fight.132 Goebbels remained among the more clear-sighted Nazi leaders, cautious from the outset about the chances of a major triumph in the Ardennes. He too, however, ended the year in good spirits, convinced that the offensive had widened the conflict between the Allies, that the Germans had won back the initiative in the west and reduced the pressure on the western front.133 The enigmatic Speer was the least given to fanciful illusions among Nazi leaders. He knew the full extent of Germany’s economic plight. And he had seen at first hand the realities of the Ardennes offensive, the hopelessness, despite the initial successes, of the attempt to break the stranglehold of mightily superior enemy forces. For Speer, so he later claimed, ‘with the Ardennes offensive the war was at an end’, apart from the drawn-out process of enemy occupation of Germany.134 But Speer’s desire for power and influence, as well as ambitions, even now, to play some part in a world after Hitler, kept him going. However resigned he was to Germany’s impending defeat, he saw no way out—and no course of action other than doing all he could to sustain the German war effort.
Among the generals—beyond the leadership of the OKW where, in Hitler’s direct proximity, illusions still held sway—there was widespread recognition that defences were now desperately overstretched, resources as good as at an end, the chances of staving off powerful enemies minimal. General of the Waffen-SS Karl Wolff, formerly chief of Himmler’s personal staff and now ‘Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht’ in Italy, became finally convinced that the war was irretrievably lost through conversations with young SS officers who had been part of the spearhead of the Ardennes offensive.135 Guderian probably spoke for most generals in his frustration with Hitler’s leadership and the crass inflexibility which had worsened Germany’s position. He acknowledged the size of the odds stacked against the Wehrmacht, given the immense disproportion in military might of the enemy. He felt, nevertheless, that it was necessary to continue to strain every sinew in the struggle to fend off the assault on the Reich, and to gain time—perhaps for the Allied coalition to crack, perhaps for some negotiated end to the nightmare, perhaps… who knew for what?
Aware of what was coming on the eastern front, Guderian pleaded in vain with Jodl for the transfer of troops from the west. Jodl refused, insisting that they were needed to retain the initiative in the west.136 The subsidiary offensive in Alsace, code-named ‘North Wind’, for which the troops, desperately needed in the east, were allegedly so vital, had been intended to bolster the southern flank of the major offensive in the Ardennes. Ordered by Hitler on 21 December, and started on New Year’s Eve, it made little headway and ground to a halt as early as 3 January.137 The consequence of this predictable failure, on top of losses from the Ardennes offensive, was to leave the overall military situation substantially worse than it had been in mid- December. In the west, the Luftwaffe was effectively now finished. Some 80,000 much-needed soldiers—a number raised under such extreme difficulties—had been lost, huge quantities of armaments had been destroyed and fuel supplies were rapidly running out. In the east, the expected offensive could only be faced with maximum apprehension—made worse by the losses in the west. Even so, the generals had no alternative in mind other than to follow Hitler’s orders, however insane they thought them to be. Neither the will nor the organizational capacity was there to challenge his authority as a group, let alone face him individually with any ultimatum to avoid the looming catastrophe. A glimpse into the prevailing mentality can be gleaned from a comment made by Goring at the beginning of November to General Werner Kreipe, just dismissed from his post as Chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe. Kreipe had pressed Goring—still exuding optimism that the enemy would be defeated, and that their coalition would split—to confront Hitler and urge him to find a political way out. The Reich Marshal refused point- blank, saying that to do so would take away the Fuhrer’s self-belief.138
At the very pinnacle of the regime, Hitler could still muster his tried and tested act of supreme confidence and optimism, however bleak the reality. Even at this stage he was able to fire up those around him. More importantly, given the fragmentation in the subordinate leadership and their inability to pose any collective criticism of his leadership, let alone think of a united and frontal challenge to his authority, he could continue to demand the impossible and expect his orders to be obeyed. He still hoped and vainly expected that the Allied coalition would crack. His own hold on reality was waning, but had far from vanished. Beneath the veneer of indomitability that his role of Fuhrer demanded, he was eminently capable of realizing the consequences of the unfolding disaster. His Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, found him one evening after the failure of the Ardennes offensive, depressed and admitting that the war was lost—characteristically attributing it to betrayal and the failings of others. For him now the struggle was about his place in history—a heroic end, not a cowardly capitulation for the country as in 1918. ‘We’ll not capitulate,’ Below recalled him saying. ‘Never. We can go down. But we’ll take a world with us.’139
Following the failure in the Ardennes, defences in the west were severely weakened. They would nevertheless hold reasonably firm for a few weeks yet, until the major Allied onslaught in March. But in the east, catastrophe was imminent.
5. Calamity in the East
The machine of duty, the will and the unquestioned ‘must’ application of the last ounce of strength work automatically within us. Only seldom do you think about the big ‘what now’.
The conviction that a victory of the Soviets would mean the extinction of life of the German people and of every individual is the general feeling of all people.
I
The storm broke on 12 January 1945 and raged with savage ferocity for the next three weeks. By the end of the month, vital eastern regions of the Reich—East Prussia to the north, East Brandenburg (between the Oder and what had once been the Polish border), Silesia with its crucial heavy industry to the south—and all of what remained of occupied Poland had been lost. The Wehrmacht had suffered huge, irreparable losses in intensely fierce and bitter fighting. The German civilian population had faced unspeakable horror as it fled in panic. The Red Army now stood on the banks of the Oder, the last natural barrier before Berlin. The roof had fallen in on the Third Reich.
The great Soviet offensive had been expected. The German General Staff even calculated exactly when it would start.1 But when it came, the Wehrmacht was still ill-prepared for it.
In the main, this simply reflected the crass imbalance of forces. Across the entire eastern front of around 2,400 kilometres the estimated enemy superiority was immense: eleven times more infantry, seven times more tanks, twenty times more guns, twenty times stronger in air-power.2 The discrepancy was smallest in the north of the front, in East Prussia, though massive even there. Further south, the central part of the front, it was overwhelming. German losses in the last six months of 1944 had been almost as high as in the whole of the previous three years, since the attack on the Soviet Union, and practically all possible reserves—often of ill-trained and unsuitable men—had by now been scraped together.3 In the path of the Red Army along the Vistula, defending a sector of around 725 kilometres, stood the 9th Army, the 4th Panzer Army and the 17th Army, all part of Army Group A, commanded by Colonel-General Josef Harpe and significantly weakened over previous months. The Army Group’s southern flank in the Carpathians was protected by Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici’s 1st Panzer Army. In the north of the front, guarding East Prussia, the route of the Russian invasion of the Reich in 1914, was the rebuilt Army Group Centre, under Colonel-General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, whose 3rd Panzer Army, 2nd and 4th Armies, together with 120 battalions of about 80,000 badly equipped
