[b]26: THE GREAT TURNING POINT: 1942-STALINGRAD AND EL ALAMElN

 

THE CONSPIRATORS COME BACK TO LIFE[/b]

 

 

THE SEVERE SETBACK to Hitler's armies in Russia during the winter of 1941-42 and the cashiering of a number of field marshals and top generals ignited the hopes of the anti-Nazi conspirators again.

 

They had been unable to interest the leading commanders in a revolt as long as their armies were smashing to one easy victory after another and the glory of German arms and of the German Reich was soaring to the heavens. But now the proud and hitherto invincible soldiers were falling back in the snow and bitter cold before an enemy which had proved their match; casualties in six months had passed the million mark; and a host of the most renowned generals were being summarily dismissed, some of them, such as Hoepner and Sponeck, publicly disgraced, and most of the others humiliated and made scapegoats of by the ruthless dictator. [i]

 

"The time is almost ripe," Hassell concluded hopefully in his diary on December 21, 1941. He and his fellow conspirators were sure that the Prussian officer corps would react not only to their shabby treatment but to the madness of their Supreme Commander in leading them and their armies to the brink of disaster in the Russian winter. The plotters had long been convinced, as we have seen, that only the generals, in command of troops, had the physical power to overthrow the Nazi tyrant. Now was their chance before it was too late. Timing was all-important. The war, they saw, after the reverses in Russia and the entry of America into the conflict, could no longer be won. But neither was it yet lost. An anti-Nazi government in Berlin could still get peace terms, they thought, which would leave Germany a major power and, perhaps, with at least some of Hitler's gains, such as Austria, the Sudetenland and western Poland.

 

These thoughts had been very much in their minds at the end of the summer of 1941, even when the prospect of destroying the Soviet Union was still good. The text of the Atlantic Charter, which Churchill and Roosevelt had drawn up on August 19, had come as a heavy blow to them, especially Point 8, which had stipulated that Germany would have to be disarmed after the war pending a general disarmament agreement. To Hassell, Goerdeler, Beck and the other members of their opposition circle this meant that the Allies had no intention of distinguishing between Nazi and anti-Nazi Germans and was "proof," as Hassell put it, "that England and America are not fighting only against Hitler but also want to smash Germany and render her defenseless." Indeed, to this aristocratic former ambassador, now deep in treason against Hitler but determined to get as much as possible for a Germany without Hitler, Point 8, as he noted in his journal, "destroys every reasonable chance for peace." [2]

 

Disillusioned though they were by the Atlantic Charter, the conspirators seem to have been spurred to action by its promulgation, if only because it impressed them with the necessity of doing away with Hitler while there was yet time for an anti-Nazi regime to bargain advantageously for peace for a Germany which still held most of Europe. They were not adverse to using Hitler's conquests to obtain the most favorable terms for their country. The upshot of a series of talks in Berlin during the last days of August between Hassell, Popitz, Oster, Dohnanyi and General Friedrich Olbricht, chief of staff of the Home Army, was that the "German patriots," as they called themselves, would make "very moderate demands" of the Allies but, to quote Hassell again, "there are certain claims from which they could not desist." What the demands and claims were he does not say; one gathers from other entries in his diary that they amounted to an insistence on Germany's 1914 frontiers in the East plus Austria and the Sudetenland.

 

But time pressed. After a final conference with his confederates at the end of August, Hassell wrote in his diary: "They were unanimously convinced that it would soon be too late. When our chances for victory are obviously gone or only very slim, there will be nothing more to be done." [3]

 

There had been some effort to induce key generals on the Eastern front to arrest Hitler during the summer campaign in Russia. But though it inevitably proved ineffectual because the great captains were naturally too absorbed in their initial stunning victories to give any thought to overthrowing the man who had given them the opportunity to achieve them, it did plant some seeds among the military minds that would eventually sprout.

 

The center of the conspiracy in the Army that summer was in the headquarters of Field Marshal von Bock, whose Army Group Center was driving on Moscow. Major General Henning von Tresckow of Bock's staff, whose early enthusiasm for National Socialism had so soured as to land him in the ranks of the plotters, was the ringleader, and he was assisted by Fabian von Schlabrendorff, his A.D.C., and by two fellow conspirators whom they had planted on Bock as A.D.C.s, Count Hans von Hardenberg and Count Heinrich von Lehndorff, both scions of old and prominent German families. [ii] One of their self-appointed tasks was to work on the Field Marshal and to persuade him to arrest Hitler on one of his visits to the army group's headquarters. But Bock was hard to work on. Though professing to loathe Nazism he had advanced too far under it and was much too vain and ambitious to take any chances at this stage of the game. Once when Tresckow tried to point out to him that the Fuehrer was leading the country to disaster, Bock shouted, "I do not allow the Fuehrer to be attacked!"  [4]

 

Tresckow and his young aide were discouraged but not daunted. They decided to act on their own. When on August 4, 1941, the Fuehrer visited the army group's headquarters at Borisov they planned to seize him as he was driving from the airfield to Bock's quarters. But the plotters were still amateurs at this time and had not counted on the Fuehrer's security arrangements. Surrounded by his own S.S. bodyguards and declining to use one of the army group's automobiles to drive in from the airfield -- he had sent ahead his own fleet of cars for this purpose -- he gave the two officers no opportunity of getting near him. This fiasco -- apparently there were others like it -- taught the plotters who were in the Army some lessons. The first was that to get their hands on Hitler was no easy job; he was always well guarded. Another was that to seize him and arrest him might not solve the problem, since the key generals were too cowardly or too confused about their oaths of allegiance to help the opposition to carry on from there. It was about this time, the fall of 1941, that some of the young officers in the Army, many of them civilians in uniform like Schlabrendorff, reluctantly came to the conclusion that the simplest and perhaps the only solution was to kill Hitler. Then the timid generals, released from their personal oaths to the Leader, would go along with the new regime and give it the support of the Army.

 

But the ringleaders in Berlin were not yet ready to go so far. They were concocting an idiotic plan called "isolated action," which for some reason they thought would satisfy the consciences of the generals about breaking their personal oaths to the Fuehrer and at the same time enable them to rid the Reich of Hitler. It is difficult, even today, to follow their minds in this, but the idea was that the top military commanders, both in the East and in the West, would simply, on a prearranged signal, refuse to obey the orders of Hitler as Commander in Chief of the Army. This of course would have been breaking their oath of obedience to the Fuehrer, but the sophists in Berlin pretended not to see that. They explained, at any event, that the real purpose of the scheme was to create confusion, in the midst of which Beck, with the help of detachments of the Home Army in Berlin, would seize power, depose Hitler and outlaw National Socialism.

 

The Home Army, however, was scarcely a military force but more a motley collection of recruits doing a little basic training before being shipped as replacements to the front. Some top generals in Russia or in the occupation zones who had seasoned troops at their command would have to be won over if the venture were really to succeed. One of them, who had been in on the Halder plot to arrest Hitler at the time of Munich, seemed a natural choice. This was Field Marshal von Witzleben, who was now Commander in Chief in the West. To initiate him and also General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the military commander in Belgium, into the new scheme of things Hassell was sent by the conspirators in mid-January 1942 to confer with the two generals. Already under surveillance by the Gestapo, the former ambassador used the "cover" of a lecture tour, addressing groups of German officers and occupation officials on the subject of "Living Space and Imperialism." In between lectures he conferred privately with Falkenhausen in Brussels and Witzleben in Paris, receiving a favorable impression of both of them, especially of the latter.

 

Shunted to the sidelines in France while his fellow field marshals were fighting great battles in Russia, Witzleben was thirsting for action. He told Hassell that the idea of "isolated action" was utopian. Direct action to overthrow Hitler was the only solution and he was willing to playa leading part. Probably the best time to strike would be during the summer of 1942 when the German offensive in Russia was resumed. To prepare for The Day he intended to be in top physical trim and would have a minor operation to put him in shape. Unfortunately for the Field Marshal and his coconspirators this decision had disastrous consequences. Like Frederick the Great -- and many others -- Witzleben was troubled by hemorrhoids. [iii] The operation to correct this painful and annoying condition was a routine case of surgery, to be sure, but when Witzleben took a brief sick leave in the spring to have it done, Hitler took advantage of the situation to retire the Field Marshal from active service, replacing him with Rundstedt, who had no stomach for conspiring against the Leader who had so recently treated him so shabbily. Thus the plotters found their chief hope in the Army to be a Field Marshal without any troops at his command. Without soldiers no new regime could be established.

 

The leaders of the conspiracy were greatly disheartened. They kept meeting clandestinely and plotting, but they could not overcome their discouragement. "It seems at the moment," Hassell noted at the end of February 1942, after one of the innumerable meetings, "that nothing can be done about Hitler." [5]

 

A great deal could be done, however, about straightening out their ideas concerning the kind of government they wanted for Germany after Hitler finally was deposed and about strengthening their helter-skelter and so far quite ineffectual organization so that it could take over that government when the time came.

 

Most of the resistance leaders, being conservative and well on in years, wanted, for one thing, a restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy. But for a long time they could not agree on which Hohenzollern prince to hoist on the throne. Popitz, one of the leading civilians in the ring, wanted the Crown Prince, who was anathema to most of the others. Schacht favored the oldest son of the Crown Prince, Prince Wilhelm, and Goerdeler the youngest surviving son of Wilhelm II, Prince Oskar of Prussia. All were in accord that the Kaiser's fourth son, Prince August Wilhelm, or "Auwi," as he was nicknamed, was out of the question since he was a fanatical Nazi and a Gruppenfuehrer in the S.S.

