Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  Still, none of this came to pass for the simple reason that the Germans no longer possessed the strength to alter their fate. Although Hitler and Krebs in the Führer’s bunker continued to issue orders that were completely out of touch with reality and were regarded by their recipients with incredulity, the remnants of the Wehrmacht fought on more like a headless chicken than the formidable force of old. Even as between 21 and 25 April the Russians worked to complete the encirclement of Berlin, Hitler’s attempt to form a defense line, and, thus, his refusal to allow the intact units of the Ninth Army to withdraw, resulted in their being cut off from Berlin, isolated, and encircled. By now, too, the Führer’s seemingly endless stream of orders for shattered or nonexistent units to launch relief attacks toward Berlin were simply ignored by his field commanders, who thought increasingly in terms of fighting their way to the west to surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets. By the time the ring had closed around Berlin, on 25 April, the Ninth Army too found itself surrounded. Rather than fight its way north into the city, however, its commander, General Busse, decided instead to seek a breakout with his remaining forces, perhaps 150,000–200,000 men, to the west and the Elbe. Beginning on the night of 25–26 April, and continuing over the next week, the troops of the Ninth Army fought desperately in a dense forest—a “dreadful mash of tortured human bodies,” according to the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov—against fierce Soviet attacks to make it westward. On 1 May, in a last great effort, some troops and civilian refugees—with their numbers estimated at anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000—managed to reach their goal; 60,000 of their mates had fallen in the struggle, while roughly 120,000 went into captivity.42

  The decisive battle for Berlin had been conducted outside the city. Despite Hitler’s hopes and Zhukov’s failures, what went on inside the city, violent and destructive though it was, amounted to not much more than a contested mop-up operation as the Germans had fewer than fifty thousand combat troops and perhaps forty thousand Volkssturm and Hitler Youth in the city. The surreal scenes in the bunker and the Führer’s periodic outbreaks of astonishing rage and hatred were little more than black comedy. By 30 April, Soviet troops, deliberately attacking along narrow sectors rather than on a broad front, had cut the defending Germans into four parts, then had begun smashing each piece in systematic fashion, using their storm troops, supported by artillery firing point-blank, to clear the defenders from fortified apartment blocks. Although especially heavy fighting raged in the subways, by 29 April they had cleared some three hundred blocks and, against fanatic resistance, reached the Reichstag building in the heart of Berlin. At 1:00 A.M. the next morning, 30 April, Hitler heard the final news that all attempts to relieve the city had failed. Shortly after 6:00 A.M., he held a last conference with his military commanders, at which he was informed that Soviet troops were near the Reich Chancellery and that the area could be held for no more than another twenty-four hours. Later that afternoon, accompanied by his new bride, the Führer committed suicide, following which his body was partially burned in a shell crater just outside the bunker. The next day, 1 May, troops of the First Belorussian and First Ukrainian Fronts joined just south of the Reichstag. Early the next morning, at 6:30 A.M., the commander of the city garrison, General Helmuth Weidling, capitulated with all resistance ended by that evening.43

  Berlin had gone down, not, as the Führer had hoped, in a Wagnerian burst of glory that would serve as an inspiration for future generations, but in a ragged wave of destruction. Fierce resistance mingled with plundering; troops fighting desperately in cellars contrasted with corpses hanging in the streets, the work even at this late date of flying courts-martial. Scenes of horror were commonplace, but the fighting seemed strangely detached, with none of the urgency of Stalingrad. This was not the rallying point but the death knell of the Wehrmacht. It had finally been crushed. The Soviet victory, however, had once more been costly. In the three-week Berlin operation (16 April–2 May), the Soviets lost over 360,000 casualties, of whom slightly more than 78,000 were killed, along with 2,000 armored vehicles destroyed. Total German losses are not known with any precision, the Russians claiming over 450,000 killed on the three fronts involved in the Berlin operation alone. This is certainly an exaggeration since the best estimate of German deaths arrives at an April–May total of 376,000 for all areas of fighting, although perhaps 125,000 German civilians died in the battle for Berlin (far more than in the Allied air raids on the city). For those Germans who had survived the fighting, the reality was both absurd and sobering. Hitler was dead, the Third Reich had vanished like a ghost, with hardly anyone taking notice, but the survivors faced “chaos”—“total and impenetrable chaos.”44

