ONE OF THE MAIN TURNING points of the war was Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which was named for the medieval Roman emperor and launched on June 21, 1941.aa Hitler sent his forces east in what would become an all-or-nothing campaign. Indeed, the fate of Germany, the Soviet Union, and Europe hung in the balance. More than three million German soldiers, a half-million Axis troops, and hundreds of thousands of trucks, tanks, and horses crossed into Soviet territory in the largest invasion in world history.
The initial months of the operation went well for the Germans. They captured vast amounts of land and numerous cities along Russia’s western border while inflicting serious casualties on the outmatched Soviet forces. The numbers are without precedent in the annals of military history. More than three million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner in 1941 alone, most of whom later perished from starvation, and millions more were killed in combat. Hitler confidently predicted the Soviet Union would fall within a few weeks. However, the German advance was about to be halted. It would then come completely unhinged when a mixture of impassably muddy roads courtesy of Russia’s inadequate infrastructure and a rainy autumn, a bitterly cold winter, shortages of food and supplies, and Hitler’s megalomania doomed the invasion.
The powerful Nazi war machine was stopped just miles from Moscow by all these factors and the Red Army’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of men, which helped turn the tide of the invasion. In the single most deadly military operation in history, millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians were dead, but the Soviets held and Germany never recovered. It would only get worse for the Nazi regime and the German people.
Almost one year after the ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union commenced, the director of the epic Nazi propaganda film Herbert Selpin was summoned to Berlin, where he was later found dead. The finished product was soon banned inside Germany. Meanwhile, the movie sets were removed, the actors and film crew headed back to Berlin to begin another propaganda project, and the grand film was largely forgotten—at least inside Germany. The Cap Arcona was relegated once again to the dull drudgery of housing German sailors on the Polish coast, just as it had done before being cast as the Titanic in the film.
Captains and crews came and went, and the Cap Arcona rusted on the Polish coast from September 23, 1942, until March 1945.bb During the two and a half years in dock, the ocean liner again fell into disrepair. But the star of the propaganda film was about to get another leading role. The reason: the war was getting even worse for Germany.
BY 1944 YEARS OF WARFARE had drained Germany’s finances and the will of the populace, who had suffered through years of severe food and fuel rationing. Throughout the country electricity and water systems no longer functioned, while in Hitler’s Berlin residents queued for hours at food shops. The Nazi economy had collapsed, and the German people were reduced to scavenging for food. The reichsmark was not worth the paper on which it was printed, and a crude system of barter had emerged, whereby alcohol, cigarettes, and supplies were exchanged like currency.
It had become difficult to travel anywhere inside Germany, whether by car, boat, train, or airplane. Fuel was scarce, and roads, bridges, and railways were destroyed. Perhaps the main deterrent to travel, however, was the constant bombing campaign by the Allies, which made it unsafe to leave one’s home. Few cities in the country were safe from bombing; the Americans attacked by day, and British bombers came at night. Germany’s air defenses ceased to exist, yet the air-raid sirens continued their eerie call, reminding Germans of the hopelessness of their situation.
Both the western and the eastern fronts had collapsed. Indeed, the bloody but successful D-Day landing of the Allies at Normandy in June 1944 marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. By August Allied forces had fought their way through France and had liberated Paris. The march to Berlin continued but was fraught with peril. One of the obstacles was the “Siegfried line.”
Germany’s vaunted defensive line included hundreds of miles of tank traps, machine-gun nests, mines, and other defensive measures organized to deny the Allies entrance to German soil. Like the “Atlantic wall” on the European coast, it proved to be a formidable defensive network. Even though the “wall” and the “line” proved to be only temporary hurdles to the liberation of Europe, they did slow Allied gains and inflict many casualties.cc The result of the delay in the march to Berlin allowed the Russians to enter the important city first. Also, each day the Allied invasion was delayed meant more suffering in the concentration camps. The death toll of the Holocaust climbed as the Allies clawed their way across the Continent. Every day mattered.