 

By the summer of 1941, however, there was more or less agreement that the most suitable candidate for the throne was Louis-Ferdinand, the second and oldest surviving son of the Crown Prince. [iv] Then just thirty-three, a veteran of five years in the Ford factory at Dearborn, a working employee of the Lufthansa airlines and in contact and in sympathy with the plotters, this personable young man had finally emerged as the most desirable of the Hohenzollerns. He understood the twentieth century, was democratic and intelligent. Moreover, he had an attractive, sensible and courageous wife in Princess Kira, a former Russian Grand Duchess, and -- an important point for the conspirators at this stage -- he was a personal friend of President Roosevelt, who had invited the couple to stay in the White House during their American honeymoon in 1938.

 

Hassell and some of his friends were not absolutely convinced that Louis-Ferdinand was an ideal choice. "He lacks many qualities he cannot get along without," Hassell commented wryly in his diary at Christmas time, 1941. But he went along with the others.

 

Hassell's chief interest was in the form and nature of the future German government, and early the year before he had drawn up, after consultation with General Beck, Goerdeler and Popitz, a program for its interim stage, which he refined in a further draft at the end of 1941. [6] It restored individual freedom and pending the adoption of a permanent constitution provided for the supreme power to rest in the hands of a regent, who, as head of state, would appoint a government and a Council of State. It was all rather authoritarian and Goerdeler and the few trade-union representatives among the conspirators didn't like it, proposing instead an immediate plebiscite so that the interim regime would have popular backing and give proof of its democratic character. But for the lack of something better Hassell's plan was generally accepted at least as a statement of principles until it was superseded by a liberal and enlightened program drawn up in 1943 under pressure from the Kreisau Circle, led by Count Helmuth von Moltke.

 

Finally that spring of 1942 the conspirators formally adopted a leader. They had all acknowledged General Beck as such not only because of his intelligence and character but also because of his prestige among the generals, his good name in the country and his reputation abroad. However, they had been so lackadaisical in organizing that they had never actually put him in charge. A few, like Hassell, though full of admiration and respect for the former General Staff Chief, had some doubts about him.

 

"The principal difficulty with Beck," Hassell wrote in his diary shortly before Christmas, 1941, "is that he is very theoretical. As Popitz says, a man of tactics but little will power." This judgment, as it turned out, was not an ungrounded one and this quirk in the General's temperament and character, this surprising lack of a will to act, was to prove tragic and disastrous in the end.

 

Nevertheless in March 1942, after a good many secret meetings, the plotters decided, as Hassell reported, that "Beck must hold the strings," and at the end of the month, as the ambassador further noted, "Beck was formally adopted as the head of our group." [7]

 

Still, the conspiracy remained nebulous and the air of unreality which surrounded even the most active members of it from the first hangs over their endless talk as one tries to follow it at this stage in the records they have left. Hitler, they knew that spring, was planning to resume the offensive in Russia as soon as the ground was dry. This, they felt, could only plunge Germany farther toward the abyss. And yet, though they talked much, they did nothing. On March 28, 1942, Hassell sat in his country house at Ebenhausen and began his diary:

 

[quote]During the last days in Berlin I had detailed discussions with Jessen, [v] Beck and Goerdeler. Prospects not very good. [8][/quote]

 

How could they be very good? Without even any plans to act. Now. While there was still time.

 

It was Adolf Hitler who at this unfolding of spring, the third of the war, had plans -- and the fierce will to try to carry them out.

 

[b]THE LAST GREAT GERMAN OFFENSIVES OF THE WAR[/b]

 

Although the Fuehrer's folly in refusing to allow the German armies in Russia to retreat in time had led to heavy losses in men and arms, to the demoralization of many commands and to a situation which for a few weeks in January and February 1942 threatened to end in utter catastrophe, there is little doubt that Hitler's fanatical determination to hold on and to stand and fight also helped to stem the Soviet tide. The traditional courage and endurance of the German soldiers did the rest.

 

By February 20 the Russian offensive from the Baltic to the Black Sea had run out of steam and at the end of March the season of deep mud set in, bringing a relative quiet to the long and bloody front. Both sides were exhausted. A German Army report of March 30, 1942, revealed what a terrible toll had been paid in the winter fighting. Of a total of 162 combat divisions in the East, only eight were ready for offensive missions. The sixteen armored divisions had between them only 140 serviceable tanks -- less than the normal number for one division. [9]

 

While the troops were resting and refitting -- indeed long before that, while they were still retreating in the midwinter snows -- Hitler, who was now Commander in Chief of the Army as well as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, had been busy with plans for the coming summer's offensive. They were not as ambitious as those of the previous year. By now he had sense enough to see that he could not destroy all of the Red armies in a single campaign. This summer he would concentrate the bulk of his forces in the south, conquer the Caucasus oil fields, the Donets industrial basin and the wheat fields of the Kuban and take Stalingrad on the Volga. This would accomplish several prime objectives. It would deprive the Soviets of the oil and rr.uch of the food and industry they desperately needed to carry on the war, while giving the Germans the oil and the food resources they were almost as badly in need of.

 

"If I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny," Hitler told General Paulus, the commander of the ill-fated Sixth Army, just before the summer offensive began, "then I must end this war." [10]

 

Stalin could have said almost the same thing. He too had to have the oil of the Caucasus to stay in the war. That was where the significance of Stalingrad came in. German possession of it would block the last main route via the Caspian Sea and the Volga River over which the oil, as long as the Russians held the wells, could reach central Russia.

 

Besides oil to propel his planes and tanks and trucks, Hitler needed men to fill out his thinned ranks. Total casualties at the end of the winter fighting were 1,167,835, exclusive of the sick, and there were not enough replacements available to make up for such losses. The High Command turned to Germany's allies -- or, rather, satellites -- for additional troops. During the winter General Keitel had scurried off to Budapest and Bucharest to drum up Hungarian and Rumanian soldiers -- whole divisions of them -- for the coming summer. Goering and finally Hitler himself appealed to Mussolini for Italian formations.

 

Goering arrived in Rome at the end of January 1942 to line up Italian reinforcements for Russia, assuring Mussolini that the Soviet Union would be defeated in 1942 and that Great Britain would lay down her arms in 1943. Ciano found the fat, bemedaled Reich Marshal insufferable. "As usual he is bloated and overbearing," the Italian Foreign Minister noted in his diary on February 2. Two days later:

 

[quote]Goering leaves Rome. We had dinner at the Excelsior Hotel, and during the dinner Goering talked of little else but the jewels he owned. In fact, he had some beautiful rings on his fingers ... On the way to the station he wore a great sable coat, something between what automobile drivers wore in 1906 and what a high-grade prostitute wears to the opera. [11][/quote]

 

The corruption and corrosion of the Number Two man in the Third Reich was making steady progress.

 

Mussolini promised Goering to send two Italian divisions to Russia in March if the Germans would give them artillery, but his concern about his ally's defeats on the Eastern front grew to such proportions that Hitler decided it was time for another meeting to explain how strong Germany still was.

 

This took place on April 29 and 30 at Salzburg, where the Duce and Ciano and their party were put up in the baroque Palace of Klessheim, once the seat of the prince -- bishops and now redecorated with hangings, furniture and carpets from France, for which the Italian Foreign Minister suspected the Germans "did not pay too much." Ciano found the Fuehrer looking tired. "The winter months in Russia have borne heavily upon him," he noted in his diary. "I see for the first time that he has many gray hairs." [vi]

 

There followed the usual German recital sizing up the general situation, with Ribbentrop and Hitler assuring their Italian guests that all was well  -- in Russia, in North Africa, in the West and on the high seas. The coming offensive in the East, they confided, would be directed against the Caucasus oil fields.

 

[quote]When Russia's sources of oil are exhausted [Ribbentrop said] she will be brought to her knees. Then the British ... will bow in order to save what remains of the mauled Empire...

 

America is a big bluff ...[/quote]

 

Ciano, listening more or less patiently to his opposite number, got the impression, however, that in regard to what the United States might eventually do it was the Germans who were bluffing and that in reality, when they thought of it, "they feel shivers running down their spines."

 

It was the Fuehrer who, as always, did most of the talking.

 

[quote]Hitler talks, talks, talks [Ciano wrote in his diary]. Mussolini suffers -- he, who is in the habit of talking himself, and who, instead, practically has to keep quiet. On the second day, after lunch, when everything had been said, Hitler talked uninterruptedly for an hour and forty minutes. He omitted absolutely no argument: war and peace, religion and philosophy, art and history. Mussolini automatically looked at his wrist watch ... The Germans -- poor people -- have to take it every day, and I am certain there isn't a gesture, a word or a pause, which they don't know by heart. General Jodl, after an epic struggle, finally went to sleep on the divan. Keitel was reeling, but he succeeded in keeping his head up. He was too close to Hitler to let himself go . . . [12][/quote]

 

Despite the avalanche of talk or perhaps because of it, Hitler got the promise of more Italian cannon fodder for the Russian front. So successful were he and Keitel with all the satellites that the German High Command calculated it would have [52] "Allied" divisions available for the summer's task -- 27 Rumanian, 13 Hungarian, 9 Italian, 2 Slovak and one Spanish. This was one quarter of the combined Axis force in the East. Of the 41 fresh divisions which were to reinforce the southern part of the front, where the main German blow would fall, one half -- or 21 divisions  -- were Hungarian (10), Italian (6) and Rumanian (5). Halder and most of the other generals did not like to stake so much on so many "foreign" divisions whose fighting qualities, in their opinion, were, to put it mildly, questionable. But because of their own shortage of manpower they reluctantly accepted this aid, and this decision was shortly to contribute to the disaster which ensued.