  The fall of Berlin did not, however, end the fighting. As German forces struggled on to allow “valuable German people” to reach safety in the west, Stalin seemed ever more consumed by his paranoia that, at this late stage, his Western allies would still betray him and make a deal with the Germans. Moreover, he showed every determination not to be cheated of his hard-won victory and to acquire as much of value as he could. In both these impulses, one can, perhaps, see the seeds of the future Cold War, but, at the time, the more immediate concern was with the Red Army’s old nemesis, Army Group Center, which had come so agonizingly close to conquering Moscow. Ironically, although it had been shattered in the summer of 1944, it now formed a relatively intact force of over 600,000 troops guarding Saxony and Bohemia, the last industrial areas controlled by the Reich. Paradoxically as well, its final destruction would come not in Germany but in Czechoslovakia, one of Hitler’s first victims. Soviet attacks in March and April against the right wing of the army group had made disappointingly little progress, but, spurred perhaps by General Omar Bradley’s offer on 1 May of American assistance in liberating Czechoslovakia and the presence of Patton’s U.S. Third Army poised on the border with Bavaria, Stalin now ordered the First, Second, and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts to accelerate their advance.45

  Even as Zhukov’s forces continued mopping-up operations in Berlin, the Soviets scrambled to regroup for the Prague Operation, which, with a combined force of over 2 million men and sixteen hundred tanks, was designed as a rapid thrust directly on the Czech capital. Although the attack was not intended to begin until 7 May, its timing was altered in response to an uprising in Prague on the morning of the fifth as well as reports of local German withdrawals. As Czech resistance fighters engaged in bitter street battles with German troops, they also made an appeal by radio for Allied assistance. With American troops already in Pilsen, just to the west, Stalin spurred Konev to launch his attack as quickly as possible. Konev responded by launching his strike from the north on the sixth. Within two days, his troops had seized Görlitz, Bautzen, and Dresden and, on the ninth, linked up with advancing Second Ukrainian Front forces for the final drive on Prague. On the night of 8–9 May, with the Western allies already having accepted formal German surrender and a further ceremony to be held in Berlin that day, Konev ordered two special tank detachments to race for the city. Over the next few days, from the ninth to the eleventh, Soviet forces ended the fighting in Prague, which had cost the Czechs some three thousand dead and ten thousand wounded, linked up with forces of the U.S. Third Army east of Pilsen, and accepted the surrender of the more than 600,000 German troops remaining in the Czech pocket. Perhaps fittingly, even at the end of this most destructive of wars, this last military operation, at least three days of which had taken place after the formal end of hostilities, had cost the Soviets twelve thousand killed and over forty thousand wounded. The spiral of violence unleashed by Hitler on 22 June 1941 had now run its course, but only after a final three-week campaign, the Berlin Operation, that resulted in another round of appalling Soviet casualties and the nearly complete destruction of the German capital.46

  Despite the widespread perception in the West that the Normandy invasion was the event that defeated Nazi Germany, the real war had always taken place in the east as any look at relevant sta
tistics indicates. In 1941, three-fourths of all German troops were fighting in the east, and, from December 1941 to November 1942, over 9 million troops on both sides fought in Russia, while in North Africa a relatively small British force contested Rommel’s Afrika Korps (which had relatively few German troops in any case). In November 1942, the British defeated Axis forces at El Alamein, inflicting sixty thousand casualties; that same month, the Soviets at Stalingrad surrounded and eventually destroyed four times that number. In July 1943, while over 2 million German troops fought at Kursk and in Ukraine and over 5 million on the entire eastern front, Allied forces invaded Sicily and expelled sixty thousand Germans from the island. Even after the Allied invasion of Italy, in October 1943, 63 percent of total Wehrmacht forces fought in the east, and, until the Allied invasion at Normandy, the Germans largely considered Western Europe as a reserve area. Nor did Normandy do much to change the proportions of troops on the various fronts since, in August 1944, roughly two-thirds of German troops were still engaged in the east.47

