PREVIEWS
On 18 December 1940 Hitler signed the orders that would send his forces east against Stalin’s Soviet Union;
“The German Wehrmacht must be prepared, even before the conclusion of the war against England, to crush the Soviet Union in a rapid campaign…”
In so doing he would launch the biggest invasion in history, built on Nazi Germany’s victories in the West and backed by much of the German people; “When Hitler took power in 1933 I was eleven years old and lived in the Ruhr, and we were poor and so was everyone else I knew. I went to school with a small piece of bread, my father was unemployed as was everyone else, we had no shoes, only wooden clogs in which I had to walk four kilometres to school through the snow and rain. I got my first real shoes from Adolf Hitler, and all of a sudden my father had a job, all our neighbours had jobs, so we all supported the Nazis.” Leo Mattowitz
The men of Nazi Germany’s armed forces – the mighty Wehrmacht – had little idea beforehand of what was planned; “In the regiment rumours were rife … either the USSR would allow us free passage into Persia or Iraq, or we were to relieve Rommel – nobody thought of an attack on the USSR.” Panzer crewman Richard von Rosen
Many feared how an attack on the vastness of the Soviet Union would end; “Funny, almost exactly 129 years ago, the Emperor Napoleon, supported by the Prussian corps under General Ludwig Yorck, started the great Russian campaign. We all know what happened to them – will we do better?” Leutnant Axel von dem Bussche-Streithorst of 23. Infanterie-Division
But the overwhelming feeling was one of their own invincibility; “It’s all kicking off against Russia. I’ve just come from a meeting with the generals of the panzer units. One declared, ‘In five weeks I’ll be in Moscow,’ then the next: ‘I’ll be there in four at the latest,’ then the last retorted: ‘I’ll make it in three.’ So, it’s going to go very quickly.” Oberleutnant Wieland
“Five minutes to zero hour! I am standing on the crest of a small hill on the south eastern border of East Prussia, the wide plains of Lithuania stretching ahead of us … I know thatj a million other Germans are looking at their watches at the same time … Three tremendous army groups and the Luftwaffe are poised for the mighty onslaught.” Dr Heinrich Haape, 6. Infanterie-Division
Taken completely by surprise the Red Army suffered defeat after defeat. “Great masses of dirt fountain up into the air … one of the huts is blazing fiercely, vehicles have been stripped of their camouflage and overturned by the blast. The Ivans come to life at last. The scene below is like an ant-heap as they scurry about in confusion. Stepsons of Stalin flee for cover in the woods in their underwear. Light flak guns fire at us. I set my sights on one of them and open up with machine-guns and both cannon. An Ivan at the gun falls to the ground, still in his underwear.” Heinz Knoke, fighter pilot
“The East is aflame!” Dr Heinrich Haape
But from the start the campaign was characterised by a violence and brutality that would scar the souls of almost everyone involved, as Hans Roth soon realised “…as he and his comrades found themselves almost entombed in their own trenches by massed Soviet artillery fire, and subject to constant Soviet attacks: ‘My hair is charred. A large chunk of earth flies against my helmet and knocks me out for a few moments, and then they come, the Red devils – Urrah! Urrah! The first ones close to within fifty metres of us. We clamber out of our trenches, our machine-guns staying behind to give us cover … we end the fighting half an hour later.” Even Roth was disturbed by the savagery of it all. “I don’t remember the details of the butchery … we ran forward like homicidal maniacs. We shot, slashed, and beat. My shirt is torn, my hands and knees are bleeding, and there is blood all over my uniform. On my left boot is a piece of pulverised brain. I vomit … I feel dizzy and have cold chills.’”
The invasion would also presage an outpouring of anti-Semitism that would see the murder of over one million Soviet Jews, as Hildegard Trutz, a baker’s daughter back in Germany, considered necessary; “I could never stick Jews … I thought they were simply disgusting. They were so fat, they all had flat feet and they could never look you straight in the eye. I couldn’t explain my dislike for them until my leaders told me it was my sound Germanic instinct revolting against this alien element.”
There would be no lightning victory for Nazi Germany, as Biddy MacNaghten, an Irishwoman married to a German and living in Berlin, understood when she met her neighbour, Frau Schroder, in their apartment block garden. Frau Schroder was in tears: “Now the war will never end.”
