Barbarossa (69 page)

The month of August 1944 saw the munitions output of the Third
Reich attain a peak figure, with a production of 869 tanks and 744
assault guns—enough to re-equip ten new Panzer divisions, and
by the end of September the factories had produced enough not only to
make up for the losses in Normandy but also to overtake the "wastage"
rate in the East. In September the British paradrop on the Arnhem
bridges failed, and Patton's tanks coughed to a standstill in Alsace,
with their fuel tanks dry. Rain fell in the Reichswald and along the
length of the Siegfried Line. The boundaries of German territory
began once again to solidify; they were still—almost
miraculously, it must have seemed—outside the frontiers from
which Hitler had started the war in 1939.

The continuous rise in German weapons output, even un-der the
hammer of Allied air attack, was a remarkable feat, achieved at God
knows what price in cruelty and privation inflicted on the slave
labour force. There were two sectors of the war economy where
resources were running out—fuel to run the machines and men,
fighting men to operate them, but even here the autumn brought
improvement. Stocks of oil, which had stood at a million tons in
April and sunk to less than a month's supply during the summer,
slowly began to pick up again as the static conditions at the front
reduced demand and the fog and thunderstorms of autumn protected the
refineries from air attack. At the same time the last of German
manhood was conscripted into the Army; by lowering the call-up age
from seventeen to sixteen and a half years and a ruthless selection
from "essential" operatives on the home front, the intake
was raised to over seven hundred thousand in the months of August,
September, and October.

Yet, impressive as these figures are, a closer inspection reveals
the same malign interplay of personal rivalries and private empires
waxing fiercer, it seems, as their period of power visibly
diminishes. After the plot Himmler had been appointed to the Reserve
or Home Army, in place of the luckless Fromm. He was also commander
of Army Group Upper Rhine (an organisation, Guderian contemptuously
observed, "for catching fugitives and deserters"),
Minister of the Interior, Chief of the Civil Police, and Reichsführer
SS. From a purely executive standpoint he was the most powerful man
in Germany, but at this stage in the war, and his country's decline,
Treuer Heinrich
was a man of troubled mind. The extension of
his personal domain from the SS, where all was tidy and the staff was
(or had until lately seemed to be) obedient and loyal, to the rough
and tumble of military affairs was proving to be a mixed blessing.
For Himmler was in a field where new elements, hitherto outside his
experience, were making themselves felt. There was his equivocal
position in the command infra structure; as an army commander he owed
a nominal obedience to OKW; he was not so much
primus
as (at
least in the eyes of his professional colleagues)
minor, inter
pares
. There was also the prospect, novel and unwelcome, that he
might be engaged with enemies who would actually be
able to shoot
back
—a development which opened all sorts of alarming
possibilities.

At this stage in the war Himmler seems to assume a double image,
one whose contrasts may be most effectively illustrated by the
different ways of pronouncing his title. The Reichsführer—the
very syllables make the listener tremble —the man who
controlled the whole retributive machinery of the Reich, from the
humblest policeman on point duty to the 88-mm. Tigers of the Waffen
SS; but in translation, the "National Leader," it has a
faintly ludicrous air, evoking youth camps and
Lederhosen
, one
well suited to the puzzled, troubled face behind the rimless
pince-nez spectacles, to the man who threw a screaming fit when the
brains of some hapless victim were spattered on his uniform. We will
attempt, then, in these last months of Germany's decline, to
alternate these titles in keeping with Himmier's role.

Certainly no one, except Hitler himself, could have successfully
handled all of Himmier's business. For it was not simply a question
of administering his army commands and the affairs of his police
empire. Himmier's constant preoccupation was to resist the efforts
of the National Director (Bormann) to diminish his powers and erode
the frontiers of his influence.

[Reichsleiter, Bormann's official title.]

