5
THE SATURDAY, 16 September, meeting in East Prussia was greeted with immediate consternation, which Hitler probably expected. As General der Flieger Werner Kreipe, the Luftwaffe representative at the Wolfsschanze, noted in his diary, ‘Objective Antwerp … Guderian protests, because of situation in the East. Request by Hitler for 1,500 fighter planes by 1 November! Pointed remarks that offensive should be launched during period of bad weather, when opponent cannot fly either. Von Rundstedt is to take command. Preparations for 1 November. The Führer again summarises his decision in a long discourse. Binds us by obligation to maintain secrecy and asks us to employ few and reliable men. Afterwards brief discussion with Jodl; still have to think it over myself. Briefed Göring, who flies back to Karinhall tonight. I am quite tired, headache.’1
Well might Kreipe have suffered from headaches. Such had been Hitler’s mania for secrecy that these revelations clearly came as a great surprise to even the inner circle at the Wolfsschanze. As events turned out, the November attack would not begin as planned, but on 16 December, exactly three months after the September conference.
The forty-year-old Kreipe found the Wolfsschanze a difficult posting, as he was for ever taking the blame for Göring’s follies and foibles. Hitler apparently liked Kreipe, a recipient of the rare Blutorden (Blood Order), meaning he had been one of several cadets at the Munich Infantry School who marched in support of the November 1923 Nazi Beer Hall putsch twenty years before. However, in Hitler’s mind, the Luftwaffe was on borrowed time, having made no impact in Normandy or on the daily bombing raids over Germany. Behind his back, Göring was held to blame for every military setback. He responded – through Kreipe, his frontman at the Wolfsschanze – that the Luftwaffe was husbanding thousands of aircraft to throw at the Allied bombers on a single day, though this never materialised.
Although the fifty-one-year-old Reichsmarschall had been the last commander of Manfred von Richthofen’s fighter wing and a decorated flying ace with twenty-two victories, he left the service in 1918 as a lowly Hauptmann. His political leap on 1 March 1935 to the rank of General and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe (subsequently Generalfeldmarschall in 1938 and Reichsmarschall in 1940), omitted the valuable years of experience between captain and colonel when a professional officer would have received a thorough grounding in command and staff work. Consequently, Göring had no qualifications whatsoever to run an air force, except a lot of bluster and self-importance, and essentially thought at the level of a fighter pilot, of the next ‘kill’, rather than possessing any skills in longer-term strategy.
The Ardennes would emphasise these personal shortcomings, with Göring’s inability to provide even air parity over the battlefields by day, or mount a modest parachute drop in support. Moreover, his leadership of the Luftwaffe was hampered by his other duties, for he was President of the Reichstag, acting Reichsstatthalter (Prime Minister) of Prussia, and Reichsminister of three ministries – Economics, responsible for the government’s four-year plans, Forestry and Aviation; as Interior Minister of Prussia, he had been the first head of its police force, the infamous Gestapo.
Göring rarely visited East Prussia in person, for relations with his Führer had been strained for some time and were getting worse. He preferred to spend time at his beloved Karinhall estate, north-east of Berlin, hunting game, accumulating plundered art and maintaining his power base, while Kreipe took the heat for his boss’s mismanagement of the air force. An acceptable second-in-command of the Luftwaffe might have done much to iron out such problems, but the man who de facto performed this role, Field Marshal Erhard Milch, was not a career military man either, being the pre-war head of Lufthansa. Milch was regarded with suspicion by senior Nazis, on account of his Jewish ancestry, though Göring protected him, stating, ‘Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich’ (‘I decide who is a Jew’).
Thus by 1944 the Luftwaffe was a frequent target of attack from Goebbels and Himmler, jealous of Göring’s influence and power, which nevertheless remained considerable, if waning.
