Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  Even though these restructuring measures were only partially successful, there was another intention underlying the concept of total war. The aim was to gear the entire public sphere to the war in an immense collective effort; people should simply be deprived of any chance to reflect in case they doubted the need to continue the war.

  Even in 1944, however, Hitler was still reluctant to approve the most radical measures as a consequence of total war; his view was that pettifogging and unpopular interventions in everyday life and the complete suspension of cultural activities should be avoided so as not to place further burdens on the ‘home front’. Thus he objected to music halls and theatres being closed down,39 to art journals no longer being published,40 to a ban on the sending of private parcels and telegrams,41 and to the suggestion that the production of beer and confectionary should be suspended: soldiers on the march were ‘dependent on drops’ and any ban on beer-brewing would surely result in ‘very negative psychological consequences in Bavaria’, he suggested.42

  As in the previous year, Hitler opposed above all attempts to use the situation of ‘total war’ to introduce aspects of the ‘great reform of the Reich’ planned for after the war;43 the complex interlacing and opacity of his power structure were the product of his style of leadership and deliberately created to be an important source of that power. Although Goebbels did finally succeed in dissolving the Prussian Finance Ministry, Hitler, having at first agreed44 to Goebbels’s proposal to get rid of the office of prime minister of Prussia, then opposed it with counterarguments supplied by Lammers and Bormann.45 He similarly resisted the dissolution of the Reich Economics Ministry and other Reich-level government departments.46 More extensive changes, such as those put forward by Stuckart, the state secretary in the Interior Ministry, to consolidate the fifty or so ministries and Reich government agencies into about ten ministries and to cut down radically the many ‘special commissions’ dispensed by Hitler were not taken further.47

  Whereas the Western Allies had focused their bombing raids since June primarily on the invasion area and the rest of France, in September the intensive bombing of Germany began again. On the one hand, the raids on German hydrogenation plants were continued and, on the other, not only Berlin48 but towns and cities in the west of Germany came increasingly under air attack. The effects were devastating: On 11 September more than 8,000 people were killed in Darmstadt, on 14/15 October more than 2,000 in Duisburg, between 23 and 25 October over 1,600 in Essen, in the night of 4/5 November more than 2,000 in both Bochum and Solingen, another 2,000 in Freiburg on the night of 27/28 November, and on 4/5 December more than 5,000 in Heilbronn.49

  On 17 September American and British forces launched Operation ‘Market Garden’. The plan was to use combined paratroop and tank attacks across the southern Netherlands to cross the Rhine and directly threaten the Ruhr area. Although the Germans’ relatively strong resistance held back this first direct attack on German soil, in the meantime American troops had advanced into the Aachen area and the city had to be partially evacuated.50

  In the last ten days of September rumours about the possibility of making a separate peace with the Soviet Union, for which Japan offered to act as mediator, prompted Goebbels to send Hitler a memorandum suggesting he should take advantage of the Japanese offer. Goebbels received no response from Hitler; he simply heard from the latter’s adjutant, Schaub, that he had read it carefully, though without commenting on its contents.51 From Hitler’s perspective – and he had told his Propaganda Minister this often enough – the preconditions for a peace initiative did not exist because of the military situation. It is, however, altogether possible that he himself was the source of rumours about Japanese attempts at mediation, his aim being to create a political context for his attempt to mount a final big military offensive in the West leading to the break-up of the enemy coalition.52

  In contrast to Hitler, Horthy, Hungary’s regent, was doing his best to arrive at a peace agreement with the Soviet Union. After Romania had changed sides, Soviet and Romanian forces had begun their offensive against Hungary, the Romanians motivated by the prospect of regaining the territories they had lost in 1940. Horthy instigated negotiations in Moscow and in the end gave way to the Soviet Union’s insistence on Hungary’s declaring war on Germany as a precondition. The Germans were fully aware of these developments and immediately ensured that power in Hungary was transferred to the fascist Arrow Cross party.

