The Second World War (105 page)
As the Allied bombing of Germany intensified, Hitler wanted revenge and terror inflicted on Britain, but most ordinary Germans had become depressed by Nazi ranting. They wanted protection from the bombers and to hear some message of hope that the war would end. Only Party loyalists now used the ‘Heil Hitler!’ greeting and salute. The overthrow of Mussolini in Italy prompted wishful thoughts in many German minds, but the two regimes and their grip on power were simply poles apart. To ensure the Nazis’ continued control in Germany, Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS, minister of the interior as well. But, to the dismay of Goebbels, Hitler had cut himself off even more from the German people and still refused to visit bombed-out civilians or wounded soldiers.
Hitler had ensured, consciously or subconsciously, that all boats had been burned. There were no alternatives save victory or total destruction. And having promised the inevitability of Nazi victory, he now, quite shamelessly, could threaten the horrors of defeat, without ever admitting that anything had changed, or that he was responsible in any way for this catastrophic state of affairs. Hitler blamed recent reverses on the treacherous French in North Africa, on the even more treacherous Italians, and on reactionary generals in the Wehrmacht who lacked Nazi faith and failed to obey his orders.
During rare moments of lucidity, it seemed that Hitler could visualize how the war was going to end. He was at least consistent in his social-Darwinistic view that might was always right. After the Stalingrad disaster, he had begun to apply this notion to his own countrymen. He told
Goebbels that ‘
if the German
people turned out to be weak, they would deserve nothing else than to be extinguished by a stronger people; then one could have no sympathy for them’. He would return to this theme as the downfall of the Reich approached.
JANUARY–APRIL 1944
O
n 4 January 1944, Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein flew to the Wolfsschanze to underline the threat facing Army Group South. The Fourth Panzer Army between Vinnitsa and Berdichev was threatened with destruction. This would leave a huge gap between his forces and Army Group Centre. The only answer was to bring troops back from the Crimea and the Dnepr bend.
Hitler refused to consider it. To abandon the Crimea risked losing the support of Romania and Bulgaria, and he could not take forces from the north as that might encourage the Finns to leave the war. He claimed that there were so many disagreements on the enemy side that the alliance would fall to pieces. It was just a question of hanging on. Manstein asked to see Hitler alone. Only General Kurt Zeitzler, the army chief of staff, remained with the two men. Hitler quite clearly sensed what was coming and did not like it.
Manstein returned to his earlier recommendation that Hitler hand over the direction of the eastern front to him. Thinking of the constant refusal of Führer headquarters to allow a retreat until it was too late, Manstein remarked that some of their problems came from the way they were commanded. ‘Even I cannot get the field marshals to obey me!’ Hitler replied in a cold fury. ‘Do you imagine, for example, that they would obey you any more readily?’ Manstein retorted that his own orders were not disobeyed. He had won the point, but Hitler abruptly ended the
meeting
. Manstein, too clever for his own good, had achieved nothing except to arouse Hitler’s profound distrust. His days as a commander-in-chief were numbered.
In January 1944, even after losses of 4.2 million men, the German armed forces were at their greatest mobilized strength with 9.5 million in uniform. Just under 2.5 million were on the eastern front, bolstered by some 700,000 allied troops, a slightly larger figure than for Operation Barbarossa two and a half years before. But numbers were misleading. The German army was a very different organization to the one which had started the invasion. On average, it was
losing the equivalent of a regiment a day
, with many of the best junior officers and NCOs killed in the fighting. Notional strengths were kept up by pressganging Poles, Czechs, Alsatians and
Volksdeutsch
into the army and Waffen-SS. Between 10 and 20 per
cent of a division’s ration strength consisted of Hiwis and forced labourers. The other great difference was that the German army could no longer count on effective support from the Luftwaffe, the bulk of which had been withdrawn to defend the Reich from Allied bombing.
The
Red Army
deployed 6.4 million men almost entirely on the eastern front, and also enjoyed a massive superiority in tanks, guns and aircraft. Yet even the Soviet Union was suffering a manpower crisis after the staggering losses of the previous two years and the mass mobilization for war industries. Many rifle divisions were down to 2,000 men or fewer. The Red Army was, nevertheless, an incomparably more professional and effective organization than it had been during the disasters of 1941. The asphyxiating fear of the NKVD’s dead hand had been replaced with a much greater sense of initiative and even experimentation. For the early part of 1944, Soviet priorities were clear. Force back the Germans from Leningrad, reoccupy Belorussia and liberate the rest of Ukraine.
