Aware of what was coming on the eastern front, Guderian pleaded in vain with Jodl for the transfer of troops from the west. Jodl refused, insisting that they were needed to retain the initiative in the west.136 The subsidiary offensive in Alsace, code-named ‘North Wind’, for which the troops, desperately needed in the east, were allegedly so vital, had been intended to bolster the southern flank of the major offensive in the Ardennes. Ordered by Hitler on 21 December, and started on New Year’s Eve, it made little headway and ground to a halt as early as 3 January.137 The consequence of this predictable failure, on top of losses from the Ardennes offensive, was to leave the overall military situation substantially worse than it had been in mid-December. In the west, the Luftwaffe was effectively now finished. Some 80,000 much-needed soldiers – a number raised under such extreme difficulties – had been lost, huge quantities of armaments had been destroyed and fuel supplies were rapidly running out. In the east, the expected offensive could only be faced with maximum apprehension – made worse by the losses in the west. Even so, the generals had no alternative in mind other than to follow Hitler’s orders, however insane they thought them to be. Neither the will nor the organizational capacity was there to challenge his authority as a group, let alone face him individually with any ultimatum to avoid the looming catastrophe. A glimpse into the prevailing mentality can be gleaned from a comment made by Göring at the beginning of November to General Werner Kreipe, just dismissed from his post as Chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe. Kreipe had pressed Göring – still exuding optimism that the enemy would be defeated, and that their coalition would split – to confront Hitler and urge him to find a political way out. The Reich Marshal refused point-blank, saying that to do so would take away the Führer’s self-belief.138
At the very pinnacle of the regime, Hitler could still muster his tried and tested act of supreme confidence and optimism, however bleak the reality. Even at this stage he was able to fire up those around him. More importantly, given the fragmentation in the subordinate leadership and their inability to pose any collective criticism of his leadership, let alone think of a united and frontal challenge to his authority, he could continue to demand the impossible and expect his orders to be obeyed. He still hoped and vainly expected that the Allied coalition would crack. His own hold on reality was waning, but had far from vanished. Beneath the veneer of indomitability that his role of Führer demanded, he was eminently capable of realizing the consequences of the unfolding disaster. His Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, found him one evening after the failure of the Ardennes offensive, depressed and admitting that the war was lost – characteristically attributing it to betrayal and the failings of others. For him now the struggle was about his place in history – a heroic end, not a cowardly capitulation for the country as in 1918. ‘We’ll not capitulate,’ Below recalled him saying. ‘Never. We can go down. But we’ll take a world with us.’139
Following the failure in the Ardennes, defences in the west were severely weakened. They would nevertheless hold reasonably firm for a few weeks yet, until the major Allied onslaught in March. But in the east, catastrophe was imminent.
5
Calamity in the East
The machine of duty, the will and the unquestioned ‘must’ application of the last ounce of strength work automatically within us. Only seldom do you think about the big ‘what now’.
Colonel-General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, 20 January 1945
The conviction that a victory of the Soviets would mean the extinction of life of the German people and of every individual is the general feeling of all people.
Propaganda report on the popular mood, 24 January 1945
I
The storm broke on 12 January 1945 and raged with savage ferocity for the next three weeks. By the end of the month, vital eastern regions of the Reich – East Prussia to the north, East Brandenburg (between the Oder and what had once been the Polish border), Silesia with its crucial heavy industry to the south – and all of what remained of occupied Poland had been lost. The Wehrmacht had suffered huge, irreparable losses in intensely fierce and bitter fighting. The German civilian population had faced unspeakable horror as it fled in panic. The Red Army now stood on the banks of the Oder, the last natural barrier before Berlin. The roof had fallen in on the Third Reich.
The great Soviet offensive had been expected. The German General Staff even calculated exactly when it would start.1 But when it came, the Wehrmacht was still ill-prepared for it.
