While a vast number of Germans were directly or indirectly acquiescent in the massacre of the Jews, a small minority displayed high courage in succouring the persecuted, at mortal risk to themselves. A young Berlin shoemaker named August Kossman, a communist, hid Irma Simon, her husband and son in his little apartment for two years. Teenager Erich Neumann’s mother, a café owner, sheltered a young Jewish family friend in Charlottenburg for five months. A Jewish fugitive named Max Krakauer compiled a list at the end of the war of all those Berliners who had assisted his long struggle to escape death, and recalled sixty-six names. Rita Knirsch’s mother sheltered a young man named Solomon Striem, a family friend, saying to her daughter, ‘Rita, you must tell nobody about this! … I cannot just turn this poor hunted man away.’ Such extraordinarily courageous people preserved a shred of the honour of German civilisation.
In 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary and Slovakia, it was the turn of most of their surviving 750,000 Jews to climb aboard transports, to perish in the last massive killings of the Holocaust. Thereafter, as Allied victory loomed, Jews who had survived thus far found their prospects improved: more people were willing to risk hiding them. But most of those whom Hitler had chosen as his pre-eminent victims were already dead.
Europe Becomes a Battlefield
On 3 November 1943, Hitler announced to his generals a strategic decision that no further reinforcements would be dispatched to the Eastern Front. He reasoned that German forces still held a wide buffer zone protecting the Reich from the Russians; he must reinforce Italy, where Anglo-American armies were established, and France, where they were certain soon to land. Yet even as he sought to address the western threats, on 14 January 1944 the Russians renewed their assaults in the north. Strategic retreat was the obvious response, because the German threat to Leningrad was no longer credible; but the Führer, after some vacillation, once more insisted that his forces should hold their positions. ‘Hitler could think only in lines, not in movements,’ sighed a German officer, Rolf-Helmut Schröder, long afterwards. ‘If he had allowed his generals to do their job, so much could have been different.’ The Russians broke through, fragmenting the German line; on 27 January, Stalin declared Leningrad officially liberated. Hitler sent Model, his favourite general, to retrieve the situation, but within a month the new commander pulled back more than a hundred miles, to prepared positions along the river Neva, Lake Peipus and Lake Pskov. Then the spring thaw imposed its usual check on operations.
Between January and March repeated Soviet thrusts made little progress. The weather imposed difficulties on all the combatants, but afflicted the Russians most, because they were attempting to advance. On 11 February, Zhukov persuaded Stalin to approve a new attempt at encirclement. This time he sought to cut off six German divisions on the west bank of the Dnieper between two Soviet bridgeheads. The manoeuvre was eventually successful, and earned Konev a marshal’s star, but on 17 February, 30,000 German troops broke out; yet again, the Wehrmacht demonstrated the ferocity with which it could respond to desperate circumstances.
Further south, through March three Ukrainian fronts battered their way westwards. The German commanders in their path, Kleist and Manstein, defied Berlin’s explicit injunctions by conducting major withdrawals, to save threatened formations from destruction. Hitler responded by sacking both field marshals, replacing them with Model and the brutish Ferdinand Schörner, whom he deemed to have the ruthlessness indispensable to the times. Schörner mounted a stubborn defence of the Crimea against his own judgement, but was eventually obliged to accept the inevitable: on 12 May 27,000 survivors of the garrison’s 150,000 men were evacuated by sea. The Russians had held Sevastopol for 250 days, but the Germans abandoned the fortress after defending it for only seven.
Captain Nikolai Belov wrote from the front in mid-April: ‘Everything is melting. There will be a terrible amount of mud here, and it won’t clear up till June.’ That spring, the condition of the Russian people improved a little. The Luftwaffe could spare few aircraft to bomb cities and civilians; in many places German prisoners were put to work, clearing debris. Across thousands of square miles of contested territory, soldiers and civilians picked a path between wrecked vehicles, abandoned trenches, uncleared mines and burnt-out villages. In communities clinging to the precipice of survival on a daily ration of three hundred grams of bread, local people grudged food to German PoWs, but admitted that they were good workers. The NKVD and Smersh – ‘the Soviet bacillus of mistrust’, in Catherine Merridale’s phrase – conducted a ruthless hunt for alleged traitors, collaborators and spies in areas that had been occupied by the Wehrmacht. In Chernigov, for instance, during February the bodies of four hanged traitors, one of them a woman, swung for days from a gallows in the central square.
