Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)

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CHAPTER 4

The Reich Before

the Storm

The Higher Leadership

ADOLF HITLER was not a great man, if we are inclined to link

that term with things that are of lasting good. But Hitler was

undoubtedly a man of great attributes, who thrilled and ener-

gised a nation, and established a personal domination over men

who were his intellectual, social and moral superiors.

To all outward appearances Hitler installed himself as total

master of the German war machine by the end of January 1945.

The process had begun much earlier, and the year 1938 was

decisive, for that was when the chief of staff (Colonel-General

Ludwig Beck) resigned in despair at Hitler's expansionist

schemes, and the war minister (Field-Marshal Werner von

Blomberg) and the commander-in-chief of the army (Colonel-

General Werner von Fritsch) were forced from office through

sexual blackmail.

The new commander-in-chief, the incompetent Field-

Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch, was deposed in December

1941 when Hitler chose to take direct control of the armies in

the East. After the abortive Bomb Plot of 20 July 1944, officers

were aware that any recalcitrance on their part might be con-

strued as treason. Finally, on 19 January 1945 Hitler ordered

that the proposed movements of every formation down to corps

and division had to be cleared with him personally before they

could be put into effect.

Hitler was fond of emphasising, among his military qualifi-

cations, his service as a front-line soldier in the Great War. His

celebrated 'intuition' brought Germany a number of incontest-

able triumphs in international affairs in the 1930s and on the

field of battle early in the Second World War. He had a re-

markable memory for factual detail, and his grasp of military

technology impressed such an expert as Lieutenant-

Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel, the dive-bomber hero, who was

summoned to the western headquarters at Ziegenberg. The

Führer led him into his private study, which was furnished in

'good taste and utilitarian simplicity,' and Hitler's conversation

ranged from updating the Ju-87 across the whole range of mod-

ern weapons development, all of which was conveyed with the

'same astonishing knowledge' (Rudel, 1952, 203).

Hitler's sense of historical destiny suggested many encour-

aging precedents. He was inspired above all by the embattled

life of the Prussian soldier-king Frederick the Great (ruled

1740-80). A portrait of Old Fritz was set above his desk, and

he used to explain: 'When bad news threatens to crush my

spirit I derive fresh courage from the contemplation of this

picture. Look at those strong, blue eyes, that wide brow. What

a head!' (Guderian, 1952, 416).

Hitler was delighted to hear that Frederick had been very

tough with his generals, for this justified his own dealings with

those gentry. Frederick too had struggled against seemingly

hopeless odds, and it was in the blackest year of all, in 1759,

that Prussia had been saved by disunity among her enemies.

Was it not reasonable to hope that the alliance of Bolsheviks

and capitalists, which made up Germany's present enemies,

might not also fall apart through its own contradictions? Hitler

explained his present situation to Major-General Thomale in

December 1945:

There is no foreseeable end to reorganisation. Everything is

in a process of flux—our national production, the state of

training, the competence of the commanders. But this is noth-

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ing new in history. Only just now I was reading through a

volume of the letters of Frederick the Great. This is what he

writes in one of them, in the fifth year of the Seven Years

War: 'There was a time when I went on campaign with the

most magnificent army in Europe. Now I have a heap of

rubbish—I possess no more commanders, my generals are

incapable, my officers are no longer proper leaders, and my

troops are of appalling quality.' You can't imagine a more

devastating indictment, and yet this man stuck it out through

the war. (Schramm, ed„ 1982, IV, 1,647)

Under this illusion of tyrannical mastery, the German war

effort lacked purpose and coordination. Goebbels perceived

that in 'neither the military nor the civilian sector have we

strong central leadership, because everything has to be referred

to the Führer, and that can only be done in a small number of

cases' (Goebbels, 1977, 71). The result was what historians term

the Hitlerian 'weak dictatorship'—a polyocracy in which

branches of the government and the armed forces went their

own ways and vied for resources and prestige.

