The Last Year of the German Army: May 1944–May 1945

By James Lucas

The year the once all-conquering German army was finally defeated.

By the summer of 1944, Germany was in crisis. The Allied landings had forced another battle arena upon an army already fighting on the vast Eastern front. The July bomb plot attempt on Hitler’s life made the dictator even more paranoid and suspicious of his own military commanders.

In this absorbing study, James Lucas examines the army’s changing structure and weaponry throughout this final year of war, and reveals the often surprising measures taken to confront a situation Hitler had never contemplated, and never really accepted.

From D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge and on to the Fall of Berlin, the author examines the last battles fought by the German army – which had by no means given up its struggle – as the Allies swept across Europe, charting the very unique experiences of a military force moving from dominance to defeat.

Perfect for readers of Antony Beevor and Max Hastings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canelo History
• Release date: Oct 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781804366356

James Lucas

James Lucas was an acclaimed military historian who worked for many years at the Imperial War Museum. He is the author of numerous bestselling books about the Second World War.

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Acknowledgements

It is with warm and grateful thanks that I acknowledge the help so generously given by a great many friends, colleagues and institutions in the production of this book. I am particularly grateful to my former colleagues at the Department of Photographs in the Imperial War Museum and would mention, specifically, Jane Carmichael, the Keeper of that Department, and Hilary Roberts. In the Department of Printed Books my very special thanks go to Julie Robertshaw and to Colin Bruce. The efficiency and knowledge of all those officers named as well as of the other members of those Departments made my research task very much easier.

I also record my thanks for the assistance of foreign institutions and officers, especially that of Dr Meyer of the Bundesarchiv in Freiburg i/ Breisgau and Dr Manfried Rauchensteiner of the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna as well as of regimental archives and organizations in Germany and Austria. In addition I must mention my comrades of the former German Army who carried out research for me in the Bundesarchiv in both Freiburg and Koblenz and whose industry and expert knowledge I gratefully acknowledge.

To my agent, Sheila Watson, I am indebted, but my most grateful thanks go, as always, to my beloved wife, Traude, upon whose unfailing support I depend absolutely.

James Lucas

Historical Introduction

The Second World War ended, officially, in Europe on 8 May 1945, although fighting flickered for a day or two longer in Czechoslovakia, in southern Austria and in the northern provinces of Yugoslavia. The German Army’s last year of war – the subject of this book – covers, therefore, the period from May 1944 to the end of hostilities in Europe. At the time that this narrative commences there were two principal battle fronts, the vast Eastern and the smaller Italian. In addition to those main theatres of operation where regular forces were engaged, there was a partisan Army of National Liberation operating in Yugoslavia as well as other guerrilla movements active in many countries of Europe. Germany’s military leaders knew that an Allied invasion of Western Europe was imminent and that when it did come the Reich would be fighting an unequal battle on not just two fronts but three. The best that they could hope to wrest from that situation would be a stalemate. The worst scenario was the utter defeat of the Reich. The only positive prospect was that the ‘miracle’ V-weapons would soon go into action. Although it was clear these could in no way bring about a total victory for German arms, they might improve the military situation to the point where a stalemate could be reached.

On the Eastern Front, in May 1944, the plans of the senior commanders of the OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres, or Army High Command) to reduce the impact of the Red Army’s blows by conducting strategic manoeuvres were brought to naught by Hitler’s refusal to let those generals yield ground. He was obsessed with holding on to the territory and lands which his Army had won in the years of conquest and would not relinquish them voluntarily. Then, in the winter of 1943–44, the Red Army opened an offensive in bitter weather. This massive operation recaptured huge areas of the Soviet Union but, more importantly, bled white the German armies which it struck. The winter offensive rolled on into the spring of 1944, but then outran its supplies and faltered. During April 1944 the onset of warmer weather and the resultant thaw brought about a reduction in the extent and weight of that massive Russian operation. Under normal circumstances such a scaling-down would have been exploited by the senior commanders at the OKH as a breathing space to rest, regroup and re-equip the armies on the Eastern Front. Hitler would not allow his subordinates to use the opportunities which these weeks of relative inactivity offered. As the German Army’s Supreme Commander, he might have used the time to strengthen the Eastern Front by pulling back his armies to a shorter line. Using the reserves which such a prudent move would have gained, he could have deployed them to block the thrust lines of the Soviet summer offensive which his intelligence sources had predicted was only a month or two away. The Führer did nothing positive or constructive, wasting the weeks of relative quiet because all his energies were now concentrated upon the Western Front, where, on 6 June, Allied forces had carried out an invasion.