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The cost of victory had been high, but the dash across Europe by the Western Allies from Normandy, through Belgium, over the Rhine and into the Third Reich’s very heart in the autumn of 1944 had dealt the death blow to Hitler’s regime. Winter had come, but not in time to save the Nazis. Stalin’s decision to secure the Balkans and eastern Europe for his new communist empire had, paradoxically, saved Germany from a vengeful Soviet army, and allowed the Americans, British and Canadians to mop up the last pockets of Nazi diehards in Saxony and Silesia. After more than five years of fighting, this new year of 1945 would surely begin with peace – except it didn’t, and it wouldn’t. The utter brilliance of the D-Day invasion on 6 June had been followed by a ten-week campaign of attrition in Normandy that had burnt away the very core of the Wehrmacht in the west, so that when the collapse came, it was spectacular. A fighting army and an occupation infrastructure that had inserted itself into every facet of life on continental Europe became just so much flotsam and jetsam almost overnight. Oberst Fritz Fullriede – a vastly experienced officer who had served in the First World War and had just been posted to the West that autumn, saw it for himself: “The whole west front has collapsed. The other side is marching about at will…”
The fact that the conflict dragged on through the winter of 1944, then spring and almost into summer of the following year, was the culmination of a whole series of decisions taken by both sides – many of which turned out to be mistakes; some fairly minor, others monumentally huge, and all tragic. Tragic, because they condemned untold thousands to a misery that could have been avoided, such as the battle of Arnhem; “One terribly wounded German, shot through both legs, pulled himself hand over hand towards his own lines. We watched his slow and painful progress with horrified fascination … he pulled himself across the road, and over the pavement, and then he dragged his shattered body inch by inch up a grass covered slope … he must have been in terrible pain, but he conquered the slope by sheer willpower. With a superhuman effort he heaved himself up to clear the final obstacle – a rifle barked next to me and I watched in disbelief as the wounded German fell back, shot through the head. To me it was little short of murder, but to my companion, a Welshman and one of our best shots, the German was a legitimate target.”
The Germans replied with heavy weapons to blast the paras out, as Horst Weber described: “Buildings collapsed like dolls’ houses. I don’t know how anyone could live through that inferno. I felt truly sorry for the British. [Watching a panzer demolish a house] …the roof fell in, the top two storeys began to crumble and then, like the skin peeling off a skeleton, the whole front fell into the street … the din was awful, but even so above it all we could hear the wounded screaming. As an SS trooper told a newly arrived artillery officer, ‘The only way to get the British out is to blast the building down, brick by brick. Believe me, these are real men. They won’t give up that bridge until we carry them out feet first.”
When the end came it was sometimes an anti-cliamx as Obergefreiter Henry Metelmann and his comrades found themselves surrounded by the Americans while hiding in a cellar.“I said to my comrades: ‘Right, that’s it, we’re going to surrender.’ No-one objected… I fixed a dirty white towel to a broomstick … and, followed by my friends, I climbed up the cellar steps, opened the door and stepped out into the street … a group of women on the opposite pavement looked at us and one of them mockingly said, ‘There’s Hitler’s last hope.’”
For others the fear was of vengeance and retribution; “When the war ended I thought of committing suicide, but instead I got rid of my uniform, changed into some civilian clothes and decided to stay in Germany rather than risk going back to Belgium. I knew I had to hide and deny I had served in the Waffen-SS, that’s when I had some photos taken of me in German Army uniform, so I could show them to anyone who asked. The shoulder boards and collar tabs were all made of paper and stuck onto the uniform, but they looked real enough to fool anyone. I had to do it, they were looking for SS men, and there were signs everywhere saying that if someone offered shelter to an SS soldier they would get twenty years in prison. So, I made my way to the French sector of Germany and called myself Hans Richter, pretended I was a German, and married a German woman because I just didn’t trust the Belgian authorities. I became an architectural draughtsman down in the Black Forest.” Belgian Flemish Waffen-SS volunteer Oswald Van Ooteghem.
A 53-year-old Texan chain-smoker of average height, with a dodgy knee and a love of Western novels - especially those by Zane Grey, a part-time dentist-cum author – was pacing up and down the thick carpet of a large room in the Georgian splendour of Southwick House, some five miles north of Portsmouth on the English south coast. Outside, rain was lashing down onto the roof and strong winds were rattling the black-out shutters, but inside, the silence was total. Seated a few feet away from the pacing man were half a dozen of the most senior officers in the Anglo-American military, all of them bar one in full uniform, heavy with their decoration ribbons; their shoes highly polished, their trousers knife-edged. Behind them, was a gaggle of aides and middle-ranking officers – standing to one side a tall, thin, lowland Scot in the blue of the British Royal Air Force, papers and charts gripped in his large, bony hands. Suddenly the pacer – popularly known to one and all as ‘Ike’ – stopped, looked up from the carpet to his seated audience, and said three words; ‘Okay, let’s go.’
