Hitler (139 page)

He believed that his admiration for Stalin gave him certain clues to the Russian's behavior. Greatness, he knew, was by its nature inexorable; it would have no truck with those shifts that were the business of bourgeois statesmen. A new offensive against the East, therefore, could possibly delay the end, but certainly could not avert it. An offensive in the West, on the other hand, might produce a shock of surprise among the Americans and British, who he believed were easily shaken. Thus he would recapture the initiative and so secure that gain in time which might yet bring about the hoped-for split in the enemy coalition. In this sense the offensive was a kind of last desperate offer to the Western Allies to make common cause with him.

Above all, however, an offensive seemed possible only in the West; and this consideration virtually decided the matter. There he could advance once again, once again bring to bear his genius as a commander, which had been proved in offensive operations. The vast expanses of the Eastern front, with its gigantic rear areas, where he himself had gone astray even in the days of optimum force, offered far less of an operational base or goal than the West. In the West, moreover, the offensive could take off from the west wall's system of fortifications. And since it would have shorter distances to cover, less fuel would be needed. Moreover, Hitler also thought that his armies in the East would put up a bitter resistance in any case. In the East fear was on his side, whereas in the West he had to reckon with a growing defeatism. The Morgenthau Plan (so-called after Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Ir.) for the dismemberment and agrarianization of Germany had just become known, and was being exploited by the propaganda specialists to build up anxiety. Though not entirely unsuccessful in this, they did not manage to create anything like the wild terror they had counted on. Consequently, the offensive was to confer upon the war in the West some of the grimness it already had in the East.

On December 11 and 12, a few days before the attack was started, Hitler summoned the troop commanders of the Western front in two separate groups to meetings in the headquarters of Field Marshal von Rund-stedt. Having first been relieved of weapons and briefcases, they were driven about haphazardly to confuse their sense of orientation until the column of cars at last stopped at the entrance to an extensive system of bunkers that proved to be the Adlerhorst (the Eagle's Nest) Führer's headquarters near Bad Nauheim. They were led down a lane formed by SS men to Hitler. One of the participants was stunned to discover “a stooped figure with a pale and puffy face, hunched in his chair, his hands trembling, his left arm subject to a violent twitching which he did his best to conceal.” An armed bodyguard stood behind every chair, and one of the participants later declared: “None of us would have dared so much as to pull out his handkerchief.”
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In a two-hour speech combining justifications with encouragements, Hitler informed the assembled commanders of Operation Autumn Mists. The attack was to advance through the Ardennes toward Antwerp, the Allies' most important supply port, and subsequently to annihilate all enemy forces to the north. Hitler admitted that his plan was a gamble and seemed to stand “in a certain disproportion to the forces and their condition.” But the risk acted as a challenge to him; for the last time he was staking everything on a single card. He pointed out the advantages of an offensive strategy, especially within an overall defensive framework. He implored the officers “to make it plain to the enemy that no matter what he does he can never count on a surrender, never, never.” And then he came back to his ever-growing hope:

 

Never in the history of the world have there been coalitions like that of our enemies, composed of so many heterogeneous elements with such totally divergent aims.... These are countries that are already bickering with one another over their aims every day. And he who sits like a spider in his web, so to speak, watching this development, can see these antagonisms blowing up more and more with every passing hour. If they are hit by a few more very heavy blows, at any moment this artificially sustained common front may suddenly collapse with a tremendous clap of thunder... provided always that this battle in no circumstances leads to a further weakening of Germany....

Gentlemen, on other fronts I have accepted sacrifices beyond the call of necessity in order to create here the preconditions for another offensive.
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On December 16, with low-hanging clouds grounding the enemy air force, the offensive began on a front of seventy-five miles. Hitler had withdrawn several battle-hardened divisions from the Eastern front. The enemy was hoodwinked by deceptive radio messages. To avoid attracting attention, some of the heavy equipment was pulled into position by horses. Low-flying planes were assigned the task of drowning out with their motors the noises and clanging in the German positions. The surprise actually succeeded, and enabled the German divisions to break through at many points. But after only a few days it became apparent that the offensive would have been condemned to failure even without the fierce American defense, simply because the German side quickly ran out of energy and reserves. One tank group stopped a mile from an American supply dump containing 3 million gallons of gasoline. Another unit waited in vain on the ridge near Dinant for fuel and reinforcements, so that it could roll on the short distance to the Meuse. Just before Christmas, moreover, the weather changed; dense swarms of Allied planes reappeared in the blue skies and within a few days flew 15,000 sorties, literally smashing to pieces the German supply lines. On December 28 Hitler once more summoned the division commanders to his headquarters to implore and bully them:

