In his quarrels with Halder I could again see a leadership crisis looming up and I advised the Führer to fly out in person to Field-Marshal von Bock to argue it out with him. My proposal was accepted. I accompanied the Führer on the flight, while Halder had provided a staff officer from the War Office operations department. As usual, the Führer outlined his basic strategy to von Bock and discussed with him, in an amiable way, the manner in which he wanted him to continue the operation.
On all sides there was a cordial atmosphere, which I must admit disappointed me, because the Führer only touched marginally upon the matter which was uppermost in his mind and which the day before he had so decisively branded as a blunder. This made me very angry and quite exceptionally I abandoned my invariable reticence and bluntly told Bock what it was that the Führer wanted, expecting that the latter would now speak his own mind more clearly too. But the moment passed unnoticed as everybody began to get up for their meal. I, nevertheless, seized the opportunity to tell the Army Group’s Chief of Staff, General von Sodenstern, quite frankly why it was that the Führer had come in person and what was on his mind.
After the meal, which was marked by the same affable atmosphere as the conference itself, we flew back to the Führer’s headquarters.
The actual outcome was a negative one: on the very next day, as Halder was addressing the war conference, Hitler again blew up about the recalcitrant and incompetent leadership of the Army Group: but the Führer himself was the one to blame, for I myself had witnessed how he had only beaten around the bush instead of clearly stipulating what it was he wanted. So we—Halder, Jodl and I—had to put up with the same scene all over again.
I have mentioned this episode only because I often experienced this weakness of Hitler’s for ‘parleying’ about with his distant but senior generals. I gained the impression that he was embarrassed to a degree and was obliged to adopt an inappropriate attitude of modest reserve, with the result that the generals who only rarely met him face to face totally failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation and certainly did not dream that they were under suspicion of kicking over the traces and of failing to recognise Hitler, the Führer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, as an expert in military affairs. In this particular respect Hitler—quite apart from his natural mistrust—was extremely susceptible and easily offended. So the germ of von Bock’s dismissal was there; and a few weeks later Field-Marshal Freiherr von Weichs had replaced him.
For the operations in the Caucasus a newly-formed Army Group A had been foreseen, and its operations staff had already been trained. The question arose of a suitable Commander-in-Chief for the Group; Halder and I—quite independently of one another—proposed the name of Field-Marshal List. Hitler wavered and could not make up his mind, while refusing to divulge what it was he had against him. Finally, when it was high time for a decision to have been reached, Halder and I had a joint interview with Hitler about it, and after much hesitation he gave his consent. But the very first operations prosecuted by the Army Group as it advanced past Rostov and prepared to fan out into the Caucasian hinterland brought a wave of unjustified charges against List: all at once the story was that he had prevented the armoured units of the SS from breaking off towards Rostov, or that he had begun far too late and attacked too cautiously, and so on, although every one of us knew that he had operated according to the orders issued to him.
Some weeks later List came to report at the Führer’s headquarters at Vinnitsa; I myself was in Berlin, but on my return I was obliged to listen to Hitler’s complaints that it was I who had been responsible for putting forward the name of this unsuitable man, as he had left the worst possible impression, one of complete lack of orientation, behind; he had put in his appearance carrying a map printed to a scale of one to a million, with none of his troops’ dispositions marked in, and so on and so on. When I rejoined that he, Hitler, had himself expressly forbidden the carrying of such detailed maps when travelling by plane he rounded violently upon me, shouting that Göring had also been at the conference attended by List and had been very shocked at it all.
