Chapter 8
By the summer of 1943, Witzig had returned to Germany. As he prepared himself for a new command, the Third Reich’s military prospects continued to crumble. In July, Hitler launched Army Groups Centre and North against the Soviet salient at Kursk in an attempt to eliminate it and shorten the Wehrmacht’s defensive line, while at the same time inflicting such heavy casualties on the Red Army as to regain the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front. The Kursk offensive sought to encircle and annihilate the Soviet troops in the salient, end German fears of a flank attack and set the conditions for a follow-on offensive east of Kursk towards Moscow and to the south-east towards the Don and Volga.
After the battle’s opening on 5 July, there followed a slugging match between German and Soviet tanks, artillery and infantry of unprecedented proportions and intensity. By 12 July, the German advance had stalled against intense Soviet resistance. The following day, Hitler called off the offensive to send German reinforcements to deal with the Allied landings in Sicily on 10 July and the imminent collapse of Italian resistance. Losses on both sides were heavy. Between 12 July and 23 August, the Red Army lashed back with a series of stinging counter-offensives against Army Group Centre that hurled the Wehrmacht back almost 150 km and liberated the city of Kharkov. As a result of their defeat at Kursk, Hitler and the Wehrmacht had lost the initiative on the Eastern Front forever.1 ‘With the Kursk offensive I wanted to reverse fate,’ Hitler bemoaned afterwards to one of his long-time personal aides, SS Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche. ‘I would never have believed the Russians were so strong.’2 Stalin followed the battle of Kursk by launching new offensive operations in August and September, throwing the Germans back in the south an average of 240 km over a 1,000-km front and inflicting heavy casualties.
In October 1943, Witzig temporarily took command of the newly reconstituted Corps 21st Parachute Engineer Regiment, which was in the process of being formed, and of the regiment’s fully formed 1st Battalion, which had been formed around his Corps 11th Parachute Engineer Battalion:
I gathered what remained of my battalion once again in Wittenberg. There we reconstituted the battalion once more and, soon afterwards, were deployed to the centre of France. During the training phase we had to deal with French partisans and maquis, who were gaining in strength. They received their equipment and weapons from British agents, who also supported and led them.3
Predominantly rural guerrilla bands of the French Resistance, the Maquis were primarily composed of men who had escaped into the mountains to avoid being conscripted by Vichy France into working as forced labourers in Germany. What began as loose groups of individuals became increasingly organized, initially fighting the Vichy French and the Germans to remain free. They evolved, however, into active resistance groups.
The spring of 1944 found Witzig’s Corps 11th Parachute Engineer Battalion deployed around Moulins in central France, conducting training of new personnel as well as engaging in anti-partisan operations. The Parachute Engineer Replacement Battalion in Decize had been subordinated to Witzig’s regiment. According to Witzig there were no other strong German formations in the area. The widespread presence of the Maquis had become a continuing source of irritation and frustration to the Vichy and German authorities and in the third week of March the Wehrmacht launched large-scale operations with massive air support against one group on the plateau of Glières after an attack by French Vichy militia had failed.
