Hitler
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Instead, Hitler put the Russian advance–and the associated stories of murder and rape, many of them true–to propagandistic use. In his last radio speech, given on the occasion of the twelfth anniversary of the takeover of power on 30 January 1933, Hitler promised to master the ‘terrible fate which is currently taking place in the east’, which was ‘exterminating people in their tens and hundreds of thousands’ in the cities and the countryside.167 The spectre of annihilation, long threatened from the air, was now visible on the ground as well. He implored Germans to rely on their own strength to repel the Bolshevik hordes, and not to depend on the west to save them, because it would itself fall victim to the Judaeo-communist virus. In a passage which revealed his enduring belief in the manipulative relationship between western plutocracy and the Soviet regime, Hitler claimed that the west was now ‘unable to banish the demons they have called from the steppes of Asia’. That said, there was a palpable sense that the Russian threat was now, for the first time in almost two years, moving to the top of Hitler’s agenda. From now on, Hitler paid more attention to the eastern front. ‘The Führer ordered,’ the war diary of the OKW recorded on 29 January 1945, ‘in view of the situation in the east, to go over to the defensive in the west.’168 Armoured forces were transferred to the east.169
In late January 1945 and early February, faced with overwhelming odds on all fronts, Hitler was forced to recognize the failure of his mobilization project. Despite the pressures of war, he was unable to overcome the deep-seated resistance within German society to the prosecution of total war. This became clear during an interminable and increasingly bizarre exchange with some generals on 27 January, when Hitler attempted to persuade them that officers of a certain age, who were no longer capable of discharging the duties associated with their existing or former rank, be recruited to serve in a more junior capacity. This idea met with furious resistance from the generals, who insisted that no man should be required to serve below a man who held a rank inferior to that at which he had retired. It violated their sense of professional honour. The Führer pointed out the absurdity of the situation. ‘At the same moment in which I am summoning the Volkssturm and recruit God knows what kind of people into the Wehrmacht by disregarding the question of age,’ he said, ‘I am sending completely fit people, who are actually soldiers, home to man redundant posts in the bureaucracy.’170 Hitler’s logic was impeccable, but he was unable to make any headway. Twelve years into the Third Reich, which had so transformed Germany and Europe, the whole episode showed how little Hitler had changed the Germans themselves.
The real problem, though, was not men but materiel. In early 1945, Germany was awash with adult males, foreign and local. The Luftwaffe, for example, comprised 2 million men, hundreds of thousands of whom no longer had meaningful functions.171 Hitler did not have enough weapons to give them. The war economy, already in a parlous state, was further battered by the capture of the Upper Silesian industrial area by the Red Army. Hitler also lamented the lack of nickel, and worried about the effect of the ‘decline of material’ on jet aircraft production. ‘The worst thing that can happen to us,’ though, was ‘the destruction of the German transport system.’ ‘We have enough coal,’ he explained, ‘there is so much being produced in the mines that we can cannot carry it all off.’ In fact, Hitler continued, ‘we have more than 80,000 wagons [of coal] more, but we cannot transport them’. On 30 January 1945, the normally optimistic Speer sent the Führer a memorandum warning him that without Upper Silesia production would collapse.
Hitler reacted the next day with the demand for an ‘Emergency Programme’ to produce more weapons. This was proclaimed a ‘currently more important task’ than ‘recruitment [of those workers] into the Wehrmacht, the Volkssturm or other purposes’.172 It was no use. The deteriorating levels of equipment provision amounted to a steady ‘de-motorization’ of the Wehrmacht. The OKH conceded in early February 1945 that ‘the active conduct of operations is no longer possible’.173 Even where vehicles were available, there was often not enough petrol to drive them, because Hitler issued strict instructions that fuel should only be provided for the artillery and panzers.174 In what can only be described as desperation, Hitler demanded the established of cyclist units led by lieutenants with ‘tank-busting weapons’ (probably bazookas) which would take on enemy armoured formations.175 All this was the result of the systematic destruction of the Nazi war economy and transportation system by Anglo-American air fleets, which were now steadily bombing the Reich back into the early nineteenth century. There was really no need for Morgenthau to de-industrialize Germany; those Swabian-American engineers were doing that already.
