The Wehrmacht’s own propaganda agents, secretly taking soundings in Berlin, acknowledged the ‘very good mood’, despite trying to dampen the excessive optimism of the ‘hurrah-patriots’. Some thought the French and Belgians would this time welcome German troops with open arms after they had had the chance to experience ‘Anglo-American occupation’.112 A positive impression was also gleaned by those outside the German propaganda apparatus. A Swedish correspondent in Berlin reported great enthusiasm at the news of the offensive, exhilaration and confidence among soldiers and a lifting of the gloom that had earlier prevailed.113 But the euphoria could not last. Already by Christmas it was fading.
The news from the front remained positive for some days. Hitler himself was in high spirits, like a man rejuvenated.114 The small town of Saint-Vith on the north of the front was taken on the 21st, but, further south, the more important Bastogne, heavily besieged (and tying down three German divisions in the process), still held out. Manteuffel’s troops, from the 5th Panzer Army, bogged down in mud as well as facing fierce resistance, could make only slow progress. On 23 December they reached Buissonville and Celles, about 7 kilometres from the Meuse, east of Dinant. But that was as far as they got. The high point of the offensive had already passed.
Rundstedt had expressed doubts on 20 December about the chances of crossing the Meuse (though Model was at this time still more optimistic).115 Karl Otto Saur, close to supplanting Speer as Hitler’s blue-eyed boy in the Armaments Ministry, said after the war that he had realized the offensive had failed as early as 19 December (implying that this was the date at which he knew the war was lost).116 Model told Speer on 23 December that the offensive had failed.117 It was plain to any perceptive soldier by 24 December, General Guderian later commented, that the offensive had finally broken down.118 By Christmas, the American and British reinforcements rushed to the area had shored up Allied defences. On 26 December, armoured units from Patton’s 3rd US Army, which had hastened northwards, finally broke through to the encircled American troops in Bastogne and ended the siege.119 Model still vainly hoped for a regrouping of forces to regain the initiative near Bastogne, and at least cement more limited goals than Antwerp, which he acknowledged was now out of reach. But Manteuffel’s advance was at an end. It had been spectacular while it lasted, but could go no further.
Meanwhile, the weather had cleared and Allied aircraft were now fully able to exert their superiority as their ceaseless attacks—the Allies flew six times more sorties during the offensive than Göring’s crippled Luftwaffe—pounded German supply lines. Reinforcements of men and matériel were, as Rundstedt admitted on 27 December, impossible under these circumstances.120 Allied losses of 76,890 men killed, wounded or captured actually outnumbered the 67,461 on the German side. But the German losses could not be made good, nor could the 600 tanks which the Allies had destroyed. Whatever gloss was put upon it, the last great German offensive had failed.
The failure only gradually became apparent to the German public. Goebbels soon began to hint at setbacks in the offensive and accepted by 29 December that the advance could go no further, that the Germans would be happy to hold on to their territorial gains. But there was a time lag in popular recognition. As the end of the year approached, with the offensive stalled, many people, noted Goebbels, still had high hopes, nourished by soldiers returning from the west and talking of getting to Paris before New Year. It was ‘naturally absolute rubbish’, he remarked, but added: ‘Large parts of the German people are convinced that the war in the west could be ended in the forseeable future.’121 Yet only two days later, on the very last day of 1944, he offered a contradictory assessment, on the basis of reports from the regional propaganda offices. ‘The German people attaches no exaggerated illusions to the western offensive,’ he now stated, and had in mind only ‘smaller aims, though naturally everyone earnestly wishes that we will come to a decisive blow in the west’.122 The bubble had burst. It was a sobering return to realities. One officer, based in the west, drew his own conclusion from Field-Marshal Model’s New Year proclamation to his soldiers, in which he had declared: ‘You have withstood the tests of the year 1944. You have held watch on the Rhine.’ This meant, the officer concluded, that after being forced to give up ‘fortress Europe’, holding on to ‘fortress Germany’ would indeed prove a success.123
VI
After the failure of the Ardennes offensive, it was as good as impossible—apart from the incorrigible optimists who insisted on the coming ‘wonder weapons’ or a split among the Allies—to hold out any further realistic hope of a positive end to the war for Germany. The regime, almost all Germans could see, was utterly doomed. No one beneath Hitler, who as always ruled out any alternative to fighting on, was, however, either able or willing to do anything about it. So nothing changed internally.
The sixth war Christmas was a muted affair, with much talk of striving further for the yearned-for peace and even more of holding out against mighty enemies. At the most miserable New Year celebrations in memory, Hitler’s exhortations offered few hopes of major change in 1945. Amid the routinely effusive outpourings of the propaganda offices about the revitalizing effect of the ‘Führer speech’, it was impossible to conceal the widespread disappointment that Hitler had no reassurance to offer on the deployment of new weapons, the status of the offensive in the west (which he did not even mention), and, most crucially, the breaking of the terror from the air. Many people, it was said (without a trace of irony) were left with tears in their eyes at the end of the speech. Some, in fact, were unable to hear it because they were without electricity.124 For all its bombast and the usual bile poured out on the ‘Jewish-international world conspiracy’ that was bent on destroying Germany, Hitler’s speech could promise no more than further hardship, suffering and bloodshed without an end in sight.125 Whatever the miserable prospects, for ordinary people at the base of society, civilian and military, there was little to be done other than struggle on with their daily existence.
The Nazi regime remained an immensely strong dictatorship, holding together in the mounting adversity and prepared to use increasingly brutal force in controlling and regimenting German society at more or less every point. It left little room for opposition—recognizably as suicidal as it was futile. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, ranging from the hundred-percenter hold-out-to-the-last contingent down to the majority simply going through the motions, officialdom—high and low—continued to do its duty. Here, too, most civil servants could not see any alternative. So the bureaucratic wheels kept turning, and with them the attritional grind of controls was sustained. No matter, however trivial, was beneath their attention. Amid the myriad concerns of local civil servants, as they tried to cope with huge social dislocation after air raids, refugee problems, housing shortages, food rationing and many other issues, they never lost sight of the need to complete forms and have them officially stamped for approval. Officials in the Munich police department spent time and energy (as well as using reams of precious paper) in December 1944 making sure that five cleaning-buckets were ordered to replace those lost in the recent air raid, deciding how to obtain copies of official periodicals that regulations said had to come from post offices (even though these were now destroyed), or obtaining permission for a usable iron heater to be taken to police headquarters, left without heating after the last bombing.126 At the top of the bureaucratic tree, the head of the Reich Chancellery, Lammers, his powers meanwhile largely usurped by Bormann, had little more to do than remind Reich authorities of the Führer’s wish that the sending of Christmas and New Year greetings should be greatly restricted to minimize the burden on transport and postal services.127