Hitler's Charisma (43 page)

But once within Stalingrad they faced determined and fierce resistance from the Soviet troops. “There were snipers firing from everywhere,” says Stempel, “from any hole, from any corner, from any chimney of a burned-down house, from any pile of earth … [there were] a lot of [Soviet] women in uniform, who proved to be excellent snipers and who made our life there a living hell.” Another problem for the soldiers of the 6th Army, many of whom had ridden across the steppes in tanks, was the alien nature of hand-to-hand combat amidst the wreckage of houses and factories. “We were totally unfamiliar with that and we had not been trained for it either … you had to make your way to the front, ducking, crouching, kneeling, [and] shots rang out from all sides—from the front, from behind, from above, from below. And all around you was the noise of the artillery salvoes hitting what was left of the factory buildings … Seeing your opponent is an indescribable feeling, when you are suddenly facing one another. [You think] ‘he wants to kill me, I have to kill him.’ I can’t describe that feeling. There is no hesitating or consideration of humane feelings … We were repeatedly told, ‘Another 100 metres, then you’ve done it! [i.e., reached the Volga].’ But how can it be done if you just don’t have the strength? And it was terrible too for our people bringing supplies, when, under cover of darkness, they finally brought the food to the front in thermal containers, even though it had got completely cold by then, and then they were suddenly killed by the Russians from behind. And we were waiting for the food which never arrived because they had been caught, taken prisoner or even shot by Russian scouts or reconnaissance patrols, behind our backs.” As each day went by, Stempel saw that “each attack resulted in such a high number of losses that it was easy to calculate how long it would be before there was no one left.”

The difficulties of the 6th Army in Stalingrad were compounded by the promise made by Adolf Hitler in a speech on 30 September 1942. “You can rest assured,” he said, “no human being can remove us from this place.”
²⁶
It was an even more explicit statement than the one he had given the year before about victory in the Soviet campaign. Now—in unequivocal
terms—Hitler had said that the German army would never retreat from Stalingrad. Carlheinz Behnke, then a junior officer in the Waffen SS, heard Hitler give his speech and say “We will take Stalingrad!” And he and his comrades “didn’t doubt it at all. Not at all.”
²⁷

We can never know for certain what was the motivation for Hitler’s promise about Stalingrad. Perhaps his decision was influenced by the fact that the city bore Stalin’s name. More likely it was that Hitler realised that he needed to rebuild confidence in his promises after the debacle of the previous year, and here was a promise to the German people that he genuinely thought he could deliver. In addition, as Antony Beevor says, Hitler “somehow believed that if the German soldier holds firm he will always be right. It was this whole notion, ‘the triumph of the will,’ and the idea that somehow moral decision and decisiveness would overcome everything.”
²⁸

But as autumn turned to winter it became clear that the German 6th Army could not remove soldiers of the Soviet 62nd Army completely from the city. Under the command of Vasily Chuikov—a man so tough that he used to beat up his own officers if they displeased him—Red Army soldiers clung to the western bank of the river Volga or lived deep in the rubble of shattered buildings. “Our principle was, we’ll put claws in the throat of the enemy and hold them very close,” says Anatoly Mereshko, then a young Soviet officer at Stalingrad, “that way you can stay alive. These were Chuikov’s tactics.”
²⁹

As the Soviet 62nd Army held out in Stalingrad, an offensive was being prepared to relieve them by two of Stalin’s most brilliant generals—Zhukov and Vasilevskii. The plan—codenamed Operation Uranus—was for a vast encirclement operation. Red Army soldiers would not, to begin with, attack Stalingrad itself but press against the flanks of the enemy, up to a hundred miles away to the far west of the city, and confront the weaker Romanian units that protected German supply lines. The operation, launched on 19 November 1942, was a spectacular success—just four days later the Red Army had succeeded in completely cutting off the Germans in Stalingrad.

