Even more devastating was the death-blow to the Luftwaffe, imparted on 1 January, the same day that ‘North Wind’ had commenced. It had finally proved possible to launch a German air-offensive — though with disastrous consequences. Around 800 German fighters and bombers engaged in mass attacks on Allied airfields in Northern France, Belgium, and Holland. They succeeded in destroying or seriously damaging almost 300 planes, limiting Allied air-power for a week or more. But 277 German planes were also lost — a good number to flak from their own batteries around the V2 launch-sites, There was no possibility of the Luftwaffe recovering from such losses. It was effectively at an end.317
On New Year’s Day 1945, German radios broadcast Hitler’s traditional address to the German People. It held nothing new for them.318 Hitler offered them not a sentence on the effect of ‘wonder weapons’, steps to counter the terror from the skies, or anything specific on military progress on the fronts. Above all, he gave no hint that the end of the war was near. He spoke only of its continuation in 1945 and until a final victory — which by now only dreamers could imagine — was attained. His audience had heard it all many times before: the reaffirmation that ‘a 9 November in the German Reich will never repeat itself’;319 that Germany’s enemies, led by ‘the Jewish-international world conspiracy’ intended to ‘eradicate
Few remained convinced. Many, like some observers in the Stuttgart area, were probably ready to acknowledge that ‘the Führer has worked for war from the very beginning’.322 Far from being the genius of Goebbels’s propaganda, such observers remarked, Hitler had ‘intentionally unleashed this world conflagration in order to be proclaimed as the great “transformer of mankind”’.323 It was belated recognition of the catastrophic impact of the leader they had earlier supported, cheered, eulogized. Their backing had helped to put him in the position where his power over the German state was total. By now, in the absence of either the ability or the readiness — especially since the events of 20 July — of those with access to the corridors of power to defy his authority, let alone oust him, this man quite simply held the fate of the German people in his own hands. He had again avowed, as he always had done, his adamant refusal to contemplate capitulation in any event. This meant that the suffering of the German people — and of the countless victims of the regime they had at one time so enthusiastically supported — had to go on. It would cease, it was abundantly clear, only when Hitler himself ceased to exist. And that could only mean Germany’s total defeat, ruin, and occupation.
With the petering out of the Ardennes offensive, all hope of repelling the relentless advance from the west was gone. And in the east, the Red Army was waiting for the moment to launch its winter offensive. Hitler was compelled by 3 January to accept that ‘continuation of the originally planned operation [in the Ardennes] no longer has any prospect of success’.324 Five days later came the tacit acknowledgement that his last gamble had been a losing throw of the dice with his approval of the withdrawal of the 6th Panzer Army to the north-west of Bastogne, and next day, his order to pull back his SS panzer divisions from the front.325 On 14 January, the day before Hitler left his headquarters on the western front to return to Berlin, the High Command of the Wehrmacht acknowledged that ‘the initiative in the area of the offensive has passed to the enemy’.326