Kiev’s inhabitants warned visitors to beware of some local girls: ‘They slept with Germans for a piece of sausage.’ A steady stream of refugees returned to the city, pushing their pathetic property on carts and wheelbarrows. Trams began to run again, some shops and cinemas reopened; water could be drawn at street hydrants, and even electricity became sporadically available. But long queues waited hours for a chance to purchase any commodity, and the streets remained uncleaned. Nazi propaganda posters, images of ‘Hitler the Liberator’, still clung to some walls. Destitution was the common condition of tens of millions of Russians: when three little street urchins approached Pravda correspondent Lazar Brontman on a street in Yelsk, he expected them to plead for money or food. Instead, they asked, ‘Uncle, have you got a little pencil, by any chance? At school we have nothing to write with.’ Brontman gave them a pencil. ‘They forgot even to thank me and disappeared hurriedly down the street, staring at their new acquisition, and apparently arguing about who should be its owner.’
In May 1944, 2.2 million German troops confronted the Russians; Hitler derived comfort from the fact that the enemy was still 560 miles from Berlin at the westernmost point of the front. He believed the main Soviet summer effort would come in north Ukraine, and apportioned his strength accordingly. But he was wrong: the objectives of Zhukov’s impending Operation Bagration, most spectacular Soviet offensive of the war, lay in the zone defended by Army Group Centre. Scheduled to commence in June, its scale reflected the enormous resources now available to the Red Army. Some 2.4 million men, 5,200 tanks and 5,300 aircraft would make an initial thrust towards Minsk; in the second phase, Second Baltic and First Ukrainian Fronts would punch forward on both flanks, exploiting the breakthrough. Bagration was hugely ambitious, but at last the Red Army’s capabilities and the Wehrmacht’s vulnerability rendered such strokes possible.
Just praise has been lavished upon the ingenuity and success of British and American deception operations in World War II, but less attention has been paid to the matching achievement of Soviet maskirovka, literally ‘camouflage’. This became progressively more sophisticated in 1943, and attained its zenith in deluding the enemy about the objectives of Bagration. Large resources were committed to building dummy tanks, guns and installations, to persuade the Germans that the main Russian thrust would come in north Ukraine, where fake roads and crossings were also created. Meanwhile, Soviet formations facing Army Group Centre maintained static defensive deployments; reinforcements moved up only by night under rigorous blackout, and until the last moment were held thirty to sixty miles behind the front. Zhukov’s intentions were revealed on a strict need-to-know basis, to only a handful of senior officers. The Germans identified 60 per cent of the Soviet forces facing Army Group Centre, but missed the vital Guards Tank Army, and supposed they would meet only 1,800 tanks and self-propelled guns, instead of the real 5,200. The Wehrmacht’s eastern intelligence chief, the highly regarded Reinhard Gehlen, was entirely misled by the Russian maskirovka, as skilful and significant as similar Anglo-American operations before D-Day. The collapse of Hitler’s residual illusions in the east waited only upon Russian readiness to strike.
Around the world that spring, cynicism persisted a
bout the modest Anglo-American contribution to the struggle, compared with that of the Soviets. The Polish corps commander in Italy, Gen. Władysław Anders, wrote gloomily in mid-April: ‘The course of the war is still the same; the Red Army continues to gain victories and the British are either being defeated, as in Burma, or, together with the Americans, have stuck fast in Italy.’ The Western Allied invasion of Normandy is customarily described as the Second Front; yet in southern Europe around one-tenth of Hitler’s army, including some of its best formations, was already embattled on a mountain line south of Rome, and on the coast further north. Successive Allied attacks on German positions around Monte Cassino were characterised by lack of coordination and imagination, indeed incompetence. The sixth-century Benedictine monastery was battered into rubble; thousands of tons of bombs and shells were expended; many British, Indian, New Zealand and Polish lives were lost; but still the Germans held on.