The fight with the partisans demanded [our] attention [wrote Witzig in his postwar history of the regiment], but was, however, limited to small engagements, which were conducted by individual companies. But at the beginning of the [Allied] invasion battle along the Channel coast, strong partisan formations made themselves felt in our area, which was under the control of the Vichy Government – tied to Germany by treaty – but which only the German military had the power to confront.4
According to Karl-Heinz Hammerschlag, who served with Witzig in France, the two formations that formed the core of the battalion’s antipartisan operations were the 1st and the 4th Companies.5 A particularly strong group of French Maquis had established themselves at St-Amand, located approximately 60 km west of Moulins. St-Amand had previously been under the control of a Vichy French battalion. Witzig’s battalion received orders to quell the partisan force and ensure security and stability in the area. Using wood-burning buses with French drivers, Witzig prepared to deploy his battalion, but was certain the partisans had been tipped off to the operation. On 16 June 1944, the battalion deployed to St-Amand and advanced against the town on two sides in a double envelopment with orders to link up in the marketplace. Most of the partisans, though caught unprepared, managed to escape the trap. However, some equipment was left behind, including a rucksack, which Witzig appropriated and later used for hiking trips after the war. After the operation, while Witzig was speaking to the chief of police in front of the police station in St-Amand near the market square, a shot rang out, killing the Frenchman standing next to him: ‘A partisan probably shot from one of the houses around the marketplace. Perhaps the shot was aimed at me.’6
According to Hammerschlag, another noteworthy incident took place at about the same time. A group of suspected partisans had been captured by Witzig’s men and these were brought to the market square to be presented to him. Before this could be done, however, the paratroopers, wearing Wehrmacht uniforms due to a shortage of their unique airborne smocks, came under fire and the prisoners bolted. Witzig’s men began firing at the escaping prisoners and, after they disappeared, into the bushes and trees close to the edge of town.7 After the firing died out, Witzig and his men laid out the dead policeman in the police station. ‘It remained only for me to visit the Vichy battalion and warn its commander to prevent such occurrences in the future,’ wrote Witzig. ‘Then we left St-Amand. As long as we remained in Moulins the peace in St-Amand held.’8 As the battalion received notice to prepare to deploy to Lithuania and East Prussia the incident was quickly forgotten. Nonetheless, it would have serious repercussions for Witzig and haunt him long after the war.
In the meantime, the much-awaited Allied invasion of France, Operation Overlord, began just after midnight on 6 June 1944, when paratroopers of the American 82nd and 101st and the British 6th Airborne Divisions landed on the flanks of five invasion beaches in Normandy. The paratroopers were followed by assault landing forces totalling eight divisions on five beaches. By the end of the day, those divisions were firmly established on the European continent. And by the end of June, the Allies had landed more than 850,000 men in France.9 At the beginning of the invasion, the newly formed II Parachute Corps had been ordered to move to the St-Lô area. The corps had been formed at the end of 1943 and placed under the command of Generalleutnant Eugen Meindl. At the time of the invasion, Meindl commanded the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th Parachute Divisions, in addition to various support units, including intelligence, reconnaissance and assault-gun detachments and a parachute training depot of battalion size. Meindl positioned the 3rd and 5th Parachute Divisions to the north-east and west of St-Lô, respectively, while the understrength 2nd Parachute Division was ordered by General Student to defend Brest in Brittany.10
Shortly after the Allied landings in Normandy, the German situation on the Eastern Front turned even more desperate. In June, Stalin had unleashed his summer offensive in Belorussia, Operation Bagration, catching Army Group Centre and the entire German High Command by surprise. On the morning of 22 June, the third anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, some 2.4 million Red Army soldiers, supported by 36,400 artillery pieces and mortars, 5,200 tanks and assault guns, and 5,300 aircraft, opened an attack aimed at nothing less than the encirclement and complete annihilation of Army Group Centre. Stalin’s marshals expected to encounter some 1.2 million German soliders, supported by 9,500 artillery pieces, 900 tanks and assault guns, and 1,350 Luftwaffe aircraft. The Red Army thus outnumbered the Wehrmacht by at least six-to-one in tanks, four-to-one in artillery pieces and combat aircraft, and two-to-one in personnel.11
Within days, the Soviets had hurled the Germans back and, by the end of July, Hitler’s armies were in headlong retreat, fighting desperately to avoid encirclement and complete annihilation. Bagration had torn a 400-km gap in the German front and only the wings of the reeling Army Group Centre, in the southern Baltic States, were still able to resist the Russian onslaught. In the north, the Third Panzer Army and the Second Army were all that remained between the Russians and East Prussia. In a frantic attempt to shore up faltering German resistance, Hitler sent out Field Marshal Model to take command of the remnants of Army Group Centre. At the same time, Model retained command of Army Group North Ukraine. Model, the Wehrmacht’s youngest field marshal, was known as ‘The Führer’s Fireman’ for his ingenuity in salvaging apparently hopeless situations. He was one of the few officers remaining who enjoyed the complete trust of Hitler. Colonel-General Heinz Guderian praised Model as ‘a bold inexhaustible soldier . . . the best man possible to perform the fantastically difficult task of reconstructing a line in the centre of the Eastern Front’.12
Hitler also directed all available German forces northward. The Führer and his commanders assessed the situation on the Eastern Front, where the Red Army was advancing as fast as its logistics allowed, as much more threatening than the Allied force trying to break out from Normandy. Hitler had hoped to concentrate Germany’s newly mobilized formations and manufactured weapons on defending Western Europe against an Allied assault, while the Eastern Front took care of itself. ‘The threat from the East remains, but an even greater danger looms in the West: the Anglo-American landing! In the East, the vastness of the space will, as a last resort, permit a loss of territory even on a major scale, without suffering a mortal blow to Germany’s chances for survival!’ he had proclaimed, in Führer Directive 51 of 3 November 1943. ‘Not so in the West! If the enemy succeeded in penetrating our defences on a wide front, consequences of staggering proportions will follow within a short time.’13 But Hitler’s policy of concentrating his forces in the West was now in shambles.14 Thus, even as the Allies were fighting to break out of the lodgement they had established, the Germans were transferring elite formations eastwards towards the Baltic states.