Hitler’s attention was brought sharply back to the Eastern Front once again when Stalin, acting in concert with the Allied landings in France, opened a summer offensive during June. The German forces in the east, holding a battle line more than 1,400 miles (2,240km) in overall length, had been so weakened by the winter operation that they were unable to withstand the blows of that new, major Russian effort and either retreated or, if they stood and fought, were overrun, surrounded and defeated. Those who survived the artillery barrages, the onslaught of tank armadas and the mass infantry assaults streamed back from the battlefield in disorder. Army Group Centre was destroyed by massive blows, and so swift were the Red Army’s advances that in Byelorussia by the first week of August the disorganized remnant of that army group had been flung back almost to the River Vistula and the outskirts of Warsaw. Once again there was a pause in the fighting. Hostilities reopened in the last months of 1944 and endured throughout the first four months of 1945. That final series of Russian offensives carried the Red Army from east of Warsaw to Berlin, where it ended the war.

In the Italian theatre of operations, by May 1944 Allied forces had fought their way up the peninsula from the beaches on which they had debarked the previous September and by December had advanced as far as the mountain barrier of Cassino. There they had been held. An attempt, during January 1944, to bypass the mountains by launching a seaborne landing at Anzio, behind the Cassino massif, failed. The Allied armies were halted by the mountains at Cassino and the hills around Anzio. Field Marshal Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, had no choice but to launch his armies, once again, into a frontal assault at Cassino. That major offensive in May 1944 eventually broke through the 21-mile (34km) wide gap between the mountains and the Tyrrhenian sea, liberated Rome on 4 June and subsequently carried the advance northwards, towards the Alps. By the war’s end the Allied armies had reached southern Austria.

The blow in the West, which had been long anticipated by the German High Command, came in, as mentioned above, on 6 June and opened a campaign of liberation, first in Normandy and then in southern France. Within ten months of D-Day the Western Allies, advancing across Germany, met the Red Army, first on the River Elbe and then in Germany’s eastern provinces and in other parts of central Europe. With the union of the Allied armies the war in Europe ended.

Not only in the military sphere but in every other degree Germany was in a condition of crisis in May 1944. At sea there was no surface fleet strong enough to challenge the Allied naval armadas. The submarine arm of service, although active and still scoring successes, was no longer the powerful force it had once been and its activities were reduced because of the Allies’ improved methods of detection which prevented the U-boats from making substantial sinkings. In the air the Luftwaffe was on the defensive, its main strength concentrating upon attacking the Allied bombers which came by day and by night. The terrible bombing unleashed upon the civilians of Germany had not broken their spirit, and despite the massive destruction of German industry production had in fact risen. Those increases in output created the situation in which there was, for example, an abundance of fighter aircraft for which there were neither sufficient fuel supplies nor enough trained pilots.

Despite the adverse situation in which she was placed, Germany was still, in May 1944, so strong that it might have been possible for her to have fought the war to a stalemate. A number of factors prevented that disaster from happening, the chief of which was Adolf Hitler’s paranoia concerning his senior military commanders. In July 1944 there had been an attempt by a group of generals to kill the Führer with a bomb. He, seeing treason in all their activities, thereupon withdrew from his senior military commanders so great an amount of their authority and decision-making that the veteran Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt complained bitterly, ‘…my authority to move troops is limited to changing the guard on the door to my office…’ That may have been an exaggeration, but the remark does illustrate how powerless the generals were in relation to their political overlord.