Another factor impacting the Allies’ plans for invading Germany was the rumor that Hitler might retreat to Bavaria, the Austrian mountains at Tyrol near Innsbruck, or elsewhere to make a last stand. Reports suggested that his forces were stockpiling food and weapons in bunkers deep in the mountainous Austrian landscape. Other reports suggested that the Nazis planned to flee to Norway by way of the Baltic Sea in order to use the peninsula with its deep fjords and snowy peaks as a final redoubt. Either scenario would have resulted in the continuation of the war in terrain advantageous to the Nazis. Some Allied commanders advocated a lightning strike to prevent German forces and the Nazi command from escaping to Austria or Norway, but others favored a more methodical approach in order to limit Allied casualties. As the debate raged over a strategy on how to get to Berlin, few military planners factored in the loss of prisoners inside Germany’s concentration camps.
But the Allied bombing command did make a decision that would soon have grave consequences for many prisoners inside the camps. For months, American and British aircraft had been conducting a savagely effective air campaign, bombing targets deeper and deeper into Germany. The British air chief, Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, hoped the bombing campaign would destroy the will of the German people and military to fight. Accordingly, the targets were not restricted to just military units and bases or trucks, trains, oil refineries, weapons factories, and industrial targets. They also targeted cities.
On the evening of February 13, 1945, nearly 800 Lancaster bombers of the Royal Air Force dropped thousands of tons of bombs in two massive attacks. The target was the historic city of Dresden in the far East of Germany, near the Czech and Polish borders. The following night, 311 American B-17 bombers from the VIII Air Corps hit the city again. The city was leveled, and countless civilians, Allied prisoners of war, and inmates who had the misfortunate of being detained nearby in the concentration camp at Muehlberg were killed. The day the bombings ended, a reporter at the Allied Expeditionary Force headquarters filed a dispatch claiming that he had been told that the Allies had adopted a deliberate terror campaign targeting German civilians with the goal of bringing about the end of the war.
A month later, Prime Minister Winston Churchill signaled a shift in British policy when, on March 28, he drafted a message for his senior staff that said, “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.” In part because of the controversy, the British command decided on April 16, 1945, to formally end the widespread bombing of nonmilitary targets. Churchill also shifted primary responsibility for targeting along Germany’s northern and coastal airspace from bomber command to fighter command. The problem was that the latter did not have the intelligence or aerial reconnaissance capabilities that the bomber command enjoyed. Fighter command also lacked detailed data on the location of the concentration camps, an oversight that would, in a bizarre twist, soon jeopardize the Cap Arcona and thousands of prisoners.
THE WEHRMACHT WAS IN full retreat, as the Allies advanced from all directions into Germany and ultimately to Berlin. Some units fled back toward Berlin. The strict discipline that had defined the Nazi war machine was also in collapse, replaced by disarray and desertion among the troops and miscommunication at the top of the command structure. In Berlin many soldiers lacked weapons or adequate ammunition for the defense of the capital city, while troops on the front lines found that their resupply lines had become nonexistent.
Exactly three years after Germany invaded Russia, Operation Bagration began, when two million Soviet troops counterattacked. By late August 1944, the Soviets had seized Bucharest. In September they were in Estonia. That October the Red Army marched through Belgrade. Later that same month, they entered German East Prussia and began a ruthless campaign, plundering villages and murdering civilians. One of the first German communities taken by the Red Army in 1944 was Nemmersdorf, in the Gumbinnen district of East Prussia. Soviet troops set about brutalizing the population to the extent that any German villager shot outright was lucky.
Women were raped by Soviet soldiers, and their naked bodies were left strewn about the ground both as a warning to others and out of an utter disregard for humanity. Other victims were crucified or thrown into icy ponds and lakes to drown as a form of sport, while Russian soldiers callously wagered bets on the time it would take villagers to die. Other civilians suffered the fate of being tied down while Soviet tanks were driven over the bodies. One account of the Red Army’s assault on the people of East Prussia recorded that “children were shot indiscriminately . . . old men and boys castrated and their eyes gouged out before being killed or burned alive. . . . Women were found nailed to barn doors after being stripped naked and gang-raped, their bodies then used for target practice.”
Another eyewitness described countless gruesome murders and Soviet soldiers dragging families out of their homes. Those not killed were never heard of again. Another account told of an elderly couple who were “chased into the village pond and forced to stay there until they drowned in the icy waters. A man was hitched to a plow and driven until he keeled over, when a burst from a submachine gun finished him off. The proprietor of the Grumbkow estate, Herr von Livonius, had his arms and legs hacked off and was thrown, still alive, to the pigs.”
