When Rundstedt was handed the instructions from Hitler’s command post he laughed out loud and congratulated the signals officer on a splendid practical joke. Only after he was shown the original encrypted message did Rundstedt accept the orders were genuine. He was amazed for they were far beyond the resources he had available. He ordered an advance, but only got as far as Rostov.
In the centre, Bock was having more luck. He got to within 20 miles of Moscow and, in a determined attack after the frost froze the ground, got in to the city suburbs on 2 December. Unfortunately for Bock he also had Hitler close at hand.
In the preparations for Barbarossa, Hitler had established himself in a forward command post in East Prussia at Rastenburg. The elaborate complex of bunkers, radio communications and living quarters was dubbed the Wolfsschanze, or Wolf’s Lair. Hitler had intended to stay here during the Russian campaign, keeping in daily contact with his commanders by radio. He had followed this pattern in the earlier campaigns, but this time things developed differently. After the crisis of early August, Hitler spent more and more time at the headquarters of the Army Group commanders, especially at Bock’s. Hitler pestered Bock with questions, queried his decisions and interfered in quite minor decisions. He was still there when a fresh crisis broke.
The Russians launched a counterattack at Moscow. That the Russians were capable of such a move came as a nasty surprise to the Germans, and to Hitler personally. Even more of a shock was the arrival of a new weapon on the field of battle, the Russian T-34 tank. This tank was ahead of its time to the extent that it outclassed the Panzer IV, the mainstay of the German army. It was equipped with a powerful 76mm gun as well as two machine guns, and could travel over 180 miles without refuelling. The armour was not only thick, but cleverly shaped and rounded to ensure that incoming shells were deflected off without exploding. The standard German anti-tank gun was almost useless.
With their new weapon and plentiful reinforcements, the Russians drove the Germans back from Moscow. The German front began to crumble. A sense of panic swept the senior staff at OKH and OKW. The military men all knew of the dreadful fate which had overtaken the French army in its retreat from Moscow in 1812. The cold, hunger and relentless Russian attacks had inflicted 90% casualty rates. One army corps had started the campaign with 32,000 men and ended it with just 297 fit for duty. Nor had Napoleon’s high command escaped lightly with 60 generals being killed. Faced with this appalling prospect, Brauchitsch seemed to lose his nerve and a creeping paralysis spread through the German high command.
It was at this point that Hitler issued what became known as his ‘Standfast Order’. The instruction was simple and clear, but devastating. No German soldier was to retreat at all under any circumstances. The suffering of men fighting in the bitter Russian conditions without winter clothing was as unimportant to Hitler as were the opinions of his generals. Only one thing was important, that there was to be no retreat, nor even the thought of retreat, and Hitler soon made it clear that he meant this literally.
General Hans von Sponeck pulled his division back after it was outflanked and in danger of being surrounded. Hitler immediately relieved him of command and sent him to a hurriedly convened court martial presided over by Göring. Sponeck was found guilty of cowardice in the face of the enemy and sentenced to death, though he was in fact merely thrown into prison. Even the greatest of soldiers were made subject to Hitler’s determination. On 15 December, Heinz Guderian pulled his panzers back from an exposed position to a more easily defended ridge a few miles to his rear. Hitler sacked him on Christmas Day.
There can be no doubt that part of Hitler’s reasoning for the brutal simplicity of the Standfast Order came from his experiences in the First World War. Prior to the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line in 1917, Hitler had seen at first hand the way entire regiments could give up the will to fight, once they knew they would soon be retreating. In the desperate circumstances facing the German army in December 1941, Hitler suspected that a retreat could quickly become a rout. Although he had no doubt that his order would lead to the annihilation of some units in isolated positions, Hitler was equally convinced that it was necessary to preserve the army as a whole: he was probably right. Although many of his generals opposed him at the time, most accepted in hindsight that his Standfast Order saved the German army.
