Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  On March 27, Hitler, enraged by the failure of his chosen troops in Hungary, ordered Leibstandarte, Das Reich, Hohenstaufen, and Hitler Jugend to remove the cuff titles bearing their division names. The alleged response exists in many versions involving combinations of a chamber pot full of armbands and high decorations being sent to the Führer’s headquarters—sometimes accompanied by a severed arm, and sometimes by the injunction “kiss my ass.”

  Reality was predictably less spectacular. The most credible version has Dietrich saying with tear-filled eyes, “So this is the thanks for everything,” and ordering the morale-killing message not to be passed to his men. The chamber pot and the epithet are gestures of defiance borrowed and adapted from Goethe’s Sturm und Drang play Götz von Berlichingen—a bit of wishful thinking by postwar SS nostalgists. Ironically, the divisions had been ordered to remove their armbands for security purposes when sent to Hungary. Many replacements never even received them.

  From Stavka’s perspective, Hitler could not have been more obliging had he been on Stalin’s payroll. The Soviet High Command’s plan to finish the war dated from October, and involved two major offensives. The secondary attack would be mounted against East Prussia; the main one across Poland. In a decision with as many postwar implications as military aspects, Zukhov and Konev, personal and professional rivals since the war’s early days, were each assigned command of a front under Stalin’s direct command—objective Berlin.

  Given the Soviets’ overwhelming numerical superiority, developed operational effectiveness, and improving logistical capabilities, the Germans could do little but play out the hand, as a trumped bridge player tosses meaningless cards onto the table. Even before Gille was transferred to Hungary, Guderian’s concept of a mobile defensive battle fought by a strong central reserve was arguably two years behind the times. Its potential was further diminished when the army group commanders concentrated four more mechanized divisions closely behind what they considered vital sectors. That approach, a variant of the Model model, was arguably only a year out of date. Its success depended on a far closer balance of quality and quantity than existed in 1945. The dispersed panzers were in fact a security blanket for an infantry who might stand to a finish—but whose chances of withstanding a major attack were limited to the point of being imaginary.

  The main Soviet offensive made five miles in the first three hours of January 12. By the end of January 13, the breakthrough was 25 miles deep. The panzer divisions in its way were overwhelmed, able to do no more than fight for mere survival. Zukhov’s 26th Guards Rifle Corps evoked the panzers’ glory days by seizing a vital bridge before German engineers could throw the demolition switches. Warsaw fell on January 17, and Hitler’s blind rage led him to turn Guderian over to the Gestapo for interrogation, albeit briefly. On January 20, Konev’s spearheads entered Silesia. By January 31, Zukhov was on the Oder at Küstrin, 40 miles from Berlin.

  The primary German response, initiated by Hitler, was to transfer the newly organized Grossdeutschland Corps from East Prussia. With Grossdeutschland, Brandenburg and Hermann Göring Divisions also under command, it went into action on January 16. But the trains carrying its rear echelon were intercepted by Soviet tanks; the best it was able to do was to serve as a rallying point for disorganized soldiers and fleeing civilians. Ever-dividing, ever-shrinking pockets, most coalesced around a couple of tanks, perhaps some half-tracks, and a company or so of panzer grenadiers, made their way toward the Oder, hoping above all to avoid attracting Soviet attention. The lucky ones beat Zukhov by a day or two.

  To the north the Russian attack took five days to break through a German defense, enervated by the withdrawal of its armored reserve. As Russian tanks reached the Baltic, the Germans withdrew in the only direction open to them—eastward, into Königsberg. And the near-forgotten Courland Pocket, with its two forlorn panzer divisions, stood to, waiting for the Russians to finish it.

  The Red Army’s pause at the end of January was in part to refresh its logistics, in part to secure its flanks, and in part to structure its internal priorities. The attacks into Pomerania and Silesia in February and March scarcely make a footnote to the story of Hitler’s panzers, apart from their success in screening a withdrawal- cum-evacuation into the relatively safe zone of the Sudetenland. The battle for Berlin was another matter. The Reich’s capital was defended by the Wehrmacht’s flotsam: boys and old men, convalescents and comb-outs, foreigners fighting with ropes around their necks, equipped with anything handy. Factories and rail sidings were full of armored vehicles that could not be moved for lack of fuel and fear of air attack.