Göring’s stock had been falling since his failure to supply the besieged garrison at Stalingrad by air, while the Luftwaffe’s seeming impotency on D-Day and generally over the skies of Europe compounded his sinking reputation. On 5 September there had been a major confrontation between Hitler on one hand and Göring and Kreipe on the other. The latter’s diary noted: ‘Nothing but reproaches against the Luftwaffe, it is inefficient, for years it has been deteriorating more and more. Complete failure in France, ground organisations and signals communication units had abandoned their aerodromes in wild flight to reach safety instead of helping the army in its fight … Hitler and Göring talked alone for an additional ten minutes.’2
In this private meeting, faced with Hitler’s opprobrium and a brooding Himmler (who was not present) requesting additional manpower for his Ersatzheer, Göring agreed to release some of his redundant Luftwaffe personnel into the army for combat duties. The deal done, Göring’s mood lightened, as Kreipe recorded: ‘Later … he was in high spirits … said the idea to dissolve the flying maintenance personnel of the Luftwaffe was dead. He promised he would ask Himmler to stop the monitoring of my telephone.’ Apparently, Hitler toyed seriously with the idea of disbanding the flying branch of the Luftwaffe altogether, in favour of tripling the Reich’s ground-based air defences – principally anti-aircraft guns – while here was evidence of the long shadow of the Reichsführer-SS, whose men tapped every phone line out of the Führerhauptquartier.3 The same disbandment issue had already arisen back in August, when Speer and Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe’s Fighter chief, had a run-in with their Führer, who had lost his temper in a discussion about aircraft production, ‘I want no more planes produced at all. The fighter arm is to be dissolved. Stop aircraft production. Stop it at once, understand? Let all the workers produce anti-aircraft guns … A programme five times what we have now. We’ll shift hundreds of thousands of workers into Flak production.’ Needless to say, Speer quietly let the matter drop and Hitler soon withdrew his absurd demand.4
The Luftwaffe’s reputation was also strained because of the delay into service of the Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter. Göring and Galland had wanted this revolutionary aircraft deployed early as a high-speed interceptor and it had shown great promise in its first victory, against an RAF high-speed Mosquito in July 1944.5 Hitler demanded it operate as a tactical fighter-bomber and the consequent re-engineering imposed a five-month delay on it coming into service. By the time this excellent plane, also named the Schwalbe (swallow), was ready the Luftwaffe had run out of fuel, and pilots. With a top speed of 530mph – about 100mph faster than any of its rivals – and four 30mm cannon, its presence over the Ardennes would have made a significant difference to clearing the skies of Allied aircraft.
The autumn of 1944 had seen Goebbels, Himmler and Speer nudge the Reich into top gear for total war. Himmler provided the manpower, Goebbels the ideological glue and Speer the armaments. From his appointment in February 1942, Hitler’s pre-war friend and personal architect, Speer, had been Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production; during his tenure of office, and despite the Allied bombing campaigns, German war production generally increased rather than declined. In 1943 it generated eight million tons of steel, a comfortable two million more than the Soviet Union’s output of this valuable commodity.
Compared to 1.83 million tons of steel produced in Germany in the first quarter of 1940, the last quarter of 1943 had seen this rise incrementally to 2.37 million tons produced, the first quarter of 1944 witnessed another leap to 2.56 million and the next quarter an increase again to 2.6 million.6 Coal and aluminium production in 1944 also exceeded that of 1943. Across most sectors, 1944 accounted for the highest growth rates of the war for German industry. The year 1943 had witnessed the unprecedented total of 6,418 Messerschmitt 109 fighters produced, but 1944 saw this more than doubled to 14,152; totals climbed steadily through the year from 932 assembled in January to 1,718 by September. Whereas 12,013 tanks and 35,235 twenty-mm Flak gun barrels had been produced in 1943, some 19,002 panzers and 47,729 equivalent guns were manufactured in 1944.7
