Despite his desire for vengeance, and determination to stamp out ‘treachery’, Hitler moved cautiously. The extent of it, which became increasingly clear as the Gestapo unmasked more and more high-ranking military men and civil servants, was sobering. Dealing with the plot was thus both an opportunity and a threat. He could make an example of the conspirators and showcase the resilience of his regime, but there was also a risk that he would showcase the resistance and turn them into martyrs, just as he had been after the beer hall putsch. For this reason, Hitler was anxious to avoid long show trials.83 About a fortnight after the attempted coup, he established an Ehrenhof–supposedly at the request of the army itself–to investigate military complicity in the events. Hitler promised a ‘ruthless purge’.84 Those who made it to trial were sentenced by Roland Freisler, the brutal head of the Volksgerichtshof, who took his instructions from Hitler. It was at the Führer’s express request that death sentences were to be carried out through ignominious hanging, and not by the more honourable method of a firing-squad. He also insisted that the executions be filmed, though there is no hard evidence that he actually watched the recordings.85
Hitler did not have much time to dwell on the events of 20 July, in any case. The military situation, already precarious, deteriorated dramatically. After an unsuccessful attempt on 18 July–Operation Goodwood–the Western Allies launched Operation Cobra on 25 July. On 31 July, the Anglo-Americans broke through at Avranches. Hitler’s counter-attack at Mortain never got off the ground, and all his attempts to stabilize the front failed.86 What Hitler had feared was now reality. The Allies were in open country and with their mobility and command of the air, there was nothing to stop them. Most of the German troops trapped in the pocket at St Lo-Falaise escaped, but the human and especially the material cost was horrendous. The 120–140, 000 killed and wounded could perhaps be replaced, albeit with great difficulty and with inferior recruits,87 but the 1,300 tanks, 500 assault guns, and 5,500 artillery pieces, not to mention all the lorries and jeeps, could not possibly be.
Throughout August–September the Allies surged eastwards across France. On 15 August, they landed in southern France. Hitler was powerless. His attempts to establish a front along the Seine quickly collapsed. Paris was liberated on 19 August; the Führer’s order for the destruction of the city was disobeyed by the German commander. On 11 September, the Americans crossed the Reich border west of Bitburg. On 17 September, the British and Americans launched an airborne operation to capture the Rhine bridges at Nijmegen and Arnhem. They hoped to punch through the German lines and push for Berlin. Around the same time, the Americans thrust in the direction of Cologne. They were the first Allies to capture a major Germany city, Aachen, on 21 October 1944.88 It was an immensely symbolic moment, because the Holy Roman Emperors had traditionally been crowned there and the cathedral still contained the bones of Charlemagne. The garrison there surrendered to men of the US 1st Infantry Division, commanded by General Clarence Huebner, whose grandfather had been born in Stuttgart.
In the east, first the central and then the southern fronts gave way, the lines massively weakened by the transfer of powerful units to the west. Army Group North temporarily lost contact with Army Group Centre when Soviet forces reached Tukums on the Baltic on 30 July. Communication was re-established after a vigorous counter-attack. During August 1944, the Red Army surged through White Russia, crossing a few kilometres into East Prussia in the middle of the month. The Polish Home Army rose in revolt, taking control of Warsaw from the German occupiers. On 14 September, Stalin launched an offensive against Riga. A fortnight later, Soviet forces reached the Baltic Sea just north of Memel, cutting off Army Group North once again, this time for good. In the south, Stalin launched an offensive against Romania on 20 August, capturing Bucharest by the end of the month. Army Group Ukraine was shattered, with the loss of about 400,000 men, though the materiel losses were less grievous than in the west. On 29 August, a major revolt broke out in Slovakia. The entire German eastern front hung in the balance.