In the main, this simply reflected the crass imbalance of forces. Across the entire eastern front of around 2,400 kilometres the estimated enemy superiority was immense: eleven times more infantry, seven times more tanks, twenty times more guns, twenty times stronger in air-power.2 The discrepancy was smallest in the north of the front, in East Prussia, though massive even there. Further south, the central part of the front, it was overwhelming. German losses in the last six months of 1944 had been almost as high as in the whole of the previous three years, since the attack on the Soviet Union, and practically all possible reserves – often of ill-trained and unsuitable men – had by now been scraped together.3 In the path of the Red Army along the Vistula, defending a sector of around 725 kilometres, stood the 9th Army, the 4th Panzer Army and the 17th Army, all part of Army Group A, commanded by Colonel-General Josef Harpe and significantly weakened over previous months. The Army Group’s southern flank in the Carpathians was protected by Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici’s 1st Panzer Army. In the north of the front, guarding East Prussia, the route of the Russian invasion of the Reich in 1914, was the rebuilt Army Group Centre, under Colonel-General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, whose 3rd Panzer Army, 2nd and 4th Armies, together with 120 battalions of about 80,000 badly equipped Volkssturm men, had to cover around 650 kilometres of extensively fortified terrain. In all, Harpe commanded around 400,000 men, Reinhardt about 580,000. Between them they had some 2,000 tanks at their disposal.4
Facing them were the daunting Soviet forces that had been assembled for the big push towards the Reich’s borders. In the centre of the front, on the middle reaches of the Vistula, and prepared for the major thrust, was the 1st Belorussian Front of Marshal Georgi Zhukov. Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front was poised further south on the Vistula. Between them, Zhukov and Konev commanded an awesome force of almost 2.25 million men, some 6,500 tanks, 32,000 heavy guns and more than 4,500 aircraft. Their objective was to drive some 500 kilometres to the Oder, towards Posen and Breslau, capture the Silesian industrial region, and take position for the final advance on Berlin. In the north, the subsidiary part of the offensive, the 3rd Belorussian Front under General Ivan Chernyakhovsky in cooperation with Marshal Ivan Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front was set to begin the assault westwards through East Prussia, directed towards the heavily fortified bastion of Königsberg, while the 2nd Belorussian Front commanded by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, aimed to drive north-westwards from the Narev river in Poland towards the East Prussian coast. The combined strength amounted to almost 1.7 million men backed by 3,300 tanks, 28,000 heavy guns and 3,000 aircraft.5 The attack from east and south, much as in 1914, towards the heavily fortified area of the Masurian Lakes, aimed to seize Königsberg, cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany and destroy the major German forces defending the province.
Crushing though the defensive burden facing the German army was, their plight was made worse by the unwieldy and divisive command structure of the Wehrmacht, which had the effect of leaving Hitler, at its head, unchallengeable. All power of decision rested in his hands, in the military as well as the political sphere. No mechanism existed to take it from him, even as he determined on actions that lacked all rationality and were hugely costly in continuing to prosecute a war that was patently lost, and when moves to end it ought to have been urgently demanded of him or of anyone stepping into his place.
At a time of utmost military crisis the long-standing crucial divisio
n in the Wehrmacht command structure, dating back to the organizational changes that followed Hitler’s assumption of command of the army in December 1941, was glaringly magnified, and highly damaging.6 The essential lack of coordination was rooted in the split between the responsibilities of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) and those of the High Command of the Army (OKH). The OKW was responsible for strategic planning on all fronts except the eastern front. This front, where the Luftwaffe and navy played only minor roles, was the province of the OKH. The problem was compounded since Hitler’s chief subordinates at the OKW, Field-Marshal Keitel and General Jodl, were guaranteed to back him at every call. Though they could not block any influence that the commanders-in-chief of the navy and Luftwaffe (Dönitz and Göring) might bring to bear on Hitler, as regards the war on land they formed an insuperable barrier to any propositions that they did not favour or that Hitler opposed. Beyond this, even, there was the added great difficulty that Hitler, since December 1941, had been the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, interfering regularly in tactical dispositions. Increasingly distrustful of his generals in such a decisive theatre, he had resolutely and persistently refused to contemplate appointing a commander-in-chief for the eastern front to parallel the position of Field-Marshal von Rundstedt in the west or that of Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring in Italy. A coordinated military command in the east, beneath Hitler, was therefore impossible. And any strategic planning of General Guderian, Chief of the Army General Staff, was made doubly difficult: first, because he had to surmount Hitler’s objections in the army command itself; and secondly, because he had to confront Hitler’s allocation of priorities to other theatres.
