Read Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 Online
Authors: Paul Carell
The attack unrolled with clockwork precision. The village of Duderhof, into which the enemy had again penetrated behind the vanguards of 36th Motorized Infantry Division, was taken once more Eckinger turned his battalion to the south, then again to the east, and with inverted front charged Bald Hill.
The hill, sparsely covered with low trees, was a fortress belching fire. But the Soviets were jumpy, taken by surprise, and made unsure by Eckinger's ingenious and unpredictable method of attack.
An entire Panzer company and the leading company of armoured troop carriers succeeded in getting into the dead angle of the westward-pointing Russian naval batteries without receiving a single hit. Guns to the right and left of the road were silenced with a few shells from a half-troop of tanks of 8th Company, 1st Panzer Regiment, under Second Lieutenant Koch. Under cover of fire from these tanks the sappers fought their way right up to the massive naval-gun emplacements. Hand-grenades were bursting all round. Flamethrowers shot their tongues into the batteries. The crews were overwhelmed in hand-to-hand fighting.
At 1130 the headquarters staff of 1st Panzer Division overheard a signal sent by Second Lieutenant Darius, commanding 6th Panzer Company, to his battalion commander. Its wording produced a sigh of relief from the division's chief of operations, Lieutenant-Colonel Wenck, who had followed the armoured infantry carrier battalion in Major-General Krüger's signals tank, but it also made them chuckle at the romantic soul of a young tank commander in the middle of a battle. Darius radioed: "I can see St Petersburg and the sea." Wenck understood. Darius was on Hill 167, the top of Bald Hill, and Leningrad was lying at his feet, within reach. The citadel of the last defensive position, on the very "generals' hill" of the Tsars, had fallen.
"All change
—
end of the line!"—In the gardens of Slutsk— Harry Hoppe takes Schlüsselburg—Order from the Fuehrer's Headquarters: Leningrad must not be taken—Hitler's great mistake.
FROM the top of Bald Hill Darius had a unique panoramic view of the battle for Leningrad. Through the captured Soviet trench telescopes the busy traffic in the city's streets could be clearly made out. The Neva glistened in the sunlight. The factory chimney-stacks were smoking, for Leningrad was still working feverishly.
In the north, on the extreme left wing, German formations were seen advancing towards Peterhof and Oranienbaum. These were the 291st Infantry Division, the "Elk Division," under Lieutenant-General Herzog, which, together with the East Prussian 1st Infantry Division, had broken through a heavily fortified line of strongpoints at Ropsha. On llth September the battalions of 505th Infantry Regiment alone had to knock out 155 concrete pillboxes, some of them with built-in guns. The division was then turned to the north, towards Peterhof, in order to cover the left flank against the twelve Russian divisions caught in the Oranienbaum pocket.
On 20th September the 1st Infantry Division reached the coast at Strelnya.
The view from Bald Hill extended as far as Kronshtadt. One could see the port and the powerful Soviet battleship
Marat,
which was shelling land targets with its heavy guns. The hits of the 30-5-cm. shells sent up fountains of earth as high as houses, especially in the sector of 58th Infantry Division, which was making a hell-for-leather drive for the coast, in order to close the Leningrad trap in the direction of Oranienbaum.
The regiments of 58th Infantry Division had broken through the fortified line at Krasnoye Selo. The battalions of 209th Infantry Regiment fought their way through the town and dislodged the Soviets. They continued to advance— always to the north, towards the roof-tops of Leningrad's suburb of Uritsk.
The time was 2000 hours on 15th September. First Lieutenant Sierts, commanding 2nd Company, 209th Infantry
Regiment, Second Lieutenant Lembke, and Sergeant Pape had worked their way forward with the spearheads of 1st Battalion as far as the big coastal road from Uritsk to Peterhof, and were now lying in the roadside ditch. Within a few feet of them ran the rails of the tramway leading to Leningrad. Civilians on bicycles and with hand-carts were coming from Peterhof. Evidently they had no idea that the enemy was so near. And then, almost unbelievably, there came a tram, crowded with civilians travelling into the city.
"Up!" Sierts ordered. Pape and his men leapt up on to the road.
The driver clanged his bell: Out of the way there—make room for the Leningrad tram. But suddenly he realized that these men with steel helmets on their heads and machine pistols under their arms were no mere traffic obstacle. He slammed on his brakes. The wheels screeched. The passengers were thrown all of a heap.
Pape stepped up to the platform and, chuckling, called out in German, "All change, please—end of the line!" And then he called across to Lembke: "Shall we get on, Herr Leutnant? It's a unique opportunity—we've even got a driver."
"We'll keep the driver till to-morrow morning," Lembke replied. "To-morrow morning we might need him."
Everybody was understandably optimistic. The distance to the centre of Leningrad was only six miles. Sierts, Lembke, Pape, and the men of Colonel Kreipe's 209th Infantry Regiment were practically in the city. And Leningrad was already cut off in the west.
