A World at Arms (158 page)

Once the Western Allies informed the Russians of the contacts, the latter became increasingly annoyed. While they had never before involved western officers in their surrender negotiations with German forces, the Soviets were increasingly violent in their objections to the
continuation of shadowy soundings in which they were not invited to participate. Stalin sent Churchill and Roosevelt an increasingly nasty series of messages which made ever worse impressions on the recipients. Perhaps in the hope of influencing the President during a time when the agreements reached at Yalta were breaking down over the refusal of Moscow to implement its promises on Poland and the coup in Romania, Stalin now let it be known that Molotov would not go to San Francisco after all.
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This rather rude step was later reversed; but the evidence is clear that in what turned out to be the last days of his life, Roosevelt was increasingly annoyed with Soviet actions.

Stalin’s actions in this situation are not easy to understand.
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Perhaps he was concerned that a German surrender on other fronts would leave him at a disadvantage.
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The Western Allies regularly waved away all German offers of wider surrenders unless made unconditionally and to all three major Allies;
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perhaps because he himself was hoping for some last-minute deal on his front that would assist his purposes, he assumed that Britain and the United States would do likewise. Perhaps he felt that heavy fighting, rather than surrenders, elsewhere would assist the Red Army’s campaign for Berlin by drawing off German forces or at least keeping them busy. Certainly the final campaign for the German capital was not easy. It had been delayed much longer than the earlier Soviet planning for the winter offensive had contemplated, and it had been this delay which both worried Eisenhower and had appeared to dangle the prize of Berlin in front of the American 9th Army.

During the latter part of February and all of March 1945 Soviet military effort was concentrated on clearing the flanks of the forthcoming assault on the Nazi capital while building up forces and supplies for that assault. In battles of tremendous ferocity, the Red Army first failed and then succeeded in destroying most of the German forces in Pomerania and driving back the remnants across the Oder. The two German armies which had been cut off in East Prussia were split into several pockets and, except for those evacuated by sea and a tiny enclave still held until May, also destroyed. Relying heavily on their artillery, the divisions of the Third Belorussian Front pounded their way into Königsberg–now Kaliningrad–and quite literally smashed the bulk of the remains of the old northern wing of the German Eastern Front to pieces. The German general who finally surrendered what was left of Königsberg was condemned to death in absentia and his family arrested, but such actions no more held up the Red Army than the ever increasing German practice
of hanging soldiers in public with signs attached to them calling attention to the fate of traitors to the Third Reich. The Germans on the Eastern Front fought with the bravery born of desperation to save their own lives and what they believed was the future of their families and homes, and for this flying execution squads were quite unnecessary. Once the front situation had collapsed and there appeared to be a way out, the equally desperate effort to escape by heading west or surrendering in place could not be held up by summary executions either. As Field Marshal Montgomery explained to Admiral Friedeburg on May 3, when the latter wanted to have German armies surrender to the Western Allies but not to the Russians, “The Germans should have thought of some of these things before they began the war, particularly before attacking the Russians.”
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One by one the isolated garrisons surrendered; tiny numbers escaped or broke through; the forces in Courland and two of the remnants of the East Prussian forces held out until May of 1945. It could easily be argued that the men trapped in these places were much more likely to survive their post-war stays in Soviet prisoner of war camps than they would have survived a return to battle on the main Eastern Front had they been evacuated earlier. But neither Hitler who wanted them to hold in place nor Guderian who wanted them evacuated was concerned about their survival; they merely had different views on how best to prolong the war. Hitler hoped to turn the tide or split the alliance against himself while Guderian hoped to hold a front in the East. Both were hopelessly unrealistic.

Further south, the Red Army cleared more of Silesia and surrounded Breslau, which held out until May. In Bohemia, the Fourth Ukrainian Front had enormous difficulty pushing back the German Army Group Center which was being substantially reinforced, partly because the Germans had believed that the major spring offensive of the Red Army would come here, partly because its commander, Field Marshal Schörner, was a great favorite of Hitler. In Hungary, the last great German offensive of the war collapsed in the face of the resistance and drive of the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts, which cleared the Germans out of Hungary and southern Slovakia.
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While beyond Bratislava (Pressburg) the Red Army headed for Vienna, at the southern end of the front they took the Hungarian oil fields on April 2 even as Tito’s army was pushing back the Germans in Yugoslavia, where they faced the possibility of being taken in the rear by the British advancing in Italy. The day before the capture of the Hungarian oil fields, Stalin had set the date for the great offensive on Berlin.
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On April 1, Stalin informed Eisenhower that Berlin was of little
importance and that the Red Army would attack it in late May; both lies since this was to be the main object of Soviet offensive operations which on that day he ordered launched on April 16 at the latest. What purpose these deceptions were to accomplish remains unclear, but in the same message Stalin agreed to further advances of Western troops into the zone allocated to the Soviet Union as well as to Eisenhower’s plan to drive into Austria to meet the Red Army there. As for the big drive on Berlin, Stalin had earlier stated his preference for Zhukov to take that city; he now gave final orders for the offensive to be conducted by three Fronts, the Second Belorussian (Rokossovski), the First Belorussian (Zhukov), and the First Ukrainian (Konev).

There was to be a prior attack by Fourth Ukrainian Front further south which, combined with a pretended offensive on the left flank of First Ukrainian, was to fool the Germans into thinking that the next big attack would come in that area. This effort was to be completely successful. Just as on the Western Front the Germans in March were tricked into thinking Patton’s 3rd Army would move through the Remagen bridgehead eastward–thereby helping open the way for his drive across the Mosel southeastward–so in April Hitler and the German high command were fooled into sending most of what few reserves they had to the southern end of the front in Germany, and leaving the key central sector, about to be struck by a massive offensive, with almost no reserves at all.

In the north, Rokossovski’s Second Belorussian Front had had the most difficult preliminary re-shuffling and faced the worst terrain: an assault crossing over a river divided into branches in an area of flooded ground traversed by dykes easily shelled by the defenders. His Army Group, therefore, was scheduled to attack several days after the other two; in the event, they struck on April 20 with only the northernmost of the three assault crossings successful. Rokossovski quickly shifted emphasis to that sector and then drove into Mecklenburg. Directly east of Berlin was Zhukov’s First Belorussian Front, which already had bridgeheads across the Oder and was to move out of them in three thrusts: to strike north of the German capital and eventually surround it, to head directly toward it, and to head southwest, thus cutting off the defending German 9th Army from the north.

Konev’s First Ukrainian Front, while pretending to attack on its left flank, was in fact to launch assault crossings of the Neisse river into the German 4th Panzer Army, head northwest to join in cutting off 9th Army, as well as reaching further west both to meet the Americans and to surround Berlin from the south. The drive to meet the Americans would split the whole German military mechanism apart and make it far
more difficult for them to maintain resistance centers in the north and south; in this regard Soviet planning essentially coincided with Eisenhower’s. Hitler recognized the same possibility–as a danger rather than an opportunity of course–and even before the launching of the Soviet offensive began preparations for that contingency, designating Admiral Dönitz as commander of the northern and Field Marshal Kesselring for the southern remnants of the armed forces. He had picked two extremely loyal adherents of his regime whom he correctly believed fully prepared to sacrifice the lives of any and all Germans in support of the Nazi state.

In the first two weeks of April, while the Third Ukrainian Front was driving deep into Austria, taking Vienna by April 3, the massive preparations for the main offensive went forward, greatly aided like previous such prepared offensives by the thousands of trucks which the United States had delivered under Lend-Lease. With some two and a half million soldiers in place, the offensive opened on April 16. Stalin had told his commanders he wanted it completed in twelve to fifteen days, and at enormous cost in casualties they delivered essentially what he had ordered.

Although Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front started out with bridgeheads across the Oder, its first attacks, launched at night with searchlights supposed to blind the Germans, barely drove the defenders back frontally. For three days the assaulting formations piled up against the defenses. Driven forward by Zhukov at Stalin’s insistence, the attackers ground forward. As artillery wore down the defenders, Red Army units broke into and through the front of Army Group Vistula toward and north of Berlin. There were very heavy casualties on both sides, and numerous Soviet tanks were destroyed, many by hand-held anti-tank rockets carried by Hitler Youth members; but the overwhelming power of the offensive slowly drove all before it.

Further south, Konev’s forces made their assault crossings of the Neisse river with great success on the heels of a tremendous artillery barrage. In short order several divisions of the 4th Panzer Army simply disintegrated, and, before the Germans quite realized what was happening, Konev’s spearheads were cutting in behind the 9th Army. Within five days, it was clear that the Eastern Front had been ripped open; the only remaining question was whether the Germans would try to fight on or give up.

In a summary of the situation and predictions for the future, General Marshall had reported to Roosevelt on April 2 that the war would end as the pockets of resistance collapsed one by one, the key question being the location of Hitler. The Germans would fight hard at that point, but there would be little guerilla warfare. The southern redoubt would
function as a center of resistance only if Hitler went there in person, but there would be no overthrow of the Nazi regime from the inside. The misery in occupied Germany was vast, but there was no political interest. The area occupied by the Western Allies was experiencing great hunger because it was a food deficit area, and would continue to do so as no food shipments from east Germany could be expected, while the population was rapidly growing as a result of a vast movement of refugees westward.
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Although in early April the Nazi leaders still professed to be confident,
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Marshall’s predictions proved to be correct. The last minute concerns of the German leaders hardly engaged the real dilemmas facing them: they were worried about evacuating their supplies of poison gas lest the Allies utilize their finding of stocks as a pretext for using gas against the Germans; they puzzled over Japanese requests for orders to the German naval forces in the Far East to continue operating with the Japanese if their European base were lost; they rejoiced over the death of President Roosevelt as a sign that all would be well for Germany.
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There is no evidence that anyone in Berlin had even the slightest interest in or knowledge about the new American President; there was instead an increasing tendency to move non-existent forces around and to engage in the most bizarre historical reminiscences.
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At this time, the Western Allies were driving toward the Baltic and into Austria, the Red Army was pushing into the suburbs of Berlin even as it moved to surround the city entirely, while on the German side a fissure was finally beginning to open up. Hitler and a number of key political and military aides were intent on continuing the fighting in preposterous hopes of stabilizing a new front. The orders Hitler himself gave to reorient Wenck’s 12th Army from heading west to heading east as well as his fantastic hope that a new organization, an “army” headed by the SS General Felix Steiner and consisting mostly of imaginary formations, would drive south from Mecklenburg and cut off Zhukov’s advancing spearheads, must be seen in this light; so should the support Goebbels and Bormann from the political, Keitel and Jodl from the military side gave to such projects.

Increasing numbers among the German military leaders, however, had by this time a rather different perspective. They recognized that the war was lost and that there was no prospect of stabilizing the front once more. With Russian shells falling in the capital, Red Army and American troops about to meet in central Germany, while other American armies from north and south could be expected to join hands at the Brenner Pass, the only point of continued fighting as they saw it was to gain time for civilians fleeing from the east to the west, and possibly to enable a
large proportion of their soldiers to be captured by the Western Allies rather than the Red Army.
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Unlike Field Marshal Schörner, who deserted his men to try to evade capture as a civilian–the sort of step he had regularly penalized with shooting or hanging when attempted by others–most of them remained with their troops and took their chances.