The Moscow Option

by David Downing

  Rastenburg was 280 miles away to the west. The FW200 gained height and flew over the outskirts of what remained of Minsk, over the German construction gangs widening the gauge of the Molodechno railway, over fields strewn with the flotsam of war and the still-smouldering remains of villages caught in the path of the German advance. Had the Führer deigned to look down on this panorama of destruction he would doubtless have been much gratified. Perhaps he might have hummed a few bars of Gotterdammerung. But he didn’t look down. Hitler was a nervous flier, and preferred not to be reminded of the distance separating him from terra firma.

  About thirty miles from its destination one of the plane’s four engines cut out. The pilot was probably not overly worried by this development. It would make the landing slightly more difficult, but if he had not been an extremely able pilot he would not have been flying Hitler’s plane.

  But worse was to come. As the dry plains of Belorussia gave way to the lakes and forests of Masurian Prussia the weather took a dramatic turn. Rastenburg was in the grip of a summer thunderstorm, and as the plane neared the airfield it was suddenly encased in sheets of driving rain.

  The pilot must have considered flying on to Konigsberg, a further sixty miles to the north-west, but chose not to do so. It must be presumed that a surfeit of confidence in his own ability lay behind this decision. If so, he must have felt momentarily justified as the plane touched down without apparent mishap.

  But split-seconds later the pilot must have realised his mistake. The poor visibility had distorted his sense of distance. He had landed too far down the runway.

  He tried to brake too rapidly. The four-engined plane went into an uncontrollable skid, slewed off the runway and careered across the wet grass. One of the wings smashed into an unfortunately placed fire-tender. With an enormous jolt the FW200 spun in a tight circle and stopped.

  Seconds later airstrip staff were removing bodies from the stricken plane and carrying them through the rain to the buildings two hundred yards away. The pilot, Field- Marshal Keitel and one of the SS guards were dead. Hitler was unconscious but alive.

  At first there seemed no signs of serious injury. But once the Führer had been taken indoors it was discovered that the rain pouring down his face was not rain at all. It was sweat. A heavy fever was developing, the breathing was shallow and rapid. Occasionally a spasm would seize the legs and head, arching them backwards.

  The Führer was driven swiftly through the dark dripping forest to the medical unit attached to his headquarters. There, in the centrally-heated alpine chalet, he was examined by the resident staff and his personal physician, the dubious Dr Morell. They could not reach an adequate diagnosis, and soon the wires to Berlin were humming with top-secret orders for specialist assistance.

  Later that evening a number of Germany’s most distinguished consultant physicians arrived at the Wolfsschanze. One of them, Dr Werner Sodenstern, was considered to be Germany’s leading brain specialist. He diagnosed multiple minor haemorrhages in the medulla and brain stem. They had probably been caused by the Führer’s head coming into forceful contact with his padded headrest. The injuries were unlikely to be fatal, and there was no damage to the main part of the brain. There was every chance that the Führer would recover, with his faculties unimpaired. But there was no way of knowing when. No special treatment was possible or necessary. Hitler needed intravenous saline to support the blood tone, and complete rest.

  Sodenstern admitted that such cases were rare, and that medical science was still trying to understand them fully. It might be days, weeks or even months before the Führer finally emerged from the coma. But the healing process had to be allowed to run its natural course. If it were hurried by either the patient or his advisers the consequences would probably be severe.

  For an unknown length of time Nazi Germany had lost the political and military services of its Führer.

  The eminent doctors had not been the only passengers on the plane from Berlin. Hitler’s acolytes, the ‘barons’ of Nazi Germany, were also gathering at the scene of the disaster. The injuries might still prove fatal, in which case a struggle for the succession would have to take place. If the Führer survived it would presumably be necessary to re-arrange the delineation of authorities until such time as his recovery was complete.

