Hitler, Donitz, and the Baltic Sea (2 page)

Gersdorff, Gen. Curt-Ulrich von
: Army Group North operations officer, July 1943–October 1944; Chief of Staff, Sixteenth Army, October 1944–May 1945

Godt, Rear Adm. Eberhard
: chief of Operations Department, U-boat Command, March 1943–May 1945

Göring, Reich Marshal Hermann
: Commander in Chief, German Air Force

Gollnick, Gen. Hans
: commander of XXVIII Army Corps in Memel, October 1944–January 1945; commander of Army Detachment Samland, February–March 1945

Grasser, Gen. Anton
: commander of Army Detachment Narva/Grasser, July–October 1944

Guderian, Gen. Heinz
: chief of Army General Staff, July 1944–March 1945

Halder, Gen. Franz
: chief of Army General Staff, 1938–September 1942

Heidkämper, Gen. Otto
: Chief of Staff, Army Group Center/North, September 1944–January 1945

Heinrici, Gen. Gotthard
: commander of Army Group Vistula, March–April 1945

Hessler, Cdr. Günter
: staff officer (Operations) to Flag Officer Commanding U-boats, 1941–1945; Dönitz’s son-in-law

Heusinger, Gen. Adolf
: chief of Army General Staff’s Operations Department, October 1940–July 1944

Hilpert, Gen. Carl
: commander of Army Group Courland, April–May 1945

Hossbach, Gen. Friedrich
: commander of Fourth Army, January 1945

Jodl, Gen. Alfred
: chief of Armed Forces operations staff, 1939–1945

Juhlin-Dannfelt, Curt
: Swedish military attaché to Berlin, 1933–1945

Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm
: chief of Armed Forces High Command, 1938–1945

Kinzel, Gen. Eberhard
: Army Group North chief of staff, December 1942–July 1944

Küchler, Field Marshal Georg von
: commander of Army Group North, January 1942–January 1944

Kummetz, Adm. Oskar
: commander of Naval High Command, Baltic, March 1944–May 1945

Leeb, Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von
: commander of Army Group North, June 1941–January 1942

Lindemann, Gen. Georg
: commander of Eighteenth Army, January 1942–March 1944; commander of Army Group North, March–July 1944

Mannerheim, Marshal Carl Gustav
: Finnish commander in chief, 1939–1946; Finnish president, August 1944–1946

Manteuffel, Gen. Hasso von
: commander of Third Panzer Army, March–May 1945

Meisel, Adm. Wilhelm
: Skl chief of staff, February 1943–April 1944; chief of Skl, May 1944–May 1945

Merker, General Director Otto
: head of Central Board for Ship Construction, 1943–1945

Model, Field Marshal Walter
: commander of Army Group North, January–March 1944

Müller, Gen. Friedrich-Wilhelm
: commander of Fourth Army, January–April 1945

Natzmer, Gen. Oldwig von
: Chief of Staff, Army Group North/Courland, July 1944–January 1945; Chief of Staff, Army Group Center/North, January–February 1945

Oehrn, Cdr. Victor
: Skl operations officer, October 1944–May 1945

Oelfken, Naval Construction Director Heinrich
: head of Glückauf Construction Office, July 1943–September 1944; head of U-boat department in Office for Warship Construction, September 1944–May 1945

Puttkamer, Rear Adm. Karl-Jesko von
: Hitler’s naval adjutant, October 1939–April 1945

Raus, Gen. Erhard
: commander of Third Panzer Army, August 1944–March 1945

Raeder, Grand Adm. Erich
: commander in chief of the German navy, October 1928–January 1943

Reinhardt, Gen. Hans
: commander of Third Panzer Army, October 1941–August 1944; commander of Army Group Center/North, August 1944–January 1945

Rendulic, Gen. Lothar
: commander of Army Group North/Courland, January 1945 and March–April 1945; commander of Army Group Center/North January–March 1945

Ruge, Vice Adm. Friedrich
: chief of the Navy’s Warship Construction Office, November 1944–May 1945

Saucken, Gen. Dietrich von
: commander of Second Army/Army of East Prussia, March–May 1945

Schmundt, Adm. Hubert
: commander of Naval High Command, Baltic, March 1943–February 1944

