Sepp Dietrich’s S.S. Panzer Army was hardly what it sounded; one-third of his armoured divisions was recruited from the Peoples’ Grenadiers, another third from the Waffen S.S. The campaign was a failure, even though Skorzeny was brought in to form a special brigade operating directly under Himmler, who assumed his command in the west only a few days before the offensive. The Allies learned in advance that Skorzeny had been ordered to send Englishspeaking Germans dressed in Allied uniforms as spearheads behind the enemy lines. Skorzeny’s men penetrated far, wide and deep, but the effort was soon lost when Sepp Deitrich’s armour, which was bogged down in the winter countryside, failed to follow and support them. Himmler’s hastily improvised forces, their commanders including Bach-Zelewski of Warsaw, undertook little fighting. He attempted to take Strasbourg with his untried army and failed. He was rescued from this inglorious situation by being posted to the command of the Vistula Army Group in the east. He left on 23 January, taking Skorzeny with him. According to the scornful General Westphal, he left behind him ‘a laundry-basket full of unsorted orders and reports’.
Himmler had been based in the Black Forest. As Bormann put it in a letter to his wife: ‘he has his quarters — that is to say, his train — either in the vicinity of one of the Murgtal tunnels or near Triberg’. Hitler’s headquarters for the offensive were at Bad Nauheim 150 miles away, but Himmler kept in touch. On Christmas Eve he was present at a dinner party, sitting next to Guderian, a hostile critic, who noted that Himmler seemed to share Hitler’s delusions about the East:
‘He harboured no doubts about his own importance. He believed that he possessed powers of military judgment every bit as good as Hitler’s, and needless to say far better than those of the generals. “You know, my dear Colonel-General, I don’t really believe the Russians will attack at all. It’s all an enormous bluff. The figures given by your department… are grossly exaggerated. They’re far too worried. I’m convinced there’s nothing going on in the East.” There was no arguing against such naïveté.’
This apparent lack of concern for the situation in which Germany was placed permeated those under the influence of Hitler, who seems to have spent his evenings looking at films while his staff entertained each other at parties. Himmler gave a reception for Rundstedt and Bormann on 29 December, after which his guests returned to their own quarters — some distance from Himmler’s — for ‘music, dancing and gaiety’. ‘I did not dance’, writes Bormann to his wife, ‘but you ought to have seen Jodl.’
Himmler nevertheless continued to watch over the self-discipline of those whose conduct he felt he should influence. In January he had written to Rauter, his representative in Holland: ‘I herewith order you to carry out your reprisal and anti-terror measures in the sharpest possible manner. Failure to do that would be the only misdemeanour you could possibly be guilty of. If there are complaints about your severity, that’s an honour to be proud of.’ In May 1944 he had written to Pancke, his Chief of Police in Denmark: ‘Will you please see to it that your wife adopts more modest and inconspicuous standards of living… I must ask you to educate your wife so that she refrains from trumpeting her personal opinions on this or that political event… I am not altogether convinced that, so far as your marriage is concerned, you have assumed leadership of your young wife to the extent I expect from a senior S.S. leader. Heil Hitler!’ In August he had sent a scathing signal to the Military Governor of Cracow: ‘I thoroughly disapprove of your orders which seem only concerned with evacuation. I demand supreme fortitude from all members of the administration. Getting your luggage away is supremely unimportant!’ When he himself was in trouble on the Western front, it did not prevent him writing a painful letter to S.S. General Höfle on 12 January, after deciding against sending a severe reprimand drafted on 30 December. His revised letter began: ‘According to my custom I have been brooding over a letter to you dictated more than a fortnight ago, and I have decided to write you a more personal letter instead, giving you one more chance.’ This letter ends: ‘Had I imagined how much this command that I confided to you exceeds your mental strength I would have spared both you and myself this grief.’
