AT THE BEGINNING OF 1945, the eastern front stretched 2200 kilometres, roughly from the mouth of the Niemen River (near Tilsit), south through Poland, then southeast toward Lake Balaton in Hungary and farther south into Yugoslavia.1 In addition, two major positions were cut off from the encircled Army Group North: on the Courland Peninsula in western Latvia and in the Hungarian capital. In January 1945, over six million Soviet soldiers were positioned along the long front. From east of Königsberg in the north to east of Lake Balaton below Budapest in the south, seven army groups stood along the front (the cities and landmarks mentioned represent latitude, not position): the Third Belorussian Front under General Chernyakhovskii at Königsberg; the Second Belorussian Front under Rokossovskii north of Warsaw; the First Belorussian Front under Zhukov south of Warsaw; the First Ukrainian Front under Ivan Konev at Sandomierz; the Fourth Ukrainian Front under Yeremenko on the same latitude as Brno (German: Brünn); the Second Ukrainian Front under Malinovsky northeast of Budapest; and the Third Ukrainian Front under Fyodor Tolbukhin at Lake Balaton. These armies planned four thrusts along this long front: toward the Baltic, Berlin, Prague, and Vienna.2
Such a massive buildup could not go unnoticed even to those who so much wanted not to notice it. Army Chief of General Staff Heinz Guderian, in a series of heated exchanges with Hitler, urged the dictator to see the dangers of the Soviet buildup; to withdraw troops from the Courland pocket for the defence of the Reich; to establish a forward line of defence (Hauptkampflinie) that would serve as a buffer for the greater, second defence line (Großkampflinie); and, above all, to prepare the Wehrmacht for a Soviet onslaught predicted to occur “towards the middle of January” at the latest.3 Himmler dismissed the threat of a Soviet attack to Guderian’s face: “It’s all an enormous bluff.”4 Guderian replied: “The Eastern Front is a house of cards. If there is one breakthrough, it will collapse.”5
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ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY 12, at 4:00, that breakthrough occurred with a ferocity and effectiveness that even Guderian failed to anticipate. Konev opened the assault in the centre of the long front. As “fierce, rolling fire” rained down on the Fourth Panzer Army, forward battalions seized the first line of German trenches.6 They dove to the ground before reaching the second, for Konev unleashed the great Soviet guns once more, pounding the Germans at a depth of ten kilometres for almost two hours.7 The onslaught ripped through German defences. The frozen ground exploded everywhere. Bunkers collapsed, crushing their occupants. Bodies flew through the air as the wounded screamed below them.8 Those who survived stumbled into Soviet captivity “ashen and trembling.”9
The bombardment destroyed the Fourth Panzer Army headquarters, killed 25 percent of that army’s men, and wrecked 60 percent of the German artillery.10 And it was only the beginning. Three armies surrounded and captured Kielce, southeast of Warsaw, and Konev pushed home his advantage by ordering three armies and one tank corps to attack on a broad front toward Krakow. By the seventeenth, Konev’s forces were pulling up to the city, which would fall two days later. The road to the river Oder was open.11
As Konev launched his offensive, Yeremenko’s Fourth Ukrainian Front moved toward the Skawa River and the southern Polish city of Rybnik. Two weeks into the offensive, riflemen from the Thirty-Eighth Army stumbled upon a large, prison-like structure denuded of German troops. It was Auschwitz. They found 7,600 emaciated and traumatized survivors, a seven-ton pile of human hair, 348,820 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s coats and dresses, and the overpowering stench of death emanating from now-cold ovens.12
On January 14, two days after Konev had attacked, Zhukov launched what was in fact the main offensive. Within a day, his forces reached the Pilica River, and by nightfall, the bridgeheads on the western side were linking up along a three-hundred-mile front.13 By January 17, the Germans had abandoned a Warsaw that they had so meticulously destroyed, and on January 19, the Soviet Eighth Guards Army captured Łódź (German: Lodsch). To the north of Łódź, Zhukov’s forces gained speed along western Poland’s good road network, while to the south, Zhukov’s left flank hooked up with Konev’s right in a concerted push.14
Words cannot capture the effect on the Germans: the Red Army destroyed the Ninth and Fourth Panzer Armies, part of Army Group A under the command of Generaloberst Josef Harpe, cutting through a mangled mass of broken machines and smashed bodies of what had once been the world’s most effective military. Large numbers of the divisions’ shattered and dazed remnants scrambled back toward the Reich.15 Others drifted aimlessly, resigned to death or captivity. By January 20, just over a week into the offensive, the Soviets had blown the entire German front wide open.