  Goebbels, Himmler and Boorman had arrived with the doctors, having been informed of the accident by their resident representatives at the Wolfsschanze. There had been attempts to reach Goering at Veldenstein Castle, but he was not expected back from Paris until later that evening. Colonel-General Jodl, Head of Operations in the OKW (Supreme Command of the Armed Forces) under the late Keitel and Hitler himself, was already there. Grand-Admiral Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine (Navy or OKM), Field-Marshal Brauchitsch, Commander- in-Chief of the Army (OKH), and Colonel-General Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff, had all been informed and were expected.

  All these men wielded great power in Nazi Germany, but all were ultimately responsible to Hitler and Hitler alone. There was no complex hierarchy - just the Führer and his subordinates. Each had an empire within the empire. When their areas of authority overlapped it was Hitler who decided the boundaries. Or had done until now. In the weeks ahead his subordinates would either have to learn the art of co-operation or, more likely, leave each other well alone.

  One man did have nominal authority over the others for, only six weeks earlier, Hitler had nominated Reich Marshal Goering as his successor. But it remained to be seen whether Goering had the personal stature, or indeed the inclination, to make his new-found authority more than nominal. It seemed more likely that he would delight in the trappings of power than exercise himself unduly in the wielding of it.

  He did, however, take the chair in the Wolfsschanze conference room the following morning. Also present were ReichsFührer SS Himmler,. Generals Jodl, Brauchitsch and Halder, Grand-Admiral Raeder, Party Chief Boorman and Propaganda Minister Goebbels. Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, whom no one but Hitler could stomach, had not been invited, nor yet informed of the accident.

  The records of this meeting did not survive the destruction of Berlin, but the memoirs of Halder and Raeder, who alone outlived the war, agree on all but the insignificant details. The first matter discussed - the reason for the meeting - was the Führer’s condition. Should the German people, and hence the world, be informed of the accident? Such news would provide a definite morale boost for the enemies of the Reich. Could the whole business be hushed up? Did too many people know already? A compromise was decided upon. News of the accident would be released, but the severity of the Führer’s condition would be played down. A broken leg, a broken arm - Goebbels’s Ministry would decide the details. Hitler rarely made public appearances now in any case. Hopefully he would be fully recovered before the next one scheduled, the traditional speech to mark the opening of the Winter Help Relief Campaign on 4 September. If not, then new excuses could be dreamed up by the Propaganda Ministry. Those who knew the truth would be sworn to silence on pain of death.

  The second item on the agenda concerned the replacing of the dead Keitel. It was agreed that Colonel-General Jodl should succeed him to the post of Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and that Colonel-General von Paulus, the Army Quarter-Master General, should succeed Jodl as OKW Head of Operations.

  No other decisions of importance were taken at the meeting. No one was yet ready to cross the boundaries Hitler had laid down between them. Things would remain as they were, ‘as the Führer would have wished them’, and as he would doubtless expect to find them when he returned.

  This, though predictable, was crucial. For in effect it offered the Army, as Hitler would never have done, carte blanche in the East. No one knows, of course, what the Führer would eventually have made of the confusion witnessed by Bock, Hoth and Guderian at Novy Borrisov on 4 August. He later told Brauchitsch in a fit of anger that he would have taken Kiev before resuming the march on Moscow. That way, he claimed, the
Soviet Union would have been brought conclusively to its knees by the end of November. Perhaps this, like many of Hitler’s later outbursts, was merely hindsight working its insidious way through his warped mind. But it is unlikely. Both his adjutant, Colonel Schmundt, and Jodl told others in the following months that Hitler had indeed set his mind on the capture of Kiev. If so his crash in the Rastenburg rain profoundly altered the course of the war, if not its final outcome.

  On 5 August the newly-promoted Jodl kept remarkably quiet about his unconscious master’s predilections. His reason was simple enough. He agreed with Brauchitsch, Halder, Bock, Guderian, Hoth and practically everyone else who mattered that Moscow should be the primary objective of the Army in the East. When the Army Group Centre generals declared that Hitler had not made a decision before leaving Novy Borrisov, Jodl did not contradict them. He agreed that those, like himself, who had never been undecided should now implement their decision. The march on Moscow should be resumed at the earliest possible date.

