Barbarossa (64 page)

"A famous composer played the piano, followed by Goering, who
played improvisations from
Der Freischütz
. The Goerings
were in a happy frame of mind. Hermann had just bought a new leather
briefcase in the blue Luftwaffe colours, which he proudly showed us,
also a bottle of Jean Desprez perfume, which he could obtain only in
Vienna."

However, Schirach had set the stage with the express purpose of
getting the Reichsmarschall into an amenable frame of mind, and
judging that this had been attained at the conclusion of the
impromptu piano solo, he approached him. Schirach's argument was that
of self-interest, with the familiar disguise of concept of duty to
the Reich, appeal to the subject's vanity, and a formal lip service
to the "strain" on the Führer. He urged Goering to
"speak to Hitler privately," but as this was coupled with
more robust talk of action—"I and my Hitler Youth are with
you, the Luftwaffe is strong, and there are plenty of men who are
prepared to act ... We must make this a common cause ... As
Reichsmarschall it is expected of you!"—what he was really
saying must have been perfectly plain to those who were listening.

At the conclusion of this address

"Goering looked at him [Schirach] without batting an eyelid.
He looked a little sad, as if he had heard this kind of complaint
before. Then he picked up one of his exquisite imported cigarettes,
fingered it for a while, and lit it very slowly. He sank deep into
the red chair and looked at us.

" 'To speak to Hitler alone, what an idea! I never see him
alone these days. Bormann is with him all the time. If I could, by
God, I would have gone to see Churchill, a long time ago. Do you
think I am enjoying this damned business!"'

At this point Emmy Goering, who had been long enough in the
immediate vicinity of the Führer to know what conversations
were, and were not, dynamite, pressed her white hand against
Hermann's mouth and said:

" 'Let's not talk about it any more, all will be well in the
end.' "

At this stage we must return to that most shadowy and perplexing
of subjects—the state of Hitler's mind. For this was the
mainspring of the German campaign in the East; the Führer's
daemonic genius, in defeat as in victory, exerted influence at each
shift in the fortunes of battle. In the late summer of 1943 three
distinct and separate factors brought themselves to bear on Hitler's
mind, warped it, and left its flexibility permanently impaired—a
change whose subsequent course on the war will soon be illustrated.

The first, and most obvious, factor was the failure of
Zitadelle
.
This had been an exclusively professional affair, conceived,
prepared, and directed by the officer corps.

They had chosen the ground, the weapons, the timing. Hitler's only
intervention had been at a strategic level (and when the issue of the
battle had already been decided).

Hitler had been uneasy about the operation from the start.

And two of the generals he most trusted, Guderian and Model, had
shared his misgivings. Yet the weight of professional opinion,
Keitel, Zeitzler, Manstein, had been against them. The result? Total
defeat; disintegration of the Panzer reserve; retreat to the Dnieper
and beyond.

Hitler's distrust of professional army officers had received
spectacular, and almost simultaneous, confirmation by their behaviour
in Italy. He regarded the Badoglio
coup
as a classic example
of behavior by the military
clique
, which will not hesitate to
overthrow the Party once it loses confidence in the outcome of the
war. (In his radio address at midnight of 20th July, 1944, Hitler was
to revert to this when he referred to the "attempted stab in the
back ... as in Italy," and this comparative formula was adopted
in all the loyal Orders of the Day that were drummed up from outlying
commanders in the days following the
attentat
.) Their loyalty
Hitler had always mistrusted; their obedience in the field could be
ensured only by the closest supervision, it seemed, for Hitler had
not forgotten 1941; their professional competence, even when they
were left to themselves, seemed doubtful.

In whom, then, could Hitler trust? He was far too shrewd a
politician, too perceptive an observer of human frailties, not to be
aware of the defeatism and intrigue to be found in his immediate
entourage. Langbehn and Himmler; Schirach and Goering; Guderian and
Goebbels. The three men closest to the Führer had been
approached. They had taken no action, it was true, but neither had
they arrested the appellants for treason. Between August and December
1943 there were five separate attempts on Hitler's life. Chance of
circumstance inhibited them, and of their existence Hitler was never
made specifically aware. But his instincts told him that he was in
danger; his excuse for starting the war, made almost in jest—"At
any moment I can be eliminated by a criminal or a madman"—had
now taken on the force of an omen. The explosion of the Stauffenberg
bomb was less than a year distant.

So, feeling himself increasingly isolated, and uneasily conscious
of the enormity of the forces he had roused outside Germany in
addition to the apprehension and discontent within her frontiers,
Hitler stood completely alone. Alone in the sense that he was
separated—whether out of suspicion or distaste—from the
company and influence (however transitory) of rational minds. The
resultant vacuum was not filled, but contaminated by influences at
the same time feverish and malignant. Bormann, Fegelein, Dr. Wulf the
astrologer, Dr. Morell . . . there were many waiting in the wings,
ready to exploit for their own ends the Führer's isolation and
disillusionment. And we can see that from this time on Hitler's
mentality alters direction; his descent into a Faustian world of true
insanity begins imperceptibly to steepen as it approaches the
precipice of the 20th July
attentat
.

Indeed, by the late summer of 1943 the morale of the whole
Wehrmacht, from top to bottom, had suffered permanent change. Its
courage and discipline were unimpaired. But hope was tainted, and
humanity, where vestiges of it remained, was extinguished.

