To break the enemy encirclement, the Germans diverted scarce resources from Army Group Center, most importantly, the Fourth SS Panzer Corps with the Totenkopf and Viking Divisions, a decision that would have dire consequences when the Soviets resumed their offensive on the Vistula in January. These units proved unable to lift the siege, but bitter fighting continued through the end of December and into the new year. Ironically, in assaulting a major urban area whose buildings provided good cover for the enemy and negated their own strength in armor and air power, the Soviets now got a taste of their own medicine. By mid-January 1945, Pest, on the eastern bank of the Danube, had been secured, but fighting still raged for Buda and the citadel on the west bank. Perhaps most damaging to the Germans was Hitler’s decision on 16 January to send the Sixth SS Panzer Army, recently withdrawn from the Ardennes, to Hungary instead of Poland. This decision was incomprehensible from a military perspective since the Russians had already begun the Vistula-Oder offensive but might well have betrayed Hitler’s vague hope of forcing the Soviets to the negotiating table by achieving at least a partial military success. Both sides suffered heavy casualties, which neither could afford, as the fighting approached that of Stalingrad in ferocity. Not until 12 February did the last remaining Germans seek to break out. They were repulsed by the Soviets in a bloody slaughter, and, the next day, the citadel finally fell. Even now, however, Hitler refused to relent. On 6 March, Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth SS Panzer Army launched the last German counteroffensive of the war, Operation Frühlingserwachen (Spring Awakening). It aimed to push the Russians back from the Danube and retake Budapest. The German force of ten panzer divisions was considerable, including the still formidable Adolf Hitler, Das Reich, and Hitlerjugend Divisions. The Soviets resisted bitterly, however, and after ten days of heavy fighting, largely out of fuel and bogged down in mud, Dietrich was forced to break off the effort. As at Kursk in 1943, it had been a waste of valuable German tank forces to no purpose: it did not seriously distract the Soviets and, with the Red Army on the Oder only forty miles from Berlin, had been a senseless use of elite German units. Lacking any reserves, Germany’s other eastern armies could only await the inevitable Russian offensive toward Berlin with resigned trepidation.51
10
Death Throes
By January 1945, the point had long been passed where a continuation of the war made any sense since Hitler had no hope of achieving Lebensraum or the envisioned racial reordering of Eastern Europe. Certainly, the unconditional surrender doctrine of the Western allies as well as fear of Soviet revenge played a role in stiffening both the regime and the population, weary as most were of the war. Hitler, however, had an additional reason. For him, as for many of his generation, the collapse of imperial Germany in November 1918 had been a searing trauma. Indeed, the burning desire to redeem this humiliation as well as ensure that it never happened again formed the core of his ideology. His unyielding hatred of the Jewish conspiracy, his determination to break the bonds of Jewish plutocracy as evidenced in the emasculation of Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, his vision of an empire in the east that would cement German hegemony in Europe, and his notion of a racially pure Volksgemeinschaft all stemmed from his understanding of the causes of the collapse in 1918. On the very day Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939, he had stressed to the Reichstag that “a November 1918 shall never occur again in Germany,” a theme that became an obsession as the war turned against him. At the height of the Stalingrad battle in early November 1942, he had again contrasted his determination with that of the Kaiser’s government. “Germany at that time,” he stressed, “laid down its arms at quarter to twelve. In principle, I always stop only at five past twelve.” Nor, in the intervening two years, had his stance softened, his last proclamation to the Old Fighters at Munich on 12 November 1944 again emphasizing the destructiveness and exterminationist intent of Jewry. This time, however, he also provided a glimpse of how he intended to stage his own and his regime’s demise. He would, he vowed, never capitulate and repeat the shame of 1918; he would instead give the world a “praiseworthy example” of struggle against the “Bolshevik monster.”1