 

At first, that summer of 1942, the fortunes of the Axis prospered. Even before the jump-off toward the Caucasus and Stalingrad a sensational victory was scored in North Africa. On May 27, 1942, General Rommel had resumed his offensive in the desert. [vii] Striking swiftly with his famed Afrika Korps (two armored divisions and a motorized infantry division) and eight Italian divisions, of which one was armored, he soon had the British desert army reeling back toward the Egyptian frontier. On June 21 he captured Tobruk, the key to the British defenses, which in 1941 had held out for nine months until relieved, and two days later he entered Egypt. By the end of June he was at El Alamein, sixty-five miles from Alexandria and the delta of the Nile. It seemed to many a startled Allied statesman, poring over a map, that nothing could now prevent Rommel from delivering a fatal blow to the British by conquering Egypt and then, if he were reinforced, sweeping on northeast to capture the great oil fields of the Middle East and then to the Caucasus to meet the German armies in Russia, which already were beginning their advance toward that region from the north.

 

It was one of the darkest moments of the war for the Allies and correspondingly one of the brightest for the Axis. But Hitler, as we have seen, had never understood global warfare. He did not know how to exploit Rommel's surprising African success. He awarded the daring leader of the Afrika Korps a field marshal's baton but he did not send him supplies or reinforcements. [viii] Under the nagging of Admiral Raeder and the urging of Rommel, the Fuehrer had only reluctantly agreed to send the Afrika Korps and a small German air force to Libya in the first place. But he had done this only to prevent an Italian collapse in North Africa, not because he foresaw the importance of conquering Egypt.

 

The key to that conquest actually was the small island of Malta, lying in the Mediterranean between Sicily and the Axis bases in Libya. It was from this British bastion that bombers, submarines and surface craft wrought havoc on German and Italian vessels carrying supplies and men to North Africa. In August 1941 some 35 per cent of Rommel's supplies and reinforcements were sunk; in October, 63 per cent. By November 9 Ciano was writing sadly in his diary:

 

[quote]Since September 19 we had given up trying to get convoys through to Libya; every attempt had been paid for at a high price ... Tonight we tried it again. A convoy of seven ships left, accompanied by two ten-thousand-ton cruisers and ten destroyers ... All -- I mean all -- our ships were sunk .. The British returned to their ports [at Malta] after having slaughtered US. [13][/quote]

 

Belatedly the Germans diverted several U-boats from the Battle of the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and Kesselring was given additional squadrons of planes for the bases in Sicily. It was decided to neutralize Malta and destroy, if possible, the British fleet in the eastern Mediterranean. Success was immediate. By the end of 1941 the British had lost three battleships, an aircraft carrier, two cruisers and several destroyers and submarines, and what was left of their fleet was driven to Egyptian bases. Malta had been battered by German bombers day and night for weeks. As a result Axis supplies got through -- in January not a ton of shipping was lost -- and Rommel was able to build up his forces for the big push into Egypt.

 

In March Admiral Raeder talked Hitler into approving plans not only for Rommel's offensive toward the Nile (Operation Aida) but for the capture of Malta by parachute troops (Operation Hercules). The drive from Libya was to begin at the end of May and Malta was to be assaulted in mid-July. But on June 15, while Rommel was in the midst of his initial successes, Hitler postponed the attack on Malta. He could spare neither troops nor planes from the Russian front, he explained to Raeder. A few weeks later he postponed Hercules again, saying it could wait until after the summer offensive in the East had been completed and Rommel had conquered Egypt. [14] Malta could be kept quiet in the meantime, he advised, by continued bombing.

 

But it was not kept quiet and for this failure either to neutralize it or to capture it the Germans would shortly pay a high price. A large British convoy got through to the besieged island on June 16, and though several warships and freighters were lost this put Malta back in business. Spitfires were flown to the island from the U.S. aircraft carrier Wasp and soon drove the attacking Luftwaffe bombers from the skies. Rommel felt the effect. Three quarters of his supply ships thereafter were sunk.

 

He had reached El Alamein with just thirteen operational tanks. [ix] "Our strength," he wrote in his diary on July 3, "has faded away." And at a moment when the Pyramids were almost in sight, and beyond -- the great prize of Egypt and Suez! This was another opportunity lost, and one of the last which Hitler would be afforded by Providence and the fortunes of war.

 

[b]THE GERMAN SUMMER OFFENSIVE IN RUSSIA: 1942[/b]

 

By the end of the summer of 1942 Adolf Hitler seemed to be once more on top of the world. German U-boats were sinking 700,000 tons of British --  American shipping a month in the Atlantic -- more than could be replaced in the booming shipyards of the United States, Canada and Scotland. Though the Fuehrer had denuded his forces in the West of most of their troops and tanks and planes in order to finish with Russia, there was no sign that summer that the British and Americans were strong enough to make even a small landing from across the Channel. They had not even risked trying to occupy French-held Northwest Africa, though the weakened French, of divided loyalties, had nothing much with which to stop them even if they attempted to, and the Germans nothing at all except a few submarines and a handful of planes based in Italy and Tripoli.

 

The British Navy and Air Force had been unable to prevent Germany's two battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen from dashing up the English Channel in full daylight and making their way safely home from Brest. [x] Hitler had feared that the British and Americans would certainly try to occupy northern Norway -- that was why he had insisted on the dash from Brest so that the three heavy ships there could be used for the defense of Norwegian waters. "Norway," he told Raeder at the end of January 1942, "is the zone of destiny." It had to be defended at all costs. As it turned out, there was no need. The Anglo-Americans had other plans for their limited forces in the West.

 

On the map the sum of Hitler's conquests by September 1942 looked staggering. The Mediterranean had become practically an Axis lake, with Germany and Italy holding most of the northern shore from Spain to Turkey and the southern shore from Tunisia to within sixty miles of the Nile. In fact, German troops now stood guard from the Norwegian North Cape on the Arctic Ocean to Egypt, from the Atlantic at Brest to the southern reaches of the Volga River on the border of Central Asia.

 

German troops of the Sixth Army had reached the Volga just north of Stalingrad on August 23. Two days before, the swastika had been hoisted on Mount Elbrus, the highest peak (18,481 feet) in the Caucasus Mountains. The Maikop oil fields, producing annually two and a half million tons of oil, had been captured on August 8, though the Germans found them almost completely destroyed, and by the twenty-fifth Kleist's tanks had arrived at Mozdok, only fifty miles from the main Soviet oil center around Grozny and a bare hundred miles from the Caspian Sea. On the thirty-first Hitler was urging Field Marshal List, commander of the armies in the Caucasus, to scrape up all available forces for the final push to Grozny so that he "could get his hands on the oil fields." On that last day of August, too, Rommel launched his offensive at El Alamein with every hope of breaking through to the Nile.

 

Although Hitler was never satisfied with the performance of his generals --  he had sacked Field Marshal von Bock, who commanded the whole southern offensive, on July 13 and, as Halder's diary reveals, had constantly nagged and cursed most of the other commanders as well as the General Staff for not advancing fast enough -- he now believed that the decisive victory was in his grasp. He ordered the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army to swing north along the Volga, after Stalingrad was taken, in a vast encircling movement which would enable him eventually to advance on central Russia and Moscow from the east as well as from the west. He believed the Russians were finished and Halder tells of him at this moment talking of pushing with part of his forces through Iran to the Persian Gulf. [15] Soon he would link up with the Japanese in the Indian Ocean. He had no doubt of the accuracy of a German intelligence report on September 9 that the Russians had used up all their reserves on the entire front. In a conference with Admiral Raeder at the end of August his thoughts were already turning from Russia, which he said he now regarded as a "blockadeproof Lebensraum," to the British and Americans, who would soon, he was sure, be brought "to the point of discussing peace terms." [16]

 

And yet, as General Kurt Zeitzler later recalled, appearances even then, rosy as they were, were deceptive. Almost all the generals in the field, as well as those on the General Staff, saw flaws in the pretty picture. They could be summed up: the Germans simply didn't have the resources -- the men or the guns or the tanks or the planes or the means of transportation  -- to reach the objectives Hitler had insisted on setting. When Rommel tried to tell this to the warlord in respect to Egypt, Hitler ordered him to go on sick leave in the mountains of the Semmering. When Halder and Field Marshal List attempted to do the same in regard to the Russian front, they were cashiered.

 

Even the rankest amateur strategist could see the growing danger to the German armies in southern Russia as Soviet resistance stiffened in the Caucasus and at Stalingrad and the season of the autumn rains approached. The long northern flank of the Sixth Army was dangerously exposed along the line of the upper Don for 350 miles from Stalingrad to Voronezh. Here Hitler had stationed three satellite armies: the Hungarian Second, south of Voronezh; the Italian Eighth, farther southeast; and the Rumanian Third, on the right at the bend of the Don just west of Stalingrad. Because of the bitter hostility of Rumanians and Hungarians to each other their armies had to be separated by the Italians. In the steppes south of Stalingrad there was a fourth satellite army, the Rumanian Fourth. Aside from their doubtful fighting qualities, all these armies were inadequately equipped, lacking armored power, heavy artillery and mobility. Furthermore, they were spread out very thinly. The Rumanian Third Army held a front of 105 miles with only sixty-nine battalions. But these "allied" armies were all Hitler had. There were not enough German units to fill the gap. And since he believed, as he told Halder, that the Russians were "finished," he did not unduly worry about this exposed and lengthy Don flank.

 

Yet it was the key to maintaining both the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army at Stalingrad and Army Group A in the Caucasus. Should the Don flank collapse not only would the German forces at Stalingrad be threatened with encirclement but those in the Caucasus would be cut off. Once more the Nazi warlord had gambled. It was not his first gamble of the summer's campaign.

