Ostkrieg
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To effect a real change in the dire German situation, at about the same time Zeitzler proposed, and Model supported, a much more daring plan, in effect a replay of Manstein’s backhand blow of 1943 that would have units from Army Group North strike south into the exposed Soviet flanks. Since the necessary forces for the attack could be assembled only through a withdrawal of Army Group North behind the line of the Dvina, thus abandoning Estonia and Latvia, which Hitler categorically refused to do, yet another in a long series of leadership crises was touched off. In one of the most turbulent scenes of the war, Zeitzler confronted Hitler on 30 June at the Berghof, where he told him point-blank that he had twice been forced to make fateful decisions against his convictions (Stalingrad and the Crimea) but that it would not happen a third time. Zeitzler also declared the war lost militarily and offered his resignation, after which he simply disappeared from the Berghof and suffered a nervous breakdown. Hitler, already contemptuous of what he saw as the defeatism of the General Staff, never spoke to Zeitzler again. He did not, in fact, even bother to replace him until 21 July, the day after the attempt on his life, when Guderian, who had proved his loyalty during the coup attempt and, in any case, had long made no secret of his contempt for the leadership of the Ostheer, was appointed to the position. Although the Führer’s comments in the days before he departed the Berghof for the last time on 14 July left some of his intimates under the impression that he had no illusions about the outcome of the war, they made it equally clear that he would not capitulate. There would be no repeat of 1918; his strength of will—or obstinate refusal to face reality—remained intact.20
In the meantime, despite their losses, the Soviets pressed on past Minsk to the west, on 8 July encircling Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, which fell on the thirteenth, although the Germans managed to extract most of the four thousand defenders of yet another of Hitler’s fortified places. The next day, as the Germans had long expected, Soviet forces under Konev burst out of Kovel and, by the eighteenth, had linked up with armored spearheads from Rokossovsky’s units on the Bug River thirty miles west of Lvov. This time, however, Soviet success proved less directly threatening since Army Group Center had already been pushed out of its exposed position to the north. In addition, much to the OKH’s relief, enemy forces pushed straight west toward the Vistula rather than turn northwest to Warsaw. Within a week, Brest-Litovsk, the scene of such hard fighting in 1941 and the cornerstone of Army Group Center’s defense in the south, was surrounded, falling to the hard-charging Soviets on the twenty-sixth, as over the next few days did Lvov, Lublin, and Kaunas. In celebration of the destruction of Army Group Center, Stalin had already on the seventeenth paraded over fifty-five thousand haggard German prisoners through the streets of Moscow, an action, ironically, that had allowed many of them to survive, but perhaps even he had been astounded at the extent of Russian success. On 27 July, Soviet forces, as the Germans had long feared, finally turned north toward Warsaw. By 1 August, Russian spearheads had reached Praga, a suburb of Warsaw east of the Vistula and, more threateningly, breached the river and established a bridgehead on the west bank at Magnuszew, fifty miles to the south. Further, unable to close the gap with its southern neighbor, and forbidden to retreat—Hitler wanted to hold on to the Baltic coast to give Doenitz time to develop new submarines—Army Group North found itself cut off in the Baltic. North and east of the Vistula at Warsaw, the Germans seemingly had no organized forces to oppose the enemy advance.21
By now, however, logistic and supply problems as well as the considerable decimation of enemy tank forces combined to slow the momentum of the Soviet attack. Still, the Russians showed every intention of taking Warsaw, a vital German transportation and supply center, on the run and advancing down the Vistula to cut off German forces to the east. Model, however, capable and energetic in a crisis as always, had one last surprise. The continual shortening of the front caused by the Russian push west allowed him to shift the Fourth and Nineteenth Panzer Divisions, along with the SS Panzer Division Viking and the newly arrived Panzer Division Hermann Goering, into position for a counterstrike. With a total of 223 battle tanks (109 Pz IVs and 114 Pz Vs) as well as a handful of assault guns and tank destroyers, this was a surprisingly strong German force at this stage of the Russian offensive, although, in numbers, it was again dwarfed by the 810 armored vehicles of the Soviet Second Tank Army. Model’s operational plan envisioned a pincer attack by the Nineteenth Panzer from the west and SS Viking from the east on Okuniew, just twelve miles east of Warsaw, in order to cut off the Soviet Third Tank Corps, which had advanced far to the north. This would be followed by a concentric attack of all four German tank divisions on the encircled corps with the aim of destroying it.22
