The German War (87 page)

The Saar–Moselle defensive triangle had held all winter, its southern side sealed by the Orscholz line. After months of fighting in snowdrifts, the Americans finally breached this sector of the West Wall on 22 February, when assault battalions of the 302nd US Infantry crossed the Saar at Taben in the dense fog before dawn. As German troops were rushed to counter different American attacks, Trier was left undefended and, after a five-month siege, the city fell with virtually no fighting on 2 March. Having finally broken through, the US 3rd Army exploited its success, advancing rapidly along the Moselle valley to where the river joined the Rhine at Koblenz.

In late February and March, as the Wehrmacht pulled back in the west, there was no repeat of the mass civilian panic of early September 1944. This time, the local population refused to flee. White flags were hung out from houses to prevent the destruction of villages. In some places, people stopped German troops from shooting; in one village, local farmers with pitchforks set on the soldiers trying to detonate charges. A group of soldiers who reached the German lines after escaping from encirclement was greeted with shouts of ‘You’re prolonging the war!’ In late February, when the Wehrmacht retook Geislautern near Völklingen, the local SS commander learned that, after the brief enemy occupation, the Americans were popular for treating the houses where they were quartered with more respect than the German troops had done and for sharing their rations, their chocolate, jam and cigarettes, with the famished population. He reported that the US forces’ good repute was preceding them throughout the territory. A tank commander reported from near Mayen that civilians had tried to sabotage the defensive measures of the local command and offered civilian clothes to soldiers so that they could abscond.
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It quickly became clear that this was a very different situation from the previous autumn. As reported to the Commander-in-Chief in the West, ‘then the soldiers flooding back from France influenced the civilian population negatively with their pessimistic judgement of the situation’, whereas now ‘the civilian population is having a depressing effect on the fighting morale and attitude of the German soldiers’. On 15 February, the Minister for Justice issued a decree establishing summary court martials for civilians, placing them under the same penalties as soldiers who deserted or undermined military morale. By 11 March, Goebbels realised that propaganda could no longer prevent morale from collapsing, noting in his diary that ‘something can now only be achieved in the west through brutal measures’. Defeatism was spreading further along the Rhine as soldiers withdrawing from its western bank told of the flight of Nazi Party functionaries and the sea of white flags that had greeted the Americans in Neuss and Krefeld. They described their own powerlessness in the face of their enemies’ incredible firepower and control of the air. In Bochum, the local Party propaganda department conceded the hopelessness of dragooning workers to listen to set-piece speeches by uniformed Party officials. Instead, in mid-March it sent out thirty trained public speakers wearing plain clothes, to spread ‘word-of-mouth propaganda’ at railway stations, on trains, in air raid shelters – wherever people gathered and opinions were noisily exchanged. By 21 March, the weekly report to the Propaganda Ministry from the right bank of the Rhine accepted that even this kind of subtle approach ‘would not help much any more’.
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Koblenz fell on 17 March. Within a week the economically vital Saar industrial area was encircled. As German forces fell back, Goebbels noted that ‘tens of thousands of soldiers, allegedly stragglers but in reality wanting to avoid front-line service, are said to be in the big cities of the Reich’. Army commanders redoubled threats of summary justice. Nazis like Ferdinand Schörner led the way in hanging soldiers from lamp posts with demeaning placards such as ‘I didn’t believe in the Führer’ or ‘I am a coward’. But he had no monopoly on this. On 5 March, even the pious Protestant Johannes Blaskowitz warned the men of Army Group H that anyone who deserted his post would be ‘summarily condemned and shot’. Shortly before Hitler retired him for the third – and final – time, Rundstedt issued another last-ditch order: ‘The enemy must have to fight for every step in German land through the highest possible bloody losses.’ On 10 March, Albert Kesselring replaced Rundstedt as Commanderin-Chief in the West and immediately established a special motorised unit of the military police to round up ‘stragglers’. A few days earlier a new ‘flying court martial’ executed four officers for failing to detonate the bridge across the Rhine at Remagen before the Americans could cross it. A fifth officer was already an American prisoner of war and, on 25 March, Kesselring personally ordered that his family should be imprisoned. The local Gestapo and Reich Security Main Office in Berlin continued to oppose such measures and, as the Waffen SS General Paul Hausser pointed out, holding relatives liable did little when ‘the family of the soldier was already within enemy-occupied territory’.