 

On July 23, at the height of the offensive, he had made another. The Russians were in full retreat between the Donets and upper-Don rivers, falling rapidly back toward Stalin grad to the east and toward the lower Don to the south. A decision had to be made. Should the German forces concentrate on taking Stalingrad and blocking the Volga River, or should they deliver their main blow in the Caucasus in quest of Russian oil? Earlier in the month Hitler had pondered this crucial question but had been unable to make up his mind. At first, the smell of oil had tempted him most, and on July 13 he had detached the Fourth Panzer Army from Army Group B, which had been driving down the Don toward the river's bend and Stalingrad just beyond, and sent it south to help Kleist's First Panzer Army get over the lower Don near Rostov and on into the Caucasus toward the oil fields. At that moment the Fourth Panzer Army probably could have raced on to Stalingrad, which was then largely undefended, and easily captured it. By the time Hitler realized his mistake it was too late, and then he compounded his error. When the Fourth Panzer Army was shifted back toward Stalingrad a fortnight later, the Russians had recovered sufficiently to be able to check it; and its departure from the Caucasus front left Kleist too weak to complete his drive to the Grozny oil fields. [xi]

 

The shifting of this powerful armored unit back to the drive on Stalingrad was one result of the fatal decision which Hitler made on July 23. His fanatical determination to take both Stalingrad and the Caucasus at the same time, against the advice of Halder and the field commanders, who did not believe it could be done, was embodied in Directive No. 45, which became famous in the annals of the German Army. It was one of the most fateful of Hitler's moves in the war, for in the end, and in a very short time, it resulted in his failing to achieve either objective and led to the most humiliating defeat in the history of German arms, making certain that he could never win the war and that the days of the thousand-year Third Reich were numbered.

 

General Halder was appalled, and there was a stormy scene at "Werewolf" headquarters in the Ukraine near Vinnitsa to which Hitler had moved on July 16 in order to be nearer the front. The Chief of the General Staff urged that the main forces be concentrated on the taking of Stalingrad and tried to explain that the German Army simply did not possess the strength to carry out two powerful offensives in two different directions. When Hitler retorted that the Russians were "finished," Halder attempted to convince him that, according to the Army's own intelligence, this was far from the case.

 

[quote]The continual underestimation of enemy possibilities [Halder noted sadly in his diary that evening] takes on grotesque forms and is becoming dangerous. Serious work has become impossible here. Pathological reaction to momentary impressions and a complete lack of capacity to assess the situation and its possibilities give this so-called "leadership" a most peculiar character.[/quote]

 

Later the Chief of the General Staff, whose own days at his post were now numbered, would come back to this scene and write:

 

[quote]Hitler's decisions had ceased to have anything in common with the principles of strategy and operations as they have been recognized for generations past. They were the product of a violent nature following its momentary impulses, which recognized no limits to possibility and which made its wish-dreams the father of its acts ... [17]

 

As to what he called the Supreme Commander's "pathological overestimation of his own strength and criminal underestimation of the enemy's," Halder later told a story:

 

[quote]Once when a quite objective report was read to him showing that still in 1942 Stalin would be able to muster from one to one and a quarter million fresh troops in the region north of Stalingrad and west of the Volga, not to mention half a million men in the Caucasus, and which provided proof that Russian output of front-line tanks amounted to at least 1,200 a month, Hitler flew at the man who was reading with clenched fists and foam in the corners of his mouth and forbade him to read any more of such idiotic twaddle. [18][/quote]

 

"You didn't have to have the gift of a prophet," says Halder, "to foresee what would happen when Stalin unleashed those million and a half troops against Stalingrad and the Don flank. [xii] I pointed this out to Hitler very clearly. The result was the dismissal of the Chief of the Army General Staff."

 

This took place on September 24. Already on the ninth, upon being told by Keitel that Field Marshal List, who had the over-all command of the armies in the Caucasus, had been sacked, Halder learned that he would be the next to go. The Fuehrer, he was told, had become convinced that he "was no longer equal to the psychic demands of his position." Hitler explained this in greater detail to his General Staff Chief at their farewell meeting on the twenty-fourth.

 

"You and I have been suffering from nerves. Half of my nervous exhaustion is due to you. It is not worth it to go on. We need National Socialist ardor now, not professional ability. I cannot expect this of an officer of the old school such as you."

 

"So spoke," Halder commented later, "not a responsible warlord but a political fanatic." [19]

 

And so departed Franz Halder. He was not without his faults, which were similar to those of his predecessor, General Beck, in that his mind was often confused and his will to action paralyzed. And though he had often stood up to Hitler, however ineffectually, he had also, like all of the other Army officers who enjoyed high rank during World War II, gone along with him and for a long time abetted his outrageous aggressions and his conquests. Yet he had retained some of the virtues of more civilized times. He was the last of the old-school General Staff chiefs that the Army of the Third Reich would have. [xiii] He was replaced by General Kurt Zeitzler, a younger officer of a different stripe who was serving as chief of staff to Rundstedt in the West, and who endured in the post, which once -- especially in the First World War -- had been the highest and most powerful in the German Army, as little more than the Fuehrer's office boy until the attempt against the dictator's life in July 1944. [xiv]

 

A change in General Staff chiefs did not change the situation of the German Army, whose twin drives on Stalingrad and the Caucasus had now been halted by stiffening Soviet resistance itself. All through October bitter street fighting continued in Stalingrad itself. The Germans made some progress, from building to building, but with staggering losses, for the rubble of a great city, as everyone who has experienced modem warfare knows, gives many opportunities for stubborn and prolonged defense and the Russians, disputing desperately every foot of the debris, made the most of them. Though Halder and then his successor warned Hitler that the troops in Stalingrad were becoming exhausted, the Supreme Commander insisted that they push on. Fresh divisions were thrown in and were soon ground to pieces in the inferno.

 

Instead of a means to an end -- the end had already been achieved when German formations reached the western banks of the Volga north and south of the city and cut off the river's traffic -- Stalingrad had become an end in itself. To Hitler its capture was now a question of personal prestige. When even Zeitzler got up enough nerve to suggest to the Fuehrer that in view of the danger to the long northern flank along the Don the Sixth Army should be withdrawn from Stalingrad to the elbow of the Don, Hitler flew into a fury. "Where the German soldier sets foot, there he remains!" he stormed.

 

Despite the hard going and the severe losses, General Paulus, commander of the Sixth Army, informed Hitler by radio on October 25 that he expected to complete the capture of Stalingrad at the latest by November 10. Cheered up by this assurance, Hitler issued orders the next day that the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army, which was fighting south of the city, should prepare to push north and south along the Volga as soon as Stalingrad had fallen.

 

It was not that Hitler was ignorant of the threat to the Don flank. The OKW diaries make clear that it caused him considerable worry. The point is that he did not take it seriously enough and that, as a consequence, he did nothing to avert it. Indeed, so confident was he that the situation was well in hand that on the last day of October he, the staff of OKW and the Army General Staff abandoned their headquarters at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine and returned to Wolfsschanze at Rastenburg. The Fuehrer had practically convinced himself that if there were to be any Soviet winter offensive at all it would come on the central and northern fronts. He could handle that better from his quarters in East Prussia.

 

Hardly had he returned there when bad news reached him from another and more distant front. Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps was in trouble.

 

[b]THE FIRST BLOW: EL ALAMElN AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN LANDINGS[/b]

 

The Desert Fox, as he was called on both sides of the front, had resumed his offensive at El Alamein on August 31 with the intention of rolling up the British Eighth Army and driving on to Alexandria and the Nilc. There was a violent battle in the scorching heat on the 40-mile desert front between the sea and the Qattara Depression, but Rommel could not quite make it and on September 3 he broke off the fighting and went over to the defensive. At long last the British army in Egypt had received strong reinforcements in men, guns, tanks and planes (many of the last two from America). It had also received on August 15 two new commanders: an eccentric but gifted general named Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, who took over the Eighth Army, and General Sir Harold Alexander, who was to prove to be a skillful strategist and a brilliant administrator and who now assumed the post of Commander in Chief in the Middle East.

 

Shortly after his setback Rommel had gone on sick leave on the Semmering in the mountains below Vienna to receive a cure for an infected nose and a swollen liver, and it was there that on the afternoon of October 24 he received a telephone call from Hitler. "Rommel, the news from Africa sounds bad. The situation seems somewhat obscure. Nobody appears to know what has happened to General Stumme. [xv] Do you feel capable of returning to Africa and taking over there again?" [20] Though a sick man, Rommel agreed to return immediately.

 

By the time he got back to headquarters west of El Alamein on the following evening, the battle, which Montgomery had launched at 9:40 P.M. on October 23, was already lost. The Eighth Army had too many guns, tanks and planes, and though the Italian-German lines still held and Rommel made desperate efforts to shift his battered divisions to stem the various attacks and even to counterattack he realized that his situation was hopeless. He had no reserves: of men, or tanks or oil. The R.A.F., for once, had complete command of the skies and was pounding his troops and armor and remaining supply dumps mercilessly.

 

On November 2, Montgomery's infantry and armor broke through on the southern sector of the front and began to overrun the Italian divisions there. That evening Rommel radioed Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia two thousand miles away that he could no longer hold out and that he intended to withdraw, while there was still the opportunity, to the Fuka position forty miles to the west.

 

He had already commenced to do so when a long message came over the air the next day from the Supreme warlord:

 

[quote]TO FIELD MARSHAL ROMMEL:

 

I and the German people are watching the heroic defensive battle waged in Egypt with faithful trust in your powers of leadership and in the bravery of the German-Italian troops under your command. In the situation in which you now find yourself, there can be no other consideration save that of holding fast, of not retreating one step, of throwing every gun and every man into the battle ... You can show your troops no other way than that which leads to victory or to death.

 

ADOLF HITLER [21][/quote]

 

This idiotic order meant, if obeyed, that the Italo-German armies were condemned to swift annihilation and for the first time in Africa, Bayerlein says, Rommel did not know what to do. After a brief struggle with his conscience he decided, over the protests of General Ritter von Thoma, the actual commander of the German Afrika Korps, who said he was withdrawing in any case, [xvi] to obey his Supreme Commander. "I finally compelled myself to take this decision," Rommel wrote later in his diary, "because I myself have always demanded unconditional obedience from my soldiers and I therefore wished to accept this principle for myself." Later, as a subsequent diary entry declares, he learned better.