While three of Student’s elite Fallschirmjäger divisions had been committed to containing the Allies in Normandy, other paratrooper formations were diverted to the Eastern Front in an attempt to stop the Soviet advance. These included Rudolf Witzig’s battalion:
After the start of the Anglo-American invasion we were not transferred to Normandy, but to Lithuania. The Russians had succeeded in breaking through there and separating Army Group North in the Baltics from [Army Group Centre] in East Prussia. This problem had to be solved quickly; therefore, once again, units were moved and transferred to get it done.15
Witzig’s command would fight as part of Lieutenant-Colonel Gerhard Schirmer’s 16th Parachute Regiment, which had been virtually annihilated near Kiev earlier in the year and then reconstituted. Schirmer had commanded a parachute company as part of the German airborne assault on the Corinth Canal in Greece. Afterwards he commanded the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Parachute Regiment in the Peloponnese and on Crete, landing near Heraklion as the strategic reserve. For capturing Hill 296, a piece of key terrain in the battle, Schirmer was awarded the Knight’s Cross. In Tunisia he commanded the 5th Parachute Regiment’s 3rd Battalion in heavy fighting and later assumed command of the regiment after Colonel Koch had been put out of action.16 On 1 January 1944 Schirmer had been appointed to command the 16th Parachute Regiment. The regiment, deployed around Abbeville in France, had been brought up to full strength with four battalions in May and then received parachute training in June, with special emphasis on night drops.
The 954 soldiers17 of the 16th Parachute Regiment entrained for Vilnius, in the south-eastern corner of modern Lithuania, in July. The German High Command considered the defence of Vilnius imperative. If the city fell, it would be impossible to maintain contact between the two German army groups in the Baltic States and to stop the Red Army’s advance towards East Prussia. It had thus been declared a ‘fortress’ city by Hitler and was to be held to the last man.18 Schirmer’s regiment was subordinated to Field Marshal Model’s Army Group Centre and the Third Panzer Army. Under the direct control of Major General Stahel, an air-defence officer and commander of Vilnius, the 16th Parachute Regiment joined a hotch-potch of units in defence of the city, including the 399th and 1067th Panzergrenadier Regiments, an independent panzergrenadier brigade, the 16th SS Police Regiment, the 2nd Battalion, 240th Field Artillery Regiment, the 256th Anti-Tank Battalion and the 296th Flak Battalion.19 In addition, elements of the 731st Anti-Tank Detachment, with 25 Hetzer tank destroyers were also available, as well as the 103rd Panzer Brigade with 21 Panther tanks, the 8th Assault Gun Detachment and the 6th Panzer Division with 23 Panzer IV tanks and 26 Panthers.20
Poised to advance on the Lithuanian capital were elements of the Soviet 5th and 5th Guards Armies of the Third Belorussian Front.21 The Soviet attack on the city began on 8 July, with Russian tanks and infantry attacking across Lake Narocz towards the airfield, which was defended by the paratroopers. After bitter fighting, the Soviet 35th Tank Brigade took the airfield. Intense street fighting then commenced as the Soviets attempted to reduce German defences. By midday, the Red Army had fought its way into the city, overrunning the initial line of anti-tank obstacles and destroying a number of the ad hoc German battle groups. The following day, the Germans reported 500 dead and another 500 wounded. By 9 July, Vilnius was encircled. Two days later, the German High Command ordered a break-out. The following night, the defenders broke contact with the enemy and crossed the Vilnia River. Some 2,000 Landsers made it across.22 With the fall of Vilnius the Wehrmacht’s position in the Baltic States became untenable.
