At the end of September the Germans' position in the Balkans was
as close to complete disaster as it had been the previous month in
France. The "front" had simply fallen apart; their order of
battle was made up of a motley assort-ment of units, almost
decimated, dispersed over several thousand square miles of hostile
countryside, united only in the resolve to get within the frontiers
of the Reich before the en-raged civilian population could exact
personal revenge. In-deed, had the two disasters occurred
simultaneously, it is probable that the war would have ended in 1944,
without the Allies ever having to have fought inside Germany at all,
and in spite (perhaps) of the Russian reluctance to force the issue
at that time. In any event, by the time that Malinovsky and Tolbukhin
reached the Hungarian frontier the crisis in the West had passed, the
Allies had been defeated at Arnhem, and the Warsaw uprising had been
mastered. Friessner's forces in the Carpathians had managed to hold
off Petrov, and although his right "flank" had been bent
back in disorder it became increasingly feasible for light scratch
forces to hold up the Russian advance, for by the end of September
the spearheads of both Malinovsky and Tolbukhin had travelled over
two hundred miles from their starting lines.
Incredible though it may seem, the "treachery" of their
allies, and the explosions of hatred and violence that took place as
German authority in the occupied territories slackened, came as a
shock to the Wehrmacht, and even to the SS. Hitherto replete in the
enforcement of Machiavelli's maxim, "It is better to be feared
than loved," the Germans nonetheless believed that as they
were the
Herrenvolk
no one could think of opposing them unless
he were a Bolshevik or a Jew.
Now they were faced with a frightening prospect. As the burning
fringe of battle approached the Fatherland, it compressed not only
the Wehrmacht but the whole apparatus of terror within the frontiers
of the Reich. Four million foreign workers, a floating
concentration-camp population of over one and a half million, a whole
collection of "national" legions of one kind and
another—even an "Indian Brigade" —many of them
carrying arms—what if a spark from the battle front should
ignite this mass of tinder? No great pow-ers of derivative argument
were required to see that if the Rumanians nurtured so powerful a
dislike for the Germans, and had been so quick to take advantage of
their discomfiture, little mercy could be expected from the slave
immigrants of the Reich itself.
The SS, ever fertile in schemes for administration where these
offered scope for an extension of its own powers, now veered around
(with a lurch that must have induced, even in the National Leader, a
faint twinge of nausea) to a pro-Vlasov standpoint. Vlasov, between
bouts of alcoholic intoxication, had been making a thorough
nuisance of himself.
Bandied from one department to another, humiliated, reim-prisoned, released, harangued, he had preserved his dignity and his
policies throughout. He refused to identify himself with the German
cause, and continued to argue that his purpose was to save Russia
from Stalin and to "reconstitute" the Russian state. He
lectured German officers on the right way to treat the Russian
people, and the entire audience (Himmler had been alarmed to see)
"hung their heads in shame." By September 1944 a section of
the SS under Gunter d'Alquen, the editor of
Die Schwarze Korps
,
and one of the movement's intellectuals, had formulated Operation
Skorpion
, whereby Vlasov was to assume authority over all the
captured Russians, including those still in the prison camps and
the slave-labour factories, and be allowed to raise fighting
divisions. The National Leader, to his marked distaste, was compelled
to stage an interview with Vlasov "as between equals," at
which the renegade Soviet General had been granted everything he
asked for. (It was after agreeing to see Vlasov that Himmler had made
his celebrated remark to d'Alquen: "Who compels us to keep the
promises we make?")
The theory behind
Skorpion
was that the Russians would be
more amenable to discipline from their own compatriots. It was a
development of the policy which had led to the inclusion of the
scum of Europe in special SS battalions. A process which had started
with the "racially pure" and allowed blond Scandinavians
into the Viking Division was now extended to the Flemish, the Dutch,
Latvians, Walloons, Uzbeks, Bosnians, Estonians, and even Arabs,
whose one qualification was a taste for the dirty work of the SS. It
was the old jailor's technique of making the prisoners fight one
another, and it ran the same risks. Once the central authority was
shaken, all the hate and brutality the jailors had released would
recoil upon them and their kin.
