Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History

CHAPTER 3 The Second Wannsee Conference

The army staff learned quickly that their new acting commanding officer had more than just a sharp tongue. He was known to grab a man by the collar and shake him till his teeth rattled. Vasili Chuikov was a man to be reckoned with as he transformed this collection of reservists and cadre into a fighting formation. They would be needed soon, he knew, in the fighting that would erupt in the spring and flame all summer.

Chuikov dashed from his headquarters shouting for his driver. ‘Come on, Grinev, we’re going for the jugular!’ He had decided to relieve one of his division commanders, and the drama would rebound through the whole army as an object lesson in what Chuikov demanded from his subordinates. Grinev was waiting and leapt to the door of his Lend-Lease jeep for the boss. In seconds they were splattering mud on anyone close to the road. Time getting around was to be kept to a minimum, and Grinev was only too happy to comply as he shot down the road. He loved this American vehicle, so sturdy and reliable, and had become expert in manoeuvring down what the Russians shamelessly called roads.

Chuikov had not noticed that this time Grinev was drunk as the jeep gathered alarming speed. ‘Grinev, don’t drive so fast; Chuikov shouted. The jeep just kept going faster until it came to a bend in the road. Grinev lost control, and the jeep overturned. Chuikov awoke in hospital. The doctor told him he had injured his spine and that he had to stay on his back. He would write, ‘For a few days I lay on a special bed, strapped down by the shoulders and legs, being given traction treatment. However, healthy and hardy by nature, I was on my feet again in a week, though I walked with a stick.’¹

Sappers and infantry of the Bavarian 132nd Infantry Division climbed silently into their assault boats on the beach east of Feodosiya on the southern flank of the Kerch Peninsula. It was the late evening of 7 May. They silently paddled down the coast in the dark until the German artillery exploded with a stunning barrage against the Soviet defenders of Kerch. Only then did the Bavarians turn on their motors whose noise was masked by the thunder of the guns. They entered the great water-filled antitank ditch that ran along the front right down to the sea. The Soviet infantry in their fighting holes did not have a chance as the Germans leapt from their boats, gunning them down.

Führer Directive 41 had set the opening act of the drive to the south as the destruction of the Soviet front on the Kerch Peninsula and the capture of the great naval base and fortress at Sevastopol. Manstein’s 11th Army pried open the Soviet defences and collapsed their defence. After that it was a rout. At a cost of only 7,500 casualties, Manstein had destroyed three Soviet armies and taken 170,000 prisoners. Hitler was more than pleased. This most talented general had cleared the southern flank for his drive to the Caucasus. Now he could concentrate on reducing the great naval fortress of Sevastopol.²

Walther von Seydlitz arrived in the city with the memory of the last kiss from his wife as he left her in Konigsberg after a few days of hurried leave. The commander of Army Group South, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, eagerly welcomed the hero of the Demyansk Pocket to his command. The strong LI Corps of six divisions was his reward. Two of them were Austrian, one of which was the 44th Infantry Division, successor to the lineage and traditions of the famous Hoch- und Deutschmeister Regiment of the old Imperial Austrian Army.³ He would serve under General der Panzertruppen Friedrich Paulus who had been in command of the 6th Army since January.

Paulus greeted him cordially; he had been complimented by Hitler with the assignment of an officer of Seydlitz’s reputation and favour. Seydlitz, on the other hand, was uneasy. Paulus’s reputation in the Army was that of a plodder, a colourless General Staff officer, a protégé of the Chief of the Army General Staff, Franz Halder. He had been selected by Hitler for command because of his compliant diligence. Seydlitz would have been even more uneasy had he read the man’s efficiency report from his staff tour:

Paulus apparently had turned inside out the famous dictum of Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke that a staff officer should appear less than he was, in other words hide his light under a bushel. With Paulus what you saw was what you got. ‘The quintessential staff officer had become a major field commander, a position to which he was strongly suited by education and intelligence but not, perhaps by temperament.’⁵

Paulus had had little command experience before taking over 6th Army. He had seen action in 1914 but then spent the rest of the war as a staff officer. He had commanded a company in the Reichswehr and a battalion briefly, but his life became that of the staff. He served as chief of staff to a motorized corps in 1938 under Guderian, who described him as ‘brilliantly clever, conscientious, hard working, original and talented’, but already had doubts about his ‘decisiveness, toughness and lack of command experience’⁶ Bock might have echoed these observations because in the crisis of a major Soviet attack, he felt Paulus had been far too slow in counterattacking.