 

Reluctantly Rommel gave the order to halt the withdrawal and at the same time sent off a courier by plane to Hitler to try to explain to him that unless he were permitted to fall back immediately all would be lost. But events were already making that trip unnecessary. On the evening of November 4, at the risk of being court-martialed for disobedience, Rommel decided to save what was left of his forces and retreat to Fuka. Only the remnants of the armored and motorized units could be extricated. The foot soldiers, mostly Italian, were left behind to surrender, as indeed the bulk of them already had done. [xvii] On November 5 came a curt message from the Fuehrer: "1 agree to the withdrawal of your army into the Fuka position." But that position already had been overrun by Montgomery's tanks. Within fifteen days Rommel had fallen back seven hundred miles to beyond Benghazi with the remnants of his African army -- some 25,000 Italians, 10,000 Germans and sixty tanks -- and there was no opportunity to stop even there.

 

This was the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler, the most decisive battle of the war yet won by his enemies, though a second and even more decisive one was just about to begin on the snowy steppes of southern Russia. But before it did, the Fuehrer was to hear further bad news from North Africa which spelled the doom of the Axis in that part of the world.

 

Already on November 3, when the first reports had come in of Rommel's disaster, the Fuehrer's headquarters had received word that an Allied armada had been sighted assembling at Gibraltar. No one at OKW could make out what it might be up to. Hitler was inclined to think it was merely another heavily guarded convoy for Malta. This is interesting because more than a fortnight earlier, on October 15, the OKW staff chiefs had discussed several reports about an imminent "Anglo-Saxon landing" in West Africa. The intelligence apparently came from Rome, for Ciano a week before, on October 9, noted in his diary after a talk with the chief of the military secret service that "the Anglo-Saxons are preparing to land in force in North Africa." The news depressed Ciano; he foresaw --  correctly, as it turned out -- that this would lead inevitably to a direct Allied assault on Italy.

 

Hitler, preoccupied as he was with the failure of the Russians to cease their infernal resistance, did not take this first intelligence very seriously. At a meeting of OKW on October 15, Jodl suggested that Vichy France be permitted to send reinforcements to North Africa so that the French could repel any Anglo-American landings. The Fuehrer, according to the OKW Diary, turned the suggestion down because it might ruffle the Italians, who were jealous of any move to strengthen France. At the Supreme Commander's headquarters the matter appears to have been forgotten until November 3. But on that day, although German agents on the Spanish side of Gibraltar had reported seeing a great Anglo-American fleet gathering there, Hitler was too busy rallying Rommel at El Alamein to bother with what appeared to him to be merely another convoy for Malta.

 

On November 5, OKW was informed that one British naval force had sailed out of Gibraltar headed east. But it was not until the morning of November 7, twelve hours before American and British troops began landing in North Africa, that Hitler gave the latest intelligence from Gibraltar some thought. The forenoon reports received at his headquarters in East Prussia were that British naval forces in Gibraltar and a vast fleet of transports and warships from the Atlantic had joined up and were steaming east into the Mediterranean. There was a long discussion among the staff officers and the Fuehrer. What did it all mean? What was the objective of such a large naval force? Hitler was now inclined to believe, he said, that the Western Allies might be attempting a major landing with some four or five divisions at Tripoli or Benghazi in order to catch Rommel in the rear. Admiral Krancke, the naval liaison officer at OKW, declared that there could not be more than two enemy divisions at the most. Even so! Something had to be done. Hitler asked that the Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean be immediately reinforced but was told this was impossible "for the moment." Judging by the OKW Diary all that Hitler did that morning was to notify Rundstedt, Commander in Chief in the West, to be ready to carry out "Anton." This was the code word for the occupation of the rest of France.

 

Whereupon the Supreme Commander, heedless of this ominous news or of the plight of Rommel, who would be trapped if the Anglo-Americans landed behind him, or of the latest intelligence warning of an imminent Russian counteroffensive on the Don in the rear of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, entrained after lunch on November 7 for Munich, where on the next evening he was scheduled to deliver his annual speech to his old party cronies gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch! [xviii]

 

The politician in him, as Halder noted, had got the upper hand of the soldier at a critical moment in the war. Supreme Headquarters in East Prussia was left in charge of a colonel, one Freiherr Treusch von Buttlar-Brandenfels. Generals Keitel and Jodl, the chief officers of OKW, went along to participate in the beerhouse festivities. There is something weird and batty about such goings on that take the Supreme warlord, who by now was insisting on directing the war on far-flung fronts down to the divisional or regimental or even battalion level, thousands of miles from the battlefields on an unimportant political errand at a moment when the house is beginning to fall in. A change in the man, a corrosion, a deterioration has set in, as it already had with Goering who, though his once all-powerful Luftwaffe had been steadily declining, was becoming more and more attached to his jewels and his toy trains, with little time to spare for the ugly realities of a prolonged and increasingly bitter war.

 

Anglo-American troops under General Eisenhower hit the beaches of Morocco and Algeria at 1: 30 A.M. on November 8, 1942, and at 5: 30 Ribbentrop was on the phone from Munich to Ciano in Rome to give him the news.

 

[quote]He was rather nervous [Ciano wrote in his diary] and wanted to know what we intended to do. I must confess that, having been caught unawares, I was too sleepy to give a very satisfactory answer.[/quote]

 

The Italian Foreign Minister learned from the German Embassy that the officials there were "literally terrified by the blow."

 

Hitler's special train from East Prussia did not arrive in Munich until 3: 40 that afternoon and the first reports he got about the Allied landings in Northwest Africa were optimistic. [22] Everywhere the French, he was told, were putting up stubborn resistance, and at Algiers and Oran they had repulsed the landing attempts. In Algeria, Germany's friend, Admiral Darlan, was organizing the defense with the approval of the Vichy regime. Hitler's first reactions were confused. He ordered the garrison at Crete, which was quite outside the new theater of war, immediately strengthened, explaining that such a step was as important as sending reinforcements to Africa. He instructed the Gestapo to bring Generals Weygand and Giraud [xix] to Vichy and to keep them under surveillance. He asked Field Marshal von Rundstedt to set in action Anton but not to cross the line of demarcation in France until he had further orders. And he requested Ciano [xx] and Pierre Laval, who was now Premier of Vichy France, to meet him in Munich the next day.

 

For about twenty-four hours Hitler toyed with the idea of trying to make an alliance with France in order to bring her into the war against Britain and America and, at the moment, to strengthen the resolve of the Petain government to oppose the Allied landings in North Africa. He probably was encouraged in this by the action of Petain in breaking off diplomatic relations with the United States on the morning of Sunday, November 8, and by the aged French Marshal's statement to the U.S. charge d'affaires that his forces would resist the Anglo-American invasion. The OKW Diary for that Sunday emphasizes that Hitler was preoccupied with working out "a far-reaching collaboration with the French." That evening the German representative in Vichy, Krug von Nidda, submitted a proposal to Petain for a close alliance between Germany and France. [23]

 

By the next day, following his speech to the party veterans, in which he proclaimed that Stalingrad was "firmly in German hands," the Fuehrer had changed his mind. He told Ciano he had no illusions about the French desire to fight and that he had decided on "the total occupation of France, a landing in Corsica, a bridgehead in Tunisia." This decision, though not the timing, was communicated to Laval when he arrived in Munich by car on November 10. This traitorous Frenchman promptly promised to urge Petain to accede to the Fuehrer's wishes but suggested that the Germans go ahead with their plans without waiting for the senile old Marshal's approval, which Hitler fully intended to do. Ciano has left a description of the Vichy Premier, who was executed for treason after the war.

 

[quote]Laval, with his white tie and middle-class French peasant attire, is very much out of place in the great salon among so many uniforms. He tries to speak in a familiar tone about his trip and his long sleep in the car, but his words go unheeded. Hitler treats him with frigid courtesy ...

 

The poor man could not even imagine the fait accompli that the Germans were to place before him. Not a word was said to Laval about the impending action -- that the orders to occupy France were being given while he was smoking his cigarette and conversing with various people in the next room. Von Ribbentrop told me that Laval would be informed only the next morning at 8 o'clock that on account of information received during the night Hitler had been obliged to proceed to the total occupation of the country. [24][/quote]

 

The orders for the seizure of unoccupied France, in clear violation of the armistice agreement, were given by Hitler at 8:30 P.M. on November 10 and carried out the next morning without any other incident than a futile protest by Petain. The Italians occupied Corsica, and German planes began flying in troops to seize French-held Tunisia before Eisenhower's forces could get there.

 

There was one further -- and typical -- piece of Hitlerian deceit. On November 13 the Fuehrer assured Petain that neither the Germans nor the Italians would occupy the naval base at Toulon, where the French fleet had been tied up since the armistice. On November 25 the OKW Diary recorded that Hitler had decided to carry out "Lila" as soon as possible. [xxi] This was the code word for the occupation of Toulon and the capture of the French fleet. On the morning of the twenty-seventh German troops attacked the naval port, but French sailors held them up long enough to allow the crews, on the orders of Admiral de Laborde, to scuttle the ships. The French fleet was thus lost to the Axis, which badly needed its warships in the Mediterranean, but it was denied also to the Allies, to whom it would have been a most valuable addition.

