The capture of Kharkov clearly demonstrated that the Soviets now held the initiative on the eastern front, but, as at Orel, the victory had been achieved at a savage cost, one that was even more painful when the meager results were tallied. The Red Army not only failed to crush a numerically far inferior German foe but also had not even come close to achieving the real goal of the offensive: the destruction of Army Group South. Stalin had expected to reach the German border by year’s end, something first accomplished a year later. The results were especially sobering considering the price paid: in twenty days, the Red Army had lost at least 255,000 (and perhaps as many as 500,000) casualties, among them 72,000 men killed, and almost 2,000 tanks against German totals of 10,000 killed and missing, 30,000 casualties, and some 230 armored vehicles, figures that left even Stalin fuming at the inexcusably large Soviet losses. Nor could a look at the totals for the entire Kursk salient operations of July and August have improved the dictator’s foul mood. In roughly fifty days of fighting, the Red Army lost, by its own admission, 863,000 men, of whom 254,000 were killed or missing, numbers that are almost certainly too low since a recent estimate by a Russian historian puts the figure at 1,677,000 casualties. In addition, the Soviets lost over 6,000 tanks—the Fifth Guards Tank Army alone was destroyed twice within two months—and 4,200 aircraft. The Germans’ losses seemed almost a pittance by comparison (170,000–200,000 total casualties; 46,000 dead; roughly 760 tanks and 524 aircraft destroyed), except that they could not afford even these numbers.94
Although they had inflicted astonishing losses on the Soviets, the Germans were afforded scant comfort since they could not as easily make theirs good. The savage fighting in the Kursk salient had reduced some German units to virtual nonexistence. On 2 September, for example, the Thirty-ninth Infantry Division had a total of six officers and three hundred men. Tellingly, the great majority of Panthers and Tigers lost resulted not from actual combat but from mechanical failures and subsequent abandonment. The Soviets now controlled the battlefield; the Germans had lost the initiative on the Ostfront and never regained it. Still, Kursk did not destroy the German tank force; it was the long and bloody defensive battles, the unrelenting pressure of overwhelming numbers, following on Citadel that inexorably ground it down. At Kursk, Soviet leaders had hoped to absorb the initial German blow, wear the enemy down, then springboard into a counteroffensive that would sweep enemy forces away like an avalanche. Instead, the defender had suffered far more losses than the attacker; then, when the roles were reversed, the onrushing Red Army again sustained appalling casualties. Not just Stalin’s, but the entire Soviet system’s utter disregard for its own people was breathtaking. As long as troops remained to be sacrificed, the Germans would be ground down in senseless, frontal assaults to the bitter end. As Karl-Heinz Frieser has noted, in April 1945 the daily loss of tanks by the Soviets was higher even than at Kursk, a truly staggering indictment of the Stalinist system. Confrontation with the Moloch, however, induced a sense of despair in many Landsers. It was, confessed one, more than a feeling of hopelessness; rather, it was a sense that a world was going under, of “collective metaphysical despair.” Citadel meant a final reversal of roles: no longer the hammer, Germany had now become the anvil.95
8
Scorched Earth
All through July and August, the continual hammer blows by the numerically superior enemy had put the German army on the defensive and threatened a breakthrough along the entire front. By late September, it had become clear that the hopes of the spring had been dashed: the great offensive had been shattered; the U-boats proved unable to block the flow of American troops and materiel to Europe; the resource discrepancy between the warring sides continued to grow; the defection of its alliance partners left Germany isolated; and both troop and civilian morale had plummeted. Faced with such realities, the German leadership was forced to concede that “ultimate defeat was now likely unavoidable.” “With the fate of the German people at stake,” the only option left was to seek an armistice and immediate peace negotiations. The leader who voiced that sentiment, as Bernd Wegner has noted, was not Adolf Hitler in 1943 but Erich Ludendorff in 1918. Now, precisely twenty-five years later, thoughts turned back to the events of that fateful autumn. Although British intelligence analysts optimistically expected a repeat of the 1918 scenario, American assessments were more skeptical, seeing a German collapse as highly unlikely. In contrast to 1918, the Americans argued, the Nazi regime had at its disposal better material and agricultural reserves, suffered no debilitating morale crisis, and faced an Allied demand of unconditional surrender.1
In Germany, too, thoughts of 1918 were not far from the surface. Although SD reports indicated that some circles in Germany yearned for just such a compromise peace, the obstacles were formidable. In practice, the unconditional surrender doctrine meant an end to his regime and, thus, gave Hitler an incentive to fight on, especially since, in conscious rejection of 1918, the Western allies explicitly refused any negotiations. Moreover, although Germany could no longer win the war, it might be able to stalemate it long enough to split the brittle Allied coalition. In any case, Hitler had long vowed, and continued to insist, that another November 1918 would never again happen. Finally, and perhaps of decisive importance, the realistic American report also stressed a key, but often overlooked, point: Germany had much more reason to fear Allied retribution than in 1918. Genocide now loomed as the ultimate barrier to any negotiated peace.2
The Führer had long proclaimed that this was an ideological war, a “life and death struggle,” a view confirmed as more than mere bombast by his merciless war of annihilation against Jewish-Bolshevism. “On the Jewish question, especially,” Goebbels had noted already in early March 1943, “we are in it so deeply that there is no getting out any longer. And that is a good thing. Experience teaches that a movement and a people who have burned their bridges fight with much greater determination and fewer constraints than those that still have a chance of retreat.” The Nazis had, indeed, burned their bridges. As Christopher Browning has noted, the great majority of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust, some 75–80 percent, were murdered in an extraordinary spasm of killing lasting roughly from spring 1942 to the early summer of 1943. Moreover, if the victims of Einsatzgruppen shootings in 1941 are included, the percentages move even higher. By the time military events turned decisively against them, then, the Nazis were well on their way to accomplishing their murderous goal. Given such facts, Hitler understood that the logic of events in 1943 pointed in only one direction: further radicalization of the war.3
Nor was the principal target of this radicalization in doubt. After all, in his total war speech, Goebbels had already raised the specter of “Jewish liquidation squads” overrunning Germany in the event of defeat. All Jews under Nazi control, without exception, thus had to be killed, a point made explicitly by Hitler in an early February 1943 speech to Reichsleiter (Reich leaders) and Gauleiter. All through the spring of 1943, in fact, Hitler seemed even more than usually obsessed with the Jews. On the German Memorial Day, 21 March, he again raised his extermination prophecy and demanded its fulfillment, while, in mid-April, Goebbels noted, “The Führer issues instructions to set the Jewish question once more at the forefront of our propaganda, in the strongest possible way.” Central to this renewed emphasis was the discovery in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk of a mass grave containing the remains of thousands of Polish army officers murdered by the Soviet Security Police in 1940. The Nazi press claimed that “Jewish commissars” had carried out the murders, further proof, it alleged, that “the extermination of the peoples of Europe” was a “Jewish war aim.”4