This was a matter of the utmost secrecy; it was not to be discussed in public, but broad if vague knowledge seeped throughout the regime—and the public. The Jews were being “resettled” in the East, but what did that mean? What happened to them there? Goebbels certainly knew the answer. To his diary on March 27, he confided that “beginning in Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitively. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 percent can be used for forced labor.” He was impressed that Globocnik was carrying out this mission “with considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention.” To Goebbels it was clear that “a judgment is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric, but fully deserved. The prophecy which the Führer gave them along the way for bringing about a new world war is beginning to become true in the most terrible fashion. . . . Here, too, the Führer is the unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution.”
While little specific was known about what awaited the Jews at the end of the train journey, the deportations, of course, were quite public, and, as the Gestapo noted, the response of the public was mixed. In Minden, “the evacuation of the Jews provoked great alarm.” Some “expressed concern that, given the cold weather many Jews would die in transit.” A widely circulated rumor claimed that the Jews were being transported to Russia—in passenger carriages to Warsaw and from there in cattle cars. Healthy Jews would then be subjected to hard labor in former Russian factories, while the older and infirm would be shot. Such rumors, the local Gestapo complained, triggered expressions of sympathy for the Jews. “It is beyond understanding,” one people’s comrade was heard to say, “how human beings could be treated so brutally, whether Jew or Aryan. . . . Germans in America would have to pay dearly because the Jews in Germany are badly treated.” A Gestapo report from Bremen explained that “while the politically educated of the population generally greeted the ‘evacuation of the Jews,’ religious and commercial circles show no understanding [for the policy] and continue to believe that they need to speak up for the Jews.” The Gestapo in Magdeburg sounded a similar refrain, reporting that “persons of German blood continue to maintain friendly relations with Jews and by that sort of behavior prove that even today they have no understanding for the most elementary principles of National Socialism.”
Domestic opinion could be shaped by the regime, but international opinion was another matter. In December, the Allied powers issued a declaration accusing the Germans of conducting the systematic mass murder of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and for a brief time made such allegations the centerpiece of their public attacks on the Third Reich. Instead of attempting to mount a counter-campaign denying the charges, Goebbels surprised his subordinates by concluding that it was best if the regime simply chose to ignore the accusations. In a remarkably revealing statement to a ministerial conference on December 12, he explained quite openly that “Since the enemy reports about alleged German atrocities against the Jews and Poles are threatening to grow even more massive, we find ourselves in a situation where we don’t have counter arguments to offer.” Two days later he returned to the theme. “We cannot answer these things. When the Jews say we have shot two and a half million Jews in Poland . . . we can’t answer that it is only two and one third million.” Nineteen forty-two would prove to be the deadliest year of the Holocaust. One third of the Jews who would perish in the “Final Solution” would die in that year.
The architect of the Final Solution did not live to see it implemented. Reinhard Heydrich, who had been appointed protector of Bohemia and Moravia to crush the resistance there, was assassinated by the Czech underground while being driven in an open car through Prague. The Czech assassins had been selected by the Czech government in exile in London and trained by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in clandestine operations. They were dropped into a field on the outskirts of Prague with the express mission of eliminating Heydrich. On May 27, they struck, attacking him with a grenade and small arms fire. Heydrich was severely wounded and lingered for eight days before dying. Hitler gave him grandiose state funerals in both Prague and Berlin. The Czech agents were trapped in a church, fought bravely for several hours, and then committed suicide. Hitler wanted to shoot ten thousand Czechs in reprisal, but Heydrich’s successor as protector, Karl Hermann Frank, managed to persuade him to make an example of one Czech village instead. On June 10, the entire population of Lidice was charged with having harbored the assassins. All the men were shot; the women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Eighty-one of the children were deemed racially unworthy and were murdered, the other seventeen were given new German identities and placed with German families. The village was burned to the ground. The Jews, Goebbels claimed, were behind the attack.
* * *
Despite a frenzy of anti-Semitic propaganda spewing from Goebbels’s office, other concerns laid a greater claim on the attention of the German public in 1942. During the first two years of the war, British bombers had launched raids against German cities, primarily in the west and along the coast. These operations had been small in scale and largely ineffective, and though they were an embarrassment to the Nazi authorities, their impact on the war effort or civilian morale was minimal. The spring of 1942 would change that. On the night of March 27–28 British planes raided the city of Lübeck on the Baltic coast. Flying at two thousand feet, the attackers unleashed four hundred tons of bombs on the historic city center that night, two thirds of which were incendiaries. Three hundred inhabitants of the city were killed, by far the highest casualty count of any raid to that point, and rumors quickly spread that ten times that number were dead and three thousand left homeless. The raid sent shockwaves through the country. Before these reverberations could be absorbed, the RAF followed with a series of firebomb attacks on Rostock, another port city on the Baltic. For several days, air raid sirens, soon to be a dreaded feature of everyday life for the urban population of the Reich, howled over the city. One hundred thousand dwellings were destroyed, and one hundred thousand residents were evacuated from the city.
