“Hitler’s sweeping, top-down solution—applied uniformly to every point of crisis in every sector of the front—was as nonsensical as it was dangerous.”

By David Stahel

GERMANY INVADED THE Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and, by the end of a five-and-a-half-month-long offensive campaign, had captured three million Soviet soldiers and killed or wounded millions more. More than half a million square miles of Soviet territory were now in German hands, including resource-rich Eastern Ukraine.

With German success in this period often left unquestioned, Army Group Centre’s winter campaign in 1941-1942 has previously been represented as Germany’s “first defeat” of the Second World War.[1]

According to the popular narrative, Army Group Centre was stopped short of the Soviet capital and thrown into retreat until Hitler issued his famous halt order of Dec. 18, 1941. Indeed, the directive has come to define Army Group Centre’s winter campaign. It certainly continued to exert an influence over Hitler’s thinking throughout the remainder of the war.

The order was a product of the dictator’s inflexible will, which supposedly undermined the army’s concept of Auftragstaktik (a German command method stressing decentralized initiative within an overall strategic framework).[2] According to this narrative, Hitler’s intervention ended Army Group Centre’s wide-ranging retreat and staved off a Napoleonic-style disaster.

There is good deal wrong with this orthodox interpretation of the winter campaign, starting with the fact that the failure of Barbarossa was surely Germany’s original, and given the implications, most important defeat.[3] More specifically, Hitler’s halt order has been misconstrued as having saved Army Group Centre. Even former German officers contributed to this perception.

“Hitler believed that he personally could ward off the catastrophe which was impending before Moscow,” Colonel Günther Blumentritt, chief of staff of the Fourth Army during the December battles, wrote after the war. “And it must be stated quite frankly that he did in fact succeed in doing so. His fanatical order that the troops must hold fast regardless in every position, and in the most impossible circumstances, was undoubtedly correct.”^[4]

Stubbornly defending every inch of ground, refusing withdrawals and rebuking commanders who sought permission to retreat was the new dictate for commanders in the East. In the absence of desperately needed manpower reserves or even winter equipment to reinforce the front, the halt order represented Hitler’s own retreat into an ideological solution – a “fanatical order” as Blumentritt characterized it, demanding that men hold even in “impossible circumstances.” In fact, Army Group Centre’s survival over the winter was not because of a rigid imposition of the halt order itself, but rather to the response to it at the lower levels.

The problem with Hitler’s order was that it offered only a blanket solution to a highly nuanced problem. Histories of the campaign have a tendency to “follow the action,” while paying much less attention to Army Group Centre’s long sections of quiet or stoutly defended front. The December crisis dominates the narrative, overshadowing all else, including the far bloodier Soviet losses in the attack. Indeed, the experience of Army Group Centre’s wider winter campaign is so varied there can hardly be a generic representation; even within the armies themselves different corps sometimes fought widely divergent winter campaigns. Not surprisingly, therefore, Hitler’s sweeping, top-down solution—applied uniformly to every point of crisis in every sector of the front—was as nonsensical as it was dangerous. Thus, the real solution to the winter crisis stemmed not from obstinate inflexibility, but precisely the opposite dynamic. It was the varied response to Hitler’s order, which commanders at all levels contributed to, that ensured Army Group Centre’s survival.

That senior, and even comparatively junior, army officers would “interpret” their own response to Hitler’s order should not be entirely surprising given the lives of their men, if not their own, depended on the results. Moreover, the German command concept of Auftragstaktik stressed decentralized initiative within an overall strategic framework, effectively encouraging creativity. Some have claimed that the halt order heralded the end of Auftragstaktik in the Wehrmacht, but research shows that generals displayed a remarkable tendency for initiative, even to the point of acting against the halt order.

