4
Victory was never as close as it is now. The decision will soon be reached. We will throw them into the ocean, the arrogant, big-mouthed apes from the New World. They will not get into our Germany. We will protect our wives and children from all enemy domination.
I shall march once more through Belgium and France, but I don’t have the smallest desire to do so… If [only] this idiotic war would end. Why should I fight? It only goes for the existence of the Nazis. The superiority of our enemy is so great that it is senseless to fight against it.
Contrasting views of German soldiers during
the Ardennes offensive, December 1944
I
All the hopes of the German leadership now rested on the great offensive in the west. If successful, it could, they thought, prove a decisive turning point in the war. If it failed, the war would be effectively lost. But remaining on the defensive would simply mean eventually being crushed between the advancing western and eastern powers, who would be able to exploit their superior resources and seemingly limitless reserves of manpower. General Jodl, responsible for strategic planning, summarized the thinking at the beginning of November. ‘The risk of the great aim, seeming to stand technically in disproportion to our available forces, is unalterable. But in our current situation we can’t shrink from staking everything on one card.’1
The card to be played was a swift and decisive military strike aimed at inflicting such a mighty blow on the western Allies that they would lose the appetite for continuing the fight. This would lead to the breakup of what was perceived as an unnatural coalition of forces facing Germany. Hitler’s own characteristic thinking was plainly outlined in his address to his division commanders four days before the beginning of the offensive. ‘Wars are finally decided’, he asserted, ‘by the recognition on one side or the other that the war can’t be won any more. Thus, the most important task is to bring the enemy to this realization.’ Even when forced back on the defensive, ‘ruthless strikes’ had the effect of showing the enemy that he had not won, and that the war would continue, ‘that no matter what he might do, he can never count on a capitulation – never, ever’. Under the impact of severe setbacks and recognition that success was unattainable, the enemy’s ‘nerve will break in the end’. And Germany’s enemy was a coalition of ‘the greatest extremes that can be imagined in this world: ultra-capitalist states on one side and ultra-Marxist states on the other; on one side a dying world empire, Britain, and on the other side a colony seeking an inheritance, the USA’. It was ripe for collapse if a blow of sufficient power could be landed. ‘If a few heavy strikes were to succeed here, this artificially maintained united front could collapse at any moment with a huge clap of thunder.’2
The first deliberations for an offensive in the west had taken place at precisely the time of German crisis on that front – during the collapse in Normandy in mid-August. By mid-September the decision for the offensive, given the code-name ‘Watch on the Rhine’ (later changed to ‘Autumn Mist’), was taken. Utmost secrecy was of the essence. Only a few in the High Command of the Wehrmacht and among the regime’s leaders were in the know. Even Field-Marshal von Rundstedt, restored as Commander-in-Chief West on 5 September, was told only in late October of the aims of the operation.3 Jodl’s plans for the attack went through a number of variations before Hitler’s order to go ahead was given on 10 November. Then the intended launch of the offensive in late November had to be postponed several times because of equipment shortages and unseasonal good weather – the attack was depending on poor weather to ground enemy aircraft – before the final date was set at 16 December. The military goal was to strike, as in 1940, through the wooded Ardennes in the gap between the American and British forces, advancing rapidly to take Antwerp and, in tandem with German divisions attacking towards the south from Holland, cutting the enemy lines of communication with the rear, encircling and destroying the British 21st Army Group and the 9th and 1st US Armies in a ‘new Dunkirk’. It would, according to Hitler’s directive for the operation, bring ‘the decisive turn in the western campaign and therefore perhaps of the entire war’.4
The situation, on the eastern as well as the western front, had deteriorated drastically since the idea for the offensive had initially been conceived. On the eastern front, the Soviet incursion into East Prussia had, it is true, been repelled but the most acutely threatened area had meanwhile become Hungary, a crucial source of oil and other raw materials. German troops were engaged there in bitter attritional fighting throughout the autumn in fending off the Red Army’s attempt to take Budapest, ordered by Stalin at the end of October.5 In the west, meanwhile, American troops stood on German soil in the Aachen area. After taking the city in late October, their advance during the following weeks in the densely wooded hills beyond the Westwall, the Hürtgenwald, between Aachen and Eupen and Düren to the east had encountered ferocious defence and proved extremely costly to the Americans.6 By the time the Ardennes offensive began, the American advance had reached only the river Roer, near Jülich and Düren.7 Further to the south, the Americans had greater success, though again at a cost and only after tough resistance by the Wehrmacht. In Lorraine, General Patton’s 3rd US Army eventually forced the surrender of the heavily fortified town of Metz on 22 November, though, battle-weary and combating driving rain, sleet and mud as well as the enemy, it was unable to continue the advance to Saarbrücken. In Alsace, the 6th US Army Group of General Jacob Devers, encountering weaker German defences, drove through the Vosges Mountains to take Strasbourg on 23 November and reach the Rhine near Kehl.8 Even so, the German leadership – attributing, typically, the fall of Strasbourg to treachery within Alsace – was encouraged by the stiffened resistance during the autumn that had held the western Allies at bay.9
In the eyes of Hitler and his chief military advisers, Keitel and Jodl, the enemy inroads since the summer strengthened rather than weakened the case for the planned western offensive. The pressure, military and economic, on Germany was relentlessly intensifying. The tightening vice, they felt, could be loosened only through a bold strike. German losses of men and equipment had mounted sharply over the autumn, predominantly on the eastern front but also in the west. But so had those of the enemy. The American casualties in fierce autumn fighting for relatively minor territorial gains totalled almost a quarter of a million men, dead, wounded or captured.10 Hitler impressed upon his commanders that the time to strike against an enemy that had suffered high losses and was ‘worn out’ was ripe.11 Beyond that, the eastern front – the heavy fighting in Hungary notwithstanding – was for the time being seen to be relatively stabilized, though no one was in doubt that a big new offensive would soon be launched. This was seen as all the more reason to press home the advantage of a German offensive in the west without delay.
Heavy priority was accorded to the demands of the western offensive in allocation of men and armaments. Three armies of Army Group B were to take part. The 6th SS-Panzer Army, led by SS Colonel-General Sepp Dietrich, one of Hitler’s toughest and most trusted military veterans, and the 5th Panzer Army under its brilliant commander and specialist in tank warfare, General Hasso von Manteuffel, were to spearhead the attack in the north and centre of the front.12 The 7th Army, under General Erich Brandenberger, was assigned the task of protecting the southern flank. Some 200,000 men in five panzer and thirteen People’s Grenadier divisions were assigned to the first wave, supported by around 600 tanks and 1,600 heavy guns. However, many of the men were young and inexperienced. Some divisions came, already battle-weary, from the fighting on the Saar. Fuel shortages were a major concern, even with some supplies taken from the hard-pressed eastern front. And an even bigger worry was the weakness of the Luftwaffe. All available planes – including two-thirds of the entire fighter force – were assembled for the attack. Hopes had to be placed in bad weather limiting the massive supremacy in the air of the Allies. Even so, the Wehrmacht began with a substantial numerical advantage in ground-troops and heavy armaments in the 170-kilometre-wide attack zone.13 The element of surprise would be vital to make this momentary superiority tell. But even surprise would not be enough if the offensive could not be sustained.
There were grounds enough for scepticism about the chances of success. Both Rundstedt and Field-Marshal Model, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group B, thought the aim of Antwerp, around 200 kilometres away, far too ambitious, given the strength of available forces. They favoured a more limited aim of beating back and destroying the Allied forces along the Meuse, between Aachen and Liège. But Hitler wanted no ‘little solution’, no ‘ordinary’ victory. He would not be moved from the aim he had stipulated for the offensive. In the end, Rundstedt and Model declared themselves to be ‘fully in agreement’ with Hitler’s ambitious plan. Privately, both remained extremely dubious. Model thought it had ‘no chance’. Dietrich and Manteuffel also bowed, their own doubts still unassuaged, to the imperative.14 Like most military commanders, they saw it as their duty to raise objections to the operational plan but then, when these were rejected, to fulfil to the best of their ability the orders of the political leadership, however futile they deemed these to be. Hitler still had the capacity, however, to make the impossible seem possible. Manteuffel himself accepted that Hitler’s addresses to the divisional commanders on 11 and 12 December had made a positive impact. ‘The commanders’, he later wrote, ‘took away from this conference a picture of the enemy’s overall situation. They had been given an appreciation of the situation from the one source in a position to see the full military picture and it seemed to give an assurance of favourable conditions.’15
In the top echelons of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, there was no readiness to back the well-founded misgivings of those who would lead the offensive. Keitel and Jodl were daily in Hitler’s immediate proximity and remained heavily under his domineering influence. Both remained believers in his unique qualities as Führer, adepts of his form of charismatic authority.16 If they harboured doubts, they kept them to themselves. Jodl refrained from any criticism of Hitler’s decision even when interrogated by his Allied captors in May 1945.17
On 15 December Rundstedt put out his ‘order of the day’, exhorting his troops on the eve of battle. ‘Soldiers of the western front!’ he proclaimed. ‘Your great hour has struck. Strong attacking armies are marching today against the Anglo-Americans. I don’t need to say any more. You all feel it: it’s all or nothing!’ Model’s own ringing exhortation followed: ‘We will not disappoint the trust of the Führer placed in us, nor that of the homeland, which has forged the sword of retaliation. Advance in the spirit of Leuthen’ (the legendary victory of Frederich the Great in the Seven Years War, almost two centuries earlier).18 At 5.30 a.m. on 16 December, an hour-long artillery barrage began. About 7 a.m., before sunrise on a frosty morning, with thick cloud offering protection from enemy aircraft, the German infantry marched out of the dawn mist and began their assault. Germany’s last major offensive was under way. The stakes could scarcely have been higher. They were indeed, as Jodl had put it, all placed on one card.
