[b]Book Six: THE FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

 

 

30. THE CONQUEST OF GERMANY[/b]

 

 

THE WAR CAME HOME to Germany.

 

 

Scarcely had Hitler recovered from the shock of the July 20 bombing when he was faced with the loss of France and Belgium and of the great conquests in the East. Enemy troops in overwhelming numbers were converging on the Reich.

 

By the middle of August 1944, the Russian summer offensives, beginning June 10 and unrolling one after another, had brought the Red Army to the border of East Prussia, bottled up fifty German divisions in the Baltic region, penetrated to Vyborg in Finland, destroyed Army Group Center and brought an advance on this front of four hundred miles in six weeks to the Vistula opposite Warsaw, while in the south a new attack which began on August 20 resulted in the conquest of Rumania by the end of the month and with it the Ploesti oil fields, the only major source of natural oil for the German armies. On August 26 Bulgaria formally withdrew from the war and the Germans began to hastily clear out of that country. In September Finland gave up and turned on the German troops which refused to evacuate its territory.

 

In the West, France was liberated quickly. In General Patton, the commander of the newly formed U.S. Third Army, the Americans had found a tank general with the dash and flair of Rommel in Africa. After the capture of Avranches on July 30, he had left Brittany to wither on the vine and begun a great sweep around the German armies in Normandy, moving southeast to Orleans on the Loire and then due east toward the Seine south of Paris. By August 23 the Seine was reached southeast and northwest of the capital, and two days later the great city, the glory of France, was liberated after four years of German occupation when General Jacques Leclerc's French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4th Infantry Division broke into it and found that French resistance units were largely in control. They also found the Seine bridges, many of them works of art, intact. [i]

 

The remnants of the German armies in France were now in full retreat. Montgomery, the victor over Rommel in North Africa, who on September I was made a field marshal, drove his Canadian First Army and British Second Army two hundred miles in four days -- from the lower Seine past the storied battle sites of 1914-18 and 1940 into Belgium. Brussels fell to him on September 3 and Antwerp the next day. So swift was the advance that the Germans did not have time to destroy the harbor facilities at Antwerp. This was a great stroke of fortune for the Allies, for this port, as soon as its approaches were cleared, was destined to become the principal supply base of the Anglo-American armies.

 

Farther south of the British-Canadian forces, the U.S. First Army, under General Courtney H. Hodges, advanced with equal speed into southeastern Belgium, reaching the Meuse River, from which the devastating German breakthrough had begun in May 1940, and capturing the fortresses of Namur and Liege, where the Germans had no time to organize a defense. Farther south still, Patton's Third Army had taken Verdun, surrounded Metz, reached the Moselle River and linked up at the Belfort Gap with the Franco-American Seventh Army, which under the command of General Alexander Patch had landed on the Riviera in southern France on August 15 and pushed rapidly up the Rhone Valley.

 

By the end of August the German armies in the West had lost 500,000 men, half of them as prisoners, and almost all of their tanks, artillery and trucks. There was very little left to defend the Fatherland. The much-publicized Siegfried Line was virtually unmanned and without guns. Most of the German generals in the West believed that the end had come. "There were no longer any ground forces in existence, to say nothing of air forces," says Speidel. [1] "As far as I was concerned," Rundstedt, who was reinstated on September 4 as Commander in Chief in the West, told Allied interrogators after the war, "the war was ended in September." [2]

 

But not for Adolf Hitler. On the last day of August he lectured some of his generals at headquarters, attempting to inject new iron into their veins and at the same time hold out hope.

 

[quote]If necessary we'll fight on the Rhine. It doesn't make any difference. Under all circumstances we will continue this battle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our damned enemies gets too tired to fight any more. We'll tight until we get a peace which secures the life of the German nation for the next fifty or a hundred years and which, above all, does not besmirch our honor a second time, as happened in 1918 ... 1 live only for the purpose of leading this fight because I know that if there is not an iron will behind it, this battle cannot be won.[/quote]

 

After excoriating the General Staff for its lack of iron will, Hitler revealed to his generals some of the reasons for his stubborn hopes.

 

[quote]The time will come when the tension between the Allies will become so great that the break will occur. All the coalitions in history have disintegrated sooner or later. The only thing is to wait for the right moment, no matter how hard it is. [3][/quote]

 

Goebbels was assigned the task of organizing "total mobilization," and Himmler, the new chief of the Replacement Army, went to work to raise twenty-five Volksgrenadier divisions for the defense of the West. Despite all the plans and all the talk in Nazi Germany concerning "total war" the resources of the country had been far from "totally" organized. At Hitler's insistence the production of civilian goods had been maintained at a surprisingly large figure throughout the war -- ostensibly to keep up morale. And he had balked at carrying out the prewar plans to mobilize women for work in the factories. "The sacrifice of our most cherished ideals is too great a price," he said in March 1943 when Speer wanted to draft women for industry. [4] Nazi ideology had taught that the place of the German woman was in the home and not in the factory -- and in the home she stayed. In the first four years of the war, when in Great Britain two and a quarter million women had been placed in war production, only 182,000 women were similarly employed in Germany. The number of peacetime domestic servants in Germany remained unchanged at a million and a half during the war. [5][/quote]

 

Now with the enemy at the gates, the Nazi leaders bestirred themselves. Boys between fifteen and eighteen and men between fifty and sixty were called to the colors. Universities and high schools, offices and factories, were combed for recruits. In September and October 1944 a half-million men were found for the Army. But no provision was made to replace them in the factories and offices by women, and Albert Speer, the Minister for Armament and War Production, protested to Hitler that the drafting of skilled workers was seriously affecting the output of arms.

 

Not since Napoleonic times had German soldiers been forced to defend the sacred soil of the Fatherland. All the subsequent wars, Prussia's and Germany's, had been fought on -- and had devastated -- the soil of other peoples. A shower of exhortations fell upon the hard-pressed troops.

 

[quote]SOLDIERS OF THE WESTERN FRONT!

 

... I expect you to defend Germany's sacred soil ... to the very last! ..,

 

Heil the Fuehrer!

 

VON RUNDSTEDT,

Field Marshal[/quote]

 

[quote]SOLDIERS OF THE ARMY GROUP!

 

None of us gives up a square foot of German soil while still alive ...

 

Whoever retreats without giving battle is a traitor to his people ...

 

Soldiers! Our homeland, the lives of our wives and children are at stake!

 

Our Fuehrer and our loved ones have confidence in their soldiers! ...

 

Long live our Germany and our beloved Fuehrer!