Letters and memoranda survive from Himmler’s files which show he must have been aware of the failure of the S.S. to commit the heroic self-sacrifice he wanted to impose on them. For example, an anonymous letter dated 14 January 1944 denounced the graft, fraud and theft in which many leading members of the S.S. indulged; the writer claimed he was an old man whose sons were all at the front and whose home was destroyed in the air-raids. The letter, which is plainly a serious one, lists about a dozen S.S. officers who were, the writer claims, betraying the Fatherland through their luxurious living. Ten days later, on 24 January, a senior S.S. officer writes to point out the folly of calling up men from the armament industry when the shortage at the front is not of men but munitions. On 16 February S.S. General Hofmann writes from Stuttgart to ask what is to be done with the surplus masses of foreign labour who have become a serious burden to the Reich now that the frontiers are contracting so rapidly and there is no work for them to do. Should they be abandoned to the enemy? There is no record of any reply to this letter.
On 23 February Himmler is himself writing to Bormann, whom he addresses as ‘Dear Martin’, about a report he has received from a young S.S. officer in Weimar, Wilhelm Vermöhlen, on the poor morale of leading Party members who have been the first to take flight.
Himmler’s appointment on the battlefront coincided with Hitler’s disastrous policy of giving both Goring and Himmler direct command over their respective Luftwaffe and S.S. fighting forces. The Army had no disciplinary power over these divisions, which reported to their own leaders. Only for tactical purposes did they come under the direction of the Army. Himmler, like Goring, was now free to intervene on matters of strategy and object to orders given by the Army Commanders in so far as these affected his own men.
According to Westphal, Himmler issued ‘a deluge of absolutely puerile orders’, but the professional soldiers were directed by Keitel to take note of Himmler’s ‘new methods of leadership’. Himmler was ‘hag-ridden by a pathological distrust’ and never hesitated to blame the Army for the failure of his own impractical orders because ‘he always felt he was being put at a disadvantage’. Westphal claims he was wasteful of supplies sent to him:
‘He was in any case receiving greater quantities than were allotted to other sections of the front, because otherwise it was feared he would ring up Hitler and have all the munition trains diverted to his sector. Yet he fired off every shell that was sent to him and then simply asked for more. He sat in his special train in the Black Forest, and had himself shunted into a tunnel every time there was an air-raid alarm. It is almost superfluous to mention that Himmler never visited the front himself, but issued his orders from the safety of the rear.’24
Himmler can scarcely be said to have approached his gravely responsible duties on the so-called Vistula front in a realistic spirit. Once more he was appointed in order to improvise, filling the vacuum left by Hitler’s spent forces in the face of the final Russian offensive. Guderian, as Chief of the General Staff, had, of course, opposed this unprofessional appointment, but Hitler had remained firm. As Guderian saw it: ‘This preposterous suggestion appalled me… Hitler maintained that Himmler had given a very good account of himself on the Upper Rhine. He also controlled the Reserve Army and therefore had a source of reinforcements immediately to hand… Hitler ordered that Himmler assemble his own staff…’25
According to Guderian, Himmler surrounded himself with a staff of S.S. men utterly inexperienced for the task ahead of them. His headquarters were 150 miles north-east of Berlin at Deutsch-Krone, and he arrived on 24 January, passing German refugees on the road. The Russians had already over-run East Prussia and reached a line stretching south from Elbing on the Baltic to Thorn, Posen, the old German Army headquarters where Himmler had so often spoken, and Breslau. Northern Germany was at the mercy of the invading
armies, and only fragmentary defences existed to stop their further advance.
