Ostkrieg (88 page)

Many in Germany were, indeed, already looking to the future after this lost war and seeking to save what could be saved. One of those evidently was the ambitious Albert Speer, who hoped, in combination with Germany's industrialists, to preserve the substance of the nation's economic resources for the post-Hitler future. In September 1944, he had already persuaded Hitler to allow German factories west of the Rhine to be disabled rather than destroyed, on the argument that they would then be available for production once German counterattacks regained the area. There is no doubt that he also acted to spare French industry from destruction and conspired with some military commanders, among them Guderian, Model, and Heinrici, to limit the destruction
of factories, power plants, bridges, mines, and other facilities vital to the German economy. This policy of “paralysis of production” rather than complete destruction was not, at least initially, as unambiguously directed at preserving Germany's material substance for the future as Speer, in his self-serving memoirs, has claimed. In the second half of 1944, Speer, along with Goebbels, had been an avid promoter of total war, a ruthless exponent of mobilizing the
Volkskraft
(the power of the people), whose efforts had resulted in the continued expansion of armaments production that allowed resistance to continue. Until the middle of January 1945, in fact, he projected a rather optimistic assessment to Hitler and other top Nazis, insisting that he could maintain armaments output as long as the Wehrmacht could hold the existing economic area and no more skilled workers were drafted into the army. His confidence had certainly influenced Hitler's January decision to launch attacks in Hungary rather than reinforce the Vistula since Speer had convinced the Führer of the importance of Hungarian oil and bauxite deposits.
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Speer's epiphany that the war could no longer be won through armaments production seems to have come rather belatedly, only at the end of January with the failure of the Ardennes offensive and the loss of the vital Silesian industrial area. Even now, however, his actions hardly resembled those of a man intent on ensuring a speedy end to the war. He made it clear in late January that he placed military needs above the interests of the east German population, instructing Gauleiter in the east that the armaments industries should continue working to the last possible moment. He also demanded that the Wehrmacht be given absolute priority in all transport matters, dooming large numbers of civilian refugees. Moreover, after personal consultation with army leaders, he arranged an emergency armaments program that aimed to “force out of the arms production . . . anything which could still be forced out of it,” especially fuel and munitions, so that the Wehrmacht could continue to wage a hopeless war. This economic strategy of holding out to the last almost certainly contributed to the belated evacuation orders that resulted in such misery. Nor did Speer show much concern for the plight of the refugees, whose suffering he observed firsthand. Instead, he rather cold-bloodedly accepted the reality of large-scale death, remarking, in the unmistakable language of a Nazi racial ideologue, that this was “a tough selection . . . [that] would contain a good kernel of this unique people for the distant future.” Although aware that the war could not be won economically, Speer nonetheless seemed intent on preserving as much Reich territory as possible from absolute destruction.
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This formed the background to his famous memorandum to Hitler,
written on 15 March but not delivered until the eighteenth, that forecast, from an economic point of view, that the war could last only another four to eight weeks and, therefore, urged the Führer not to destroy the industrial and economic infrastructure of the Reich but only to temporarily disable it. If Speer believed that his earlier argument would again prove successful, Hitler's response on the nineteenth quickly dispelled that illusion. If the war was lost, the Führer suggested, then the only thing left to do was to deny the enemy anything of value in Germany. Besides, even if a miracle occurred and lost territory was recaptured, it was foolish to believe that the enemy would not himself engage in a scorched-earth policy and destroy everything. His famous “Nero Order” of 19 March 1945 (“Destructive Measures on Reich Territory”), which ordered the destruction of all military, transport, industrial, and communications installations as well as all material resources, also betrayed the iron logic of his own social Darwinism. “If the war is lost so too is the Volk,” he declared, and no special measures need be taken to ensure its survival since “the Volk [would have] shown itself to be the weaker.” The future belonged to the victors. Those Germans left alive would be the dregs of the racial stock since the best would have been killed in the war, so there was no use to provide for their future existence, even on the most primitive of levels.
