CHAPTER NINE
THE STORM BREAKS
THERE WAS A Red Army saying: “Where Zhukov is, there is victory.” Georgi Zhukov was forty-eight, a shoemaker’s son from a village some ninety miles south of Moscow, who had fought in the First World War as a tsarist cavalryman. He rose to prominence in the Mongolian conflict of 1939 between Japan and Russia, which remains almost unknown in the West. He played a leading role in the councils of the Soviet high command from the first days of the war in June 1941. Critics argued that luck and German blunders did as much as Zhukov’s own generalship to win his laurels in the battles of Leningrad and Moscow, but this seems ungenerous. In January 1943 he received his marshal’s star. His wholesale executions of men suspected of cowardice or desertion demonstrated a ruthlessness which did Zhukov no disservice in the eyes of Stalin. During the defence of Leningrad, he directed that any man who abandoned his post without written orders should be shot. He deployed tanks behind the forward positions not to kill Germans but to shoot down mercilessly any Russian who fled. Zhukov’s high intelligence and grasp of all military matters, matched by a sobriety unusual among Soviet senior officers, were generally acknowledged. He had been leading large armies for longer than any other Allied commander. While Zhukov was directing the defence of Leningrad back in 1941, Eisenhower was still Chief of Staff of Third Army in Louisiana, newly promoted to brigadier. The Russians did not always get it right—indeed, their mistakes were on a scale as extravagant as everything else about the Eastern Front. But Soviet generals in the last two years of the war handled large forces with much greater assurance than their American and British counterparts.
Zhukov’s perfectionism, his meticulous staffwork and summary dismissal of any officer who failed to meet his standards made him a harsh taskmaster. Yet he was the servant of an even harsher one. In 1941, he burst into tears after a tongue-lashing from Stalin. Reading the memoirs of Russia’s wartime commanders, it is easy to be deluded into supposing that they inhabited a rational world, recognizable to Americans and west Europeans. They did not. From the first day of the war to the last, they existed and fought in a universe more fearsome than that of Hitler’s commanders. Under Stalin, failure signalled death. Not even the greatest marshal was secure from degradation, torture and execution. One day in 1941, Russia’s senior airman became drunk and complained to his supreme warlord: “You’re making us fly in coffins.” Stalin responded quietly: “You shouldn’t have said that.” The general—Pavel Rychagov—was shot, along with much of the Red Air Force high command. Stalin’s military subordinates existed in a state of permanent fear. It is not easy to compare relative evils, rival monsters, yet it is a matter of fact that the senior subordinates of Adolf Hitler enjoyed a much better prospect of survival than those of Joseph Stalin, until military defeat overtook Germany.
Such a man as Zhukov could scarcely be less than utterly ruthless. Yet he inspired enthusiasm among his soldiers, for the reason common to other great commanders throughout history: he was a winner. “Zhukov was very popular, much more popular than Stalin,” said Corporal Anatoly Osminov. The marshal’s stern, unbending presence utterly dominated his headquarters. “He was a hard case,” said one of his artillery staff officers. “He was slow, stubborn, and never said much. It was difficult, if not impossible, to change his mind.” The marshal’s office was studiedly austere—a metal table, maps, a thermos water container with the painted words “drinking water” misspelt on it, and a tin mug chained to the urn. In his operations room in the midst of a battle, Zhukov savagely reprimanded an officer whom he noticed working in a black fur coat, for being improperly dressed. Lieutenant Vasily Filimonenko trembled when Zhukov appeared in his artillery forward observation post, and spent ninety minutes studying the German line through his periscope. “I must see for myself,” said the marshal, and quizzed the young officer closely about his living conditions and the gunfire support plan. There was no warmth there, but a steely, uncompromising professionalism of the highest order. “Everyone was terrified of him,” said Lieutenant Evsei Igolnik. “We knew that he was not above using a cane on his own staff officers.” On one occasion, he dispatched a divisional commander to a penal battalion for displaying inadequate energy on the battlefield. Zhukov was the most effective military commander of the Second World War.
Yet, in the Soviet Union’s great advance west from the Vistula and into East Prussia, the glory was not intended for any marshal. For more than two years, to a remarkable degree Stalin had deferred to his subordinate commanders in the conduct of the war. They rewarded him with victories. Stalin’s resentment of Zhukov’s celebrity and popularity had grown, however, eating into what passed for his soul. All his life, the ruler of Russia displayed towards able comrades a blend of admiration and envy which impelled him to murder most of them sooner or later. Although his marshals would fight the great battles now impending, and Zhukov would play the decisive role on the Vistula front, Stalin was determined that in the eyes of the Russian people and of history the January offensive of the Red Army should be identified as his own achievement.
Among the men of the Red Army, attitudes towards the nation’s leader were complex and various. Many soldiers avowed less respect for him than for Zhukov. “Stalin won the war, but he was responsible for so many deaths,” said Corporal Nikolai Ponomarev of the 374th Rifle Division. Major Fyodor Romanovsky of the NKVD was, unsurprisingly, a passionate admirer of his nation’s leader: “He saved the Soviet state. He possessed a very good mind and picked good people. The leaders of England and America did not have to fight the war with a fifth column in their midst. We did. Stalin destroyed our traitors. We were real communists in those days.” Yet for every party zealot like Romanovsky there were scores of men whose families had suffered badly at the hands of Stalin. Nikolai Senkevich, a Red Army doctor, often asked himself: “Is there no one to rid us of this cannibal?” His father, an illiterate Belorussian peasant, had died in the Gulag after being convicted of hoarding flax seed. His brother had served ten years in a labour camp for “political crimes.” Yet Senkevich would never have voiced aloud a harsh thought about Stalin. Corporal Anna Nikyunas said: “We were fighting for our country, not for Stalin.” Major Yury Ryakhovsky’s father told him: “You should obey Stalin not for what he is, but because he is the leader of our nation.” Ryakhovsky himself said: “Stalin seemed like a god to us.”
To the frustration of the Party, however, Christian religion still touched the hearts of many Soviet soldiers. Men and women in imminent danger of death reached out to a deity who promised a hereafter, rather than to a national leader likely to consign them there. “I often prayed to God for deliverance,” said Nikolai Ponomarev, who wore a crucifix through his entire front-line service. Corporal Anatoly Osminov always carried an icon given to him by his mother. He knew that he would have lost his Party membership if a political officer had heard about it, “but many men crossed themselves privately, and prayed for their lives. There was a little bit of religion somewhere in most of us.” Lieutenant Alexandr Sergeev’s men liked to recall the Russian proverb: “We all stand together beneath the hand of God.” Seventeen-year-old Yulia Pozdnyakova had never been taught the words of any prayer, but when she found herself being bombed, she invented some.
