The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  The troops in the Heiligenbeil encirclement, with their backs to the sea, had held off the Soviet forces around them thanks only to the gunnery of the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the Lützow. On 13 March, however, the Red Army attacked in force.

  Troops in another smaller pocket at the port of Rosenberg were refused permission by Hitler to evacuate by sea. They were destroyed in an assault on 28 March. ‘The port of Rosenberg was looking like a kasha of metal, dirt and flesh,’ wrote a Red Army lieutenant to his mother. ‘Corpses of Fritzes covered the ground. What was here dwarfs the events on the Minsk highway in 1944. One walks on corpses, sits down to rest on corpses, one has one’s meals on corpses. For about ten kilometres there are two corpses of Fritzes on each square metre… PoWs are being driven in battalions, with their commanders in front. I can’t understand why we bother to take them prisoners. We’ve got so many already, and here is another fifty thousand. They walk without any guards like sheep.’

  The Samland Peninsula west of Königsberg was defended by a mixture of army and Volkssturm troops trying to defend the evacuations by sea from the port of Pillau. An officer in the 551st Volksgrenadier Division described how they were serenaded with loudspeakers, broadcasting music interspersed with messages in German urging them to lay down their arms. ‘But there was no question of that, because in our mind’s eye we could still see the women of Krattlau and Ännchenthal who had been raped to death, and we knew that behind us thousands of women and children had yet to make the decision to evacuate.’

  In Königsberg itself, members of the Feldgendarmerie, known as ‘chain-hounds’ because of the metal gorgette worn round their neck, searched cellars and ruined houses for men trying to avoid service in the Volkssturm. Many civilians longed desperately for the city to surrender to end their suffering, but General Otto Lasch had the strictest instructions from Hitler to fight to the very end. Gauleiter Koch, having fled early on and evacuated his own family to safety, now returned from time to time in a Storch plane to see that his orders were fulfilled.

  Königsberg had strong defences, with old forts and a moat combined with new bunkers and earthworks. At the end of March Marshal Vasilevsky, who had taken over command of the 3rd Belorussian Front after Chernyakhovsky was killed by a shell, ordered a massive assault. It was a chaotic operation, with Soviet artillery and aircraft frequently killing and wounding their own troops by mistake. The Red Army’s casualties were horrific, so when its troops finally made their way into the fortress city they showed no pity, even to civilians in houses with white sheets hung from the windows in surrender. Women were soon begging their attackers to kill them. Heart-rending screams could be heard coming from ruins in all directions. Thousands of civilians and soldiers committed suicide.

  General Lasch finally surrendered on 10 April, and was promptly condemned to death in absentia on Hitler’s order. The Gestapo arrested his family under the Nazi Sippenhaft law of reprisal. A group of SS and police fought on in the castle, but they too were soon killed in the blazing fire, which almost certainly destroyed the precious panels of the Amber Room, looted during the siege of Leningrad and brought back to Königsberg.

  There had been an estimated 120,000 civilians in Königsberg at the start of the siege. The NKVD counted 60,526 at the end. Some of the Volks-sturm were shot out of hand as ‘partisans’ because they had no uniform. Everyone else, with many women included, was marched off for forced labour, either in the region or back in the Soviet Union. The East Prussian campaign was finally over. Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front had lost 159,490 men dead and wounded, while the 3rd Belorussian Front suffered 421,763 casualties. Yet, even with these sacrifices, the war was not yet won. The German army at bay was still a dangerous beast. It fought on, whether prompted by fear of retribution for war crimes in the Soviet Union, or fear of the Bolsheviks and slave labour in Siberia. There were growing numbers of deserters, but the threat of the ‘flying courts martial’ issuing summary sentences, and the SS and Feldgendarmerie hanging any they caught, certainly had an effect. As a senior Red Army officer observed: ‘Morale is low, but discipline is strong.’