After the successful Zhitomir–Berdichev operation carried out by Vatutin’s 1st Ukrainian Front, which fought off all of Manstein’s counterattacks, Marshal Zhukov, the Stavka representative, aimed to destroy the strong German salient on the Dnepr around Korsun. On 24 January, the XI and XLII Corps, which Hitler had not allowed Manstein to withdraw, were taken by surprise and cut off by the 5th Guards Tank Army and the 6th Tank Army from Konev’s 2nd Ukrainian Front. Manstein, determined to get them out after the failure of the rescue mission at Stalingrad, assembled four panzer divisions.
Zhukov’s great rival, General Konev, was equally keen to destroy the four infantry divisions and the 5th SS Panzergrenadier Division
Wiking
before help arrived. Konev, who according to Beria’s son had ‘
wicked little eyes
, a shaven head that looked like a pumpkin, and an expression full of self-conceit’, was utterly ruthless. He ordered the 2nd Air Army supporting him to rain incendiaries on the wooden buildings of the towns and villages within what had become the
Cherkassy
pocket. This would force the under-nourished German troops out into the bitter cold.
On 17 February the encircled troops made their attempt to break out, struggling through deep snow. Konev was ready and sprang his trap. With their broad tracks, his T-34s could cope with the drifts. Their crews chased the weakened German infantrymen, crushing them under their tracks. Then the cavalry charged on their Cossack ponies, and with their sabres hacked off the raised arms of those trying to surrender. It is said that some 20,000 Germans died there on that day alone. Stalin was so impressed by Konev’s vengeance that he promoted him to marshal. Vatutin might also have been promoted if he had not been ambushed by Ukrainian
nationalists on 29 February and left mortally wounded. Zhukov took over command of his 1st Ukrainian Front and continued to attack the northern flank of Army Group South, while Malinovsky’s 3rd Ukrainian Front and Tolbukhin’s 4th Ukrainian Front crushed or forced back the German forces in the Dnepr bend.
Hitler had been even more reluctant to contemplate withdrawal from Leningrad. Any hope of destroying the ‘cradle of Bolshevism’ had long disappeared, but he feared that it would give the Finns the excuse they wanted to make peace with the Soviet Union. His soldiers could not understand why they were being held in these marshlands, especially when word spread that the Red Army had made major advances in the south.
Expecting a major attack soon, the German military authorities forced the civilian population in northern Russia further to the rear to prevent the Red Army from recruiting them in an advance. ‘
Our car passed the body
of a woman lying in the snow,’ wrote Godfrey Blunden near Velikie Luki. ‘Our driver did not stop. Such sights are common in the Russian war zone. The woman who had probably fallen out of line while being marched to Germany had been shot or had died of cold. Who will ever know who she was? She was just one of many million Russians.’
On 14
January 1944
, the Leningrad, Volkhov and 2nd Baltic Fronts began a series of attacks to break the siege entirely. Over the previous two months, the Leningrad Front had secretly been ferrying the 2nd Shock Army at night into the Oranienbaum bridgehead on the Baltic coast west of the city. Then, once the Gulf of Finland had frozen hard, another 22,000 troops, 140 tanks and 380 guns crossed the ice into the pocket.
In a dense, freezing fog, the Red Army and the Baltic Fleet opened an exceptionally heavy bombardment with 21,600 guns and 1,500 Katyusha rocket batteries. So great was the trembling from 220,000 shells fired in a hundred minutes that plaster fell from ceilings in Leningrad twenty kilometres away. ‘
The shells were throwing
up a whole wall of earth, smoke and dust with flashes of fire inside it,’ wrote a mortarman. The attack out of the Oranienbaum bridgehead was joined by one from the Pulkovo Heights on the south-west flank of the city. Generaloberst Georg Küchler, the commander-in-chief of Army Group North, had not expected such skilfully co-ordinated attacks. But German
Kampfgruppen
fought back with their usual professionalism. An 88mm gun hit one Soviet tank after another from a well-built pillbox. Advancing Soviet infantry could smell the scorched flesh of those inside the tanks.
