The German War (83 page)

In fact, Hitler’s own thinking in launching the offensive was not far removed from these popular hopes. To suggestions by Goebbels and the Japanese ambassador that it was time to sue for peace with the Soviets he had responded by insisting that the war in the east had to be fought to the finish and that a peace in the west could only be made from a position of strength. The aim of the Ardennes offensive was to drive northwards to Antwerp. If the port could be regained, then the British and Americans would again become bogged down by the trials of slow overland transport. In this optimistic scheme, German strength in the west might force the Western Allies to negotiate a separate peace.
⁵⁶

By 23 December, German troops reached Buissonville and Celle, with the Meuse less than 8 kilometres away. But they never crossed the great river. As the fog which had protected the German armoured divisions from bombing cleared on Christmas Eve, Antwerp remained a distant goal. Even the loyal Walter Model admitted that the offensive had failed. With 5,000 British and American planes pounding the German tanks, airfields, artillery positions and supply lines, Rundstedt conceded on 27 December that no reinforcements could be moved up the line. The offensive was effectively over. The fact that the Allied losses of 76,890 were slightly higher than the 67,461 men captured, wounded and killed on the German side testified to the remaining effectiveness of the German Army as a fighting force. But it could not replace its losses from the operation.
⁵⁷

Hitler had told Albert Speer that everything depended on the Ardennes offensive, admitting that ‘If it doesn’t succeed, I see no other possibility of bringing the war to a favourable conclusion.’ Speer knew that coal was no longer reaching the power stations and that the loss of iron and steel from France, Belgium and Luxembourg could not be offset: German arms production was now in irreversible decline. Increasingly, the Armaments Minister devoted his efforts to keeping the rail network from collapsing completely. By halting the construction of the new generation of U-boats, he tried to boost the production of ammunition and tanks. This was far worse than the crisis management of the first winter of the war, when coal and steel had also been in short supply. Alfred Jodl, acting characteristically as Hitler’s voice, had admitted to the commanders in the west in early November that the Wehrmacht lacked the ‘available forces’ for the counter-attack, simply pointing out that ‘in our current situation we can’t shrink from staking everything on one card’.
⁵⁸

Now it had been played, Hitler and the High Command returned to their prior strategy of holding the line. Halt orders, which declared towns to be ‘fortresses’ to be held to the last bullet, followed one after another as the British and American advance restarted in the west. German soldiers, returning on leave from the west, still talked excitedly about reaching Paris before the New Year; ‘absolute rubbish’ was Goebbels’s estimate, as he ordered the media to lower expectations. On 29 December, the press acknowledged that the offensive had, in fact, stalled.
⁵⁹

*

On New Year’s Eve, the great actor Heinrich George read over the radio the words which the founder of modern military theory, Carl von Clausewitz, had written in February 1812:

I believe and confess that a people can value nothing more highly than the dignity and liberty of its existence; that it must defend these to the last drop of its blood; that there is no higher duty to fulfil, no higher law to obey; that the shameful blot of cowardly submission can never be erased; that this drop of poison in the blood of a nation is passed on to posterity, crippling and eroding the strength of future generations.

Clausewitz had written these lines to his patron and mentor, Scharnhorst, to explain why he was resigning from the Prussian service in order to take up arms against Napoleon in Russia. He had also penned them in the expectation of defeat. What was left to him was a romantic belief in the greater moral victory and faith in the future of the nation. As the letter, which became known as Clausewitz’s
Confession,
went on: ‘Even the destruction of liberty after a bloody and honourable struggle assures the people’s rebirth. It is the seed of life, which one day will bring forth a new, securely rooted tree.’
⁶⁰

