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

At the opposite end of the eastern front, on the Baltic, Army Group North fought throughout the summer in a desperate attempt to avoid being cut off. The Soviet advance had opened up a huge gap between Army Group North and what was left of Army Group Centre. Entreaties to Hitler, already in early July and later, to allow Army Group North to withdraw to a more defensible line to the west were predictably rejected. The Baltic could not be surrendered, since Swedish steel, Finnish nickel and oil shale (used by the navy) from Estonia were vital for the war effort. But Hitler was also influenced by the need to retain the Baltic harbours for trials of the new generation of U-boats, which, Grand-Admiral Dönitz had impressed upon him, still offered a chance for Germany to turn the fortunes of war in her favour by throttling supplies to Britain and cutting off Allied shipment of men and matériel to the Continent.¹⁰ Bitter fighting continued throughout July and August as Army Group North was forced to retreat some 200 kilometres to the north-west and evacuate parts of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, though it was able for the time being to prevent the Red Army from breaking through to the Baltic. What contribution, if any, to Army Group North’s resilience was made by the fanatical and ferocious leadership of its Commander-in-Chief, Colonel-General Schörner—one of Hitler’s outright favourites—is hard to say. Schörner, the most brutal of Hitler’s commanders, was unremitting in his demands for ruthless and fanatical fighting spirit, and in his merciless punishment of any that he deemed to be falling short of his demands.¹¹ His tactical errors, however, accentuated the plight of the Army Group.¹² Almost a quarter of a million strong, comprising three armies, its situation remained precarious, facing Soviet forces on three sides and mainly dependent upon supplies by sea across the Baltic. Meanwhile, by 2 September Germany’s important northern ally, Finland, had pulled out of the struggle and was soon to sign an armistice with the Soviet Union.

After a brief lull in the fighting, the Red Army opened a big northern offensive on 14 September. By the end of the month, the Wehrmacht had pulled out of Estonia and most of Latvia with great losses of men and equipment. The main forces had managed to withdraw, however, and were concentrated on a shorter front. A Soviet breakthrough in the area of Riga was held off—though not for long. In early October the Red Army forced its way through to the Baltic coast, just north of Memel. With that, the main forces of Army Group North were cut off from East Prussia. The German retreat from Riga was by then under way and the city fell to the Soviets in the middle of the month. By the end of October, intense German efforts to re-establish links with Army Group North had irredeemably failed. The Army Group’s defences were by now stabilized. But its 33 divisions were completely cut off on the Courland, the peninsula north-west of Riga. Apart from 3 divisions that were promptly evacuated and a further 10 divisions brought out by sea in early 1945, its main forces, comprising around a quarter of a million frontline troops, so badly needed elsewhere, would remain there, isolated and of little further strategic relevance, until the capitulation in May 1945.¹³

From the Baltic to the Balkans, Germans armies had reeled at the ferocious onslaught of the Red Army in the summer months of 1944. In those months, the magnitude of the losses and the secession of crucial allies meant that Germany’s hopes of a victorious outcome to the war in the east had vanished. Goebbels was among those in the Nazi leadership who plainly recognized this. In September, he took up a Japanese suggestion for separate peace soundings with the Soviet Union and put the proposal to Hitler in a lengthy letter.¹⁴ Hitler took no notice of it. Whether there was the remotest chance of Stalin showing an interest in coming to terms with Germany when his forces were so rampantly in the ascendancy might well be doubted. But the issue could not be put to the test. Hitler’s silent veto was sufficient to rule out any possibility of an approach. The structures of Nazi rule ensured that there was no platform of any kind where Hitler’s adamant refusal to contemplate a negotiated end to the war, east or west, could be deliberated, let alone challenged.