[Guderian's high opinion of Gehlen, "one of my best staff
officers," was evidently shared by the Americans who put him in
charge of a special department in Germany after the war, with almost
the same title as his old "Foreign Armies East." This
organisation was subsequently taken over by the Bonn government,
and at the time of writing (1964) it is an offence to try to take
Gehlen's photograph].
At the close of their interview Hitler told him, "The Eastern
Front has never before possessed such a strong reserve as now. That
is your doing, and I thank you for it." Unmollified, Guderian
retorted, "The Eastern Front is like a house of cards. If the
front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse . .
."
On 12th January, Koniev began his attack from the Baranov
bridgehead, and within thirty-six hours had broken clean through
this, the "Hubertus position," and allegedly the strongest
sector of the German line. Within twenty-four hours first Zhukov,
then Rokossovski opened their attacks, and by 14th January every one
of the precious Panzer divisions in Poland had been committed,
grouped in two corps— the 24th (Nehring) was trying to seal off
the breaches in the Hubertus, while the 46th struggled to prevent
Zhukov wheeling north from the bridgeheads at Magnuszev and Pulavy
and encircling Warsaw.
Guderian's strongest reserve was situated in East Prussia, and
consisted of the Hermann Goering Division and
Gross Deutschland
,
grouped as a corps and under the command of General von Saucken. But
on 15th January, OKW (either Hitler or Jodl) had interfered and sent
a message from Ziegenberg, ordering that Saucken be sent down to
Kielce (a distance of some 150 miles, involving a flank "march"
over the Partisan-infested Polish railway system). Guderian at first
refused pointblank, arguing that there could be no possibility of
holding the present positions on the Vistula, but that the Russian
advance could be slowed down if East Prussia were held as a "balcony"
overlooking their front from the north. How far this was a real
tactical proposition, how far influenced by the fact that Guderian
had himself been born in East Prussia and was brought up in the
tradition that the cradle of German militarism must be preserved
inviolate at any price is a matter of conjecture. In any case, the
Führer overrode his Chief of Staff, and Saucken's powerful
corps spent the first week of the Russian offensive in railway
sidings loading and unloading its brand-new Tiger and
Jagdtiger
.
Hitler himself left Ziegenberg on 16th January and set up his new
headquarters at the Chancellery in Berlin, where he was to spend the
last three months of his life.
Saucken and Nehring together managed to keep up some cohesion at
the southern end of the front, but the 46th Panzer Corps in the
centre was far too weak to delay Zhukov for longer than a few days.
By 18th January it had been forced back to the north bank of the
Vistula, where it was caught in the rear by the full strength of
Rokossovski's armour. During that week Hossbach's 4th Army was
driven back onto the frozen Masurian Lakes and with Saucken's corps
now in south Poland, he had no reserves for their defence. Day by day
the hallowed soil of East Prussia quaked under the tread of Russian
armour, and the first augurs of a (deliberate) relaxation of Red Army
discipline were heard. Thousands of civilians took to the roads,
loading their belongings on horsedrawn carts, pushing baby carriages
and barrows in a replica of the 1940 scene in Western Europe—
but enacted under subzero temperatures.
Over a seventy-mile stretch between the Narew curve and Kielce the
German front had been blown to pieces, and with the exception of the
debris of the 46th Panzer Corps there were no mobile forces with
which to delay their progress. Zhukov's tanks were making thirty and
forty miles a day, and on 20th January captured Hohensalza,
celebrating their arrival on German soil with a lurid and violent
sack of the town which went on for three days.