Schörner, Field Marshal Ferdinand
: commander of Army Group North, July 1944–January 1945

Sköld, Per Edvin
: Swedish defense minister

Speer, Albert
: Minister for Armaments and War Production, 1942–1945

Thiele, Vice Adm. August
: commander, Second Task Force, July 1944–April 1945, Commanding Admiral Eastern Baltic, April–May 1945

Thörnell, Gen. Olof
: supreme commander of Sweden’s armed forces to the end of March 1944

Uthmann, Gen. Bruno von
: German military attaché in Stockholm, 1938–1945

Vietinghoff, Gen. Heinrich-Gottfried von
: commander of Army Group Courland, January–March 1945

Voss, Vice Adm. Hans-Erich
: permanent naval representative to Hitler (Admiral Führer Headquarters), March 1943–April 1945

Wagner, Rear Adm. Gerhard
: head of Skl’s Operations Department, June 1941–June 1944; Admiral on Special Duty, June 1944–May 1945

Walter, Professor Dr. Hellmuth
: German submarine designer

Wangenheim, Adm. Hubert
: Skl operations officer, 1941–October 1944

Warlimont, Gen. Walter
: deputy chief of Armed Forces operations staff, 1939–September 1944

Weiss, Gen. Walter
: commander of Second Army, February 1943–March 1945; commander of Army Group Center/North, March–April 1945

Wenck, Gen. Walter
: head of OKH’s Operations Department, July–September 1944; head of OKH’s Command Group, September 1944–February 1945

Weygold, Capt. Konrad
: naval liaison officer to Army General Staff, November 1941–April 1944

Zeitzler, Gen. Kurt
: chief of the German Army General Staff, September 1942–July 1944

T
O ANY SUBMARINER
, it was the dream of a lifetime. Adalbert Schnee, commanding the German submarine
U-2511,
peered through his periscope and saw the heavy cruiser
Norfolk,
a British warship of approximately ten thousand tons with a crew of 650. The U-boat slipped undetected within the cruiser’s screen of destroyers and reached a range of only five hundred yards. Yet Schnee did not issue the order to fire his torpedoes. The date was 4 May 1945, and earlier that day he had received orders to halt attacks on Allied vessels. Schnee’s U-boat, a sleek Type XXI on its first patrol, stealthily slipped away from the British task force and returned to its base in Norway. The
Norfolk
proceeded on its course, completely unaware that it had avoided possible destruction by a matter of only a few hours.

* * *

Not all strategies succeed; some fail completely. Although this appears obvious, some historians dismiss the notion that Hitler even had a strategy in 1944 and 1945. The popular conception of Hitler in the final years of the war is that of a deranged Führer who stubbornly demanded the defense of every foot of ground on all fronts and ordered hopeless attacks with nonexistent divisions. To imply that Hitler had a rational plan to win the war flies in the face of accepted interpretation. Yet the fact that a plan does not succeed does not mean that none existed. In fact, refusal to accept the possibility that Hitler had a strategy in the final years of the war is more striking than to assume the reverse. Most scholars agree that Hitler possessed a strategy in 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, and possibly even 1943. Why would he suddenly discard plans to win the war in 1944 and 1945? The British had a strategy in the dark days of 1940 and 1941, and the United States developed plans to defeat Japan even as Japanese forces overran Allied positions in the Pacific in 1941 and 1942. Was Germany alone in neglecting to devise a strategy when its enemies held the initiative?

It is more reasonable to assume that Hitler still hoped to win the war and that he had some idea how to achieve this. Although we now know it
proved unsuccessful in the end, piecing together such a strategy helps to answer lingering questions about German actions in the Third Reich’s final months. Some of the key evidence often used to demonstrate that Hitler had no strategy can be used to support an opposing interpretation. For example, between October 1944 and March 1945, over a million German soldiers were cut off from land contact with the rest of the front in coastal regions of Latvia, Lithuania, and eastern Germany. An additional 350,000 troops sat idle in Norway until Germany’s capitulation in May 1945. Could Hitler not have better used these men to defend Germany’s heartland? The standard interpretation for the emergence of the Courland pocket in Latvia, as well as those in East and West Prussia, and elsewhere, is simply that Hitler never permitted retreats. His insistence on holding the line everywhere meant that he could hold it nowhere, which represented no strategy at all. Many historians maintain that these examples in particular provide some of the best evidence that any strategy of Hitler’s actually best served the goals of the Allies.

