The Second World War (83 page)

The Stavka plan was for Zhukov to lead off down the Warsaw-Berlin axis, while Konev aimed for Breslau. Both offensives were to be direct power-drives against the German defences, eschewing manoeuvre, in what had now become the Red Army’s distinctive, brutal and terrifying means of making war. Over a million tons of supplies were brought up to Zhukov’s front alone in the days before the attack; they were carried in 1200 trains and 22,000 of the American-supplied six-by-six trucks which were the backbone of the Soviet logistic system. Almost equal quantities were stockpiled behind Konev’s front. The daily requirement of each front was 25,000 tons, less fuel and ammunition.

Konev’s offensive opened first on 12 January 1945 behind a barrage fired by guns disposed at a density of 300 to each kilometre of front – an earthquake concentration of artillery power. By the evening of the first day his tanks had broken the front of the Fourth Panzer Army to a depth of twenty miles, in exactly the same sector as the Germans and Austrians had made their great breakthrough in the Gorlice-Tarnow battle against the tsar’s army in 1915, but in the opposite direction. Cracow, the great Polish fortress-monastery city, was threatened; beyond it the way lay open to Breslau and the industrial regions of Silesia, where Speer had concentrated clusters of German armaments factories out of range of the Anglo-American bomber force.

Zhukov’s offensive on the Warsaw-Berlin axis began two days later, behind another pulverising bombardment, from the Vistula bridgehead south of Warsaw. The city was quickly encircled, and inevitably decreed a ‘fortress’ by Hitler, but it fell on 17 January before the reinforcements he had allotted it could reach the defenders. On 20 January he announced, to the despair of his commanders both in the west and the east, that he was transferring the Sixth SS Panzer Army, just extricated from the débâcle of the Ardennes offensive, to the east: ‘I’m going to attack the Russians where they least expect it. The Sixth SS Panzer Army is off to Budapest! If we start an offensive in Hungary, the Russians will have to go too.’ This wild diversion of precious defensive resources demonstrated how little he grasped both the Wehrmacht’s growing debility and the imperviousness of the Russians to subsidiary manoeuvres; the Ukrainian fronts, as events would prove, could deal adequately with the Sixth SS Panzer Army’s intervention, and Zhukov and Konev were not at all deflected from their drive on Berlin.

On 21 January, again clutching at straws, Hitler decreed the creation of a new army group, Vistula, command of which he gave to Himmler (also head of the Home Army), though he was quite unfitted to exercise military command, in the belief that loyalty to the Führer might prove a substitute for generalship. Army Group Vistula, positioned behind the threatened front, had almost no troops except
Volkssturm
units – the militia of Germans too young or too old to serve in the army which Hitler had set up on 25 September under Martin Bormann, the Nazi Party secretary.

The
Volkssturm
would shortly be fighting for German territory. On 22 January Konev’s First Ukrainian Front crossed the Oder at Steinau; Rokossovsky’s Second White Russian Front, which had attacked across the Narew on 14 January, was by then deep into East Prussia. The arrival of the Red Army
en masse
on German soil provoked a stampede of refugees towards any tenuous outlet to safety. It was as if the submerged knowledge of what the Wehrmacht had done in the east had suddenly come to the surface, seized whole populations with terror and flung them on to the snowbound roads in an agony of urgency to put themselves beyond the reach of the Red Army’s columns. In a few days 800 years of German settlement in the east were ended as 2 million East Prussians left homes, farms, villages and towns in a frantic trek towards the German interior or the coast; 450,000 were evacuated from the port of Pillau in the next few weeks, while another 900,000 sought rescue at Danzig, many of them trudging across the frozen waters of the Frisches Haff lagoon to reach it. Many escaped, many did not. As Professor John Erickson, no enemy to the Red Army, has described this terrible episode:

Speed, frenzy and savagery characterised the advance. Villages and small towns burned, while Soviet soldiers raped at will and wreaked an atavistic vengeance in those houses and homes decked out with any of the insignia or symbols of Nazism . . . some fussily bedecked Nazi Party portrait photograph would be the signal to mow down the entire family amidst their tables, chairs and kitchenware. Columns of refugees, combined with groups of Allied prisoners uprooted from their camps, and slave labour no longer enslaved in farm or factory, trudged on foot or rode in farm carts, some to be charged down or crushed in a bloody smear of humans and horses by the juggernaut Soviet tank columns racing ahead with assault infantry astride the T-34s. Raped women were nailed by their hands to the farm carts carrying their families. Under these lowering January skies and the gloom of late winter, families huddled in ditches or by the roadside, fathers intent on shooting their own children or waiting whimpering for what seemed the wrath of God to pass. The Soviet Front command finally intervened, with an order insisting on the restoration of military discipline and the implementation of ‘norms of conduct’ towards the enemy population. But this elemental tide surged on, impelled by the searing language of roadside posters and crudely daubed slogans proclaiming this and the land ahead ‘the lair of the Fascist beast’, a continuous incitement to brutalised ex-prisoners of war now in the Soviet ranks or to the reluctant peasant conscripts dragged into the Red Army in its march through the Baltic states, men with pity for no one.

