Hitler's Panzers (55 page)

In the absence of air and artillery support, the panzers were compelled to push right up to the canal banks to cover the infantry as they crossed. That brought them into killing range of Soviet antitank guns, and AFVs were no longer expendable assets. Where they were forced to retreat, the rubber boats of the assault troops were easy targets. Elsewhere Das Reich and Hohenstaufen were stymied. Leibstandarte managed to establish a bridgehead, and its pioneers managed to put a bridge across the Sio. But field bridging equipment had long since failed to keep pace with the panzers’ increasing weight. The bridge promptly collapsed. Only heroic improvisation under heavy fire reopened it sufficiently to funnel forward tank destroyers able to counter the T-34/85s that for three days kept counterattacking what was in any case a foothold to nowhere. On March 15, Dietrich and his staff ordered a withdrawal, intending to shift the army’s Schwerpunkt to II SS Panzer Corps. On March 16 it ceased to matter.

The Soviets had been able to contain Spring Awakening without committing their sector reserves. Instead those forces were concentrated west of Budapest, on the German left flank and rear. On March 14, Gille’s corps reported the threat. On March 16, under cover of a heavy fog, a million men and 1,699 armored vehicles tore a 20-mile hole in the Axis defenses and kept going. Balck, an operational optimist, had been too engaged by Spring Awakening’s chimerical prospects to retain deployable German armored reserves. By the time he, Dietrich, and Hitler could agree on the timing and direction of a counterattack, its prospects were long gone and the situation had deteriorated to
sauve qui peut
.

Viking was almost surrounded. Its CO pulled back in defiance of Hitler’s order to stand fast, but it was Hohenstaufen’s intervention that enabled Viking’s remnants to withdraw. The IV and II SS Panzer Corps in turn held open a corridor long enough for most of the Germans cut off by the Soviet offensive to escape. That included all that was left of 1st Panzer Division—11,473 men and exactly one operational tank, as of April 1. Leibstandarte and Das Reich, the farthest east of the Panzers, managed to bring out the men able to walk.

Hohenstaufen’s panzer regiment alone accounted for more than 100 verified kills in the course of the fighting. But 6th SS Panzer Army was reduced to fewer than 100 AFVs. More than 1,000 tanks and assault guns, Hungarian as well as German, fell to the Soviets. Relatively few had been knocked out. It was empty fuel tanks, engine breakdowns, and “General Mud” that finished off the panzers. The Russians captured enough usable tanks to put them into service against their former owners.

The German front in the south was never reestablished. For the next six weeks, operations amounted to a fighting withdrawal to, then past, Vienna. The Germans still had some sting in their tails. The last remaining tanks of Leibstandarte, predictably led in person by Peiper, retook a few villages around Sankt Pölten. For the panzers, SS or army, the primary mission nevertheless became covering the retreat as long as possible, then, wherever possible, pulling back quickly enough to surrender to the Americans. But the story of those final days is best expressed in the myth of the chamber pot.

On March 27, Hitler, enraged by the failure of his chosen troops in Hungary, ordered Leibstandarte, Das Reich, Hohenstaufen, and Hitler Jugend to remove the cuff titles bearing their division names. The alleged response exists in many versions involving combinations of a chamber pot full of armbands and high decorations being sent to the Führer’s headquarters—sometimes accompanied by a severed arm, and sometimes by the injunction “kiss my ass.”

Reality was predictably less spectacular. The most credible version has Dietrich saying with tear-filled eyes, “So this is the thanks for everything,” and ordering the morale-killing message not to be passed to his men. The chamber pot and the epithet are gestures of defiance borrowed and adapted from Goethe’s Sturm und Drang play
Götz von Berlichingen
—a bit of wishful thinking by postwar SS nostalgists. Ironically, the divisions had been ordered to remove their armbands for security purposes when sent to Hungary. Many replacements never even received them.

From Stavka’s perspective, Hitler could not have been more obliging had he been on Stalin’s payroll. The Soviet High Command’s plan to finish the war dated from October, and involved two major offensives. The secondary attack would be mounted against East Prussia; the main one across Poland. In a decision with as many postwar implications as military aspects, Zukhov and Konev, personal and professional rivals since the war’s early days, were each assigned command of a front under Stalin’s direct command—objective Berlin.