Guderian encountered such difficulties on three separate visits he made to Hitler’s western headquarters between 24 December 1944 and 9 January 1945. His entreaties for the recognized weakness on the eastern front to be bolstered by the transfer of divisions from the west were turned down flat by Hitler. The eastern front would have ‘to make do with what it’s got’, Hitler declared. He dismissed the careful figures put together by Colonel Reinhard Gehlen of the Foreign Armies East department of the General Staff as gross exaggerations, part of a Soviet ‘enormous bluff’ – a view echoed by Himmler. Jodl also backed Hitler’s refusal to move troops eastwards, continuing to attribute decisive importance to the western front. The most Guderian eventually squeezed out of Hitler, on his second visit, was the transfer of four divisions. However, Hitler insisted that these be sent not to the broad part of the eastern front threatened by the coming offensive, but to Hungary, where the attritional battles around Budapest had raged for weeks and would continue until mid-February.
Only with the Soviet offensive under way and the attempted breakthrough in the Ardennes and Alsace definitively over was Hitler finally prepared to move forces to the east. But Guderian was infuriated to learn that these forces, too, the redoubtable 6th SS-Panzer Army of Sepp Dietrich, back from the Ardennes, were to be sent to Hungary. Protecting the Hungarian oilfields, so crucial to the German war effort, was the chief consideration.7 Hitler, following pressure from Armaments Minister Albert Speer, deemed the few oilfields there still available to Germany indispensable to the war effort and to be held at all cost, even if it meant weakening the defences of Army Groups A and Centre.8 In fact, the Danube, for all the intense fighting there, was rapidly turning into a sideshow to the main event about to unfold on the eastern front. But when Guderian, on 9 January, showed him the detailed assessment of troop figures in the Soviet build-up that he had obtained from Gehlen Hitler responded in fury that the man who had devised them was ‘completely idiotic’ and should be sent to a lunatic asylum. He also predictably refused to allow Harpe and Reinhardt to withdraw to the more defensible positions they had advocated, spouting his usual condemnation of generals who thought only of retreat. And during the Soviet onslaught he overrode Guderian’s objections and insisted on the transfer of a formidable armoured corps, the Großdeutschland, from Reinhardt’s hard-pressed army in East Prussia to help shore up defences in Poland – only to find that Kielce, which they had been meant to defend, had already fallen. Before then, Guderian had told Hitler that the eastern front was ‘like a house of cards’: one push and it would collapse.9 It was an all too reasonable prophecy.
In their post-war memoirs, German generals often tended to lay the blame for the military catastrophe almost wholly at Hitler’s door. His own domineering, interfering and increasingly erratic military leadership without doubt notably worsened the extent of the disaster and thereby the scale of the human losses. But such personalized blame overlooks the support the generals had given in better times to Hitler’s unfettered command and the structures that had given him such total dominance in the military sphere. Even as battlefield fortunes had turned remorselessly against Germany after 1942, the generals made no concerted attempt to alter the command structures. In March 1944 all the field-marshals had presented Hitler with a sworn declaration of their unwavering loyalty.10 And following the failure of Stauffenberg’s plot in July 1944, they had simply acknowledged that nothing could be done, however absurd the orders appeared to be. Moreover, Hitler was far from bereft of support among the generals for his decisions, however irrational they subsequently seemed, as the records of his military conferences demonstrate. His refusal to accede to Guderian’s request to move large numbers of troops from the west to shore up the eastern front, for example, was, however bluntly put, little more than a reflection of realities. Any major transfer from the west would have laid bare defences on that front and might at best have delayed, but almost certainly could not have prevented, the Red Army’s breakthrough. In the stretched and splintered Wehrmacht of early 1945, few had anything approaching an overall view of the situation and most generals were above all anxious to hold on to what they could of their own men and resources. Guderian’s main support came from the commanders of the Army Groups directly in the Soviet path. Even here, however, his reluctance, with few exceptions, to recommend sensible retreat to more defensible lines (since he knew Hitler would reject such a suggestion) meant an ultimate readiness to accept orders in the full knowledge that they would have disastrous results.11 Even with a different supreme head of the Wehrmacht, the calamity about to beset Germany in the east could not have been prevented. Only immediate capitulation could have achieved that. But the full extent of the disaster could have been significantly lessened. A more rational defensive strategy, together with orchestrated evacuation of the threatened civilian population, could have held off the Red Army for longer and in so doing possibly saved countless lives.