  Guderian’s hopes of forming new reserves by transferring divisions from the West and evacuating Courland were not much less delusional than the Führer’s. His plans for a local spoiling attack to disrupt the Russians on Berlin’s doorstep primarily featured winning a screaming argument with Hitler. The attack itself collapsed within days—a predictable outcome given its limited striking power.

  The final Russian offensive began on April 16. It was still a Zukhov- Konev derby, with the final prize the Reichstag. Familiar numbers flash across the screen: 21st Panzer Division, 25th Panzer Grenadier, LXVI Panzer Corps, 3rd Panzer Army, SS Northland Panzer Grenadiers. All by now were shadow formations exercising ad hoc command over constantly changing orders of battle that meant nothing except in a wire diagram. The tanks and assault guns that remained went down by ones and twos, on streets and in neighborhoods with names all too familiar.

  No narrative of the Reich’s final days can be called typical. Let one stand nevertheless for many. The 249th Assault Gun Brigade was evacuated from West Prussia, reorganized and reinforced, and picked up new guns in Spandau, at the factory itself. It went into action in Berlin on April 27. In three days it destroyed 180 Soviet AFVs—at least by its own reckoning—and had only nine guns left. They fought in the heart of Berlin: on Frankfurter Allee, around the Technische Hochschule, across Alexanderplatz. One of the officers was hanged by an SS flying squad, presumably for “cowardice.” Another received the Knight’s Cross for valor.

  On May 5, Hitler’s death was announced. The CO called his men together, and it was decided to break out toward the Elbe. In the darkness, the brigade lost contact. Half cut its way through to the Elbe. The other half, three guns, came under Russian fire. The lead vehicle took a direct hit. The next one got stuck. The third came to help, saw the second gun blown apart, and was itself disabled. Its crew escaped. The 249th had fought to the last gun and the last round. Adolf Hitler had long been aware the war was lost. Instead of a glorious final victory, he sought a heroic downfall, a Wagnerian Götterdammerung. What he achieved was in macrocosm the fate of this single small unit: downfall in chaos.

  EPILOGUE

  HITLER’S PANZERS ENDED their careers at random, wherever they had been washed up by the war’s final tides. The 1st Panzer Division wound up in Austria and surrendered to the Americans. What was left of 2nd Panzer—200 men and seven AFVs—had been absorbed into a provisional brigade and surrendered in Plauen in the Vogtland—again to Americans. Fifth Panzer capitulated to the Red Army near Danzig. Seventh fought around Berlin and managed to deliver most of its men to the British. Fourth, 8th,13th, 20th, and 23rd Panzer Divisions were caught in the final Soviet offensives. Twelfth and 14th Panzer went under with the rest of the Courland Pocket; 29th and 90th Panzer Grenadier Divisons capitulated in Italy.

  Ironically the bulk of 6th SS Panzer Army managed at the last minute to surrender to the Americans. A regiment of Das Reich brought a thousand-vehicle convoy of German wounded and civilians out of Prague and into the US 3rd Army’s lines. Hitler Jugend, defiant to the last, refused to display white flags on their vehicles as ordered when they stampeded past a Russian tank column. Hohenstaufen surrendered en bloc. Frundsberg and Viking broke up and scattered. Totenkopf ’s CO negotiated with the Americans: surrender in return for disarming the guards at Mauthausen concentration camp. The division’s 3,000 survivors were promp
tly turned over to the Russians—something about reaping what had been sown.

  Most of the tankers who fell into Western hands demobilized themselves or were quickly released once it became clear that resistance to the occupation was limited and eroding. Some prisoners of the Russians returned home almost as quickly. Others disappeared into a postwar labor/penal system in a near-random process having nothing to do with individual behavior and little with unit identity—except in the case of Waffen SS. As many as a half million died; most survivors were held for around ten years.

