Why Dietrich Said The Ardennes Plan Was “Impossible — And At Christmas”
There is a photograph from a Bavarian pr1son cell taken in the spring of 1946 that shows a heavy set man with a thick neck and small dark eyes sitting at a wooden table. He is 53 years old. He has just been told that he is being charged with the murd3r of unarmed pr1soners of w4r near a Belgian crossroads called Malmedy.
He does not deny it. What he tells his American interrogator instead, almost as an aside, is something the interrogator did not expect and did not at first know what to do with. He says that the offensive he led in the Ardennes the previous Christmas had been impossible from the moment it was handed to him. He told this to his Führer in private.
He told it to his own chief of staff. He repeated it to his colleagues in the days before the @ttack began and no one wanted to hear it. The man’s name was Josef Dietrich, called Sepp by everyone who had ever served with him. He had been a butcher’s apprentice, a farm laborer, a hotel waiter, and a gas station attendant before becoming in the 1920s one of the drivers and bodyguards in Adolf Hitler’s traveling entourage.
He was not a trained staff officer. He had not attended the Kriegsakademie. He spoke a rough Bavarian dialect that the educated officers of the Wehrmacht had quietly mocked behind his back for 15 years. By December of 1944, this former chauffeur commanded the Sixth Panzer Army, the strongest single formation Germany had left, the spearhead of the largest counteroffensive the German army would ever launch in the west.
He was the man who would lead the @ttack. He was also the man who, in private, summed up its impossibility in one of the most quoted lines of the Second World W4r. The standard story of the Battle of the Bulge, the one most viewers have heard, is a story of American grit, Bastogne, Patton’s pivot, the frozen foxholes of the 101st Airborne, McAuliffe’s one word reply.
All of that is real, and all of that matters.” There is a different story behind it. A story that has been hiding in post w4r interrogations, in the diaries of German staff officers, and in the bound files of the United States Army Historical Division for 80 years. It is the story of the men who planned the offensive, and what they said about it before a single sh0t was fired.
This is the story of how the German army, the army that had once moved faster and thought clearer than any force on Earth, walked into a b4ttle that its own commanders, every one of them, knew it could not win. To understand why, we need to go back not to December of 1944, not even to the bre4kout from Normandy that summer, but to a single afternoon in September of 1944, in a room beneath an East Prussian forest, where a sick and shaking man pointed at a map and announced that the w4r was about to be reversed. The afternoon was the 16th of
September, 1944. The room was the situation map chamber inside the Wolf’s Chance, the Wolf’s Lair, a complex of concrete bunkers buried in the pine forests of East Prussia. The man pointing at the map was Adolf Hitler. He was a different man from the one who had planned the conquest of France four years earlier.
The b0mb that had detonated under his briefing table on the 20th of July had ruptured his eardrums and shaken something loose inside him that never went back to where it belonged. His left hand trembled. His face had taken on a gray, sunken quality. His personal physician, Theodor Morell, was treating him with daily methamphetamine injections, and Hitler was also swallowing dozens of Dr.
Koester’s anti gas pills each day, which an examining ear specialist that autumn discovered contained strychnine and belladonna. He was, by the a.ssessment of nearly everyone who saw him in in period, a sick man. He was also still the supreme commander of the German armed forces, and on that afternoon he was about to make the decision that would shape the rest of the w4r.
Colonel General Alfred Jodl, the head of the operations staff at the Supreme Headquarters of the Armed Forces, had been delivering a routine briefing on the Western Front. He mentioned, almost in pa.ssing, that the German line in the Eifel and Ardennes sector was being held by only four American divisions across roughly 80 miles of frontage.
The Americans, exhausted from their summer pursuit across France, had treated the rugged forested terrain as a quiet zone, a place to rotate worn out divisions and break in green ones. Hitler raised his hand and stopped the briefing. According to the diary of General Werner Kreipe, the Air Force Chief of Staff who was present, the Führer announced, in a voice that suddenly carried the energy of his earlier years, that he had reached a decision.
