Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

visit to the western front, and of his decision, in the light of the situation there, to remove two panzer divisions from the east. While they talked, news came in of the heaviest daytime raids yet on Berlin — destroying many of the main representative and government buildings in the centre of the city. Goring’s popularity had, unsurprisingly, sunk to an all-time low on the Obersalzberg, with Hitler raging about the Reich Marshal’s incompetence. Goebbels also had a chance to speak to Speer, who told him of the precarious situation following the American raids on the fuel plants. By August, fuel for tanks and planes would be in short supply. Drastic measures were needed to contain consumption in the civilian sector. Having seen Salzburg, on his arrival there, looking as it had done in peacetime, Goebbels’s instincts to press for new powers to take control over the revitalization of the ‘total war’ effort and the mobilization of remaining forces on the home front were sharpened still further.¹⁷⁰

After lunch, sitting together in the great hall of the Berghof, with its huge window opening out to a breathtaking panorama of the Alps, Goebbels fully expounded his argument. He expressed his doubts about groundless optimism, ‘not to say illusions’, about the war. ‘Total war’ had remained a mere slogan. The crisis had to be recognized before it could be overcome. A thorough reform of the Wehrmacht was urgently necessary. Goring, he had observed (here came the usual attacks on the Reich Marshal), lived in a complete fantasy world. The Propaganda Minister extended his attack to the remainder of the top military leadership. The Fuhrer needed a Scharnhorst and a Gneisenau — the Prussian military heroes who had created the army that repelled Napoleon — not a Keitel and a Fromm (commander of the Reserve Army), he declared. Goebbels promised that he could raise a million soldiers through a rigorous reorganization of the Wehrmacht and draconian measures in the civilian sphere. The people expected and wanted tough measures. Germany was close to being plunged into a crisis which could remove any possibility of taking such measures with any prospect of success. It was necessary to act with realism, wholly detached from any defeatism, and to act now.¹⁷¹

Characteristically, Hitler began his wordy reply with a potted history of the Wehrmacht. He accepted that there were some weaknesses in the organization of the Wehrmacht, and that few of its leaders were National Socialists. But to dispense with them during the war would be a nonsense (Unding), since there were no replacements. He defended Keitel and Fromm. The overblown organization of the Wehrmacht had been necessary for the occupation of the huge areas of the east that had been conquered. Though these had now largely been lost, a reorganization could not take place overnight. Hitler was bitter at the ‘absolute failure’ of the Luftwaffe, which he laid at Goring’s door. His own wishes had been ignored by Luftwaffe technical experts. Reform in the Luftwaffe was needed, and had already been started. He could not rely upon his generals, who had ‘swindled’ him the whole time. The war had not produced a single genius among them.

Despite his criticisms, his answer could offer Goebbels little encouragement. All in all, Hitler concluded, the time was not ripe for the extraordinary measures the Propaganda Minister wanted. Despite Goebbels’s pleas, he wanted to proceed for the time being with the tried and tested methods. He thought that they would come through the present crises with such methods. If more serious crises took place — among them, entry of Turkey on the Allied side, the collapse of Finland, inability (which he acknowledged as a possibility) to hold the eastern front, or failure to break the bridgeheads in the west — then he would be ready to take ‘completely abnormal measures’. Goebbels summed up: ‘The Fuhrer does not regard the crisis as sufficiently serious and compelling that it could persuade him to pull out all the stops.’¹⁷² Hitler told Goebbels that the instant he felt the need to resort to ‘final measures’, he would bestow the appropriate powers on the Propaganda Minister. But ‘for the time being he wanted to proceed along the evolutionary, not revolutionary, way’. Goebbels went away empty-handed, leaving what he regarded as one of the most serious meetings he had had with Hitler sorely disappointed.¹⁷³

Goebbels was evidently dubious about Hitler’s continued positive gloss on military prospects. He doubted, correctly, the reassurances that it ought to be possible to hold Cherbourg until the two new divisions from the east could arrive; and Hitler’s view that a massive panzer attack could then destroy the Allied bridgehead. On the ‘wonder-weapons’, however, the Fuhrer’s expectations seemed realistic enough to the Propaganda Minister. Hitler did not, thought the Propaganda Minister, over-estimate the impact of the V1 (short for Vergeltungswaffe-1 — ‘Retaliation Weapon 1’), as Goebbels had now dubbed the flying- bomb. But he hoped to have the A4 rocket (later renamed the V2) ready for launching by August, and looked to its destructive power to help decide the war. Hitler ruled out once again any prospect of an ‘arrangement’ with Britain, but was less inclined — so Goebbels inferred — to dismiss the possibility at some point of coming to terms with the Soviet Union. This could not be entertained given the present military situation, though a significant shift in fortunes in the Far East might alter the position. As Goebbels realized, however, this was entering the realm of vague musings.¹⁷⁴