The month of December saw a large scale clearing and replacing of the senior commanders. Rundstedt offered his resignation rather than carry out the Standfast Order and was promptly replaced by Walther von Reichnau. Bock gave way to Hans von Kluge and Leeb was replaced by Küchner. Further down the lines of command other generals were ousted if Hitler had any doubts as to their loyalty.
The single most far-reaching command replacement came at OKH. Under Brauchitsch the Army High Command had remained a bastion of tradition and of excellent, if cautious, staff work. The logistics of supply were accurately assessed as were roads, railways and river crossings. But Brauchitsch had been won over to Hitler by an act of personal generosity in the pre-war years, not by any great admiration for his political or military skills. Throughout the long summer and autumn of 1941, Brauchitsch had disagreed with Hitler’s strategy and tactics on more than one occasion. In early December, Brauchitsch suffered a mild heart attack. On 19 December, sick and exhausted he resigned and retired to his family home for the rest the war, dying of a heart attack in 1948.
With Brauchitsch gone, Hitler appointed himself as the new Commander in Chief of the Army. The move was to have profound consequences. Until the summer of 1941 Hitler had been the guiding strategic hand of the Wehrmacht. He had decided to send troops into the Rhineland in 1936. He had authorised the military march into Austria in 1938. As time passed he had become inclined to get involved with the planning of operations, his interventions at a detailed level in the planning of the attacks on Poland and France had been considerable. But Hitler had usually stood back from the actual conduct of military campaigns.
When Hitler made himself Supreme Commander in Chief in 1938 he had taken the OKW as his personal staff. This gave him secure control of overall strategy for the Wehrmacht, on land, on sea and in the air. He had used this power, for instance, to force an unwilling army to accept Manstein’s plan for the invasion of France. At this level, there can be little doubt that Hitler had a flair for choosing the right men for difficult jobs and had a capacity to grasp the potential of a radically unorthodox idea.
The decision in August 1941 to divert Guderian’s panzers to the Ukraine had been the first major operational decision taken by Hitler in the course of a campaign. Thereafter he became increasingly interested in what was going on lower down the command structure and showed a growing tendency to interfere in the operational commands of his generals. By taking the position of Commander in Chief of the army, Hitler formalised this interference and gave himself the powers to issue orders of increasing tactical detail. This revealed Hitler’s military weakness. He simply did not have the patience for the detail of staffwork. He had no idea of the sheer complexity of the logistics needed to back up a sweeping new battle plan, and he had no intention of learning.
During the grinding winter of 1941–42 these drawbacks would not matter too much. But as Hitler took ever-increasing control, treating generals as his tools, his failings at an operational level became more important. And the campaigns to come would reveal those failings in the stark form of dead soldiers and lost battles.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Eastern Front
Hitler’s first real opening move affecting the Eastern Front in 1942 took place in Berlin. By this time Hitler held three crucial positions in the military hierarchy of the Third Reich. He was the head of the army and so had control over the planning staff of the army at OKH. He was the supreme commander of the armed forces, giving him control over the global strategy planned by the general staff at OKW. Thirdly, Hitler was the Minister for War in the civilian government.
It was as Minister for War, that Hi
tler appointed a new Minister for War Production and Armaments in February 1942. The man was Albert Speer, an architect who had been responsible for building the arena for the Nuremberg rallies, the new Reich Chancellery and other major buildings. As an outsider to the Nazi Party, Speer was unpopular with Nazi veterans such as Himmler and Göring, but his undoubted gifts as an architect and organiser made him invaluable. As Minister for War Production, Speer turned German industry over totally to the war effort, boosting production of tanks, aircraft, submarines and all the impedimenta of war with consistent efficiency through to 1944.
It was Speer in Berlin who told Hitler some unpleasant truths early in 1942. Blitzkrieg had failed to crush Russia in the five months Hitler had hoped for. As a result, said Speer, Germany had to plan for a war of at least two or three years duration, making it essential to secure for Germany a steady supply of oil. No less essential was the disruption or destruction of the Russian arms manufacturing capacity.