In the meantime, the 16th Parachute Regiment had been followed to the Baltics by Witzig’s 1st Battalion of the 21st Parachute Engineer Regiment, which arrived from France. The battalion, which had an authorized strength of 21 officers and 1,011 other ranks, had been conducting night parachute training at the Salzwedel airbase when it was alerted for movement to Lithuania. ‘By means of a railway movement of several days duration via Berlin and through the peaceful and marvellously sunny summer countryside of Brandenburg and West Prussia and then through East Prussia the battalion reached the border with Lithuania,’ wrote Witzig. ‘The first deployment took place in the Kaunas area.’ Witzig’s battalion reached their planned defensive positions between Schescuppe and Wilkowischen, located only 10 km from the East Prussian border, at the end of July and began to entrench. Within a few days of arriving, the unit was reinforced with an artillery detachment and elements of an assault gun brigade.
Due to the length of the front we were deployed from right to left as follows: Parachute Engineer Battalion, 2nd Battalion, 1st Battalion, and the 3rd Battalion with the 13th Company in reserve and an assault gun brigade [recorded Witzig]. After a while the regiment, which was only equipped with its infantry weapons, received four 75-mm anti-tank guns, which were distributed among the frontline battalions. This position was held the whole of August and September 1944.23
Initially the Russians were nowhere in sight. Instead, the men of Witzig’s battalion witnessed the massive westward exodus of Nazi civilian leaders and their families fleeing for their lives to escape the advancing Red Army. The German population in the path of the Russians was thus left leaderless. ‘This was the beginning of the breakdown of law and order,’ remembered Witzig.
After changing positions several times, the battalion finally made contact with the Russians. Witzig’s 3rd Company relieved the 500th SS Parachute Battalion, a punishment battalion:
Only the commander and a few members of the staff had the required rank. All of the company, platoon, and squad leaders were demoted SS officers and NCOs, who wore only an arm badge with their official position. These men had conducted a jump in a coup de main against the headquarters of Yugoslav partisan commander Marshal Tito, only a few weeks earlier. Only with great effort and at the very last moment had he managed to escape.
On the day of their relief, the SS paratroopers bloodily repulsed a Russian tank attack.24
On 20 July 1944, a bomb planted at Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters barely missed killing the leader of the Third Reich. In the confusion that followed the attempt, the vast majority of the Wehrmacht’s leaders swore their loyalty to the Führer, while those opposed to the regime were hunted down, cruelly tortured and brutally murdered. A small number committed suicide; only a few survived. Hearing the news at an impromptu parade complete with loudspeakers, Witzig and his men were stunned and felt betrayed. ‘Can you imagine how you would feel if you learned, fighting in the middle of a war, that someone had tried to kill your president?’ one veteran asked the author, when recounting the incident.25
But the war went on. According to Witzig, the Red Army attacked his positions about once a week, usually in division strength. Twice Soviet armour, in regimental strength, broke through the German positions:
The majority of tanks, and especially the accompanying infantry, were destroyed by our forward companies in close combat, while the tanks which penetrated deeper were shot by our assault gun brigade. The position was reformed after each attack.