August came in stifling heat; then September, the days crisper but
with an evening fog. The old battlefields of 1941 rose and
receded—Bryansk, Konotop, Poltava. To the rattle of machine
guns, as a few last scores were settled with the local population,
and the thud of demolition charges, the German Army retreated across
European Russia, leaving a trail of smoke, of abandoned vehicles and
loose-covered shallow graves.

BOOK IV | Nemesis

Fight on with us against hated Bolshevism, bloody Stalin, and his
Jewish clique; for freedom of the individual, for freedom of religion
and conscience, for the abolition of slave labour, for property and
possession, for a free peasantry on its own land, for your own
homestead and freedom of labour, for social justice, for a happy
future for your children, for their right to advancement and
education without regard to origin, for state protection of the aged
and infirm . . .
Goebbels, January 1945
(Doc. Occ. E,
18-19)
Who compels us to keep the promises we make?
Himmler
to d'Alquen

COMMANDERS AND
DISPOSITIONS OF OPPOSING FORCES IN SPRING 1944

nineteen
| "THE FLOODGATES ARE
CREAKING''

Now it was late October. At evening those same banks of inert and
freezing clouds which had first roused foreboding in the invader two
autumns before returned to the battlefield. Each night the
temperature fell below zero, to petrify the soft ridges of glutinous
mud which bordered every road across the steppe. During the day a
weak sun would thaw the surface, but with the shortening of its
parabola and the increase in the hours of darkness, the ground turned
hard as concrete.

As the winter of 1943 approached, a feeling of gloom and despair
permeated the German Army, a dull conviction that the war was
lost—yet without sight of its end. They were still deep inside
Russia. Unlike the winter of 1944-45, when they were aroused to
heroic frenzy in the defence of their homeland, they found themselves
slowly retreating across a bleak and hostile landscape, always
outnumbered, perpetually short of fuel and ammunition, constantly
having to exert themselves and their machinery beyond the danger
point. And behind them lay bitter memories of what midwinter was
like. Major Gustav Kreutz, an artillery officer with the 182nd
Division wrote:

Towards the end of the month we at last got some replacements,
new assault guns [these probably were self-propelled 75-mm. on Skoda
chassis] up to battalion strength. They were mostly young chaps from
the training barracks with a few officers and n.c.o.'s who had seen
action in Italy. In no time they were complaining about the cold.
They kept fires going during the day as well as at night, and were
breaking up a lot of wooden outhouses for fuel which would have been
valuable later. I had occasion to speak sharply to them about this
and one of them answered that on that day the thermometer had fallen
to ten below, and was this not abnormal? I told him that soon he
would count himself lucky when the thermometer was not ten but
twenty-five degrees below, and that in January it would fall to forty
below. At this the poor fellow broke down and sobbed.

Kreutz adds a characteristic comment. "I found out that
Lieutenant P------had a good combat record in Sicily, and so took no
disciplinary action. Later, he was killed fighting in the gallant
defensive battles around Zaporozhe."

Throughout the last half of 1943 the German Army in the East was
in a steady decline. In the three months immediately following the
suspension of
Zitadelle
, Manstein's army group received only
33,000 replacements, although it suffered 133,000 casualties. Nominal
strength fell lower even than these figures suggest because all the
satellite troops had been taken out of the line. The remnants of the
Italian force had returned to their home country, and the Hungarians
and Rumanians, who were now more interested in fighting each other,
had to be kept on anti-Partisan duties in the rear and as far apart
as possible.

The equipment situation continued to deteriorate, especially in
the Panzer units, for with Guderian's enforced sick leave the
principles he had tried so hard to enforce came to be neglected.
First, there was a reversion to the bad old practice of proliferating
new divisions. Besides the dangerously false impression of strength
which this practice gave to the order of battle in the map rooms, it
also had the effect of starving the experienced divisions at the
front of equipment, as most of the material from the factories went
into the new formations. In the absence of the Inspector General,
various subordinate departments began to stake out their claims on
industrial production. The SS tried to corner the production of
Panthers for its own divisions; the artillery succeeded in diverting
a large proportion of the assault-gun output, and even went so far as
to get a ruling that the PzKw IV was to be stopped altogether and the
production of assault guns increased. The tail end of the Mk IV
turret production was to go to the Todt organisation for installation
in concrete fortifications in the West. Production of a quadruple
20-mm.-gun AA tank was stopped just as it was about to get started,
and a new design for one fitted with twin 37-mm. was put under way.

The Russians, in contrast, continued to produce an enormous volume
of armour with a minimum of variations. T 34 chassis were coming out
of the factories at the rate of nearly two thousand per month, and
they were about evenly divided between "normal" types, T
34/85 and SU self-propelled guns. Soviet ordnance had developed two
new antitank guns, a long-barrelled 100-mm. and a 122-mm., and the
"100" was now being installed in the SU in place of the
85-mm. Neither of these guns had the refinement, in terms of muzzle
velocity or quality of projectile, of the German "86" and
"long 75" variations, but sheer weight of shot achieved the
same effect if they scored a direct hit. Such heavy ammunition
restricted the amount that could be carried and made the crews'
quarters unpleasantly cramped, but the Russians' numerical
superiority, their familiarity with extreme discomfort, and their
enthusiasm for new machinery more than compensated for this.