He would launch a counter@ttack out of the Ardennes. Objective would be Antwerp. The goal would be to split the British and American armies along their seam and produce a new Dunkirk. The men in the room received this announcement in stunned silence. The idea was not, on its face, ridiculous. Germany had pa.ssed through the Ardennes once before, in May of 1940, and the world had watched in disbelief as the Wehrmacht emerged behind the French lines and rolled to the channel.
Hitler was proposing to do it again. What made the announcement difficult to process was not the idea, but the arithmetic. Germany in September of 1944 was not the Germany of 1940. The Wehrmacht had taken something on the order of 3 and 1/2 million casualties since the invasion of the Soviet Union. The officer corps that had ex3cuted the lightning campaigns of 1939 and the breakthrough of 1940 had been ground down on the steps of Russia until what was left of it was a thin crust of surv1vors over a vast pool of replacements who had never seen combat.
The Luftwaffe, which had cleared the skies in 1940, no longer controlled the air over its own homeland. The synthetic fuel plants that powered the panzer divisions were being b0mbed flat by American heavy b0mbers at a rate the chemists could not repair. The Soviet army, which in 1940 had been a distant rumor, was now standing on the Vistula River, 300 miles from Berlin, preparing the largest single offensive in the history of w4rfare.
Hitler was proposing to take what was left of Germany’s strategic reserves, every panzer division that could be scraped together, every barrel of fuel that could be hidden from the b0mbers, every artillery sh3ll that could be set aside, and throw all of it not at the Soviets, who thre4tened the German heartland, but at the Western Allies, who thre4tened only the German border.
He was proposing to do it across one of the most difficult pieces of terrain in Northwestern Europe, in the de@d of winter, against an enemy whose air superiority was almost total, with an army whose average rifleman in 1944 was a teenager, or a man in his 40s pulled out of a factory. What Hitler was actually betting was that he could produce, by surprise and ferocity, a tactical victory so sh0cking that the Western Allies would lose the will to continue the w4r.
He believed that the alliance between Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union was politically fragile, and that a hard p.unch in the face would crack it. He had said as much in private. The Reich, he believed, did not need to defeat the Allies in the field. It only needed to make them stop. The men in the room did not believe this.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of the supreme headquarters, did not openly disagree with Hitler about anything by that stage of the w4r, but his subordinates noticed the tightness around his eyes. Jodl, who had been delivering the original briefing, smoothed his expression and began the work of converting the Führer’s vision into staff orders.
Within days, planning had beg.un for what would be code named, with deliberate misdirection, Wacht am Rhein, Watch on the Rhine. The name was meant to suggest a defensive operation. The plan inside the folders was an all out @ttack. The first to push back was the man who had been brought back from semi retirement in September to serve as commander in chief of the Western Theater, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt.
69 years old, the patrician embodiment of the old Prussian officer corps, had served in the First World W4r, conquered Poland in 1939, broken the French Army in 1940, and was personally and professionally cont3mptuous of Adolf Hitler in private, even as he served him in public. Rundstedt was given the operational outline in October.
He read it once, and according to his post w4r testimony, he saw immediately that, as he later put it, all, absolutely all, conditions for the possible success of such an offensive were lacking. Rundstedt was not a man given to dr4matic phrasing. When he used a word like absolutely, he meant it. Beneath Rundstedt was Field Marshal Walter Model, the commander of Army Group B, the formation that would actually conduct the offensive.
Model was a different kind of officer entirely. Where Rundstedt was aristocratic, distant, and cynical, Model was short, intense, and crude. He wore a monocle, carried a riding crop, and shouted at junior officers in a way that the old Prussians considered slightly vulgar. He was also, by the autumn of 1944, the most respected f1ghting field marshal Germany had left, a man who had st4bilized the Eastern Front after the Stalingrad disaster, rebuilt shattered army groups, and earned the nickname the Führer’s fireman, because Hitler kept sending him
to the worst sectors of the w4r, and he kept somehow saving them. When Model received his copy of the operational outline, he read it through and gave the verdict that has been preserved in the records of his staff officers. This plan, he said, hasn’t got a d@mned leg to stand on. What Rundstedt and Model did next was extraordinary.