The Anglo-American corps that landed on the coast further north at Anzio in January, in fulfilment of Churchill’s personal vision, was confined to a narrow perimeter which the Germans attacked fiercely and repeatedly. ‘So back we go to World War I,’ wrote a young officer of a Scottish regiment holding the line there. ‘Oozing thick mud. Tank hulks. The cold, God, the cold. Graves marked by a helmet, gashed with shrapnel. Shreds of barbed wire. Trees like broken fishbones …’ The routines of trench life and incessant bombardment dulled men’s senses. ‘Efficiency in general and combat efficiency in particular suffer when individuals remain too long and too constantly under the gun,’ wrote US Lt. Col. Jack Toffey. Behind the front, existence under siege became bizarrely domesticated: ‘This beachhead is the craziest place I have ever seen,’ a US signals officer wrote to his brother in New Jersey. ‘The boys have their own private horses, chickens, livestock, bicycles and everything else that the civilians left.’ Some men planted vegetable gardens.
In February, the Germans launched a massive counter-attack on the perimeter. ‘I never saw so many people killed around me before in all my life,’ said an Irish Guards corporal. An NCO, watching as swine snuffled around the bodies of the dead in no man’s land, mused bitterly, ‘Is this what we are fighting for, to be eaten by pigs?’ The Germans found the experience of Anzio as tough as did the Allies. ‘Spirits are not particularly high since 4½ years of war start to get on your nerves,’ wrote one of Kesselring’s soldiers with some understatement. Another man observed on 28 January that he had been unable to get his boots off for a week: ‘The air roars and whistles. Shells explode all around us.’ The February assault cost the Germans 5,400 casualties, and their army log reported: ‘It has become very difficult to evacuate the wounded. All ambulances, even the armoured ones, have been lost, making it necessary to use assault guns and Tiger tanks.’ Some Allied units broke, streaming in flight towards the rear – and so too did several German ones, in the face of annihilatory US and British artillery fire. The Allies expended 158,000 rounds during the February battles, ten for each one fired by the Wehrmacht.
Meanwhile further south, though the Allies were still pinned in the mountains, their foes found nothing to celebrate. The German corps commander at Cassino, Gen. Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, told an aide: ‘The rotten thing is to keep fighting and fighting and to know all along that we have lost this war … Optimism is the elixir of life for the weak.’ Von Senger, a rare and indisputable ‘good German’, soldiered on like the fine professional he was. But his men endured hell under Allied bombing and shelling, which levelled the town below as well as the monastery on the mountain. Explosions flung men about like ‘scraps of paper’. A German lieutenant described the March air attacks: ‘We could no longer see each other. All we could do was to touch and feel the next man. The blackness of night enveloped us and on our tongues was the taste of burnt earth.’ Yet as clouds of dust subsided and the Allied infantry and tanks began to advance, still the Germans fought back. Craters and rubble created by the bombing obstructed the attackers, not the defenders. ‘Unfortunately we are fighting the best soldiers in the world – what men!’ Alexander wrote ruefully to Brooke on 22 March.
The breakthrough in Italy, when it came, was too late and too incomplete to promote triumphalism: on 12 May Alexander launched his first intelligently planned attack, with Allied forces making two simultaneous thrusts. Deception persuaded Kesselring to fear a new amphibious landing behind his front, and thus to hold back his reserves. General Alphonse Juin’s men of the French Expeditionary Corps played a prominent role in overrunning the Hitler line south-west of Cassino, while Polish forces overcame the defences north of the monastery. The Americans attacked on the left, just inland from the sea. The Germans, their front broken, began a general retreat northwards. On 23 May Alexander ordered a breakout from the Anzio beachhead, besieged for four months. Many German units were reduced to one-third strength or less. ‘My heart bleeds when I look at my beautiful battalion,’ one CO wrote to his wife, ‘… see you soon, I hope, in better days.’