However, the traditional view of the Reich’s ‘economic miracle’ needs revising. While Speer was a talented organiser, he was also able to use millions of slave labourers, who suffered appalling privations in order to raise output. After release from Spandau Prison, and through his 1970 bestselling volume Inside the Third Reich, Speer emphasised his undoubted logistical abilities as a way of deflecting attention from his cynical use of the enslaved workforce, and contrasted low output figures from the pre-Speer era to prove how talented he was at improvisation in generating the impressive industrial increase.8
There is evidence that Allied bombing actually helped streamline manufacturing processes and forced the Reich’s inventors to devise cheaper components for weapons that used fewer vital metals and were quicker to assemble. For example, 10 per cent was successfully shaved off the weight of many parts to save essential raw materials. Hitler was already aware of the differences between German and US industrial manufacturing methods, but had done nothing to implement change; in February 1942 he had observed, ‘We’ve always been hypnotised by the slogan “the craftsmanship of the German worker” … we are far behind the Americans [in industrial terms] … they build far more lightly than we do. A car of ours that weighs eighteen hundred kilos would weigh only a thousand if made by the Americans.’9
Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht’s very backwardness constituted a drain on its raw materials: throughout the war its horses and mules (the peak strength in 1943–4 was 1.2 million equines) – it would use more than 50,000 in the Ardennes – required reshoeing with 4.8 million horseshoes ideally every six to seven weeks, the equivalent of 5,000 tons of iron a month or 60,000 tons a year. Illustrative of the Wehrmacht’s use of horses was the huge German convoy on the outskirts of Montélimar caught by artillery fire that Sergeant Audie Murphy – the most decorated American soldier of the war – remembered in August 1944 when moving up from southern France with the US 3rd Infantry Division: ‘As far as we can see, the road is cluttered with shattered, twisted cars, trucks and wagons … Hundreds of horses … have been caught in the barrage. They look at us with puzzled, unblaming eyes, whinnying softly as their torn flesh waits for life to drain from it. We are used to the sight of dead and wounded men, but these shuddering animals affect us strangely.’10
The ferrous content of steel produced in 1943–4 was also lower than in earlier years, which impacted on quality, sometimes with dire results in combat. Yet some of these austerity measures were needed desperately, as German designers tended to over-engineer their inventions: for example, the sixty-ton Tiger I tank took 300,000 man-hours to manufacture compared to 55,000 for a Panther, 48,000 for a Sherman – and only 10,000 hours for a Russian T-34.11 Nevertheless, monthly panzer production rose from 1,284 in January 1944, to 1,697 in June and peaked at 1,854 in December.12
Under Speer’s leadership, war production continued to increase despite the air attacks, which caused less than 1 per cent casualties of his workforce. However, German industry had not been mobilised for total war until 1944, had plenty of spare capacity, and, as noted earlier, Speer was able to replace some of his workforce conscripted into the Wehrmacht with cheap slave labour, some of which comprised skilled factory workers from defeated nations; naturally this boosted production. Additionally, it was only in 1944 that the Wehrmacht standardised much of its weapons and equipment: fewer designs of field gun, anti-aircraft artillery and anti-tank weapons and their associated ammunition, for example, and just three types of tanks – the Mark IV, Panther and Tiger – plus assault guns. Yet there is evidence that some weapons and supplies desperately needed in the Bulge, such as artillery shells, ammunition for the MP-44 and, above all, fuel, were disrupted.
For perhaps a three-week period in late August to early September 1944, the Fatherland was laid open and defenceless to her foes. The Wehrmacht was in a shambles. Most of its combat power had been lost in Normandy, and the remainder, disorganised, was hurrying back to the safety of the Reich and the Westwall as fast as they could. Their pursuers were not as diligent as they might have been. Partly the Allies were worn out after their heady chase across France; they were also running critically short of fuel and ammunition. There may have been a psychological factor at work as well. They had experienced three weeks of being fêted as liberators by the French and Belgians, with little combat, and perhaps sensed the Wehrmacht was irreparably damaged and the end of the European war nigh. Consequently the necessary sense of urgency was lacking – and within that time frame the Germans made good their escape to the Westwall, brought in reinforcements and raised new formations. The moment soon passed.