The disputes over the
Volkssturm
are one more example of
the multilateral squabbling that sapped the vitality of the German
war effort. The idea had originally been Guderian's (or, to be
strictly accurate, that of General Heusinger, of the OKH Operations
Department, who had first suggested it in 1943, and had it turned
down), and in scope had been confined to the Eastern provinces which
were immediately threatened by Russian invasion. Guderian had
suggested to Hitler that a kind of "Home Guard" be raised
locally, draw-its staff from former members of the SA. Hitler had
agreed, but evidently discussed the idea during the night with Bormann, for the following day he told Guderian that he had changed his
mind, that it would be better if the organisation was made a Party
affair, and that he proposed to entrust it to Bormann. Bormann then
proceeded to enlarge the scope of the
Volkssturm
to cover the
whole country, and made its raising and administration the
responsibility of the Gauleiters, who were, of course, directly
answerable to him. The Reichsleiter was now, at this late hour, in
sight of one of his most cherished ambitions—a private army
which would lend the substance of power to his undoubted ascendancy
in the privy counsels of the Führer. Meanwhile the National
Leader, not to be outdone, was administering the Home Army in a most
peculiar way. Instead of directing the new conscripts into the
various manpower pools of the fighting fronts for allocation to
existing units, Himmler was busy forming yet another kind of
division—the
Volksgrenadier
.

These formations were based on the skeletal remnants (often
existing as little more than numbers in the OKW
Kriegstagebuch
)
of units that had been "burned out" in earlier campaigns.
They were now filled out with a motley collection of Hitler Youth,
Luftwaffe ground staff, "reserved" middle-aged businessmen,
invalids, and naval cadets. If their training period was dangerously
short—sometimes as little as six weeks—their
esprit de
corps
was very high, and helped by the priority Himmler granted
them in the distribution of new weapons from the factories. Indeed,
with so many new tanks and assault guns going to the SS, whose
divisions were being raised to
Panzergrenadier
establishment
as fast as possible, and all the infantry weapons being acrimoniously
divided between the rival claims of the Reichsführer and the
Reichsleiter, it is a wonder that the regular German Army got any new
equipment at all.

Bormann's power over the armed forces was developing in another
way also. In the weeks following the
attentat
he had developed
and greatly expanded a system first introduced by the odious General
Reinecke in 1943, of "National Socialist Leadership Officers,"
who were to be attached to regular units in the field and
"indoctrinate" (i.e., spy on) the officers and N.C.O.'s.
Bormann had fixed things so that these characters were responsible
to, and reported directly to, himself. Nothing daunted, the National
Leader chose to address them himself in his capacity as commander of
the Home Army, and cast his speech in a suitably ruthless mould:

Put the best, the most brutal officers of the division in
charge. They will soon round up such a rabble [those who advised
retreat]. They will put anyone that answers back against a wall.

Guderian, in the meantime, was dealing with the National Socialist
Leadership Officers in his own style. After complaining that "their
conduct had led to a number of gross breaches of discipline," he
took to transferring the offenders to the OKH staff, where

... I did retain certain limited disciplinary powers. There I
allowed the very self-confident young men in question to cool their
heels for several weeks, and to consider their manners . . .

When Guderian told Hitler about this, the Führer "looked
at me in astonishment but said nothing." However, Bormann had
an ally in General Burgdorf, the head of the Army Personnel Office,
who was in control of all postings.

[Burgdorf has a particular niche in the mythology of the Ger-man
Army, for it was he who had driven to Rommel's house on the 14th
October and handed the Field Marshal a box of poison ampoules.
Burgdorf had ottered Rommel the choice of taking his own life or
returning to Berlin and "helping" with an investigation
into information which Cesar von Hofacker had revealed under torture,
concerning Rommel's part in the 20th July plot.]

A running battle developed between the weary OKH staff and
Burgdorf's department, with the rival nominees shunted back and forth
to the adagio rustle of forms in triplicate.