 

Never in my life have I accepted the idea of surrender, and I am one of those men who have worked their way up from nothing. Our present situation, therefore, is nothing new to me. Once upon a time my own situation was entirely different, and far worse. I say this only so that you can grasp why I pursue my goal with such fanaticism and why nothing can wear me down. No matter how much I might be tormented by worries, even if my health were shaken by them—that would still have not the slightest effect on my decision to fight on....”
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In the East, meanwhile, the Red Army had begun its preparations for an offensive on a broad front, and on January 9, 1945, Guderian once more called on Hitler to alert him to the threatening danger. But Hitler would not hear of it; he was thinking only of his own offensive, which had once more restored the possibility of planning and operating. He called all warnings to the contrary “completely idiotic” and ordered the chief of Foreign Armies Intelligence, East, who had furnished Guderian with his information, to be “locked up in a lunatic asylum at once.” The Eastern front had never been buttressed by so many reserves as it was at the moment, Hitler stated. The chief of staff retorted: “The Eastern front is a house of cards. If the front is penetrated at a single point, it will collapse.”

Early in January the troops in the Ardennes made two further attempts to advance to the south. They were thrown back to their starting positions by January 16. But in the meanwhile, on January 12, the first blow of the Russian offensive under Marshal Konev struck at the bridgehead of Baranov and effortlessly crashed through the German lines. A day later the armies of Marshal Zhukov crossed the Vistula on both sides of the Polish capital, while farther north two armies pushed toward East Prussia and the Gulf of Danzig. The entire front between the Baltic and the Carpathians was in motion. A tremendous war machine with infantry superiority of eleven to one, tanks seven to one, and artillery twenty to one, pushing an enormous avalanche of human beings before it, rolled over the scattered German efforts at resistance. By the end of the month Silesia was lost, and the Russians had reached the Oder. The Red Army was only a hundred miles from Berlin. On some nights the inhabitants of the German capital could hear the rumble of heavy artillery.

On January 30, 1945, twelve years after his appointment as Chancellor of the Reich, Hitler delivered his last speech over the radio. Once again he tried to conjure up the peril of the “Asian tidal wave” and appealed in curiously weary and unconvincing phrases to every individual's spirit of resistance. “However grave the crisis may be at the moment,” he concluded, “in the end it will be mastered by our unalterable will, by our readiness for sacrifice, and by our abilities. We will overcome this emergency also.”
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On that same day Albert Speer addressed a memorandum to Hitler informing him that the war was lost.

To put the matter briefly, someone who has no heir for his house would do best to have himself burned with everything that is in it—as if on a magnificent pyre.

Adolf Hitler

 

On January 16, after receiving news of the beginning of the great Soviet offensive, Hitler returned to the chancellery. The vast gray pile, once intended to be the starting point for the reconstruction of the capital, had meanwhile become surrounded by a landscape of craters, ruins, and mountains of rubble. Bombs had damaged many of the wings, blown loose porphyry and marble, and blasted out windows, whose empty frames were boarded up. Only the section in which Hitler's apartments and offices were located had remained undamaged; in this wing even the windows were scarcely shattered.

Soon the almost continual air raids had forced Hitler to retire so often to the shelter installed twenty-four feet beneath the garden of the chancellery that after a while he decided to move in there. In any case, this withdrawal to the cave fitted in with the traits that were emerging with ever-increasing force: the fear, the suspicion, and the denial of reality. For a few weeks he continued taking his meals in the upper rooms, but in these, too, the curtains were always drawn. Meanwhile, outside, with the fronts cracking everywhere, against a background of burning cities and roads choked with refugees, of ruins and collapsing supplies, unprecedented chaos broke out.