This was not apparent to the Allies. By the second week in September 1944, the Americans had reached the ancient town of Aachen, beloved of the Romans and Charlemagne, and the first city of the Third Reich to be threatened by the Allies. On the twelfth of the month, they occupied the first pillbox of the nearby Westwall. Given the speed of their advance, both Hodges’ US First Army and the Germans assumed Aachen would fall straightaway and the local commander, Generalleutnant Gerd Graf von Schwerin, left a letter in the city’s telephone exchange, written in his superb English, requesting his opposite number respect the non-combatant status of Aachen’s civilian population: ‘I stopped the absurd evacuation of this town; therefore, I am responsible for the fate of its inhabitants and I ask you, in the case of an occupation by your troops, to take care of the unfortunate population in a humane way. I am the last German Commanding Officer in the sector of Aachen.’13 Humanitarian, but hardly controversial; the Count was a secret opponent of the regime, with form to prove it. In January 1939, as Major von Schwerin, he had approached the British Military Attaché in Berlin, Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong, with a deal. If Chamberlain abandoned his policy of appeasement and opposed Hitler, his friends in the army were willing to mount a coup against the Nazis. Lamentably this excellent opportunity was ignored by the Foreign Office. Meanwhile, by 1944 Strong had become Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence.14
Supply problems and lack of urgency delayed the final US assault. Meanwhile Schwerin’s Aachen letter was retrieved and read by local Nazi officials, brought to Himmler’s attention and the Count, then also commanding 116th Panzer Division (the Greyhounds), was sacked on 20 September and threatened with treason for his defeatist letter. Model and Rundstedt managed to fight off Himmler’s demands for a trial and had Schwerin posted out of harm’s way to Italy, where – off the SS radar – he made good and even rose to corps command. Scion of a high-achieving family of East Prussian nobility, whose ancestors had included a field marshal under Frederick the Great, Schwerin’s other relatives included a government minister and another divisional commander, while a cousin was connected closely to the Stauffenberg plot and had been hanged on 8 September. These were days when your surname could get you executed. Fortunately, the Count had friends in the right places: his operations officer in 116th Panzer – the Greyhound Division which would fight at Hotton – was Heinz Günther Guderian, son of the chief of the Army General Staff, who would himself later rise to high rank in the post-war Bundeswehr.15 As we will see, the Greyhound Panzer Division fought a cleaner war than many in the Bulge, generally following the noble example of their erstwhile commander.
Throughout the autumn of 1944 it was Himmler even more than Hitler who interfered constantly to remove or arrest senior officers whom he considered unreliable. The Count’s corps commander, Friedrich Schack, was replaced for no other reason than being Schwerin’s superior, while General Franz Beyer, who would lead his formation to the Ardennes in Brandenberger’s Seventh Army, was placed under suspicion on the absurd grounds that a report of his had ‘lacked optimism’. The day after Schwerin’s removal, the very capable Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz was also sacked. This was a significant interference, for he was a contemporary of Model’s, commanding Army Group ‘G’, which included the frontier terrain south of Seventh Army. The grounds were that Blaskowitz had failed to mount an armoured counter-attack against the US forces pursuing him, but the real reason dated back to 1940. He had complained through the Army General Staff about atrocities committed in Poland, and the insolent attitude of the SS to the army. This earned him the undying enmity of Himmler and brought about his loss of office four years later. He was replaced on 21 September 1944 by an officer who epitomised military achievement.
In May 1940 Hermann Balck had stormed across the River Meuse at Sedan at the head of his Panzergrenadier regiment. It brought him a Knight’s Cross and rapid promotion; by November 1943 he had risen to full general. Yet even he did not last long at Army Group ‘G’, and was replaced at the end of December 1944 in the ever-faster game of musical chairs that the combination of Hitler, Himmler and OKW saw fit to inflict on their commanders.16 Not even a field marshal could intervene in a colleague’s favour: since July 1944, Rundstedt had been sacked once, while Rommel, Kluge and von Witzleben had died as a result of the plot. Even Major Schramm in the Führerhauptquartier had been under suspicion and threatened with removal after the execution of his sister-in-law, though Jodl managed to protect him.
