Hitler, Donitz, and the Baltic Sea (11 page)

At the beginning of August, Voss requested an assessment of Hogland’s importance should the Russians control the waters north of the island. The Skl reversed an earlier statement and replied that although Hogland’s possession would still be of value if the Soviets dominated Finland’s southern coast, the navy would have to erect a new minefield farther west and that the execution of Tanne East was advisable only if additional forces were available.
⁸³

When news of Finland’s surrender arrived, however, Dönitz quickly intervened to salvage plans to take Hogland. On 3 September he phoned the Skl from Hitler’s headquarters to inquire whether it was possible simultaneously to conduct both Tanne operations, evacuate Twentieth Mountain Army, and maintain the supply of Army Group North. Although the navy’s shipping department replied in the affirmative, Meisel pointed out that the necessary prerequisites for Tanne East no longer existed, because not enough trained troops were available for the operation.
⁸⁴
Later that day Wagner reported from Hitler’s headquarters that Tanne probably would not
take place due to lack of forces, and the next day plans for the occupation of the Åland Islands were canceled.
⁸⁵

Dönitz, however, continued to push for the seizure of Hogland. In the following days the Skl reported to Assmann, Voss, and Capt. Hans-Dietrich von Conrady (naval liaison officer to the Army General Staff) that it had received reliable information that the Finns planned to evacuate Hogland on 12 September and would not resist a German occupation of the island, or at most would offer only token resistance. Although Soviet control of Finland’s southern coast reduced the island’s value, Dönitz insisted that to surrender it to the enemy without a fight was unacceptable and urged that the operation be carried out by 15 September at the latest.
⁸⁶
The “reliable information” Dönitz referred to was a report from the German naval liaison officer on Hogland stating that the island’s commander had declared he would never hand Hogland over to the Russians or fire upon German troops.
⁸⁷
Yet Dönitz, desperately seeking justification to seize the island, felt this provided exactly what he sought. The next day Hitler approved Dönitz’s request and ordered Tanne East carried out as quickly as possible, preferably by the 15th. Dönitz was ready—he had issued preparatory orders the previous morning.
⁸⁸

As the operation drew closer Dönitz stubbornly clung to his insistence upon its execution, despite changing conditions. He now warned that although Finnish resistance was not expected, it could not be ruled out. If the Finns did oppose the landing, however, their resistance was to be crushed. Although this at least took into account recent reports regarding Finland’s attitude, it ignored earlier assessments that the island would be extremely difficult to capture against opposition.
⁸⁹
On 11 September the Luftwaffe informed the Skl that it could provide fighters neither to defend the island if captured nor to protect supply transports to its garrison. Early the next morning the Skl received word that the Finns had no plans to evacuate Hogland. The reasons Dönitz had used to convince Hitler to seize Hogland had collapsed one by one. Yet he never considered calling off the operation and even issued instructions certain to antagonize the Finns. He ordered the mining of Finnish territorial waters to reinforce the
Seeigel
barrage, which was carried out on the evening of 14 September.
⁹⁰

The assault occurred early on the morning of 15 September, and it was, in brief, a complete fiasco. Communications with the landing force were virtually nonexistent, the Finns had received advance warning and offered fierce resistance, and Soviet aircraft effectively responded to Finnish calls for assistance.
⁹¹
Dönitz, however, refused to admit defeat. He demanded a report on what help the assault force required and insisted that resistance
be crushed at all costs. At 1305 (1:05 pm) he ordered the cruiser
Prinz Eugen
dispatched to assist in the conquest of the island, and at 1400 (2 pm) Wagner relayed Dönitz’s command that everything be sent into action to fulfill this task. He finally bowed to the inevitable around midnight but vowed the operation would be repeated.
⁹²
In fact, only Schörner’s decision to evacuate Estonia prevented Dönitz from trying again. The Germans suffered over 1,300 casualties in the futile attempt to capture Hogland.
⁹³

