Stalingrad. By this time, devastating offensives in the Baltic and in the south were gathering momentum.187 The next months would bring even worse calamities and, together with the unstoppable advance of the Allies in the west, would usher in the final phase of the war.
VIII
Hitler’s response to the military disasters of the early summer was characteristic: he blamed others, and sacked his commanders. Whatever Hitler’s capabilities as a military strategist had been, they had paid dividends only while Germany held the whip-hand and lightning offensives had been possible. Once — irrevocably after the failure of ‘Citadel’ in summer 1943 — a defensive strategy had become the only one available, Hitler’s inadequacies as supreme German warlord were fully exposed. As the records of the military conferences with his advisers indicate, it was not that he was wholly devoid of tactical knowledge, despite his lack of formal training. Nor was it the case, as was sometimes adumbrated in post-war apologetics of German generals, that professionals who knew better were invariably forced into compliance with the lunatic orders of an amateur military bungler. As the verbatim notes of the conferences show, Hitler’s tactics were frequently neither inherently absurd, nor did they usually stand in crass contradiction to the military advice he was receiving.
Even so: at points of crisis, the tensions and conflicts invariably surfaced. And by 1944, the individual military crises were accumulating into one almighty, life-or-death crisis for the regime itself. Hitler’s political adroitness was by this time long gone. He dismissed out of hand all contemplation of a possible attempt to reach a political solution. Bridges had been burnt (as he had indicated on several occasions); there was no way back. And, since he refused any notion of negotiating from a position other than one of strength, from which all his earlier successes had derived, there was in any case no opportunity to seek a peace settlement. The gambling instinct which had stood Hitler in such good stead down to 1941 had long since lost its effectiveness in what had become a backs-to- the-wall struggle. But the worse the situation became, the more disastrously self-destructive became Hitler’s other overriding and irrational instinct — that ‘will’ alone would triumph over all adversity, even grossly disparate levels of manpower and weaponry. As we have seen, he was wont, on occasion, to compare — absurdly — the adversity he had often faced in his rise to power with the current adversity in the throes of a world war. In a sense, his own invariable resort — all the more, the worse the crisis became — to a simple belief in ‘triumph of the will’ as the way out was indeed a replication of his attitude at critical junctures during the ‘time of struggle’ (such as the Party Leadership crisis of July 1921 or the crisis surrounding Gregor Strasser in December 1932). The innate self- destructive tendency which had been implicit in his all-or-nothing stance at such times now conveyed itself, catastrophically, to military leadership.
It was inevitable that seasoned military strategists and battle-hardened generals, schooled in more subtle forms of tactical command, would clash with him — often stridently — when their reading of the options available was so diametrically at variance with those of their supreme commander, and where the orders he emitted seemed to them so plainly militarily suicidal. They were also, however, schooled in obedience to orders of a superior; and Hitler was head of state, head of the armed forces, and since 1941 — disastrously — commander-in-chief (responsible for tactical decisions) of the army. Refusal to obey was not only an act of military insubordination; it was a treasonable act of political resistance.
Few were prepared to go down that route. But loyalty even to the extent of belief in the Fuhrer’s mission was no safeguard against dismissal if near-impossible demands were not met. In accordance with his warped logic, where ‘will’ had not triumphed, however fraught the circumstances, Hitler blamed the weakness or inadequacy of the commander. Another commander with a superior attitude, he presumed, would bring a different result — however objectively unfavourable the actual position. The commander of Army Group Centre, Field-Marshal Busch, a Hitler loyalist, correspondingly paid the price for the ‘failure’ of Army Group Centre during the onset of the Soviet offensive. He was dismissed by Hitler on 28 June, and replaced by one of his favourite commanders, the tough and energetic newly-promoted Field-Marshal Walter Model (who at the same time retained his command of Army Group North Ukraine) — dubbed by some, given the frequency with which he was charged with tackling a crisis, ‘Hitler’s fireman’.188
Within days, there was a change of command, too, in the west. Reports to the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht submitted by the Commander-in-Chief, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt, and the Commander of Panzer Group West, General Geyr von Schweppenburg, had drawn a pessimistic picture of the prospects of holding the lines against enemy inroads in France. Jodl played to Hitler’s sentiments by noting that this meant the first step towards the evacuation of France. The report had followed similarly realistic assessments of the situation on the western front delivered by Rundstedt and Rommel at the Berghof two days earlier, on 29 June.189 On 3 July, Rundstedt received a handwritten notice of his dismissal from Hitler. Officially, he had been replaced on grounds of health.190 The sacking of Geyr and Field-Marshal Hugo Sperrle, who had been responsible for air- defences in the West, also followed. Rundstedt’s replacement, Kluge, at that time high in Hitler’s esteem, arrived in France, as Guderian later put it, ‘still filled with the optimism that prevailed at Supreme Headquarters’.191 He soon learnt differently.