HITLER HAD ALWAYS opposed the building of fixed fortifications, on the ground that they discouraged the offensive spirit which he demanded from his armies. Yet in the weeks before the Soviets struck on the Vistula some 1.5 million German civilians were belatedly struggling in the snows to drive spades and mattocks into the frozen soil of the Reich from the Rhine to Königsberg, to create anti-tank ditches and trench lines against the Allied flood. In East Prussia alone, 65,000 people of both sexes and all ages and conditions were engaged upon defensive works, almost all of them futile. Hitler fiercely rejected Guderian’s proposal to withdraw the main German forces in Poland from the forward defence zone—the Hauptkampflinie—to positions further back—the Grosskampflinie—beyond the range of the initial Soviet bombardment. Germany’s warlord lost his temper when this was mooted, “saying that he refused to accept the sacrifice of 12 miles without a fight.” The Grosskampflinie was thus established only two miles behind the front, in accordance with the Führer’s wishes, beneath the immediate path of Soviet artillery. This was in absolute contradiction of German military doctrine, and destroyed the prospects of a successful counter-attack even before the battle began.
Worse, Hitler transferred to Hungary two of the fourteen and a half panzer and panzergrenadier divisions available to face the Russians on a 750-mile front from the Baltic through Poland, because of his obsessive anxiety about the Lake Balaton oilfields. “If something happens down there, it’s over,” he told Guderian. “That’s the most dangerous point. We can improvise everywhere else, but not there. I can’t improvise with the fuel. Unfortunately, I can’t hang a generator on a panzer [to power it electrically].” The Russians were delighted by this folly. “A very stupid disposition,” Stalin observed on learning of the German diversion of forces to Hungary. On 1 January 1945, the only major German armoured reserve on the Eastern Front was thrown into Operation Konrad, to relieve Hitler’s forces beleaguered in Budapest. The counter-attack came within sight of the Hungarian capital before it was halted on 13 January. Hitler’s obsession with Hungary caused seven of the eighteen panzer divisions available in the east to be deployed there, while four were in East Prussia, two in Courland and just five faced Zhukov and Konev. In January on the Eastern Front the Germans could deploy only 4,800 tanks against the Red Army’s 14,000, and 1,500 combat aircraft against 15,000.
Soviet propaganda loudspeakers blared music towards the German lines night after night of early January, to drown the engine noise of thousands of tanks and guns moving towards their start lines on the east bank, or preparing their breakout from the western beachhead already established at Sandomierz. Some of the men who occupied listening posts beyond the Russian lines, watching the Germans, lay prone all day in the snow. Only when darkness fell could they rise to relieve themselves, to force some movement back into paralysed limbs. Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko, one of the Red Army’s superbly skilled patrol leaders, spent Russian New Year’s Eve, 7 January, crawling for hours across the ice of a frozen river to reach German positions on the far bank. As always ahead of an attack, the Red Army needed prisoners. His patrol stormed a house where they had identified a German machine-gun post, killed three and captured three of the enemy, and returned across the ice before dawn. In the early days of January, such operations were repeated a thousand times along the entire front from East Prussia to Yugoslavia.
Until the very eve of Stalin’s assault, Hitler’s fawning military courtiers Keitel and Jodl continued to feed their Führer’s belief that the Soviet threat was a bluff. There were scant grounds for such a delusion. A steady stream of reports from prisoners and deserters—how strange it seems that Red Army soldiers were still deserting to the Wehrmacht in these last months—confirmed the scale of Russian preparations. “A deserter from 118th Guards Army at Baranov says the Soviet attack will start in three days, aims to reach the German border in a single bound, and will mask Cracow,” observed a Wehrmacht situation report sent to Berlin on 9 January. A prisoner from 13th Guards Division likewise declared that the attack would start in three days, and that the River Nida was his unit’s first objective. Another PoW from 370th Guards Division said his formation had been given the cheering reassurance that its assault would be preceded by a penal battalion’s “fighting reconnaissance.” Soviet mine-clearing, bridge-building and reinforcement on a huge scale were reported to OKH.
The deluge of foreign equipment which had descended upon the Red Army caused some difficulties for those obliged to use it, especially American radios. Yulia Pozdnyakova, a signaller, puzzled desperately over the English-language instruction manuals for the sets she was expected to operate, together with the English labelling on their controls and dials. To confuse matters further, she was attached to a Polish formation of the Red Army, most of whose men spoke little Russian. She was horrified at being ordered to wear a Polish uniform. Her own family were descended from old Russian nobility, and indeed her grandparents had fled from the Bolsheviks, never to be seen again. Her father died in 1930. She lived with her mother and stepfather until they were arrested for “political crimes” in 1940. She and her two sisters found themselves alone in Moscow.
When the war came, though she was only fifteen she enlisted in the Red Army, claiming to be two years older. She discovered a companionship in its ranks which had been entirely missing from her lonely childhood at home. “I always felt an orphan, but you cannot be entirely lonely when you are eating every day from the same soup pot as a lot of other people.” The soldiers called her “the kindergarten kid.” She had a good musical ear, a sense of tone and timing which proved invaluable in learning Morse transmission. Yet the campaign was always an experience of discomfort, fear and bewilderment for a girl of seventeen. “We weren’t living proper lives. We were simply surviving, and doing a job that had to be done.” Corporal Ponomarev said: “In January 1945 we could see the end in sight, which seemed wonderful.” He himself had been a soldier since 1940, fighting from Moscow westwards with all three Baltic Fronts at different times, twice wounded. Now, he yearned to finish the business and go home to Omsk to fulfil his ambition to become a doctor.
Though the Red Army was incomparably better supplied in 1944 than it had been earlier in the war, shortages remained endemic. Lieutenant Valentin Krulik’s unit found itself without lubricants for its weapons, and tried to substitute sunflower oil. This was not a success. All its tommy-guns jammed. The favoured Guards divisions were generally well provided, but lesser Soviet formations still relied heavily upon scavenging for equipment, vehicles and above all food. Early in 1945, units were given advance warning that they would be required to carry out the harvest on German territory when summer came, to reduce the requirement for bringing flour from Russia. As far as possible, the Red Army lived off the land, in the manner of European armies centuries earlier.
Its enemies, however, were in a far worse case. On 11 January, an OKW report on the condition of Germany’s forces acknowledged that morale was low in many units. On all fronts, there were serious shortages of clothing, machine-guns, motor tyres, trucks. Army Group E revealed that it had been forced to destroy much of its own artillery because it lacked means to move the guns; “the men’s ability to march is handicapped by the number of worn-out boots.” Fifteenth Army reported shortages even of mess-kits and horses. All units lacked men, and especially trained NCOs. Army Group Centre said that many replacements were inadequately trained in the use of weapons, and physically unfit. Klaus Salzer, an eighteen-year-old paratrooper, wrote home describing how a local farmer had invited him and some comrades for a great Christmas dinner—the last of his young life, as it happened—with chicken and pork and roast potatoes: “When you haven’t had a lot of food for ages and that sort of feast is put in front of you, it’s hard not to stuff yourself,” he told his parents. “A lot of us were horribly ill next day as a result.”