The immediate result of the disasters was the collapse of Hitler’s remaining alliance system. In Romania, Marshal Antonescu was sacked on 22 August 1944 and King Michael took his country first out of the war and then over to the other side. On 7 September 1944, Marshal Mannerheim’s Finland signed an armistice with the Soviet Union. A day later, Bulgaria jumped ship. On 15 October, Admiral Horthy announced that Hungary was leaving the war. Hitler immediately launched a special forces operation which took his son hostage. Horthy abdicated, and a puppet Hungarian fascist grouping took power, but all pretence of a coalition of European states fighting the United Nations had now collapsed. Hitler’s allied admirals, marshals and kings had all departed. Only Japan remained true. Once again, Germany stood almost alone against a world of enemies.
As if all this were not bad enough, the Allied breakout from Normandy enabled an escalation of the strategic air campaign, which targeted German industry, energy supply and communication system with renewed ferocity. Speer gave Hitler detailed accounts of the effects of Allied raids with the help of photographs and diagrams.89 He warned his Führer of the resulting loss of steel, tank engine and motor vehicle production.90 Even where raw materials were being mined, or goods produced, they often could not be completed or moved due to damage to road, rail and canal networks.91 Krupp’s Gusstahlfabrik in Essen was not completely destroyed physically, despite repeated attacks, but from October 1944 it ceased production after the bombers ended its source of electrical power. By the middle of November, Speer was warning Hitler that the vital Ruhr industrial area was effectively cut off from the rest of the Reich.92
Worse still, these attacks were accompanied by devastating raids against civilian targets: Darmstadt, Freiburg and Heilbronn, as well as familiar targets such as Munich and Berlin. The Führer was deeply shaken by the bombing, not least because he feared for Eva Braun’s safety in Munich.93 Allied raids took a steady toll on his health and nerves.94 Hitler saw these attacks as evidence of the annihilatory intent of the Western Allies. ‘The will of the enemy,’ he warned in mid September 1944, ‘is clearly directed towards the destruction of the German people.’ In order to achieve this, Hitler continued, the enemy ‘considers every means legitimate’ including ‘bloody terror through bombing attacks against women and children’.95 ‘He is mobilizing his strength in order to smash our Reich,’ he claimed a month later, and to destroy ‘the German people and its social order.’ ‘His final aim,’ Hitler reiterated, ‘is the extermination of the German person.’96 The (in his mind) pre-emptive war of annihilation which Hitler had himself launched on the world enemy was now coming home to Germany.
Unsurprisingly, the disasters of the late summer and autumn of 1944 led to renewed calls for a separate peace within the military and civil leadership of the Third Reich, and offers from Japan to mediate with the Russians.97 Hitler refused, on the grounds that any overtures would be understood as a sign of weakness, and would be rejected in any case.98 He refused point-blank to approach the west, telling Papen, who had offered himself as a conduit, that ‘this war must be fought through to the end without compromise’.99 As for trying to find out what the Russians thought, he remarked, that would be as pointless as ‘touching a red-hot oven simply in order to establish whether it was hot’.100 Significantly, Hitler laid down that he would only agree to a settlement which guaranteed the survival of future generations. This was code for his determination to hold on to as much ‘living space’ as he possibly could in any final settlement. ‘The world knows no empty spaces,’ he reminded a party audience, adding that ‘peoples which are numerically or biologically too weak and cannot fill their Lebensraum will at best receive a reservation [sic]’.101 The language was chosen with care. If the Germans did not act like Americans, Hitler warned, they would end up as Red Indians.
In the face of all these challenges, Hitler mounted an astonishing rally in the late autumn of 1944. Despite all the rhetoric, his strategy was not simply a str
ategy of perseverance, of clinging grimly to each and every part of his shrinking empire. On the contrary, Hitler set clear priorities in accordance with an overall strategy which was largely unchanged since the end of 1943. He would hold not simply where he could, but where he needed to. He would withdraw where he had to, and where he could give way without fatal results. The purpose of this strategy was to retain as much of the economic potential of Europe as possible, and thus a credible military capability. This would allow him, he hoped, to outlast the enemy, and to exploit any splits that might have emerged in the coalition. ‘We must carry on the fight until this moment arrives,’ he remarked, adding that ‘it may be closer than anybody imagines’.102 He repeated these sentiments on the very last day of August 1944. ‘There will be moments,’ Hitler predicted, in which the tensions between the Allies become so great that there is a breach.’ In the meantime, his job was to ‘keep his nerve under all circumstances’.103
Hitler was clear about the resulting strategic priorities. The most pressing issue, he explained to the generals, might appear to be ‘the stabilization of the eastern front’, but because the Wehrmacht enjoyed the advantage of interior lines, that should be perfectly doable. The western front, by contrast, was much more problematic and was in fact the ‘decisive’ theatre, because defeat there risked losing the ‘points of departure for the U-boat war’. Unlike most of the Wehrmacht leadership, especially the army chief of staff, Guderian, who were exercised by the Soviet onslaught on the Reich,104 therefore, Hitler’s strategy remained firmly western-centric.
