The Fall of Berlin 1945 (3 page)

Using the findings of Gehlen's intelligence department, Guderian outlined the Red Army's build-up for a huge offensive in the east. He warned that the attack would take place within three weeks and requested that, since the Ardennes offensive had now ground to a halt, as many divisions as possible should be withdrawn for redeployment on the Vistula front. Hitler stopped him. He declared that such estimates of enemy strength were preposterous. Soviet rifle divisions never had more than 7,000 men each. Their tank corps had hardly any tanks. 'It's the greatest imposture since Genghis Khan,' he shouted, working himself up. 'Who is responsible for producing all this rubbish?'

Guderian resisted the temptation to reply that it was Hitler himself who talked of German 'armies' when they were the size of a single corps, and of 'infantry divisions' reduced to battalion strength. Instead, he defended Gehlen's figures. To his horror, General Jodl argued that the offensive in the west should continue with further attacks. Since this was exactly what Hitler wanted, Guderian was thwarted. It was even more provoking for him to have to listen at dinner to the verdict of Himmler, who revelled in his new role of military leader. He had recently been made army group commander on the upper Rhine in addition to his other appointments. 'You know, my dear Colonel General,' he said to Guderian, 'I don't really believe that the Russians will attack at all. It's all an enormous bluff".'

Guderian had no alternative but to return to OKH headquarters at Zossen. In the meantime, the losses in the west mounted. The Ardennes offensive and its ancillary operations cost 80,000 German casualties. In addition, it had used up a large proportion of Germany's rapidly dwindling fuel reserves. Hitler refused to accept that the Ardennes battle was his equivalent of the
Kaiserschlacht
, the last great German attack of the First World War. He obsessively rejected any parallels with 1918. For him, 1918 symbolized only the revolutionary 'stab in the back' which brought down the Kaiser and reduced Germany to a humiliating defeat. Yet Hitler had moments of clarity during those days. 'I know the war is lost,' he said late one evening to Colonel Nicolaus von Below, his Luftwaffe aide. 'The enemy's superiority is too great.' But he continued to lay all the blame on others for the sequence of disasters. They were all 'traitors', especially army officers. He suspected that many more had sympathized with the failed assassins, yet they had been pleased enough to accept medals and decorations from him. 'We will never surrender,' he said. 'We may go down, but we will take a world with us.'

Horrified by the new disaster looming on the Vistula, Guderian returned to the
Adlerhorst
at Ziegenberg twice more in rapid succession. To make matters worse, he heard that Hitler, without warning him, was transferring SS panzer troops from the Vistula front to Hungary. Hitler, convinced as usual that only he could see the strategic issues, had suddenly decided to launch a counter-attack there on the grounds that the oilfields must be retaken. In fact he wanted to break through to Budapest, which had been surrounded by the Red Army on Christmas Eve.

Guderian's visit on New Year's Day coincided with the annual procession of the regime's grandees and the chiefs of staff, to transmit in person to the Führer their 'wishes for a successful New Year'. That same morning Operation North Wind, the main subsidiary action to prolong the Ardennes offensive, was launched in Alsace. The day turned out to be a catastrophe for the Luftwaffe. Goring, in a grand gesture of characteristic irresponsibility, committed almost 1,000 planes to attack ground targets on the Western Front. This attempt to impress Hitler led to the final destruction of the Luftwaffe as an effective force. It gave the Allies total air supremacy.

The Grossdeutscher Rundfunk broadcast Hitler's New Year speech that day. No mention was made of the fighting in the west, which suggested failure there, and surprisingly little was said of the
Wunder-waffen
. A number of people believed that the speech had been pre-recorded or even faked. Hitler had not been seen in public for so long - that wild rumours were circulating. Some asserted that he had gone completely mad and that Goring was in a secret prison because he had tried to escape to Sweden.

Some Berliners, fearful of what the year would bring, had not quite dared to clink glasses when it came to the toast '
Prosit Neujahr!
The Goebbels family entertained Colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the Stuka ace and the most decorated officer in the Luftwaffe. They sat down to a dinner of potato soup as a symbol of austerity.

The New Year holiday ended on the morning of 3 January. The German devotion to work and duty remained unquestioned, however improbable the circumstances. Many had little to do in their offices and factories, owing to shortages of raw materials and parts, but they still set out on foot through the rubble or on public transport. Once again, miracles had been achieved repairing the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn tracks, even though few of the carriages had unbroken windows. Factories and offices were also freezing due to smashed windows and so little fuel for heating. Those with colds or flu had to struggle on. There was no point attempting to see a doctor unless you were seriously ill. Almost all the German doctors had been sent to the army. Local surgeries and hospitals depended almost entirely on foreigners. Even Berlin's main teaching hospital, the Charité, included doctors from over half a dozen countries on its staff, including Dutch, Peruvians, Romanians, Ukrainians and Hungarians.

