Nonetheless Guderian returned to Hitler’s headquarters for a third time on January 9. He took with him his Chief of Intelligence in the East, General Gehlen, who with maps and diagrams tried to explain to the Fuehrer the precarious German position on the eve of the expected renewal of the Russian offensive in the north.
Hitler [Guderian says] completely lost his temper … declaring the maps and diagrams to be “completely idiotic” and ordering that I have the man who had made them shut up in a lunatic asylum. I then lost my temper and said … “If you want General Gehlen sent to a lunatic asylum then you had better have me certified as well.”
When Hitler argued that the Eastern front had “never before possessed such a strong reserve as now,” Guderian retorted, “The Eastern front is like a house of cards. If the front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse.”12
And that is what happened. On January 12, 1945, Konev’s Russian army group broke out of its bridgehead at Baranov on the upper Vistula south of Warsaw and headed for Silesia. Farther north Zhukov’s armies crossed the Vistula north and south of Warsaw, which fell on January 17. Farther north still, two Russian armies overran half of East Prussia and drove to the Gulf of Danzig.
This was the greatest Russian offensive of the war. Stalin was throwing in 180 divisions, a surprisingly large part of them armored, in Poland and East Prussia alone. There was no stopping them.
“By January 27 [only fifteen days after the Soviet drive began] the Russian tidal wave,” says Guderian, “was rapidly assuming for us the proportions of a complete disaster.”13 By that date East and West Prussia were cut off from the Reich. Zhukov that very day crossed the Oder near Lueben after an advance of 220 miles in a fortnight, reaching German soil only 100 miles from Berlin. Most catastrophic of all, the Russians had overrun the Silesian industrial basin.
Albert Speer, in charge of armament production, drew up a memorandum to Hitler on January 30—the twelfth anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power—pointing out the significance of the loss of Silesia. “The war is lost,” his report began, and he went on in his cool and objective manner to explain why. The Silesian mines, ever since the intensive bombing of the Ruhr, had supplied 60 per cent of Germany’s coal. There was only two weeks’ supply of coal for the German railways, power plants and factories. Henceforth, now that Silesia was lost, Speer could supply, he said, only one quarter of the coal and one sixth of the steel which Germany had been producing in 1944.14 This augured disaster for 1945.
The Fuehrer, Guderian later related, glanced at Speer’s report, read the first sentence and then ordered it filed away in his safe. He refused to see Speer alone, saying to Guderian:
“… I refuse to see anyone alone any more … [He] always has something unpleasant to say to me. I can’t bear that.”15
On the afternoon of January 27, the day Zhukov’s troops crossed the Oder a hundred miles from Berlin, there was an interesting reaction at Hitler’s headquarters, which had now been transferred to the Chancellery in Berlin, where it was to remain until the end. On the twenty-fifth the desperate Guderian had called on Ribbentrop and urged him to try to get an immediate armistice in the West so that what was left of the German armies could be concentrated in the East against the Russians. The Foreign Minister had quickly tattled to the Fuehrer, who that evening up braided his General Staff Chief and accused him of committing “high treason.”
But two nights later, under the impact of the disaster in the East, Hitler, Goering and Jodl were in such a state that they thought it would not be necessary to ask the West for an armistice. They were sure the Western Allies would come running to them in their fear of the consequences of the Bolshevik victories. A fragment of the Fuehrer conference of January 27 has preserved part of the scene.
HITLER: Do you think the English are enthusiastic about all the Russian developments?
GOERING: They certainly didn’t plan that we hold them off while the Russians conquer all of Germany … They had not counted on our … holding them off like madmen while the Russians drive deeper and deeper into Germany, and practically have all of Germany now …
JODL: They have always regarded the Russians with suspicion.
GOERING: If this goes on we will get a telegram [from the English] in a few days.16
On such a slender thread the leaders of the Third Reich began to pin their last hopes. In the end these German architects of the Nazi–Soviet Pact against the West would reach a point where they could not understand why the British and Americans did not join them in repelling the Russian invaders.
THE COLLAPSE OF THE GERMAN ARMIES
The end came quickly for the Third Reich in the spring of 1945.
The death throes began in March. By February, with the Ruhr largely in ruins and Upper Silesia lost, coal production was down to one fifth of what it had been the year before and very little of this could be moved because of the dislocation of rail and water transport by Anglo–American bombing. The Fuehrer conferences became dominated by talk of the coal shortage, Doenitz complaining that many of his ships had to lie idle because of lack of fuel and Speer explaining patiently that the power plants and armament factories were in a similar situation for the same reason. The loss of the Rumanian and Hungarian oil fields and the bombing of the synthetic-oil plants in Germany caused such an acute shortage of gasoline that a good part of the desperately needed fighter planes had to be grounded and were destroyed on the fields by Allied air attacks. Many panzer divisions could not move for lack of fuel for their tanks.