If Hitler had been unnerved at all by what he had heard from his commanders in the west during his short and turbulent visit a few days earlier, he had shown not the slightest trace of it during his private discussion with Goebbels. And when, the next afternoon, he again addressed his generals — adumbrating once more his belief in the survival of the fittest, emphasizing that no internal revolution was possible since the Jews were ‘gone’ and that he would mercilessly wipe out the slightest hint of internal subversion, stressing that to give in always meant ‘destruction… in the long run complete destruction’, that the current struggle was for Germany’s very existence, and, underlining his unshaken belief that he had been called by Providence, that the dangers would be surmounted, that ‘this new state will never capitulate’ — he again performed to perfection the role of Fuhrer, with no hint of weakness or doubt.¹⁷⁵ He could still enthuse his audience — at least momentarily.¹⁷⁶

That same day, 22 June 1944, exactly three years since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army launched its new big offensive in the east. Hitler had predicted that Stalin would not be able to resist the appeal of launching his offensive on that day.¹⁷⁷ The main thrust of the massive Soviet offensive — the biggest undertaken, deploying almost 2? million men and over 5,000 tanks, backed by 5,300 planes, and given by Stalin the code-name ‘Bagration’ after a military hero in the destruction of Napoleon’s Grand Army in 1812 — was aimed at the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Centre.¹⁷⁸ Based on fatally flawed intelligence relayed to Chief of Staff Zeitzler by the head of the eastern military intelligence service, Reinhard Gehlen, German preparations had, in fact, anticipated an offensive on the southern part of the front, where all the reserves and the bulk of the panzer divisions had been concentrated. Army Group Centre had been left with a meagre thirty-eight divisions, comprizing only half as many men and a fifth of the number of tanks as the Red Army had, in a section of the front stretching over some 800 miles.¹⁷⁹ Only belatedly, it appears, did the realization dawn, against the continued advice of Chief of the General Staff Zeitzler, that the offensive was likely to come against Army Group Centre.¹⁸⁰ But when Field-Marshal Ernst Busch, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, recommended shortening the front to more defensible limits, Hitler contemptuously asked whether he too was one of those generals ‘who always looked to the rear’.¹⁸¹

The relatively mild beginnings of the offensive then misled Hitler’s military advisers into thinking initially that it was a decoy.¹⁸² However, the initial opening was sufficient to breach the German defences around Vitebsk. Suddenly, the first big wave of tanks swept through the gap. Others rapidly followed. Bombing and heavy artillery attacks accompanied the assault. Busch appealed to Hitler to abandon the ‘fortified places’ (Feste Platze) in Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev, and Bobruisk, which had been been established in the spring in a vain attempt to create a set of key defensive strongholds — fortresses to be held come what may under the command of selected tough generals.¹⁸³

Hitler’s answer could have been taken as read. The ‘fortified places’ were to be held at all costs; every square metre of land was to be defended.¹⁸⁴ Busch, one of Hitler’s fervent admirers among the generals, accepted the order without demur. He sought to carry it out unquestioningly as a demonstration of his loyalty. The consequences were predictable. The Red Army swept around the strongholds, and the German not Soviet divisions were tied down, then encircled and finally destroyed by the forces following in the wake of the advance troops.¹⁸⁵ The Wehrmacht divisions lost through such a disastrous tactical error would have been vital in defending other parts of the front.¹⁸⁶

Within two days of the start of the offensive, the 3rd Panzer Army in Vitebsk had been cut off, followed a further two days later by the encirclement of the 9th Army near Bobruisk. By the first days of July, the 4th Army faced the same fate near Minsk. Reinforcements drawn from the southern part of the front could not prevent its destruction. By the time the offensive through the centre slowed by mid-July, the Soviet breakthrough had advanced well over 200 miles, driven a gap 100 miles wide through the front, and was within striking range of Warsaw. Army Group Centre had by then lost twenty-eight divisions with 350,000 men in a catastrophe even greater than that at