The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (172 page)

In retrospect Guderian added:

Those events may now be briefly narrated, but not without first stressing one point: terrible as the Russian winter was and granted that the Soviet troops were naturally better prepared for it than the German, the main factor in what is now to be set down was not the weather but the fierce fighting of the Red Army troops and their indomitable will not to give up. The diary of Halder and the reports of the field commanders, which constantly express amazement at the extent and severity of Russian attacks
and counterattacks and despair at the German setbacks and losses, are proof of That. The Nazi generals could not understand why the Russians, considering the nature of their tyrannical regime and the disastrous effects of the first German blows, did not collapse, as had the French and so many others with less excuse.

“With amazement and disappointment,”
Blumentritt
wrote, “we discovered in late October and early November that the beaten Russians seemed quite unaware that as a military force they had almost ceased to exist.” Guderian tells of meeting an old retired Czarist general at
Orel
on the road to Moscow.

Yet, as November approached its end amidst fresh blizzards and continued subzero temperatures, Moscow seemed within grasp to Hitler and most of his generals. North, south and west of the capital German armies had reached points within twenty to thirty miles of their goal. To Hitler poring over the map at his headquarters far off in East Prussia the last stretch seemed no distance at all. His armies had advanced five hundred miles; they had only twenty to thirty miles to go. “One final heave,” he told Jodl in mid-November, “and we shall triumph.” On the telephone to Halder on November 22, Field Marshal von Bock, directing Army Group
Center
in its final push for Moscow, compared the situation to the Battle of the Marne, “where the last battalion thrown in decided the battle.” Despite increased enemy resistance Bock told the General Staff Chief he believed “everything was attainable.” By the last day of November he was literally throwing in his last battalion. The final all-out attack on the heart of the Soviet Union was set for the next day, December 1, 1941.

It stumbled on a steely resistance. The greatest tank force ever concentrated on one front: General
Hoepner
’s
Fourth
Tank Group and General Hermann
Hoth
’s
Third Tank
Group just north of Moscow and driving south, Guderian’s
Second Panzer
Army just to the south of the capital and pushing north from
Tula
,
Kluge
’s great Fourth Army in the middle and fighting its way due east through the forests that surrounded the city—on this formidable array were pinned Hitler’s high hopes. By December 2 a reconnaissance battalion of the
258th Infantry
Division had penetrated to Khimki, a suburb of Moscow, within sight of the spires of the
Kremlin
, but was driven out the next morning by a few Russian tanks and a motley force of hastily mobilized workers from the city’s factories. This was the nearest the German troops ever got to Moscow; it was their first and last glimpse of the Kremlin.

Already on the evening of December 1, Bock, who was now suffering severe stomach cramps, had telephoned Halder to say that he could no longer “operate” with his weakened troops. The General Staff Chief had tried to cheer him on. “One must try,” he said, “to bring the enemy down by a last expenditure of force. If that proves impossible then we will have to draw new conclusions.” The next day Halder jotted in his diary: “Enemy resistance has reached its peak.” On the following day, December 3, Bock was again on the phone to the Chief of the General Staff, who noted his message in his diary:

When Bock spoke for the first time of going over to the defensive Halder tried to remind him that “the best defense was to stick to the attack.”

It was easier said than done, in view of the Russians and the weather. The next day, December 4, Guderian, whose
Second Panzer
Army had been halted in its attempt to take Moscow from the south, reported that the thermometer had fallen to 31 degrees below zero. The next day it dropped another five degrees. His tanks, he said, were “almost immobilized” and he was threatened on his flanks and in the rear north of
Tula
.

December 5 was the critical day. Everywhere along the 200-mile semicircular front around Moscow the Germans had been stopped. By evening Guderian was notifying Bock that he was not only stopped but must pull back, and Bock was telephoning Halder that “his strength was at an end,” and Brauchitsch was telling his Chief of the General Staff in despair that he was quitting as Commander in Chief of the Army. It was a dark and bitter day for the German generals.

At
Kluge
’s Fourth Army headquarters,
Blumentritt
, the chief of staff, realized that the turning point had been reached. Recalling it later, he wrote: “Our hopes of knocking Russia out of the war in 1941 had been dashed at the very last minute.”

The next day, December 6, General Georgi Zhukov, who had replaced Marshal Timoshenko as commander of the central front but six weeks before, struck. On the 200-mile front before Moscow he unleashed seven armies and two cavalry corps—100 divisions in all—consisting of troops that were either fresh or battle-tried and were equipped and trained to fight in the bitter cold and the deep snow. The blow which this relatively unknown general now delivered with such a formidable force of infantry,
artillery, tanks, cavalry and planes, which Hitler had not faintly suspected existed, was so sudden and so shattering that the German Army and the Third Reich never fully recovered from it. For a few weeks during the rest of that cold and bitter December and on into January it seemed that the beaten and retreating German armies, their front continually pierced by Soviet breakthroughs, might disintegrate and perish in the Russian snows, as had
Napoleon
’s Grand Army just 130 years before. At several crucial moments it came very close to that. Perhaps it was Hitler’s granite will and determination and certainly it was the fortitude of the German soldier that saved the armies of the Third Reich from a complete debacle.

