convinced that Rommel had lost his nerve. But at least the 50,000 German and 18,000 Italian troops rushed to Tunis in November and December had seriously held up the Allies, preventing their rapid domination of North Africa and ruling out an early assault on the European continent itself. Even so, Hitler knew the Italians were wobbling. Göring’s visit to Rome at the end of November had confirmed that. Their commitment to the war was by now in serious doubt. And when Ciano and Marshal Count Ugo Cavalero, the head of the Italian armed forces, arrived at the Wolf ’s Lair on 18 December for three days of talks, it was in the immediate wake of the catastrophic collapse of the Italian 8th Army, overwhelmed during the previous two days by the Soviet offensive on the middle stretches of the Don. When Ciano put Mussolini’s case for Germany coming to terms with the Soviet Union in order to put maximum effort into defence against the western powers, Hitler was dismissive. Were he to do that, he replied, he would be forced within a short time to fight a reinvigorated Soviet Union once more. The Italian guests were non-committal towards Hitler’s exhortations to override all civilian considerations in favour of supplies for North Africa.
For the German people, quite especially for the many German families with loved ones in the 6th Army, Christmas 1942 was a depressing festival. The triumphalist propaganda of September and October, suggesting that victory at Stalingrad was just around the corner, had given way in the weeks following the Soviet counter-offensive to little more than ominous silence. Rumours of the encirclement of the 6th Army – passed on through despairing letters from the soldiers entrapped there – swiftly spread. It soon became evident that the rumours were no less than the truth.
A series of letters from senior officers in the 6th Army, describing their plight in graphic detail, were received by Hitler’s Luftwaffe Adjutant, Nicolaus von Below. He showed them to Hitler, reading out key passages. Hitler listened without comment, except once remarking inscrutably that ‘the fate of the 6th Army left for all of us a deep duty in the fight for the freedom of the our people’. What he really thought, no one knew.
After Paulus had rejected a call to surrender, the final Soviet attack to destroy the 6th Army began on 10 January. An emissary to the Wolf ’s Lair, seeking permission for Paulus to have freedom of action to bring an end to the carnage, went unheeded by Hitler. On 15 January, he commissioned Field-Marshal Erhard Milch, the Luftwaffe’s armaments supremo and mastermind of all its transp
ortation organization, with flying 300 tons of supplies a day to the besieged army. It was pure fantasy – though partly based on the inaccurate information that Zeitzler complained about on more than one occasion. Snow and ice on the runways in sub-arctic temperatures often prevented take-offs and landings. In any case, on 22 January the last airstrip in the vicinity of Stalingrad was lost. Supplies could now only be dropped from the air. The remaining frozen, half-starved troops, under constant heavy fire, were often unable to salvage them.
By this time, the German people were already being prepared for the worst. After a long period of silence, the Wehrmacht report on 16 January had spoken in ominous terms of a ‘heroically courageous defensive struggle against the enemy attacking from all sides’. The press was instructed to speak of ‘the great and stirring heroic sacrifice which the troops encircled at Stalingrad are offering the German nation’.
Hitler had bluntly described the plight of the 6th Army to Goebbels on 22 January. There was scarcely a hope of rescuing the troops. It was a ‘heroic drama of German history’. News came in as they talked, outlining the rapidly deteriorating situation. Hitler was said by Goebbels to have been ‘deeply shaken’. But he did not consider attaching any blame to himself. He complained bitterly about the Luftwaffe, which had not kept its promises about levels of supplies. Schmundt separately told Goebbels that these had been illusory. Göring’s staff had given him the optimistic picture they presumed he wanted, and he had passed this on to the Führer. It was a problem that afflicted the entire dictatorship – up to and including Hitler himself. Only positive messages were acceptable. Pessimism (which usually meant realism) was a sign of failure. Distortions of the truth were built into the communications system of the Third Reich at every level – most of all in the top echelons of the regime.