Given the Soviets’ overwhelming numerical superiority, developed operational effectiveness, and improving logistical capabilities, the Germans could do little but play out the hand, as a trumped bridge player tosses meaningless cards onto the table. Even before Gille was transferred to Hungary, Guderian’s concept of a mobile defensive battle fought by a strong central reserve was arguably two years behind the times. Its potential was further diminished when the army group commanders concentrated four more mechanized divisions closely behind what they considered vital sectors. That approach, a variant of the Model model, was arguably only a year out of date. Its success depended on a far closer balance of quality and quantity than existed in 1945. The dispersed panzers were in fact a security blanket for an infantry who might stand to a finish—but whose chances of withstanding a major attack were limited to the point of being imaginary.

The main Soviet offensive made five miles in the first three hours of January 12. By the end of January 13, the breakthrough was 25 miles deep. The panzer divisions in its way were overwhelmed, able to do no more than fight for mere survival. Zukhov’s 26th Guards Rifle Corps evoked the panzers’ glory days by seizing a vital bridge before German engineers could throw the demolition switches. Warsaw fell on January 17, and Hitler’s blind rage led him to turn Guderian over to the Gestapo for interrogation, albeit briefly. On January 20, Konev’s spearheads entered Silesia. By January 31, Zukhov was on the Oder at Küstrin, 40 miles from Berlin.

The primary German response, initiated by Hitler, was to transfer the newly organized Grossdeutschland Corps from East Prussia. With Grossdeutschland, Brandenburg and Hermann Göring Divisions also under command, it went into action on January 16. But the trains carrying its rear echelon were intercepted by Soviet tanks; the best it was able to do was to serve as a rallying point for disorganized soldiers and fleeing civilians. Ever-dividing, ever-shrinking pockets, most coalesced around a couple of tanks, perhaps some half-tracks, and a company or so of panzer grenadiers, made their way toward the Oder, hoping above all to avoid attracting Soviet attention. The lucky ones beat Zukhov by a day or two.

To the north the Russian attack took five days to break through a German defense, enervated by the withdrawal of its armored reserve. As Russian tanks reached the Baltic, the Germans withdrew in the only direction open to them—eastward, into Königsberg. And the near-forgotten Courland Pocket, with its two forlorn panzer divisions, stood to, waiting for the Russians to finish it.

The Red Army’s pause at the end of January was in part to refresh its logistics, in part to secure its flanks, and in part to structure its internal priorities. The attacks into Pomerania and Silesia in February and March scarcely make a footnote to the story of Hitler’s panzers, apart from their success in screening a withdrawal- cum-evacuation into the relatively safe zone of the Sudetenland. The battle for Berlin was another matter. The Reich’s capital was defended by the Wehrmacht’s flotsam: boys and old men, convalescents and comb-outs, foreigners fighting with ropes around their necks, equipped with anything handy. Factories and rail sidings were full of armored vehicles that could not be moved for lack of fuel and fear of air attack.

Guderian’s hopes of forming new reserves by transferring divisions from the West and evacuating Courland were not much less delusional than the Führer’s. His plans for a local spoiling attack to disrupt the Russians on Berlin’s doorstep primarily featured winning a screaming argument with Hitler. The attack itself collapsed within days—a predictable outcome given its limited striking power.

The final Russian offensive began on April 16. It was still a Zukhov- Konev derby, with the final prize the Reichstag. Familiar numbers flash across the screen: 21st Panzer Division, 25th Panzer Grenadier, LXVI Panzer Corps, 3rd Panzer Army, SS Northland Panzer Grenadiers. All by now were shadow formations exercising ad hoc command over constantly changing orders of battle that meant nothing except in a wire diagram. The tanks and assault guns that remained went down by ones and twos, on streets and in neighborhoods with names all too familiar.

No narrative of the Reich’s final days can be called typical. Let one stand nevertheless for many. The 249th Assault Gun Brigade was evacuated from West Prussia, reorganized and reinforced, and picked up new guns in Spandau, at the factory itself. It went into action in Berlin on April 27. In three days it destroyed 180 Soviet AFVs—at least by its own reckoning—and had only nine guns left. They fought in the heart of Berlin: on Frankfurter Allee, around the Technische Hochschule, across Alexanderplatz. One of the officers was hanged by an SS flying squad, presumably for “cowardice.” Another received the Knight’s Cross for valor.