  Chapter 1: ‘Moscow Before The Snow Falls’

  Do you remember the dryness in your throat

  When rattling their naked power of evil

  They were banging ahead and bellowing

  And autumn was advancing in steps of calamity?

  Boris Pasternak

  I

  According to Führer Directive 21, issued on 18 December 1940, the German Army was to ‘crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign’. With that aim in mind eight infantry armies and four panzer groups had crossed the border on 22 June 1941, destroyed the bulk of the armies facing them and advanced deep into Soviet territory. For three weeks, as the miles rolled away beneath the panzers’ tracks, any doubts as to the enormity of the task had been subdued beneath the enthusiasm of conquest. In the north Hoppner’s two panzer corps were a mere eighty miles from Leningrad by mid-July; in the south Kleist’s Panzer Group was striking towards the lower Dnieper. In the centre, astride the main Moscow highway, the panzer groups under Hoth and Guderian twice closed on huge concentrations of Soviet troops. By 16 July the tanks were rumbling through the ruins of Smolensk, already two-thirds of the way to the Soviet capital. A slice of the Soviet Union over twice the size of France had been amputated, and close to two million prisoners taken. This, surely, was victory on an epic scale.

  Epic, perhaps. But not yet victory. The Soviet Union had not collapsed as Hitler had predicted it would. ‘We have only to kick in the door,’ the Führer had said, ‘and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’ Well, the door had been comprehensively kicked in, but the structure still stood bloodily intact. Fall Barbarossa, the plan for the defeat of Russia, was beginning to fray at the centre.

  It had been an optimistic plan from the beginning. There were too many miles, too few roads, too little firm and open ground. This enemy was an altogether different proposition to those already crushed under the Wehrmacht’s motorised heel. The citizens of the Soviet Union had a greater will to resist than had been shown by the French; they had more room to make resistance count than had been available to the hapless Poles. And there were many more of them. The Germans, outnumbered from the start, were advancing on three divergent axes towards objectives separated by over a thousand miles of often difficult terrain. And as the force of their spearheads was diluted by the growing distances between and behind them the German intelligence estimates of Soviet strength were continually being revised upwards. For every prisoner the Germans took, or so it seemed, there were two new Soviet citizens donning Red Army uniform. The German boat was taking water faster than its crew could bail. Sooner or later, unless something radical was done, it would sink.

  There was only one solution to this problem. If the limbs of the Soviet Goliath could not be held down, then the blow had to be struck at the nervous system. This, after all, was the basis of panzer warfare. Death by paralysis, not by body blows. The assault had to be focused on objectives whose importance transcended their immediate value, before the Army as a whole was sucked into a war of attrition it could only lose.

  But which objectives? This essentially was the question at issue during the last two weeks of July and the first few days of August. Hitler was not yet overly concerned about Russian resistance, informing the Japanese Ambassador on 15 July that he expected to be withdrawing forces from the Eastern Front some time in August. At this point Barbarossa still seemed to be on schedule, and this implied, according to Hitler’s reading of the plan, that Army Group Centre’s armour would soon be sent north and south to aid the flanking Army Groups in securing the Baltic Coast and the Donets industrial region. Hence Führer Directive 33, issued on 19 July, which ordered such a redeployment.

  Brauchitsch, Halder and the Army Group Centre generals neither shared Hitler’s confidence nor agreed with the proposed rerouting of the central panzer groups. It was becoming apparent to them that the grandiose aims of Barbarossa were not attainable in a ‘rapid campaign’. They urged a continuation of the advance on the central axis. Only before Moscow, they argued, would the Russians be forced to stand and fight. And only the capture of the capital would provide that paralysing blow which alone could avert a long and costly war of attrition. They quoted the findings of the Zossen war-game of December 1940. ‘In view of the paramount importance of preserving (Army Group Centre’s) resources for the final, ultimate onslaught on Moscow’, it had been decided, Army Groups South and North would have to make do with their own resources. For should Moscow not be attained the war-gamers foresaw ‘a long drawn-out war beyond the capacity of the German Armed Forces to wage’.