Meanwhile Himmler, suffering from the overt contempt and
indifference of the General Staff, the unrelenting opposition of
Bormann, and the pernicious intrigues of Kaltenbrunner and
Fegelein, had found a new ally. There had been a day when Dr.
Goebbels and the National Leader were barely on speaking terms.
"He'll be careful in future not to send me insolent teletyped
messages," reads a petulant entry in Goebbels' diary in 1943,
but of late each, sensing a growing exclusion from the intimacies of
the beloved Führer, had found himself drawn toward a marriage of
convenience. Following the
attentat
Goebbels had been appointed "Plenipotentiary for Total War," with exceptional
powers over the home front and, in particular, the redistribution
of manpower. It was natural that he and Himmler should work
together—indeed, a few days before 20th July, in a conversation
with Werner Naumann, Goebbels had spoken yearningly of the
possibility:

The Army for Himmler, and for me the civilian direction of
the war! That is a combination which could rekindle the power of
our war leadership, but it will probably remain a wonderful dream!

Yet no amount of personal enthusiasm could "rekindle"
the German war effort while it was burdened with that rigid
departmentalisation, bounded by the frontiers of privilege and
personal jealousy which had been multiplying since 1938. Sometimes
the different departments pulled in diametrically opposite
directions. In September, when fuel stocks were barely adequate for a
fortnight's operations, Speer's factories delivered more
single-seater fighters to the Luftwaffe than during any previous
month of the war. Even if the fuel had been available, to get them
airborne the ground crews required to service these aircraft were
being pressed into the
Volksgrenadier
divisions at the rate of
fifteen thousand a week. Still more ludicrous, although the
directives for the comb-out of civilians emanated from Goebbels'
office, the apparatus for implementing them was operated by Bormann
through the district Gauleiters. When Speer objected to Hitler that
he could not part with the three hundred thousand workers Goebbels
was proposing to take from industry, and the Führer hesitated,
neither Himmler nor Goebbels could acquire his support by arguing on
the basis of military requirements. Instead Himmler had to work on
Bormann, by suggesting that his dignity as Reichsieiter was being
flouted by Speer's resistance. Bormann then approached Hitler, and
Goebbels got his conscripts.

While the Diadochi squabbled, Hitler brooded in Olym-pian
isolation on the next stage of the war. Half deaf, trembling down one
side of his body, and subject to un-controllable attacks of
paranoiac violence, Hitler was still far from being mad. His spirit
had been broken by disappointment and treachery, and his physique
was being steadily eroded by the medications of Dr. Morell, but the
Führer's intellect still held all its old range and scope. He
recognised the change in the balance of power, he saw that Germany's
war aims had to be trimmed, that the old cry of "Security,"
so shamelessly employed to cover the aggressions of the thirties,
had now become a painful reality; that the problems and the strategy
of World War I were resurrected. "Wars are finally decided by
one side or the other recognising that they cannot be won."
Hitler coined this aphorism, and it then be-came the touchstone of
the new "two-front" strategy of the winter of 1944-45.

Never in history was there a coalition like that of our
enemies, composed of such heterogeneous elements with such divergent
aims . . . Ultra-capitalist states on the one hand; Ultra-marxist
states on the other. On the one hand a dying empire, Britain; on the
other, a colony bent upon inheritance, the United States. Each of the
partners went into this coalition with the hope of realising his
political ambitions . . .

The solution, Hitler believed, was a violent "shock"
blow against one of the partners, which would sap their will to
continue a struggle to which no end was in sight. The secret weapons
were inadequate for such an assignment, but thanks to the efforts of
Speer, Goebbels, and Himmler, the "conventional" forces
might just do the trick, for by late autumn he had accumulated a
reserve of seven Panzer and thirteen
Volksgrenadier
divisions,
and by the end of November this figure had risen to twenty-eight.
This force, at the earliest possible moment, was to be thrown against
the Anglo-Saxons. For they were the weakest, Hitler believed, both
morally and physically, and a sharp defeat would "bring them to
their senses."

The history of the Ardennes offensive is outside the scope of this
work except where it impinges on the Eastern campaign, but where it
does so it is extremely revealing. The German plan went wrong, first
in its timing by a small margin and then (again by a small margin) in
its execution. But in conception it rested on one basic premise—that
the Russian front in Poland and East Prussia would stay quiet
throughout the autumn. This assumption was shown to be valid. The
Eastern front, between the Carpathians and the Baltic, barely shifted
at all from August 1944 until the end of the year. Why? Why did the
Russians stop when one more concentrated drive could (and later did)
carry them to the outskirts of Berlin?