On August 20th, 1944, the Russians launched their attack against Army Group South Ukraine. This was successful against those sectors that were held by Rumanian troops. But that was not all; the Rumanians deserted in large numbers to the enemy and turned their guns against their allies of yesterday. Neither the German troops nor their leaders had reckoned on such treachery. Although Hitler immediately authorised the withdrawal of the Army Group’s front, the troops attempted to hold out in places and to carry out a fighting retreat step by step. In order to avoid a complete collapse and consequent annihilation an immediate withdrawal and rapid seizure of the bridges over the Danube were essential. As this was not done the Rumanians reached that river before the Germans, closed the crossing-places, and thus left their former allies at the mercy of the Russians. Sixteen German divisions were completely destroyed, an irreplaceable loss in view of our already very difficult situation. These German soldiers fought valiantly to the bitter end; their military honour was unsullied. They were in no way responsible for their sad fate. The misfortune could only have been avoided if the decision to withdraw to the line Galatz–Focsani–the Carpathian Mountains had been implemented before ever the Russians launched their attack; the whole Russian plan would thus have been forestalled and we should have been in possession of a line so shortened that we could have held it even without the assistance of the Rumanians. But to take such a decision required a clear grasp of the political situation and of the morals of the Rumanian leaders. Antonescu himself had been grossly deceived concerning the nature of his organisation and he paid for his mistake with his life. The reliance he placed on his generals and officers was unfortunately unjustified; but it had made a certain impression on the German leaders, with the result that they too were deceived. Within a few weeks Rumania was lost. On September 1st the Russians fought their way into Bucharest. Bulgaria, whose king had died in mysterious circumstances on August 28th, 1943, broke its alliance and went over to the enemy on September 8th. We lost the 88 Panzer IV’s and the 50 assault guns that we had delivered to the Bulgars. Hitler’s hopes of forming at least two anti-bolshevist Bulgarian divisions proved to be illusory. The German soldiers in Bulgaria were disarmed and imprisoned. The Bulgars, too, went over to the Russians and from then on fought against us.
It was now plain to Hitler that the Balkans could no longer be defended. He ordered a gradual withdrawal with delaying actions. In order to make available forces for the defence of Germany this withdrawal was far too slow.
On September 19th, 1944, Finland signed an armistice with Great Britain and Russia. The immediate consequence of this was that the Finns broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. Field-Marshal Keitel’s visit to Field-Marshal Mannerheim on August 20th, 1944, had availed nothing; the Finns were already suing for peace on September 3rd.
It is little wonder that these events began to have their effect on Hungary’s loyalty to its ally. The Regent, Admiral Horthy, had indeed never deeply believed in collaboration with Hitler and had only done so under the compulsion of political necessity. His attitude, compounded of caution and restraint, had already been in evidence on the occasion of his visit to Berlin in 1938. During the war Hitler had had repeatedly to exert heavy pressure in order to make Horthy carry out those measures which Germany considered desirable. Now, at the end of August 1944, Hitler sent me to Budapest with a letter for the Regent and instructions that I form my own impression of his attitude. I was received, in the castle at Budapest, with the customary honours and courtesy. The first words that the Regent uttered, after we had sat down, were: ‘Look, my friend, in politics you must always have several irons in the fire.’ I knew enough. The clever and experienced politician had, or at least thought he had, more than one iron in the fire. Admiral Horthy and I had a long, pleasant conversation on the subject of the problems of nationality in Hungary, a country in which for hundreds of years racial groups of many sorts had lived in close proximity to one another. He emphasised the close and friendly relations which had long bound his country to Poland and which Hitler had, in his opinion, not sufficiently considered. He asked that the Hungarian cavalry division, at present fighting in the Warsaw area, be sent home in the near future; this I was in a position to say would be done; we were engaged in sending home all the Hungarians still on Polish soil. But I could not form a favourable picture of the situation in Hungary, and this I had to tell Hitler. All the fair words of the Chief of the Hungarian General Staff, Vörös, could not change the impression I gained.