  First of all, on Hitler’s orders Otto Skorzeny, who had freed Mussolini, abducted Horthy’s son Nikolaus on 15 October and brought him to Germany in order to prevent Horthy from issuing the declaration of war on Germany. When Horthy reacted by deciding to ask the Soviet Union for a cease-fire, on 16 October Skorzeny’s unit occupied the castle at Budapest, Horthy’s seat of office, and compelled him to abdicate in favour of Szálasi, leader of the Arrow Cross. Horthy was then also taken to Germany and held captive until the end of the war. The Hungarian army was now fighting on its own soil on the German side under the unpopular Szálasi regime and against the advancing Soviet army. In addition, the Germans were trying to involve the Arrow Cross in their Jewish policy, in order to bind it more closely to them. After Horthy had put a stop to deportations in July there were still 200,000 Jews in Budapest. The Szálasi government agreed to surrender a first contingent of 50,000 Jews, who were marched in brutal fashion in the direction of the Austrian border. In October, however, Germany not only lost Hungary as an ally, but on 10 October Army Group North was definitively cut off in Courland in Latvia, defending its position there until the end of the war.53 The Allies were now approaching German soil on the eastern as well as the western front.

  In the middle of October the Red Army crossed the East Prussian border for the first time, thus posing a direct threat to Hitler’s headquarters. Hitler reduced its personnel but banned any references to giving up or evacuating the headquarters.54 By the beginning of November the Soviet advance had been beaten back.55

  On 21 October the city of Aachen surrendered after heavy fighting. Although American troops on this section of the front did not at first manage to make significant progress towards penetrating further into Germany, on the southern section of the front they, together with French units, were able to advance to the Upper Rhine at the end of November. In the Saar they had already taken a strip of German territory.56

  On 8 November, amid celebrations to mark the anniversary of the 1923 putsch, the Wehrmacht reported that V2 rockets were being deployed and had been, according to the communiqué, for several weeks. The bombing of targets in Britain, France, and Belgium had in fact started in September and since the middle of October been concentrated on London and Antwerp. However, the very fact that these new rockets had been in use for some time clearly indicated that they lacked the devastating power to change the course of the war, in spite of all the hopes invested in continuing and escalating ‘retaliation’. Although the rockets landed without warning and there was no defence against the V2, the scattered impacts, as in the case of the V1, did not have sufficient force to be truly devastating.57 Thus the last hope of a miracle weapon of retaliation had been destroyed.

  On this occasion Hitler’s physical frailty made him decide not to make a speech to mark 9 November.58 Instead, he had Himmler read out a longwinded proclamation in Munich the following Sunday. Much was said about the ‘treason’ of former allies, the ‘20 July criminals’ were castigated, and Hitler also stated clearly that he was determined to fight up to the very last: ‘as long as I live, Germany will not suffer the same fate as those European states engulfed by Bolshevism’.59

  Although in the middle of November Hitler was telling those around him that he would not leave East Prussia as the war was in any case lost,60 he nevertheless left the Wolf’s Lair on 20 November in order to undergo a further operation on his vocal chords in Berlin.61 In the previous few months he had suffered from ‘chronic hoarseness’ as the result of a polyp. But it was not only this handicap that h
ad prevented him from appearing in public62 for he was making only a slow recovery from an attack of jaundice that had developed at the end of September or beginning of October and greatly weakened him physically.63 Meanwhile, his absence had given rise to rumours that he was seriously ill or even already dead.64

  After a short final private visit to the Goebbelses in Lanke on 3 December,65 Hitler moved to his headquarters at Ziegenburg near Bad Nauheim. From there he intended to lead the military operation that had been intensively planned during the previous few weeks and which he hoped would bring about a turn in the war. The Ardennes offensive was designed to inflict a painful defeat on the Americans, which Hitler hoped would bring about a rupture in the enemy coalition. On 11 and 12 December he gathered twenty or thirty generals in order to explain to them in detail the goals of the operation. Hitler’s speech of 12 December, which has been largely preserved,66 indicates that he was not using this occasion to batter the generals with slogans about endurance; instead, the address was measured in tone, with Hitler setting the highly risky offensive in the overall context of his war policy, for which he gave detailed historical justification.

