Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  To dismiss Hitler’s vision as irrational or unrealistic would miss the mark. Typically, it was a curious mixture of clear-sighted realism and gross self-delusion, of a cogent understanding of Germany’s predicament and little sense of its limitations. In truth, at least for a flickering moment, the prospects for victory in the west, after all, appeared not unfavorable. Industrial output was rising, which meant that enough tanks and weapons were being produced to equip new divisions for the west and replace some of the losses in the east. Synthetic oil production had peaked, with stocks of aviation fuel at their highest since 1941. Under Speer’s guidance, fighter plane production rose spectacularly, with the result that the Luftwaffe strength in January 1944 of 5,585 planes was over 1,600 more than the year before. Moreover, in the autumn and winter of 1943–1944, the American strategic bombing campaign had been suspended as a result of unacceptable losses. Under Rommel’s energetic guidance, defensive preparations in the west along the Normandy coast had also accelerated. Hitler had high hopes for the technologically advanced V weapons as well as a new type of submarine that would enable the American supply line to Great Britain to be cut. In addition, Soviet manpower reserves were not inexhaustible, and the May pause seemed to indicate that the Red Army had passed its culmination point. Finally, the Allied invasion of France was a complicated operation that required months of preparation. If defeated, as Jodl noted, it could not simply be repeated any time soon, and a failure, Hitler anticipated, would result in a severe political crisis in Great Britain and provide Germany an opportunity again to seize the initiative.78

  These hopes, however, proved illusory. As far back as the autumn of 1943, Hitler had planned to stabilize the eastern front in order to transfer troops west to defeat the Allied invasion of France. Then, once that had been accomplished, he would transfer units back to the east in order to reconquer the vital Ukraine. With Führer Directive No. 51 of November 1943, he had even attempted to enact the first part of this scenario, which was, perhaps, the only strategic option he had left. The Soviets, however, had refused to cooperate and play their assigned role. Instead of sitting passively through the winter, the Red Army had launched a series of continuous offensives that had drained German resources and brought the Ostheer to the breaking point. Although the Second SS Panzer Corps, reluctantly dispatched from France back to the east, had finally brought a halt to the Soviet offensive, its absence in June was to play a key role in the success of the Normandy landing, a circumstance that Hitler complained of bitterly after the fact. Just as crucially, the provision of long-range fighter support allowed a resumption of the American strategic bombing campaign, with devastating consequences. As Allied bombers targeted oil production and synthetic fuel facilities, aircraft engine plants, and key rail yards, any hope the Nazis had of winning the aerial war over Germany was crushed. By mid-May, Speer later conceded, “a new era in the air war” had begun, one that meant “the end of German armaments production.” The technological war had been decided; new miracle weapons could no longer save Germany.79

  In any case, Hitler himself bore considerable responsibility for the failure of his strategy. In his unwillingness to sacrifice land for time, to allow his armies in the east to retreat to more defensible positions and preserve manpower, he had lost the former and gained none of the latter. Worse, in anticipating the decisive blow in the west, he had stripped the Ostheer of its reserves, leaving it exposed and vulnerable to Soviet attack. It would, its commanders realized, have to bear the brunt of the Red storm alone while hoping for a quick decision in the west that would free forces to be sent back to the Ostfront. Manstein’s feat in extricating the First Panzer Army and stabilizing the eastern front had averted catastrophe, but the bleak reality of a multifront war now awaited. Within two months, all Hitler’s remaining illusions would be shattered and Germany plunged into the abyss. His strategy of striking in the west and holding in the east would fail for the simple reason that the Ostheer was too weak to hold the line. From June 1944 to the end of the war, however, some 3 million Germans would lose their lives, while Germany would suffer its worst devastation since the Thirty Years’ War. Hitler’s determination not to preside over another November 1918 would, in fact, result in the very thing he had warned was the goal of the Jewish conspiracy: the extinction of Germany.

  9

  Disintegration

  The end of the prolonged fighting into the spring of 1944 had left the eastern front dangerously skewed from the German perspective. South of the Pripet Marshes, Soviet advances in Ukraine had pushed a huge bulge far to the west, only 150 miles from Warsaw. North of the great swamp, however, Army Group Center’s success at holding off the Red Army in the winter fighting meant that German troops not only occupied most of Belorussia but also still held a bridgehead east of the Dnieper. The front line now ran roughly where it was in mid-July 1941, at the end of the first German leap into Russia. German possession of this so-called Belorussian balcony posed both grave risks and, to Hitler, strategic possibilities. The danger was obvious to anyone who looked at a map: a breakthrough at Kovel, at the southwestern edge of the Pripet, would allow the Soviets two great opportunities. Red Army forces could be turned to the southwest, with the goal of striking deep into Hungary and Rumania, knocking these German allies out of the war, and encircling and destroying Army Group South. If, however, they pushed to the northwest through Warsaw and on to Danzig, both Army Groups Center and North might be bagged in a giant pocket, the heart of the German position in the east ripped apart, and the way to Berlin, only 320 miles to the west, completely open. In a single action, the OKH feared, the Soviets would strike the death blow to the German war effort.1

  Hitler was not unaware of the dangers, but he preferred to focus on the opportunity afforded by the German position. In effect, he modeled his behavior on that of his rival dictator, Stalin, who in the summer of 1942, in a similarly dangerous position, had issued his famous “Not one step back” order and insisted on holding bridgeheads across the Don, with the result that a decisive Soviet counterattack had reversed the situation at Stalingrad and allowed the Red Army to sweep to the west. Now, in the summer of 1944, Hitler counted on pulling off a similar feat that would restore the initiative to Germany. Believing that the prolonged, costly Soviet winter offensive in Ukraine had finally bled the Red Army dry, much as the Wehrmacht had been ground down by persistent Soviet resistance at Stalingrad, Hitler hoped to blunt the anticipated Russian offensive, then launch the game-changing German response. Human memory, of course, can be dangerously selective, and, although Hitler correctly remembered the success of the Soviet counterstrike in the autumn of 1942, he ignored the key contextual background that allowed that achievement. The Soviets’ triumph had depended on German weakness, failures of leadership, and distraction by events elsewhere as well as a good bit of aid from their Western allies. In 1944, as two years earlier, the balance of all these factors again favored Stalin, not Hitler.

  From the OKH’s viewpoint, both options available to the enemy had much to recommend them since, if executed properly, either could lead to a decisive, war-ending victory for the Soviets. Here, perhaps, German analysts were guilty of a bit of hubris since they thought that the Soviets would act as they would in a similar situation—to seek to win the war in one bold, decisive blow. OKH staffers originally believed that the Soviets would push the so-called Balkan solution since Ukraine had been the focal point of enemy action for the past year, the bulk of Red Army tank units remained in the south, and Stalin was known to have a desire to get his forces into the Balkans before his Western allies could get a foot in the door. In addition, Southeastern Europe and the Dardanelles had been the traditional focal point of Russian expansion, while the Germans feared that the loss of Rumanian oil would cause a quick end to the war. Much, then, supported the notion of a push to the southwest. By spring 1944, however, many in German intelligence had begun to favor the Baltic solution, not only because of reported enemy troop movements, but als
o because it was the sort of operation that appealed to German sensibilities. If the Soviets broke out at Kovel and raced to the northwest, they could, in a single bold stroke reminiscent of the brilliant German victory in France four years earlier, end the war by trapping Army Groups Center and North against the Baltic Sea. Not only were distances short and the eastern Polish countryside ideal for mobile warfare, but the exposed Soviet left flank would also be partly covered by the Vistula River. The irony, that spring, was that, while the OKW hoped to prepare a second Dunkirk for the Western allies along the Channel coast, the OKH feared its own Dunkirk along the Baltic.2

