5
The machine of duty, the will and the unquestioned ‘must’ application of the last ounce of strength work automatically within us. Only seldom do you think about the big ‘what now’.
Colonel-General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, 20 January 1945
The conviction that a victory of the Soviets would mean the extinction of life of the German people and of every individual is the general feeling of all people.
Propaganda report on the popular mood, 24 January 1945
I
The storm broke on 12 January 1945 and raged with savage ferocity for the next three weeks. By the end of the month, vital eastern regions of the Reich – East Prussia to the north, East Brandenburg (between the Oder and what had once been the Polish border), Silesia with its crucial heavy industry to the south – and all of what remained of occupied Poland had been lost. The Wehrmacht had suffered huge, irreparable losses in intensely fierce and bitter fighting. The German civilian population had faced unspeakable horror as it fled in panic. The Red Army now stood on the banks of the Oder, the last natural barrier before Berlin. The roof had fallen in on the Third Reich.
The great Soviet offensive had been expected. The German General Staff even calculated exactly when it would start.1 But when it came, the Wehrmacht was still ill-prepared for it.
In the main, this simply reflected the crass imbalance of forces. Across the entire eastern front of around 2,400 kilometres the estimated enemy superiority was immense: eleven times more infantry, seven times more tanks, twenty times more guns, twenty times stronger in air-power.2 The discrepancy was smallest in the north of the front, in East Prussia, though massive even there. Further south, the central part of the front, it was overwhelming. German losses in the last six months of 1944 had been almost as high as in the whole of the previous three years, since the attack on the Soviet Union, and practically all possible reserves – often of ill-trained and unsuitable men – had by now been scraped together.3 In the path of the Red Army along the Vistula, defending a sector of around 725 kilometres, stood the 9th Army, the 4th Panzer Army and the 17th Army, all part of Army Group A, commanded by Colonel-General Josef Harpe and significantly weakened over previous months. The Army Group’s southern flank in the Carpathians was protected by Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici’s 1st Panzer Army. In the north of the front, guarding East Prussia, the route of the Russian invasion of the Reich in 1914, was the rebuilt Army Group Centre, under Colonel-General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, whose 3rd Panzer Army, 2nd and 4th Armies, together with 120 battalions of about 80,000 badly equipped Volkssturm men, had to cover around 650 kilometres of extensively fortified terrain. In all, Harpe commanded around 400,000 men, Reinhardt about 580,000. Between them they had some 2,000 tanks at their disposal.4
Facing them were the daunting Soviet forces that had been assembled for the big push towards the Reich’s borders. In the centre of the front, on the middle reaches of the Vistula, and prepared for the major thrust, was the 1st Belorussian Front of Marshal Georgi Zhukov. Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front was poised further south on the Vistula. Between them, Zhukov and Konev commanded an awesome force of almost 2.25 million men, some 6,500 tanks, 32,000 heavy guns and more than 4,500 aircraft. Their objective was to drive some 500 kilometres to the Oder, towards Posen and Breslau, capture the Silesian industrial region, and take position for the final advance on Berlin. In the north, the subsidiary part of the offensive, the 3rd Belorussian Front under General Ivan Chernyakhovsky in cooperation with Marshal Ivan Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front was set to begin the assault westwards through East Prussia, directed towards the heavily fortified bastion of Königsberg, while the 2nd Belorussian Front commanded by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, aimed to drive north-westwards from the Narev river in Poland towards the East Prussian coast. The combined strength amounted to almost 1.7 million men backed by 3,300 tanks, 28,000 heavy guns and 3,000 aircraft.5 The attack from east and south, much as in 1914, towards the heavily fortified area of the Masurian Lakes, aimed to seize Königsberg, cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany and destroy the major German forces defending the province.
Crushing though the defensive burden facing the German army was, their plight was made worse by the unwieldy and divisive command structure of the Wehrmacht, which had the effect of leaving Hitler, at its head, unchallengeable. All power of decision rested in his hands, in the military as well as the political sphere. No mechanism existed to take it from him, even as he determined on actions that lacked all rationality and were hugely costly in continuing to prosecute a war that was patently lost, and when moves to end it ought to have been urgently demanded of him or of anyone stepping into his place.
At a time of utmost military crisis the long-standing crucial division in the Wehrmacht command structure, dating back to the organizational changes that followed Hitler’s assumption of command of the army in December 1941, was glaringly magnified, and highly damaging.6 The essential lack of coordination was rooted in the split between the responsibilities of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) and those of the High Command of the Army (OKH). The OKW was responsible for strategic planning on all fronts except the eastern front. This front, where the Luftwaffe and navy played only minor roles, was the province of the OKH. The problem was compounded since Hitler’s chief subordinates at the OKW, Field-Marshal Keitel and General Jodl, were guaranteed to back him at every call. Though they could not block any influence that the commanders-in-chief of the navy and Luftwaffe (Dönitz and Göring) might bring to bear on Hitler, as regards the war on land they formed an insuperable barrier to any propositions that they did not favour or that Hitler opposed. Beyond this, even, there was the added great difficulty that Hitler, since December 1941, had been the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, interfering regularly in tactical dispositions. Increasingly distrustful of his generals in such a decisive theatre, he had resolutely and persistently refused to contemplate appointing a commander-in-chief for the eastern front to parallel the position of Field-Marshal von Rundstedt in the west or that of Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring in Italy. A coordinated military command in the east, beneath Hitler, was therefore impossible. And any strategic planning of General Guderian, Chief of the Army General Staff, was made doubly difficult: first, because he had to surmount Hitler’s objections in the army command itself; and secondly, because he had to confront Hitler’s allocation of priorities to other theatres.
Guderian encountered such difficulties on three separate visits he made to Hitler’s western headquarters between 24 December 1944 and 9 January 1945. His entreaties for the recognized weakness on the eastern front to be bolstered by the transfer of divisions from the west were turned down flat by Hitler. The eastern front would have ‘to make do with what it’s got’, Hitler declared. He dismissed the careful figures put together by Colonel Reinhard Gehlen of the Foreign Armies East department of the General Staff as gross exaggerations, part of a Soviet ‘enormous bluff’ – a view echoed by Himmler. Jodl also backed Hitler’s refusal to move troops eastwards, continuing to attribute decisive importance to the western front. The most Guderian eventually squeezed out of Hitler, on his second visit, was the transfer of four divisions. However, Hitler insisted that these be sent not to the broad part of the eastern front threatened by the coming offensive, but to Hungary, where the attritional battles around Budapest had raged for weeks and would continue until mid-February.
Only with the Soviet offensive under way and the attempted breakthrough in the Ardennes and Alsace definitively over was Hitler finally prepared to move forces to the east. But Guderian was infuriated to learn that these forces, too, the redoubtable 6th SS-Panzer Army of Sepp Dietrich, back from the Ardennes, were to be sent to Hungary. Protecting the Hungarian oilfields, so crucial to the German war effort, was the chief consideration.7 Hitler, following pressure from Armaments Minister Albert Speer, deemed the few oilfields there still available to Germany indispensable to the war effort and to be held at all cost, even if it meant weakening the defences of Army Groups A and Centre.8 In fact, the Danube, for all the intense fighting there, was rapidly turning into a sideshow to the main event about to unfold on the eastern front. But when Guderian, on 9 January, showed him the detailed assessment of troop figures in the Soviet build-up that he had obtained from Gehlen Hitler responded in fury that the man who had devised them was ‘completely idiotic’ and should be sent to a lunatic asylum. He also predictably refused to allow Harpe and Reinhardt to withdraw to the more defensible positions they had advocated, spouting his usual condemnation of generals who thought only of retreat. And during the Soviet onslaught he overrode Guderian’s objections and insisted on the transfer of a formidable armoured corps, the Großdeutschland, from Reinhardt’s hard-pressed army in East Prussia to help shore up defences in Poland – only to find that Kielce, which they had been meant to defend, had already fallen. Before then, Guderian had told Hitler that the eastern front was ‘like a house of cards’: one push and it would collapse.9 It was an all too reasonable prophecy.
In their post-war memoirs, German generals often tended to lay the blame for the military catastrophe almost wholly at Hitler’s door. His own domineering, interfering and increasingly erratic military leadership without doubt notably worsened the extent of the disaster and thereby the scale of the human losses. But such personalized blame overlooks the support the generals had given in better times to Hitler’s unfettered command and the structures that had given him such total dominance in the military sphere. Even as battlefield fortunes had turned remorselessly against Germany after 1942, the generals made no concerted attempt to alter the command structures. In March 1944 all the field-marshals had presented Hitler with a sworn declaration of their unwavering loyalty.10 And following the failure of Stauffenberg’s plot in July 1944, they had simply acknowledged that nothing could be done, however absurd the orders appeared to be. Moreover, Hitler was far from bereft of support among the generals for his decisions, however irrational they subsequently seemed, as the records of his military conferences demonstrate. His refusal to accede to Guderian’s request to move large numbers of troops from the west to shore up the eastern front, for example, was, however bluntly put, little more than a reflection of realities. Any major transfer from the west would have laid bare defences on that front and might at best have delayed, but almost certainly could not have prevented, the Red Army’s breakthrough. In the stretched and splintered Wehrmacht of early 1945, few had anything approaching an overall view of the situation and most generals were above all anxious to hold on to what they could of their own men and resources. Guderian’s main support came from the commanders of the Army Groups directly in the Soviet path. Even here, however, his reluctance, with few exceptions, to recommend sensible retreat to more defensible lines (since he knew Hitler would reject such a suggestion) meant an ultimate readiness to accept orders in the full knowledge that they would have disastrous results.11 Even with a different supreme head of the Wehrmacht, the calamity about to beset Germany in the east could not have been prevented. Only immediate capitulation could have achieved that. But the full extent of the disaster could have been significantly lessened. A more rational defensive strategy, together with orchestrated evacuation of the threatened civilian population, could have held off the Red Army for longer and in so doing possibly saved countless lives.