  47

  Americans on the Elbe

  FEBRUARY–APRIL 1945

  American commanders had always criticized Montgomery for his caution, yet Eisenhower became extremely cautious himself after the sur prise attack in the Ardennes. The counter-attack against the bulge had been slow and deliberate, allowing Model to withdraw the bulk of his forces. At one stage, Eisenhower did not expect to cross the Rhine until May, believing it would be in spate until then. He greatly over-estimated the fighting power of the German armies facing him, which were in fact crippled by fuel and ammunition shortages. Speer’s achievements in the mass production of armaments in 1944 had simply not been matched by the munitions industry.

  ‘The Germans just don’t seem to understand,’ was a frequent complaint by American soldiers. Why did they continue to fight when the war was so obviously lost? General Patton had asked a captured German colonel the same question in November. ‘It is the fear of Russia that is forcing us to use every man who can carry a weapon,’ he replied. Some historians have argued that the Germans fought to the last because of the Allies’ insistence on unconditional surrender, but this was not a major factor. Roosevelt and Churchill were convinced that the German people, after the delusions over their defeat in 1918, had to be forced to recognize this time that they were totally defeated. The Morgenthau Plan, on the other hand, had been a major blunder.

  Rather more to the point was the knowledge of senior Nazis that they would be executed for war crimes. Hitler had no illusions. Surrender in any form was anathema to him, and his entourage knew that the war could not end as long as he still lived. Hitler’s greatest fear was not execution, but of being captured and taken back to Moscow in a cage. His plan had always been to implicate the military and civilian hierarchy in the crimes of the Nazi state, so that they could not dissociate themselves from it when there was no further hope.

  At the beginning of February 1945, the US First Army began its offensive south of the Hürtgen Forest in freezing conditions. On 9 February, Hodges’s troops at last took the Roer dam near Schmidt. That same day the French First Army, supported by US armoured divisions, eliminated the Colmar pocket. Bradley’s offensive, led by Major General Matthew B. Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps, went well, thanks to the great fighting qualities of his paratroopers. But the crossing of the River Sauer, swollen by floodwaters in a sudden thaw, cost many casualties and took three days. The Westwall was breached and many more German troops on the central sectors of the front were now ready to surrender.

  To Bradley’s consternation, Eisenhower then halted Collins’s VII Corps advancing towards Cologne. This was to allow Montgomery the priority in supplies for Operation Veritable, an attack south-east from Nijmegen through the Reichswald between the Rhine and the Maas. There the Germans fought back with every division they could scrape together, and it was a miserable battle in rain and sleet. There was no room for manoeuvre between the rivers, and the German defences in the Reichswald were manned with determination by Student’s paratroopers. The ground was still sodden, with tanks casting tracks in the glutinous mud and unable to operate effectively in the woods. It gave the British a taste of what the Hürtgen had been like for the Americans. They were not helped when they reached the ancient city of Cleve. Harris’s bombers had smashed the city for once with high explosive instead of incendiaries, which made it far harder to capture because the Germans fought from the ruins.

  The German concentration against the British offensive did at least give Simpson’s Ninth Army a better chance when it crossed the River Roer on 19 February, but the inundated flood plain on both sides made it a difficult and messy operation. German civilians could only pray that their own troops retreated before too much damage was done to their towns and villages. They also assisted the growing number of young soldiers trying to desert. On 1 March Patton’s Third Army took Tr
ier. He scented blood and rapid advances, and pushed his divisional commanders on with his coruscating language.

  Once the British Second Army had reached the Rhine at Wesel on 10 March, Montgomery began preparations for his great setpiece crossing, a model of Staff College planning, with no fewer than 59,000 engineers involved. The assault would include 21st Army Group, Simpson’s Ninth Army and the drop of two airborne divisions on the east bank. The para-troopers and glider-borne infantry suffered far more casualties than the amphibious attack. Americans made caustic comments about the massive build-up and the time it took.

