Ostkrieg (64 page)

The Russian position, however, was not as grand as it seemed since the Red Army was, after a long advance, approaching its logistic and combat limits and Stalin once again seriously underestimated the Wehrmacht's ability to recover. German forces, reorganized by Manstein, were poised for an ambitious counterstrike. Although at a meeting with Manstein at the latter's headquarters near Zaporozhye from 17 to 19 February Hitler clung to a linear notion of defense, a breakthrough by Soviet spearheads that forced an abrupt end to the gathering occasioned an uncommon concession from him. Granted a rare freedom of action by the Führer, and with SS armored formations recently arrived from France to augment those of Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army, Manstein aimed to strike against the exposed southern flank of the enemy, whose offensive had now passed the culmination point, not so much to retake Kharkov as to destroy the formations of the Soviet Southwestern Front. Compounding the problem for the Soviets was the fact that they completely misread German intentions, interpreting troop movements as an impending sign of further withdrawals rather than preparations for a counterattack. When it came on 20 February, the German assault caught the Soviets off guard, with SS units making swift progress over the next week against an increasingly disintegrating enemy. The success of the attack so revived Hitler's spirits, in fact, that he now demanded that the
advance be continued beyond Kharkov to the southern wing of Army Group Center.
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Faced with deteriorating conditions owing to the imminent start of the
rasputitsa
, however, Manstein abandoned his original bold plan of crossing the Don downstream of Kharkov in order to wheel and take the city from the east. Instead, he opted to strike past the Ukrainian metropolis on the west, thus threatening the enemy's southern flank and forcing him to abandon the city. Favored by a renewed drop in temperatures that aided German mobility, Hoth ordered Hausser's SS Panzer Corps (with the powerful Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and Das Reich Divisions, along with parts of Totenkopf and Grossdeutschland) to seize Kharkov from the north, then advance on Belgorod. The former was reconquered on 14 March, with the latter falling a few days later. With that, the Soviet offensives begun at Stalingrad had run their course, while the front line at the end of March 1943, when the onset of the
rasputitsa
gave the Germans a much-needed respite, roughly resembled that at the beginning of the 1942 summer campaign.
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The stabilization of the front not only demonstrated that the Wehrmacht remained a formidable fighting force but also illustrated misjudgments by Stalin and the Stavka, who had pushed ahead on a broad front without a point of main effort. Although impressive as an operational achievement, Manstein's remarkable success could neither disguise nor alter the true state of affairs: although the Ostheer was able to inflict serious losses in a fighting retreat, it was no longer a force capable of winning the war. The significance of Manstein's achievement, in fact, lay less in what he had won and more in what he prevented: an early spring attack by the Red Army that might well have shattered the eastern front. Having lost the Caucasus and a good bit of the Donets industrial area, and now faced with a multifront war, Hitler saw any lingering hopes he might have had of bringing the Ostkrieg to a satisfactory conclusion largely evaporate. Stalin, too, had been sobered, now finally realizing that his dream of a single decisive offensive that would reverse the strategic situation was illusory. The war in the east would have to be won gradually and incrementally rather than by a Soviet blitzkrieg, despite the judgments of a mid-February 1943 American intelligence report that termed Germany's defeat in the east
irreversible
, suggesting even that “organized German resistance in Russia might collapse.”
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Certainly, the Germans had suffered casualties and equipment losses that they could not easily make good, while the Soviets could count not only on their own resources but on a significantly increased delivery of Lend-Lease goods as well. Still, not losing the war was a far cry from
winning it, and, as Manstein's successful defensive battles had shown, the way west was likely to be long and bloody. The reality facing Stalin of a protracted, costly struggle, as well as his habitual morbid suspicion of his Western allies, led to a renewed Soviet attempt to explore new ways out of the war through a separate peace. Perhaps it was merely to apply pressure to the Anglo-Americans to spur them to greater activity in building a second front that Stalin explored contacts with the Germans that were hardly secretive. In any case, in the months after Stalingrad the Soviet leader did not act like a man certain of triumph. Significantly, it was Hitler who continually rejected Soviet offers. The enforced inactivity of the
rasputitsa
, then, found both sides pondering their next move.