II
At 4 a.m. on the icily cold morning of 12 January, the 1st Ukrainian Front began a huge artillery bombardment against the positions of the German 4th Panzer Army across the Vistula, some 200 kilometres south of Warsaw. Even the immediate impact seemed to indicate what was to follow. By midday, the barrage alone had destroyed the 4th Panzer Army’s headquarters, disabled two-thirds of its artillery, and left a quarter of its men dead or wounded. By the end of the day, Soviet infantry had broken through to a depth of more than 20 kilometres across a 40-kilometre front while tank spearheads had pushed forward more than 32 kilometres, crushing German resistance in their path. Kraków was taken on 19 January, the beautiful city still unscathed since the Germans had had no time to destroy it. Just over a week later, on 27 January, Red Army soldiers came across the horrific site of the huge concentration camp complex at Auschwitz, where more than a million Jews and other victims of Nazi terror had been exterminated. They liberated around 7,000 emaciated and ill prisoners left cowering in the remains of the camp as the Germans had retreated. By 28 January, nearby Katowice had fallen. German forces managed to escape destruction as they evacuated the area. But by next day, nearly all of Upper Silesia, Germany’s last intact, vital industrial belt, was in Soviet hands. Before the end of the month, Breslau, capital of Silesia, had been encircled. The city, a designated ‘fortress’ whose fanatical leadership had determined on holding out to the end, would not fall until May. It was a futile act of defiance, at enormous human cost, which scarcely inconvenienced the Soviet steamroller. Already on 22 January advance troops had crossed the upper reaches of the Oder, near Brieg, between Oppeln and Breslau, and established a bridgehead – rapidly reinforced – on the western banks. By the end of the month five of Konev’s armies had taken up positions on or over the Oder, though large-scale crossings of men and equipment had been difficult as the thick carpet of ice over the river started to break up.
A massive barrage in the thick fog of early morning on 13 January announced the beginning of a mighty assault on East Prussia by Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorussian Front, followed next day by the northward thrust of Rokossovsky 2nd Belorussian Front. Ferocious German resistance, together with the heavy snow that initially hampered Soviet air support for the offensive, meant the advance was less speedy than further south. After the first few days, however, defences started to crumble. Tilsit fell on 20 January. Chernyakhovsky’s forces poured through the so-called Insterburg Gap towards Königsberg, though the massively fortified city itself was to hold out, despite an intense battering, until April. Goldap, Gumbinnen and the area around Nemmersdorf in the east of the province, scene of the notorious incursion of the Red Army in October, were retaken. Advancing from the south, Rokossovsky’s troops found that the great Nazi monument commemorating the battle of Tannenberg and victory over the Russians in 1914 had been blown up by the Germans, who had hastily exhumed the remains of Field-Marshal Hindenburg, hero of Tannenberg, and his wife, and shipped them on a cruiser westwards out of Pillau.12 Hitler’s former headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair, near Rastenburg, was overrun, Red Army soldiers wandering in amazement around the concrete ruins of the arch-enemy’s command centre. Once the Soviet forces had overcome the battery of fortifications in the Allenstein area by 23 January, the way was clear to strike for the sea. The main railway line from Königsberg to Berlin was severed. By 26 January the main forces of the 5th Guards Tank Army reached the Frisches Haff – the huge, shallow lagoon stretching for more than 80 kilometres from near Elbing to Königsberg – at Tolkemit, east of Elbing. With that, East Prussia was cut off from the rest of the Reich.
The trapped 4th German Army, to Hitler’s fury, abandoned the heavily fortified defences of Lötzen amid the Masurian Lakes and tried to break out to the west, aiming to reach the river Nogat and the Vistula beyond, and advancing about 32 kilometres before being forced back on Heiligenbeil. A last attempt to break out was blocked on 30 January. Most of the remaining German forces – the bulk of them comprising twenty-three divisions of the 4th Army – were now compressed between the Red Army and the sea in a sizeable enclave, about 60 kilometres long and 20 kilometres wide along the Frisches Haff south-west of Königsberg, centred on Heiligenbeil. Remnants of the 3rd Panzer Army, some nine badly mauled divisions, still held the Samland peninsula, to the north-west of Königsberg, and with it, crucially, the harbour at Pillau. The rest were left to defend the encircled fortress of Königsberg itself. In all, around half a million soldiers were cut off.13 By the end of January, after a little over two weeks of ferocious fighting, almost the whole of East Prussia lay in Soviet hands.
On 14 January, Zhukov launched his 1st Belorussian Front from bridgeheads on the Vistula, driving on remorselessly through heavy fighting to encircle Warsaw with the help of attached Polish divisions, and racing westwards through central Poland towards Łódz´ and Posen – the gateway to Berlin. The speed and savagery of the assault swept away German defences. When Polish and Soviet troops entered Warsaw on 17 January, scarcely a building was still intact. The German destruction of the city during and after the uprising, carried out under Himmler’s express instructions, following Hitler’s order, had been savage in the extreme. The occupiers had engaged in a last orgy of wanton destruction before they left, fleeing westwards, German troops offering only scant resistance from the rearguard. The big textile city of Łódz´ was seized by General Vasily Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army on 19 January, with little resistance and no demolition, so fast had been the Soviet advance. Two days later, Soviet tanks reached the outskirts of Posen, government and communications centre of what the Nazis had called the ‘Wartheland’. They were, however, for the time being unable to overcome heavy fortifications to crush the resistance of the 25,000 or so German troops trapped in what had been deemed a ‘fortress’, whose remnants were eventually stormed only in mid-February. Other Soviet divisions were meanwhile driving north-west towards the Baltic coast of western Pomerania, at the same time protecting the flank of Zhukov’s main forces headed due west towards the middle stretches of the Oder. One unit reached the frozen river on 30 January and managed to cross it next morning to establish a small but significant bridgehead north of Küstrin. Berlin was now in sight, no more than about 80 kilometres away. Zhukov, and to the south Konev, swayed by the speed and scale of their successes, had their eyes set for a short time on a rapid triumphal drive to the Reich capital, each already envisaging a hero’s return to Moscow. But the Red Army’s advance had slowed as German resistance had intensified. And heavy losses of men and equipment had been suffered. Zhukov’s men, like Konev’s, were in need of a respite before the big push for the German capital. Momentary hopes of a dash to Berlin to bring a swift end to the war had to be abandoned. It was more important to consolidate strength for the final phase.14
III
The unfolding military disaster for the Wehrmacht conveys little or nothing of the unimaginable agony of the civilian population caught up in the offensive. As they advanced so quickly through formerly occupied parts of Poland, the troops of the Red Army could envisage themselves as liberators of the Polish people – though the subjugated Poles often simply felt one brutal conqueror was being replaced by another. When they reached Reich territory, however, Soviet soldiers saw themselves as avengers. The Germans had shown no mercy as they had laid waste Soviet towns and villages, burning homes and farmsteads, slaughtering innocent civilians. Red Army soldiers, and their commanders, saw no need for restraint now they were the conquerors, advancing through the land of those who had brought them such misery, raping, plundering, murdering as they went. Soviet propaganda encouraged revenge through maximum brutality. The brief incursion in October, for which the name ‘Nemmersdorf’ had become the symbol, now paled into insignificance in comparison with the scarcely imaginable horror experienced during the onslaught in January 1945.
Just as they had the previous October, Nazi officials, clinging to their own propaganda that the Soviet attack would be repulsed, contributed to the unfolding disaster by their stubborn refusal to give the orders for evacuation in time. In East Prussia, Gauleiter Erich Koch set the tone.15 He continued, in empty sloganeering, to preach entirely unjustified optimism and to exhort the population to defend their province to the last. This did not stop him on 21 January encouraging his own secretary to leave with her fellow villagers while she could.16 His wife had already taken a special train to Bavaria the previous day.17 Koch himself left Königsberg with his entourage on 28 January and moved his headquarters to the security of a bunker on a naval air base in Neutief on the Frische Nehrung near Pillau.18 Koch also insisted that no subordinate officials should permit evacuation without his authorization. Not surprisingly, there was intense anger and bitterness directed at the Party’s representatives, though even now faith in Hitler had not completely vanished.19 Last-minute attempts to organize evacuation were often made by local Party leaders and the NSV. Most families however, as the panic at the thought of falling into Soviet hands spread like a contagion, did not wait for orders but resorted to self-help. For many it was too late.20
Even by East Prussian standards, where the winter was invariably hard, this was an intensely cold January, with temperatures falling as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius. The prospect – days and nights out in the open without warm clothing, making painfully slow headway on icy roads in biting winds or on tracks blocked by drifting snow, trying to avoid becoming caught up in the fighting – was frightening in the extreme. Some, too infirm or weak to take the risk, decided not to go, and to await in trepidation the arrival of the Soviet occupiers. Some could not face the future and took their own lives. Cyanide was easily available, at least in Königsberg, and there was much talk of using it.21 But, for most, clinging to life and fear of the Russians were greater than worries about the cold or anxiety about the future. There was no time to wait. ‘Panic grips the people as the cry goes up: “the Russians are close”,’ recalled one woman. ‘Then a man comes by on horseback, shouting in a loud voice: “Save yourselves, you who can. The Russians will be here in half an hour.” We’re overcome by a paralysing fear.’22 In such scenes of chaos, people hurriedly gathered what few belongings they could, threw them onto handcarts, sledges or horse-drawn wagons, left their homesteads, abandoned practically all their possessions and their livestock, and fled into the unknown. Retreating German soldiers grabbed anything they could find and loaded it onto lorries, slaughtering cattle left roaming the fields as they went.23
In the first days after the start of the invasion, trains to the west, into Pomerania, were the means of escape for tens of thousands. Chaotic scenes unfolded at railway stations as people desperately tried to clamber into the departing trains. The big square in front of Königsberg’s main station was jammed with rows of refugee wagons. Armed guards held people back in the station, though Party members and others with ‘connections’ were found places. The Wehrmacht had priority use of the insufficient number of trains available. Soldiers forced their way onto the only trains departing.24 Refugees had to wait – often in vain. Conditions were appalling, with no toilet facilities or food and drink for the crowds milling round the platforms.25 Thousands were stranded as the last trains pulled out. By 23 January trains that had headed west were returning, the lines blocked by the Soviets.26 A few were lucky enough to find transport in military vehicles travelling westwards, even in open-top lorries where they were exposed for long hours to the extreme cold. The majority, however, had to resort to treks, in columns of covered wagons. Those from the western parts of the province were the most fortunate. In the east, the treks were often unable to make progress on roads blocked by snow or army vehicles before being overtaken by Soviet tanks, or otherwise falling into the hands of the dreaded enemy after finding themselves embroiled in fighting zones. Once the rail connection to the Reich was severed, only two means of flight – both extremely perilous – were left.