Convinced that the Army, led by treacherous generals, lacked the will to win, Hitler turned for military support to the National Socialist Party of which he was the Führer. He had persuaded himself that the Army had failed him and he had gone from that self-deception to the conviction that the Party would not. As a measure of his confidence he promoted to positions of authority Party comrades – men who were unfit to hold them. For example, he gave the post of Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula to Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and a man unusual in the highest echelons of the Nazi hierarchy for not having served in the First World War. Hitler’s confidence in the ability of his political comrades was unbounded; nor was it diminished when their obvious shortcomings and general incompetence became apparent. Late in the war he bestowed upon the Gauleiters, or regional governors, the authority of Reichs Defence Commissars, giving those men, acting in the Führer’s name, the right to challenge, obstruct or even countermand orders given by military commanders if they disagreed with them.

Another feature of the Party military initiative was the bizarre campaign, initiated by Josef Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, to use the emotive word ‘Volks’ (People’s) as a prefix to a unit title, for example Volksgrenadier Division. It was confidently predicted and overwhelmingly believed at party political level that this description would imbue the soldiers of that formation with a fanatical revolutionary zeal. Following on from the introduction of ‘Volks’ divisions was the creation of the ‘Volkssturm’, the German Home Guard, and then the raising of various types of formations designated ‘Freikorps’, another emotive term, imbuing those Nazi Party formations with the nimbus gained by similarly named patriotic bodies which had, in former times, taken up arms to defend Germany’s national borders.

There was, however, one body among the Party institutions which was efficient, well-organized and fanatical and which had been active since the outbreak of war. This was the Waffen SS (Armed SS), which had participated in the Polish campaign as a handful of regiments but which within a few years had gained such a reputation for outstanding bravery that it had become an élite force. The Waffen SS organization expanded: the regiments became divisions, then corps, and eventually there was an SS Panzer Army. Because of the formidable reputation which the SS gained on the battlefield, its formations were committed to battle in critical sectors, where they attacked with berserk fury or defended the positions allotted to them with tenacious skill. Such total commitment inevitably brought the SS appalling losses, but these in no way diminished its fighting edge, for there were always volunteers coming forward to seek death or glory in its ranks.

The first four Waffen SS divisions to be raised were filled by Reichsdeutsche, that is, men born in Germany or Austria. Then, late in 1940, the SS Central Office reported large numbers of Scandinavian men volunteering for service with the SS because the regular German Army was not allowed to accept them. To exploit that enthusiasm the Party encouraged the recruitment of those volunteers, who eventually became the SS ‘Viking’ Division. Over the following years, as Germany expanded across Europe, enclaves of Germans living in foreign countries, the so-called ‘Volksdeutsche’, were also recruited to serve in the Waffen SS.

Later in the war came the acceptance of foreign and non-European races, including such exotic peoples as Tartars, Turcomen and Uzbheki who served alongside Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Danes, Italians and Hungarians in what had become an international military force and one which many former German soldiers claim was the forerunner of the United Nations peacekeeping forces. The Waffen SS entered the war as a token body but at the peak of its strength contained thirty-nine divisions totalling nearly a million men. A party political force of such size was, theoretically, a threat to the national Army which proclaimed itself to be the weapons carrier of the German people. Hitler had, perhaps, always intended that the SS, the Party’s soldiers, should represent a challenge to traditional beliefs and in time usurp the Army’s historic role. If that had indeed been his intention, then it was intensified after the July 1944 Bomb Plot. Thereafter, it was almost exclusively to the SS that the Führer turned to conduct his military operations.

