Hitler: Military Commander

by Rupert Matthews

  In the midst of these disasters to east and west, Hitler made it clear that he was not going to follow the advice of his generals and sue for peace. He had made some serious mistakes as a military commander before, but this was the greatest of them all. There was no longer any realistic chance of victory, but Hitler chose to continue the war. This decision to carry on fighting led to the attempt on 20 July to assassinate Hitler. Plots had been cobbled together before, but this came closest to success. It was backed by large numbers of senior army officers who now realised that Hitler was determined to fight until he had brought about the bitter and crushing defeat of Germany. The assassination plot failed and thereafter there could be only one end to the war, the final battles around Berlin in 1945.

  The reasons why Hitler chose to fight on in the summer of 1944 were varied. He continued to speak about destiny and fate, about the miraculous escape of Frederick the Great, and there can be little doubt that he believed in such things. Above all he believed in the force of will power. After the Normandy landings and as the Eastern Front was rolled back, Hitler told Jodl, ‘My task, especially since the year 1941, has been never to lose my nerve under any circumstances.’ It was willpower that had turned the half-blind, gassed and penniless ex-soldier of 1918 into the dictator of Germany. His faith in will power had been reinforced by the success of his Standfast Order in the winter of 1941. By 1944 his confidence in it was absolute.

  There has been much speculation about Hitler’s use of astrology both in the early days of power and, more significantly, as the war moved towards defeat. Astrology was very popular in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Many astrological readings and predictions were about politics and some were remarkably accurate. In 1934 it was made illegal for any horoscopes to be printed that related to Hitler or the Nazi Party. Some have seen this as a move to monopolise astrology, but it is just as likely that Goebbels wanted complete control of information published about Hitler.

  Rudolf Hess was certainly a firm believer in astrology. It is likely that his surprise flight to Scotland in 1941 was prompted, at least in part, by an astrological reading he had which predicted defeat for Germany unless peace came before November 1942.

  In 1941 the OKW hired an astrologer named Karl Krafft to produce birth charts on the Allied commanders the German generals were facing in the hope of gaining an insight into their characters. Krafft was also tasked with producing astrological predictions of German success that could then be used in the German press or leaked to foreign astrological circles. This news prompted the British high command to hire their own astrologer to produce identical charts so that they would know what information, true or otherwise, the Germans had at their disposal. The British later expanded this programme in order to explain how they could predict German actions. In fact the information came from the Ultra project, the breaking of German military codes.

  What remains very unclear is exactly how much of all this Hitler actually believed, or indeed heard about. In the early years, the influence of astrology was probably slight. But by 1944 Hitler was willing to grasp at straws. An astrological prediction of victory would have been very welcome.

  On 9 July 1944, Hitler told his senior staff that the war would be won early in 1945. The key factor in the recent defeats, Hitler argued perfectly correctly, had been the Allied control of the air. This, he announced, was about to be ended. The coming success would be guaranteed by yet another secret weapon. This time it was an aircraft named the Swallow, or Messerschmitt Me262.

  The Swallow had a troubled history. It had been conceived in 1938, but the primitive jet engines then available were neither powerful enough nor reliable enough for combat service. By spring 1942 new engines, the Junkers Jumo 004, had been developed. These built up to a thrust of 15,600lbs and could power the aircraft at an astonishing 540mph, at a time when the leading Allied fighters could manage only 400mph. Unfortunately the engines had an alarming habit of suddenly blowing up unless stripped down and thoroughly cleaned after every 50 hours of flying time. As with many other projects, funding was cut off as Hitler believed the war was almost won.

  Not until the summer of 1943 was the Swallow project revived. Despite the engine problems, in autumn 1943 Hitler ordered the aircraft to enter production under the strictest security measures. He instructed that the aircraft be developed as a bomber, able to deliver two 500lb bombs with great precision, then escape before the enemy fighters could arrive. Göring as head of the Luftwaffe had other ideas. His ace pilot Adolf Galland had flown a prototype and declared it essential that fighter squadrons be equipped with the aircraft as soon as possible.

  In May 1944 Hitler learned that the Me262 was being developed as a fighter. He flew into a temper and gave instructions the aircraft was to be built as a bomber only. He was angered more that his orders had been disobeyed than by the fighter design itself. Aviation experts put forward the reasons why a fighter version was not only more useful in combat but easier to produce. Hitler brushed their comments aside. It was to be months before he could be persuaded to allow development of the fighter version as well. By then months of lost production had slipped by and Allied bombing was making manufacture difficult.

  In the event only 300 of these superb aircraft entered service. Allied pilots had real difficulties facing the Me262 in combat. But due to Hitler’s meddling the aircraft appeared in such small numbers that its impact was insignificant and did nothing to stem the collapse of the German armed forces. Other secret weapon projects, such as the Komet rocket plane, were similarly delayed by Hitler’s intervention and also had little effect on the war.