One way was to escape by ship from Pillau, the harbour opening from the Frisches Haff onto the Baltic. But the first ship to lift off refugees only arrived a fortnight after the launch of the Soviet offensive.27 Soon, the harbour-town was besieged by tens of thousands who had trekked mainly from the north-eastern parts of the province. Every house was full. People slept where they could, in barns and cow-byres, even exposed to the bitter cold in the open on the dunes. Big communal kitchens were hurriedly set up to provide basic meals.28 When they finally arrived, the ships, filled to the gunnels with refugees, including sick patients evacuated from hospital, suffered long delays before leaving. Those on board had the constant worry of attacks from the air.29 One woman, a teacher who had already endured, after a long wait, more than twenty-four hours on the open deck of a small ship with her elderly mother, travelling round the coast before even reaching Pillau, had then to ‘stand around all day with thousands in the filth of the harbour and wait…. Everywhere broken glass, dirt and excrement. It’s impossible to get a ship. Only families with several children are let through.’ It was twelve miserable, uncertain and dangerous days before she and her mother eventually reached Rügen.30
By the end of January, around 200,000 refugees were crammed onto the Samland, still in German hands. Around 150,000 had also flooded at first into Königsberg, thinking the fortified city was a sanctuary. Once it became impossible to leave by train, many of these, too, headed for Pillau in the hope of escaping by sea. Nursing staff of military hospitals in Königsberg rejected the chance to join them, and decided to stay to look after the wounded.31 By the end of January, when Königsberg was cut off, about 100,000 were still stranded there, though more were able to leave when the connection to the Samland was opened up again for a brief time in mid-February. Many lost their lives in the crossings when their small boats went down. The German navy sent help in the rescue effort. Over the next months, 679,541 refugees were ferried from Baltic harbours to the west (450,000 from Pillau), along with 345,000 wounded and a further 182,000 soldiers, though many more could have been shipped to safety if the navy had not given priority to military demands.32
The alternative was to cross the frozen Haff to the narrow spit of land, the Frische Nehrung, little over a kilometre wide at its broadest point and running for about 70 kilometres along its northern shore, and to head westwards for Danzig (or in some cases eastwards to try their luck in Pillau). By the latter part of January, hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees from all over East Prussia had defied the bitter cold, raging hunger, thirst, frostbite and attacks from the air by Soviet planes to reach the ever smaller cusp of land still in German hands at the southern end of the Haff and, amid mounting chaos, attempt the crossing over the ice to the frozen dunes of the Nehrung. Day and night for weeks thousands of trekkers, haggard and anxious families leading their heavily laden horse-drawn wagons or pushing prams or homemade wooden trucks and sledges carrying all their belongings, an easy target for low-flying Soviet planes, trudged fearfully over the carpet of ice on routes marked out by the military towards what they hoped was safety. Even this escape route was blocked for a time when the German navy used an ice-breaker to force a channel through the frozen Haff to allow three new torpedo boats through from Elbing to Pillau and prevent their falling into Soviet hands. Thousands were trapped on the ice until rapidly improvised pontoon bridges allowed a way across again.33
Once on the Nehrung, the misery was far from over. On the narrow, unpaved track, chewed up by military vehicles as well as the refugees’ wagons, progress was painfully slow and the columns were exposed to repeated terror from the air. For many, the hazardous journey ended in tragedy. The extreme cold took its toll, especially of infants and the elderly. Others died of sheer exhaustion, or were caught in air raids. In some cases, despairing efforts to get away had ended with wagons and the families on board tipping through breaks in the ice into the dark waters of the Haff. One farmer’s wife, after struggling for eight days to reach the Haff, watched in horror as rows of wagons fell into the holes just left by a bombing raid.34 Nor, amid such traumas, did Nazi controls ease up. SS men and military police regularly searched the treks for men aged between sixteen and sixty to serve in the Volkssturm.35 In all, perhaps as many as 30,000 perished on the treks.36 But by the time it started to melt in late February nearly half a million had escaped across the ice.
In one way or another, defying all the perils, most of East Prussia’s population of about 2 million at the beginning of the year, managed to flee. In so doing, they avoided the unspeakable fate of the half a million from the province who fell into Soviet hands. Though there were plenty of honourable exceptions, many of the Red Army soldiers did their best to impersonate the caricatures of Nazi propaganda in their bestial behaviour, with the toleration if not outright encouragement of their superior officers. ‘A blind feeling of hatred’ was how a Red Army veteran described the attitude of the Soviet troops as they entered Reich territory. ‘The German mother should curse the day that she bore a son! German women have now to see the horrors of war! They have now to experience what they wanted for other peoples!’ wrote one soldier in a letter home. ‘Now our soldiers can see how German homes burn, how their families wander round dragging their viper’s brood with them…. They hope to stay alive. But for them there is no mercy,’ wrote another.37 Alcohol played its part. Looting and plundering were endemic among frequently drunken soldiers from desperately poor parts of the Soviet Union who thought they were entering a land of plenty on encountering the war-torn eastern regions of Germany. They commented in wonder in letters home at the stores of food and drink they found. ‘Everybody eats what he has appetite for and drinks as much spirits as he wants,’ wrote one. ‘I’m wearing riding-boots, have more than one watch… in a word, I’m swimming in riches,’ another proudly proclaimed.38 For them, anything they could steal counted only as a token form of recompense for what they and their families and their fellow countrymen had suffered at the hands of the German enemy.
The thirst for revenge was seemingly unquenchable. Houses were ransacked and destroyed, buildings set alight, sometimes entire parts of towns and villages burnt down. German men were often callously and arbitrarily shot, many severely beaten or otherwise mishandled. Anyone recognized as a Nazi functionary was summarily executed. Those in possession of a uniform, even a railway worker or fireman who had no role in the Nazi Party, were likely to be similarly dispatched. It is thought that as many as 100,000 people in the eastern parts of Germany were killed in such fashion.39 The rape of women, young and old, often many times over – a mass phenomenon and act of revenge through inflicting maximum humiliation on the defeated male population by the degradation of their wives and families – was a terrible hallmark of the first encounter with the Soviet conquerors, mentioned in innumerable eyewitness accounts.40 ‘Can you hear?’ one farmer despairingly asked as cries came from his house. ‘They’ve got my thirteen-year-old daughter for the fifth time already this morning.’41 Such horror was commonplace. Some estimates reckon that 1.4 million women – close to a fifth of the female population – were raped in the eastern provinces conquered by the Red Army in these weeks.42 Fortunate indeed were women who managed to hide or otherwise avoid the bestiality. Those Germans who survived such horrors were, however, condemned to endless further misery: to the harshness of further maltreatment and forced labour under Soviet occupation, or – the fate of about a quarter of a million Germans – to transport in the most dire conditions, accompanied by huge death rates, to labour camps mainly in the industrial regions of the USSR, where brutal working conditions extracted a further heavy toll.43
What happened in East Prussia also occurred, with variants, throughout the German east. Whereas the flight of the East Prussian and Silesian population took place over the best part of four months, the German minority living in the parts of Poland that had not fallen to the Soviets had only about two weeks to make their escape as Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies raced towards the Oder. Only around a half of them, mainly from the western regions closest to the Reich, could avoid being overtaken by the rapidly advancing Red Army. East Brandenburg, with an almost entirely German population of over 600,000, had been taking in refugees from the Wartheland in western Poland for days before huge panic at the imminent arrival of the Russians led to a stampede to reach safety across the Oder. The Nazi authorities of the region had until almost the end of January refused to give orders to evacuate the province in the optimistic belief that the lines of fortifications would provide a formidable barrier to the Red Army. Consequently many Germans fell into enemy hands as the area was swiftly overrun.44
The largest German population east of the Oder–Neiße line was in Silesia, home of more than 4.5 million at the beginning of 1945. In Silesia, not far from the Reich border and from routes into the Sudetenland and Bohemia, not all the territory fell immediately to the Red Army, and, unlike in more easterly regions, there was also some warning of the Soviet advance. Conditions for flight were, therefore, more favourable than in East Prussia and other eastern regions. More than 3 million were able to flee by one means or another into parts of former Czechoslovakia or westwards into the Reich towards Saxony and Thuringia. In the Upper Silesian industrial district to the south, however, which was in Soviet hands by the end of January, only women and children had been permitted to leave. The local Gau leadership, following Speer’s demands, ordered the men to remain behind to keep production going as long as possible. Many nevertheless fled on overcrowded trains and buses, on lorries or on foot. Important industrial installations were sometimes reportedly left intact in the panic. There was no time to detonate them.45 Even so, hundreds of thousands were overrun by the Red Army.