By the end of August the Russians had reached the gates of Bucharest and had entered Transylvania. The war was knocking at the portals of Hungary. It was under the shadow of these events that my visit to Budapest took place.
While these grave events were taking place in Eastern Europe, on the Western Front our forces were engaged in bloody and costly defensive battles. On July 17th Field-Marshal Rommel had been the victim of a British fighter-bomber attack. Field-Marshal von Kluge had taken over his command as well as the task of controlling all operations in the West. On this date the German front still ran from the mouth of the Orne—the southern edge of Caen–Caumont–St. Lô–Lessay, on the coast. On July 30th the Americans broke through this front at Avranches. A few weeks later, on August 15th, the mass of the German Army in the West, thirty-one divisions, was fighting for its very existence. Twenty divisions, two-thirds of this force, were in the process of being encircled near Falaise. The enemy’s armoured and motorised formations were advancing through Orléans and Chartres towards Paris. Normandy and Brittany had been lost, with the exception of a part of the Atlantic Wall defences inside which five divisions were cut off. Weak American forces had landed on the Mediterranean coast between Toulon and Cannes. The 11th Panzer Division, which was supposed to operate against these forces, found itself unfortunately on the wrong side of the Rhône, on the west bank near Narbonne. The rest of the German divisions were located as follows:
2divisions in Holland.
7 divisions on the Channel between the Scheldt and the Seine.
1 division on the Channel Islands.
2 divisions on the coast between the Loire and the Pyrenees.
7divisions on the Mediterranean coast.
1 division on the Franco–Italian Alpine frontier.
Only two and a half divisions could be made available to parry the Allied thrust for Paris. Two new SS divisions were sent as reinforcements to Belgium, while three infantry divisions were moved into France by way of Cologne and Koblenz.
Now the Armed Forces Command Staff began to appreciate the value of rearward prepared positions. Their maps of the time show a Seine position and a Somme–Marne position. These existed solely on the maps.
Hitler now decided that Model should replace Field-Marshal von Kluge. In order that Model might devote attention to the main invasion front, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt was once again made responsible for controlling all operations in the West.
That day, the 15th of August, was one of violent scenes at Supreme Headquarters. I had briefed Hitler on the situation of our armoured forces in the West as I saw it from the reports I had received and I said: ‘The bravery of the panzer troops is not enough to make up for the failure of the other two Services—the air force and the navy.’ This put Hitler in a raving temper. He requested that I follow him into another room. There the argument continued and our voices must have grown louder and louder, for eventually an adjutant, Major von Amsberg, entered with the remark: ‘The gentlemen are talking so loudly that every word is clearly audible outside. May I close the window?’
Hitler was desperate when he learned that Field-Marshal von Kluge had failed to return from a visit to the front. He imagined that the Field-Marshal had established contact with the enemy. He therefore ordered that he report to Supreme Headquarters. But Field-Marshal von Kluge killed himself by taking poison while on the way there.
On August 25th, 1944, Paris fell.
Hitler and the Armed Forces Command Staff were now c
onfronted with the need for making a vital decision concerning the future prosecution of operations. This involved deciding clearly where the point of main effort was to be made in the defence of Fortress Germany.
That the defence must be continued was a matter beyond doubt both to Hitler and to his military advisers. All thought of negotiation, either collectively with all our enemies or singly with those in the West or those in the East, had been rendered fruitless in advance by their unanimous requirement that we surrender unconditionally. If we were to go over completely to the defensive we could reckon on a long resistance but hardly on a favourable outcome to the war.
If it were decided to make our main defensive effort in the East, this would lead to a solidification of the front which might well halt any further Russian advance. Upper Silesia and large areas of Poland, essential to Germany for the production of war materials and of food supplies, would remain under our control. On the other hand this solution would leave our Western Front to its own resources, and within the foreseeable future it must collapse beneath the overwhelming superiority of the Western Powers. Since Hitler had no reason to believe that the Western Allies would be willing to make a separate peace for the purpose of discomforting the Russians, he refused to follow this course.