Once again, a Soviet offensive had dealt a heavy blow to Army Group North. Although unable to break through at Narva, the Russians had forced the rest of the army group to retreat from its fortified line in the Panther Position. In the process of annihilating Army Group Center, the Soviets succeeded in temporarily isolating German armies in the Baltic States, though they proved unable to destroy Eighteenth Army. As had been the case during the Soviet winter offensive, all that had prevented the army from retreating further, and in this case from evacuating much of the Baltic States, was a series of Führer orders. The various commanders of Army Groups North and Center considered closing the Baltic Gap and protecting East Prussia of far greater importance than maintaining possession of the Estonian coast.

The army group had three commanders in a relatively short period. Lindemann’s tenure during the crisis was too brief to permit an accurate analysis of his ability. His readiness to assist Busch, however, reveals a grasp of the interrelationship of the Eastern Front as a whole, unlike some commanders (like Model) who tended to hoard their reserves while neighboring sectors collapsed. Friessner attempted to carry out Hitler’s commands but did not shirk from protesting orders he believed were impractical. He usually made his objections, however, from a distance. When they met face to face, Hitler usually succeeded in instilling in Friessner a renewed sense of purpose and determination. Friessner’s interpretation of Hitler’s reluctance to evacuate Estonia following the conference of 18 July deserves mention. Immediately after this meeting, Friessner notified the army group that Hitler had ordered the defense of its present positions due to the diplomatic situation.
⁹⁴
Hitler, however, had given a lengthy explanation for his decision, of which diplomatic reasons were only a part. He had listed several military and economic advantages to retaining Estonia, but at the time Friessner chose to view the decision as politically motivated. Schörner was a different type of commander altogether; his qualities and abilities will be analyzed below, but for now it is sufficient to state that he was the only one seriously to consider disobeying Hitler’s express orders and ordering the evacuation of Estonia.

Hitler did not issue as many orders regarding the Narva front as he had during the Soviet winter offensive, but then, the Narva sector was never directly threatened in the course of the summer offensive. Although every other army group on the Russian front—to say nothing of those in France and Italy—suffered horrendous losses that summer, Hitler refused to give up Estonia to provide forces urgently required in other theaters. In addition, Army Detachment Narva initially possessed nearly one-third of the army group’s divisions on a relatively tiny proportion of the front. Hitler knew the locations of his divisions.

Dönitz’s actions during the summer of 1944 reveal a great deal about the man Hitler later chose as his successor. For a brief period, Dönitz recognized the reality of Germany’s predicament. Yet after his forty days in the wilderness, desperately groping for something in which he could believe, he all too readily reverted to his blind faith in the person and policies of Adolf Hitler. Even in the period of his uncertainty, however, Dönitz never abandoned his desire to maintain German domination of the Baltic. His assertion of 9 July that the retention of Estonia was of no value if the Soviets reached the coast farther south reflected his desire to preserve control of the Baltic by ensuring German possession of Courland and East Prussia, areas that he considered the most vital to the war at sea. Although he initially countenanced in an indirect manner Army Group North’s withdrawal, claiming that the navy could not guarantee its supply if Schörner’s forces were isolated, once Dönitz’s faith in Hitler had been restored he hastened to submit revised figures showing the navy could supply the army group by sea after all. Once more Dönitz held that the army must not retreat but should maintain its forward positions to keep the Soviet fleet as far as possible from the U-boat training areas.