Some historians who concede that Hitler had a strategy in the final years of the war assert that he fought on primarily in hopes of winning the war by unleashing Germany’s “miracle weapons.” Technological studies of the war tend to focus on rockets and jet aircraft as the most decisive of these weapons. Yet neither of these was a strategic offensive weapon. The Nazis launched the V-1 and V-2 rockets to strike terror into the hearts of their enemies and to exact vengeance for the destruction of German cities, but these weapons were not accurate enough to hit individual strategic targets. The main task of the jet aircraft, for their part, was defensive, to drive Allied bombers from the skies over Germany.

Hitler also had a third, often overlooked, miracle weapon in his arsenal. This was a new, technologically advanced submarine, the Type XXI, with which Admiral Karl Dönitz planned to regain the initiative in the Battle of the Atlantic. An offensive weapon with war-winning potential, the Type XXI was a true submarine rather than a submersible, and its speed and ability to remain underwater indefinitely rendered contemporary Allied antisubmarine tactics ineffective. With a fleet of these new U-boats Dönitz intended to starve Britain into submission and halt the shipment of American troops and supplies to Europe. But before these new submarines could be brought into action, they had to undergo trials and their crews had to be trained, which for geographic reasons was possible only in the eastern Baltic. If Dönitz was to revive the war at sea and turn the tide yet again in Germany’s favor, the Nazis had to control the Baltic and maintain possession of its ports. Norway’s retention was also essential, because it remained the only suitable location from
which to launch the new U-boat war following the loss of Germany’s submarine bases in France in the summer of 1944.

This study proposes an alternative way of viewing some of Hitler’s military decisions in the last months of World War II. It suggests that he did possess a strategy to regain the initiative, and that the Baltic theater played the key role in this plan. This strategy, Hitler believed, provided more than a chance to stave off defeat. Rather, it offered an opportunity to achieve his long-cherished ambition—total victory and mastery of Europe. This work examines German naval strategy and its role in shaping the war on land on the northern sector of the Eastern Front, particularly in determining where the army would have to stand and fight along the Baltic coast and where it could retreat. To demonstrate this, it is necessary to analyze operations in this theater from the end of 1943, when Hitler considered withdrawing Army Group North from the Leningrad area, until Germany’s capitulation in May 1945. Throughout 1944, as the Red Army steadily drove Army Group North back to the west, Dönitz increasingly urged the defense of the Baltic coast in the interest of naval strategy. By mid-October 1944, Army Group North, with over half a million men, had been isolated in Latvia, cut off from land contact with the Reich. German naval strategists then switched their attention to influence Army Group Center’s defense of the Baltic coast in eastern Germany.

Germany’s relations with Finland and Sweden, two other nations sharing the Baltic shoreline, assumed greater significance as the new submarines approached operational readiness. Finland fought alongside Germany in the war against the Soviet Union and provided Germany with vital raw materials, particularly nickel, but in September 1944 Finland surrendered to the Russians. Finland’s role in the Second World War has been the topic of several fine monographs.
¹
These studies, however, focus mainly upon Finland’s value to Germany economically and on the land front, overlooking the Finns’ crucial importance to the German navy in preventing the Soviet Baltic Fleet from leaving its base near Leningrad. Hitler’s frantic efforts to keep Finland in the war resulted more from naval considerations than from the need for raw materials.

Neutral Sweden’s geographic location posed a potential threat to German domination of the Baltic, and thus it was a source of concern to Hitler and Dönitz. In general, Sweden’s role in the war has evoked little interest. In the mid-1960s historians debated the importance of Swedish iron ore for Germany’s war economy, but otherwise little has been written outside of Sweden on its position during the war.
²
Hitler, however, demonstrated a keen interest in ensuring that Sweden remain neutral. This study
examines steps Germany took to prevent Sweden’s entry into the war, as well as Swedish war plans and the Swedes’ assessment of the German threat at various stages of the war.
³
Surprisingly, the Swedes believed that the threat of a German attack had receded at the very time Hitler seriously contemplated invading the country.