The only industry which appeared to be flourishing was armaments production, directed by Hitler's personal architect and
Wunderkind
, Albert Speer. On 13 January, Speer gave a presentation to army corps commanders in the camp at Krampnitz just outside Berlin. He emphasized the importance of contact between front commanders and the war industries. Speer, unlike other Nazi ministers, did not insult his audience's intelligence. He disdained euphemisms about the situation and did not shrink from mentioning the 'catastrophic losses' sustained by the Wehrmacht over the last eight months.

The Allied bombing campaign was not the problem, he argued. German industry had produced 218,000 rifles in December alone. This was nearly double the average monthly output achieved in 1941, the year the Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union. The manufacture of automatic weapons had risen by nearly four times and tank production nearly fivefold. In December 1944, they had produced 1,840 armoured vehicles in a single month, over half what they had made in the whole of 1941. This also included far heavier tanks. 'The trickiest problem', he warned them, was the shortage of fuel. Surprisingly, he said little of ammunition reserves. There was little point producing all these weapons if munitions production failed to keep pace.

Speer spoke for over forty minutes, reeling off his statistics with quiet professionalism. He did not rub in the fact that it was the massive defeats on the eastern and western fronts over the last eight months which had reduced the Wehrmacht to such shortages in all types of weapons. He voiced the hope that German factories might reach a production level of 100,000 machine pistols a month by the spring of 1946. The fact that these enterprises relied largely on slave labourers dragooned by the SS was not, of course, mentioned. Speer also failed to remark upon their wastage — thousands of deaths a day. And the territories from which they came were about to diminish further. At that very moment, Soviet armies numbering over 4 million men were massed in Poland along the River Vistula and just south of the East Prussian border. They were starting the offensive which Hitler had dismissed as an imposture.

2
The 'House of Cards' on the Vistula

General Gehlen's estimates of Soviet strength were certainly not exaggerated. If anything, they were well short of the mark on the threatened sectors. The Red Army had 6.7 million men along a front which stretched from the Baltic to the Adriatic. This was over twice the strength of the Wehrmacht and its allies when they invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Hitler's conviction that summer that the Red Army was about to collapse had proved to be one of the most catastrophic miscalculations in history.

'We are lost,' a German sergeant acknowledged in January 1945, 'but we will fight to the last man.' Battle-hardened combatants of the Eastern Front had come to believe that it must all end in death. Any other outcome appeared unthinkable after everything that had gone before. They knew what had been done in the occupied territories and that the Red Army intended to exact revenge. Surrender meant being worked to death in Siberian labour camps as a ''
Stalinpferd
', a 'Stalin horse'. 'We no longer fought for Hitler, or for National Socialism, or for the Third Reich,' wrote an Alsatian veteran of the
Grossdeutschland
Division, 'or even for our fiancees or mothers or families trapped in bomb-ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear . . . We fought for ourselves, so that we wouldn't die in holes filled with mud and snow; we fought like rats.'

The disasters of the previous year, above all the encirclement and destruction of Army Group Centre, were hard to forget. National Socialist leadership officers, the Nazi imitation of the Soviet commissar, tried to raise the fighting morale of the ordinary German soldier, the
Landser
, with promises as well as threats of execution for anyone who deserted or retreated without orders. 'You do not need to fear the Russian offensive,' they told them. 'If the enemy start to attack, our tanks will be here in four hours.' But the more experienced soldiers knew what they were up against.

Although Guderian's staff officers at Zossen had formed an accurate idea of the date of attack, the information does not seem to have filtered down to the front line. Corporal Alois K., of the 304th Infantry Division, seized as a 'tongue' by a Soviet raiding party, told intelligence officers of the 1st Ukrainian Front that they had expected an attack before Christmas, then they were told to expect one on 10 January because it was supposed to be Stalin's birthday.

On 9 January, after an urgent tour of the three main eastern fronts — Hungary, the Vistula and East Prussia — General Guderian, accompanied by his aide, Major Baron Freytag von Loringhoven, had again gone to see Hitler at Ziegenberg. He presented the latest estimates of enemy strengths, both Gehlen's compilation and also those of the Luftwaffe commander, General Seidemann. Air reconnaissance indicated that there were 8,000 Soviet planes concentrated on the Vistula and East Prussian fronts. Goring interrupted the army chief of staff. 'Mein Führer, don't believe that,' he said to Hitler. 'Those are not real planes. Those are just decoys.' Keitel, in a sycophantic show of resolution, smashed his fist down on the table. 'The Reichsmarschall is right,' he declared.