After an acrimonious argument about the deployment of reserves, Hitler surprised Guderian by becoming suddenly calm and declaring emolliently that he respected his Chief of Staff’s anxiety to strengthen the line in Poland. Guderian said bluntly: “The Eastern Front is a house of cards. If it is broken at one point, all the rest will collapse.” On 12 January, British Naval Intelligence sent a dispatch to London from Stockholm, detailing the latest information from agents about the mood inside Germany. Civilian morale had improved a little, said the report. There was optimism about the coming of the new jet fighters. There was no expectation of a new Allied push in the west before early summer, but a Russian offensive in south and central Poland was anticipated at any moment: “Germans who had hitherto held some hope of making terms with the Russians no longer count upon this possibility.” This was a prudent concession to reality. The Soviet Union indeed possessed no interest in negotiation with any faction inside Germany. Vengeance, the destruction of Hitler and the spoils of victory were the objectives of the vast armies which Stalin now unleashed. He professed to the Western allies that he had advanced the timing of his onslaught in order to ease their difficulties in the Bulge battle. In reality, the essential schedule of the offensive had been determined back in November. Churchill expressed Allied gratitude anyway. “May all good fortune rest upon your noble venture,” he cabled to Stalin. “. . . German reinforcements will have to be split between our flaming fronts.”
The Soviet offensive began with an assault by Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front, from the western bridgehead across the Vistula some 120 miles south of Warsaw. The cold was even more brutal than on the Western Front in the Ardennes. Fog and intermittent blizzards cut visibility. At key points, 300 artillery pieces were allocated to a single kilometre of front. The bombardment began at 0435 on 12 January, directed against the positions of Fourth Panzer Army. The frozen ground was torn open in a thousand places. Houses crumbled to rubble. Bunkers collapsed on their occupants. The survivors lay stunned and traumatized by the cacophony unleashed by the Soviets. The assault began at 0500, with Soviet “forward battalions”—penal units—probing the German front, bypassing strongpoints and advancing up to half a mile beyond the outpost line. This was a mere reconnaissance, however, before a new barrage began at 1000, pouring fire upon the defences to a depth of six miles. This phase lasted almost two hours. The Germans estimated that the bombardment cost them 60 per cent of their own artillery and 25 per cent of their men, together with the destruction of Fourth Panzer Army’s headquarters.
The main Russian infantry attack began late in the morning, and by 1700 hours had advanced some twelve miles across the snowclad landscape. The Germans paid an immediate and heavy price for Hitler’s insistence that much of the German armoured reserve was deployed in the forward zone, within easy reach of the Russian guns. One Tiger unit was destroyed while refuelling. The commander of 17th Panzer Division was wounded and captured. On the second day, Soviet spearheads penetrated fifteen to twenty-five miles on a forty-mile frontage. LXVIII Panzer Corps ceased to exist, and German infantry fell back as best they could, covered by the surviving tanks of 16th and 17th Panzer Divisions. LXII Corps found itself being outflanked, and retreated on foot with the loss of all its heavy equipment.
“We now had to pay for our tardiness in retiring from the great salient which in any case was bound to be lost in the end,” wrote von Manteuffel, lamenting the belated transfer of his formations from the Ardennes to the Vistula Front; “. . . our troops were more tired even than we had expected, and were no longer capable, either physically or mentally, of coping with a tough, well-equipped and well-fed enemy. Replacements received in January were inadequate both in quality and quantity, being mostly older men or of a low medical category, and ill-trained as well.”
On 14 January, forty-eight hours behind Konev, Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front launched the principal thrust of the offensive, breaking out of its two small bridgeheads west of the Vistula. On the first day, his men advanced twelve miles into the positions of the German Ninth Army. By the night of the 15th the Russians had reached the Pilica river, which they were eager to secure before the enemy could stabilize a line behind it. Infantry crossed the ice, but it proved too thin for vehicles. Engineers fortunately discovered a ford, and blew holes in the ice to open a path. Six tanks and two assault guns were abandoned in the river after their engines flooded, but two dozen Soviet tanks reached the western bank. By nightfall on 15 January, Soviet bridgeheads west of the Vistula were linking up across a front of 300 miles. Zhukov’s leading tanks and infantry had advanced sixty miles from their start lines. Hitler’s Army Group A was reduced to ruin.
The Germans mounted repeated counter-attacks with tanks, assault guns and infantry. All failed. It is impossible not to contrast the manner in which the Russians brushed aside German spoiling operations with the checks to which the Americans and British submitted in similar circumstances. The Germans considered the Western allies absurdly nervous about their flanks. Again and again on the Western Front, local counter-attacks caused assaults to be broken off. Russian aggressiveness was indeed sometimes punished by the encirclement of their spearheads, but Russian forces became accustomed to this predicament and were relatively untroubled by it. Men spoke with pride of having survived two, three, four encirclements. Sooner or later, either the isolated troops broke back to re-establish contact with the Soviet main positions or a relieving force fought its way through to join the spearhead. In the early days of the Vistula offensive, poor weather restricted Russian air support. But the entire operation demonstrated the Soviets’ mastery of the setpiece attack; their dash in exploiting success and their resolve in dismissing counter-attacks.
Alexandr Sergeev, one of Zhukov’s gunner officers, found the mood of the Red Army at this time quite different from that which he had known in the years of struggle for the motherland and the long winter lull in Poland. “In the trenches, we all knew each other intimately. We were together for a long time. Now, people seemed to come and go so quickly. We once got a new battery commander whom I never even met, because he was killed so quickly. His replacement was shot by a sniper a few hours after he arrived. I lost ten replacement gunners in a single morning. At this stage of the war, some of them were very poorly trained.” Yet Lieutenant Gennady Klimenko, fighting further north with 2nd Ukrainian Front, said: “Morale was very high.”
As early as 15 January, OKH’s war diary acknowledged: “The Russians have achieved their breakthrough. It is to be feared that within two days they will have reached the Upper Silesian border. The forces of Army Group A are hopelessly inadequate . . . the divisions moved from the west by the Führer on the 13th will not arrive before the 19th, which will be too late.” Army Group A reported: “The battle in the Vistula salient continues at undiminished intensity, and threatens a major crisis . . . 16th and 17th Panzer Divisions are no longer coherent forces, having lost all their tanks . . . Our available forces have been gravely weakened. We are conducting piecemeal withdrawals to more secure positions. These movements are still in progress, and details are not available.” Details were unnecessary. The overarching reality was that the remains of Hitler’s armies on the Vistula were retreating in disarray. On the 15th, Hitler belatedly ordered two divisions of the crack Grossdeutschland Panzer Corps south from East Prussia to prop up the sagging front in Poland. Guderian was aghast, since it was plain that a big Russian offensive was looming in that sector too. These reinforcements never reached their intended destination in front of 1st Ukrainian Front, but became entangled in the Polish shambles created by Zhukov. The Grossdeutschland detrained near Lodz on 18 January, amid a mass of fleeing ethnic German civilians. Its tanks covered the withdrawal of Ninth Army, and then themselves joined the retreat across the vast white, flat plain where the only landmarks were blackened vehicles and buildings. Guderian fumed at the absence of Sixth SS Panzer Army in Hungary. He had wanted the Ardennes formations for a strategic counter-stroke in Poland. Hitler refused to commit further forces against Zhukov. He merely replaced the Wehrmacht’s commander on the Polish Front, Josef Harpe, with the brutish Nazi Field-Marshal Ferdinand Schörner.
