Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (14 page)

Skorzeny was given unlimited powers to prepare his mission. His officers obtained whatever they wanted simply by saying
‘order from the Reichsführer’
. Officers and NCOs from the army, Waffen-SS, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe who spoke English were ordered to report to the camp at Schloss Friedenthal outside Oranienburg for ‘interpreter duties’. Around half of them came from the navy. There they were interrogated in English by SS officers. They were told that they would be part of a special unit designated the 150th Panzer-Brigade and were sworn to secrecy. They had to sign a paper which stated:
‘Everything I know
about the commitment of 150th Panzer-Brigade is secret. Secrecy will be maintained even after the war. Breach of the order is punishable by death.’ Their commander, the wonderfully named Oberstleutnant Musculus, had blond hair and facial scars from student duels. He promised them that the activities of the 150th Panzer-Brigade would have a
‘decisive effect on the course of the war’
.

A young naval officer, Leutnant zur See Müntz, was sent along with all the others to the heavily guarded camp of Grafenwöhr. He was then given the task of collecting 2,400 American uniforms, including those of ten generals and seventy officers, from prisoner-of-war camps by 21 November. Müntz first went to Berlin to the department of prisoners of war. The officer in charge, Oberst Meurer, was taken aback by the Führer order they presented signed by Hitler himself. He mentioned that such activities were illegal under international law, but provided them with written instructions to all camp commanders. Müntz set off with a truck and various helpers to collect the uniforms as well as identity papers, paybooks and so forth, but they had great difficulty obtaining what they needed from the prisoner-of-war camps. At Fürstenberg-an-der-Oder, the camp commandant refused the order to strip field jackets from eighty American soldiers. Müntz was recalled to Grafenwöhr in
case the Red Cross heard of the row and word of it then reach the Allies. His mission partly failed because of the grave shortage of US Army winter clothing, as GIs had already found to their cost in the Hürtgen Forest, Lorraine and Alsace.

At Grafenwöhr, all ranks had to salute in the American style, they were fed on K-Rations and were kitted out in the few uniforms which Müntz and his group had managed to obtain. Every order was given in English. They were made to watch American movies and newsreels to learn the idiom, such as ‘chow-line’, and to improve their accent. They also spent two hours a day on language and American customs, including how to eat
‘with the fork after laying down the knife’
. They were even shown how to tap their cigarette against the pack in an American way. All the usual commando skills were also taught, such as close-quarter combat training, demolition and the use of enemy weapons.

When given more details of the forthcoming Operation
Greif
, as it was called, those who expressed doubts about going into action in American uniforms were threatened by SS-Obersturmbannführer Hadick. He
‘emphasized that the
Führer’s orders would be obeyed without question, and that anyone who chose to disagree would be sentenced to death’. Morale was also rather shaken when they were issued with ampoules of cyanide ‘concealed in a cheap cigarette-lighter’.

Men from SS units almost worshipped Skorzeny as a super-hero after his exploits in Italy and Budapest, while he treated them with
‘conspicuous friendship’
. One of them wrote later:
‘he was our pirate captain’
. Many rumours ran around the camp about what their true mission was likely to be. Some thought that they were to be part of an airborne operation to reoccupy France. Skorzeny himself later claimed that he had encouraged the story that certain groups would be tasked with heading to Paris, to kidnap General Eisenhower.

Kampfgruppe Skorzeny was split into a commando unit, Einheit Steilau, and the 150th Panzer-Brigade. For the commandos, Skorzeny picked 150 men out of 600 English-speakers. Mounted mostly in Jeeps and wearing American uniforms, they included demolition groups to blow up ammunition and fuel dumps and even bridges; reconnaissance groups to scout routes to the Meuse and observe enemy strength; and other teams to disrupt American communications by cutting wires and issuing false orders. Four men were mounted in each Jeep, which was a
mistake since the Americans themselves seldom packed as many on board, and each team had a ‘speaker’, the one with the best grasp of American idiom. The German soldiers in American uniforms waiting to advance in their Jeeps were clearly nervous. In an attempt to reassure them, an officer from brigade headquarters told them that
‘according to the German radio
, US soldiers in German uniforms had been captured behind the German lines, and that … a lenient view would be taken, and the US soldiers treated as prisoners of war’.

The 150th Panzer-Brigade was much stronger with nearly 2,000 men, including support units. There was a paratroop battalion, two tank companies with a mixture of M-4 Shermans and badly disguised Panthers, panzergrenadier companies, heavy mortars and anti-tank guns in the event of their securing one of the Meuse bridges at Andenne, Huy or Amay. The plan was to get ahead of the panzer spearheads once they reached the Hohes Venn plateau on a line with Spa, by taking side roads and tracks. They would hide up by day, then race forward in the dark to seize the three bridges.

Skorzeny also had plans to blow up the five bridges over the upper Rhine at Basle, in case the Allies entered Switzerland to outflank German defences in the south. In fact on 5 December SHAEF studied the possibility of outflanking German forces in the south by going through Switzerland, but Eisenhower turned this idea down. (Stalin, who clearly hated the Swiss, had urged the Allies at the Teheran conference a year before to attack southern Germany through Switzerland.)

As X-Day for the Ardennes offensive approached, the defensive covername was changed from
Wacht am Rhein
to
Herbstnebel
, or ‘Autumn Mist’. The delays in the delivery of fuel and ammunition became worse and the attack had to be pushed back to dawn on 16 December. Altogether some 1,050 trains were needed to bring the divisions to their concentration areas. Each panzer division needed seventy trains alone.