The Red Army had reached the Danube on 5th October, and a
fortnight later joined forces with Tito in Belgrade. A hundred and
fifty miles due north Malinovsky forced the line of the Tisza, and by
the end of October the German "front," still little more
than a patchwork of
ad hoc
formations of widely varying
quality, was back on the upper Danube. Meanwhile Finland had
dropped out of the war and the Russians had broken out into the
Baltic with the capture of islands of Dago and Ösel. It was only
in the centre that the front still held, or, rather, that the
Stavka
maintained its game of cat-and-mouse. And Guderian, for one, knew
when its blow would fall. It would come, he reasoned, after the
Ardennes offensive opened and when its outcome could be predicted.
The last hand the Wehrmacht could deal itself would have been
shown, and played; thereafter its extinction would be as simple and
calculable as the outcome of the chess problems with which Vlasov
and his colleagues would while away their useless hours.
The running down of German strength in Poland and East Prussia had
gone far beyond the danger point by Christmas 1944. In November and
December, out of a total production of 2,299 tanks and assault guns,
only 921 went to the Eastern front. The number of divisions had
shrunk to 130; this was 27 fewer than the total with which the Soviet
offensive of June had been checked. And of these just under half were
deployed where they could play little part in the decisive battle,
for there were still nearly 30 infantry divisions in Memel and
Courland, guarding the Baltic shore for Doenitz's U-boat exercises;
and 28 south of the Carpathians, where the Russians' pressure in
Hungary and their encirclement of Budapest was gradually drawing off
some of the best divisions in the OKH reserve.
Indeed, it is an extraordinary tribute to Guderian's single-minded dedication and efficiency that he had been able to amass any
reserves at all. Yet he had done so. In spite of the demands of the
Ardennes offensive, the recurrent crises in the Balkans, the
deliberate withholding and diversion of weapons by the Home Army, and
persistent obstruction at the highest administrative level by Jodl,
at least twelve Panzer divisions had been taken out of the line by
Christmas 1944 and were being held in readiness to take the shock of
the Russian spearheads. Guderian knew, though, that on a front of
nearly six hundred miles and having neither the fuel nor the orders,
nor indeed the space in which to fight a mobile battle, his armies
were soon to face the risk of annihilation.
In December, OKH intelligence reported over sixty rifle divisions and eight tank corps (or slightly more than the total German
strength along the whole front) in the Baranov bridgehead alone. Two
other major Russian concentrations, fifty-four divisions and six tank
corps north of Warsaw, and approximately the same number on the East
Prussian border, gave warning that the blows would be successive. "By
the time the last one comes," said Reinhardt, ". . . we
shall be debris."
It had originally been Hitler's intention to start the Ardennes
offensive in November. If he had done so, and even if the results had
been no more substantial than they were in actuality, the return of
the Panzer reserve to Guderian's command would have been possible
before the Russian winter offensive started. But in fact Manteuffel
and Sepp Dietrich did not start until 16th December, and their
progress was watched with as great anxiety by OKH at Zossen as it was
by the staff of Hitler's temporary headquarters in the West, at
Ziegenberg.
By 23rd December, Guderian's nerves could stand the sus-pense no
longer, and he drove across Germany to Ziegenberg, resolved to
"request that the battle, which was causing us heavy casualties,
be broken off and that all forces that could be spared be immediately
transferred to the Eastern Front."
Although the Chief of the General Staff was ultimately proved
right, his intervention at this stage was premature, and this
misjudgment probably cost him several divisions, for it gave the
"Western" school the opportunity to show him up as ill
informed and needlessly apprehensive ("far too worried," as
the National Leader soothingly expressed it). For on that day, in the
words of the U. S. Official Historian, ". . . the attempt to
plug the gap had been converted to a struggle for survival, as every
division sent to First Army in a counterattacking role . . . was
forced into the defensive fighting to prevent a new German
breakout." It was not until 24th December that Model decided
even to substitute the "small solution" for the original
plan of breaking through to Ant-werp, and it was unthinkable that
Hitler should start to disengage at a point which seemed to be the
crisis of the battle.