  There was also a terrible, dark reason why Hitler could not surrender. He knew that he was ultimately responsible for the murders of millions of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. The horrors of the slave camps, death camps and concentration camps were, in the summer of 1944, only guessed at by most Germans and carefully hidden from the Allies. Hitler knew that he could expect little in the way of mercy if Germany were to surrender. He and many of his top Nazi aides would have only execution to look forward to once the secret of the Holocaust was revealed. With death his only reward for surrender, why not continue fighting? He may have been throwing away hundreds of thousands of lives, but they belonged to other people. His own life was already forfeit and he must have known it.

  Hitler had always had a liking for Wagnerian opera. By bringing about the total ruin of Germany and as much of Europe as he could engineer, Hitler would be creating his very own nightmare of destruction. His own Twilight of the Gods.

  And so the war went on, even though it was already lost.

  Hitler continued to grasp at straws, however, whether they promised an illusory chance at victory or simply served to delay the Allied advance and so give time for the development of more secret weapons. As 1944 advanced Hitler came to place increasing reliance in the concept of the ‘fortress wavebreak’. The thinking behind this idea was tactically sound. Towns or villages in the path of the advancing enemy which served as important road or rail centres were fortified with bunkers, pill boxes, tank traps heavy artillery and the like. These fortresses would then be held for as long as possible after the enemy army swept through the open country around them. By denying the enemy the transport junction, the logistics and supplies of the advance would be seriously disrupted. At the same time, the enemy would be obliged to use combat units to reduce the fortresses, taking forces from the advancing front to do so. These factors would tend to slow or temporarily halt the advancing enemy.

  In the event, the fortress wavebreak system proved far less effective than Hitler had hoped. In some instances the supposed value of the transport centre was greater than its actual worth to the enemy. In such cases, the fortress was simply bypassed and a few reserve forces set to watch the German defenders until they surrendered through lack of food. Those fortresses which were assaulted were quite often lacking the heavy artillery or prepared defences to withstand a full attack. The resistance crumbled in a few da
ys, not the few weeks that Hitler had anticipated.

  Typically of Hitler by this stage of the war, he seemed blind to the fact that the soldiers left in the fortresses were being abandoned to death or capture with no hope of relief. He simply did not care about the fate of these men. In Hitler’s eyes their duty was to fight for Volk and Fatherland and he expected them to do so until they died.

  Although the fortress wavebreak tactic failed time and again, Hitler continued to place great faith in the idea. He blamed its failures not on a lack of defences or supplies, but on a lack of fighting spirit in the commanders of the fortresses. From Hitler’s point of view this was very often true. The commanding officers knew that they and their men faced only death or capture in the cause of a war that was already lost. Very often the commanders made a show of resistance, then negotiated surrender terms. Hitler was predictably furious when this happened. The commanding officers were routinely condemned to death for cowardice in the face of the enemy, though as they were prisoners the sentence could not be carried out. Realising this, Hitler began ordering the imprisonment and even execution of the families of the officers who surrendered.

  A tactically sound idea was being turned into a ruinously costly strategy of failure by Hitler’s blindness to the realities of the German military situation. The armed forces no longer had the resources to make a reality of Hitler’s ideas.

  In January 1945, as Hitler played desperately for time, the Allies were standing on the borders of Germany in both the East and the West. The final thrust into the heartland of the Reich was just a matter of time.

  Heinz Guderian, now a Field Marshal was chief of staff at OKH. During December he had been compiling intelligence on the state of the Eastern Front and sending a stream of reports to Hitler. Getting no reply from the Führer, Guderian travelled personally to Berlin to see him. He presented a report stating that the Russians had 225 infantry and 22 tank divisions poised to attack the German line held by just 50 infantry and 12 panzer divisions. Hitler listened to Guderian with barely concealed contempt, then threw the report back at him. ‘Who produced this rubbish?’ he demanded before launching into his own analysis of the situation with its usual reliance on the coming secret weapons, the imminent collapse of the enemy alliance and other fantasies.

  Guderian travelled back to his headquarters. When he arrived Guderian found that while he had been travelling, Hitler had called OKH and personally ordered the only two remaining reserve panzer divisions to be sent south to launch an attack aimed at relieving the 140,000 German and Hungarian troops trapped in Budapest. The attack proved to be a costly failure with the panzers suffering heavy losses and the Budapest garrison being forced to surrender. Guderian now had no reserves to meet the coming Soviet attack.

  That attack began on 12 January 1945. With the opening assaults the Germans received a shock even more unpleasant than they had anticipated. The Russian attack was spearheaded by large numbers of a new tank, the Josef Stalin, which had very thick armour and was armed with a powerful 122mm gun. Only the German King Tiger stood a chance against this monster in combat, and the Germans had few such panzers on hand.

  Within three weeks the Soviets captured over 100,000 prisoners and leapt forwards to reach the Oder River, deep within Germany, near Guben. The rapidly advancing tank columns of Marshal Zhukov’s army reached Kustrin, just 40 miles from Berlin, early in February. For once, however, Hitler’s fortress wavebreak doctrine was working effectively. The garrison at Poznan held out for several weeks and effectively disrupted the Soviet supply system, which was not very good at the best of times. As a result the Russian advance came to a halt on the Oder The Soviets spent the next few weeks capturing fortresses and advancing on the flanks to Vienna and Danzig.