None of the German army groups north of the Carpathians could stem this onrush; the only impediment to Zhukov’s and Konev’s uninterrupted advance on Berlin was provided by the attenuation of their own supplies, which the enormous artillery preparations consumed at the rate of 50,000 tons for each million shells fired, losses in the ranks – divisional strengths in the two fronts averaged only 4000 at the end of January – and the resistance of the ‘Führer fortresses’. On Rokossovsky’s front Memel held out until 27 January, Thorn until 9 February, Königsberg until mid-April; on Zhukov’s and Konev’s, Posen (Poznan) held until 22 February, Küstrin until 29 March, Breslau until the day before the end of the war. The loss of other places brought the Red Army great propaganda sensation: on 21 January Rokossovsky’s Second White Russian Front took Tannenberg, where a ‘miracle’ battle had saved East Prussia from the tsar in 1914, and from which the retreating Germans just managed to save the remains of the victor of that battle, Field Marshal Hindenburg, and the colours of the regiments he had commanded (they hang now in the hall of the Bundeswehr Officer Cadet School at Hamburg), before blowing up his memorial tomb. On 27 January Konev’s First Ukrainian Front stumbled on the extermination camp of Auschwitz, chief place of the Holocaust, from which its operatives had not succeeded in removing the pathetic relics of the victims – clothes, dentures, spectacles and playthings. Meanwhile the strong places of Germany’s eastern frontier, so many of them fortresses of the Teutonic knights who had once pushed the tentacles of
Germantum
eastward into the Slav lands, held out to block or menace the lines of advance which the Soviet fronts were punching westward towards Berlin.

By the beginning of February, however, as the Allied leaders gathered for the last great conference of the European war at Yalta in the Crimea, Zhukov’s and Konev’s fronts were firmly established on the line of the Oder, ready to begin their final advance on Berlin. The German army groups opposite them – now reorganised as Vistula and Centre, the latter commanded by the Führer-dedicated Schörner – were shadows of their former selves. In East Prussia the Third Panzer Army was still active, and was to launch a brief counter-attack against the flank of the Russian concentration on 15 February; on 17 February the Sixth SS Panzer Army opened Hitler’s promised diversionary offensive against Tolbukhin’s Third Ukrainian Front to the east of Lake Balaton in Hungary. But the sands were now running out fast for the Wehrmacht. On 13 February Dresden, the last undevastated city of the Reich and packed with refugees, but also stripped of anti-aircraft guns to bolster the anti-tank screen on the Oder front, was overwhelmed by a British bomber assault and burnt to the ground, with appalling loss of life. Although the figure sometimes quoted of 300,000 dead is grossly exaggerated, at least 30,000 were killed in the raid. The consequences of this attack, for which the champions of the strategic bombing have never been able to advance a convincing military justification, quickly became known throughout Germany and gravely depressed civilian morale in the last months of the war. The Lake Balaton offensive, though mounted with the last 600 tanks at Hitler’s disposal as an uncommitted force, soon ran into immovable Russian defensive lines. Army Group E in Yugoslavia was meanwhile bending its front back towards the bastion of pro-German Croatia. The remnants of Army Group South gathered what strength they had left to bar the approaches to Vienna. But the crisis of the war hovered between Küstrin and Breslau where, along the Oder and the Neisse, Zhukov’s and Konev’s fronts stood ready to race the last forty-five miles to Berlin.