In accordance with this approach, Hitler withdrew from southern and western France to more defensible positions.105 He managed to get most of his men, though not their equipment, out by September 1944.106 Hitler also ordered the Wehrmacht to pull out of the Balkans, taking with it all the equipment, raw materials and foodstuffs it could manage.107 The main reason for the withdrawal was fear of being cut off by the Red Army offensive into Hungary, but Hitler also calculated that the resulting vacuum would cause tensions between the west and Stalin; the fighting between British forces and Greek leftists later that year vindicated his hopes. In a policy of ‘scorched earth’, Hitler ordered the destruction of anything–east, west and in the Reich itself–that could not be moved and might be of use to the advancing enemy.108 At the same time, the Führer held his ground in key areas. He insisted that as many of the French ports be retained as possible, partly to deny the Anglo-Americans the facilities to land more men and equipment, partly to tie down Allied forces, and partly to support a resumption of the U-boat campaign once the new submarines went into mass production. In the south of France, the key cities of Toulon and Marseille were soon lost, much to Hitler’s chagrin, but the Wehrmacht continued to hold Brest, Lorient, St Nazaire for some time, and in a few cases until the end of the war, long after the Allies had overrun the surrounding hinterland.109 He also held on to Holland, and thus the bases from which to maintain the missile offensive against Britain.
Hitler then turned his attention to stabilizing the fronts. In the late summer and autumn of 1944, he issued a flurry of decrees demanding the fortification of ‘Germany’s western emplacement’, a line from the German north coast, along the Dutch coast and back across France and Germany to Belfort. Hitler also called for defensive positions in Italy and along the Adriatic.110 Once safely out of France, the Wehrmacht resisted stubbornly. The British airborne forces at Arnhem were crushed, and while the Germans were unable to hold on to Aachen, they managed to get the Americans bogged down in bloody fighting in the Hürtgen Forest amid scenes comparable to the First World War. By November 1944, the western front had been stabilized, at least for the time being.
In the east, Hitler gave priority to holding Kurland, in order to protect the U-boat training areas and the Estonian shale oil reserves, and Hungary, on account of the oil and bauxite reserves there.111 He ordered the suppression of the Warsaw Rising, which was completed with great bloodshed in early October 1944.112 The Slovak rebellion was also crushed, and the Jews of that country were deported and murdered. For the rest, Hitler relied on the Ostwall, a defensive system which was more psychological than military, whose main purpose was to reassure the civilian population and prevent large refugee flows. It was far inferior in fortifications and firepower to anything that Hitler had created, or was still planning, to keep out the Anglo-Americans. In late November 1944, Hitler left the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ for good. Thereafter the defence of East Prussia, and–until early 1945–the whole of eastern Germany, was a low priority for Hitler.113
Instead, Hitler’s main aim in the autumn and winter of 1944 was the delivery of a crushing blow against the Western Allies. His motivation for doing so was unchanged: to undermine Churchill and Roosevelt, and if possible to split the Allied coalition. He increasingly cited the case of Frederick the Great as an example of how a great leader could survive an encircling coalition through ‘steadfastness’, which eventually enabled him to exploit divisions among his foes.114 One method of delivering such a blow was the missile offensive. The V1 barrage had caused extensive damage and disquiet in southern England, but had not made much impact on the political leadership in London. Hitler had higher hopes for the more sophisticated V2 rocket, for which reason he was determined to hold on to bases to continue the ‘long-range struggle’ against Britain. Another weapon deployed against the west was new, more advanced aircraft. The development of the Me 262 was speeded up, and in September 1944, the Führer tasked the designer and manufacturer Ernst Heinkel with building a smaller and more easily mass-produceable jet fighter.115 Hitler also looked to the new U-boats, and was given optimistic briefings about the success of the ‘snorkel’ submarines.116