The disastrous flight which Jodl then made out to the mountain Corps, which was based predominantly on the Caucasus and fighting for the mountain passes leading out to the Black Sea, brought the crisis to a head. Jodl conducted a detailed interview with the commanding general of the mountain Corps General Konrad, and with Field-Marshal List, about the hopelessness of the situation, and upon his return he reported to the Führer that evening that he was obliged to subscribe to List’s appreciation that the task he had been given was impossible of execution. I will skirt round the details—Jodl can and will relate them far better than I can. In any event, Jodl’s contribution—which really represented nothing more than the views of Jodl himself and List—left the Führer speechless, and finally caused a terrible outburst of rage. Here again the damage had been done by the crisis of confidence and by his pathological delusion that his generals were conspiring against him and were trying to sabotage his orders on what were in his view pretty shabby pretexts. He had become obsessed by the idée fixe of capturing the coast road running along the Black Sea and over the western spur of the Caucasus mountains; and he believed that his generals were failing to appreciate the value of this strategy and were opposing him for that reason. What he did not seem to want to understand was that the very great supply and logistical difficulties entailed by the mountain paths made the operation absolutely impracticable.
As a result, his unbridled rage was directed against Jodl and myself—myself for having originally arranged Jodl’s visit; I was ordered to fly out to List at Stalino next day and inform him that he had been relieved of his command of the Army Group and was to return home to await the Führer’s pleasure.
I never found out who had been stirring things up against List, an army commander of the highest calibre who had particularly proved his value in France and in the Balkans. It is my belief that the witchhunt started on the political side, with Himmler or Bormann; otherwise it is inexplicable.
The consequences of this series of events have been related elsewhere already: Jodl was supposed to disappear, although I shielded him by saying I was responsible; although I had lost my reputation, my dismissal or posting elsewhere was denied to me, despite Göring’s having promised to secure this from the Führer. We no longer ate our meals with him at one common table, and stenographers were permanently introduced among us as we conferred. It was not until 30th January, 1943, that he deigned to shake hands with Jodl and myself again.
Nor did the Chief of General Staff, Halder, escape unscathed during this brouhaha over List. The operations in and to the north of the Caucasus failed to satisfy Hitler’s ambitious plans, and the Russian attacks on Army Group South to the west and south of Moscow had created a serious situation; they had in fact been designed to relieve the hard-pressed Russians on the southern sector of the front.
Halder rightly described the overall situation as anything but satisfying, despite the enormous territorial gains brought by our offensive. Halder, like Jodl and myself, was waiting to see where the Russians’ strategic reserves would put in their appearance, in addition to these recognisable and recognised focuses of attack; in his opinion these reserves had still not been thrown into the balance. Furthermore, the Russian mode of warfare during our big offensive in the south had manifested a new character: in comparison with the previous encirclement actions, the numbers of prisoners that fell into our hands remained relatively small. The enemy was evading the traps we laid for him in time, and as a strategic defence was exploiting the sheer vastness of his territory, dodging our forces and avoiding disastrous actions. Only in and about Stalingrad and in the mountain passes did the enemy really offer his most stubborn resistance, as he no longer had to fear the prospect of tactical encirclement.
Even if the mass of the Sixth Army under Paulus did succeed—relying heavily on the strength of our allies along the river Don, who were reinforced by ind
ividual German divisions—in driving through into the Stalingrad area, his forces were too extended for more than localised offensives in the oil fields and near Stalingrad; the over-extended front was no longer capable of smashing its attacks through. Halder correctly perceived the danger to which the Don flank, which was being held south of Voronezh by the Hungarians and Italians, and to the west of Stalingrad by the Roumanians, was exposed. The Führer had never lost sight of the possible danger to the Don flank and his faith in his allies was only meagre, but he assessed the value of the river Don so highly as an obstacle, at least until it froze over, that he thought it justifiable to take this risk with them.
Although Hitler had tolerated co-operating with Halder more from common sense than from a sense of trust or even personal inclination, one could detect a marked estrangement between them, an increasing tension manifested partly by his abrupt treatment of Halder, partly by unfavourable criticism of him and occasionally even by violent quarrels. We all saw how Hitler ventilated his disillusionment over the way the offensive had seized up and about the cries for help from Army Groups North and Centre—desperately fighting and desperately on the defensive—cries which Halder was underlining and emphasising to him.