They found no civilians in the villages, since they had been evacuated behind the German lines. The advance continued towards Pushkin (Tsarskoe Selo) and Peterhof. German corpses, face down in the snow, had been
flattened by the tracks of the advancing T-34 tanks. Some soldiers sang as they advanced, others prayed. ‘
I realized that I
myself was trying to remember prayers that I had been taught as a child,’ an officer recorded, ‘but I could not remember any.’ When they reached Gatchina, they found the palace ‘covered in shit’. The Germans occupying the place had not bothered to go outdoors in the cold. The British correspondent Alexander Werth, however, claimed that Red Army soldiers were furious to find that part of the palace at Gatchina had been turned into a German officers’
brothel
.
On the morning of 22 January, General Küchler flew to the Wolfsschanze to ask Hitler’s permission to withdraw from Pushkin, a pointless exercise since the retreat was unstoppable. The next day, the last German shell fell on Leningrad. On 27 January 1944, after 880 days, the siege was truly broken. Victory salutes were fired in Leningrad, but the celebrations were overshadowed by thoughts of all who had died. The predominant feeling among most people was one of survivor guilt.
The desire for revenge among front-line troops was strong. Vasily Churkin described in his diary how, when they entered Vyritsa, they ‘
caught four Russian teenage boys
who were wearing German uniforms. They were immediately shot, so great was the hatred of all things German. But the boys were innocent. The Germans had used them as horse drivers in the rear. They were given greatcoats and forced to wear them.’
Hitler soon sacked Küchler and replaced him with Generalfeldmarschall Model, his favourite commander in a crisis, but this failed to stop the Soviet advance which continued for over 200 kilometres. Foreign Waffen-SS formations, including the Belgian Walloon Legion commanded by Léon Degrelle, were thrown back from Narva. To the south, the central front line across Belorussia remained stable during those early months of 1944. But the German campaign against partisans in Belorussia was as savage as any fighting at the front. The German Ninth Army forced 50,000 Soviet
civilians regarded as unfit for labour out into no-man’s-land
, a virtual death sentence.
In the western Ukraine, the German army continued to receive a battering, with no time to recover between one offensive and another. On 4 March, Zhukov’s 1st Ukrainian Front smashed the German line with two tank armies and headed for the Romanian border. Another tank army crossed the Dnestr and advanced into north-eastern Romania.
Hitler had left the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia on 22 February while concrete bunkers were constructed now that his headquarters was within range of Soviet aviation. He moved to the Berghof, which also happened to be closer to his increasingly undependable Balkan allies. Early in March
he decided to tackle the problem of Hungary’s ‘treachery’, having heard of overtures made by Admiral Horthy to the western Allies. Hitler intended to take over the country, keep Horthy in protective custody and deal with the Hungarian Jews.
On 18 March, Horthy arrived at Schloss Klessheim, accompanied by senior figures in his government. He and his entourage thought that they had been summoned to discuss their request to withdraw Hungarian forces from the eastern front, to defend the Carpathian frontier from the Red Army. But Hitler simply presented Horthy with an ultimatum. Horthy, although outraged by Hitler’s blunt threats, even against his own family, was left with no option. He returned by train to Budapest a virtual prisoner in the company of SS Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the RSHA. A puppet government was installed the next day and German forces entered the country. They were immediately followed by Eichmann’s ‘experts’, ready to round up Hungary’s 750,000 Jews and send them to Auschwitz.
On 19 March, as German troops drove into Budapest, Hitler also held a bizarre ceremony at the Berghof. He had summoned all the field marshals in the Wehrmacht to declare their loyalty to him. Their doyen, Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt, began by reading out a statement which they had all signed. Hitler appeared to be moved by this totally artificial perform ance, which left the field marshals fearing for his sanity.
Hitler and Goebbels had become increasingly unsettled by the ‘anti-fascist’ propaganda emanating from the League of German Officers. This group of prominent prisoners in the Soviet Union, manipulated by the NKVD, was led by General der Artillerie Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach and other senior officers captured at Stalingrad.
Seydlitz
, now virulently anti-Nazi, had proposed in September to the NKVD that he should form a 30,000-strong corps from German prisoners of war, who could be flown into Germany to overthrow Hitler. When informed of this, Beria wrongly suspected that it was an elaborate and over-ambitious attempt at a mass escape.