Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  The fear of the Red Army was by no means limited to the civilian population. By this point in the war, most Landsers understood the fundamentally criminal nature of the war in the east and feared that they might be held accountable by the Russians. Reports now indicated a growing problem with morale and discipline, especially among rear support units and outfits hastily cobbled together from the remnants of units shattered by enemy action, in which the men had no sense of primary group loyalty. Among these men, there was a reluctance to fight and a quickness to take flight; fear of Russian revenge predominated, a mood that easily dissolved into panic. Cases of desertions and plundering soared, retreats often turned into routs; soldiers (and local party officials) not infrequently commandeered places on the trains meant to carry civilian refugees westward from the threatened eastern provinces. Soldiers displayed signs of resigned indifference, lack of empathy, a loss of any sense of the future, and a preoccupation with the fates of their families. Increasingly, too, Goebbels’s propaganda stressing enemy atrocities and raising fears of Asiatic-Bolshevik hordes descending on Germany backfired. For many, it simply reinforced their will to flee, while others regarded it as profoundly hypocritical since, as one man put it, “Weren’t our SS men even more cruel . . . ? We have shown the others how to deal with political enemies.” Nor did exhortations on ideological lines have much impact. Holding on seemed foolish to many since it promised only death and destruction, especially as Allied planes now rained down bombs on virtually all areas of Germany unimpeded. Hitler’s boast in the 1930s, “Give me ten years and you will have airy and sunny homes, you will not recognize your cities,” was now invoked with bitterness and derision. Local party efforts to stir up enthusiasm were often greeted with indifference; where Sieg Heil or Heil Hitler once predominated, there was now only a conspicuous silence.21

  German soldiers had long fought from a complex mix of motives. The Nazis had been successful to a great extent in mixing traditional aspects of military life (obedience to orders, discipline, fulfillment of duty, camaraderie) with National Socialist notions of the ideal soldier (service to the Volksgemeinschaft, fighting on behalf of an ideal, the soldier as the kernel of a new society, obligations to comrades), so any precise separation of the lines of motivation is difficult. Traditional ideas of fighting to defend family and country mingled with the Nazi racial emphasis on protecting the Fatherland from the allegedly inferior hordes or the threatening Jewish conspiracy bent on destroying Germany (“Wir kämpfen für das Leben unserer Frauen und Kinder!”). In his propaganda, Goebbels appealed to the men’s sense of superiority as well as to the simple survival instinct (“Sieg oder Siberian”), while he even sought to use the logic of the hopeless situation in order to continue the fight: a common slogan among men at the end of the war was, “Enjoy the war because the peace is going to be hell.” The Nazis sought to reinfuse men with the original spirit of the movement, reminding them of Nazi accomplishments and that the Volksgemeinschaft was a revolutionary social-egalitarian society that had provided real benefits, both material and nonmaterial. As signs of demoralization and indiscipline increased, Nazi authorities tried other measures, such as active political indoctrination through National Socialist leadership officers. These proved not as effective as hoped, given the time demands on the officers and men, the weariness of the endless retreat, and the fact that propaganda was quickly overtaken by events. Most Landsers instead came to rely for support on trusted officers at the platoon and company level, with their willingness to continue the struggle decisive for many ordinary soldiers.22

  To combat the unmistakable evidence of growing demoralization and disintegration among the troops, the Nazi regime used increasingly radical measures as the terror that until now had been visited on the subject peoples was directed against the Wehrmacht and the civilian population. Flying courts-martial and drumhead tribunals punished with death those suspected of any action or utterance deemed guilty of undermining the war effort or damaging the fighting spirit. Men in buildings flying white surrender flags were to be shot, while individual soldiers were authorized to take command of their squads if their nominal superior officer failed to obey orders to resist. Anyone suspected of being a deserter, even those luckless men whose units had simply been shattered by enemy attacks, was to be dealt with in the harshest manner. Such men were dismissed by General Otto Wöhler, the commander of Army Group South, as “cowards and shirkers and therefore war criminals who deserve no mercy since they left their comrades to bear the hardness of combat alone. . . . [They] are to be condemned by a court-martial and shot. . . . Who refuses to fight from cowardice will die in shame!” Not to be outdone, Guderian ordered that “cowards were to be shot ruthlessly.” The consequence of the Nazis’ furor directed against their own troops was plain for all to see. At Frankfurt on the Oder, German soldiers wearing signs that proclaimed, “I am a deserter,” hung from both sides of the bridge. Landsers in the final phase of the war grew accustomed to the sight of daily executions or comrades hanging from trees and bridges. In all during the war, Wehrmacht courts sentenced some 35,000 Landsers for desertion, of whom 22,750 received the death sentence, which in roughly 15,000 cases was carried out. In addition, up to 10,000 people, mostly civilians, were summarily executed in this final spasm of terror.23