On Dec. 16, before Hitler’s order was formally issued, the out-going commander of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, assessed the situation on his most perilous sectors and concluded in his diary that “units will possibly pull back without orders.”[5] The same day Heinz Guderian, commander of the Second Panzer Army wrote privately to his wife: “The people from the OKH and OKW, who have never seen the front, have no idea of these conditions; they merely wire impossible orders and reject all requests and submissions. The feeling of not being understood and being helplessly at the mercy of the circumstances is simply nerve-wracking.”[6]

Bock’s successor, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, who took over command on Dec. 19, was immediately tasked with enforcing Hitler’s order, but explained it to Guderian in anything but unconditional terms. “No area is to be given up unnecessarily but neither is it to be held if troops are to be wiped out as a result.”^[7] Kluge’s characterization of the order clearly departed from the instructions received by Army Group Centre on Dec. 18, which unambiguously stated: “Larger evasive movements cannot be made… Commanding generals, commanders, and officers are to intervene in person to compel the troops to fanatical resistance in their positions without regard to enemy broken through on the flanks or in the rear.”[8]

Kluge was Army Group Centre’s point-of-contact with the high command and he repeatedly pleaded for permission to withdraw in particular areas of crisis. Hitler did, on occasion, allow some retreats after Dec. 18, but these were typically achieved only after days of unrelenting argument and mounting crisis, in which the interim costs in blood made a farce out of Hitler’s objections and complicated the withdrawal process. They also covered only the most prominent flashpoints on the front; Hitler simply could not deal with every crisis in need of review, or even a fraction of them. But his order did not allow for independence at the army, corps, divisional, regimental or even battalion-level. It was a circumstance that immediately provoked the ire of army commanders.

On Dec. 17, Colonel-General Erich Hoepner wrote to his wife that the proposed order was a “death sentence” for his panzer group.^[9] On the same day, Reinhardt noted in his diary: “Order from above: ‘Annihilation or hold’! What with?!”^[10] Adolf Strauss of the Ninth Army believed a slow withdrawal to be the “one correct solution.”^[11] Rudolf Schmidt, in command of the Second Panzer Army after Guderian, bitterly rejected Hitler’s new order and complained to the army group that: “Rigidly imposed… the order leads to very great danger.”^[12] Guderian was the most outspoken of all. On Dec. 19, he informed the army group “I am prepared to take these orders and file them. I will not pass them on even under threat of court martial. I want at least to give my career a respectable ending. I would rather die first.”[13] He was relieved on Dec. 25.

Clearly, Hitler’s order was unpopular, threatening as it did the independence of the senior officers as well as their ability to react to dangerous situations. How their resistance was organized and managed is a central tenant of my book Retreat from Moscow, but it was the generals – not Hitler – who saved the German army in the winter of 1941-1942.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: David Stahel, a senior lecturer in European history at the University of New South Wales, is the author of five previous books on Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union. His new book, Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany’s Winter Campaign, 1941-1942, will be published on Nov. 19.

(Originally published Nov. 12, 2019)

Footnotes

[1] Michael Jones, The Retreat: Hitler’s First Defeat (London, 2009).

[2] The first study to assess this was Miguel A. Lopez, The Survival of Auftragstaktik during the Soviet Counterattack in the Battle for Moscow, December 1941 to January 1942, MA thesis submitted to Temple University (December, 2015).

[3] David Stahel, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge, 2009).

[4] Günther Blumentritt, ‘Moscow’ in William Richardson and Seymour Freidin (eds.), The Fatal Decisions (London, 1956) pp. 66-67.

[5] Fedor von Bock, Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock: The War Diary 1939-1945, Klaus Gerbet (ed.), (Munich, 1996) p. 395 (16 December 1941).

[6] ‘Briefe von Heinz Guderian an seine Frau Margarete’ BA-MA N 802/46 (16 December 1941).

[7] As cited in: Kenneth Macksey, Guderian: Panzer General (London, 1975) pp. 158-159.

[8] Percy E. Schramm (ed.), Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht 1940-1941: Band I/2: 1. August 1940 – 31. Dezember 1941 (Munich, 1982) p. 1084 (18 December 1941).

[9] ‘Briefe Hoepners an seine Frau’ BA-MA N 51/9 Fol. 98 (17 December 1941).

[10] ‘Tagebuch Reinhardts’ N 245/3 Fol. 18 (17 December 1941).

[11] As cited in: Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer: Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42 (Munich, 2006), p. 333, footnote 227.

[12] As cited in: Ibid., p. 333.

[13] ‘Kriegstagebuch Nr.1 (Band December 1941) des Oberkommandos der Heeresgruppe Mitte’ BA-MA RH 19-II/122. Fol. 147 (19 December 1941).