The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (171 page)

The Soviet Fifth Army on the Dnieper in the south, whose stubborn resistance had annoyed Hitler for several days, must, he laid it down, be utterly destroyed, the Ukraine and the Crimea occupied, Leningrad surrounded and a junction with the Finns achieved. “Only then,” he concluded, “will the conditions be created whereby Timoshenko’s army can be attacked and successfully defeated.”

To add insult to injury to the field marshals and the generals who did not appreciate his strategic genius, Hitler sent what Halder called a “countermemorandum” (to that of the Army of the eighteenth), which the General Staff Chief described as “full of insults,” such as stating that the Army High Command was full of “minds fossilized in out-of-date theories.”

“Unbearable! Unheard of! The limit!” Halder snorted in his diary the next day. He conferred all afternoon and evening with Field Marshal von
Brauchitsch about the Fuehrer’s “inadmissible” mixing into the business of the Army High Command and General Staff, finally proposing that the head of the Army and he himself resign their posts. “Brauchitsch refused,” Halder noted, “because it wouldn’t be practical and would change nothing.” The gutless Field Marshal had already, as on so many other occasions, capitulated to the onetime corporal.

When General Guderian arrived at the Fuehrer’s headquarters the next day, August 23, and was egged on by Halder to try to talk Hitler out of his disastrous decision, though the hard-bitten panzer leader needed no urging, he was met by Brauchitsch. “I forbid you,” the Army Commander in Chief said, “to mention the question of Moscow to the Fuehrer. The operation to the south has been ordered. The problem now is simply how it is to be carried out. Discussion is pointless.”

Nevertheless, when Guderian was ushered into the presence of Hitler—neither Brauchitsch nor Halder accompanied him—he disobeyed orders and argued as strongly as he could for the immediate assault on Moscow.

But Halder had at no point in the previous discussions nodded his agreement. When Guderian saw him the next day and reported his failure to get Hitler to change his mind, he says the General Staff Chief “to my amazement suffered a complete nervous collapse, which led him to make accusations and imputations which were utterly unjustified.”
^*

This was the most severe crisis in the German military High Command since the beginning of the war. Worse were to follow, with adversity.

In itself Rundstedt’s offensive in the south, made possible by the reinforcement of Guderian’s panzer forces and infantry divisions withdrawn from the central front, was, as Guderian put it, a great tactical victory. Kiev itself fell on September 19—German units had already penetrated 150 miles beyond it—and on the twenty-sixth the Battle of Kiev ended
with the encirclement and surrender of 665,000 Russian prisoners, according to the German claim. To Hitler it was “the greatest battle in the history of the world,” but though it was a singular achievement some of his generals were more skeptical of its strategic significance.
Bock
’s armorless army group in the
center
had been forced to cool its heels for two months along the Desna River just beyond
Smolensk
. The autumn rains, which would turn the Russian roads into quagmires, were drawing near. And after them—the winter, the cold and the snow.

Reluctantly Hitler gave in to the urging of Brauchitsch, Halder and Bock and consented to the resumption of the drive on Moscow. But too late! Halder saw him on the afternoon of September 5 and now the Fuehrer, his mind made up, was in a hurry to get to the Kremlin. “Get started on the central front within eight to ten days,” the Supreme Commander ordered. (“Impossible!” Halder exclaimed in his diary.) “Encircle them, beat and destroy them,” Hitler added, promising to return to Army Group Center Guderian’s panzer group, then still heavily engaged in the
Ukraine
, and add Reinhardt’s tank corps from the
Leningrad
front. But it was not until the beginning of October that the armored forces could be brought back, refitted and made ready. On October 2 the great offensive was finally launched. “
Typhoon
” was the code name. A mighty wind, a cyclone, was to hit the Russians, destroy their last fighting forces before Moscow and bring the Soviet Union tumbling down.

But here again the Nazi dictator became a victim of his megalomania. Taking the Russian capital before winter came was not enough. He gave orders that Field Marshal von Leeb in the north was
at the same time
to capture Leningrad, make contact with the Finns beyond the city and drive on and cut the
Murmansk
railway. Also, at the same time, Rundstedt was to clear the
Black Sea
coast, take
Rostov
, seize the
Maikop
oil fields and push forward to
Stalingrad
on the Volga, thus severing Stalin’s last link with the Caucasus. When Rundstedt tried to explain to Hitler that this meant an advance of more than four hundred miles beyond the Dnieper, with his left flank dangerously exposed, the Supreme Commander told him that the Russians in the south were now incapable of offering serious resistance. Rundstedt, who says that he “laughed aloud” at such ridiculous orders, was soon to find the contrary.

