rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

982 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHWas this last phrase an admission of ultimate defeat? Hitler quickly triedto correct any such impression.I hasten to add, gentlemen, that . . . you are not to conclude thateven remotely I envisage the loss of this war . . . I have never learnedto know the word ”capitulation” . . . For me the situation today isnothing new. I have been in very much worse situations. I mentionthis only because I want you to understand why I pursue my aimwith such fanaticism and why nothing can wear me down. As muchas I may be tormented by worries and even physically shaken bythem, nothing will make the slightest change in my decision to fighton till at last the scales tip to our side.Whereupon he appealed to the generals to support the new attacks ”withall your fire.”We shall then . . . smash the Americans completely . . . Then weshall see what happens. I do not believe that in the long run theenemy will be able to resist forty-five German divisions . . . We shallyet master fate!It was too late. Germany lacked the military force to make good his words.On New Year’s Day Hitler threw eight German divisions into an attack inthe Saar and followed it with a thrust from the bridgehead on the Upper Rhineby an army under the command of – to the German generals this was a badjoke – Heinrich Himmler. Neither drive got very far. Nor did an all-out assaulton Bastogne beginning on January 3 by no less than two corps of nine divisionswhich led to the most severe fighting of the Ardennes campaign. By January5 the Germans abandoned hope of taking this key town. They were now facedwith being cut off by a British-American counteroffensive from the north whichhad begun on January 3. On January 8 Model, whose armies were in danger ofbeing entrapped at Houffalize, northeast of Bastogne, finally received permissionto withdraw. By January 16, just a month after the beginning of the offensiveon which Hitler had staked his last reserves in men and guns and ammunition,the German forces were back to the line from which they had set out.They had lost some 120,000 men, killed, wounded and missing, 600 tanks andassault guns, 1,600 planes and 6,000 vehicles. American losses were also severe– 8,000 killed, 48,000 wounded, 21,000 captured or missing, and 733 tanks andtank destroyers. ∗ But the Americans could make good their losses; the Germanscould not. They had shot their last bolt. This was the last major offensive of the∗ Among the American dead were several prisoners shot in cold blood by Colonel JochenPeiper’s combat group of the 1st S.S. Panzer Division near Malmedy on December 17. Accordingto the evidence presented at Nuremberg 129 American prisoners were massacred; atthe subsequent trial of the S.S. officers involved, the figure was reduced to 71. The trial beforean American military tribunal at Dachau in the spring of 1946 had a curious denouement.Forty-three S.S. officers, including Peiper, were condemned to death, twenty-three to life imprisonmentand eight to shorter sentences. Sepp Dietrich, commander of the Sixth S.S. PanzerArmy, which fought in the northern side of the Bulge, received twenty-five years; Kraemer,commander of the 1st S.S. Armored Corps, ten years, and Hermann Priess, commander of the1st S.S. Panzer Division, eighteen years.Then a hue and cry arose in the U.S. Senate, especially from the late Senator McCarthy,that the S.S. officers had been treated brutally in order to extort confessions. In March 1948thirty-one of the death sentences were commuted; in April General Lucius D. Clay reduced