Despite the shift in military gravity towards the eastern front, Hitler’s overall strategy had not changed. He still hoped to make the Anglo-Americans sicken of the fight and to split the enemy coalition.176 In order to profit from any such development, Hitler needed to ensure the survival of the Reich and maintain a capacity to strike at the Anglo-Americans. To that end, his military dispositions were not driven by classic strategic considerations, but by economic ones. ‘Modern war,’ he told Dönitz on 5 February 1945, ‘was principally an economic war whose needs must be given priority.’177 Hitler laid down as the priorities on the eastern front not the Vistula or East Prussia, where the Soviet military threat was greatest, but first the industrial Vienna basin and the Hungarian oil-fields (which now provided 80 per cent of Germany’s requirements), and then the Upper Silesian industrial area and the Bay of Danzig, which was vital for the submarine war.178 He refused Dönitz’s offer to send 1,500 naval ratings from Gdynia to fight in Danzig as infantry because they were irreplaceable specialists.179 Substantial forces still remained in Kurland–more than 630 tanks in mid February 1945, despite withdrawals–for the same reason.180 There were also still some 400,000 men in Norway to safeguard the iron-ore supply and support the submarine campaign.
The new element in February 1945 was diplomacy. Despite Hitler’s hopes and stratagems, three-power unity between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin was reaffirmed at the Yalta conference between 4 and 12 February 1945. Either in reaction to this, or following some other logic, Hitler finally authorized, or at least tolerated, negotiations for a separate peace. On 6 February, he was briefed by the supreme SS commander in Italy, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, on apparent Allied overtures in that theatre via Switzerland and the Catholic Church.181 Hitler apparently received the information without comment. On 19 February Himmler began a dialogue with Count Bernadotte about a possible separate peace with the Western Allies, seemingly without Hitler’s knowledge.182 The Führer did, however, reluctantly bless Ribbentrop’s overtures to the western powers at around the same time, which were conducted by the Foreign Office diplomat Fritz Hesse in Stockholm.
Hesse’s instructions bore Hitler’s imprint, much more than that of Ribbentrop. They stressed the ‘biological’ strength of some 200 million Russians who were about to be reinforced by another 100 million or so mainly Slav eastern Europeans. In this context, the Western Allies were told, they could ill afford to lose the Germans, who were the ‘only biological factor’ which could provide a ‘counterweight to the immense Bolshevik mass of Slavs in the east’.183 Persisting with the ‘Morgenthau Plan’, the argument continued, would simply do Stalin’s work in Germany for him. The Soviet dictator would also be able to rely on the ‘20 million bombed-out’, desperate people who were now tending towards communism. The main addressee of the document was Britain. It was in her ‘own deepest interest’ to establish a front in Germany against the Soviet Union on the first day after the ‘possible’ defeat of the Third Reich, especially as the United States would probably lapse back into ‘isolationism’. London would therefore need to abandon ‘the old British idea of a balance inside Europe’, and accept that ‘every further weakening of Germany through the Anglo-American air force and through the advance of the British and Americans would in the long term be a policy of self-destruction from the British point o
f view’. The pitch was no different from those which Hitler had been making for a decade, except that he was now threatening London not with German strength but the spectre of a complete German collapse. Hesse’s cover was soon exposed, the Allies showed no interest, and Hitler’s plan came to nothing.