II
Nor had the civilian leadership of the Reich given up hope that depressing autumn. Whatever illusions Nazi leaders harboured, however ready they were to delude themselves and listen to their own propaganda, they were intelligent enough to see how rapidly the situation was deteriorating. Yet they still somehow hoped against hope that Hitler would find a way out, that the Allied coalition would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, or that the deployment of new ‘wonder weapons’ could bring a dramatic change of fortunes.
Few Nazi leaders were apprised of the plan for the Ardennes offensive. One who was, however, was Albert Speer, among the most resigned about Germany’s inevitable fate (to go from his later account) but possibly the most crucial of Hitler’s immediate lieutenants in enabling the war to continue. Without Speer’s efforts, drive and organizational skill in the autumn of 1944 in making the armaments available, the Ardennes offensive would not have been feasible however much Hitler and his top military aides wanted it.
It is striking, in fact, how late the almost complete collapse of the economy took place and how great the efforts were, even then, to overcome the increasingly insuperable difficulties. In their post-war interrogations, Speer and the leading figures in his ministry were adamant that the damage to Germany’s economic infrastructure only became insurmountable during the autumn of 1944, largely as a consequence of the systematic destruction of the transport and communications network through a relentless Allied bombing campaign that had begun in October. Whatever their private thoughts about Germany’s chances of avoiding defeat, the actions of Speer’s able and energetic subordinates showed they were far from resigned to inevitable disaster. They performed organizational near miracles (if in part by grossly inhumane exploitation of foreign workers) to enable the economy to continue functioning at all, prolonging the war in its most destructive phase. Some indeed, most notably Karl Otto Saur, the ruthless head of the Technical Department, retained an astonishingly optimistic view of Germany’s chances almost down to the end of 1944.
By the autumn of 1944 it was impossible to manufacture enough to compensate for the losses.19 Heavy air raids caused a sharp drop in the availability of steel for manufacture of ammunition.20 Coal production was cushioned until late autumn by reduced deliveries for winter stocking, but catastrophic from November onwards, while serious shortages of most indispensable basic products mounted in the second half of 1944. Speer reckoned that there was a drop in armaments production of 30–40 per cent across 1944, worsening sharply as the year went on. By late autumn there were critical shortages of fuel and gas. The emergency needs of the Luftwaffe could be met only until around October. Aviation fuel levels could not be sustained following the attacks earlier in the year on the synthetic oil plants, though minimum production of motor spirit and diesel oil continued to the end of the war. By autumn, anti-aircraft defence was being accorded priority over fighter production. Speer estimated that some 30 per cent of the total output of guns in 1944 and 20 per cent of heavy calibre ammunition together with up to 55 per cent of armaments production of the electro-technical industry and 33 per cent of the optical industry went on anti-aircraft defences, meaning diminished armaments provision for the front and a weakening in the fighting power of the Wehrmacht. Emergency transport arrangements meant that armaments production could be more or less sustained until late autumn. By then, increasingly damaging attacks on the transport network, including crucial attacks on canals in late autumn, were causing massive disruption to both civilian and military supplies, to the growing concern of the OKW. The severe lack of fuel and other supplies so evident at the outset of the Ardennes offensive, which worried Model and Dietrich, arose in good part from the transport difficulties as the number of railway wagons available for armaments fell by more than a half. Speer went so far as to claim that transport problems, meaning that adequate fuel supplies could not be provided to the frontline troops on time, were decisive in causing the swift breakdown of the Ardennes offensive.21
Speer’s departmental heads broadly agreed with his assessment that late autumn was the time when the economic crisis became overwhelming. According to Hans Kehrl, head of the Raw Materials and Planning departments, the concentrated Allied attacks on the Reich’s transport system had an increasingly drastic effect on production from October onwards and became a decisive factor after December. He estimated that the drop in output owing to lack of transport facilities was around 25 per cent from June to October, but 60 per cent between November and January 1945.22 The effects on the distribution of raw materials were particularly severe. Werner Bosch, in Kehrl’s department, highlighted the critical shortage of cement, needed for building works (including the extensive underground factories run largely on slave labour), as supplies halved from November onwards. He allocated the dwindling supplies through rigorous rationing on a system of priorities. He claimed after the war that he had realized by spring 1944 that the war could not be won and thought (as, he imagined, did Speer himself) that Germany’s leadership should have sought peace terms as soon as possible. ‘As it was, however,’ he remarked, ‘people in his position could do nothing except get on with their own work.’23 Whatever his post-war claims and his private reflections at the time, Bosch, in ‘getting on with his own work’ so effectively in the interests of the war effort, had helped to keep things going even in such desperate straits.
The impact of the transport crisis on iron and steel production in the escalating crisis of the autumn was extremely grave. Supplies from Belgium and France had dried up during the summer, but German production remained almost at full capacity until September before entering upon a steep decline from October onwards, and was down by half in December from 2 to 1 million tons in the month.24 Hermann Röchling, head of the Reich Iron Federation and a member of the Technical Department in Speer’s ministry, pointed out the huge drop, about 350,000 metric tons a month, in raw steel when Lorraine and Luxemburg fell out of production, then the big fall of around 50 per cent in production from the Saar and the Ruhr district, partly on account of disruption of the railways through bombing.25 In the Ruhr, Germany’s biggest industrial heartland, steel production had been sustained at relatively stable levels, despite increased difficulties, during the first nine months of 1944, according to Dr Walther Rohland, head of the main committee for the iron-producing industry in the Speer Ministry and Deputy Chief of the Reich Iron Federation. Reserves were, however, almost used up by September. Then, from October, a drastic deterioration set in as the transport crisis deepened.26
According to Günther Schulze-Fielitz, head of the Energy Department, the total capacity of Germany’s power stations had expanded during each year of the war. Electricity supplies held up well until November but then declined sharply as coal deliveries became seriously impaired. By November, coal stocks at power stations were down by 30 per cent compared with the previous year. Many had sufficient coal for only a week.27 As most of the reports acknowledged, the impact of the incessant air raids on transport installations was uppermost in the production problems by late 1944. By the end of the autumn the difficulties were becoming impossible to surmount.