  Anticipating a bold Soviet stroke whichever way they decided to turn, neither the OKH nor Foreign Armies East initially paid much attention to the possibility of a frontal offensive against the Belorussian balcony. Indeed, much spoke against it; an attacker here would have to fight through the endless forests and swamps of Belorussia just to reach the Vistula, almost five hundred miles to the west. In addition, an offensive north of the Pripet struck the Germans as implausible since, even if operationally successful, it would not likely be decisive in a strategic, war-winning sense. Moreover, the OKH misinterpreted the ability of Army Group Center to maintain its front through the winter as indicative of German strength and Soviet weakness. Instead, it resulted from a combination of factors that would be absent in the summer. The Germans had fended off Soviet attacks by using nimble, flexible defensive tactics reminiscent of World War I, in which defenses in depth were prepared so that, when faced with an attack, German forces could withdraw to rear positions, allowing the enemy to punch into air. Then, at the proper moment, counterattacks would snap the Germans back to their approximate original positions. In the summer, however, Hitler would insist on an inflexible, static defense of forward positions that would deny the use of such tactics. More to the point, German troops, dispersed thinly among scattered strongpoints that often could not maintain contact with each other, had neither the front strength nor the reserves necessary to contain enemy breakthroughs. In addition, a good bit of German defensive success in the center had been the result, as Evan Mawdsley put it, of the Stavka reinforcing success and starving failure. In the winter of 1943–1944, Soviet armies in other sectors, especially in Ukraine, had performed much better and, thus, had been given priority in men and equipment. Red Army forces in the center, achieving fewer results, had simply not been reinforced. With the focal point of the Soviet summer offensive in the center, however, this would no longer be the case.3

  Ironically, however, despite the earlier Soviet willingness to gamble on large, war-winning offensives, and just as the Germans had begun to credit the Soviets with the ability to execute such operations, Stalin himself had decided that such grandiose schemes were beyond Soviet capabilities. Rather than summon its courage, then, in early spring 1944, the Stavka rejected both the Balkan and the Baltic solutions in favor of a third option: use the overwhelming Soviet preponderance in strength to launch a series of staggered offensives, starting from north to south, that would force the Germans to fight everywhere at once and, thus, be unable to concentrate their scarce resources. The initial blow would fall on the Finnish army in Karelia, to be followed in succession by attacks in Belorussia and in northern and southern Ukraine. In effect, there would not be a single Schwerpunkt, although the attack against Army Group Center would form the main effort. Here, the Soviets hoped to pull off a complicated plan that envisaged, in rapid pincer movements, a quick initial encirclement of Vitebsk and Bobruisk, the German anchor positions at the northern and southern ends of the salient, even as mobile units moved quickly west in a deep envelopment centered on Minsk. Even then, Soviet forces were not to stop but to thrust beyond Minsk on either side, with forces on the right flank hoping to trap as much of Army Group North as possible, while the southern thrust, aided by units shoving through Kovel, would seize Brest-Litovsk before converging on Warsaw. This was not a typical Soviet mass attack across a broad front but one based on the German model that concentrated overwhelming force in key sectors to achieve a breakthrough, then aimed to exploit it through rapid movement to encircle and destroy the enemy defenders. Stalin, suspicious of overly complicated maneuver schemes, initially opposed the idea but was, ultimately, persuaded to accept it. An ambitious plan, although not the war-winning Baltic solution feared by the Germans, it proposed in one leap the liberation of Belorussia and a sweep to the Vistula.4

  Given the serious German weaknesses and lack of mobility on the Ostfront, the key to Hitler’s strategy of holding on in the east and striking in the west was to identify the Soviet Schwerpunkt correctly. Since the Ostheer had neither the mobility nor the operational reserve to pinch off a Soviet breakthrough and, thus, prevent it from turning into a catastrophe, all depended on blunting the Soviet attack at the outset and successfully defending German frontline positions. Since no reinforcements could be expected from the west until the defeat of the Western allies’ invasion, the only chance for successful static operations was to identify correctly the Schwerpunkt of the enemy offensive and prepare adequate defenses and forces to counter it. Despite differences in opinion as to the ultimate direction of the enemy summer offensive, the OKH and Foreign Armies East could agree on at least one thing: regardless of whether the Soviets headed for the Balkans or the Baltic, the focal point of their attack would be Kovel. This assessment played into the hands of Field Marshal Model, the aggressive and predatory commander of Army Group North Ukraine, whose units defended the Kovel area, and who now saw a chance to strengthen his forces at the expense of his passive colleague to the north, Ernst Busch. Not surprisingly, on 20 May, Hitler yielded to Model’s urging and ordered the powerful Fifty-sixth Panzer Corps transferred to Army Group North Ukraine. At one blow, Army Group Center thus lost 88 percent of its tanks, 50 percent of its tank destroyers, and 33 percent of its heavy artillery.5