Then there was the gossip that Paulus was too much under the influence of his sharp-tongued chief of staff, Colonel Arthur Schmidt. That could be a problem, Seydlitz reflected. He too had a sharp tongue and was not afraid to use it. Tilting at windmills was a family tradition.

Before Seydlitz could join his command he took the opportunity to tour Kharkov. The city had fallen so quickly that its factories had been captured intact. The Germans had converted the huge tractor plant into a tank repair and refurbishment facility, not only to mend German equipment but to put captured Soviet tanks, specifically the T-34 and KV-1, in condition. He spent a whole day as the guest of the plant director on a special tour. He was amazed to see the factory yard filled with Soviet tanks freshly painted in German colours and marked with the German black cross outlined in white.⁷

Working on the premise that it was not enough to strike while the iron was hot, but that one had to strike first to make the iron hot, Hitler determined to clean up a very dangerous salient in Army Group South’s front. That was the Barvenkovo Salient just south of the great industrial city of Kharkov. Sixth Army would attack from the north while 1st Panzer and 17th Armies would strike from the south pinching off the salient. The attack was scheduled for 18 May. The Soviets beat them to the punch.

Marshal of the Soviet Union Semyon Timoshenko brought to Stalin the plan to strike out of the salient and encircle the enemy’s 6th Army with two fronts. He struck on 12 May, pressing 6th Army back as Paulus committed reserve after reserve. But the Germans were much more adept. In a masterful turnabout Bock counterattacked with 1st Panzer Army snapping off the spearhead Soviet armies. Bock’s troops eventually linked up with Seydlitz’s Hoch- und Deutschmeister Division. Timoshenko was not done, though. The trapped armies turned about and threw themselves at the blocking German divisions. A German division commander described what came next:

For three nights they came before they broke. By 22 May, Timoshenko had lost two full armies and seen two more savagely mauled at cost of almost a quarter of a million men in prisoners alone against 29,000 German casualties. Hitler showered Friedrich Paulus with honours, and the press eagerly focused on his humble origins. From this moment Paulus seems to have developed a case of hero worship for his Führer. Congratulations poured in to the embarrassment of the self-effacing Paulus. One of them was in a letter from Major Stauffenberg, who had stood by his side through part of the battle. He wrote,

Hitler was now pouring reinforcements into Army Group South. Ten panzer and seven panzergrenadier divisions were transferred from Army Groups Centre and North as well as large numbers of infantry by reducing the establishment of most of their infantry divisions from nine to six infantry battalions. Army Group South swelled from 20 to 68 divisions and almost 1,500 tanks.¹⁰

Hitler was preparing Thor’s Hammer itself to wield against the Soviets. In addition to the German reinforcements, he ordered that all their allies should concentrate their contingents to cover the long front that would be opened between the Donets and Don Rivers. So hundreds of thousands of Italians, Hungarians, Slovaks and Romanians gathered for the great offensive. The most powerful force was the Italian 8th Army of ten divisions including three Alpini or mountain divisions, elite units of the Italian Army.

‘Wie dumm von mir!’ (‘How stupid of me!’) Dönitz exclaimed as he read the report forwarded from the German intelligence network in Switzerland. He was staggered, but now all the coincidences, the lost submarines and the Allied interception of various rendezvous between U-boats and oilers and supply ships, and the destruction of so many weather ships, all came together. He handed the report to the chief of his Operations staff whose eyes grew wide as he read the summary.

This was Bletchley Park’s worst nightmare, that sharing with the notoriously lax Americans would compromise their work.