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Immediately after the Dresden raids, Hitler and Goebbels wanted to abrogate the Geneva Convention in the west and execute British and American prisoners of war in retaliation for German civilian dead. By inciting the Allies to execute German prisoners in turn, Hitler hoped to replicate in the west the mix of terror and dogged self-sacrifice which imbued German soldiers on the eastern front. The draft order ran into the united opposition of Jodl, Dönitz and Keitel, however, who succeeded in talking their Führer out of it: they might countenance the lynching of Allied pilots – by now commonplace even in areas which had hardly been bombed before 1944, such as Austria – or push for reprisals against the families of German deserters but they baulked at endangering German prisoners of war. This crossed some invisible line in their sense of a professional ethical code.
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As Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry tried to keep pace with military events, they recalibrated the message: reports of the good behaviour of American front-line troops in the Moselle–Saar borderland were countered with the warning that they would be followed by rear services ready to commit atrocities when ‘the Jews’ took control – as if the US armies would deploy their own Jewish
Einsatzgruppen.
Increasingly, German hopes centred on the prospect that the enemy alliance might break up. German officers in British captivity told each other that ‘the British and Americans will one day . . . awaken to the real situation and will join the Germans in holding off Russia’. The Chief of Staff of Wehrmacht Armament, Colonel Kurt Pollex, knew how depleted his arsenals were and harboured no illusions about ‘miracle weapons’; but he too hoped that conflict between the Americans and Russians could still give Germany a chance. As he put it, it was like a car race decided 100 metres from the finishing line by a puncture. The flimsy simile echoed something Goebbels himself had said in a national broadcast on 28 February, in which he compared the nation to a marathon runner, with 35 kilometres behind him and only 8 kilometres to go.
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After cutting off his Jewish star, Victor Klemperer was terrified that he would be killed if he was picked up by the Gestapo. To avoid contact with the mass organisations of the Party, he and his wife turned to their former domestic servant, Agnes, who lived in the Wendish-speaking village of Piskowitz in Saxony. There Klemperer listened to the clear cadences of the Propaganda Minister on the radio: ‘Only the greatest willpower keeps him going, drives him on, perhaps he will collapse unconscious at the finishing post, but he must reach it! . . . We are strained to the utmost, the terror attacks have become almost unbearable – but we must stay the course.’ With its combination of metaphysical metaphors about the meaning of History, practical consolation that ‘Our enemies were “just as tired as we were”’, hints at a massive German counter-offensive and threats to ‘“coldly and calmly put a rope round the neck” of anyone who tries to sabotage us’, Goebbels had ceased to claim that the war could last much longer. Indeed, the ever-alert Klemperer was struck by his message of ‘utter despair’. His own hopes that he and Eva would live to see their liberation revived once more.
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In 1943 and 1944, Goebbels had repeatedly proposed that Hitler open negotiations with either the Soviets or the British and Americans in order to secure a separate peace. He was perhaps the only Nazi leader who could risk making such a suggestion so frequently in their private meetings: although Hitler had never accepted that the time was right, he had not banned the topic. But Goebbels now realised that time to negotiate was running out: the Rhine had to be held if there was to be any prospect of persuading the Western Allies that it was better to negotiate than to go on losing men. Defending Germany west of the Rhine had cost the Wehrmacht half its forces on the western front: 60,000 soldiers were wounded or dead, and 293,000 had been taken prisoner, including 53,000 in a single encirclement near Wesel.
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What remained of Hitler’s ‘Great German Reich’ was bounded by two major rivers, the Oder and the Rhine, both of which had already been breached by enemy bridgeheads. In between lay 540 kilometres of the North German Plain, punctuated by only one natural obstacle: the river Elbe. A German General Staff officer told his Allied captors in mid-March that the German High Command