 

MODEL, Field Marshal[/quote]

 

Nevertheless, with the roof caving in, there were an increasing number of desertions and Himmler took drastic action to discourage them. On September 10 he posted an order:

 

[quote]Certain unreliable elements seem to believe that the war will be over for them as soon as they surrender to the enemy....

 

Every deserter ... will find his just punishment. Furthermore, his ignominious behavior will entail the most severe consequences for his family ... They will be summarily shot.[/quote]

 

A Colonel Hoffmann-Schonforn of the 18th Grenadier Division proclaimed to his unit:

 

[quote]Traitors from our ranks have deserted to the enemy ... These bastards have given away important military secrets ... Deceitful Jewish mudslingers taunt you with their pamphlets and try to entice you into becoming bastards also. Let them spew their poison! ... As for the contemptible traitors who have forgotten their honor -- their families will have to atone for their treason. [6][/quote]

 

In September what the skeptical German generals called a "miracle" occurred. To Speidel it was "a German variation of the 'miracle of the Marne' for the French in 1914. The furious advance of the Allies suddenly subsided."

 

Why it subsided has been a subject of dispute to this day among thc Allied commanders from General Eisenhower on down; to the German generals it was incomprehensible. By the second week in September American units had reached the German border before Aachen and on the Moselle. Germany lay open to the Allied armies. Early in September Montgomery had urged Eisenhower to allot all of his supplies and reserves to the British and Canadian armies and the U.S. Ninth and First armies for a bold offensive in the north under his command that would penetrate quickly into the Ruhr, deprive the Germans of their main arsenal, open the road to Berlin and end the war. Eisenhower rejected the proposal. [ii] He wanted to advance toward the Rhine on a "broad front."

 

But his armies had outrun their supplies. Every ton of gasoline and ammunition had to be brought in over the beaches in Normandy or through the single port of Cherbourg and transported by truck three to four hundred miles to the advancing front. By the second week of September, Eisenhower's armies were bogging down for lack of supplies. They were also running into unexpected German resistance. By concentrating his available forces at two critical points Rundstedt was able, by the middle of September, to halt at least temporarily Patton's Third Army on the Moselle and Hodges' First Army in front of Aachen.

 

Eisenhower, prodded by Montgomery, had then agreed to a bold plan to seize a bridgehead over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem and thus obtain a position from which the Siegfried Line could be outflanked on the north. The objective fell far short of Montgomery's dream of racing into the Ruhr and thence to Berlin, but it promised a strategic base for a later try. The attack, led by a massive drop of two American and one British airborne divisions, flying in from bases in Britain, began on September 17, but due to bad weather, to the circumstance that the airborne troops landed right in the midst of two S.S. panzer divisions they did not know were there. and to the lack of adequate land forces pushing up from the south, it failed, and after ten days of savage fighting the Allies withdrew from Arnhem. The British 1st Airborne Division, which had been dropped near the city, lost all but 2, 163 of some 9,000 men. To Eisenhower this setback "was ample evidence that much bitter campaigning was to come." [7]

 

Yet he hardly expected the Germans to recover sufficiently to launch the stunning surprise that burst on the Western Front as Christmas approached that winter.

 

[b]HITLER'S LAST DESPERATE GAMBLE[/b]

 

On the evening of December 12, 1944, a host of German generals, the senior field commanders on the Western front, were called to Rundstedt's headquarters, stripped of their side arms and briefcases, packed into a bus. driven about the dark, snowy countryside for half an hour to make them lose their bearings, and finally deposited at the entrance to a deep underground bunker which turned out to be Hitler's headquarters at Ziegenberg near Frankfurt. There they learned for the first time what only a handful of the top staff officers and army commanders had known for more than a month: the Fuehrer was to launch in four days a mighty offensive in the West.

 

The idea had been simmering in his mind since mid-September, when Eisenhower's armies had been brought to a halt on the German frontier west of the Rhine. Although the U.S. Ninth, First and Third armies tried to resume the offensive in October with the objective of "slugging" their way to the Rhine, as Eisenhower put it, the going had been hard and slow. Aachen, the old imperial capital, the seat of Charlemagne, surrendered to First Army on October 24 after a bitter battle -- the first German city to fall into Allied hands -- but the Americans had been unable to achieve a breakthrough to the Rhine. Still, all along the front they -- and the British and Canadians to the north -- were wearing down the weakening defenders in battles of attrition. Hitler realized that by remaining on the defensive he was merely postponing the hour of reckoning. In his feverish mind there emerged a bold and imaginative plan to recapture the initiative, strike a blow that would split the U.S. Third and First armies, penetrate to Antwerp and deprive Eisenhower of his main port of supply, and roll up the British and Canadian armies along the Belgian-Dutch border. Such an offensive, he thought, would not only administer a crushing defeat on the Anglo-American armies and thus free the threat to Germany's western border, but would then enable him to turn against the Russians, who, though still advancing in the Balkans, had been halted on the Vistula in Poland and in East Prussia since October. The offensive would strike swiftly through the Ardennes, where the great breakthrough in 1940 had begun, and which German intelligence knew to be defended only by four weak American infantry divisions.

 

It was a daring plan. It would, Hitler believed, almost certainly catch the Allies by surprise and overcome them before they had a chance to recover.  [iii] But there was one drawback. The German Army was not only weaker than it had been in 1940, especially in the air, but it was up against a much more resourceful and far better armed enemy. The German generals lost no time in bringing this to the Fuehrer's attention.

 

"When I received this plan early in November," Rundstedt later declared, "I was staggered. Hitler had not troubled to consult me ... It was obvious to me that the available forces were far too small for such an extremely ambitious plan." Realizing, however, that it was useless to argue with Hitler, Rundstedt and Model decided to propose an alternative plan which might satisfy the warlord's insistence on an offensive but which would be limited to pinching off the American salient around Aachen. [8] The German Commander in Chief in the West, however, had so little hope of changing the Fuehrer's mind that he declined to attend a military conference in Berlin on December 2, sending his chief of staff, Blumentritt, instead. But Blumentritt, Field Marshal Model, General Hasso von Manteuffel and S.S. General Sepp Dietrich (the last two were to command two great panzer armies for the breakthrough), who attended the meeting, were unable to shake Hitler's resolve. All through the late autumn he had been scraping the barrel in Germany for this last desperate gamble. In November he had managed to collect nearly 1,500 new or rebuilt tanks and assault guns, and in December another 1,000. He had assembled some twenty-eight divisions, including nine panzer divisions, for the Ardennes breakthrough, with another six divisions allotted for an attack in Alsace to follow the main offensive. Goering promised 3,000 fighter planes.

 

This was a considerable force, though far weaker than Rundstedt's army group on the same front in 1940. But raising it had meant denying the German forces in the East the reinforcements their commanders thought absolutely necessary to repel the expected Russian winter attack in January. When Guderian, the Chief of the General Staff, who was responsible for the Eastern front, protested Hitler gave him a stern lecture.