The SS also produced bizarre formations, including a loose-linked collection of first class commando detachments. Out of that galaxy of élite units within an élite force there evolved the last of the Party’s military formations – Wehrwolf, a partisan movement which scored minor successes against each of the Allied armies but which failed to inspire, as Josef Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, had intended that it should, the German people to last-ditch resistance and to all-out battle. Although the Party propaganda machine had been unable to rally either the German people or the Army to that pitch of heroic resistance which would have brought all Europe crashing down in a mighty Götterdämmerung, field propaganda units did have a number of successes, particularly on the Eastern Front. There, even as late as the last week of April 1945 – only a week before the war in Europe ended – Red Army soldiers were still deserting to the Germans, waving ‘Safety Passes’, many of which which had been picked up months or even years earlier and which had been kept hidden for such a day. Earlier than this, in 1941 and 1942, the Reich’s propaganda machine had exploited the belief held by the civilian populations of the East that the German soldiers had come to liberate the peoples of the Soviet Union from the brutal, communist dictatorship. The result of these early propaganda campaigns had been the creation of a strong labour force of Russian women working in the factories of the Reich and the employment of Russian men in police units and on anti-partisan operations. The raising of a Russian national army under the former Red Army general Vlasov, as well as of Cossack divisions under officers who had been former Soviet citizens – all of which might well have been brought about in 1943 – was forbidden by Hitler until 1945, too late for them to influence the outcome of the war on the Eastern Front. By the middle years of the war, Germany’s manpower resources had begun to diminish, making it not merely desirable but essential for the Reich to find front-line soldiers. The nations of Western Europe which had supplied the Third Reich with men in the first years of the war had reached the stage where they were no longer able, or willing, to supply replacements in sufficient numbers to cover the losses of their nationals. It was to the seemingly bottomless reservoir of Russian manpower in the territories which her Army had conquered that Germany turned for the men for her regiments. One of the chapters of this book will illustrate an SS propaganda offensive mounted during late 1944, a ‘saturation’ operation against a specific sector of the Eastern Front intended to encourage the desertion of large numbers of Red Army soldiers.

Thus it was that the German Army entered into the last year of its life with a dwindling number of soldiers to man the battle line. This shortage of native Germans meant that the Reich would be more and more dependent upon foreign men of doubtful loyalty and unproven fighting ability. It was an army which, as we shall discover, was short of arms and equipment and one which received few weapons of new design and, in the matter of supplies, was kept so short of petrol that a great many vehicles whose fuel tanks had run dry during a withdrawal had to be abandoned or blown up to deny them to the enemy. It was an army with a Supreme Commander, Adolf Hitler, who had committed it to a war on three major fronts; a generalissimo who, moreover, suspected his field commanders of treason, just as they doubted his strategies and policies; and a commander who was almost totally ignorant of strategy or the movement of armies and who had once claimed that he moved with the assurance of a sleepwalker. Somnambulism is not the most reliable means by which strategic decisions may be reached or military victories gained. Most of the generals in the Army carried out the orders of their Supreme Commander despite the mutual contempt which existed between both parties. Their obedience to even the most ridiculous of Hitler’s orders condemned thousands of soldiers to death, fighting in offensives which had no chance of success or holding out to the last in hopeless positions, held to obedience by loyalty to a man who despised their efforts. An army of diminishing resources, commanded at the highest level by a paranoiac, fought the opening months of its final year on enemy soil. In the succeeding months, as Allied advances took the war into the Reich, the Army still did its duty. It did not need the terror of SS ‘flying courts martial’ to bolster its resistance, but it fought for the concept of ‘Volk und Vaterland’, even if not so devotedly for the ‘Führer’ part of that tripartite slogan.

The person of Adolf Hitler is crucial to an understanding of operations in that last year of the war, and the Führer and his relations with his generals as well as his destruction of the Supreme Command Staff system will be dealt with in another chapter. The text of the book will also include details of the principal weapons and vehicles in service during the period of the last year and will cover the rise of the Waffen SS and its commando groups. The most important of the Party formations which were created in that final year will also be mentioned. It is not the purpose of this book to describe in depth all the military campaigns in the several theatres of war, but there will be coverage of the main operational areas and each brief account will mention one or more of the specific operations which were fought out in that theatre, either to highlight a weapon used in the fighting to or illustrate a specific incident in that campaign.

