The regime had appeared during the summer to teeter close to the edge. It had survived an internal uprising, but its armed forces had been pummelled in east and west. As summer had turned into autumn, it had stabilized the military situation and redoubled its energies at home to galvanize an often reluctant or truculent population into action to shore up defences and provide manpower for the front and the armaments industry.
In mid-October, Aachen – by now a ruined shell, its remaining inhabitants cowering in cellars – became the first German city to fall into enemy hands. But by this time, attention had switched to the east. There, in East Prussia, the population was already gaining a horrific foretaste of what Soviet conquest would bring.
3
Foretaste of Horror
Hatred… fills us since we have seen how the Bolsheviks have wrought havoc in the area that we have retaken, south of Gumbinnen. There can be no other aim for us than to hold out and to protect our homeland.
Colonel-General Georg-Hans Reinhardt to his wife
after visiting the scene of Soviet atrocities near
Nemmersdorf, in East Prussia, 26 October 1944
I
The disastrous collapse of Army Group Centre, steamrollered by the Red Army as its gigantic summer offensive, ‘Operation Bagration’, drove back the Wehrmacht, then the smashing of the Army Groups North Ukraine and South Ukraine, and the cutting off in the Baltic of Army Group North left the German east precariously exposed. The scale of the calamity from the German perspective could scarcely be exaggerated. In 150 days, the German army in the east lost more than a million men, dead, wounded or missing – 700,000 of them since August. Put another way, more than 5,000 men a day were dying. Only around a third of the losses could be made good. On 1 October 1944 the overall strength of the Wehrmacht was just over 10 million men. Of the 13 million who had served since the war began, 3 million were lost.1
The disaster on the eastern front in summer 1944 was in terms of human loss by far the worst military catastrophe in German history, worse than the First World War slaughterhouse at Verdun, way beyond the losses at Stalingrad.2 Army Group Centre, its operative strength of around half a million men grossly inferior to that of the Soviet forces, was like a house of cards waiting to be knocked over. In the first phase of the offensive, 25 divisions with more than 250,000 men of Army Group Centre were destroyed.3 By the end of July the Red Army had swept through Belorussia, recovering all the territory lost since 1941, and through eastern Poland to the Vistula. On the northern flank of the advance, the Red Army had also overrun much of Lithuania, including the main cities of Vilnius and Kovno. The borders of East Prussia, the farthest eastern frontier of the Reich, now lay perilously close. In a short-lived incursion on 17 August, Soviet troops did, in fact, cross the East Prussian border near Schirwindt, entering the Reich for the first time, though on this occasion they were quickly repulsed.4
To the south of Army Group Centre, further disaster rapidly unfolded. Army Group North Ukraine (the former Army Group South, renamed earlier in the year) suffered huge losses in intense combat as the Red Army drove into Galicia, in southern Poland, taking Lemberg (Lvov) and forcing a German retreat of nearly 200 kilometres over a 400-kilometre-wide area. Of the 56 divisions of Army Group North Ukraine (including some Hungarian divisions), 40 were partially or totally destroyed. As Soviet troops on the northern flank pressed on north-westwards to the Vistula and the approaches to Warsaw, the southern flank pushed German forces back towards the Carpathians. The desperate German attempt to defend Galicia was a recognition of the strategic and economic importance of the region. By mid-August almost the whole of the Ukraine and most of eastern Poland were in Soviet hands, while the basis had been laid for attacking the crucial Upper Silesian industrial belt, 200 kilometres to the west.5 Meanwhile, on 1 August, Warsaw’s martyrdom had begun with the rising of the Polish Home Army. As the Red Army stood inactive in the vicinity, unwilling to assist the rebels, the SS moved in to destroy the rising and pulverize the Polish capital.6 In the unfolding tragedy over the following two months, the city was turned into a ruined shell, with some 90 per cent of its buildings destroyed and 200,000 civilians left dead amid the terrible German reprisals.7
