Hitler's order of 19 January

On 19 January 1945, a week after the start of the Soviet offensive from the Vistula, Adolf Hitler issued an order in Berlin that was meant to restore his complete control over every movement of the German forces. Commanders of armies, corps and divisions were henceforth personally answerable to him for ensuring that every intention to retreat, attack or abandon a position, strongpoint or “fortress” was reported to him early enough for him to intervene, and for any counter-order to reach the front line in time. The immediate cause was the loss of Warsaw, which German troops had evacuated on 17 January against his wishes.

Popular accounts often present the matter as if every retreat by a division or larger formation now required Hitler’s approval. That is a simplification. Formally, the order imposed a duty to report in advance – and not only retreats but every operational decision – yet in practice it meant that no commander could change anything without the Führer’s tacit or explicit consent. The date also needs comment: document collections date the order to 19 January, while the teleprinter version was sent out to the staffs during the night of 20–21 January as “Weisung Nr. 69” – the “Führer order on reporting”.

The loss of Warsaw

On 12 January 1945 Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front struck from the Baranów–Sandomierz bridgehead, and two days later Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front attacked from the bridgeheads at Magnuszew and Puławy. The front of Colonel General Josef Harpe’s Army Group A collapsed within days. Warsaw, declared a “fortress” and held by an improvised fortress division with a few battalions fit for combat, was caught in a pincer: to the north the 47th Army was forcing the Vistula near Modlin, while to the south the 61st Army and the 2nd Guards Tank Army were bypassing the city.

The garrison faced encirclement and destruction to no purpose. The headquarters of the army group and of General Smilo von Lüttwitz’s Ninth Army decided to pull it out. Approval was given – without Hitler’s knowledge – by the head of the Operations Branch of the Army General Staff (OKH) at Zossen near Berlin, Colonel Bogislaw von Bonin. On 17 January units of the Polish 1st Army and the Red Army entered the abandoned, ruined left-bank city.

Hitler had been at the Reich Chancellery since 16 January, having returned to Berlin from the Adlerhorst headquarters in Hesse, from which he had directed the Ardennes offensive. In November 1944 he had left the Wolf’s Lair for good, and now the front was approaching the capital faster than anyone around him had foreseen. He received the news of Warsaw with an outburst of rage. To a man long accustomed to thinking in terms of prestige and symbols, giving up the capital of a conquered country without a fight was proof of disobedience, perhaps even of treachery, on the part of the staff officers.

Arrests at Zossen

Punishment fell first on the OKH Operations Branch. The Gestapo arrested Colonel von Bonin and two of his officers, Lieutenant Colonel von dem Knesebeck and Lieutenant Colonel von Christen. Sources give different dates – a German biography of Bonin says 17 January, his 37th birthday, while other accounts give 18–19 January. Bonin was taken to the prison on Lehrter Straße and then to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße.

Colonel General Heinz Guderian, acting Chief of the Army General Staff since July 1944, described the affair at length in his memoirs (Erinnerungen eines Soldaten, 1951). By his account, he demanded to be interrogated himself, since he was responsible for the branch’s decisions. For several hours he was questioned by the head of the RSHA, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller. Guderian also records words he says he heard from Hitler: that it was not about him but about the General Staff, whose “system” – cliques of intellectuals imposing their views on their superiors – the Führer intended to break. According to Guderian, Bonin’s two subordinates were released after a few weeks and sent to the front, while Bonin himself remained in Gestapo hands until the end of the war. In April 1945 he was moved as a special prisoner via Flossenbürg to Dachau, and on 30 April he and other hostages were freed by a Wehrmacht detachment at Niederdorf in South Tyrol.

Front-line commanders suffered too. On 19 January General Walter Fries, commander of the XLVI Panzer Corps, who had pulled his exhausted troops back behind the Vistula, was relieved of his command; brought before the Reich Court Martial in March, he was acquitted but never received another command. General Friedrich Weber, commander of the “Warschau” division, was placed in the reserve. On 20 January Lüttwitz was replaced by General Theodor Busse, and Harpe by Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, known for his ruthlessness towards his own soldiers and his blind obedience to Hitler.