The siege of cities seems an operation that belongs to an earlier age than that of the Second World War, whose campaigns appear to have been exclusively decided by the thrust of armoured columns, the descent of amphibious landing forces or the flight of bomber armadas. Cities, however, are as integral to the geography of war as great rivers or mountain ranges. An army – however well mechanised, indeed precisely because it is mechanised – can no more ignore a city than it can the Pripet Marshes or the defile of the Meuse. On the Eastern Front the three ‘cities of Bolshevism’ – Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad – which Hitler had marked out as the targets of the
Ostheer
’s advance had each brought one of his decisive campaigns to grief. His own designation of cities as fortresses – Calais, Dunkirk and the Ruhr complex in the west, Königsberg, Posen, Memel and Breslau in the east – had severely hindered the progress of his enemies’ armies towards the heartland of the Reich. Capital cities, with their maze of streets, dense complexes of stoutly constructed public buildings, labyrinths of sewers, tunnels and underground communications, storehouses of fuel and food, are military positions as strong as any an army can construct for the defence of frontiers, perhaps stronger indeed than the Maginot Line or the West Wall, which merely tried to replicate in artificial form the features that capital cities intrinsically embody. Hitler’s return to Berlin on 16 January 1945, and his decision by default not to leave it thereafter, ensured that the last great siege of the war, shorter than Leningrad’s but even more intense than Stalingrad’s, would be Berlin’s. The final moment at which he might have left Berlin, and over which he deliberately prevaricated, was his birthday, 20 April. ‘I must force the decision here’, he told his two remaining secretaries on his birthday evening, ‘or go down fighting.’

Berlin was a stout place for a last stand. It was unique among German cities in being large, modern and planned. Hamburg, densely packed around its port on the Elbe, had burned as if by spontaneous combustion in July 1943; the fragile and historic streets of Dresden had gone up like tinder in February 1945. Berlin, though heavily and consistently bombed throughout the war, was a tougher target. A complex of nineteenth- and twentieth-century apartment blocks standing on strong and deep cellars, and disposed at regular intervals along wide boulevards and avenues which served as effective fire-breaks, the city had lost about 25 per cent of its built-up area to Bomber Command during the Battle of Berlin between August 1943 and February 1944. Yet it had never suffered a firestorm, as Hamburg and Dresden had done, nor had its essential services been overwhelmed, and new roads had since been constructed. While the destruction of their dwellings had driven many Berliners into temporary accommodation or out of the city, the ruins left behind were as formidable military obstacles as the buildings left standing.

At the heart of the city, moreover, beat the pulse of Nazi resistance. Hitler’s bunker had been constructed under the Reich Chancellery at the end of 1944. The bunker was a larger and deeper extension of an air-raid shelter dug in 1936. It contained eighteen tiny rooms, lay 55 feet under the Chancellery garden, had independent water, electricity and air-conditioning supplies and communicated with the outside world through a telephone switchboard and its own radio link. It also had its own kitchen, living quarters and copiously stocked storerooms. For anyone who liked living underground, it was competely self-sufficient. Although Hitler had spent extended periods of the war in spartan and semi-subterranean surroundings, at Rastenburg and Vinnitsa, he felt the need for fresh air; his after-dinner walks had been favourite occasions for his monologues. On 16 January, however, he descended from the Chancellery into the bunker and, apart from two excursions, on 25 February and 15 March, and occasional prowls about his old accommodation upstairs, he did not leave it for the next 105 days. The last battles of the Reich were conducted from the bunker conference room; so too was the Battle of Berlin.

Berlin did not have its own garrison. Throughout the war, except for the brief period of uneasy peace between the French armistice and Barbarossa, the German army had been at the front; the units of the Home Army which remained within the Reich performed recruitment or training functions. Inside the capital, the only unit of operational value was the Berlin Guard Battalion, out of which had grown the
Grossdeutschland
Division. It had figured largely in the suppression of the July Plot and was to fight in the siege of Berlin. However, the bulk of Berlin’s defenders was to be supplied by Army Group Vistula as it fell back from the Oder on the capital. Its strength at the beginning of the siege was about 320,000, to oppose nearly 3 million men in Zhukov’s, Konev’s and Rokossovsky’s fronts, and it comprised the Third Panzer and Ninth Armies. The most substantial force within Army Group Vistula was LVI Panzer Corps, containing the 18th Panzergrenadier and SS
Nordland
divisions, as well as fragments of the 20th Panzergrenadier and 9th Parachute Divisions and the recently raised Müncheberg Division; Müncheberg belonged to a collection of ‘shadow’ formations, based on military schools and reinforcement units, without military experience. To them could be added a motley of
Volkssturm
, Hitler Youth, police, anti-aircraft and SS units; among the latter was the Charlemagne Assault Battalion of French SS men and a detachment of the SS Walloon Division, formed from pro-Nazi French Belgians commanded by the fanatically fascist Léon Degrelle, the man Hitler is alleged to have said he would have liked for a son, and who would lead it in a fight to the end over the ruins of the Reich Chancellery.