The German War (79 page)

Nothing can be defended so outstandingly as a major city or a field of rubble . . . Here we must defend . . . the country . . . The saying ‘till the last cartridge and bullet!’ must be no idle phrase, but a fact. It must be our sacred duty to ensure that the sorrowful and costly exemplar which Warsaw gave us is enacted by the Wehrmacht and Volkssturm for every German city which has the misfortune to be encircled and besieged.

The comparison was not a hyperbolic one. That autumn, under Guderian’s guidance, German military strategy on the eastern front shifted away from digging continuous entrenched lines, like the positions so recently abandoned along the river Dniepr. Instead, military engineers were using their corvées of civilian workers to turn key cities such as Warsaw, Königsberg, Breslau, Küstrin and Budapest into strongpoints. They were to become the ‘fortresses’ that would hold back the Soviets the way that Moscow and Stalingrad had stopped the Wehrmacht.
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Into October 1944, the new defensive lines held and, against all expectations, blocked the advance of both the Soviets and the Western Allies into the Reich. Partly because of the Wehrmacht’s strong position in the southern Vosges, it was not easy for Patton’s force advancing on the Saar to link up with Patch’s troops in Alsace. The British and American armies also struggled with their own logistical bottleneck: all supplies were still being shipped by road from Normandy and Marseilles. Although the port of Antwerp had been captured on 4 September, before the Germans could blow it up, the Wehrmacht controlled its harbour mouth until November. While the Allies concentrated on reopening Antwerp and shortening their supply lines, the Germans re-equipped the West Wall and began to mass their divisions on the western front.
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On the eastern front, in early October the Red Army suddenly turned its northern assault across the marshlands, rivers and tough defences protecting Army Group North in the Baltic states around to the west. As Soviet troops crossed the pre-war German frontier for the first time, penetrating the East Prussian district of Gumbinnen and taking the town of Gołdap and the village of Nemmersdorf, they also cut off thirty German divisions on the Memel peninsula. Scratch units of the new, East Prussian Volkssturm managed to hold the Russian advance around Treuburg, Gumbinnen and along the Angerapp river until mobile reserves could move up to give them support. Then, in mid-October, the Wehrmacht counter-attacked in East Prussia, threatening to encircle the Soviets and forcing them to retreat to the border. With Berlin still over 600 kilometres away the Red Army’s summer offensive had come to a halt along the Vistula and the line of the Carpathians.
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Compared to the mass panic which had gripped many of its units on the western front in September, a month later the Wehrmacht presented a very different opponent. Allied commanders were shocked by the stiffening resistance of an enemy that they had assumed was on the point of collapse. At Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Eisenhower called a crisis summit in November to ask why nothing had destroyed the ‘will of the Wehrmacht to resist’. The psychological war experts, responsible for debriefing German prisoners of war and profiling their beliefs, were at a loss to explain it. Earlier in the year they had been similarly baffled as the Allies slowly fought their way up the Italian peninsula: there too the morale of their German prisoners had kept rising, the complete oppos-ite of what they had predicted and hoped. Asked if they believed in the existence of ‘new weapons’, in October 1943, only 43 per cent of prisoners had answered in the affirmative, but by February 1944 that proportion had risen to 58 per cent. After the initial shock of the Allied landings in southern Italy, German morale had stabilised. Now, Eisenhower was told, at least half of the captives on the western front still displayed ‘loyalty to the Führer’ and spoke confidently of the Red Army as a spent and defeated force.
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It seemed clear that the findings in Italy were now being replicated on the western front. In late August and early September, while ordinary German infantrymen were downcast, morale remained high amongst the core cadre of junior officers, not to mention elite formations such as paratroopers and Waffen SS divisions. But even before German resistance at the front stiffened, most of the prisoners being questioned affirmed the absolute necessity of national defence and the righteousness of their cause. Allied insistence on Germany’s ‘unconditional surrender’ and the leaking of the Morgenthau Plan to strip Germany of all industrial capacity played a part; but the most important factor, now as ever, remained the fear of conquest by the Russians. The exiled novelist Klaus Mann was one of those German-speakers in the US Army tasked with debriefing prisoners of war on the Italian front. In late 1944, he asked his New York publisher: ‘Why don’t they finally stop? What are they waiting for, the unfortunates? This is the question which I don’t just ask you and me, but always pose to them too.’ Other Western experts were equally baffled. Henry Dicks, a veteran of the Tavistock Clinic and the leading British Army psychiatrist, who had interviewed hundreds of German prisoners and written the standard analysis of their outlook, now took refuge in the rather vague concept of the ‘German capacity for repressing reality’. What neither Klaus Mann nor Henry Dicks considered was that, in the absence of a separate peace in the west, German troops considered blocking the British and Americans as essential to holding the Soviets in the east.
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In mid-October 1944, the Western Allies could not be sure whether the stiffening German resistance amounted to a temporary pause or a real change in the balance of forces. Military historians now know that the defeats of the summer had ripped the Wehrmacht apart, its fighting power sapped beyond recovery. In the three months from July until the end of September, German military deaths reached a new peak of 5,750 per day. The Army High Command knew in part how disastrous the summer had been – and it was Guderian who first suggested raising an East Prussian Landsturm. Even with bitter fighting in the west, it was on the eastern front that the real haemorrhaging had occurred: 1,233,000 German troops died there in 1944, accounting for nearly half the German fatalities in the east since June 1941.
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At home, Goebbels’s highest priority as Plenipotentiary for Total War was to ‘comb’ men out of the civilian economy for military service. By the end of September, 500,000 extra men had been called up; by the end of December, the number had doubled. Exercising his new powers as commander of the Reserve Army, Himmler ordered that all men who had become detached from their units – irrespective of whether they belonged to the Wehrmacht, the police, Waffen SS, the Organisation Todt or the Reich Labour Service – were to be turned over to the Replacement Army. Meanwhile, Party leaders at local, district and Gau level were busy rounding up ‘stragglers’ and sending them back to their units: by mid-September there were 160,000 of them. While none of these measures could compensate for the losses of the previous summer, the reinforcements did help. The Wehrmacht remained a powerful fighting force, bound together by increasingly draconian discipline and hardened
esprit de corps
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The new ‘quadrumvirate’ of Goebbels, Himmler, Speer and Bormann drew their authority from Hitler, who remained largely remote, intervening, if at all, to soften the impact of their final mobilisation on society: the Führer queried whether Bavarians’ ‘nerves’ could cope with a cut in their beer ration; and he added names to Goebbels’s ‘Noah’s Ark’ of German musicians and actors who were to be spared conscription. But even now, implementing such ‘total war’ measures depended on mass participation and a degree of popular belief in their legitimacy.

