Wehrmacht Master of Defense » Armchair General Magazine

The drawbacks of mixing formations were diminished by a system of rotation within each division— which now consisted of three regiments, each of two battalions.

For the second day of battle, the re-enforcing battalion would be the sister of the one that was brought in the day before. After two more days, a second completely new regiment would be in the lines; and on the sixth day, the original division would have been relieved altogether, and gone to hold a quiet sector recently vacated by the replacement units.

The repeated successes of this defensive maneuver against overwhelming odds were a remarkable achievement. They indicated how the war might have been drawn out, and the Russians’ strength exhausted if the defensive strategy had matched the tactics. But this prospect was wrecked by Hitler’s insistence that no withdrawal be made without his permission, and an accompanying reluctance to give such permission. With parrot-like repetition, the Supreme Command recited ‘every man must fight where he stands.’ Commanders who used their discretion were subject to court martial, even in cases where it was only a matter of withdrawing a small detachment from an isolated position.

Thus, Heinrici could count himself lucky that he was only confined to convalescence in the Karlsbad nursing home. He knew the war was being lost, and fully expected to never wear the Wehrmacht uniform again; a prospect he found unbearably frustrating.

There he languished for eight months as the Allies landed at Normandy, increased pressure in Italy; as the Russians moved every closer to the Reich, and Hitler survived the generals’ bomb plot. At last, late in the summer of 1944, he was ordered back to duty in Hungary as commander of First Panzer and Hungarian First armies. Although forced to retreat from northern Hungary, he contested the ground so tenaciously that on March 3, 1945, he was decorated with the Swords to the Oak Leaves of his Knight’s Cross—a remarkable achievement for a man so intensely disliked by Hitler.

At about this time, Heinz Guderian, Chief of the General Staff (OKW), the architect of Germany’s panzer armies and blitzkrieg tactics of the early years, began to entreat Hitler to place Heinrici in command of Army Group Vistula, replacing Heinrich Himmler.

That Himmler had ever been in command was in itself either shockingly naive or criminally ignorant. Himmler was one of Hitler’s closest associates, the head of the SS and the Gestapo, and considered the most powerful man in Germany next to the Fuhrer himself. A former chicken farmer, Himmler had not held military command at even a regimental level, let alone was he capable of commanding a major group of several armies.

After the failure of the Ardennes offensive in the West, Guderian had been able to convince Hitler that the only hope for survival in the East lay in having Heinrici direct the defense there. Hitler finally agreed after Himmler resigned the position because of ‘other pressing duties.’

It was, therefore, an evolving set of circumstances that brought Heinrici in April, 1945, to the line of defenses along the Oder and Neisse Rivers, and which would determine the fates of Berlin and the entire German nation.

What he found upon taking command was chaos. He had nearly half a million men, but their quality and loyalty were in question. Mixed with regular German troops were Romanians and Hungarians. Two Waffen-SS divisions were made up of Norwegian and Dutch volunteers. There was even a formation of former Russian POW’s that he expected to desert at the first opportunity. His shortages were acute in gasoline, ammunition, food, medicine, tanks, and even in rifles. One anti-tank regiment had one projectile for each man!

Within one week of taking command, Heinrici had bulldozed his way through these seemingly insurmountable difficulties. He cajoled and goaded his troops, growled at and praised them, to build morale and to gain time to save lives. He moved all the anti-aircraft guns out of Berlin where they were no longer effective. Though they were immobile, needing to be set in concrete, they did help to fill the gap; the Third Panzer Army alone received 600 flak guns.

His adroit anticipation of Zhukov’s barrage and his astute movement of troops from one critical point to another served him well, as it had in the past. But he was under no illusions that the collapse of the Reich was inevitable. His only hope at the point was to prevent the wholesale loss of his armies, and to prevent a block-by-block, house-by-house battle in Berlin, which he knew would kill thousands of civilians.

When his forward position on the Oder became indefensible under mounting Russian attacks, he ordered the German Third army to retreat, setting up a second line of defense. As expected this was met with an immediate and sharp reaction from the Fuhrerbunker. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, one of Hitler’s primary sycophants arrived on the scene. After berating Heinrici for cowardice, Keitel ordered the Third Army not be moved to secondary positions. When Heinrici refused, Keitel removed him from command of Army Group Vistula.

As Heinrici drove toward his headquarters at Plon, he told his driver to do so slowly. Perhaps the war would be over before they arrived.
It is clear had Heinrici’s ‘rotating and delaying’ tactics been employed by other German generals, and had Hitler come to support them, the Russian advances may have been checked. After 1943, there was no way Germany could win the war, but perhaps negotiations could have begun which would have spared the Germans the depredations of the Red Army in Berlin and prevented for a time, the Soviet domination of East Germany; indeed of all Eastern Europe.