Dönitz’s penchant for lost causes is well illustrated in his persistent efforts to ensure Hogland’s occupation. He was willing to risk the addition of Finland to the growing list of nations at war with Germany in an attempt to seize an island that would have been difficult to defend, nearly impossible to supply, and whose possession could not have prevented the Soviets from clearing at their leisure a path through the mine barrage along the Finnish coast. The evidence is clear that this was Dönitz’s operation. Hitler displayed no desire to attack the Finns. Goebbels tried to “spin” the unsuccessful attempt to seize Hogland as not a German failure but a Finnish betrayal of German attempts to protect other Baltic “kindred peoples.”
⁹⁵

The concentration of naval forces in the Baltic also demonstrates this theater’s importance to Dönitz. In mid-August there were well over two hundred German vessels operating in the Gulf of Finland. Furthermore, in
the first week of September fifteen submarines patrolled the Gulf, exactly 10 percent of Germany’s U-boat force available for action.
⁹⁶
Considering Dönitz’s repeated assertions that the U-boat war remained the navy’s foremost task, such a concentration of submarines in a theater where there were no targets is a telling indication of its priority for the navy. Moreover, with the exception of a few destroyers and the nonoperational battleship
Tirpitz,
all of Germany’s heavy surface vessels had been assembled in the Baltic. These numbers are even more impressive considering the extraordinarily high losses inflicted upon German naval forces in the West in the course of the summer.
⁹⁷

Notwithstanding the navy’s heavy losses in irreplaceable warships, Dönitz did not refrain from risking its remaining vessels for missions he considered vital. At the end of July Soviet minesweepers broke through the
Seeigel
mine barrage in the Gulf of Finland. The breakthrough occurred in an area not covered by German artillery on the island of Tütters or by Finnish coastal guns on Hogland. This only served to emphasize the importance of retaining these islands in keeping the Soviet fleet from the Baltic. Hitler displayed his interest in this affair by ordering the Luftwaffe to provide fighter protection for naval vessels laying a new mine barrage to close the gap.
⁹⁸

On the night of 17–18 August four torpedo boats and eight motor minesweepers left Helsinki to extend the
Seeigel.
But as they began to lay their mines, several sudden explosions occurred, and three torpedo boats sank. The ships had either run into their own minefields or had struck mines that one vessel began to lay prematurely.
⁹⁹
To prevent a repetition of this debacle, on 23 August the Skl ordered Kummetz not to employ large surface vessels in the Gulf of Finland unless their use would be decisive.
¹⁰⁰
Dönitz ordered an attempt to reinforce the
Seeigel
barrage again in December—with, however, even more catastrophic results.

Although in the first weeks of September Schörner’s forces still controlled most of Estonia, they held a dangerously exposed position. The German front on the central and southern sectors had been pushed back far to the west, leaving Army Group North on a line jutting out to the east with only a slim corridor connecting it with the rest of the front. There had been a respite following the winter offensive, but this time the Soviets would not allow Army Group North several months to rest and regroup.

C
HAPTER
3

A
T THE BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER
1944, Army Group North defended a sector approximately seven hundred kilometers in length with slightly over 570,000 men.
¹
In the first days of the month Schörner took advantage of the lull to reorganize his units and reinforce the Tuckum–Schlock corridor linking his forces with Army Group Center. Once land contact with the Reich had been regained, the seemingly logical step would have been to evacuate the Baltic States, thereby removing Schörner’s armies from their perilously exposed position and providing over a half-million troops for Germany’s defense. Although the army group repeatedly requested to withdraw from Estonia and despite Finland’s surrender, Hitler insisted on holding the present front.
²

Schörner, however, with Guderian’s connivance, made secret preparations to evacuate the army group. Scarcely two weeks after he had assumed command, Schörner prepared the groundwork for a withdrawal from Estonia and eastern Latvia. On 8 August Natzmer sent Eighteenth Army’s chief of staff, General Foertsch, draft plans for the retreat, code-named “Map Exercise Königsberg,” with the admonition that these plans were intended for his eyes only. The plan assumed that Army Group Center would not reestablish land contact in the foreseeable future, that Finland had joined the anti-German coalition, and that Soviet air superiority ruled out large-scale troop evacuations by sea. Exercise Königsberg envisaged the army group’s withdrawal to a bridgehead around Riga and, following an attack to regain contact with Army Group Center, the establishment of a new defensive front on a line slightly west of Riga.
³
In spite of Hitler’s order to defend the present positions, preparations for the withdrawal continued.