 

[quote]"There's no need for you to try to teach me. I've been commanding the German Army in the field for five years and during that time I've had more practical experience than any gentleman of the General Staff could ever hope to have. I've studied Clausewitz and Moltke and read all the Schlieffen papers. I'm more in the picture than you are!"[/quote]

 

When Guderian protested that the Russians were about to attack in overwhelming strength and cited figures of the Soviet build-up, Hitler shouted, "It's the greatest bluff since Gengis Khan! Who's responsible for producing all this rubbish?" [9]

 

The generals who assembled at the Fuehrer's headquarters at Ziegenberg on the evening of December 12, minus their briefcases and revolvers, found the Nazi warlord, as Manteuffel later recalled, "a stooped figure with a pale and puffy face, hunched in his chair, his hands trembling, his left arm subject to a violent twitching which he did his best to conceal. A sick man ... When he walked he dragged one leg behind him." [10]

 

Hitler's spirits, however, were as fiery as ever. The generals had expected to be briefed on the over-all military picture of the offensive, but the warlord treated them instead to a political and historical harangue.

 

[quote]Never in history was there a coalition like that of our enemies, composed of such heterogeneous elements with such divergent aims ... Ultracapitalist states on the one hand; ultra-Marxist states on the other. On the one hand a dying Empire, Britain; on the other, a colony bent upon inheritance, the United States ...

 

Each of the partners went into this coalition with the hope of realizing his political ambitions ... America tries to become England's heir; Russia tries to gain the Balkans ... England tries to hold her possessions ... in the Mediterranean ... Even now these states are at loggerheads, and he who, like a spider sitting in the middle of his web, can watch developments observes how these antagonisms grow stronger and stronger from hour to hour.

 

If now we can deliver a few more blows, then at any moment this artificially bolstered common front may suddenly collapse with a gigantic clap of thunder ... provided always that there is no weakening on the part of Germany.

 

It is essential to deprive the enemy of his belief that victory is certain ... Wars are finally decided by one side or the other recognizing that they cannot be won. We must allow no moment to pass without showing the enemy that, whatever he does, he can never reckon on [our] capitulation. Never! Never! [11][/quote]

 

With this pep talk resounding in their ears the generals dispersed, none of them -- or at least so they said afterward -- believing that the Ardennes blow would succeed but determined to carry out their orders to the best of their ability.

 

This they did. The night of December 15 was dark and frosty and a thick mist hung over the rugged snow-laden hills of the Ardennes Forest as the Germans moved up to their assault positions on a seventy-mile front between Monschau, south of Aachen, and Echternach, northwest of Trier. Their meteorologists had predicted several days of such weather, during which it was calculated that the Allied air forces would be grounded and the German supply columns spared the inferno of Normandy. For five days Hitler's luck with the weather held and the Germans, catching the Allied High Command completely by surprise, scored several break-throughs after their initial penetrations on the morning of December 16.

 

When a German armored group reached Stavelot on the night of December 17, it was only eight miles from the U.S. First Army headquarters at Spa, which was being hurriedly evacuated. More important, it was only a mile from a huge American supply dump containing three million gallons of gasoline. Had this dump been captured the German armored divisions, which were continually being slowed down because of the delay in bringing up gasoline, of which the Germans were woefully short, might have gone farther and faster than they did. Skorzeny's so-called Panzer Brigade 150, its men outfitted in American uniforms and driving captured American tanks, trucks and jeeps, got farthest. Some forty jeeploads slipped through the crumbling front, a few of them getting as far as the River Meuse. [iv]

 

Yet stubborn makeshift resistance by scattered units of the U.S. First Army after the four weak divisions in the Ardennes had been overrun slowed up the German drive and the firm stand on the northern and southern shoulders of the breakthrough at Monschau and Bastogne, respectively, channeled Hitler's forces through a narrow salient. The American defense of Bastogne sealed their fate.

 

This road junction was the key to the defense of the Ardennes and of the River Meuse behind. If strongly held it not only would block the main roads along which Manteuffel's Fifth Panzer Army was driving for the Meuse River at Dinant but would tie up considerable German forces earmarked for the push beyond. By the morning of December 18, Manteuffel's armored spearheads were only fifteen miles from the town and the only Americans in it belonged to a corps headquarters staff which was preparing to evacuate. However, on the evening of the seventeenth the 101st Airborne Division, which had been refitting at Reims, was ordered to proceed with all speed to Bastogne a hundred miles away. By driving its trucks with headlights on through the night it reached the town in twenty-four hours, just ahead of the Germans. It was a decisive race and the Germans had lost it. Although they encircled Bastogne, they had difficulty in getting their divisions around it to renew the drive toward the Meuse. And they had to leave strong forces behind to contain the road junction and to try to take it.

 

On December 22, General Heinrich von Luettwitz, commander of the German XLVIIth Armored Corps, sent a written note to General A. C. McAuliffe, commanding the 10Ist Airborne, demanding surrender of Bastogne. He received a one-word answer which became famous: "NUTS!"

 

The definite turning point in Hitler's Ardennes gamble came on the day before Christmas. A reconnaissance battalion of the German 2nd Panzer Division had reached the heights three miles east of the Meuse at Dinant the day before and had waited for gasoline for its tanks and some reinforcements before plunging down the slopes to the river. Neither the gasoline nor the reinforcements ever arrived. The U.S. 2nd Armored Division suddenly struck from the north. Already several divisions of Patton's Third Army were moving up from the south, their main objective being to relieve Bastogne. "On the evening of the twenty-fourth," Manteuffel later wrote, "it was clear that the high-water mark of our operation had been reached. We now knew that we would never reach our objective." The pressure on the northern and southern flanks of the deep and narrow German salient had become too great. And two days before Christmas the weather had finally cleared and the Anglo-American air forces had begun to have a field day with massive attacks on German supply lines and on the troops and tanks moving up the narrow, tortuous mountain roads. The Germans made another desperate attempt to capture Bastogne. All day Christmas, beginning at 3 A.M., they launched a series of attacks, but McAuliffe's defenders held. The next day an armored force of Patton's Third Army broke through from the south and relieved the town. For the Germans it now became a question of extricating their forces from the narrow corridor before they were cut off and annihilated.

 

But Hitler would not listen to any withdrawal being made. On the evening of December 28 he held a full-dress military conference. Instead of heeding the advice of Rundstedt and Manteuffel to pull out the German forces in the Bulge in time, he ordered the offensive to be resumed, Bastogne to be stormed and the push to the Meuse renewed. Moreover, he insisted on a new offensive being started immediately to the south in Alsace, where the American line had been thinned out by the sending of several of Patton's divisions north to the Ardennes. To the protests of the generals that they lacked sufficient forces either to continue the offensive in the Ardennes or to attack in Alsace he remained deaf.