  Casualty figures also reinforce this reality. In March 1945, the Ostheer had lost a total of 6,172,373 dead, missing, wounded, or taken prisoner, or almost exactly double its strength on 22 June 1941. Moreover, from June 1941, in no month of the war did the Germans suffer more deaths in the west than in the east, with December 1944 (the Ardennes Offensive) the only month that came close. Even then, the Germans suffered 85,000 deaths in the east (during a “quiet” period) compared to 74,363 on all other fronts. In the decisive months of June–August 1944, when the Wehrmacht was being torn asunder, the Ostheer lost 589,425 killed compared to 156,726 on all other fronts combined. Total Wehrmacht casualties in World War II have been estimated at over 11,300,000, including, by the most thorough calculation, 5,318,000 military dead. Of these, 2,743,000 (or 51.6 percent) died on the Ostfront through December 1944, while another 1,230,000 (23.1 percent) were killed during the Endkampf, the final months of the war, again with the great majority (at least two-thirds, if not more, or roughly 811,000) fighting the Russians. A total of 3,554,000 Germans (67 percent of total losses) thus died in combat with the Red Army. In addition, of the roughly 459,000 German prisoners of war who died in captivity, the great majority (363,000) perished in Soviet camps. That pushes the number killed by Soviet actions to at least 3,917,000 (74 percent of the total). By contrast, 340,000 German soldiers (6.4 percent) died in the western theater, with another 151,000 (2.8 percent) killed in Italy. Even if we assume that one-third of the deaths during the Endkampf were inflicted in the west (419,000), that means that 910,000 (17 percent) of total German military deaths were attributable to Anglo-American forces. If one adds the 138,000 deaths suffered by the navy, most in the Battle of the Atlantic, along with the remaining 96,000 who died in captivity, that brings the total of military deaths accounted for by the Western allies to approximately 1,048,000 (21.5 percent). Rather more sobering, anywhere from 360,000 to 465,000 civilians died in Allied bombing raids, a number roughly equivalent to the military deaths inflicted by the Western allies in Italy and the western theater. Almost four of every five German military deaths thus came at the hands of the Red Army. Certainly, no one today can visit any cemetery in Germany, and definitely no military cemetery, without being given a stark visual reminder of this reality: row on row of names with the sobering inscription “died in Russia” or “missing in Russia” next to them.48

  None of this is meant in any way to denigrate the contributions of the Western allies, which were vital to victory. Lend-Lease aid was of pivotal importance to the Soviet Union, not so much in 1941–1942 as in 1943–1944. Without aid from the Western allies, the Soviet economy would have been even more heavily burdened, while the mobility that allowed the Red Army to fight and win large-scale offensives in 1944 would not have existed. Most probably, without Lend-Lease vehicles, the crushing Soviet drives of that year would have stalled at an early stage, having quickly outrun their logistic tail, thus allowing the Germans time to withdraw, avoid encirclements, and prepare new defensive positions. Allied military actions also came at key points and drew off scarce German resources, while the air war over Germany not only contributed to the Soviet ability to achieve air superiority over the Ostfront but also had an enormous impact on restricting and then crippling the German war economy. The Soviets also enjoyed the advantage of essentially fighting on only one front. Without Western aid, Stalin might well have had to fight another year in order to achieve victory, if his system had survived in the first place, or he conceivably would have sought a negotiated way out of the war. Still, the Red Army (and the Soviet civilian population in general) suffered enormous losses. Although the generally accepted post-Communist figure for total Soviet military deaths has hovered around 11.5 million (or 39 percent of those mobilized during the war), with a total of 29 million military casualties, other estimates of total Soviet armed forces dead have ranged as high as 26 million. At the highest end of the estimates, then, ten Ivans were killed for every Landser lost on the Ostfront. There have been equal discrepancies with regard to civilian deaths (which were not all caused by direct German action), with the estimates ranging from 16.9 to 24 million, with a total demographic loss in the Soviet Union during World War II at anywhere from 35 to 43 million. In addition, the Soviet Union was left physically in ruins, with an extraordinary catalog of destruction: seventy thousand villages, seventeen hundred towns, thirty-two thousand factories, forty thousand miles of railroad track, and over a third of Soviet wealth destroyed. While American GDP had grown anywhere from 50 to 72 percent and German between 14 and 23 percent, Soviet GDP between 1940 and 1942 fell by 34 percent, with a total decline between 1940 and 1945 of 18 percent. By any reckoning, the devastation wrought by the Germans in the Soviet Union had been appalling.49