The operations officer in turn handed the report to the chief of the Naval Communications Department. The man’s face went into shock and then righted itself. He stated with vehemence, ‘Continuous current reading of our radio traffic is out of the question.’

Dönitz’s reply could have been carved from ice, ‘You will notice that the agent has been verified. Read it aloud so everyone can hear.’ With clenched teeth, the signals officer read that the agent ‘was related to our Military Attaché, and often travelled to London with the US Navy delegation, so he should be well informed’.

The man looked up. ‘Herr Admiral, this cannot be true. The system is just too complicated to break, with almost an infinite number of settings on the machine. We have even had the codebooks printed in water-soluble ink on pink paper to make them easy to destroy to prevent capture.’

Dönitz remained the only calm man in the room. ‘I call your attention to the obvious answer to all these bewildering coincidences in the loss of so many boats.’ He read on,

He looked at the staff. ‘Change the damned codes.’

Then he turned to his aide and said, ‘Get me Heydrich on a secure line at once.’

Heydrich was in the air from Prague within the hour after receiving Dönitz’s call. The admiral was waiting for him as his car sped to the naval headquarters at two in the morning. Dönitz whisked him to his office and showed him the reports. Even Heydrich’s impassive expression was broken as he read on.

‘You know, Dönitz, we can turn this to our advantage. I destroyed the best of Stalin’s senior officers with just such an opportunity to deceive the enemy.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘You know, that if the enemy has broken the naval Enigma code, they surely have broken the less complex Luftwaffe and Army Enigmas. Oh, how dicke [fat] Hermann will squirm.’

The irony was that Heydrich was only half right. Indeed, the British had broken Enigma and were reading the Luftwaffe and Army’s traffic, but the addition of a further rotor to the naval Enigma machines had slammed the door shut for the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Since February they had been unable to read any naval Enigma messages.

It did not occur to Dönitz that all the coincidental losses he cited had occurred before the upgrade of naval Enigma only two months before. For Heydrich, though, the thought of what this knowledge could do to his enemies within the Reich leadership was like a sweet taste on his tongue. Dönitz was struck by how vulpine the man looked at that moment; his normally ice blue eyes burned like those of a carnivore closing in for a kill.

The pilots of Kampfgeschwader 30 (KG30 — Bomber Group 30) exulted in another victory. Below them the SS Empire Elgar staggered under the hits by their Ju 88 dive-bombers. It went down quickly, the British Valentine tanks filling its hold breaking loose and crashing into the bulkheads.

For the first time, the Germans had made a concerted effort to stop an Arctic convoy. The death of the Empire Elgar was one of nine out of thirty-five ships lost to aircraft, U-boats, and mines. The Ju 88 crews boasted six of the kills. None of the losses, however, compared to the destruction of the Empire Elgar in importance. This ship was a 2,847grt heavy lift vessel. It had been launched early in the year and completed in April at West Hartlepool in the United Kingdom. This was its first voyage. It was a very special ship, equipped with powerful derricks to unload heavy cargo, such as tanks, locomotives and aircraft, from other ships. It was intended to stay in the Russian northern ports where its derricks would be vital in unloading operations. The Russians had nothing like it in the way of heavy unloading derricks. Without it, getting cargoes ashore would be a time-consuming effort when every day counted in getting supplies and equipment to the hard-pressed Soviet forces.

The crew of U-103 were preparing the nine pennants, each signifying a sunk ship, to fly on their return to Lorient. The men were in the best of moods. They had had a gloriously successful voyage in the Caribbean, and they were heading home to the comforts of soft French billets.

It was then that their captain was shocked out of his good mood when his signals officer handed him the latest Enigma decryption from OKM. The man was ashen-faced even under the normal pallor of a submariner denied sunlight. Schultze read, sucked in his breath, and muttered, ‘Lieber Gott!’ Then to the signals officer, ‘Müller, ask that the message be confirmed.’

‘I have, Herr Kapitän. It is confirmed.’

Schultze called over his executive officer and showed him the message. The younger man almost whispered the word ‘Loki’. The captain turned back to the signals officer. ‘You know what we must do with all outgoing transmissions now.’

