An Honourable Defeat (25 page)

The Russian campaign was the most bloody and bitterly fought of the war. The Soviets lost 20 million men — a tenth of the entire population of the Soviet Union — and hundreds of villages and towns were razed to the ground. Almost from the start the very landscape was against the Germans — Hoepner’s advance on Leningrad failed in part because this was not the terrain for tanks, and to the south Hoth’s advance on Minsk was similarly impaired by sandy tracts of land and dense forests. In the end, Hoepner’s tanks were withdrawn, and German and Finnish infantry settled in for the long siege of Leningrad. Minsk was taken, and Guderian and Kleist drove into the Ukraine, but, as autumn brought torrential rain, more problems began. The Germans were now faced with the difficulty of maintaining a front of nearly 1500 miles, from Leningrad to Rostov-on-Don, which in places was up to 600 miles deep. Seventy-five per cent of the German Army was committed here, comprising its best divisions. This was a very big gamble.

That the Germans held on at all is a testimony to their doggedness and courage. They were not equipped for the severity of a Russian winter, with temperatures of well below -25° Celsius. Hitler, who had run the campaign personally from the first, almost without consultation, would not hear of retreat. When Guderian and Hoepner withdrew their troops for sound humane and tactical reasons, both were dismissed in disgrace. An attack ordered on Moscow in the depths of winter ground to a halt in the suburbs of the city on 5 December. The city never fell to Hitler.

Guderian was subsequently recalled; Hoepner was not. Already allied to the Resistance, Hoepner had never had any faith in the assault on the USSR, telling his ADC: ‘This can’t be true: it’ll be our hara-kiri.’

His Number 4 Tank Group was ordered away from the Leningrad Front in mid-September 1941 to join the attack on Moscow. After fighting his way south-eastwards, by November he could see no chance of a successful conclusion of the campaign that winter and requested permission to retreat, secure winter quarters and batten down. This was refused, and Hoepner could see that if he continued to follow the Führer’s orders he would be cut off by the Russians coming behind him at Borovsk, Kaluga, near Moscow. He struggled with his conscience for a long time before deciding that his duty to his men took precedence over his obedience to Hitler. On 8 January 1942 he gave the order to withdraw. He was relieved of his command the following day. By now the diktat of the Führer-order was in place: Hitler’s word was absolute law, in accordance with the Führer-principle. The dictator saw himself as nothing less than god on earth. It is strange that so few people stood up to such a manifest lunatic; but the nation was now firmly locked into war, and many of the generals were torn between fighting for their country and the attendant obligation of fighting for Hitler. More and more of them closed their minds to the implications of defending Nazism along with Germany. Unified action by the generals could have stopped the war at any time; but any hope of creating the necessary unity — if it had ever truly been possible — was vain by now.

In his farewell address to his troops Hoepner said, ‘I have been in the Army since my youth and as I have learnt a sacred duty to the German soldier, I feel that my obedience is owed to a higher authority than any on earth. At any time I would repeat the action which has led to my dismissal.’

This dismissal was another smack in the face for the Army, for Hoepner was summarily dismissed, without benefit of a hearing or a court martial. He was deprived of his right to wear uniform — a singular dishonour — and of his pension (though the latter punish-ment was later rescinded). He retired to Berlin, now a confirmed and dangerous enemy of the Reich. Immediately he took up contact with the military Resistance there, and became a regular attender at Wednesday Club meetings. Beck briefed him to take over the Reserve Army in the event of a successful coup.

Hoepner’s commanding officers did not stand up for him against Hitler, who by now had added the title of Commander-in-Chief of the Army to his other titles. On 6 December von Brauchitsch, who had suffered a series of heart attacks, tendered his resignation. Hitler’s response was that he was too busy to pay attention to such petty matters at that moment; but on the 19th Brauchitsch’s retirement was duly announced. Hitler told Halder that although he would remain as Chief of Staff, all administrative functions relating to Army High Command would be transferred to Keitel. Halder’s job therefore had no meaning any more. He did not resign, however, but continued to attend strategy meetings, and courageously kept up his criticism of Hitler’s increasingly erratic plans. Finally Hitler had had enough. On 24 September 1942 Halder was dismissed in one of Hitler’s not infrequent High Command reshuffles. His nerves were shattered, but he had managed to be a thorn in the flesh of the Führer, and also something of a restraining influence. In the round-up following 20 July 1944, he was arrested and interrogated, but sent to a VIP barrack in a concentration camp. He survived the war.

