VICTORY OR DEATH
The spring thaw of 1942 saw a new German offensive moving southwest into the Caucasus. Advanced German panzer units reached the ridge overlooking the Volga River and the vast Russian steppe in August 1942, and at the same time, Rommel was preparing to punch through Egypt to the Suez Canal and beyond, with the ultimate objective of linking up with German forces in the Caucasus. Montgomery’s hammer blow at El Alamein, in October 1942, deprived Rommel of half his men and destroyed 90 per cent of his equipment. Following this, for the first time, the Africa Corps and the forces of the Third Reich were in full retreat. The Reich could spare no additional resources for their North African campaign, just as the enormous resources of the United States started flowing into the North African theatre.ccxxx Although Britain had suffered one humiliating defeat after another, at Narvik, Dunkerque, Crete and Tobruk, her strategy of spreading German forces thin and wide was finally about to start paying dividends, and at the critical moment in the war. The Africa corps finally surrendered in May 1943, just as the Eastern Front began to cave in, depriving Germany of 275,000 battle-hardened troops, the Germans lacking both the ships and the airpower to successfully evacuate them to Italy.
The great tipping point had come at the battle of Stalingrad in February 1943 in which the Axis lost 1.5 million troops, who were killed, wounded or captured.ccxxxi The last German victory was led by Field Marshal Manstein; ‘Manstein’s Riposte’ took place on the Eastern Front at the Third Battle of Kharkov, fought between 16th February and 15th March 1943. Kharkov was followed by the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, which raged from 4th July until 23rd August, and ended the German High Command’s last hopes of a major strategic breakthrough or counter-offensive on the Eastern Front. Germany was now on the retreat on all fronts, including on the home front from the air, as her cities were being pounded to dust one after another. From 24th July to 3rd August, the RAF launched the most destructive bombing campaign, in an ever-escalating list of devastating historical firsts, on the city of Hamburg during operation ‘Gomorrah’. The raids, combined with a summer heat wave, created a ‘firestorm’ that destroyed over 80 per cent of the city, killed 45,000 civilians and left over 1 million people homeless. Albert Speer (the German Armaments Minister) feared that three more such raids on strategic targets could force Germany out of the war.ccxxxii(2)
Stalin never took Churchill’s strategy of opening a second front against the Axis in Italy seriously, and berated his Western Allies for the slowness of their build-up of a ‘real second front’ against Nazi Germany. Stalin was only consoled by the photographs and figures which showed the destruction of German cities by the RAF’s unflinching air offensive that Churchill gave him. The Battle of the Atlantic also turned decisively between March and May 1943; this was the battle that Churchill had said he feared most, the one that threatened to strangle Britain’s supply routes and force her out of the war. In March 1943, the Allies lost 120 ships for twelve U-boats, but by May the tables had turned, with a ratio of fifty-eight ships for forty-three U-boats — a quarter of the Reich’s active U-boat fleet. With the effective use of new radar technologies and aircraft to hunt the U-boats, the German strategy in the Atlantic began to unravel.(3)
Germany was now not only in full retreat on all fronts, she was also losing the war of production. Although the war had swung sharply against Germany by the summer of 1943, Hitler and Goebbels held on, in the vain hope of another spectacular victory. Nazi propaganda, fear of retribution, the demand for unconditional surrender, hoped-for miracle weapons, and the belief in the collapse of the impossible capitalist-communist coalition kept their hopes alive; but with the successful opening of a third land front in Normandy in June 1944, all but the most fanatical Nazis realised the war was lost.
Leading elements of the military, seeing the writing on the wall, took matters into their own hands. In July 1944, the largest and most spectacularly disastrous of the forty-two assassination attempts on Hitler’s life failed, which had dire consequences for the continuation of the war and for Germany as a whole. The last significant elements of resistance to Hitler were purged; 5,000 were arrested, thousands were interned into concentration camps, and 200 were gruesomely executed. The Third Reich’s leadership now locked itself in to the unreality of its Berlin bunkers and declared war on its own people: if Nazism was to fail, it would take the German people with it into the abyss. There would be no repeat of November 1918, no surrender, only victory or death. Hitler began to push around armies that no longer existed on maps, preparing defensive positions for which there was neither time, resources, nor troops sufficient to man them.