On May 5, Hitler’s death was announced. The CO called his men together, and it was decided to break out toward the Elbe. In the darkness, the brigade lost contact. Half cut its way through to the Elbe. The other half, three guns, came under Russian fire. The lead vehicle took a direct hit. The next one got stuck. The third came to help, saw the second gun blown apart, and was itself disabled. Its crew escaped. The 249th had fought to the last gun and the last round. Adolf Hitler had long been aware the war was lost. Instead of a glorious final victory, he sought a heroic downfall, a Wagnerian Götterdammerung. What he achieved was in macrocosm the fate of this single small unit: downfall in chaos.

EPILOGUE

H
ITLER’S PANZERS ENDED their careers at random, wherever they had been washed up by the war’s final tides. The 1st Panzer Division wound up in Austria and surrendered to the Americans. What was left of 2nd Panzer—200 men and seven AFVs—had been absorbed into a provisional brigade and surrendered in Plauen in the Vogtland—again to Americans. Fifth Panzer capitulated to the Red Army near Danzig. Seventh fought around Berlin and managed to deliver most of its men to the British. Fourth, 8th,13th, 20th, and 23rd Panzer Divisions were caught in the final Soviet offensives. Twelfth and 14th Panzer went under with the rest of the Courland Pocket; 29th and 90th Panzer Grenadier Divisons capitulated in Italy.

Ironically the bulk of 6th SS Panzer Army managed at the last minute to surrender to the Americans. A regiment of Das Reich brought a thousand-vehicle convoy of German wounded and civilians out of Prague and into the US 3rd Army’s lines. Hitler Jugend, defiant to the last, refused to display white flags on their vehicles as ordered when they stampeded past a Russian tank column. Hohenstaufen surrendered en bloc. Frundsberg and Viking broke up and scattered. Totenkopf ’s CO negotiated with the Americans: surrender in return for disarming the guards at Mauthausen concentration camp. The division’s 3,000 survivors were promptly turned over to the Russians—something about reaping what had been sown.

Most of the tankers who fell into Western hands demobilized themselves or were quickly released once it became clear that resistance to the occupation was limited and eroding. Some prisoners of the Russians returned home almost as quickly. Others disappeared into a postwar labor/penal system in a near-random process having nothing to do with individual behavior and little with unit identity—except in the case of Waffen SS. As many as a half million died; most survivors were held for around ten years.

More senior panzer officers faced trial than is sometimes understood. Hoth and Reinhardt each received 15 years in the High Command Trial held in 1948. A British tribunal sentenced Manstein to 18 years, essentially for failing to protect civilians in his areas of operation. Kurt Meyer and Jochen Peiper had death sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Guderian and Harpe were held by the US without charge or trial for three years, then released. Balck went underground as a day laborer until 1948 when he was arrested, tried, and convicted of ordering the drumhead execution of a subordinate for being drunk on duty. Raus, who remained below his own army’s radar throughout the war, profited from his relative invisibility and was released after two years as a POW.

As in the case of their soldiers, there is no discernible pattern in the postwar treatment of the generals. What they have in common is the shortness of the time actually served relative to the sentences: six years for Hoth; four for Reinhardt and Manstein (the latter on health grounds!).

The generals’ treatment is frequently dismissed as a revolving door farce inspired by the emerging Cold War and the perceived need for West German participation in a developing Atlantic Alliance. A more sinister variant asserts a comprehensive readiness to forgive and forget in the name of anti-Communism. Both were undeniable factors but played secondary roles. The Nuremberg Trials proper are best understood in the context of that variant of vigilantism which seeks to do justice according to existing generally accepted principles, in crypto-Hobbesian circumstances where an applicable legal apparatus does not exist. The tribunals’ ultimate purpose was to establish precedents, not to replace one system of drumhead punishment by another.

In that context a major principle of selecting defendants was the potential for making an unchallengeable case. In the immediate postwar years, finding legally credible documentary or eyewitness evidence for specific criminal acts authorized or committed by senior officers was seldom easy. That was particularly true for field officers as opposed to occupation commanders—especially so for those whose primary service had been in Russia. Wilhelm Bittrich, for example, was convicted in 1953 by a French military tribunal of ordering the summary execution of Resistance members, but was later acquitted by a civilian court. Manstein’s trial in the British system was sufficiently irregular to generate public protests from several generals—and from Winston Churchill, who denounced the process as politically inspired by a Labour government seeking to curry favor with the Soviet Union.