• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1250 0

by 30 December, Budapest was under siege. The Soviet summer advances obliged Hitler to recognise that most of the Balkans had become indefensible. In late October, the Germans began to evacuate Greece. Weichs, the theatre commander, was thereafter chiefly concerned to use his 600,000 men – mostly drawn from low medical categories and service personnel – in Albania and Yugoslavia, to protect the right flank of Army Group South. Along the entire Eastern Front, the German predicament was dire. The Soviets’ looming triumph was delayed only by the logistical difficulties of fuelling and supplying huge forces in regions of few roads and wrecked railways; their armies halted to rearm and regroup. Hitler’s generals knew that when the Russians chose to advance again, the Wehrmacht could merely delay the inevitable.

If great wars were ever fought rationally, the moment had come for Germany to surrender, as it had surrendered in 1918 before the Fatherland became a battlefield. In 1944, by contrast, many of its greatest cities had been devastated by an Allied bombing offensive which was now reaching its peak. The Luftwaffe was shattered, the armed forces starved of fuel, men, tanks, vehicles, artillery. It is unsurprising that the leading Nazis were committed to fight on, because they could expect only death at the hands of the victors. It is debatable whether Hitler himself, in his innermost consciousness, preserved real hopes of retrieving his fortunes. But he had committed himself to a policy of total, indeed perpetual, war. If he was to be denied victory, in the last months of his rule he seemed content instead to preside over a titanic cataclysm, matching in scale the collapse of his titanic ambitions.

Posterity is more puzzled by the failure of other Germans to accept the logic of their predicament, to depose the Nazis and save hundreds of thousands of lives by abandoning the struggle. Such an initiative could only credibly have come from the generals. The 20 July 1944 bomb plot, the only concerted military attempt to decapitate the Nazi regime, was conducted with stunning incompetence and lack of conviction, and engaged a relatively small number of officers. A legend of anti-Nazi resistance was created, and is today sustained, chiefly to bolster the revival of post-war German self-esteem. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg would almost certainly have been successful in killing Hitler had he remained in the Führer’s headquarters to detonate his bomb instead of hastening back to Berlin. Many other officers had opportunities to achieve the same end, at the sacrifice of their own lives.

As it was, a perverted sense of duty caused most of the Wehrmacht’s leadership to follow the Nazi regime to the end, to their perpetual dishonour. Among themselves, Germany’s generals often mocked the character and conduct of the gangsters and grotesques by whom their country was led; yet their own slavishness towards Hitler seldom flagged. At a meeting on 27 January 1944, when he called on every officer to display loyal and fanatical support for National Socialism, Manstein called out, ‘And so it will be, my Führer!’ He later claimed that his interjection was intended ironically, but few believed him. He and his kind placed their reputations as members of the soldierly caste, committed to fulfil to the last their military responsibilities and oath to Hitler, ahead of the interests of the society they professed to serve. They made an explicit or implicit choice to fight and die as servants of the Third Reich, rather than as protectors of the nation, whose interests could only credibly be served by securing peace on any terms, or indeed none. Waffen SS panzer officer Hubert Meyer wrote in outrage about the 20 July plot: ‘It was incomprehensible that soldiers would attempt a coup against the supreme military leadership while they were themselves involved in bitter defensive fighting against the enemy who demanded “unconditional surrender”, not willing to negotiate a ceasefire or even peace.’ Many Wehrmacht officers, even those hostile to the Nazis, shared