  While on paper what remained of Army Group Center still seemed a formidable force, in reality it was little more than a house of cards. Its four armies (the Third Panzer to the north at Vitebsk, the Fourth in the center defending Orsha and Mogilev, the Ninth to the south in front of Bobruisk, and the Second protecting the far right flank) theoretically possessed forty-seven divisions, but many of them were still in the process of being created or restructured, while others were simply burned out. Numerous security units were not even at the front but engaged in the rear fighting the partisans, who now numbered around 150,000. In reality, then, the army group possessed about thirty-four functional divisions, of which only twenty-nine were directly at the front. Of these, there existed a vast discrepancy between their nominal and their actual strength. On paper, these units numbered some 486,000 men, although only a bit over 336,000 if the Second Army, which was not initially involved in the attack in the Belorussian salient, is removed. Of these, roughly 166,000 were frontline combat troops who faced some 1.25 million Red Army soldiers massed for the first phase of the attack, giving the enemy a seven-and-a-half-to-one superiority in manpower. In total, the Soviets had assembled over 2.5 million men for the entire operation, a figure that swamped corresponding German totals.6

  Just as serious was the almost complete lack of tanks; the great bulk of the Ostheer’s panzers were in southern sectors of the front, while most new production had been sent to the west. The term Third Panzer Army was a complete misnomer, for example, since it had no actual battle tanks and only seventy-six assault guns. In fact, at the beginning of June, only a single large tank unit existed on the entire northern half of the eastern front (the Twelfth Panzer Division), and it belonged to Army Group North. Even with the addition of the Twentieth Panzer Division, which was dispatched from Army Group North Ukraine to Army Group Center just before the start of the offensive, the three armies facing the Soviet onslaught possessed only 118 battle tanks and 377 assault guns, as against an enemy force of 2,715 battle tanks and 1,355 assault guns—and these figures were for the first phase alone. For the second phase, the Soviets had a
force of 1,126 tanks and 622 assault guns. The inferiority of German artillery proved just as marked (2,589 barrels against 24,383), but it was the discrepancy in aerial strength that made a mockery of Hitler’s notion of static defense. Throughout the eastern campaign, the Luftwaffe had often intervened at critical moments to overcome army weaknesses and provide the margin of victory. Given the demotorization of the Ostheer and its almost complete lack of mobility (as noted above, the Third Panzer Army had no battle tanks but did have sixty thousand horses), the Luftwaffe would again have to play a vital role if a defensive front was to be maintained. On the eve of the battle, however, Luftflotte 6 had only 602 operational aircraft, of which little more than a third were fighters or ground attack aircraft. Even these were limited in their activity because of chronic shortages of fuel and spare parts. As with ground forces, the Red Air Force enjoyed a staggering numerical advantage, with over four thousand fighters/ground attack planes. Across the board, then, the Soviets possessed a crushing material superiority—at the initial point of attack upwards of ten to one—that meant that they could achieve a breakthrough at any point they chose to mass forces. Amazingly, in the summer of 1944, they had mobilized a force roughly similar in size to that of the German invasion force three years earlier, but on a front a third the size; Bagration, in effect, was on a larger scale than Barbarossa. Since the Germans had only a fraction of the force available to the Red Army in 1941, this meant that Army Group Center, although perhaps capable of local resistance, would be unable to mount any mobile or operational defense. Nor, given the virtually complete absence of operational reserves, could it hope to launch a decisive counterattack to pinch off any enemy breakthrough. Moreover, it could not even envision a shortening of the front to escape the looming danger, given Hitler’s absolute prohibition of tactical withdrawals and aversion to construction of river defense lines.7