Author: Paul Karel
Translation: Little Xiaoice
On September 7, 1942, the late summer heat enveloped the forests of Ukraine. Known as the "Werewolves", the Fuehrer's base camp, inside the airtight fortress, the temperature reached 30 degrees Celsius. Hitler endured heat beyond usual. This increased his anger at the situation between the Kuban and Terek rivers. All reports from the "oilfield front" indicate that the troops have reached the pinnacle of what their forces can withstand.
Army Group a was stuck in the Caucasus and the Terek River. The gorge leading to the Black Sea coast and, more importantly, to Tuapshey, had been blocked by the Soviets, and the Terek River proved to be a strongly reinforced obstacle, the last obstacle in front of the old military roads to Tbilisi, Kutaisi and Baku.
We can't do it, the divisions reported. "We can't do it, we can't do it... How I hate these words! Hitler was furious. He refused to believe that no further progress could be made in the Terek River or in the caucasus mountains simply because the forces were insufficient. He put the blame on the field commanders, believing that they had made mistakes in the execution of the operation.
To this end, he sent the Chief of Staff of the Wehrmacht Command Staff, Artillery General Jodel, to Stalinno on the morning of 7 September to see Marshal Liszt and to find out why he had not been able to make progress on the road to Tuapshe. Taking this opportunity, Jodl will also emphasize Hitler's orders.
That night, Yodel returned to the Werewolf. His report triggered the worst crisis in the German High Command since the start of the war. Jodl defended Marshal Liszt and supported his view that the strength of the troops was too weak to complete the tasks entrusted to them. Like Liszt, he demanded a radical reorganization of the front.
Hitler refused this request, suspecting that Jodl had been hoodwinked by Marshal Liszt. The heat and the rush of a day made General Jodel irritable and irritable, and he exploded. General Jodl angrily and loudly quoted Hitler the orders and instructions he had given over the past few weeks, and he observed that Marshal Liszt had carried out these orders conscientiously, resulting in Army Group A now finding itself in an extremely difficult situation.
Hitler was greatly surprised by Jodl's accusations, and his most trusted generals not only fiercely rebelled against him, but even explicitly questioned his strategic ability, and blamed him for the crisis in the Caucasus and the terrible defeat brewing on the Southern Front.
"You're lying!" Hitler screamed, "I've never given an order like this, never!" Then he dropped Yodel, who was standing aside, and rushed out of the bunker breathlessly into the darkness of the Ukrainian forest. A few hours later, he returned, pale and curled up, his eyes glowing with fanaticism.
The extent to which Hitler was angered by this conflict is evident from the fact that from that day on he no longer invited his generals to dinner with him. From then until his eventual death, he dined alone in his Spartan retreat, his only companion, the Alsatian, Burundi.
But that wasn't the only reaction he made to Yodel's accusations. There were also more far-reaching effects — the dismissal of Army Chief of Staff General Halder and Field Marshal Liszt. Hitler even decided to replace his most trusted Generals Keitel and Jodl, and envisioned marshals Kesselring and Paulus replacing them. Unfortunately, this plan could not be put into practice, otherwise the replacement of these two experienced generals on the front would at least avoid the disaster at Stalingrad.
In the end, Hitler did not abandon Keitel and Jodl, two military assistants, who had served him for many years. He simply ordered that everything he said in future military conferences, and every word spoken by any general, should be recorded in shorthand. In addition, he stubbornly insisted on his orders that the offensive in the Caucasus must continue. He never considered abandoning the main objectives of the summer offensive: the oil fields of the Caucasus, Grozny, Tbilisi and Baku, as well as transshipment ports on the Black Sea, which must be seized at all costs. The German army had to achieve the goals of war in Russia in the autumn of 1942, at least in the south.
Hitler's attitude was one of the signs of his growing stubbornness in many areas, including in the military sphere. This aspect of his personality brought bad luck to the war on the front line. In other respects, Hitler's persistence has been going on for some time.
In the economic sphere, Hitler was obsessed with oil. For him, oil is the element of progress, the driving force of the machine age. He had read everything about oil. He is familiar with the history of oil fields in Arabia and the United States, as well as the extraction and refining of oil. Anyone who turned the topic to oil would surely attract Hitler's attention. Goering was appointed head of the four-year economic plan because he played Hitler's favorite card, oil.
Hitler's comments on an efficient civil servant in the trade policy department of the German Foreign Office clearly prove this attitude: "I can't stand this man, but he does understand oil." "Hitler's Balkan policy was based entirely on Romanian oil. He included the operations against Crimea in the Barbarossa directive out of pure concern about the Romanian oil fields, which he believed would pose a threat to the Romanian oil fields by the Soviet Air Force that would take off from the Crimea.
Worst of all, Hitler's obsession with oil led him to ignore the most revolutionary scientific and technological advance of the twentieth century— atomic physics. His mind left little room for the military decisiveness of nuclear fission, although it was the Germans who discovered nuclear fission, and it was the German physicists who were the first to study the project. It turns out once again that Hitler was basically a man of the nineteenth century, not a man of the twentieth century.
Every thought of Hitler played a key role in the war against the Soviet Union, but the most decisive was his obsession with oil. From the very beginning, it dominated the fighting on the Eastern Front, and in the summer of 1942 it was this obsession that led Hitler to decide to make demands on the Southern Front, which ultimately determined the campaign of 1942 and thus the course of the war as a whole. A final glimpse of the "oil front" in 1942 would support this argument.
Army Group a is trapped on the northern and western edges of the Caucasus. But Hitler refused to acknowledge that Germany's power had been stretched to the limit. He wanted to use the old Caucasus military roads to rush to Tbilisi and Baku. Therefore, he ordered that the Germans must cross the Terek River to resume the offensive.
This article is excerpted from "Eastward Advance: The Soviet-German War of 1941-1943"
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