With the order given Private Charles East of the American 29th Division (set to hit Omaha Beach) recalled a briefing when one of his officers told the assembled infantrymen that as they were the first wave it was expected that nine out of ten of them would become casualties on the day. East remembered looking around his comrades on hearing the news and thinking to himself: “You poor bastards.”
Who would East and his fellow liberators find on the enemy shore? Many weren’t the Aryan supermen of Nazi propaganda, many weren’t even German as Grenadier Heinrich Runder saw for himself; “…we felt sorry for them, even though many of them were Russians … that zone was manned by Russian units that were working for the German Army, men who had changed sides when they were captured in Russia. There was a whole company of them dotted around down there; we called it ‘little Russia.’”
Even Hollywood acknowledged this in the conclusion to the harrowing open scene of Steven Spielberg’s 1998 D-Day film epic, Saving Private Ryan, two American soldiers who have survived the carnage on Omaha Beach are confronted by two enemy soldiers who clamber out of their trench, throw away their weapons, thrust their hands into the air and try to surrender. The duo are clearly terrified, and pathetically plead for their lives as the Americans bear down on them – whatever they say is to no avail, and both are shot dead in cold blood, before their killers stoop down and start rifling their pockets for mementos or anything of intelligence value – probably both. The actor and star of the film, the American everyman Tom Hanks, looks away, his face a mixture of revulsion at what the soldiers have done, and relief at having survived the slaughter on the beach. To Western eyes – so used to the stereotype of Nazi atrocities versus Allied fair-play, that scene is shocking enough, and becomes even more so when what the executed men say before they are shot is translated into English: ‘Nestřílejte. Já jsem nikoho nezabil. Já jsem Čech.’ It’s not German, it’s Czech, and translates as: ‘Don’t shoot. I haven’t killed anyone. I’m Czech.’
Yet more of the defenders were German but were the old and the infirm; “I slept in the middle bunk, underneath me was an older man of thirty-five, already ancient to us eighteen-year-olds. Heinrich his name was, he had spent the last weeks in Bayeux at the dentist getting a set of false teeth. These didn’t fit very well and each evening he placed them in a glass of water on the headboard of his bunk. There were others with us who would normally have been classed as unfit for duty, the ‘Invaliden’. One eighteen-year-old had lost an eye as a child and now wore a glass one, another was hard of hearing.” Grenadier Peter Simeth.
Some, like twenty-one-year-old Klaus Herrig – a Naval signals corps wireless operator based at Le Havre – just wanted it to be over; “Some fools believed that Germany could still win the war, but I wasn’t among them. I couldn’t believe it by then. I think about half my comrades felt as I did. Everyone could see that we weren’t invincible, as we had always been told. The outcome of the war was a dangerous thing to discuss – you could only do it with friends, or people you felt you could trust – because in every unit there was a spy or two from the political side who would be watching and listening all the time… News from home made us very concerned for our families because of all the air raids. We expected the invasion to come that summer and waited for it with mixed feelings … if the invasion came we thought it might be the end of the war and that was what we wanted, to get the thing over and finished so we could go home. I knew I had to do my duty as a soldier, but in my innermost heart I just hoped for it to be over.”
When the invasion came Runder for one was awestruck; “A vast number of ships. Absolutely vast… I can tell you that my throat went dry, painfully dry, and my hands began to shake. I wasn’t the only man to be affected that way, one of the very young lads began to retch as if he was going to be sick. It was the effect of pure fear…” Runder’s position was first hit by an Allied air attack, and then by naval bombardment; “I could feel the blasts which made my ears ring and my nose bleed…I could see the large bunker behind us, which was a concrete bunker mounting an anti-tank gun. One of the rockets struck it, and simply blew the bunker to pieces. The walls and roof all flew apart, and the gun itself crashed down near our trench.”
Franz Gockel was facing the armada too; “We were just defending ourselves, we wanted to survive. They were not our enemy … we didn’t know them and we had no option to say yes or no to what was happening – I just remember thinking they had more ships than we had men.”