In an account of a complete year of a war fought by millions of men across an area extending from the French Atlantic coast to the banks of the Vistula in Poland, it is self-evident that there will be gaps in the recording of events and battles. It must be left to the reader to see in his mind’s eye the weapons which are detailed here and how they were used in action. He must imagine for himself the German Landser armed with their single-shot Panzerfaust rocket and battling against the masses of Allied armoured fighting vehicles rolling across Germany from both east and west. It is for the reader to imagine the despair, the terror and the sense of isolation of the German fighting soldier who, alone in a slit trench, endured the fury of enemy bombardments and air attacks to which the artillery and the air force of his own country could offer no reply. The military organization and the orders of battle, the Army’s weapons and a few of the battles it fought are recorded here, but these are just the highlights from which the reader must create a picture of the embattled German Army in the last year of the Second World War.

1

Organization

The organization of the German Armed Forces at the start of the Second World War was for three arms of service, the Army (Heer), the Navy (Kriegsmarine) and the Air Force (Luftwaffe). During the war a fourth arm of service was added – a party political force called the Waffen SS which expanded from a pre-war nucleus of regiments (Standarten). In addition to the thirty-nine named divisions which it raised, as well as a great many independent formations, there were certain military bodies which were associated with the Waffen SS although they were not an integral part of that organization.

In peacetime the Army was made up of a series of numbered corps, each of which contained, usually, two divisions. A division as the basis of the hierarchical structure meant, in those days, an infantry division, for that arm of service was paramount. It was not until the third year of the war that the victories achieved by the Panzer arm caused it to take the nimbus from the infantry and for the armoured force to be accepted as the backbone of the German Army. A corps was the largest hierarchical grouping in peacetime and paralleled, approximately, the military districts into which Germany was partitioned. Cadres existed for the next senior grouping, the army, and when a new campaign was being planned an army or number of armies was created. It was a standard composition for two corps to be grouped to form an army.

The next hierarchical step was the army group, which usually contained at least two armies. The combined services (Wehrmacht) were directed by a Supreme Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) and each Service had its own High Command. In the case of the Army this was the OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres). Upon the outbreak of war the whole Army was divided to become the Field Army, which came under the control of the OKH, and the Replacement (Ersatz) Army, which came under the aegis of the OKW.

Hitler, as Supreme Commander, was head of the OKW and, as a result of the débâcle of the winter of 1941, also took up the post of Head of the OKH. Although Hitler had been a soldier in the First World War he had had no training as a staff officer and his was, therefore, the layman’s ignorance of logistics. Nor could or would he take into account the limitations imposed upon plans by time and space. Although he did not have the disciplines required for his exalted command position, the Führer did possess an astonishing memory for detail – one could call it a mastery of military trivial pursuits. He was able to quote muzzle velocities of guns, thicknesses of armour plate on Panzers or arms production figures – useful tricks which impressed his listeners but were no substitute for years of formal preparation and training. Nevertheless, he very quickly realized that his orders, however bizarre or senseless, would have the General Staffs at both the OKW and the OKH working hard to carry them out. Being a generalissimo was, he concluded, an easy task. All one had to do was to suggest a course of action or produce a plan, to issue directives or take decisions and to sack those subordinates who failed to achieve the set goals or those who argued against the proposals.

This simplistic idea of the Commander-in-Chief’s function affected the relationship between the Führer and his military advisers. Unable to accept criticism or advice, Hitler became increasingly isolated and in that isolation was surrounded by senior officers who were afraid tell him the truth about the disasters which his eccentric policies were inflicting upon the Army. His growing isolation from reality and his distrust of the aristocrats in the High Command – particularly after the Bomb Plot of 20 July 1944