The meeting continued as a black farce. Hitler repeated his view that the intelligence figures were 'completely idiotic' and added that the man who compiled them should be locked in a lunatic asylum. Guderian retorted angrily that since he supported them completely, he had better be certified as well. Hitler refused out of hand the requests of General Harpe on the Vistula front and General Reinhardt in East Prussia to withdraw their most exposed troops to more defensible positions. He also insisted that the 200,000 German troops trapped on the Courland peninsula in Latvia should remain there and not be evacuated by sea to defend the Reich's borders. Guderian, disgusted with the 'ostrich strategy' of Führer headquarters, prepared to take his leave.

'The Eastern Front,' said Hitler, suddenly trying to charm him, 'has never before possessed such a strong reserve as now. That is your doing. I thank you for it.'

'The Eastern Front,' Guderian retorted, 'is like a house of cards. If the front is broken through at one point all the rest will collapse.' Ironically, Gocbbels had used exactly the same simile in 1941 about the Red Army.

Guderian returned to Zossen in 'a very grave mood'. He wondered whether Hitler and Jodl's lack of imagination had something to do with the fact that they both came from parts of the Reich - Austria and Bavaria — which were not threatened. Guderian was a Prussian. His homeland was about to be ravaged, and probably lost for ever. Hitler, to reward his great panzer leader for his successes early in the war, had presented him with the expropriated estate of Deipenhof in the Warthegau, the region of western Poland which the Nazis had seized and incorporated into the Reich. But now the imminent offensive across the Vistula threatened that too. His wife was still there. Watched closely by the local Nazi Party chiefs, she would not be able to leave until the very last moment.

Just over twenty-four hours later, Guderian's staff at Zossen received confirmation that the attack was now hours rather than days away. Red Army sappers were clearing minefields at night and tank corps were being brought forward into the bridgeheads. Hitler ordered that the panzer reserves on the Vistula front should be moved forward, despite warnings that this would bring them within range of Soviet artillery. Some senior officers began to wonder whether Hitler subconsciously wanted to lose the war.

The Red Army seemed to make a habit of attacking in atrocious weather conditions. German veterans, accustomed to this pattern, used to call it 'weather for Russians'. Soviet troops were convinced that they had a distinct advantage in winter warfare, whether through frost or mud. Their comparatively low rates of frostbite and trench foot were attributed to the traditional Russian army use of rough linen foot bandages instead of socks. Weather forecasts had foretold a 'strange winter'. After the hard cold of January, 'heavy rain and wet snow' were predicted. An order went out: 'Leather boots must be mended.'

The Red Army had improved in so many ways — its heavy weaponry, the professionalism of its planning, the camouflage and control of oper- ations which had frequently caught the Germans off balance — yet some weaknesses remained. The worst was the chaotic lack of discipline, which seems astonishing in a totalitarian state. Part of the problem came from the terrible attrition among young officers.

It was a hard school indeed for seventeen- and eighteen-year-old junior lieutenants in the infantry. 'At that time,' wrote the novelist and war correspondent Konstantin Simonov, 'young people were becoming adult in a year, a month or even in the course of one battle.' Many, of course, never survived that first battle. Determined to prove themselves worthy of commanding veterans, some of whom were old enough to be their fathers, they showed reckless courage and suffered for it.

Indiscipline came also from the dehumanized way in which Red Army soldiers were treated by their own authorities. And, of course, the strengths and weaknesses of the complex national character played its part too. 'The Russian infantryman,' as one writer put it, 'is hardy, undemanding, careless and a convinced fatalist... It is these characteristics which make him incomparable.' An ordinary soldier in a rifle division provided a summary in his diary of the changing moods of his comrades. 'First state: soldier with no chiefs around. He is a grumbler.

He threatens and shows off. He is keen to pocket something or grab someone in a stupid argument. One can see from this irritability that the soldier's life is hard for him. Second state: soldier in the presence of chiefs: submissive and inarticulate. Readily agrees with what he is told. Easily believes promises. Blossoms when praised and is eager to admire the strictness of officers whom he makes fun of behind their backs. Third state: working together or in battle: here he is a hero. He won't leave his comrade in danger. He dies quietly, as if it is still part of his work.'

Tank troops in the Red Army were in particularly good heart. Having been as demoralized as Soviet aviation in the early part of the war, they were starting to enjoy heroic status. Vasily Grossman, another novelist and war correspondent, now found 'tankists' almost as fascinating as he had found snipers at Stalingrad. He described them admiringly as 'cavalrymen, artillerymen and mechanics all rolled in one'. But the greatest strength of the Red Army was the burning idea that they were finally within striking distance of the Reich. The violators of the Soviet Motherland were about to discover the true meaning of the proverb, 'You will harvest what you have sown.'