Himmler’s knowledge was also fragmentary. According to Skorzeny, he ordered him to relieve a town barely thirty miles from Berlin and a hundred miles west of his own headquarters. Either Himmler had got the name wrong, or believed the Russian forces to be scattered over widely separated areas of Germany. The Russians were, in fact, waiting for the supplies their previous advances had outstripped, but they had already cut off the German forces in East Prussia, who were in urgent need of relief by Himmler’s army and were in only partial occupation of Posen, the German communication centre for the region. Himmler withdrew the garrisons at Thorn, Kulm and Marienwerder, which might, in favourable circumstances at least, have given him bridgeheads from which to relieve the men in East Prussia, and replaced the garrison commander in Posen with a diehard S.S. commander at the head of 2,000 officer cadets. He also placed police guards along the line of the River Oder to shoot soldiers seen deserting and put their bodies on display. When he tried to stage a limited local offensive from Deutsch-Krone in the direction of Schneidemuehl, his men were defeated, and he had to re-site his headquarters and withdraw his forces hastily a hundred miles west to the Oder, ordering the garrison commanders of the forces he left behind to be court-martialled if they abandoned their posts. In the north the Russian forces followed on his heels to establish bridgeheads as far east as the Oder. Himmler, on orders from Hitler, extended his defences dangerously along the fringe of the Baltic coast in order to hold as long as possible the U-boat bases that stretched as far distant as Elbing itself.
By 31 January Russian advance forces were beginning to threaten Berlin with spearhead advances from the line of the Oder, less than fifty miles away. Panic set in, but the Russian offensive in this sector came to a halt.
Himmler’s second headquarters on the Eastern front was at the luxurious villa owned by Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, near the S.S. Ordensburg Crössinsee at Falkenburg.26 Here he lived, in effect, the life of a civil-servant who happened to be administering a war. He got up between eight and nine o‘clock, received treatment from Kersten if he were there or from Gebhardt, whose nursing home at Hohenlychen was in fact conveniently near. Between ten and eleven o’clock he received his war reports and took his decisions. After lunch he rested for a while, then conferred again with his staff officers. In the evening he was too tired to concentrate, and after dinner he went to bed. By ten o’clock he was inaccessible.
Hitler, oblivious of the threat to the capital, still planned his principal offensive in the south,27 but Guderian was convinced that it was necessary to attack the Russian spearheads east of the capital immediately with all the force that could be assembled. He was also sure that Himmler was quite incapable of directing this action, which must be undertaken promptly and skilfully before the Russians had built up their strength for further advances.
Guderian determined to insist on his plan at a staff conference called by Hitler in the Chancellery in Berlin on 13 February. Himmler left his nursing home to be present and, as Guderian expected, opposed the offensive on the grounds that neither ammunition nor fuel could be made available in time. Guderian has recorded the conversation that followed in front of Himmler:
GUDERIAN: We can’t wait until the last can of petrol and the last shell have been issued. By that time the Russians will be too strong.
HITLER: I won’t permit you to accuse me of wanting to wait.
GUDERIAN: I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m simply saying that there’s no sense in waiting until the last lot of supplies have been issued and thus losing the favourable moment to attack.
HITLER: I have just told you that I won’t permit you to accuse me of wanting to wait.
GUDERIAN: General Wenck must be attached to the Reichsführer’s staff, since otherwise there can be no prospect of the attack succeeding.
HITLER: The National Leader is man enough to carry out the attack on his own.28
The dispute went on, according to Guderian, for two hours. Hitler became enraged:
‘His fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling, the man stood there in front of me, beside himself with fury and having lost all self-control. After each outburst of anger Hitler would stride up and down the carpet edge, then suddenly stop immediately before me and hurl his next accusation in my face. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed about to pop out of his head and the veins stood out on his temples. I had made up my mind that I should let nothing destroy my equanimity and that I would simply repeat my essential demands over and over again. This I did with icy consistency.’
Suddenly Hitler stopped short in front of Himmler and said: ‘Well, Himmler, General Wenck will arrive at your headquarters tonight and will take charge of the attack.’
Guderian had never seen Hitler rave so violently. The grim eyes of Bismarck in Lenbach’s portrait had stared down on the scene, and Guderian sensed the strength of the gaze from the bronze bust of Hindenburg which was standing behind him.