Without the constant improvisation in all production areas by Speer’s capable subordinates, the decline would undoubtedly have set in earlier and been more steep. Richard Fiebig, head of the main committee for railway vehicles, pointed out, for instance, that through efficiencies his department ‘not only succeeded in balancing the losses of workshops through bombing and loss of territory, but we actually increased the output’. From September, 1,100 to 1,200 locomotives per month were being lost to enemy raids, but 6,800 were being repaired each month during the autumn, in spite of decreasing repair capacity.28 Extraordinarily rapid, though inevitably piecemeal, repairs were also made in towns and cities, in factories and workshops, after bombing raids, thanks in no small part to the surplus of manpower through inactive production that the raids themselves had made available. From autumn onwards, between 1 and 1.5 million people were at any one time engaged on work resulting from air-raid damage.29
Perhaps most remarkably, according to Saur, owing to long gestation periods in production the total output of weapons increased continuously throughout 1944, reaching its absolute peak for practically all weapon types in December 1944.30 Saur was prone to excessive optimism (and invariably ready to convey this to Hitler). He went so far as to claim, as ‘one of the best informed men in Germany as to the war situation’, that, on a purely statistical basis, Germany’s situation on the eve of the Ardennes offensive ‘looked good’. He pointed out that Germany’s total number of soldiers under arms was greater than ever before, as was production of guns, tanks and U-boats in that month and the quantity of weapons and ammunition in the hands of the fighting troops. Of course, as he acknowledged, when it came to the quality of the troops, which had certainly fallen as increasingly the young, ill-trained or battle-weary were conscripted, it was a different matter. Saur’s final point, emphasizing the great numerical strength of the Volkssturm, whose fighting capabilities were widely derided within both the Wehrmacht and in the civilian population, is sufficient indication of the spurious grounds for his apparently optimistic outlook. Nevertheless, it is striking that, far from being resigned to inevitable defeat, Saur still felt that at the outset of the Ardennes offensive ‘Germany held many good cards’.31
Speer certainly did all he could during the deepening transport and production crisis that autumn to sustain the faltering German war economy. His efforts included a visit to the Ruhr and three to the western front to inspect the extent of the crisis and assess what improvised measures could be taken to improve the dire situation. Each time he reported directly to Hitler, enabling him to put specific proposals in his briefings in the full expectation of gaining Hitler’s approval.32
On 11 November he informed Hitler of the increasingly serious situation in the Ruhr district, subjected to systematic intense bombing that autumn.33 Transport was the overriding concern. Speer appointed a plenipotentiary, the head of the Reichsbahn administration, Dr Karl Lammerz, with powers to coordinate transport throughout the region without waiting for directions from Berlin, and also organized emergency measures to keep supplies moving (including food for the civilian population) and set industry to work again. These involved deploying 50,000 foreign workers supplied by Bormann by removing them from digging fortifications, another 30,000 taken from the armaments industry – a sign of the desperation – and 4,500 skilled electricians, pipe-layers and welders brought in from other parts of the Reich. The Gauleiter were ordered by Bormann to draft the local population of their areas, if necessary, to help in the removal of damage. Some 10 per cent of mineworkers were envisaged for this work, even at the cost of temporarily reducing output from the pits – another extraordinary reflection of how bad the situation was. Other emergency measures were put in place to clear the waterways. The local population was to be mobilized, as in times of flood emergencies, to help in repairing the damage. Despite all this, Speer pointed out, it was not possible in the short term to prevent a drastic drop in production. The severity of the damage meant that stockpiles of coal sufficed for no more than ten days and would be exhausted by the end of November if no great improvement could be made. Rail transport, gas and electricity supplies were seriously threatened. He was, therefore, instigating an emergency programme (including strict allocation of railway wagons and priority for coal transportation) that would guarantee at least partial armaments production and sustain current levels of arms deliveries in the short term.34
Between 15 and 23 November Speer visited several units of Army Group B, the Krupp works at Essen and several other major concerns in the Ruhr. He made a number of recommendations to overcome the damage to waterways, shipping and bridges, and improve anti-aircraft defences. He urged the accelerated expansion of aerodromes to take the Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter and other modern planes, and more efficient use of the labour force. He was critical about the sluggishness in providing the necessary labour from other parts of the Reich, especially when 128,000 men from the Ruhr, among them skilled workers, had been conscripted for fortification work outside the area when they were so badly needed to restore the damaged Ruhr industrial heartland. He wanted alterations in steel allocation, with priority to be removed from U-boats and shifted to restoration of transport and reconstruction of Ruhr industrial works. Otherwise, he could propose only minor improvements. Lack of transport meant people were having to walk long distances to work each day over damaged roads. There was a shortage of shoes, which Speer requested be provided from elsewhere in the Reich. Because of damage to power stations and electricity cables, many people were without lighting. He recommended a ‘special action’ to provide candles and other means of lighting, including pit-lamps. Factories could not contact each other since the telephone system was not fully working, and the Reich postal service did not have the manpower to restore the system. He advocated a communications regiment from the army to be sent to restore and maintain a communications system for industry. Overall, the tenor of his report was that, despite the huge damage, there were still unused capacities of labour and resources if systematically deployed to overcome the worst.35
Hitler accepted Speer’s recommendations at their meeting at the end of November. He agreed, for example, that the Reich should provide a labour force of between 100,000 and 150,000 to assist the Ruhr, and that all workers from the area conscripted for digging elsewhere should be returned. He also ordered an improvement in shoe provision for the Ruhr.36
In the build-up to the Ardennes offensive, Speer paid another, shorter, visit to the western front between 7 and 10 December, visiting mainly units of Army Groups B and G to hear their experiences and suggestions on the armaments situation. Major improvements were no longer possible. The armaments industry was by now scraping the barrel. (This had not prevented Speer, however, just before leaving for the western front, impressing a selected audience with an array of improved weapons in preparation.37) He was reduced to recommending incentives – additional army stores goods or leave – for troop units with especially low losses of weaponry. He also encouraged intensified propaganda efforts by the NSFOs to explain how well the armaments industry was performing despite all difficulties, and to combat rumours on shortages of tanks and fuel that were damaging troop morale. He pointed out to Hitler that Saar coal and gas were keeping the whole of south-west German industry going. The severe consequences if the Saar fell to the enemy were obvious.38
Speer’s third trip to the western front took place in the second half of December, during the Ardennes offensive, when he took soundings from a number of units of Army Group B. There was little concrete return from his visit. The most significant part of the report emphasized again the crisis on the railways. The Reichsbahn network in the region had, he reported, been ‘almost completely smashed’ beyond repair. (Sepp Dietrich complained that his troops were getting no munitions because the communications routes had been destroyed by air raids.)39 Other methods had to be deployed to ensure that materials were delivered and that inefficiencies, such as leaving loaded wagons at the mercy of air attacks, were reduced. Speer recommended the deployment of Party Local Leaders who, together with stationmasters, could organize alternative transport, get railway wagons unloaded and convey important communications by car or motorbike to the army commanders. However, minor improvisations to try to keep things moving could not gloss over, even for Hitler, the fact that the end was approaching.40
With the end of the war and the onset of a post-Hitler era plainly in view, Speer’s considerable energies were not least directed, in collaboration with industrial leaders and the army, at preserving what could be saved of German industry.41 Industrialists were under no illusions about the outcome of the war. Their main concern was avoiding the total destruction of their industries in a futile struggle so that they could be swiftly restored and continue in operation when Hitler was gone. Albert Vögler, head of the Federated Steelworks and among the Ruhr’s foremost industrial magnates, a long-standing Hitler supporter, asked the Minister directly, in full recognition of the desolate state of the economy, when Hitler would end the conflict. ‘We’re losing too much substance,’ he said. ‘How shall we be able to reconstruct if the destruction of industry goes on like this only a few months longer?’42
Neither Speer’s later actions to fend off Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ order, nor that order itself, came out of thin air. Under the ever more obvious fiction that immobilizing rather than totally destroying German industrial installations would enable them to be restored to working conditions as soon as the areas lost to military action were retaken, Speer had been issuing corresponding directives both on the eastern and western fronts since July.43 In early December he had to contend with instructions from Keitel, indicating Hitler’s wish that, where industrial installations could be quickly reconstructed to serve the enemy, they should be completely destroyed, not just paralysed. Keitel emphasized in particular that the Saar coal mines should on no account be allowed to fall undestroyed into enemy hands.44 Speer evidently intervened directly with Hitler to have the order amended. The same day he wired Saarbrücken: ‘all directives stating that coal mines are not to be crippled but destroyed are invalid. The Führer has again stipulated today that he only wants the coal mines to be crippled in the way we have established.’ Four days later Keitel transmitted Hitler’s decision that industrial installations endangered by the enemy in the area of Army Group G were merely to be crippled, not destroyed, and that all contrary orders were cancelled.45 Speer’s exertions to head off the destruction of Germany’s industry were not, however, over yet. The big conflict with Hitler on this front still awaited him.
Speer was clear-sighted enough to see the scale of the mounting disaster. But his strenuous efforts to keep the collapsing war economy functioning never wavered. Whatever motives he had, his efforts helped to maintain his position of power and influence at a time when they were under threat.46 To one so power-conscious, this mattered. Of course, Speer and his able subordinates in the Armaments Ministry, realists as most of them were (apart, perhaps, from the incorrigible super-optimist Saur), knew full well that they could not prevent the inexorable disintegration of the war economy. Without their extraordinary endeavours and capacity for improvisation, however, it is difficult to see how the German war effort could have staggered on until May 1945.
III
The other members of the power quadrumvirate – Goebbels, Himmler and Bormann – also strived to the utmost during the fraught autumn weeks to ensure there was no slackening of the war effort. They gave no hint whatsoever that the war was unwinnable, maintaining a complete grip on the population through propaganda, organization and unrelenting coercion.
One task was to provide the Gauleiter, crucial figures in the power apparatus in the regions, with the backing they felt they needed. Towards the end of October, Bormann had passed on to Himmler a copy of a communication from Gauleiter Friedrich Karl Florian, the provincial boss of the Düsseldorf area and spokesman of the western Gauleiter, about the ‘extremely serious and difficult situation’ caused by air raids on cities and the transport network. Florian stated that this could not be mastered, and could become threatening, unless accelerated aid from the Reich were forthcoming. Meetings with individual ministers or their officials had so far been without powers of decision. The western Gauleiter now sought ‘new ways’ to persuade Hitler to order a meeting of ministers, to be chaired by Bormann, to coordinate measures on food, transport, armaments, labour and other urgent issues without delay. Bormann agreed to the meeting but at Hitler’s request handed responsibility for it to Himmler.47
The meeting took place on 3 November, attended by representatives of the Party, the Wehrmacht, business, and State Secretaries from relevant ministries in the insignificant location of Klein-Berkel in Lower Saxony, not far from Hameln in the Hanover area, well secluded from the threat of air raids. One of Himmler’s bright ideas was that towns away from the beleaguered western and eastern areas could sponsor a lorry carrying an electricity generator. The town’s name would be proudly displayed on the vehicle, which would come with a driver. ‘In this way’, Himmler suggested, ‘something could be done in good spirit and with humour.’ Just as unpromising was his suggestion of creating mobile flak units on trains and lorries to shoot down low-flying bombers. This initiative was to be accompanied by a competition for sharpshooters, organized by the Party, with the winners rewarded with the Iron Cross Second Class. Another suggestion unlikely to be overwhelmed by a rush of volunteers was the setting up of short training sessions on defusing bombs so that ordinary citizens, not just specialists, could help save lives – although often at the expense of their own. Lessons could be learnt from the Russians, who, if no motorized vehicles were available, used ponies and traps, sledges and even prams to carry munitions to the front. ‘We have a lot to learn in improvisation,’ remarked Himmler.