Thus, all commanders in the west, but especially those entrusted with leading the Ardennes attack, found themselves fighting while more than occasionally having to glance over their shoulders, just to check that the SS were not about to blacken their name or arrest them on some trumped-up notion of Himmler’s. Illustrative of the gap between front soldiers and Nazi functionaries in the rear at this time was the experience of Major Georg Grossjohan, a highly decorated regimental commander on leave from the Vosges front. He was enjoying a cup of coffee in a café when a field security policeman asked to see his leave pass and identification. ‘The demeanor with which this officer requested my paybook was extremely close to the line between brevity and insubordination. One could really sense the gratification this armchair warrior enjoyed by bothering the wearer of a German Cross in Gold and Knight’s Cross,’ remembered Grossjohan. As his paybook did not include confirmation of the award of his Ritterkreuz, he was obliged to retrieve the relevant documentation from his lodgings, an hour away. Evidently disappointed, the policeman ‘muttered an apology’ and reproached Grossjohan for failing to have his latest award annotated in his paybook. ‘At the end of my rope with this nonsense, I reminded him that barely seventy-two hours before, at the front, I had problems of quite a different kind than checking the entries in my paybook!’17
The revelations about Schwerin angered Hitler who, with the nihilism that characterised his later defence of Berlin, ordered that ‘each individual house in Aachen is to be defended exactly the way the Russians defended Stalingrad’. Walther Model’s 14 October ‘Order of the Day’ to his Army Group ‘B’ reiterated this fanaticism: ‘Now we must shield the sacred soil of the Fatherland with tenacity and doggedness.’ Defenders had to ‘radicalise the fighting to the utmost degree of toughness in the battle zone, employing every physically capable man … every bunker, every city block, every village must become a fortress which shatters the enemy. That’s what the Führer, the people and our dead comrades expect from us.’ This phraseology was not Model’s but almost certainly written by Goebbels or a senior propaganda officer: ‘The enemy shall know that there is no road into the heart of the Reich except over our dead bodies … Whoever retreats without giving battle is a traitor to his people. Soldiers! Our homeland, the lives of our wives and children are at stake! Commanders of all ranks are responsible for making sure this fanaticism is spread amongst the troops and population … Anybody who does not do his job by fully committing his own life will be eliminated.’18
It was this rhetoric which dominated the fighting from then on, certainly acting as a motivator in the Bulge, and into 1945. It combined the stick of threatened execution with the carrot of revenge for the sufferings of the population and dead comrades. Meanwhile, Himmler had already taken his own steps to counter any notions of defeatism; his 10 September 1944 memorandum was brief and to the point: ‘Certain unreliable elements seem to believe that the war will be over for them as soon as they surrender to the enemy. Against this belief it must be pointed out that every deserter will be prosecuted and will find his just punishment. Furthermore, his ignominious behaviour will entail the most severe consequences for his family. Upon examination of the circumstances they will be summarily shot.’19
This probably lessened the tendency to desert, but could not stem it altogether, especially for single men faced with a barrage of equally succinct and clever Allied propaganda leaflets. Fashionably called ‘information operations’ today, propaganda or ‘psyops’ were regarded as vital to the Allied war effort, and whole RAF and USAAF squadrons were devoted to delivering propaganda leaflets over German-occupied territory. It was calculated that the Allies dropped 1,512,000,000 paper leaflets, usually attempts to get German soldiers to desert, mostly during 1944–5.20
A much-damaged Aachen, which was open for the taking at the beginning of September, thus fell only on 21 October after a bitter fight, the acting Commandant of the city, Oberst Gerhard Wilck, having been obliged to fight to the last. Even in the moment of defeat, the long shadows of Hitler, Himmler and Model produced a defiant farewell as his men marched into captivity: ‘I have been forced to surrender, as ammunition, food, and water are exhausted. I have seen that further fighting would be useless. I have acted against my orders which directed I should fight to the last man … I wish you all the best of health and a quick return to our Fatherland when hostilities have ceased so that you may help in the rebuilding of Germany. The American commander has told me that I cannot give you the “Sieg Heil” or “Heil Hitler” but we can still do it in our hearts.’21
Nevertheless, as the man who surrendered the first German city to the Allies, his words did not prevent the Nazis from producing a hostile propaganda leaflet entitled ‘Wilck – Er trägt die Schuld (“Wilck – he carries the blame”), which encouraged hostility even to distant relatives who bore his surname.’22 Despite massive artillery and aerial support, Aachen’s capture cost each side 5,000 casualties and was the largest urban battle fought by US forces in the European war; the tenacious defence seemed a grim prophecy of things to come and removed all hope of victory before Christmas.