Witzig noted that the Soviets had a large superiority in artillery, which they used liberally. As a result, the terrain surrounding the German defensive positions ‘looked liked the World War I Verdun battlefield’. From time to time the artillery detachment attached to the regiment neutralized a Soviet battery, but it was a losing battle. Nonetheless, Witzig’s battalion, which was deployed as infantry, fought with great determination.26
In one particulary hard-fought battle, Witzig’s battalion was mentioned in communiqués for destroying 27 Soviet tanks and stopping the advance of an entire Red Army tank division. On 25 July, the battalion covered a movement to, first, the Kaunas–Daugavpils road and, later in the evening, still further to the north-east to Jonava and entrenched there. ‘A few days ago a strong concentration of enemy tanks was observed and reported in this area,’ reported Witzig, ‘so it was assumed a major attack was imminent.’ The 1st Battalion, 21st Parachute Engineer Regiment, was attached to a battle group commanded by a Colonel Theodor von Tolstorff for this deployment. Tolstorff was, according to Witzig, an excellent officer, and he would win the Swords and Diamonds to the Knight’s Cross the following year as commander of the 340th Volksgrenadier Division.27
As had been so often the case, one of Witzig’s companies was detached from the battalion and Witzig was forced to defend with his three remaining companies. The ground on which the battle was fought was open, although the battalion’s flanks were covered by a large forest. The 1st Company, commanded by Lieutenant Kubillus, deployed on the left of the Kaunas–Daugavpils road, while the 2nd Company, commanded by Lieutenant Walther, deployed on the right as it was clear that the Soviets would focus their attacks on this road. Elements of Lieutenant Schürmann’s understrength 4th Company were attached to the 2nd Company, while the remainder served as a battalion reserve. The 3rd Company, commanded by Lieutenant von Albert, was detached from the battalion to serve as a corps reserve in the rear. According to Witzig, several assault and anti-tank guns were deployed with the battalion, located at the edge of a wood and in battle positions in a cornfield, but were not attached to it. The battalion’s own T-mines, stored in stacks of a hundred, had been left in the woods in forward positions. Witzig notes that every squad was equipped with anti-tank weapons of some sort, including at least one Panzerschreck and three to five Panzerfausts.28
The Panzerschreck (‘Tank Terror’) or Ofenrohr (‘Stovepipe’) was similar to the American Bazooka rocket-launcher. More than 1.5 metres long and weighing more than 11 kg it was a handful for any soldier to carry, much less use effectively. However, its 88-mm, 3-kg, anti-tank rocket was capable of stopping any Allied tank at ranges of up to 120 metres. The Panzerfaust, on the other hand, was the world’s first truly disposable anti-tank recoilless launcher. Weighing only 6 kg and easy to use, this shoulder-fired launcher shot a hollow-charge anti-tank grenade, which could pierce 200 mm at ranges of 30–80 metres. This was literally point-blank range against a tank and it took a great deal of raw courage, steady nerves and patience to use the weapon effectively.29 By 1944, both weapons had acquired a fearsome reputation. In the last year of the war, the Allies would find themselves losing hundreds of vehicles a week to the Panzerschreck and Panzerfaust.30
During the night of 25/26 July, Witzig’s companies entrenched in fighting positions optimized for anti-tank defence, with two to three men in each position. To defend against surprise attacks, a string of forward outposts had been established, especially in the 1st Company sector. These preparations all took place against a backdrop of the constant sound of Russian tanks moving into place just forward of the battalion’s positions. ‘The defensive position was too exposed,’ complained Witzig, who was convinced that the Russians would attack in strength. The battle began that night, with a combat patrol by the 4th Company, which surprised and captured a Soviet tank crew and a commissar. A short time later, a Russian patrol evened the odds by capturing two outposts of the 2nd Company. Shortly afterwards, a third outpost disappeared. ‘Another outpost was gone,’ remembered Witzig. ‘Only the soldier’s rifle was left in his foxhole.’ The sound of tanks massing continued throughout the night and at the crack of dawn the next day they were visible across a wide front some 1,200 metres from the battalion’s positions.31
At the break of dawn on July 26, 1944 the men of the battalion were aware that a day was starting that would demand the greatest efforts from them. With a provoking directness an armada of steel and iron, aware of its superiority, deployed so that even the bravest individual felt depressed. Countless T-34 tanks, artillery pieces and the dreaded ‘Stalin Organ’ [multiple rocket launcher] and assault guns were deployed to break through the defensive positions of the parachute engineers. Yet not one round was fired. There was an uncanny silence on both sides, the calm before the storm.