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In the end, this order was never carried out, and Speer certainly played a role in persuading many Gauleiter and military leaders not to implement it. Still, his own immediate reaction to what was clearly a rebuke from his Führer was much more equivocal than he later allowed. He had, in fact, prepared a second memorandum, one written on 18 March, that he now promoted. In it, he demanded that “drastic measures to defend the Reich at the Oder and Rhine are to be taken,” including the “ruthless” mobilization of all military personnel and Volkssturm units and their immediate transfer to the river defense lines. “By holding out tenaciously on the present front for a few weeks,” he concluded, “we can win the enemy's respect and perhaps bring about a favorable end to the war.” In this memorandum, Speer, like Hitler, indicated no wish to capitulate but emulated his Führer in wanting to stake everything on another, fully illusory gamble. He showed no reluctance to use young recruits or poorly trained Volkssturm men as little more than cannon fodder, nor did he evidence any understanding that each day the war was prolonged the death toll on the fronts, as well as from Allied carpet bombing, rose. Ironically, far from his “heroic resistance” to the Nero Order, it was precisely his solidarity with the Führer, at one point demanding that it was “our duty to make every effort to increase resistance to the utmost,” that
finally persuaded Hitler at the end of March to modify his order since it made “no sense” for such a small territory as Germany. Crucially, as well, the collapse in loyalty to the Nazi regime in the last weeks of the war meant that people at the local level would hardly have implemented the destruction in any case, as Goebbels fully realized.
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The nonimplementation of the Nero Order was the first clear sign that Hitler's authority had begun to crumble, at least domestically. Self-destructive warfare, however, continued to be waged by the Wehrmacht, whose leaders continued to obey the Führer's commands to fight the war to the last. Neither side in March had, it seemed, a clear idea of how to end the war. Although Stalin and the Stavka certainly attached great importance to seizing Berlin, it was not evident to them that the final battle would necessarily be fought at the German capital. After all, Hitler might choose to move south into an Alpine fortress—the Russians, too, like the Western allies, were receiving disturbing reports—and continue the fight as a guerrilla struggle. Nor, until late March, had Stalin displayed much urgency about taking Berlin. His attitude changed, however, with the sudden acceleration of the American push across the Rhine, encirclement of the Ruhr (where Model's entire Army Group B, some seventeen divisions, was trapped in the last great Kessel of the war), and rapid movement into central Germany. Although in late March Eisenhower, much to Churchill's and Montgomery's displeasure, had notified the Soviet leader that he intended to turn his forces to the south and southeast to prevent an enemy move into an Alpenfestung, Stalin put little trust in his Western allies. In late March, he had openly expressed to Czech leaders his expectation that the Germans and Anglo-Americans would negotiate a separate peace (something that Hitler's close associates urged on him but that he rejected until he could deal from a position of strength, which effectively meant no negotiations), while, in early April, he openly insulted Roosevelt by suggesting in a letter that the Germans in the west had effectively stopped fighting. Eager to seize the great prize, and fully aware of the political importance of controlling Central Europe, Stalin now insisted on concrete plans for an operation across the Oder aimed directly at Berlin.
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For the Germans any hope of a military solution bordered on the delusional, yet even now the generals continued to play their assigned role in Hitler's Götterdämmerung. Although no rational person could be in doubt about the final outcome of the battle, the Germans remained determined to exact a high price for their defeat. The OKW had stripped much of the western front in order to assemble some eighty-five divisions
and Volkssturm units for the final struggle in the east. Although old men, untrained boys, soldiers recovering from wounds, and those previously classified as physically unfit composed the great majority of the manpower in these units, they were surrounded by a core of hardened veterans that significantly increased their combat power. In addition, Speer's effort to squeeze the last bit out of the German war economy meant that these men were generally well equipped with small arms, including large numbers of the Panzerfaust, the devastating short-range antitank weapon. Moreover, the Germans could still field large numbers of tanks and aircraft, although severe fuel shortages crippled their effectiveness. Of more immediate help was the transfer of large numbers of flak units to the Oder front, where they would employ their powerful eighty-eight-millimeter guns as antitank weapons.