They sat down together with their staffs, and they wrote an alternative plan. Rundstedt’s version was called Fall Martin, Case Martin. Model’s version was called Unternehmen Herbstnebel, Operation Autumn Mist. Both plans called for an offensive in the Ardennes sector using the same forces Hitler was a.ssembling.
Neither of them tried to reach Antwerp. Both @ttacks would stop east of the Meuse River, turn north, and aim to encircle and destr0y the American First Army inside the bulge it would create. Model called this the small solution. The objective was modest, achievable, and limited. It accepted that Germany did not have the fuel, the air cover, or the trained men for a drive of 125 miles in midwinter against an enemy that controlled the sky.
It tried to win the most that could be won with what was actually available. The two field marshals presented their joint small solution to Hitler in early November. He refused to listen. He had marked the original outline with the words “Nicht abändern” written in his own hand, not to be altered. He told them that their alternative would not accomplish his political goal.
A limited tactical victory would not shake the Western alliance. Only a strategic blow, the loss of a major port, the destruction of multiple armies, only that would force the British and Americans to reconsider the w4r. The objective was Antwerp. It would remain Antwerp. The plan would not change.
The two field marshals returned to their headquarters and began planning the ex3cution of an operation they did not believe in. They had presented an alternative. The alternative had been refused. Under the old Prussian tradition, a senior commander in that position had a duty either to find a way to accomplish the spirit of the order with the means available or in extremity to resign.
Neither man did either. They saluted, returned to their offices, and continued the work. The man who was about to be handed the heaviest burden of the offensive, the commander of its main effort, the spearhead that was supposed to drive farthest and fastest and reach Antwerp first, was a man who, until very recently, had been driving Adolf Hitler around in a Mercedes.
To understand what happened in the snow of the Ardennes that December, you have to understand who Sepp Dietrich was and how he had come to command the strongest army Germany had left. He had been born in 1892 in a Bavarian village called Hawangen, the son of a railway baggage master. He left school at 14. He worked, as already mentioned, in a series of jobs that nobody who looked at the man in 1944 would have a.ssociated with high command.
He had served in the First World W4r as a sergeant in a Bavarian a.ssault tank battalion, where he developed a lifelong reputation for physical bravery and a complete indifference to fear. After the w4r, he drifted through the Freikorps, the right wing paramilitary groups that fought in the streets of Bavaria, and in the late 1920s, he met a young agitator named Adolf Hitler.
Hitler liked him immediately. Dietrich was loyal, simple, completely without intellectual pretension, and physically tough. He drove Hitler around Germany in the early 1930s at speeds that terrified the Führer’s other companions, which seemed to please Hitler in some way that was difficult to explain. When the SS was formed, Dietrich became one of its first senior officers, despite having no formal military education whatsoever.
He commanded the personal bodyguard regiment, the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, which over the course of the w4r expanded from a guard formation into a full panzer division, and then a corps, and finally an army. Dietrich rose with it. By June of 1944, he was commanding the first SS Panzer Corps in Normandy. By the autumn of that year, he had been given the new Sixth Panzer Army, formed from the best surv1ving Waffen SS divisions, and equipped with priority access to wh@tever fuel, ammunition, and replacement equipment the collapsing
German economy could still produce. His professional peers did not respect him. There is a famous quote attributed to General Wilhelm Bittrich, who said that he had once spent an hour and a half trying to explain a situation to Dietrich with the aid of a map, and that it was quite useless.
Dietrich, Bittrich said, “understood nothing at all.” The transcr.i.pts of secret conversations among captured German generals, recorded by British intelligence at a country house called Trent Park, north of London, contain page after page of senior officers complaining about Dietrich’s lack of training, his lack of understanding of operational matters, and his promotion far beyond his competence.
These men were not entirely wrong. Dietrich was not a brilliant operational commander. He could not have planned a core level offensive on his own. He was, in the technical sense, a sold1er of limited education promoted to a position that required a kind of education he did not have. The picture his peers painted was also incomplete.
Dietrich was something else, something they did not always credit. He was a man who knew when something was being asked of his men that they could not deliver. He had spent four years watching SS divisions burn themselves out on the Eastern Front. He had seen what happened when ideologically driven @ttacks were ordered against well prepared defenses by men who did not understand what they were ordering.