believed that the line of the Elbe at the east and of the Rhine in the west could be held for as long as proved necessary. It was envisaged that sooner or later a split would occur between the US and UK on the one hand and the USSR on the other, which would enable Germany to restore her position.

In order to safeguard the re-emergence of the Luftwaffe and its jet fighters in this next phase of fighting, oil refineries and other key installations had been equipped with heavy anti-aircraft defences. On 20 March, Hitler appointed General Gotthard Heinrici to command the Oder front, replacing Himmler, on whose ‘defeatism’ and military incompetence he blamed the loss of Pomerania. Heinrici, who had proved his skill in tactical defence time and again, also believed that as long as German forces held the Rhine, his defence of the Oder made strategic sense.
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Albert Speer was steeling himself to warn Hitler that the German economy would unwind in just four weeks; but he too joined in the optimistic talk and suggested rushing back the divisions in Italy and Norway to defend the Rhine and Oder fronts. As the Armaments Minister put it in a memo for Hitler on 18 March, ‘Holding out tenaciously on the current front for a few weeks can gain respect from the enemy and perhaps thus favourably determine the end of the war.’ The two men met the same day, with Hitler asserting that the war would continue and the army would wage a ‘scorched earth’ policy without regard to Germany’s future needs: ‘If the war is lost, then the people too is lost.’ If the German people proved too weak, he declared, then the ‘future belongs exclusively to the stronger people of the east’. This sentiment, first expressed in a moment of despair during the retreat from Moscow in the winter of 1941–42, had become one of Hitler’s
idées fixes.
He had expressed it in a private address to the Gauleiters on 24 February, and would repeat it verbatim when drafting his political testament a few weeks later. But it remained an idea which Hitler and Goebbels expounded only to that inner circle of leaders whom they considered responsible enough to think of their final hour in terms of heroic suicide.

After speaking to the Gauleiters, Hitler was too exhausted to broadcast his customary speech to the German people on 24 February, a date which commemorated the promulgation of the Party programme. Instead his proclamation had to be read over the radio by his old Party comrade, Hermann Esser. It was redolent with the Führer’s recognisable phrases: ‘this Jewish-Bolshevik annihilation of peoples and its West European and American pimps’; ‘freedom of the German nation’; fighting till ‘the historical turning point’. ‘The life left to us can serve only one command,’ the Führer demanded at the close: ‘that is to make good what the international Jewish criminals and their henchmen have done to our people.’ Even the local Party boss in Lüneburg was driven to quip bitterly, ‘The Führer is prophesying again.’
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Goebbels’s most loyal correspondents continued to pin their hopes on leaflet drops to persuade British and American troops not to allow themselves to serve as the pawns of ‘world Jewry’. Suggesting ways of getting the message across to enemy soldiers that they were being made to pay the ‘blood sacrifice’ of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and ‘Jewish plutocracy’, they all emphasised that the only hope for Western civilisation lay in Britain and the United States forging an alliance with Germany against Stalin. One letter to the Propaganda Ministry closed with the pseudo-Marxist slogan: ‘Goy awake! Non-Jews of the world unite!’
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Ernst Guicking wrote to Irene about the coming spring counter-offensive, advising her just to bunker down, make sure that their furniture was safe and lay in enough provisions. He was confident that they would be able to withstand the coming Allied assault. ‘If we can survive the summer,’ Ernst wrote to Irene on 9 March, ‘then we have also won.’ Promising her that Germany still possessed a ‘miracle weapon’ which would turn the tables on the Allies even if Berlin fell, Ernst affirmed that those who doubted the German cause did not ‘belong among us any more’. Without ceasing to talk up their hopes, for the first time Ernst and Irene began to consider their post-war future. On his last leave, the ever-practical Ernst had noticed that many young men would never return to his father’s village of Altenburschla. With the prospect of farms lying vacant, he suggested to Irene that they sink their savings into a plot of land. ‘If we win the war,’ he explained, ‘then we have what we most need, namely land. If we go to the dogs, then everything goes to the dogs.’
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On 22 and 23 March, the US 5th Infantry Division under Patton crossed the Rhine at Nierstein and Oppenheim. The troops met with little resistance but found it hard to exploit their success, because there were few roads in this rural area to the south of the river Main. In addition to the bridgehead established at Remagen on 7 March, a further crossing was forced along the middle Rhine where it ran through a gorge at St Goar. The main assault in the north came as expected on the Lower Rhine, where the British crossed the river at Wesel and Rees late on 23 March. The following day, engineers bridged the wide river and marshy terrain. Without reserves or air support and with few tanks or artillery, the German 1st Parachute Army was ill equipped to oppose the 1,250,000 men under Montgomery. The German commander, General Günther Blumentritt, agreed with Blaskowitz, his superior, that they could neither counter-attack nor continue to hold a broken line: by 1 April he had disengaged and pulled back to the far side of the Dortmund–Ems Canal, leaving the way into the Ruhr open from the north.