Hitler had to vent his ill-humour on somebody. In his dispute with Jodl and myself he had already shown his inability to control his feelings. His unbearable irritability had to a great extent been brought on by the hot, continental climate at Vinnitsa, which he could not stand and which literally went to his head, as Professor Morell several times explained to me. Medicaments were useless against it; and even the permanent humidifying installation in his bunker and in the conference chamber only temporarily alleviated his discomfort.
But quite apart from all this, every situation only hardened in us a tacit realisation that the enormous quantities of men and material we were pouring in with no hope of replacement bore no comparison to the meagre expenditure it had forced upon the Russians hitherto. Almost every day Halder was waiting with new statistics on the formations still available to the enemy as a strategic reserve and on the enemy’s tank and spares outputs (data provided by General Thomas) and on the capacity of the enemy’s armaments industry in the Urals (Thomas again) and so on; again and again the Führer was provoked to refute the statistics.
I was forbidden to circulate General Thomas’ ‘defeatist’ reports any longer: they were pure fantasy, he refused to stand it, and so on. His criticisms of Halder became increasingly frequent: he was a pessimist, a prophet of doom, he was infecting the commanders-in-chief with his wailing and so on. It was then that I knew that the wheel had turned full circle again: a scapegoat was being sought, somebody else to be sent out into the wilderness.
When Hitler informed me in General Schmundt’s presence that he was going to part with Halder, I broke the resolution I had made after the calamity over Field-Marshal List, never to put forward another name for any post whatsoever. I just could not bring myself to sit fast and turn a blind eye as things took their course: I energetically championed General von Manstein as Halder’s successor; Hitler again rejected my proposal, this time with the excuse that he could not spare him from his present command. After much to-ing and fro-ing I proposed with much more firmness the name of General Paulus; I received a categorical ‘No’. Paulus, he said, was going to take over General Jodl’s office after the battle of Stalingrad; that had already been decided upon, as he did not intend to keep working with Jodl very much longer; he had already reached these decisions, and had talked it all over with Schmundt.
The latter was to fly to Paris next day and fetch General Zeitzler, the Chief of Staff to von Rundstedt as Commander-in-Chief, West; he was going to make Zeitzler his new Chief of General Staff. I considered Zeitzler quite indispensable in the west and urgently warned him against recalling him from there in the present situation; he was not the man the Führer was looking for, he didn’t need him, I said; I added that I was in a good position to judge, and I knew Zeitzler too well, although I did consider him a brilliant Army and Army Group Chief of Staff.
None of my advice was heeded; it was obvious that the Führer and Schmundt were at one on this, and the latter executed his mission in Paris.
On the same day, Halder was summoned to Hitler in my presence. The Führer made a lengthy speech, in the course of which he explained that he could not work with him much longer and had resolved to find another Chief of the General Staff. Halder listened to the tirade without a word; then he rose and walked out of the chamber with the words: ‘I am leaving.’
Two days later the Zeitzler era began, in close collaboration with Schmundt, who must, therefore, have been behind this choice. Zeitzler had rightly attracted the Führer’s attention to himself: he had been Chief of Staff to an Army Corps in the Polish campaign, and during the campaign in the west he had been Chief of Staff to Kleist’s armoured group at the time of the Sédan break-through to Abbeville; he had particularly excelled as the organiser of the Atlantic coastal defences, playing a considerable rôle in the success of the Dieppe defences at the time of the British raid there in the summer of 1942. When all was said and done I had, after all, a more than academic interest in who was selected as the Chief of the Army General Staff, because I wanted at length to see somebody who really enjoyed the Führer’s confidence occupying the controlling office in the Army.
It could not be anything but a great release for me if I did not have to fight a daily battle against the Führer’s distrust.