Schörner’s first report to OKH was a catalogue of woes: “Thousands of soldiers are fleeing in the region of Litzmanstadt [Lodz], especially support, police and administrative units. Numerous vehicles—even armoured ones—are being abandoned. Measures to halt this tide have so far proved fruitless . . . I must demand urgent assistance to restore order in the rear areas. The enemy’s breakthrough can be checked only by rounding up every man in uniform who is running away.”
The famous General Walther Nehring of XXIV Panzer Corps performed one of the most notable feats of the Polish campaign. He withdrew his forces in a series of night marches punctuated by fierce local battles with Russian troops. Nehring’s men encountered terrible scenes, where Russian columns had smashed through columns of trekking refugees, leaving roads strewn for miles with shattered humanity and vehicles. When they reached the Pilica river, they found a single small bridge which they reinforced with tree trunks, to carry trucks and light armour. Finally, they drove two tanks into the water under the bridge, to reinforce it for the passage of Panzer IVs. Many vehicles were lost when they ran out of fuel, but on 22 January the vanguard of Nehring’s force reached the comparative safety of the Warthe river, after covering 150 miles in eleven days. Other units trickled in during the days that followed. Coolness, luck and exceptionally shrewd map-reading by their commander had enabled them to sidestep the main Russian forces. Nehring’s units were finally able to cross the Oder westwards at Glogau.
The Russians were now advancing up to forty miles a day, exceeding the most optimistic estimates of the Stavka. Yet in the exhilaration of such a dash, with the enemy fleeing in disarray, death came upon many men unexpectedly. Lieutenant Vasily Kudryashov was driving at full speed down a long, empty Polish road in a tank column behind his company commander, Victor Prasolov. For hours they had not heard or seen gunfire, nor any sign of the enemy. Kudryashov was leaning on his turret hatch, smoking. Prasolov was sitting on top of his T-34, singing exuberantly, though no one including himself could hear his words above the roar of the engines. The column emerged from a forest into open fields on both sides of the road. A German tank concealed behind a haystack a thousand yards away fired a single shot which struck Prasolov’s tank. A shrapnel splinter neatly severed the commander’s head. Kudryashov, behind him, stared in horror as it bounced among the shell fragments on the road.
Captain Abram Skuratovsky, a signals officer, finished supervising the laying of telephone lines fifteen miles behind the front one morning and prepared to drive back to corps headquarters. A group of pretty girl soldiers begged a lift. The unit’s deputy political officer said peremptorily: “I’ll take the girls—you take the men and lead the way.” Their little column of vehicles had just set off when the Luftwaffe made one of its rare appearances. Four German aircraft strafed the column. Skuratovsky and most of his men sprang out of their trucks and ran hard for the fields. A bomb scored a direct hit on the commissar’s staff car. The planes disappeared. Badly shaken, Skuratovsky stood smoking a cigarette and contemplating the dreadful wreckage on the road. Suddenly the divisional commander drove up, and sprang out. “Fuck you!” he shouted. “Is this your idea of being an officer? Don’t just stand there looking at wreckage—get the road cleared!” The signallers dragged out the bodies of the political officer, his driver and the six girls, dug a common grave for them, and pushed the remains of the vehicles into the ditch. Then the survivors drove soberly towards corps headquarters.
A bizarre little episode of this period concerned a Soviet general named Mikahylov. A man in his forties, he possessed a much younger wife. Returning unexpectedly to Moscow, he found her with a young captain and a newborn baby. He was overcome with despair. “O blad! Generals na kapitana zamyenila!” he said drunkenly one night, back with his division, “What a whore! She prefers a captain to a general!” A few days later, Mikahylov personally led a suicidal assault on the German lines. He was badly wounded, but survived to become a Hero of the Soviet Union. “If we could have made good use of all the futile heroic deeds we witnessed, we could have won five wars,” Major Yury Ryakhovsky mused sardonically.
Konev took Cracow on 19 January, before the Germans had time to demolish it. Next day, the first Russian troops crossed the German border east of Breslau, pushing for the city. On the southern flank in Upper Silesia, the German Seventeenth Army possessed only seven feeble divisions, 100,000 men, to hold a front of seventy miles in an industrial region which contained the most important mines and factories left in Hitler’s empire. Konev had been ordered by Stalin to do his utmost to secure the area intact. The marshal launched his forces upon a grand envelopment, while simultaneously pressing the Germans frontally. Schörner recognized that Upper Silesia was untenable. He ordered a wholesale retreat. The field-marshal telephoned Hitler and told him: “If we don’t pull out, we’ll lose the whole army . . . We’re going back to the Oder.” Hitler stunned his staff by acceding without protest. He knew that if Schörner, most blindly loyal of his commanders, said that the line could not be held, he must be believed. By 29 January, the Russians had overrun all of Upper Silesia. They had also taken Auschwitz.
Red Army signaller Yulia Pozdnyakova was one of those sent to help the doctors coping with the 7,600 survivors of the largest death camp in Hitler’s empire. The ovens had been cold for ten days, but the stench of death lingered, though at first the girl did not recognize this for what it was. She gazed upon the great heaps of children’s shoes, the hoards of human hair, the mass of files and paperwork in the camp offices, and was perplexed that the Germans had left behind such a gigantic collection of documentation and evidence about their unspeakable actions there, not least 348,820 men’s suits and 836,255 women’s coats and dresses. As she sorted through clothing and papers, “I felt somehow guilty that I was touching all these things. The ghosts of the dead were all around us. It was very hard to sleep at night. For weeks afterwards, I could not stand the smell of fried meat.” Each night when they returned to their billets, they heated water and scrubbed themselves desperately, seeking to wash from their bodies the taint of genocide.
It is curious that, though Konev was told what his men had found at Auschwitz, he did not trouble to visit the camp for himself. The marshal said after the war that his duties on the battlefield did not permit him to “abandon myself to my own emotion.” It seems more plausible to suppose that any Rus-sian who had lived through the mass murders of Stalin was incapable of excessive sentiment in the face of those perpetrated by Hitler. Moscow made no public announcement about Auschwitz, or about what had been found there, until after the war ended.
On 14 January, Guderian ordered the mobilization of the Volkssturm along the entire length of the Eastern Front. The military value of this measure was negligible. It was quickly found necessary to mingle the VS with regular army units in forward positions. “Used in isolation [the Volkssturm] possesses only limited military value and can be quickly destroyed,” Hitler himself acknowledged in a general order of 27 January. The consequences of the VS mobilization were disastrous for German industrial production, emptying whole factories of their workforces, provoking a flood of complaints on this score from regional gauleiters, and driving another nail into the coffin of Speer’s armament production. Keitel reminded all commands that the Volkssturm should be deployed only when there was an immediate local threat. But he continued to urge the virtues of Germany’s citizen defenders: “The VS consists of men of all ages engaged in the defence of the Reich, many of whom have suffered severely from the terror-bombing, and most of whom have long experience of important war work. They have been mobilized to assist the defence of the Reich in its most dangerous hour.” In justice to the Nazis, they committed the Volkssturm in exactly the circumstances for which the British trained and prepared their own Home Guard, “Dad’s Army,” in the event of a German invasion in 1940. The Volkssturm’s military value proved small, not least because few weapons were available for its units. In the battle for Germany, some teenagers fought with frightening courage. But most of the Volkssturm’s old men wanted no part of the struggle, and drifted home as soon as they dared.