Although the regime had set out from the beginning to reshape the values and loyalties of its citizens, it was neither propaganda nor Hitler’s popularity that played the decisive part in this process. Belief in Hitler in the 1930s or even in 1940 did not depend on sharing his radical anti-Semitism or his view of war as a spiritual necessity for a great nation. On the contrary, Nazism was most successful and popular when it promised peace, prosperity and easy victories. It took the mass bombing of 1943 and the military defeats of 1944 to make large numbers of Germans share in their Führer’s apocalyptic vision of ‘victory or annihilation’. In the autumn of 1944, as Germans realised that they had to secure their own national defence, there was a spike in denunciations of colleagues and a small flurry of new entrants joining the Party. Even though many Nazi functionaries remained deeply unpopular and the leaders were being criticised more frequently too, their failures to defend the home front seemed to galvanise people into taking more initiative themselves. It was the regime’s failures rather than its successes which imprinted the moral brutality of its core values on so many who did not see themselves as Nazis.

As the ruthless logic of defending Germany at its borders took hold, there was a new murderousness in the air. On 14 October 1944, the Duisburg Volkssturm seized a ‘suspicious-looking’ Russian working in a clean-up squad after an air raid on the city. They stood him against a wall in the street and shot him, merely because they had been told that some Russian prisoners of war had been eating stolen jam in the basement of a demolished house nearby. The upsurge in violence went hand in hand with a new sense of vulnerability and fear. On a walk through the long underground passages of Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse station, Ursula von Kardorff was fascinated and scared by the polyglot world of foreign workers she saw in this ‘Berlin Shanghai’. As young men with bright scarves and long hair laughed and sang, bartered and traded with one another in the large beer halls, she remembered the rumours she had heard about their secret weapons caches. ‘Twelve million foreign workers in Germany,’ she mused, inflating the real figure by 50 per cent. ‘An army in itself. Some call them the Trojan Horse of this war.’ Indeed, rumours circulated that the foreign workers were about to be sent to concentration camps to prevent an uprising.
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On one of her trips into the capital from Krumke, Liselotte Purper was exhilarated by the carefree atmosphere in the city: ‘Berlin remains Berlin,’ she announced to Kurt. As loyal supporters of the regime, the couple also felt entitled to voice their opinions. Liselotte admitted to Kurt that she found the logic of Goebbels’s view that ‘We will win because we have to win’ unconvincing, proposing instead a more positive message of her own: ‘We can take our fate into our own hands.’ Kurt too had not been impressed by a Goebbels speech that November; to him weapons mattered more than words.
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But words still mattered, binding Germans into patterns of rationalisation which they seemed unable to escape. Goebbels’s new slogan was ‘Time against space’: the promise that the soaring military casualty rate and bitter defensive battles of 1943 and 1944 had bought time for ‘new weapons’ to come on stream. On 30 August, the
Völkischer Beobachter
published a piece on ‘The secret of the last phase of the war’ by the veteran war correspondent Joachim Fernau. Fernau fed the hunger for uplifting news with promises of weapons of unequalled power. He quoted Winston Churchill as saying that ‘We have to end the war by the autumn, or else.’ Germany only had to hold out till then. ‘Victory’, Fernau confided as if letting his readers in on a secret, ‘is really quite close.’ In some schools, his piece was read aloud in class; in Berlin, Ursula von Kardorff was astonished by the extraordinary excitement which greeted his revelation that Germany was readying itself to use the ‘secret weapon’. When he read the article in Dresden, Victor Klemperer responded with his typical mixture of sceptical disbelief about the ‘fact’ and curiosity about its propaganda value, noting in his secret diary, ‘That’s the richest yet. Popular secrecy . . . All the same: with the slogan “time against space” and with the secret weapons one can make the people keep at it.’ But even Klemperer was not sure what was real and what was propaganda: ‘Germany is playing poker. Is it bluffing or does it really have trumps?’ Throughout the late summer and autumn, other Germans asked the same question.