Two other factors induced the Germans to fight on. One was the highly charged political announcement, made by Roosevelt on 24 January 1943, at the end of the ten-day Casablanca ‘Symbol’ Conference, that the Allies would accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers, Roosevelt borrowing the term from Ulysses S. Grant (who had demanded it as a pre-condition to ending the American Civil War). In Volume IV of his memoirs, The Hinge of Fate, Churchill suggested he was startled by the president’s words. Churchill was still uneasy about it when he wrote the relevant volume of his memoirs, published in 1951, and spent seven pages justifying himself:
It was with some feeling of surprise that I heard the President say at the press conference on 24 January that we would enforce ‘unconditional surrender’ upon all our enemies. It was natural to suppose that the agreed communiqué had superseded anything said in conversation … In my speech which followed the President’s, I of course supported him and concurred in what he had said. Any divergence between us, even by omission, would on such an occasion and at such a time have been damaging or even dangerous to our war effort. I certainly take my share of the responsibility, together with the British War Cabinet.23
The purpose was to keep Soviet forces battling on the Russian Front, thus depleting German munitions and troops, and to prevent Stalin from negotiating a separate peace with the Third Reich.
The news was not universally welcomed; many inside both governments felt the stance too inflexible, removing any opportunity for accommodation with Germany and staving off a Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe. Allen Dulles, the new OSS station chief in Switzerland, soon realised that Goebbels had been handed an extraordinary coup. He later maintained the Casablanca declaration was ‘merely a piece of paper to be scrapped without further ado if Germany would sue for peace. Hitler had to go.’
The US military’s view was universally hostile, Eisenhower feeling that ‘Unconditional Surrender’ would do nothing but cost American lives; later, he observed, ‘If you were given two choices, one to mount a scaffold, the other to charge twenty bayonets, you might as well charge twenty bayonets’. General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who had attended the Kriegsakademie, said it would ‘weld all the Germans together’, while Ira C. Eaker, commander of the US Eighth Air Force, was more blunt – ‘How stupid can you be?’24
As late as 20 November 1944, Eisenhower had again asked the Combined Chiefs of Staff ‘for a modification’ of the ‘Unconditional Surrender’ demand, which he felt was preventing an early collapse of German morale in the west – by then he had realised the Germans would be ‘able to maintain a strong defensive front for some time, assisted by weather, floods and muddy ground’.25 But Roosevelt was stubborn, and though military logic dictated otherwise, was determined not to give in to Eisenhower’s demands.
The second factor was US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau’s plan for the post-war Allied occupation of Germany. It advocated destruction of all Germany’s industry in any way connected with war-making and the conversion of the Reich ‘into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character’. Agreed at the Second Quebec ‘Octagon’ Conference of 12–16 September 1944, the plan was immediately leaked to the world’s press. Even in the US these ideas were unpopular with a public that was heavily Germanic in origin, and Time magazine ran an editorial on 2 October 1944, calling it ‘The Policy of Hate’.26 The Washington Post argued, ‘if the Germans suspect that nothing but complete destruction lies ahead, then they will fight on’.
This is exactly what happened, with banner headlines in the Völkischer Beobachter announcing that ‘the Jew Morgenthau wishes to convert the Reich into a giant potato patch’. Even in private, Goebbels could not believe his luck: ‘we need not add a single word to its publication in order to enflame the spirit of resistance of our people,’ he wrote to his aide. Speer observed that it could have been ‘made to order for Hitler and the party, insofar as they could point to it for proof that defeat would finally seal the fate of all Germans. Many people were actually influenced by this threat.’27 Even Roosevelt disowned it when he learned that US troops had to fight so hard to capture Aachen, and complained that ‘Morgenthau’s ideas were worth thirty divisions to the Germans’.