In their rush toward Warsaw and the north, the Soviets had neglected elementary precautions, such as basic reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, flank protection, and the provision of supply lines, so, when it came on 1 August, Model’s attack took the enemy completely by surprise. Over the next four days, in fighting so savage that the noise of battle could be heard in Warsaw, itself now the scene of bitter street fighting, the Germans largely crushed the Third Tank Corps and dealt a sharp blow to the other formations of the Soviet Second Tank Army. Its units suffered such severe losses—on 5 August it had only 263 of its original 810 tanks and assault guns left—that it had to be pulled off the line. Still, Model proved unable completely to destroy the enemy, for, on the fourth and fifth, first the Nineteenth Panzer and then the Hermann Goering Panzer Division had to be withdrawn from the battle and sent to contest the Soviet bridgehead across the Vistula at Magnuszew. Although overshadowed in historical literature by other important events at the same time (the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army and, the day before, the American breakout from the Cotentin Peninsula at Avranches), this tank battle in front of Warsaw was, perhaps, the key operational turning point on the eastern front in 1944. It allowed the Germans finally to stabilize a defensive line, avoid the encirclement of their remaining forces to the east, and prevent the Soviets from overrunning East Prussia.23
The battle also sheds some light on the controversy surrounding Stalin’s response to the Warsaw Uprising. Despite later denials, the Russians almost certainly meant to take Warsaw on the run as their forces swept north and west along the Vistula. Model’s counterattack, however, had the unintended effect of dooming the Polish uprising, for, after weeks of unbroken fighting, the Soviets had outrun their supply capabilities and passed the culmination point of the offensive. The Poles, hoping to liberate their capital just before the Russians arrived, had assumed, at most, a few days’ combat against the German occupiers, followed by the entry of the Red Army into the city. Instead, the uprising lasted sixty-three agonizing days, during which the Soviets at first were unable and then unwilling to help the besieged Poles, even as the Germans destroyed their capital around them.24
Despite the success at Warsaw, however, from the German point of view the situation could hardly have been worse. To further compound the grim news in the east, American forces had at the end of July broken out from the Cotentin Peninsula and, after repelling a senseless German counterattack at Mortain, destroyed large numbers of the enemy at Falaise, followed by a swift advance across France. Having recklessly reduced German strength in the east in order to strike a decisive blow in the west, Hitler had now suffered fatal blows in both areas. Even with American forces poised to race across France, the Führer now reversed himself and declared the eastern front once again to be the area of vital concern. As with most of his decisions in the summer of 1944, it came too late. Still, the Germans could take some comfort in the fact that they had managed finally to build a stable front and that, even though the Soviet offensive had been a spectacular operational success, it had not, at the end of the day, knocked them from the war. Hitler, grasping at the thinnest of straws, even posed the question at the end of July as to whether the situation was all that bad. Amazingly, since his desire for Lebensraum had been
a prime reason for the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Führer could now state, “If the territory that we now possess can be held, that is an area that will enable us to live, and we don’t have this giant rear area.”25
The blow to Army Group Center, however, had been as spectacular as it had been swift. In a bit more than two months, it had lost almost 400,000 men killed, wounded, and missing, making Operation Bagration a far worse disaster for the Wehrmacht than the comparable one at Stalingrad or even that of Verdun in the previous war. Indeed, only the Battle of the Somme in 1916 had exacted a greater toll. Again, some slight comfort could be found in the fact that the Red Army had paid a very high price for its brilliant success: total casualties of almost 800,000 men, along with almost 3,000 armored vehicles destroyed, while auxiliary operations in the Lvov area had cost another 300,000 casualties and 1,269 armored vehicles. The Germans, however, could not have found much comfort in the reasons behind the enemy success. First, and perhaps foremost, the Soviet quantitative advantage in manpower and materiel had become so great as to produce a qualitative effect. The Soviet edge in manpower remained enormous; despite the losses of Bagration, the strength of the Red Army steadily rose, while that of the Ostheer shrank. In addition, the Soviets’ war production, supplemented by Lend-Lease deliveries, swamped that of the Germans. In 1944 alone, for example, the Soviets lost 23,000 tanks and assault guns, while the Germans produced only 22,000. During the entire war, in fact, the Soviets lost the astounding total (their figures) of 96,500 tanks and assault guns, 106,400 aircraft, and 317,5000 mortars and artillery pieces. Even as his mobilization effort struggled to keep pace with Germany’s enemies in equipment, Speer could not generate the resource most desperately needed—trained soldiers. In his analysis of this operation, Niklas Zetterling has noted the astonishing fact that the Germans’ “casualty inflicting capability” was 5.4 times greater than that of their adversary yet they still suffered a crushing defeat.26