In November of 1944, when he was first briefed in detail on what the Sixth Panzer Army was supposed to do in the Ardennes, he reacted in a way that surprised the staff officers around him. The terrain a.ssigned to him, the rugged hills and narrow roads of the northern Ardennes around the Eifel border region, was the worst possible ground for the kind of fast moving armored breakthrough Hitler was demanding.
The roads were narrow, often single track, and ran through dense forest and across deep stream cuts. There was not enough open ground to deploy his armored divisions properly. The infantry a.ssigned to support him was made up largely of newly raised Volksgrenad1er units, men who had been factory workers 6 months earlier, sold1ers who had never fought together as formations.
They would, Dietrich predicted, clog the very roads his tanks needed for rapid advance. SS Lieutenant General Hermann Priess, the commander of the First SS Panzer Corps a.ssigned to break through, had done the fuel arithmetic and reached a conclusion he later relayed to Joachim Peiper, the colonel chosen to command the lead b4ttle group of the offensive.
Priess told Peiper, in a phrase that has been preserved in multiple accounts, that if Peiper got just one d@mned tank as far as the Meuse with the column intact, he would have done his job. He was not entirely joking. He was telling the man who would lead the @ttack that, by the corps’ calculations, getting a single German tank as far as the Meuse River, only halfway to Antwerp, would already exceed what the operation could realistically achieve.
Dietrich made his own complaints in the channels available to him. He argued in private with Hitler. He grumbled to his staff. He told colleagues that the plan was, in his Bavarian phrasing, cr4zy. He did not, like Rundstedt and Model, attempt a formal alternative. He was too dependent on Hitler’s personal favor. The Sixth Panzer Army existed because Hitler had created it specifically as an SS formation he could trust.
Dietrich’s whole career was a product of that personal bond. He could not credibly thre4ten to resign. He could only complain and then, when ordered to @ttack, @ttack. That is exactly what he did. On the 11th and 12th of December 1944, the senior officers who would ex3cute the offensive were summoned to a place most of them had never heard of.
The location was Adlerhorst, the Eagle’s Eyrie, a complex of disguised bunkers near Ziegenberg in the Taunus Mountains north of Frankfurt. It was a forw4rd command post Hitler had moved into specifically for the Ardennes operation. The generals were driven in by SS bus along a deliberately circuitous route through the mountains designed to confuse them about the location.
They were searched at the entrance. Their pistols and briefcases were taken from them. They were ushered into a long room and made to sit in rows of chairs like schoolboys while SS guards stood behind them. The man who entered the room and stood at the front of it was barely recognizable to those who had not seen him in months.
Hitler was hunched. His face was gray. His left arm sh00k visibly. He had to steady himself against the lectern when he stood at it. According to General Ha.sso von Manteuffel, the commander of the Fifth Panzer Army, who would @ttack on Dietrich’s southern flank, the Führer’s appearance was so disturbing that several of the a.ssembled commanders later said they had been sh0cked.
Hitler spoke for nearly two hours on the second day’s session, the 12th of December. The speech of which a near complete stenographic record survives. He did not, for most of that time, talk about the operational details of the upcoming offensive. He talked about Frederick the Great. He returned to his standard anti Semitic talking points about the Reich’s enemies.
He talked about the spiritual decline of the Western democracies and the historical inevitability of German victory. Tow4rd the end, almost as an afterthought, he turned to the matter of the Ardennes Offensive and explained, in broad terms, what he expected to happen when it began on the 16th of December. Sepp Dietrich was in the room.
So was Ha.sso von Manteuffel. So was Erich Brandenberger, the commander of the Seventh Army, whose job would be to protect the southern flank of the breakthrough. So were the corps and division commanders who would actually order their men forw4rd into the snow. None of them, not a single one of them, believed what Hitler was telling them.
Manteuffel would write later that he listened to the Führer with what he called a dry mouth and a sinking feeling. Dietrich said nothing publicly. In conversation with the British military historian Basil Liddell Hart after the w4r, however, he gave his honest verdict in a pa.ssage that has come down through history.