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Was Stalingrad the turning point of the war? Certainly, many contemporary observers, both inside and outside Germany, perceived it as such. Already in late August, SD reports noted that Germans displayed “overwhelming” interest in the fighting around Stalingrad, assuming that the “capture of this important cornerstone would bring a militarily decisive turning-point” and an end to the war in the east. By early November, the “blood sacrifice” at Stalingrad had become a “nightmare” that even Hitler's effort to downplay the comparison with Verdun could not dispel. In late January 1943, the SD reported that the imminent destruction of the Sixth Army occasioned “deep worries about the further development of the war,” adding that the “entire population was shaken to its depths.” “Universally,” another report stressed in early February, “there is a conviction that Stalingrad represents a turning-point in the war.” Not only had the popular mood reached a low point, but anxious questions were raised: “How will it all end?” “How long can we hang on?” Significantly, in their desire to get an accurate picture of the situation, Germans increasingly began to listen to foreign radio. Even the person of the Führer was no longer spared criticism. By March, images of Hitler were often found defaced with the slogan “The Stalingrad Murderer.” Events in North Africa—termed a
second Stalingrad
or
Tunisgrad
—also contributed to a “growing war weariness.” In Vienna, the numbers
1918
were scrawled on walls, while, in Berlin, people were reminded of that fateful year in leaflets. As in 1918, people whispered, “The United States had not yet really begun to fight, even as Germany was already drained.” Not only had it become an idée fixe among many Germans that “a third winter of fighting in the east meant a loss of the war,” but Germany's fate had also become an object of speculation: some argued that, following a defeat, southern Germany would be “given over to the Anglo-American sphere of interest,” while others asserted that eastern Germany would be “delivered to the Soviets.”
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Rather than thinking in terms of
the
turning point in the war, especially since modern wars were no longer winnable in a single, decisive battle, it might instead be worth recasting the issue. In order to win, or at least stalemate, the global war in which they were now engaged, the Germans would have had both to cripple their Soviet enemy and to capture the oil and other resources of the Caucasus necessary for a prolonged struggle with the Anglo-American powers. Seen in this light, the Battle of Stalingrad was, perhaps, not the turning point, but rather the breaking point for the German effort, “the final conclusion,” as Bernd Wegner has put it, “of a process of diminishing options of victory in the east.” In this view, Stalingrad was not the turning point in the larger conflict, in the sense that a still-winnable war had suddenly turned into a losing one, for the Battle of Smolensk, the failure in front of Moscow, American entry into the war, and the lopsided distribution of human and economic resources all meant that, from December 1941, Germany had little chance of victory in the global struggle. Some sort of victory
in the east
, however, had been possible, where German triumphs had brought the Soviet Union to the point of collapse. The battle at Stalingrad would tip the balance one way or another, but Hitler's mid-July decision to split the German forces ensured that the balance tipped against Germany. At Stalingrad, the failure of all Hitler's assumptions over the previous year had become clear: the Soviets had not been smashed in a single blow; the British had not sued for peace; the United States had not been deterred from entering the war; the resources necessary to prevail in a global conflict had not been secured; the Wehrmacht would no longer be able to concentrate its resources on a single front. Rather than a turning point, then, Stalingrad marked a “point of no return,” as the Germans plunged over the abyss. Still, even as, by his own admission, Hitler now “muddled through from one month to the next,” the realization that any hope of victory was gone served to occasion not a softening in German war policy but its radicalization.