The reason for this lay in the second key factor, the new operational mobility of the Soviets, which allowed them to strike rapidly and deeply into the German rear. More than anything, the Russians could thank Lend-Lease for this decisive advantage, for, during the war, their Western allies delivered over 450,000 trucks and jeeps to the Red Army. Without these vehicles, Bagration simply could not have been executed to its full extent since the Soviets would have had no way to supply or maintain the momentum of the offensive. Indeed, David Glantz has estimated that, without deliveries of these vehicles, the Red Army in its various offensives between 1943 and 1945 would have achieved only shallow penetrations and not meaningful operational breakthroughs, for, without this key element of mobility, the Germans would have been afforded time to build new defensive lines in the rear. The dominant image in the summer of 1944 on the eastern front was one of plodding German columns of men marching on foot accompanied by horse-drawn wagons being overtaken and harassed by Red infantry riding on tanks, trucks, or jeeps. In terms of aid from their Western allies, the Soviets also benefited enormously from the success of the Normandy invasion. Hitler, after all, had stripped the Ostfront of men and equipment in the expectation that a triumph in the west would lead to a decisive change in the east. Instead, the lack of men, equipment, and reserves in Russia all but ensured the success of Bagration.27
This overwhelming disparity in strength, in turn, highlighted the third key factor, German mistakes in intelligence assessment and leadership. In this case, deficiencies in intelligence gathering were, perhaps, not as significant as the failure to form an accurate picture from the information obtained. Again, it was not so much that their original assessment of the danger point was wrong as that the Germans credited the Soviets with more boldness than they should have. Then, in the face of the reality of the Soviet attack, they stubbornly clung to this misassessment until it was too late. This accentuated the larger problem of overall leadership, Hitler’s unwillingness to withdraw to more defensible positions in order to shorten the front and create an operational reserve in the east. The problem here was not only his stand-fast mania but also the inversion of character between Stalin and himself. At the outset, Hitler had been the gambler and innovator, willing to listen to his generals’ advice, while Stalin had been mistrustful of his generals, micromanaged battles, and insisted on not yielding any ground. Having survived his early mistakes, however, Stalin had come to listen to and rely on key advisers such as Vasilevsky and Zhukov. Hitler, on the other hand, became not only inflexible tactically and operationally but, especially after the 20 July assassination attempt, also both contemptuous and distrustful of his generals. The result, ironically, was that Soviet methods in 1944 resembled those of the Germans in 1941. While it had taken the Red Army three years to learn the lesson of mobile warfare and it still suffered far more disproportionate losses, it had now developed the effective use of combined weapons. The Germans, however, under the weight of Hitler’s operational mistakes, reacted to the enemy blitzkrieg much as the Soviets had in 1941. As with that earlier German blitzkrieg, despite spectacular operational victories, it ultimately failed to end the war in one blow. For that, the Germans could thank Stalin and the Stavka, who not only passed on the initial chance to strike boldly out of Kovel to the northwest but also compounded their error by refusing, in the face of the evidence of spectacular success, to accede to Zhukov’s request on 8 July to alter the plan of attack and strike toward Warsaw. Instead, Stalin stuck to the original idea of a general offensive along the entire front. Perhaps, as Karl-Heinz Frieser has suggested, he remembered all too clearly the disaster, and his role in it, that resulted from another sudden lunge to Warsaw, this time in 1920 during the Russian Civil War. Perhaps, as well, he simply could not believe the spectacle of the German debacle unfolding in front of him.28