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Perhaps most importantly, the German retreat had shortened the lines considerably, which meant that they would now have sufficient manpower to build and at least partially man three successive lines of defense. Indeed, correctly anticipating the main axis of the enemy attack, the Germans had constructed an elaborate defense in depth on the central Oder consisting of three positions stretching some twenty miles to the rear, or halfway to Berlin. Each of these lines, moreover, contained up to three separate belts of trenches, fortified strongpoints, antitank obstacles and ditches, flak gun emplacements, and dense mine-fields. During the spectacular campaigns of 1944 and early 1945, the Soviets had grown accustomed to piercing relatively lightly manned front positions, then exploiting their superior mobility, not only to shatter the enemy front, but also to prevent any new defense from being established. Now, however, the Red Army no longer had any maneuver room since Berlin was only forty miles away and the Americans not more than a hundred miles to the west. Instead, the Soviets faced the unpleasant task of fighting a series of penetration battles against successive, fully manned, well-equipped positions whose defenders could be expected to put up fierce resistance. Furthermore, the flat Polish countryside that had favored a mobile attacker had now been replaced by terrain much more suitable for defense. The so-called Oderbruch, the floodplain on the western side of the river that stretched up to ten miles in depth, was a low-lying, marshy area crisscrossed by numerous small streams and drainage ditches, largely devoid of trees or any natural cover, containing many towns and villages that could be turned into strongpoints. Not only would it be difficult for infantry or heavy tanks to traverse this region, but also, once across it, the high bluffs, especially the Seelow Heights, afforded superb positions from which the defenders could
make effective use of all their weapons. If, then, Hitler retained any glimmer of hope, it rested on a successful defensive battle that would finally exhaust the Russians, although even here General Busse, the commander of the defending Ninth Army, had a clearer perspective. “Even if American and British tanks slammed into our rear,” he indicated, his men were to contest every step of the Russians westward in order to do their “soldierly duty” to their people.
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Neither side remained passive as the Soviets built their strength for the inevitable assault on Berlin. In order to prevent the Germans from transferring forces to the Oder front, the Soviets remained active in Hungary and Silesia; both served, as well, to distract Hitler's attention from the main threat. To gain better jumping-off points, the Russians also hammered throughout March at expanding and uniting their various bridgeheads across the Oder, while the Germans resisted just as determinedly. The focal point of the March battles soon became the fortress of Küstrin, at the confluence of the Warthe and Oder Rivers. For a variety of reasons, ranging from the historical to the tactical, Hitler was soon obsessed with holding on to the city, which resulted in a wearying, weeks-long contest that the Germans could not win. At his insistence, they even mounted a late March counterattack from Frankfurt/Oder in order to relieve the besieged city. Although it caught the Soviets by surprise and even reached the outskirts of Küstrin, the attack, which could not possibly have altered the balance of forces, rapidly lost momentum, with the only result a waste of scarce German forces. Amazingly, even at this late date, Hitler could not accept the inability of the Wehrmacht to win operational victories or the fact that the enemy now dictated events. Seething with anger, and searching for a scapegoat, the Führer found him in one of his few remaining rational military leaders, Heinz Guderian. Having vigorously defended the actions of the commanders involved in the Küstrin attack, the field marshal now once more felt Hitler's wrath, being given on 28 March six weeks “sick leave.” Although Hitler would have preferred no OKH chief of staff or to surround himself with old free-booting Freikorps types, he nonetheless named General Hans Krebs, a young firebrand, acting chief of staff. Küstrin fell on the thirtieth, an action that brought to a close the grinding March battles along the Oder that had cost both sides dearly.
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