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

The best prospects lay in the central sector of the front. The US First Army, under General Courtney Hodges, advancing north-eastwards from the Paris area in late August, had destroyed several German panzer divisions, taking 25,000 prisoners, before reaching Mons, in Belgium. Part of the army, the V US Corps, then turned south-east to advance through Luxemburg and almost to the German border near Trier by 11 September, while the VII US Corps drove directly eastwards towards Aachen. Around 6 p.m. on 11 September, the first American troops set foot on German soil, just south of Aachen, a city by now largely free of defending troops and with a panic-stricken population. But the Americans pressed their advance over too wide an area. German forces regrouped and, through tenacious fighting, blocked the larger and stronger American forces. Within five days, reinforced German units had succeeded in repulsing the American attack. German authorities were able—for the time being—to restore their control over Aachen and prevent any American breakthrough in the direction of Cologne. Another chance had been missed. It would take a further five weeks of bitter fighting before Aachen became the first German city to fall into Allied hands, on 21 October. And it would be nearly six months before Cologne, only 90 kilometres or so away, was taken.

Meanwhile, Rundstedt had been recalled as Commander-in-Chief West (in overall command of the army in that theatre) on 5 September, leaving Model, a brilliant defence strategist, to take charge of Army Group B (one of two Army Groups on the western front; the other, Army Group G, was commanded by Colonel-General Johannes Blaskowitz). Under Model’s command, the German defences, helped by shortened supply lines and hardened reinforcements, both salvaged from Normandy and brought across from the eastern front, had been strengthened. By mid-September the Allies stood close to the German border over a long stretch of the front from Belgium almost to Switzerland. But it was now clear that expectations which the Allies had held for months, drawing on the experiences of the First World War, of the sort of German collapse that had happened in 1918 were misplaced.⁶ The war was set to drag on.⁷

The Allies had shown hesitation and made costly errors at crucial junctures. But the Germans had made their own major contribution to prolonging the war. For Germany, despite fierce and courageous fighting by the outnumbered forces of the Wehrmacht, the collapse in France had come as a dreadful shock. Within a little over three months, the Allies had liberated France and reached Germany’s borders. Soon, it was evident, the war would be fought on German soil. Under Model’s able command, however, they had survived the critical, but not fatal, defeat near Falaise. Since then, they had surprised the Allies with the tenacity, even fanaticism, of their fighting. Though outnumbered, they had shown energy and initiative. And they had some technically superior weaponry and tanks—if in insufficient quantities. The main weakness was not on the ground, but in the air, where the Luftwaffe was increasingly paralysed and Allied superiority immense.⁸ Even so, German defence was stubborn, and not easy to break down. Unlike the Russian army in 1917, the German army the following year, the Italian army in 1943, or other instances where heavy defeats had produced a collapse in morale with devastating political consequences, the German armed forces in late summer and autumn of 1944 were far removed from the point at which they were unwilling to fight on any further. What lay behind the extraordinary tenacity of the fighting front in the west?

II

Had the Allies seen reports that were reaching the German leadership at this time on the demoralization among the German civilian population on the western borders of the Reich and within the Wehrmacht produced by the disastrous military collapse in the west, they might have been encouraged in their ‘collapse theory’ based upon the events of 1918.⁹ Such reports certainly did not give the impression that Germany was capable of fighting on for a further eight months.