The silence, however did not last long. ‘And then, flashes from the other side, from thousands of barrels simultaneously’, and shells were pounding the German positions unmercifully: ‘Again and again, pounding, hammering, shattering, pulsating, bursting and cracking,’ recorded Witzig. The incessant barrage lasted for an hour without any reduction in intensity, inflicting numerous casualties on the battalion. As it began to lift, Witzig’s men noticed that the German assault guns had abandoned their battle positions and were nowhere to be seen. But there was nothing that could be done, for the Russian tanks, heavily laden with foot soldiers, were already advancing on the paratroopers through the smoke and the dust with more infantry running alongside the tanks.32
Witzig’s men held their fire until the first line of enemy tanks were only twenty metres away, then unleashed a devastating barrage of antitank rounds. At this range, nothing, not even the thickly armoured Josef Stalin tank, was immune from the deadly German volley:
The men of the 1st [Company] took heart and set themselves against this colossus. It came to furious fighting directly on the highway. Lieutenant Fromme fired his Panzerfaust at a T-34 which ground to a halt, engulfed in flames. He himself was wounded. Then Lieutenant Kubillus, the company commander, who had hastened to the highway after realizing the focal point of the attack, went down seriously wounded. Sergeant Weber took command of the company. He himself blew apart three tanks, which stood burning and shattered in front of the company foxholes. Then he saw Sergeants Scheuring, Hüchering and a few other engineers, whom he could not recognize because of the dust and smoke, obliterate another three tanks. Within a short period, the men of the 1st Company, using Panzerfausts and Ofenrohr, had turned fifteen tanks into burning, smouldering iron.33
As the enemy tank attack was broken up, leaving dozens of T-34s and Soviet assault guns engulfed in flames, the Russian infantry sprang from their carriers to the ground, intent on making the paratroopers pay. Instead, they were cut down at close range by MG 42s. Caught in the open and without their tanks to suppress the machine guns, the Red Army soldiers were slaughtered. Within minutes, the first Russian attack had collapsed under the massed and accurate anti-tank and machinegun fire of Witzig’s parachute engineers. But the battalion, in turn, suffered heavy losses, with the 1st Company reduced to thirty men.34
In the meantime, to the south of the Kaunas–Daugavpils road the 2nd Company, reinforced with the understrength 4th Company, was having a more difficult time containing the Russian assault. A group of some fifty T-34s succeeded in fighting their way through the company positions and cutting off the road behind the two companies. ‘The mounted infantry were taken under fire first and forced to jump off,’ wrote Witzig. ‘Engineer Stauss engaged a tank with his Ofenrohr and suddenly a second tank was also on fire. But the remainder rolled westward without bothering about their infantrymen left behind.’ The German assault guns, which might have defeated the Russian tanks, had already left the battlefield and these had been followed by the surviving anti-tank guns, leaving the paratroopers to fight unsupported. ‘I engaged the tanks which were passing close by my right as the Russians did not attack head on,’ remembered Sergeant Hans-Ulrich Schmidt, from Hamburg, relating his escape in the midst of the advancing Red Army:
After the first echelon passed by, I discovered about five Russian soldiers on every T-34. At the same moment another T-34 showed up about 100 metres to the right of me. I fired one shot with my Ofenrohr and hit it, but after two minutes it began moving and firing again. I charged my Ofenrohr with a second shell immediately as I heard the noise of battle behind me. I tried to establish contact to the right and left of me, but no one had remained in their positions. So I left the position and ran back into the cornfield behind me. Here I found myself between several Russian tanks, which surrounded me. I raised my Ofenrohr, aimed and fired, but the electrical firing trigger failed. One of the tanks discovered me and fired with its gun. I was knocked to the ground by the blast of the shell and hit my forehead against the Ofenrohr. That was my salvation. I pretended to be dead and the tanks moved on. After they were out of sight I ran as fast as I could to the rear, concealed by the cornfield.35
By this point in the battle, there were Russian soldiers to the front, on the right flank and behind the battalion’s position. Now it was only a matter of breaking contact with the Soviets as quickly as possible, withdrawing before the battalion could be encircled and annihilated, and regrouping on defensive positions to the west. But the Soviet tanks which had broken through had been followed by masses of Russian infantry, which attacked the German paratroopers as they sought to cross the 2 km of open ground to reach the safety of the forest and cover. Now it was the Russian machine guns which fired unremittingly, mowing down the German paratroopers as they sought to escape. Few made it. Only twelve unwounded survivors of the 1st Company made it to the battalion rally point, along with only ten men from the 2nd Company. Major Witzig led the remnants of his battalion through the forests, bypassing the Soviets and avoiding battle until the survivors reached the German lines.