These raids signaled an ominous shift in the British approach to bombing. An Air Directive of February 14 indicated that the targets of future operations were to be Germany’s large industrial cities. The RAF had decided to embark on a strategy of area bombing. By concentrating on cities of over 100,000 in population, large targets that were easy to find and hit, it could render over one third of the German population homeless and demoralized. Henceforth, Bomber Command would measure its success by acres of built-up area destroyed and a calculation of acres of concentrated urban devastation and industrial man-hours lost.
The man who executed this policy was the new head of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris. Harris was convinced that the way to defeat Nazi Germany was to destroy its cities, devastating the Reich’s war-making capabilities and, in the process, breaking the morale of its citizens. This meant smashing the civic infrastructure of Germany’s cities—housing, electricity, water, sanitation—to such an extent that their inhabitants simply could not function. It also meant large-scale killing. During the spring and summer of 1942, Harris provided a terrifying hint of what was to come. Mustering every available aircraft and all combat crews—including raw trainees and their instructors—Bomber Command launched three monster raids on German cities. On May 30–31, one thousand British planes attacked Cologne in what RAF Bomber Command called Operation Millennium. The bombers dropped 1,400 tons of explosives on the city, leaving 500 dead, 5,000 wounded, and 60,000 homeless. In early June 900 aircraft raided Essen, and 1,000 appeared in the night skies over Bremen. Harris could not sustain these numbers and the subsequent raids would be lighter, but he had made his point. In the following summer months, RAF bombers ranged far and wide over Germany, attacking not only the factory c
ities of the Ruhr but Frankfurt, Kassel, and deep in Bavaria, Nuremberg and Munich. The nature of the air war was undergoing a radical change.
The Americans joined the air assault on Germany in 1942, flying daylight missions to complement the British nighttime raids. In January 1943, at a conference in Casablanca, attended by Roosevelt and Churchill and their military staffs, American air commander Ira Eaker coined the term “Round the Clock Bombing.” The formulation implied a coordinated plan of attack—the Americans would hit key targets during the day, the RAF would go over at night. Churchill was particularly taken with the phrase, and the Casablanca Directive from the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff ordered the two air commanders to embark on the systematic demolition of a range of German target systems as essential preliminaries to an invasion of Europe: submarine yards and bases, the German aircraft industry, ball bearings, oil, synthetic rubber, and military transportation. Yet, despite the apparent unity, genuine coordination remained something of a mirage; rather than “a Combined Bomber Offensive” there were two distinct, parallel efforts. Harris routinely ignored pressure to send his planes against the priority targets and instead continued to bomb large urban centers. These attacks occasionally overlapped with the American raids but were rarely coordinated.
Still, the Anglo-American raids presaged a dramatic intensification of the air campaign in 1942 and made a deeply unsettling impression on the German public. Events in Russia were troubling, but, the Gestapo reported, “of far greater concern to the public in all parts of the Reich is the increasing British bombing of German cities. That worry is exacerbated by the regime’s failure to give information about the extent of casualties and physical damage. One fears that the coming months will see an increase in the number of British raids whose objective is to destroy one industrial city after another.” Worries about the stalled war in the East, the Anglo-American bombing campaign, and a tightening of rationing as the food supply dwindled, led to the first real signs of war weariness and pessimism. “The hope for a quick collapse of Bolshevism has perhaps given way to a conviction that the Soviet Union cannot be defeated by the offensive war in its current form but by a war of attrition whose distant end is not yet in view.” This was not the war the Nazis and their early, easy victories promised, not the war the German people had come to expect.
* * *
Despite the pounding the Wehrmacht had taken in the East, Hitler was preparing to undertake a new campaign in the spring of 1942. He decided to abandon the ambitious objectives of Barbarossa and concentrate his forces on one primary objective: seizing the Caucasus oil fields to deny Soviet resupply and claim this valuable asset for the Reich. The plan, code-named Operation Blue, called for a three-phase campaign in the south. First, German troops would encircle Soviet troops west of the Don River, then dash southward along the Volga to Stalingrad. There General Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army and Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army would establish a blocking position near the city to protect the southern force. Finally, phase three—a drive deep into the Caucasus. It was not as audacious as Barbarossa, but its scale was still extraordinary—over five hundred miles from Kiev to the heart of the Caucasus, and the German army in the Soviet Union had 350,000 fewer troops than the year before. Total tank strength was slightly less than in 1941, but the offensive would concentrate them in the south. The Wehrmacht would therefore be forced to rely on Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian units, and these were neither as well equipped nor as committed as their German allies.
The Russian position was also shaky as the spring approached. The winter offensive—during the worst winter in Russia in 140 years—had left the Red Army spent. The Russians had suffered almost incomprehensible losses—both of men and matériel—and Stalin was convinced that when the Germans attacked in late spring, as he knew they would, they would renew their drive on Moscow. As a result, the Red Army’s best units remained on the approaches to the capital. The Germans planned to preface their offensive in June by eliminating a Soviet salient in their line south of Kharkov. But before they could do so, they were preempted by the Russians. Kharkov was the hub of the German communications network in the south and was a prime objective. Stalin and the Russian commander there, General Semyon Timoshenko, decided to launch an offensive from the salient in May. The attack began on May 12 with great initial success, but the Russians had played into German hands. Five days later, the Germans cut off the Soviet spearhead, capturing 240,000 prisoners and destroying more than 600 tanks. To the south, Manstein, who had conquered the Crimea in the fall of 1941, began a siege of Sebastopol in early June, and although the Russians held out for a month, Sebastopol fell on July 3, yielding 100,000 more prisoners and 200 tanks. The German offensive began with a replay of 1941, and Hitler was ecstatic.
