‘How does he think that can come about? He knows only too well that there is no further way, unless I shoot myself in the head.’4
The ‘either-or’ dogmatism, the stubbornly principled refusal to entertain compromise or concession, had served him well and had invariably proved successful in his political ‘career’ as long as he was combating weak, divided, and irresolute opponents. But it was a massive and insuperable obstacle when enemy positions were strong and united, when initiative had been irretrievably lost, bargaining power was weakening by the day, and more flexible military tactics and more subtle political skills were desperately needed. Not just the scale of the monstrous crimes against humanity perpetrated by his regime eliminated the possibility of any search for a negotiated end to the war — which could conceivably have been attained by a different leadership despite the Allied demands for ‘unconditional surrender’ stipulated in 1943 at Casablanca. His character, and everything he had stood for since entering politics, also categorically ruled it out. Hitler’s temperament, often revealed in crises on his way to attaining absolute power — in 1921, for instance, when he gained the Party leadership, in 1923, when forcing ahead the ill-fated putsch, or in 1932 when faced with the challenge of Gregor Strasser — inclined him to pose self-destruction as the alternative to having his own way. There was indeed a touch of the theatrical, the melodramatic, the hysterical about his threats of suicide. But they nevertheless reflected a genuine, deep-rooted trait of Hitler’s character. His philosophy of life as ‘struggle’, his reduction of all elements of conflict to stark ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘either-or’, his instinctively radical stance on all matters, precluded any thought of retreat or compromise, leaving only the threat of self-destruction as his alternative to domination of his will.
Thus a Wagnerian end implicitly beckoned. There would be no capitulation at any cost — even if this meant bringing down Valhalla.
I
Hitler was still reeling from the failure of the Ardennes offensive, his last big hope, when all hell broke loose on the eastern front. The Soviet offensive had started. The main thrust, from bridgeheads on the Vistula, south of Warsaw, was aimed at southern Poland, then on to the vital Silesian industrial belt, and the river Oder, the last barrier before Berlin. Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front began the attack on 12 January, following a five-hour artillery barrage, from the Baranov bridgehead on the southern Vistula. It was rapidly followed, farther to the north, from the bridgeheads at Polavy and Magnuszev, by an assault from Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front. A secondary thrust, by the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts, from bridgeheads on the river Narev to the north of Warsaw, aimed at cutting off German troops in East Prussia.
The Red Army’s superiority in numbers was overwhelming. In the vital central sector of the 900-kilometre front that stretched from the Carpathians to the Baltic, some 2,200,000 Soviet troops were arrayed against 400,000 on the German side. But at the key bridgeheads on the Vistula, from where the offensive was launched, the imbalance was massive. The German general staff calculated that it was 11 to 1 in infantry, 7 to 1 in tanks, and 20 to 1 in guns in favour of the Red Army.5 Aware from the reports of General Reinhard Gehlen, head of ‘Foreign Armies East’ department, of the huge build-up of Soviet forces and of an impending offensive, Guderian had pleaded with Hitler at Christmas, when the Ardennes offensive had already lost impetus, to transfer troops to the east. Hitler had dismissed Gehlen’s reports as enemy bluff, ‘the greatest imposture since Ghengis Khan’.6 When, on a further visit to Fuhrer Headquarters at Ziegenberg on New Year’s Day 1945, Guderian had wrung the release of four divisions out of Hitler, the Dictator insisted they be sent to Hungary, not to the centre of the eastern front where military intelligence was pointing to the looming peril.7 On 9 January, Guderian had made a further trip to Ziegenberg to show Hitler diagrams and charts displaying the relative strength of forces in the vulnerable areas on the Vistula. Hitler, in a rage, rejected them as ‘completely idiotic’, and told Guderian that whoever had compiled them should be shut up in a lunatic asylum. Guderian defended Gehlen and stood his ground. The storm subsided as rapidly as it had blown up. But Hitler nevertheless contemptuously refused the urgent recommendations to evacuate parts of the Vistula and Narev, withdraw to more defensible positions, and transfer forces from the west to shore up these weak points of the front. Guderian remarked, prophetically: ‘The Eastern Front is like a house of cards. If the front is broken through at one point, all the rest will collapse.’ Hitler’s reply was that ‘The Eastern Front must help itself and make do with what it’s got.’ As Guderian later commented, it was an ‘ostrich strategy’.8