Hitler had always been difficult to reach as a social animal:

He was a vegetarian, a teetotaller and a non-smoker. These

were, taken independently, very admirable qualities which

derived from his personal convictions and from his ascetic

way of life. But, connected with this, was his isolation as a

human being . . . his path through the world was a solitary

one, and he followed it alone, with only his gigantic plans

for company. (Guderian, 1952, 440-41)

By this late stage in the war Hitler's capacity to follow rational

arguments was severely affected by his neurological state. The

bomb explosion in his old eastern headquarters at Rastenburg

on 20 July 1944 had left him in the grip of uncontrollable

twitches and tremblings, and his feverish excitement was sus-

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

tained only by the crazy regime of pills prescribed by his doctor,

the sinister Theodor Morell.

Hitler was also isolated in the geographic sense. On 16 De-

cember 1944 he moved his headquarters to the Adlerhorst at

Ziegenberg, in the wooded Hessian hills near Giessen, to co-

incide with the opening of the German offensive in the Ar-

dennes. In the middle of January he was back at Berlin, where

the concrete of his bunker and the massive Chancellery above

gave him protection against bombs of 1,000 kilograms or more.

'Zossen [i.e. the headquarters of the General Staff] is in-

secure—not because it was impossible to make it secure, but

because it was built by the army and not a private construction

firm. . . . Everything the Wehrmacht puts up is a fraud' (Hitler,

23 March 1945, Schramm, ed„ 1982, IV, 1,657).

Hitler stirred from his lair less and less frequently, and it

required a crippling effort on the part of the chief of staff,

Colonel-General Heinz Guderian, to supply the Führer with

the detailed briefings he required twice daily—at noon, and

again after midnight. Guderian writes that the drive from Zos-

sen took forty minutes, making three hours lost on the road

for the two round trips, to which was added the time spent in

preparing the material, and the duration of the briefings them-

selves, which often lasted two hours each. Even when relays

of staff officers took on some of the briefings in January, they

still had to be rehearsed in the presence of Guderian.

The main visual material for the Führer briefings was pro-

vided by situation maps which were updated constantly by the

Operations Branch of the General Staff. 'Enemy attacks were

clearly plotted on the maps by means of red arrows, so that

one could not fail to see them. Moreover, there was a legend

provided at the side of the maps displaying, clearly arranged

in graphic form, the current status of the individual units'

(Humboldt, 1986, 93). The scale of the briefing maps was

1:300,000, a significantly small scale which was capable of dis-

playing only one theatre of war at a time. General Hans Krebs,

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who succeeded Guderian as chief of staff on 29 March 1945,

made so bold as to provide a map on the scale of 1:1,000,000.

The effect was appalling. Both the Eastern and Western fronts

for the first time appeared on the same map, showing the enor-

mous gains made by the Allies. Hitler was outraged, and re-

proached Krebs for being defeatist.

The Competition for Power

Beyond the Führerbunker we encounter not so much a rec-

ognisable hierarchy of command as a number of disassociated

centres of influence and responsibility—the two things by no

means coincided.

Next to Hitler four men in particular stood out in the lead-

ership of the Reich. Largest in physical mass and popular stat-

ure was Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring (1893-1946), who

was chief of the Luftwaffe and minister of the interior of Prussia.

He had been a swashbuckling fighter ace in the Great War, and

he became one of Hitler's right-hand men in the Nazi Party's

fight for power. He was rewarded with the command of the

Luftwaffe, which he built into a formidable modern air force

in the 1930s. In the course of the war, however, Goring lost all

standing with Hitler on account of the unfulfilled promises

which he made on behalf of himself and the Luftwaffe—to

destroy the British at Dunkirk, to supply the encircled Sixth

Army at Stalingrad, and to deny the German skies to enemy

bombers.

Men of taste despised Goring for the ostentation of his coun-

try house, Karinhall, which was stuffed with plundered trea-

sures, and for his painted face and the extravagance of his

garb—from vast tent-like uniform jackets and coats to his own

version of the hunting dress of the ancient Teutons. Vulgar,

cruel and incompetent though he was, Goring owed his ulti-

mately unassailable position to the affection of the Party

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

masses, who saw him as a man of the world who knew how

to enjoy himself.

