Barbarossa (76 page)

[Garder 303,
Une Guerre pas commes les Autres
, Paris 1963.
A loose translation might be, "They were letting themselves
go."]

Consequently on the first day the German attack made good
progress. The Russians had only scattered a few mines around villages
and road junctions, and from these positions they managed to take the
edge off the attack with
Cheristikye
[The Russian equivalent
of the Bazooka antitank rocket.] and their 76-mm. antitank guns
(now firing hollow-charge ammunition).

But in open country, and where the forest ran out into plain, the
Panzers drove deep. By nightfall on the 16th three thousand prisoners
had been taken. The vital task for the Germans was to confront the
Soviet armour and to destroy it in the first days. Their own
limitations in fuel, training, and endurance made it essential that
the issue be decided before Zhukov could develop his reaction. On
17th December there were some signs that this might be achieved.
Tanks of the 4th SS attempting to cross the Warthe southwest of
Landsberg were engaged in a gun duel by a group of JS 2's which
appeared on the opposite bank and forced them to retire. Probing
attacks in company strength across the Oder below Küstrin indicated that Zhukov had no intention of pulling back because of the
threat to his right flank.

At the
Stavka
news of the Rauss-Wenck offensive brought an
immediate reaction. Rokossovski was ordered to intensify his pressure
against Weiss in Pomerania, and Kozlov's 19th Army was taken from
Chernyakovski's command to reinforce 2nd ARB.

[Chernyakovski was killed by a sniper on 18th February.]

Coordination between Zhukov and Rokossovski had been greatly
simplified by the surrender of the German garrison at Schneidemühl
on 14th February, for this important rail centre provided both
north-south and east-west communication. Had the German attack opened
but three days earlier, the town would have been relieved and. with
Graudenz and Dirschau still holding out in the Russian rear,
Rokossovski's power of rapid concentration would have been severely
limited.

[Graudenz held until 6th, Dirschau until 13th March.]

As it was, fate took a hand in the affair before either the
Russians had time to revise their disposition or the Panzers had
managed to bring the 2nd Guards Armoured to battle. In spite of
Guderian's contention that the evening "briefings" with
Hitler were "simply chatter and a waste of time," Wenck was
compelled to attend them at the end of each day. This involved a
round trip of nearly two hundred miles between Berlin and army group
headquarters outside Stettin. On the night of 17th February, Wenck,
dead-tired himself, took the wheel of the car so as to relieve his
driver, who had collapsed. He fell asleep, and the car went off the
road, crashing into the parapet of a bridge on the Berlin-Stettin
Autobahn
.

Wenck was seriously injured and taken to a hospital, and with him
went Guderian's last chance of retaining personal control of the
Arnswalde operation. The following day Hitler, at the recommendation
of Burgdorf, appointed General Hans Krebs (a close friend of
Burgdorfs) to take Wenck's position.
Treuer Heinrich
was now
more or less permanently quartered in Berlin, and had given up all
but nominal responsibility for his army group, but Krebs, like Model,
whose Chief of Staff he had been, was a "Nazi general."

Thus did control of Army Group Vistula return to the hands of the
Party, and from that time the attack, lacking continuity of
direction, petered out. It had lasted four days —the shortest
as well as the least successful offensive undertaken by the German
Army. To the many factors which, from its inception, had militated
against success—personal jealousies, administrative
obstruction, deficiencies of men and equipment—fate had now
delivered the coup de grâce. As in the case of General Billotte
four and a half years earlier, a motor accident had decapitated an
army poised on the brink of defeat.

[General Billotte was the commander of the Anglo-French armies in
Belgium at the time of the German breakthrough at Sedan in May
1940.]

Hitler, the repository of all blame for Germany's military defeats
in World War II, must certainly bear a large proportion for the
collapse of Army Group Vistula and the abortion of Guderian's plan
for a counterattack. But before condemning this simply as feckless
irresponsibility, the product of spite or unsound mind, we should
try to estimate what the Führer's strategic intentions were at
the time. We have evidence of two, one military and the other
political. Doenitz had persuaded Hitler that with the electro U-boat
he would once again place in Germany's hands an instrument of war-winning importance, and that retention of the Baltic was vital so as
to provide a quiet area where the new boats could be "worked up"
by their crews.

