By 31 January Russian advance forces were beginning to threaten Berlin with spearhead advances from the line of the Oder, less than fifty miles away. Panic set in, but the Russian offensive in this sector came to a halt.
Himmler’s second headquarters on the Eastern front was at the luxurious villa owned by Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, near the S.S. Ordensburg Crössinsee at Falkenburg.26 Here he lived, in effect, the life of a civil-servant who happened to be administering a war. He got up between eight and nine o‘clock, received treatment from Kersten if he were there or from Gebhardt, whose nursing home at Hohenlychen was in fact conveniently near. Between ten and eleven o’clock he received his war reports and took his decisions. After lunch he rested for a while, then conferred again with his staff officers. In the evening he was too tired to concentrate, and after dinner he went to bed. By ten o’clock he was inaccessible.
Hitler, oblivious of the threat to the capital, still planned his principal offensive in the south,27 but Guderian was convinced that it was necessary to attack the Russian spearheads east of the capital immediately with all the force that could be assembled. He was also sure that Himmler was quite incapable of directing this action, which must be undertaken promptly and skilfully before the Russians had built up their strength for further advances.
Guderian determined to insist on his plan at a staff conference called by Hitler in the Chancellery in Berlin on 13 February. Himmler left his nursing home to be present and, as Guderian expected, opposed the offensive on the grounds that neither ammunition nor fuel could be made available in time. Guderian has recorded the conversation that followed in front of Himmler:
GUDERIAN: We can’t wait until the last can of petrol and the last shell have been issued. By that time the Russians will be too strong.
HITLER: I won’t permit you to accuse me of wanting to wait.
GUDERIAN: I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m simply saying that there’s no sense in waiting until the last lot of supplies have been issued and thus losing the favourable moment to attack.
HITLER: I have just told you that I won’t permit you to accuse me of wanting to wait.
GUDERIAN: General Wenck must be attached to the Reichsführer’s staff, since otherwise there can be no prospect of the attack succeeding.
HITLER: The National Leader is man enough to carry out the attack on his own.28
The dispute went on, according to Guderian, for two hours. Hitler became enraged:
‘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 of anger 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 about to pop out of his head and the veins stood out on his temples. I had made up my mind that I should let nothing destroy my equanimity and that I would simply repeat my essential demands over and over again. This I did with icy consistency.’
Suddenly Hitler stopped short in front of Himmler and said: ‘Well, Himmler, General Wenck will arrive at your headquarters tonight and will take charge of the attack.’
Guderian had never seen Hitler rave so violently. The grim eyes of Bismarck in Lenbach’s portrait had stared down on the scene, and Guderian sensed the strength of the gaze from the bronze bust of Hindenburg which was standing behind him.
‘The General Staff has won a battle this day’, said Hitler, and suddenly gave one of his most charming smiles.
On the same day Himmler’s headquarters were moved once more, this time to the woods near Prenzlau, seventy miles north of Berlin and some thirty miles west of Stettin and the Russian front on the Oder. But Himmler returned to Hohenlychen, Gebhardt’s nursing home, which was some seventy miles north of Berlin, in a state of nervous collapse, addressing an absurd order of the day to his forces: ‘Forward through mud! Forward through snow! Forward by day! Forward by night! Forward to liberate our German soil!’29 Wenck arrived on 16 February to direct the operations which began that same day, while Himmler summoned Skorzeny to the nursing home, and indulged in day-dreams about the imminent defeat of the Russians. According to Guderian, ‘His appreciation of our enemies was positively childish.’
But the offensive was doomed; Wenck broke his shoulder in a car accident while driving through the night to Berlin on 17 February to report to Hitler. On 20 February Bormann wrote to his wife: ‘Uncle Heinrich’s offensive did not succeed, that is to say it did not develop properly, and now the divisions which he was holding in reserve have to be put in on other sectors. It means constant improvisation from one day to the next.’ According to Guderian the attack, which had begun well enough under Wenck on 16 and 17 February, had lost its momentum by 18 February. The Russians regained their lost ground and inflicted heavy casualties on the German armoured divisions.
For a further month Himmler remained in his nominal command during a period involving heavy losses of territory in most sectors in the north-east and the south; the coastal bases were cut off or evacuated; meanwhile the endless, merciless bombing of Berlin continued every night. By the middle of March, the morale of the S.S. divisions in Hungary had collapsed, and they began to retreat against Hitler’s absolute orders. In his fury, Hitler demanded that the men of these divisions have their S.S. armbands stripped from them; one of the divisions to be so disgraced was the Leibstandarte, which had once formed his bodyguard. Himmler was ordered south to Hungary to supervise the dishonouring of the S.S.
But Himmler had for some weeks lived in a state bordering on collapse. His experiences as a general in the field subject to the raging pressures of Hitler’s fanatical command drove him back in March to his bed in Gebhardt’s nursing home, which became both his retreat and his headquarters. Wherever he went he could not escape the appalling dilemma of the Russian advances and Hitler’s hysterical reproaches. Like Goring, he could not stand the anger of the Führer; he did not have the strength of mind or purpose to oppose him. Like a terrified schoolboy, he retired to bed to escape the wrath of an authority that overwhelmed him. As Guderian saw it: ‘I was in a position on several occasions to observe his lack of selfassurance and courage in Hitler’s presence… His decisions when in command of Army Group Vistula were dictated by fear.’
In consequence of this, Himmler lost the regard of his armies over whom in Hitler’s name he endeavoured to establish a reign of terror. During the last days of German rule in Danzig, the trees of the Hindenburg-Allee became gibbets for the bodies of dead youths displayed with placards hung round their necks proclaiming, ‘I hang here because I left my unit without permission.’
On the main Oder front, immobile again for a brief while during the middle of March, the still massive armies of Hitler had little armour left with which to fight. Men press-ganged for the front had no equipment with which to repel the invader. Yet they were ordered to fight without thought of retreat, and the practice abandoned almost a century before of thrashing soldiers found guilty of cowardice was revived to curb the defeatism in Himmler’s improvised forces, which now included such irregular recruits as foreign conscripts, schoolboys, convicts, exiles from the Baltic, staff from aerodromes abandoned by the Luftwaffe, and old men drafted from the Home Guard.