The German drive along the old road which
Napoleon
had taken to Moscow at first rolled along with all the fury of a typhoon. In the first fortnight of October, in what later
Blumentritt
called a “textbook battle,” the Germans encircled two Soviet armies between
Vyazma
and
Bryansk
and claimed to have taken 650,000 prisoners along with 5,000 guns and 1,200 tanks. By October 20 German armored spearheads were within forty miles of Moscow and the Soviet ministries and foreign embassies
were hastily evacuating to
Kuibyshev
on the Volga. Even the sober
Halder
, who had fallen off his horse and broken a collarbone and was temporarily hospitalized, now believed that with bold leadership and favorable weather Moscow could be taken before the severe Russian winter set in.

The fall rains, however, had commenced.
Rasputitza
, the period of mud, set in. The great army, moving on wheels, was slowed down and often forced to halt. Tanks had to be withdrawn from battle to pull guns and ammunition trucks out of the mire. Chains and couplings for this job were lacking and bundles of rope had to be dropped by Luftwaffe transport planes which were badly needed for lifting other military supplies. The rains began in mid-October and, as Guderian later remembered, “the next few weeks were dominated by the mud.” General
Blumentritt
, chief of staff of Field Marshal von
Kluge
’s
Fourth
Army, which was in the thick of the battle for Moscow, has vividly described the predicament.

For the first time there crept into the diary of Halder and the reports of Guderian, Blumentritt and other German generals signs of doubt and then of despair. It spread to the lower officers and the troops in the field—or perhaps it stemmed from them. “And now, when Moscow was already almost in sight,” Blumentritt recalled, “the mood both of commanders and troops began to change. Enemy resistance stiffened and the fighting became more bitter … Many of our companies were reduced to a mere sixty or seventy men.” There was a shortage of serviceable artillery and tanks. “Winter,” he says, “was about to begin, but there was no sign of winter clothing … Far behind the front the first partisan units were beginning to make their presence felt in the vast forests and swamps. Supply columns were frequently ambushed …”

Now, Blumentritt remembered, the ghosts of the Grand Army, which had taken this same road to Moscow, and the memory of
Napoleon
’s fate began to haunt the dreams of the Nazi conquerors. The German generals began to read, or reread,
Caulaincourt
’s grim account of the French conqueror’s disastrous winter in Russia in 1812.

Far to the south, where the weather was a little warmer but the rain and the mud were just as bad, things were not going well either.
Kleist
’s tanks had entered
Rostov
at the mouth of the Don on November 21 amidst much fanfare from Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda band that the “gateway to the Caucasus” had been opened. It did not remain open very long. Both Kleist and Rundstedt realized that Rostov could not be held. Five days later the Russians retook it and the Germans, attacked on both the
northern and
south
ern flanks, were in headlong retreat back fifty miles to the
Mius River
where
Kleist
and Rundstedt had wished in the first place to establish a winter line.

The retreat from Rostov is another little turning point in the history of the Third Reich. Here was the first time that any Nazi army had ever suffered a major setback. “Our misfortunes began with Rostov,” Guderian afterward commented; “that was the writing on the wall.” It cost Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the senior officer in the German Army, his command. As he was retreating to the Mius:

“I then,” said Rundstedt, “went home.”
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11

This mania for ordering distant troops to stand fast no matter what their peril perhaps saved the German Army from complete collapse in the shattering months ahead, though many generals dispute it, but it was to lead to
Stalingrad
and other disasters and to help seal Hitler’s fate.

Heavy snows and subzero temperatures came early that winter in Russia. Guderian noted the first snow on the night of October 6–7, just as the drive on Moscow was being resumed. It reminded him to ask headquarters again for winter clothing, especially for heavy boots and heavy wool socks. On October 12 he recorded the snow as still falling. On November 3 came the first cold wave, the thermometer dropping below the freezing point and continuing to fall. By the seventh Guderian was reporting the first “severe cases of frostbite” in his ranks and on the
thirteenth that the temperature had fallen to 8 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, and that the lack of winter clothing “was becoming increasingly felt.” The bitter cold affected guns and machines as well as men.

“The result,” says Guderian, “was a panic which reached as far back as
Bogorodsk
. This was the first time that such a thing had occurred during the
Russian campaign
, and it was a warning that the combat ability of our infantry was at an end.”

But not only of the infantry. On November 21 Halder scribbled in his diary that Guderian had telephoned to say that his panzer troops “had reached their end.” This tough, aggressive tank commander admits that on this very day he decided to visit the commander of Army Group
Center
,
Bock
, and request that the orders he had received be changed, since he “could see no way of carrying them out.” He was in a deep mood of depression, writing on the same day: