The Third Reich at War (111 page)

In any case, there was no known effective protection against the gases. It was simply too dangerous to deploy them on the battlefield. Supposing the wind turned and blew them back on the German troops? Putting them into bombs or missiles was almost as dangerous. Mistakes always occurred, and nobody could be certain of the direction the gas cloud would take when a gas-bomb went off. Hitler’s Plenipotentiary for Chemical Warfare, Karl Brandt (who was also his personal doctor), was convinced, like other scientists, that the Allies’ superior resources must mean that they were more advanced in the development and production of nerve gases. If Germany started to use them, he reasoned, then Allied air supremacy would mean that there would be no defence if the Allies decided to retaliate. In the autumn of 1944, reflecting this thinking, gas-mask production in Germany was rapidly increased, and millions of masks were manufactured within the space of a few months. In fact, the Allies did not possess modern nerve gases, though they did have stocks of phosgene and mustard gas. They too were well equipped with gas masks, which had been distributed in their millions to the British population even before the war began. Whether such simple devices would have offered any protection against Sarin or Tabun, however, is extremely doubtful.
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Flying-bombs, rockets, atom-bombs and nerve gases were far from being the only technologically advanced devices under development in Germany during the war. As Speer remarked, by 1944 there was a whole variety of wonder-weapons in preparation:

We possessed a remote-controlled flying bomb, a rocket plane that was even faster than the jet plane, a rocket missile that homed on an enemy plane by tracking the heat rays from its motors, and a torpedo that reacted to sound and could thus pursue and hit a ship fleeing in a zigzag course. Development of a ground-to-air missile had been completed. The designer Lippisch had jet planes on the drawing board that were far in advance of anything so far known . . . We were literally suffering from an excess of projects in development. Had we concentrated on only a few types we would surely have completed some of them sooner.
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But none of these came to anything. The regime’s inability to prioritize, based partly on in-fighting between different agencies, partly on a general overestimation of its ability to finance and construct such programmes, partly on a general underestimation of the time and resources needed to get from research and development to production, doomed them to failure. Instead of concentrating on the ‘Waterfall’ ground-to-air missile, for example, which in Speer’s view would have played a vital role in reducing the impact of Anglo-American bombing raids, Hitler ordered a concentration of resources on the V-1 flying bomb and then the V-2 rocket. This left the missile programme to stagger on from one problem to another, denied the workforce and equipment that might have hastened its development to a point where it could actually have come into operation.
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Speer and others were aware of the lack of co-ordination; some projects were being continued despite their obvious lack of practical military relevance. Yet the perpetual struggle for power within the regime meant that no one could do anything about it. The costs of these projects were enormous: there were more operational staff employed at the V-2 site in Peenem̈nde, for example, than there were on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. In the end, all these schemes imposed a huge financial burden on Germany without having any effect on the outcome of the war.
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It was a similar story with the jet-engined fighter, which might also have helped defend Germany’s cities. The scientific and technological expertise was certainly available. By 1941 Ernst Heinkel had succeeded in developing and testing a jet engine, which was to be put into a revolutionary new fighter plane, the twin-engined Me262, giving it a speed of over 500 miles per hour. It first flew in July 1943. Speer was enthusiastic about the new aircraft, and blamed the subsequent failure to bring it into mass production on repeated interventions by Hitler, who first ordered a halt, then changed his mind but declared that it had to be a bomber instead of a fighter. Speer and many others, including the top commanders of the air force, tried to convince Hitler that the Me262 would be able to inflict enormous damage on the British and American bombers now devastating Germany’s towns and cities if it was developed and deployed as a fighter plane. But Hitler took this as criticism of his military and technical expertise and became so irritated with these repeated attempts to get him to change his mind that he banned all discussion of the Me262 from the autumn of 1944 onwards. In any case, Allied bombing was disrupting the plane’s development and manufacturing sites well before this stage had been reached. Thus few were produced. Fuel supplies were being destroyed, the necessary supplies of metal alloys to construct the plane in large numbers were lacking, and the time and facilities for training pilots to fly the plane were absent. Most important of all, however, much more time was needed to test and refine the design until the inevitable teething troubles were dealt with and the plane could be flown safely and effectively. The Air Ministry committed itself whole-heartedly to developing the aircraft; Messerschmitt simply lacked the time and resources to bring the project to fruition.
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High hopes were entertained for a new generation of submarines, equipped with powerful batteries that would enable them to remain submerged for long periods so that they could not be detected by radar. The new craft were built for speed so that they could overtake convoys and sink them before the accompanying destroyers could steam into action. The first of the new U-boats was delivered in June 1944, and over 150 had been built by February 1945. But they had been rushed into production before being properly tried and tested, and many of them succumbed almost immediately to teething troubles. In any case, without aerial reconnaissance they would have found it difficult to locate their targets. A crash programme of construction of a long-range reconnaissance aircraft, the Ju290, had to be called off in the summer of 1944 after the damage inflicted by Allied air raids on production centres had made the futility of the project clear. Soon afterwards, the U-boat bases on the French coast fell into Allied hands. The new U-boats did not succeed in sinking a single ship, though the priority given to the construction programme, and the hopes held out for its success, convinced Hitler that the commander of the U-boat fleet, Admiral D̈nitz, was one of the few remaining leaders in the armed forces who still possessed the will to victory that he demanded.
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Another wonder-weapon, dubbed the V-3, was intended purely as a measure of revenge against the British. An enormous gun with a barrel over 150 metres long, it was intended to shoot shells all the way from the Continent to the middle of London, boosting them with small explosions as they went up the barrel and so increasing their velocity. It was still under development when Allied bombs destroyed the firing site, and by the time the facilities had been repaired the war was irrevocably lost.
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Yet another wonder-weapon, a four-stage rocket with powder instead of liquid fuel, was to lead eventually to the multi-stage, solid-fuel rockets of the postwar era, but the army never succeeded in producing more than a handful, which were launched from the end of 1944 against Antwerp, but overshot and fell into the sea. The only damage done by this weapon was when a trial firing sent a rocket whizzing towards a nearby farm, killing several chickens and a dog and injuring two cows.
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The list of wonder-weapons was seemingly endless. In early April 1945 Albert Speer encountered the Labour Front leader Robert Ley with Martin Bormann and others deep in discussion:

Ley came rushing towards me with the news: ‘Death rays have been invented! A simple apparatus that we can produce in large quantities. I’ve studied the documentation; there’s no doubt about it. This will be the decisive weapon!’ With Bormann nodding confirmation, Ley went on, stuttering as always, to find fault with me. ‘But of course your Ministry rejected the inventor. Fortunately for us, he wrote to me. But now you personally must get this project going. Immediately. At this moment there’s nothing more important.’
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Speer’s team soon found that the inventor was an eccentric amateur who was asking for equipment so out of date that it had not been manufactured for forty years.
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In the end, the main significance of the wonder-weapons was as a propaganda device that offered hope to those who still wanted Nazism to win. The German media carried lurid stories of the devastation caused by the V-1 and V-2, trying to satisfy people’s demand for effective retaliatory action on the British that would bring the bombing raids to an end. Many of these were invented. In all, fewer than 6,000 V-1s fell on Britain and just over 1,000 V-2s. 31,600 houses were destroyed, mostly in London, and nearly 9,000 people were killed by the two weapons, with 24,000 being injured. This damage did not compare to the devastation inflicted by Allied bombing in Germany, and in no way met the demand for massive retaliation. People called the V-1 the
Volksverdummer Nr 1
(Stultifier of the People Number 1) or the
Versager Nr 1
(Failure Number 1). Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry was aware of this scepticism. So the co-ordinated media pumped out vague promises of new, as yet unspecified wonder-weapons of a far greater destructiveness. As early as 19 February 1943 Hitler was talking in public of ‘hitherto unknown, unique weapons’ that were on the way and would turn the tide of war.
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Yet such promises soon lost any potency they might have had. Even in November the same year, a joke about them was doing the rounds. It revealed how well people knew that Germany’s lack of resources was losing the war. ‘1950,’ so went the imaginary report. ‘Meeting in the Leader’s headquarters about the date fixed for Vengeance. It is postponed once more because there is no agreement on whether the two airplanes should fly side-by-side or one in front of the other.’
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Towards the end of the war even the most optimistic and convinced followers of Nazism were beginning to have their doubts about the wonder-weapons. On 3 September 1944 Inge Molter wrote to her husband Alfred:

Fred, darling, we’ve got to keep going until the new weapons are ready, it can’t be that the enemy will force us on to our knees before that happens. Darling, I simply can’t believe that. Will it all have been in vain, will there be no more Germany? No, darling, I can’t believe that. But unfortunately this view is very gradually trickling through into the shops and everywhere that one sees several people gathered together .
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On 12 November 1944 a concerned radio listener sent a letter to the head of the news service in the Propaganda Ministry, Hans Fritsche, asking: ‘Why haven’t at least some of the new weapons been put into action, when the enemy is standing so close before our borders to the west and the east?’ He did not receive an answer.
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By March 1945, Germany’s situation, wrote the university student Lore Walb, was ‘unspeakably bitter’:

And in this situation the government is still talking of victory! In my innermost heart I too do not want to believe that our people are destined to downfall. But if you only think about them just a little, things look very black. You can’t see any chink of light any more. The new weapons haven’t turned up, and will most likely never turn up. I certainly believe that they were planned and that construction of them was begun, but at this point they won’t succeed in getting them ready any more.
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‘Until the last few days,’ reported the Security Service of the SS at the end of March 1945, ‘people retained a remnant of the belief in a miracle that has been so skilfully and purposefully nurtured by the propaganda about the new weapons.’ But this small residue of hope had to be seen as a kind of psychological defence mechanism to cope with the despair that was now overwhelming the German people. The report concluded: ‘Nobody believes that we can still escape a catastrophe with the methods and possibilities of waging war that have existed up to now. The last spark of hope remains rescue from outside, or a completely exceptional set of circumstances, or a secret weapon of enormous power. This hope too is being extinguished.’
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V

If new weapons could not rescue Germany, then perhaps new soldiers could. Already at the end of 1943 the call-up of increasingly older age-cohorts of men to the armed forces was prompting a variety of popular jokes. ‘Vengeance will come,’ so one went, ‘when you see notices on the old people’s homes: “Closed because of the call-up”.’
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On 26 September 1944, in a desperate attempt to deal with the shortage of military personnel, Hitler ordered the creation of the ‘People’s Storm’ (
Volkssturm
), in which all men from the ages of sixteen to sixty were required to take up arms, and to undergo training for a final stand. They were to be organized by the Party, with the aim, Hitler said, of defending the German people against the attempt of its ‘Jewish-international enemies’ to annihilate them. All of them had to swear a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler, allegiance unto death. The official date for the launch of the People’s Storm was chosen by Himmler as 18 October, the anniversary of the defeat of Napoleon’s army in the ‘Battle of the Nations’ at Leipzig in 1813. This was to be a national uprising just like the one that - in popular legend - had ended French rule over Germany just over 130 years before. But the reality fell far short of the rhetoric. The men of the People’s Storm were never going to be a very effective fighting force. They had no uniforms - there was no way of providing them by this stage - and had to come in their own clothes, bringing with them a rucksack, a blanket and cooking equipment. The arms and ammunition they needed were never fully forthcoming, and by the final stage of the war they were little more than a poor imitation of an army. Wandering out from his woodland hiding-place one day, the Social Democratic schoolboy Ullrich S. noted 400 men of the People’s Storm come into the nearby village. ‘Tired and exhausted, most of them were wearing uniforms borrowed from the air force, or plundered. A few only had their mufti. I only saw 5 soldiers in all who were bearing arms, the rest were not even carrying a bayonet.’ With the characteristic disdain of the adolescent for the middle-aged, he added: ‘Most of them were between 45 and 60 years of age. The whole crowd made a very pitiable impression on us. They almost looked like an old people’s home on an outing.’
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This view was widespread. ‘Two men with shovels are walking across the graveyard,’ went one popular joke of the day. ‘An old man shouts after them: “So you want to dig out reinforcements for the People’s Storm?” ’
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For the men of the People’s Storm, however, enlistment was more than a joke. No fewer than 175,000 were eventually killed fighting against the professional armies of the Russians and the Western Allies.
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