Hitler

catastrophic collapse of the Italian 8th Army, overwhelmed during the previous two days by the Soviet offensive on the middle stretches of the Don. When Ciano put Mussolini’s case for Germany coming to terms with the Soviet Union in order to put maximum effort into defence against the western powers, Hitler was dismissive. Were he to do that, he replied, he would be forced within a short time to fight a reinvigorated Soviet Union once more. The Italian guests were non-committal towards Hitler’s exhortations to override all civilian considerations in favour of supplies for North Africa.
    For the German people, quite especially for the many German families with loved ones in the 6th Army, Christmas 1942 was a depressing festival. The triumphalist propaganda of September and October,suggesting that victory at Stalingrad was just around the corner, had given way in the weeks following the Soviet counter-offensive to little more than ominous silence. Rumours of the encirclement of the 6th Army – passed on through despairing letters from the soldiers entrapped there – swiftly spread. It soon became evident that the rumours were no less than the truth.
    A series of letters from senior officers in the 6th Army, describing their plight in graphic detail, were received by Hitler’s Luftwaffe Adjutant, Nicolaus von Below. He showed them to Hitler, reading out key passages. Hitler listened without comment, except once remarking inscrutably that ‘the fate of the 6th Army left for all of us a deep duty in the fight for the freedom of the our people’. What he really thought, no one knew.
    After Paulus had rejected a call to surrender, the final Soviet attack to destroy the 6th Army began on 10 January. An emissary to the Wolf ’s Lair, seeking permission for Paulus to have freedom of action to bring an end to the carnage, went unheeded by Hitler. On 15 January, he commissioned Field-Marshal Erhard Milch, the Luftwaffe’s armaments supremo and mastermind of all its transportation organization, with flying 300 tons of supplies a day to the besieged army. It was pure fantasy – though partly based on the inaccurate information that Zeitzler complained about on more than one occasion. Snow and ice on the runways in sub-arctic temperatures often prevented take-offs and landings. In any case, on 22 January the last airstrip in the vicinity of Stalingrad was lost. Supplies could now only be dropped from the air. The remaining frozen, half-starved troops, under constant heavy fire, were often unable to salvage them.
    By this time, the German people were already being prepared for the worst. After a long period of silence, the Wehrmacht report on 16 January had spoken in ominous terms of a ‘heroically courageous defensive struggle against the enemy attacking from all sides’. The press was instructed to speak of ‘the great and stirring heroic sacrifice which the troops encircled at Stalingrad are offering the German nation’.
    Hitler had bluntly described the plight of the 6th Army to Goebbels on 22 January. There was scarcely a hope of rescuing the troops. It was a ‘heroic drama of German history’. News came in as they talked, outlining the rapidly deteriorating situation. Hitler was said by Goebbels to have been ‘deeply shaken’. But he did not consider attaching anyblame to himself. He complained bitterly about the Luftwaffe, which had not kept its promises about levels of supplies. Schmundt separately told Goebbels that these had been illusory. Göring’s staff had given him the optimistic picture they presumed he wanted, and he had passed this on to the Führer. It was a problem that afflicted the entire dictatorship – up to and including Hitler himself. Only positive messages were acceptable. Pessimism (which usually meant realism) was a sign of failure. Distortions of the truth were built into the communications system of the Third Reich at every level – most of all in the top echelons of the regime.
    Even more than he felt let down by his own Luftwaffe, Hitler voiced utter contempt for the failure of the German allies to hold the line against the Soviet counter-attack. The Romanians were bad, the Italians worse, and worst of all were the Hungarians. The catastrophe would not have occurred had the entire eastern front been controlled by German units, as he had wanted. The German bakers’ and baggage-formations, he fumed, had performed better than the élite Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian