Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

‘Operation Thunderclap’ — as ‘a catastrophe-solution’ (‘Katastrophenlosung’) .³²³ That evening, Hitler dismissed the idea: Paulus only had fuel for a short distance; there was no possibility of breaking out.³²⁴ Two days later, on 23 December, Manstein had to remove units from Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army to hold the crumbling left flank of his Army Group. With that, Hoth had to pull back his weakened forces. The attempt to break the siege of Stalingrad had failed.³²⁵ The 6th Army was doomed.

Paulus still sought permission to break out. But by Christmas Eve, Manstein had given up trying to persuade Hitler to give approval to what by this time could only be seen as a move of sheer desperation, without hope of success. The main priority was now to hold the left flank to prevent an even worse catastrophe.³²⁶ This was essential to enable the retreat of Army Group A from the Caucasus.³²⁷ Zeitzler had put the urgency of this retreat to Hitler on the evening of 27 December. Hitler had reluctantly agreed, then later changed his mind. It was too late. Zeitzler had telephoned through Hitler’s initial approval. The retreat from the Caucasus was under way.³²⁸ Stalingrad had become a lesser priority.³²⁹

Preoccupied though he was with the eastern front, and in particular with the now inevitable catastrophe in Stalingrad, Hitler could not afford to neglect what was happening in North Africa. And he was increasingly worried about the resolve of his Italian allies.

Montgomery had forced Rommel’s Afrika Corps into headlong retreat, and would drive the German and Italian army out of Libya altogether during January 1943.³³⁰ Encouraged by Goring, Hitler was now convinced that Rommel had lost his nerve.³³¹ But at least the 50,000 German and 18,000 Italian troops rushed to Tunis in November and December had seriously held up the Allies, preventing their rapid domination of North Africa and ruling out an early assault on the European continent itself.³³² Even so, Hitler knew the Italians were wobbling. Goring’s visit to Rome at the end of November had confirmed that.³³³ Their commitment to the war was by now in serious doubt.³³⁴ And when Ciano and Marshal Count Ugo Cavalero, the head of the Italian armed forces, arrived at the Wolf’s Lair on 18 December for three days of talks, it was in the immediate wake of the catastrophic collapse of the Italian 8th Army, overwhelmed during the previous two days by the Soviet offensive on the middle stretches of the Don. Hitler concealed his fury and dismay at what he saw as the military weakness of his Axis partner, alluding only in a single sentence to the Italian setbacks. His chief interest in the talks was in pressing upon the Italians the urgent need to intensify efforts — through greater sacrifices from the civilian population — to ensure sufficient transport for vital supplies to the forces in North Africa, emphasizing that this was ‘decisive for the war’. From the Italian point of view, the central concern was to suggest to Hitler that the time had come to end the war in the east and seek a settlement with the Soviet Union.³³⁵

It was the first time a summit with the Italians had taken place in East Prussia. Ciano referred to ‘the sadness of that damp forest and boredom of collective living in the Command barracks’. ‘There isn’t a spot of colour,’ he continued, ‘not one vivid note. Waiting-rooms filled with people smoking, eating, chatting. Kitchen odour, smell of uniforms, of boots.’³³⁶ The talks produced little that was constructive for either side. When Ciano put Mussolini’s case for Germany coming to terms with the Soviet Union in order to put maximum effort into defence against the western powers, Hitler was dismissive. Were he to do that, he replied, he would be forced within a short time to fight a reinvigorated Soviet Union once more.³³⁷ The Italian guests were non- committal towards Hitler’s exhortations to override all civilian considerations in favour of supplies for North Africa.³³⁸

For the German people, quite especially for the many German families with loved ones in the 6th Army, Christmas 1942 was a depressing festival. A radio broadcast linking troops on all the fighting fronts, including Stalingrad, brought tears to the eyes of many a family gathered around the Christmas tree back home, as the men at the ‘front on the Volga’ joined their comrades in singing ‘Silent Night’. The listeners at home did not know the link-up was a fake.³³⁹ Nor did they know that 1,280 German soldiers died at Stalingrad on that Christmas Day in 1942.³⁴⁰ They were, however, aware by then of an ominous fate hanging over the 6th Army.

