Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)

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ers encouraged the Germans to enjoy some of the conditions

of peacetime society. Goebbels delivered his energising Total

War speech on 18 February 1943, and yet by July the next year

half a million domestic servants were still in employment, and

3.2 million men were locked in office work. Suddenly, the

armed forces, the public facilities and the industries found that

they were in competition for manpower. As commissar for Total

War, Goebbels proceeded to withdraw half a million men from

the economy between August and October 1944. He made fur-

ther heavy drafts in 1945, and he wrote proudly in March that

great numbers were still being offered up for front-line duty

by the most diverse agencies of the Reich, from the Post Office

to the forestry service. This was in the same month that Albert

Speer complained that he had just 180,000 men to repair the

railways, when 2 million were needed.

Some of the most economically productive areas of the Reich

were now falling to the Allies as they closed in from east and

west. A sudden crisis in the provision of coal was reported on

26 January 1945, when trains ceased to arrive from the Upper

Silesian Industrial Region. By February half the Reichsbahn

(National Railway) was compelled to resort to the use of brown

coal, which was dirty and inefficient, and the locomotives la-

boured between their coaling stops (now every seventy to

eighty kilometres instead of two hundred), punching sparks

and clouds of sulphurous smoke into the frosty air. The coal

and iron of the Saar were lost in March, after which the Reich

could draw only upon the mangled mines and factories of the

Ruhr, and the beleaguered south-western rump of the Upper

Silesian Industrial Area around Mährisch-Ostrau.

A severe shortage of oil had set in earlier still, after Romania

was abandoned in August 1944. The Reich now had to depend

on synthetic oil plants (which were vulnerable to air attack),

and the sources of natural oil at Zistersdorf in Lower Austria,

and Nagykanizsa and other locations near Lake Balaton in Hun-

gary, which were threatened by the Russian ground forces.

Now that vital regions were in immediate danger, Hitler was

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

more convinced than ever that he had been right to defy his

military critics—'and yet they are the same people who used

to keep up a sustained attack on my "insane" policy of holding

large tracts of ground' (January, undated, Schramm, ed., 1982,

IV, 1,652).

Compounding all these problems was the unrelenting Amer-

ican and British offensive from the air. As Hitler put it, 'The

bombers are our destruction' (10 January, Schramm, ed., 1982,

IV, 649). Air attacks caused a temporary but complete stoppage

of synthetic oil production in September 1944. There were fur-

ther damaging strikes in December and near-total destruction

in a series of raids between 13 and 15 January 1945. A German

report on 27 February confirms that production of synthetic oil

had ceased altogether.

Industrial output was also hit by the Anglo-American attacks

on the railways. Between July and December 1944 the number

of railway waggons available to the Reichsbahn fell from 136,000

to 87,000. In February 1945 the Germans calculated that they

needed 36,000 waggons to sustain just 80 per cent of public

facilities and 25 per cent of industrial production—in other

words, a mere semblance of civil and economic life. By then

only 28,000 waggons had survived. The proportionate losses

in locomotives were at least as severe, and 104 were destroyed

on 14 February alone. By the end of the month the activity of

the armaments factories was largely confined to producing am-

munition and to completing work on vehicles and weapons

which were already on the production line. Even when they

were finished, many of these precious items were stranded in

the factory yards because the railways had collapsed.

Germany had large stocks of the heavy diesel oil which pow-

ered the surviving vessels of the Kriegsmarine (navy), which

were therefore able to keep up a high rate of operations in the

Baltic in support of the army and the civilian refugees. The

Luftwaffe, however, was very badly hit when the RAF de-

stroyed the synthetic oil plant at Pölitz near Stettin on 8 Feb-

ruary 1945, and the manoeuvrability and effectiveness of the

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ground forces were degraded by shortages of fuel and am-

munition. Thus most of the tanks lost by the 7th Panzer Di-

vision, for example, were simply abandoned from lack of petrol

(gasoline), and not because they had been shot up by the Rus-

sians. In January the Panzer and Panzer-Grenadier divisions as

a whole were overtaken by an enforced policy of demechani-

sation, which reduced the truck establishment by 25 per cent

and forced many of the infantrymen to go about on foot or

bicycle.