Among Hitler’s final orders was the instruction to implement a thorough scorched earth policy in Germany, to destroy every factory, farm, remaining livestock, bridge, airport and facility that could be of use to the Allies, which would also deprive the German people of the means to subsist. His twisted rationale, in the increasingly surreal mood in the bunker, was that the best had fallen and what remained was not worth saving. In the epic Darwinist struggle between the races, the Slavs had won and thus the future was theirs.
Hitler’s final insane strategy was to use the last of Germany’s military reserves in a forlorn attempt to throw the Western Allies back into the Channel, just as the Red Army approached the Reich’s eastern frontier. Sepp Dietrich, the head of the SS Panzer Army, on being informed of Hitler’s plans for a German offensive in the west, exclaimed:
All Hitler wants me to do is cross a river, capture Brussels, and then go on to take Antwerp. And all this at the worst time of the year through the Ardennes when the snow is waist deep and there isn’t room to deploy four tanks abreast let alone armoured divisions. When it doesn’t get light until eight and it’s dark again at four with reformed divisions made up chiefly of kids and sick old men — and at Christmas.(4)
As always, the Germans achieved miracles with what they had, taking sixty miles in three days, more ground than the entire Allied armies had done in three months. Numerous military historians have described the German military as the greatest fighting machine in the modern era. Sir Max Hastings gave the men of the Wehrmacht this accolade: ‘The defence of Germany against overwhelming odds reflected far more remarkable military skills than those displayed by the attackers, especially when all German operations had to be conducted under the dead hand of Hitler.’(5) But to what end? The Battle of the Bulge raged from 16th December 1944 to 27th January 1945, petering out for lack of fuel and in the face of overwhelming Allied superiority, in men, materials and particularly in air power. Hitler had used up the last and best of his reserves just as the Red Army was poised to launch its most ferocious assault on Germany. Before Hitler’s Ardennes offensive, Allied troops had stood an equal distance away from Berlin both to the west and to the east. If Hitler had had any sympathy for the fate of the German people he would have used his last best reserves to stem and slow the tide of the advancing Soviet forces in the east, allowing the Western Allies to meet them not in central Germany but much further east.ccxxxiii Had he done this, he would have saved countless civilian lives, and many towns and cities would have been spared from needless destruction, as more bombs fell on Germany in the last six months of the war than during the four years since the fall of France. It would not have changed the outcome of the war, nor would it have averted the carve-up of Germany, but it would have saved millions of his fellow citizens’ lives.
Why did common sense not prevail and why did the war fail to end in 1944? Aside from a fanatical leadership’s refusal to accept reality and face the consequences of their own barbarism, it was primarily because of the memory of Versailles, and because the relentless bombing campaigns did not break the will of the German people, but rather stiffened their resistance and rage against the Allies, irrespective of their political sympathies. Goebbels was also given invaluable propaganda material by the Allies with the acceptance and publication of the Morgenthau Plan by Roosevelt and Churchi
ll at their Quebec Conference in September 1944; plans that outlined the destruction, dismemberment and pasturalisation of Germany. To compound this, news emerged from the Yalta Conference in January 1945 that Germany would lose East Prussia and vast swathes of her territory in the east to Russia and Poland. The insistence on Germany’s unconditional surrender meant that even the most ardent opponents of Hitler’s regime saw no point in surrender; they let themselves be deluded that miracle weapons, or the inevitable rift between the Allies, would come to Germany’s rescue. The Nazi propaganda machine called for ‘Victory or Death’. An air of unreality and denial pervaded the last phase of the war; the killing would go on.
