For Hitler, as well, a defeat of the invasion was the great chance, the last opportunity to achieve a decisive turning point in the war. Germany, he believed (given the example of World War I), had no hope if it remained on the defensive. In order to win time and break the “unnatural alliance” of his enemies, itself an uneasy association of capitalists and Communists, Germany needed to break out of this “unfruitful defensive” and regain the initiative. This, above all, was a matter of fanatic will. Germany, Hitler asserted, needed to achieve a great victory in order to demonstrate to its enemies that they could not win the war. Just as the iron will of Stalin had saved Russia from collapse in the autumn of 1941, he argued, so now his will would transform the bleak situation. It was, he thought, reminiscent of the period of struggle in the 1920s, when a few determined individuals with a powerful belief in an idea created a movement with its own revolutionary dynamic that accomplished the seemingly impossible. Just as the street agitator had swept to power and achieved undreamed-of triumphs, so now, in the spring of 1944, a few key victories would tip the balance and unleash an unstoppable momentum. The Germans had lost World War I, Hitler believed, because the imperial leadership had given up too soon, a mistake he would not repeat. Always willing to stake everything on an all-or-nothing gamble, he conjured visions of a new “miracle of 1940,” of a decisive triumph in the west that would free Germany from the nightmare of a two-front war.77
To dismiss Hitler’s vision as irrational or unrealistic would miss the mark. Typically, it was a curious mixture of clear-sighted realism and gross self-delusion, of a cogent understanding of Germany’s predicament and little sense of its limitations. In truth, at least for a flickering moment, the prospects for victory in the west, after all, appeared not unfavorable. Industrial output was rising, which meant that enough tanks and weapons were being produced to equip new divisions for the west and replace some of the losses in the east. Synthetic oil production had peaked, with stocks of aviation fuel at their highest since 1941. Under Speer’s guidance, fighter plane production rose spectacularly, with the result that the Luftwaffe strength in January 1944 of 5,585 planes was over 1,600 more than the year before. Moreover, in the autumn and winter of 1943–1944, the American strategic bombing campaign had been suspended as a result of unacceptable losses. Under Rommel’s energetic guidance, defensive preparations in the west along the Normandy coast had also accelerated. Hitler had high hopes for the technologically advanced V weapons as well as a new type of submarine that would enable the American supply line to Great Britain to be cut. In addition, Soviet manpower reserves were not inexhaustible, and the May pause seemed to indicate that the Red Army had passed its culmination point. Finally, the Allied invasion of France was a complicated operation that required months of preparation. If defeated, as Jodl noted, it could not simply be repeated any time soon, and a failure, Hitler anticipated, would result in a severe political crisis in Great Britain and provide Germany an opportunity again to seize the initiative.78
These hopes, however, proved illusory. As far back as the autumn of 1943, Hitler had planned to stabilize the eastern front in order to transfer troops west to defeat the Allied invasion of France. Then, once that had been accomplished, he would transfer units back to the east in order to reconquer the vital Ukraine. With Führer Directive No. 51 of November 1943, he had even attempted to enact the first part of this scenario, which was, perhaps, the only strategic option he had left. The Soviets, however, had refused to cooperate and play their assigned role. Instead of sitting passively through the winter, the Red Army had launched a series of continuous offensives that had drained German resources and brought the Ostheer to the breaking point. Although the Second SS Panzer Corps, reluctantly dispatched from France back to the east, had finally brought a halt to the Soviet offensive, its absence in June was to play a key role in the success of the Normandy landing, a circumstance that Hitler complained of bitterly after the fact. Just as crucially, the provision of long-range fighter support allowed a resumption of the American strategic bombing campaign, with devastating consequences. As Allied bombers targeted oil production and synthetic fuel facilities, aircraft engine plants, and key rail yards, any hope the Nazis had of winning the aerial war over Germany was crushed. By mid-May, Speer later conceded, “a new era in the air war” had begun, one that meant “the end of German armaments production.” The technological war had been decided; new miracle weapons could no longer save Germany.79
In any case, Hitler himself bore considerable responsibility for the failure of his strategy. In his unwillingness to sacrifice land for time, to allow his armies in the east to retreat to more defensible positions and preserve manpower, he had lost the former and gained none of the latter. Worse, in anticipating the decisive blow in the west, he had stripped the Ostheer of its reserves, leaving it exposed and vulnerable to Soviet attack. It would, its commanders realized, have to bear the brunt of the Red storm alone while hoping for a quick decision in the west that would free forces to be sent back to the Ostfront. Manstein’s feat in extricating the First Panzer Army and stabilizing the eastern front had averted catastrophe, but the bleak reality of a multifront war now awaited. Within two months, all Hitler’s remaining illusions would be shattered and Germany plunged into the abyss. His strategy of striking in the west and holding in the east would fail for the simple reason that the Ostheer was too weak to hold the line. From June 1944 to the end of the war, however, some 3 million Germans would lose their lives, while Germany would suffer its worst devastation since the Thirty Years’ War. Hitler’s determination not to preside over another November 1918 would, in fact, result in the very thing he had warned was the goal of the Jewish conspiracy: the extinction of Germany.
9
Disintegration
The end of the prolonged fighting into the spring of 1944 had left the eastern front dangerously skewed from the German perspective. South of the Pripet Marshes, Soviet advances in Ukraine had pushed a huge bulge far to the west, only 150 miles from Warsaw. North of the great swamp, however, Army Group Center’s success at holding off the Red Army in the winter fighting meant that German troops not only occupied most of Belorussia but also still held a bridgehead east of the Dnieper. The front line now ran roughly where it was in mid-July 1941, at the end of the first German leap into Russia. German possession of this so-called Belorussian balcony posed both grave risks and, to Hitler, strategic possibilities. The danger was obvious to anyone who looked at a map: a breakthrough at Kovel, at the southwestern edge of the Pripet, would allow the Soviets two great opportunities. Red Army forces could be turned to the southwest, with the goal of striking deep into Hungary and Rumania, knocking these German allies out of the war, and encircling and destroying Army Group South. If, however, they pushed to the northwest through Warsaw and on to Danzig, both Army Groups Center and North might be bagged in a giant pocket, the heart of the German position in the east ripped apart, and the way to Berlin, only 320 miles to the west, completely open. In a single action, the OKH feared, the Soviets would strike the death blow to the German war effort.1
Hitler was not unaware of the dangers, but he preferred to focus on the opportunity afforded by the German position. In effect, he modeled his behavior on that of his rival dictator, Stalin, who in the summer of 1942, in a similarly dangerous position, had issued his famous “Not one step back” order and insisted on holding bridgeheads across the Don, with the result that a decisive Soviet counterattack had reversed the situation at Stalingrad and allowed the Red Army to sweep to the west. Now, in the summer of 1944, Hitler counted on pulling off a similar feat that would restore the initiative to Germany. Believing that the prolonged, costly Soviet winter offensive in Ukraine had finally bled the Red Army dry, much as the Wehrmacht had been ground down by persistent Soviet resistance at Stalingrad, Hitler hoped to blunt the anticipated Russian offensive, then launch the game-changing German response. Human memory, of course, can be dangerously selective, and, although Hitler correctly remembered the success of the Soviet counterstrike in the autumn of 1942, he ignored the key contextual background that allowed that achievement. The Soviets’ triumph had depended on German weakness, failures of leadership, and distraction by events elsewhere as well as a good bit of aid from their Western allies. In 1944, as two years earlier, the balance of all these factors again favored Stalin, not Hitler.