“All he had to do,” he said, “was cross the river, capture Brussels, and then go on to take the port of Antwerp. The snow was waist deep, and there was not room to deploy four tanks abreast, let alone six armored divisions. It did not get light until 8:00 in the morning and was dark again by 4:00 in the afternoon, and his tanks could not f1ght at night.
” And all this, he added, with the bitter incredulity of a man who could not believe what he was being asked to do, “All this at Christmas time.” That single quote, recorded in Liddell Hart’s interviews and published in his book The Other Side of the Hill, has been quoted in every serious history of the Battle of the Bulge.
It is usually quoted for its sarcasm. It is rarely quoted for what it actually was, which was an accurate, professional a.ssessment of an impossible mission delivered by the man Adolf Hitler had personally chosen to carry it out. Dietrich knew the snow was waist deep because he had been to the front. He knew the roads because his staff had measured them.
He knew the daylight hours because his artillery officers had calculated the firing windows. He knew about the season because no one needed to be told that it was December. He was reading out to a fellow professional a list of the reasons his army was about to fail. Five days after the second Adlerhorst briefing, on the morning of the 16th of December, at half past 5:00 in the morning, 1,600 German artillery pieces would open fire across an 80 mile front and the offensive that none of its commanders believed in would begin. The
artillery barrage that opened the Ardennes offensive lasted 90 minutes. It was, by some measures, the largest concentration of German artillery fire in the entire western theater of the w4r. When it lifted, the German infantry moved forw4rd through fog and snow into the American positions on the Schnee Eifel and the Losheim Gap.
The first day went, in places, well. Two American regiments of the 106th Infantry Division, men who had only arrived at the front days earlier, were surrounded on a piece of high ground and would surrender on the 19th, the largest single ma.ss surrender of American troops in the European theater of the w4r. Almost from the first hour, the cracks in Dietrich’s predictions began to appear.
The Sixth Panzer Army’s main effort in the north, in the sector around the twin villages of Krinkelt and Rocherath, ran straight into the United States Second and 99th Infantry Divisions on a piece of high ground called Elsenborn Ridge. The American positions were rough but well sighted. The infantry units holding them were a mix of green replacements and b4ttle hardened veterans.
They did exactly what Preiss and Dietrich had feared. They held. Dietrich threw in his 12th SS Panzer Division. The division had been raised the previous year out of teenagers from the Hitler Youth, supplemented by a cadre of officers and NCOs from the older SS divisions. They were brave and ideologically motivated.
They were also poorly trained, mishandled at the battalion level, and channeled by the terrain into k1lling zones the American artillery had pre registered. Over several days, the division burned through its fuel and a significant portion of its tanks battering against the ridge. They never broke through.
The northern shoulder of Dietrich’s offensive was permanently blocked within the first week of the @ttack. This is where Dietrich’s earlier complaints about the terrain proved exactly right. There were not enough roads. The Volksgrenad1er infantry had clogged the few that existed, just as he had w4rned.
His tanks could not deploy in the numbers needed to overwhelm a determined defense in dense forest. His armored spearhead, the formation that was supposed to lead the breakthrough to the Meuse, had to be detached from the main effort and sent south on a single secondary road in search of an opening. That spearhead was Kampfgruppe Peiper, a b4ttle group of about 4,800 men and 600 vehicles built around the 1st SS Panzer Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Joachim Peiper.
Peiper was 29 years old, a fanatical SS officer who had served as Heinrich Himmler’s adjutant before commanding tank units on the Eastern Front. He was given the most prestigious a.ssignment of the offensive and the least realistic timetable. He was supposed to reach the Meuse in approximately 1 day. What happened to Peiper’s column in the snowfields of Eastern Belgium became the most stud1ed microhistory of the entire b4ttle.
He moved fast at first. By the 17th of December, he had captured an American fuel depot at Bullingen containing about 50,000 gallons of gasoline. Captured American pr1soners were forced at g.unpoint to refuel his tanks before his column moved on. That afternoon, at a crossroads near Malmedy, men of his command murd3red 84 American pr1soners in a snow covered field, the w4r crime that would, 16 months later, send Sepp Dietrich to a Dachau courtroom.