II
At 4 a.m. on the icily cold morning of 12 January, the 1st Ukrainian Front began a huge artillery bombardment against the positions of the German 4th Panzer Army across the Vistula, some 200 kilometres south of Warsaw. Even the immediate impact seemed to indicate what was to follow. By midday, the barrage alone had destroyed the 4th Panzer Army’s headquarters, disabled two-thirds of its artillery, and left a quarter of its men dead or wounded. By the end of the day, Soviet infantry had broken through to a depth of more than 20 kilometres across a 40-kilometre front while tank spearheads had pushed forward more than 32 kilometres, crushing German resistance in their path. Kraków was taken on 19 January, the beautiful city still unscathed since the Germans had had no time to destroy it. Just over a week later, on 27 January, Red Army soldiers came across the horrific site of the huge concentration camp complex at Auschwitz, where more than a million Jews and other victims of Nazi terror had been exterminated. They liberated around 7,000 emaciated and ill prisoners left cowering in the remains of the camp as the Germans had retreated. By 28 January, nearby Katowice had fallen. German forces managed to escape destruction as they evacuated the area. But by next day, nearly all of Upper Silesia, Germany’s last intact, vital industrial belt, was in Soviet hands. Before the end of the month, Breslau, capital of Silesia, had been encircled. The city, a designated ‘fortress’ whose fanatical leadership had determined on
holding out to the end, would not fall until May. It was a futile act of defiance, at enormous human cost, which scarcely inconvenienced the Soviet steamroller. Already on 22 January advance troops had crossed the upper reaches of the Oder, near Brieg, between Oppeln and Breslau, and established a bridgehead – rapidly reinforced – on the western banks. By the end of the month five of Konev’s armies had taken up positions on or over the Oder, though large-scale crossings of men and equipment had been difficult as the thick carpet of ice over the river started to break up.
A massive barrage in the thick fog of early morning on 13 January announced the beginning of a mighty assault on East Prussia by Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorussian Front, followed next day by the northward thrust of Rokossovsky 2nd Belorussian Front. Ferocious German resistance, together with the heavy snow that initially hampered Soviet air support for the offensive, meant the advance was less speedy than further south. After the first few days, however, defences started to crumble. Tilsit fell on 20 January. Chernyakhovsky’s forces poured through the so-called Insterburg Gap towards Königsberg, though the massively fortified city itself was to hold out, despite an intense battering, until April. Goldap, Gumbinnen and the area around Nemmersdorf in the east of the province, scene of the notorious incursion of the Red Army in October, were retaken. Advancing from the south, Rokossovsky’s troops found that the great Nazi monument commemorating the battle of Tannenberg and victory over the Russians in 1914 had been blown up by the Germans, who had hastily exhumed the remains of Field-Marshal Hindenburg, hero of Tannenberg, and his wife, and shipped them on a cruiser westwards out of Pillau.12 Hitler’s former headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair, near Rastenburg, was overrun, Red Army soldiers wandering in amazement around the concrete ruins of the arch-enemy’s command centre. Once the Soviet forces had overcome the battery of fortifications in the Allenstein area by 23 January, the way was clear to strike for the sea. The main railway line from Königsberg to Berlin was severed. By 26 January the main forces of the 5th Guards Tank Army reached the Frisches Haff – the huge, shallow lagoon stretching for more than 80 kilometres from near Elbing to Königsberg – at Tolkemit, east of Elbing. With that, East Prussia was cut off from the rest of the Reich.