by David Grier
Partisan Activity
DESPITE THE GERMANS’ refusal to restore Latvia’s independence, local partisans never posed a serious threat to German forces in Courland. Fearing Soviet occupation more than that of the Nazis, most of Courland’s inhabitants did not actively combat the Germans and refused to aid existing partisan bands. At the time of its isolation, the army group estimated that there was no true Latvian resistance movement and only a few small groups of Soviet partisans. The Germans assessed that these isolated groups lacked central leadership and that no partisan-dominated areas existed in Courland.21 At the end of November German intelligence concluded that there were only about five hundred “bandits” in Courland, consisting of Latvian deserters, local communists, and escaped POWs. Although estimates of the number of active partisans in Courland increased, their operations in 1944 were only a nuisance.22 The Soviets continued to parachute troops behind the front to engage in sabotage and at times landed small groups by sea.23 Nonetheless, partisan activity remained at a low level in 1945. Several small bands, mainly located in northern Courland, operated under the loose direction of two Soviet partisan staffs. German antipartisan operations inflicted high losses on these groups, whose activities consisted primarily of isolated rail demolition and cutting of cable communications.24 The Soviets parachuted into Courland a large number of German POWs who had joined the National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD), but the majority (an estimated 75 percent) promptly turned themselves in, and most of the rest were betrayed by the local populace.25
The Commanders of Army Group Courland
IN 1945 HITLER REVERTED TO his habit of constantly changing the army group’s commander. On 16 January he recalled Schörner from Courland, and in the following three months Army Group Courland had four commanders, one of them twice, and three in the month of January alone. The characteristics of these generals varied greatly, from the brutality of Schörner and Rendulic to the relative humanity of Vietinghoff and Hilpert. At the time of Germany’s capitulation Hilpert commanded the armies in Courland, but each of the other three held an important position: Schörner commanded Army Group Center, Rendulic led Army Group South, and Vietinghoff directed German forces in Italy. Hitler did not send second-rate commanders to Courland—or at least, he sent only those he trusted.
On 17 January Gen. Lothar Rendulic, an Austrian who had just directed Twentieth Mountain Army’s perilous withdrawal from Finland to Norway, met with Hitler and received instructions to assume command in Courland. Rendulic had gained a reputation for brutality in Croatia, once exclaiming that he wished that he had enough troops to exterminate all the country’s inhabitants.26 After taking leave to visit his family, Rendulic flew to Courland on 26 January. Only twelve hours after his arrival Hitler ordered Rendulic to report immediately to the headquarters of Army Group North (formerly Army Group Center) in East Prussia. Rendulic was in Courland less than twenty-four hours.
In his place came Gen. Heinrich-Gottfried von Vietinghoff, who arrived on 29 January. Vietinghoff remained in Latvia slightly over a month, but in that time he quickly won the trust of his subordinates through his kindness and courtesy. He questioned the wisdom of retaining Courland and unsuccessfully proposed the army group’s withdrawal into bridgeheads around Libau and Windau, from which the majority of its divisions would be evacuated to Germany.27 On 11 March Hitler ordered Vietinghoff to replace Field Marshal Albert Kesselring as Commander in Chief, Southwest. Vietinghoff returned to Italy and remained there for the duration of the war, negotiating the surrender of German forces in that theater. (Vietinghoff died in 1952.)
Hitler again appointed Rendulic army group commander. Rendulic reached Latvia on 13 March, the final day of the Fifth Courland Battle. In East Prussia Rendulic had employed brutal methods similar to those of Schörner, attempting to prevent retreats and desertion with roving squads of military police who executed stragglers in drumhead courts-martial. Goebbels approvingly compared Rendulic’s leadership to that of Model and Schörner.28 Rendulic considered Russian commanders in Courland superior to those in East Prussia, believing that Soviet leaders in Latvia possessed greater initiative and were willing to exploit successes by committing their reserves without regard to German countermeasures.29 Once more, Rendulic’s stay in Latvia was brief; on 4 April he received orders to report to Berlin immediately. Rendulic left Courland the next day commanding Army Group South until the end of the war. (In 1948 he was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, but he was released in 1951. Rendulic died in 1971 at the age of eighty-three.)