The destructive effects of the bombing reached throughout

the decision-making processes of the Reich. Goebbels mourned

the destruction of the 'lovely building' of the Propaganda Min-

istry on the Wilhelmstrasse on 13 March 1945, and his nerves

and those of the Berliners were worn ragged by the light and

fast British Mosquito bombers, which ranged unchecked over

the capital almost every night. In the middle of January the

move of the location of the OKH from Friedberg eastwards to

Zossen was delayed by fourteen hours because of damage to

the railways. Two months later, on 15 March, the OKH became

the target of a direct attack, and the key personnel were prob-

ably saved only through the presence of mind of Guderian's

wife (a refugee from the Warthegau), who was watching an

NCO while he tracked the progress of a bombing raid on his

radar screen at Zossen. She saw the blips turn aside from the

direct path to Berlin, and perceiving the danger to headquar-

ters, she telephoned her husband, who immediately ordered

all his people to the shelters. The Operations Branch ignored

the warning, and its chief, General Hans Krebs, sustained a

wound in his temple which took him away from work for one

or more days (the accounts differ).

The sheer danger of moving anywhere in the Reich during

this period was brought home by the death of the gifted Lieu-

tenant-General Wolfdietrich von Xylander, the chief of staff of

Army Group A, whose aircraft strayed into the air raid on

Dresden on 14 February and was shot down.

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

The German Armed Forces

By 1945 the German ground forces were as severely stressed

as the German economy. In the final months of 1944 the Ger-

man strength on the Eastern Front sank to a level estimated at

3,700,000 troops by Soviet historians and at 1,840,000 by some

of their West German counterparts. The odds were in any case

stacked heavily in favour of the Russians, with their 6,000,000

men. In the areas of the Vistula bridgeheads the German dis-

advantage was on the order of 1:5, and some of the formations

faced superiorities of 1:30 or 1:40. 'It was no wonder that those

divisions were oftentimes simply vaporized by the Soviet as-

sault' (Glantz, 1986, 507).

The German army in general was a backward organisation

from the aspect of mechanical transport. Horsepower in the

literal sense was still vital to the Germans for moving guns and

military supplies. About nine out of ten German divisions in

the East were still unmechanised (see p. 365), and on 12 January

1945 the Wehrmacht had on its books no fewer than 1,136,318

horses, of which 923,679 were on active service with the field

army.

Mechanisation was largely confined to the original divisions

of the Waffen-SS, and the comparable Panzer (armoured) and

Panzer-Grenadier (mechanised) divisions of the Wehrmacht

proper. In this sense the German phenomenon of blitzkrieg

was exactly what the Soviet historians say it was, namely a

'bourgeois elitist' concept, depending on the prowess of a mi-

nority of well-equipped forces, and not mass mechanised ar-

mies after the Soviet style. Otherwise the brunt of the fighting

was borne by the long-enduring Landser of the ordinary infantry

divisions.

In the autumn of 1944 and over the following winter, the

political leadership of the Reich threw itself into the task of

raising fresh forces from the last available reserves of man-

power. In general terms the Nazis were impelled by the need

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to confront the near-certainty of invasion, but they were also

attracted, after the generals' Bomb Plot of 20 July 1944, by the

notion of creating units and formations which owed everything

to themselves and nothing to the military hierarchy of the Wehr-

macht.

The new levies were of two kinds. The Volksgrenadiers were

raised by Himmler and Goebbels, wearing their respective hats

as commander of the Training Army and commissar for Total

War, and they were destined from the first to form active com-

bat divisions. Half a million Volksgrenadiers were mobilised

within a few months, and one of their divisions, the 6th, had

an unenviable place in the front line facing the Magnuszew

bridgehead when the 1st Belorussian Front opened its attack

at 0630 on 14 January 1945.

The Volkssturm was a militia summoned in virtue of a decree

of 25 September 1944 from all non-serving males aged sixteen

to sixty. The relevant lists were compiled by the local Party

organisation, and the officers were appointed (largely on

grounds of political reliability) by the gauleiters and their sub-

ordinate kreisleiters. The size of the Volkssturm ultimately

reached 1.5 million, and it is not included in the figures of

German forces which have been outlined above.