To the north, in Lower Silesia, the evacuation order, pressed for by the military authorities (who had, however, elsewhere at times also played their part in delaying evacuation to prevent blocking supply routes46), had in most instances been given out earlier, and most inhabitants were able to get away – often trekking in wagons or on foot in icy weather since the means of transport by rail and road rapidly proved inadequate. In Breslau, the capital and by far the biggest city in Silesia, the thunder of artillery on 20–21 January brought urgent orders – backed by heavy pressure from the Party – for women, children, the old and the sick to leave the city. There were, however, not enough trains or motor vehicles to cope with the mass evacuation. There were reports of children being trampled to death in the stampede to board the few trains available and station waiting-rooms being turned into morgues.47 Without transport, around 100,000 people, mainly women, were forced to head off into the winter night and brave the extreme cold on foot, hauling prams, sledges and carts along the icy roads, battling through snowdrifts, carrying just a few belongings. Bodies of infants who had perished in the bitter weather had to be left in the roadside ditches. Many women, unable to go on, returned and were among the 200,000 or so civilians in Breslau when the vice closed on the city in mid-February.48
Further north, an enclave of the West Prussian coast, centred on Danzig and Gotenhafen (Gdynia), was also engulfed in the refugee crisis. From mid-January onwards the area became the temporary destination of countless thousands fleeing northwards from the path of Rokossovsky’s armies and pouring westwards from East Prussia as the province was cut off, across the last opening of the Frische Nehrung or arriving by boat from Pillau. By the end of the month, the area was teeming with close to a million refugees to add to its 3 million population. The NSV and German Red Cross were overwhelmed by the numbers. It was impossible to offer anything like sufficient care for the many who were ill, weak or injured from the terrible treks. Barracks and temporary camps had to be used to accommodate the mass influx. Many tried to travel further as soon as they could, but could find no place on the hugely overcrowded trains and ships. Among the vessels carrying away refugees, many of them sick and wounded, was the big former ‘Strength through Joy’ cruise vessel, the Wilhelm Gustloff, that eventually set sail from Gotenhafen, after long delays, on 30 January, crammed with perhaps as many as 8,000 persons on board – four times its peacetime complement. That evening the ship was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine and sank into the icy waters after little more than an hour. Possibly around 7,000 drowned in the worst maritime catastrophe in history, with nearly five times as many lost as in the sinking of the Titanic.49 It was one of many disasters at sea over the following weeks. Nevertheless, between late January and the end of April, some 900,000 escaped over the Baltic and a further quarter of a million by land through Pomerania, before this region, too, was swallowed up by the Soviet advance.50 A final horror still awaited the 200,000 or so, many of them refugees who had earlier managed under the greatest difficulties to flee from East Prussia, as Danzig and the surrounding area were taken in a maelstrom of violence by the Red Army in the last days of March.51
Even when the refugees escaped the worst, they still faced immense difficulties – and were far from assured of a warm welcome at their destination. By the end of January, 40,000 to 50,000 were arriving each day in Berlin, by train for the most part. The overwhelmed authorities, unable to cope with the mass influx and fearful of importing infectious diseases, did their best to move them on or have trains rerouted around the Reich capital.52
In this unending catalogue of misery and suffering, it is hard to conceive of anything worse than the fate of those in the eastern regions of Germany fleeing from the Red Army in the appalling conditions of that dreadful January. Yet the fate of the regime’s racial victims was indeed worse: their horror was far from at an end. Even at this time the murder machinery of the SS showed no respite.
For around 6,500–7,000 Jews, rounded up from subsidiary camps in East Prussia of Stutthof concentration camp (itself located in West Prussia), hastily closed down on 20–21 January as the Red Army approached, scarcely conceivable days of terror began as they were marched off, not in a westwards direction like other inmates, but eastwards. The initial aim seems to have been to march them to a small satellite camp at Königsberg prior to transporting them by sea to the west, presumably from the port of Pillau, in order to retain them in German hands and prevent their liberation by the Red Army. But they never arrived in Pillau.
The prisoners, sent in recent months to Stutthof from the Baltic regions, Poland and elsewhere, were guarded on their forced march by over twenty SS men and up to 150 members of the Organisation Todt (including Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Belgians and Frenchmen). After the lengthy trek, in horrific conditions, to reach Königsberg, they were marched onwards to the small and once attractive Baltic town of Palmnicken, on the picturesque Samland coast. Many Jews were shot even on the way to Königsberg. Still more were killed, their bodies left on the streets of the East Prussian capital, as the death march to Palmnicken began. The remainder were herded off, clothed in little more than rags and wooden clogs. Though hardly able to walk on the snow and ice, any Jews lagging behind or falling down were shot. The guards killed more than 2,000 on the 50-kilometre march from Königsberg to Palmnicken, leaving the bodies by the roadside. Some 200–300 corpses were found on the last stretch of little over a kilometre as the remaining 3,000 or so prisoners straggled into Palmnicken on the night of 26/7 January.
When it became plain that there was no prospect of ferrying the prisoners to the west, the question of what to do with them took an even more lethal turn. Ideas now surfaced about getting rid of them altogether. The head of the state-run amber works in Königsberg and the East Prussian Gau leadership eventually agreed that the guards would drive the Jews into a disused mineshaft and seal up the entrance. The frozen, exhausted and bedraggled Jews nevertheless met a rare expression of sympathy as the estate manager ordered food for the prisoners and said that as long as he lived nobody there would be killed. His mine-director bravely refused to open up the shafts that they were to be driven into.
On 30 January, however, the courageous estate manager was found dead. He had received threats from the SS and was thought to have taken his own life; either that, or, as some thought, he had been murdered. The idea of entombing the Jews in the mine was, nevertheless, abandoned. That same evening, the local mayor, a long-standing and fanatical member of the Nazi Party, summoned a group of armed Hitler Youth members, plied them with alcohol and sent them, along with three SS men, who were to explain the task ahead, down to the disused mine. The boys were left to guard around forty to fifty Jewish women and girls who had earlier tried to escape, until they were taken out, in the dim light of a mine-lamp, to be shot by a group of SS men, two by two. The Soviets were thought by this time to be very close. The SS men were anxious to ‘get rid of the Jews no matter how’. They decided to solve their problem by shooting the rest of their captives.
The following evening, 31 January, the improvised massacre took full shape. Shielded from the village by a small wood, the SS men, their flares lighting up the night sky, drove the Jews onto the ice and into the frozen water using the butts of their rifles and mowed them down on the seashore with machine guns. Corpses were washed up along the Samland coast for days to come. One woman was so shaken at what she saw, she later recalled, ‘that I covered my eyes with my hands…. We then quickly went on walking because we could not stand the sight.’ The SS had not been altogether efficient in their massacre; some Jews survived and managed to clamber back up the beach. The survivors met varied reactions. One German refused to help three of them, saying ‘that he did not intend to feed Jewish women’. Another, however, hid them, gave them food, and protected them till the arrival of the Red Army. Doctors and nurses in the local hospital treated some wounded survivors. Two Polish labourers also gave them help. About 200 out of the original 7,000 survived.53
IV
People in other parts of Germany were not prepared for the dreadful news from the east that soon started to spread like wildfire, or for the tales of horror from those who had managed to escape the mayhem. The success of the Wehrmacht in repelling the Soviet incursion into East Prussia the previous October and reassurances about German defences in the east meant that there was no psychological readiness for the scale of the disaster that gradually became clear in the second half of January.
The first brief mention of the start of the Soviet offensive in the Völkischer Beobachter, reproducing the Wehrmacht report, suggested that the attack had been expected and that German defences had been successful.54 Within a few days, however, newspapers started to adopt a more anxious tone.55 The public swiftly caught the note of alarm that crept in about the speed of the Soviet advance, all the more when reports of the evacuation of the civilian population could not conceal the scale of the danger, and were more than amplified by the tales of their experiences carried by the stricken refugees as they poured west. Propaganda offices throughout Germany reported that ‘the improved mood of the past weeks caused by our western offensive and the Führer’s speech has disappeared in the wake of the Soviet major offensive. People are now looking to the east with the utmost concern and paying little attention to all other fronts and to political events.’ ‘The slump in mood’, the summary report continued, ‘was intensified by the disappointment that no one in any Gau, not even in the east, had reckoned with such speedy and big successes of the Soviets.’ Widespread expectation of the offensive had been accompanied by much apprehension, but also a belief that the German leadership was well prepared and would regain the upper hand in the east. There was astonishment, then, that the Red Army had gained so much territory so quickly, and that German defences, presumed to be solid, has been so easily overrun.
The shock waves rippled through Germany. A severely depressed mood was accompanied by deep worry about the future. Discussion was dominated by the events on the eastern front and there was much criticism of the media, which had given the impression that all preparations had been made to counter the awaited attack. The German leadership were reproached for underestimating Soviet strength and morale, criticism underscored by the massive advances that the Red Army continued to make despite the reported destruction of huge numbers of Soviet tanks. Notable shock was caused by the advance into the Upper Silesian industrial belt, raising fears about sustaining German armaments potential. Worries about the fate of the civilian population in the threatened regions were only mentioned in last place.
