hours, Hitler suddenly backed down and assigned General Walther Wenck to Himmler’s headquarters to take over effective command of the planned limited counter-offensive on the Oder in Pomerania. ‘The General Staff has won a battle this day,’ he declared.18 The Reichsfuhrer-SS’s failure as a military commander would finally — and belatedly — be recognized by Hitler in his replacement by Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici on 20 March.19 It marked a significant point in the growing estrangement of Hitler and his SS chief.20
The catastrophe on the eastern front was by that time well-nigh complete. In the south, fired by the fanatical Nazi leadership of Gauleiter Karl Hanke, Breslau held out under siege until early May.21 Glogau, to the north-west, also continued to resist. But the defiance was of little military significance. By the end of January, the key industrial region of Silesia was lost to Germany. By 23 January Russian troops had already reached the Oder between Oppeln and Ohlau; five days later, they crossed it at Steinau, south of Breslau.22 Further north, Posen was encircled and most of the Warthegau lost.23 Its Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, one of Hitler’s most brutal henchmen, who had imposed a reign of terror on the predominantly Polish population of his fiefdom, had already fled westwards, along with other Nazi leaders from the region, in an attempt — ultimately to prove futile — to save his own skin.24 His flight, like that of other Party representatives, fuelled the anger and contempt of ordinary people at the behaviour of Nazi bigwigs.25
By the first days of February, Soviet troops had established a bridgehead over the Oder between Kustrin and Frankfurt an der Oder. Even now, Hitler, waving his fists in a frenzy of rage, refused to listen to Guderian’s entreaties to evacuate forthwith the military outposts in the Balkans, Italy, Norway, and, especially, Courland to free up reserves to defend the capital.26 All that Guderian could muster was poured into a short-lived German counter-offensive in Pomerania in mid-February. Easily fending this off, the Red Army occupied practically the whole of Pomerania during February and early March. Though the surrounded Konigsberg was still holding out, most of East Prussia was by now also in Soviet hands.
The immense Soviet gains of January had by then been consolidated, and even extended. Zhuvov’s men had advanced almost 300 miles since the middle of January. From the bridgehead on the Oder near Kustrin, Berlin lay open to attack, only forty or so miles away. The last obstacle
While this disaster of colossal proportions was unfolding on the eastern front, the Allies in the west were swiftly reasserting themselves after staving off the Ardennes offensive.28 By early February, some 2 million American, British, Canadian, and French soldiers were ready for the assault on Germany.29 The attack of the Canadian 1st Army, which began on 8 February south of Nijmegen in the Wesel direction, met stiff opposition and could at first advance only slowly, amid bitter fighting. But in the last week of the month, American troops to the south-west pushed rapidly forwards towards Cologne, reaching the Rhine south of Dusseldorf on 2 March and the outskirts of Cologne three days later. Hitler’s dismissal — again — of Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Commander-in-Chief in the West, who had tried in vain to persuade him to withdraw his forces behind the Rhine, and replacement on 10 March by Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring, the former tenacious defender of German positions in Italy, made no difference.30
Retreating German troops had blown up the Rhine bridges everywhere as they went — except Remagen, between Bonn and Koblenz, which was discovered intact, as the retreating Germans failed to detonate in time the explosives they had laid, and immediately secured by American forces of the 1st US Army under General Courtney H. Hodges on 7 March. With a bridgehead swiftly established, the last natural barrier in the way of the western Allies had been crossed. Within a fortnight, American troops had again crossed the Rhine, boldly using assault boats — the first time such a manoeuvre had been undertaken since Napoleon’s era — at Oppenheim, south of Mainz, then rapidly erecting a pontoon bridge and consolidating their position on the right bank of the river.31 By then, the banks of the Rhine between Koblenz and Ludwigshafen were under American control. Further north, Montgomery now enjoyed a staged moment of glory as, watched by Churchill and Eisenhower, his troops crossed the Lower Rhine on 23 — 4 March following a massive air and artillery assault on Wesel. The most serious German resistance had by now been largely overcome. A third of all the German forces arrayed on the western front had been lost since early February — 293,000 men captured, 60,000 killed or wounded. Hitler’s insistence on refusing to concede any territory west of the Rhine, rather than retreating to fight from behind the river, as Rundstedt had recommended, had itself contributed significantly to the magnitude and speed of the Allied success.32
As German defences were collapsing on both eastern and western fronts and enemy forces prepared to strike at the very heart of the Reich, German cities as well as military installations and fuel plants were being subjected to the most ferocious bombing of the entire war. Pressed by the British Air Marshal Arthur Harris’s Bomber Command, the American and British chiefs of staff had agreed by the end of January to exploit the shock of the Soviet offensive by extending the planned air-attacks on strategic targets — mainly oil-plants and transport interchanges — to include the area-bombing and destruction of Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, and other cities in central and eastern Germany. The aim was to intensify the mounting chaos in the big urban centres in the east of the Reich, as thousands of refugees fled westwards from the path of the Red Army. In addition, the western Allies were keen to demonstrate to Stalin, about to meet Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta, that they were lending support to the Soviet offensive in their bombing campaign. The result was to magnify massively the terror from the skies as the bombs rained down on near-defenceless citizens. Beyond the forty-three large-scale precision attacks on Magdeburg, Gelsenkirchen, Bottrop, Leuna, Ludwigshafen, and other targeted installations that laid waste Germany’s fuel production, massive raids directed at civilian centres of population turned German inner-cities into wastelands. Berlin was hit on 3 February by the most damaging raid it had suffered so far during the war, killing 3,000 and injuring a further 2,000 people. Some of its poorer inner-city areas suffered most. Ten days later, on the night of 13 — 14 February, the beautiful city of Dresden, the glittering cultural capital of Saxony, renowned for its fine china but scarcely a major industrial centre, and now teeming with refugees, was turned into a towering inferno as thousands of incendiaries and explosive bombs were dropped by waves of RAF Lancaster bombers (followed next day by a further massive raid by American B-17S). At least 35,000 citizens are estimated to have lost their lives in the most ruthless display experienced of Allied air superiority and strength.33 Other devastated cities included Essen, Dortmund, Mainz, Munich, Nuremberg, and Wurzburg. In the last four and a half months of the war, 471,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany, double the amount during the entire year of 1943. In March alone, almost three times as many bombs were dispatched as during the whole of the year 1942.34
By that time, Germany — militarily and economically — was on its knees. But as long as Hitler lived, there could be no prospect of surrender.
II
The savage brutality inflicted on those they had conquered — most of all in the eastern parts of Europe — was now rebounding on the German people. In the last months they reaped the whirlwind of the unconstrained barbarism Hitler’s regime had sown.
As news of the Red Army’s advance spread like wildfire, East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, and other eastern regions were filled with panic-stricken refugees, often scarcely equipped to cope with the bitter cold, fleeing with or without their possessions by any means they could find, many of them on foot. ‘The roads are full of refugees, carts, and pedestrians,’ one eye-witness recalled. ‘Now and then cars packed with people and suitcases go by, followed by envious looks from those on foot. Again and again there are jams. People are gripped by panic as the cry goes up: “The Russians are close!” People look at each other. That can’t be possible. Then a man comes by on horseback, shouting in a loud voice: “Save yourselves, you who can. The Russians will be here in half an hour.” We’re overcome by a paralysing fear.’35
Another report, from Konigsberg, where the main square was thronged with refugee-wagons, mainly driven
