Hitler, Donitz, and the Baltic Sea (44 page)

The examples of Guderian, Schörner, and Dönitz illustrate some general conclusions regarding leadership in the final months of the Third
Reich. Ian Kershaw has described the activity of these men as “working towards the Führer.” According to Kershaw, those who really wanted to advance in Hitler’s Germany would not wait for instructions from Hitler but would “in the spirit of the Führer, work towards him.”
¹⁰
In other words, as Hitler attempted to regain the initiative it was ambitious subordinates like Dönitz, proposing a radical war-winning strategy by offensive action, who gained Hitler’s ear and his support. A general like Schörner who shot stragglers and guaranteed that his troops would hold their positions to the last round was more likely to secure Hitler’s approval than a commander who claimed he could not hold his sector of the front. If someone faltered, as did Guderian, and began to urge greater caution and repeatedly propose giving up territory Hitler wanted to hold, he would lose favor and be replaced by a Model, Schörner, or Rendulic. Guderian started off as army chief of staff with great enthusiasm and with Hitler’s support, but by late 1944 or early 1945 he was probably one of those generals who believed that the war could no longer be won. Perhaps it would be better to get out of the war as tidily as possible than to fight the most bitter, bloody, and destructive battles on German soil. Hitler often could tell whether a general was genuinely loyal or merely appeared to follow his commands. He was therefore willing to accept retreats by Schörner that he would not have permitted Guderian.
¹¹

This explains much in the rise of these loyalists during the final months of the war, but there appears to be something more involved. In the final years of the war, Hitler demanded two additional qualities from those who wished to rise to the
very
top—loyalty to him personally and unquestioning ideological conformity to National Socialism.
¹²
The truly influential people in the final year of the war were those like the “old fighters” from the period before the Nazi seizure of power. Himmler, Goebbels, and Bormann would be joined by soldiers like Dönitz, Model, and Schörner. Hitler took the Führer principle and Nazi racial and expansionist ideology seriously, and he expected his top officials to do so as well.

One important point that has not generally been recognized is that Hitler permitted more retreats than previously assumed. The major retreats in France, Finland, and the Balkans from August through October 1944 provide convincing evidence that Hitler would sanction major withdrawals when he thought they were necessary. Hitler refused to approve retreats along the Baltic in 1944 and 1945 not because he never did so but because he considered domination of the Baltic essential to turn the tide of the war yet again in Germany’s favor.

For the past three decades historians have considered questions of continuity and discontinuity in the German Navy, and some brief comments along these lines are in order. In both world wars the German Navy planned to fight according to Mahanian principles, with a fleet centered around battleships, but both broke out before Germany’s naval buildup had been completed.
¹³
In each conflict the navy had no objection to war with Britain, only to the premature outbreak of hostilities. As a result, in the First World War the fleet remained largely inactive, and in the second the navy was too weak to challenge Britain on the surface. Germany therefore again had to wage guerrilla warfare at sea, to conduct a submarine campaign in an unsuccessful attempt to force Britain to submit.

The attitudes of navy veterans also were strikingly similar after both conflicts. Following each world war, naval officers closed ranks and permitted no criticism of their wartime leaders. Just as Raeder allowed no condemnation of Tirpitz after World War I, disparagement of Raeder or Dönitz in the post-1945 period brought disapproval and ostracism from former Kriegsmarine comrades. Most naval officers bitterly resented the trial and conviction of Raeder and Dönitz as war criminals, and naval officers generally presented a united front in their refusal to examine critically the conduct of the war at sea or the navy’s relationship to Hitler and National Socialism.
¹⁴

The relationship of the navy’s commanders in chief with Hitler is another topic that has generated much discussion among historians. Keith Bird’s recent biography of Raeder convincingly demonstrates that Raeder was far more attracted to National Socialism than previously thought, yet the appointment of Dönitz represented something new for the navy.
¹⁵
Raeder welcomed many of the national and social aspects of Nazi Germany, but Dönitz embraced National Socialism, including its racist ideology, with a zeal not evident in Raeder. At the outbreak of war Raeder gloomily envisioned the navy “dying gallantly”;
¹⁶
in the end Dönitz expected Germany’s civilian population to perish rather than deviate from Hitler’s criminal commands. Dönitz’s devotion to Hitler in spite of the collapse of the world around him signified something radical and extreme. Despite many Germans’ hatred of the Versailles Treaty, Germany survived Versailles. In the final months of World War II many Germans must have wondered if their country would survive Hitler.