 

Hitler won the race against Eisenhower to seize Tunisia, but it was a doubtful victory. At his insistence nearly a quarter of a million German and Italian troops were poured in to hold this bridgehead. If the Fuehrer had sent one fifth as many troops and tanks to Rommel a few months before, the Desert Fox most probably would have been beyond the Nile by now, the Anglo-American landing in Northwest Africa could not have taken place and the Mediterranean would have been irretrievably lost to the Allies, thus securing the soft undercover of the Axis belly. As it was, every soldier and tank and gun rushed by Hitler to Tunisia that winter as well as the remnants of the Afrika Korps would be lost by the end of the spring and more German troops would be marched into prisoner-of-war cages than at Stalingrad, to which we must now return.  [xxii]

 

[b]DISASTER AT STALINGRAD[/b]

 

Hitler and the principal generals of OKW were lingering on in the pleasant Alpine surroundings of Berchtesgaden when the first news of the Russian counteroffensive on the Don reached them a few hours after it had been launched in a blizzard at dawn on November 19. Though a Soviet attack in this region had been expected it was not believed at OKW that it would amount to enough to warrant Hitler and his chief military advisers, Keitel and Jodl, hurrying back to headquarters in East Prussia after the Fuehrer's ringing beerhouse speech to the old party comrades in Munich on the evening of November 8. So they had puttered about on the Obersalzberg taking in the mountain air.

 

Their peace and quiet was abruptly broken by an urgent telephone call from General Zeitzler, the new Chief of the Army General Staff, who had remained behind at Rastenburg. He had what the OKW Diary recorded as "alarming news." In the very first hours of the attack an overwhelming Russian armored force had broken clean through the Rumanian Third Army between Serafimovich and Kletskaya on the Don just northwest of Stalingrad. South of the besieged city other powerful Soviet forces were attacking strongly against the German Fourth Panzer Army and the Rumanian Fourth Army and threatening to pierce their fronts.

 

The Russian objective was obvious to anyone who looked at a map and especially obvious to Zeitzler who, from Army intelligence, knew that the enemy had massed thirteen armies, with thousands of tanks, in the south to achieve it. The Russians were clearly driving in great strength from the north and the south to cut off Stalingrad and to force the German Sixth Army there to either beat a hasty retreat to the west or see itself surrounded. Zeitzler later contended that as soon as he saw what was happening he urged Hitler to permit the Sixth Army to withdraw from Stalingrad to the Don bend, where the broken front could be restored. The mere suggestion threw the Fuehrer into a tantrum.

 

"I won't leave the Volga! I won't go back from the Volga!" he shouted, and that was that. This decision, taken in such a fit of frenzy, led promptly to disaster. The Fuehrer personally ordered the Sixth Army to stand fast around Stalingrad. [25]

 

Hitler and his staff returned to headquarters on November 22. By this time, the fourth day of the attack, the news was catastrophic. The two Soviet forces from the north and south had met at Kalach, forty miles west of Stalingrad on the Don bend. In the evening a wireless message arrived from General Paulus, commander of the Sixth Army, confirming that his troops were now surrounded. Hitler promptly radioed back, telling Paulus to move his headquarters into the city and form a hedgehog defense. The Sixth Army would be supplied by air until it could be relieved.

 

But this was futile talk. There were now twenty German and two Rumanian divisions cut off at Stalingrad. Paulus radioed that they would need a minimum of 750 tons of supplies a day flown in. This was far beyond the capacity of the Luftwaffe, which lacked the required number of transport planes. Even if they had been available, not all of them could have got through in the blizzardy weather and over an area where the Russians had now established fighter superiority. Nevertheless, Goering assured Hitler that the Air Force could do the job. It never began to.

 

The relief of the Sixth Army was a more practical and encouraging possibility. On November 25 Hitler had recalled Field Marshal von Manstein, the most gifted of his field commanders, from the Leningrad front and put him in charge of a newly created formation, Army Group Don. His assignment was to push through from the southwest and relieve the Sixth Army at Stalingrad.

 

But now the Fuehrer imposed impossible conditions on his new commander. Manstein tried to explain to him that the only chance of success lay in the Sixth Army's breaking out of Stalingrad to the west while his own forces, led by the Fourth Panzer Army, pressed northeast against the Russian armies which lay between the two German forces. But once again Hitler refused to draw back from the Volga. The Sixth Army must remain in Stalingrad and Manstein must fight his way to it there.

 

This, as Manstein tried to argue with the Supreme warlord, could not be done. The Russians were too strong. Nevertheless, with a heavy heart, Manstein launched his attack on December 12. It was called, appropriately, "Operation Winter Gale," for the full fury of the Russian winter had now hit the southern steppes, piling up the snow in drifts and dropping the temperature below zero. At first the offensive made good progress, the Fourth Panzer Army, under General Hoth, driving northeast up both sides of the railroad from Kotelnikovski toward Stalingrad, some seventy-five miles away. By December 19 it had advanced to within some forty miles of the southern perimeter of the city; by the twenty-first it was within thirty miles, and across the snowy steppes the besieged troops of the Sixth Army could see at night the signal flares of their rescuers.

 

At this moment, according to the later testimony of the German generals, a breakout from Stalingrad of the Sixth Army toward the advancing lines of the Fourth Panzer Army would almost certainly have succeeded. But once again Hitler forbade it. On December 21, Zeitzler had wrung permission from the Leader for the troops of Paulus to break out provided they also held on to Stalingrad. This piece of foolishness, the General Staff Chief says, nearly drove him insane.

 

"On the following evening," Zeitzler related later, "I begged Hitler to authorize the breakout. I pointed out that this was absolutely our last chance to save the two hundred thousand men of Paulus' army."

 

[quote]Hitler would not give way. In vain I described to him conditions inside the so-called fortress: the despair of the starving soldiers, their loss of confidence in the Supreme Command, the wounded expiring for lack of proper attention while thousands froze to death. He remained as impervious to arguments of this sort as to those others which I had advanced.[/quote]

 

In the face of increasing Russian resistance in front of him and on his flanks General Hoth lacked the strength to negotiate that last thirty miles to Stalingrad. He believed that if the Sixth Army broke out he could still make a junction with it and then both forces could withdraw to Kotelnikovski. This at least would save a couple of hundred thousand German lives. [xxiii] Probably for a day or two -- between December 21 and 23 -- this could have been done, but by the latter date it had become impossible. For unknown to Hoth the Red Army had struck farther north and was now endangering the left flank of Manstein's whole Army Group Don. On the night of December 22, Manstein telephoned Hoth to prepare himself for drastic new orders. The next day they came. Hoth was to abandon his drive on Stalin grad, dispatch one of his three panzer divisions to the Don front on the north, and defend himself where he was and with what he had left as well as he could.

 

The attempt to relieve Stalin grad had failed.

 

Manstein's drastic new orders had come as the result of alarming news that reached him on December 17. On the morning of that day a Soviet army had broken through the Italian Eighth Army farther up the Don at Boguchar and by evening opened a gap twenty-seven miles deep. Within three days the hole was ninety miles wide, the Italians were fleeing in panic and the Rumanian Third Army to the south, which already had been badly pummeled on the opening day of the Russian offensive on November 19, was also disintegrating. No wonder Manstein had had to take part of Hoth's armored forces to help stem the gap. A chain reaction followed.

 

Not only the Don armies fell back but also Hoth's forces, which had come so close to Stalingrad. These retreats in turn endangered the German Army in the Caucasus, which would be cut off if the Russians reached Rostov on the Sea of Azov. A day or two after Christmas Zeitzler pointed out to Hitler, "Unless you order a withdrawal from the Caucasus now, we shall soon have a second Stalingrad on our hands." Reluctantly the Supreme Commander issued the necessary instructions on December 29 to Kleist's Army Group A, which comprised the First Panzer and Seventeenth armies, and which had failed in its mission to grab the rich oil fields of Grozny. It too began a long retreat after having been within sight of its goal.

 

The reverses of the Germans in Russia and of the Italo-German armies in North Africa stirred Mussolini to thought. Hitler had invited him to come to Salzburg for a talk around the middle of December and the ailing Duce, now on a strict diet for stomach disorders, had accepted, though, as he told Ciano, he would go on one condition only: that he take his meals alone "because he does not want a lot of ravenous Germans to notice that he is compelled to live on rice and milk."

 

The time had come, Mussolini decided, to tell Hitler to cut his losses in the East, make some sort of deal with Stalin and concentrate Axis strength on defending the rest of North Africa, the Balkans and Western Europe. "Nineteen forty-three will be the year of the Anglo-American effort," he told Ciano. Hitler was unable to leave his Eastern headquarters in order to meet Mussolini, so Ciano made the long journey to Rastenburg on December 18 on his behalf, repeating to the Nazi leader the Duce's proposals. Hitler scorned them and assured the Italian Foreign Minister that without at all weakening the Russian front he could send additional forces to North Africa, which must, he said, be held. Ciano found German spirits at a low ebb at headquarters, despite Hitler's confident assurances.

 

[quote]The atmosphere is heavy. To the bad news there should perhaps be added the sadness of that humid forest and the boredom of collective living in the barracks ... No one tries to conceal from me the unhappiness over the news of the breakthrough on the Russian front. There were open attempts to put the blame on us.[/quote]

 

At that very moment the survivors of the Italian Eighth Army on the Don were scurrying for their lives, and when one member of Ciano's party asked an OKW officer whether the Italians had suffered heavy losses he was told, "No losses at all: they are running." [26]

 

The German troops in the Caucasus and on the Don, if not running, were getting out as quickly as they could to avoid being cut off. Each day, as the year 1943 began, they withdrew a little farther from Stalingrad. The time had now come for the Russians to finish off the Germans there. But first they gave the doomed soldiers of the Sixth Army an opportunity to save their lives.

 

On the morning of January 8, 1943, three young Red Army officers, bearing a white flag, entered the German lines on the northern perimeter of Stalingrad and presented General Paulus with an ultimatum from General Rokossovski, commander of the Soviet forces on the Don front. After reminding him that his army was cut off and could not be relieved or kept supplied from the air, the note said:

 

[quote]The situation of your troops is desperate. They are suffering from hunger, sickness and cold. The cruel Russian winter has scarcely yet begun. Hard frosts, cold winds and blizzards still lie ahead. Your soldiers are unprovided with winter clothing and are living in appalling sanitary conditions ... Your situation is hopeless, and any further resistance senseless.

