For ordinary Germans, there was scarcely any avenue of life free from the intrusions of the Party and its affiliates. In the armed forces, too, the scope for escaping Nazification had diminished. The repercussions of the failed bomb plot, the need to demonstrate loyalist credentials, extended deployment of NSFOs, increased surveillance and fear of falling into the clutches of Himmler (who now possessed greater room for intervention in the military sphere) left their mark on both officers and men. Whether at the front or in the civilian population, as the war had come close to home, and the popular base of the regime had shrunk, compliance with ever more invasive controls had come increasingly to dominate daily life.
The regime had appeared during the summer to teeter close to the edge. It had survived an internal uprising, but its armed forces had been pummelled in east and west. As summer had turned into autumn, it had stabilized the military situation and redoubled its energies at home to galvanize an often reluctant or truculent population into action to shore up defences and provide manpower for the front and the armaments industry.
In mid-October, Aachen—by now a ruined shell, its remaining inhabitants cowering in cellars—became the first German city to fall into enemy hands. But by this time, attention had switched to the east. There, in East Prussia, the population was already gaining a horrific foretaste of what Soviet conquest would bring.
3. Foretaste of Horror
Hatred… fills us since we have seen how the Bolsheviks have wrought havoc in the area that we have retaken, south of Gumbinnen. There can be no other aim for us than to hold out and to protect our homeland.
I
The disastrous collapse of Army Group Centre, steamrollered by the Red Army as its gigantic summer offensive, ‘Operation Bagration’, drove back the Wehrmacht, then the smashing of the Army Groups North Ukraine and South Ukraine, and the cutting off in the Baltic of Army Group North left the German east precariously exposed. The scale of the calamity from the German perspective could scarcely be exaggerated. In 150 days, the German army in the east lost more than a million men, dead, wounded or missing—700,000 of them since August. Put another way, more than 5,000 men a day were dying. Only around a third of the losses could be made good. On 1 October 1944 the overall strength of the Wehrmacht was just over 10 million men. Of the 13 million who had served since the war began, 3 million were lost.1
The disaster on the eastern front in summer 1944 was in terms of human loss by far the worst military catastrophe in German history, worse than the First World War slaughterhouse at Verdun, way beyond the losses at Stalingrad.2 Army Group Centre, its operative strength of around half a million men grossly inferior to that of the Soviet forces, was like a house of cards waiting to be knocked over. In the first phase of the offensive, 25 divisions with more than 250,000 men of Army Group Centre were destroyed.3 By the end of July the Red Army had swept through Belorussia, recovering all the territory lost since 1941, and through eastern Poland to the Vistula. On the northern flank of the advance, the Red Army had also overrun much of Lithuania, including the main cities of Vilnius and Kovno. The borders of East Prussia, the farthest eastern frontier of the Reich, now lay perilously close. In a short-lived incursion on 17 August, Soviet troops did, in fact, cross the East Prussian border near Schirwindt, entering the Reich for the first time, though on this occasion they were quickly repulsed.4
To the south of Army Group Centre, further disaster rapidly unfolded. Army Group North Ukraine (the former Army Group South, renamed earlier in the year) suffered huge losses in intense combat as the Red Army drove into Galicia, in southern Poland, taking Lemberg (Lvov) and forcing a German retreat of nearly 200 kilometres over a 400-kilometre-wide area. Of the 56 divisions of Army Group North Ukraine (including some Hungarian divisions), 40 were partially or totally destroyed. As Soviet troops on the northern flank pressed on north-westwards to the Vistula and the approaches to Warsaw, the southern flank pushed German forces back towards the Carpathians. The desperate German attempt to defend Galicia was a recognition of the strategic and economic importance of the region. By mid-August almost the whole of the Ukraine and most of eastern Poland were in Soviet hands, while the basis had been laid for attacking the crucial Upper Silesian industrial belt, 200 kilometres to the west.5 Meanwhile, on 1 August, Warsaw’s martyrdom had begun with the rising of the Polish Home Army. As the Red Army stood inactive in the vicinity, unwilling to assist the rebels, the SS moved in to destroy the rising and pulverize the Polish capital.6 In the unfolding tragedy over the following two months, the city was turned into a ruined shell, with some 90 per cent of its buildings destroyed and 200,000 civilians left dead amid the terrible German reprisals.7
In the Balkans, too, where Romanian oil, Hungarian bauxite and Yugoslav copper were crucial to Germany’s war economy, the Wehrmacht suffered crippling defeats, leading to the defection of its allies in the region. The position of the German Army Group South Ukraine, around half of it composed of war-weary Romanian units, was already weakened by mid-August through the withdrawal of 11 out of 47 divisions to help shore up the battered Army Groups Centre and North Ukraine. When a major Soviet offensive began on 20 August, many Romanian units, with no further stomach for the fight, deserted. Three days later, following an internal coup, Romania sued for peace and changed sides. During the next few days, Army Group South Ukraine was demolished. The German 6th Army, reconstituted after Stalingrad, was again encircled and destroyed. In all, 18 divisions of the Army Group ceased to exist; the rest were forced into headlong retreat to the west and north-west. Within a fortnight, more than 350,000 German and Romanian troops had been killed or wounded, or had entered captivity.8 Huge quantities of armaments were also lost, as were the Ploesti oilfields, vital for the German war effort, on which Hitler had always placed such a premium. Bulgaria soon followed Romania’s example, switching sides and declaring war on Germany on 8 September. German occupation of Greece and Yugoslavia was now no longer viable. Control over the Balkans was as good as at an end. And for the Red Army, the approaches to Slovakia and Hungary lay open, and behind them the Czech lands and Austria.9
At the opposite end of the eastern front, on the Baltic, Army Group North fought throughout the summer in a desperate attempt to avoid being cut off. The Soviet advance had opened up a huge gap between Army Group North and what was left of Army Group Centre. Entreaties to Hitler, already in early July and later, to allow Army Group North to withdraw to a more defensible line to the west were predictably rejected. The Baltic could not be surrendered, since Swedish steel, Finnish nickel and oil shale (used by the navy) from Estonia were vital for the war effort. But Hitler was also influenced by the need to retain the Baltic harbours for trials of the new generation of U-boats, which, Grand-Admiral Dönitz had impressed upon him, still offered a chance for Germany to turn the fortunes of war in her favour by throttling supplies to Britain and cutting off Allied shipment of men and matériel to the Continent.10 Bitter fighting continued throughout July and August as Army Group North was forced to retreat some 200 kilometres to the north-west and evacuate parts of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, though it was able for the time being to prevent the Red Army from breaking through to the Baltic. What contribution, if any, to Army Group North’s resilience was made by the fanatical and ferocious leadership of its Commander-in-Chief, Colonel-General Schörner—one of Hitler’s outright favourites—is hard to say. Schörner, the most brutal of Hitler’s commanders, was unremitting in his demands for ruthless and fanatical fighting spirit, and in his merciless punishment of any that he deemed to be falling short of his demands.11 His tactical errors, however, accentuated the plight of the Army Group.12 Almost a quarter of a million strong, comprising three armies, its situation remained precarious, facing Soviet forces on three sides and mainly dependent upon supplies by sea across the Baltic. Meanwhile, by 2 September Germany’s important northern ally, Finland, had pulled out of the struggle and was soon to sign an armistice with the Soviet Union.