Ostkrieg (86 page)

With the Germans strained to the breaking point in both the north and the south, on the morning of 14 January Zhukov unleashed his First Belorussian Front from the Magnuszew and Pulawy bridgeheads south of Warsaw. Similar to Konev's successful effort to the south, after a twenty-five-minute artillery barrage, Zhukov's forces launched a series of powerful probing attacks on the forward German positions, followed by the main assault. Even though Zhukov planned to engage his mobile forces only on the second and third days of the attack in order to generate momentum, the power of the Soviet onslaught so unhinged the
Ninth Army's defenses that, by the end of the first day, the Russians in the Magnuszew bridgehead had advanced up to seven miles and the gains at Pulawy were even more impressive. The next day, the Soviets shattered a determined counterattack by the Nineteenth and Twenty-fifth Panzer Divisions and achieved an operational breakthrough. While Russian armored units began their drive toward Lodz, eighty miles northwest of Magnuszew, units of the First Polish Army moved north to encircle Warsaw, in combination with forces of the Soviet Forty-seventh Army that had pushed across the Vistula at Modlin, north of the capital. On the sixteenth, Hitler reacted in typical fashion to the brewing disaster, sacking the hapless commander of Army Group A, General Joseph Harpe, and replacing him with the ubiquitous Ferdinand Schörner. At the same time, he issued a completely delusory directive that Army Group A should not only hold a line from east of Krakow to Warsaw and Modlin but also attack and destroy or throw back the enemy all along the line—even though it could expect no reinforcements for two weeks. Despite the Führer's will, however, the next day Polish forces seized Warsaw with virtually no opposition, an action that touched off an explosion in Berlin. Hitler immediately suspected that the OKH had sabotaged his orders, on the eighteenth ordering the arrest of the three senior officers at Operations Branch, and the next day signing an order that effectively directed all commanders down to the division level to get permission from him for any operational movement, whether attack or withdrawal.
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The energetic and ruthless Schörner quickly emulated his Führer by getting rid of various commanders and issuing orders that exuded will and confidence, but to no avail. By the end of the day on the eighteenth, having destroyed forward German defenses and routed their counterattacks, Soviet forces were in a headlong dash westward, with some units advancing twenty-five to thirty miles a day. Behind the front, masses of civilian refugees, and not a few stragglers from combat units, fled westward in treks that would become all too familiar. Although the Grossdeutschland Panzer Corps, sent by train from East Prussia with orders to “restore the situation,” and the remnants of the Nineteenth and Twenty-fifth Panzer Divisions tried to halt the Soviet advance near Lodz, they did little to slow Soviet momentum. By now, the Russians had steamrollered any opposition in their way and, enjoying complete aerial domination, swarmed toward the German border. The Stavka had itself been surprised by the swiftness of the collapse of Army Group A but reacted immediately and directed both Zhukov and Konev to push on to the Oder. On the nineteenth, Konev's troops overran the Reich border in Silesia and, three days later, reached the Oder south of Breslau.
Not to be outdone, Zhukov's troops seized the industrial city of Lodz on the nineteenth, encircled Posen on the twentieth, took Bromberg (Bydgoszcz) on the twenty-first, and had reached the fortifications on the east Brandenburg border by the twenty-sixth. Four days later, these had been broken through, and, by the end of January, Zhukov's troops had reached the Oder at Küstrin, over 240 miles from their starting point two weeks earlier. Over the first few days of February, they proceeded to establish bridgeheads across the Oder in preparation for what seemed an imminent strike at the Reich capital. Hitler reacted to this disaster, perhaps hoping to conjure something out of nothing, by renaming his army groups: Army Group Center became North, North became Courland, and A became Center. At the same time, a new army group, misleadingly named Vistula, was created under the most improbable of commanders, Heinrich Himmler, with the task of defending western Pomerania and the port city of Stettin.