Jodl and I also hoped to achieve a fruitful collaboration with him, as Zeitzler had been Jodl’s operations officer for several years and was not only familiar with the basic concepts of unified armed forces command but indeed one of its earliest champions. It was our first and most grievous disappointment when we saw exactly the opposite of what we had hoped taking place: Zeitzler not only dissociated himself from us, but was intent on excluding us to an increasing degree—and even more than hitherto—from the decision-making on the eastern front, by means of frequently briefing Hitler on the eastern front situation alone and à deux; it was obvious that he considered Jodl solely interested in the other theatres of war; and it was even more obvious that he feared our influence on the Führer—a very regrettable and narrow-minded point of view.
In North Africa, during the summer of 1942, Rommel’s triumphant campaign with his one light infantry and two armoured divisions, and with the participation of Italian units and magnificent support from Kesselring’s Air Group, brought unexpected victories. Now that he had organised the defence of the sector he had reached to the west of Alexandria, Rommel himself, who had in the space of one year been promoted from lieutenant-general to field-marshal, urgently needed to return to Germany to regain his health which had been badly affected by the tropical climate. One cannot help wondering what this daring and highly-favoured tank commander would have achieved had he been fighting with his units in the one theatre of war where Germany’s fate was to be determined.
The Army’s new C.G.S. was inheriting an onerous legacy: there was fierce and unprofitable fighting among the northern spurs of the Caucasus mountains, there was uncertainty along the weakened front in the steppes between the mountains and Stalingrad, there was very heavy fighting in and about Stalingrad itself and the gravest possible danger to our allies holding the front along the river Don. The uneasy question overshadowing everything was: where are the Russians going to launch their counter-offensive? Where were their strategic reserves?
The battle of Stalingrad swallowed up division after division, attracting them like moths to a candle flame: although the Volga had been reached to the north and south of, and actually within Stalingrad, fierce house-to-house fighting was raging throughout the city and its vast industrial sites. Painfully won advances, brilliant defensive victories to the north of the city between the loops of the Volga and the Don increased our determination to capture every corner of the city, and with it of achieving our tantalising and hidden aim—the victory over St
alingrad—which seemed at times so near. Certainly it was the ambition of every officer and every soldier of Paulus’ army to crown their campaign with absolute victory: I will offer no opinion on whether and how far our Supreme Command [i.e. Hitler] was thereby already promoting the catastrophe that was to follow.
When the [Russian] counter-offensive began in November, perfectly positioned from the strategic viewpoint, first bowling over the [Third] Roumanian Army and thereby opening up deep into the flank of the Sixth Army, and when it was then on the point of surrounding Paulus’ army in Stalingrad, only one decision could possibly have staved off disaster: giving up Stalingrad and using the entire Stalingrad army to fight its way out to the west.
I am in no doubt whatsoever that that would have worked out, that the Sixth Army would have been saved and the Russians probably defeated—admittedly at the cost of giving up Stalingrad and our position on the bank of the Volga. All the frightful events that followed in consequence of the complete encirclement of Paulus’ army in Stalingrad by January 1943—the forbidden breakout for which it was too late, the vain attempt at supplying the army by air, the tardy counter-attack launched with too little strength to liberate the Sixth Army—all are graven deeply on my memory. I cannot paint the drama in its full intensity: for that I lack the material. . . .*
Giving up Stalingrad was inevitably a severe blow to our prestige; the wiping out of a whole army, and the situation brought about by its loss, meant a setback which was consonant with our having lost our 1942–1943 campaign, despite the genius with which it had been conceived and born. Small wonder that our critics became more vociferous, and the Russians received a tremendous boost for the prosecution of their war; we had played our last trump, and lost.
Whatever the outcome of an attempt to rescue Paulus’ army from Stalingrad might have been, in my view there would have been only one way of staving off the total defeat which faced us in our eastern campaign: that would have been to authorise a strategic withdrawal of all our troops to the shortest conceivable front: a line from the Black Sea or the Carpathians to Lake Peipus. To have built and fortified such a front line as a line of defence, and to have held it with the forces still available and to have strengthened it adequately with such reserves as came to us, would—in my opinion—not have been impracticable.
The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel Page 24