  More senior panzer officers faced trial than is sometimes understood. Hoth and Reinhardt each received 15 years in the High Command Trial held in 1948. A British tribunal sentenced Manstein to 18 years, essentially for failing to protect civilians in his areas of operation. Kurt Meyer and Jochen Peiper had death sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Guderian and Harpe were held by the US without charge or trial for three years, then released. Balck went underground as a day laborer until 1948 when he was arrested, tried, and convicted of ordering the drumhead execution of a subordinate for being drunk on duty. Raus, who remained below his own army’s radar throughout the war, profited from his relative invisibility and was released after two years as a POW.

  As in the case of their soldiers, there is no discernible pattern in the postwar treatment of the generals. What they have in common is the shortness of the time actually served relative to the sentences: six years for Hoth; four for Reinhardt and Manstein (the latter on health grounds!).

  The generals’ treatment is frequently dismissed as a revolving door farce inspired by the emerging Cold War and the perceived need for West German participation in a developing Atlantic Alliance. A more sinister variant asserts a comprehensive readiness to forgive and forget in the name of anti-Communism. Both were undeniable factors but played secondary roles. The Nuremberg Trials proper are best understood in the context of that variant of vigilantism which seeks to do justice according to existing generally accepted principles, in crypto-Hobbesian circumstances where an applicable legal apparatus does not exist. The tribunals’ ultimate purpose was to establish precedents, not to replace one system of drumhead punishment by another.

  In that context a major principle of selecting defendants was the potential for making an unchallengeable case. In the immediate postwar years, finding legally credible documentary or eyewitness evidence for specific criminal acts authorized or committed by senior officers was seldom easy. That was particularly true for field officers as opposed to occupation commanders—especially so for those whose primary service had been in Russia. Wilhelm Bittrich, for example, was convicted in 1953 by a French military tribunal of ordering the summary execution of Resistance members, but was later acquitted by a civilian court. Manstein’s trial in the British system was sufficiently irregular to generate public protests from several generals—and from Winston Churchill, who denounced the process as politically inspired by a Labour government seeking to curry favor with the Soviet Union.

  In the background lay as well the tu quoque argument that Allied forces had been guilty of similar behavior, ranging from Americans’ shooting inconvenient prisoners in Sicily to mass rapes perpetrated by French goumiers in Italy and tolerated by the command structure. Nor, with effective deadly force in their own systems resting in the military, were governments especially enthusiastic about establishing the kinds of precedents involved in prosecuting senior officers for not denouncing and disobeying policies established by state authority.

  In wider contexts, any hope of reconstructing a Europe devastated by war, occupation, and liberation depended heavily on restoring comity among states and peoples—especially given the obvious refusal of the British and Americans to consider anything but a limited occupation of “their” Germany. Even before the war, a major consideration in appeasing Hitler and seeking to integrate his Reich into Europe’s order had been the sense that Germany’s contributions to Europe’s history, culture, and civilization were too seminal to be excluded at will and permanently.

  Within what became the Federal Republic, Vaclav Havel’s familiar argument against comprehensive punishment has retroactive force. Justice and reconciliation are concepts easier enunciated than implemented, especially in the context of the Third Reich. German society as a whole was complicit—arguably enthusiastically complicit—in Hitler’s regime and Hitler’s war. In practical terms, very few adult individuals were completely free of involvement. The nature of that involvement was such, moreover, that retribution involved half the German people perpetually sitting in judgment on the other half—with the halves differing for each situation. A reconstructed government and society would tear itself apart with new conflicts—unless it was created on what amounted to a totalitarian model.

  That last was essentially the case in the Soviet Zone that became the German Democratic Republic. The experience of the Third Reich was addressed by fiat and implemented instrumentally: officially denying any connection between the “new” GDR and its immediate predecessor, and overlooking or redefining the awkward pasts of individuals useful to the new New Order.