This struck an immediate chord with Hitler. A few weeks before he appointed Speer, Hitler had received a report on the Soviet war capacity. The report stated the Soviets would have 1.7 million men under arms by March 1942 and that the Soviets were producing 1,200 tanks a month. Halder, the chief of planning at OKH, was present and recorded ‘Hitler flew with clenched fists and foam in the corners of his mouth at the man who was reading the statement and forbade such idiotic twaddle’.
Hitler never did like bad news and would increasingly ignore it. But in March 1942 the bad news he was receiving fitted in with his own ideas and influenced the strategic and tactical plans for the campaigning summer season. The oil Speer wanted for Germany could be found in the oilfields of the Caucasus Mountains and much of the Soviet industrial plant that needed to be destroyed was in the valleys of the Donetz, Don and Volga rivers, particularly around the city of Stalingrad.
Hitler wanted a grand, dramatic campaign that stood a chance of defeating Russia in 1942 or, at least, of setting the groundwork for a victory in 1943. This, Hitler thought, could be achieved by a large-scale assault on the Russians in the south to destroy the main centre of Soviet war production, capture the oilfields and put the German forces in a position to surge north up the Volga to take Moscow from the rear and so finally destroy the Soviets.
At first, Hitler hoped to complete the southern advance by early September, giving the Germans two months of good weather to march up the Volga. Halder and the generals, however, thought the southern conquests themselves were ambitious enough to consume the whole summer. They prevailed on Hitler to draw up detailed plans for the first stage of the attack only. The Volga attack could wait.
Using his new position as head of OKH, Hitler involved himself as never before in the detailed planning for the 1942 summer offensive. But detail was not Hitler’s strength, so he treated the task with contempt. He told Halder, ‘This little affair of operational command is something anybody can do’. It was not so easy and Hitler’s refusal to give the task due priority was to cause problems.
Nevertheless, the plans were drawn up. Army Group South was divided into two huge units, Army Group A in the south beside the Black Sea and Army Group B in the north, along the Don. Of the two, Army Group A had further to travel, but was expected to meet the lesser resistance. Army Group A consisted of the Seventeenth Army and the First Panzer Army and was put under the command of List. His task was to race southeast to take the oilfields and reach the Caspian Sea, securing the foothills of the Caucasus. Army Group B was under the command of von Bock, and made up of Sixth Army and Second Army together with the Fourth Panzer Army,. Their task was to drive down the Don, capture Stalingrad and secure a defensive line along the Volga behind which the Germans could prepare for the march north.
In planning this mighty assault, Hitler came up against a problem. The German army simply did not have enough men and equipment to succeed. To remedy this shortfall, Hitler embarked on a series of determined diplomatic missions to his allies. Large numbers of Italians, Rumanians and Hungarians were sent, at Hitler’s insistence, to form the reserve forces of the great assault. As preparations for the attack became complete, Hitler moved to yet another forward command post. This time it was located at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine and was dubbed Werwolf (Werewolf).
As in the previous year, the German attack could not begin as soon as the spring weather settled over Russia. First the mighty fortress city of Sebastopol had to be captured in the south, and then a Russian attack near Kharkov had to be defeated. Hitler’s great sumer offensive did not begin until 28 June, a week later in the year than Barbarossa had been launched.
As in 1941 the German attack began well. The panzer spearheads thrust deep into Soviet territory while the following artillery and infantry dispatched isolated and surrounded Russian troops. As in 1941, however, the Germans did not move quite fast enough to ensure that all the opposing Russians were captured or killed, many thousands of them escaped eastward to fight again. Meanwhile, the panzers surged forwards across the seemingly endless grainfields of southern Russia.
The speed of the advance in the north was discussed at a meeting at Werewolf on 10 July. Hitler was in optimistic mood, believing the Soviet forces in the south had been crushed and were in full flight. Halder, ever cautious, thought they had merely been defeated and were retreating in good order to defensive positions beyond the Don River. Halder was, in fact, deeply worried by the way the attack was progressing. His aide noted that, unlike in previous discussions with Hitler, Halder got so agitated that he completely forgot to address Hitler as ‘mein Führer’.