It was Hitler’s opinion that if our main effort were concentrated in the West and all our available forces gathered together there, we should be in a position to strike a powerful blow against the Western Allies before they reached, or at any rate crossed, the Rhine.
Prerequisites for this course of action were:
1. Stabilisation of the Eastern Front and the holding of that front until the offensive with limited objectives in the West had been completed and the forces there employed could be freed for transfer to the East.
2. The carrying out of this offensive to be completed in the shortest possible time, and certainly before the frosts set in, since this would presumably be the signal for a renewed Russian attack and therefore the necessary forces must be available for transfer eastwards by that time.
3. Rapid preparation of the attacking force, in order that the plan might be practicable.
4. A successful battle to gain time on the Western Front preparatory to the launching of the attack.
Hitler and the OKW believed that the attack could certainly be launched by mid-November and that there would be strong reserves available for transfer to the Eastern Front by mid-December. The prospect of a mild autumn and a delayed frost in the East made it seem probable that the Russian winter offensive would not start before the new year. In view of these considerations it was decided that my views concerning the Eastern Front must take second place.
It is obvious that I, being responsible for the Eastern Front, could only regard these plans with the gravest misgivings. Once the decision had been taken, I regarded it as my duty to ensure that the first prerequisite of the proposed operation, the stabilisation of the Eastern Front, be carried out.
Apart from the building of rearward lines and positions, already mentioned above, attempts were now made to construct strong points at the front with all the means at our disposal. By mid-December all the panzer and panzergrenadier divisions had gradually been withdrawn from the front; they were now assembled in four groups as a mobile reserve and were brought up to strength so far as this was possible. The Eastern Front’s weakness in infantry made it only possible to withdraw a single infantry division from the front; it was assembled as a reserve in the Cracow area.
The bridgeheads over the Vistula which the Russians had captured during the previous summer had to be eliminated or at least reduced in size so as to delay the enemy’s attack and to increase his difficulties in launching it.
Finally, in order to shorten the front and to create a reserve it was necessary to evacuate our forces still in the Baltic States by sea, since the attempt to re-establish land communications with them had failed.
Unfortunately we did not manage to carry out the whole of our eastern programme successfully. It is true that we did succeed in building the necessary fortified lines and positions, but the indispensable garrisons and weapons were not forthcoming as a result of the catastrophic and rapid sequence of events on the invasion front in the West. The value of the fortifications built therefore remained limited. They further suffered as a result of an order by Hitler that the ‘Great Defensive Line,’ to which the troops were to withdraw immediately before the enemy launched its attack, was not—as the army groups and I desired—to be some 12 miles behind the normal main defensive line, but was to be built at an insufficient depth of only 1 to 3 miles back.
On the Vistula the elimination of one Russian bridgehead was successfully completed while the others were reduced in size. But when a number of the divisions were withdrawn and the very active commander of Fourth Panzer Army, General Balck, was transferred to the Western Front, I regret to say that no further successes were achieved in these important operations. The bridgeheads, and particularly the important one at Baranov, remained a serious threat.
Also highly disadvantageous to us was the failure to shorten our front which resulted from the retention of Army Group North in Courland. Although I insisted over and over again that Courland must be evacuated and a strong reserve set up from the formations of Army Group North, Hitler continued to refuse to sanction the withdrawal, partly for reasons of prestige and partly because of the arguments advanced by Grand-Admiral Dönitz which supported his own attitude. Hitler was afraid that this evacuation might have an undesirable effect on Swedish neutrality and evil consequences for the U-boat training area in the Gulf of Danzig. Also he believed that by retaining an area on the Baltic to the north of the Eastern Front he was tying up a disproportionately large number of Russian divisions which would otherwise be committed against more vital sectors of our front. The repeated offensives launched by the Russians in Courland strengthened him in this conviction.
