All Hell Let Loose (90 page)

A Soviet report on 25 August 1944 described the Germans still resisting effectively: ‘The enemy’s use of self-propelled guns and tanks to cover their retreats makes it difficult for us to engage their infantry. In these circumstances, our infantry often behave indecisively. The nature of our units has changed significantly during the last few months. Many consist overwhelmingly of green replacements. There are few men who have served since 1941. Many who have fought since 1943 complain about the inexperience of replacements.’ Soviet operations were punctuated with displays of stunning incompetence, often influenced by drunkenness. The cruelties inflicted on ordinary soldiers by their superiors explain the fact that even in 1944–45 some Russian soldiers continued to desert to the Germans. It can be said of Stalin’s men, as of the Japanese, that their barbarous conduct towards other races merely mirrored their own rulers’ treatment of themselves. But Russian higher commanders now displayed an impressive confidence in the handling of large forces and the coordination of all arms, aided by American-supplied communications equipment.

The Red Army advanced more swiftly than Eisenhower’s forces in 1944– 45, partly because its soldiers lived off the land and required much lower scales of supply: they were the least cosseted of the war. Among the long list of comforts and facilities routinely provided to Western Allied troops but denied their Russian counterparts were razors, delousing chambers, pencils, ink, paper, knives, torches, candles, games. Vodka was the only Red Army-issue stimulant to morale, and some sections pooled their rations, so that men could take turns to drink themselves into stupefaction. To the end, many men advanced to attack while suffering hunger, lice, piles, toothache, bleeding gums caused by scurvy, and sometimes tuberculosis.

The foremost Russian advantages in waging war were a willingness to accept almost unlimited casualties, together with men’s knowledge of the draconian penalties awaiting those who flinched or failed. Russian units confronted with German resistance were never permitted to adopt the familiar Anglo-American expedient of taking cover and calling for artillery and air support. They were expected to drive on, heedless of obstacles or minefields, and to pay the price: there were always more men. On 5 July, the first phase of
Bagration
ended with the German Ninth Army destroyed. First Panzer Army and Fourth Army had each lost around 130,000 of the 165,000 men with which they started the battle. Vast columns of bedraggled German prisoners shuffled to the Russian rear, flotsam of the formerly invincible Wehrmacht. The 1st Belorussian
Front
now swung west towards Warsaw, while two other army groups headed for East Prussia and into Lithuania. On 13 July, 1st Ukrainian
Front
began an advance towards the Vistula. By the month’s end, Vilnius and Brest-Litovsk were in Russian hands.

Poles had a dark joke in 1944, about a bird which falls out of the sky into a cowpat, to be rescued by a cat. Its moral, they said, was that ‘Not everyone who gets you out of the shit is necessarily your friend.’ The Soviet ‘liberation’ of Poland, which began with
Bagration
, obliged its people to exchange the rule of one tyranny for another. On 14 July the Stavka issued an order to all Russian commanders: ‘Soviet troops … have encountered Polish military detachments run by the Polish émigré government. These detachments have behaved suspiciously and have everywhere acted against the interests of the Red Army. Contact with them [is] therefore forbidden. When these formations are found, they must be immediately disarmed and sent to specially organised collection points for investigation.’ The Russians murdered thousands of Poles whose only crime was a commitment to democratic freedom. Most notoriously, they declined to succour the August Warsaw Uprising. Russians nursed a historic hatred for the Polish people, and indulged this in 1944–45 with indiscriminate savagery towards both sexes.

The 1944 Thrust into Poland

Even as the Red Army approached the Vistula, its Karelian
Front
drove deep into Finland, breaching the Mannerheim line which the Finns had defended so staunchly in 1940. The Finnish people paid dearly for their second challenge to Stalin: on 2 September the Helsinki government signed an armistice which rendered its eastern territories forever forfeit. Hitler refused to evacuate the Baltic Courland peninsula in Latvia, though his generals pleaded that the forces holding the perimeter there might contribute importantly to the defence of Germany. Twenty-one divisions – 149,000 men and forty-two generals – remained beleaguered in Courland until May 1945.