THE PRECIPICE
By the autumn of 1944, much of Poland was in the hands of the Red Army, but far from executing ‘liberation’ the horrors perpetuated by the Soviets during their first invasion of Poland in September 1939 began again, with renewed enthusiasm. From 1939–41 the Russians had annexed eastern Poland and, by some estimates, deported anywhere from 500,000 to 1.5 million Poles from these territories to the Russian Gulags.(6) From 1944, the Soviets started a new campaign of terror against the surviving Polish inhabitants of eastern Poland. The Russians labelled these survivors ‘collaborators’ because they could not explain to the NKVD how they had failed to be killed by the Nazis.(7) Mass deportations began again with an estimated further 500,000 Poles being sent to Siberia. Only approximately 1.5 million Poles remained in eastern Poland and these were to be ‘transferred’ to the West, to areas of Germany that were to be cleared for their settlement.ccxxxiv(8)
The Russians lost no time in reorganising eastern Poland into Lithuania, Byelorussia and the Ukraine. Ukrainian militias were used to ‘encourage’ the Poles to leave, which meant murdering, raping and terrorising the inhabitants. The persecution and pursuit of ‘political prisoners’ — a reign of terror initiated by Soviet forces — went on well into the 1950s. Roger Moorhouse and Norman Davies have described the suffering of the Poles in the following terms:
In the end, automated judges passed extreme sentences of hard labour, life imprisonment and death. Appeals were rejected… Executions in the Kleczkowska Prison were carried out casually, sometimes carelessly. One of the most terrible sights was that of an officer who was shot three times. He had survived the camp at Auschwitz, but having fought the communists he was arrested and sentenced to death. At the first salvo, only one rifle fired and the bullet missed him. At the second attempt two rifles fired, but the bullets did not cause fatal injury. Finally, the commander approached the man, prostrate in a pool of blood, drew a revolver and shot him in the head…(9)
All-out war began between the AK and the heavily reinforced units of the Soviet NKVD, and some historians have argued that the plight of these desperate Poles was possibly even worse than it had been under the Nazis.(10)
The Red Army first arrived at the furthest reaches of the German Reich, on the borders of East Prussia, in the late summer of 1944. The capital of East Prussia, Königsberg — which had survived the ravages of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War – went up in smoke between 26th and 29th August, as a result of the attentions of the RAF in its most easterly bombing raids of the war (raids which incidentally breached Sweden’s airspace, violating her neutrality). During this period, the Russians briefly occupied the East Prussian town of Nemmersdorf, raping and massacring the inhabitants; Goebbels spared the German public none of the graphic details of the bestial behaviour of the occupying forces, and it was an ominous prelude to what was to follow. Similar massacres occurred in the East Prussian towns of Schulzenwalde and Brauersdorf which received less attention but were no less horrific. An unnerving and eerie lull fell over the Eastern Front from late August 1944 until January 1945. There were fantastical hopes that Soviet forces had run out of steam, that the Red Army had been ‘bled white’. The October harvest festivals came and went, the harvest collected in large part by captured Allied POWs, as all the available young German men were at the front. Most families enjoyed a peaceful Christmas and New Year in 1945, not knowing it would be their last in the German East.
The German High Command knew better; they expected the big push, but were uncertain as to where the main thrust would come. Initially they reinforced their flanks, assuming the Russians would focus on their weaker allied positions, against the Hungarians and Romanians to the south, and on the Courland region to the north. However, they had not anticipated that Germany’s allies were simply going to slip away. On 23rd August, Romania defected to the Allies, and on 8th September, the Russians took Bulgaria without a shot being fired. Hitler obsessed over Hungary and marshalled forces there. By the time the German High Command realised that the Soviet’s main thrust would come at their centre, it was too late; there was no time left to move sufficient reserves or construct adequate defences.
Since the Wehrmacht’s advance on Russia stalled in December 1941, Hitler had refused to allow the military to build a defensive fall-back position in the East, fearing this would encourage the abandonment of equipment and cause flight to a more defensible position; he preferred them to fight to the last man and the last bullet, and never to retreat from any position. (In that endeavour Hitler was only outdone by Stalin, whose NKVD units — forerunners of the KGB — would shoot soldiers who retreated. If they were ‘lucky’ their end was postponed and they were attached to penal battalions to help clear landmines by running across the minefields).(11) The German ‘situation’ had become so desperate by August 1944 that General Heinz Guderian managed to persuade Hitler of the urgent necessity to start construction of the Ostwall (Eastern Wall), a defensive position in the East to hold back the Russians. On paper it was supposed to match the enormous scope of the Atlantic Wall. The Atlantic Wall had been started three years earlier and had just spectacularly failed to stop the Allied invasion of France. Nevertheless, local Nazi Gauleiters (Nazi regional leaders) ordered their populations along the front to construct tank traps, ditches and new landing strips, all of which were casually pushed aside and overrun when the advance came.
