Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  VI

  Hitler had laid out his demands for an Ardennes offensive on 16 September. Guderian voiced grave misgivings because of the situation on the eastern front, the theatre for which he was directly responsible. Jodl warned of air supremacy and the likelihood of parachute landings. Hitler ignored them. He wanted, he said, 1,500 fighters by 1 November, when preparations for the offensive must be complete. The launch of the offensive would take place in bad weather, when enemy aircraft were badly handicapped. Enemy forces would be split and encircled. Antwerp would be taken, leaving the enemy without an escape route.

  By this time, the enemy was already on German soil in the west. By mid-September, American soldiers from the 1st US Army had penetrated the Westwall and reached the outskirts of Aachen, which was finally taken on 21 October.

  A few days earlier, the enemy had also burst into German territory in the east. On 16 October, the ‘3rd White Russian Front’, led by General Ivan Tscherniakowski, had broken through into East Prussia as far as Nemmersdorf, Goldap – the first sizeable town in the province – and the fringes of Gumbinnen, heading for Königsberg. The roads were full of refugees fleeing in panic from the oncoming Russians. The Red Army was within striking reach of Führer Headquarters. For the time being, Hitler resisted pressure to leave the Wolf ’s Lair. A move to the Berghof or to Berlin, he thought, would send the wrong signals to his fighting men at the front. He gave strict instructions that there should be no talk of leaving. But the staff was reduced, while Schaub packed all Hitler’s files and possessions, ready to depart at any moment. It proved possible to delay the moment. Gumbinnen was recaptured – revealing horrifying scenes of atrocities (including untold cases of women raped and murdered, and houses plundered at will by Soviet troops). The Red Army was forced on the defensive in East Prussia. Goldap, too, was retaken by the Wehrmacht a fortnight or so later. The immediate danger was contained.

  When Nicolaus von Below returned to the Wolf’s Lair on 24 October, after recuperating for several weeks from the effects of the bomb-blast on 20 July, he found the Dictator heavily involved in preparations for the Ardennes offensive, expected to take place in late November or early December. The big anxiety, as ever, was whether by then the Luftwaffe would be in any position to provide the necessary air cover. The failure of the Luftwaffe, Below was told by naval adjutant Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, was still the ‘number one topic’, and there was permanent tension between Hitler and Göring. Though he put the best face on it, Hitler was well aware that air-power was his weakest suit; hence, the constant tirades against Göring. The odds in the coming offensive were far more heavily stacked against him than he was prepared to acknowledge.

  Immersed in military matters and facing calamity on all sides, Hitler was in no mood to travel through a war-weary Reich to address the party’s Old Guard as usual on 8 November, the anniversary of the putsch in 1923 and the most sacred date in the Nazi calendar. Instead, a pale shadow of the normal event was scheduled to take place for the first time not on the actual anniversary of the putsch, but on the following Sunday, 12 November, in Munich. Its centrepiece was a proclamation by Hitler to be read out by Himmler. As Goebbels pointed out, this had nothing like the effect of hearing Hitler himself, particularly when read out in Himmler’s cold diction.

  The proclamation itself could only have been a disappointment for those hoping for news of some reversal of war fortunes or – the desire of most people – a hint that the war would soon be over. It offered no more than the old refrain that eventual triumph would come. And Hitler made it clear that as long as he was alive, there would be no capitulation, no end to the fighting. He was, he said, ‘unshakeable in his will to give the world to follow a no less praiseworthy example in this struggle than great Germans have given in the past’. It was a veiled hint that what now remained for him to fight for was his place in history. The ‘heroic’ struggle he envisaged, one of Wagnerian proportions, ruled out any contemplation of capitulation, the shameful act of 1918. The fight to the last, it seemed clear, was destined to drag down to destruction the German people itself with the ‘heroic’ self-destruction of its warlord.