That this fight to the last, to be staged as a Wagnerian spectacle of epic proportions, would result in the “heroic” destruction of Germany as well as its warlord was self-evident to Hitler, if not welcomed by the mass of Germans. Nonetheless, it resulted in the unparalleled destruction of an advanced industrial society. In the last four months of the war, over 1.4 million German soldiers lost their lives (over 1.5 million through December 1945), Allied bombing reduced the medieval splendor of many German cities to little more than heaps of rubble, and hundreds of thousands of civilians (especially women) felt the brunt of Soviet revenge. Huddled in their ruined cellars beneath mounds of stone, much of the German population at the end of the war resembled nothing more than the cave dwellers of old. True to his racial theories, however, and in accordance with notions of total war developed in the 1930s, Hitler was fully prepared to fight this struggle for the naked existence of Germany to the bitter end, even if it meant the complete destruction of his own people.2
A number of factors reinforced Hitler’s decision to fight on: the spinelessness of his top military advisers, the ideological indoctrination of young Germans, the conviction of those who had committed crimes that they had nothing to lose by fighting on, and Goebbels’s propaganda argument that both the Western allies and the Soviets were determined to destroy Germany. It was also, ironically, given a boost by seemingly objective factors: natural obstacles protected Germany in the west and south, while the German navy still controlled the Baltic Sea to the north. In addition, the last burst of Speer’s armaments economy had resulted in an upsurge of weapons production, and, although there was no prospect for continued high output, the enormous losses of 1944 had largely been made good, although the Soviets still enjoyed a crushing material superiority. The most serious problems were shortages of ammunition, trucks, and fuel as well as the fact that Hitler would squander much of the tank production in the Ardennes and Hungary, but the quality of the weapons was still outstanding. Moreover, the shortening of the front in the east meant that for the first time in years the Germans had troops available to man defensive lines (even though the strength of the Ostheer was still 700,000 less than a year earlier) and to form at least a limited tactical reserve and that supply of these forces would be easier and quicker. Finally, it could be expected that German troops would fight bitterly to defend their homeland while even the seemingly inexhaustible Soviet reserves of manpower were reaching their limits. With the German hope of a successful conclusion of the war reduced to splitting the Allied coalition, Hitler’s main goal was simply to win time.3
To that end, the Vistula front had been prepared according to the World War I model. In view of the enemy’s manpower and material superiority and their own continued deficiencies, the Germans aimed to create successive defensive lines to a depth of 120 miles that would slow an advancing army by forcing it to fight its way through endless defensive positions while at the same time defending against mobile counter-thrusts. In addition, the backbone of this defense tactically was to be a series of fortified front positions that, as in the Great War, would allow the defenders to withdraw from the exposed forward line during an enemy artillery bombardment, absorb the energy of the attack and slow its momentum, and then launch tactical counterattacks that would snap the defenders back to their original positions. The key problem, however, remained that this sort of defense required sufficient manpower and mobile reserves, neither of which the Germans possessed. Army Group A, which would bear the brunt of the Soviet winter offensive, at best numbered 400,000 troops with just over 300 tanks and 600 assault guns, while Luftflotte 6, covering the areas of both Army Group A and Army Group Center, on 10 January 1945 had only 300 fighters against 10,500 enemy aircraft, a ratio of thirty-five to one, which actually represented an improvement from June 1944, when the figure was forty to one. Although reinforced on the eve of the offensive with another 300 fighters and 700 ground attack aircraft, Luftflotte 6 faced the impossible task of compensating for army weakness on a five-hundred-mile-wide front. Nor, evidently, had anyone at the OKH pondered the obvious lesson of July 1943 when, during the Kursk offensive, a far smaller German force had penetrated a much more elaborate Soviet defensive system. The question of how a much smaller defending force in far less prepared positions would halt an attack by an overwhelmingly superior enemy remained unasked. Indeed, Army Group A’s own study had already shown not only that the Russians could break through and reach the Silesian border in six days, but also that even stopping them on the Oder was problematic.4