Scholars have demonstrated that the German Navy was much more receptive to Nazism than earlier imagined, and Salewski even refers to the navy as
the
National Socialist organization.
¹⁷
Dönitz supported Hitler’s vision of conquest and racial reorganization of society, and he believed in
unquestioning obedience to his Führer. What greater demonstration of the navy’s loyalty to Hitler and his regime could there be than for its admirals literally to follow Hitler to the grave? Nine German admirals committed suicide rather than surrender.
¹⁸
Dönitz, who possessed great charisma himself, had indeed inspired his men to follow Hitler.

In the end Hitler’s
Durchhalt
strategy with its Baltic emphasis failed, and failed spectacularly. Yet examination of this unsuccessful attempt on the part of Hitler to alter the fortunes of war is not merely an intellectual exercise. If we eschew the wisdom of hindsight and attempt to analyze the situation from Hitler’s perspective at the time he made his decisions, we find that this strategy made sense. Hitler was not just clutching at straws. Some of Hitler’s most incomprehensible decisions—abandoning one army group in Latvia and another in East Prussia, leaving hundreds of thousands of troops idle in Norway as Allied armies advanced on Berlin—formed individual pieces of a plan. For the plan to succeed, however, Hitler needed commanders who would not lose their nerve, men who were as determined as he to hold out until the very last moment. Finally, Hitler also demanded his followers’ unconditional loyalty and acceptance of National Socialist ideology. That Dönitz demonstrated both of these attributes was the deciding factor when Hitler chose an admiral as his successor.

Due to limitations of space, the notes have been abbreviated and the bibliography has been reduced to a list of works cited. For full citations, supplemental information, and a complete bibliography, visit
http://faculty.erskine.edu/hdgrier/index.html
, where the information is available in PDF (preferred) and HTML versions.

Introduction

    
1
.
 
Important works dealing with Finland in World War II include Ziemke, The
German Northern Theater of Operations;
Klink, “Die deutsch-finnische Zusammenarbeit 1944”; Krosby,
Finland, Germany and the Soviet Union;
Erfurth,
The Last Finnish War.

    
2
.
 
This debate is summarized in Fritz, “Swedish Iron Ore and German Steel.”

    
3
.
 
Major works on Sweden during the war include Ziemke,
German NTO;
Boheman,
På Vakt;
Ehrensvärd,
I rikets tjänst;
Calgren,
Swedish Foreign Policy during the Second World War;
Calgren,
Svensk underrättelsetjänst;
Gemzell, “Tysk militär planläggning under det andra världskriget: fall Sverige”; Wangel,
Sveriges militära beredskap.

    
4
.
 
Dönitz,
Ten Years and Twenty Days.

    
5
.
 
The most recent biography, Padfield,
Dönitz, the Last Führer,
contains much useful information but is marred by questionable psychoanalysis.

    
6
.
 
Guderian,
Erinnerungen eines Soldaten.

    
7
.
 
Dülffer,
Weimar, Hitler und die Marine.

    
8
.
 
Salewski,
Die deutsche Seekriegsleitung.

    
9
.
 
Thomas,
German Navy in the Nazi Era;
Rust,
Naval Officers under Hitler;
Bird,
Weimar, the German Naval Officer Corps and the Rise of National Socialism;
Bird,
Raeder;
Herwig,
Politics of Frustration;
Schreiber,
Revisionismus und Weltmachtstreben;
Rahn’s sections in
Germany and the Second World War;
Kraus, “Karl Dönitz und das Ende des ‘Dritten Reiches’”; Peifer,
Three German Navies.

  
10
.
 