Manpower had to be pumped into the Gaue of Essen, Düsseldorf and Cologne-Aachen for fortification work to free up labour from these areas to repair the railways. Keeping coal moving and the arteries to the front open was vital. Men were to be housed in barracks and fed in canteens. He would have Bormann dispatch 100,000 men from the Gaue in central Germany to help build the entrenchments. Himmler undertook to provide additional labour from Polish, Slovakian and Russian prisoners of war for railway work. He would also supply around 500–600 prisoners currently held in four goods trains belonging to the SS Railway Construction Brigade, and find another ten trains stuffed with prisoners to complement them. Another 40,000 workers were to be drawn from the mammoth construction body, the Organisation Todt, and 500 vehicles commandeered from Italy to move them around. He exhorted the Gauleiter to coordinate emergency food distribution following air raids to ensure that one area was not privileged over another.
He emphasized the value of the Volkssturm (to be provided, he declared, with 350,000 rifles before the end of the year). The Warsaw rising had shown – to Germany’s cost, he implied – that there was no better defensive position than a ruined city. The Volkssturm existed to mobilize the endless resources within the German people for patriotic defence. Fighting to the last bullet in the ruins to defend every German city had to be in deed, not just words. It is hard to imagine that his own words were greatly reassuring for his audience. He ended with a rhetorical flourish, perhaps heard with differing levels of conviction, evoking patriotic defence, a vision of the future and loyalty to Hitler. ‘We will defend our land, and are at the start of a great world empire. As the curve sometimes goes down, so one day it will go up again.’ He believed all present agreed that the difficulties, however great, could be mastered. ‘There are no difficulties that cannot be mastered by us all with dogged tenacity, optimism and humour. I believe all our concerns are small compared with those of one man in Germany, our Führer.’ All that was to be done was no more than duty towards ‘the man whom we have to thank for the resurrection of Germany, the essence of our existence, Adolf Hitler’.48
Himmler had naturally been unable to offer any panacea and was in no position to meet the Gauleiter’s demands, given the scale of the transport crisis. The Gauleiter were far from satisfied. All they gained was the hope that sufficient aid would come from the Reich to tide over the worst of the crisis. For the rest, they had to resort to ‘self-help’ and passing on to the District Leaders responsibility for repairs to the railway in their own areas. The meeting, Goebbels concluded, had come to nothing.49
If the Gauleiter were left to cope as best they could, Himmler’s address had nevertheless ruled out any alternative to retaining a positive and constructive approach to the worst difficulties. As high representatives of the regime, they were expected not to bow to problems – a sign of weakness and lack of resolve – but to show initiative in finding improvised solutions. Not least, Himmler appealed to their loyalty to Hitler, whose ‘charismatic authority’ rested ultimately on the personal bonds built into the Nazi system. And as arch-loyalists for many years, who owed their power entirely to Hitler, and who had nothing to lose, the Gauleiter were far from ready to contemplate deserting him. Their bonds to Hitler might have weakened. But they had not broken. The public face of the regime was still not flinching.
The notion of the power of will to overcome difficulties, central to the operation of ‘charismatic authority’ throughout the system, ran in its essence completely counter to impersonal bureaucratic administration – the basis of all modern states. The Party had always distinguished between the positive, desirable qualities of ‘leadership of people’ (Menschenführung) and the negative, arid attributes of mere ‘administration’. Leaders, at whatever level, ‘made things happen’. Bureaucrats simply administered rules and regulations which invariably, unless overridden by ‘will’, blocked initiative and sapped dynamism. Yet the Party, despite its unbureaucratic ethos, in seeking to implement the wishes and long-term goals of the Führer had, of course, in reality always been intensely bureaucratic as an organization. The tension in trying bureaucratically to work towards unbureaucratic ends had been there from the start, had increased greatly after the takeover of power and had intensified dramatically in conditions of total war.50
In late 1944, when less and less could be achieved, the Party bureaucracy went into overdrive.51 Time and energy were expended by a bloated Party officialdom on the most trivial matters. The Party Chancellery squandered countless hours, for instance, drawing up regulations on the minutiae of Volkssturm service – stipulating duties, regulating training periods, laying down rules about clothing and equipment, dealing with exemptions and, among the most notable absurdities, designating letterheads and service seals and providing detailed descriptions of the insignia to be used by different ranks.52 Goebbels described the bureaucracy involved as ‘laughable’.53 But it was unrelenting. When Bormann moved to Hitler’s new field headquarters at Ziegenberg, near Bad Nauheim in Hessen, prior to the start of the Ardennes offensive, he found ‘teleprinters were unsuitably installed, no teleprinter cables connected, neither typewriter desks nor shelves set up in the tiny room where my typists have to work’.54 Even so, the bureaucratic output from his Party Chancellery continued unabated.
The regime’s unfolding of bureaucratic, controlling energy at all levels was little short of astonishing. Orders poured out. Every official, however minor, groaned under the suffocating load of paperwork on the desk (despite efforts to save paper).55 The Reich Post Minister wrote to all the offices of state, at both Reich and regional levels, complaining bitterly that the postal system was greatly overburdened through the increase in bureaucracy. ‘A swelling mass of communications like an avalanche’ was how he described it, at precisely a time when the damage to the rail network and postal installations, together with loss of personnel to the Wehrmacht, had gravely affected the efficiency of the service.56 His urgent entreaties to reduce the level of post fell on deaf ears.
More and more was controlled, orchestrated, regulated, ordained, militarized, directed and organized, yet less and less resulted from all the effort – except, crucially, the stifling of all remaining limited levels of personal free space in the system. If ‘total society’ has a meaning in the sense that little or nothing not subjected to regime control existed any longer, and that opinion deviating from the official stance could be openly expressed only at great personal risk, then Germany towards the end of 1944 was approaching such a state.
As living conditions worsened drastically under the pounding from Allied bombs, the pressure on the population intensified. The total-war effort, for instance, far from subsiding after the extreme exertions of the late summer, redoubled its attempt in the autumn to dredge up all possible remaining reserves of manpower for the Wehrmacht. Goebbels pointed out at the beginning of November that by this time 900,000 extra men had been provided for the Wehrmacht. But he admitted it was not enough. The losses in the previous three months had numbered 1.2 million. He wanted Hitler’s support for pressing a reluctant Speer to surrender more men from the armaments sector. Speer eventually agreed to give up 30,000 men, though only temporarily until they could be redeployed once the transport situation had improved. Goebbels could not accept the condition, so the matter was left to be resolved by Hitler. As so often, no decision was forthcoming.57
More important for Goebbels, however, was for him to have authority from Hitler to ‘comb out’ the Wehrmacht for additional personnel to be sent to the front, as he had done earlier in the civilian sector. He finally managed to gain Hitler’s signature to a decree to this effect on 10 December. Goebbels felt revitalized, bursting with new energy, and determined to overcome all opposition within the army itself to raise new forces for Hitler. He expected – once more working through a small directing staff and the Gauleiter at the regional level – to attain very positive results in the New Year. He was convinced that only his total-war drive had made the coming western offensive at all possible. He now hoped, he said, to be able to give the Führer the basis of an offensive army in the east, as the ‘combing out’ of the civilian sector had provided one for the west.58
It was, of course, wishful thinking. But in these weeks Goebbels veered between an evident sense of realism about Germany’s plight, brought home to him most forcefully through the destruction of one German city after another through Allied bombing (which, unlike Hitler, he saw at first hand in visits to bombed-out localities), and continued hope that willpower, shored up by propaganda, would sustain the fight, whatever the odds, until the shaky enemy coalition cracked. ‘The political crisis in the enemy camp grows daily’ was only one of repeated assertions that the internal divisions, and the losses they were suffering, would split the coalition before long.59 Numerous diary entries hint at scepticism about Germany’s position. And when he viewed the impressive new, highly modern U-boats being built in Bremen at the end of November, he sighed despairingly that it was all too late.60 Yet he had far from given up hope. Following a long talk with Hitler – lasting deep into the night – a few days later, when the embattled Führer exuded confidence, expounded excitedly on the forthcoming offensive and envisioned a grandiose rebuilding of German cities and revitalization of culture after the war, Goebbels was so excited that he could not sleep.61 He was still, as he always had been, in thrall to Hitler.