Modifying such a downbeat set of reports came the inevitable emphasis on the resilience of the population – a reflection, without doubt, of opinion mainly registered in the more Nazified sectors of the population. Despite the slump in mood, the propaganda offices declared that there was no apathy or slackening of work effort. Instead, it was claimed, there was a determination to do everything possible to fight ‘unconditionally’ in the ‘hour of decision’ and to comb out ‘anyone who can bear weapons’ to send to the front in the hope of repelling ‘the danger of Bolshevism’. Comments that such efforts were too late and pointless were rare. The holding – by and large – of the Reich borders in the west gave grounds for hope that a transformation could at some point be brought about in the east. The purpose of the German western offensive – to prevent a double attack by the enemy, east and west – had, it was said, become clearer. No one was prepared to accept that all the sacrifice, suffering and misery had been in vain. There was complete understanding, therefore, for whatever restrictions were needed in the interest of the war effort and for the ‘toughest resistance’ and defence at any price.56
Though hardly mirroring accurately a cross-section of attitudes, such reported views do indicate the unyielding stance of a still sizeable proportion – how large is impossible to say, though if it was a minority, it was a powerful one – unprepared to admit defeat and ready to do anything to combat the threat from the east. Even as the sense that the war was irredeemably lost became increasingly commonplace, anxiety about what defeat would bring intensified a desperate refusal to give in. ‘The conviction that a victory of the Soviets would mean the extinction of life of the German people and of every individual is the general feeling of all people’ was said to have bolstered the readiness to fight on and radicalized intolerance towards those seen to be shirking their duty.57
The lengthy summary report from the propaganda offices contained no mention of atrocities perpetrated by Red Army soldiers, or the horrors of the treks. But accounts of the refugees flooding westwards soon seeped through to the rest of the population. Immediately after the beginning of the Soviet offensive, propagandists had been warned to counter views that the Bolsheviks were not as bad as they had been painted (arising from known instances of humane treatment of German prisoners of war) by emphasizing atrocities – including reports from Memel refugees of Soviet soldiers on the hunt for German women and of mothers raped in front of their own children.58 Goebbels, though aware of the ‘indescribable’ misery of those enduring the treks, was nevertheless initially hesitant about publishing reports on Bolshevik atrocities because of the panic they would cause.59 There was quite justified panic, nevertheless, and the horror stories of the refugees were told wherever they went. ‘The refugees arriving here from the eastern Gaue’, ran one report from distant regions of Bavaria, ‘are bringing for the most part quite shattering news of the misery of the fleeing population which, partly in panic, has sought refuge from the Bolsheviks within the Reich.’60 Instead of keeping silent on the atrocities, German propaganda turned, therefore, to using them as a weapon to sustain the fight. ‘How the Soviets Rampage in East Germany. Eyewitnesses Report on the Gruesome Extermination Methods of the Bolsheviks’, proclaimed the headline in the Völkischer Beobachter on 9 February and, in variants, repeatedly in subsequent weeks.61
Letters still trickling west from the afflicted areas in the early phase of the Soviet offensive also painted a graphic picture of the appalling conditions in the east and the great anxiety about the future. One letter, from Josef E. from the Glogau district on the Oder, describing the state of refugees fleeing from the Warthegau and the dread of having to leave all that was precious behind, remarked that everything had turned out so different from the hopes of the future once fostered. How long would it be, he asked, before ‘the whole of East Prussia – Posen – Silesia is deluged with the eastern hordes’? Then it was only a short way to Berlin. ‘If the tempo of the Russians can’t be stopped, and that doesn’t look likely, then anyone can work out how long the war can last. I’m hoping for an end with horror rather than horror without end,’ he concluded, repeating a phrase commonly heard at this time.62
People beyond the afflicted zones had their own pressing anxieties, however, and, despite widespread dismay at the Soviet breakthrough, the loss of the eastern territories and the prospect of a lost war, could often spare little concern for the plight of the refugees. Those with fathers, sons, husbands and friends caught up in the bitter fighting during the Soviet onslaught were understandably beset with worry about the fate of their loved ones at the front. ‘Dear boy, I’ve just heard the Wehrmacht report and learnt that you are again engaged in fighting,’ wrote one mother to her son, cut off in Courland. She had heard nothing from him in over a month and feared the worst. ‘I was upset about what you have to cope with and hope you can still get away…. Dear God has to bring an end to it soon, but who knows how. We just hover between worry and expectation. “Without you, where would be my strength and courage?”,’ she ended, quoting a religious text.63 With many so anxious about their own relations, the suffering of others played a secondary role.
In Upper Bavaria, where in the absence of the promised new weapons people were said to have little hope of the Soviets being repelled from Reich territory, the mood was apparently more dominated by concern about transport and postal difficulties, and the likely food shortages that would result from the loss of territory in the east.64 In Franconia, events in the east were overshadowed by the complete destruction of the lovely old centre of Nuremberg through a severe bombing raid on 2 January, which had killed 1,800 people and demolished 29,500 buildings, leaving much of the city’s population without homes.65 Ursula von Kardorff, a Berlin journalist, admitted that her senses were so deadened that she could scarcely imagine the horrifying scenes reported to her at first hand of what happened at the railway station in Breslau after the order had been given to leave the city – of refugees trampling on each other in their desperation, corpses being thrown out of unheated goods-wagons, trekkers stuck on the roads, delirious mothers unable or unwilling to see that the babies they were carrying in their arms were dead. A few days later, she remarked on the gruesome atrocity reports that reached her desk day after day. ‘Goebbels’ propaganda brain is evidently again working feverishly,’ she commented, before asking: ‘Or is it all true? I don’t believe anything any longer before I have seen it myself.’66
By this time, there was a chance to do so. The first trains bursting with refugees were already arriving in Berlin from Silesia. An open lorry reached the city packed with children, many of them dead after ninety-six hours exposed to the extreme cold.67 ‘Columns of lorries crowded with refugees and luggage in bags and sacks roll through the Berlin streets,’ wrote the Berlin correspondent of a Swedish newspaper on 24 January in a dispatch that came into Allied hands. ‘The invasion of Berlin by the refugees is now so striking that the population of the Reich capital has fully realised how the eastern danger is tempestuously approaching the frontiers and Berlin itself.’68
In a city preoccupied with its own problems – a transport system near collapse, food and coal shortages, electricity cuts, constant worries about air raids – the refugees were not universally welcomed. Few wanted to share their often already overcrowded apartments or meagre food rations.69 Porters at the main stations were apparently reluctant to help those leaving the trains; some people complained, probably unfairly, that National Socialist ‘sisters’ preferred their warm rooms to helping the new arrivals (though their aid and that of other Party organizations was often acknowledged by the refugees); there were worries about the lack of food, especially milk for infants, and complaints that ‘we have so little, and now there are all these refugees’. By the end of the month, the city was teeming with the incomers, who poured out their anger and bitterness regardless of the consequences. There was enormous resentment at Party functionaries who had saved themselves first, shown little interest in others, not given warnings in time, and managed to find places in trains leaving for the Reich.70 ‘Those who have lost everything also lose their fear,’ an observer remarked. The police temporarily refrained from intervening.71
The stories of the refugees had, unsurprisingly, a depressing effect on Berliners. There was a widespread fear that once the Red Army seized the Upper Silesian industrial region the war was as good as lost. People asked repeatedly where the long-awaited ‘wonder weapons’ meant to turn the tide of war were, and why they were not being used against the Russians after they had been so much talked and written about. There was frank disbelief that they existed; they were seen as no more than a figment of propaganda. Even if the Red Army could be halted, there was scepticism that Germany would be in a position to go on the offensive again. And people regarded as mere propaganda the claim that the Soviets had expended their last forces and were incapable of a new offensive of their own.72 When, on the morning of 3 February, some 1,500 American planes dropped over 2,000 tons of bombs on Berlin in the heaviest raid of the war on the Reich capital, leaving 5,000 dead, injured or missing, the fate of the stricken population in the east took a back seat as panic temporarily gripped the city. However, reports of the continued Soviet advance in the east prompted great anxiety and talk about an evacuation of Berlin – worries sharpened by the erection of roadblocks. Sarcastic wits asked with black humour how long it would take the Red Army to pass through the roadblocks. The answer to the joke was an hour and five minutes: an hour to laugh at the barricades and five minutes to demolish them.73
The population was said to be under no illusions about the consequences of a lost war ‘and what those can expect who fall into the hands of the Russians. People basically agree, therefore, that it’s better to fight on to the last drop of blood and accept all deprivations rather than lose the war or surrender prematurely.’74 The sense of fighting to the last was certainly not shared by all. For many, perhaps most, a fatalistic mood prevailed. ‘Don’t think too much, do your duty and have faith. The German will master this Huns’ storm,’ wrote one woman to a friend based with the Luftwaffe in East Prussia.75 According to the recollections of a foreign journalist who experienced life in the German capital at the time, intensified restrictions and controls, transport difficulties and worsening food supplies, constant fear of the bombs and worries about the future, prompted many to look to escapism, often in drink.76 But the reported determination to hold out did signify an important strain of opinion which had been underpinned by the reports of the atrocities in the east. Unlike the situation in the west, where there was no great fear of British or American occupation, the justified dread of what defeat at the hands of the Soviets would bring was a significant component in support for continuing the fight in the east, especially among those most directly threatened.