To the north of Zhukov, Rokossovskii’s Second Belorussian Front pushed approximately sixty kilometres into German positions before being ordered, to the commander’s dismay, to swing north and northeast toward East Prussia, cutting it off from the Reich. East Prussia, particularly Königsberg, had been the focus of the Third Belorussian Front’s efforts since January 13. Smashing his way though German defences in one battle after another, Chernyakhovskii pushed his way slowly toward Kant’s city. Rokossovskii, once he had overcome his fury at the change in orders, threw himself into the attack and launched a rapid, brutal assault toward the same goal.16
As they pushed into the German Reich, Soviet soldiers combined hardened warfare with atavistic revenge. They burned villages and small towns, shot German officials in the back of the head, and mowed down civil servants, mayors, and even entire families at their dining tables with sudden bursts of machine-gun fire.17 Soldiers raped German women. As columns of refugees attempted to flee west, Soviet tanks rolled over them, crushing horses and humans alike. Blood, exploded brains, and intestines seeped into the snow among the corpses and severed limbs. Families outside the tanks’ direct path huddled whimpering at the roadside or in ditches, the father often brandishing a pistol with which he would shoot his wife, children, and then himself. When reports of Soviet behaviour drifted back to Keitel, he bemoaned the fact that the German civilian population had lost its valour.18
Rokossovskii’s forces took Tannenberg on January 21; the Germans had withdrawn, taking the remains of Hindenburg and his wife with them and blowing up the massive memorial to Hindenburg’s August 1914 victory as they withdrew. Before the end of the month, Rokossovskii’s men reached the sea, cutting off East Prussia and trapping the German Third Panzer Army, the Fourth Army, and eight divisions (six infantry, two motorized) from the Second Army.
Hitler, whose meddling had helped ensure this military catastrophe, responded the only way he knew how: with fury and firings. Seething against every real or imagined tactical withdrawal, he sacked Generaloberst Georg-Hans Reinhardt, Commander of Army Group Centre, and Fourth Army commander Friedrich Hoßbach. He replaced them with Ferdinand Schörner and Lothar Rendulic, two generals who had previously established a record of stiffening morale and stabilizing fronts through the judicious shooting of German recruits, but neither of these men could change the outcome.19
In a move that reached even more brazenly for the absurd, Hitler created an “Army Group Vistula” (“Heeresgruppe Weichsel”) under the command of Heinrich Himmler. It was a paper army made up of the wrecked fragments of the Second and Ninth Armies, and Commander Himmler’s military expertise did not extend far beyond firing a gun—if even that far. The choice was ideological. “Hitler,” writes military historian Albert Seaton, “was of the conviction that loyalty, reliability, and fanaticism outweighed military ability and experience. Of these latter qualities Himmler had none.”20 Added to these changes were a few tactical movements, but given the shortages that he had in large measure created, these involved robbing one beleaguered sector to reinforce another.21 Rather predictably, Hitler also sought to shift the blame to his generals, implying that they had kept the truth from him in the run-up to the Soviet offensive. “I order,” he said in the last week of January, “… that every report sent to me directly or through the usual channels contains the unvarnished truth. I will in future punish most severely any attempt to conceal the truth whether this has arisen intentionally, through slackness, or through neglect.”22
Guderian continued to tell the truth to little effect. By now frequently shouting at Hitler, he demanded that troops in the Courland pocket, Italy, Norway, and the Balkans be withdrawn and gathered for a counterstrike against Soviet forces from the Cottbus-Glogau line. The Soviets’ rapid advances, he argued, had opened gaps and left lead armies thinned out and short on supplies. Hitler refused, transferring instead the Sixth SS Panzer Army toward western Hungary.23 That army, led by Sepp Dietrich, launched a counterattack in the southern sector on February 17. It succeeded in pushing the Soviets back over the Hron River running through central Slovakia, and the SS pushed several miles into Soviet lines. But in the end, it failed: after losing 500 tanks, 300 guns, and 40,000 men, the counterattack ground to a halt on March 15. The German front teetered, then collapsed as Soviet tanks surged forward, crushing the few tanks in their path, as the SS, including Dietrich himself, fled.24 German resistance in Hungary collapsed, and by April 1, the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts were at the gates of Vienna.