Propaganda, in his view, had the vital task of reinforcing the will to resist, ‘in strengthening the backbone of the nation again and restoring its diminished self-confidence’.62 Ceremonies held throughout Germany where the newly created Volkssturm swore their oaths of allegiance – around 100,000 men in ten separate ceremonies in Berlin alone on Sunday, 12 November – were part of this task. In seasonal mist and with the ruins of the Wilhelmplatz as a macabre backdrop, Goebbels addressed the arrayed Volkssturm men from the balcony of the Propaganda Ministry. ‘Some are already armed,’ he recorded in his diary – unwittingly acknowledging the impoverished levels of support for the new organization. In fact, rifles, bazookas and some machine guns had been handed out just before the ceremony. Few of the men knew how to use them, but in any case they had to give them up again once the ceremony was over. Silence fell across the square as, lacking uniforms, they doffed their caps and hats in an oath to the Führer before marching past ‘in sacred earnestness’. Everything was filmed to make a big impression in the newsreels. The optical effect was excellent, remarked Goebbels’ aide Wilfred von Oven. But what the cameras did not show were young boys and soldiers on leave standing on the footpaths and doing their best not to laugh at the march-past. The Volkssturm was not worth ‘a shot of powder’ in von Oven’s view.63
As a further attempt to maintain fighting spirit, Goebbels had in 1943 commissioned the colour film Kolberg – a grand spectacular aimed at turning the defence of the Pomeranian coastal town of that name during the Napoleonic Wars into a heroic epic to inspire the present-day defenders of the Reich.64 By the end of 1944 the film – with an enormous cast of extras, apparently including 187,000 soldiers temporarily removed from active service at a time when new recruits for the front were being so desperately sought – was almost ready. Goebbels was hugely impressed, on seeing a rough-cut at the beginning of December, by what he called a ‘masterpiece’ that ‘answered all the questions now bothering the German people’. He had great expectations of the film, which he thought worth ‘a victorious battle’ in its likely impact on the mood of the public.65 But he feared ‘scenes of destruction and despair’ would have the effect that in the current situation many Germans would decide against viewing it.66 As the comment betrays, Goebbels was fully aware of the uphill task he faced in overcoming the deep pall of gloom in Germany as the disastrous year of 1944 neared its close.
IV
The reports reaching Goebbels from the regional propaganda offices left no doubt of the worrying state of morale. News of the success in repelling the Red Army in East Prussia made scarcely a dent in the depressed mood in early November. Feelings ranged from extreme anxiety about the future and anger at being left defenceless as bombs rained down on German cities to wearied resignation (also among Party members, especially in the west) and fatalism. Large parts of the population just wanted ‘peace at any price’.67 In western regions, where the population was most exposed to the nightly horror of devastation from the skies, now being inflicted upon most of Germany’s big industrial cities, the mood was at rock bottom. Amid the jangled nerves and constant worry, Goebbels noted, ‘outright anger towards the Party, held responsible for the war and its consequences’, could be heard.68
It was scarcely surprising. Cologne, for instance, was subjected to another huge attack on the night of 30 October in what one witness described as the city’s ‘death blow’. The quarter of a million people still living there – until the heavy raids started there had been around 800,000 – had no gas or electricity. The little water available was only to be had at hydrants in the street. The NSV distributed meagre food rations to people standing in queues. Almost all remaining habitable parts of the city were now destroyed. There was a stampede to leave as masses of refugees gathered with their few possessions at the Rhine bridges. But an immediate organized evacuation was impossible because of lack of transport. The rail crisis meant trains could not be laid on. Any military vehicle going east was stopped and loaded to capacity with those fleeing the city. There was much bitterness directed at the regime and a sense of the futility of the conflict. The exodus lasted for more than a week. Cologne was now ‘virtually a ghost city’. As Goebbels put it, ‘this lovely Rhine metropolis has at least for the time being to be written off’.69
Among the remnants of the population, housed in improvised barracks or surviving in cellars in the ruined shell of the city, groups of dissident youths, foreign workers, deserted soldiers and former Communist Party members took to despairing kinds of partisan-like active resistance, which reached its climax in December. With hand grenades and machine guns that they had managed to steal from Wehrmacht depots, they waged their own war against the Cologne police, killing the head of the Gestapo in the city and, in one incident, engaging in a twelve-hour armed battle with police before being overwhelmed. Only with difficulty did the Gestapo attain the upper hand before taking savage vengeance on the 200 or so members of the resistance groups whom they arrested.70
No similar action materialized in the other cities of the Rhine–Ruhr industrial belt. But hundreds of thousands experienced similar misery to that of the population of Cologne following the devastating raids on Bochum, Duisburg, Oberhausen and other major cities of the region over the autumn. The mood in the Ruhr was bad.71 The air war was creating ‘a downright despairing mood’, Goebbels noted from the reports reaching him.72 There was only a single topic of conversation: ‘the war-weariness of all people’.73
Still, there was no collapse of discipline either in the workplace or in the army. People carried out to the best of their ability what they took to be their duty.74 There were no signs of sabotage, strikes or – beyond the events in Cologne – other prominent forms of resistance.75 Dr Walther Rohland thought shortly after the end of the war that the reason for what he saw as the extraordinary effort made by workers who had little enthusiasm for the war (or the regime) was that ‘each single person felt clearly that on the one hand there was no opportunity for the individual to take action against the war’. ‘However, if the war was lost, then, in contrast to 1914–18, Germany also, and with her the possibilities of existence for the individual, would be lost’.76 Such fears were given sustenance by the propaganda gift of the ‘Morgenthau Plan’ – as the programme prepared by the US Secretary to the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to split up post-war Germany into a powerless, dismembered country with a pre-industrial economy swiftly became known to the German public.77
On 12 December Goebbels went to the Ruhr district to assess the situation for himself, and while he was there witnessed a heavy air raid on Witten, turning much of the town into a raging inferno. He also saw the misery of the 100,000-strong population of Bochum, deprived of all amenities, existing in primitive conditions in cellars and little more than holes in the ground. His speech in the Krupp factory in Essen failed to rouse the grim-faced workers who had been dragooned into hearing him, collars turned up against the bitter cold, hands deep in their pockets. The applause was meagre and had scarcely died down when the sirens began to wail. The Propaganda Minister and his entourage had swiftly to take cover in the vaulted cellars deep underground, where they encountered ‘grey, disconsolate faces’. Little was said, but the glances on the men’s faces were ‘not friendly’.78 Goebbels was made fully aware of the strength of feeling among the Party and industrial leaders of the Rhine and Ruhr about the failings of Göring (blamed for the inability to protect German cities against the ‘gangsters of the air’), and also Ribbentrop (held generally in contempt, and seen as inept in his conduct of foreign policy), but came away convinced of their continued ‘blind, unshakeable faith’ in Hitler.79 In early December, Goebbels was still persuading himself that ‘faith in the Führer is largely unshaken and many’ – after seeing the troop build-up near the western front and sensing a coming offensive – ‘are again beginning to believe in a German victory’.80
It was in the main a delusion. It is true that among the Party elite, those wielding power in the regions as well as at the centre of the regime, there were no signs that loyalty towards Hitler was starting to flake.81 And in enabling the regime to continue to function, this is what mattered. Among the civilian population, however, beyond Party diehards and sections of youth, it was in the main a different matter. By the end of November, propaganda reports were indicating ‘the danger of a crisis in confidence in the leadership’ which ‘can no longer be ignored’. The concern was seen as important and urgent.82 For the first time, Hitler had failed to speak in person – Himmler read out his proclamation – at the annual gathering in Munich of the Party ‘Old Guard’ for the Putsch commemoration on 8 November. Immediately, rumours flared up (mostly arising from foreign speculation) that he was dead, or seriously ill, had suffered a nervous breakdown, or had fled and that Himmler or Goebbels had taken over.83 Still, popular belief in Hitler had not altogether vanished. And indeed, even at this late hour there were those who clung as a drowning man clings to a piece of wood to their long-held faith in the Führer, and in his ability to save Germany. But such people were in a dwindling minority. Hitler’s charisma, in the sense of its popular appeal, was by now fast fading.
On the eve of the Ardennes offensive, Goebbels recorded in his diary a somewhat sobering assessment of popular feeling on the basis of the reports – themselves inevitably tending to emphasize the positive wherever they could – sent in by the regional propaganda offices. ‘The scepticism in the German public continues,’ he noted. ‘There’s no proper faith in German powers of resistance… There have been too many military disappointments recently for the people to be easily able to build up hopes.’84
Generalizations about attitudes among soldiers are hazardous. Rank, temperament and earlier approaches towards Nazism affected their mindset. There were reports, for instance, of poor morale among the new recruits of the People’s Grenadier divisions.85 Among battle-hardened veterans, however, it was often a different story. Confidence instilled by generals such as Model was a further factor affecting morale. The situation on the different fronts – and parts of the fronts – produced widely varying experiences and perspectives.