By this time, belief in Hitler had waned so strongly that it had little to do with any continued readiness to fight on among the civilian population. A eulogistic article on New Year’s Eve by Goebbels in Das Reich, the prominent Berlin weekly, lauding Hitler’s ‘genius’, had been strongly criticized, according to the SD in Stuttgart. In the light of what had happened, people were saying, ‘the Führer is either not that genius depicted by Goebbels, or he had intentionally unleashed this world conflagration.’ Some were looking back at what Hitler had written in Mein Kampf, where ‘twenty years ago he had pointed out his aims. There are people who are prepared to claim that there lies the origin of the war’. The conclusion was drawn by many that ‘the Führer had worked for war from the very beginning’.77
A spark of lingering faith in his powers had, nevertheless, not been totally extinguished. Some refugees in Berlin apparently said ‘that the Führer would soon lead them back again into their homeland’, and it was claimed, in standard propaganda fashion, that ‘faith in the Führer is so great that even a small success quickly improves the mood of very many again’.78 A German Red Cross sister, writing home from the relative quiet of a naval hospital in La Rochelle in dismay ‘that the Bolsheviks are now in our beautiful Germany’, evidently wanted to trust Hitler’s promise of final victory in his New Year address, but added: ‘it’s damned hard to believe it.’79 Another woman brushed away such doubts. Despite her horror at events in the east and bombs raining down on German cities, and her anxiety about the future, she still felt confidence in a leadership ‘that only wants the best and greatness for the people’, regretted that Party members ‘did not uphold the Führer’s idea better’, and was certain that the war ‘must simply end in victory for us’ since a Jewish ‘diabolical state leadership’ could not hold out in the long run.80
A genuine, naive belief in Hitler – perhaps most commonly still encountered among younger Germans, though here, too, by now very much a minority taste – was registered in an otherwise pessimistic diary entry of a teenager from Siegen in southern Westphalia, whose mother was ridden with anxiety about relatives who had not managed to escape from the encirclement of Königsberg. Without radio since the last air raid, the girl was unsure precisely where German troops stood, but saw only too clearly how bad the situation was. Germany needed troops in the east; but then the British and Americans would attack in the west. And now, at the evacuation of Breslau, people were having to flee in the east as well as the west. ‘Our poor, poor Führer,’ was her immediate thought. ‘He will probably no longer be able to sleep at night and had only the best in mind for Germany.’ She was unsure of her own future, but clung on to two hopes: that God would recognize that the German people had been punished enough (for what she did not say); or ‘that the Führer still has a secret weapon to use’. Perhaps the weapon was so destructive, she mused, that the government hesitated to deploy it. Whatever the case, there was nothing any ordinary person could do, she added, fatalistically. Things would take their course. She ended by regretting that her school would reopen at the beginning of February: ‘Still having to learn at such a time? Horrible!’ she remarked.81
Germany was a shrinking country, its eastern parts severed, its western borders threatened, its population subjected to mounting threats of invasion as well as constant bombardment. City dwellers had to face severe privations as gas and electricity supplies were restricted, water often available only at street standpipes and food rations tightened. People frequently had to walk or cycle to work, since public transport systems functioned only partially at best. In country areas not as yet scarred by the war, conditions were generally better. There was food to be had – often hoarded, despite the penalties for doing so. Nor, except for areas on the edge of urban conglomerates, was there the nightly terror of air raids, although anyone at work in the fields might be exposed to the ever more frequent attacks from ‘low-flyers’. It was, however, no rural idyll. Huge and increasing numbers of refugees from bombed-out cities and then from the ravaged regions of the east had to be put up – not always graciously – in already cramped and crowded accommodation, and fed from falling ration allowances. In areas close to the front, soldiers too had to be found billets. Incomers were often far from grateful for what was on offer, complaining about primitive conditions and showing reluctance to help out in farm work.82
Whether in town or countryside, those with a ‘brown’ background in the Nazi Party or one of its subsidiary organizations could not fail to recognize how widely they were by now despised by much of the population. But they were still the holders of power. Despite gathering criticism, people were rightly wary of being too outspoken and paying the consequences. Anyone with a history of anti-Nazi views had to be especially careful. The numbers of those sure the war was lost was growing daily. Few could be other than fearful of the future. But there was still a dwindling minority prepared to believe – perhaps more from desperation than conviction – that Hitler had something up his sleeve, even at this late hour. Many who had lost faith in the Führer nevertheless saw no alternative to fighting on if the land was not to fall to the feared Bolsheviks. Then there were the desperadoes who had allied themselves so closely with the Nazi regime for so long that they had a vested interest in continuing the struggle since they had no future once it was over. The Soviet breakthrough in the east triggered the start of their final fling. With nothing to lose, the radicalism of the Party fanatics threatened any who stood in their way.
Whatever the varied attitudes, ranging from outright anti-Nazis to still fervent loyalists, the mass of divided, dislocated and disillusioned Germans could do little or nothing to shape what the future held for them. Beyond the refusal of the Nazi leadership, most obviously and crucially Hitler himself, to contemplate capitulation, the continuation of an evidently lost war rested heavily upon the capacity of the regime to raise troops and provide them with armaments, and on the willingness and determination of the Wehrmacht to fight on even when the only outcome seemed certain to be disastrous defeat.
V
Letters home from the front inevitably indicate a range of attitudes among ordinary soldiers. Most, in fact, avoided any political comment and confined themselves to private matters. Of those who expressed opinions about the war, some were defeatist (despite the dangers of such views being picked up by the censors, with dire consequences for the writer) and others simply resigned to what they had to face; but most still exuded optimism and resilience – often perhaps to assuage the anxieties of relatives. A corporal based in Courland did not hold back in his criticism of Party functionaries who, he said (in sentiments commonplace within Germany), would ruthlessly sacrifice everything rather than serve at the front. ‘If only common sense could triumph among tyrants,’ he wrote, adding, perceptively, ‘but they know that they themselves are in any case doomed. So they will first ruthlessly sacrifice the entire people.’83 In another letter home, a soldier, recounting stories he had heard from an eyewitness of the ‘indescribable rage’ of refugees as they fled from the Red Army, thought they would soon have Communism ‘if the Americans don’t save us from it’.84 A sergeant writing from Breslau was fearful, but fatalistic: ‘The Russians are getting ever closer, and there’s the danger that we’ll be encircled. But our life is in God’s hand and I still hope that we’ll see each other again.’85
A quite different tone was more usual. ‘The very serious situation at present shouldn’t take away our confidence!’ wrote one soldier. ‘It’ll be different, believe me! We must, must have patience and mustn’t, mustn’t lose faith.’86 Another, asking for necessary material sacrifice at home, thought it would be possible with courage to hold the front and force back the ‘great steamroller from the east’.87 An NCO based in East Prussia expressed his sadness at the ‘refugee misery’, but also the anger that it provoked, a feeling shared unquestionably by many soldiers and a further motivation to uncompromising efforts to fend off the Soviet threat.88 A corporal, upset that the Tannenberg monument in East Prussia had had to be blown up and worried about the possible loss of Silesian industry, still strongly believed, he wrote, that Germany would eventually master the enemy.89 An injured grenadier, in a field hospital in Germany after being transported by sea from Pillau out of the East Prussian cauldron, was confident, despite the worrying situation. ‘We must have faith,’ he declared. ‘I believe for certain that a change will soon come. On no account will we capitulate! That so much blood has already been spilt in this freedom fight cannot be in vain. The war can and will end in German victory!’90
How representative such attitudes were is impossible to tell, though, as in these letters, hopes and fears were surely especially prominent in the minds of most soldiers overwhelmed by the crisis in the east. Political opinion is barely mentioned. It was, of course, dangerous to voice criticism of the regime. But expressly pro-Nazi feeling was also seldom registered. Contempt for Party functionaries was by now widespread in the Wehrmacht, as among the civilian population, though it surfaces only rarely in the letters home, for obvious reasons. On the other hand, attitudes supportive of Nazism were not always clearly definable. The regime’s extreme nationalism fed into the feeling that the homeland must be protected, come what may. And years of strident anti-Bolshevik propaganda and racist stereotyping matched, for many soldiers, their own experience of the brutal practices of the Red Army and shored up their determination to resist the onslaught of those whom, influenced by Nazi indoctrination, they frequently saw as ‘Asiatic hordes’ or ‘Bolshevik beasts’. Propaganda slogans such as ‘Victory or Siberia’ or ‘We are Fighting for the Lives of our Wives and Children’ were probably not without effect, even if it cannot be judged how well they were received.91 One junior officer, serving in the west but closely following the reports of events in the east with deepening sadness and pessimism, probably echoed the views of many when he jotted in his diary: ‘Enough of slogans. They no longer cut any ice.’92 On the western front at this time, Allied army psychiatrists investigating the mentality of captured Germans reckoned that about 35 per cent of them were Nazis, though only about 10 per cent ‘hard core’. The remaining 65 per cent showed, they estimated, no clear signs of what they saw as a Nazi personality type.93 Whether such assessments on the eastern front would have reached similar conclusions cannot be known.
Whatever their private views, the rank-and-file could not influence events. Overwhelmingly, they simply obeyed orders. The number of desertions was rising, even on the eastern front, but they represented, nevertheless, a tiny proportion of those serving. There were signs of sagging morale, certainly, but, countered by severe punishment, this never threatened to turn into outright mutiny. Crucial to the continued readiness to fight was in any case less the behaviour of the ordinary soldiers than the stance of their commanders.
The inner tensions of the military leader trying, in desperate days, to stem the flow of the Red Army’s inexorable march through East Prussia can be seen in the daily diary entries and letters home to his wife of Colonel-General Reinhardt, in the eye of the storm as Commander-in-Chief of the beleaguered Army Group Centre. Reinhardt, a firm regime loyalist, wrestled with problems of conscience more widely felt in the military leadership as he struggled to reconcile responsibility to those under his command with obedience to Hitler, even when the orders he received diametrically contradicted his own judgement on what he knew to be necessary. After the war he still saw no alternative to his actions. Resignation, unless Hitler demanded it, had not been possible. Even the thought of feigning illness to lay down his command had caused him ‘the most serious psychological struggles’. Under the illusion that he could personally influence events, and that ‘it was pointless to sacrifice himself’ since a willing successor would easily be found, he saw no alternative to remaining in post.94
Mid-evening on 14 January, with the offensive in its earliest stages, Hitler telephoned to hear Reinhardt’s view of the situation of his Army Group, but abruptly ended the conversation before the commander had a chance to express his concern at the shortage of reserves. Hours later, during a restless night, Reinhardt received Hitler’s order to transfer two vital panzer divisions to Harpe’s hard-pressed Army Group A, struggling to hold the Soviet advance on the Vistula. This would further weaken his limited reserves. But he was told there was no point in protesting; the Führer’s decision was final. Reinhardt noted that the consequences in East Prussia could only be ‘catastrophic’. Removing the last reserves would inevitably bring an enemy breakthrough very soon. ‘Monstrous blow for us! But has to be borne, as our position is also dependent on Harpe,’ he stoically jotted in his diary.95
Reinhardt was having to contend with Guderian as well as Hitler. On 15 January Guderian initially refused to allow him to shorten the north-eastern corner of the front. Reinhardt, desperate for reserves, appealed to Hitler, who this time supported him as Guderian backed down. On 17 January Hitler, supported by Guderian, rejected Reinhardt’s fervent plea to pull back the 4th Army to save much needed reserves to help support the struggling 2nd Army further to the west. Reinhardt’s hour-long telephone call to Hitler to put the case was difficult. Hitler said at the outset that, because of his hearing problems as a result of the attack on his life the previous July, General Wilhelm Burgdorf, his Wehrmacht adjutant, would conduct the discussion. Reinhardt and his Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Otto Heidkämper, also a firm regime loyalist, suspected that their case was not fully or clearly represented by Burgdorf. In any case, it was to no avail. Hitler was convinced, he said, that withdrawals did not save forces, because the enemy simply advanced to more favourable positions. This type of retreat, he claimed, had led to catastrophe at every point of the eastern front. He then rejected Reinhardt’s request to allow the 4th Army to retreat to the Masurian Lakes and was dismissive about the value of the fortifications in Lötzen. The most that Reinhardt achieved was to retain two divisions that Guderian had wanted to transfer to the OKH.96
Reinhardt’s nerves were jangling as he struggled to cope with the crisis. They were not improved when on 19 January he witnessed terrible scenes of devastation after fleeing civilians had been hit by a bombing raid that left a trail of corpses, wrecked vehicles and horses torn in pieces by the roadside.97 He asked himself in a letter to his wife how it was possible to carry on under such a heavy and painful burden. He gave his own answer: ‘the machine of duty, the will and the unquestioned “must” application of the last ounce of strength work automatically within us. Only seldom do you think about the big “what now”.’98
Another entreaty from Reinhardt on the evening of 20 January to withdraw the increasingly imperilled 4th Army to safer lines in the Masurian Lakes was bluntly rebuffed by Hitler – a decision found incomprehensible by the leadership of Army Group Centre since the situation was becoming critical and encirclement almost certain. Guderian promised to try to persuade Hitler to change his mind, but held out little hope. Reinhardt spent another sleepless night. ‘Still no permission to retreat,’ he noted in his diary on 21 January. ‘I’m now in the most severe anguish over whether I should disobey.’ That morning he again begged Guderian and the head of the OKH command staff, General Walther Wenck, to get him an immediate decision, ‘otherwise trust in the leadership will collapse altogether’. ‘Unbelievably tense hours’ went by. Reinhardt smoked one cigarette after another until he had none left. Guderian rang mid-morning to say that Hitler had again rejected a withdrawal of the 4th Army.