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The Germans' only success in January—itself limited—had been in East Prussia, where, in putting up fanatic resistance for a piece of strategically pointless territory, they had forced Rokossovsky's thrust to diverge to the north and away from support of Zhukov to his south. By the twenty-fourth, however, troops from the Third Belorussian Front had pushed past Gumbinnen and threatened to cut off the Third Panzer Army in Königsberg, while forces from the Second Belorussian Front reached the coast, cutting off Army Group Center. On the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, seeing no point to the further defense of East Prussia, and hoping to save his troops in order to bring them back to Germany proper, the commander of the Fourth Army, General Friedrich Hossbach, told his corps commanders that they were to prepare for a breakout on the twenty-sixth. It was Hossbach who, as Hitler's military adjutant in November 1937, had secretly recorded notes from a top-level conference at which Hitler had outlined his plans for expansion, notes that were soon to be used as evidence of premeditated Nazi aggression at the postwar Nuremberg Trials. Hossbach now earned a different sort of notoriety. Although his plans for a breakout directly contradicted Hitler's orders, on the twenty-sixth, and with the knowledge of the commander of Army Group Center, General Hans Reinhardt, Hossbach nonetheless ordered his troops to attack to the west. Catching the Russians by surprise, units of the Fourth Army managed to push almost twenty miles to the west before furious enemy counterattacks halted their progress. Confronted with this clear violation of his orders, Hitler fell into a rage and ordered both Hossbach and Reinhardt relieved of their commands (although, amazingly, not of their lives). Just three
decades after the great triumph at Tannenberg, which had made heroes of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, Hossbach and Reinhardt had earned only the Führer's ire. Reinhardt was replaced by General Lothar Rendulic, an Austrian of Croatian origin who had gained notoriety for his involvement in shooting hostages in Yugoslavia in 1942. An evident clone of Schörner, Rendulic seemingly took pride in having commanders and ordinary soldiers court-martialed and shot for retreating.
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None of this brutal activity could disguise the fact that, in three weeks, the Red Army had won perhaps its most spectacular victory of the war. Not only could Stalin go to the Yalta Conference in control of Poland and only a day's march from the German capital, but his Western allies were also still fighting hard battles west of the Reich border. In late January, moreover, both Zhukov and Konev had indicated their readiness, after a few days' rest to bring up supplies, equipment, and fresh troops, to resume the offensive toward Berlin and the industrial regions of Silesia. In urging that the enemy not be given time to prepare defenses that his forces would only have to break through later at high cost, Zhukov reinforced his argument by noting the absence of either a continuous defensive front or any preparations for a concerted counterattack. Viewed from Moscow, the end of the war seemed tantalizingly close.
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By mid-February, however, the Soviet offensive had ground to a halt. Although some have seen politics at work in this decision, more tangible factors played the key role. Although Soviet casualties had been relatively light, with only forty-three thousand permanent losses, the Red Army had lost almost thirteen hundred tanks and assault guns, not an insignificant figure even given its material preponderance. In the dash to the Oder, the Soviets had also bypassed numerous pockets of resistance that now had to be eliminated, especially those astride rail and supply lines. None of these posed a major threat, but they did demand troops and time. More to the point, German resistance on the flanks seemed to be stiffening appreciably, although, now that the Soviets could no longer rely on information from partisans, poor intelligence tended to exaggerate the threat. The heavy fighting in East Prussia had not only tied down large Soviet forces but also, in causing Rokossovsky to veer away from Zhukov's right flank, left the latter dangerously vulnerable to counterattack, which through hard experience the Russians had learned was a favorite German tactic. Nor was Zhukov's left flank fully secure. Although his troops had pushed beyond the Oder and secured large bridgeheads south of Breslau, Konev was also feeling increased German pressure on his left flank. Any drive on Berlin, however, would require
Konev to redeploy forces to his right flank in order to support Zhukov. Before such an operation could commence, then, he would have to clean up the situation on his left as well as deal with the problem of Fortress Breslau. In February, therefore, the Stavka halted the drive in the center and turned its attention to clearing up the flanks.
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To that end, on 8 February, Konev's forces in the south launched an attack out of bridgeheads across the Oder both north and south of Breslau and, despite stiff German resistance, had completed the encirclement of the fortress city within a week. Still, Breslau, with some 35,000 troops and 116,000 civilians, under the command of the fanatic Nazi Karl Hanke, stubbornly held out in destructive house-to-house fighting until 6 May. By the end of February, Konev's forces had closed up to the Neisse River and linked up with troops of the First Belorussian Front at the Neisse's junction with the Oder. Although this was largely a strategic backwater for the Soviets, the bloody fighting in February did bring the industrial riches of Silesia, a key area of armaments production out of range of Allied bombers, under their control, a reward not lost on a veteran industrializer like Stalin.