[In fact, this was an unsound strategic appreciation, for the war
at sea was no longer of fundamental importance; indeed, the Al-lied
High Command considered it "more than likely that the enemy
would succeed in recovering the initiative at sea—during the
spring."]

The second element in the Führer's calculations was less
improbable, although the element of fantasy is still perceptible.
Hitler had always conceived of himself as comparable to Frederick
the Great, combining military resolution with political guile, and
the accumulating successes of the coalition arrayed against him had,
if anything, lent force to this illusion. Although he never showed it
to his generals (by any manner other than his conduct) surviving
recorded fragments of discussions with his Party cronies suggest that
denuding the front which protected Berlin was an act of deliberate
political calculation. This conversation took place on the evening of
27th January:

Hitler. Do you think the English can be really enthusiastic
about all the Russian developments?

Jodl. No, certainly not. Their plans were quite different. Only
later on perhaps will the full realisation of this come.

Goering. They had not counted on our defending ourselves step by
step, and holding them off in the West like madmen, while the
Russians drive deeper and deeper into Germany.

Hitler. If the Russians would proclaim a national government for
Germany, the English will start to be really scared. I have given
orders that a report be played into their hands to the effect that
the Russians are organising two hundred thousand of our men led by
German officers and completely infected with communism, who will come
marching into Germany . . . that will make them feel as if someone
has stuck a needle into them.

Goering. They entered the war to prevent us going into the East;
not to have the East come to the Atlantic. . . .

If this goes on [the Russian advance into Germany], we shall get a
telegram in a few days.

The rest of the evening's discussion on this subject has not been
recorded, but it is significant that the following day Hitler
announced to Guderian that he had decided to send Sepp Dietrich's 6th
Panzer Army to Hungary instead of putting it under Army Group
Vistula.

If we realise that the Führer and the Chief of the General
Staff had conceived and were trying to implement diametrically
opposed policies, each of which they believed to be in the urgent
national interest, then the curious and dramatic events of January
1945 are more easily understood.

Vanity and self-delusion are among the lesser vices of despotic
courts—indeed, they are to be welcomed, for it is in such
ground that the seeds of self-destruction flourish. Thus the Nazis
held seriously to this conviction, and even after four years of war
they could indulge in extravagant fantasia in which the members of
the alliance negotiated either singly or together with them. After
all, they were the constituted government of the Reich. There was no
alternative form, nor since 20th July were there any "shadow"
personae
. They still held (or so they reasoned) cards of a
certain strength: a powerful and disciplined army, the loyalty of
some eighty million people, and the lives of fifty million more as
hostage. Their power of destruction, if no other, remained.

Above all, they, who had thrived, who had been helped up every
rung on the ladder by the bogey of communism, which had so perplexed
and divided the counsels of their enemies, could not rid themselves
of their pose as the sole alternative regime to the chaos of
Bolshevism.

But in the last days of February the conclusions of the Yalta
conference began to percolate to Berlin. It was plain that the Allies
intended to preserve at least the semblance of unity of purpose—and
that purpose, which they had declared at Casablanca, was the
"unconditional surrender" of the Reich. The corollary was
plain. The Nazi leaders were fighting for their lives. From now on
their orders that not another yard of ground was to be yielded have a
quality of desperation that is next to pleading, and the fighting in
the East entered its final, and most bitter, phase.

twenty-two
| The Fall of Berlin

As the wary Panzers drew back into the Arnswalde they gathered up
in their tracks a whole mass of civilian flotsam. Infants and aged,
wounded, slave labourers,
Hiwi
's, deserters in various
disguises, crowded the roads and byways, huddled in broken carts,
spawned over the bleak white-streaked countryside like maggots on an
open wound. German soil, which for so long had escaped retribution
for the sins of its children, was now visited by scenes whose horror
evokes the Thirty Years' War, and which seem to rise straight from
the sketches of Goya.

Rape, pillage, and random destruction seethed on the crest of the
advancing Russian wave. To Soviet soldiers killing was incidental;
the very fecklessness with which they valued human life made its
taking, or sparing, a trivial matter. In contrast, the German blood
lust was a positive and accelerating cancer which, having devoured so
many subject peoples, was now beginning fast to consume the
Herrenvolk
themselves. Men of the
Volkssturm
, hurrying
up to the Oder, could see the bodies of "malcontents,"
their former comrades in arms, swinging from the twisted girders of
the blown-up bridges, where they had been hanged by special flying
courts-martial which ranged the military zone, pronouncing and
executing sentence at will. Every tree in the Hindenburg Allee in
Dan-zig had been used as a gibbet, and the dangling soldiers kicked
and threshed, sometimes for hours, with placards pinned to their
uniforms: "I hang here because I left my unit without
permission."

Many of the "deserters" had been schoolboy flak gunners
who had gone to visit their parents for a few hours, proud of the
opportunity to display their new uniforms. But their protestations
went unheard in an atmosphere where

It is an act of racial duty according to Teutonic tradition to
exterminate even the kinsmen of those who surrender themselves into
captivity without being wounded.

At Zossen, Guderian recorded that deserters' families were not the
only class of Germans to be "exterminated" in that terrible
spring of '45. Black marketeers, spreaders of rumours, hoarders of
food, people on the move with unsatisfactory papers, even those who
changed their addresses without notifying the Gauleiter, stood in
jeopardy of their lives.

Underlying the brutal and chaotic enforcement of the new penal
"code" were the first tremors of impending disturbance
from the slave population. The camps in the East were opened as the
Russians advanced, and in a welter of bureaucratic confusion their
occupants suffered a variety of fates, often starting out into the
freezing wind with a few guards who soon lost their patience and, as
the Red Army approached, their nerve, and simply did their charges to
death in some wood or quarry on the route before making their own
getaway. Charged with obliterating the camp sites and removing every
trace of the satanic practices which had pervaded them, the men of
the SS were usually too jumpy to achieve this properly—although
the giant crematoria which had been put into Auschwitz in 1943 were
totally destroyed by high explosives in an expert demolition job,
which extended even to destruction of the architects' drawings in
the files of SS
Hauptamt
and of the firm which had built them,
a subsidiary of Kammler's WVHA.

Slaves in other categories, less crippled by disease and
starvation, often succeeded in overpowering their guards and breaking
away into the country, where they roamed for weeks in the shifting
boundaries of no man's land between the two armies, ravaging the
deserted townships and taking vengeance on any civilians who
remained. As the super-structure of civilisation fell away into
rubble, war reverted even to the colour it had carried down the
centuries. One German has described

... A group of
Hiwi
's mounted on horseback. They had
broken into a deserted Hohenzöllern castle which has been
preserved as a museum and looted it indiscriminately. They were all
drunk and had draped themselves with golden tapestries, carrying
spears and armour, and pulling a covered wagon loaded with priceless
pictures and
objets d'art
into which the snow was blowing in
gusts ...

At the end of February the thaw started, and the ice on the Oder
began to break up. Within a few days the long and precarious frontage
of Army Group Vistula, as it was still optimistically termed, enjoyed
the protection of the fast-flowing river, while to the north the
battered remnants of the 3rd Panzer Army and its ancillaries could
detect the weight of pressure against them easing as Soviet tanks and
supply lines began to feel the drag of the mud.

The effect on the National Leader was pronounced. He had been
suffering (or so he believed) indifferent health for some months, and
had been paying periodic visits to Dr. Karl Gebhardt's clinic at
Hohenlychen. Himmler's state of mind, already troubled by
"conscience" and desire "to do the right thing"
(which euphemisms, among a wider variety, he used to cover his desire
to take such measures as were necessary to preserve his own survival
in power without risking an open breach with the Führer), was in
a condition of perpetual inflammation from the proddings of Schellenberg, who had now come out in the open with his urgings to seize
power and open negotiations with the West. Schellenberg also
believed—and it is unlikely that he managed to conceal this
conviction from his chief even if he had wished to do so—that
Himmler was suffering from cancer of the bowel, and this added to the
gloom. Certainly Dr. Gebhardt, whose only recorded medical
achievement is the highly un-Hippocratic feat of deliberately
infecting Polish girls with gas gangrene at Ravensbrück, was no
man for the valetu-dinarian. He had the National Leader on a course
of strych-nine and hormone "tonic," supplemented by that
durable standby of the medical profession for hysterical stomach—
Belladonna. For spiritual fare Himmler alternated between the mystic
(and mystifying) prophesies of Dr. Wulf—"a student of
poisons, Sanskrit and other interesting subjects" who had been
discovered by Schellenberg and had evolved some pre-cooked tale of
the National Leader's impending succession to supreme office—and
the more arduous material of the army reports which piled up around
his bedside, dutifully brought to him by SS despatch riders every
twelve hours.