Reinhardt decided once more to speak directly with Hitler in an attempt to ‘save what can be saved’. He had another long struggle to try to surmount Hitler’s stubborn rejection of retreat to the Masurian Lakes district as the only hope of holding the front. He found the conversation distressing, he wrote to his wife, ‘because I fought so much with my entire feelings and sense of duty and conflicts of conscience between wanting and having to obey and feeling of responsibility for my task’. The turning point in the discussion came when Reinhardt vehemently claimed that, if the withdrawal did not happen, East Prussia and the Army Group would collapse. He had, Reinhardt continued, been bombarded with requests for support from his subordinate commanders and had to say that the question of confidence from below was now a serious factor. He knew of no solution other than the one he had proposed. If this were again to be rejected, he feared he would lose control. After almost two hours Hitler conceded. He gave permission for the retreat to the lakes. ‘Thank God!’ Reinhardt noted. ‘I was near despair. Is suicide desertion? Now probably yes! Thank God,’ he repeated, ‘that the crisis of confidence has been overcome. I wouldn’t have been able to face my commanders. They doubted me, justifiably. Now God must help us see that it is not all too late.’99
It was too late. No sooner had Hitler finally agreed to allow the 4th Army to pull back to the fortified zone centred on Lötzen than further Soviet advances endangered the area. Already that same evening, 21 January, Reinhardt acknowledged that the Lötzen position was no longer safe, and a move westwards to the ‘Heilsberg triangle’ was imperative. As he travelled to Königsberg next day in a heavy snowstorm, Reinhardt was dismayed at the sight of the refugees in the appalling weather. It upset him, he told his wife, that ‘they were driven off and roughly handled by us if they were blocking our roads with their vehicles and holding up vital troop movements’. The threat to the 4th Army was, meanwhile, becoming graver. Impassable roads meant Reinhardt could not reach the 4th Army’s commander, General Hoßbach, on 23 January to assess the overall situation. By that evening, as further depressing news of Soviet advances came in, Reinhardt, blaming the belated permission to retreat, recorded in his diary: ‘We are, then, encircled.’
His view by now was that a ‘breakthrough to the west’, which Hoßbach had urged as the only hope, had to be undertaken. He informed the OKH of the decision that evening – though he omitted to mention his conviction that his forces were too weak both to attempt this and at the same time to hold Königsberg and the Samland. Nor – since it was plain that Hitler would reject the move out of hand – did he report the intention to give up the Lötzen area and retreat entirely to a new defensible position near Heilsberg. The OKH agreed, unaware of the full extent of the crisis, and promised to send forces eastwards from the Elbing area to meet up with the 4th Army pushing westwards. When he and Hoßbach met next morning, Reinhardt, no doubt put under pressure to act by Hoßbach, whose confidence in his Commander-in-Chief had been waning over recent days, gave the order to accelerate the breakout. Reinhardt worried that it was being attempted too late and continued to fret about whether he ought to have disobeyed Hitler’s earlier persistent refusal to allow a retreat. ‘I cannot survive this catastrophe,’ he lamented. ‘I’ll be blamed, even though my conscience is clear, except that I was perhaps, from a sense of duty, too obedient.’
Next day, 25 January, Reinhardt faced a further inner conflict. He had suffered a severe head injury that morning when he was badly cut by flying glass following a grenade explosion at a field headquarters he was visiting. Bloodied and haggard, he pleaded in vain with Guderian to withdraw the front further. Guderian, backing Hitler’s stance, insisted on holding the position on the lakes near Lötzen. Reinhardt, from his sickbed, struggled again the following afternoon to gain a favourable decision from the OKH as the threat to the 4th Army worsened. He was promised a decision by 5 p.m., which he had said was the last possible moment. At 5.30 p.m. Hitler’s order eventually came through, but permitted only a limited withdrawal to positions which, in fact, had already been overrun by the Red Army. Hitler continued to insist on holding the position around Lötzen. Reinhardt told Hoßbach, repeatedly pressing for a decision, that if he had received none by 7.15 p.m. he would order the withdrawal himself. Amid rising tension, both Guderian and Wenck at the OKH, remarkably, were unavailable to speak to Reinhardt on the telephone. Hoßbach rang at 7 p.m. to say he needed immediate permission to break out; he could wait no longer. Reinhardt gave the order. He had no choice, he noted; the advantage of the position on the lakes had in any case been lost. He had no forces strong enough to retain it. ‘My conscience is clear in favour of the attack… on which everything depends,’ he added. ‘I firmly believe that the success and sustaining of our attack is more important to the Führer than the lake position.’ He was wrong. Hitler, feeling he had been deceived, exploded in blind fury at the news that the 4th Army had given up Lötzen, accusing Reinhardt and Hoßbach of treason. He later calmed down. But a scapegoat was needed. That night the loyalist, if conscience-stricken, Reinhardt, along with his Chief of Staff, Heidkämper, was dismissed.
VI
Striking throughout the drama was not only Hitler’s absurd obtuseness in refusing to concede sensible withdrawals, but also Reinhardt’s unhappiness at having to entertain the idea of disobedience even in such extremes. Significant, too, is that Reinhardt and the leadership of Army Group Centre felt they could rely upon no support from the OKH or from the military entourage around Hitler. The distrust of Burgdorf, Hitler’s Wehrmacht adjutant, was plain. But so too was the feeling that Guderian, as Chief of the General Staff, would side with Hitler. When, therefore, the complete withdrawal of the 4th Army to the Heilberg area was recognized as the only remaining option, even if it meant the loss of Königsberg and the Samland, this had to be kept not only from Hitler, but also from the OKH. Gauleiter Koch, still trumpeting the need to hold onto ‘Fortress East Prussia’ down to the last man, had also to be kept in the dark, since he would immediately tell Hitler. The lines of military as well as political command that kept Hitler’s leadership position untouchable and ensured that his orders were carried out, however nonsensical, remained, then, intact throughout the crisis. Hoßbach embellished his own reputation by claiming after the war that he had disobeyed Hitler in unilaterally ordering the attack to the west to break out of the encirclement. In reality, however, down to Reinhardt’s dismissal on 26 January he was acting with the full support of his Commander-in-Chief. The decision, reluctantly to act against Hitler’s wishes because he felt he had no choice, appears to have been in the first instance Reinhardt’s, rather than Hoßbach’s.
The aim of Army Group Centre’s leadership in retreating to Heilsberg was to move to a more defensible position. Once there, further consideration could be given to whether there was anything left of East Prussia to try to save. Hoßbach’s view, so he wrote shortly after the war, was more radical still. He knew East Prussia was lost, he stated. He saw the only option as trying to save the German forces trapped there so that they could fight again.100
This became an end in itself. Desperation produced its own dynamic. Hoßbach, like other military leaders, later claimed that the reason he had fought on was to protect and save the civilian population. The truth was different: saving the army came first. Of course, commanders, as Reinhardt’s diary notes and letters as well as other contemporary accounts make plain, were frequently shaken and saddened by the plight of the refugees in the depths of the East Prussian winter. Retreating soldiers often did what they could to carry refugees with them or help where they could, though this amounted to little. The misery they witnessed had a depressing effect on troop morale.101 Unquestionably, the Wehrmacht wanted where possible to prevent the population falling into the hands of the Soviets. But the streams of refugees on the frozen roads threatened to hamper the breakthrough to the west. Reinhardt’s orders on 22 January showed where the priorities lay. ‘Treks that disturb troop movements on the main roads’, ordered Reinhardt, ‘are to be removed from these roads… It’s painful, certainly. But the situation demands it.’102 ‘The civilian population has to keep back,’ Hoßbach in turn told his subordinate commanders of the 4th Army two days later. ‘It sounds horrible, but can’t unfortunately be altered, since, tough though it is, it’s a matter now after the loss of East Prussia of getting the military forces there back to the homeland with some fighting power.’ ‘Treks have to get down off the roads,’ he put it bluntly to Reinhardt later the same evening.103 Repeatedly, the retreating army put the order into practice, manhandling refugees and their carts off the roads as they forced their way westwards.