The winter of 1941-42 saw a change in Army High Command following the departure of Brauchitsch. Two generals who had long been a source of irritation to Hitler, von Leeb and Witzleben, were retired — the latter on grounds of ill health which had plagued the ageing soldier for years, but which did not prevent him from continuing to be of service to the Resistance.

Despite Stalin’s counter-attacks — he had hoped that ‘General Winter’ would help drive the Germans out of Russia as it had the French in 1812 — the German Army held its line, and in June 1942 could even launch a new campaign of its own. Hitler’s purpose was to secure the Baku oilfields in the Caucasus, as those of Romania were no longer supplying enough for him. The idea was that Hoth’s panzer army would drive the Russians back to the line Voronezh-Stalingrad and hold them there, while Kleist drove south-east down to Baku, occupying the land between the Black and Caspian Seas. Throughout the summer the campaign went well, but, ominously, by the end of August 1942 it had become bogged down. Stalingrad proved almost impossible to take. The city straddled the River Volga and the Russians could send reinforcements across every night: they were never driven back to the east bank completely. But Hitler was determined to hold on to what he had of the city, even though Kleist’s advance had ground to a halt to the south as a result. More and more troops were poured into the Stalingrad cauldron, to no avail, and, as not enough German divisions were available, weaker units of Hungarians, Italians and Romanians were used. The Russians counter-attacked in mid-November, stronger both on land and in the air, as well as being used to, and fully equipped for, fighting in conditions of deep snow and freezing cold. The Romanian armies protecting either side of the city crumbled immediately and the Russians had the city surrounded within three days, encircling twenty-two divisions — 250,000 men — of the German 6th Army. Hitler ordered them to stand firm, and told Hoth to break through to relieve them. This was a mistake because Hoth could not organise a relieving action until mid-December, by which time the Russians had the city firmly in their grip. Soon afterwards they smashed the remaining Italian and Romanian armies in the area. A plan by Göring to relieve the city by air proved to be as vainglorious as its proposer, marking the end of Göring’s already shaky career. At last, Hitler ordered Hoth and Kleist to retreat to lines they could defend. The 6th Army was left to its fate but ordered to fight to the last man. On 2 February 1943 its commander, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, finally surrendered. There were only 90,000 survivors. Nazi propaganda gave it out that
all
had died in a glorious action on behalf of the Fatherland.

Before Stalingrad, Hitler had been at the peak of his power, his dominion stretching from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. The orders to Hoth and Kleist to retreat were the first such orders he had ever given. On 30 January 1943 he celebrated the tenth anniversary of his seizure of power, but it was the beginning of the end now, as everyone but the Führer and his most fanatical acolytes realised. The Resistance, however, still felt a moral duty to try to bring him down. Perhaps Germany might yet be saved from the wreck of the Third Reich.

Since 1939, when the pact between Stalin and Hitler was concluded, the Communist Resistance in Germany had been in abeyance. Hard-line ideologues held that anything the Soviet Union did must ultimately be in the interests of world Communism, but ordinary workers with serious socialist views could not go along with such a blinkered point of view. After the outbreak of war with the USSR, issues once again became clearer, though efforts to make reasonable contact (as Trott tried to in 1943) with such extravagant revolutionary figures as Alexandra Kollontai, Russia’s ambassadress in Stockholm, whose taste for high living was notorious, came to nothing.

At home, several groups made their presence felt. A many-branched organisation had centred itself since the late thirties on the Berliner Robert Uhrig, who succeeded in making Berlin a core of Communist Resistance until the early forties. His contacts spread not only to workers’ underground organisations in Hamburg, the Ruhr and the industrial south, but also to the group run by Beppo Romer and even to the Goerdeler group. Their activities involved the distribution of anti-Nazi literature and industrial disruption, especially in the armaments industry. Uhrig himself, a lifelong Communist born in 1903, worked in the radio-valve testing department of the Osram Company, and was clearly a master organiser, though the ultimate effectiveness of his network in denting the Nazi machinery must be doubted. It did establish a great sense of solidarity among disparate groups however. But, because of its sprawling nature, it was relatively easy for the Gestapo to infiltrate the Uhrig group. Uhrig was executed in August 1944. He had been arrested in 1942 with Romer, who was killed immediately. Their ultimate plan had been to establish a Soviet state after the collapse of National Socialism.