 

[quote]Gentlemen, I have been in this business for eleven years, and ... I have never heard anybody report that everything was completely ready ... You are never entirely ready. That is plain.[/quote]

 

He talked on and on. [v] It must have been obvious to the generals long before he finished that their Commander in Chief had become blinded to reality and had lost himself in the clouds.

 

[quote]The question is ... whether Germany has the will to remain in existence or whether it will be destroyed ... The loss of this war will destroy the German people.[/quote]

 

There followed a long dissertation on the history of Rome and of Prussia in the Seven Years' War. Finally he returned to the immediate problems at hand. Although he admitted that the Ardennes offensive had not "resulted in the decisive success which might have been expected," he claimed that it had brought about "a transformation of the entire situation such as nobody would have believed possible a fortnight ago."

 

[quote]The enemy has had to abandon all his plans for attack ... He has had to throw in units that were fatigued. His operational plans have been completely upset. He is enormously criticized at home. It is a bad psychological moment for him. Already he has had to admit that there is no chance of the war being decided before August, perhaps not before the end of next year ...[/quote]

 

Was this last phrase an admission of ultimate defeat? Hitler quickly tried to correct any such impression.

 

[quote]I hasten to add, gentlemen, that ... you are not to conclude that even remotely I envisage the loss of this war ... I have never learned to know the word "capitulation" ... For me the situation today is nothing new. I have been in very much worse situations. I mention this only because I want you to understand why I pursue my aim with such fanaticism and why nothing can wear me down. As much as I may be tormented by worries and even physically shaken by them, nothing will make the slightest change in my decision to fight on till at last the scales tip to our side.[/quote]

 

Whereupon he appealed to the generals to support the new attacks "with all your fire."

 

[quote]We shall then ... smash the Americans completely ... Then we shall see what happens. I do not believe that in the long run the enemy will be able to resist forty-five German divisions ... We shall yet master fate![/quote]

 

It was too late. Germany lacked the military force to make good his words.

 

On New Year's Day Hitler threw eight German divisions into an attack in the Saar and followed it with a thrust from the bridgehead on the Upper Rhine by an army under the command of -- to the German generals this was a bad joke -- Heinrich Himmler. Neither drive got very far. Nor did an all-out assault on Bastogne beginning on January 3 by no less than two corps of nine divisions which led to the most severe fighting of the Ardennes campaign. By January 5 the Germans abandoned hope of taking this key town. They were now faced with being cut off by a British-American counteroffensive from the north which had begun on January 3. On January 8 Model, whose armies were in danger of being entrapped at Houffalize, northeast of Bastogne, finally received permission to withdraw. By January 16, just a month after the beginning of the offensive on which Hitler had staked his last reserves in men and guns and ammunition, the German forces were back to the line from which they had set out.

 

They had lost some 120,000 men, killed, wounded and missing, 600 tanks and assault guns, 1,600 planes and 6,000 vehicles. American losses were also severe -- 8,000 killed, 48,000 wounded, 21,000 captured or missing, and 733 tanks and tank destroyers. [vi] But the Americans could make good their losses; the Germans could not. They had shot their last bolt. This was the last major offensive of the German Army in World War II. Its failure not only made defeat inevitable in the West, it doomed the German armies in the East, where the effect of Hitler's throwing his last reserves into the Ardennes became immediately felt.

 

In his long lecture to the generals in the West three days after Christmas Hitler had been quite optimistic about the Russian front, where, though the Balkans was being lost, the German armies had held firmly on the Vistula in Poland and in East Prussia since October.

 

[quote]Unfortunately [Hitler said] because of the treachery of our dear allies we are forced to retire gradually ... Yet despite all this it has been possible on the whole to hold the Eastern front.[/quote]

 

But for how long? On Christmas Eve, after the Russians had surrounded Budapest, and again on New Year's morning Guderian had pleaded in vain with Hitler for reinforcements to meet the Russian threat in Hungary and to counter the Soviet offensive in Poland which he expected to begin the middle of January.

 

[quote]I pointed out [Guderian says] that the Ruhr had already been paralyzed by the Western Allies' bombing attacks... . on the other hand, I said, the industrial area of Upper Silesia could still work at full pressure, the center of the German armament industry was already in the East, and the loss of Upper Silesia must lead to our defeat in a very few weeks. All this was of no avail. I was rebuffed and I spent a grim and tragic Christmas Eve in those most unchristian surroundings.[/quote]

 

Nonetheless Guderian returned to Hitler's headquarters for a third time on January 9. He took with him his Chief of Intelligence in the East, General Gehlen, who with maps and diagrams tried to explain to the Fuehrer the precarious German position on the eve of the expected renewal of the Russian offensive in the north.

 

[quote]Hitler [Guderian says] completely lost his temper ... declaring the maps and diagrams to be "completely idiotic" and ordering that I have the man who had made them shut up in a lunatic asylum. I then lost my temper and said ... "If you want General Gehlen sent to a lunatic asylum then you had better have me certified as well."[/quote]

 

When Hitler argued that the Eastern front had "never before possessed such a strong reserve as now," Guderian retorted, "The Eastern front is like a house of cards. If the front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse." [12]

 

And that is what happened. On January 12, 1945, Konev's Russian army group broke out of its bridgehead at Baranov on the upper Vistula south of Warsaw and headed for Silesia. Farther north Zhukov's armies crossed the Vistula north and south of Warsaw, which fell on January 17. Farther north still, two Russian armies overran half of East Prussia and drove to the Gulf of Danzig.

 

This was the greatest Russian offensive of the war. Stalin was throwing in 180 divisions, a surprisingly large part of them armored, in Poland and East Prussia alone. There was no stopping them.

 

"By January 27 [only fifteen days after the Soviet drive began] the Russian tidal wave," says Guderian, "was rapidly assuming for us the proportions of a complete disaster." [13] By that date East and West Prussia were cut off from the Reich. Zhukov that very day crossed the Oder near Lueben after an advance of 220 miles in a fortnight, reaching German soil only 100 miles from Berlin. Most catastrophic of all, the Russians had overrun the Silesian industrial basin.