In the Balkans, too, where Romanian oil, Hungarian bauxite and Yugoslav copper were crucial to Germany’s war economy, the Wehrmacht suffered crippling defeats, leading to the defection of its allies in the region. The position of the German Army Group South Ukraine, around half of it composed of war-weary Romanian units, was already weakened by mid-August through the withdrawal of 11 out of 47 divisions to help shore up the battered Army Groups Centre and North Ukraine. When a major Soviet offensive began on 20 August, many Romanian units, with no further stomach for the fight, deserted. Three days later, following an internal coup, Romania sued for peace and changed sides. During the next few days, Army Group South Ukraine was demolished. The German 6th Army, reconstituted after Stalingrad, was again encircled and destroyed. In all, 18 divisions of the Army Group ceased to exist; the rest were forced into headlong retreat to the west and north-west. Within a fortnight, more than 350,000 German and Romanian troops had been killed or wounded, or had entered captivity.8 Huge quantities of armaments were also lost, as were the Ploesti oilfields, vital for the German war effort, on which Hitler had always placed such a premium. Bulgaria soon followed Romania’s example, switching sides and declaring war on Germany on 8 September. German occupation of Greece and Yugoslavia was now no longer viable. Control over the Balkans was as good as at an end. And for the Red Army, the approaches to Slovakia and Hungary lay open, and behind them the Czech lands and Austria.9
At the opposite end of the eastern front, on the Baltic, Army Group North fought throughout the summer in a desperate attempt to avoid being cut off. The Soviet advance had opened up a huge gap between Army Group North and what was left of Army Group Centre. Entreaties to Hitler, already in early July and later, to allow Army Group North to withdraw to a more defensible line to the west were predictably rejected. The Baltic could not be surrendered, since Swedish steel, Finnish nickel and oil shale (used by the navy) from Estonia were vital for the war effort. But Hitler was also influenced by the need to retain the Baltic harbours for trials of the new generation of U-boats, which, Grand-Admiral Dönitz had impressed upon him, still offered a chance for Germany to turn the fortunes of war in her favour by throttling supplies to Britain and cutting off Allied shipment of men and matériel to the Continent.10 Bitter fighting continued throughout July and August as Army Group North was forced to retreat some 200 kilometres to the north-west and evacuate parts of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, though it was able for the time being to prevent the Red Army from breaking through to the Baltic. What contribution, if any, to Army Group North’s resilience was made by the fanatical and ferocious leadership of its Commander-in-Chief, Colonel-General Schörner – one of Hitler’s outright favourites – is hard to say. Schörner, the most brutal of Hitler’s commanders, was unremitting in his demands for ruthless and fanatical fighting spirit, and in his merciless punishment of any that he deemed to be falling short of his demands.11 His tactical errors, however, accentuated the plight of the Army Group.12 Almost a quarter of a million strong, comprising three armies, its situation remained precarious, facing Soviet forces on three sides and mainly dependent upon supplies by sea across the Baltic. Meanwhile, by 2 September Germany’s important northern ally, Finland, had pulled out of the struggle and was soon to sign an armistice with the Soviet Union.
After a brief lull in the fighting, the Red Army opened a big northern offensive on 14 September. By the end of the month, the Wehrmacht had pulled out of Estonia and most of Latvia with great losses of men and equipment. The main forces had managed to withdraw, however, and were concentrated on a shorter front. A Soviet breakthrough in the area of Riga was held off – though not for long. In early October the Red Army forced its way through to the Baltic coast, just north of Memel. With that, the main forces of Arm
y Group North were cut off from East Prussia. The German retreat from Riga was by then under way and the city fell to the Soviets in the middle of the month. By the end of October, intense German efforts to re-establish links with Army Group North had irredeemably failed. The Army Group’s defences were by now stabilized. But its 33 divisions were completely cut off on the Courland, the peninsula north-west of Riga. Apart from 3 divisions that were promptly evacuated and a further 10 divisions brought out by sea in early 1945, its main forces, comprising around a quarter of a million frontline troops, so badly needed elsewhere, would remain there, isolated and of little further strategic relevance, until the capitulation in May 1945.13
From the Baltic to the Balkans, Germans armies had reeled at the ferocious onslaught of the Red Army in the summer months of 1944. In those months, the magnitude of the losses and the secession of crucial allies meant that Germany’s hopes of a victorious outcome to the war in the east had vanished. Goebbels was among those in the Nazi leadership who plainly recognized this. In September, he took up a Japanese suggestion for separate peace soundings with the Soviet Union and put the proposal to Hitler in a lengthy letter.14 Hitler took no notice of it. Whether there was the remotest chance of Stalin showing an interest in coming to terms with Germany when his forces were so rampantly in the ascendancy might well be doubted. But the issue could not be put to the test. Hitler’s silent veto was sufficient to rule out any possibility of an approach. The structures of Nazi rule ensured that there was no platform of any kind where Hitler’s adamant refusal to contemplate a negotiated end to the war, east or west, could be deliberated, let alone challenged.