The army group’s final commander was Gen. Carl Hilpert. Formerly Sixteenth Army’s commander, Hilpert had served as acting commander of the army group between Rendulic’s departure and Vietinghoff’s arrival. By all accounts Hilpert was the most popular and humane of the army group’s leaders—kind, sympathetic, devout, honorable, and highly respected by his troops. Rendulic had erected a cinema, club room, and dining room for his personal use; Hilpert dismantled them and lived in a bunker. He conducted the negotiations for the army group’s surrender, and on 8 May he was thus among the first to enter captivity. (He did not return. Hilpert died of disease in a Soviet POW camp in 1947.)30
Schörner commanded Army Group North from July 1944 until mid-January 1945, arguably the most dangerous six months of its campaign in the Soviet Union. One of Hitler’s most controversial generals, Schörner had been born in Munich on 12 June 1892, the son of a police official.31 During World War I he had earned Germany’s highest decoration for bravery, the Pour la Mérite, in October 1917 at the Battle of Caporetto. After the war Schörner joined Germany’s hundred thousand-man army, in which as a lieutenant he participated in the suppression of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. During the Weimar period he was a tactics instructor at the military college in Dresden.32 In the invasion of Poland Schörner was a regimental commander, and he commanded the 6th Mountain Division in the campaigns in France and Greece. In the fall of 1941 he went to the Arctic, to the Murmansk front, where he remained until October 1943, when he traveled to the opposite end of the Russian front to command Army Detachment Nikopol. Thereafter, having served approximately two months as the first head of the National Socialist Leadership Officer Corps, in March 1944 Schörner received command of Army Group South Ukraine. He remained in this position until Hitler transferred him to Army Group North in July.
On 16 January 1945 Hitler again called upon Schörner to reestablish a crumbling front, this time for Army Group A (ten days later renamed Army Group Center), which was reeling under a terrific Soviet offensive. Before he left Army Group North, Hitler awarded Schörner Diamonds for his Knight’s Cross in recognition of his successful defense of Courland.33 With Army Group Center, Schörner managed to re-form a line and keep his army group largely intact until Germany’s surrender. On the morning of 9 May he flew to the Tyrol—deserting, his critics charge, his men at the last moment, having executing many for cowardice. For Schörner, of all people, to have deserted his men at the end was unforgivable. He was to claim that his staff had been scattered for several days and that transmitting orders to his troops was no longer possible.34
The Americans captured Schörner and turned him over to the Russians, who in 1952 sentenced him to twenty-five years imprisonment for war crimes. The sentence was later reduced, and he was released on Christmas Day of 1954. He returned to Munich, where in January 1955 a West German court indicted him for executing soldiers in the war’s final weeks. In 1957 he received a sentence of four and a half years’ imprisonment for manslaughter. Denied a pension and other rights of returned prisoners of war after his release from prison in 1960, Schörner died in Munich in 1973 at the age of eighty-one.
Although he proved himself a capable commander in offensive operations in Poland, France, and particularly Greece, he earned his reputation and Hitler’s praise for his tenacity on the defense.35 His methods were effective but exceedingly brutal; he ordered the execution of numerous soldiers for cowardice, which he inter
preted more broadly than most generals. A terror to staff and rear-area units, he sacked divisional, corps, and army commanders whom he considered not tough enough, and he was infamous for establishing roving squads of military police to round up—and often execute—stragglers behind the front.36 His motto was that his soldiers’ fear of their commander should be greater than their fear of the enemy, and this slogan applied equally to officers and enlisted men. He received several unflattering nicknames, including “Wild Ferdinand,” “the Bloodhound,” “the Gendarme of Courland,” and “the Legend of a Thousand Gallows.”37
In times of crisis Schörner relied upon draconian decrees to stabilize the front. During the Soviet offensive that isolated Army Group North in Courland in October 1944, Schörner instructed General Raus (Third Panzer Army’s commander) that rear area units were to fight to the last round in their current positions or face a firing squad. In another instance Schörner decreed that a major who had given up his strongpoint had forfeited his life; the division’s commander had forty-eight hours to report if the major had earned a reprieve by some act of special bravery. Schörner once instructed Eighteenth Army to inform one of its divisional commanders, whose troops had not carried out an attack as ordered, that he was to reestablish his and the division’s honor or face dismissal. The general had less than four hours to report which commander he had shot, or ordered shot, for cowardice.38 Other officers would have quickly learned of these measures and presumably attempted to ensure that they did not incur Schörner’s wrath.
