The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Several months later, on 5 May 1944 and again on 24 May 1944, he repeated these sentiments in addresses to senior army officers at Sonthofen, describing how difficult he found ‘the fulfilment of this soldierly command that was issued to me’ to exterminate the Jews. Killing the women and children as well as the men, he implied, was his own interpretation of Hitler’s order; the reference to a ‘soldierly command’ could only be a reference to Hitler himself, since there was nobody else from whom Himmler would accept commands of any kind. Hitler himself was clear enough about his own overall responsibility, however. As he remarked to senior military personnel on 26 May 1944: ‘By removing the Jews, I have removed from Germany the possibility of the construction of any kind of revolutionary cell or nucleus . . . Humanitarianism would mean the greatest cruelty towards one’s own people, here as in general, everywhere.’229 It was a life-or-death struggle. If the Jews were not eliminated, they would exterminate the entire German people. Not only the generals and Party satraps, but also Himmler himself seemed to share the view that the extermination of the Jews was a crime, a necessary crime in their view, but a crime none the less: for why, otherwise, would the history books to be written in the future never dare to mention it? Such a crime would invite retribution should Germany lose the war. So these speeches, delivered at a time when Germany’s military situation was becoming steadily more desperate, were designed not least to remind the senior Party figures and generals of their complicity in the genocide, in order to ensure that they would carry on fighting to the end, a point fully grasped by Goebbels, who wrote in his diary on 9 October 1944 that Himmler in his speech ‘pleaded for the most radical solution and the toughest, namely to exterminate Jewry, bag and baggage. That is certainly the most consistent solution, even if it is also a brutal one. For we have to take on the responsibility of completely solving this question for our time.’230

  To SS leaders, on 4 May 1944, Himmler had an even more explicit message. He had no doubt that they would continue the struggle to the bitter end. He wanted to remind them, however, that the extermination of the Jews had to be carried out wherever and whenever it was possible, and without any exceptions:

  ‘The Jewish people will be exterminated’, says every Party comrade. ‘It’s clear, it’s in our programme. Elimination of the Jews, extermination and we’ll do it.’ And then they come along, the worthy eighty million Germans, and each one of them produces his decent Jew. It’s clear the others are swine, but this one is a fine Jew. Not one of those who talk like that has watched it happening, not one of them hs been through it. Most of you will know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand are lying there. To have stuck it out and - apart from a few exceptions due to human weakness - to have remained decent, that is what has made us tough.231

  Even the SS men who carried out the murders, therefore, were told by Himmler that what they were doing went against the wishes of the great majority of Germans.

  Most of Europe’s Jews had already been murdered by this time; but one very large Jewish community remained more or less untouched, namely the Jews of Hungary, whom Hitler had for some time been pressing the H’rthy regime to hand over. With the rapidly worsening military situation, the signs that H’rthy was preparing to switch sides began to multiply. Still the major source of petroleum for the Reich, Hungary could not be allowed to slip out of German control. Hitler summoned H’rthy to meet him on 18 March 1944 and told him that German forces would occupy his country immediately. The only question was whether it was to be done without bloodshed. H’rthy had no option but to accept the ultimatum, and to agree to install the pro-German Ambassador in Berlin, D̈me Szt’jay, as Prime Minister. Not the least of Hitler’s complaints against H’rthy was, as he told the Hungarian Regent at their meeting, that ‘Hungary did nothing in the matter of the Jewish problem, and was not prepared to settle accounts with the large Jewish population in Hungary.’ Now all this was about to change.232