In the Soviet Union, as with the Americans and British, the scale of Germany’s defeats raised expectations that the war might be almost over. It could have been, too, had Stalin and his military advisers, like the western Allies, not made strategic errors in their operational planning. Mighty though ‘Bagration’ was, the attack on four fronts was less decisive than the attack that the Germans had feared most: a huge, concentrated surge through southern Poland to Warsaw and from there to the Baltic coast, east of Danzig, cutting off two entire Army Groups (Centre and North) and opening the route to Berlin.15 The colossal battering the Wehrmacht had taken in the summer fell short, crippling though the losses were, of the decisive death blow that such a manoeuvre could have inflicted. The armies of the east, as in the west, could be patched up to fight on. Rapidly dwindling reserves of manpower and weaponry were dredged up. It was a mere plaster on a gaping wound. But it allowed the war to continue for several more months of mounting horror and bloodshed.
II
Behind the capacity to keep on fighting lay, as in the west, attitudes in the Wehrmacht which were not uniform in nature, but essentially resilient, and structures of government and administration, crisis-ridden but still intact. For the civilian population there was little choice but to grit their teeth and carry on. In conditions of perpetual emergency, the regime put people under extreme pressure to conform and collaborate. Private space to avoid such pressure dwindled almost to zero point. Ad hoc, piecemeal measures to attempt to hold off the inroads of the Red Army could, therefore, be implemented by a workforce now embracing almost the entire adult (and youthful) population, seldom (other than within parts of the Hitler Youth) enthusiastic, sometimes willing, often grudging, but scarcely ever rebellious. At the root of the readiness to comply, however reluctantly, a sentiment prevailed that was far more searing and penetrating than in the west: fear.
In East Prussia, the most exposed of Germany’s eastern provinces, the fear was palpable. Older citizens still had memories of the incursion of the Russians in the opening phase of the First World War before the Germans finally beat them back in February 1915. Some 350,000 people had fled in hasty evacuations as the Russians approached in August and September 1914. By the time the Russian troops had been forced out of East Prussia, according to German reports (though there is no reason to doubt their essential veracity), towns and villages had been ransacked, more than 40,000 buildings destroyed, several thousand inhabitants deported to Russia, and around 1,500 civilians killed.16 Thirty years later, the fear rested not just on old memories. The anti-Bolshevik propaganda, relentlessly pumped into the population by the Nazis, had seemed less abstract in this region than in western outposts of Germany. And for three years, soldiers had been passing through East Prussia backwards and forwards to the eastern front. Those with ears to hear had heard stories – not just vague rumours, but often concrete detail – of disturbing happenings in the east. Not only tales of the intense bitterness of the fighting, but news of atrocities perpetrated against the civilian Russian population and massacres of Jews had filtered back. The war against the partisans, it was well known, had been brutal. It had been no holds barred. As long as the war had been going well, what German soldiers had been doing to Russians and Jews had been of little concern. Many, influenced by propaganda, had no doubt approved. But now the tables had been turned: the Soviets were in the ascendancy, crushing German forces, pressing on the borders and threatening to break into East Prussia.
