Inferno - Max Hastings [348]
On the far left of the Soviet line, on 20 August two Ukrainian fronts began a drive into southeast Europe of which the objectives were political rather than military. Stalin, bent upon securing most of the Balkans ahead of the Western Allies, committed his forces first against Romania, which surrendered on the twenty-third. The Romanians’ change of allegiance cost them dear: by 25 October their army had suffered a further 25,000 casualties, after being conscripted to assist the Red Army to evict the Germans from their country. On 5 September Russia declared war on Bulgaria, which was officially fighting only the Anglo-Americans. Facing overwhelming Soviet might, the Bulgarians surrendered four days later. A communist government was installed in Sofia, enabling the Red Army to shift forces to Transylvania and Yugoslavia—Belgrade fell on 19 October.
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Only a Nazi-engineered coup in Budapest on 15 October prevented the Hungarian government from also yielding to the Soviets: 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. Gen. Maximilian von 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 approaching its peak. The Luftwaffe was shattered, the armed forces starved of fuel, men, tanks, vehicles and 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