claiming after the war that he had disobeyed Hitler in unilaterally ordering the attack to the west to break out of the encirclement. In reality, however, down to Reinhardt’s dismissal on 26 January he was acting with the full support of his Commander-in-Chief. The decision, reluctantly to act against Hitler’s wishes because he felt he had no choice, appears to have been in the first instance Reinhardt’s, rather than Ho?bach’s.
The aim of Army Group Centre’s leadership in retreating to Heilsberg was to move to a more defensible position. Once there, further consideration could be given to whether there was anything left of East Prussia to try to save. Ho?bach’s view, so he wrote shortly after the war, was more radical still. He knew East Prussia was lost, he stated. He saw the only option as trying to save the German forces trapped there so that they could fight again.100
This became an end in itself. Desperation produced its own dynamic. Ho?bach, like other military leaders, later claimed that the reason he had fought on was to protect and save the civilian population. The truth was different: saving the army came first. Of course, commanders, as Reinhardt’s diary notes and letters as well as other contemporary accounts make plain, were frequently shaken and saddened by the plight of the refugees in the depths of the East Prussian winter. Retreating soldiers often did what they could to carry refugees with them or help where they could, though this amounted to little. The misery they witnessed had a depressing effect on troop morale.101 Unquestionably, the Wehrmacht wanted where possible to prevent the population falling into the hands of the Soviets. But the streams of refugees on the frozen roads threatened to hamper the breakthrough to the west. Reinhardt’s orders on 22 January showed where the priorities lay. ‘Treks that disturb troop movements on the main roads’, ordered Reinhardt, ‘are to be removed from these roads… It’s painful, certainly. But the situation demands it.’102 ‘The civilian population has to keep back,’ Ho?bach in turn told his subordinate commanders of the 4th Army two days later. ‘It sounds horrible, but can’t unfortunately be altered, since, tough though it is, it’s a matter now after the loss of East Prussia of getting the military forces there back to the homeland with some fighting power.’ ‘Treks have to get down off the roads,’ he put it bluntly to Reinhardt later the same evening.103 Repeatedly, the retreating army put the order into practice, manhandling refugees and their carts off the roads as they forced their way westwards.
Military logic can, of course, at times determine that the civilian population has to suffer in the short term to allow the armed forces to reorganize in order to benefit that population in the longer term. But there was little sign of clear strategic thinking in the mayhem of East Prussia in January 1945. Rescuing the troops so that they could fight again, Ho?bach’s avowed aim, did not attempt to explain the purpose of fighting on. Precise motivation is not easy to discern, for leaders or for troops. Gaining time until the enemy coalition split was becoming a fainter hope by the day. ‘Now it’s a question of holding in the west and developing German partisan war in the east,’ one colonel stated—the only hope in ‘a fight to the death’. This still left the ultimate purpose unsaid, and was in any case an aim rapidly being overtaken by events.104 ‘Defence of the Fatherland’ was an abstraction. And where would it be defended? At the Oder (and the Rhine)? Within the Reich itself? In the Reich capital until all was destroyed? The savagery of the Soviet attack, and the dread of falling into enemy hands, a sense of self- preservation, loyalty to immediate comrades facing the same fate, and anxieties about loved ones back home provided sufficient motivation for most ordinary soldiers—when they reflected at all on why they were continuing the fight. For those leading them, there was perhaps another element. Reinhardt’s diary remark that an almost automated sense of duty drove on his actions, with little or no thought to further consequences, probably applied to most military leaders, and not just on the eastern front.