 

Albert Speer, in charge of armament production, drew up a memorandum to Hitler on January 30 -- the twelfth anniversary of Hitler's coming to power -- pointing out the significance of the loss of Silesia. "The war is lost," his report began, and he went on in his cool and objective manner to explain why. The Silesian mines, ever since the intensive bombing of the Ruhr, had supplied 60 per cent of Germany's coal. There was only two weeks' supply of coal for the German railways, power plants and factories. Henceforth, now that Silesia was lost, Speer could supply, he said, only one quarter of the coal and one sixth of the steel which Germany had been producing in 1944. [14] This augured disaster for 1945.

 

The Fuehrer, Guderian later related, glanced at Speer's report, read the first sentence and then ordered it filed away in his safe. He refused to see Speer alone, saying to Guderian:

 

[quote]" ... I refuse to see anyone alone any more ... [He] always has something unpleasant to say to me. I can't bear that." [15][/quote]

 

On the afternoon of January 27, the day Zhukov's troops crossed the Oder a hundred miles from Berlin, there was an interesting reaction at Hitler's headquarters, which had now been transferred to the Chancellery in Berlin, where it was to remain until the end. On the twenty-fifth the desperate Guderian had called on Ribbentrop and urged him to try to get an immediate armistice in the West so that what was left of the German armies could be concentrated in the East against the Russians. The Foreign Minister had quickly tattled to the Fuehrer, who that evening up braided his General Staff Chief and accused him of committing "high treason."

 

But two nights later, under the impact of the disaster in the East, Hitler, Goering and Jodl were in such a state that they thought it would not be necessary to ask the West for an armistice. They were sure the Western Allies would come running to them in their fear of the consequences of the Bolshevik victories. A fragment of the Fuehrer conference of January 27 has preserved part of the scene.

 

[quote]HITLER: Do you think the English are enthusiastic about all the Russian developments?

 

GOERING: They certainly didn't plan that we hold them off while the Russians conquer all of Germany ... They had not counted on our ... holding them off like madmen while the Russians drive deeper and deeper into Germany, and practically have all of Germany now ...

 

JODL: They have always regarded the Russians with suspicion.

 

GOERING: If this goes on we will get a telegram [from the English] in a few days. [16][/quote]

 

On such a slender thread the leaders of the Third Reich began to pin their last hopes. In the end these German architects of the Nazi-Soviet Pact against the West would reach a point where they could not understand why the British and Americans did not join them in repelling the Russian invaders.

 

[b]THE COLLAPSE OF THE GERMAN ARMIES[/b]

 

The end came quickly for the Third Reich in the spring of 1945.

 

The death throes began in March. By February, with the Ruhr largely in ruins and Upper Silesia lost, coal production was down to one fifth of what it had been the year before and very little of this could be moved because of the dislocation of rail and water transport by Anglo-American bombing. The Fuehrer conferences became dominated by talk of the coal shortage, Doenitz complaining that many of his ships had to lie idle because of lack of fuel and Speer explaining patiently that the power plants and armament factories were in a similar situation for the same reason. The loss of the Rumanian and Hungarian oil fields and the bombing of the synthetic-oil plants in Germany caused such an acute shortage of gasoline that a good part of the desperately needed fighter planes had to be grounded and were destroyed on the fields by Allied air attacks. Many panzer divisions could not move for lack of fuel for their tanks.

 

The hopes in the promised "miracle weapons," which had for a time sustained not only the masses of the people and the soldiers but even such hardheaded generals as Guderian, were finally abandoned. The launching sites for the V-1 flying bombs and the V-2 rockets directed against Britain were almost entirely lost when Eisenhower's forces reconquered the French and Belgian coasts, though a few remained in Holland. Nearly eight thousand of the two V bombs were hurled against Antwerp and other military targets after the British-American armies reached the German frontier, but the damage they did was negligible.

 

Hitler and Goering had counted on the new jet fighters driving the Allied air forces from the skies, and well they might have -- for the Germans succeeded in producing more than a thousand of them -- had the Anglo-American flyers, who lacked this plane, not taken successful counteraction. The conventional Allied fighter was no match for the German jet in the air, but few ever got off the ground. The refineries producing the special fuel for them were bombed and destroyed and the extended runways which had to be constructed for them were easily detected by Allied pilots, who destroyed the jets on the ground.

 

Grand Admiral Doenitz had promised the Fuehrer that the new electro-U-boats would provide a miracle at sea, once more wreaking havoc on the British-American lifelines in the North Atlantic. But by the middle of February 1945 only two of the 126 new craft commissioned had put to sea.

 

As for the German atom bomb project, which had given London and Washington much worry, it had made little progress due to Hitler's lack of interest in it and Himmler's practice of arresting the atom scientists for suspected disloyalty or pulling them off to work on some of his pet nonsensical "scientific" experiments which he deemed more important. Before the end of 1944 the American and British governments had learned, to their great relief, that the Germans would not have an atom bomb in this war. [vii]

 

On February 8 Eisenhower's armies, now eighty-five divisions strong, began to close in on the Rhine. They had expected that the Germans would fight only a delaying action and, conserving their strength, retire behind the formidable water barrier of the wide and swift-flowing river. Rundstedt counseled this. But here, as elsewhere throughout the years of his defeats, Hitler would not listen to a withdrawal. It would merely mean, he told Rundstedt, "moving the catastrophe from one place to another." So the German armies, at Hitler's insistence, stood and fought -- but not for long. By the end of the month the British and Americans had reached the Rhine at several places north of Duesseldorf, and a fortnight later they had firm possession of the left bank from the Moselle River northward. The Germans had lost another 350,000 men killed, wounded or captured (the prisoners numbered 293,000) and most of their arms and equipment.

 

Hitler was in a fine fury. He sacked Rundstedt for the last time on March 10, replacing him with Field Marshal Kesselring, who had held out so stubbornly and long in Italy. Already in February the Fuehrer, in a fit of rage, had considered denouncing the Geneva Convention in order, he said at a conference on the nineteenth, "to make the enemy realize that we are determined to fight for our existence with all the means at our disposal." He had been urged to take this step by Dr. Goebbels, the bloodthirsty noncombatant, who suggested that all captured airmen be shot summarily in reprisal for their terrible bombing of the German cities. When some of the officers present raised legal objections Hitler retorted angrily:

 

[quote]To hell with that! ... If I make it clear that I show no consideration for prisoners but that I treat enemy prisoners without any consideration for their rights, regardless of reprisals, then quite a few [Germans] will think twice before they desert. [17][/quote]

 

This was one of the first indications to his followers that Hitler, his mission as world conqueror having failed, was determined to go down, like Wotan at Valhalla, in a holocaust of blood -- not only the enemy's but that of his own people. At the close of the discussion he asked Admiral Doenitz "to consider the pros and cons of this step and to report as soon as possible."

 

Doenitz came back with rus answer on the following day and it was typical of the man.

