In August 1944, in an attempt to seize back control of Warsaw, the Poles staged an uprising against the Nazis. They wished to circumvent the ‘liberation’ and control of the capital by Soviet forces lying in wait just ten miles east of the city. Stalin refused the western Allies permission to parachute food and supplies in from his airfields. During two months of intense fighting, the Germans eventually subdued the uprising, laying waste to the city, before evacuating ahead of the Soviets’ arrival soon afterwards.
Polish insurgents during the Warsaw Uprising, September 1944
Following their success at Kursk, the Soviets pushed the Axis back, retaking Kharkov, Smolensk, Kiev and liberating the besieged city of Leningrad on 27 January 1944. Hitler issued numerous ‘stand or die’ orders, not allowing his troops space to withdraw and thereby giving them no room to counter-attack. Depleted of men and resources, Hitler’s war on two fronts could not be sustained. On 22 June 1944, the Soviet Union launched its great counter-offensive against the Nazis, Operation Bagration, exactly three years on from the German launch of Operation Barbarossa. Like Stalin in 1941, Hitler was shocked into inactivity by the scale and the size of the Soviet offensive. During August and September, the Soviets advanced into Romania (who then declared war on her former allies), Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia (aided by Tito’s communist partisans) and neutralized Finland.
In October 1944, the Soviets entered East Prussia and took the village of Nemmersdorf. When, days later, the Nazis temporarily recaptured the village, they found scenes of atrocity, including rape and murder of women, children and the elderly. The Nazis seized on the propaganda opportunity this afforded them. On 30 January 1945, the German ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff (named after the assassinated German leader of the Swiss Nazi Party) was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine while trying to evacuate from East Prussia, and sunk with the loss of almost 10,000 civilians, almost half children – the greatest loss of life in maritime history (over six times the number who died on the Titanic).
The fury of the Red Army prompted a mass panicked surge westwards of German civilians, desperate to get away from the advancing Russians. By February 1945, the Soviets had reached the River Oder, only ninety miles east of Berlin, while, a month later, the Anglo-American advance had reached the Rhine. As the Soviets pushed on to Berlin, they came across the death camps and countless scenes of Nazi barbarism and, angered, subsequently indulged in mass rape of German women. Hitler decreed that the slightest sign of defeatism should be punished by summary execution, and made up the numbers of his severely depleted forces by using Volkssturm, young boys and men over fifty. But by this time, Hitler had given up on his people, believing them not worthy of him: ‘The nation has proved itself weak … Besides, those who remain after the battle are of little value; for the good have fallen.’ Stalin was determined his men should take Berlin ahead of the western Allies – it was, after all, his countrymen that had shed most blood in winning the war. By 25 April, Soviet troops, moving in from the north and south, converged at Potsdam, west of Berlin, thereby encircling the capital, and, on the same day, Soviet and American troops met up on the River Elbe.