When
Bagration
reached its triumphant conclusion, the Russians claimed to have killed 400,000 Germans, destroyed 2,000 tanks and taken 158,000 prisoners. The victors were struck by the poor physique of many captured Germans. One soldier wrote, ‘They all looked pitiful. They are like bank clerks. Many of them wear glasses.’ By the end of August 1944 the Russians stood on the Vistula, almost within reach of Warsaw and at the border of East Prussia. They were besieging Riga, and in the south had reached the Danube. In two months they had advanced 450 miles. A Russian officer marvelled at the endless wrecked tanks he and his men passed on their lines of march westwards, which he fancifully likened to ‘camels on their knees’. As the Red Army savoured its dominance of the battlefield, for the first time men found opportunities to enjoy the pleasures of living and fighting in the territories of other nations. ‘One night you sleep under the open sky, the following night you are sunk into a feather bed like a nobleman,’ Gennady Petrov wrote to his parents from Ukraine. ‘I am living so well I have no complaints about anything save lack of music records and camera film.’

On the far left of the Soviet line, on 20 August two Ukrainian
fronts
began a drive into south-east Europe of which the objectives were political rather than military. Stalin, bent upon securing most of the Balkans ahead of the Western Allies, committed his forces first against Romania, which surrendered on the 23rd. The Romanians’ change of allegiance cost them dear: by 25 October their army had suffered a further 25,000 casualties, after being conscripted to assist the Red Army to evict the Germans from their country. On 5 September Russia declared war on Bulgaria, which was officially fighting only the Anglo-Americans. Facing overwhelming Soviet might, the Bulgarians surrendered four days later. A communist government was installed in Sofia, enabling the Red Army to shift forces to Transylvania and Yugoslavia – Belgrade fell on 19 October.

Only a Nazi-engineered coup in Budapest on 15 October prevented the Hungarian government also from yielding to the Soviets: by 30 December, Budapest was under siege. The Soviet summer advances obliged Hitler to recognise that most of the Balkans had become indefensible. In late October, the Germans began to evacuate Greece. Weichs, the theatre commander, was thereafter chiefly concerned to use his 600,000 men – mostly drawn from low medical categories and service personnel – in Albania and Yugoslavia, to protect the right flank of Army Group South. Along the entire Eastern Front, the German predicament was dire. The Soviets’ looming triumph was delayed only by the logistical difficulties of fuelling and supplying huge forces in regions of few roads and wrecked railways; their armies halted to rearm and regroup. Hitler’s generals knew that when the Russians chose to advance again, the Wehrmacht could merely delay the inevitable.

If great wars were ever fought rationally, the moment had come for Germany to surrender, as it had surrendered in 1918 before the Fatherland became a battlefield. In 1944, by contrast, many of its greatest cities had been devastated by an Allied bombing offensive which was now reaching its peak. The Luftwaffe was shattered, the armed forces starved of fuel, men, tanks, vehicles, artillery. It is unsurprising that the leading Nazis were committed to fight on, because they could expect only death at the hands of the victors. It is debatable whether Hitler himself, in his innermost consciousness, preserved real hopes of retrieving his fortunes. But he had committed himself to a policy of total, indeed perpetual, war. If he was to be denied victory, in the last months of his rule he seemed content instead to preside over a titanic cataclysm, matching in scale the collapse of his titanic ambitions.

Posterity is more puzzled by the failure of other Germans to accept the logic of their predicament, to depose the Nazis and save hundreds of thousands of lives by abandoning the struggle. Such an initiative could only credibly have come from the generals. The 20 July 1944 bomb plot, the only concerted military attempt to decapitate the Nazi regime, was conducted with stunning incompetence and lack of conviction, and engaged a relatively small number of officers. A legend of anti-Nazi resistance was created, and is today sustained, chiefly to bolster the revival of post-war German self-esteem. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg would almost certainly have been successful in killing Hitler had he remained in the Führer’s headquarters to detonate his bomb instead of hastening back to Berlin. Many other officers had opportunities to achieve the same end, at the sacrifice of their own lives.