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Two days after Konev's attack, units of Rokossovsky's Second Belorussian Front struck northeastward into Pomerania to eliminate the Baltic balcony overhanging Soviet forces in Poland. Five days later, the Germans gave proof of the overstated Soviet fears for their flanks, launching one of the sorriest attacks in their military history. Conceived by Guderian as a typical two-pronged thrust into the flanks of an advancing enemy, Operation Sonnenwende (Solstice) was a fiasco from the beginning. Hitler eliminated the planned southern part of the operation by refusing to transfer the Sixth SS Panzer Army from Hungary, while the northern half fell under the operational control of Himmler's Army Group Vistula. Since the Reichsführer-SS had never actually gone anywhere near the front and, in contrast to his eagerness to persecute helpless racial inferiors, had demonstrated a thorough absence of combat spirit, Guderian managed after a two-hour argument to get his deputy, General Walter Wenck, appointed to lead the offensive. The Führer agreed but, typically, took command power away from Himmler without specifically giving it to Wenck. Although Guderian managed the amazing feat at this stage of the war of cobbling together ten divisions for the counterattack, seven of them panzer, the troops involved were poorly equipped, inexperienced, and woefully led. Even the timing of the attack seemed a comedy of errors as one division lurched forward on the fourteenth, taking the Soviets by surprise, while the rest of the attack went off on 15 February. By the eighteenth, Sonnenwende had sputtered to a halt,
having gained at most three miles. Ironically, although a complete failure, it evidently made an outsized contribution to the final Soviet decision to delay the attack toward Berlin. Within days, Zhukov had turned forces north to aid Rokossovsky, while Konev had halted his operations on the Neisse. The Vistula-Oder offensive, however, had, in less than two months, taken the Soviets from Warsaw to the gates of Berlin, inflicted irreplaceable losses on the Germans, and cost the enemy the vital Silesian industrial areas. As everyone knew, the next step would be Berlin.
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In his last radio addresses in early 1945, Hitler continued to stress the intention of the “Jewish-international world conspiracy” to eradicate the German people as well as to affirm his belief that the indomitable spirit of the Volksgemeinschaft would still prevail. Although the shared sacrifices and ritual mourning that had elevated the dead to fallen heroes had sustained internal unity for a surprisingly long time, in the face of an obviously lost war the image of fighting valiantly to the end for the Volksgemeinschaft inspired fewer people. Increasingly, the members of that national community now largely ignored their Führer. He was, in fact, so little a presence in their daily lives that rumors had persisted for months that he was seriously ill or dead. Nor was he spared criticism, SD reports now regularly indicating that average Germans held him responsible for deliberately provoking war and, thus, for causing the devastation now being rained on Germany. “What an enormous guilt Hitler bears,” declared one soldier in late January. The urban inhabitants of the western industrial centers had been paying the price all along, and now the eastern German population would reap the whirlwind of the savage brutality inflicted on the Soviet peoples by Hitler's unconstrained policies of exploitation and mass murder.
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As news spread of the rapid Soviet advance, panic-stricken residents of East Prussia, West Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia filled roads as they fled, often unprepared, into bitter cold. The sight of long columns of civilians trudging westward, pulling what possessions they could save in carts, became common. “The roads are full of refugees, carts, and pedestrians,” recalled one eyewitness. “People are gripped by panic when the cry goes up, ‘The Russians are close!' ” Others told of the chaos and desperation at railway stations as people scrambled to get on the last trains heading west, trampling each other, even throwing people out of boxcars. Still others related tales of distraught mothers gone mad unwilling to believe the babies they carried in their arms were already dead or conveyed horrifying images of towns and villages burned to the ground, of marauding Red Army soldiers looting and pillaging, of the mass rape
of women and the shooting of men who came to their aid, of hospitals turned into death houses, of systematic brutality. All too often, these horror stories turned out to be true, as Red soldiers frequently wreaked vengeance for what had been done to their own country and families. One estimate put the number of civilians killed in the eastern provinces in the first months of 1945 at 100,000, while another suggested that as many as 1.4 million women might have been raped (including one of every two women in Berlin). Since many women were raped repeatedly, even a figure as high as this cannot convey the reality of the constant anxiety, lingering uncertainty, and inner turmoil to which women were subjected. Gang rapes were common, as were sexually transmitted diseases, while many unwanted pregnancies resulted in abortions or abandoned babies. The sexual violence went on for weeks and months, long after the war had ended. Women learned to hide, to disguise themselves, or to find a protector (preferably an officer).
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