We set out towards the north under heavy fire along a small trail [remembered Private Anzenhofer]. For some time we strayed through the forest in column formation led by Major Witzig, meeting remnants of the battalion. The commander led us, through Russian tank and crowded troop formations, back to our own lines without further losses. To this day, everyone who survived still gives him credit.36
Witzig himself had only praise for his men, especially his medical personnel, as he wrote after the war:
Their sense of duty saved the lives of hundreds of German and Russian soldiers. Only someone who has been in the inferno of death and destruction can measure how these men fought. Selfless and fearless, animated by the thought of helping their wounded comrades, no matter which uniform they were wearing and bringing them back safely as quickly as possible.37
Many of the German medics were killed or seriously wounded, while others disappeared, never to be seen again.
Over the course of the next several days, other paratroopers rejoined the battalion, which, according to Witzig’s account, numbered sixty-five men. Witzig used these to establish blocking positions and prevent the Russians from breaking through. This remnant of Witzig’s battalion was committed again and again in a futile attempt to stop the Red Army.38 By the end of August, the 1st Battalion, 21st Parachute Engineer Regiment, had a total strength of 8 officers and 274 men. Of these, however, only 4 officers and 184 men were frontline soldiers.39 Karl-Heinz Hammerschlag, who fought under Witzig in Lithuania, remembered that from a battalion of more than 1,000 men in the summer of 1944, only 30 remained by September. ‘We had no tanks, no field artillery, no anti-tank artillery and no Luftwaffe,’ he told the author. ‘We fought mostly with Panzerfausts and anti-tank mines.’40
Still, other intense battles followed near Memel and elsewhere in October. In the end, the unit’s losses were so heavy it had to be pulled out of the line. Its few surviving officers were sent to fight on the Western Front, while the surviving rank and file were dispersed among the other parachute battalions. Witzig bade farewell to his men in order to take command of the newly formed 18th Parachute Regiment of the 6th Parachute Division. Lieutenant Tiemens, Witzig’s adjutant for many years and the commander of the intelligence platoon, departed with Witzig, as did Lieutenant Heise, the medical officer and other officers, NCOs and soldiers who had served with Witzig. At the same time, Lieutenant von Albert departed to take command of the 2nd Replacement and Training Battalion in Güstrow. Others, including Lieutenants Fromme and Ackermann and Officer Candidate Wehnart, were sent to form the core of the newly reconstituted 2nd Parachute Engineer Battalion, to be commanded by Captain Siegfried Gerstner. The remainder, including the bulk of Witzig’s 3rd Company, formed the core of the new 6th Parachute Engineer Battalion, commanded by Major Stipschütz:
This was the end of the battalion, which endured along with the 1st Parachute Engineer Battalion, as the Corps Parachute Engineer Battalion, then as the 1st Battalion, 21st Parachute Engineer Regiment, for the longest time of all. Elements deployed to El Alamein under Ramcke and Rommel and it was one of the strongest and most reliable units during the long-lasting defence in Tunisia and on the Eastern Front in Lithuania.41
In another account Witzig recalled that:
Schirmer stayed there [in the Baltics] with his battalion until the very end, when he was attached to the Fallschirmpanzerkorps Hermann Göring . . . while I and the rest of my battalion were detached in the late autumn of 1944. My battalion, the pieces of it, was dissolved. They used it to build three new battalions that were necessary for the Fallschirmjäger divisions in Holland.42
Witzig’s elite parachute engineers had fought their last battle and learned that raw courage and skill were simply not enough in the face of the massive firepower and numbers the Red Army was hurling at the Germans. Even the Führer’s elite Fallschirmjäger had proven unable to stop the relentless westward onslaught of Stalin’s legions.
