As in Hitler’s eyes the Soviet threat was insignificant, not to say non-existent, the measures to meet it proposed by Guderian were therefore completely meaningless. A strictly logical conclusion, such as madmen are liable to arrive at after starting from radically wrong premises, led Hitler to give Guderian this meagre food for thought for his return journey to Zossen: "The Eastern Front must fend for itself and make do with what it has got.” Could it be that Guderian was right when he said that Hitler the Austrian and Jodi the Bavarian were indifferent to the threat to Prussia? That might be somewhat farfetched, but one might equally well suppose that Guderian the Prussian was ready to accept defeat in the West if the 6th Panzerarmee's reinforcements were to he taken out of the Ardennes and given to him to block the Soviet advance towards Berlin. The least we can say is that events confirmed this latter assumption.
In any event it is clear that, reasoning a p7'io7'i as was his custom and despite always being contradicted by events. Hitler took it that Stalin’s intention was to deploy his main effort in the Danube basin towards Vienna, the second capital of the Reich, then Munich. On the other hand, after allowing IX S. S. Mountain Corps to become encircled in the so-called fortress of Budapest, it now seemed to Hitler that he should extricate it again as a matter of urgency.
So if the Eastern Front was required to go it alone, the Fiihrer did not give any priority to dealing with Soviet advances towards Konigsberg and Berlin or providing any of the resources necessary to stop them.
A General 1. D. Chernyakhovsky, one of the Red Army’s brightest stars and commander of the 3rd Belorussian Front until his death in action on February 18.
< A Members of the Volkssturm line up for an inspection. The equivalent of Britain's Home Guard, they formed a last line of defence against the numerically superior Russian forces.
< V General Guderian: he argued in vain against Hitler's lunatic theories.
A Marshal of the Soviet Union.4. M. Vasilevsky, ivho assumed command of the 3rd Belorussian Front on Chernyakhovsky’s death. He was on the spot to co-ordinate the final attacks of the 1st Baltic and 3rd Belorussian Fronts in the crushing of East Prussia.
A A German freighter on the run from Danzig is caught by the Red Air Force. Though Hitler’s "stand and fight" orders severely hampered the garrisons along the Baltic coast, they received heroic support from the navy.
Warships gave close support, and the merchant marine evacuated over two million refugees.
World History