By swivelling the trench telescope on top of Bald Hill over to the other side, to the east, one could make out the Chudovo-Leningrad main road and the deep-cut valley of the Izhora river along which Leningrad's first line of defences ran. The thirteen-foot-high northern bank of the river had been cut off steeply by the Russians and made almost unscalable. This was the sector of Lieutenant-General Schede's 96th Infantry Division.
The Izhora had to be forced. To tackle this heavily fortified obstacle Lieutenant-General Schede on 12th September employed the combat groups Arntzen and Hirthe of the 284th Infantry Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel von Chappuis. Artillery and Richthofen's indefatigable Stukas again did the preliminary work and enveloped the river-bank in thick clouds of smoke. Under cover of this screen Hirthe's companies crossed the river, which was about 28 yards wide.
"Ladders forward!" came a shout. Instantly the special assault detachments appeared with their assault ladders, of which Engineers Battalion 196 had manufactured hundreds. As in a medieval attack on a fortress, the ladders, each of them 15 to 20 feet long, were propped against the steep bank. Under covering fire from the machine-guns the assault detachments of 2nd Battalion, 284th Infantry Regiment, clambered up on to the high northern bank. Once up, Major Arntzen's grenadiers and the sappers attached to them charged the Soviet machine-gun posts and infantry foxholes on the steep bank with hand-grenades, flamethrowers, and those lobbed bombs which were nicknamed "Stukas on foot."
The combat group under von Chappuis likewise got across the river in this manner. Presently, however, under surprise attack by heavy Soviet tanks, they had to fall back to a Soviet anti-tank ditch, since the German 3-7-cm. anti-tank guns were useless against the Kolpino-made T-34s and KVs. Only a last-minute intervention by Stukas saved the situation and prevented the grenadiers from being crushed one by one by the heavy enemy tanks.
Throughout 13th and 14th September heavy fighting continued against attacking Soviet armoured formations. Only the 8-8-cm. anti-aircraft guns and a heavy 10-cm. gun which had taken up position in the foremost line saved the situation and repulsed the enemy tanks.
On 16th September the battalions of 96th Infantry Divi-sion and 121st Infantry Division burst into the famous park of Slutsk.
[Now Pavlovsk.]
Scattered about the extensive parkland were romantic pavilions in the French style. They belonged to the Tsars' summer residence, the famous Tsarskoye Selo which the Bolsheviks had renamed Pushkin. Now the war's fiery hand
swept across this idyllic spot. Pushkin fell.
Thus the 96th, the 122nd, and the 121st Infantry Divisions were now all within 15 miles of Leningrad. Only the important industrial suburb of Kolpino, with its huge tank factories, and the heights of Pulkovo, where in 1919 the White Guards' attack against Red Leningrad was halted, were still in Russian hands. But Pulkovo was reached on 17th September and Kolpino on the 29th.
An important part of the battlefield, however, was not visible through the trench telescope on the Duderhof Hills— the battle for Schlüsselburg, the town on the western bank of Lake Ladoga, where the Neva leaves the lake and makes a wide arc towards Leningrad and the Baltic Sea. Whoever held Schlüsselburg—as, indeed, its name implies, meaning 'key fortress'—could close Leningrad's door to the east, block the waterway between the Baltic and Lake Ladoga, and thus also the system of canals linking the city with the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean.
This cornerstone in the battle of Leningrad was to be seized in a special operation. The man chosen to lead it was Harry Hoppe, the colonel commanding 424th Infantry Regiment, 126th Infantry Division. The rank and file knew him simply as "Harry," because the colonel invariably tackled all tasks and problems in a clear and simple manner which gained the troops' immediate confidence and their absolute belief in the success of every operation. Kray, one of the motor-cycle messengers, had experience of this before Schlüsselburg. The colonel was standing outside a workers' settlement on the edge of the town with a plan in his hand, and said to him, "You drive along this road right into the town, then you take the first to the right, and there you wait for me." The motor-cyclists roared off. They were quite sure that Harry would turn up.
The southern bank of the huge Lake Ladoga, with Schlüsselburg, was a strategically most important area. The Bolsheviks had utilized the lake and the lock-gates of its canals for the generation of electricity. A widely ramified system of canals had been connected with the railway network of the Leningrad hinterland, and the marsh and forest area had been cultivated.
As a result, a large area, as though designed on the drawing-board, had been developed outside Schlüsselburg, with eight large workers' settlements known as Poseloks—the Russian word for settlement. They bore the rather unimaginative names of Poselok l, Poselok 2, Poselok 3, and so on to Poselok 8.
It was from there, from this centre of an important communications and power industry system, that the waterways from Leningrad and the Baltic to the Volkhov, via Lake Onega to the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean with Archangel and Murmansk, as well as between Leningrad and Moscow by way of the Rybinsk reservoir and the Moskva-Volga Canal, were controlled. Anyone wanting to seize Leningrad, strangle it, capture it, or starve it into submission would have to close these vital doors to the city. The key to these doors was Schlüsselburg.