Armageddon (36 page)

Dispirited Wehrmacht soldiers, hastening to the rear amid a Russian attack, shouted angrily at men of the Grossdeutschland Division, waiting patiently for the Soviets in their positions: “You silly sods are just keeping the war going!” Yet even as late as the winter of 1944 Germany possessed some outstanding fighting formations. “We knew we were still pretty good,” said Sergeant Max Wind of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers with pride. “The important thing in war is not the equipment, but the man behind it. The allies’ biggest mistake was ‘unconditional surrender.’ If there had been a chance of a deal, we would have taken it. Hitler did not play the role people think. He was simply our leader. The issue was Germany. It was common knowledge what the enemy would do if they won—and what indeed they did. Knowing that, we only wanted to fight.”

Twenty-six-year-old Captain Walter Schaefer-Kuhnert of 9th Panzer Division had endured many hardships in the course of the war. His father, a proud First World War veteran and estate owner, had urged him to volunteer for military service, “because that is how a man grows up.” Schaefer-Kuhnert was wounded once in France in 1940, then twice again in Russia, where he also survived typhus. He had known the exhilaration of marching towards apparent victory, “cheering like schoolboys” as his battery lobbed shells at the Kremlin in 1941. He had experienced the bitterness of retreat in the years that followed. Kursk, the vast tank battle of 1943, had been a turning point for Schaefer-Kuhnert, as for many thousands of other German soldiers. Before the battle began, his commanding officer said one night: “Do you think we can still win the war?” Schaefer-Kuhnert, contemplating the vast armoured force Germany had assembled, replied: “If we can’t do it with what we’ve got here, then it’s the beginning of the end.” The panzers did not “do it” at Kursk. Yet the gunner was shocked by the conspiracy of German officers against Hitler in July 1944. He thought the bomb plot was “utterly wrong,” and did not change his mind for many years.

By the autumn of 1944, “We recognized the inevitability of defeat, but we had to consider what we owed to our honour as soldiers. We had to stick together.” He was appalled by the breakdown of discipline he saw during the retreat from France, “men fleeing loaded down with loot, taking girls, driving commandeered civilian vehicles . . . already there was a breakdown.” One battery in his own regiment was now equipped with captured Russian mortars, because it lacked sufficient 105mm guns. Yet he found confronting the U.S. Third Army in Lorraine a very much more acceptable experience than the Eastern Front. “You were fighting against human beings, who shared broadly the same philosophy. Once we agreed a truce with them, to remove dead and wounded from the battlefield. One of our men carried a wounded American from no-man’s-land to their lines, and came back loaded with chocolate and cigarettes the ‘Amis’ had given him. That could never have happened in the east.” Schaefer-Kuhnert “took it for granted that we must go on to the end, whatever that meant.”

Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt expressed sentiments that were widely shared: “I knew that I was against the Nazis—but I did not know what I was
for
. Like most German soldiers, I thought that it was my duty to fight, and by day we did fight. But at night we prayed for the war to end. I felt no personal sense of shame. Once, when I saw a train loaded with Russian prisoners, I felt a stab of pity. But then I also felt: ‘Such is war.’ I didn’t know the ‘German Resistance’ existed. I read Marcus Aurelius. From him, I learned that it makes no sense to fight what you cannot change.” Sergeant Otto Cranz said: “I get so angry when people ask why we did not join the heroic resistance to Hitler. One could do nothing.”

“I wonder what Hitler’s thinking now,” mused General Weiknecht, a Wehrmacht captive in Soviet hands. General Friedrich von Paulus, the vanquished commander of Stalingrad, said savagely: “He’s trying to find some way of inspiring the nation to new sacrifices. Never in history have lies been such vital instruments of diplomacy and policy. We Germans have been tricked by this usurper.” Colonel-General Strekker asked: “Why has the Lord been so angry with Germany as to send us Hitler? Is the German nation so base as to deserve such a punishment?”