With the same or similar arguments Hitler and the Armed Forces Command Staff turned down all proposals for a timely evacuation of the Balkans and of Norway and for a shortening of the front in Italy.
But it was not only the programme in the East that remained largely unfulfilled. The situation in the West developed far more unfortunately.
The neglect of our western defences, including the West Wall, since 1940 and the confining of all our constructional activities exclusively to the Atlantic Wall now began to exact a very heavy toll. It was not only from the Eastern Front that the new units formed with such trouble in the autumn of 1944 had now to be withdrawn. These units, insufficient as they were and consisting of soldiers who could scarcely be described as even third-class military material, were not enough to breach the gap in the West. Furthermore, the rear echelon soldiers of the armies in France had collapsed. As a result the ungarrisoned and unarmed fortifications were quite valueless. Their rapid loss compelled us to fight a mobile war with almost immobile units, a bombed communications network in our rear and enemy air superiority above us. While our panzer units still existed, our leaders had chosen to fight a static battle in Normandy. Now that our motorised forces had been squandered and destroyed they were compelled to fight the mobile battle that they had hitherto refused to face. Favourable chances that the boldness of the American command occasionally offered us we were no longer in a position to exploit. The original intention—to counter-attack the southern wing of the advancing American armies—had to be given up. But the worst was yet to come: the time schedule by which the offensive was to be launched in mid-November could no longer be kept and the attack was postponed until mid-December. This worsened the prospects for the timely release and transfer of our reserves to the East, and indeed decreased our chances of holding the now weakened Eastern Front at all.
The preparations of our offensive forces for the attack in the West were not completed in time. The battle for time that was fought on the Western Front was not successful. But despite these unfavourable circumstances Hitler and the OKW s
tuck to their determination that an attack be launched in the West. They succeeded in keeping their intentions secret. The enemy was taken completely by surprise. Security measures, so far as our own staffs and units went, were indeed carried to such lengths that the distribution of supplies for the attacking force, in particular the fuel supplies, suffered in consequence.
Operations on the Eastern Front
While the Western Front was being thrown back from the Atlantic to the West Wall, in the East heavy fighting continued without pause. At the southern end of this front all attempts to stop the Russian advance failed. Within a short time they had occupied all of Rumania, all of Bulgaria and finally large parts of Hungary. In the latter country Colonel-General Friessner’s Army Group South Ukraine was fighting; on September 25th its now inappropriate name was changed to Army Group South. In October all of Transylvania was lost to the Russians, though not without heavy fighting in the Debrecen area where German counter-attacks succeeded in temporarily halting the enemy. In the area controlled by the Commander-in-Chief South-East, Field-Marshal Freiherr von Weichs, Belgrade was lost during the course of the month. This area was still an OKW theatre of operations and was not controlled by the OKH, even though the Balkan Front was now certainly part of the Eastern Front. The boundary between the areas controlled by the OKW and the OKH ran through a village on the Danube near the mouths of the Drava and the Baja. This was utterly senseless. The Russians crossed the Danube at a point immediately south of this boundary between the two Supreme Command staffs’ areas, and therefore in the territory controlled by the Commander-in-Chief South-East, who was concentrating his attention on his scattered fronts many miles away to the south. On October 29th the Russians reached the outskirts of Budapest, and on November 24th they won a bridgehead over the Danube at Mohacs. At this date there were still German troops in Salonica and Durazzo while the Morava valley was already held by the enemy. The intensification of guerrilla warfare in the Balkans made the evacuation of these areas increasingly difficult. On November 30th the Russians broke the Commander-in-Chief South-East’s front at Pecs, north of the Drava, pushed on to Lake Balaton and rolled up Army Group South’s line along the Danube. By December 5th they had reached the southern outskirts of Budapest. On the same day they also crossed the river to the north of that city, pushed on to Vac, and could only be held with difficulty to the east of the Gran. Farther to the north-east they took Miskolc and reached a point south of Kosice. Our forces had withdrawn from the Balkans as far as a line Podgorica–Uzice and were continuing northward.
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