The Third Reich at War (108 page)

Successive reports could only note a further decline in morale as the Red Army moved ever further towards, and then into, Germany itself. A seemingly endless series of defeats against the invading Allied armies in the west only added to the deepening gloom. Diplomatically, too, the Reich was becoming increasingly isolated. Turkey broke off diplomatic relations with Germany on 2 August 1944 and Bulgaria declared war on Germany as Soviet troops entered the country on 8 September 1944. After the remnants of the Romanian army disintegrated in the face of the Soviet advance, leading to the annihilation of eighteen German divisions in Romania by the Red Army, Marshal Antonescu was ousted from power on 23 August 1944 and Romania went over to the Allies, hoping to regain the territory it had lost to Hungary in 1940. All this threatened to cut off German forces in Greece, and on Hitler’s authorization they withdrew into Macedonia in October, also evacuating Albania and southern Yugoslavia. The defection of Turkey in particular caused yet further demoralization in Germany itself.
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The loss of Romania brought the Red Army to the borders of Hungary, where the ruler, Admiral H’rthy, organized fierce resistance to the invaders. H’rthy realized, however, that the game was up and wrote to Stalin claiming, somewhat implausibly, that he had joined the war on the German side in 1941 as a result of a misunderstanding. On 15 October 1944 he announced that Hungary was no longer allied to the Reich.
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Hitler had already planned his counter-move to this long-anticipated defection. On the same day as Hungary left the alliance, Otto Skorzeny, acting on Hitler’s orders, broke into the fortress in Budapest where Admiral H’rthy and his government were ensconced, and kidnapped the Hungarian leader’s son, also called Mikl’s, rolling him up in a blanket and rushing him out of the building to a waiting lorry. Within a short time, the younger H’rthy was incarcerated in the concentration camp at Mauthausen. Hitler now informed H’rthy that his son would be shot and the fortress stormed unless he surrendered. The admiral gave in, resigned and was taken off to a relatively comfortable exile in a Bavarian castle. In the meantime, Ferenc Sz’lasi, the leader of the fascist Arrow Cross, seized power with the backing of the Germans. Sz’lasi lost no time in passing new laws reconstructing the state along fascist-style, corporate lines. His men began murdering surviving Jews across Budapest, assisted in some cases by Catholic priests, one of whom, Father Kun, got into the habit of shouting ‘In the name of Christ, fire!’ as the Arrow Cross paramilitaries levelled their guns at their Jewish victims. As 35,000 Jewish men who had been rounded up into labour battalions to construct fortifications around the Hungarian capital started crossing the Danube into the city in a hasty retreat before the oncoming Red Army, Arrow Cross units blocked their way, killed them on the banks or bridges and threw the bodies into the water. So many bodies were found lying around in the streets that even the police complained. On 18 October 1944 Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest again and organized the arrest of another 50,000 Jews, who were sent out of the city on foot in the direction of Vienna with the idea of working on fortifications there: they were poorly provisioned and brutally maltreated, and many thousands died on the futile march - so many, indeed, that Sz’lasi stopped the deportations in mid-November, perhaps now fearing, justifiably enough, that he would be held to account for them. In Budapest itself the remaining Jews were confined to ghetto quarters. By January 1945 there were 60,000 living in just 4,500 dwellings, sometimes fourteen to a room. Subject to repeated raids by Arrow Cross murder squads, the inhabitants were also soon starving, disease-ridden and suffering rapidly escalating death rates. A small group of international diplomats in the Hungarian capital, among whom the Swedish representative Raoul Wallenberg was particularly prominent, made strenuous and partially successful attempts to protect the Jews, and succeeded in getting nearly 40,000 sets of exemption papers - many of them forged - recognized by the Arrow Cross.