Instead of negotiating, the Allies surged forward again. The eastern front buckled under repeated Soviet blows. The much-vaunted Ostwall gave way within a few days; the Wehrmacht was forced to admit shamefacedly in February 1945 that all the digging had been in vain.184 On 11 February the last defenders of Buda Hill in Budapest surrendered after a six-week siege. Four days later, Breslau was surrounded; supplies had to be flown in by air. In East Prussia, the Red Army pinned the Wehrmacht ever more against the Baltic coast as the main thrust pushed westward. Hitler rolled with the punch, determined to hold on to as much of the province as possible, and especially Königsberg.185
In the west, the Canadians advanced through the Reichswald near Kleve in early February, where there was bitter fighting, closely watched by Hitler, as the town was completely destroyed.186 Towards the end of the month, their spearheads met with the Americans at Geldern. The Americans also advanced in the Palatinate in western Germany. Hitler told the defenders there to show the same ‘fanatical toughness with which the Americans defended Bastogne’.187 In the air, the Allies kept up a relentless pressure. On 3 February, the USAAF launched a large-scale attack on Berlin which killed the head of the ‘People’s Court’, Roland Freisler. The bombers also damaged much of the government district, including the new Imperial Chancellery and Hitler’s own apartment. On the night of 13/14 February 1945 came the most terrible blow of all. A massive Anglo-American strike on Dresden devastated one of Europe’s most beautiful cities and killed about 35,000 civilians. Hitler was particularly affected by the destruction. In the immediate aftermath, he seriously considered shooting a British or American prisoner of war for every dead civilian in Dresden.188 He also discussed repudiating the Geneva Convention with regard to the Anglo-Americans (Stalin was not a signatory).189 It was only after hearing strenuous objections from Ribbentrop and the Wehrmacht leadership that Hitler desisted. His sense that the Western Allies were fighting a war of annihilation against the German people remained strong.190
The strain under which Hitler was operating became apparent on 24 February 1945, when he hastily convened his Gauleiter for a meeting. They were shocked by his appearance, especially the fact that not merely his hands but his entire body was trembling. Hitler’s message was stark, and reflected his narratival strategy. ‘Should the German people give up,’ he warned, ‘then it would be demonstrated that they had no moral worth, and in that case they would deserve destruction. That would be the rightful judgement of history and Providence.’ Hitler then announced that he would stay on the defensive in the west and counter-attack in the east. He also promised new submarines and jet fighters, but was not specific. Towards the end Hitler ‘predicted that, if Germany held firm during the crisis, a day would come’ when the Allies were riven by ‘serious conflicts’. Hitler’s ninety-minute speech was a disappointment to his audience, who had been expecting concrete information about the deployment of new weapons. ‘For the first time,’ the Gauleiter of Swabia, Karl Wahl, recalls, ‘the impression upon his listeners was not convincing’ because the ‘sensational news which all anticipated was not forthcoming’.191
That same day, Hermann Esser read out a statement by Hitler in Munich at a meeting to mark the anniversary of the drawing-up of the NSDAP programme. Hitler repeated the message given to the Gauleiter about the ‘unnatural alliance between exploitative capitalism and human-destroying Bolshevism’, though in fact he had spent most of his career claiming that this alliance was anything but unnatural. Hitler then reiterated the perils posed by the Red Army advance to German women and children, but referred to the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik destruction of peoples and their west European [he meant British] and American pimps’, phrasing which suggests that Hitler still saw the Soviet Union primarily as the instrument of the Anglo-Americans. The Führer also stressed the example of Frederick the Great, though more as the man who had made the second Reich possible than as the great survivor of the Seven Years War. ‘When the greatest king of our history, Frederick II, was in danger of being defeated in his seven-year war against a world coalition [sic],’ Hitler claimed, ‘it was solely down to his heroic soul that the germ cell and core of a future Reich came out victorious in the end.’192 Once again, the narratival strategy was clear: an exhortation to resist now as the precondition not for victory but for rebirth.
Despite widespread concerns about the military situation, Hitler’s authority remained unchallenged, among the Nazi leadership, the Wehrmacht and the population at large. At the meal with his Gauleiter after the meeting on 24 February, he once again dominated the room and revived many of them with his visions of splitting the Allied coalition.193 They all still accepted his mediation of their disputes, as did all other members of the Nazi hierarchy. The Führer sided with Goebbels against Speer on the recruitment of armament workers, with Speer against Bormann on the same issue with regard to the Volkssturm.194 Despite the steady crumbling of the ‘Hitler Myth’ more generally, as the military situation deteriorated,195 loyalty to Hitler still inspired a large proportion of the army rank and file.196 There was thus no prospect of Hitler being toppled, by either a palace revolt or a popular revolution.