The success of Operation Uranus laid bare a series of flaws in Hitler’s leadership. More than anything, it showed the consequences of his immense arrogance: he had grossly underestimated the Soviets’ capacity to resist. Specifically, he had dismissed their ability to learn intelligently from the tactics of the German army. Because Soviet forces had
behaved in a particular way in the past—for example by walking into a trap set by the Germans at the Battle of Kharkov, back in the spring—he thought they would behave in a similar way in the future. But from the highest level of the Soviet government—Joseph Stalin—to the lowest ordinary soldier, the Soviet military machine had changed. In recent months Stalin had become less dictatorial as far as his senior generals were concerned—he had, for instance, allowed Zhukov and Vasilevskii to initiate and then develop Operation Uranus unhindered—whilst improvements had also been made in the training and coordination of individual units. Most importantly, the Soviets had developed techniques of
maskirovka
—deception—to conceal their military build-up from the Germans.

Hitler’s underestimation of the capacity of the enemy had spread to his commanders. On 23 October 1941, just a few weeks before the launch of Operation Uranus, the new chief of the General Staff, Kurt Zeitzler, had declared that the Soviets were ‘in no position to mount a major offensive with any far-reaching objective.”
³⁰
Yet Hitler, even in the face of the surprising Soviet success in encircling the 6th Army, still continued to underrate his opponents.
Unternehmen Wintersturm
(Operation Winter Storm), Manstein’s attempt to relieve the stricken 6th Army, was never adequately resourced and the rescue attempt was called off after less than a week. As for Göring’s boast that the Luftwaffe could adequately supply the 6th Army from the air—that turned out to be mere wishful thinking. As a consequence of the German failure to relieve the 6th Army, conditions inside the encirclement grew increasingly grim. “After Christmas, things deteriorated rapidly in terms of morale, and, not only in terms of morale, there was also the question of [lack of] food, supplies,”
³¹
says Gerhard Hindenlang, a German battalion commander at Stalingrad.

But still, many of the soldiers of the 6th Army hoped for rescue. They would listen and think they heard the advancing tanks of their German liberators. As one officer trapped inside Stalingrad put it, “I believed that the Führer would not give us up; that he wouldn’t sacrifice the 6th Army; that he would get the 6th Army out of there.”
³²

They were wrong. Their Führer had given them up. All that was left for Hitler was to attempt to engineer a Wagnerian ending to the saga by promoting the commander of the 6th Army, Friedrich Paulus, to Field Marshal on 30 January 1943, just before Stalingrad fell. Since no German
Field Marshal had ever allowed himself to be captured by the enemy it was a clear sign that Hitler wanted Paulus to kill himself. But Paulus decided not to take his own life and was captured by the Red Army. Hitler’s reaction was a mix of fury and disbelief. “It hurts me so much,”
³³
Hitler said when he heard the news, “because the heroism of so many soldiers is destroyed by a single, spineless weakling …”

The transcript of Hitler’s words that day reveals a growing side to his leadership—one that would be on display to the world just over two years later—the desire to embrace death in defeat. “What does that mean, ‘life’?” asked Hitler. “… the individual has to die. What remains alive beyond the individual is the people. But how can one fear this moment—through which one [can free] oneself from misery …”
³⁴
Instead of entering into “national immortality”
³⁵
Paulus had “preferred” to go to Moscow, where “rats will eat” him in the Lubyanka prison. Moreover, Paulus had set a dangerous precedent—now other officers in the future might not fight to the death. Hitler was certain how the end ought to come: “… you gather yourselves together, build an all-round defence, and shoot yourself with the last cartridge. If you imagine that a woman, after being insulted a few times, has so much pride that she goes out, locks herself in, and shoots herself dead immediately—then I have no respect for a soldier [who prefers] going into captivity.”
³⁶

Ever since he had joined the German Workers’ Party twenty-three years before, Hitler had shown himself to be a gambler, prepared to take huge risks on enterprises that could so plainly go either way. He had also said that he had assumed the Battle of Stalingrad would end “heroically”—and by “heroically” he meant, if necessary, in a last suicidal stand. In this respect, Paulus and many of the other commanders of the 6th Army had let him down. He would shortly try and ensure that millions of other Germans did not.