Even as the front collapsed before the Russian onslaught, however, some Germans impressed the Red Army by the tenacity of their resistance. A Pole quoted a Wehrmacht prisoner saying: “A terrible end is better than terror without end.” A report to Beria from 1st Belorussian Front declared: “There are still a lot of Germans fanatically confident of Germany’s victory.” The same document complained that resistance was being encouraged by the promiscuity with which some Soviet units were slaughtering German prisoners:
Soldiers of 1st Polish Army are known to be particularly ruthless towards Germans. There are many places where they do not take captured German officers and soldiers to the assembly points, but simply shoot them on the road. For instance, [in one place] 80 German officers and men were captured, but only two were brought to the PoW assembly point. The rest were shot. The regimental commander interrogated the two, then released them to the Deputy Chief of Reconnaissance, who shot these men also. The deputy political officer of 4th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Urbanovich, shot nine prisoners who had voluntarily deserted to our side, in the presence of a divisional intelligence officer.
The NKVD’s objections to such practises were practical rather than moral, but the killing of prisoners had plainly attained epidemic proportions if it provoked a protest to Moscow.
Yelena Kogan was an interpreter who spoke fluent German and was often charged with interrogations:
For everyone else, a German was simply an enemy with whom it was impossible to have any human contact. But I could talk to them. I saw in their eyes their awful uncertainty about their own fate, as they wondered if they would be shot. The younger Germans were professional warriors. But the older ones had families, civilian jobs, some experience of the world. I tried to find a common denominator among the fascists, and I usually failed. It seemed to me that they were simply victims of their country’s madness. I only met one real fascist in the whole war—in the spring of 1942, a German navigator who bailed out when his Heinkel was hit while he was bombing us. I asked him: “Didn’t it bother you to bomb defenceless women?” He shrugged: “It was fun.”
By January 1945 the Soviet Air Force, which had begun the war with pitifully primitive aircraft, had become a formidable ground-support arm, equipped with machines as good as anything its enemies possessed. As the Luftwaffe’s squadrons declined steeply in both quantity and quality, those of Russia had improved dramatically. Pilot training was never of the same standard as that available to British and American aircrew, who flew for a year or longer before being committed to combat. Alexandr Markov, a boyish-looking twenty-one-year-old from the Caucusus, spent three and a half years in pilot training among 800 other air cadets at Grozny, because there were no aircraft available for them to fly. After an eternity of boredom and frustration—“we wanted to go out and conquer Germany, but all we were able to do was study the theory of flight”—he won a place in flying school by getting into the school band. His commanding officer was captivated by the fashion in which Markov played the balalaika. But, even in 1944, they were expected to train on old aircraft, which constantly failed them. “Sometimes, there were three funerals in a week.” Forty-seven per cent of all wartime Soviet aircraft losses were the consequence of technical failure rather than pilot error or enemy action. They learned next to nothing about fighter tactics, because they were forbidden even to loop: “We were just taught to make figures in the sky.” Markov qualified in May 1944, with 100 hours’ dual and solo experience. When he was finally sent to a squadron, he was expected to learn to fight in the air over the German lines.
The Soviet Union devoted little effort to strategic bombing. Its air force was a branch of the army, overwhelmingly committed to tactical operations. Russian units never received the sort of “cab-rank” close support from fighter-bombers that was available to the Western allies, because they lacked sophisticated ground–air radio links. But in 1944–45, the Soviets possessed overwhelming air superiority over the battlefield, protecting their advancing armies from the sort of devastation they had suffered from the Luftwaffe between 1941 and 1943. Most Russian bomber operations were carried out by daylight formations of Ilyushin-2s and American-built Bostons, attacking with heavy fighter escort. “I was testing my own skills to the limit,” said Alexandr Markov of his days as an escort pilot. “Right to the end, the Germans had some pretty good fliers. We were sometimes flying four missions a day, each one from half an hour to two hours. Nobody asked whether we could take it. The tired pilots were simply the ones most likely to die.” Unlike British and American pilots who were rested after a “tour,” Russian aircrew flew until they died, or won the war. On the ground, their planes were serviced almost entirely by women. The girls did everything for them—bombing up and arming the aircraft, manning communications, washing their clothes. One Soviet night-bomber wing was entirely crewed by women, twenty-three of whom became Heroes of the Soviet Union.
Markov fell in love with his unit’s meteorological officer, twenty-six-year-old Lydia Fyodorovna. She was married, but her husband serving on the Leningrad Front wrote suggesting that the couple should part: “He had found someone else, of course.” Markov married Lydia after the war. At their airfield behind the Polish front, the pilots partied every night. Yet in most respects their war was more austere than that of their British and American counterparts. No one painted names or cartoons on their planes, any more than they did on Rus-sian tanks. They had enough to eat, and almost unlimited supplies of alcohol. But there were few creature comforts, and no leave. There was only the war, and the comradeship of the unit.
BREACHING THE ODER
AT THE END of January, the Russians seized bridgeheads across the upper Oder, upstream and downstream from Breslau. The Germans first learned of their coming when Russian tank gunfire sank a steamer proceeding blithely downriver from the city. Breslau was designated by Hitler as a fortress, and doggedly held by the Germans for many weeks to come. But Konev’s southern offensive had now achieved its principal purposes. It had opened a path into the heart of Germany across the last great river barrier. The loss of Upper Silesia caused Albert Speer to dispatch a memorandum to Hitler, copied to Guderian, in which the armaments minister asserted that without Silesia’s factories Germany’s war was lost.
Meanwhile, further north, General Vasily Chuikov had seized Lodz against negligible resistance on 19 January. Soviet and Polish flags burgeoned across the city. The Russians had enveloped Warsaw. Its garrison, such as it was, fled without resistance. The occupiers found that the Germans had systematically razed every landmark: St. John’s Cathedral, the Royal Palace, the National Library, the Opera House. There was no military purpose behind the devastation. It reflected only Hitler’s nihilism. Captain Abram Skuratovsky, a Soviet signals officer and also a Jew, wandered among the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. Like many Russians who had already seen so much horror and destruction, he felt regret, but no sense of shock. For Skuratovsky, this was “just another bloody page in the history of the war.” Beria’s men were already arresting Polish Jews. As early as December 1944, the NKVD chief had reported to Stalin the arrest of a group who had established an organization in Lublin, with the intention of sending a delegation to the planned Polish Jewish Congress in the United States. Beria declared that he had evidence the Lublin Jewish leader was a British agent.