So far, nobody below the level of corps command had been informed. But SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper of the 1st SS Panzer-Division
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
guessed what was afoot on 11 December when Krämer, the Sixth Panzer Army’s chief of staff, wanted to discuss a hypothetical offensive in the Eifel region. He asked Peiper how long it would take a panzer regiment to move eighty kilometres at
night. To be sure of his answer, Peiper himself took out a Panther for a test run over that distance in darkness. He realized that moving a whole division was a much more complicated matter, but what he and his superiors had underestimated was the state of the roads and the saturated ground in the Ardennes.

Hitler reached his western headquarters at the Adlerhorst
that day in a long motorcade of huge black Mercedes. His main concern was maintaining secrecy. He had become nervous when Allied bombers flattened the town of Düren, the main communications centre just behind the start-line for the operation. His mood swings were highly erratic, from total dejection to groundless optimism. According to his Luftwaffe adjutant Oberst von Below, he
‘was already seeing in his mind’s eye
the German spearhead rolling into Antwerp’. The next morning, Sepp Dietrich was summoned to his bunker concealed under fake farm buildings.

‘Is your army ready?’
Hitler asked straight out.

‘Not for an offensive,’ Dietrich claimed to have replied.

‘You are never satisfied,’ the Führer answered.

Late that afternoon, buses brought divisional commanders to the Adlerhorst
to be addressed by Hitler. Each officer was searched by SS guards and had to surrender his pistol and briefcase. At 18.00 hours, Hitler limped on to the stage. Generals who had not seen him for some time were shocked by his physical deterioration, with pallid face, drooping shoulders and one arm which shook. Flanked by Keitel and Jodl, he sat behind a table.

He began with a long self-justification of why Germany was in the state it was at that stage of the war. A ‘preventative war’ had been necessary to unify the German peoples and because ‘life without
Lebensraum
is unthinkable’. Never for a moment did he consider how other nations might react. Any objection was part of a conspiracy against Germany. ‘Wars are finally decided by the recognition on one side or the other that the war can’t be won any more. Thus, the most important task is to bring the enemy to this realization. The fastest way to do this is to destroy his strength by occupying territory. If we ourselves are forced on to the defensive, our task is to teach the enemy by ruthless strikes that he hasn’t yet won, and that the war will continue without interruption.’

Hitler reminded the assembled generals that some of them had feared
taking the offensive against France in 1940. He claimed that the Americans had ‘lost about 240,000 men in just three weeks’ and ‘the enemy might have more tanks, but with our newest types, ours are better’. Germany was facing a fight that had been inevitable, which had to come sooner or later. The attack had to be carried through with the greatest brutality. No ‘human inhibitions’ must be allowed. ‘A wave of fright and terror must precede the troops.’ The purpose was to convince the enemy that Germany would never surrender. ‘Never! Never!’

Afterwards the generals went to a party to toast Rundstedt’s sixty-ninth birthday at his headquarters in the nearby Schloss Ziegenberg, a gloomy building rebuilt in neo-Gothic style. Nobody felt much like celebrating. According to Dietrich, they did not dare discuss the offensive because of the death penalty threatened against anyone who mentioned it.

On 13 December, Dietrich visited the headquarters of Army Group B. Model said to him that this was
‘the worst prepared German offensive of this war’
. Rundstedt noted that out of the thirty-two divisions promised, four divisions were withdrawn just before the attack, including the 11th Panzer-Division and the 17th SS Panzergrenadier-Division. Only twenty-two were assigned to take part in the opening of the offensive. The rest were held back as an OKW reserve. While most generals were deeply sceptical of the operation’s chances of success, younger officers and NCOs, especially those in the Waffen-SS, were desperate for it to succeed.

Peiper’s regiment received its march order from east of Düren to its assembly area behind the front. It set off after dark following the plain yellow arrows which marked the route. No divisional insignia or numbers were shown. The night and the following morning were foggy, which allowed the men to slip into their assembly areas without being spotted by air reconnaissance. Other divisions also removed their divisional insignia from vehicles just before the advance.

Joachim, or ‘Jochen’, Peiper was twenty-nine years old and good looking with his brown hair slicked back. In the Waffen-SS he was seen as the beau idéal of a panzer leader, a convinced Nazi and utterly ruthless. In the Soviet Union he was well known for torching villages and killing all the inhabitants. On 14 December, shortly before noon, he
reported to the headquarters of the 1st SS Panzer-Division
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
where Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke issued its orders for X-Day on 16 December. The division had been reinforced with an anti-aircraft regiment with 88mm guns, a battalion of heavy howitzers and an extra engineer battalion for repairing bridges. Each Kampfgruppe was to be accompanied by one of the Skorzeny units, with captured Shermans, trucks and Jeeps, but the division had no control over them. On his return Peiper briefed his battalion commanders in a forester’s hut.

Only on the evening of 15 December were officers allowed to brief their troops. Hauptmann Bär, a company commander in the 26th Volksgrenadier-Division, told his men:
‘In twelve or fourteen
days we will be in Antwerp – or we have lost the war.’ He then went on to say: ‘Whatever equipment you may be lacking, we will take from American prisoners.’ Yet, in SS formations especially, the mood was one of fierce exultation at the prospect of revenge. NCOs appear to have been among the most embittered. Paris was about to be recaptured, they told each other. Many regretted that the French capital should have been spared from destruction while Berlin was bombed to ruins. In the 10th SS Panzer-Division
Frundsberg
, the briefing on the offensive produced
‘an extraordinary optimism’
because the Führer had ‘ordered the great blow in the West’. They believed that the shock of an unexpected attack would represent a massive blow to Allied morale. And according to an officer in the highly experienced 2nd Panzer-Division,
‘the fighting spirit was better than in the early days of the war’
. Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army alone had more than 120,000 men, with nearly 500 tanks and assault guns and a thousand artillery pieces. Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army had another 400 tanks and assault guns. The Allied command had no idea of what was about to hit them on their weakest sector.