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This was not quite the last major extermination of Jews in a European country. In August 1944 it became clear that the Slovakian military, led by the Defence Minister, were plotting to overthrow the puppet government that had run the country under German tutelage since 1939, and switch sides to the Allies. As a consequence, German troops occupied Slovakia on 29 August 1944. A full-scale uprising ensued. The nationalist and pro-Soviet insurgents could not co-ordinate their activities, however. The Western Allies thought it unnecessary to fly in support since the Red Army was already on the border. The Soviet forces failed to move quickly enough to come to the partisans’ aid. By October 1944 the uprising had been brutally suppressed. Meanwhile the German occupiers had lost no time in ordering the resumption of the deportation of the country’s remaining Jews, which the collaborationist regime there had brought to a halt in October 1942 after some 58,000 had been taken away to the extermination camps. The first trainloads left in September 1944 and continued until March 1945. By this time, almost 8,000 Slovakian Jews had been rounded up and deported to Auschwitz, more than 2,700 to Sachsenhausen and over 1,600 to Theresienstadt.
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Not only Himmler’s SS but also the German civilian and military authorities thus continued to pursue the Jews long after it had become clear to most of them that the war was lost. Revenge for the Jews’ imagined role in the imminent defeat had become their prime motivation, and they pursued it to the bitter end.

II

A popular joke told in the summer of 1944 had a naive young man being shown a globe, on which, it was explained, the large green area was the Soviet Union, the huge red area the British Empire, the enormous mauve area the United States and the vast yellow area China. ‘And that little blue spot?’ he asks, pointing to the middle of Europe. ‘That is Germany!’ ‘Oh! Does the Leader know how small it is?’
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The rapid deterioration of the Reich’s military situation in 1943-4 was obvious to everyone. As the self-proclaimed greatest military leader of all time, Hitler felt instinctively that Germany would still be winning if the generals had not been constantly undermining his strategy, disobeying his commands and deliberately retreating in the face of an enemy he alone knew how to defeat. Only a last effort, and everything would come right. He appointed Goebbels Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort on 18 July 1944, an initiative stemming from Goebbels himself, who was claiming his reward for his loyalty and presence of mind during the coup attempt. Goebbels’s rival, Hermann Göring, felt himself outflanked, and sulked on his estate at Rominten for several weeks afterwards. In alliance now with Martin Bormann, Goebbels unleashed a flurry of measures, many of which were to be implemented not by the cumbersome bureaucracy of the state but by the Party Regional Leaders in the provinces. They concentrated in particular on trying to draft yet more men into the armed forces. This brought him up against Speer, who wanted more men for the arms industry. But Hitler overruled his former favourite. With the Leader’s backing, Goebbels and Bormann summoned the Armaments Minister and told him bluntly that he was under their command. He was to make no further attempts to influence Hitler directly.
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Goebbels’s renewed drive to ‘total war’ produced a series of labour-saving measures, as three-quarters of the staff of the Reich Culture Chamber were made redundant, and theatres, orchestras, newspapers, publishing houses and other institutions deemed inessential to the war effort were cut back or closed down. There was a fresh clampdown on consumer goods industries. Hitler himself vetoed Goebbels’s suggestion to stop sending newspapers and magazines to soldiers at the front on the grounds that this would damage morale, but other cuts in the postal service went ahead, and redundancies in local government and administration brought further efficiency savings. The upper age-limit for women to be drafted into war industries was raised from forty-five to fifty-five, and some 400,000 women, most of them foreign, were moved out of domestic service into war-relevant areas of the economy. The attempt to merge the Prussian Ministry of Finance, over which the bomb plot conspirator Popitz had presided, into the Reich Finance Ministry proved too complex to resolve, but overall, the measures freed up more than 450,000 additional men for the war. With further men taken out of reserved occupations in war industries, all of this helped send a million more men to the front from the beginning of August to the end of December 1944. Yet over the same period, more than a million soldiers were killed, captured or wounded, and the area the Reich covered, and hence the number of people it could call upon, were shrinking fast. The Reich was running faster and faster to try to stay in the same place.
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By 20 November 1944 the Red Army had come within striking distance of Hitler’s field headquarters at Rastenburg, and Hitler, yielding to the entreaties of Martin Bormann, left it for good, making his way back to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Yet the Red Army’s advance now slowed down as it reached Germany itself, where the front narrowed between the Baltic and the Carpathians, and the German forces had interior communication lines. The Soviet forces were exhausted after their rapid advances, they had to regroup and reorganize themselves, and it took some time to solve the supply problems caused by the narrower gauge of the railway lines in the areas they were now entering, compared to the broad gauge used in the Soviet Union and the Balkans. The pause allowed Hitler to undertake one last attempt to reverse the situation in the west, where supply and manpower difficulties had also slowed down the Allied advance. By early December, the German armies had been forced back behind the fortifications of the West Wall. Hitler planned to break out with thirty freshly formed and equipped divisions, spearheaded by an armoured punch through the defences of the Americans, for whose fighting qualities he had nothing but contempt. This was to be a repeat in many ways of the campaign of 1940, dividing the enemy forces, pinning them against the sea and destroying them in a massive encirclement. The blow this would strike was intended to keep the Western Allies at bay while a new generation of ‘wonder-weapons’ was developed that would decisively turn the fortunes of war in Hitler’s favour. If the offensive was really successful, indeed, and managed to capture Antwerp, Hitler and Jodl thought that it might even bring the Western Allies to the negotiating table. The generals and commanders to whom Jodl put the plans on 3 November 1944 dismissed it as wholly unrealistic. A rapid advance to the coast in 1940, against a confused and unprepared enemy, was one thing; under the conditions of December 1944, with a massively superior force ranged against them, and hampered by shortages of men, munitions and above all fuel, it was quite another. But Jodl told them there was no alternative. A mere tactical victory such as the recapture of Aachen would not suffice.
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On 11 December 1944, Hitler arrived at his new field headquarters near Bad Nauheim, close to the launch-point for the offensive. On 16 December 1944 the attack began. Aided both by surprise and by bad weather that prevented Allied planes from flying, 200,000 German troops and 600 tanks with 1,900 artillery pieces broke through the American lines, which were defended by 80,000 soldiers and 400 tanks, and pushed forwards 65 miles towards the river Meuse. But they soon began running out of petrol, and on Christmas Eve American armour fought them to a halt, supported by continual bombardment of the German lines by 5,000 Allied aircraft once the weather improved. Although the British, under the over-cautious Bernard Montgomery, failed to react quickly enough to cut off the German forces now occupying a large salient that gave the encounter its name - the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ - the Americans under George Patton mounted a successful armoured counter-attack from the south. The German air force tried to neutralize Allied air supremacy by launching a series of raids with 800 fighters and bombers on Allied airfields on 1 January 1945, but this operation cost as many German planes as Allied ones - about 280 - and failed in its objective. A subsidiary German attack in Alsace also came to nothing. Frustrated by their failure to make the decisive breakthrough, the men of the SS First Panzer Division massacred a large number of American prisoners of war at Malm’dy on 17 December 1944. This simply served to enrage the American forces now resuming their advance towards Germany. Altogether some 80,000 German and 70,000 American troops were killed, wounded or reported missing in the battle, and each side lost around 700 tanks and armoured vehicles. For the Germans, these losses were irreplaceable. The Americans made good their losses with ease from the vast quantities of men and equipment continually being transported across the Channel into the combat zone. Hitler’s last major counter-attack had failed. On 3 January 1945 he recognized reality and withdrew his main forces from the battlefield to defensive positions further east.
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Defeat now seemed inevitable. On 15 January 1945 Hitler boarded his special train and returned to Berlin.
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Increasingly, Hitler and the Nazi leadership turned their thoughts not to victory, but to revenge. In particular, Hitler hoped to develop the means to pay back the Allied bombing campaign in its own coin, and some more. Although he had from the very beginning of his career regarded terror as a key means of fighting his enemies, he had not initially regarded bombing raids on Rotterdam, London and other cities as what Allied propaganda referred to as ‘terror raids’. Even the Blitz on London was aimed above all at the docks, while the notorious attack on Coventry was mounted because of the city’s key function in armaments production. The purpose of such raids was to weaken the British war economy and bring Churchill to the negotiating table, not, as Hitler explicitly noted, to terrorize the civilian population. In April 1942, following the British raid on L̈beck, he had ordered the beginning of ‘terror raids’ on Britain. For many months, however, he lacked the means to undertake them to any effect. Meanwhile the rapidly intensifying Anglo-American raids on German towns and cities, during which - in 1943 - up to 70 per cent of high-explosive bombs and 90 per cent of incendiaries fell on residential areas - had created a widespread popular desire for retaliation, not in order to wreak revenge on the British but in order to force them to bring the destruction to a halt.