There are also numerous examples of Schörner’s posting lists of soldiers executed for a variety of offenses, such as desertion, cowardice, self-mutilation, unauthorized presence in the rear area, or pretending to be wounded. Wenck, who served as Schörner’s chief of staff with Army Group South Ukraine, later claimed that Schörner invented lists with fictitious names and offenses, to maintain discipline.39 Yet many of these names were not fictitious, and a marked increase in the number of cases brought before military judges occurred when Schörner commanded the army group. Schörner issued his most famous order on the Murmansk front. Receiving reports that Arctic conditions were causing morale to decline, he decreed, “The Arctic does not exist!”40 Notwithstanding his harsh methods, however, Schörner insisted that no effort be spared to support frontline troops, and whatever else they may have thought of him, many soldiers in the trenches believed that he would not abandon them.41 He commanded from the front lines and displayed personal bravery, frequently visiting the heat of the action.42
His meteoric rise was remarkable. In the summer of 1939 a lieutenant colonel, in less than five years he had attained the rank of colonel general. Schörner was one of only twenty-seven recipients of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds, and he possessed the Golden Party Badge.43 On 5 April 1945 Hitler further rewarded Schörner’s accomplishments by promoting him to field marshal, making him the last army officer to reach this rank. In his will Hitler named Schörner commander in chief of the German Army. At the end of April 1945, Hitler said of him:
On the entire front, only one man has proven to be a real field strategist. The one who has to endure the worst attacks has the most orderly front: Schörner. Schörner had terrible equipment; he put it in order again. With every assignment he was given, Schörner achieved excellent results. . . . And Schörner, within a few weeks, made a front out of a mess—and he didn’t just build it up, but filled it with a new spirit and held the front. When he left it disappeared again.44
Even in death Hitler revealed his esteem for Schörner, ordering one of the three copies of his political testament delivered to Schörner. This close relationship with Hitler provided added benefits, as Hitler granted some of Schörner’s special requests. As we have seen, Schörner appealed for Major Rudel’s tank-busting Stuka squadron, and Rudel and his squadron were in Riga by the end of the day.45 Shortly after he took command of Army Group North, Hitler granted his request for additional officers to replace losses.46 At the end of September 1944, a time when Germany was being driven back to its borders, every commander was screaming for troops, and Hitler was planning for the Ardennes Offensive, Schörner asked for thirty thousand replacements and received most, if not all, of these men.47
Schörner’s acceptance of Nazi ideology is best characterized by his statement that he considered himself a half–SS man, and by Hitler’s selection of Schörner as the first head of the National Socialist Leadership Corps, whose duty was to indoctrinate troops with Nazi beliefs. Hitler once described Schörner ideologically as a “fanatic,” clearly a compliment, and Goebbels praised him as “more than 100 percent behind Hitler.”48 His orders to his troops reflect a preoccupation with Nazi ideology, informing his troops that the war with Russia was an ideological struggle for existence against a bestial enemy, a campaign different from previous ones. His harsh methods led Goebbels to praise him as a great military commander with “superb political insight,” a man who hanged stragglers from the nearest tree.49 In a letter to Hitler of 6 August 1944, in which he explained why he had been compelled to carry out a retreat, Schörner showed that he knew exactly what Hitler wanted to hear. He claimed that prisoners taken in the previous days had been untrained fourteen-year-olds and old men. He maintained that the Soviets were staking everything on one card and that if he could weather this crisis, victory was assured.50
