By early July, Army Group North found its position increasingly jeopardized by the collapse of its neighbor to the south. With Soviet forces racing west through the “Baltic hole,” a twenty-five-mile-wide gap between Army Groups North and Center, the commander of the former army group, General Georg Lindemann, not only had to defend more front with fewer troops but also faced the prospect that the advancing enemy might cut off his forces entirely. Lindemann, of course, reacted to the threat with the rational request that Hitler allow him to withdraw his forces to safety. Just as predictably, Hitler not only refused to give up territory but also ordered Lindemann to launch a counterattack with his nonexistent reserves. The latter responded by renewing his demand to be allowed to evacuate his troops in order to escape encirclement as well as halting the senseless counterattack. These actions left Hitler no choice, and, on 4 July, he replaced Lindemann with General Johannes Friessner, who, although initially determined to carry out Hitler’s orders energetically, soon discovered the correctness of his predecessor’s prescription. By mid-July, both Friessner and Model pleaded with Hitler to allow a withdrawal of Army Group North, which, as the most intact and battleworthy force on the eastern front, could be used to build the operational reserve so desperately needed to stabilize the front. These divisions, having been spared the brunt of battle in 1942 and 1943, had a level of primary group cohesion and combat effectiveness rare in German units at this point in the war and, thus, would have been invaluable as a backstop. Their fighting ability was on ample display in these weeks of summer fighting when, despite its overwhelming superiority in strength, the Red Army had been unable to achieve an operational breakthrough, instead being forced at high cost to push Friessner’s units back. Despite his dogged defensive success—in one month, his troops, mostly in close combat with the lethal handheld Panzerfaust, destroyed almost eight hundred enemy armored vehicles—Friessner met the same fate as Lindemann. On 23 July, he was relieved of his command, although formally he exchanged positions with the commander of Army Group South Ukraine, General Ferdinand Schörner. The latter, although given unusual command authority by Hitler, had no answer to the problems of the “poor man’s war” that the Germans were now fighting, and he too demanded withdrawal to sensible positions, which the Führer ignored. By the end of the month, the Soviets finally reached the Baltic coast just west of Riga, effectively trapping Army Group North. Although a tenuous connection to Army Group Center was reopened on 20 August, the position of Army Group North remained highly precarious.43
After a temporary respite in order to prepare its forces, the Red Army on 14 September resumed its hammer blows against Army Group North. With any attempt to hold its exposed position untenable, Hitler finally relented two days later, following an impassioned appeal by Schörner, and approved the evacuation of Estonia, which commenced on the eighteenth. Still, he insisted on maintaining a bridgehead around Riga as well as holding on to Courland. Since Finland agreed to an armistice and left the war on 19 September, Hitler’s decision seemed to be based on his desire to continue testing the new-type U-boats. In any case, the Soviets continued their pounding attacks along the northern front, their forces increasingly augmented by units transferred from Finland, and, on 10 October, once again reached the Baltic coast. Although the Red Army paid a high price, suffering over 280,000 casualties and losing over five hundred armored vehicles, it had once more trapped Army Group North, with 250,000 troops and over five hundred armored vehicles, this time for good. Over the course of the next weeks and months, neither rational arguments (these tough, battle-hardened units could better be used as an operational reserve to defend Germany than sitting in Courland) nor emotional appeals (since most of the troops were from the eastern provinces, they would fight more fiercely than a bunch of untrained boys and elderly men in the Volkssturm) altered Hitler’s determination to hold on to Courland. Nor, despite a series of battles until the end of the war that cost the Red Army a ridiculously high number of casualties, were the Soviets able to take it.44
Of all Hitler’s controversial decisions in 1944, none has seemed to demonstrate so well his irrational stand-fast mentality as the decision voluntarily to entomb German troops and tanks sorely needed to defend the Reich in a backwater place such as Courland. As an illustration of his irrationality, however, it might be better to seek explanations on the strategic rather than the tactical level, with the key to the Courland puzzle lying in the Ardennes rather than the Baltic. As is generally known, Hitler hoped with the Ardennes offensive in December 1944 (originally scheduled for late November) to achieve a sudden turnaround in the war through an operation remarkably similar to Sickle Cut of May 1940. In this latest version, Great Britain was to play the role of France, with the United States, emulating the English, expected temporarily to withdraw from European affairs. Having dealt a savage blow to his Western enemies, and at the same time perhaps finally splitting the unnatural coalition arrayed against him, Hitler could then mass his remaining forces in the east to repel the Soviet invaders. In effect, he was clinging to the strategy outlined in November 1943 for the coming year: seek a turnaround in the war by striking in the west and holding on in the east. His forces had failed to achieve the desired results in both areas, but, Hitler believed, one last opportunity beckoned. For this plan to work, however, Courland had to be held as a springboard for a new offensive deep into the Soviet rear, while at the same time the new-model U-boats could be unleashed in the Atlantic. Although this interpretation is clearly a flight of fantasy, much speaks in support of it, not least the timing of Hitler’s final decisions to hold Courland and launch the Ardennes offensive, made within two days of each other in late October. Just as importantly, such a scheme fit his all-or-nothing mentality, his conviction, as Speer noted, that the war could be won only through offensive action. The Führer yearned to throw off the “eternal defense” into which Germany had been forced and again seize the initiative, but, when his “Blitzkrieg without gasoline,” as Karl-Heinz Frieser termed the Ardennes offensive, failed, he was left with the bankruptcy of his strategy. Only now, in early 1945, did he permit some units to be evacuated from Courland and sent back to Germany, although, even here, he could not quite fully abandon the illusion of a miracle that would again turn the war in his favor.45
Even as the OKH struggled to build a stable front line out of the ruins of Army Group Center, it faced another disaster in the south in the area of Army Group South Ukraine, itself a mixed German-Rumanian conglomeration. The winter/spring campaign of 1943–1944 had left it in tatters, but under General Schörner’s energetic leadership the army group had managed to reestablish its structure, order, and discipline. Nor did it hurt that its front remained quiet as the dramatic events played out to the north. It held seemingly strong forward positions with the formidable obstacle of the Carpathian Mountains at its rear but faced the inescapable German dilemma—in order to cobble together forces to stem the Red tide in the north, Guderian had stripped Army Group South Ukraine of six of its eight panzer divisions and six infantry divisions, leaving it little in the way of a mobile reserve. It was also hampered by a tenuous logistic situation, with its Rumanian allies often diverting supply trains for their own use, while its other nominal ally, the Hungarians, seemed more intent on fighting the Rumanians and Slovaks than the Russians. For political reasons, in order for the Rumanians to hold on to Bessarabia (Moldova) and protect the cities of Iassy and Kishinev as well as to guard the Ploesti oil fields, the Germans were compelled to defend an extensive front that bulged eastward from the Carpathians and then along the Dniester to the Black Sea. Although the wise military move would have been to shorten this line and pull back to more defensible positions, this proved impossible, both because Hitler would not have approved such a move and because of the tenuous political situation of Marshal Antonescu, the Rumanian leader. Still, on paper, it seemed a strong force, with approximately 500,000 German troops and 170 armored vehicles, along with some 400,000 Rumanians, although the quality of the latter was, as always, maddeningly uneven. Some units could be counted on to fight bravely and fiercely, while others would simply melt away at the first sign of battle. Having witnessed the debacle to the north, German commanders were in little doubt that the next major Soviet blow would come against them.46