Meanwhile, the Russians had advanced through the shattered front in the central sector as far as the Vistula. Thanks to Hitler’s obstinate refusal to yield ground, they had been able to cut off and encircle more and more German divisions. The situation in the West developed in similar fashion, a series of breakthroughs and encirclements, once the Allies initiated the war of movement at the end of July. Hitler, who in the past had so successfully employed this very operational method, found himself increasingly incapable of responding to it. He continued to reject all proposals for a mobile defense, such as the newly appointed Chief of Staff Guderian was constantly making. Instead, as if compulsively fixated upon his offensive ideas, he continually developed new plans for attack that prescribed to the local commanders the sectors and even the details of the villages, bridges, and roads over which they were to advance.
The Wehrmacht at this time still comprised more than 9 million men. But these forces were deployed over half the continent, from Scandinavia to the Balkans. Hitler’s determination to hold lost positions for the sake of prestige, and the necessity of protecting the vanishing base of raw materials, strangled all operational freedom. In August, 1944, Rumania with her oil fields was lost to the Red Army, in September, Bulgaria; and while the German position in the Balkans was cracked open almost without opposition, exhausted Finland withdrew from the war. About the same time the British landed in Greece and captured Athens. By the end of August the Allies had also taken northern France, sweeping up gigantic quantities of material and armaments as well as an army of prisoners. In the early days of September their tank forces reached the Moselle, and a week later, on September 11, an American patrol for the first time crossed the western boundary of Germany. Shortly afterward, a Russian thrust into East Prussia was beaten off. But there could now be no doubt about it: the war was coming home to Germany.
Nevertheless Hitler did not even think of surrender. He met the first signs of disintegration in the Wehrmacht with drastic measures; at the beginning of September, for example, he had Himmler threaten deserters with arrest of kin. He was counting on dissension among the Allies, on the intervention of “Providence,” which he saw confirmed again by the events of July 20, and on a sudden turn of affairs. “They are stumbling into their ruin,” he declared in the course of a conversation in the Führer’s headquarters, and made clear his resolve to continue the war under all circumstances:
I think I can say this, that it is impossible to imagine a greater crisis than the one we have already experienced in the East this year. When Field Marshal Model went there, Army Group Center was actually nothing but a hole. There was more hole than front, but then at last there was more front than hole…. We will fight even on the Rhine if need be. That doesn’t matter in the least. Come what may we will continue this struggle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our accursed enemies tires of continuing to fight, and until we obtain a peace which will guarantee the life of the German nation for the next fifty or a hundred years, and which above all does not sully our honor a second time, as happened in 1918…. If my life had been ended fon July 20], that would have been for me personally—I believe I may say this—only a liberation from anxieties, sleepless nights, and a severe nervous disease. It is only a fraction of a second; then one is released from all that and has one’s rest and eternal peace. Nevertheless I am grateful to Providence that I was left alive.26
All the same his body seemed to be reacting violently to the incessant overstrain. After July 20 Hitler hardly left the bunker. He avoided the open air, fearing infections and assassins. His doctors urged him to leave the musty, confined rooms with their depressing atmosphere, but he refused. Instead, disillusioned and bitterly misanthropic, he buried himself more and more deeply in the world of the bunker. In August he began complaining about constant headaches; in September he suffered an attack of jaundice. Along with this, he was tormented by dental troubles. And in the middle of the month, shortly after the Allied troops had penetrated the territory of the Reich in force, he collapsed with a heart attack.
For some time he lay torpid on his cot, his voice low and quivering, and at times all desire to live seemed to have ebbed out of him. Attacks of dizziness, sudden sweating, and stomach cramps followed in quick succession, all connected, with a severe infection. That this bout of illness was of hysterical origin, or at any rate psychosomatic, seems all too likely; and the hypothesis is reinforced by the fact that just now, as had happened in the autumn of 1935, an operation on his vocal chords was necessary. On October 1, while being treated by one of his doctors, Hitler briefly fainted. Shortly afterward, the illnesses began to diminish; only the trembling in the limbs persisted, stronger than ever now. He also had spells of disturbed equilibrium, and, occasionally, during one of his rare walks, when he finally let himself be persuaded to take one, he would suddenly veer to one side as if directed by an alien hand. But his recuperation was on the whole quite surprising. Possibly he was pulling himself together for those fundamental decisions that had to be made in view of the impending final phase of the war.
Strategically, he was left with only two options. Returning to the old theory of the bulwark, he could gather the greater part of Germany’s remaining forces in the East and thus reinforce the long defensive front. Or else he could once more muster his forces for a blow against the West. Ever since the summer of 1943 the question had been asked whether it would be better to look for the way out of the quandary in the East or in the West. Now this question was being put in military terms—weak and fundamentally untenable though it was. Early in 1944 Hitler, in a radio address, had tried to revamp his old claim to being Europe’s rescuer from “Bolshevist chaos.” Comparing his mission to that of ancient Greece and Rome, he declared that this war would achieve its higher meaning when it was seen as a decisive struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union, that it was fending off a new invasion by the Huns, which menaced all of Western Europe and America. If Soviet Russia were to win, “within ten years the continent of the most ancient culture will have lost the essential features of its life. The scene so dear to all of us of millennial artistic and material evolution would be wiped out. The peoples who stand as the representatives of this culture… would die wretchedly somewhere in the forests or marshes of Siberia, those of them who had not been finished off by a shot in the nape of the neck.”27 But now, only a few months later, he decided on an offensive against the West, at the cost of weakening the hard-pressed Eastern front.
This decision has frequently been viewed as a last great unmasking, as the self-revelation of an unprincipled cynic. And it does almost seem to rend a veil and expose him as the nihilistic revolutionary Hermann Rauschning had pictured: a man without a concept, a program, a goal, who merely used concepts, goals, and programs for the accumulation of power and the cranking up of actions. Undeniably, the predicament in which he found himself at this time brought to light some basic elements of this character: his faithlessness toward ideas and convictions, his contempt for principles. And certainly the decision casts a peculiar light upon the already tattered banner of “struggle against Bolshevism.” It was, strictly speaking, more compromising than the Moscow Pact, which Hitler in any case could justify as a detour and tactical maneuver. For now there were no more detours left.