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Meanwhile, the home front demanded that its borders be vigorously defended. As Kurt Orgel’s unit retreated along the Baltic coast, his men could not bring themselves to shoot the cattle in front of the Latvian farmers, although they knew that the Red Army would gain from their compassion. Liselotte’s reply was prompt and forthright:

Rage fills me! I have to tell you: close your soft German heart with hardness to the outside. No one in the whole world values or cares for soft fine feelings more than the Germans. But think of the cruelties to which your homeland is delivered, if . . . Think of the brutality with which we will be raped and murdered, think of the terrible misery, which the air terror alone is already bringing upon our country. No, let the farmer wail, if you have to kill their animals. Who cares about our suffering which you are adding to? – yes, you with your genuine German fine feelings. No, do the enemy harm where you can, that’s what you are there for, not to make it easier for him in his struggle against you.

By 24 October, Kurt and the rest of the 18th Army had retreated into the Memel peninsula and he was aware that it was not only Latvian farmers who were suffering: every shell they fired now hit a German village or farm. It felt, he wrote to Liselotte, like the worst burden the war had laid on them. Despite his experience over the previous three years in which his battery had helped shell Leningrad, this was the first time that Kurt mentioned the human cost of the war.
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Peter Stölten was now fighting on German soil too. To reach the East Prussian farm where he was quartered, he had had to pass the ‘treks’ of German evacuees. He had driven over squashed geese, past a nervous girl in a fur hat looking around all the time for ground-attack aircraft, past children driving carts and kilometre-long herds of lowing cattle. Stölten also knew that the farms burning in the distance were German ones. After the Normandy battles and in the midst of the Warsaw Uprising, Stölten had tried to express and resolve his own moral crises in literary form. Now, he picked up books left behind by fleeing civilians and leafed through his favourite authors – Lichtenberg, Oscar Wilde, Dostoevsky, Hoffmannsthal, Binding, Edgar Allan Poe and Hesse – but he felt that they did not ‘speak’ to him. Instead, he was left with a depressing sense of ‘how much poorer I am’. Even Rilke and Hölderlin no longer moved him. In the relative quiet of the East Prussian farmstead, he gave in to his exhaustion. ‘If you knew how tired everyone is,’ he told Dorothee. But as soon as the next attack came, Stölten’s tiredness gave way to a renewed intensity, his senses heightened to ‘see more beauty of a morning’ in the moments between action; yet another part of him was now looking on with Olympian detachment: ‘I see death and destruction, the mass murder of Europe.’ Increasingly, Stölten tried to school himself in a kind of faith he had lacked after Normandy and to learn ‘that all fate comes from God and to be content with not being able to escape it – and
yet
to love, to plan and to build’. He accepted his role, but his own sense of a future was invested in Dorothee. In one of his dreams, he had seen her waiting to meet him off the S-Bahn in Berlin, her straight-cut, white woollen coat standing out against the tunnel entrance and accentuating the contrast between her dark hair, eyes and lips and her fair skin – ‘a pretty picture’, he told her.
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