In March 1945, Hitler made one last attempt to change the strategic dynamic. He launched two offensives on the eastern front, both of them driven by economic rather than narrowly military considerations. In early March, the Wehrmacht counter-attacked at Lauban in Lower Silesia as part of an operation designed to recover the vital industrial area there. At around the same time, a larger thrust, long in the preparation,197 was mounted in Hungary with a view to protecting Germany’s last remaining oil reserves around Lake Balaton. On the night of 3 March 1945, the Luftwaffe conducted its first bombing raids on Britain for a long time, striking targets in the midlands, the north and the east of England. The firing of V2 rockets against Britain continued, the last one being launched on 27 March 1945. That same day, the now redundant commander of the rocket programme, Hans Kammler, was appointed the ‘general plenipotentiary for jet aircraft’ with all powers necessary to develop and produce jet aircraft.198 Above all, Hitler still put his faith in the new submarines and in the U-boat war more generally, on whose progress he was briefed by the navy throughout the month. According to Dönitz, the two first boats of type XXIII had performed well on operations and mass production could begin soon. The first type XXI, he claimed, would go on patrol within a few days.199
Despite the dire military situation, Hitler remained reluctant to draw on another human resource, though for very different reasons. He had long puzzled over how best to use the various potentially pro-Axis flotsam and jetsam which had ended up in Germany either as prisoners of war or as refugees. ‘One does not know,’ he remarked to his generals in late March 1945, ‘what else is ambling around here,’ adding that he had ‘just heard to my astonishment of the sudden appearance of a Ukrainian SS division’. The Führer reserved particular contempt for Bose’s Indians. ‘The Indian Legion,’ he pronounced, ‘is a joke.’ ‘There are Indians,’ he continued, ‘who cannot kill a louse, they would rather allow themselves to be eaten.’ ‘They would not kill any British,’ he predicted. Hitler argued that because the Indians deployed by the Japanese in Burma, who were after all fighting to liberate their homeland, had performed badly–‘they ran away like stampeding sheep’–they would be highly unlikely to do better in Europe. It would be more sensible, he concluded, to put them to work on prayer mills.200
These discussions were, in any case, somewhat academic. Throughout March 1945, the enemy coalition tightened its grip on Germany still further. The Western Allies, who had moved slowly in January and February, made spectacular gains. On 7 March, the Americans took Cologne; more importantly, they seized the bri
dge over the Rhine at Remagen intact. Men and tanks poured across. Further north, Hitler vainly hoped to hold on to a bridgehead around Duisburg to enable the transport of coal out of the Ruhr via the Dortmund–Ems canal.201 The British–again closely watched by Hitler202–prepared to mount a massive airborne and amphibious assault across the Rhine. Churchill came to Venlo on 25 March to watch the ‘Anglo-Saxons’–the British 2nd Army, the 1 Canadian and the 9 US Army–crossing the last great natural obstacle in western Germany. A day later, the Americans took Darmstadt. Despite all Hitler’s exhortations, resistance in the west was crumbling fast. The entire left bank of the Rhine was now in Allied hands, the crossings of the river were secure, and the way to Berlin for eighty-five Allied divisions from the west lay open. March 1945 also saw the heaviest bombing of the entire war against both industrial and civilian targets.203
Hitler was powerless to do anything against the succession of Anglo-American blows, both on the ground and in the air. He reshuffled the military leadership in the west, replacing Rundstedt (for ‘age reasons’) with Kesselring, who in turn was replaced in Italy by General von Vietinghoff,204 but these were largely cosmetic moves. Hitler was pleased with the excellent performance of the Me 262 against Allied bombers,205 but there were too few of them to make much difference. He was aghast at the dismal performance of the rest of the Luftwaffe, which had largely disappeared from the skies over Germany. ‘What particularly worries me about the Luftwaffe,’ Hitler complained in late March 1945, ‘are the so-called missing figures for aircraft.’206 Clearly, many pilots were treating discretion as the better part of valour. By contrast, Hitler was increasingly impressed with the attitude of Dönitz’s Kriegsmarine. In late March 1945, he ordered that command of fortresses in the west should be given in the first instance to naval officers because, though many fortresses had surrendered in the course of the war, no ship had been lost without fighting to the last.207 This sentiment was strengthened by Hitler’s increasing reliance on the navy as the one branch of the Wehrmacht which could still plausibly deliver, if not victory, then at least a painful blow against the Western Allies. The extent of his belief in the new submarines is demonstrated by the fact that he allocated for their production a quantity of steel equivalent to 5,100 tanks, not to mention the man hours and other opportunity costs.208