Nor was the damage confined to Army Group Centre’s front. On 20 August, while Witzig and his battalion were defending against the Red Army in the north, two German and two Romanian armies of Army Group South Ukraine disintegrated almost totally between the Black Sea and the Carpathian Mountains in the face of another overwhelming Russian attack. Romania now lay open to an advance by the Red Army, while German troops in Greece were cut off altogether from the Reich. The collapse of Army Group Centre and Army Group South Ukraine made August 1944 the Wehrmacht’s worst month of the entire war in terms of losses, with almost 278,000 German soldiers killed on the Eastern Front. Almost 170,000 more had been killed in July. And the number of Wehrmacht soldiers killed on the Eastern Front from July through September 1944 totalled almost 518,000, or 5,750 dead a day, the highest daily loss rate of the war.43
Now Hitler’s network of alliances, from Scandinavia to the Balkans, began to unravel. On 25 August the Romanian people overthrew Marshal Antonescu, renounced their alliance with Germany and declared war upon Hitler and the Reich. This meant the loss of the desperately needed Ploesti oilfields to the Wehrmacht at a time when the German oil industry was being obliterated by the Allied air forces. To make matters even worse, on 25 August, Bulgaria began negotiations with the Russians for an armistice and demanded the withdrawal of all German military personnel from its territory. At about the same time, a serious insurrection broke out in Slovakia, while Finland prepared to declare its alliance with Germany at an end, as it too sought an armistice with the Soviet Union.44
Soviet casualties were equally horrendous. The Red Army and 1st Polish Army had lost 180,000 men killed and suffered another almost 600,000 sick and wounded in Operation Bagration alone. But they had succeeded in shattering the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front and that success, in turn, forced the German High Command to transfer some 40–45 divisions to stem the Soviet onslaught and defend the Reich’s increasingly vulnerable eastern borders.45 In the meantime, the Western Allies were racing through France and into the Low Countries. On 25 August they moved into Paris; by 4 September they were in Antwerp, capturing the vital port undamaged. More ominously, Bagration also uncovered the roads to East Prussia and Berlin to an army fed on hate for the Germans and bent on vengeance. ‘Murder, arson, rape and devastation marked the trail of the Russian armies, excited as the latter had been by an unimaginable propaganda of hate,’ wrote Walter Goerlitz, in his authoritative history of the German General Staff:
Huge columns of refugees were moving westward. Often they were overtaken by Russian tanks, in which case they were massacred or crushed beneath their tracks. Ships carrying thousands of refugees were sunk by Russian submarines. All the horrors perpetuated in Russia by the S.S., all the deeds of shame committed in this ‘degenerate war’ of Weltanschauungen which Hitler had so impiously declared, were now revenged a hundred and a thousand fold, the innocent population of the German East being the victims. The culture which had taken centuries to build was buried within a matter of days.46
But it was much more than ‘an unimaginable propaganda of hate’ that drove the Red Army soldier. It was unadulterated rage for the tremendous scale of death and destruction Germany and the Wehrmacht had inflicted on the Soviet Union and its people. ‘Everything, from the deaths of beloved friends to the burning of cities, from the hunger of the children back at home to the fear of facing yet another hail of shells,’ writes Catherine Merridale, in her masterful and uniquely insightful book on the Red Army soldier at war, ‘everything . . . was blamed on the Germans.’ One Russian soldier summed up what awaited the inhabitants of Hitler’s Third Reich: ‘We will take revenge, revenge for all our sufferings.’ Another wrote home: ‘We are clenching our fists and moving unrelentingly towards the west.’47 With the Americans and British advancing in the west and the Russians pressing forward virtually unhindered in the east, the German people were about to reap the hate-filled whirlwind Hitler and his Wehrmacht had sown.