As Heinrich George reached the final sentence, violins began to play the national anthem, quietly at first, the sound then swelling before the twelve strokes that saw out the Old Year. The last stroke was sounded by the unmistakable bronze Rhine bell. The nineteenth-century Prussian soldiers’ song ‘Oh Germany High in Honour’ followed, its choral injunction, ‘Hold out! Hold out!’, more fitting than ever. Then, prefaced by a brief rendition of the Badenweiler March, at five past midnight Hitler spoke. His message for the New Year was brief. The Führer dwelt on the threat of the ‘Jewish international world conspiracy’, repeating his prophecy that its attempt to ‘destroy Europe and eradicate its peoples’ would fail and lead only to ‘its own destruction’. This was neither news nor particularly comforting; it merely underlined the fear many felt that there would indeed be no negotiated end to the war, or, as Hitler once more affirmed, ‘a 9 November in the German Reich will never be repeated’. He promised a change of fortune, but offered no details, made no promises about the deployment of new weapons and none about how or when the Allies’ air attacks would be halted. And he did not mention the offensive in the west. The war was described in the bleak and apocalyptic terms he had employed so often: ‘A matter of death and life, to be or not to be, and victory will be ours, because ours it must be.’ The Propaganda Ministry swiftly issued instructions that the obvious lack of concrete detail which might have comforted German listeners should be explained away as a security precaution.
⁶¹

While he heard the broadcast on the Courland front, Kurt Orgel was filled with thoughts of Liselotte, rather like couples during the
Request Concert
broadcasts of the first years of the war. ‘I imagined’, he wrote to her on 1 January 1945, ‘how lovely it is that we both can simultaneously hear the same man! Were you delighted as well to hear the voice of the Führer again?’ During the whole of 1944, Hitler had spoken publicly only once, briefly and immediately after the assassination attempt of 20 July. That he now stepped before the microphone brought a kind of reassurance to many; it felt like a sign that a battle had been won. Otherwise, people assumed on the basis of their experience of 1943–44, he would have remained silent. Across the country, report-writers for the Propaganda and Justice Ministries, as well as for the Wehrmacht, concurred. Many people entered 1945 buoyed up and hoping, once more, that the war might yet end well for Germany.
⁶²

In Marburg, Lisa and Wolf de Boor disagreed. To Lisa, Hitler’s voice sounded as ‘hollow as the grave’. They had sat by their Christmas tree, while they watched the candles slowly burn down in their holders and drank a glass of vermouth, a special allocation for the over-sixties. Their three children, all medics, were scattered. Hans, the youngest, was on the Baltic coast, qualifying in medicine with the Wehrmacht at Greifswald. The older son, Anton, a staff doctor, had been posted to a tank division and was cut off in Courland. But the parents remained most anxious about their daughter Monika, who had spent the last twelve months on remand in a Gestapo prison. To her mother’s delight, Monika had turned to religion during her imprisonment, using the time in solitary confinement to read and pray. As her parents reread her Christmas letter together, it allayed their fears for a while, Lisa jotting down how ‘profoundly impressed’ they were ‘by the way she used the opportunities offered by contemplation not just to withstand this time but to elevate it’.
⁶³

In Lauterbach, Irene Guicking was roused from her bed at 5.30 on New Year’s morning: Ernst had come home. She had taken his advice and sent a telegram to say that they had been ‘totally bombed out’ and it had done the trick. Ernst was granted ten days’ compassionate leave, and it had taken him just an afternoon and a night to reach her from Alsace. The front was moving closer.
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15

Weakened by its own tremendous efforts during the Ardennes offensive, the Wehrmacht returned immediately afterwards to strategic defence. Simply absorbing the Allied onslaughts was once again the primary aim, just as in January 1944, but with a key difference. After twelve months of trading ‘space against time’, the lines had shifted from the Dniepr and the Atlantic to the German borderlands. The Germans still held Warsaw and the Vistula in the east and on the Italian front could defend a line along the river Po. In the west, the Allied advance was blocked by the German defensive lines of the West Wall, especially the powerful triangle formed around Trier by the confluence of the Saar and Moselle rivers. In the panic of September 1944, Trier had looked as vulnerable as Aachen. Through the autumn and winter, however, it weathered numerous attacks, anchoring the northern apex of the fortified triangle. Behind these defences lay the Rhine, the final natural obstacle facing the British and Americans. Crossing the great rivers – the Po, Vistula and Rhine – became the key to defeating and occupying the Reich. For the Allies, these were still formidable barriers. For the Germans, they provided the last lines in a defensive strategy.