Peiper’s column drove west. Then, by inches, the operation that none of the German commanders had believed in began to fail in exactly the ways they had predicted. The roads were too narrow. The bridges were blown by retreating American engineers. The fuel ran out. The American resistance, instead of collapsing as Hitler had a.ssumed it would, hardened.
By the 23rd of December, the weather, which had grounded Allied air power for a week, finally cleared. Within hours, American P 47 Thunderbolts and British Typhoons were in the sky over the Ardennes, and Peiper’s column, strung out along narrow forest roads with dozens of vehicles already abandoned for lack of gasoline, became a target gallery.
By Christmas Eve, Peiper’s surv1ving men had abandoned their tanks near La Gleize, blown the breechblocks on their g.uns, and were walking back east through the snow on foot. They had reached a point about 20 miles from where they had started and roughly half the distance to the Meuse. Preuss’s prediction, the one tank on the Meuse, had turned out to be too optimistic.
That same evening, in the Fifth Panzer Army’s sector to the south, General von Manteuffel privately recommended to the senior military aide at the Adlerhorst that the offensive be halted and the entire German force pulled back to the Westwall fortifications along the German border. He was making the same argument, in a darker tone, that he and Model and Rundstedt had been making since November.
The plan had not worked. It would not now suddenly begin to work. Continuing the @ttack would only consume the last reserves Germany had. He was overruled. If you have made it this far, please take a moment to like the video. The men whose names appear in the German records, the staff officers, the corps commanders, the colonels who knew the plan was doomed and saluted anyway, are not figures most viewers will ever hear about.
The American sold1ers who stopped them in the snow are rightly remembered. The Germans who tried to w4rn against the disaster are mostly forgotten. Liking this video helps the story reach the small aud1ence that cares about getting both sides of the record straight. By that point, Hitler was already planning his next @ttack. On the 28th of December, with the Ardennes offensive visibly stalling, he summoned a fresh group of senior commanders to the Adlerhorst.
This time including Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz of Army Group G. The subject of the briefing, as the surv1ving stenographic record in the Heiber edition of the military conferences shows, was not the salvage of the offensive that had just failed. The subject was a new offensive in Alsace, code named Nordwind, that was supposed to begin on New Year’s Eve and break through the thinly held American lines south of the Ardennes.
Hitler told the a.ssembled commanders that this @ttack had a very clear objective, namely the destruction of the enemy forces. He spoke for over an hour. He did not, in the surv1ving record, offer any concession that the operation in the Ardennes had failed. The men in the room understood that the Panzer reserves now committed in the snow north of Bastogne were not coming back.
They would be expended where they were, and any further attempt at an offensive would have to be paid for from formations that had not yet been shattered. Manteuffel, who would later record his recollections of that period, described the mood of the German command in those days as one of grim mechanical continuation.
The 6th Panzer Army would be pulled out of the Ardennes only when its mission could be transferred to a new theater. That theater, as Dietrich was later informed, would be the oil fields around Lake Balaton in Hungary, where the 6th would be sent in February to launch one final @ttack tow4rd the Danube. It was the operation called Spring Awakening that two months later would finish the army that had beg.un the winter as the strongest formation in the Wehrmacht.
Hitler meanwhile was still pacing the corridors of the Adlerhorst and speaking optimistically about the fall of Antwerp. According to officers who saw him in those days, he had beg.un to display a pattern of behavior that aides would later describe as detached from the situation. He talked about Frederick the Great.
He talked about the fragility of the Western Alliance. He repeated with what sounded like genuine conviction that the offensive was about to turn the w4r. The men in the field knew better. By the end of the first week of January, the German advance had stopped. The bulge had beg.un to be reduced and the strategic reserves Hitler had a.ssembled at such cost, the divisions that might have made a real difference if used to st4bilize the Eastern Front, were burning in the fields of Belgium and Luxembourg.
In total, roughly 100,000 German sold1ers had been k1lled, wounded, or captured. Up to 800 German tanks and a.ssault g.uns had been destr0yed or abandoned. The fuel reserves Germany had carefully hoarded for the offensive had been consumed. 12 days after the operation finally collapsed, on the 12th of January, the Soviet army launched the Vistula Oder Offensive in the East.