 

[quote]The disadvantages would outweigh the advantages ... It would be better in any case to keep up outside appearances and carry out the measures believed necessary without announcing them beforehand. [18][/quote]

 

Hitler reluctantly agreed and while, as we have seen, [viii] there was no general massacre of captured flyers or of other prisoners of war (except the Russians) several were done to death and the civil population was incited to lynch Allied air crews who parachuted to the ground. One captive French general, Mesny, was deliberately murdered on the orders of Hitler, and a good many Allied POWs perished when they were forced to make long marches without food or water on roads strafed by British, American and Russian flyers as the Germans herded them toward the interior of the country to prevent them from being liberated by the advancing Allied armies.

 

Hitler's concern to make German soldiers "think twice before they desert" was not ungrounded. In the West the number of deserters, or at least of those who gave themselves up as quickly as possible in the wake of the British-American advances, became staggering. On February 12 Keitel issued an order "in the name of the Fuehrer" stating that any soldier "who deceitfully obtains leave papers, or who travels with false papers, will ... be punished by death." And on March 5 General Blaskowitz, commanding Army Group H in the West, issued this order:

 

[quote]All soldiers ... encountered away from their units ... and who announce they are stragglers looking for their units will be summarily tried and shot.[/quote]

 

On April 12 Himmler added his bit by decreeing that any commander who failed to hold a town or an important communications center "is punishable by death." The order was already being carried out in the case of the unfortunate commanders at one of the Rhine bridges.

 

On the early afternoon of March 7, a spearhead of the U.S. 9th Armored Division reached the heights above the town of Remagen, twenty-five miles down the Rhine from Koblenz. To the amazement of the American tank crews they saw that the Ludendorff railroad bridge across the river was still intact. They raced down the slopes to the water front. Engineers frantically cut every demolition wire they could find. A platoon of infantry raced across the bridge. As they were approaching the east bank a charge went off and then another. The bridge shook but held. Feeble German forces on the far shore were quickly driven back. Tanks sped over the span. By dusk the Americans had a strong bridgehead on the east bank of the Rhine. The last great natural barrier in Western Germany had been crossed. [ix]

 

A few days later, on the night of March 22, Patton's Third Army, after overrunning the Saar-Palatinate triangle in a brilliant operation carried out in conjunction with the U.S. Seventh and French First armies, made another crossing of the Rhine at Oppenheim, south of Mainz. By March 25 the Anglo-American armies were in possession of the entire west bank of the river and across it in two places with strong bridgeheads. In six weeks Hitler had lost more than one third of his forces in the West and most of the arms for half a million men.

 

At 2: 30 A.M. on March 24, he called a war conference at his headquarters in Berlin to consider what to do.

 

[quote]HITLER: I consider the second bridgehead at Oppenheim as the greatest danger.

 

HEWEL [Foreign Office representative]: The Rhine isn't so very wide there.

 

HITLER: A good two hundred fifty meters. On a river barrier only one man has to be asleep and a terrible misfortune can happen.[/quote]

 

The Supreme Commander wanted to know if there was "no brigade or something like that which could be sent there." An adjutant answered:

 

[quote]At the present time no unit is available to be sent to Oppenheim. There are only five tank destroyers in the camp at Senne, which will be ready today or tomorrow. They could be put into the battle in the next few days ... [19][/quote]

 

In the next few days! At that very moment Patton had a bridgehead at Oppenheim seven miles wide and six miles deep and his tanks were heading eastward toward Frankfurt. It is a measure of the plight of the once mighty German Army whose vaunted panzer corps had raced through Europe in the earlier years that at this moment of crisis the Supreme Commander should be concerned with scraping up five broken-down tank destroyers which could only be "put into battle in the next few days" to stem the advance of a powerful enemy armored army. [x]

 

With the Americans across the Rhine by the third week of March and a mighty Allied army of British, Canadians and Americans under Montgomery poised to cross the Lower Rhine and head both into the North German plain and into the Ruhr -- which they did, beginning on the night of March 23 -- Hitler's vengeance turned from the advancing enemy to his own people. They had sustained him through the greatest victories in German history. Now in the winter of defeat he thought them no longer worthy of his greatness.

 

"If the German people were to be defeated in the struggle," Hitler had told the gauleiters in a speech in August 1944, "it must have been too weak: it had failed to prove its mettle before history and was destined only to destruction." [20]

 

He was fast becoming a physical wreck and this helped to poison his view. The strain of conducting the war, the shock of defeats, the unhealthy life without fresh air and exercise in the underground headquarters bunkers which he rarely left, his giving way to ever more frequent temper tantrums and, not the least, the poisonous drugs he took daily on the advice of his quack physician, Dr. Morell, had undermined his health even before the July 20, 1944, bombing. The explosion on that day had broken the tympanic membranes of both ears, which contributed to his spells of dizziness. After the bombing his doctors advised an extended vacation, but he refused. "If I leave East Prussia," he told Keitel, "it will fall. As long as I am here, it will hold."

 

In September 1944 he suffered a breakdown and had to take to bed, but he recovered in November when he returned to Berlin. But he never recovered control of his terrible temper. More and more, as the news from the fronts in 1945 grew worse, he gave way to hysterical rage. It was invariably accompanied by a trembling of his hands and feet which he could not control. General Guderian has given several descriptions of him at these moments. At the end of January, when the Russians had reached the Oder only a hundred miles from Berlin and the General Staff Chief started to demand the evacuation by sea of several German divisions cut off in the Baltic area, Hitler turned on him.

 

[quote]He stood in front of me shaking his fists, so that my good Chief of Staff, Thomale, felt constrained to seize me by the skirt of my jacket and pull me backward lest I be the victim of a physical assault.[/quote]

 

A few days later, on February 13, 1945, the two men got into another row over the Russian situation that lasted, Guderian says, for two hours.

 

[quote]His fists raised, his cheeks flushed with rage, his whole body trembling. the man stood there in front of me, beside himself with fury and having lost all self-control. After each outburst Hitler would stride up and down the carpet edge, then suddenly stop immediately before me and hurl his next accusation in my face. He was almost screaming, his eyes seemed to pop out of his head and the veins stood out in his temples. [21][/quote]

 

It was in this state of mind and health that the German Fuehrer made one of the last momentous decisions of his life. On March 19 he issued a general order that all military, industrial, transportation and communication installations as well as all stores in Germany must be destroyed in order to prevent them from falling intact into the hands of the enemy. The measures were to be carried out by the military with the help of the Nazi gauleiters and "commissars for defense." "All directives opposing this," the order concluded, "are invalid." [22]

 

Germany was to be made one vast wasteland. Nothing was to be left with which the German people might somehow survive their defeat.