But the failure was great. The Red armies had been crippled but not destroyed. Moscow had not been taken, nor
Leningrad
nor
Stalingrad
nor the oil fields of the Caucasus; and the lifelines to Britain and America, to the north and to the south, remained open. For the first time in more than two years of unbroken military victories the armies of Hitler were retreating before a superior force.

That was not all. The failure was greater than that. Halder realized this, at least later. “The myth of the invincibility of the German Army,” he wrote, “was broken.” There would be more German victories in Russia when another summer came around, but they could never restore the myth. December 6, 1941, then, is another turning point in the short history of the Third Reich and one of the most fateful ones. Hitler’s power had reached its zenith; from now on it was to decline, sapped by the growing counterblows of the nations against which he had chosen to make aggressive war.

   A drastic shake-up in the German High Command and among the field commanders now took place. As the armies fell back over the icy roads and snowy fields before the Soviet counteroffensive, the heads of the German generals began to roll. Rundstedt, as we have already seen, was relieved of command of the southern armies because he had been forced to retreat from
Rostov
. Field Marshal von Bock’s stomach pains became worse with the setbacks in December and he was replaced on December 18 by Field Marshal von
Kluge
, whose battered
Fourth
Army was being pushed back, forever, from the vicinity of Moscow. Even the dashing General Guderian, the originator of massive armored warfare which had so revolutionized modern battle, was cashiered—on Christmas Day—for ordering a retreat without permission from above. General
Hoepner
, an equally brilliant tank commander, whose Fourth Armored Group had come within sight of Moscow on the north and then been pushed back, was abruptly dismissed by Hitler on the same grounds, stripped of his rank and forbidden to wear a uniform. General Hans Count von Sponeck, who had received the Ritterkreuz for leading the airborne landings at The
Hague
the year before, received a severer chastisement for pulling back one division of his corps in the
Crimea
on December 29 after Russian troops had landed by sea behind him. He was not only summarily stripped
of his rank but imprisoned, court-martialed and, at the insistence of Hitler, sentenced to death.
^*

Even the obsequious Keitel was in trouble with the Supreme Commander. Even he had enough sense to see during the first days of December that a general withdrawal around Moscow was necessary in order to avert disaster. But when he got up enough courage to say so to Hitler the latter turned on him and gave him a tongue-lashing, shouting that he was a “blockhead.”
Jodl
found the unhappy OKW Chief a little later sitting at a desk writing out his resignation, a revolver at one side. Jodl quietly removed the weapon and persuaded Keitel—apparently without too much difficulty—to stay on and to continue to swallow the Fuehrer’s insults, which he did, with amazing endurance, to the very end.
¹⁷

The strain of leading an army which could not always win under a Supreme Commander who insisted that it always do had brought about renewed heart attacks for Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, and by the time Zhukov’s counteroffensive began he was determined to step down as Commander in Chief. He returned to headquarters from a trip to the receding front on December 15 and Halder found him “very beaten down.” “Brauchitsch no longer sees any way out,” Halder noted in his diary, “for the rescue of the Army from its desperate position.” The head of the Army was at the end of his rope. He had asked Hitler on December 7 to relieve him and he renewed the request on December 17. It was formally granted two days later. What the Fuehrer really thought of the man he himself had named to head the Army he told to Goebbels three months later.

To his cronies Hitler said of Brauchitsch, “He’s no soldier; he’s a man of straw. If Brauchitsch had remained at his post only for another few weeks, things would have ended in catastrophe.”
¹⁹

There was some speculation in Army circles as to who would succeed Brauchitsch, but it was as wide of the mark as the speculation years before as to who would succeed Hindenburg. On December 19 Hitler called in Halder and informed him that he himself was taking over as Commander in Chief of the Army. Halder could stay on as Chief of the General Staff if he wanted to—and he wanted to. But from now on, Hitler made it clear, he was personally running the Army, as he ran almost everything else in Germany.

This little matter of operational command [Hitler told him] is something anyone can do. The task of the Commander in Chief of the Army is to train
the Army in a National Socialist way. I know of no general who could do that, as I want it done. Consequently, I’ve decided to take over command of the Army myself.
²⁰

   Hitler’s triumph over the Prussian officer corps was thus completed. The former Vienna vagabond and ex-corporal was now head of state, Minister of War, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and Commander in Chief of the Army. The generals, as Halder complained—in his diary—were now merely postmen purveying Hitler’s orders based on Hitler’s singular conception of strategy.

Actually the megalomaniacal dictator soon would make himself something even greater, legalizing a power never before held by any man—emperor, king or president—in the experience of the German Reichs. On April 26, 1942, he had his rubber-stamp Reichstag pass a law which gave him absolute power of life and death over every German and simply suspended any laws which might stand in the way of this. The words of the law have to be read to be believed.