But through it all some guiding energy seemed to be at work, arranging matters, as it were, so that the Third Reich did not just end but went down to destruction. Hitler had repeatedly posed the alternative of world power or doom. A flat, undramatic end would have disavowed his entire previous life and his operatic temperament, his fascination with stunning effects. Early in the thirties, in one of his fantasies about the impending war, he had declared that if the National Socialists did not win, “even as we go down to destruction we will carry half the world into destruction with us.”®
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But there was more than defiance and despair, more than histrionics, in his craving for catastrophe. In fact, Hitler saw disaster as his ultimate chance for survival. The study of history had taught him that only grand downfalls lent themselves to the process of mythmaking. Consequently, he was staking all his remaining strength on staging his departure. When Otto Ernst Remer, the officer who had suppressed the July 20 coup and had been rewarded by being promoted to a general's rank, asked him at the end of January why he wanted to continue the struggle in spite of admitted defeat, Hitler replied darkly: “From total defeat springs the seed of the new.” He made a similar remark to Bormann about a week later: “A desperate fight retains its eternal value as an example. Think of Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans. In any case it does not suit our style to let ourselves be slaughtered like sheep. They may exterminate us, but they will not be able to lead us to the slaughter.”
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This determination lent an obstinate consistency to Hitler's behavior through the entire final phase and shaped his last conception of how to wage the war: the strategy of grandiose doom. As early as the autumn of 1944, when the Allied armies had advanced to the German border, he had ordered the practice of “scorched earth” for the territory of the Reich and insisted that nothing but a desert should be left to the enemy. But the policy, which at first seemed justified by operational considerations, soon developed into an abstract mania for destruction, totally Without any discernible purpose. Not only industrial plants and supplies were to be demolished, but all facilities essential for the maintenance of life: supplies of food and sewerage systems, amplifying stations, long-distance cables and radio towers, telephone centrals, switching diagrams and stocks of spare parts, municipal registries, and bank-account records. Even those artistic monuments that had survived the air raids were consigned to destruction: the historic buildings, castles, churches, theaters, and opera houses. Hitler's vandal nature was still there beneath the veneer of cultural respectability. Now that barbarian syndrome emerged undisguised. In one of the last military conferences he joined with Goebbels in regretting that they had not unleashed a revolution in the classical style. Both the seizure of power in 1933 and the annexation of Austria had been marred by the “flaw” of insufficient opposition. Goebbels, who now reverted to his radical beginnings and during these weeks with good reason moved closer to Hitler than ever before, eagerly chimed in that if there had been such opposition they “could have smashed everything to pieces.” Hitler, for his part, regretted his numerous concessions: “Afterwards you rue the fact that you've been so kind.”
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In a similar spirit, at the very beginning of the war—according to an account by General Halder—he opposed the opinions of the generals, insisting on the bombing and bombardment of Warsaw when the city was ready for surrender, and extracted aesthetic thrills from the images of destruction: the apocalyptically darkened sky, the walls pulverized by a million tons of bombs, people panic-stricken and wiped out.
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During the campaign in Russia he waited impatiently for the annihilation of Moscow and Leningrad, similarly in the summer of 1944 for the doom of London and Paris, and later he voluptuously pictured the effects an air raid would have upon the canyons of Manhattan. But he had been thwarted in all of this.
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Now he could once again, and almost without check, pursue his primal bent for destruction. That emotional bias matched effortlessly with his special strategy of doom and with his revolutionary hatred for the old world. It provided the slogans of the final phase in an act of extreme selfrevelation. “Under the ruins of our devastated cities the last so-called achievements of the bourgeois nineteenth century have finally been buried,” Goebbels raved. “Together with the monuments of culture, the last obstacles to the fulfillment of our revolutionary task are likewise falling. Now, when everything lies in ruins, we are forced to reconstruct Europe. In the past private ownership imposed bourgeois restraint upon us. Now the bombs, instead of killing all Europeans, have only razed the walls of the prisons that had incarcerated them.... The enemy who strove to annihilate Europe's future has succeeded only in annihilating the past, and consequently everything old and worn out is gone.”
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