The Wehrmacht's Last Stand by Robert M. Citino

Author:Robert M. Citino
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780700624959
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2017-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

The Revival: Model’s War

One way to determine the relative urgency of a sector or front in the late war period is to identify the commander. Where did the Führer plant his “standers” (Stehern), those fighters whom he trusted to hold out at any price? Their task was always the same: defend their position to the “last man” or the “last bullet,” as the new late-1944 formulation had it, “to annihilation” (Vernichtung).35 Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner was a good example. The commander of XXXX Mountain Corps in the Arctic, he had proven his mettle against superior forces and hideous conditions. “Arktis ist nicht!” he told his men when they began to complain about the cold and the desolation—“The Arctic does not exist!”36 Shifted all the way down south to Army Group A when things looked bleakest and the Soviets were about to bludgeon their way into Crimea, he managed to extricate what German forces he could from the beleaguered peninsula. He moved back up to Army Group North in July 1944 to ward off yet another existential threat in the Baltic region. Finally, with Army Group North shut up in the Courland Pocket, Hitler sent him to command Army Group Center until the end of the war, where he exhorted the Landser into battle until the very end.

General Lothar Rendulic fit the same bill. This former Austrian officer commanded a corps in the bitter defense of the Orel Salient in 1943, slaughtered the Partisans in Yugoslavia as 2nd Panzer Army commander in 1943–1944, then shifted to 20th Mountain Army in the high north, where he ravaged the already poor province of Lapland during the long retreat from Finland back into northern Norway.37 Hitler knew he could count on Rendulic. During the last four months of war in 1945, the Führer shuttled him from post to post: Army Group Courland, then Army Group North, then back to Army Group Courland, and finally to Army Group South (renamed Army Group Ostmark just before the end of the war). In diehards like Schörner and Rendulic, Hitler finally had the loyal cadre that he felt had been missing earlier in the conflict.

The greatest of them all, however, was Field Marshal Walter Model. When one of the Wehrmacht’s armies or army groups had collapsed, or the defenses in a given sector had exploded into smithereens, when Soviet tank armies or Anglo-American armored divisions were rampaging in the German rear and carrying all before them, Model was in his element. He was the Führer’s real fireman. By any reasonable standard, German 9th Army should have fallen victim to massive Soviet attacks in the narrow Rzhev Salient. Model not only held the position, he then managed to extricate the army from the trap in the famous “buffalo maneuver” (Büffel-Bewegung). From there, he had moved from one astonishing performance to another. He defended the Orel Salient after the breakdown at Kursk, then propped up Army Group South after Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s dismissal. His greatest achievement was taking

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