  Hitler, pressured even by the normally docile Jodl, wavered. Directive 34, issued on 30 July, postponed ‘for the moment the further tasks and objectives laid down (for Panzer Groups 2 and 3) in Directive 33’.

  This procrastination on the Führer’s part formed the background to the Novy Borrisov meeting of 4 August. The generals all clamoured for permission to continue the advance on Moscow. Hitler spoke forcibly of the need to take Leningrad, the Ukraine and the Crimea, but did not commit himself either way. He then flew off for his rendezvous with destiny on the Rastenburg airfield. Two days later Halder began to supervise the drafting of an operational plan for the capture of Moscow.

  This was not a straightforward task, for the Germans’ room for manoeuvre was already severely limited. Halder could not merely sanction a headlong charge towards the capital. That would have been as suicidal as continuing to advance slowly on a broad front.

  The first, most obvious, limiting factor was the current disposition of the German and Soviet armies. In the central sector conditions were superficially favourable. During the first week of August both Hoth and Guderian’s groups had taken strides to by-pass the heavy Red Army concentrations in the Yelna area. Hoth’s reconnaissance units were approaching Rzhev, Guderian’s forces had taken Roslavl and were firmly astride the road that ran through it towards Moscow. Luftwaffe reconnaissance reported that behind the Soviet line in this sector there were virtually no reserves. A breakthrough in depth would present few problems to the armoured spearheads of a renewed German advance.

  But there would be problems, further back, in the rear flanks of such an advance. Here, in the Velikiye Luki and Gomel areas, there had been a build-up of Soviet strength. To charge forward towards Moscow would further stretch the German forces covering these threatened sectors. Army Group Centre did not have the strength both to advance and protect its own flanks. Units from the other two army groups would have to perform the latter task.

  In the north the flow of battle provided Halder with a ready-made solution. On 6 August the Red Army held a line from Lake Ilmen to the town of Luga and then down the Luga river to the Baltic coast. Here the terrain - mostly marshland and forest - was most unsuitable for the panzers, and for several weeks Hoppner’s Panzer Group 4 had been bogged down in positional warfare. Then on 12 August the Soviet Thirty-fourth Army launched an attack in the region south of Lake Ilmen, and one of Hoppner’s two co
rps, the 56th under General Manstein, was detached from the Luga front to deal with it. Within a few days it had done so. More to the point, 56th Panzer Corps was now ideally deployed to form the northern wing of the drive on Moscow.

  In the south no such solutions presented themselves. The armoured fist of Army Group South, Kleist’s Panzer Group 1, was moving away from Army Group Centre. A decisive encirclement of Soviet forces had just been completed in the Uman region, and Kleist’s spearhead was now flowing south-eastwards down the land-corridor between the Bug and lower Dnieper rivers. Behind them the huge garrison of Kiev still held out against Sixth Army; further north the Soviet Fifth Army around Chernigov threatened the northern and southern flanks of Army Groups South and Centre respectively. This was a potentially dangerous situation for the Germans, and the dangers were not greatly lessened by Soviet Fifth Army’s voluntary withdrawal across the Desna River in mid-August. Clearly the gap between Army Groups Centre and South had to be filled.

  All this was basic strategy, second nature to the mandarins of the German General Staff. One did not advance without securing one’s flanks. But Halder, unlike Hitler, did not exaggerate the problem. He intended to solve it, not let it dictate his overall strategy. One of Kleist’s three panzer corps would be brought back and placed under the temporary command of Sixth Army. The newly-strengthened Army would extend its control northwards to establish a firm connection with Second Army, the southernmost formation of Army Group Centre. This shifting of Army Group South’s centre of gravity away from the Ukrainian steppe would probably limit the prospects of conquest in that area, but it was unavoidable if the march on the capital was to succeed. Rather Moscow and no Ukraine than Ukraine and no Moscow. For the moment the Germans could not have both.