The triumphalist propaganda of September and October, suggesting that victory at Stalingrad was just around the corner, had given way in the weeks following the Soviet counter-offensive to little more than ominous silence. Indications of hard fighting were sufficient, however, to make plain that things were not going to plan. Rumours of the encirclement of the 6th Army — passed on through despairing letters from the soldiers entrapped there — swiftly spread.³⁴¹ It soon became evident that the rumours were no less than the truth. As the sombre mood at home deepened by the day, the terrible struggle in the streets of Stalingrad headed towards its inexorable denouement.

Last letters home confirmed the worst fears. ‘Please don’t be sad and weep for me, when you receive this, my last letter,’ wrote one captain to his wife in mid-January. ‘I’m standing here in an icy storm in a hopeless position in the city of fate, Stalingrad. Encircled for months, we will tomorrow begin the last fight, man against man.’³⁴² Another soldier compared the miserable reality of death in Stalingrad with the imagery of heroism: ‘They’re falling like flies, and no one bothers and buries them. Without arms and legs and without eyes, with stomachs ripped open, they lie around everywhere.’³⁴³ ‘We’re completely alone, without help from outside,’ ran another last letter home. ‘Hitler has left us in the lurch. This letter is going off while the airfield is still in our possession. We’re in the north of the city. The men of my battery guess it, too, but don’t know it as certainly as I do. This, then, is what the end looks like.’³⁴⁴ Some clutched vainly, even now, to final strands of belief in Hitler. ‘The Fuhrer solidly promised to get us out of here. That’s been read out to us and we firmly believed it. I still believe it today, because I have to believe in something… I have believed my entire life, or at least eight years of it, always in the Fuhrer and his word. It’s horrible how they’re in doubt here, and shameful to hear words spoken that you can’t contradict because they’re in line with the facts.’³⁴⁵ Such sentiments were by this time rare indeed among those fighting, suffering, and dying in the hell-hole of Stalingrad. Far more typical was the wretchedness expressed in the last letter of another despairing soldier: ‘I love you, and you love me, and so you should know the truth. It is in this letter. The truth is the knowledge of the hardest struggle in a hopeless situation. Misery, hunger, cold, resignation, doubt, despair, and horrible dying… I’m not cowardly, just sad that I can give no greater proof of my bravery than to die for such point-lessness, not to say crime… Don’t be so quick to forget me.’³⁴⁶

A series of letters from senior officers in the 6th Army, describing their plight in graphic detail, were received by Hitler’s Luftwaffe Adjutant, Nicolaus von Below. He showed them to Hitler, reading out key passages. Hitler listened without comment, except once commenting inscrutably that ‘the fate of the 6th Army left for all of us a deep duty in the fight for the freedom of the our people’.³⁴⁷ Below had the impression that Hitler realized by this time that victory in a two-front war against the Russians and the Americans could not be won. But Hitler betrayed no outward sign of weakening. He felt obliged to maintain the charade, even in his inner circle, that the war would be won — and he was able still to convey his optimism to those around him. What he really thought, no one knew.³⁴⁸

After Paulus had rejected a call to surrender, the final Soviet attack to destroy the 6th Army began on 10 January. An emissary to the Wolf’s Lair, seeking permission for Paulus to have freedom of action to bring an end to the carnage went unheeded by Hitler. On 15 January, he commissioned Field-Marshal Erhard Milch, the Luftwaffe’s armaments supremo and mastermind of all its transportation organization, with flying 300 tons of supplies a day to the besieged army. It was pure fantasy — though partly based on the inaccurate information that Zeitzler complained about on more than one occasion. Snow and ice on the runways in sub-arctic temperatures often prevented take-offs and landings. In any case, on 22 January the last airstrip in the vicinity of Stalingrad was lost. Supplies could now only be dropped from the air. The remaining frozen, half-starved troops, under constant heavy fire, were often unable to salvage them.³⁴⁹

By this time, the German people were already being prepared for the worst. After a long period of silence, the Wehrmacht report on 16 January had spoken in ominous terms of a ‘heroically courageous defensive struggle against the enemy attacking from all sides’.³⁵⁰ After Goebbels had visited the Wolf’s Lair on 22 January, and obtained Hitler’s backing for a radicalization of the home front in a drive for ‘total war’, the press was immediately instructed to speak of ‘the great and stirring heroic sacrifice which the troops encircled at Stalingrad are offering the German nation’. This was now to be brought into the direct context of mobilizing the population for ‘total war’.³⁵¹

Hitler had bluntly described the plight of the 6th Army to Goebbels at their meeting. There was scarcely a