The hopes in the promised “miracle weapons,” which had for a time sustained not only the masses of the people and the soldiers but even such hardheaded generals as Guderian, were finally abandoned. The launching sites for the V-l flying bombs and the V-2 rockets directed against Britain were almost entirely lost when Eisenhower’s forces reconquered the French and Belgian coasts, though a few remained in Holland. Nearly eight thousand of the two V bombs were hurled against Antwerp and other military targets after the British-American armies reached the German frontier, but the damage they did was negligible.
Hitler and Goering had counted on the new jet fighters driving the Allied air forces from the skies, and well they might have—for the Germans succeeded in producing more than a thousand of them—had the Anglo–American flyers, who lacked this plane, not taken successful counteraction. The conventional Allied fighter was no match for the German jet in the air, but few ever got off the ground. The refineries producing the special fuel for them were bombed and destroyed and the extended runways which had to be constructed for them were easily detected by Allied pilots, who destroyed the jets on the ground.
Grand Admiral Doenitz had promised the Fuehrer that the new electro-U-boats would provide a miracle at sea, once more wreaking havoc on the British-American lifelines in the North Atlantic. But by the middle of February 1945 only two of the 126 new craft commissioned had put to sea.
As for the German atom bomb project, which had given London and Washington much worry, it had made little progress due to Hitler’s lack of interest in it and Himmler’s practice of arresting the atom scientists for suspected disloyalty or pulling them off to work on some of his pet nonsensical “scientific” experiments which he deemed more important. Before the end of 1944 the American and British governments had learned, to their great relief, that the Germans would not have an atom bomb in this war.*
On February 8 Eisenhower’s armies, now eighty-five divisions strong, began to close in on the Rhine. They had expected that the Germans would fight only a delaying action and, conserving their strength, retire behind the formidable water barrier of the wide and swift-flowing river. Rundstedt counseled this. But here, as elsewhere throughout the years of his defeats, Hitler would not listen to a withdrawal. It would merely mean, he told Rundstedt, “moving the catastrophe from one place to another.” So the German armies, at Hitler’s insistence, stood and fought—but not for long. By the end of the month the British and Ameri
cans had reached the Rhine at several places north of Duesseldorf, and a fortnight later they had firm possession of the left bank from the Moselle River northward. The Germans had lost another 350,000 men killed, wounded or captured (the prisoners numbered 293,000) and most of their arms and equipment.
Hitler was in a fine fury. He sacked Rundstedt for the last time on March 10, replacing him with Field Marshal Kesselring, who had held out so stubbornly and long in Italy. Already in February the Fuehrer, in a fit of rage, had considered denouncing the Geneva Convention in order, he said at a conference on the nineteenth, “to make the enemy realize that we are determined to fight for our existence with all the means at our disposal.” He had been urged to take this step by Dr. Goebbels, the bloodthirsty noncombatant, who suggested that all captured airmen be shot summarily in reprisal for their terrible bombing of the German cities. When some of the officers present raised legal objections Hitler retorted angrily:
To hell with that! … If I make it clear that I show no consideration for prisoners but that I treat enemy prisoners without any consideration for their rights, regardless of reprisals, then quite a few [Germans] will think twice before they desert.17
This was one of the first indications to his followers that Hitler, his mission as world conqueror having failed, was determined to go down, like Wotan at Valhalla, in a holocaust of blood—not only the enemy’s but that of his own people. At the close of the discussion he asked Admiral Doenitz “to consider the pros and cons of this step and to report as soon as possible.”
Doenitz came back with his answer on the following day and it was typical of the man.
The disadvantages would outweigh the advantages … It would be better in any case to keep up outside appearances and carry out the measures believed necessary without announcing them beforehand.18
Hitler reluctantly agreed and while, as we have seen,* there was no general massacre of captured flyers or of other prisoners of war (except the Russians) several were done to death and the civil population was incited to lynch Allied air crews who parachuted to the ground. One captive French general, Mesny, was deliberately murdered on the orders of Hitler, and a good many Allied POWs perished when they were forced to make long marches without food or water on roads strafed by British, American and Russian flyers as the Germans herded them toward the interior of the country to prevent them from being liberated by the advancing Allied armies.
Hitler’s concern to make German soldiers “think twice before they desert” was not ungrounded. In the West the number of deserters, or at least of those who gave themselves up as quickly as possible in the wake of the British-American advances, became staggering. On February 12 Keitel issued an order “in the name of the Fuehrer” stating that any soldier “who deceitfully obtains leave papers, or who travels with false papers, will … be punished by death.” And on March 5 General Blaskowitz, commanding Army Group H in the West, issued this order:
All soldiers … encountered away from their units … and who announce they are stragglers looking for their units will be summarily tried and shot.
On April 12 Himmler added his bit by decreeing that any commander who failed to hold a town or an important communications center “is punishable by death.” The order was already being carried out in the case of the unfortunate commanders at one of the Rhine bridges.