P
OSTERITY IS
bemused by the banality of Hitler and the coterie of gangsters who formed the leadership of the Third Reich. It is scarcely surprising that during the 1944–45 campaign they sought refuge in military and political fantasies, and committed themselves to a struggle to the end. Most tacitly acknowledged that their own lives were forfeit, and they were therefore indifferent to the fate of others. Through the last months of the war, many Nazi officials, Gestapo agents and SS men showed themselves eager to encompass the deaths of as many enemies of the Third Reich as possible before their own time came. Beria reported to Stalin on 19 September the discovery of a concentration camp near Tallin in Estonia. A squad of sixty SS had been rushed there, on the eve of its liberation by the Red Army, and 1,600 Jews—“mostly doctors, artists and scientists”—together with 260 Russian PoWs, had been murdered in a matter of hours, leaving only eighty survivors. Such actions were commonplace. In the spring of 1945 there was a rush to kill surviving critics of National Socialism within the Nazis’ reach before they could be delivered by the Allies.

It is much harder to comprehend the behaviour of the generals such as Guderian and von Rundstedt, with their intelligence, high military competence and pretensions to honour, than that of the senior Nazis. Most of Germany’s senior commanders had been dismissed for suffering defeats on the battlefield, only to be reinstated when their successors proved incapable of doing better. The generals complained constantly about the humiliations to which they were exposed, professed to despise Hitler, privately acknowledged that the war was lost. Yet, month after month, they attended the Führer’s military conferences, endured his ravings about “wonder weapons,” Wallenstein and Frederick the Great, then returned to their headquarters to continue the direction of his doomed war.

It is interesting to compare the German command structure with that of the Allies. The Russian system worked remarkably well from 1942 onwards, once Stalin showed himself willing to delegate to able commanders. Stalin shared Hitler’s monomania and paranoia, but acquired vastly better strategic judgement. The U.S. Chiefs of Staff directed their forces with great managerial skill, though their effectiveness was weakened by inter-service rivalries. Roosevelt displayed no inclination to play the warlord as Churchill did, nor to impose his authority upon the military decision-makers except on the largest issues. Churchill’s generals often complained about their master’s military fantasies, eccentricities and egotism. In small matters, Britain’s prime minister could behave high-handedly and pettishly. But on great decisions, however loud his protests, he accepted the advice of the military professionals. He possessed an extraordinary instinct for war. The partnership of Brooke and Churchill created the most efficient machine for the direction of the war possessed by any combatant nation, even if its judgements were sometimes flawed and its ability to enforce its wishes increasingly constrained.

By contrast, for all the tactical genius displayed by German soldiers fighting on the battlefield, they could never escape the consequences of serving under the direction of a man who rejected rationality. Hitler believed that his own military skills and judgement were superior to those of any of his professional advisers. He immersed the leadership in a morass of detail, wasting countless hours of his commanders’ time, about armament design and the movements of trifling numbers of men and tanks. He allowed Göring, his old political crony, to remain leader of the Luftwaffe even when it was plain that it was collapsing as a fighting force through huge errors of policy and management. He gave Himmler a battlefield command which caused that master of mass murder to suffer a nervous collapse. His insistence upon sustaining to the end of the war heavily garrisoned German “fortresses” in the Channel Islands, Scandinavia and the Aegean for reasons of prestige deprived Germany of prodigious numbers of men and quantities of precious arms and matériel, which might significantly have influenced the battles of 1945 if they had been withdrawn to Germany while there was still time.

One of Hitler’s greatest follies in the last years of the war was the devotion of enormous scientific and industrial effort to the so-called
Vergeltungswaffen
—“retaliation weapons.” The V1 was a small pilotless aircraft powered by a pulse-jet engine, catapulted from launch ramps located at hundreds of sites in Holland after the loss of those in France and Belgium. The first was fired at England on 13 June 1944, and in the weeks that followed 2,451 others followed. About two-thirds crashed prematurely, were toppled by British fighters (which perfected a clever manoeuvre of flying alongside the bomb, then flicking a wingtip under its fins) or were shot down by anti-aircraft fire. Many of the remainder fell on and around greater London, bringing renewed misery to a people exhausted by years of blitz and privation. The most destructive single V1 explosion took place at the Guards Chapel near Buckingham Palace during a service, in which 121 people died. By March 1945, over 10,000 V1 “flying bombs” had been fired, causing 24,000 casualties in England and many more in Belgium.