  If Soviet forces fought on a few days after the official end of the war in order finally to destroy the Nazi beast, the question remains as to why the Germans fought on in such hopeless circumstances. Hitler, of course, had vowed no repetition of November 1918 and had held to his conviction with extraordinary determination, long after prospects for a military victory had vanished. But that begs the question of why he was able to continue fighting, of why his system did not collapse. In part, he profited from the caution of his enemies. The broad front strategy that both pursued in 1944 was militarily and politically cautious. In this fear of taking any risks, both the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans betrayed great respect for the Wehrmacht, which, although battered, was still capable of springing nasty surprises. Terror and the willingness of the Nazi regime to inflict it on its own citizens also played an important role. Average Germans, in contrast to the Soviet population under Stalin’s arbitrary and violent rule, had hardly been exposed to systematic terror during the course of the Third Reich, but now, at the end of a lost war, they experienced a noticeable increase in violence and coercion. Despite signs of apathy, war-weariness, and resignation, they nonetheless responded not by revolting (as in 1918) but by continuing the struggle. Certainly, in the east, Soviet atrocities and Goebbels’s lurid propaganda played a role in stiffening the backs of people who might otherwise have given it up. The very brutalization of war seemed to play a role as well, as many Landsers, their feelings stunted by the hardships they had suffered, lacked empathy for German civilians as they retreated. Not only did they seem indifferent to the destruction around them, but it was also hard for them to visualize an alternative. Although some acted to defend their homes or allow their compatriots to get to the west and others, especially officers and younger Landsers, resisted from ideological conviction or Nazi indoctrination, most simply sought to escape war with their own lives. Beyond Hitler, the key responsibility for the senseless continuation of war, however, lies with the weak and irresponsible military leadership that failed to act to oppose his obviously destructive plans and orders. In this, they were abetted by people such as Albert Speer and other technocratic and industrial figures who at all costs kept the armaments economy producing the wea
pons necessary to maintain the fight. Ultimately, then, the Third Reich expired, not with the “magnificent mystery of the dying hero,” or as a result of “heroic idealism,” but as a sordid act of Hitlerian willed self-destruction in which far too many people who knew better participated.50

  Conclusion

  Its impressive blitzkrieg triumphs over Poland and France obscured the reality that, when the war began in September 1939, Germany had no clear economic, military, or technical superiority over its Western adversaries. The furious rearmament effort of the 1930s had simply allowed the Germans to make up the vast gulf produced by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Further, the war that did result was, from the perspective expressed in Mein Kampf, the wrong war. Hitler had originally intended an Anglo-German alliance to confront the Judeo-Bolshevik threat but in 1939 reversed himself and allied with the Soviet Union in an effort to forestall an Anglo-French declaration of war. After the quick destruction of Poland, then, the war that followed was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and against the wrong enemy. This conjunction of circumstances has led many historians to conclude one of two things: either rapid rearmament generated an overheated economy that threatened a domestic crisis and, thus, pushed Hitler toward war, or he simply gambled that, having failed to oppose earlier territorial grabs and with little leverage now that Germany’s pact with the Soviet Union made it blockade-proof, the Western democracies would once again stand aside in the face of aggression. Both interpretations contain a kernel of truth, for Hitler did make a rational assessment of economic and strategic factors before plunging ahead, but both are incomplete. What they lack, as Adam Tooze has suggested, is the racial-ideological dimension.