  In his lengthy historical introduction, Hitler described his war as the continuation of the Wars of Unification from 1864 to 1871, the aim of which, now as then, was to bring all Germans together into a unitary state. He then defended his rearmament and foreign policy since 1933 once again in detail. The introduction of conscription, the huge rearmament programme, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the ‘incorporation’ of Austria, and the ‘sorting out’ of Czechoslovakia and Poland had been designed to put ‘German Reich territory into a state in which it could be defended’: ‘These were the preconditions for a peace that could be maintained for the future’, the process of ‘territorial arming’ in the light of Germany’s ‘tiny living space’. He had of course been aware that these policies were liable to lead to conflict and war: ‘If they led to war then that war had to be put up with. For it was better to accept it immediately at a moment when we were equipped for it as never before.’ Interestingly, however, he concluded his review of his war policy at this point and did not repeat yet again the arguments, all too familiar to his audience, that had been crucial to his decision to invade the Soviet Union and extend the war by declaring war on the USA.

  Finally, he explained his decision to go on the offensive again, in spite of the generally precarious situation. Even if they were on the defensive over all, they had to try ‘from time to time to bring home to the enemy by means of ruthless attacks that they had not gained anything but rather that the war would be continued regardless’. Similarly, the enemy must be made to understand that they ‘can never, ever count on capitulation’ and will ‘never under any circumstances’ bring things ‘to a successful outcome’. Then, according to Hitler, ‘at the end of the day their resolve will finally collapse’. This was particularly true of the enemy coalition, as it was made up of ‘such heterogeneous elements with such completely irreconcilable objectives’.

  On the morning of 16 December the last great German offensive of the Second World War was launched. Three German armies advanced through the snow-covered Ardennes and attacked the sparsely defended American lines. Poor weather conditions at first prevented the deployment of Allied aircraft and allowed the German spearheads to penetrate up to a hundred kilometres into Belgian territory. They did not, however, achieve their objective of pushing through to Antwerp, the Allies’ vital supply port. By the end of December the Americans had already regained the initiative in the Ardennes. Hitler tried to intercept the American counter-offensive by launching a second offensive in northern Alsace (Operation Northwind), but it was quickly evident that this effort was in vain: In January the Americans gradually forced the German troops back to where they had started from.67

  Thus Hitler’s last attempt to regain the military initiative had failed. It was now clear that he would have no further opportunity to regain by military success the scope for action he had always said was a precondition for any initiative to end the war by political means. His adjutant Below reports that in the days following the failure of the Ardennes offensive Hitler for the first time made a completely despairing impression.68 He had spoken of the war being lost, of being the victim of betrayal, and said it would be best if he killed himself. Yet this report, which cannot be corroborated by other evidence, appears untypical of Hitler during the last months of his life. In fact, up to his last days he communicated to those around him an imperturbable confidence, for he appealed to his (totally unfounded) hope that at the last moment there would be discord in the enemy camp, while at the same time preparing to turn the end of his regime, if its end should really be unavoidable, into a ‘heroic’ downfall.

  44

  The End

  On 12 January the Red Army, with its huge numerical superiority, launched its winter offensive from its positions on the Vistula; during the previous days Colonel General Guderian, chief of the general staff, had asked in vain for troops to be transferred from the western front. Within three weeks the Soviet forces had succeeded not only in taking most of East Prussia and cutting it off, but in advancing to the River Oder on a broader front. By the beginning of February Soviet troops had captured the eastern part of Silesia with its valuable industry. Further north they had formed a bridgehead near Küstrin [Kostrzyn nad Odra] and were now only about sixty kilometres from the capital.1