  The warlord’s own end was now starting to occupy his mind. Perhaps a renewed bout of illness, now affecting his throat, prompted his depressed mood. It may also have encouraged him to agree with Bormann that the time had indeed finally come to move his headquarters from East Prussia, since it had been established that he needed a minor operation in Berlin to remove a polyp from his vocal cords. On the afternoon of 20 November, Hitler and his entourage boarded his special train bound for Berlin and left the Wolf ’s Lair for good.

  So little was Hitler a real presence for the German people by this time that, as Goebbels had to note, rumours were rife that he was seriously ill, or even dead. Goebbels had the opportunity to speak at length with him at the beginning of December. He found him recovered from his stomach troubles, able to eat and drink normally again. He was also over the operation to his vocal cords, and his voice was back to normal. Hitler told him he had come to Berlin to prepare for the coming attack in the west. Everything was prepared for a major blow to the Allies which would give him not just a military but also a political success. He said he had worked day and night on the plan for the offensive, also during his illness. Goebbels thought Hitler back to his old form.

  Hitler outlined the grandiose aim of the offensive. Antwerp would be taken within eight to ten days. The intention was to smash the entire enemy force to the north and south, then turn a massive rocket attack on London. A major success would have a huge impact on morale at home, and affect attitudes towards Germany abroad. Hitler, in Goebbels’s judgement, was like a man revived. The prospect of a new offensive, and of regaining the initiative, had evidently worked on him like a drug.

  Operational plans for the Ardennes offensive had been devised by the OKW in September and put to Hitler on 9 October. The objective of the operation – the sweep through the Eifel and Ardennes through Belgium to the Channel coast, taking Antwerp – was finalized at this point. The detailed plans of the offensive were outlined by Jodl to senior western commanders on 3 November. Sixteen divisions, eight of them armoured, would form the focal point of the attack. SS-Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich would lead the 6th SS-Panzer Army; General Hasso von Manteuffel the 5th Panzer Army. Without exception, the assembled military commanders thought the objective – the taking of Antwerp, some 125 miles away – quite unrealistic. The forces available to them were simply inadequate, they argued, especially in winter conditions. At best, they claimed, a more limited objective – recovery of Aachen and the adjacent parts of the Westwall, with perhaps the base being laid for a later westward push – might be attained. Jodl ruled out the objections. He made clear to the commanders that limited gains would not suffice. Hitler had to be in a position, as a result of the offensive, to ‘make the western powers ready to negotiate’. On 10 November, Hitler signed the order for the offensive. He acknowledged in the preamble that he was prepared ‘to accept the maximum risk in order to proceed with this operation’.

  Hitler left Berlin on the evening of 10 December and moved his headquarters to Ziegenberg, not far from Bad Nauheim, close to the western front. Bunkers and barracks had been constructed in a woodland area by the Organization Todt earlier in the war. Rundstedt and his staff were quartered in a stately residence nearby.

  In two groups, on the day of his arrival, 11 December, and again the following day, Hitler spoke to his military commanders at the ‘Adlerhorst’ (‘Eagle’s Eyrie’), as the new headquarters were called, to brief them on the coming offensive. After a lengthy preamble giving his own account of the background to the war, he outlined his thinking behind the offensive. Psychological considerations, as always, were paramount for Hitler. War could only be endured as long as there was hope of victory. It was necessary, therefore, to destroy this hope through offensive action. A defensive strategy could not achieve this goal. It had to be followed by successful attack
. ‘I have striven, therefore, from the beginning to conduct the war wherever possible in the offensive,’ he stated. ‘Wars are finally decided through the recognition by one side or the other that the war as such can no longer be won. To get the enemy to realize this is therefore the most important task.’ If forced back on to the defensive, it was all the more important to convince the enemy that victory was not in sight. Hitler came to another unalterable premiss of his conduct of the war. ‘It is also important to strengthen these psychological factors in letting no moment pass without making plain to the enemy that whatever he does he can never reckon with capitulation, never, never. That is the decisive point.’ He referred, almost inevitably, to the reversal of Frederick the Great’s fortunes in the Seven Years War. Here, he had reached another constant in his thinking: the will of the heroic leader, which alone made triumph out of adversity possible when all around him despaired of success.