By the end of January, Soviet forces would advance roughly 300 miles, reaching the Oder River and est4blishing bridgeheads less than 70 miles from Berlin. The German defensive line on the Eastern Front, str.i.pped of the Panzer divisions that had been sent west, broke almost immediately. There is a direct line between the divisions consumed in the snow of the Ardenne and the speed of the Soviet advance into Germany the following month.
Hitler had bet everything on the Western p.unch. The p.unch had failed. The defense in the East had nothing left to hold with. Now we come to the part of the story that does not appear in most popular accounts. By the spring of 1945, the w4r was effectively over for Germany. By May, the surrender had been signed.
In the months that followed, the United States Army began an unusual project. It set up a research division called the Foreign Military Stud1es Program, headquartered first at a former Wehrmacht facility at Allendorf in the German state of Hessen, then later moved to Königstein, and finally to Karlsruhe. Its purpose was to bring together as many surv1ving German senior officers as possible, and have them write detailed accounts of the operations they had planned and ex3cuted during the w4r.
The Americans wanted in particular a complete and unflinching record of the Ardennes Offensive, written by the men who had run it. What came out of that program is one of the strangest archives in 20th century military history. The transcr.i.pts and reports run to thousands of pages. Manteuffel’s account is detailed, professional, and largely candid.
Cramer’s report on the Sixth Panzer Army, cataloged among the European Theater Historical Interrogations as ETHINT 21, is thorough and self critical. Rundstedt, by then frail and fatalistic, told his post w4r interviewers that the operation came to him as an order complete to the last detail, that Hitler had even written on the plan in his own handwriting not to be altered, and that he himself had been little more than a postman.
He would publicly disavow any responsibility for the offensive for the rest of his life. He d1ed, broken and bitter, in 1953. Model never gave an account. Trapped in the Ruhr Pocket in April of 1945, ordered by Hitler to f1ght to the last man, the field marshal who had been called the Führer’s fireman walked into a wood between Duisburg and Lintorf with three staff officers and sh0t himself.
He had told his deputy, Colonel Karl Wegener, in the hours before that for a commander in defeat there was nothing left, that in antiquity they took poison. The man who had told Hitler the small solution was the only realistic option, and who had then loyally ex3cuted the big one anyway, took his own internal contradiction with him into the trees.
Dietrich, the man whose Christmas time complaint titles this story, lived. After the failure of his army’s last offensive in Hungary in March of 1945, the disastrous Operation Spring Awakening at Lake Balaton, he is said to have remarked to his staff that the Sixth Panzer Army was now properly named because they had only six tanks left.
In May, he surrendered to American forces. He was tried at Dachau in 1946 for his command responsibility in the Malmedy ma.ssacre and sentenced to life impr1sonment. The sentence was reduced on review to 25 years. He was paroled in 1955 after serving roughly 10. He returned to West Germany where he was almost immediately re arr.ested for his role in the murd3r of SA leaders during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 and sentenced by a Munich court to a further 18 months.
He d1ed of a heart @ttack at his home in Ludwigsburg in April of 1966. He was 73 years old. In his post w4r conversations, Dietrich was asked repeatedly to give his honest a.ssessment of the Ardennes Offensive. He gave the answer about the snow and the roads and the daylight and the time of year. He also said something else which is rarely included alongside that famous quote.
The offensive, he said, had been brilliantly planned by Hitler and poorly ex3cuted by the generals. This was the line that has caused some historians to dismiss Dietrich’s complaints as self serving, as the after the fact excuses of a man trying to escape responsibility. There is some truth to that reading. Dietrich was, in his interrogations often evasive, sometimes dishonest.
He claimed at one point that he had only learned of the offensive on the 12th of December at Adlerhorst, a claim his own chief of staff Kramer contradicted by stating that detailed planning had beg.un in his presence on the 20th of November. To focus on Dietrich’s evasions is to miss the larger pattern.