As it was, a perverted sense of duty caused most of the Wehrmacht’s leadership to follow the Nazi regime to the end, to their perpetual dishonour. Among themselves, Germany’s generals often mocked the character and conduct of the gangsters and grotesques by whom their country was led; yet their own slavishness towards Hitler seldom flagged. At a meeting on 27 January 1944, when he called on every officer to display loyal and fanatical support for National Socialism, Manstein called out, ‘And so it will be, my Führer!’ He later claimed that his interjection was intended ironically, but few believed him. He and his kind placed their reputations as members of the soldierly caste, committed to fulfil to the last their military responsibilities and oath to Hitler, ahead of the interests of the society they professed to serve. They made an explicit or implicit choice to fight and die as servants of the Third Reich, rather than as protectors of the nation, whose interests could only credibly be served by securing peace on any terms, or indeed none. Waffen SS panzer officer Hubert Meyer wrote in outrage about the 20 July plot: ‘It was incomprehensible that soldiers would attempt a coup against the supreme military leadership while they were themselves involved in bitter defensive fighting against the enemy who demanded “unconditional surrender”, not willing to negotiate a ceasefire or even peace.’ Many Wehrmacht officers, even those hostile to the Nazis, shared his sentiments.

Helmuth von Moltke of the Abwehr explained the continuing support of a sufficiency of Germans for Hitler in a secret letter written in English to his former Oxford tutor, and dispatched from Stockholm in March 1943: ‘There are a great many people who have profited from the Third [Reich] and who know that their time will be up with the Third [Reich]’s end. This category does not only comprise some few hundred people, no it runs into hundreds of thousands. Further there are those who supported the Nazis as a counterbalance against foreign pressure and who cannot now easily find their way out of the tangle; even where they believe the Nazis to be in the wrong they say that this wrong is counterbalanced by a wrong done to us before … There are those who … say: if we lose this war we will be eaten up by our enemies and therefore we have to stand this through with Hitler.’ Moltke observed that Germany’s soldiers were ‘continuously led into positions where there is no choice but to fight. Their mind is occupied with the enemy as fully as the housewife’s with her requirements.’ He repeated a remark made by Hitler to Manstein: ‘The German general and soldier must never feel secure, otherwise he wants to rest; he must always know there are enemies in front and at his back, and that there is only one thing to be done and that is to fight.’ Von Moltke’s analysis remained valid until 1945.

The soldiers abandoned the civilians to their despair. In Hamburg, old Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg wrote on 25 June 1944: ‘No one ever laughs any more, no one is light-hearted or happy … We are waiting for the final act.’ She added a few weeks later: ‘For days we have had no water; everything is chipped and broken and frayed; travelling is out of the question; nothing can be bought; one simply vegetates. Life would have no purpose at all if there weren’t books and human beings one loves, whose fate one worries about day and night.’

Germany’s military leaders earned the contempt of posterity for indulging the mass-murderers who led their country, while claiming to absolve themselves of complicity in the Nazis’ crimes. To contemplate revolt in the last phase of a struggle for national survival demanded a moral courage such as few German officers had. They knew the carnage they had wreaked in Russia: they could expect no mercy from Stalin’s people, and fear of impending Soviet vengeance became a dominant motivation for millions of German soldiers. It provided a perverse and spurious justification for the generals’ refusal to turn on Hitler. Their reasoning was vacuous, because sustained resistance merely delayed the inevitable. Yet even the more intelligent clung to fantastic hopes that the Western Allies would deliver them from the Russians. Career officer Captain Rolf-Helmut Schröder believed that once the Americans had defeated Germany, they would confront the Soviet Union: ‘We thought it impossible the Americans would accept that the Russians should overrun Germany.’