The Soviets estimated that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Warsaw’s buildings had been destroyed. Most of the population, expelled by the Germans, scavenged like animals in the surrounding countryside across a radius of ten or fifteen miles. “In order to re-establish order in Warsaw,” Beria’s local commander reported to him on 22 January, “we have formed an executive group composed of members of the Department of Public Security and NKVD, with orders to locate and arrest members of Army Krajowa and other underground political parties. 2nd NKVD Frontier Guards Regiment has been moved to Warsaw to implement these measures.” In Poznan, the NKVD reported that a third of the housing and half the city’s industry had been destroyed, and that more than half the pre-war population of 250,000 had fled. The Germans blew all the bridges before they retired. The speed of the Soviet seizure of Lodz took the Nazi leadership and local population by surprise, though “all members of the city’s administration have fled to Germany.” No demolitions had been conducted, and 450,000 residents remained from the pre-war population of 700,000. Of these, almost half were Poles, about 100,000 Ukrainians, Russians and Belorussians, together with some 50,000 Germans. The Russians immediately embarked upon the massive task of shipping each racial group in its tens of thousands to the homelands which Moscow deemed most suitable for them.
Even as the Red Army was storming towards the Oder, its relentless rear-area campaign continued, to clear Soviet-occupied territory of “hostile elements.” These operations required the deployment of thousands of NKVD troops. A report to Stalin from Beria in January described one action in which the 256th Escort Regiment was sent to liquidate a 200-strong partisan band; 104 were killed and 25 captured, including their leader. In another action, eighty-seven were killed and twenty-three captured. Among the dead were five Germans. A further Wehrmacht straggler was taken prisoner. An armoured train was dispatched to deal with another such group, which included draft-evaders as well as “bandits.” In a further action, seven “bandits” and 252 draft-evaders were captured. Some of these, said Beria, were wearing SS uniform. A captured Wehrmacht officer proved to be a White Russian who had left his country in 1918 and who admitted that he had been serving as an intelligence officer for Vlassov’s Cossacks.* 8 The validity of Beria’s claims is, of course, highly doubtful. But his reports provide a vivid picture of the bloody chaos which persisted for many months within the territories reconquered by the Red Army.
On 24 January, Beria reported that 110,000 people had now been returned from the occupied territories to Russia, including 16,000 children. Of these, 53,610 had been sent home; 7,068 drafted for military service; 43,000 dispatched to NKVD camps for “further screening”; 194 “collaborators and betrayers of the motherland” had already been identified. Stalin ordered that all liberated Red Army officers about whose behaviour there was the smallest doubt should be sent to penal battalions. “One had to be very vigilant at Front HQ,” said Major Fyodor Romanovsky of the NKVD. “There were so many kind of nationalists, and Whites who were urging men to desert, and assuring them of good treatment from the Germans.” He added gravely: “We would never convict innocent people. We looked into every case.” It was acute awareness of the significance of the Soviet tide for the people of eastern Europe, above all the Poles, that caused Churchill to send to a friend a greeting for this “New, disgusting year.” How perverse it seemed that, amid Stalin’s smashing victories, Jock Colville, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, should observe: “The prospect of the end of the war and the problems it will bring with it are depressing the PM.” Churchill said to Colville: “Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be bolshevised; and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for poor Poland either.”
Roosevelt raised the Polish issue half-heartedly at the Yalta conference of the leaders of the Grand Alliance in February 1945, reminding Stalin that the United States possessed seven million inhabitants of Polish stock. As an elected national leader, the president had to consider their concerns. Stalin dismissed this assertion with a shrug: of those seven million Poles, only 7,000 voted, he said. A British junior minister, H. G. Strauss, resigned from Churchill’s government over Yalta, observing that he found it “impossible to approve of the treatment of the Polish people by the Crimean conference.” When New Zealand’s prime minister remonstrated about the abandonment of the Poles to Stalin, Churchill answered: “Great Britain and the British Commonwealth are very much weaker militarily than Soviet Russia, and have no means, short of another general war, of enforcing their point of view. Nor can we ignore the position of the United States. We cannot go further in helping Poland than the United States is willing or can be persuaded to go. We have therefore to do the best we can.” Poland’s doom was sealed—to be passed with the acquiescence of the democracies from the bloody hands of one tyrant into those of another.
When Hitler heard that Warsaw had fallen, he ordered the arrest and interrogation by the SS of three senior staff officers at OKH who were deemed to have connived in this act of weakness. As a gesture of solidarity, Guderian insisted on sharing his subordinates’ ordeal. In the midst of one of the climactic battles of the Third Reich, its senior commanders were obliged to devote hours to this black farce. Guderian was then grudgingly permitted to return to his duties. OKH’s chief of operations was dispatched to a concentration camp. Another of the three staff officers was shot.
“Germany’s leadership faces its greatest challenge of the war,” acknowledged a Berlin radio broadcast on 22 January. “Retreats and disengagements are no longer possible, because our armies are now disputing territory of vital importance to German war industry . . . The utmost effort is required from every man and woman. The German people will respond willingly to the call, because they know that our leader has never failed to restore the situation, however grave the difficulties.” On the same day, Bradley’s aide Colonel Hansen wrote in his diary: “It is incredible to view the advance of the Russian front and realise how the East has suddenly become the cynosure of American and allied attention.” After many months when commanders in the west had scarcely considered events in the east, now as they pored over their maps and perceived the Soviet line of battle drawing so close to Berlin, the movements of the Red Army began to cast a long shadow over the operations of the Anglo-Americans.
For the Western allies, the frustrations of communicating with the Russians about practical military problems, such as bomb lines, remained as great as ever. To the end, Stalin rejected all demands for liaison officers to be attached to Soviet field headquarters, just as Russian officers were attached to SHAEF. He insisted that contacts should be conducted exclusively through Moscow. In addition to refusing to refuel Allied aircraft seeking to aid the Poles, the Russians denied requests that RAF and USAAF planes crippled on bomber operations should be allowed to land at Soviet forward airfields. A British SOE mission parachuted to the Army Krajowa, led by a full colonel, was detained, disarmed, interrogated, humiliated, imprisoned and finally shipped to Moscow. The Russians were seriously tempted to shoot its members, as they had already shot some SOE personnel in Hungary. It was two months before the British embassy in Moscow could gain exit visas for the SOE group. Allied commanders, conscious of the huge volume of vehicles, equipment and supplies delivered to the Soviet Union, were increasingly exasperated by Russian recalcitrance. Yet from Stalin’s viewpoint his policy was perfectly rational. The consequences would be gratuitously embarrassing if Allied liaison officers witnessed at first hand the conduct of the Red Army in eastern Europe, and reported it to Washington and London.