What the German records show, when a.ssembled in full, is not a single complaint from a single bitter loser. Runstedt thought the plan was impossible. Model thought the plan was impossible. Manteuffel thought the plan was impossible. Brandenberger, the 7th Army commander, thought his own sector’s role was impossible. Priess and his staff thought one tank on the Meuse would be a victory.
Dietrich thought he would be lucky to f1ght through waist deep snow on roads too narrow for his armor on the shortest days of the year. Every senior officer at every level of the command structure told someone, in writing or in person, that the operation could not succeed. Every one of them, when ordered to ex3cute it anyway, did so.
Why did they do it? There was no single reason, and the men involved were not interchangeable. Keitel and Jodl had identified themselves so completely with Hitler’s regime that disobed1ence by that stage of the w4r was something neither of them could imagine. Model was professionally addicted to the challenge of impossible missions, and had built his entire reputation on saving situations the rest of the army considered hopeless.
Dietrich owed his career to Hitler personally, and could not have refused him without ceasing to exist as the man he had become. Runstedt was simply too old, too tired, and too cynical to f1ght one more internal b4ttle at the age of 69. None of these reasons are flattering. None of them excuses the consequences.
About 100,000 German sold1ers became casualties in an operation their own commanders did not believe could work. Roughly 19,000 American sold1ers were k1lled in stopping it. 84 American pr1soners were murd3red in a field at Malmedy. Belgian civilians were k1lled by both sides, sometimes deliberately, in their own villages and on their own roads.
None of this had to happen. The small solution, the Model and Rundstedt alternative, would still have produced casualties. It would still have ended in defeat. By every a.ssessment available, however, it would have achieved a meaningful tactical result with significantly less cost. It was rejected because Adolf Hitler could not accept a tactical objective.
He needed a strategic miracle. The men beneath him, who knew there was no miracle available, did not stop him. The record I have just described comes from sources that you can verify if you wish. Manteuffel’s reports are in the Foreign Military Stud1es Archive. Cramer’s interrogation, ETHINT 21, is in the same collection.
Kreipe’s diary, filed as MSP 069, sits beside it. The Trent Park transcr.i.pts have been published in academic editions, most prominently in German by Sönke Neitzel as Abgehört in 2005 and in English as Tapping Hitler’s Generals in 2007. Rundstedt’s interrogations and the surv1ving Adlerhorst stenographic records have been published in multiple editions of the German military conferences.
Dietrich’s interrogation transcr.i.pts and his post w4r with Liddell Hart are in the public record. The fuel calculations are documented in the official United States Army history of the Ardennes campaign, written by Hugh Cole and published by the Office of the Chief of Military History in 1965. Nothing in this video has been invented.
Nothing has been dramatized. What the record shows is a particular kind of failure. Not the failure of an army that did not know what was coming. Not the failure of commanders who believed in their orders and were proven wrong. The men responsible for the Ardennes Offensive of December 1944 knew, in writing, that it was not going to work.
The arguments against it had been made, in writing, by men whose professional judgement was as good as any in the world at the time. The men who made the arguments were the same men who, when ordered, carried out the operation against their own counsel. There is no clean lesson in this. There is only the record, the cost, and the more than 30,000 military de@d from both sides whose names are inscribed in the cemeteries of Belgium and Luxembourg, and a quiet question that history has never fully answered, which is what a senior officer is for if not for the
moment when the order he is given is the wrong one. If your father, your grandfather, or any member of your family served in the Ardennes that winter, on either side of the line, I would consider it a privilege to read about them in the comments. The official accounts can tell you what units fought where, and how many men were lost on each day of the campaign, and how the Sherman tanks of the 4th Armored Division finally broke through to Bastogne the day after Christmas.
They cannot tell you what your grandfather remembered about the cold, or which body he lost on the third day, or what he never spoke of for the rest of his life. Those small, specific, personal things are the part of the record that the books do not contain. They are the only part of the record that the men who lived through it actually carried home.
They deserve to be preserved. The next chapter of this channel is already in production. Subscribe if you want to be there for the next one. The men who d1ed in that December and January came home, when they came home, to families who often never asked, and never told what the cold and the dark and the snow had really been like.
Their silence is part of the record, too. They deserve to be remembered for everything they did, including the parts they could not bring themselves to say out loud.