*

The basic concept of the campaign had been decided in outline by the end of October 1944. The
Stavka
, the Soviet supreme headquarters, was headed by Marshal Stalin, as he had promoted himself after the battle of Stalingrad. Stalin intended to keep full control. He allowed commanders a latitude of action which their German counterparts envied, and, unlike Hitler, he would listen carefully to counter-arguments. Nevertheless, he had no intention of allowing Red Army commanders to get above themselves as the moment of victory approached. He stopped the usual practice of appointing 'representatives of the
Stavka
' to oversee operations. Instead, he took on this role himself, even though he still had no intention of going anywhere near the front. Stalin also decided to shake up the key commands. If this resulted in jealousies and 'disconcertedness', then he was far from displeased.

The main change was to replace Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, the commander-in-chief of the 1st Belorussian Front, the main group of armies on the axis of advance to Berlin. Rokossovsky, a tall, elegant and good-looking cavalryman, presented a striking contrast to most Russian commanders, many of whom were squat, thick-necked and shaven-headed. He was also different in another way. Born Konstanty Rokosowski, he was half-Polish, the grandson and great-grandson of Polish cavalry officers. This made him dangerous in the eyes of Stalin. Stalin's hatred of the country had started during the Soviet-Polish war of 1920, when he had been partly blamed for the disastrous defeat of the Red Army attacking Warsaw.

Rokossovsky was outraged when he heard that he was to be transferred to command the 2nd Belorussian Front army group to attack East Prussia. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the stocky and immensely tough commander who directed the defence of Moscow in December 1941, was to take his place. 'Why this disgrace?' Rokossovsky demanded. 'Why am I being moved from the main axis to one of secondary importance?' Rokossovsky suspected that Zhukov, whom he had considered a friend, had undermined him, but in fact Stalin did not want a Pole to enjoy the glory of taking Berlin. It was natural that Rokossovsky should be suspicious. He had been arrested during the purge of the Red Army in 1937. The beatings from Beria's henchmen demanding confessions of treason were enough to make even the most balanced person slightly paranoid. And Rokossovsky knew that Lavrenty Beria, the head of the NKVD secret police, and Viktor Abakumov, the chief of SMERSH counter-intelligence, watched him closely. Stalin had left Rokossovsky in no doubt that the 1937 accusations still hung over him. He had simply been released conditionally. Any blunder as a commander would put him straight back into NKVD custody. 'I know very well what Beria is capable of,' Rokossovsky said to Zhukov during the changeover. 'I have been in his prisons.' It would take Soviet generals eight years to get their revenge on Beria.

The forces of the 1st Belorussian Front and the 1st Ukrainian Front lining up against the German front line along the Vistula were not simply superior, they were overwhelming. To Zhukov's south, Marshal Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front would attack due east towards Breslau. Its main thrust would be launched from the Sandomierx bridgehead, the largest salient of all on the west bank of the Vistula. Unlike Zhukov, however, Konev intended to use his two tank armies to smash the enemy line on the very first day.

Konev, according to Beria's son, had 'wicked little eyes, a shaven head that looked like a pumpkin, and an expression full of self-conceit'. He was probably Stalin's favourite general and one of the very few senior commanders whom even Stalin admired for his ruthlessness. Stalin had promoted him to marshal of the Soviet Union after his crushing of the Korsun pocket, south of Kiev, just under a year before. It had been one of the most pitiless engagements in a very cruel war. Konev ordered his aircraft to drop incendiaries on the small town of Shanderovka to force the Germans sheltering there out into the blizzard. As they struggled to break out of the encirclement on 17 February 1944, Konev sprang his trap. His tank crews charged straight for the column, firing machine guns and running men down to crush them under their tracks. As the Germans scattered, trying to flee through the heavy snow, Konev's three divisions of cavalry set off in pursuit. The Cossacks cut them down mercilessly with their sabres, apparently hacking even at arms raised in surrender. Some 20,000 Germans died that day.

On 12 January, the Vistula offensive began at 5 a.m. Moscow time, when Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front attacked out of the Sandomierz bridgehead. The snow was quite heavy and visibility almost nil. After
shtraf
companies of prisoners were forced through the minefields, rifle battalions secured the front line. The full artillery bombardment then began, using up to 300 guns per kilometre, which meant one every three to four metres. The German defenders were shattered. Most of them surrendered, grey-faced and trembling. A panzergrenadier officer watching from the rear described the spectacle on the horizon as a 'fire-storm' and added that it was 'like the heavens falling down on earth'. Prisoners from the 16th Panzer Division captured late that day claimed that once the bombardment started, their commander, Major General Müller, drove off towards the town of Kielce, abandoning his men.

Soviet tank crews had painted slogans on their turrets: 'Forward into the fascist lair!' and 'Revenge and death to the German occupiers!' They faced little resistance as their T-34 and heavy Stalin tanks moved forward at 2 p.m. Their hulls coated in frost were well camouflaged for the snowy landscape ahead, even if all was brown in the middle distance from shell-churned mud.