The other group which stemmed from the workers’ movement and which gave Hitler pause during the war years was that led by a young Jewish electrician called Herbert Baum. Most of the group were Jewish skilled workers employed in the Jews Only sector of the Elmo factory in Berlin. Baum worked there from 1941.

The main function of the group, once again, was the dissemination of anti-Nazi literature, a dangerous and expensive business, especially in wartime. The group financed itself through burglary. As Jews and Communists, the Baum group were taking quite extraordinary risks. Their finest hour, however, was yet to come.

After the outbreak of hostilities with the Soviet Union, the German Propaganda Ministry was not slow to set about slandering the image of the USSR in every way possible. In spring 1942, in the Lustgarten, a large square in central Berlin, the Nazis set up an exhibition called ‘Soviet Paradise’, at which life in Russia was held up to sarcastic criticism. (They had done the same with the ‘Degenerate Art’ of banned painters in Munich in 1937 — unfortunately for them, that was the most popular exhibition the Nazis ever staged.)

On 17 May, following a meeting at which a leaflet campaign to coincide with the planned ‘action’ was organised, Baum and several friends visited the exhibition, managed to distribute small bottles of inflammable liquid in corners, and set the place on fire. The fire, which was seen by the group as of symbolic significance — they wanted to demonstrate disapproval, not involve innocent visitors in a conflagration — was quickly put out, but the plan had been betrayed to the Gestapo and most of the group were arrested during the following week. Baum himself, in order to avoid the torture which might compel him to betray more of his friends, committed suicide in Moabit Prison on 11 June. He was just over thirty years old. Five hundred Jews were arrested in Berlin. One hundred and fifty of them, together with another hundred already in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, were shot out of hand as part of the ‘vengeance’ exacted for the assassination of the SS leader Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, which had recently been carried out by Czech partisans. The rest were sent either to Sachsenhausen or to another camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) near Prague.

There was a third Communist group working in Berlin in the early forties. It was associated with the leaflet campaign planned by the Baum group to coincide with the firesetting at the Soviet Paradise exhibition. This third group was the most important, and its base was in the heart of Göring’s Air Ministry. Its main function was to process secret military information and relay it to the Russians. For this reason, a long controversy has existed about whether its members were indeed members of the Resistance to Hitler, or simply Soviet spies and traitors to their country.

The group, which later came to be known by the nickname the Gestapo gave it, the ‘Red Orchestra’, was run by two married couples, Arvid Harnack (who was related to the Bonhoeffers) and his American wife Mildred; and Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen.

The ‘Red Orchestra’ in fact had two wings. One fed information to the Russians, but the other was a very widespread Resistance organisation, involved with pamphleteering and discussion groups. It had a high and disparate membership. One typically detailed Gestapo report, discussing the 118 arrests which followed the breaking up of the group in 1942, spoke of ‘20 per cent professional soldiers and civil servants, 21 per cent artists, writers and journalists, 29 per cent academics and students, and 13 per cent workers’ among them. The group produced a regular magazine,
Inner
Front
, and established contacts both abroad and with foreign forced labour in Germany.

Boysen, whose volatile marriage to Libertas Haas-Heye was the subject of much gossip, had always been an opponent of Nazism. In the early thirties he worked for an important national revolutionary magazine called
Gegner
(Opponent), which occupation landed him in a concentration camp as early as April 1933. He was well connected, however, being an indirect descendant of Admiral Tirpitz and related to the von Hassell family, so he was soon released, and thereafter joined the Air Force. He knew that Hitler was bent on war and embarked on a pamphlet campaign against it, but through artist friends with Communist sympathies he also contacted the Russian Trade Delegation, which he was able to supply with information about ‘illegal’ German Air Force activities in the Spanish Civil War. This activity in turn attracted the interest of the Russian Secret Service. In 1939 the headstrong Boysen met the Harnacks, who were both left-wing radicals. Arvid came from a family of eminent academics. He had met his wife at the University of Wisconsin. Mildred had by now been in Germany, her adopted country, for many years, and taught at the university in Berlin.