In the late autumn of 1944, away from the continuing bitter fighting in Hungary, the eastern front was relatively quiet. A naval officer who had been based in Memel, then Gotenhafen (now Gdynia), on the Baltic near Danzig, was shocked in the autumn when he travelled through southern Germany. He felt as if he had been until now living on an isolated island as he encountered repeated bombing attacks from low-flying aircraft and constant controls by the military police in the overcrowded compartments of slow-moving, greatly delayed trains. The experience made him and his fellow officers ‘deeply pessimistic, in part even despairing’. During the return journey, when almost all in the train were en route to fight the Soviets, he was struck by the unequivocal criticism of the Party and its functionaries. These were blamed for the unstoppable partisan warfare in the east, seen to have been caused by their brutal treatment of the population.86
Another officer, based in south-west Germany, was also deeply affected by what he saw while on leave in late November. Though he did not have far to travel, even short rail journeys were difficult. His heavily delayed train was packed with refugees and evacuees, many of them women and children. He was struck, as they journeyed through villages near the front, by the crowded roads, full of people carrying their few possessions and hoping to find refuge somewhere in the Reich. He eventually reached home in Emmendingen only to be told of the bombing on 27 November of nearby Freiburg, a town with a medieval core of picture-book attractiveness not far from the Swiss border to the south, without strategic or industrial significance, and with a population of more than 100,000. When he travelled to Freiburg a couple of days later, he could scarcely believe his eyes. Practically the entire old town had been obliterated. Only the glorious Gothic minster, its tall spire the very symbol of the town, was left standing, if badly damaged, much as Cologne’s cathedral had withstood everything the Allies had thrown at the city. Almost 3,000 bodies lay beneath the rubble. It was a terrible picture of devastation. The helpless rage of the survivors, amid the all-embracing misery, was directed only in part at the Allied bombing crews; it was aimed more at the Nazi Party and its leaders who had provoked such outrages. When his leave was over, the officer travelled northwards through Mannheim and Koblenz, again deeply saddened and troubled by the destruction of once lovely towns. Amid the ruined buildings of Koblenz, at the confluence of the Rhine and the Mosel, he was reminded of how the ‘prophecy’ that Robert Ley, the Labour Front leader, had made in 1933 had in an unintended sense come true: ‘in ten years’ time you won’t recognize your town.’87
This sardonic comment reflected a weary resignation at the scale of the destruction. Such sentiments were commonplace. But other attitudes among soldiers were less pessimistic, and still supportive of the regime and what they took to be Germany’s aims in continuing the struggle. One sergeant, writing home in early December, spoke wistfully of the coming ‘feast of peace’ at Christmas. However, the bombs were still raining down and the bells not ringing out for the peace ‘which is so yearned for by all peace-loving peoples’. ‘Our enemies’, he continued, ‘have no understanding for this wish’, and so ‘we, the entire German people, still stand during this feast in a fierce struggle against these degenerate peoples, led by Jewish parasites who know no fatherland nor have one’.88
Within the SS, unsurprisingly, outrightly Nazified views were still prevalent. An SS corporal, sympathizing with his family’s living conditions after an air raid on Munich but relieved that they were well, blamed the ‘air terror’ on the Jews ‘because the damned Jews are worried about their sack of money and see that the entire world slowly understands that they are guilty of wars and are making money out of blood and tears’. He believed, however, ‘that we will be victorious, though it will still cost much sacrifice and suffering’.89 Along with many other soldiers, he had great hopes of the V2 rockets launched at Antwerp and London, after published reports of the destruction they had caused in the British capital. ‘The V2 are all the talk with us,’ he wrote in mid-November. ‘Perhaps they can be fired on America…. I believe for certain that the final victory will be ours.’90 A corporal, writing home the same day, hoped that the V2 would ‘bring a decision with England’ in 1945. Then it would be Russia’s turn in 1946. ‘I can’t help it. I have the feeling that all will be well,’ he commented.91 A gunner writing to his family from Schneidemühl in Pomerania rejoiced at the news of the V2 attacks on England. ‘Great, isn’t it?’ he remarked. The arrogance of the Allies, he felt, was being paid back in kind. His confidence had also been bolstered by the way, seemingly against the odds, German troops had managed to stabilize the fronts. ‘The German soldier has again proved that he is not yet beaten after five years of war,’ he proudly stated.92
An Army High Command censorship report in early November, which came into Allied hands, indicated that such attitudes were not isolated. Of course, it was sensible to avoid negative comments in letters that passed under the censor’s eyes and could have dire repercussions, but there was no requirement to express outrightly pro-Nazi or glowingly positive comments on the war. Yet the German censor’s report stated: ‘In spite of the fact that there are now more letters showing a rather weak belief in the final victory, the whole of the mail still proves a strong confidence. They still trust the Führer as much as ever, and some even think that the destiny of the German people depends on him alone.’ The main qualification was the increased doubts about new weapons and the view that ‘all our efforts are useless if the new weapons are not committed very soon’.93
Among higher officers, though attitudes towards the Nazi leadership varied, there was no hint of disloyalty to Hitler. For the sustenance of the regime, this was crucial. Even those far from enthusiastic about Nazism and writing privately could still find much to applaud in Hitler. In diary comments he made in late December, Colonel Curt Pollex, in charge of officer training at Döberitz, the troop-training grounds west of Berlin, was critical of the Party and the ‘bigwigs’ running it but complimentary about Hitler. He remarked positively on the need for National Socialism and the justification for the war (blame for which he attributed to Roosevelt and Stalin). Germany had to break the Versailles Treaty, he claimed, and the timing of the war had been correct. Some of Hitler’s underlings were rogues and idiots who had deceived him and the people. But, despite evident crass errors in military matters, ‘big-mouth propaganda’ and other nonsense, Colonel Pollex still thought the direction of the state leadership was right. If Hitler was ill and could no longer cope, then he should resign; but no decent person of judgement should underrate what he had achieved.94
Beyond continued loyalty to Hitler, there was in the officer corps still an independent ‘code of honour’. This had not hindered complicity in atrocities in the eastern campaigns, but it did offer its own block on action that might undermine the war effort. Major-General Johannes Bruhn, commander of a People’s Grenadier division before being captured on the western front in November 1944, and regarded by his captors as ‘anti-Nazi’ in attitude, spoke of suggestions emanating from Switzerland that German generals should lay down their arms. ‘That couldn’t be reconciled with their honour. It couldn’t possibly be done: it’s absolutely out of the question,’ he remarked to fellow officers, unaware that his comments were being bugged by his British captors. ‘The officer corps loves its country, and believes implicitly in its own respectability and ideas of honour and lives accordingly; and like a trusting child considers it quite impossible that it is being wrongly led, and that the command is other than it says it is, and that they have stained their hands with blood etc. in the most revolting way.’95
Such fragments of a mosaic never build into a complete picture. As far as it is possible to generalize, it seems that morale within the Wehrmacht was somewhat better than within the civilian population. Attitudes varied widely and as in the civilian population scepticism, apathy and resignation were evident among soldiers, alongside anxiety about loved ones suffering and dying in the bombing raids, and worry about the future. A rise in the number of desertions, though punishable by death, tells its own story.96 About 350 members of the Wehrmacht each month in the second half of 1944 were sentenced to death for desertion.97 Precise motives for desertion are not easy to establish. Probably, fear and desperation played a big part. Most soldiers were by now, like the civilian population, war-weary, just longing for the fighting to stop and to be able to get out of the daily misery and back home. However, there was also commitment, determination, a sense of patriotic duty and, among a minority, still a belief in Hitler. The vast majority of soldiers – probably without much reflection – did what they were told to do by their officers. The unquestioning obedience that was the axiom of military life, not just in Germany, continued to prevail. ‘If the troops don’t want [to fight], it’s all hopeless,’ remarked Colonel Pollex.98 Despite everything, the troops did want to fight – or at least were prepared to do so. Whatever they thought of the war, Hitler’s leadership, Germany’s plight, their own hopes of survival, for the overwhelming number of ordinary soldiers there was no sense of any alternative but to continue fighting. Unlike the last months of the First World War, there was no danger of mutiny in the ranks feeding into internal collapse.
V
There was, indeed, optimism among the German troops who advanced into the Ardennes on the early morning of 16 December. Many, according to General von Manteuffel, still believed in Hitler’s ability to turn the tide through new ‘wonder weapons’ and U-boats, and saw it as their task to win him time.99 The early stages of the offensive were so successful that the optimism and belief seemed justified. The cloak of secrecy over the operation had worked superbly. The Allies were caught completely unawares. And the bad weather, significantly hindering Allied air strikes, was exactly what the Germans wanted. Enemy forward positions were swiftly overrun. On the northern flank, Dietrich’s 6th SS-Panzer Army, hampered by bad roads and transport difficulties as well as stiff resistance, made relatively slow progress, though its most advanced troops included the SS-Panzer Regiment 1, commanded by the brutal SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper, which left a trail of atrocities in its wake, murdering more than eighty American prisoners of war near Malmédy as it went on its way. Further south, Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army made initial spectacular progress, breaking the American lines, taking some 8,000–9,000 prisoners, and opening up a gap of more than 30 kilometres in the front. His troops poured through the opening, and had pressed forward by 18 December – though, held up by barely passable roads and detonated bridges, still more slowly than the operational plan required – almost to the Meuse, a distance of some 100 kilometres, where they encountered heavy American resistance at the vital communications point of Bastogne. The town had to be taken and the Meuse crossed if the planned advance on Antwerp was to have the remotest chance of success. But the offensive was slowing. And on 19 December, Eisenhower halted Allied offensive action along the rest of the front in order to rush reinforcements to the Meuse. Hitler’s offensive was on the verge of stalling.100
To the troops this was far from clear. One lieutenant was impressed that day, he recorded in his diary, as the ‘endless columns of prisoners pass; at first, about a hundred, half of them negroes, later another thousand’. When his vehicle stuck, he found none other than Field-Marshal Model – ‘a little, undistinguished looking man with a monocle’ – directing traffic. The roads, the junior officer noted, were ‘littered with destroyed American vehicles, cars and tanks. Another column of prisoners passes. I count over a thousand men.’101 Another lieutenant, with explicitly Nazi views, was elated at the offensive and delighted in the brutality as he thought the tables were now being turned on the Americans. ‘You cannot imagine what glorious hours and days we are experiencing now,’ he told his wife in his letter home.