A week later, on 16 January, with the Red Army already making massive advances, Hitler, now back in Berlin, was finally prepared to transfer troops from west to east. But Guderian was outraged to learn that Sepp Dietrich’s 6th Panzer Army — brought back from the unsuccessful Ardennes campaign and forming the bulk of the new forces available — was to be sent to Hungary, where Hitler was hoping to force the Russians back across the Danube and relieve Budapest. With German synthetic oil-plants destroyed by air-raids in mid-January, retention of the Hungarian oil-fields and refineries was, for him, the vital consideration. Without them, he argued, the German war effort was doomed anyway.9 Nor did Guderian have much success in trying to persuade Hitler to evacuate by sea over the Baltic the German troops in grave danger of being cut off in Courland, on the tip of Latvia, for redeployment on the eastern front. Donitz had been instrumental in persuading Hitler that Courland was a vital coastal area for the new U-boats which, he claimed, were almost ready to be turned against the west.10 The consequence was that 200,000 desperately needed troops were tied up in Courland until Germany’s capitulation in May.11
As Guderian had predicted, the Wehrmacht was wholly incapable of blocking the Red Army’s advance. By 17 January, the Soviet troops had steamrollered over the troops in their path. The way to the German frontier now lay open before them. Overhead, Soviet planes controlled the skies, strafing and bombing at will. Some German divisions were surrounded; others retreated westward as fast as they could go. Warsaw was evacuated by the remaining German forces on 17 January, driving Hitler into such a paroxysm of rage that, at a critical point of the advance when they were needed for vital military operations, he had several officers from the General Staff who had issued signals connected with the withdrawal from Warsaw arrested and — together with Guderian himself — interrogated for hours by the head of the Reich Security Head Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and the chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Muller.12
On 18 January, Soviet troops entered Budapest. The battles in the city would last until mid-February, bitter fighting around Lake Balaton and in other parts of Hungary for several weeks longer.13 But however much weight Hitler attached to it, the uneven contest could have only one outcome. And Hungary formed little more than a sideshow to the major catastrophe for the Reich unfolding to the north, where Soviet troops encountered little serious opposition as they advanced at great speed through Poland. Lodz was taken. The towns of Kalisz and Posen in the Warthegau were already in their sights.14 On 20 January, they crossed the German border in the Posen area and in Silesia.
Still further north, German forces were in disarray in the face of Soviet advances into East Prussia. Colonel- General Hans Reinhardt, commander of Army Group Centre which was defending East Prussia, was sacked by a raging Hitler for evacuating coastal positions when Soviet troops broke through on 26 January, cutting off two German armies. General Friedrich Ho?bach, commanding the 4th Army, was also peremptorily dismissed by a furious Hitler for ignoring orders to hold ground — and not consulting his Army Group about his decision — when faced with a hopeless position and in grave danger of encirclement.15 In a wild temper, Hitler accused both Reinhardt and Ho?bach of treason.16 But a change of personnel — the capable Austrian Colonel-General Lothar Rendulic in place of Reinhardt, and General Friedrich-Wilhelm Muller for Ho?bach — could do nothing to alter the disastrous German collapse in the face of hopeless odds, in East Prussia as on the rest of the eastern front. This proved equally true in Hitler’s replacement on 17 January of Colonel-General Josef Harpe, made the scapegoat for the collapse of the Vistula front, by his favourite, Colonel-General Ferdinand Schorner, and his ill- judged appointment on 25 January of Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, in the teeth of Guderian’s strident objections, to take command of the newly formed and hastily constituted Army Group Vistula which aimed to stave off the Soviet advance into Pomerania. The hope that ‘triumph of the will’ and the toughness of one of his most trusted ‘hard’ men would prevail rapidly proved ill-founded.17 Himmler, backed by courageous but militarily inexperienced Waffen-SS officers, soon found that combating the might of the Red Army was a far stiffer task than rounding up and persecuting helpless political opponents and ‘racial inferiors’. By mid-February, Hitler was forced to concede that Army Group Vistula was inadequately led. After a furious row with Guderian lasting two