  Nor, in its death throes, did the regime neglect to deal with its perceived enemies. Even as it crumbled from both sides, it took its revenge on internal opponents. Hundreds of anti-Nazi resisters and those who had plotted Hitler’s assassination were now murdered, often in the cruelest fashion. As Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller told one, in that characteristic Nazi obsession with the earlier war, “We won’t make the same mistake as in 1918. We won’t leave our internal German enemies alive.” In addition, throughout Germany in the last weeks of the war, long, meandering columns of emaciated, starving prisoners became a common sight as the Nazis marched survivors of the camps back to Germany to suffer yet further in horribly overcrowded and disease-ridden facilities. Mortality rates were enormous, with those unable to continue the journey simply shot. “It was,” remembered one march participant, “as if they were shooting at stray dogs.” Although some Germans took pity and offered food to the wretched marchers, many others reacted with hostility and vindictiveness, not infrequently, in a sign of just how deeply Nazi propaganda had taken hold, lashing out at the Jews for their alleged responsibility in starting the war. Throughout Germany, the conquering Allies stumbled on camp after camp overflowing with the unburied dead and the miserable survivors clinging to life.24

  By this last phase of the war, Hitler’s destructive rage was no longer directed at specific groups, however, but now encompassed the entire nation. In his determination to prevent a repetition of November 1918, no price, even self-destruction (his own and Germany’s), was too high to pay. Convinced that his enemies were determined to bring about the ruination of Germany in any case, drawing on his own rigid social Darwinism and, perhaps, as well on Stalin’s example, Hitler urged a scorched-earth policy that would deny the enemy the ability to profit from German industrial resources. The idea, of course, was ridiculous since the Allies could easily supply themselves from their own resources, but, if applied, it would have had far-reaching consequences for the German people, whose very existence would have been threatened. In yet another dreadful irony, Hitler, who had long warned that the Jewish conspiracy was out to destroy Germany, resolved himself to take measures that would ensure just such a result. Few in Germany were this fanatic, even those of his close associates who wanted to continue the struggle, and certainly not the mass of the German people, who primarily wondered why he did not end the war and stop, as one put it, “the senseless murder.” In yet another ironic invocation of 1918, Victor Klemperer recorded the bitter contrast noted by one man in late March: “It can’t go on much longer . . . , but how we shall suffer in the meantime! What decent people Hindenburg and Ludendorff were by comparison! When they saw the game was up, they brought it to an e
nd and didn’t let us go on being murdered.”25

  Many in Germany were, indeed, already looking to the future after this lost war and seeking to save what could be saved. One of those evidently was the ambitious Albert Speer, who hoped, in combination with Germany’s industrialists, to preserve the substance of the nation’s economic resources for the post-Hitler future. In September 1944, he had already persuaded Hitler to allow German factories west of the Rhine to be disabled rather than destroyed, on the argument that they would then be available for production once German counterattacks regained the area. There is no doubt that he also acted to spare French industry from destruction and conspired with some military commanders, among them Guderian, Model, and Heinrici, to limit the destruction of factories, power plants, bridges, mines, and other facilities vital to the German economy. This policy of “paralysis of production” rather than complete destruction was not, at least initially, as unambiguously directed at preserving Germany’s material substance for the future as Speer, in his self-serving memoirs, has claimed. In the second half of 1944, Speer, along with Goebbels, had been an avid promoter of total war, a ruthless exponent of mobilizing the Volkskraft (the power of the people), whose efforts had resulted in the continued expansion of armaments production that allowed resistance to continue. Until the middle of January 1945, in fact, he projected a rather optimistic assessment to Hitler and other top Nazis, insisting that he could maintain armaments output as long as the Wehrmacht could hold the existing economic area and no more skilled workers were drafted into the army. His confidence had certainly influenced Hitler’s January decision to launch attacks in Hungary rather than reinforce the Vistula since Speer had convinced the Führer of the importance of Hungarian oil and bauxite deposits.26