 

In view of [this] and in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, we propose that you accept the following terms of surrender ...[/quote]

 

They were honorable terms. All prisoners would be given "normal rations." The wounded, sick and frostbitten would receive medical treatment. All prisoners could retain their badges of rank, decorations and personal belongings. Paulus was given twenty-four hours to reply.

 

He immediately radioed the text of the ultimatum to Hitler and asked for freedom of action. His request was curtly dismissed by the Supreme warlord. Twenty-four hours after the expiration of the time limit on the demand for surrender, on the morning of January 10, the Russians opened the last phase of the Battle of Stalin grad with an artillery bombardment from five thousand guns.

 

The fighting was bitter and bloody. Both sides fought with incredible bravery and recklessness over the frozen wasteland of the city's rubble -- but not for long. Within six days the German pocket had been reduced by half, to an area fifteen miles long and nine miles deep at its widest. By January 24 it had been split in two and the last small emergency airstrip lost. The planes which had brought in some supplies, especially medicines for the sick and wounded, and which had flown out 29,000 hospital cases, could no longer land.

 

Once more the Russians gave their courageous enemy a chance to surrender. Soviet emissaries arrived at the German lines on January 24 with a new offer. Again Paulus, tom between his duty to obey the mad Fuehrer and his obligation to save his own surviving troops from annihilation, appealed to Hitler.

 

[quote]Troops without ammunition [he radioed on the twenty-fourth] or food Effective command no longer possible ... 18,000 wounded without any supplies or dressings or drugs ... Further defense senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops.[/quote]

 

Hitler's answer has been preserved.

 

[quote]Surrender is forbidden. Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and the last round and by their heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution toward the establishment of a defensive front and the salvation of the Western world.[/quote]

 

The Western world! It was a bitter pill for the men of the Sixth Army who had fought against that world in France and Flanders but a short time ago.

 

Further resistance was not only senseless and futile but impossible, and as the month of January 1943 approached its end the epic battle wore itself out, expiring like the flame of an expended candle which sputters and dies. By January 28 what was left of a once great army was split into three small pockets, in the southern one of which General Paulus had his headquarters in the cellar of the ruins of the once thriving Univermag department store. According to one eyewitness the commander in chief sat on his camp bed in a darkened corner in a state of near collapse.

 

He was scarcely in the mood, nor were his soldiers, to appreciate the flood of congratulatory radiograms that now began to pour in. Goering, who had whiled away a good part of the winter in sunny Italy, strutting about in his great fur coat and fingering his jewels, sent a radio message on January 28.

 

[quote]The fight put up by the Sixth Army will go down in history, and future generations will speak proudly of a Langemarck of daredeviltry, an Alcazar of tenacity, a Narvik of courage and a Stalingrad of self-sacrifice.[/quote]

 

Nor were they cheered when on the last evening, January 30, 1943, the tenth anniversary of the Nazis' coming to power, they listened to the fat Reich Marshal's bombastic broadcast.

 

[quote]A thousand years hence Germans will speak of this battle [of Stalingrad] with reverence and awe, and will remember that in spite of everything Germany's ultimate victory was decided there ... In years to come it will be said of the heroic battle on the Volga: When you come to Germany, say that you have seen us lying at Stalingrad , as our honor and our leaders ordained that we should, for the greater glory of Germany.[/quote]

 

The glory and the horrible agony of the Sixth Army had now come to an end. On January 30, Paulus radioed Hitler: "Final collapse cannot be delayed more than twenty-four hours."

 

This signal prompted the Supreme Commander to shower a series of promotions on the doomed officers in Stalingrad, apparently in the hope that such honors would strengthen their resolve to die gloriously at their bloody posts. "There is no record in military history of a German Field Marshal being taken prisoner," Hitler remarked to Jodi, and thereupon conferred on Paulus, by radio, the coveted marshal's baton. Some 117 other officers were jumped up a grade. It was a macabre gesture.

 

The end itself was anticlimactic. Late on the last day of January Paulus got off his final message to headquarters.

 

[quote]The Sixth Army, true to their oath and conscious of the lofty importance of their mission, have held their position to the last man and the last round for Fuehrer and Fatherland unto the end.[/quote]

 

At 7:45 P.M. the radio operator at Sixth Army headquarters sent a last message on his own: "The Russians are at the door of our bunker. We are destroying our equipment." He added the letters "CL" -- the international wireless code signifying "This station will no longer transmit."

 

There was no last-minute fighting at headquarters. Paulus and his staff did not hold out to the last man. A squad of Russians led by a junior officer peered into the commander in chief's darkened hole in the cellar. The Russians demanded surrender and the Sixth Army's chief of staff, General Schmidt, accepted. Paulus sat dejected on his camp bed. When Schmidt addressed him -- "May I ask the Field Marshal if there is anything more to be said?" -- Paulus was too weary to answer.

 

Farther north a small German pocket, containing all that was left of two panzer and four infantry divisions, still held out in the ruins of a tractor factory. On the night of February 1 it received a message from Hitler's headquarters.

 

[quote]The German people expect you to do your duty exactly as did the troops holding the southern fortress. Every day and every hour that you continue to fight facilitates the building of a new front.[/quote]

 

Just before noon on February 2, this group surrendered after a last message to the Supreme Commander: "... Have fought to the last man against vastly superior forces. Long live Germany!"

 

Silence at last settled on the snow-covered, blood-spattered shambles of the battlefield. At 2: 46 P.M. on February 2 a German reconnaissance plane flew high over the city and radioed back: "No sign of any fighting at Stalingrad."

 

By that time 91,000 German soldiers, including twenty-four generals, half-starved, frostbitten, many of them wounded, all of them dazed and broken, were hobbling over the ice and snow, clutching their blood-caked blankets over their heads against the 24-degrees-below-zero cold toward the dreary, frozen prisoner-of-war camps of Siberia. Except for some 20,000 Rumanians and the 29,000 wounded who had been evacuated by air they were all that was left of a conquering army that had numbered 285,000 men two months before. The rest had been slaughtered. And of those 91,000 Germans who began the weary march into captivity that winter day, only 5,000 were destined ever to see the Fatherland again. [xxiv]

 

Meanwhile back in the well-heated headquarters in East Prussia the Nazi warlord, whose stubbornness and stupidity were responsible for this disaster, berated his generals at Stalingrad for not knowing how and when to die. The records of a conference held by Hitler at OKW with his generals on February 1 survive and shed enlightenment on the nature of the German dictator at this trying period in his life and that of his Army and country.

 

[quote]They have surrendered there -- formally and absolutely. Otherwise they would have closed ranks, formed a hedgehog, and shot themselves with their last bullet ... The man [Paulus] should have shot himself just as the old commanders who threw themselves on their swords when they saw that the cause was lost ... Even Varus gave his slave the order: "Now kill me!"[/quote]

 

Hitler's venom toward Paulus for deciding to live became more poisonous as he ranted on.

 

[quote]You have to imagine: he'll be brought to Moscow -- and imagine that rattrap there. There he will sign anything. He'll make confessions, make proclamations -- you'll see. They will now walk down the slope of spiritual bankruptcy to its lowest depths ... You'll see -- it won't be a week before Seydlitz and Schmidt and even Paulus are talking over the radio [xxv] ... They are going to be put into the Liublanka, and there the rats will eat them. How can one be so cowardly? I don't understand it ...

 

What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the Nation. But how can anyone be afraid of this moment of death, with which he can free himself from this misery, if his duty doesn't chain him to this Vale of Tears. Na!

 

... So many people have to die, and then a man like that besmirches the heroism of so many others at the last minute. He could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow! ...

 

What hurts me most, personally, is that I still promoted him to field marshal. I wanted to give him this final satisfaction. That's the last field marshal I shall appoint in this war. You mustn't count your chickens before they're hatched. [27][/quote]

 

There followed a brief exchange between Hitler and General Zeitzler on how to break the news of the surrender to the German people. On February 3, three days after the act, OKW issued a special communique:

 

[quote]The battle of Stalingrad has ended. True to their oath to fight to the last breath, the Sixth Army under the exemplary leadership of Field Marshal Paulus has been overcome by the superiority of the enemy and by the unfavorable circumstances confronting our forces.[/quote]

 

The reading of the communique over the German radio was preceded by the roll of muffled drums and followed by the playing of the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Hitler proclaimed four days of national mourning. All theaters, movies and variety halls were closed until it was over.

 

Stalingrad, wrote Walter Goerlitz, the German historian, in his work on the General Staff, "was a second Jena and was certainly the greatest defeat that a German army had ever undergone." [28]

 

But it was more than that. Coupled with El Alamein and the British-American landings in North Africa it marked the great turning point in World War II. The high tide of Nazi conquest which had rolled over most of Europe to the frontier of Asia on the Volga and in Africa almost to the Nile had now begun to ebb and it would never flow back again. The time of the great Nazi blitz offensives, with thousands of tanks and planes spreading terror in the ranks of the enemy armies and cutting them to pieces, had come to an end. There would be, to be sure, desperate local thrusts -- at Kharkov in the spring of 1943, in the Ardennes at Christmas time in 1944 -- but they formed part of a defensive struggle which the Germans were to carry out with great tenacity and valor during the next two -- and last -- years of the war. The initiative had passed from Hitler's hands, never to return. It was his enemies who seized it now, and held it. And not only on land but in the air. Already on the night of May 30, 1942, the British had carried out their first one-thousand-plane bombing of Cologne, and more followed on other cities during the eventful summer. For the first time the civilian German people, like the German soldiers at Stalingrad and El Alamein, were to experience the horrors which their armed forces had inflicted on others up to now.