  German troops marched into Hungary on 19 March 1944. On the very same day, Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest, to be followed shortly by a special unit led by Theodor Dannecker, charged with the arrest and deportation of the Hungarian Jews. Two radical antisemites, L’szl’ Endre and L’szl’ Bary, were appointed as the top civil servants in the Interior Ministry, to assist in the round-up. In the usual way, a Jewish Council was established, and on 7 April 1944 the compulsory wearing of the Jewish star was introduced. The first arrests of Jews now began in Hungarian Transylvania and Carpatho-Ukraine, where ghettos and camps were quickly erected, all with the full co-operation of the Hungarian police. In the meantime, the Gestapo arrested several thousand Jewish professionals, intellectuals, journalists, left-wing or liberal politicians and other prominent figures, mostly in Budapest, and sent them off to concentration camps in Austria. Their further fate remained for the moment uncertain. The same was not the case with the provincial Jews now being herded into the new temporary camps and ghettos in Hungary. Although the Council and also many individual Jews knew full well from personal contacts, the Hungarian service of the BBC and many other sources what awaited Jewish deportees who got on to the trains destined for Auschwitz, no steps were taken to warn Jews outside Budapest not to embark on them. Printed and widely distributed reports from four escapees from the camp did not change this situation. Most likely the Jewish Council did not want to cause unrest, and hesitated before urging people to break the law. At the same time, however, several Council members used their contacts with the SS to enable them, their families and their friends to flee to Romania or in some cases to other neighbouring countries. Up to 8,000 Jews managed to escape in this way.233 Meanwhile, in Berlin, the Propaganda Ministry began directing the German press to carry stories about the ‘Jewification’ of Hungary, which was now finally being rectified by the measures taken after the German invasion.234

  The first trainloads of Jews left for Auschwitz on 14 May 1944. From now on, between 12,000 and 14,000 were packed into cattle-trucks and sent to the camp every day. Four gas chambers and crematoria were brought into action again and worked round the clock without a break. New Special Detachments were recruited to pull the bodies of the dead out of the gas chambers as fast as they could, to allow the next contingent of victims to be driven in. One prisoner in the buna factory nearby saw flames up to ten metres high roaring out of the crematoria chimneys at night, while the smell of burning flesh reached as far as the factory itself. One crematorium broke down under the strain, and the Special Detachments began burying bodies in pits. Visiting Hitler on 7 June 1944, Prime Minister Szt’jay sought to convince the German Leader that the deportations were causing resentment in Hungary because they were widely perceived as resulting from foreign intervention in the country’s internal affairs. Hitler responded with a tirade against the Jews. He had warned H’rthy, he said, that the Jews had too much influence, but the Regent had done nothing. The Jews were responsible for killing tens of thousands of Germans in Allied bombing raids, he claimed. For this reason ‘nobody could demand of him that he should have the least pity for this global plague, and he is now only sticking to the old Jewish saying: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” ’.235 By this time, the King of Sweden and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt had both protested to H’rthy and asked him to bring the deportations to an end. However, Pius XII’s intervention, on 25 June 1944, neither mentioned the Jews by name nor specified the fate to which they were being sent. The leading figures in the Hungarian Catholic hierarchy refused to issue any public condemnation of the deportations; one of them, the Archbishop of Eger, considered that ‘what is currently happening to the Jews is nothing other than an appropriate punishment for their misdeeds in the past’.236 On 7 July 1944, finally overcoming the opposition of the most pro-Nazi members of the Hungarian government, H’rthy ordered them to stop. Eichmann managed none the less to send two more trainloads of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, on 19 and 24 July. By this time, in little over two month
s, no fewer than 438,000 Hungarian Jews had been taken to Auschwitz, where some 394,000 of them had been gassed immediately on arrival.237

  II

  These tragic and desperate events took place in a rapidly deteriorating military situation for the Third Reich. On 3 November 1943 Hitler issued a general directive for the conduct of the war over the coming months. The Red Army might be advancing in the east, but German forces were still deep inside Soviet territory, so for the moment there was no direct threat to the survival of the Reich itself. The danger posed by the imminent Allied invasion of Western Europe, on the other hand, was far more acute, given the relatively short distance the Anglo-American armies would have to traverse before they got to the German border once they had succeeded in landing on the Continent. Priority therefore had to be given to building up defences in the west; the east could for the time being look after itself. At the same time, however, Hitler was unwilling to sacrifice territory in the east that provided Germany with major supplies of grain, raw materials and labour. And the Red Army was pressing on relentlessly, driving the German Army Group South under Manstein back west of Kiev and forcing Kleist’s Army Group A back from the Dnieper river bend. All along the front, from the Pripet marshes to the Black Sea, Soviet armoured divisions were pushing through the German armies, now depleted by the transfer of more forces and equipment to the west, outflanking their defences and advancing towards the borders of Hungary and Romania. The 120,000 German and Romanian troops cut off in the Crimea were annihilated by a Soviet pincer movement in April and May 1944. As in the past, Hitler blamed his generals for these defeats, sacking Manstein and Kleist on 28 March 1944 and replacing them with two of his favourite senior officers, Ferdinand Scḧrner and Walter Model.238