‘The General Staff has won a battle this day’, said Hitler, and suddenly gave one of his most charming smiles.
On the same day Himmler’s headquarters were moved once more, this time to the woods near Prenzlau, seventy miles north of Berlin and some thirty miles west of Stettin and the Russian front on the Oder. But Himmler returned to Hohenlychen, Gebhardt’s nursing home, which was some seventy miles north of Berlin, in a state of nervous collapse, addressing an absurd order of the day to his forces: ‘Forward through mud! Forward through snow! Forward by day! Forward by night! Forward to liberate our German soil!’29 Wenck arrived on 16 February to direct the operations which began that same day, while Himmler summoned Skorzeny to the nursing home, and indulged in day-dreams about the imminent defeat of the Russians. According to Guderian, ‘His appreciation of our enemies was positively childish.’
But the offensive was doomed; Wenck broke his shoulder in a car accident while driving through the night to Berlin on 17 February to report to Hitler. On 20 February Bormann wrote to his wife: ‘Uncle Heinrich’s offensive did not succeed, that is to say it did not develop properly, and now the divisions which he was holding in reserve have to be put in on other sectors. It means constant improvisation from one day to the next.’ According to Guderian the attack, which had begun well enough under Wenck on 16 and 17 February, had lost its momentum by 18 February. The Russians regained their lost ground and inflicted heavy casualties on the German armoured divisions.
For a further month Himmler remained in his nominal command during a period involving heavy losses of territory in most sectors in the north-east and the south; the coastal bases were cut off or evacuated; meanwhile the endless, merciless bombing of Berlin continued every night. By the middle of March, the morale of the S.S. divisions in Hungary had collapsed, and they began to retreat against Hitler’s absolute orders. In his fury, Hitler demanded that the men of these divisions have their S.S. armbands stripped from them; one of the divisions to be so disgraced was the Leibstandarte, which had once formed his bodyguard. Himmler was ordered south to Hungary to supervise the dishonouring of the S.S.
But Himmler had for some weeks lived in a state bordering on collapse. His experiences as a general in the field subject to the raging pressures of Hitler’s fanatical command drove him back in March to his bed in Gebhardt’s nursing home, which became both his retreat and his headquarters. Wherever he went he could not escape the appalling dilemma of the Russian advances and Hitler’s hysterical reproaches. Like Goring, he could not stand the anger of the Führer; he did not have the strength of mind or purpose to oppose him. Like a terrified schoolboy, he retired to bed to escape the wrath of an authority that overwhelmed him. As Guderian saw it: ‘I was in a position on several occasions to observe his lack of selfassurance and courage in Hitler’s presence… His decisions when in command of Army Group Vistula were dictated by fear.’
In consequence of this, Himmler lost the
regard of his armies over whom in Hitler’s name he endeavoured to establish a reign of terror. During the last days of German rule in Danzig, the trees of the Hindenburg-Allee became gibbets for the bodies of dead youths displayed with placards hung round their necks proclaiming, ‘I hang here because I left my unit without permission.’
On the main Oder front, immobile again for a brief while during the middle of March, the still massive armies of Hitler had little armour left with which to fight. Men press-ganged for the front had no equipment with which to repel the invader. Yet they were ordered to fight without thought of retreat, and the practice abandoned almost a century before of thrashing soldiers found guilty of cowardice was revived to curb the defeatism in Himmler’s improvised forces, which now included such irregular recruits as foreign conscripts, schoolboys, convicts, exiles from the Baltic, staff from aerodromes abandoned by the Luftwaffe, and old men drafted from the Home Guard.
It was Guderian, according to his own account, who finally managed to displace Himmler from his command, where he had ‘proved a complete failure’. No reports were sent in to Army headquarters, and in mid-March Guderian drove to Prenzlau to find out what was happening. He had the impression that the orders sent to Himmler were no longer carried out. When he arrived, Himmler was not there; Guderian was informed he was at Hohenlychen suffering from influenza.
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