Even before the Sixth SS Panzer Army shed its lifeblood in the wrong sector, the Soviets launched the devastating assaults that Guderian had feared. On February 10, as Guderian endured a hysterical rant from Hitler, Rokossovskii launched an attack to destroy German forces in East Pomerania and to make a drive for Stettin (Szczecin).25 Chernyakhovskii had already received orders a day earlier to destroy the Fourth Army in East Prussia. The two Soviet commanders launched their attacks simultaneously on the tenth to little immediate effect. General der Panzertruppe Walther Wenck launched a counterattack with the Third Panzer Army on February 15, but this got nowhere after Wenck crashed his car and temporarily incapacitated himself. The most notable Soviet success in February occurred in Posen (Poznań), where Chuikov’s Eighth Guards Army took the city after a month-long battle that ended when they pushed the Germans, who defended every block, back toward the city’s citadel.
Shortly before Posen fell, Guderian made another stab, if a futile one, at reason: he told Ribbentrop that an armistice had to be sought on at least one front.26 Ribbentrop made his move on February 16. He sent a communiqué to the German Legation in Dublin and asked that it be passed on to the Americans and British.27 The communiqué spoke of Germany’s “iron determination” to fight on against the Allies, and assured that “Germany and her Allies cannot be conquered.”28 After outlining a not wholly inaccurate picture of Soviet designs on all of Eastern Europe, France, Italy, and Britain, Ribbentrop assured his would-be Anglo-American audience that Germany “desires freedom for all nations in Europe” and that the “Jewish question in other countries does not interest Germany.” He then urged that the Americans and British join Germany against the Soviet Union. As evidence that this former champagne salesman’s diplomatic skills had hardly improved since he was the laughingstock of London, Ribbentrop admitted that he was unaware of which “Englishmen and Americans are available at [the Irish] end.” The ludicrous offer went nowhere, of course, not least because Ultra intercepts had told the Allies in August 1944 of plans by Ribbentrop to make peace with Stalin in order to concentrate all forces in the west!29 In the end, the sheer idiocy of the missive mattered little: no German appeal for an armistice had even the remotest chance of success at this point in the war.
Following the relatively poor February results, due in part to stretched supply lines following the huge early advances, the Soviets modified their plan, ordering Rokossovskii to turn east and attack Danzig (Gdańsk) on February 24 and Zhukov to move toward Kolberg (Kołobrzeg) on March 1.30 Both fronts swept toward the Baltic Coast. Zhukov reached Kolberg on March 4, while Rokossovskii cleared Danzig by the end of March. Chuikov’s forces, meanwhile, raced from Posen toward the Oder bridgeheads. On March 29, they launched an artillery assault on Küstrin (Kostrzyn), a fortress town straddling the Oder. After shells pounded the fortress, Soviet infantrymen stormed it, breaking in and engaging the defending Germans in close combat. At noon, the garrison surrendered, the bodies of its men strewn throughout the fortress.31 Zhukov was across the Oder.
To the south, Konev, the only marshal giving Zhukov a serious run for his money in the race for military glory, launched on February 8 an assault north of Breslau (Wrocław). His First Ukrainian Front encircled Glogau (Głogów) and then did the same to Breslau, both of which had been declared fortresses. Silesians fled in conflicting directions: some of those who had begun escaping Breslau rushed back into the city, where they suffered the agonies of a siege that did not end until May 6, while almost all others fled west. The great flight and expulsion—die Flucht und Vertreibung, which would become the numerically greatest ethnic cleansing in human history, denuding Eastern Europe of German populations that in some cases had been there for centuries—was under way. By March 30, as Zhukov crossed the Oder, Konev had conquered Upper Silesia. These ambitious commanders set their sights on the battered and desperate streets of Berlin.32
The great assault occurred in darkness on April 16. Facing the German-held Seelow Heights (Seelower Höhen), Zhukov’s First Belorussian Front turned on great floodlights intended to blind the Germans.33 Zhukov launched a massive artillery raid with bombing support, but the artillery too often missed its intended target, and the great lights blinded his own infantry instead of his enemy’s.34 The Germans responded with fierce resistance, and Zhukov was forced to report that the operation was not going according to plan.35
To the south, General Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front opened with a more conservative but more effective artillery barrage on German formations on the river Neiße.36 When his forces moved under a smokescreen, they were able to make a deep cut into the Fourth Panzer Army’s lines; several divisions disintegrated, and Konev pushed north toward Berlin.37 His advance panicked both the Germans and Zhukov, who feared that the commander of the First Ukrainian would enter the capital before he did. It was an entirely reasonable fear: the original plan had been to allow Zhukov to cover himself in glory by taking the capital, but it foundered on the fact that Konev’s forces were also needed to get the job done. Stalin solved the problem by assigning the capital to whomever got there first.38
Driven partly by jealousy between the two great commanders (men in some of Zhukov’s patrols got themselves killed trying to find out how far Konev had advanced), German defences were broken within three days. Zhukov was within firing range of Berlin. On April 20, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, the first shells landed in the capital, and British and American air forces marked the Führer’s birthday with a particularly heavy raid on the city. By the next day, Soviet forces were advancing street by street. Zhukov’s forces entered from the east, Konev’s advanced from the south, and Rokossovskii’s men of the Second Belorussian Front encircled Berlin from the north. By April 25, the city was entirely surrounded. Shells shattered buildings and bullets sprayed through streets as Konev advanced toward Anhalter Station (near Potsdamer Platz) and Zhukov toward the Reichstag. All the while, bands of SS roamed the streets, hanging civilians and soldiers who showed any desire to surrender. On April 30, Hitler killed himself. The next day, Soviet troops were advancing through a storm of fire toward the Reichstag.