It looks as if the Americans cannot withstand our important push. Today we overtook a fleeing column and finished it… It was a glorious bloodbath, vengeance for our destroyed homeland. Our soldiers still have the same old zip. Always advancing and smashing everything. The snow must turn red with American blood. Victory was never as close as it is now. The decision will soon be reached. We will throw them into the ocean, the arrogant, big-mouthed apes from the New World. They will not get into our Germany. We will protect our wives and children from all enemy domination. If we are to preserve all tender and beautiful aspects of our lives, we cannot be too brutal in the deciding moments of this struggle.102
Such extreme attitudes (encouraged by propaganda concoctions on the terror of American ‘negro soldiers’, including the base calumny that ‘drunken niggers murder German children’103) were almost certainly no rarity, but conceivably less representative than the contrasting views entered in the diary of a soldier, killed in January, whose unwillingness to fight was coloured by the destruction of his home in Hamburg and the blame he attached for this personal tragedy and the wider calamity of the war to Hitler and the Nazis. ‘On the 16th December, about 05.30 in the morning, we attacked,’ he wrote. ‘I shall march once more through Belgium and France, but I don’t have the smallest desire to do so… If [only] this idiotic war would end. Why should I fight? It only goes for the existence of the Nazis. The superiority of our enemy is so great that it is senseless to fight against it.’104
How most soldiers felt as they advanced into the Ardennes is impossible to assess. Their main consideration was probably survival – living to tell the tale – coupled with daring to hope that this offensive might indeed prove a turning point on the way to a peace. Letters and diary jottings from soldiers serving in the Ardennes and on other fronts suggest that such hopes were widespread. ‘I think the war in the west is again turning,’ wrote a corporal from the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division on 17 December. ‘The main thing is that the war will soon be decided and I’ll be coming home again to my dear wife and we can again build a new home. The radio is now playing bells from the homeland.’105 Another corporal learnt of the attack when Field-Marshal Model’s proclamation to his soldiers was read out in the barracks. ‘Hopefully, the change will now come for Germany to a successful final struggle and peace in the foreseeable future,’ he jotted in his diary.106 An NCO based in the Courland echoed the sentiment. ‘The news from yesterday’s OKW report, that the offensive in the west has begun, will certainly have filled you with great joy,’ he wrote. ‘We were all thrilled here. No one had reckoned with that before Christmas. Let’s hope that it will bring the decision and with it the end of the war in the west.’107
At home, the mood was also suddenly lifted at the news of the offensive. The first the public heard was through the brief OKW report on 18 December. Goebbels was personally elated and more than ready to take the credit for making the offensive possible by raising troops to take part through his ruthless total-war drive. It showed, he thought, what could be done through toughness, resilience and refusal to capitulate in the face of difficulties or be discouraged through ‘minor setbacks’. He nevertheless advocated caution in the reportage in order not to arouse exaggerated expectations.108 Newspapers publicized the offensive for the first time on 19 December, and, following Goebbels’ instructions, without trumpet-blowing.109 The response to the German attack was, even so, immediate and hugely enthusiastic. ‘Great surprise’ and a ‘deep inner joy’ were recorded by propaganda offices as early reactions to the OKW news. There was a sense of being ‘freed from a nightmare’. ‘What a lovely Christmas present’ was a sentiment frequently heard. That such an offensive could be launched had in itself significantly raised confidence in the leadership and the strength of the Reich, even if it was abundantly plain ‘that the whole of France and Belgium would not be reconquered immediately’.110 A day later, Goebbels was convinced that the impact on morale within the Reich was unquestionably successful. ‘The few sentences in the OKW report on Monday [18 December] have prompted a mood in the country which recalls the great times of our offensives,’ he recorded. ‘In Berlin that evening the entire Christmas schnapps rations were consumed. The people are deeply joyous that we have again gained the initiative, especially since no one in the public, other than the few in the know, had expected that. The surprise is all the greater as a result.’111
The Wehrmacht’s own propaganda agents, secretly taking soundings in Berlin, acknowledged the ‘very good mood’, despite trying to dampen the excessive optimism of the ‘hurrah-patriots’. Some thought the French and Belgians would this time welcome German troops with open arms after they had had the chance to experience ‘Anglo-American occupation’.112 A positive impression was also gleaned by those outside the German propaganda apparatus. A Swedish correspondent in Berlin reported great enthusiasm at the news of the offensive, exhilaration and confidence among soldiers and a lifting of the gloom that had earlier prevailed.113 But the euphoria could not last. Already by Christmas it was fading.
The news from the front remained positive for some days. Hitler himself was in high spirits, like a man rejuvenated.114 The small town of Saint-Vith on the north of the front was taken on the 21st, but, further south, the more important Bastogne, heavily besieged (and tying down three German divisions in the process), still held out. Manteuffel’s troops, from the 5th Panzer Army, bogged down in mud as well as facing fierce resistance, could make only slow progress. On 23 December they reached Buissonville and Celles, about 7 kilometres from the Meuse, east of Dinant. But that was as far as they got. The high point of the offensive had already passed.
Rundstedt had expressed doubts on 20 December about the chances of crossing the Meuse (though Model was at this time still more optimistic).115 Karl Otto Saur, close to supplanting Speer as Hitler’s blue-eyed boy in the Armaments Ministry, said after the war that he had realized the offensive had failed as early as 19 December (implying that this was the date at which he knew the war was lost).116 Model told Speer on 23 December that the offensive had failed.117 It was plain to any perceptive soldier by 24 December, General Guderian later commented, that the offensive had finally broken down.118 By Christmas, the American and British reinforcements rushed to the area had shored up Allied defences. On 26 December, armoured units from Patton’s 3rd US Army, which had hastened northwards, finally broke through to the encircled American troops in Bastogne and ended the siege.119 Model still vainly hoped for a regrouping of forces to regain the initiative near Bastogne, and at least cement more limited goals than Antwerp, which he acknowledged was now out of reach. But Manteuffel’s advance was at an end. It had been spectacular while it lasted, but could go no further.
Meanwhile, the weather had cleared and Allied aircraft were now fully able to exert their superiority as their ceaseless attacks – the Allies flew six times more sorties during the offensive than Göring’s crippled Luftwaffe – pounded German supply lines. Reinforcements of men and matériel were, as Rundstedt admitted on 27 December, impossible under these circumstances.120 Allied losses of 76,890 men killed, wounded or captured actually outnumbered the 67,461 on the German side. But the German losses could not be made good, nor could the 600 tanks which the Allies had destroyed. Whatever gloss was put upon it, the last great German offensive had failed.
The failure only gradually became apparent to the German public. Goebbels soon began to hint at setbacks in the offensive and accepted by 29 December that the advance could go no further, that the Germans would be happy to hold on to their territorial gains. But there was a time lag in popular recognition. As the end of the year approached, with the offensive stalled, many people, noted Goebbels, still had high hopes, nourished by soldiers returning from the west and talking of getting to Paris before New Year. It was ‘naturally absolute rubbish’, he remarked, but added: ‘Large parts of the German people are convinced that the war in the west could be ended in the forseeable future.’121 Yet only two days later, on the very last day of 1944, he offered a contradictory assessment, on the basis of reports from the regional propaganda offices. ‘The German people attaches no exaggerated illusions to the western offensive,’ he now stated, and had in mind only ‘smaller aims, though naturally everyone earnestly wishes that we will come to a decisive blow in the west’.122 The bubble had burst. It was a sobering return to realities. One officer, based in the west, drew his own conclusion from Field-Marshal Model’s New Year proclamation to his soldiers, in which he had declared: ‘You have withstood the tests of the year 1944. You have held watch on the Rhine.’ This meant, the officer concluded, that after being forced to give up ‘fortress Europe’, holding on to ‘fortress Germany’ would indeed prove a success.123
VI
After the failure of the Ardennes offensive, it was as good as impossible – apart from the incorrigible optimists who insisted on the coming ‘wonder weapons’ or a split among the Allies – to hold out any further realistic hope of a positive end to the war for Germany. The regime, almost all Germans could see, was utterly doomed. No one beneath Hitler, who as always ruled out any alternative to fighting on, was, however, either able or willing to do anything about it. So nothing changed internally.
The sixth war Christmas was a muted affair, with much talk of striving further for the yearned-for peace and even more of holding out against mighty enemies. At the most miserable New Year celebrations in memory, Hitler’s exhortations offered few hopes of major change in 1945. Amid the routinely effusive outpourings of the propaganda offices about the revitalizing effect of the ‘Führer speech’, it was impossible to conceal the widespread disappointment that Hitler had no reassurance to offer on the deployment of new weapons, the status of the offensive in the west (which he did not even mention), and, most crucially, the breaking of the terror from the air. Many people, it was said (without a trace of irony) were left with tears in their eyes at the end of the speech. Some, in fact, were unable to hear it because they were without electricity.124 For all its bombast and the usual bile poured out on the ‘Jewish-international world conspiracy’ that was bent on destroying Germany, Hitler’s speech could promise no more than further hardship, suffering and bloodshed without an end in sight.125 Whatever the miserable prospects, for ordinary people at the base of society, civilian and military, there was little to be done other than struggle on with their daily existence.