  This brought him to the fragility (he thought) of the coalition he was facing. ‘If a few really heavy blows were inflicted,’ he argued, ‘it could happen any moment that this artificially sustained common front could suddenly collapse with a huge clap of thunder.’ The tensions between the Soviet and western Allies had, indeed, become more apparent during the second half of 1944. But Hitler was certainly rational enough to know that his own destruction, and that of the regime he headed, provided sufficient common ground to hold the coalition together until Germany’s defeat. He knew, too, that neither the western Allies nor – despite what Oshima had told him – the Soviets would look for peace with Germany while they were militarily so totally in the ascendancy.

  As the supreme propagandist of old, he could always summon up absolute conviction when addressing an audience and needing to persuade them that what he was proposing was the only alternative on offer. It had proved his greatest strength since the early 1920s. The hints of pessimism – or greater realism – to Below and others in the weeks before the Ardennes offensive, even though only momentary slips of his guard, suggest, however, that Hitler was well aware of the size of the gamble in the Ardennes. He had to take it because, indeed, from his perspective, there was no alternative way out. If the long-shot were to come off, he reasoned, and a serious defeat were to be inflicted on the western powers while new German weaponry started to come into operation and before the expected Soviet winter offensive could begin, then new options could open up. At any rate, the only alternative to the gamble, as he saw it, was to fight for every inch of German soil in a rearguard struggle certain ultimately to end not just in defeat but in Germany’s total destruction – and his own. The gamble had to be taken.

  ‘Operation Autumn Mist’ – the Ardennes offensive – began in the early morning of 16 December. All possible reserves had been mustered. Around 200,000 German troops backed by 600 tanks were launched against a front comprising around 80,000 American soldiers with 400 tanks. The weather was perfect for the German attack, with heavy cloud hindering enemy aircraft. The American forces were taken by surprise. Sepp Dietrich’s SS-Panzer Army soon encountered strong defence on the north of the front and could make only slow progress. Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army broke through in the south, however, and pressed forward in a deep cut of some sixty-five miles to within a few miles of the river Meuse, laying siege to the town of Bastogne, an important communications point. But Bastogne held out, tying down three German divisions in the process before eventually being relieved by General Patton’s 3rd US Army.

  Manteuffel’s advance had meanwhile slowed, handicapped by difficult terrain, bad weather, broken bridges, and fuel shortages as well as increasingly stiff American resistance. On 24 December, the weather lifted, exposing the German troops to relentless air attacks by some 5,000 Allied aircraft. Troop movements could now only take place at night. Supply-lines and German airfields were heavily bombed. German fighters suffered serious losses. Once Patton had broken through the German front to relieve Bastogne on 26 December, Manteuffel had to give up any hopes of advancing further. ‘Operation Autumn Mist’ had failed.

  Hitler was still not prepared, however, to bow to the inevitable. As a diversion, he ordered a subsidiary offensive in the north of Alsace (‘Operation North Wind’). The aim was to cut off and destroy the American forces in the north-eastern corner of Alsace, enabling Manteuffel to continue the main offensive in the Ardennes. Once more Hitler addressed the commanders of the operation. And once more he laid the stress on the all-or-nothing nature of the struggle for Germany’s existence. Again, he ruled out the possibility 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 half of the western front. ‘Then we’ll want to have a further look,’ he added.

  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 aim’ of the operation as producing merely ‘in part’ a ‘cleansing’ of the situation in the west. 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.

  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. There was no possibility of the Luftwaffe recovering from such losses. It was effectively at an end.

  On New Year’s Day 1945, German radios broadcast Hitler’s traditional address to the German people. It held nothing new for them. 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’; that Germany’s enemies, led by ‘the Jewish-international world conspiracy’, intended to ‘eradicate’ its people; 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 Europe and eradicate its peoples, but would bring about its own destruction’.

  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’. 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” ’. It was belated recognition of the catastrophic impact of the leader they had earlier supported, ch
eered, 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’. 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. 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’.