This meant that the military leadership, devoid of any alternative strategy for ending the war, was objectively continuing to work towards the regime’s only remaining goal—of fighting to the last, whatever the cost in material destruction and human lives. Hitler’s decisions during the January crisis in the east furthered that goal alone. As always, generals found wanting were discarded as easily as used shell-cartridges, even if, like Reinhardt, their task had been hopeless. Hitler replaced Reinhardt with Colonel-General Lothar Rendulic?, a trusted Austrian, tough, shrewd and capable—though no more capable than Reinhardt had been of mastering the impossible task in East Prussia. In Ho?bach’s view, he arrived without any understanding of the overall situation, had no relationship with the troops now placed under his command, ‘probably acted on binding orders of Hitler’ and greatly overestimated the strength of the forces at his disposal. He clashed immediately with Ho?bach over the intended breakthrough to the west at the cost of abandoning Konigsberg and the Samland to their fate, saying he would not support a move he described as ‘worthy of death’.105 Only now did Ho?bach act independently, against the wishes of the Army Group leadership. The breakout went ahead, but, lacking in sufficient strength, was already floundering by 30 January when Ho?bach, too, was sacked and replaced by General Friedrich-Wilhelm Muller, competent though without experience of high command, who broke off the attempt to reach the Vistula.106
Further south, an enraged Hitler had already dismissed the chief of Army Group A, Colonel-General Harpe, blamed for the abandonment of Warsaw despite the order to hold the city at all costs.107 His replacement, the commander who most epitomizes Nazi values, the brutal Colonel-General Ferdinand Schorner, lost no time in imposing his own ruthless discipline on retreating troops, mercilessly rounding up deserters and carrying out exemplary executions.108 He demanded of his subordinate officers that they put down immediately any sign of desertion or indiscipline without concern for the fine points of a legal trial. Justice was subordinate to the general interest. ‘After all, war is also not “fair”,’ he reasoned.109 Much later, when he returned from imprisonment in Russia and was facing trial in West Germany, Schorner claimed that on taking up his command he found demoralization of troops, millions of refugees on the roads preventing ordered troop movements and disintegration of fighting units. He had been able to restore the situation and through tough measures had eventually stabilized the front. His aim, he stated, had nothing now to do with ‘final victory’ or the regime, but was solely the prevention of the Red Army advancing into Germany and saving hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Bolsheviks.110 This conveniently overlooked his determination, even at this desperate stage, to do all he possibly could to implement Hitler’s ‘fight to the last’ policy in the most fanatical fashion.
On 25 January Hitler took the opportunity of the personnel changes to redesignate the Army Groups, bringing them more in line with reality. Army Group A, taken over by Schorner, became Army Group Centre; Army Group Centre, placed under Rendulic?, was renamed Army Group North; and Army Group North, stranded in Courland despite Guderian’s entreaties to evacuate the 200,000 or so much-needed troops trapped there for better deployment on the heavily stretched fronts elsewhere, was turned into Army Group Courland under the command of Colonel-General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, who was moved to the frozen north from sunnier climes on the Italian front. The changes reflected the need felt by the leadership to combat signs of wavering morale and the potential collapse of the front from within through the imposition of ruthless discipline. ‘Triumph of the will’ through blind obedience was set to replace totally the imperatives of military professionalism. To reinforce this, the head of the OKW, Field-Marshal Keitel, demanded unconditional obedience in carrying out orders and ordered the imposition of the death penalty by military courts for anyone failing in this.111 In the most remarkable move, Hitler created a new force, Army Group Vistula, to shore up the tottering defences of north-eastern Germany and block the assault on the line of the Oder north of Glogau and Soviet penetration of West Prussia and Pomerania. Astonishingly, and in a move that smacked of desperation, he gave the command to Heinrich Himmler—skilled at the merciless treatment of helpless political and racial victims, certainly, but whose only experience of high-level frontline military leadership had been his brief and unsuccessful command of the hastily assembled Army Group Upper Rhine in the preceding weeks. His role was to restore order to the wavering front and, through harsh discipline, ensure an unrelenting fight to the end.112 His troops consisted at first largely of what was left of the forces of the 9th and 2nd Armies, though by mid-February he commanded some forty divisions.113
One of Hitler’s firmest backers in the unconditional fight to the end was Grand-Admiral Donitz, whose actions belie the post-war image he cultivated of the unpolitical, purely professional military man. Donitz was a real hardliner, totally committed to the fight against Communism. He never wavered in his complete support for Hitler, whom, he said in post-war interrogations, he saw as a man of ‘extreme chivalry and kindness’. He insisted that his relations with Hitler had been purely those ‘of a soldier, who was in his activities entirely limited to his province; that is to his soldier’s interests’,114 and presented himself as primarily concerned only with the fate of the stricken civilian population of the east. He declared that, after the opening of the Soviet offensive on the eastern front in January, saving the inhabitants of the eastern provinces was the most important task for the German soldier, and he proudly recounted the navy’s role in ferrying more than 2 million Germans to the west in the