It was payback time for Nazi aggression. As these stories spread, panic ensued in eastern Germany and Prussia. Many Germans rushed westward and to the south to surrender to American and British forces rather than be caught on the eastern front. Others fighting in East Prussia committed self-inflicted wounds in hopes of being transferred back to Berlin. By 1945 entire communities were fleeing to the Baltic Sea to board ships headed out of Prussia and away from the Russians.
The Allied advance on all fronts meant that concentration camps were liberated. On July 24, 1944, the Soviets arrived at Majdanek, in Poland, the first concentration camp to fall into Allied hands. Like so many camps in Poland, Majdanek was unimaginably gruesome. As early as April 1942, the Schutzstaffel (SS) had killed 2,800 Jews there in one mass orgy of death. On November 3, 1943, a staggering 17,000 inmates were murdered, many with machine guns. Of the roughly 500,000 prisoners to arrive at or near Majdanek, about 200,000 of them died. Of those lost, roughly 125,000 were Jewish.
The Soviets also liberated the notorious camp at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. They found much of the camp destroyed and deserted, but there were still roughly 1,200 prisoners clinging to life. In haste, they had been abandoned as the Nazis fled the advancing Red Army. Just two weeks earlier, many of the prisoners were marched out of the camp in a last-minute effort to avoid their falling into Soviet hands. More than 1.5 million Jews had died at Auschwitz.
To make matters worse, some German units continued fighting and mounted spirited counteroffensives that stalled the Allied invasion. Throughout Nazi-occupied territories, partisans were murdered in alarming numbers in late 1944 and through the waning months of the war in 1945. Hitler also gave orders to “shoot any officers who retreated,” and the SS responded. At the same time, many of the young boys who were drafted to fight were quick to flee when the front lines collapsed. Any such soldier caught deserting was hanged with a sign around his neck reading, “I am a deserter. I was a coward in the face of the enemy.”
Every day and every delay by the Allies mattered.dd For the Allies, the final days of the war brought with them a series of questions and additional challenges beyond the obvious goal of destroying the last vestiges of Nazi resistance. Both sides were faced with the question of what to do about the concentration camps. For the Allies, the march to Berlin contained evidence of the shocking reality that the Nazis had established an extensive system of ruthless concentration camps and had murdered countless innocent people across the Continent. The sheer number of camps and the inhuman conditions of them shocked even the most battle-tested soldiers. Most military units were unprepared to handle the conditions of the camps. It also became apparent to the Allied forces that there might still be hundreds of thousands of prisoners in concentration camps throughout Germany, Poland, and other Nazi-occupied areas not yet liberated. The march to Berlin meant that each victory and each liberated camp spared lives from the crematoriums.
The fate of countless Allied and German soldiers as well as civilians inside Germany also hung in the balance. Soon, the timing of the Allied march to Berlin would even matter for an old ocean liner.
a The operation was announced on national radio the following morning by Goebbels, who said, “At this moment a march is taking place that, for its extent, compares with the greatest the world has ever seen. I have decided today to place the fate and future of the Reich and our people in the hands of our soldiers.”
b Captain F. Seeger was forced to abandon his command by his crew on January 21, 1943, whereupon First Officer G. Müller temporarily assumed control. Roughly one year later, Captain J. Gerdts took command of the ship, followed by Captain H. Bertram, who took control on March 1, 1945.
c One effort to subvert the Siegfried line was Operation Market-Garden, the largest airborne campaign at the time, overseen by British general Bernard Montgomery and launched on September 17, 1944. But, tragically, it too stalled and caused further delays. General Dwight Eisenhower was hesitant to undertake an “all-out offensive” that would incur high casualties. Rather, he reluctantly opted for a more cautious strategy for getting to Berlin. Sure enough, on the other side of Berlin, the Soviets ended up suffering perhaps three hundred thousand casualties in the battle for the German capital.
d In February 1945, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met at Yalta on the shores of the Black Sea. After much wrangling, the Crimean Conference produced an agreement to conduct coordinated attacks on the remaining forces in Germany.