 

And finally, in the snows of Stalingrad and in the burning sands of the North African desert, a great and terrible Nazi dream was destroyed. Not only was the Third Reich doomed by the disasters to Paulus and Rommel but also the gruesome and grotesque so-called New Order which Hitler and his S.S. thugs had been busy setting up in the conquered lands. Before we turn to the final chapter, the fall of the Third Reich, it might be well to pause and see what this New Order was like -- in theory and in barbarous practice -- and what this ancient and civilized continent of Europe barely escaped after a brief nightmare of experiencing its first horrors. It must necessarily be for this book, as it was for the good Europeans who lived through it, or were massacred before it ended, the darkest chapter of all in the history of the Third Reich.

 

_______________

 

[b]Notes:[/b]

 

i. Among those retired, it will be recalled, were Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the Army, and Field Marshals von Rundstedt and von Bock, who led the southern and central army groups, respectively, and General Guderian, the genius of the panzer corps. The commander of the army group in the north, Field Marshal von Leeb, soon followed, being relieved of his post on January 18, 1942. The day before, Field Marshal von Reichenau, who had taken over Rundstedt's command, died of a stroke. General Udet of the Luftwaffe shot himself to death on November 17, 1941. Moreover, some thirty-five corps and divisional commanders were replaced during the winter retreat.

 

This, of course, was only a beginning. Field Marshal von Manstein summed up at Nuremberg what happened to the generals when they started losing battles or finally got up enough courage to oppose Hitler. "Of seventeen field marshals," he told the tribunal, "ten were sent home during the war and three lost their lives as a result of July 20, 1944 [the plot against Hitler -- W.L.S.]. Only one field marshal managed to get through the war and keep his position. Of thirty-six full generals [Generalobersten] eighteen were sent home, and five died as a result of July 20 or were dishonorably discharged. Only three full generals survived the war in their positions." [1]

 

 

ii. Lehndorff was executed by the Nazis on September 4, 1944.

 

iii. The Prussian King often complained about this malady. which he found hampered  his mental facilities as well as his physical activities.

 

iv. Prince Wilhelm, the oldest son, had died of battle wounds in France on May 26,  1940.

 

 

 

v. Jens Peter Jessen, a professor of economics at the University of Berlin, was one of the brains of the circle. He had become an ardent Nazi during the period between 1931 and 1933 and was one of the few genuine intellectuals in the party. He was quickly disillusioned after 1933 and soon became a fanatical anti-Nazi. Arrested for complicity in the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler, he was executed at the Ploetzensee prison in Berlin in November of that year.

 

 

vi. Goebbels had seen Hitler a month before at headquarters and expressed shock in  his diary at his ailing. "I noted that he has already become quite gray ... He  told me he has had to fight off severe attacks of giddiness ... The Fuehrer this  time truly worries me." He had, Goebbels added, a "physical revulsion against  frost and snow ... What worries and torments -- the Fuehrer most is that the country  is still covered with snow ... " (The Goebbels Diaries, pp. 131-37.)

 

vii. In a savage series of battles with the British in November and December 1941,  Rommel's forces had been driven back clear across Cyrenaica to the El Agheila  line at its western borders. But bounding back with his customary resilience in  January 1942, Rommel recaptured half of the ground lost, in a swift seventeen-day  campaign which brought him back to El Gazala, from where the new drive of the  end of May 1942 began.

 

 

viii. Hitler's naming Rommel a field marshal the day after the capture of Tobruk caused Mussolini "much pain" because, as Ciano noted, it accentuated "the German character of the battle." The Duce left immediately for Libya to grab some honors for himself, believing that he could enter Alexandria, Ciano says, "in fifteen days." On July 2 he contacted Hitler by wire about "the question of the future political government of Egypt," proposing Rommel as the military commander and an Italian as "civilian delegate." Hitler replied that he did not consider the matter "urgent." (Ciano Diaries. pp. 502-04.)

 

"Mussolini was waiting impatiently in Derna [behind the front]," General Fritz Bayerlein, chief of staff to Rommel, later recalled, "for the day when he might take the salute at a parade of Axis tanks beneath tile shadow of tile Pyramids." (The Fatal Decisions, ed. Freidin and Richardson, p. 103.)

 

 

ix. According to General Bayerlein's postwar testimony. He probably exaggerated  his losses. Allied intelligence gave Rommel 125 tanks.

 

x. This had taken place on February 11-12, 1942, and had caught the British by  surprise. Only weak naval and aircraft forces were rounded up in time to attack  the German fleet and they inflicted little damage. "Vice-Admiral Ciliax [who led  the dash]," commented the Times of London, "has succeeded where the Duke of  Medina Sidonia failed ... Nothing more mortifying to the pride of sea power has  happened in Home Waters since the 17th Century."

 

xi. Kleist confirmed this to Liddell Hart: "The Fourth Panzer Army ... could  have taken Stalingrad without a fight at the end of July, but was diverted south to  help me in crossing the Don. I did not need its aid, and it merely congested the  roads I was using. When it turned north again a fortnight later the Russians had  gathered just sufficient forces at Stalin grad to check it." By that time Kleist needed  the additional tank force. "We could have reached our goal [the Grozny oil] if my  forces had not been drawn away ... to help the attack on Stalingrad," he added.  (Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk. pp. 169-71.)

 

xii. Halder relates that "quite by accident" he came across in the Ukraine about that  time a book about Stalin's defeat of General Denikin between the Don bend and  Stalingrad during the Russian Civil War. He says the situation then was very  similar to that of 1942 and that Stalin exploited "masterfully" Denikin's weak  defenses along the Don. "Hence," he adds, "came the changing of the name of the  city from 'Tsaritsyn' to 'Stalingrad.'"

 

 

xiii. The sacking of Halder was a loss not only to the Army but to historians of the Third Reich, for his invaluable diary ends on September 24, 1942. He was eventually arrested, placed in the concentration camp at Dachau along with such illustrious prisoners as Schuschnigg and Schacht and liberated by U.S. forces at Niederdorf, South Tyrol, on April 28, 1945. Since then, up to the time of writing, he has collaborated with the U.S. Army in a number of military historical studies of World War II. His generosity to this writer in answering queries and pointing out sources has already been noted.

 

xiv. The faithful and fanatically loyal General Jodi, Chief of Operations at OKW, also was in Hitler's doghouse at this time. He had opposed the sacking of Field Marshal List and General Halder and his defense of them sent Hitler into such a rage that for months he refused to shake hands with Jodl or dine with him or any other staff officer. Hitler was on the point of firing Jodl at the end of January 1943 and replacing him with General Paulus, but it was too late. Paulus, as we shall shortly see, was no longer available.

 

 

xv. Stumme, who was acting commander in the absence of Rommel, had died of a heart attack the first night of the British offensive while fleeing on foot over the desert from a British patrol that had almost captured him.

 

xvi. The next day, November 4 -- after telling Bayerlein, "Hitler's order is a piece of unparalleled madness. I can't go along with this any longer" -- General von Thoma donned a clean uniform, with the insignia of his rank and his decorations, stood by his burning tank until a British unit arrived, surrendered and in the evening dined with Montgomery at his headquarters mess.

 

 

xvii. Rommel's losses at El Alamein were 59,000 killed, wounded and captured, of  whom 34,000 were Germans, out of a total force of 96,000 men.

 

xviii. I learn from Hitler's captured daily calendar book that the celebration had been  moved from the old Buergerbraukeller, where the putsch had taken place, to a more  elegant beer hall in Munich, the Loewenbraukeller. The Buergerbraukeller, it will  be remembered, had been wrecked by a time bomb which had just missed killing the  Fuehrer on the night of November 8, 1939.

 

ix. General Giraud at that moment was arriving in Algiers. He had escaped from a German POW camp and settled in the south of France, where he was taken off by a British submarine on November 5 and brought to Gibraltar to confer with Eisenhower just before the landings.

 

xx. "During the night," Ciano wrote in his diary on November 9, "Ribbentrop telephoned. Either the Duce or I must go to Munich as soon as possible. Laval will also be there. I wake up the Duce. He is not very anxious to leave, especially since he is not feeling very well. I shall go."

 

 

xxi. It is only fair to point out that Hitler strongly suspected, not without reason, that  the French fleet might try to sail for Algeria and join the Allies. Despite his  treacherous dealings with the Germans and his violent hatred of the British, Admiral Darlan, who happened to be visiting an ailing son at Algiers, had been pressed into service by Eisenhower as French commander in North Africa not only because he seemed to be the only officer who could get the French Army and Navy to cease resisting the Anglo-American landings but also in the hope that he could get the admiral commanding in Tunisia to oppose the German landings there and also induce the French fleet in Toulon to make a dash for North Africa. The hopes proved vain, although Darlan tried. To his message ordering Admiral de Laborde to bring the fleet over from Toulon he received an answer in one expressive -- if indelicate -- word: "Merde." (See the Proces du M. Petain.)

 

xxii. Some 125,000 Germans, according to General Eisenhower, out of a total of 240,000 Axis troops, the rest being Italian. This number includes only those who surrendered during the last week of the campaign -- May 5 to 12, 1943. (Crusade in Europe, p. 156.)

 

 

xxiii. In his postwar memoirs, Field Marshal von Manstein says that on December 19,  in disobedience to Hitler's orders, he actually directed the Sixth Army to begin to  break out of Stalingrad to the southwest and make a junction with the Fourth  Panzer Army. He publishes the text of the directive. But it contained certain  reservations and Paulus, who still was under orders from Hitler not to break out,  must have been greatly confused by it. "This," declares Manstein, "was our one  and only chance of saving the Sixth Army." (Manstein. Lost Victories, pp. 336-41,  562-63.)

 

xxiv. According to the figure given by the Bonn government in 1958. Many of the prisoners died during an epidemic of typhus in the following spring.

 

xxv. Hitler was correct in his forecast, except for the timing. By July of the following summer Paulus and Seydlitz, who became the leaders of the so-called National Committee of Free Germany, did take to the air over the Moscow radio to urge the Army to eliminate Hitler.

 

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