An American officer who did glimpse the Red Army in motion was amazed by the spectacle of this teeming host, mingling the modern and the medieval, drawn from a hundred races and tribes, burdened with equipment and loot, accompanied by horse-drawn carts, civilian vehicles, bicycles, trucks of every shape and size interspersed with tanks and guns: “I’ll never forget those Russian columns and the crap they had. Holy smoke, you wondered how the hell they marched all that distance with that kind of stuff.” A New Zealand doctor liberated from captivity by the Soviet advance watched Zhukov’s men stream across Poland in late January:
What a disorderly rabble they looked. Terrible congestion and utter chaos . . . During my whole eight weeks as a guest of the USSR, I saw absolutely nothing in the way of medical organisation . . . Before leaving a Polish hospital, I was attracted by a commotion outside. I went to the window and saw a stretcher containing a wounded German officer being carried down the steps. As I looked, a young Cossack officer hurried after the stretcher, drew his revolver, and shot the German through the head. It was a ghastly exhibition, but even more nauseating was the sight, some few minutes later, of Polish children stripping the body of clothing as it lay in the street.
Even after the doctor’s recent experiences in the hands of the Nazis, he experienced a surge of pity when he found himself on a train at Odessa halted alongside wagonloads of Germans on their way to Siberia: “it was difficult not to feel sorry for the blighters.”
“There seemed to be little difference between [Russian] treatment of the peoples they were supposed to be liberating and those they were conquering,” wrote Peter Kemp, one of the SOE party mentioned above, who observed the Red Army’s behaviour to the Polish residents of a building commandeered as a corps headquarters.
The soldiers . . . behaved with calculated brutality and contempt. They broke up furniture for firewood, they pilfered every article of value and marked or spoilt what they did not care to take away; they urinated and defecated in every room . . . the hall, the stairs and passages were heaped and spattered with piles of excrement, the walls and floors were splashed with liquor, spittle and vomit—the whole building stank like an untended latrine. It is a pity those communists who declared that they would welcome the Red Army as liberators never saw that particular army at its work of liberation.
Discipline within the Red Army was indeed erratic. Pyotr Mitrofanov, the forty-five-year-old driver of Vasily Kudryashov’s T-34, was supposed to be on watch one night when the lieutenant found him asleep in their tank. Kudryashov lashed out at him: “You traitor! You know you could be shot for this!” Mitrofanov fell trembling on his knees before the officer, pleading for mercy. He was brusquely forgiven. Next day, the driver said: “Comrade commander, will you write a letter to my family for me?” Mitrofanov, like many Red soldiers, was illiterate. Kudryashov shot back, intending humour: “Yes—we can tell them how you were guilty of dereliction of duty!” Mitrofanov turned ashen once more: “No, no, no!” he cried. “Send me to Siberia—tell them anything but that.” The Soviet Army was a maze of contradictions. Sentiment and terror, comradeship and cruelty, devotion to duty and reckless indiscipline marched together in a fashion that could confuse its own men, never mind the rest of the world. Mitrofanov was killed in action three days afterwards.
When millions of very young men were entrusted with weapons, fatal accidents became endemic. For fun, a soldier in Valentin Krulik’s unit of Sixth Guards Tank Army dressed himself one day in a German smock and helmet, then dashed into his section’s bunker waving a Schmeisser and crying “Hände hoch!” This was agreed to be extremely funny. But one of his comrades shot the cross-dresser before he was recognized.
ZHUKOV DETACHED several divisions northward, to secure his flank against the German forces in Pomerania. But, with the collapse of organized resistance in the path of his 1st Belorussian Front, the exultant marshal began to think that he might be able to advance to Berlin “on the run.” This was certainly the fear of German Intelligence, which reported to OKH on 20 January: “From the enemy’s behaviour and reports received, he is aiming to complete operations rapidly and not to permit any pause. We must therefore reckon that, against his usual behaviour pattern, he will continue to press forward without worrying about short-term threats to his flanks.”
Everything seemed to hinge upon whether Zhukov could seize a bridgehead across the Oder in the Berlin region before the Germans regrouped. Through the last days of January, the Russian advance towards the river slowed, as it met new German lines of resistance. None amounted to much, but each imposed delay and some casualties. On 30 January, on the northern flank men of Fifth Shock Army reached the Oder. Next morning an officer and a few men walked across the frozen river and took possession without opposition of the small town of Kienitz. The local stationmaster nervously approached the Russian officer and demanded: “Are you going to allow the Berlin train to leave?” The Russian expressed ironic regret: “The passenger service to Berlin will undergo a brief interruption—let us say until the end of the war.” Although the Germans rushed forces to Kienitz, Zhukov’s men were able to reinforce their foothold west of the river. On the night of 2 February, the Soviet 301st Rifle Division crossed the Oder ice under heavy German fire, to strengthen the bridgehead. The Germans still held ground eastwards at Frankfurt and Küstrin. But elsewhere the Russians had secured vital ground on the western bank. Here was the final prize in an operation which had overrun a large part of Hitler’s remaining territory in three weeks. On 2 February, the Stavka formally declared 1st Belorussian Front’s Vistula–Oder operation concluded.
Zhukov’s dash to the Oder inspired the Germans to a last Herculean effort. The Wehrmacht’s difficulties now far exceeded those of September 1944, when new defences were forged in the west after the Anglo-American rush across France. Men, weapons, aircraft, fuel were drastically diminished. Yet German reaction was effective enough to crush Zhukov’s hopes, briefly shared by Stalin’s Stavka, of a dash for Berlin. On 19 February, the artillery commander of 1st Belorussian Front was told to prepare for an immediate attack on Hitler’s capital. But these orders were almost immediately countermanded in the face of intelligence reports of large-scale German movements on the northern flank: “The Front commander took the decision to liquidate enemy forces in Pomerania before starting the Berlin attack.” In reality, of course, the decision was Stalin’s. The Russians felt obliged to delay their final assault by almost two months, vastly increasing the price they paid for Hitler’s capital. In February, with the Russians within sixty miles, the city lay almost undefended. By April, when the climactic encounter took place, hundreds of thousands of men had been summoned from every corner of the shrunken Reich to fight its last battle.
We shall never know how the Russians would have fared in February had their spearheads pressed on. Chuikov, the hero of Stalingrad, now commanded Eighth Guards Army, which had advanced 200 miles in fourteen days. He vociferously asserted until the day of his death that Hitler’s capital could have been seized in February. His Soviet peers strongly disagreed. First and Second Guards Tank Armies could almost certainly have got to Berlin. But even the Soviets, often so bold about exposing their flanks, feared that after driving a deep salient into the enemy’s line it was too dangerous to go further, leaving large German armies behind their front both north and south, in Pomerania and Hungary. To Stalin’s Stavka it seemed reckless to risk disaster, having achieved overwhelming success. Zhukov’s and Konev’s men were tired. They faced problems of supply immensely more challenging than those of the Anglo-Americans in France in September. Distances were greater, roads worse and transport limited. The Anglo-Americans were still far away, and seemed to pose no threat of pre-empting Stalin’s triumph in Berlin. It was decided to defer the final assault until the Soviet armies north and southwards had caught up; the enemy had been further battered; and reserves of men, guns and ammunition could be brought forward.