  In view of these developments Hitler had decided to move his headquarters on 15/16 January from Ziegenberg in Hesse to Berlin. Once there, he ordered the 6th Panzer Army, stationed in the West, to the East, although not to the highly vulnerable front between the Baltic and the Carpathian Mountains, but rather to Hungary, in order to secure the Hungarian oil wells, which in his opinion were now vitally important for the war economy following the destruction of most of the hydrogenation works.2

  The Red Army’s rapid advance towards Berlin made it necessary to set up a new army group as quickly as possible to hold the Oder line in the Berlin area and also defend Pomerania and West Prussia. Hitler appointed Himmler, Reichsführer-SS and Head of the Reserve Army, as its commander-in-chief, with the intention of giving him the opportunity to prove his competence to be commander-in-chief of the army.3

  Army Group North (renamed Army Group Courland in January) had since October 1944 been cut off in Courland and on Hitler’s express orders had to remain in Latvia, forbidden to evacuate by sea or to break out towards East Prussia. Although massively reduced in numbers by continuous Soviet attacks, the army group was not defeated and did not capitulate until May 1945.4 Similarly, more than half a million Wehrmacht soldiers were still in ‘Fortress Norway’, which Hitler, even after the Allied landing in France, meant to defend against any further invasion attempts. Even in March 1945 Hitler was still unwilling to evacuate northern Norway because by doing so he thought the German U-boat positions in the south of the country would come under threat.5

  From the point of view of the military leadership it was absurd to retain large intact formations on the periphery while there was no operational reserve force left to defend the Reich. Thus, at the beginning of February 1945, Guderian sought an interview with Hitler and as a precondition for launching a counter-offensive in the East he asked for the evacuation of troops from the Balkans, Italy, Norway, and in particular, and not for the first time, from Courland to be accelerated. Hitler’s response was a fit of rage, which he repeated when Dönitz supported Guderian’s request.6

  The military could explain Hitler’s attitude only on the grounds that he was blind to reality, a dilettante in military matters who could not give up his illusions of victory and who insisted rigidly and fanatically on holding the line, whatever the cost. This assessment has often been repeated in post-war historiography and in analyses of Hitler.7 In reality, however, his insistence on holding on to distant and exposed territorial bargaining chips and his unwillingness to surrender opportunities to launch offensives, even if they
appeared completely unrealistic at that particular point, was an essential part of his political and strategic thinking, although in conflict with the methods of the military leadership. The military leaders were pursuing a defensive strategy based on professional military principles, which amounted to pulling back the fronts gradually to the German border, in the process preventing as far as possible any sizeable formations from being cut off and destroyed. This strategy relied on attrition and delaying tactics, but it could only postpone eventual defeat; defensive action could not be sustained indefinitely, and, at the latest at the stage when enemy troops were at Germany’s borders, the next move would have to be a political decision to end the war, as had happened at the end of the First World War. Their training and mentality made the generals regard themselves as military managers of a war whose conditions had been set by the political leadership: politicians determined the objectives as well as the point at which the war would begin and end and they carried the responsibility for it.

  For Hitler, however, capitulation was unthinkable. Not for nothing had he been stressing for decades that the German defeat in 1918 had been the result of weakness, treachery, and lack of political leadership and that the war should have continued at all costs, even if the prospects of success were slim, for the sake of the nation’s honour and dignity. Thus in ‘his’ war he put his trust in a strategy of ‘all or nothing’. Well-timed counter-offensives would regain the initiative and would bring about a rupture of the ‘unnatural’ enemy coalition; this would open up the prospect of concluding a separate peace with one or other of the parties, and the war could then continue or be brought to an end (for the time being) under tolerable conditions. For this reason distant territories had to be held and troops kept in reserve in case an offensive war were resumed. The fact that they were not available to defend Germany was for Hitler a matter of secondary importance, as the defensive strategy in any case amounted only to a capitulation in stages. If the opportunity to go on the offensive did not arise or the offensive failed and the enemy coalition did not break up, then the war must not end in capitulation but rather (and this theme acquired increasing prominence) be fought to the point of total destruction.