Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

proposal to make twenty-five German divisions in Italy available to the Allies as a defence against Communism in return for a guarantee of the preservation of the Reich’s territory and population. Both the British and the Americans rejected the overtures out of hand.¹⁵⁰ In this scenario, Hitler would have been dispensable. But it was pure self-delusion. Himmler was too centrally implicated in the most appalling facets of the Nazi regime to be taken seriously by the Allies as a prospective leader of a post-Hitlerian Germany. For Himmler, too, there was no way out. Without Hitler’s backing, his power would vanish like a breath in the chill morning air. This was as true in late 1944 as at any other time during the Third Reich.

Hitler’s authority remained intact. But if they could have found an escape route by removing him or discarding him, there were now those among his closest paladins who would have followed it.

IV

Meanwhile, the vice around Hitler’s Reich was tightening. Between June and September the Wehrmacht lost on all fronts well over a million men killed, captured, or missing. The losses of tanks, guns, planes, and other armaments were incalculable.¹⁵¹ The war in the air was by now almost wholly one-sided. Fuel shortages left many German fighters unable to take to the air as the British and American bomber armadas wreaked havoc on German towns and cities with impunity by day as well as by night. The war at sea had also by this time been definitively lost by Germany. The U-boat fleet had never recovered from its losses in the second half of 1943, while Allied convoys could now cross the Atlantic almost unmolested. In the second half of 1944, only twelve ships, with a tonnage of 55,290 tons, were sunk in the northern Atlantic (with no losses at all in October). Another sixty-five ships — a tiny fraction of the overall Allied shipping crossing the seas — fell victim to German submarines off the shores of Britain. In all, 138 U-boats were lost over the same period.¹⁵² In the meantime, the territories of the Nazi empire were shrinking markedly by the end of the summer following the advances of the Allies on both western and eastern fronts since June.

On the western front, Germany’s military commanders had by then long viewed the continuation of the war as pointless. On replacing Rundstedt in early July, the weak and impressionable Kluge was easily persuaded by Hitler that the western commanders, especially Rommel, had been far too pessimistic in their judgement of the situation. After a two-day visit to the front, however, Kluge had been forced to admit that Rommel was right. In his letter to Hitler of 15 July, Rommel had explicitly stated that, heroically though the troops were fighting, ‘the unequal struggle is heading for its end’. He felt, therefore, compelled to ask Hitler, he wrote, ‘to draw the consequences from this position without delay’.¹⁵³ He let the leaders of the conspiracy against Hitler know that he would be prepared to join them if the demands for an end to the war were dismissed. Germany’s most renowned field-marshal was never put to the test. Three days before Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded, Rommel was seriously injured when his car skidded from the road after being strafed by an enemy aircraft.¹⁵⁴

Five days after the assassination attempt on Hitler, ‘Operation Cobra’, the Allied attack southwards towards Avranches, began with a ferocious ‘carpet-bombing’ assault by over 2,000 aircraft, dropping 47,000 tons of bombs on an already weakened German panzer division in an area of only six or so square miles. It ended on 30 July with the taking of Avranches and the opening not only of the route to the Brittany coastal ports, but also to the exposed German flank towards the east, and to the heart of France.¹⁵⁵

The significance of the loss of Avranches was still not fully appreciated when Hitler provided Jodl with his overview of the entire military situation on the evening of 31 July. Hitler was far from unrealistic in his assessment. He was well aware of how threatening the position was on all fronts, and how impossible it was in the current circumstances to combat the overwhelming Allied superiority in men and materials, above all in air-power. His main hope was to buy time. Weapon technology, more planes, and an eventual split in the Alliance would open up new opportunities.¹⁵⁶ He had to get some breathing-space in the west, he told his Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, shortly after his briefing with Jodl. Then, with new panzer divisions and fighter formations, he could launch a major offensive on the western front. In common with many observers, Below had thought it more important to concentrate all forces against the Red Army in the east. Hitler replied that he could attack the Russians at a later point. But this could not be done with the Americans already in the Reich. (He led Below to believe at the same time that he feared the power of the Jews in the USA more than the power of the Bolsheviks.¹⁵⁷) His strategy was, therefore, to gain time, inflict a major blow on the western Allies, hope for a split in the Alliance, and turn on the Russians from a new position of strength.