On 25th September 1944 Hitler announced the creation of the Volkssturm (people’s militia — in practice more of a Home Guard/Dad’s Army), and total war took another step towards draining Germany’s remaining human reserves. Everyone between the ages of sixteen and sixty was to be forced into action, and it was not unusual for kids as young as thirteen to be press-ganged into service in the final months of the war. The Volkssturm was put under the ‘command’ of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, a man who had never seen action and was uniquely unsuited to command military affairs, especially with an ‘army’ such as this. The military statistics were utterly hopeless by now; the Soviets had overwhelming superiority in everything, and had carefully marshalled massive reserves for the big push. The German air force had 300 fighter aircraft facing 10,500 Russian fighters. For the main Vistula offensive, spearheaded by Generals Koniev and Zhukov, the Russians had 2,250,000 men facing a German ragtag of regiments with 400,000 men. The Russians’ superiority was five to one in men and armour, and seven to one in artillery.(12) For the Eastern Front as a whole, by January 1945, the Soviets had amassed over 6 million troops, facing 2 million German defenders. The Russians had 13,000 tanks against the Germans’ 4,000, and 15,000 aircraft against the Germans’ 2,000; they also possessed over 100,000 heavy guns and the fearful Katyusha rocket launchers. At a time when Allied air superiority was obliterating what was left of Germany’s cities, the Germans had to withdraw their superb 88 Howitzer heavy guns from flak defence against Allied bombers in order to staunch the defence of their eastern border. In 1944, the Allies dropped 663,000 tonnes of bombs on Germany compared to the Luftwaffe’s 9,334 tonnes dropped on the Allies. By the time the Allies came to seek out the last of Germany’s unbombed cities, such as Dresden, in February 1945, there were no German aircraft or flak guns left to defend them; the Allies could destroy at will.
Anglo-American forces breached Germany’s
‘western wall’ in October 1944, taking their first major German city, the ancient coronation city of Aachen.ccxxxv By the autumn of 1944, the Western Allies already outnumbered the Germans twenty to one in tanks and had 14,000 serviceable aircraft against the Germans 573. By early December, Eisenhower’s army had amassed overwhelming force, with 3.24 million Allied troops at his disposal; this number rose to over 4 million by March 1945.(13) On 12th January 1945, an earth-shattering artillery barrage broke the two and a half month lull in the east. Although the fields of East Prussia were covered in snow, the night sky was aglow; a terrifying inferno consumed the horizon — the Russians were coming.
COLLAPSE
The Russian advance smashed through the German centre. The Red Army took the ruins of Warsaw on 17th January 1945 and reached the gates of Auschwitz on 27th January, although the Russians did not release evidence of the horrors they uncovered at Auschwitz until after the war. Whilst Germany was fighting for her survival, the Nazi regime showed no intention of ending its genocide against the Jews of Europe; if anything, more time and resources were diverted to speed up their extermination. Concentration camp victims who had not been killed before the Russian advance, were forced on westbound death marches in the depths of winter; those who faltered were killed by the roadside; those who survived were interned in overcrowded camps with totally inadequate facilities and supplies, and left to starve to death.
Just beyond Auschwitz lay the Third Reich’s last surviving industrial region that still remained intact. Upper Silesia produced 60 per cent of Germany’s hard coal, 20–30 per cent of her steel and construction metals, and all of her important synthetic gasoline. The Germans needed to defend and hold this area at all costs. Albert Speer, the Minister for Armaments, told Hitler in a memo in early January 1945 that the war was lost should this region fall.(14) The area held until 31st March and was then overrun, miraculously without it being razed to the ground. The remaining German forces fell back behind the river Oder, technically the last physical barrier, even though some parts of it are shallow enough to cross with relative ease. The Oder was all that stood in the way of Dresden and Berlin, and Stalin initiated a race between his generals to capture the German capital in time for the May Day parades; irrespective of the additional losses this would inflict upon the long suffering Red Army. Hitler’s capital was now tantalisingly close.
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