twenty-one
| Black January
With the disintegration of the 46th Panzer Corps the imbal-ance
of the German armies became ever more precarious. On 22nd January,
Zhukov's right wing had made contact with Rokossovski a few miles to
the east of Graudenz. This meant that besides the encirclement of a
number of slower-moving units in the 2nd Army, the flank of the main
Russian thrust was now secured for another forward bound. Taking the
fullest advantage from the new system of flexible subcom-mands,
Zhukov had already drawn off four of the tank corps with which Koniev
had made the first breach at Baranov, on 12th January, and with the
identification by OKH of the 1st and 2nd Guards tank armies on
27th-28th January some idea of the size of the armoured wedge that
was approaching them began to percolate to the "Wilhemstrasse
circle" in Berlin. Even after allowing for an element of duplication in German intelligence figures, this force cannot have
amounted to less than eighteen hundred tanks, of which about six
hundred were of the formidable new type T 34/85. The Russians had
fully assimilated the techniques for penetrating the
Pakfront
,
which they had first encountered, then adapted, at Kursk, and their
brigades roamed as independent units of up to three hundred T-34's
(T-34/85 in the Guards tank armies) fanned out around a hard core of
the slower-moving JS's (usually about two battalions or less in
strength, i.e., thirty to forty tanks) with their long-barrelled
122-mm. guns.
Twice daily the situation map at Zossen was marked with the
position of the leading Russian formations. Army Group Centre had
been literally shattered, with its headquarters staff and the
remnants of four divisions forced up into East Prussia. Only the
valiant but exhausted 24th Panzer Division and
Gross Deutschland
,
struggling westward in an endless series of mobile encirclement
battles, formed a link between Reinhardt and the fourteen divisions
of Army Group A under Harpe. Then on the 22nd the Russians seemed to
be changing direction. They wheeled north, following the left bank of
the Vistula as it turns through 100 degrees between Bromberg
(Bydgoszcz) and Thorn (Torun). It was flat, open country— the
same terrain over which the original Panzers had torn the Polish
cavalry to ribbons four and a half years ago. The ground was hard,
and lightly covered with powdery snow. Each day the sun shone from a
cloudless sky, at night the temperature fell to minus 20 degrees.
The Russian spearhead was heavily weighted—in contrast with
the Western armies—along its cutting edge. The tank brigades
had a battalion of infantry, riding in American trucks, and a few
pieces of artillery, some of it self-propelled, but the mainspring of
the thrust, once it hit open country, was the redoubtable T 34. It
seems to have been used for every task which in more sophisticated
armies was allotted to particular and specialised units and vehicles.
Charging ahead in reconnaissance, massed side by side as artillery,
dug in as pillboxes; towing, crushing, bulldozing; carrying infantry
or, still more perilous, bringing up ammunition chained in boxes to
its flat afterdeck, this crude, cramped, poorly ventilated but
immensely tough and reliable instrument of war played its many
roles. The few early models which had so alarmed the Germans in front
of Moscow in 1941 had spawned a limitless progeny. In the one year
from January to December 1944 over 22,000 were produced. So
extravagant a use of a single type of vehicle to perform a variety of
tasks carried general advantages which more than offset the waste of
life and effort in particular instances. The Russians limited their
supply problem to two items, fuel for the twelve-cylinder diesel
engine of the T 34 and ammunition for its 76-mm. gun. Where there
was mechanical failure the parts were "cannibalised" from
wrecks, and this same policy was adopted toward the trucks. The
crews, and to a still greater extent the motorised infantry, were
well fed in static positions but obliged to forage for themselves
once the advance gathered momentum.
Within a fortnight of the start of the offensive the Russians had
left the desolation of Poland and penetrated the frontiers of the
Reich itself. Here in Silesia and Pomerania they found a countryside
richer and more tranquil than anything they had seen since their
enlistment—in many cases they found an abundance such as they
had never experienced before. Of all the regions of Greater Germany
these were the ones which had felt the impact of the war least. They
were the quiet evacuation centres, the prosperous areas of the "new
industries," the small factories which Speer had dispersed
from the Allied air offensive. Through this peaceful countryside the
Soviet columns literally blazed their trail. Shops, houses, farms,
were plundered and set alight. Civilians were shot down casually for
the possessions they carried with them; it was common for a man to be
murdered for his wrist watch. The Russians soon discovered that the
inhabitants were hiding their womenfolk in the cellars of their
houses and adopted the practice of setting fire to buildings they
suspected were being used for this purpose. An incendiary shell from
a T 34 proved the quickest way to assemble the occupants for
scrutiny.