  In his bunker in Berlin, Hitler inspected the maps marked with flags giving the positions of German divisions, few of which were up even to half strength, and the supposed positions of the enemy forces. In the west, in December 1944, Hitler’s maps showed the Americans seriously weakened by the Autumn Mist offensive, known to the Americans as the Battle of the Bulge. Convinced the western allies would be unable to launch an attack for some weeks, perhaps months, Hitler shifted divisions from the Rhine to the Oder. He was convinced the main attack would come from the Russians and he was mustering his forces to face it.

  February passed relatively quietly for Hitler on the military front. The Allies held a conference at Yalta where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed to partition Germany and impose the payment of serious reparations after they had gained victory. Hitler and Goebbels used this decision in their propaganda aimed at stiffening German resistance. Germany had to fight, they argued, or be destroyed by the Allies.

  Hitler then had a row with Guderian. Hitler had appointed the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, to command a proposed offensive against Zhukov’s Russians. Convinced the attack would fail, Guderian wanted the reliable General Walter Wenck in charge rather than the fanatical Nazi Himmler. After a shouting match lasting over two hours, Hitler agreed to a compromise with Himmler in command and Wenck as his deputy. Unknown to either man, Himmler was even then engaged in secret talks with Swedish diplomats to try to secure a last minute peace deal with the Allies.

  On 7 March the long-expected Allied attack began. But it was the Americans who launched the assault, not the Russians. Within three days the Americans were on the Rhine and had even captured an intact bridge at Remagen. Hitler promptly sacked his commander in the west, Field Marshal Rundstedt, who had been reinstated the previous November. Hitler then travelled to the Eastern Front to address his commanders facing the Russians.

  He appeared a physical wreck when he met them. When he entered the room, Hitler had to be supported by an assistant for his left leg was useless. His left arm jerked and twitched throughout the meeting. For the first time, Hitler’s gifts of oratory failed him. His voice barely reached above a whisper as he instructed the commanders to halt the Soviet advance or, at least, delay it long enough for the secret weapons to be deployed. Few of the officers were convinced, but the ever present SS men made sure that orders were followed. It was the last time Hitler would leave Berlin, and probably the last time he stepped outside the area immediately around his command bunker in the grounds of the Chancellery.

  When Hitler got back to Berlin he ordered the total destruction of the Ruhr industrial area, which lay in the path of the advancing Americans. On 22 March, Hitler ordered that ‘the battle should be conducted without consideration for our own population’ and that ‘all industrial plants, all electricity works, waterworks, gas works and all food and clothing stores are to be destroyed.’

  Hitler’s minister of production, Albert Speer, was horrified. He secretly contacted the senior officers in the west, begging them not to obey the order. He then sent a memo to Hitler asking for the orders to be rescinded as the German people would need these basic services once the war was over. Hitler summoned Speer and delivered a chilling lecture.

  ‘If the war is lost,’ Hitler told Speer, ‘the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even these things. For the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs to the stronger Eastern nation. In any case only those who are inferior will remain after this struggle, for the good have already been killed.’

  As a strategy plan for the final weeks of the war such a view was disastrous. Apparently no longer interested in winning the war, nor even in gaining a peace, Hitler was determined to destroy as much of Germany as possible.

  The senior German commanders could not, of course, see things in this light. On 28 March Guderian again came to Berlin and descended to the bunker where the increasingly infirm Hitler waited with his maps and battle plans. Guderian was determined to get a decision from Hitler on the fate of 200,000 German troops trapped behind Russian lines at Kurland. Guderian either wanted an attempt to be made to evacuate the men by
sea, or authority for them to surrender and so save lives. After some preliminary debates about the defence of the Oder, Guderian asked about the evacuation of the Kurland troops. ‘Never’ shouted Hitler and a bitter argument followed.

  Finally Hitler told Guderian that he was looking ill and should take six weeks leave. ‘Find somewhere to rest,’ urged Hitler in a sudden rush of conciliation. ‘In six weeks the situation will be critical and I shall need you.’

  ‘I’ll try to find somewhere that won’t be captured by the weekend,’ remarked Guderian icily as he left. The two men never met again.

  With Guderian gone, Hitler’s fragile grip on reality seemed to vanish completely. His maps were populated with German divisions which were not just below strength but entirely phantom. Units which had surrendered en masse to the Americans were shown as still in combat. Rail links that had been bombed to oblivion were shown as still functioning perfectly. Never leaving his bunker, Hitler sent out a stream of orders to non-existent units or to commanders quite unable to fulfill his demands.

  Then, on 12 April, Hitler’s hoped for miracle seemed to arrive. American President F. D. Roosevelt died in the midst of a heated dispute with Stalin over procedure for a German surrender. To Hitler this was a direct comparison with the death of the Russian Tsarina which had saved the Prussian King Frederick the Great in the Seven Years War two centuries earlier. Hitler was radiant. ‘It is the turning point’ he told his staff. He was convinced the grand alliance against him would collapse now that one of its principal architects was dead. He called in his Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to discuss the situation. After leaving, Ribbentrop reported ‘The Führer is in seventh heaven. What nonsense. How can Roosevelt’s death change anything?’