The main offensive began on June 28 and made rapid progress against weakened Soviet forces. The Russian position was made worse by the failed Kharkov offensive and by Stalin’s continued conviction that the major German thrust would still be directed at Moscow. Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army drove one hundred miles in eight days, reaching the Don near Voronezh. The Russians fought tenaciously there, allowing a withdrawal toward Stalingrad. For the Russians, it had all the makings of a catastrophe. “The Russian is finished,” Hitler enthused, and even the sober Halder agreed. At this point, Hitler altered the original plan of the offensive with fateful consequences. He decided that it was now possible to move to Phase Three of the operation—the advance into the Caucasus—without first securing his flank at Stalingrad. According to the plan, the Fourth Panzer Army was to lead the Sixth Army, composed of infantry units, into Stalingrad. The panzers would take the city; the infantry would hold it. But now Hitler decided to divert Hoth’s tanks away from Stalingrad and left the task of securing that sprawling industrial city to Paulus’s Sixth. The diversion proved costly. Hoth’s panzer army would probably have reached Stalingrad before Soviet defenses were established, and its presence proved unnecessary to forces moving south across the Don.
By August, the First Panzer Army had streaked southeastward against weak Russian defenses. Within days it had pressed two hundred miles southeast of Rostov and reached the Maikop oil fields in the foothills of the Caucasus. A sense of victory surged through the German army, from headquarters to the lowly foot soldier. On July 29, a soldier in the Sixth Army recorded in his diary: “The company commander says the Russian Troops are completely broken and cannot hold out any longer. To reach the Volga and take Stalingrad is not so difficult for us. The Führer knows where the Russians’ weak point is. Victory is not far away.” A week later he added, “Our company is tearing ahead. Today I wrote to Elsa, ‘We shall soon see each other. All of us feel that the end, victory, is near.’ ”
At this point Hitler made another critical decision. He split his forces, one element moving east toward the Grozny oil fields, while the other pushed south toward the Black Sea. In September, the offensive slowed, and in October, Russian resistance stiffened. German troops did reach Mount Elbrus, Europe’s highest mountain, and a team of climbers placed the German flag near the summit. But here the problems began to multiply. German forces were stretched to their absolute limit; resupply was difficult and fuel was short. Army Group South had begun the offensive covering a 500-mile front. Now it was stretched dangerously thin over almost 1,300 miles. Hitler grew impatient, then furious, at the slow progress in Stalingrad and the Caucasus, and in September he sacked General Wilhelm List, commander of Army Group South, as well as Army Chief of Staff Halder, against whose cautious judgment he had constantly battled. He replaced both with younger, more pliable officers.
Meanwhile progress was being made toward Stalingrad. On August 22, the Germans broke through Russian defenses and a panzer corps fought its way into the northern suburbs, reaching the Volga the next day. The Russians seemed trapped in the city, and the Luftwaffe was called in to seal their fate. On August 23 the Luftwaffe carried out its largest raid since the opening day of Barbarossa. Air
units from all over the Eastern Front were brought to bear on the city. Over half the bombs dropped were incendiaries, and the results were horrifyingly spectacular. Nearly every wooden structure, including acres of workers’ housing, burned. The fires were so intense, so vast, that German soldiers could read a paper forty miles away by the light of their flames. It was a terror raid to kill civilians, overload public services, and create panic. “The whole city is on fire,” a German soldier wrote home, “on the Führer’s orders our Luftwaffe has sent it up in flames. That’s what the Russians need, to stop them resisting.”
But the city did not surrender. Instead, the Regional Party Committee proclaimed a state of siege. The Russians were grimly determined to hold the city and the Germans resolutely determined to take it. As the fighting intensified, the Battle of Stalingrad assumed epic symbolic meaning for both sides. The fighting turned into a ferocious struggle of attrition, fought block by block, house by house, floor by floor, room by room. The city itself was reduced to rubble, and movement was measured in meters. There had been nothing like it since the colossal carnage of the World War I battlefields.
In the midst of the fighting, as the German home front soberly marked the third anniversary of the war, the Gestapo reported an unmistakable mood of resignation, symptomatic, it believed, of a disconcerting war weariness. That report closed with a comment that concealed, barely, a condemnation of Hitler’s war. “The mounting difficulties of supply, three years of shortages in all spheres of everyday life, the intensity and extent of the steadily increasing enemy air attacks, worries about the life of family members at the front and not least the blood sacrifices of . . . the civilian victims of the enemy air attacks are factors that exert an ever greater influence on the mood of wide circles and increasingly the desire for an end to the war soon.”
The Third Reich Page 65