  “Collective amnesia” is too strong a term for what happened in the Federal Republic. Stunde Null (Zero Hour) is closer to the mark, if understood as drawing a line under the past for the sake of a present and a future. Memories remained so strong that one can best speak neither of denial nor repression, but rather of taboo: taboo against asking awkward questions in private and public. Beginning in the 1960s the memories have been eloquently evoked and comprehensively evaluated. In particular the concept that German soldiers remained free of the Reich’s crimes and bore a “clean shield” as men fighting honorably for their country has been discredited beyond revival. But like drastic medical procedures and psychological processes, such voluntary fundamental reconstructions can only be performed effectively in a general context of health and stability. Without the “economic miracle” and the restoration of at least marginal international respectability, “mastering the past” was likely to have remained little more than a cosmetic project. Even then the examples of post-World War II Japan and post-Soviet Russia indicate that Germany’s behavior remains more exception than rule.

  During the 1950s most senior panzer officers found niches in a Federal Republic that was more a niche society than generally realized. Guderian and Manstein were by all odds the most visible, writing widely translated memoirs that continue to define many aspects of the tankers’ war. Only a cut below these works in external influence is Friedrich von Mellenthin’s Panzer Battles, a detailed, at times tendentious, operational/tactical analysis of his campaigns as a staff officer in North Africa and Russia. Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin made most of his reputation in Italy as a panzer general without armored troops. His Neither Fear Nor Hope probably ranks fourth in familiarity among English translations of tanker memoirs, probably because it is informed by a hostility to Nazism defined by Senger’s Catholicism—which did not deter him from doing his duty to the German people by serving Hitler’s Reich.

  Other Panzermänner turned to the pen at home. Balck’s Ordnung im Chaos presents the Russian front from the division and corps perspective. Kurt Mayer’s Grenadiere, published in 1957 and later translated into English, has done much to confirm the image of the Waffen SS as a force of bold adventurers. History rather than autobiography was the preferred métier for more senior officers. Hoth published a narrative of his panzer group during Barbarossa. Raus authored a number of specialized reports for the US Army.

  In wider contexts, Hasso von Manteuffel spent four years in the Bundestag as a Free Democrat, and was a guest lecturer at West Point. Herbert Gille became a journalist, founded a magazine for Viking’s veterans, and actually owned a bookstore. Balck and Mellenthin made virtual second careers in the late 1970s as think-tank consultants advising the US Army how to fight outnumbered against the Soviet Union in the Fulda Gap and win panzer-style.

  The panzers’ direct influence on the emer
ging Bundeswehr was limited. Manstein served as Konrad Adenauer’s senior defense advisor for a time, but the Federal Republic took extreme pains to keep out of leadership positions anyone whose attitudes or behavior might give the new armed forces a tone encouraging the denial of previous experiences. The ex-Wehrmacht officers accepted for service were almost all lower-ranking; major and below. Traditions were established de novo, in line with historian Manfred Messerschmidt’s prescient warning against concentrating on achievements at the expense of intentions. Lines of heritage emphasized reformers and resisters. Unit designations were severely numerical. Naming buildings after former generals regularly generated criticism.

  In operational contexts, the Bundeswehr in its developed form did closely replicate panzer formats and experience. Ten of its twelve divisions were armored or mechanized. Its Leopard tanks owed more in concept to the Panzer III and IV than the Tiger, and arguably the Panther as well, in their combination of gun power, mobility, and reliability. That was a sharp contrast to the British, for example, whose post-Centurion lines of tank development emphasized protection and hitting power in the fashion of the later panzer models. Its principal companion, the Marder, borrowed an old name for a development of the SdKfz 251: an armored personnel carrier that was a full- tracked fighting platform as opposed to a half-track battle taxi.

  Politically the Bundeswehr was just as committed to a forward defense as had been its predecessor in Russia, albeit for essentially different reasons. With 30 percent of the Federal Republic’s population and a quarter of its industrial capacity within 100 miles of the Eastern frontier, trading space for time in the Manstein/Guderian tradition was impossible. Analysis of the defensive operations in Russia between 1943 and 1945, however, strongly suggested that mechanized forces properly trained, equipped, and commanded retained the capacity to check effectively any conventional offensive in central Europe. Model and Raus became fashionable, albeit unacknowledged, mentors of a tactical doctrine calling for quick ripostes: trip-hammer blows executed at the lowest possible levels with the purpose of stabilizing the battle line to a point where nuclear escalation became a calculable option as opposed to a logical development.