It is characteristic of the chaotic state of Germany at that time

that nobody can establish the precise occasion of the founding

of the Volkssturm. In September 1944 Guderian had to yield

up most of the one hundred battalions of fortress infantry with

which he had intended to hold the prepared positions behind

the Eastern Front. He writes that he then fell back on a proposal

by General Adolf Heusinger's Operations Branch of the OKH,

to the effect that men should be withdrawn from hitherto re-

served civilian occupations and formed into a levée en masse.

This, according to Guderian, was the origin of the Volkssturm.

In 1956 (two years after Guderian died) Guderian's account was

contested by Heusinger, who pointed out that his proposal had

just been to evacuate the population of East Prussia, for he was

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

convinced that there was no place for armed civilians in modern

warfare.

Veterans of the Grossdeutschland Panzer Corps saw one of

the Volkssturm battalions spill into a factory yard:

Some of these troops with Mausers on their shoulders must

have been at least sixty or sixty-five, to judge by their curved

spines, bowed legs, and abundant wrinkles. But the young

boys were even more astonishing. . . . They had been hastily

dressed in worn uniforms cut for men, and were carrying

guns which were often as big as they were. They looked both

comic and horrifying, and their eyes were filled with unease,

like the eyes of children at the reopening of school. Not one

of them could have imagined the impossible ordeal which

lay ahead. . . . We noticed some heart-wringing details about

these children, who were beginning the first day of their

tragedy. Several of them were carrying school satchels their

mothers had packed with extra food and clothes, instead of

schoolbooks. A few of the boys were trading their saccharine

sweets which the ration allowed to children under thirteen.

(Sajer, 1971, 395)

In fact, some of the baby-faced boys of the Volkssturm turned

out to be its most effective elements, when they hailed from

the Hitlerjugend and were armed with anti-tank Panzerfaust

rocket launchers. The Mausers mentioned by our soldier were

the standard service rifles, which were something of a rarity,

and many of the Volkssturm had to be content with Russian

or Italian rifles or the Carl Walther Volksmaschinenpistole, (a Ger-

man version of the British Sten). Preparation was largely con-

fined to drill, on account of the lack of proper materials or

facilities, and the allowance of practice ammunition often con-

sisted of a handful of cartridges.

The Volkssturm were not employed for local defence per se,

let alone as guerrillas, but were formed into battalions which

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(however badly armed) found themselves holding gaps in the

line, static positions and built-up areas. Those who fought on

the Eastern Front usually stood their ground much better than

those in the West, many of whom were concerned only about

how to arrange to surrender to the Americans or the British.

Morale and Proficiency

Germany's war was lost, by any rational calculation of the ma-

terial and human resources. Already in 1942 well-informed staff

officers at the OKH were aware that a disaster of great pro-

portions was taking shape. The outlines became much clearer

at the time the German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad

in February 1943, and from the middle of 1944 it was evident

that the army was burnt out and the cause was hopeless. We

are left with the paradox that at the beginning of 1945 the

Soviets detected no signs of fading morale among the Germans,

and all the Russian plans 'proceeded from the knowledge that

we would have to fight a battle-wise, strong and stubborn en-

emy' (Zhukov, 1971, 562). For an explanation we must look to

the technical skills, cohesion and motivation of the German

troops.

By the end of 1944 it was possible for the Grossdeutschland

Panzer Corps to have suffered losses which equated to 192 per

cent of its original strength and still fight on to the following

spring without any obvious signs of strain. Grossdeutschland

was admittedly an elite formation, but in 1944 the German army

as a whole was still killing or wounding four Russian soldiers

for every casualty of its own, and only the Soviet advantage in

replacement (6:1) permitted the Russians to sustain and im-

prove their decisive numerical advantage until the end of the

war (Magenheimer, 1976, 47).

Among the reasons why the Germans held together and

fought so well was the legacy of the old Prussian tradition of

Auftragstaktik ('mission-directed command'), which set out ob-

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

jectives clearly but left subordinates on a loose rein when it

came to deciding just how those tasks were to be achieved. The

Heeres Dienstvorschrift of 1936 put it in the following terms:

Above all, orders are to avoid going into detail when

changes in the situation cannot be excluded by the time they

are carried out. In the case of larger operational situations,

involving orders for several days in advance, this prob-

lem is to be taken into account. ... In such cases the over-

all objective gains overriding importance. (Van Creveld, 1983,

37)

The influence of Auftragstaktik was by no means always good

(see p. 362), but it undeniably encouraged initiative, and its

survival (although degraded by the heavy losses among com-

manders) gave German officers and NCOs an almost unique

facility to meet unexpected emergencies. Scratch forces were

thrown together at a moment's notice, which permitted the

Germans to deliver counterattacks or fight their way to safety

when other troops might have broken or surrendered.

