The immediate result of the stand-and-fight decision was the removal of both Brauchitsch and Bock, neither of whom appeared to Hitler fit to deal with the crisis. More consequential, since virtually all regarded Brauchitsch as irrelevant and no more than a messenger boy, was the fact of Hitler’s assumption on the nineteenth of formal command of the army. Although Halder initially believed that he might profit from the new situation, he was quickly left in no doubt that the OKH would be little more than a transmission service for Hitler’s wishes. On the twentieth, the Führer gave orders to Halder on how the war in the east should be conducted, emphasizing again that “a fanatical will to fight” had to be instilled in the troops by “all, even the most severe, means.” Every soldier, even those in support services, was to “defend himself where he is.” Otherwise, he noted, “a crisis of confidence in the leadership threatens to develop from every retreat.” Significantly, in order to retain a sense of assertive will and deny the enemy anything of value, the most brutal scorched earth policy was to accompany any evacuation of territory: “All abandoned farms were to be burned to the ground; prisoners and inhabitants were to be ruthlessly stripped of their winter clothing.” “There was,” he declared, “no reason that the troops should lose their sense of superiority… over this enemy.”13
That same day, in a remarkable five-hour meeting, Hitler rebuffed efforts by Guderian, who had flown to Führer Headquarters to get him to rescind the rigid Haltebefehl, dismissing his commander’s concerns as exaggerated since he, too, had endured enemy break-ins in World War I. When Guderian indicated his intention to retreat, Hitler said that the troops should dig in where they stood. When the panzer commander pointed out that the earth was frozen to a depth of five feet, the Führer retorted that they would have to blast holes with howitzers, as was done in Flanders during the earlier war. To Guderian’s observation that the loss of life would be enormous, Hitler pointed to the sacrifices made by Frederick the Great’s soldiers. None wanted to die, Hitler noted, but like the great king, he stressed, he had the right to demand sacrifices from his troops. Guderian, he thought, was too close to the suffering of his men. “You are seeing events at too close a range,” he told the panzer commander. “You should stand back more. Believe me, things appear clearer when examined at longer range.” If Guderian had hoped to convince the Führer of the reality of the situation at the front, he failed dismally, for, in a strongly worded directive to Army Group Center, Hitler merely reaffirmed his order forbidding withdrawals.14
While Hitler and the German commanders were debating what to do in response to the crisis facing them, the Soviets, too, were pondering the situation. Zhukov’s original idea had been to gain space in front of Moscow by driving back the German armored spearheads, something that the Soviets had clearly accomplished. Although they had failed to destroy the bulk of the panzer forces, the near-total collapse of Army Group Center raised the possibility of an envelopment, but, since the Russians had planned for only a shallow operation, their initial momentum was petering out even as Hitler was making the decision to stand and fight. For the second phase of the counteroffensive, Zhukov still thought conservatively, hoping to drive the Germans back some 150 miles to the line just east of Smolensk from which Operation Typhoon had begun. Stalin and the Stavka, however, now filled with militant enthusiasm, were beginning to think in more ambitious terms—the complete encirclement of Army Group Center—but allowed Zhukov to proceed with his new round of attacks, which resumed on 18 December.15
By now, the appearance of a seemingly endless supply of enemy troops able to endure the harsh cold and supplied with clearly superior weapons began to frighten the German troops, as if they were fighting a superhuman force. Halder tried to contain what he termed “a numbers psychosis” by urging German intelligence to stress the often low quality of the new Soviet troops rather than their absolute number, but, to Landsers on the sharp end, this was scant comfort. With little winter clothing, short of food, fuel, and ammunition, bedeviled by equipment breakdowns and malfunctions in the awful cold, confronted with a warmly dressed opponent whose tanks, with their compressed-air starters and wide tracks, could not only run but also traverse the deep snow, many German soldiers were, little wonder, spooked by even the appearance of Russian troops. Nothing so demoralized the Landsers as the sight of their antitank shells bouncing off the thick armor of the Russian T-34s, but, in a bitter irony, even the antidote to this superiority was denied them. In the fall, the Germans had tested a new, vastly more effective hollow-charge shell (Rotkopf) that could penetrate Soviet armor, but Hitler had them recalled in November for fear that they would fall into enemy hands, be imitated, and then used against German tanks. Not until 22 December, after much pleading by his army commanders, did he release the Rotkopf ammunition. By that time, a report of Army Group Center indicated, a mood of fear, a feeling of defenselessness, and a general unwillingness to attack had so undermined fighting efficiency that even the admittedly poor-quality Soviet troops could not be repulsed.16
The renewed Soviet attacks had, by the twentieth, forced the entire Second Panzer Army to retreat again, a move strenuously opposed by Bock’s replacement, Kluge, who ordered Guderian to hold his line at all costs. Guderian, with the connivance of Bock, had grown accustomed to ignoring or evading orders with which he disagreed. But, with Kluge, that was to change. Even as he reported his suspicions to Halder that Guderian had lost his nerve and intended to retreat to the Oka, Kluge was confronted the next day with a Russian breakthrough of the Second Army in the area of Tim, which forced a withdrawal of the Forty-third Army Corps to the Oka. Although the withdrawal was approved by Hitler, Halder vehemently opposed the idea of disengagement, once again insisting, “If we hold out everywhere, everything will be over in fourteen days. The enemy cannot pursue these frontal attacks forever.” By the twenty-second, however, the breakthrough at Tim had spread further westward, and, by the twenty-fourth, the commander of the Second Army, Schmidt, had been forced to withdraw from Livny, even though such an action had been forbidden by Hitler. At the same time, the Second Panzer Army argued that these withdrawals forced it to pull back as well and asked permission to retreat to the Oka. Although Halder tentatively agreed to this, the mood between Kluge and Guderian, already hostile, intensified when the latter refused the former’s order to send the Fourth Panzer Division to Sukhinichi to hold this vital rail and road juncture against a Russian advance. Guderian, in fact, had given further orders for his units to withdraw, and, when, on Christmas Day, Kluge learned of this, he took Guderian to task, then demanded his ouster. Hitler complied, removing Guderian from his post and replacing him with General Schmidt.17
The removal of Guderian, however, did nothing to improve Kluge’s position, for Russian advances so threatened the Second, Fourth, and Ninth Armies with envelopment that he informed Halder on 26 December of the necessity of withdrawing the entire army group. Halder countered with Hitler’s warning that it would be impossible to hold out once the front started to move, but Kluge, surprisingly forceful, insisted that, with nothing to eat and no ammunition, his men could hardly be expected to fight, adding: “Whether the Führer likes it or not he will have to order a retreat. If supplies cannot be delivered, things will soon collapse…. The Führer will have to come down from cloud-cuckoo-land and… set his feet firmly on the ground.” Hitler, however, refused to accede to Kluge’s demand, telling him that “one day the Russians will no longer have the strength to attack,” an assurance that did little to assuage Kluge since the number of German troops freezing to death exceeded the number of replacements. When, on the thirtieth, Kluge tried to make a case for retreat, Hitler accused him of wanting to “go right back to the Polish border.” Unlike his front commanders, Hitler stressed, he had to see things with “cool reason.” After all, he had experienced days of extended artillery fire in World War I and had continued to hold on. When, in exasperation, Kluge replied that this was a winter war in Russia, with physically and mentally exhausted troops facing temperatures far below zero, Hitler ended the discussion by saying, “If that is the case, then it means the end of the German Army.”18