Goring occasionally prized himself free of Karinhall to visit

nearby operational formations. Late in January 1945 he mani-

fested himself to the astonished staff officers of the II Flieger-

korps at Schorfheide on the middle Oder:

He was wearing a fur hat, and on top of his long greatcoat

he sported a gigantic pistol in a holster of curious design.

The staff officers were accustomed to Göring's style of uni-

form, but they had never before seen him wear that pistol.

In some amazement they asked him where he had got it.

Goring answered that it had been presented to him in 1938

by German industrialists.

It was explained to him on the map that the Russian spear-

heads were at Kunersdorf. Goring jabbed his index finger at

the map table . . . and replied: 'Kunersdorf, Kunersdorf,

that's where I'll give them a kick in the balls!' (Paul, 1978,

75-76)

This was a quotation from one of the less urbane sayings of

Frederick the Great.

If he had served any master other than Hitler, the career of

Dr. Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) might now be remembered

as one of inspired dedication. The contrast with Goring was

total. His slight frame, his pinched features and his elongated

head bore resemblances to an ancient Egyptian mummy, and

his relative importance in the Nazi scheme of things grew when

the war neared its end. Already the minister of propaganda,

responsible for all aspects of communications, Goebbels became

Reich commissar for Total War Mobilization on 24 July 1944,

and began to introduce the German people to the disciplines

of a national fight to the death. Lies, fantasies and self-delusion

were part of Goebbels' makeup, but his work as gauleiter of

Berlin gave him a direct insight into the day-to-day existence

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of the suffering capital, and his messages to the German nation,

delivered in his beautiful actor's voice, were informed with a

new sense of urgency and realism. By their massacres in East

Prussia in October 1944, the Russians had shown that they

would give little mercy, and Goebbels also tried to persuade

the public that not much more could be expected from the

Western Allies, to judge by their terror bombing and the de-

mand for unconditional surrender which emanated from the

Casablanca Conference in January 1943.

Martin Bormann (1900-45?) was a thick-set, sweating thug

who was secretary to Hitler and national organiser (Reichsleiter)

of the Nazi Party. In the first of these capacities this 'sinister

guttersnipe' (Guderian, 1952, 449) controlled all access to Hitler.

As national organiser, Bormann was head of the political and

administrative structure of the Reich, whose representatives at

the provincial level were the gauleiters, or governors, exercising

responsibility for local defence as well as local administration.

The gauleiters were frequently in conflict with the military

authorities, and they often fell out among themselves. Late in

1944 Gauleiter Bracht of Upper Silesia began to set up fortifi-

cations along his borders. On some sectors the barbed wire and

other defences spilled onto the soil of German-occupied Poland.

Governor-General Hans Frank of Poland sought to deny all

access to Bracht's men, and then relented only as far as to put

the working parties under police control and levy customs du-

ties on the trucks which crossed the border with building ma-

terials. Bracht appealed to Hitler and had the border advanced

temporarily to the outer wire. Frank lodged a new protest, and

he was still awaiting the outcome when the Russian troops

arrived and imposed a solution of their own.

It is possible to link Goring, Goebbels and Bormann with

recognisable human characteristics, however distorted. The

same does not apply in the case of Heinrich Himmler (1900-

45), who seemed like 'a man from another planet' (Guderian,

1952, 447). Only an extraordinarily ruthless and ambitious man

could have become creator and head (Reichsführer) of the SS

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

(Schutzstaffel), chief of the German Police, and in the last two

years of the war successively commander of the Training Army,

commander of Army Group Upper Rhine, and on 25 January

commander of the new Army Group Vistula.

The difficulty comes in trying to relate this career to what is

known of Himmler the individual. This man of personal kind-

ness was head of the Allgemeine-SS of the death camps. Like-

wise the lean young warriors of the Waffen-SS owed their

allegiance to a person of timid disposition whose chief physical

characteristics were a receding chin, heavy jowls, and eyes

which appeared not so much bespectacled as glazed in: 'For

the Waffen-SS Himmler was an alien being who was tolerated

but not esteemed. We knew from manifold experience that his

notions of military affairs were devoid of any real solidity. In-

deed, the most junior lieutenant could have put him right' (SS

General Steiner, in Murawski, 1969, 68).