 

Albert Speer, the outspoken Minister for Armament and War Production, had anticipated the barbarous directive from previous meetings with Hitler and on March 15 had drawn up a memorandum in which he strenuously opposed such a criminal step and reiterated his contention that the war was already lost. He presented it to the Fuehrer personally on the evening of March 18.

 

[quote][b][size=120]In four to eight weeks [Speer wrote] the final collapse of the German economy must be expected with certainty ... After that collapse the war cannot be continued even militarily ... We must do everything to maintain, even if only in a most primitive manner, a basis for the existence of the nation to the last ... We have no right at this stage of the war to carry out demolitions which might affect the life of the people. If our enemies wish to destroy this nation, which has fought with unique bravery, then this historical shame shall rest exclusively upon them. We have the duty of leaving to the nation every possibility of insuring its reconstruction in the distant future ... [23][b][/size][/quote]

 

[b][size=120]But Hitler, his own personal fate sealed, was not interested in the continued existence of the German people, for whom he had always professed such boundless love. He told Speer:[b][/size]

 

[quote][b][size=120]If the war is lost, the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no necessity to take into consideration the basis which the people will need to continue a most primitive existence. On the contrary, it will be better to destroy these things ourselves because this nation will have proved to be the weaker one and the future will belong solely to the stronger eastern nation [Russia]. Besides, those who will remain after the battle are only the inferior ones, for the good ones have been killed.[b][/size][/quote]

 

Whereupon the Supreme Warlord promulgated his infamous "scorched earth" directive the next day. It was followed on March 23 by an equally monstrous order by Martin Bormann, the Fuehrer's secretary, a molelike man who had now gained a position at court second to none among the Nazi satraps. Speer described it on the stand at Nuremberg.

 

[quote]The Bormann decree aimed at bringing the population to the center of the Reich from both East and West, and the foreign workers and prisoners of war were to be included. These millions of people were to be sent upon their trek on foot. No provisions for their existence had been made, nor could it be carried out in view of the situation. It would have resulted in an unimaginable hunger catastrophe.[/quote]

 

And had all the other orders of Hitler and Bormann -- there were a number of supplementary directives -- been carried out, millions of Germans who had escaped with their lives up to then might well have died. Speer tried to summarize for the Nuremberg court the various "scorched earth" orders. To be destroyed, he said, were

 

[quote]all industrial plants, all important electrical facilities, water works, gas works, food stores and clothing stores; all bridges, all railway and communication installations, all waterways, all ships, all freight cars and all locomotives.[/quote]

 

That the German people were spared this final catastrophe was due to -- aside from the rapid advances of the Allied troops, which made the carrying out of such a gigantic demolition impossible -- the superhuman efforts of Speer and a number of Army officers who, in direct disobedience (finally!) of Hitler's orders, raced about the country, to make sure that vital communications, plants and stores were not blown up by zealously obedient Army officers and party hacks.

 

The end now approached for the German Army.

 

While Field Marshal Montgomery's British-Canadian armies, after their crossing of the Lower Rhine the last week of March, pushed northeast for Bremen, Hamburg and the Baltic at Luebeck, General Simpson's U.S. Ninth Army and General Hodges' U.S. First Army advanced rapidly past the Ruhr, the Ninth Army on its northern perimeter, the First Army to the south. On April 1 they linked up at Lippstadt. Field Marshal Model's Army Group B, consisting of the Fifteenth and the Fifth Panzer armies -- some twenty-one divisions -- was trapped in the ruins of Germany's greatest industrial area. It held out for eighteen days, surrendering on April 18. Another 325,000 Germans, including thirty generals, were captured, but Model was not among them. Rather than become a prisoner he shot himself.

 

The encirclement of Model's armies in the Ruhr had torn the German front in the West wide open, leaving a gap two hundred miles wide through which the divisions of the U.S. Ninth and First armies not needed to contain the Ruhr now burst toward the Elbe River in the heart of Germany. The road to Berlin lay open, for between these two American armies and the German capital there were only a few scattered, disorganized German divisions. On the evening of April 11, after advancing some sixty miles since daybreak, a spearhead of the U.S. Ninth Army reached the Elbe River near Magdeburg, and on the next day threw a bridgehead over it. The Americans were only sixty miles from Berlin.

 

Eisenhower's purpose now was to split Germany in two by joining up with the Russians on the Elbe between Magdeburg and Dresden. Though bitterly criticized by Churchill and the British military chiefs for not beating the Russians to Berlin, as he easily could have done, Eisenhower and his staff at SHAEF were obsessed at this moment with the urgency of heading southeast after the junction with the Russians in order to capture the so-called National Redoubt, where it was believed Hitler was gathering his remaining forces to make a last stand in the almost impenetrable Alpine mountains of southern Bavaria and western Austria.

 

The "National Redoubt" was a phantom. It never existed except in the propaganda blasts of Dr. Goebbels and in the cautious minds at Eisenhower's headquarters which had fallen for them. As early as March 11, SHAEF intelligence had warned Eisenhower that the Nazis were planning to make an impregnable fortress in the mountains and that Hitler himself would command its defenses from his retreat at Berchtesgaden. The icy mountain crags were "practically impenetrable," it said.

 

[quote]Here [it continued], defended by nature and by the most efficient secret weapons yet invented, the powers that have hitherto guided Germany will survive to reorganize her resurrection; here armaments will be manufactured in bombproof factories, food and equipment will be stored in vast underground caverns and a specially selected corps of young men will be trained in guerrilla warfare, so that a whole underground army can be fitted and directed to liberate Germany from the occupying forces. [24][/quote]

 

It would almost seem as though the Allied Supreme Commander's intelligence staff had been infiltrated by British and American mystery writers. At any rate, this fantastic appreciation was taken seriously at SHAEF, where Eisenhower's chief of staff, General Bedell Smith, mulled over the dread possibility "of a prolonged campaign in the Alpine area" which would take a heavy toll of American lives and prolong the war indefinitely.  [xi]

 

This was the last time that the resourceful Dr. Goebbels succeeded in influencing the strategic course of the war by propaganda bluff. For though Adolf Hitler at first considered retiring to the Austro-Bavarian mountains near which he was born and in which he had spent most of the private hours of his life, and which he loved and where he had the only home he could call his own -- on the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden -- and there make a last stand, he had hesitated until it was too late.

 

On April 16, the day American troops reached Nuremberg, the city of the great Nazi Party rallies, Zhukov's Russian armies broke loose from their bridgeheads over the Oder, and on the afternoon of April 21 they reached the outskirts of Berlin. Vienna had already fallen on April 13. At 4:40 on the afternoon of April 25, patrols of the U.S. 69th Infantry Division met forward elements of the Russian 58th Guards Division at Torgau on the Elbe, some seventy-five miles south of Berlin. North and South Germany were severed. Adolf Hitler was cut off in Berlin. The last days of the Third Reich had come.