  These defeats showed that the Red Army had now completely seized the initiative. German counter-attacks on any scale were effectively out of the question. All that Scḧrner, Model and the other field commanders could do was try to guess where the Red Army would strike next. But guessing was not easy. Stalin, Zhukov and the leading Soviet generals decided to deceive their German counterparts into thinking that the push would come in the Ukraine, building on the victories achieved in the spring. Model persuaded Hitler to move substantial reinforcements and equipment to support his own forces (now renamed Army Group North Ukraine), taking reserves away from Army Group Centre in Belarus under Field Marshal Ernst Busch. The central sector of the front was now bulging out to the east after the spring successes of the Red Army to the north and south. Previous attempts by the Soviet forces to reduce the bulge had been unsuccessful. Under conditions of great secrecy, Stalin and his commanders moved massive reinforcements of men, tanks and armaments into this area, concentrating on one big push - codenamed ‘Operation Bagration’ - rather than dissipating their forces over disparate sectors of the front. Lulled into complacency by repeated and deliberate deceptions carried out on German intelligence by the Russians, Busch went away for a few days, ignoring a massive spread of partisan activity to the rear of his forces. From the night of 19-20 June 1944 onwards pro-Soviet partisans blew up hundreds of railway lines and roads to make it more difficult for the Germans to bring up reinforcements. One and a half million Soviet troops, equipped with enormous quantities of tanks, armour and artillery, began a huge encirclement, of the kind so successfully practised by the Germans earlier in the war, with a series of armoured thrusts. Busch returned to the front, but Hitler refused his appeal to withdraw. In less than two weeks 300,000 German troops were killed or captured as the Red Army swept on. By the middle of July, the Soviet forces had advanced 200 miles in the central sector of the front and had to stop to regroup. On 17 July 1944 some 57,000 German prisoners were paraded through the middle of Moscow in a kind of Roman Triumph. Many of them had simply given themselves up. They were not prepared to undergo another Stalingrad. It was one of the greatest and most spectacular victories of the war.239

  ‘Operation Bagration’ opened the way for further victories all along the line. In the north, Soviet troops advanced as far as the Baltic, west of Riga; sent to rescue the situation, Scḧrner managed to fight back and recapture enough of the coastline to restore the line of communication, but his forces still had to retreat from Estonia and much of Latvia to avoid getting cut off. On 5-9 October 1944, Soviet troops pushed through again to the sea. The German forces lacked the resources for a counter-attack, but supplies and reinforcements came in by sea. A new note of desperation characterized their fighting as they defended the German territory of East Prussia. Soviet lines of communication were now over-extended. The German forces managed to slow down the Soviet advance until it ground to a halt. However, the Red Army had also launched an attack on Finland in June 1944, completing the relief of Leningrad and convincing the Finns that there was no option but to sue for peace. On 4 September 1944 a new government under Marshal Mannerheim signed an armistice under which the 1940 borders were to be restored and any German troops in the country arrested and interned. Further south, Model’s Army Group North Ukraine, weakened by the transfer of troops and equipment to Army Group Centre, was attacked by a series of savage armoured blows that sent it reeling back to the Carpathian mountains. Red Army commanders were helped by a massive superiority in arms and equipment, and by supremacy in the air after Germany’s fighter force had been redeployed to deal with Allied bombing raids from the west. Soviet artillery was being produced in huge quantities to pulverize the enemy before the tanks moved in. Particularly feared was the Katyusha rocket launcher, first used at Smolensk in 1941. It had been kept absolutely secret, so that when it came into action for the first time, firing dozens of rockets against the enemy with a huge noise, not only German troops but also Red Army soldiers fled in panic. Initially rather inefficient, with a range of less than 10 miles, by 1944 the device had been improved and was being manufactured en masse. German soldiers called it the ‘Stalin Organ’ from the appearance of its closely packed launch-tubes. They had no equivalent to use in eturn.240

