A World at Arms (151 page)

15

GERMANY’S SITUATION

The Allies early in 1945 hoped to crush Germany that year. It was their expectation that the German army would continue to fight ferociously on the defensive, especially now that it was the German homeland which was being invaded, but there was confidence in victory. The Allied air forces controlled the skies over all the fronts; and although at times the German air force could still muster substantial numbers, the Allies greatly outnumbered them, had better trained and more experienced pilots, and could, when it came to it, replace losses far more easily than the Germans. By this time, furthermore, the air attacks on Germany’s synthetic oil plants and the capture of the Romanian oil fields by the Russians had so reduced the supplies available to the German air force that many of its planes simply could not be flown.
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Control of the air assured the Allies of full support for their land offensives and the opportunity to attack industrial, transportation, and other targets in the whole area still under German control. What few newly developed jet airplanes the Germans could produce were often destroyed on the ground or simply overwhelmed in the skies. Both the Western Allies and the Soviet Union were producing propeller driven airplanes of improved design in great numbers even as the German air force had, for the most part, concentrated on modified versions of by 1945 obsolescent models of the early war years. In the air, there was obviously a dramatic reversal of the situation from that at the beginning of the war when the Germans had won air superiority first over Poland, then in the Western campaign of 1940 and the Balkan campaign of the spring of 1941, and finally in the first stage of the German attack on Russia. The earlier German insistence on building up a new air force
in the face of their treaty commitments and in a world without great fleets of warplanes no longer looked like the “success” which it had been hailed as by many in the 1930S and is still occasionally referred to in the literature.

The German navy was, as shown in
Chapter 14
, still hoping to return to the Battle of the Atlantic with new submarines which could go at high speed submerged; but even if these new types, being delivered and tried out in the winter, ever could be put into combat service, they would be blind without aerial reconnaissance–of which there was not the slightest prospect. The submarines in actual service, those of the old types but equipped with a snorkel so that the batteries could be recharged without the need for full surfacing, were now having little success. In all of January, they sank 80,000 tons of shipping in the Atlantic; this and the few remaining months of the war saw a pattern of minimal sinkings but high levels of U-Boats lost, often on a first combat cruise.

The German navy had by this time been effectively driven out of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, so that the Allies were not only safe in those waters but were beginning to send supplies to the Soviet Union through the Turkish Straits to Soviet Black Sea ports. The first shipments were delivered on this route in January 1945; by March and April, fully a third of the tonnage was being sent this way.
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Not only were German submarines excluded from the Mediterranean and successfully hunted in the Atlantic, but their operations in the Indian Ocean from Japanese bases were being affected by the deteriorating situation of their Japanese ally. Although the Germans did not have an entirely accurate view of the vast losses which had by then been inflicted on the Japanese navy, they knew enough to realize that the fleet whose accession to the Axis in December 1941 had made them hope for victory at sea was now to a large extent at the bottom of the ocean.
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Because of the loss of the Philippines, the severing of communications between the Japanese home islands and the conquered areas of Southeast Asia would make it difficult for the Japanese to refuel the German submarines stationed in Malaya, so any new ones sent had better be plentifully fitted out;
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hardly welcome advice at a time when Germany’s synthetic oil industry was being smashed.

The major immediate operational concern of the German navy in the last months of the war was not, however, the ongoing activity of submarines in the Atlantic or the hope of reviving effective submarine warfare with new submarines, but the danger threatening its major training area in the Baltic, which was also the sea over which Germany drew the Swedish iron ore essential to the continuation of the war. Sweden was not willing to join the Allies, as the Germans by this time feared, but it
was imperative for Germany to keep the Soviet navy out of as much of the Baltic as possible to protect German trade as well as submarine training. As the German army–in the face of the navy’s calling for efforts to seize Leningrad–instead retreated closer to the German border, Dönitz became ever more frantic in his insistence that as much of the Baltic shore as possible be held, a point already repeatedly discussed in connection with the Germans holding on to the Courland area of western Latvia.
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The converse of the navy’s pressure, of course, was the insistence of the army for support of its fighting on land first by naval artillery and, thereafter, in supplying the garrisons in Courland and Memel cut off by the advancing Red Army.
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During the winter of 1944, the naval war in the Baltic revolved around the efforts of the Soviet navy to strike into that sea, which the Germans on the whole warded off; and the latter’s frantic attempts to supply isolated garrisons, evacuate wounded soldiers and those ordered withdrawn for employment elsewhere, and the evacuation of vast numbers of civilian refugees. In these tasks, the remnant German navy was surprisingly successful. Ironically, it proved to be best in those missions which the founders and leaders of the Imperial and the Nazi navy had pushed aside to pursue world-wide ambitions and offensives; those few who had once argued for a navy attuned to coastal and defensive needs were proved right after all.

But the key question in the last months of war in Europe was not what the German air force and navy could do but whether the German home front would remain solidly behind the army as it fought in the west, east and south. In spite of the enormous casualties of the summer and fall and in spite of the impact of the increasingly heavy Allied bombing offensive, the home front held up. There had been a lift of morale when the first news of gains in the December offensive came through, but that quickly evaporated. There were still hopes for new secret weapons, since the V-1 and V-2 had obviously not turned the tide, but other factors helped to hold the system together.

Certainly a major factor in the cohesion of Nazi Germany was the victory of Hitler and his supporters over the internal resistance on and after July 1944.
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The success of the secret police in ferreting out opponents as well as the increasing terror at home and in the army appeared to oblige all to go along or at least keep their criticism to themselves. Many Germans were scared of their own government; others were scared of the Allies. The widespread participation in and even wider knowledge of the most awful crimes perpetrated in prior years made for a sense of desperation in the face of possible punishment and retribution. It was assumed that defeat would be followed by the harshest measures
and terms for Germany. There was a sad joke circulating in the country: it would be best to enjoy the war while it lasted because the peace would be terrible. Furthermore, in important ways, the massive disruption of the bombing campaign made people more dependent on the social service and support system of the government and thus contributed to a consolidation rather than disruption of public adherence to the existing regime.
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There were also strong positive cohesive factors in German society. Many, both among the leadership and in the population, continued to believe in the system. Some enjoyed the benefits of high rank and office, and the regime was especially careful to make sure that the monthly bribes to the highest generals and all field marshals (and their naval equivalents) continued until the end. Many simply could not envisage any alternative and, like numerous soldiers, fought on or held on out of loyalty not to the Nazi state but to their comrades. It should also be recalled that in World War II, unlike World War I, the looting of German-occupied Europe had assured the population the highest rations on the continent until the last portion of the conflict. And there was always the hope that Hitler, who continued to be held in high esteem by most of the public, would find some way to reverse the tide or attain a compromise or hold out until the coalition against Germany split Up.
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There were some minimal signs of recognition within the German government that peace on whatever terms might be a preferable alternative to fighting to the bitter end; but unlike in Italy, Romania, Finland, Hungary and subsequently Japan, that recognition was never transferred into serious action.
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When Japanese Ambassador Oshima saw von Ribbentrop and his new State Secretary von Steengracht in early January, he found them less adamant than earlier in response to his usual refrain of urging a German–Soviet peace.
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Evidently the Foreign Minister, in the interval between the failure of the Ardennes offensive and the beginning of the Soviet winter offensive, had begun to think of some diplomatic initiative and had not been completely prohibited from doing so by Hitler, whose own inclination was toward a settlement with the Soviet Union for a joint war to crush Britain.
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In a series of tentative feelers, which von Ribbentrop himself in part cancelled, the German Foreign Minister urged the Western Allies to make peace with Hitler and join Germany in fighting the Soviet Union, lest Germany join the latter in fighting them–while simultaneously either making the opposite suggestion to the Soviet Union or trying to find a way to do so. The details of these soundings made in Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and at the Vatican are not entirely clear; what is clear is that one of those who has written on them is correct in likening them
to von Ribbentrop’s earlier project, while still a champagne salesman, to peddle German champagne in France, of all places.
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The very fact that von Ribbentrop in the early months of 1945 could expect any of Germany’s enemies to fall for such approaches reveals a great deal about the perceptiveness of the German Foreign Minister.

Now that the foreign ministry could no longer devote most of its efforts to pressuring Axis satellites into yielding up their Jews to be murdered, it was concentrating on dealings with various shadowy governments-in-exile of its own creation for France, Romania, Bulgaria and others along with such old clients as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Rashid Ali Gaylani of Iraq; but all this had no connection with the realities of either the war or the post-war era.
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More significant were the orders to move nerve gas supplies out of areas about to be overrun by the Allies against the possibility of their use in the last stage of the war. The nerve gas factory at Dyhernfurth in Silesia, nevertheless, fell undamaged into Soviet hands and was taken to the Soviet Union after the war.
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Plans for what to do with and in occupied Germany, as well as the rest of once German-controlled Europe, were already well advanced in all the major Allied countries by the end of 1944; and they had agreed among themselves on some but by no means every one of the major issues which affected all of them. The Soviet leadership may once have believed, as the surviving exiled German Communists in the Soviet Union held, that the German masses, misled and terrorized by their exploiting capitalist masters, would revolt against the Fascist agents of monopoly capitalism as soon as Germany attacked the Soviet Union, but such notions had long since fallen by the wayside. The experience of war on the Eastern Front had shown all too dramatically that the overwhelming majority of German soldiers (as well as officers) fully supported the regime of the Third Reich, and even in the prisoner of war camps the Communists had difficulty finding recruits. Those few they did locate would in subsequent years come to play significant roles in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany and later in the German Democratic Republic, but their number was and remained small. In the later stages of the fighting in the East, especially in the summer and fall of 1944, German soldiers surrendered in large numbers and at times before they were completely exhausted and without ammunition, and numerous captured generals joined those of the captives of Stalingrad who had called on their fellow officers to end a useless war; but it was
as obvious to the devoted German Communists as to the leaders of the Soviet Union that the bulk of the German army would fight to the bitter end and that the home front remained solidly behind it.

Every Soviet effort to find alternative ways out of the war had failed: the existing German government had refused any possibility of a compromise peace when such a peace still seemed to have advantages to the Soviet Union, and there had been neither an uprising from below nor any substantial effort of nationalistic military leaders to displace the regime and make peace. The events of July 20, 1944, only reinforced the impression of a minute and ineffective opposition to the Nazi regime inside Germany. Under these circumstances, Soviet planning for the future of Germany and for the future of the area between the Soviet Union and Germany came to have a basic set of priorities and principles.
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