War and Remembrance (130 page)

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:
Armin von Roon’s epilogue gives a vivid picture of the Führer in action, especially as he was falling apart. In this reminiscence Roon is much harder on Hitler than in the operational analysis. His German editor notes that Roon drafted this memoir on his last sickbed, and did not revise it.

The memoir opens with these words:

For more than four years I observed Adolf Hitler at close hand in Supreme Headquarters. Keitel and Jodl, who had the same opportunity, were hanged by the Allies. Most of the generals who knew the Führer well were executed by him, or sickened and died from the strain, or fell on the battlefield. I have seen no military memoir which truly portrays him as a man. The books of Guderian and Manstein pass over his personal aspects in understandable silence.

In my military history I have acknowledged his adroitness and his inspiring force as a politician, and have cited his flare for strategic and tactical decision-making in war, especially involving surprise. I have indicated that at his peak he seemed to us the soul of Germany reborn. I have also suggested his serious failings as a supreme commander that led to catastrophe.

Personally, he more and more revealed himself in adversity as a low and ugly individual. In his behavior after the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt he showed his true colors. Nobody who sat beside him as I did, and saw him gloat and giggle and applaud at motion pictures of great German generals, my revered superiors and friends, strangling naked in nooses of piano wire, their eyes popping from their discolored faces, their purple tongues thrust out, blood, urine, and feces streaking down their jerking bodies, could thereafter feel anything for Adolf Hitler but distaste.

If Germany is ever to rise again, we must uproot the political and cultural weaknesses that led us to follow a man like this to defeat, disgrace, and partitioning. Hence I have written this unsparing personal description of the Führer as I saw him in his headquarters.

This is a far cry from Roon’s encomiums in the first volume of
Land, Sea, and Air Operations;
such as, “A romantic idealist, an inspiring leader dreaming grand dreams of new heights and depths of human possibilities, and at the same time an icy calculator with iron willpower, he was the soul of Germany.”

Roon seems to have decided to level about the Führer before he died. Or possibly he felt more kindly toward him in writing about the victorious years; then, as he worked through the second volume, the bitterness of collapse came back to mind. At any rate, the epilogue is a warty picture of Hitler and a brisk recapitulation of the war. My translation of
World Holocaust
concludes with excerpts which sketch the war to the end.
—
V.H.

Hitler’s phantom “Fortress Europe,” a pure propaganda bluff, began to crumble visibly in July 1943, when the Red Army smashed our big summer offensive at Kursk, the Anglo-Americans landed in Sicily, and Mussolini fell.

These disasters stemmed straight from Hitler’s two most colossal and pigheaded blunders: Stalingrad and Tunis. When I returned from my inspection trip to Tunis I told Hitler that Rommel was right, that our successes against the green American soldiers at Kasserine Pass were ephemeral, that in the long run we couldn’t supply three hundred thousand Italian and German troops across a sea dominated by enemy navies. But Goring airily assured Hitler that Tunis was “just a hop” from Italy, and that the Luftwaffe would keep the armies supplied. Despite Göring’s abject failure to make good the identical boast at Stalingrad, Hitler accepted this and kept pouring troops into North Africa, when he should have been evacuating the ones who were there. Had he taken out all those troops to Italy as an operating reserve, they might well have pushed the Allies off Sicily, and kept Italy in the war. We never recovered in the south from the Tunis bloodletting.

The Kursk offensive was just as ill-advised. My son Helmut fell there on July 7 at the head of a tank battalion under Manstein. He was a studious gentle lad who perhaps would not have been a professional soldier if not for his father’s example. He died for Germany in the gigantic and futile operation called
Citadel,
the last gasp of German strategic initiative.

Like Guderian and Kleist, I was against Citadel. The Anglo-Americans were bound to attack the continent somewhere soon, and we had to stay uncommitted and mobile till we knew where the blow would fall. The sensible
course was to straighten our lines in the east, gather strong reserves, let the Russians commit themselves, and then smash them with a counterattack as we did at Kharkov. Manstein was the master of this backhand stroke;
^*
another such bloody setback and the Soviets might have proved more flexible in the secret peace talks. The Russians were showing interest, but their demands were still too cocky and unrealistic. No doubt what Hitler wanted at Kursk was a big victory that would improve his bargaining position with Stalin.

But Manstein and Kluge fell in love with the Citadel plan. As an actor offered a star part in a bad play will take it and hope to pull off a success, so generals become intoxicated by plans for large-scale operations which they will command. In the hinge of our front between Manstein’s Army Group South and Kluge’s Army Group Center, the Russians in their winter counterattacks had punched a deep westward bulge around the city of Kursk. Manstein and Kluge were to drive armored pincers in from north and south, cut off this bulge of territory, bag a reverse Stalingrad of Russian prisoners, and then drive on to God knows what great victories through this gaping hole torn in the Soviet lines.

A charming vision, but we lacked the means.

Hitler loved to reel off figures of divisions available for combat. We had hordes of such “divisions,” but the figures were poppycock. Nearly all these divisions were understrength, and the men they had lost were the best troops, the fighting head, leaving the flabby administrative tail. Other divisions had been wiped out and were mere names on charts. But Hitler had ordered these “reconstituted”; and behold, by the breath of his mouth, they were again — in his mind — the full-strength trained fighting forces he had squandered forever on the Volga, in the Caucasus, and in Tunis. He was retreating into a dream world where he was still the triumphant master of the continent, commanding the strongest army on earth. This retreat went on until it ended in outright paranoia. But out of that private dreamland, until April 1945, there issued a stream of insensate orders which the German fighting man had to carry out on the harsh and bloody field of battle.