In retrospect, the most noteworthy aspect of the summer of 1944 was not the heartening (from the Allied point of view) sight of the German debacle but the fact that, despite the savage blows of Normandy, Bagration, the escalating bomber war, and the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, the regime not only survived but also somehow managed to hold off its demise for another eight months. After all, in just June, July, and August alone, on all fronts the Wehrmacht lost a total of 750,000 men killed (590,000 on the eastern front), or roughly a third of the total number who had died from September 1939 to May 1944 (2.23 million). At the same time, the Western allies dropped ten times more tonnage of bombs on Germany in 1944 than they had in the war to date, and would top the 1944 figure by a third in just over four months in 1945, yet proved unable to break the German war economy. Amazingly, despite the battering the German armaments industry took, its output did not peak until the late summer of 1944. Bagration, as well as the other blows, certainly accelerated the German descent into the abyss, but it was not a decisive, war-winning operation.29
The key question, then, is why, despite their overwhelming advantages, the Allies proved incapable of knocking Germany from the war in the summer of 1944. Part of the answer certainly lies in the failures of Allied strategy and decisionmaking. In the east, Stalin and the Stavka shrank from a truly bold initiative that might have dealt the Ostheer a mortal blow, while, in both east and west, a preference for broad frontal advances allowed the Wehrmacht to wriggle free from its death trap. The Allied drives also slowed as a natural consequence of logistic, supply, and manpower problems as the offensives simply reached their culmination point. In addition, the German military leadership showed an uncanny ability time and again to cobble sufficient troops together for well-placed counterattacks that succeeded in knocking the enemy off stride. Finally, the dogged persistence and remarkable fighting skill of the average Landser also played a role.
Just as importantly, however, not only did the institutional pillars of the regime (the Wehrmacht, the SS, the party, and the ministries) remain intact, but the myriad catastrophes of the summer of 1944 unleashed a flurry of activity as the Nazi leadership made one last effort at implementing total war. No one
in the inner circle promoted or benefited more from this than Joseph Goebbels, who, of course, had long been obsessed with the need to reorganize the German economy and German society. As early as the winter crisis of 1941–1942, he had warned about the deleterious impact of the continuation of peacetime activities and, instead, sought to harden the public for the demands ahead through a propaganda campaign of “realistic optimism.” Again in the winter crisis of the following year, supported this time by Albert Speer, he had railed against the luxuries and excesses of the elite while demanding the extensive mobilization of German society. Young men should be released by the armaments industries for service in the army, he insisted, with their places taken by women. At the same time, production of unnecessary consumer goods should be halted and the bureaucratic ranks combed for men suitable for military service, both of which would free further manpower for the front. He also expected this “war socialism” to generate a huge wave of energy from the body of the Volksgemeinschaft that would result in a national rising against the existential threat from the east. None of this, of course, eventuated as the political infighting among top Nazis ensured that little of lasting consequence would be done.30
The summer crisis of 1944, however, presented another opportunity for action. Already on 2 July, Goebbels had published a leading article in Das Reich, one intended to begin the psychological mobilization of the masses, in which he answered the question posed in the title, “Are we conducting a total war?” by suggesting, “obviously not total, or at least not total enough.” He stressed again his recurrent theme that, in view of the material superiority of the enemy, Germany had to make the most rational and efficient use of its resources. A few days later, he found an ally in his initiative as Albert Speer, in conversations with Hitler between the sixth and the eighth, urged that Goebbels be placed in charge of mobilizing the home front while Himmler be given an expanded role in supervising the Wehrmacht. In a 12 July memorandum to Hitler, Speer explicitly adopted Goebbels’s program, setting out a list of “revolutionary measures” for boosting armaments production—closing unnecessary businesses, drafting women into the labor force, combing administrative offices for personnel—that were virtually identical to the propaganda minister’s. Speer followed this memorandum with another on the twentieth, the day of the attempted coup, in which he further bolstered his proposals with a favorite Goebbels argument. There was, complained the armaments minister, “an absolute disparity between the numbers of productive [workers] required for the defense of the homeland and those unproductive ones needed to maintain living standards and the bureaucracy.” By this time, Goebbels had joined the debate directly. In a memorandum of 18 July to the Führer urging the ruthless mobilization of the German people for total war, he stressed that Germany could still win the war simply by not losing it; that is, given the superiority of its opponents, Germany’s only chance for victory lay in a rupture in the enemy coalition. That breach would surely come, Goebbels asserted, but it was questionable, without a full reorganization of the economy, whether Germany would have enough punch left to take advantage of this crisis when it happened.31