Forwick, “Der Rückzug der Heeresgruppe Nord nach Kurland.”

  
11
.
 
Haupt,
Kurland: Die letzte Front;
Haupt,
Heeresgruppe Nord;
Haupt,
Kurland: Die vergessene Heeresgruppe;
Kurowski,
Todeskessel Kurland.

  
12
.
 
Kabath, “Die Rolle der Seebrückenköpfe beim Kampf um Ostpreussen, 1944–1945”; Dieckert and Grossmann,
Kampf um Ostpreussen;
Lasch,
So fiel Königsberg;
Murawski,
Eroberung Pommerns.

Chapter 1: The Retreat: From Leningrad to Narva

    
1
.
 
Hitlers Weisungen,
86.

    
2
.
 
International Military Tribunal,
Trial of the Major War Criminals
[hereafter
IMT, TMWC
], 34: 425–27; Heeresgruppe Nord/Ia, “Kriegstagebuch [hereafter HGr Nord,
KTB],” 18 Sept. and 12 Oct. 1941, National Archives Microcopy T-311, roll 53, frames 7065327, 7065441 [hereafter T-311/53/7065327];
Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht
[hereafter
OKW KTB
], 1: part 2, 1036; Rich,
Hitler’s War Aims,
2: 327, 392;
Hitlers Tischgespräche,
192–93;
Monologe im Führerhauptquartier,
71, 93, 116, 331, 334.

    
3
.
 
Glantz,
Battle for Leningrad,
78–80; Erickson,
Road to Berlin,
169.

    
4
.
 
Glantz,
Battle for Leningrad,
144.

    
5
.
 
Komarov, “Operation Iskra,” 44–46.

    
6
.
 
“Besprechung beim Führer am 11.9.1943,” T-311/77/7100293–95; Der Ob. der HGr Nord, “Nr. 106/43,” 22 Sept. 1943, T-311/77/7100287; HGr Nord, KTB, 4 Nov. 1943, T-311/57/7070854–60; HGr Nord, “Aufstellung der Abgaben aus dem alten Bereich der H.Gr. Nord seit dem 1.8.1943,” 3 Nov. 1943, Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv (to avoid cluttering the notes, all non-microfilm archival sources should be considered from the Militärarchiv unless otherwise noted) RH 19 III/5, 110–11.

    
7
.
 
HGr Nord, KTB, 14 Nov. 1943, T-311/57/7071026.

    
8
.
 
Ibid., 30 Dec. 1943, T-311/57/7071536; “Anruf O.B. an Chef, 30.12.43, 17.42 Uhr,” RH 19 III/19, 101; HGr Nord, “Bericht über den Vortrag des Herrn Oberbefehlshabers im Führerhauptquartier am 30.12.1943,” RH 19 III/3, 35–38;
Hitlers Lagebesprechungen,
519–24.

    
9
.
 
HGr Nord, KTB, 31 Dec. 1943, T-311/57/7071550–51; “Anruf Chef GenStab an Chef, 31.12.43, 10.45 Uhr,” RH 19 III/19, 104.

  
10
.
 
HGr Nord, “Nr. 232/43,” 31 Dec. 1943, RH19 III/14, 133; HGr Nord, “Beurteilung des inneren Kampfwertes der Divisionen,” 31 Dec. 1943, T-78/337/6292937–44.

  
11
.
 
Glantz,
Battle for Leningrad,
328–37.

  
12
.
 
HGr Nord, KTB, 14 Jan. 1944, T-311/58/7071863.

  
13
.
 
Ibid., 17 Jan. 1944, T-311/58/7072051.

  
14
.
 
Ibid., 18–21, 23 Jan. 1944, T-311/58/7072099–103, 7072107, 7072121, 7072127, 7072135, 7072177, 7072215–17, 7072235, 7072237; HGr Nord, “Nr. 15/44,” 20 Jan. 1944, T-78/337/6292925–26.

  
15
.
 
HGr Nord, KTB, 22 and 24 Jan. 1944, T-311/58/7072299–303, 7072349.