As Soviet forces were closing in on the very centre of Berlin, the bulk of the Second Belorussian Front, led by Rokossovskii, moved west across northern Germany to link up with British forces. Rokossovskii ordered the right spearhead to move through the Mecklenburg Lake District over Prenzlau, Waren, Rostock, and Wismar (the last within 120 kilometres of Hamburg). One corps split off and moved north toward Pasewalk and then northwest toward Anklam, not far from the Baltic Sea. From Anklam, the corps split again: the southern flank moved toward Schwerin, Wittenberge, and the Elbe. Two divisions with large numbers of tanks, heavy artillery, and bombers moved northwest toward Greifswald, a small Hanseatic city of approximately forty thousand inhabitants on the Baltic coast.
As they did, the commander of the city, Rudolf Petershagen, anticipating these movements on a map, raised his eyes and looked out the window. He imagined the city’s ancient walls, medieval houses, and brick Gothic churches exploding into fragments and dust.39
Notes
1. Specifically from Tukums (Latvia) south to Memel-Klaipeda-Augustów, cutting southwest to Warsaw, somewhat southeast to Sandomierz, and then following a line through Jasło-Košice-Esztergom-Balaton and ending on the Drava River.
2. Albert Seaton, The Russo-German War 1941–45 (London: Arthur Baker Limited, 1971), 522.
3. Erickson, Road to Berlin, 432.
4. Ibid., 430, 447.
5. From Hastings, Armageddon, 279, with a slight altering of the translation.
6. Erickson, Road to Berlin, 456.
7. Seaton, Russo-German War, 534.
8. Imagery in this paragraph drawn from Hastings, Armageddon, 280–1, and Erickson, Road to Berlin, 456.
9. Erickson, Road to Berlin, 456.
10. Hastings, Armageddon, 280.
11. Erickson, Road to Berlin, 458.
12. Statistics from Hastings, Armageddon, 285, and Weinberg, World at Arms, 801.
13. Hastings, Armageddon, 281.
14. Erickson, Road to Berlin, 460.
15. Weinberg, World at Arms, 800.
16. Erickson, Road to Berlin, 464–6.
17. Details in this paragraph from ibid., 466–7.
18. Seaton, Russo-German War, 546.
19. Weinberg, World at Arms, 801.
20. Seaton, Russo-German War, 539.
21. Ibid., 535.
22. West Europe, January 24, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3483, TOO 1750.
23. Seaton, Russo-German War, 536.
24. Erickson, Road to Berlin, 510–4.
25. Ibid., 518–9.
26. Seaton, Russo-German War, 540.
27. Communiqué from Ribbentrop to the German Legation, Dublin, February 16, 1945, UKNA, HW 1/3539.
28. “Iron mood” in the text, but this is a slightly loose translation of what must have been the original German.
29. Japanese Plan for German-Soviet Peace: Ambassador Oshima’s enquiries, August 28, 1944, UKNA, HW 1/3191.
30. I am grateful to Richard Bessel for drawing my attention to the point on supply lines.
31. Erickson, Road to Berlin, 524.
32. Ibid., 526, 528; Hastings, Armageddon, 299.
33. Seaton, Russo-German War, 567.
34. Richard Lakowski, Seelow 1945: die Entscheidungsschlacht an der Oder, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Brandenburgisches Verlagshaus, 1996), 75–7.
35. Ibid., 78.
36. Erickson, Road to Berlin, 556.
37. Ibid., 564, 567.
38. See ibid., 568–72.
39. Rudolf Petershagen, Gewissen in Aufruhr ([East] Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1966), 34.