 

_______________

 

[b]Notes:[/b]

 

 

i.  On August 23, according to Speidel, Hitler had ordered all the Paris bridges and other important installations destroyed "even if artistic monuments are destroyed thereby." Speidel refused to carry out the order, as did General von Choltitz, the new commandant of Greater Paris, who surrendered after a few shots had satisfied  his honor. For this Choltitz was tried in absentia for treason in April 1945, but  officer friends of his managed to delay the proceedings until the end of the war.  Speidel also reveals that as soon as Paris was lost Hitler ordered its destruction by  heavy artillery and V-1 flying bombs, but this order too he refused to obey. (Speidel,  Invasion 1944, pp. 143-45.)

 

 ii. "I am certain." Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs (Crusade in Europe, p. 305),  "that Field Marshal Montgomery, in the light of later events, would agree that this  view was a mistaken one." But this is far from being the case, as those who have  read Montgomery's memoirs know.

 

iii. There was an interesting adornment to the plan called "Operation Greif," which  seems to have been Hitler's brain child. Its leadership was entrusted by the Fuehrer  to Otto Skorzeny. who, following his rescue of Mussolini and his resolute action in  Berlin on the night of July 20, 1944, had further distinguished himself in his special  field by kidnaping the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, in Budapest in October  1944, when the latter tried to surrender Hungary to the advancing Russians. Skorzeny's  new assignment was to organize a special brigade of two thousand English-speaking  German soldiers, put them in American uniforms, and infiltrate them in  captured American tanks and jeeps behind the American lines to cut communication  wires, kill dispatch riders, misdirect traffic and generally sow confusion. Small units  were also to penetrate to the Meuse bridges and try to hold them intact until the  main German panzer troops arrived.

 

iv. On the sixteenth a German officer carrying several copies of Operation Greif was  taken prisoner and the Americans thus learned what was up. But this does not seem  10 have curbed the initial confusion spread by Skorzeny's men, some of whom,  posing as M.P.s, took up posts at crossroads and misdirected American military  traffic. Nor did it prevent First Army's intelligence office from believing the tall  tales of some of the captured Germans in American uniform that more than a few  of Skorzeny's desperadoes were on their way to Paris to assassinate Eisenhower. For  several days thousands of American soldiers as far back as Paris were stopped by  M.P.s and had to prove their nationality by telling who won the World Series and  what the capital of their native state was -- though some could not remember or did  not know. A good many of the Germans caught in American uniforms were  summarily shot and others court-martialed and executed. Skorzeny himself was  tried by an American tribunal at Dachau In 1947 but acquitted. Thereafter he  moved to Spain and South America. where he soon established a prosperous cement  business and composed his memoirs.

 

v. For several hours, judging by the length of the stenographic record of this conference,  which has survived almost intact. It is Fragment 27 of the Fuehrer conferences.  Gilbert gives the entire text in Hitler Directs His War, pp. 158-74.

 

 

vi. Among the American dead were several prisoners shot in cold blood by Colonel Jochen Peiper's combat group of the 1st S.S. Panzer Division near Malmedy on December 17. According to the evidence presented at Nuremberg 129 American prisoners were massacred; at the subsequent trial of the S.S. officers involved, the figure was reduced to 71. The trial before an American military tribunal at Dachau in the spring of 1946 had a curious denouement. Forty-three S.S. officers, including Peiper, were condemned to death, twenty-three to life imprisonment and eight to shorter sentences. Sepp Dietrich, commander of the Sixth S.S. Panzer Army, which fought in the northern side of the Bulge, received twenty-five years; Kraemer, commander of the 1st S.S. Armored Corps, ten years, and Hermann Priess, commander of the 1^st S.S. Panzer Division, eighteen years.

 

 Then a hue and cry arose in the U.S. Senate, especially from the late Senator  McCarthy, that the S.S. officers had been treated brutally in order to extort confessions.  In March 1948 thirty-one of the death sentences were commuted; in April  General Lucius D. Clay reduced the' death sentences from twelve to six; and in  January 1951, under a general amnesty, John J. McCloy, the American High  Commissioner, commuted the remaining death sentences to life imprisonment. At  the time of writing all have been released. Almost forgotten in the hubbub over  the alleged ill-treatment of the S.S. officers was the indisputable evidence that at  least seventy-one unarmed U.S. war prisoners were slain in cold blood on a snowy  field near Malmedy on December 17, 1944, on the orders -- or incitement -- of several  S.S. officers.

 

vii. How they learned is a fascinating story in itself but too long to be set down here.  Professor Samuel Goudsmit has told it well in his book Alsos. "Alsos" was the code  name of the American scientific mission which he headed and which followed Eisenhower's  armies into Western Europe.

 

viii. In Chapter 27, "The New Order."

 

ix. Hitler had eight German officers who commanded the weak forces at the Remagen  bridge executed. They were tried by a "Flying Special Tribunal, West," set up by  the Fuehrer and presided over by a fanatical Nazi general by the name of Huebner.

 

x. The transcript of this March 23 Fuehrer conference is the last one which was saved, fairly intact, from the flames. It gives a good picture of the frantic mind of the Fuehrer and his obsession with trivial details at the moment when the walls are caving in. For the best part of an hour he discusses Goebbels' proposal to use the broad avenue through the Tiergarten in Berlin as an airstrip. He lectures on the weakness of German concrete in the face of bombing. Much of the conference is given over to scraping up troops. One general raises the question of the Indian Legion.

 

[quote]HITLER: The Indian Legion is a joke. There are Indians who can't kill a louse, who'd rather let themselves be eaten up. They won't kill an Englishman either. I consider it nonsense to put them opposite the English ... If we used Indians to turn prayer mills, or something like that, they would be the most indefatigable soldiers in the world ...

 

And so on far into the night. The meeting broke up at 3:43 A.M.[/quote]

 

 

xi. "Not until after the campaign ended," General Omar Bradley later wrote, "were we to learn that this Redoubt existed largely in the imaginations of a few fanatic Nazis. It grew into so exaggerated a scheme that I am astonished we could have believed it as innocently as we did. But while it persisted, this legend of the Redoubt was too ominous a threat to ignore and in consequence it shaped our tactical thinking during the closing weeks of the war." (Bradley, A Soldier's Story, p. 536.)

 

"A great deal has been written about the Alpine Fortress," Field Marshal Kesselring commented wryly after the war, "mostly nonsense." (Kesselring, A Soldier's Record, p. 276.)

   

Go to Next Page