Another military leader who fell irredeemably from grace at this time was Chief of the General Staff Kurt Zeitzler. When appointed as replacement to Halder in September 1942, Zeitzler had impressed Hitler with his drive, energy, and fighting spirit — the type of military leader he wanted. The relationship had palled visibly since the spring of 1944, when Hitler had pinned a major part of the blame for the loss of the Crimea on Zeitzler. By May, Zeitzler was indicating his wish to resign. The Chief of Staff’s strong backing at the end of June for withdrawing the threatened Army Group North in the Baltic to a more defensible line, and his pessimism about the situation on the western front amounted to the last straw. Zeitzler could no longer see the rationale of Hitler’s tactics; Hitler was contemptuous of what he saw as the defeatism of Zeitzler and the General Staff. At the end of his tether following furious rows with Hitler, Zeitzler simply disappeared from the Berghof on 1 July. He had suffered a nervous breakdown. Hitler never spoke to him again. He would have Zeitzler dismissed from the Wehrmacht in January 1945, refusing him the right to wear uniform. Until his replacement, Guderian, was appointed on 21 July, the army was effectively without a Chief of the General Staff.192
The Soviet advance had left the Red Army, in the northern sector of the front, poised not far from Vilna in Lithuania. Already, the borders of East Prussia were in their sights. On 9 July, Hitler flew with Keitel, Donitz, Himmler, and Luftwaffe Chief of Staff General Gunther Korten back to his old headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia. Field-Marshal Model and General Johannes Frie?ner, recently appointed as commander of Army Group North in place of General Georg Lindemann, joined them from the eastern front. The discussions ranged mainly over plans for the urgent creation of a number of new divisions to shore up the eastern front and protect any inroads into East Prussia. Model and Frie?ner sounded optimistic. Hitler, too, thought his Luftwaffe adjutant, Below, also remained positive about developments on the eastern front. Hitler flew back to the Berghof that afternoon.193 He had already hinted that, in the light of the situation in the east, he would have to move his headquarters back to East Prussia, even though the fortifications of his accommodation there were still incomplete. Reading between the lines of one or two comments, Below gained the impression, he later wrote, that during what were to prove Hitler’s last days at the Berghof, before he left on 14 July for the Wolf’s Lair, never to return, he was no longer under any illusions about the outcome of the war. Even so, any hints of pessimism were more than countered by repeated stress on continuing the war, the impact of the new weapons, and ultimate victory. Once more, it was plain to Below that Hitler would never capitulate.194 There would be no repeat of 1918. Hitler’s political ‘mission’ had been based from the outset on that premise. The entire Reich would go down in flames first.
Hitler had lived amid the relative tranquillity of the Obersalzberg for almost four months. The regular entourage at the Berghof had dwindled somewhat in that time. And in the days before departure there had been few guests to enliven proceedings. Hitler himself had seemingly become more reserved. On the last evening, perhaps sensing he would not see the Berghof again, he had paused in front of the pictures hanging in the great hall. Then he had kissed the hand of Below’s wife and Frau Brandt, the wife of one of his doctors, bidding them farewell.195 Next morning, 14 July, he flew back to East Prussia, returning to a Wolf’s Lair now heavily reinforced and scarcely recognizable from its appearance when first set up in 1941. He arrived in the late morning. At one o’clock he was running the military conference there as if he had never been away. He was more