"Who's responsible for producing all this rubbish?"
Hitler shouted when Guderian showed him a memorandum reciting the
accumulation of Soviet divisions in Poland. Guderian was entertained
at dinner, after which Jodl gloatingly "confided" that
the Ardennes would be followed by another offensive, in Alsace. "We
must not lose the initiative that we have just regained," he
lectured Guderian, "the enemy's operational timetable has been
gravely damaged." Indeed, the sole result of Guderian's visit
was that OKW briefly turned its attention to the Eastern front and
ordered (while Guderian was returning to Zossen and without informing
him) the two SS Panzer divisions of Gille's corps which were in reserve behind Warsaw to proceed to Hungary and "raise the siege
of Budapest."
Realising that he would never make any headway with the OKW
sycophants at Ziegenberg, who were intoxicated by the unaccustomed
approbation of the Führer and by the unfamiliar sensation of
handling a major offensive, Guderian now directed his efforts along
the traditional channels of Prussian freemasonry—and was better
rewarded. On New Year's Eve he returned to Ziegenberg, but this time
took the precaution of calling first on Rundstedt, the C. in C. West,
and General Siegfried Westphal, his Chief of Staff. These cool
professional colleagues, who held nothing but contempt for the "Nazi
soldiers" around the Führer, were gravely impressed by
the dangers in the East. Westphal gave Guderian the numbers of three
divisions behind the Western front and one in Italy which were
immediately available and located near railway stations, and even
went so far as to send their commanders a warning order to stand by
for entrainment.
Guderian then went personally to the Field Transport Office and
arranged for the necessary rolling stock to be made available, and
then, finally, to Hitler's conference room, where he repeated his
request of the previous week for reinforcement.
Jodl immediately said there was "nothing available."
"But this time I could contradict him . . . When I gave
Hitler the number of the divisions available, Jodl asked me angrily
where I had got them from; when I told him—from the
Commander-in-Chief of his own front—he relapsed into sulky
silence." Guderian was duly allowed to transfer the divisions,
but the time and effort wasted to get this slight reinforcement, and
the divided state of the German High Command which the incident
exemplifies, were a poor augury for the critical battles that lay
ahead.
Following this minor personal triumph, the Chief of Staff spent
the first week in January on a tour of the Eastern army headquarters.
What he learned from them and from his own observation was so
alarming that he decided to make one last appeal to Hitler, this time
both for more troops and for permission to make a pre-emptive
withdrawal which would al-low a thinly defended buffer of land to
take the first shock of the Russian attack. For Guderian rightly saw
that in the months which they had spent in preparation the Russians
had accumulated such strength that it was no longer within the power
of the German Army to stop them in their tracks. The only hope was,
by ducking at the last moment, to make Zhukov "hit air,"
then to fight a flexible battle across western Poland until
exhaustion and the spring thaw would take the impetus out of the
Russian advance.
But even Manstein in his heyday had been unable to persuade
Hitler to a strategic philosophy of this kind. Now, as Guderian wryly
observed, ". . . whenever Hitler heard the word 'operational' he
lost his temper, knowing it to be a prelude to a withdrawal."
When Guderian presented him with the revised estimates of Russian
strength, Hitler declared that they were "completely idiotic"
and "pure bluff."
[German estimates were slightly exaggerated, at a total of 225
divisions. In fact, Russian strength was 180 infantry divisions, with
4 tank armies, each of around 1,200 tanks, and an additional 23
independent tank brigades. Increasing mechanisation had reduced the
cavalry, and there were only three cavalry corps deployed.]
He who had for so long deployed Panzer "brigades" two
battalions strong and "divisions" barely the size of
regiments was now attributing the same deceptions to his enemy.
Hitler went on to order General Gehlen, who had drawn up the
appreciation, to be committed to an insane asylum. This Guderian
managed to deflect, but he achieved little else.