The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945

104. Walter Görlitz, Model: Strategie der Defensive, Wiesbaden, 1975, p. 188. More critical towards Model than Görlitz’s biography are the biographical sketches in Smelser and Syring, pp. 368–87 (Joachim Ludewig), in Ueberschär, pp. 153–60 (Samuel W. Mitcham Jr. and Gene Mueller), and in Correlli Barnett (ed.), Hitler’s Generals, London, 1990, pp. 319–33 (Carlo d’Este).

105. Model’s ‘Tagesbefehl’ of 31.7.44, quoted in Manfred Messerschmidt, ‘Die Wehrmacht in der Endphase: Realität und Perzeption’, Aus Parlament und Zeitgeschichte, 32–3 (1989), pp. 38–9 (4.8.89).

106. See Smelser and Syring, pp. 497–509 (Klaus Schönherr) and Ueberschär, pp. 236–44 (Peter Steinkamp). A largely sympathetic portrait of Schörner is provided in Roland Kaltenegger, Schörner: Feldmarschall der letzten Stunde, Munich and Berlin, 1994.

107. DRZW, 9/1 (Förster), pp. 596–600; Smelser and Syring (Schönherr), p. 504.

108. BA/MA, RH19/III/727, fos. 2–3, Tagesbefehle der Heeresgruppe Nord, 25, 28.7.44.

109. BA/MA, RH19/III/667, fo. 7, post-war recollections of Hans Lederer (1955): ‘Kurland: Gedanken und Betrachtungen zum Schicksal einer Armee’.

110. Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters 1939–45, pb. edn., Novato, Calif., n.d. (original Eng. language edn., London, 1964), p. 464.

111. Warlimont, p. 462.

112. Ronald Smelser, Robert Ley: Hitler’s Labor Front Leader, Oxford, New York and Hamburg, 1988, p. 291, for Ley’s speech. The impact on the military was said to have been ‘simply catastrophic’.—Wilfred von Oven, Finale Furioso: Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende, Tübingen, 1974, p. 505 (29.10.44).

113. Orlow, pp. 462–5.

114. See Förster, pp. 132–3.

115. TBJG, II/13, p. 134 (23.7.44).

116. Förster, pp. 131, 134, 139.

117. NAL, WO208/5622, fo. 120A, not contained in the printed edition of these bugged conversations by Sönke Neitzel, Abgehört: Deutsche Generäle in britischer Kriegsgefangenschaft 1942–1945, Berlin, 2005 (Eng. edn., Tapping Hitler’s Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, 1942–45, Barnsley, 2007).

CHAPTER 2. COLLAPSE IN THE WEST

1. The High Command of the Wehrmacht had expected to cut off the Americans by a counter-attack and was taken by surprise at the breakthrough to Avranches.—NAL, WO219/1651, fo. 144, SHAEF: interrogation of General Jodl, 23.5.45.

2. This was the tenor of his discussions with Jodl late on the evening of 31 July 1944.—BA/MA, 4/881, fos. 1–46; printed in Lagebesprechungen im Führerhauptquartier: Protokollfragmente aus Hitlers militärischen Konferenzen 1942–1945, ed. Helmut Heiber, Berlin, Darmstadt and Vienna, 1963, pp. 242–71 (Eng. edn., Hitler and his Generals: Military Conferences 1942–1945, ed. Helmut Heiber and David M. Glantz, London, 2002, pp. 444–63). See Nicolaus von Below, Als Hitlers Adjutant 1937–45, Mainz, 1980, p. 386, for Hitler’s thinking about a new offensive in the west; and DRZW, 7 (Vogel), pp. 576–7, for the implications for a negotiated end.

3. DZW, 6, p. 105.

4. DZW, 6, p. 112.

5. Joseph Balkoski, ‘Patton’s Third Army: The Lorraine Campaign, 19 September–1 December 1944’, in Albert A. Nofi (ed.), The War against Hitler: Military Strategy in the West, Conshohocken, Pa., 1995, pp. 178–91. BA/MA, N647/12, NL Balck, Kriegstagebuch, Bd. 11, fo. 90, diary entry for 21.9.44, shows Balck’s impressions on receiving the command of a ‘fresh and confident’ Hitler, and of the troops he was taking over as ‘mere shadows’. TBJG, II/13, p. 528 (20.9.44) gives Goebbels’ assessment of Balck as a ‘first-class general from the eastern front’.

6. Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, Munich, 1995, p. 98. Lieutenant-General Siegfried Westphal, appointed at the beginning of September 1944 as Chief of Staff to Rundstedt in Oberkommando West, and struck on taking up the post by the poor morale of the retreating troops and the bloated numbers of the rear-lines staff, reckoned that a more determined advance by Eisenhower’s forces would have made it impossible to have built up a new front on the western borders of the Reich, and would have allowed an assault on the Reich itself that would have ended the war in the west.—Siegfried Westphal, Erinnerungen, Mainz, 1975, pp. 273, 279, 289.