It was too late. No sooner had Hitler finally agreed to allow the 4th Army to pull back to the fortified zone centred on Lötzen than further Soviet advances endangered the area. Already that same evening, 21 January, Reinhardt acknowledged that the Lötzen position was no longer safe, and a move westwards to the ‘Heilsberg triangle’ was imperative. As he travelled to Königsberg next day in a heavy snowstorm, Reinhardt was dismayed at the sight of the refugees in the appalling weather. It upset him, he told his wife, that ‘they were driven off and roughly handled by us if they were blocking our roads with their vehicles and holding up vital troop movements’. The threat to the 4th Army was, meanwhile, becoming graver. Impassable roads meant Reinhardt could not reach the 4th Army’s commander, General Hoßbach, on 23 January to assess the overall situation. By that evening, as further depressing news of Soviet advances came in, Reinhardt, blaming the belated permission to retreat, recorded in his diary: ‘We are, then, encircled.’
His view by now was that a ‘breakthrough to the west’, which Hoßbach had urged as the only hope, had to be undertaken. He informed the OKH of the decision that evening—though he omitted to mention his conviction that his forces were too weak both to attempt this and at the same time to hold Königsberg and the Samland. Nor—since it was plain that Hitler would reject the move out of hand—did he report the intention to give up the Lötzen area and retreat entirely to a new defensible position near Heilsberg. The OKH agreed, unaware of the full extent of the crisis, and promised to send forces eastwards from the Elbing area to meet up with the 4th Army pushing westwards. When he and Hoßbach met next morning, Reinhardt, no doubt put under pressure to act by Hoßbach, whose confidence in his Commander-in-Chief had been waning over recent days, gave the order to accelerate the breakout. Reinhardt worried that it was being attempted too late and continued to fret about whether he ought to have disobeyed Hitler’s earlier persistent refusal to allow a retreat. ‘I cannot survive this catastrophe,’ he lamented. ‘I’ll be blamed, even though my conscience is clear, except that I was perhaps, from a sense of duty, too obedient.’
Next day, 25 January, Reinhardt faced a further inner conflict. He had suffered a severe head injury that morning when he was badly cut by flying glass following a grenade explosion at a field headquarters he was visiting. Bloodied and haggard, he pleaded in vain with Guderian to withdraw the front further. Guderian, backing Hitler’s stance, insisted on holding the position on the lakes near Lötzen. Reinhardt, from his sickbed, struggled again the following afternoon to gain a favourable decision from the OKH as the threat to the 4th Army worsened. He was promised a decision by 5 p.m., which he had said was the last possible moment. At 5.30 p.m. Hitler’s order eventually came through, but permitted only a limited withdrawal to positions which, in fact, had already been overrun by the Red Army. Hitler continued to insist on holding the position around Lötzen. Reinhardt told Hoßbach, repeatedly pressing for a decision, that if he had received none by 7.15 p.m. he would order the withdrawal himself. Amid rising tension, both Guderian and Wenck at the OKH, remarkably, were unavailable to speak to Reinhardt on the telephone. Hoßbach rang at 7 p.m. to say he needed immediate permission to break out; he could wait no longer. Reinhardt gave the order. He had no choice, he noted; the advantage of the position on the lakes had in any case been lost. He had no forces strong enough to retain it. ‘My conscience is clear in favour of the attack… on which everything depends,’ he added. ‘I firmly believe that the success and sustaining of our attack is more important to the Führer than the lake position.’ He was wrong. Hitler, feeling he had been deceived, exploded in blind fury at the news that the 4th Army had given up Lötzen, accusing Reinhardt and Hoßbach of treason. He later calmed down. But a scapegoat was needed. That night the loyalist, if conscience-stricken, Reinhardt, along with his Chief of Staff, Heidkämper, was dismissed.
VI
Striking throughout the drama was not only Hitler’s absurd obtuseness in refusing to concede sensible withdrawals, but also Reinhardt’s unhappiness at having to entertain the idea of disobedience even in such extremes. Significant, too, is that Reinhardt and the leadership of Army Group Centre felt they could rely upon no support from the OKH or from the military entourage around Hitler. The distrust of Burgdorf, Hitler’s Wehrmacht adjutant, was plain. But so too was the feeling that Guderian, as Chief of the General Staff, would side with Hitler. When, therefore, the complete withdrawal of the 4th Army to the Heilberg area was recognized as the only remaining option, even if it meant the loss of Königsberg and the Samland, this had to be kept not only from Hitler, but also from the OKH. Gauleiter Koch, still trumpeting the need to hold onto ‘Fortress East Prussia’ down to the last man, had also to be kept in the dark, since he would immediately tell Hitler. The lines of military as well as political command that kept Hitler’s leadership position untouchable and ensured that his orders were carried out, however nonsensical, remained, then, intact throughout the crisis. Hoßbach embellished his own reputation by claiming after the war that he had disobeyed Hitler in unilaterally ordering the attack to the west to break out of the encirclement. In reality, however, down to Reinhardt’s dismissal on 26 January he was acting with the full support of his Commander-in-Chief. The decision, reluctantly to act against Hitler’s wishes because he felt he had no choice, appears to have been in the first instance Reinhardt’s, rather than Hoßbach’s.
The aim of Army Group Centre’s leadership in retreating to Heilsberg was to move to a more defensible position. Once there, further consideration could be given to whether there was anything left of East Prussia to try to save. Hoßbach’s view, so he wrote shortly after the war, was more radical still. He knew East Prussia was lost, he stated. He saw the only option as trying to save the German forces trapped there so that they could fight again.100
This became an end in itself. Desperation produced its own dynamic. Hoßbach, like other military leaders, later claimed that the reason he had fought on was to protect and save the civilian population. The truth was different: saving the army came first. Of course, commanders, as Reinhardt’s diary notes and letters as well as other contemporary accounts make plain, were frequently shaken and saddened by the plight of the refugees in the depths of the East Prussian winter. Retreating soldiers often did what they could to carry refugees with them or help where they could, though this amounted to little. The misery they witnessed had a depressing effect on troop morale.101 Unquestionably, the Wehrmacht wanted where possible to prevent the population falling into the hands of the Soviets. But the streams of refugees on the frozen roads threatened to hamper the breakthrough to the west. Reinhardt’s orders on 22 January showed where the priorities lay. ‘Treks that disturb troop movements on the main roads’, ordered Reinhardt, ‘are to be removed from these roads… It’s painful, certainly. But the situation demands it.’102 ‘The civilian population has to keep back,’ Hoßbach in turn told his subordinate commanders of the 4th Army two days later. ‘It sounds horrible, but can’t unfortunately be altered, since, tough though it is, it’s a matter now after the loss of East Prussia of getting the military forces there back to the homeland with some fighting power.’ ‘Treks have to get down off the roads,’ he put it bluntly to Reinhardt later the same evening.103 Repeatedly, the retreating army put the order into practice, manhandling refugees and their carts off the roads as they forced their way westwards.