Elsewhere in the eastern provinces, the danger of Soviet occupation was not so imminent. But the fears were little different from those of the people of East Prussia. The Nazi Party had gained some of its greatest electoral successes before 1933 in the eastern regions of Germany – largely, apart from the Silesian industrial belt, Protestant and rural. Border issues, resentment at the territorial losses in the Versailles Treaty, and revanchist feelings had contributed to making these regions disproportionately stalwart in their backing for Hitler’s regime after 1933. The early war years, sheltered by German occupation of Poland and the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, had been relatively calm for eastern Germany. But the start of the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941 brought the regions far closer to the fighting front. Some compensation derived from the new military importance of the eastern provinces; the location of government and army bases close to Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, for instance, produced some economic benefits for the region. Following the rapid conquests by the Wehrmacht, the reality of war, even in the east, seemed at first far away. The area was also free from the heavy bombing – East Prussia suffered from some light Soviet bombing sorties in June 1941, but little more – that increasingly beset the western parts of Germany from 1942 onwards. In fact, one of its main roles was as a reception area, forced to take in large numbers of evacuees sent from the bomb-threatened towns and cities of western Germany. By early 1944 about 825,000 evacuees were housed in eastern regions.17 They were often seen as a burden, providing a real test for the solidarity of the much-vaunted ‘people’s community’. The presence of the refugees, in such numbers, was a clear sign that the war was close to home. The east had so far been spared the worst. That was now to alter rapidly.
Unsurprisingly, panic had spread like a bush fire through the east in the wake of the Wehrmacht’s collapse.18 As the Red Army’s advance then slowed and the German front gained some semblance of stability, the initial panic had subsided. But the population remained subdued, depressed and acutely worried. A general nervousness prevailed. Any negative news had a pronounced impact on people. ‘The unfavourable and dangerous military situation in the east has such a depressing effect on the mood of the great proportion of the population’, the SD reported in early August, ‘that the same anxious fears about the further development of the war can be heard in all strata.’19 Influenced by letters home from the front, and from the stories of evacuees from formerly occupied parts of Poland, people were sceptical about the capacity of the German forces to halt the Soviet advance completely and were not convinced that the danger for East Prussia had subsided.20 The fears were that the Soviets would eventually succeed. And everyone, it was said, was aware of the threat of Bolshevism. What that meant in concrete terms was left unstated.21 But the implications of dire consequences should the Soviets break through were plain enough. By early October, following the defect
ion of Germany’s eastern allies, the destruction of the 6th Army in Romania and the penning in of Army Group North in the Courland, the mood in the German east sank to ‘zero point’.22
Fear was also a prime motivating factor for many frontline soldiers. Aware, at least in general terms if not always specifically, of at least some of what German troops had done in the occupied Soviet Union, fear of falling into the hands of the Red Army was intense, and highly understandable. Whatever the feelings towards the British and American enemies in the west, nothing there equated to this. Alongside it went the fear of being one of the growing, countless victims of the eastern war. While fear of dying and hopes of survival were common to all soldiers, of whatever army, on whatever front, the reported casualties and intensity of the battles in the east sent a special shiver of anxiety down the backs of those learning that they had been called up to serve on the eastern front. Not surprisingly, though official reports were loath to admit it, there was growing anxiety about the call-up.23 And anyone summoned to serve fervently hoped it would be in the west, not in the east.
As in the west, the attitudes of soldiers actually fighting at the front varied. Army reports in August and September indicated the predictable negative impact of the retreats and recognition of the great superiority of the enemy in men and heavy weapons. Young replacements and older men produced through the ‘combing out’ of the total-war recruitment actions were said to be particularly affected by the nerve-wracking intense fighting with such heavy losses. They feared another major Soviet offensive, and their powers to resist were said to be shaken. Anxiety and war-weariness were seen as the cause. ‘Serious, but nevertheless confident’ was, however, the somewhat unlikely gloss put on the mood in general. ‘Unconditional trust in the Führer’ was, of course, ritualistically asserted. But from Army Group North, cut off in the Baltic, it was reported that the known ‘Bolshevist conditions’ and the fear of never seeing the homeland again if the war were lost served to strengthen fighting morale. And those soldiers whose fighting spirit fell below expectations were subjected to increasingly ferocious discipline. Worries about the threat to East Prussia and their families were recorded from soldiers with homes in the eastern regions.