Military logic can, of course, at times determine that the civilian population has to suffer in the short term to allow the armed forces to reorganize in order to benefit that population in the longer term. But there was little sign of clear strategic thinking in the mayhem of East Prussia in January 1945. Rescuing the troops so that they could fight again, Hoßbach’s avowed aim, did not attempt to explain the purpose of fighting on. Precise motivation is not easy to discern, for leaders or for troops. Gaining time until the enemy coalition split was becoming a fainter hope by the day. ‘Now it’s a question of holding in the west and developing German partisan war in the east,’ one colonel stated – the only hope in ‘a fight to the death’. This still left the ultimate purpose unsaid, and was in any case an aim rapidly being overtaken by events.104 ‘Defence of the Fatherland’ was an abstraction. And where would it be defended? At the Oder (and the Rhine)? Within the Reich itself? In the Reich capital until all was destroyed? The savagery of the Soviet attack, and the dread of falling into enemy hands, a sense of self-preservation, loyalty to immediate comrades facing the same fate, and anxieties about loved ones back home provided sufficient motivation for most ordinary soldiers – when they reflected at all on why they were continuing the fight. For those leading them, there was perhaps another element. Reinhardt’s diary remark that an almost automated sense of duty drove on his actions, with little or no thought to further consequences, probably applied to most military leaders, and not just on the eastern front.
This meant that the military leadership, devoid of any alternative strategy for ending the war, was objectively continuing to work towards the regime’s only remaining goal – of fighting to the last, whatever the cost in material destruction and human lives. Hitler’s decisions during the January crisis in the east furthered that goal alone. As always, generals found wanting were discarded as easily as used shell-cartridges, even if, like Reinhardt, their task had been hopeless. Hitler replaced Reinhardt with Colonel-General Lothar Rendulic´, a trusted Austrian, tough, shrewd and capable – though no more capable than Reinhardt had been of mastering the impossible task in East Prussia. In Hoßbach’s view, he arrived without any understanding of the overall situation, had no relationship with the troops now placed under his command, ‘probably acted on binding orders of Hitler’ and greatly overestimated the strength of the forces at his disposal. He clashed immediately with Hoßbach over the intended breakthrough to the west at the cost of abandoning Königsberg and the Samland to their fate, saying he would not support a move he described as ‘worthy of death’.105 Only now did Hoßbach act independently, against the wishes of the Army Group leadership. The breakout went ahead, but, lacking in sufficient strength, was already floundering by 30 January when Hoßbach, too, was sacked and replaced by General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, competent though without experience of high command, who broke off the attempt to reach the Vistula.106
Further south, an enraged Hitler had already dismissed the chief of Army Group A, Colonel-General Harpe, blamed for the abandonment of Warsaw despite the order to hold the city at all costs.107 His replacement, the commander who most epitomizes Nazi values, the brutal Colonel-General Ferdinand Schörner, lost no time in imposing his own ruthless discipline on retreating troops, mercilessly rounding up deserters and carrying out exemplary executions.108 He demanded of his subordinate officers that they put down immediately any sign of desertion or indiscipline without concern for the fine points of a legal trial. Justice was subordinate to the general interest. ‘After all, war is also not “fair”,’ he reasoned.109 Much later, when he returned from imprisonment in Russia and was facing trial in West Germany, Schörner claimed that on taking up his command he found demoralization of troops, millions of refugees on the roads preventing ordered troop movements and disintegration of fighting units. He had been able to restore the situation and through tough measures had eventually stabilized the front. His aim, he stated, had nothing now to do with ‘final victory’ or the regime, but was solely the prevention of the Red Army advancing into Germany and saving hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Bolsheviks.110 This conveniently overlooked his determination, even at this desperate stage, to do all he possibly could to implement Hitler’s ‘fight to the last’ policy in the most fanatical fashion.
On 25 January Hitler took the opportunity of the personnel changes to redesignate the Army Groups, bringing them more in line with reality. Army Group A, taken over by Schörner, became Army Group Centre; Army Group Centre, placed under Rendulic´, was renamed Army Group North; and Army Group North, stranded in Courland despite Guderian’s entreaties to evacuate the 200,000 or so much-needed troops trapped there for better deployment on the heavily stretched fronts elsewhere, was turned into Army Group Courland under the command of Colonel-General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, who was moved to the frozen north from sunnier climes on the Italian front. The changes reflected the need felt by the leadership to combat signs of wavering morale and the potential collapse of the front from within through the imposition of ruthless discipline. ‘Triumph of the will’ through blind obedience was set to replace totally the imperatives of military professionalism. To reinforce this, the head of the OKW, Field-Marshal Keitel, demanded unconditional obedience in carrying out orders and ordered the imposition of the death penalty by military courts for anyone failing in this.111 In the most remarkable move, Hitler created a new force, Army Group Vistula, to shore up the tottering defences of north-eastern Germany and block the assault on the line of the Oder north of Glogau and Soviet penetration of West Prussia and Pomerania. Astonishingly, and in a move that smacked of desperation, he gave the command to Heinrich Himmler – skilled at the merciless treatment of helpless political and racial victims, certainly, but whose only experience of high-level frontline military leadership had been his brief and unsuccessful command of the hastily assembled Army Group Upper Rhine in the preceding weeks. His role was to restore order to the wavering front and, through harsh discipline, ensure an unrelenting fight to the end.112 His troops consisted at first largely of what was left of the forces of the 9th and 2nd Armies, though by mid-February he commanded some forty divisions.113
One of Hitler’s firmest backers in the unconditional fight to the end was Grand-Admiral Dönitz, whose actions belie the post-war image he cultivated of the unpolitical, purely professional military man. Dönitz was a real hardliner, totally committed to the fight against Communism. He never wavered in his complete support for Hitler, whom, he said in post-war interrogations, he saw as a man of ‘extreme chivalry and kindness’. He insisted that his relations with Hitler had been purely those ‘of a soldier, who was in his activities entirely limited to his province; that is to his soldier’s interests’,114 and presented himself as primarily concerned only with the fate of the stricken civilian population of the east. He declared that, after the opening of the Soviet offensive on the eastern front in January, saving the inhabitants of the eastern provinces was the most important task for the German soldier, and he proudly recounted the navy’s role in ferrying more than 2 million Germans to the west in the remaining months of the war.115 Yet he reached agreement with Hitler on 22 January that dwindling coal reserves ‘must be reserved for military tasks and could not be used to take away refugees’. Transport of refugees by sea could only be undertaken as long as there was no hindrance to the fighting troops. Dönitz’s main priority was shipping provisions to the troops trapped in East Prussia and the Courland. Refugees desperately hoping for ships to take them from Pillau and other Baltic harbours had to wait.116
As the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, though effectively in disgrace for the failings of air defence and present at Führer Headquarters only when he had to be, remained loyal, however resigned he was to Germany’s impending fate.117 Colonel-General Robert Ritter von Greim, Commander-in-Chief of the 6th Air Fleet on the eastern front, already in mind as a possible replacement for Göring, was another convinced National Socialist, a participant in the putsch attempt of 1923, and utterly committed to Hitler to the very end. Other senior Luftwaffe officers were also fanatical about continuing the fight, however hopeless it seemed. Whether or not leaders of the Luftwaffe felt this way, hopes that something could be saved for the future made most of them ultra-cautious about doing anything that would prompt disfavour.118
Guderian, as Chief of the Army General Staff, was as a consequence of his disagreements with military dispositions becoming increasingly frustrated and estranged from Hitler, though, as we have noted, he had usually come down on his side when Reinhardt had desperately been trying to get decisions to retreat in East Prussia. However much he disagreed with Hitler’s decisions, Guderian accepted them and tried to implement them as well as he could. Soon after the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944 he had wanted every General Staff officer to be an NSFO.119 He had also served on the ‘Court of Honour’ that had thrown fifty-five army officers out of the Wehrmacht in disgrace.120 He remained a loyalist, if by now a disillusioned one. And at the top of the Wehrmacht, lapdog loyalty was assured in Keitel and Jodl. The military establishment, contrary to its later claims, remained, therefore, committed to Hitler, and to a strategy which, ruling out any form of capitulation, could logically only lead to further immense bloodshed and ultimate self-destruction.
What above all enabled the military struggle to continue, though at inevitable cost on other fronts, was the belated acceptance that massive reinforcements for the east had to be found. Losses on the eastern front in January and February were more than 450,000.121 But the front had to be strengthened beyond these losses. The navy and the Luftwaffe made available tens of thousands of sailors and airmen for the land war.122 The Replacement Army scraped together many more, often from those in reserved occupations previously exempted from call-up. The Volkssturm mobilized in total over half a million men, grossly lacking in weapons, to serve on the eastern front, suffering horrendous losses as they did so.123 But since genuine reserves were as good as exhausted, and new recruits were often scarcely trained boys of sixteen or seventeen, many of the reinforcements could only come from the west or the south. On 19 January, six days into the Soviet offensive, Lieutenant-General August Winter, deputy head of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, presented a memorandum whose basic premiss was that the war would be decided over the coming weeks in the east. Winter stated the necessity, forced by the emergency in the east, ‘at the cost of other theatres of war and with conscious acknowledgement of the serious risk involved for the western theatre of concentrating maximum forces in the eastern theatre for the great decisive battle’.124 The order resulted in a further forty divisions being dispatched to the east. Aircraft, anti-aircraft batteries, tanks and heavy artillery were now overwhelmingly also sent east, to the neglect of other fronts. By 12 February, thirty-three divisions had been sent to the eastern front, with another twelve to follow by early March. But eighteen of these divisions could be provided only by weakening the fight against the British and Americans in the west and in northern Italy.125 The eventual final phase of the Allied advance in the west was, therefore, directly presaged by the collapse of the Wehrmacht in the east.
In the meantime, increasing desperation on the part of the regime’s leaders and their representatives at lower levels, coupled with the evident signs that morale was crumbling at home as well as on the fronts, intensified the resort to measures of extreme repression. These were now directed not just at helpless, persecuted minority groups, but at the German population itself. The terror that had been exported eastwards for so long was coming home to the Reich.