Notwithstanding all this, Schörner was by no means Hitler’s lackey. If he felt the situation warranted it, he would order an immediate retreat without waiting for approval from OKH or Hitler.51 As previously discussed, Schörner ordered several major retreats, some involving great distances, such as his command to evacuate Estonia and eastern Latvia, and others strategic sites, as in the case of Sworbe. Nor were these isolated occurrences. Schörner acted in a similar manner both before and after commanding Army Group North. Other areas he evacuated against Hitler’s orders included bridgeheads across the Dnieper and Dniester rivers, the cities of Odessa and Sevastopol, and the vital industrial area of Upper Silesia. In addition, Speer persuaded Schörner to ignore Hitler’s “scorched earth” policy in the war’s final weeks, a risk that the supposedly unpolitical Dönitz refused even to consider.52
After the war, Natzmer, Schörner’s chief of staff with Army Group North, harshly criticized him. Natzmer denigrated Schörner for wasting time directing traffic and terrorizing cooks when he should have been leading his army group. Schörner, he claimed, merely laid down basic operational guidelines and, except for special cases, left tactical matters to his staff—although admittedly he supported his staff’s decisions, even those against Hitler’s wishes. He concentrated on terrorizing rear-area units and so was frequently out of contact with headquarters; he was, as Natzmer described him, part gendarme and part soldier. Nonetheless, Natzmer recognized his personal courage and talents, especially his contribution to the army group’s defensive successes, in large part due to his maintaining order and discipline in Courland. Surprisingly, Natzmer did not criticize Schörner for the drumhead courts-martial, and he confirmed that the soldiers in the front lines had a grudging admiration for him.53 Several other officers who served under Schörner, although they may not have liked him personally or approved of his methods, admitted that he possessed talent as a military commander.54
Schörner was a different type of general, one who, like Hitler, believed that determination and an iron will could accomplish much. One might add that personal devotion to Hitler was another key characteristic of the new battlefield commanders of Schörner’s kind.55 For these reasons Goebbels considered Model and Schörner the army’s best generals and declared that Schörner was a commander to whom one could entrust any front sector without having to worry. Goebbels also remarked that Schörner did not attempt to paint a rosy picture for Hitler but always told him the truth.56 Precisely because Hitler could count on him to present the unvarnished truth, however reassuringly, and because Hitler did not question Schörner’s loyalty, he accepted decisio
ns from him that he would not have tolerated from any other commander, except possibly Model.57 This was the key advantage Schörner possessed over most other generals.
Morale
BY THE TIME OF THE ARMY group’s isolation in Courland, Germany was reeling in defeat. Hungary, the last of Hitler’s major allies (Slovakia’s puppet government hung on as Germany’s sole remaining ally), defected on 15 October, following the example of its Balkan neighbors. In the West, Anglo-American aircraft dominated the skies over Germany, reducing the Reich’s cities to rubble and destroying its potential to produce and transport goods essential to the Nazi war effort. In October Germany itself came under attack from enemy armies in both the East and the West. The Russians launched an offensive into East Prussia on 16 October, and the first major German city to be occupied, Aachen, fell to the Americans five days later. Even though the troops in Courland fought far from their homeland as it was being transformed into an inferno, their morale remained surprisingly high to the end.
One author reports a serious decline in morale among units in Courland, but available evidence does not support this conclusion.58 Nevertheless, there were sporadic outbreaks of poor morale, especially early in the army group’s isolation in Courland and upon Germany’s surrender. For example, in early November Schörner complained of an alarming increase in cases of self-mutilation, and a chaplain reported that the first question asked by most wounded troops was whether their injury was serious enough to require evacuation to Germany.59 Yet there were relatively few cases of desertion among German units in Courland, certainly in large part owing to the simple fact that there was really nowhere to desert to. At the end of March 1945, however, nine soldiers from one division went over to the Russians. This is the only report of multiple desertion to the enemy, and other cases of desertion were relatively few and far between.60 Surprisingly, most reports of poor morale after November 1944 concerned replacements who had just arrived in Courland, not troops already there.61