As always, the Germans seized the respite. They threw themselves into rendering the Oder line defensible. In the last days of January aircraft bombs, power saws, demolition charges were employed in attempts to breach the frozen river. Then God took a hand. On the night of 1 February, it began to rain. In the days that followed, a premature blush of spring brought a thaw. The snows melted—and so did the Oder ice. Hitler had been given a moat. More than that, and as always when seasonal thaws came, the roads of eastern Europe deteriorated dramatically. The task of providing daily supply for Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies became dauntingly harder, when every ton had to be trucked 300 miles or more through chronic mud from the nearest railheads.
The Germans rushed 88mm flak guns from all over the Reich to reinforce the anti-tank defences beyond Berlin. Almost the entire remaining strength of the Luftwaffe was thrown into the eastern battle. The Germans were able to mount some damaging air attacks on Soviet positions. By St. Valentine’s Day, fourteen German divisions were deployed against Zhukov’s front. In February, while just sixty-seven new and repaired tanks were sent to the west, 1,675 were shipped east. German counter-attacks on Soviet positions west of the Oder failed. The Russians slowly but steadily enlarged their bridgeheads. The outcome of the impending struggle for Berlin was hardly in doubt. But each day of respite granted to the Germans would increase the price the Soviets must pay for final victory.
BEHIND ZHUKOV’S front in Poland, the bitter struggle between the “London Poles” and the communists continued unabated. On the night of 19 February, men of Army Krajowa stormed the communist-run prison in Lublin, killed two guards and released eleven AK prisoners, along with twelve guards who also defected. Seven of the prisoners had been awaiting execution for “political crimes.” On 2 March, the commanding officer of 28th Regiment of the 9th Polish Division of the Red Army persuaded 380 of his men to desert on their way to the front. Most set off for their homes, to which they were pursued by NKVD detachments. On 7 March, a junior officer at the Polish army tank school at Holm, a secret member of Army Krajowa named Kunin, persuaded seventy cadets to quit with their weapons, and to join the anti-Soviet struggle. In the days that followed, the deserters were ruthlessly hunted down by the NKVD. Most were killed or captured. So alarmed was the NKVD by the political threat that a draconian order was issued to remove all personal radio sets from members of Polish units of the Red Army, to prevent them from listening to broadcasts from London. This ban was soon afterwards extended to make possession of radios illegal even among Polish civilians. The Russians had now “liberated” almost all Poland. Yet the plight of most of its citizens was, if possible, worse than their lot under the Nazis. Beria received permission from Stalin drastically to reinforce the NKVD’s forces in Poland.
While Zhukov paused at the Oder, further south Konev renewed his own massive operation to clear south-east Germany. First, his men closed upon the ancient city of Breslau, Silesia’s capital. At 0600 on 8 February, at first moving sluggishly through the quagmire created by the thaw, the Russians advanced from their bridgeheads on the upper Oder. Against slight resistance from the remains of Fourth Panzer Army, the attackers gained almost forty miles on the first day. By 15 February, 35,000 troops and 80,000 civilians in Breslau were encircled by Konev’s armies. The Germans of Seventeenth Army attempted a counter-attack which met some of the Breslau fortress troops on 14 February, but were then driven back by overwhelming Russian forces. The only consequence of the German effort was to impose a delay on Konev, during which he was able to rest and resupply his men. Like Zhukov his great rival, the marshal had cherished his own hopes of reaching Berlin in a single bound. He, too, was now obliged to acknowledge that this was unrealistic.
Nehring’s XXIV Panzer Corps launched an ambitious counter-attack in the south on the night of 1 March, which surprised the Russians and inflicted substantial casualties before it ran its course—Konev lost 162 tanks to the Germans’ ten. Goebbels joined Schörner for a parade in the recaptured town of Lauban on 8 March, at which the field-marshal, a devout Nazi, flattered the propaganda minister outrageously. Next day, amid snow showers, a new German counter-attack began at Streigau, forty miles eastwards. This recaptured the town. Revelations of atrocities committed by the Russians during their brief occupation may have done something to stiffen the determination of Schörner’s soldiers. The Russians did not make an impressive military showing during these operations. They had grown over-confident, allowed themselves to be taken by surprise, and retired in disarray.
German Intelligence was still making extraordinary efforts to gather information from behind the Russian front. Four Ukrainians were parachuted from a Ju-88 on the night of 27 February, led by a former Red Army sergeant, carrying a radio and 206,000 roubles. They were immediately captured. On the night of 4 March, troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front met a twenty-two-man German patrol nine miles beyond the Oder. After a protracted firefight in which thirteen Germans and five Russians were killed, the survivors were found to be members of Abwehr Group 306, guided by three Red Army defectors. It seems remarkable that even the legendary Reinhard Gehlen, chief of German Intelligence for the Eastern Front, still considered operations of this kind practicable or worthwhile, though as late as New Year’s Day 1945 a U-boat landed two German spies on the Maine coast, to conduct ill-defined intelligence operations against the United States.
German counter-attacks seemed irrelevant. It was meaningless to expend lives and irreplaceable equipment to recapture small fragments of lost Reich territory, which were doomed to be lost again within a matter of days. Army Group Balck reported miserably from Hungary on 5 February: “Amid all the stresses and strains, no improvement in morale or performance is visible. The numerical superiority of the enemy, combined with the knowledge that fighting is now taking place on German soil, has proved very demoralizing to the men. Their only nourishment is a slice of bread and some horsemeat. Movement of any kind is hampered by men’s physical weakness.” The staff officer cataloguing these dismal realities concluded in wonder: “In spite of all this, and six weeks’ unfulfilled promises of relief, the men still fight tenaciously and obey orders.” Yet for how long?
The counter-attacks inside Germany took place in sectors lightly held by the Russians, and lacked the weight to achieve anything beyond local successes. They exerted no influence upon Konev’s latest big push, against the Germans further east in Upper Silesia. This was the last important industrial area in the east which remained in German hands. Konev attacked on 15 March. His men gained a Neisse crossing the following night. Reinforcements began to pour over a pontoon bridge. By 31 March, the Russians had gained Ratibor and Katscher, claiming to have killed some 40,000 German troops and captured a further 14,000. The bulk of Hitler’s forces in the region were able to pull back intact, above all First Panzer Army. But Konev’s left flank was now secure.
Between 12 January and 3 February, the drive to the Oder cost 1st Belorussian Front 77,342 casualties, and 1st Ukrainian Front 115,783—more than twice U.S. losses in the month-long Bulge battle. OKH posted eastern casualties for the months of January and February of 77,000 dead, 334,000 wounded and 192,000 missing—a total of 603,000, at least five times German losses in the Ardennes. Soviet forces in Hungary stood eighty miles from Vienna. Konev was 120 miles from Prague. Zhukov’s spearheads were forty-five miles from Berlin.
Yet, even as the eyes of the world were fixed upon Allied forces approaching Hitler’s capital, further north a vast human tragedy was unfolding. The Soviet drive into East Prussia, northern axis of Stalin’s assault upon Germany, was to cost the lives of up to a million people, and inflicted a wound upon the consciousness of the German people which has never healed.