The text of the order

The order, sent by teleprinter from the Wehrmacht Operations Staff (OKW) to the headquarters of all fronts, to the Army General Staff, the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe, had three points. In the version published in the collection Hitlers Weisungen für die Kriegführung (1962, edited by Walther Hubatsch), the first laid down that commanders of armies, corps and divisions were personally responsible to Hitler for ensuring that he was informed of:

• every decision on an operational movement,
• every planned attack at division level or above that went beyond the general directives of the high command,
• every offensive action on a quiet sector of the front larger than routine raids that might draw the enemy’s attention,
• every planned withdrawal,
• every planned abandonment of a position, strongpoint or fortress.

The report was to arrive early enough for the Führer to “intervene in the decision-making process” and for any counter-order of his to reach the front-line troops in time. The second point made commanders, chiefs of staff and every staff officer responsible for ensuring that reports contained “the unvarnished truth”; any attempt to “conceal” it, whether deliberate or through carelessness, Hitler threatened to punish “draconically”. The third point required communications up and down the chain of command to be maintained at all costs. The second point was aimed squarely at the staff officers at Zossen, whom Hitler accused of presenting the situation in Warsaw to him in such a way as to justify a retreat.

From Moscow to the “fortresses”

The order of 19 January was the last link in a long chain. In the winter of 1941, when the Moscow counter-offensive threatened to shatter Army Group Centre, Hitler issued his stand-fast order (Haltebefehl) on 16 December, forbidding any retreat without his consent, and three days later took personal command of the Army. Some historians believe that order prevented a panic; Hitler concluded from it that his will was always stronger than his generals’ calculations. At Stalingrad he forbade General Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army to break out of the encirclement, relying on an airlift and a relief attempt, which ended in surrender in February 1943.

On 8 March 1944 Führer Order No. 11 introduced “fortified places” (feste Plätze): towns designated by Hitler were to defend themselves even when surrounded, and their commandants answered for this with their lives. In the summer of 1944, during Operation Bagration, Vitebsk, Bobruisk and Mogilev became traps for tens of thousands of soldiers. In January 1945 the “fortresses” included Warsaw, Poznań, Toruń, Piła and Wrocław (Breslau). The order of 19 January went further than its predecessors: it no longer concerned selected towns and positions but every operational decision of every commander from division level upwards.

Command from the bunker

The consequences were predictable. In January 1945 Soviet troops were advancing 25–30 km a day, and their armoured spearheads even faster. A report from a division travelled through corps, army and army group to the OKH at Zossen, and from there to the Reich Chancellery, where Hitler reviewed the situation at briefings that often dragged on late into the night. By the time an answer came back, the situation had usually changed completely. Commanders faced a choice: wait and risk encirclement, or act on their own initiative and risk a court martial – as Fries had. After the 20 July plot the generals knew that Hitler’s distrust of the officer corps was boundless, and that dismissal, arrest or demotion could befall any of them.

Guderian later judged the order unequivocally: it took from commanders the last remnant of freedom that decided survival in a war of movement, and was, in his view, one of the reasons for the speed with which the Vistula front collapsed. This verdict must be read with some caution, since German generals’ memoirs were all too ready to blame defeats on Hitler alone, but here most historians agree with it: Soviet superiority was so great that the Vistula front would have collapsed anyway, and rigidly holding positions merely hastened the destruction of one encircled group after another, as the course of the Vistula–Oder offensive shows.

Place in the war

The order of 19 January did not stop a single Soviet army. In the last days of January Zhukov’s spearheads reached the Oder, and the garrisons of the “fortresses” – Poznań, Toruń, Piła, later Wrocław and Königsberg – were surrounded and held out for weeks, tying down Soviet forces but with no prospect of relief. On 24 January Hitler created Army Group Vistula under Heinrich Himmler, a man with no experience whatever of command in the field, and on 25 January he renamed his army groups: Army Group A became Army Group Centre, the former Army Group Centre became Army Group North, and the old Army Group North, cut off in Courland, became Army Group Courland. On 30 January a separate order on fortresses reserved to Hitler the right to designate fortresses and their commandants.

The conflict between Guderian and Hitler grew until 28 March 1945, when, after failed attempts to relieve Küstrin, the chief of staff was sent on “sick leave”. Hitler spent the last weeks of the war in the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, issuing orders to divisions and armies that now existed only on staff maps. The order of 19 January is a fair measure of that state of affairs: a supreme commander who no longer trusted anyone tried to replace trust with control of every movement on a front stretching from the Baltic to the Carpathians – at the very moment when the only way to save his troops was a swift, independent decision by the commander on the spot.