Operation Diadem, as the May offensive was codenamed, offered the Allies their only opportunity between 1943 and 1945 to achieve the comprehensive defeat of Kesselring’s armies in Italy, by cutting off their retreat. The consequences of Gen. Mark Clark’s disdain for this objective because of his obsession with gaining the personal glory of taking Rome, has passed into the legend of the war; his disobedience of orders emphasised his unfitness as an army commander. Alexander, a weak commander-in-chief, was not the man to control the anglophobic Clark, and bore significant responsibility for Allied sluggishness in exploiting Diadem. When Rome fell on 4 June, Kesselring withdrew to a strong new defensive position, the Gothic line, on a north-westerly axis anchored in the Apennines between La Spezia on the west coast and Pesaro on the east.
But it seems just to measure the disappointments the Allies experienced in Italy during June 1944 alongside those suffered by their armies elsewhere: the Wehrmacht displayed consistent skill and determination in escaping from encirclements on both Eastern and Western Fronts. Again and again the Russians trapped German armies, only to see them break out. If Clark had closed the Italian roads north, Kesselring’s retreating forces would probably have smashed through anyway. The failure of Diadem to translate tactical into strategic success was matched a few weeks later by the escape of substantial German forces through the Falaise Gap in Normandy, and by American unwillingness to cut off von Rundstedt’s withdrawal from the Bulge in January 1945.
In Italy, the Allies had to content themselves with escaping from the miseries of the winter stalemate and advancing 250 miles. Once it became clear that decisive victory in the theatre remained unattainable, to Churchill’s fury the Americans insisted upon winding down the campaign: they withdrew six US and French divisions to join the battle for France. For the last eight months of the war, in Washington’s eyes the only merit of residual Italian operations was that they engaged twenty German divisions which would otherwise have been defending the Reich against Eisenhower or Zhukov.
Hitler received news of the Italian retreat with uncharacteristic fatalism. In the late spring of 1944 he knew that within weeks, his armies must face a major Russian offensive. It was vital first to repulse the Anglo-American invasion of France, which was plainly imminent. If this could be achieved, it was unlikely that the Western Allies could mount a new assault on the Channel coast before 1945; most of the German forces in the west could be shifted to the Russian front, dramatically improving the prospects of repelling Stalin’s offensive. If this was an implausible scenario, as Germany’s generals thought, it was by nurturing such hopes that Hitler rationalised his strategy. Everything hinged upon the outcome of Eisenhower’s invasion attempt.
On the Allied side, there was a matching awareness of the stakes. A comparison of paper strengths suggested that the Anglo-Americans must prevail, above all because of their overwhelming air power. But amphibious operations in the Mediterranean had done nothing to promote complacency: in Sicily, and again at Salerno and Anzio, for
ces had landed in chaos, and come within a hair’s breadth of disaster. The British had always been apprehensive about fighting a big battle in France: when Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan began his task as chief Allied planner for D-Day in 1943, he found it ‘evident that the project was not highly regarded by the War Office save as a high-grade training exploit … The British entered upon this expedition from the start with the utmost reluctance and that is to put the matter very mildly.’ In May 1944, Churchill and Brooke were still scarred by the shambles of Anzio.
American and British air chiefs were also hostile. Believing themselves close to achieving Germany’s defeat by strategic bombing, they bitterly resented the diversion of their aircraft to invasion support. Churchill had his own objections to bombing French rail links, because of the inevitable civilian casualties, displaying a sensitivity that disgusted Bomber Command’s C-in-C Sir Arthur Harris: ‘Personally I couldn’t have given a damn if I killed Frenchmen. They should have been fighting the war for themselves. But I was being bullied all the time by Winston.’ Roosevelt, Marshall and Eisenhower overruled the prime minister. In the course of the war, some 70,000 French people were killed by Allied bombs: ‘collateral damage’ in France thus included almost one-third more civilians accidentally killed than the British suffered from the Luftwaffe’s deliberate assault on their island. Bombing played a critical role in slowing the German build-up after D-Day, but the price was high.
All Hell Let Loose Page 71