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It was a dramatic moment, as all in attendance and those listening on the radio were well aware. After two weeks of mourning the catastrophe at Stalingrad, Joseph Goebbels on the evening of 18 February 1943 addressed a handpicked audience of the party faithful in Berlin's Sportpalast, itself emblazoned with rousing slogans (“Hail, Victory!” “Führer command, we'll follow!” “Total War, Shortest War!”). After praising the spirit of the defenders of Stalingrad, Goebbels promised “an unvarnished picture of the situation.” The events in the east, he admitted, had been a serious blow, and Germans had to be made aware of the possibility of
defeat, of the threat from the “Bolshevist-capitalist tyranny” of the Jews. Describing precisely what the Germans had already done to the Poles, Jews, and Russians, Goebbels raised the specter of “the liquidation of our educated and political elite,” “forced labor battalions in the Siberian tundra,” and “Jewish liquidation commandos.” “We must act quickly and radically,” he stressed, then, adroitly exploiting class antagonisms with effective populist rhetoric, outlined a series of measures designed to root out luxury and complacency among the German population. Making it clear that worker outrage was the driving force behind these actions, he blasted privileged elites, those who persisted in a frivolous lifestyle, and those who indulged in comfortable entertainments. Invoking a “community of fate,” Goebbels demanded that radical methods be employed to achieve results. Having stoked the populist resentments of his listeners, the propaganda minister then posed a series of ten provocative questions, at the end of each of which he asked, “Do you want total war?” At each question, fourteen thousand frenzied voices rang out in unison to affirm loyalty to Hitler and the war effort. As his speech, which had been interrupted more than two hundred times with shouts of approval and thunderous applause, moved to its climax, Goebbels screamed, amid a wild tumult and choruses of approval, “Do you want total war? Do you want it . . . more total and more radical than we can even imagine it today?” As the crowd erupted once more in hysteria, Goebbels closed by invoking the words used by the nationalist poet Theodor Körner in the struggle against Napoléon, “Now people, arise—and let the storm burst forth!”
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Although generally well received at the time, especially by the working class, which understood and approved the element of egalitarian social revolution implicit in it, the speech marked the culmination, not the beginning, of a process to reorient the German war economy and society—a process itself that was only indifferently successful. Long convinced that only “the total commitment of all of our resources and reserves” could produce victory, Goebbels had argued at least since the first winter crisis in December 1941 for radical measures to mobilize the German population. Although some steps had been taken in early 1942 to reorganize the war economy, the stabilization of the front, the success of Sauckel's labor roundups, the opposition of the Gauleiter, and the military triumphs of the summer all undermined the effort at a comprehensive mobilization of the Reich's resources. Even as Goebbels attempted to dampen the “illusionary mood” at home and Hitler, chastened by the September crisis, issued orders for a fundamental reorganization of the war effort, resistance persisted. Goebbels's proposals in
December 1942 to use sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys and girls as flak helpers and to require labor service for all men and women aroused howls of opposition. Ever conscious of the collapse of morale on the home front during World War I that had allegedly undermined the war effort and led to revolution, and convinced of the reality of a Jewish conspiracy, top Nazis, including Hitler and Goering, instinctively recoiled from imposing any increased hardships and material sacrifices on the home front. Others such as Sauckel, who claimed that labor deployment was his responsibility alone, sought to guard their own jurisdictions.
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Goebbels persisted nonetheless, arguing forcefully that “too much has been expected of the front, too little of the homeland.” The massive losses suffered by the Ostheer, combined with the need drastically to increase arms production, meant that superfluous personnel had to be redirected from the bureaucracy and civilian economy to the war effort. His own nervous exhaustion—on Christmas Day he admitted that the dire situation demanded “the complete mobilization of the entire German people in this decisive struggle for existence”—and a palpable mood of panic among the top leadership persuaded the Führer that the regime could gain a breathing space only through a total effort in both the Reich and the occupied territories. The result was a competition among leading government figures to translate the Führer's will into reality. While Bormann demanded that the party return to “the spirit and methods of the period of struggle for power [the Kampfzeit],” army officials quickly prepared a new personnel plan for raising troops for the Wehrmacht. Armed with a special authorization from Hitler—“Tanks must be produced, no matter the cost”—Speer rushed to put into place a new program that would drastically escalate tank production but that would also require millions of additional workers. As a first step to secure that labor, by the end of January measures had been put in place that required all women between the ages of seventeen and fifty (with the upper limit quickly reduced to forty-five) to register for work and young men and women to be used as Luftwaffe spotters and flak helpers.
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