Hitler swept aside Halder’s comments and issued new orders. The Fourth Panzer Army of General Hermann Hoth was to be removed from Army Group B and sent south to help Army Group A, now given the additional task of conquering all Russian territory south of the Volga. The task of capturing the Don valley and Stalingrad was given to General Friedrich Paulus and his unmechanised Sixth Army. ‘You may shake your head now,’ said Hitler to Halder, ‘but you will see that everything is going to work out very well.’ Halder considered resigning, but decided to stay on in the hope that he could persuade Hitler to change his mind.
In fact, Hitler’s decision to send Hoth and his panzers south ensured things did not turn out well at all. Without the panzers and motorised units, Paulus made slow progress towards Stalingrad. Instead of taking it in mid-August, as he might well have done with Hoth, Paulus was still trying to reach the suburbs in early September. Hitler then transferred Hoth back northwards from the attack on the Caucasus. It was too late. The panzers would have been useful in pushing across the open country of the Don at high speed, but were useless in the street fighting developing in Stalingrad. Meanwhile, the move meant that they were no longer able to help capture the oilfields. Hundreds of panzers had, effectively, spent most of the summer driving back and forth behind German lines without attacking the Russians.
On 24 September, with the prospect of winter closing in before the main objective of the 1942 offensive had been gained, Hitler removed troops from in front of Moscow to join the attack on Stalingrad. Halder objected more forcefully than usual, and was sacked by Hitler. Like so many others, Halder retired to his home for the rest of the war. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 after the bomb plot to kill Hitler, but as we have seen, persuaded them of his innocence. He was cleared of war crimes by the Allies after the war and spent the post-war years working on various military history projects. He died in 1972.
Halder was replaced at OKH by General Kurt von Zeitzler, an expert at logistics and supplies. Zeitzler was a younger and less experienced man than Halder and Hitler was confident he could overawe him.
It was at this time that General Adolf Heusinger, who had long had doubts about Hitler’s abilities in the field, confided to a colleague, ‘He’s the supreme commander, and that is the problem. He suppresses all individual initiative, he is suspicious of anyone whose opinion differs from his own. He tells the generals only what it is absolutely essen
tial for them to know. This is bound to lead to trouble.’ It was an accurate assessment.
Hitler had been wrong to send Hoth’s panzers south but, having done so, he then compounded the mistake by sending them back north. Halder had been right both times, and Hitler could not forgive him. Other generals saw what happened to Halder and learned the lesson. If they wanted to keep their jobs they had to agree with the Führer.
Meanwhile, the attack on Stalingrad was moving slowly. By early October it was clear the city would not be captured before the snows came. But Hitler was determined that the city would fall. It was essential that the Germans be poised ready for the attack north along the Volga the following spring and for that they needed Stalingrad. Hitler also came to regard the city as a major morale factor. It bore the name of the Soviet leader and had become something of a personal battle between Hitler and Stalin: its capture would surely break the Soviet will to resist. For this reason, Hitler continued to order Paulus’ Sixth Army to attack long after they should have broken off the engagement.
In October, with the winter weather closing in, Hitler abandoned Werewolf for his more congenial headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair in Prussia. He left Zeitzler in the Ukraine, but kept in constant touch by radio and refused to allow Zeitzler or Paulus to take any decisions without his express approval. One of Zeitzler’s first actions after Hitler left was to undertake a review of the German defensive lines either side of the Sixth Army attacking Stalingrad. These were actually held by Rumanians, Hungarians and Italians. Zeitzler was appalled by the haphazard state of defences and in particular by the poor state of the supply system. He sent a message to Hitler stating that the area was vulnerable to Soviet counterattack and needed to be strengthened with German units or properly engineered defences. Hitler replied that the Russians were finished.
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