Moreover, while the Wehrmacht had been going downhill, the Red Army had been reviving and growing. The Soviet generals had been studying our tactics for two years. American Lend-Lease trucks, canned food, tanks, and planes, together with new Russian tanks from factories behind the Urals, had stiffened the real, not phantom, fresh divisions from Russia’s limitless manpower. Of all these adverse factors our intelligence warned us, but Hitler paid no attention.

Still, the Kursk attack might have had a chance in May, as first planned,
when the Russians were worn out by their counterattacks and had not yet dug into the salient. But he put it off for six weeks so as to use our newest tanks. I warned Jodi that this would put Citadel squarely into the time-frame of the probable Anglo-American landing in Europe, but as usual I was ignored. The Russians used the time well to harden up the haunches of the Kursk bulge with mine fields, trenches, and antitank emplacements, while bringing in more and more forces.

Our intelligence spoke of
half a million railroad cars
entering the salient with troops and matériel! Hitler’s response was to commit more and more divisions and air wings to Citadel. As in an American poker game, the stakes of this gamble kept building up on both sides, until Hitler had thrown in as many tanks as we had used in the entire 1940 campaign in the west. At last, on July 5, despite serious second thoughts of even Manstein and Kluge because of the two-month delay, Hitler unleashed the attack. What ensued was the world’s biggest tank and air battle, and a total fiasco. Our pincers made very heavy weather against the Russian static defenses and swarms of tanks, achieving penetration of only a few miles. The attack was five days old and going very badly, north and south, when the Allies landed in Sicily.

What was Hitler’s reaction? At a hurriedly summoned conference, he announced with great assumed glee that since the Anglo-Americans had now presented him with an opportunity to smash them in the Mediterranean, “the true theatre of decision,” Citadel would be called off! That was his way of wriggling out of his failure. Not a word of apology, regret, or acknowledgment of error. Eighteen of our best remaining armored and motorized divisions, a striking force which we could never replace, and which should have been hoarded as a precious operational reserve, had been thrown away in the Kursk battle on a dreamy echo of the grand summer campaigns of the past. With Citadel all German offensives were over. Any attacks we made for the rest of the war were tactical counterthrusts to stave off defeat.

Hitler soon learned that we could not just “call off” a major offensive. There was the little matter of the enemy. On both sides of the Kursk salient the Russians struck back, and within a month freed the two central anchors of our eastern line, the cities of Orel and Belgorod. After Citadel our whole front slowly and inexorably crumbled before a Russian advance that stopped only at the Brandenburg Gate. If Stalingrad was the psychological turning point in the east, Kursk was the military pivot.

My feelings about my son have no place here. He died advancing at Kursk. Thereafter millions of Germany’s sons were to die retreating, so as to keep the heads of men like Hitler and Goring on their shoulders.

Meantime, my inspection trip to Sicily and Rome convinced me that Italy was about to drop out of the war or change sides. I saw that we must
cut our losses and form a strong defense line in the Apennines at the northern end of the Italian boot. There was nothing to be gained by trying to hold on to Italy. From the start of the war this nation had been one gigantic
bouche inutile,
gulping enormous quantities of Germany’s war resources to no result. The southern front was a chronic abscess. The Anglo-Saxons were welcome to occupy and feed Italy, I wrote in my summary report, and our forces thus released would help stabilize the eastern front and defend the west.

When I told this to Keitel at Berchtesgaden, he drew a face like an undertaker’s and warned me to change my tune. But I was past caring. My only son was dead. I was suffering seriously from high blood pressure. To be transferred from Supreme Headquarters to the field seemed to me a welcome prospect.

So at the briefing conference I presented the picture as I had seen it. The Allies had total air superiority over Sicily, and Palermo had been flattened. The Sicilian divisions assigned to defend their island were fading into the countryside. In the German-held sector of Sicily the civilians were cursing and spitting at our soldiers. Rome looked like a city already out of the war, for soldiers were scarcely to be seen on the streets. Our German troops were staying out of sight, and the Italian soldiers were shedding their uniforms wholesale. I had encountered only evasiveness from Badoglio on the whole question of bringing more German divisions into Italy, and the Italians were
strengthening their Alpine fortifications,
an action which could only be directed against Germany. Such was the situation report I presented to Hitler.

He listened with his head down between his shoulders, glaring at me from under his graying eyebrows, now and then curling one side of his mouth in the half-smile, half-snarl that distorted his mustache, showed his teeth, and signalled extreme displeasure. His only comment was that “there still must be some worthwhile people in Italy. They can’t have all turned rotten.” As for Sicily, his inspiration was to assume command himself. Of course this made not the slightest difference.

Still, my report must have sunk in, because he arranged a meeting with Mussolini. It took place in a country house in northern Italy a few days before II Duce fell, and it was a dismal affair. Hitler had nothing new to offer the sick-looking disheartened Mussolini and his staff. He spewed out optimistic statistics by the hour on manpower, raw materials, arms production, details of improved or new weaponry while the Italians looked at each other with their expressive miserable dark eyes. The end was written on their faces. During the meeting Mussolini received a dispatch saying that the Allies were making their first air raid on Rome. He handed the message to Hitler, who barely glanced at it, then resumed his boasting about our rising arms production and marvelous new weapons.