  Speer’s epiphany that the war could no longer be won through armaments production seems to have come rather belatedly, only at the end of January with the failure of the Ardennes offensive and the loss of the vital Silesian industrial area. Even now, however, his actions hardly resembled those of a man intent on ensuring a speedy end to the war. He made it clear in late January that he placed military needs above the interests of the east German population, instructing Gauleiter in the east that the armaments industries should continue working to the last possible moment. He also demanded that the Wehrmacht be given absolute priority in all transport matters, dooming large numbers of civilian refugees. Moreover, after personal consultation with army leaders, he arranged an emergency armaments program that aimed to “force out of the arms production . . . anything which could still be forced out of it,” especially fuel and munitions, so that the Wehrmacht could continue to wage a hopeless war. This economic strategy of holding out to the last almost certainly contributed to the belated evacuation orders that resulted in such misery. Nor did Speer show much concern for the plight of the refugees, whose suffering he observed firsthand. Instead, he rather cold-bloodedly accepted the reality of large-scale death, remarking, in the unmistakable language of a Nazi racial ideologue, that this was “a tough selection . . . [that] would contain a good kernel of this unique people for the distant future.” Although aware that the war could not be won economically, Speer nonetheless seemed intent on preserving as much Reich territory as possible from absolute destruction.27

  This formed the background to his famous memorandum to Hitler, written on 15 March but not delivered until the eighteenth, that forecast, from an economic point of view, that the war could last only another four to eight weeks and, therefore, urged the Führer not to destroy the industrial and economic infrastructure of the Reich but only to temporarily disable it. If Speer believed that his earlier argument would again prove successful, Hitler’s response on the nineteenth quickly dispelled that illusion. If the war was lost, the Führer suggested, then the only thing left to do was to deny the enemy anything of value in Germany. Besides, even if a miracle occurred and lost territory was recaptured, it was foolish to believe that the enemy would not himself engage in a scorched-earth policy and destroy everything. His famous “Nero Order” of 19 March 1945 (“Destructive Measures on Reich Territory”), which ordered the destruction of all military, transport, industrial, and communications installations as well as all material resources, also betrayed the iron logic of his own social Darwinism. “If the war is lost so too is the Volk,” he declared, and no special measures need be taken to ensure its survival since “the Volk [would have] shown itself to be the weaker.” The future belonged to the victors. Those Germans left alive would be the dregs of the racial stock since the best would have been killed in the war, so there was no use to provide for their future existence, even on the most primitive of levels.28

  In the end, this order was never carried out, and Speer certainly played a role in persuading many Gauleiter and military leaders not to implement it. Still, his own immediate reaction to what was clearly a rebuke from his Führer was much more equivocal than he later allowed. He had, in fact, prepared a second memorandum, one written on 18 March, that he now promoted. In it, he demanded that “drastic measures to defend the Reich at the Oder and Rhine are to be taken,” including the “ruthless” mobilization of all military personnel and Volkssturm units and their immediate transfer to the river defense lines. “By holding out tenaciously on the present front for a few weeks,” he concluded, “we can win the enemy’s respect and perhaps bring about a favorable end to the war.” In this memorandum, Speer, like Hitler, indicated no wish to capitulate but emulated his Führer in wanting to stake everything on another, fully illusory gamble. He showed no reluctance to use young recruits or poorly trained Volkssturm men as little more than cannon fodder, nor did he evidence any understanding that each day the war was prolonged the death toll on the fronts, as well as from Allied carpet bombing, rose. Ironically, far from his “heroic resistance” to the Nero Order, it was precisely his solidarity with the Führer, at one point demanding that it was “our duty to make every effort to increase resistance to the utmost,” that finally persuaded Hitler at the end of March to modify his order since it made “no sense” for such a small territory as Germany. Crucially, as well, the collapse in loyalty to the Nazi regime in the last weeks of the war meant that people at the local level would hardly have implemented the destruction in any case, as Goebbels fully realized.29