The captain went to his cabin to think. Loki. The codename had been given to the captain, his executive officer and signals officer only orally. It was never to be printed or written down. It was the fail-safe code from OKM telling every U-boat that Enigma had been compromised, that the enemy was reading their mail. He had not thought much about the possibility so adamantly sure was the Navy that Enigma was unbreakable. Then he laughed to himself. The full import of the codename truly struck home. Loki in Norse and Germanic mythology was the trickster god brimming with deceit and betrayal.

Dönitz and Heydrich had jointly requested this meeting with Hitler at his headquarters in the pine forests of East Prussia. Dönitz thought it was fitting that he was accompanied into Hitler’s wolfs lair by a human wolf.

Neither was surprised when Hitler flew into a towering rage. It was as if his own child had been struck down. He raved that the plans for the entire 1942 campaign which would win the war had now been dashed. Dönitz had never seen him in such a fury. But when that rage subsided, he seemed to reach out to Heydrich for some consolation in a way Dönitz had never seen him act towards anyone else.

Dönitz was surprised then at how Hitler acted the role of proud father. He was even more impressed at how Heydrich played his part for all it was worth. He knew how to manage Hitler. He knew that you either had to bring good news, or if forced to bring bad news to sweeten it with solutions. Preferably you brought both.

In this case the sweetener to the bad news was that it was Heydrich’s own Sicherheitsdienst that had discovered the compromise of Enigma. By implication it was more than just patting himself on the back but an assertion that Hitler’s own SS had succeeded where the Luftwaffe and Army had let him down, and since Hitler was the personification of the German people they had by extension let the Reich down. It allowed Hitler to play the aggrieved father figure to every common German soldier who had died unnecessarily because of the failure of the generals.

True to his agreement with Dönitz, Heydrich cast his protection over the Navy, pointing out without any real evidence that had the other services implemented the advanced security fixes to their Enigmas that the Navy had, there would have been no compromises. The failure had been with their simpler systems. They had been broken, which gave the British the key to the more secure naval Enigma. Heydrich should have been a lawyer hypnotizing a jury he was so skilful at weaving truth, innuendo and outright fabrication into a story Hitler wanted to believe.

Dönitz shrewdly let Heydrich do all the talking. He was further amazed at the man’s ruthless backstabbing of Goring, the great rival to his own boss, Himmler. He was playing a deadly hand, undermining Goring. Having heard of Hitler’s comment about Heydrich being the ideal of the son he never had, the SS man obviously had the son’s role of heir apparent in mind.¹²

Finally Hitler asked the obvious question. ‘How fast can we change the codes?’

Heydrich was ready with the answer.

Hitler leaned over to give Dönitz his complete attention.

Heydrich convened a meeting of the Wehrmacht and services chiefs of communication and intelligence as well as the finest minds in German cryptology. The lovely villa, set in a leafy Berlin suburb, was the perfect out of the way setting for a conference. He had used it in January for another conference on the Jewish question. He expected this conference to go as well.

He surveyed the room with a stare that most men could not meet. He needed to exert a moral ascendancy over the lot of them. He began. ‘Meine Herren, we are here to discuss the extent of the Enigma compromise and the outline of Operation Waterloo. The Führer has entrusted me and the Sicherheitsdienst with complete authority in this matter.’ Not a peep from the faces at the table.

‘You will see in Grossadmiral Dönitz’s report the distressing number of coincidences that have occurred involving the loss of U-boats and other ships.’ He looked at the Luftwaffe’s communications chief and went on,

He looked now directly at the chief of Fremde Heere Ost (FHO, Foreign Armies East), the Wehrmacht’s chief of intelligence for the Eastern Front, Colonel Reinhard Gehlen. Heydrich knew that Gehlen was in the midst of a major reorganization of the FHO to which he had just succeeded as chief having been its deputy for most of the last year. He was drawing in a stream of very talented men — linguists, geographers, anthropologists, lawyers and able junior officers. Here obviously was a serious man. Fortunately, he did not know how serious. Gehlen was a member of the group planning to assassinate Hitler. ‘Herr Oberst, we have not heard from OKH on this matter.’