The Führer’s best hope of changing the dynamic, however, was a devastating counter-attack against the Anglo-American field armies. It was for this reason that he decided in late August 1944 to launch a major offensive in the west at the earliest possible opportunity.117 ‘It was his intention,’ he told Oshima shortly afterwards, ‘to take the offensive in the west on a large scale.’ Hitler hoped to take advantage of the rainy weather in September and October to conceal his preparations, negating Allied air superiority, and launching his attack ‘after the beginning of November’.118 His objective, he explained on 16 September 1944, was to thrust through the Ardennes, capture Antwerp and thus force the Allies to withdraw to Britain. Hitler expected that the Luftwaffe would provide about 1,500 fighter aircraft in support. The projected start date was now late November, and it was to be delayed still further.119 Throughout the autumn there was a furious debate in the OKW. Few shared Hitler’s belief that the spearheads would ever reach Antwerp, and most would have been more than satisfied with getting to the Meuse. On 11 November, Hitler issued his guidelines for the operations plan, which stressed the importance of tactical and strategic surprise, as well as exploiting the adverse weather conditions. He alone would decide the timing of the attack.120
Over the course of ten weeks, Hitler quietly assembled a huge force in the west, including a whole new panzer army. His plan, as he told Oshima, was to deploy more than ‘one million’ men, ‘to combine them with units to be withdrawn from the front in every area’, and to wait for ‘the replenishment of the air forces’.121 Hitler ordered the systematic starving of other theatres of forces, and the avoiding of defensive battles which might suck in and consume reserves needed for the offensive.122 This applied to the eastern front in general, where the Red Army continued to mount attacks. One of these thrusts, towards Gumbinnen in late October 1944, led to a massacre among the civilian population in the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf.123 Hitler remained insistent that spare forces were not to be sent there, but preserved for the planned offensive in the west. He was more interested in what was happening in Kurland, where the Wehrmacht was hit with three separate offensives between late October and December 1944. For the sake of clarity, Hitler laid down his priorities in detail in late November 1944. ‘Unperturbed by even the
greatest crises and loss of territory,’ the OKW war diarist records, the Führer determined ‘that the west[ern] and east [ern fronts] should have priority over the other theatres of war’, but that the west should have ‘priority’ over the east, and ‘within the west[ern front]’, priority should be given to the army groups involved in the forthcoming offensive.124 Hitler completed his preparations at the new Führer Headquarters–Adlerhorst–in the Taunus mountains just north of Frankfurt, not far from Germany’s western border.
In order to support his strategy, Hitler launched one last great mobilization effort in the second half of 1944. His first task was psychological, to restore public confidence in the regime after the military defeats of the summer and the attempt on his life. The latter had shaken the German public, and the Führer himself saw it as evidence of an ‘internal circulatory disruption’, something that Germans of all ages and all times have taken very seriously.125 On 25 July 1944, five days after the attempt on his life, Hitler appointed Goebbels ‘imperial plenipotentiary for total war’. This was a largely symbolic move,126 in which the propaganda minister was empowered to mobilize energies and lift the spirits of the population; the actual running of the war economy remained in Speer’s hands. Hitler also sought to maintain morale by holding out the prospect of relief from the relentless Allied bombing. In early July 1944, he gave Speer permission to show colour footage of the rocket programme and, if possible, of the new jet fighter, to the Gauleiter in closed session, taking care not to reveal any technical secrets.127 A little later, Hitler also authorized the release of films of the V2 rocket for the Wochenschau and thus for public viewing, although these were not actually shown until much later.128 These were supposed to reassure the public that the hour of ‘reprisal’ against the Anglo-American attacks–which the Führer was constantly announcing–was soon at hand.
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