  19. The Long Retreat, 1942-4

  By the autumn of 1944 Soviet forces were fast approaching the gates of Warsaw. Stalin announced the appointment of a puppet Polish government, a rival to the exiled Polish regime in London. The exiled regime’s underground Home Army, a nationalist organization opposed to the communists, was being crushed by the Red Army as it moved into Polish territory. Nevertheless, when Stalin called upon the citizens of Warsaw to rise up against their German oppressors, in the expectation that Soviet forces would shortly be entering the city, the Home Army in the city decided to stage an uprising on 1 August 1944, fearing that, if it did not, Stalin would brand it pro-German, and hoping in any case to gain political influence by taking control of the traditional capital of Poland. The Home Army in Warsaw was poorly equipped, since most of its weapons and ammunition were being used for partisan activities in the countryside, and it was ill prepared. Its commanders had paid little attention to the ghetto uprising the previous year, and learned nothing from its fate. With ‘Molotov cocktails’, pistols and rifles, the Poles fought a stubborn defence against tanks, artillery, machine-guns and flame-throwers. For two months, the terrible scenes of 1943 were repeated on a larger scale, as German SS and police units commanded by Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski confined the insurgents to isolated areas, then reduced them to pockets of resistance, and finally wiped them out altogether, razing most of the city to the ground in the process. 26,000 German troops were killed, wounded or missing, but the Polish dead, men, women and children, numbered more than 200,000. Bach-Zelewski, employing Ukrainians, Soviet renegades and convicts drafted in from the concentration camps, massacred everyone he could find. An insurgent nurse described a typical scene as German and Ukrainian SS troops entered her hospital,

  kicking and beating the wounded who were lying on the floor and calling them sons of bitches and Polish bandits. They kicked the heads of those lying on the ground with their boots, screaming horribly as they did it. Blood and brains were spattered in
all directions . . . A contingent of German soldiers with an officer at its head came in. ‘What is going on here?’ the officer asked. After driving out the murderers, he gave orders to clear up the dead bodies, and calmly requested those who had survived and could walk to get up and go to the courtyard. We were certain they would be shot. After an hour or two another German-Ukrainian horde came in, carrying straw. One of them poured some petrol over it . . . There was a blast, and a terrible cry - the fire was right behind us. The Germans had torched the hospital and were shooting the wounded.241

  Similar and worse incidents repeated themselves throughout the Polish capital during these weeks. Himmler had ordered the whole city and its population to be destroyed. The centre of Polish culture would exist no longer. If the uprising was seen historically, he told Hitler, ‘it is a blessing that the Poles are doing it.’ It would enable Germany to bring the ‘Polish problem’ to a decisive end.242

  Stalin held back the Red Army while it focused on establishing bridge-heads on the Vistula and Narva rivers. He did nothing to assist the few Anglo-American planes that tried to airlift supplies to the insurgents. Most of the drops fell into German-held territory, and Stalin’s refusal to allow the planes to use Soviet airfields, along with the reluctance of the air force commanders, ensured that the airlift had no effect. From Stalin’s point of view, the uprising was a success: it inflicted heavy losses on the Germans, and it wiped out the politically inconvenient Polish Home Army as well. Once the last resisters surrendered, on 2 October 1944, he moved his forces in to take over the devastated city.243 ‘You have to seal your eyes and your heart,’ wrote the Warsaw-based German army officer Wilm Hosenfeld as the unequal fight continued. ‘The population is being pitilessly exterminated.’244 After the Warsaw uprising was finally defeated, he watched the ‘endless columns of the captured rebels. We were totally amazed by the proud bearing they showed when they came out.’ The women in particular impressed him, marching past, heads held high, singing patriotic songs.245 His attempt to get the captured resisters recognized as enemy combatants and so subject, at least in theory, to the laws of war, was predictably rebuffed by his superiors. Hosenfeld was ordered to interrogate the survivors. ‘I try to rescue everyone,’ he wrote, ‘who can be saved.’246