Auftragstaktik was itself built on the 'small-unit cohesion'

which is prized by military sociologists. This too was fostered

by the German military ethos:

The soldiers felt at home in their company, and it was the

only protection which they had—to keep together as closely

as possible, which they did. It was the same thing with the

wounded personnel who tried everything to get out of the

hospital within a four-week period, in order to be authorised

to return to their parent unit. This was their home. And this

also explains a little bit how the units of a battalion held

together in cooperation throughout the war. In larger units,

like divisions or regiments, there was the same kind of feel-

ing. The artillery belonged to the infantry and the infantry

belonged to the artillery. There was interdependence and

trust. This is the only explanation. (Condne, 1986, 658)

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The point of view of the individual Landser was put particularly

well by a first lieutenant of the 21st Panzer Division. By early

1945 the high hopes which had been invested in the Ardennes

offensive had been dashed, and little confidence now remained

in the effectiveness of the 'miracle weapons':

Even the last soldier was aware that the war was lost. He

was aiming to survive, and the only sense he could see was

to protect the front in the East to save as many refugees as

possible. He felt bitter to have to fight on German soil for

the first time in this century, and he could not foresee any

alternative but to stay with his unit and to stick to his oath

of allegiance. He realised that the attempt of 20 July against

Hitler had failed and, despite the obvious facts, he was hop-

ing for a political solution for ending the war, not knowing

however what kind of solution. Last but not least the demand

for unconditional surrender left in the light of self-respect no

alternative but to continue the hopeless fighting. (Liebeskind,

1986, 646)

The Ardennes Offensive

Germany could not afford a single mistake at the strategic or

operational level, now that the war was fast approaching a

decisive stage and material and human resources were so short.

Towards the end of 1944 the German war managers had to

resolve two basic questions—to weigh up the balance of prior-

ities between the Eastern and Western fronts, and (given that

the Eastern Front was much longer than the Western) to de-

termine in detail how the forces facing the Russians were going

to be deployed.

On the first issue Hitler was increasingly drawn from August

onwards to the notion of assembling a striking force for some

great pre-emptive effort in the West. He hoped that the thrust

CHRISTOPHER DUFFY

would sow dissension among the Allies, for he could not imag-

ine how the Russians would be willing, as he put it, to 'pull

the chestnuts out of the fire' for the Americans and the British

(Magenheimer, 1976, 22). The plan was determined in detail

on 10 November, when Hitler rejected the generals' 'Small So-

lution' of pinching out the American salient at Aachen and

instead opted for an offensive through the Ardennes that was

intended to smash its way to the city-port of Antwerp and to

lead to the destruction of the Anglo-American forces north of

the breakthrough.

On 16 December Field-Marshal Walter Model's Army Group

B (twenty-eight divisions) opened the attack from the Eifel

Mountains in a period of snowy and misty weather. The of-

fensive was brilliantly conceived and executed at a tactical level,

and it took the Americans by surprise on a weakly held sector

of their front. Up in the far north Battle Group Peiper of the

Sixth SS Panzer Army effected a deep penetration along the

narrow ice-bound roads, but the most significant progress was

made in the centre by General Hasso von Manteuffel's Fifth

Panzer Army, where one of the Panzer divisions reached the

heights above the Meuse.

It was not good enough. The OKW was unwilling to reinforce

success by putting its main effort behind Manteuffel's army,

which was a Wehrmacht and not a SS formation. Cut-off Amer-

ican forces held out obstinately at the road junctions of St. Vith

(until 21 December) and Bastogne, which interfered with the

German schedules, and worst of all the skies cleared on 23

December, enabling the Allied air forces to intervene after days

of enforced inactivity.

By 24 December the effort was breaking down. From 30 De-

cember the Germans had to face a threat to their own left flank,

where Patton's Third Army was pushing north in the direction

of besieged Bastogne. On 8 January Hitler authorised the first

withdrawals, and five days later the Germans began a full-scale

retreat. The last German effort on the Western theatre was

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