The shame of Stalingrad caused a widespread deterioration in belief in Hitler’s charisma. What’s extraordinary, therefore, is that Hitler held out as leader of Germany for two years more. One explanation sometimes given for this phenomenon is that the Nazi regime began to rely more on terror and threat to stay in power—elements of coercion that had always existed but which now became more prevalent. But that’s only part of the story. Hitler’s charismatic appeal did not entirely disappear and its legacy cast a long and destructive shadow.

Hitler sought to limit the damage to his prestige caused by events in Stalingrad in a number of ways. The most obvious was that he simply did not appear in public during this time of defeat. It was Goebbels who was given the hapless task of reading out a lengthy proclamation from Hitler on 30 January 1943, the tenth anniversary of his appointment as chancellor. And it was left to Göring, speaking that same day on the radio, to articulate why the German people should still have faith in Hitler. The reason he gave was straightforward; “Providence” had sent Hitler to Germany and allowed this “simple fighter” from the First World War to attain greatness. So how could one believe that what was happening now was
all “senseless”?
¹
It was an obvious attempt to appeal for “faith” in Hitler’s charisma to be continued, if not redoubled. It was, in essence, the same simple admonition the 6th Army had received from Hitler’s headquarters just a few days before their surrender—which was to always remember that the “Führer knows best.”
²

There were obvious difficulties in following this advice. For Hitler had unquestionably broken his promise made the previous September that “no one” would ever get the Wehrmacht out of Stalingrad. And, as other events in the first half of 1943 demonstrated, simply exhorting the German armed forces to fight on, in the face of the obvious advantages the Allies now possessed, scarcely deserved to be called a strategy at all. Take, for example, what was now happening in the Battle of the Atlantic. In May 1943 the German navy was forced to withdraw all U-boats from the North Atlantic—an outright admission of German defeat. Jürgen Oesten, one of the most successful U-boat captains of the war, explains why, from his perspective, this decision had to be taken: “If a U-boat got hold of a convoy then, of course, it gave the relevant signal and then the other U-boats were in position to adjust their course accordingly, so that they got hold of the convoys as well … and this system was working reasonably well as long as the escort vessels were not in a position to detect the boats at night … [But] from the second half of 1942 onwards the [British] escort vessels were able to find the direction of the [U-boat] wireless signal, so that if a submarine in the vicinity of the convoy gave a signal, the destroyers could be in a position to come directly to the U-boat. The second thing was that radar development was far quicker on the British side than in Germany, and the escort vessels were equipped with radar, so from then onwards the escort vessels were in a position, as well, to detect the boats by means of radar at night [and] they were in the position to find the direction of the U-boat as soon as the U-boat gave a wireless signal. In these two respects the Allies were superior and therefore we had to stop the war in the Atlantic, early in the months of 1943. We stopped all submarine war in the North Atlantic because the boats were no longer safe enough.”
³

In addition to Allied advances in radar technology, the code breakers at Bletchley Park in England had broken the German naval Enigma code, and this, plus better air defence of Atlantic convoys, meant the lifeline across the sea between America and Britain could not be broken.

It symbolised one key reason the Nazis were losing the war—they did not have the time or resources to innovate. After any initial success the Germans might have, the initiative rapidly passed to their better-equipped and more numerous opponents. For all of the bluster of the new Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, and for all of the hints of German “wonder weapons” to come, the consequences of this reality in 1943 were inescapable—Germany could not win this war. The German navy had no answer to Allied technological advances in the Atlantic, and the German army had no answer to the increasing strategic awareness and power of the Red Army on the Eastern Front.

As for the German air force, the inability of the Luftwaffe to protect German cities and towns from attack was on show for all to see. Extensive bombing of the industrial Ruhr region began in March 1943 and the fire storms in Hamburg, as a result of bombing raids in late July, killed more people—40,000—than lost their lives in London in the entire course of the Blitz. In the bomber war, just as with the Battle of the Atlantic, it was this same combination of greater Allied innovation and resources that was now making the Germans suffer.