Hitler thought, so he told Jodl, that the eastern front could be stabilized, as long as additional forces could be mobilized. But a breakthrough by the enemy in the east, whether in East Prussia or Silesia, imperilling the homeland itself and bearing serious psychological consequences, would pose a critical danger.¹⁵⁸ Any destabilization on the eastern front would, he went on, affect the stance of the Balkan states — Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Preventive measures had to be taken. It was vital to secure Hungary, both for vital raw materials such as bauxite and manganese and for communications lines with south-eastern Europe. Bulgaria was essential to securing a hold on the Balkans and obtaining ore from Greece.¹⁵⁹ He also feared a British landing in the Balkans or on the Dalmatian islands, which Germany was scarcely in a position to ward off and which ‘could naturally lead to catastrophic consequences’.¹⁶⁰

On the Italian front, Hitler saw the greatest advantage in the tying down of significant Allied forces which could otherwise be deployed elsewhere. The withdrawal of German forces into the Apennines would remove tactical mobility, would still not prevent an Allied advance, and would leave only retreat to alpine defence positions as a possibility — thereby freeing up Allied troops for the western front. But as a last resort, he was prepared to give up Italy (and the entire Balkans), pull back German troops to the Alps, and withdraw his main forces for the vital struggle on the western front.¹⁶¹

This was for him the decisive theatre of war. The troops would not understand him remaining in East Prussia when valuable western parts of the Reich were threatened, and behind them the Ruhr — Germany’s industrial heartland.¹⁶² Preparations would have to be made to move Fuhrer Headquarters to the west.¹⁶³ Command would have to be centralized.¹⁶⁴ Kluge, supreme commander in the west, could not be left with the responsibility. So paranoid was Hitler by now about treachery within the army, that he told Jodl it would be necessary in such an event to avoid communicating such a plan to army command in the west — pointing to Stulpnagel’s involvement in the plot against him — since it would probably be immediately betrayed to the enemy.¹⁶⁵

Hitler pointed to what he saw as a decisive issue in the west. ‘If we lose France as a war area (Kriegsgebiet), we lose the basis of the U-boat war.’¹⁶⁶ (Though, as we have noted, the U-boats were ineffective in the second half of 1944, Hitler was persuaded by Donitz that new, improved submarines would soon be ready, and would be a vital weapon in the war against the western powers.¹⁶⁷) In addition, essential raw materials — he singled out wolfram, important for steel production and electro-technical products — would be lost. If it were not so important to the war effort to hold on to France, he said, he would vacate the coastal areas — still vital for U-boat bases at Brest and St Nazaire — and pull back mobile forces to a more defensible line. But he saw no prospect at present of holding such a line with the forces available, wherever the line might be drawn. ‘We’ve got to be clear,’ he stated, ‘that a change could come about in France only if we succeed — even for a certain time — in gaining air-supremacy.’ But he drew the conclusion that, ‘however bitter it might be at the moment’, everything had to be done to hold back ‘for the most extreme case’ as a ‘last reserve’ whatever Luftwaffe divisions could be assembled in the Reich — though that could take weeks — to be deployed wherever it might be possible ‘at the last throw of the dice (wo die letzten Wurfel fallen)’ to bring about a decisive shift in fortunes.¹⁶⁸

Hitler was desperate to buy time. ‘I can’t operate myself,’ he said, ‘but I can make it colossally difficult for the enemy to operate in the depths of the area.’ For this, it was essential to deprive the enemy of access to ports on the French coast, preventing the landing of troops, armaments, and provisions. (At this point only Cherbourg, with a much-damaged harbour, was in Allied hands.) Hitler was prepared, as he bluntly stated, ‘simply to sacrifice certain troops’ to this end. The ports were to be held, he emphasized, ‘under all circumstances, with complete disregard for the people there, to make it impossible for the enemy to supply unlimited numbers of men’. Should this not happen, a breakthrough could come quickly. Along with this, in an early glimpse of what would become a ‘scorched-earth’ policy targeted finally at the Reich itself, all railway installations, including track and locomotives,