The Nazi regime remained an immensely strong dictatorship, holding together in the mounting adversity and prepared to use increasingly brutal force in controlling and regimenting German society at more or less every point. It left little room for opposition – recognizably as suicidal as it was futile. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, ranging from the hundred-percenter hold-out-to-the-last contingent down to the majority simply going through the motions, officialdom – high and low – continued to do its duty. Here, too, most civil servants could not see any alternative. So the bureaucratic wheels kept turning, and with them the attritional grind of controls was sustained. No matter, however trivial, was beneath their attention. Amid the myriad concerns of local civil servants, as they tried to cope with huge social dislocation after air raids, refugee problems, housing shortages, food rationing and many other issues, they never lost sight of the need to complete forms and have them officially stamped for approval. Officials in the Munich police department spent time and energy (as well as using reams of precious paper) in December 1944 making sure that five cleaning-buckets were ordered to replace those lost in the recent air raid, deciding how to obtain copies of official periodicals that regulations said had to come from post offices (even though these were now destroyed), or obtaining permission for a usable iron heater to be taken to police headquarters, left without heating after the last bombing.126 At the top of the bureaucratic tree, the head of the Reich Chancellery, Lammers, his powers meanwhile largely usurped by Bormann, had little more to do than remind Reich authorities of the Führer’s wish that the sending of Christmas and New Year greetings should be greatly restricted to minimize the burden on transport and postal services.127
The overlapping, often competing, bureaucracy of the Party was equally cumbersome and even more oppressive for ordinary citizens. Practically every aspect of civil defence was now orchestrated by the Party. The frequent whine of the sirens produced frenetic attempts to usher people into air-raid shelters, organize the clearance of damage after the devastation, try to provide welfare and accommodation for those without homes (with the help of the hopelessly overstretched NSV) and arrange emergency food distribution (still holding up remarkably well, in contrast to the near famine towards the end of the First World War), among an array of other tasks. In a different society, such efforts might have met with gratitude and approval. By now, however, few beyond the ranks of the diehards could find much else than feelings of anger and bitterness towards the Party functionaries who, even at this stage, combined their attempts at welfare with ceaseless hectoring and haranguing through pointless propaganda and with the surveillance and monitoring that could have dire consequences for any who stepped out of line.
At a higher level of the Party, the Gauleiter, whatever their mounting inner despair at the ever deteriorating situation following the short-lived raising of hopes, had little option but to stick with Hitler. In their own provinces, they were still figures of real power, capable of ferocious repression against any lesser mortals who appeared to pose a threat. Beyond their own domain, however, they were a divided group, and incapable of any unified positive action to avoid the gathering maelstrom of self-destruction, certain only that their own destinies were bound up with the inevitable demise of the regime.
Survival strategies varied, though they usually involved some refusal to accept reality. Göring was probably among the more realistic in recognizing the irredeemable destruction of the Luftwaffe, though he still paid frequent visits to airfields to spur on his demoralized air crews. He retreated as much as he could to the luxury of his palatial country residence at Carinhall, in the Schorfheide 65 kilometres north of Berlin, well away from Hitler’s proximity and the malign influence of Bormann. There he could surround himself with fawning friends and relatives, dress in outlandish garb, pop his codeine pills and bemoan the failings of Luftwaffe generals.128 He had long been a spent force. Ribbentrop was still insisting, a week into January, that the Ardennes offensive had been a success and telling the Japanese ambassador, Oshima Hiroshi, that ‘Germany now holds the initiative everywhere’. He was adamant that the Allied coalition was bound to split if Germany and Japan could hold out until the end of 1945 and harboured illusions that peace could even at this late hour be negotiated.129 Robert Ley, when he was sober, fell into reveries about a coming social revolution, remaining at the same time one of Hitler’s most fanatical lieutenants in advocating an all or nothing showdown with the enemy.130
Bormann was another with flights of fancy, as, evidently, was his wife, Gerda. Writing to her on 26 December, as the Ardennes offensive was petering out and with it Germany’s last military hope of success, he referred to her ‘ideas about things to come’ as ‘by no means extravagant’, and outlined his own future scenario.
There is no doubt that in the future we shall be compelled to build important factories and the like deep beneath the earth’s surface. Wherever towns and villages are built on a slope it will be necessary at once to dig deep shafts into the hill or mountainside, with special cellars – storerooms – for all inhabitants. In the new manor farms which we are going to build in the north, the buildings will have to be constructed with three or four basements, and collective shelters must be built at various points for the whole village community from the start.
Gerda found the plans for post-war construction intriguing, but was ‘boundlessly furious at the thought that we, with our innate longing for light and sunshine, should be compelled by the Jews to make our abodes as if we were beings of the underworld’.131
Himmler, who in mid-December, when he was temporarily based in the Black Forest as Commander-in-Chief of the newly formed Army Group Upper Rhine, was rumoured to have fallen into disgrace at Führer Headquarters, cherished the belief that Britain would come to see that its interests lay in joining forces with Germany to combat advancing Soviet power on the Continent. He thought of himself as an essential element of that continued fight.132 Goebbels remained among the more clear-sighted Nazi leaders, cautious from the outset about the chances of a major triumph in the Ardennes. He too, however, ended the year in good spirits, convinced that the offensive had widened the conflict between the Allies, that the Germans had won back the initiative in the west and reduced the pressure on the western front.133 The enigmatic Speer was the least given to fanciful illusions among Nazi leaders. He knew the full extent of Germany’s economic plight. And he had seen at first hand the realities of the Ardennes offensive, the hopelessness, despite the initial successes, of the attempt to break the stranglehold of mightily superior enemy forces. For Speer, so he later claimed, ‘with the Ardennes offensive the war was at an end’, apart from the drawn-out process of enemy occupation of Germany.134 But Speer’s desire for power and influence, as well as ambitions, even now, to play some part in a world after Hitler, kept him going. However resigned he was to Germany’s impending defeat, he saw no way out – and no course of action other than doing all he could to sustain the German war effort.
Among the generals – beyond the leadership of the OKW where, in Hitler’s direct proximity, illusions still held sway – there was widespread recognition that defences were now desperately overstretched, resources as good as at an end, the chances of staving off powerful enemies minimal. General of the Waffen-SS Karl Wolff, formerly chief of Himmler’s personal staff and now ‘Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht’ in Italy, became finally convinced that the war was irretrievably lost through conversations with young SS officers who had been part of the spearhead of the Ardennes offensive.135 Guderian probably spoke for most generals in his frustration with Hitler’s leadership and the crass inflexibility which had worsened Germany’s position. He acknowledged the size of the odds stacked against the Wehrmacht, given the immense disproportion in military might of the enemy. He felt, nevertheless, that it was necessary to continue to strain every sinew in the struggle to fend off the assault on the Reich, and to gain time – perhaps for the Allied coalition to crack, perhaps for some negotiated end to the nightmare, perhaps… who knew for what?
Aware of what was coming on the eastern front, Guderian pleaded in vain with Jodl for the transfer of troops from the west. Jodl refused, insisting that they were needed to retain the initiative in the west.136 The subsidiary offensive in Alsace, code-named ‘North Wind’, for which the troops, desperately needed in the east, were allegedly so vital, had been intended to bolster the southern flank of the major offensive in the Ardennes. Ordered by Hitler on 21 December, and started on New Year’s Eve, it made little headway and ground to a halt as early as 3 January.137 The consequence of this predictable failure, on top of losses from the Ardennes offensive, was to leave the overall military situation substantially worse than it had been in mid-December. In the west, the Luftwaffe was effectively now finished. Some 80,000 much-needed soldiers – a number raised under such extreme difficulties – had been lost, huge quantities of armaments had been destroyed and fuel supplies were rapidly running out. In the east, the expected offensive could only be faced with maximum apprehension – made worse by the losses in the west. Even so, the generals had no alternative in mind other than to follow Hitler’s orders, however insane they thought them to be. Neither the will nor the organizational capacity was there to challenge his authority as a group, let alone face him individually with any ultimatum to avoid the looming catastrophe. A glimpse into the prevailing mentality can be gleaned from a comment made by Göring at the beginning of November to General Werner Kreipe, just dismissed from his post as Chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe. Kreipe had pressed Göring – still exuding optimism that the enemy would be defeated, and that their coalition would split – to confront Hitler and urge him to find a political way out. The Reich Marshal refused point-blank, saying that to do so would take away the Führer’s self-belief.138
At the very pinnacle of the regime, Hitler could still muster his tried and tested act of supreme confidence and optimism, however bleak the reality. Even at this stage he was able to fire up those around him. More importantly, given the fragmentation in the subordinate leadership and their inability to pose any collective criticism of his leadership, let alone think of a united and frontal challenge to his authority, he could continue to demand the impossible and expect his orders to be obeyed. He still hoped and vainly expected that the Allied coalition would crack. His own hold on reality was waning, but had far from vanished. Beneath the veneer of indomitability that his role of Führer demanded, he was eminently capable of realizing the consequences of the unfolding disaster. His Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, found him one evening after the failure of the Ardennes offensive, depressed and admitting that the war was lost – characteristically attributing it to betrayal and the failings of others. For him now the struggle was about his place in history – a heroic end, not a cowardly capitulation for the country as in 1918. ‘We’ll not capitulate,’ Below recalled him saying. ‘Never. We can go down. But we’ll take a world with us.’139
Following the failure in the Ardennes, defences in the west were severely weakened. They would nevertheless hold reasonably firm for a few weeks yet, until the major Allied onslaught in March. But in the east, catastrophe was imminent.