  The nonimplementation of the Nero Order was the first clear sign that Hitler’s authority had begun to crumble, at least domestically. Self-destructive warfare, however, continued to be waged by the Wehrmacht, whose leaders continued to obey the Führer’s commands to fight the war to the last. Neither side in March had, it seemed, a clear idea of how to end the war. Although Stalin and the Stavka certainly attached great importance to seizing Berlin, it was not evident to them that the final battle would necessarily be fought at the German capital. After all, Hitler might choose to move south into an Alpine fortress—the Russians, too, like the Western allies, were receiving disturbing reports—and continue the fight as a guerrilla struggle. Nor, until late March, had Stalin displayed much urgency about taking Berlin. His attitude changed, however, with the sudden acceleration of the American push across the Rhine, encirclement of the Ruhr (where Model’s entire Army Group B, some seventeen divisions, was trapped in the last great Kessel of the war), and rapid movement into central Germany. Although in late March Eisenhower, much to Churchill’s and Montgomery’s displeasure, had notified the Soviet leader that he intended to turn his forces to the south and southeast to prevent an enemy move into an Alpenfestung, Stalin put little trust in his Western allies. In late March, he had openly expressed to Czech leaders his expectation that the Germans and Anglo-Americans would negotiate a separate peace (something that Hitler’s close associates urged on him but that he rejected until he could deal from a position of strength, which effectively meant no negotiations), while, in early April, he openly insulted Roosevelt by suggesting in a letter that the Germans in the west had effectively stopped fighting. Eager to seize the great prize, and fully aware of t
he political importance of controlling Central Europe, Stalin now insisted on concrete plans for an operation across the Oder aimed directly at Berlin.30

  For the Germans any hope of a military solution bordered on the delusional, yet even now the generals continued to play their assigned role in Hitler’s Götterdämmerung. Although no rational person could be in doubt about the final outcome of the battle, the Germans remained determined to exact a high price for their defeat. The OKW had stripped much of the western front in order to assemble some eighty-five divisions and Volkssturm units for the final struggle in the east. Although old men, untrained boys, soldiers recovering from wounds, and those previously classified as physically unfit composed the great majority of the manpower in these units, they were surrounded by a core of hardened veterans that significantly increased their combat power. In addition, Speer’s effort to squeeze the last bit out of the German war economy meant that these men were generally well equipped with small arms, including large numbers of the Panzerfaust, the devastating short-range antitank weapon. Moreover, the Germans could still field large numbers of tanks and aircraft, although severe fuel shortages crippled their effectiveness. Of more immediate help was the transfer of large numbers of flak units to the Oder front, where they would employ their powerful eighty-eight-millimeter guns as antitank weapons.31

  Perhaps most importantly, the German retreat had shortened the lines considerably, which meant that they would now have sufficient manpower to build and at least partially man three successive lines of defense. Indeed, correctly anticipating the main axis of the enemy attack, the Germans had constructed an elaborate defense in depth on the central Oder consisting of three positions stretching some twenty miles to the rear, or halfway to Berlin. Each of these lines, moreover, contained up to three separate belts of trenches, fortified strongpoints, antitank obstacles and ditches, flak gun emplacements, and dense mine-fields. During the spectacular campaigns of 1944 and early 1945, the Soviets had grown accustomed to piercing relatively lightly manned front positions, then exploiting their superior mobility, not only to shatter the enemy front, but also to prevent any new defense from being established. Now, however, the Red Army no longer had any maneuver room since Berlin was only forty miles away and the Americans not more than a hundred miles to the west. Instead, the Soviets faced the unpleasant task of fighting a series of penetration battles against successive, fully manned, well-equipped positions whose defenders could be expected to put up fierce resistance. Furthermore, the flat Polish countryside that had favored a mobile attacker had now been replaced by terrain much more suitable for defense. The so-called Oderbruch, the floodplain on the western side of the river that stretched up to ten miles in depth, was a low-lying, marshy area crisscrossed by numerous small streams and drainage ditches, largely devoid of trees or any natural cover, containing many towns and villages that could be turned into strongpoints. Not only would it be difficult for infantry or heavy tanks to traverse this region, but also, once across it, the high bluffs, especially the Seelow Heights, afforded superb positions from which the defenders could make effective use of all their weapons. If, then, Hitler retained any glimmer of hope, it rested on a successful defensive battle that would finally exhaust the Russians, although even here General Busse, the commander of the defending Ninth Army, had a clearer perspective. “Even if American and British tanks slammed into our rear,” he indicated, his men were to contest every step of the Russians westward in order to do their “soldierly duty” to their people.32