Gehlen stood:

Gehlen, of course, was not aware that Stalin had refused to believe the major piece of decrypted intelligence — the plan for the German attack on the Soviet Union — when the British sent it to him. The British had provided the intelligence but not the source of that intelligence. After that they had offered nothing derived from listening in on Enigma. Heydrich looked at him coldly, ‘You are sure of this, Herr Oberst?’

Heydrich rejoiced, not that anyone at the table would have noticed.

Heydrich had planned to return to Prague the day after the conference, but yesterday’s revelation by Gehlen changed his mind. The first thing the next morning, Heydrich flew to Hitler’s headquarters with Gehlen in tow. He let the intelligence officer brief Hitler then took the credit for sorting out the mess and establishing the fact that the British were not passing any intercepted information to the Soviets. Hitler burst out laughing. ‘You see the humour, don’t you, meine Herren? The British are keeping the secret of our summer offensive better than we have!’

He looked more relaxed now than anyone had seen him for months. The crushing Soviet counterattack before Moscow last December, the near collapse of the front, and then the constant crises through the winter had worn him down. Now he leaned back in his stuffed chair and gloated.

Heydrich and Gehlen settled in for another one of Hitler’s monologues:

At last he paused and put away his memories. Gehlen noticed that two hours had passed. Hitler stood up to indicate that their meeting was over. He extended his hand to the SS man. ‘Your timing was perfect, Heydrich. I am leaving on 1 June to establish my headquarters in Ukraine with Army Group South.’ As the two left, Hitler said to him, ‘You have done such a good job with the Czechs, I had thought to appoint you to get the French in hand, but now after this Enigma business, I think I have something even more important in mind for you.’ He almost added to the end of the sentence the words ‘my son’.

Heydrich flew back to Berlin with Dönitz a well satisfied man. He would spend the night in the capital completely unaware of how satisfied he should have been. Had he remained in Prague, he most likely would have been dead. Two soldiers from the Czech army in exile in Britain were waiting to kill him. The British had sent them because Heydrich had been far too successful in exploiting Czech industry to support the German war effort. It should have been easy. Heydrich took the same route like clockwork every day. Only, that day, he had been at the Wolfsschanze. They would not get a second chance. In the coming days Heydrich would not often be in Prague, and the two Czechs were quickly betrayed.

Khasan and Hussein Israilov watched the white parachutes descending through the moonlight into the mountain valley. Shadowy figures emerged from the woods to run over to the men who were just landing. Before long the visitors were standing in front of the brothers. ‘Welcome to Chechnya,’ Khasan said as he offered his hand and introduced himself and his brother. His visitors were two officers of the German Abwehr, the Wehrmacht’s military intelligence arm. They had an interesting proposal.

The Chechens were of great interest to the Abwehr. They were a possible open sore for the Soviets, and an abscess in the Caucasus would be of great help in upcoming operations. The Chechens were a particularly virulent pathogen. They were a warrior people with a broad cruel streak and had been converted to Islam in the seventeenth century. They had tormented the Georgians to the south and the Russians to the north before Tsar Nicholas I decided to crush them. It took thirty years against a determined resistance led by the legendary Shamil finally to succeed at the cost of thousands of lives and only by chopping down all the forests of Chechnya to deprive the insurgents of cover.

The Abwehr had discovered that Khasan had begun an insurgency to free his people from the grip of Soviet power. The example of the drubbing the Finns had given the Red Army early in the Winter War of 1939-40 had inspired him:

The war of liberation had begun in February 1942. Khasan had 5,000 men under his command and had extended operations even into neighbouring Dagestan. News of his insurrection had caused the immediate desertion of almost 70,000 Chechens in the Red Army.

The Abwehr’s interest in Chechnya coincided nicely with the fact that near the capital of Grozny was one of the major oilfields of the Soviet Union. Israilov was no fool; the German interest was transparent, but he made it clear to the Abwehr agents that he did not intend to exchange one master for another. The Germans assured him he had nothing to worry about.