Yet, barbarous and horrific though it was, the first impact of the
Soviet armies on Germany will not stand comparison with the Nazi
conduct in Poland in 1939, or in White Russia and the Baltic
provinces in 1941. The atrocities of the "Death's Head"
(
Totenkopf
) units of the SS which systematically murdered
school children and poured gasoline over hospital inmates were the
expression of a deliberate policy of terror, "justified" by
half-baked racial notions, but implemented with a perverse and
sadistic relish. The brutalities of the Russian armies were not so
much intended as incidental. Periodically, where overindulgence
jeopardised efficiency, they were repressed with ruthless severity by
the Soviet military police. The Russian soldiers were illiterate
primitives, indoctrinated to hate their enemy, conditioned by years
of privation and physical danger, traditionally contemptuous of human
life, and many of them with fierce personal incentives for taking
vengeance on the Germans. Their impact on the Reich was that of a
hard warrior host on a disintegrating civilisation—the very
aspect of war in which so many Germans had formerly exulted, now
visited on those provinces which had for so long nursed it as a
heroic ideal and so seldom experienced it as a reality.
Nonetheless, for Guderian, as for every Prussian in the German
Army, the prospect was a terrible one. They could hardly be expected
to perceive—much less to appreciate— the retributive
irony of the situation. The urgent need for a policy, for some
measure to halt the ordeal to which the country of their birth was
being subjected, now assumed a desperate personal importance.
The speed of the Russian advance owed much to the extraordinary
character of the German dispositions. The full weight of the Soviet
blow had fallen, as has been seen, against that sector which was both
the most important and the least strongly defended. Along their
extended left flank, stretching three hundred miles across East
Prussia and into the Baltic states, the Germans had nearly fifty
divisions.
Yet the majority were infantry, needlessly strong for its
protection, yet neither mobile nor concentrated enough to menace the
offered flank of the Russians who were pressing across their front to
the south, while in the centre the Panzer divisions were grinding to
and fro without rest, mak-ing up by their mobility for their lack of
numbers, wearing out crews and machines when they should have been
husbanded for a
riposte
. A few more weeks of this unnatural
strain and the front would split from end to end, the whole Reich
would be overrun. Now was the last chance to distribute the
divisions in an orthodox defensive pattern of concentration and
depth. If this could be achieved, there was still a possibility that
the Russians' advance might be halted and a sharp defeat administered
to them. For the shape of their salient began to look conventionally
vulnerable on the map. The maximum force lay at the tip. The base was
held down by the German divisions holding out around the Masurian
Lakes and in the Carpathians. It was true that the German forces no
longer had the weight to converge at the base of the salient and
inflict a strategic defeat on the invader, but Guderian believed that
the chance might present itself for a pincer counterattack on a
shorter axis, with one arm attacking southeast from Pomerania and the
other driving to meet it from the Glogau-Kottbus area.
There was some evidence that the Russian offensive was under
strain, for units which had fought in Finland and Rumania had already
been reidentified in the central and southern sectors.
[We know today that this last offensive absorbed virtually every
weapon and man left in the Red Army. For the first time since 22nd
June, 1941, Stalin had released the whole of his strategic reserve.
This was partly out of strategic necessity—the Russians wanted
to put as much of Western Europe as possible between them and their
allies before negotiating the peace—partly from an
understandable tactical miscalculation. In conversation after the war
Zhukov told brigadier Spurling, ". . . when we reached Warsaw we
could not see how we could get beyond the Vistula unless the German
forces on our front were considerably weakened," for the
Russians assumed that Hitler would always maintain a maximum
concentration against themselves, even if it meant endangering other
fronts.]
Now, with their communications stretched tight across a frozen and
devastated Poland and their tank armies having seen three weeks of
continuous ac-tion, they seemed to be vulnerable. Twice in his diary
Guderian noted that Zhukov was taking greater and greater risks as
his awareness of the German weakness mounted. It would not be the
first time that invaders from the East who had the temerity to
penetrate into Prussia would be rout-ed by a combination of skill
and leadership. Even if Tannenberg or Galicia-Tarnow were beyond
their reach, the German armies might still achieve a victory
comparable to Manstein's "miracle of the Donetz."