The German armed services lacked any kind of coordinating

body which might have spoken to Hitler with a united voice.

The fault, as Guderian conceded, lay largely with the staff of

the Wehrmacht, which in the 1930s had resisted the notion of

giving up any of its independence. The joint-services Armed

Forces Command Staff consequently had no real authority, and

its sessions became still more pointless towards the end of the

war, by which time the Luftwaffe had lost many planes and

was virtually out of fuel.

The management of the ground forces was split into two

parts on geographic, not functional, grounds. This arrangement

bolstered the power of Hitler as supreme commander of the

Wehrmacht, but otherwise defied all logic.

The OKW

Most directly under the thumb of Hitler was the OKW (Ober-

kommando der Wehrmacht, or High Command of the Wehr-

macht) which was responsible for the Scandinavian, Western

European, Mediterranean and Balkan theatres. The dividing

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line between this area and that under the command of the other

organisation, the OKH, ran through a village between Belgrade

and Budapest, and therefore made it difficult for the Germans

to conduct the war on the Danube as a unified theatre. The

chief of the OKW was the colourless Field-Marshal Wilhelm

Keitel (1882-1946), who functioned in effect as head of Hitler's

private military office. Most of the real work was taken on by

Colonel-General Alfred Jodl (1890-1946), who was a more ac-

tive individual, but was disinclined to argue further with Hitler

after a great falling-out they had experienced at the time of the

Stalingrad campaign.

The OKH

By 1945 the only man to put a coherent view of the war in front

of Hitler was Colonel-General Heinz Guderian (1888-1954),

who from 21 July 1944 to 29 March was chief of staff, as head

of the OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres), responsible for con-

ducting the war on the Eastern Front. Guderian had been Ger-

many's leading theorist, organiser and practitioner of armoured

warfare, and he carried all his creative energy and indepen-

dence of mind into his new post. He spoke without reserve

whenever he believed the war was being mismanaged, and he

concluded that Hitler the Austrian and Jodl the Bavarian were

incapable of perceiving the mortal danger to the north-eastern

provinces of the Reich: 'For us Prussians it was our immediate

homeland that was at stake, that homeland which had been

won at such cost and which had remained attached to the ideals

of Christian, Western culture through so many centuries, land

where lay the bones of our ancestors, land that we loved' (Gu-

derian, 1952, 389).

It must be said, however, that not all the proceedings of the

OKH were conducted in such a sense of historical perspective.

Major-General Mueller-Hillbrand claimed that every evening

the officers of OKH, including the Operations Branch, were as

drunk as lords, and he remembered in particular a conference

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

on 5 December 1944: 'First of all there was a tremendous

grubfest with enough food to burst, and then a binge. Guderian

stayed until 2 A.M. By which time they were standing on the

tables. I was revolted' (Irving, 1977, 741).

The German Economy

In some respects the German war industry was still capable of

some remarkable achievements. Production of fighters reached

a wartime peak of 3,375 machines in September 1944, and in

the following December a total of 1,854 tanks, assault guns and

self-propelled guns was manufactured, which was another

monthly record. Technically, many of the weapons were at least

as advanced as anything in the hands of the Allies. These feats

were accomplished under the weight of the Allied bomber of-

fensive, and the credit goes largely to Albert Speer (1905-81),

the Reichsminister for armaments and production. In the overall

context of the war, however, the German efforts were the equiv-

alent of the last feverish rally of a dying consumptive, and Speer

himself pointed out that on economic grounds alone the war

had become unwinnable.

It is extraordinary to reflect that in spite of its totalitarian

trappings, and the ruthless conduct of some of its forces, the

Reich was never fully geared up for total war. The commitment

of material resources to military ends was very great, but all

the long-term planning had been designed to produce a mili-

tary-economic superpower by the middle 1940s, and not to

supply the campaigns which were actually fought from 1939.

There was still a great deal of the atmosphere of craft industry

about the teams of designers and skilled workers who produced

weapons which were superb in quality but rarely available in

sufficient quantity to meet the demands of the armed forces.

Significant shortages were already noted during Operation Bar-

barossa in 1941, and they got much worse.

Until late in the war the availability of 4 million foreign work-

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