The V2 was the world’s first ballistic missile, fuelled by alcohol and liquid oxygen, impossible to intercept and destroy because it travelled at supersonic speeds. The first V2 crashed on Chiswick in west London on 8 September 1944, killing three people and injuring seventeen. By 27 March 1945, some 1,050 rockets had fallen on England, killing 2,700 Londoners. A further “wonder weapon,” the V3 long-range gun designed to fire on London, was used only briefly in the winter of 1944 against Antwerp and Luxembourg, to little effect. The V-weapons caused great apprehension and misery among the civilians of England and Belgium, but it should have been evident to the rulers of Germany that dumping small payloads of explosive with indifferent accuracy on the enemy could not conceivably justify the slave labour, materials and commitment of highly skilled personnel and technology necessary to create the delivery systems. The technology was extremely advanced, but it was futile, as even Hitler seemed to grasp in the last months. On the night of 17 December, a V2 crashed into the Rex cinema in Antwerp during a crowded show. When Hitler was informed that 1,100 people including 700 soldiers had been killed or wounded, by a characteristic irony he was reluctant to credit the report. “That would finally be the first successful launch,” he observed sarcastically. “But it is so fairytale that my scepticism keeps me from believing it. Who is the informer? Is he paid by the launch crew?”

Had Hitler forsaken the propaganda rewards of raining V-weapons on England—to negligible military and industrial effect—and concentrated his firepower on the Channel ports, the consequences could have been serious for the Allied armies. Yet there was never the remotest possibility that any of the “wonder weapons” could change the outcome of the war. The Germans had made no significant progress with developing the only device that might have done so—an atomic bomb. The folly of persisting with the V-weapon programme, which drained Germany’s shrinking resources merely to torment the enemy’s population, highlighted the irrationality of Nazi behaviour as defeat beckoned.

Three forces determined Germany’s ability to sustain the war. The first was the organizational genius of Speer. It was ironic that the most cultured member of the Nazi leadership, and the only one to display practical concern for the fate of the German people in the midst of defeat, alone provided the means to enable Hitler to fight on until May 1945. The second factor was the effectiveness of the machinery of internal repression, for which Himmler was responsible. One of the bleakest lessons of modern history is that while half-hearted dictatorships often collapse, those willing to sustain policies of implacable ruthlessness, slaughtering all enemies real or imagined, frequently survive until the natural death or military defeat of their principal. Himmler’s task was made easier by the fact that hundreds of thousands of his agents knew that their crimes irretrievably committed them. Goebbels’s contribution was also vital. His programme of national indoctrination, maintained over a decade, perverted the reasoning processes of one of the best-educated societies on earth. Here was a significant difference between the German and Soviet tyrannies. Whatever the Russian people’s commitment to the war, many were privately cynical about Stalin’s rule. By contrast, a formidable proportion of Hitler’s subjects retained their belief in his policies. The self-delusion of the German people flagged only when the fabric of their society literally collapsed about their heads.

The third force in enabling Hitler to continue the war was the support of the Army. The only people who realized that Germany was doomed, and also possessed the power to do something about it, were its generals. Beyond the Army’s feeble attempt in July 1944, they failed to act upon their knowledge to save the German people from Hitler. This is the basis for their claims upon the contempt of history. On 10 September, two months after the dismissal of Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt as C-in-C West, he was once more summoned to Hitler’s presence and invited to resume his role. He was sixty-eight, and showing signs of age, stress and some over-indulgence in alcohol. He was taking a cure at Bad Tolz when Hitler’s message came. The lean, leathery old veteran tersely accepted recall to duty, observing later that he considered it his duty as a German officer. “Duty” and “honour” were words constantly on the lips of Wehrmacht generals, both then and afterwards. Yet von Rundstedt’s pretensions were crippled by his participation in the so-called Court of Honour which presided over the dismissal of many officers from the German Army for their roles in the July bomb plot, in most cases as a preliminary to their execution. Von Manstein, who was regarded for some years after the war as an honourable man as well as a brilliant commander, has been exposed by modern research as deeply implicated in massacres of Jews and prisoners in the east. He happily accepted large cash hand-outs from Hitler, which in a moment of sublime optimism he used to buy an estate in East Prussia as late as October 1944. If von Manstein, von Kluge, von Rundstedt and others had faithfully followed Hitler’s military instructions in the second half of the war, it would have been over much sooner. As it was, however, again and again they defied the Führer’s demented orders, in the exercise of their best professional judgement.