But soldiers like Henrick Naube were ready; “The Americans were about four hundred metres away from us. I did not sight on them individually at first, but I began firing and swept the gun from left to right along the beach. This knocked down the first few men in each line; the MG 42 was so powerful that the bullets would often pass through a human body and hit whatever was behind it. So many of these men were hit by a bullet which had already passed through a man in front, or even two men. .The Americans began to run, wade or stagger forwards, trying to get out of the water and onto the sand itself. They still moved quite slowly, and because of that and the close range they were easy targets to hit.”
The beginning of 1942 brought Hitler another chance to finish the assault in the East, but all the reports from the military planners of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Supreme High Command - OKW) made uncomfortable reading for the Führer. The best brains the German staff had all agreed: Nazi Germany was physically unable to repeat the scale of the original three[1]pronged offensive of 1941 and would even struggle to adequately assemble a single major assault force. Searching for a solution, Hitler’s answer was to belatedly turn to his allies and demand they commit totally to the war in the Soviet Union. The result was a major influx of troops from Romania, Italy and Hungary, as all together the ‘Axis big three’ committed 750,000 men to that summer’s drive to conquer the oil-rich Soviet Caucasus. The offensive, code named Fall Blau (Case Blue), failed, and another Russian winter would find the ill-equipped Axis allied armies stretched thin and shivering on the banks of the River Don to the north and south of Stalingrad, where the German Sixth Army was being ground into meat. The disaster that then befell four entire Axis allied armies would condemn the Sixth Army to annihilation in Stalingrad and deal a blow to all of their armed forces from which they never recovered – this is that story.
The Nazis and the Luftwaffe were intertwined from the very beginning. It was the Nazis who created the Luftwaffe, and there was a saying in military circles of the time that Germany had ‘an Imperial Navy, a Prussian Army, and a National Socialist Air Force’. The Nazis fell in love with air power. It was everything they wanted for themselves, new, powerful and destined to rule, and indeed Hitler and his propaganda chief, Goebbels, pioneered a winning combination of air power and politics. Goebbels would have Hitler criss-cross the country in his own plane before every election, seeming to be everywhere, and appearing from the heavens as a messiah to his adoring crowds, and once elections were no longer necessary in totalitarian Germany, air power became a way for the Nazis to project their might on to their neighbours. Visiting diplomats and politicians were treated to carefully choreographed fly pasts by armadas of warplanes, and the message was clear: ‘We can reach you wherever you are.’ So, lauded and nurtured by the Nazis, the Luftwaffe came to embody Hitler’s Germany. Instrumental in the conquest of the west and the Balkans, it was in the east with the launch of Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of the Soviet Union – that the Luftwaffe was to reach its zenith. As the army rolled inexorably eastwards, the Luftwaffe flew above it providing a vast protective canopy. Final victory was within reach, and yet … And yet the certainty of that victory proved a mirage, leaving only a monumental war of attrition that ground the Luftwaffe into bloody shreds. As the Duke of Wellington might have commented had he seen another German attempt at European domination come to naught: “They came on in the same old way, and we saw them off in the same old way.”
A Soviet pilot said of the air war; “Did we consider that we were killing fellow human beings? Not at all. We saw the Nazis bombing our country, shooting and killing. Each of us knew they simply had to be shot down. You fired at an enemy plane as if it were a flying target, especially if you’d developed a desire to score. If you didn’t shoot him down he’d shoot you down – or one of your friends. You had to shoot him first.”
Their German opponents were forced to fight a war of attrition they were fundamentally incapable of sustaining; “I joined our unit, Hauptmann Machfeld was there then, he was later burnt to death … He landed in an Fw 190 and ran off the runway into all those damned bomb craters, the aircraft turned over and caught fire, he screamed like an animal – it was horrible … the mechanics couldn’t bear to hear it, and they let the aircraft engines run at full speed so that the screams couldn’t be heard. I was always terrified of being burnt to death, especially in the 109 – I’ve seen a great many of those aircraft turn over myself.”
In the end, assailed on all sides, the once-mighty Luftwaffe crumbled, despite the efforts of some of the most successful air aces of all time; “A fighter pilot not only bears the burden of stress in battle, he also bears responsibility for his wingmen, for his comrades. He also has to deal with losing close friends. He must be prepared for all situations, all pressures. For example, I never felt fear before a sortie or during briefing, but sometimes we were navigated by a ground station and I couldn’t see the enemy – then I was nervous. I felt blind – the enemy is out there somewhere, probably preparing to attack, but I cannot see him. You go nuts. As soon as you see the enemy your nerves are back to normal. Then it all depends on who is stronger.”