On the early afternoon of March 7, a spearhead of the U.S. 9th Armored Division reached the heights above the town of Remagen, twenty-five miles down the Rhine from Koblenz. To the amazement of the American tank crews they saw that the Ludendorff railroad bridge across the river was still intact. They raced down the slopes to the water front. Engineers frantically cut every demolition wire they could find. A platoon of infantry raced across the bridge. As they were approaching the east bank a charge went off and then another. The bridge shook but held. Feeble German forces on the far shore were quickly driven back. Tanks sped over the span. By dusk the Americans had a strong bridgehead on the east bank of the Rhine. The last great natural barrier in Western Germany had been crossed.*
A few days later, on the night of March 22, Patton’s Third Army, after overrunning the Saar-Palatinate triangle in a brilliant operation carried out in conjunction with the U.S. Seventh and French First armies, made another crossing of the Rhine at Oppenheim, south of Mainz. By March 25 the Anglo–American armies were in possession of the entire west bank of the river and across it in two places with strong bridgeheads. In six weeks Hitler had lost more than one third of his forces in the West and most of the arms for half a million men.
At 2:30 A.M. on March 24, he called a war conference at his headquarters in Berlin to consider what to do.
HITLER: I consider the second bridgehead at Oppenheim as the greatest danger.
HEWEL [Foreign Office representative]: The Rhine isn’t so very wide there.
HITLER: A good two hundred fifty meters. On a river barrier only one man has to be asleep and a terrible misfortune can happen.
The Supreme Commander wanted to know if there was “no brigade or something like that which could be sent there.” An adjutant answered:
At the present time no unit is available to be sent to Oppenheim. There are only five tank destroyers in the camp at Senne, which will be ready today or tomorrow. They could be put into the battle in the next few days …19
In the next few days! At that very moment Patton had a bridgehead at Oppenheim seven miles wide and six miles deep and his tanks were heading eastward toward Frankfurt. It is a measure of the plight of the once mighty German Army whose vaunted panzer corps had raced through Europe in the earlier years that at this moment of crisis the Supreme Commander should be concerned with scraping up five broken-down tank destroyers which could only be “put into battle in the next few days” to stem the advance of a powerful enemy armored army.*
With the Americans across the Rhine by the third week of March and a mighty Allied army of British, Canadians and Americans under Montgomery poised to cross the Lower Rhine and head both into the North German plain and into the Ruhr—which they did, beginning on the night of March 23—Hitler’s vengeance turned from the advancing enemy to his own people. They had sustained him through the greatest victories in German history. Now in the winter of defeat he thought them no longer worthy of his greatness.
“If the German people were to be defeated in the struggle,” Hitler had told the gauleiters in a speech in August 1944, “it must have been too weak: it had failed to prove its mettle before history and was destined only to destruction.”20
He was fast becoming a physical wreck and this helped to poison his view. The strain of conducting the war, the shock of defeats, the unhealthy life without fresh air and exercise in the underground headquarters bunkers which he rarely left, his giving way to ever more frequent temper tantrums and, not the least, the poisonous drugs he took daily on the advice of his quack physician, Dr. Morell, had undermined his health even before the July 20, 1944, bombing. The explosion on that day had broken the tympanic membranes of both ears, which contributed to his spells of dizziness. After the bombing his doctors advised an extended vacation, but he refused. “If I leave East Prussia,” he told Keitel, “it will fall. As long as I am here, it will hold.”
In September 1944 he suffered a breakdown and had to take to bed, but he recovered in November when he returned to Berlin. But he never recovered control of his terrible temper. More and more, as the news from the fronts in 1945 grew worse, he gave way to hysterical rage. It was invariably accompanied by a trembling of his hands and feet which he could not control. General Guderian has given several descriptions of him at these moments. At the end of January, when the Russians had reached the Oder only a hundred miles from Berlin and the General Staff Chief started to demand the evacuation by sea of several German divisions cut off in the Baltic area, Hitler turned on him.
He stood in front of me shaking his fists, so that my good Chief of Staff, Thomale, felt constrained to seize me by the skirt of my
jacket and pull me backward lest I be the victim of a physical assault.
A few days later, on February 13, 1945, the two men got into another row over the Russian situation that lasted, Guderian says, for two hours.
His fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling, the man stood there in front of me, beside himself with fury and having lost all self-control. After each outburst Hitler would stride up and down the carpet edge, then suddenly stop immediately before me and hurl his next accusation in my face. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed to pop out of his head and the veins stood out in his temples.21
It was in this state of mind and health that the German Fuehrer made one of the last momentous decisions of his life. On March 19 he issued a general order that all military, industrial, transportation and communication installations as well as all stores in Germany must be destroyed in order to prevent them from falling intact into the hands of the enemy. The measures were to be carried out by the military with the help of the Nazi gauleiters and “commissars for defense.” “All directives opposing this,” the order concluded, “are invalid.”22
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Page 174