Even though German tank production had reached a new peak in late 1944, the Allies’ massive superiority in weaponry was increasingly obvious to everyone, as the American and British bomber fleets quite eclipsed their massed air attacks of a year earlier, targeting the railway network, synthetic oil plants and Germany’s cities. It was devastatingly clear that the prospect of defending Germany until their own side could wrest a military or technological advantage was now minimal. Instead, German hopes dwelt on purchasing time during which the Allied coalition might – just – disintegrate under its own inner tensions. This optimistic scenario depended on history repeating itself. Frederick II of Prussia had been saved from certain defeat in the Seven Years War when Tsarina Elizabeth of Russia suddenly died in 1762 and the overwhelming Franco-Austro-Russian coalition had miraculously disintegrated. Through films like the 1942 biopic
The Great King,
Germans had been encouraged to see their Führer as the successor of Frederick the Great. It was also a parallel which inspired Hitler, and he sent a print of the film to Mussolini. When he returned to Berlin on 15 January from his western headquarters, he took the Prussian King’s portrait into his study in the bunker deep below the Reich Chancellery. Anticipating the clash of the capitalist West with the communist East was not entirely baseless, as decades of Cold War would later demonstrate. But in their desperation to find an exit strategy from the cul-de-sac of their own making, the Nazi leaders forgot that they themselves were the threat which had forged this ‘unholy alliance’ in the first place. When Roosevelt died on 12 April, Hitler, who had come to see the American President as his Jewish-aided nemesis, celebrated briefly, anticipating the moment when the events of 1762 would begin to replay.
¹

Hoping that America would join Germany in saving Europe from Bolshevism offered a final reason to play for time and spend lives. Though the Wehrmacht High Command no longer knew the scale of its own losses, in 1945 each day of fighting would cost the lives of 10,000 German soldiers. As long as the Rhine held, the Wehrmacht was defending a coherent, if greatly shrunken, territory, in which every week kept the prospect alive that the Grand Alliance against the Reich might still fall apart. And it was the most formidable of the remaining German armies, Walter Model’s Army Group B, that was entrusted with defending the western front.
²

From December to March, the British and Americans fought their way from the river Saar to the Rhine. The great river barriers of the Vistula and Rhine fell in near-simultaneous offensives which unfolded from January to the end of March 1945. The greatest breakthrough came in the east, as the Soviets bridged the Vistula and swept through Poland, conquering the eastern German provinces and seizing bridgeheads over the Oder by late January. It would take until late March for the rest of the Soviet front to anchor itself along this new front line, a mere 80 kilometres from Berlin. It was conceivable that the German armies in the east could still fall back to the Elbe from the Oder, but the armies in the west had no such option. Beyond the Rhine lay nothing but the North German Plain all the way to the Elbe. Along the Rhine lay the heartland of German industry, with the great river itself serving as a major shipping route for coal and other goods. The Rhine remained the key barrier without which no German defensive position could be mapped out, let alone sustained.

After going through a final flowering during the autumn of 1944, national solidarity disintegrated under the force of the Allied invasion. The collapse of the Reich, region by region, naturally exacerbated local loyalties and robbed people of any sense of belonging to a larger ‘community of fate’, to use one of Goebbels’s favoured terms. Even before the final assault on the Reich began, regional differences were growing: the shake-up of government after the July bomb plot strengthened the powers of the Gauleiters at the expense of central government, a trend which was greatly magnified once the battle for Germany began. Of far greater impact was the increasingly divergent experience of the fighting itself. With Soviet, American, British and French armies invading different parts of the Reich, Germans did not face the same enemies everywhere or run the same risks. Moreover, the conquest of Germany, region by region, completed the elevation of family and
Heimat
above
Reich
and
Volk.
Throughout the war, men had justified their military service above all in terms of a patriotism grounded in the family and where they came from. Mass evacuation from the cities – with all its attendant conflicts between town and village, Catholics and Protestants, north and south and east and west – had only underlined the extent to which Germany remained a nation of provincials. By 8 May 1945, Germany had become a nation of migrants and refugees, as millions of displaced soldiers and civilians tried to survive far from home, and calls to self-sacrifice and national solidarity were finally exhausted. The German nation state was destroyed not only by the four-power occupation which was to come, but by its own disintegration in the final months of the war. Defeat did not destroy German nationalism; many of its exclusive hatreds could not be so easily excised. But its positive meanings, its ability to harness social effort and motivate self-sacrifice for a national cause, promptly collapsed. Just as workers in the Ruhr had wished for someone else to be bombed in 1943, so, as the fighting crossed into the Reich in January 1945, everyone wanted to escape the war zone themselves.