  Montgomery’s thunder was stolen before he had started. On 7 March, south of Bonn, the 9th Armored Division had seized the bridge at Remagen, which was partly destroyed by demolition charges. Showing great dash, the division grabbed the opportunity and was across before the Germans could react. On hearing the news, Hitler ordered that the officers in command should be executed immediately. He sacked Rundstedt for the third time and replaced him with Kesselring. He also ordered massive reinforcements to crush the bridgehead. This stripped other sectors and Patton’s Third Army, which had been clearing the Palatinate region on the west bank of the Rhine at speed, made several crossings south of Koblenz.

  A report of the coup de main at Remagen was immediately passed back to Moscow by Major General I. A. Susloparov, the Red Army liaison officer at SHAEF headquarters. The next morning, Stalin ordered Zhukov to fly back to Moscow, even though he was directing his armies in Pomerania. He was driven straight to Stalin’s dacha, where the Soviet leader had been recuperating from stress. The Vozhd took him out into the garden where they walked and talked. Zhukov briefed him on Pomerania and the state of the Oder bridgeheads. Stalin then spoke of the Yalta conference, and said that Roosevelt had been most friendly. Only as Zhukov was about to leave after tea did Stalin reveal the reason for his summons. ‘Go to the Stavka,’ he said, ‘and look at the calculations on the Berlin operation with Antonov. We will meet here tomorrow at 13.00.’

  Antonov and Zhukov, who both sensed the urgency of Stalin’s order, worked through most of the night. They knew they had to take ‘into account the action of our allies’, as Zhukov acknowledged later. From the moment Stalin heard that the Americans were across the Rhine, he knew that the race for Berlin was on. It was just as well that Zhukov and Antonov worked through the night, because Stalin brought forward the meeting and came into Moscow for it, although he was still weak.

  Stalin had two vital reasons for wanting to take Berlin before the Allies. ‘The lair of the fascist Beast’ was the key symbol of victory after all the Soviet Union had suffered, and Stalin had no intention of allowing any other flag to fly over the city. Berlin had also been the centre for Nazi Germany’s atomic research, mainly at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Dahlem. Through his spies, Stalin was well aware of the Manhattan Project in the United States and its progress towards creating an atomic bomb. The Soviet nuclear research programme, Operation Borodino, had received full priority, but the Russians were short of uranium, which they hoped to seize in Berlin. Soviet intelligence, although informed of every detail of the Manhattan Project, had no idea that the bulk of the uranium and most of the scientists they wanted had been evacuated from Berlin to Haigerloch in the Black Forest.

  At the meeting on 9 March, Stalin approved the outline plan for the Berlin operation drawn up by Zhukov and Antonov. The Stavka worked furiously on the details. The main problem was the time needed by Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front to complete the clearance of Pomerania. It would then have to redeploy along the lower Oder up to Stettin, so that it could attack at the same time as Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front opposite Berlin, and Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front to the south on the River Neisse.

  Stalin’s main fear was that the Germans would open their western front to the British and Americans, and transfer troops east to face the Red Army. His paranoia led him to suspect that the western Allies were still capable of making a secret deal with Germany. American talks in Berne with SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, discussing a possible surrender in north Italy, had aroused his worst fears. On 27 March, just before the Stavka plans were finalized, a Reuters report from 21st Army Group boasted that British and American troops were meeting hardly any German resistance.

  Anglo-American relations came under strain again at this time, because Montgomery assumed that he would be given the task of advancing to Berlin. But on 30 March Eisenhower issued his orders. 21st Army Group would head for Hamburg and Denmark. Montgomery lost Simpson’s Ninth Army, which would form the northern pincer movement on the Ruhr defended by Generalfeldmarschall Model’s army group, while the US First Army would encircle it from the south. Bradley’s armies would then head for Leipzig and Dresden. The main thrust was to be for central and southern Germany. Eisenhower insisted that Berlin was ‘not the logical nor the most desirable objective for the forces of the Western Allies’. He had seized on some speculative intelligence which suggested that Hitler would fight to the end in an ‘Alpine fortress’ in the south.

  Montgomery was not the only one who was furious. Churchill and the British chiefs of staff were horrified by this change of direction away from Berlin, which the supreme commander had not discussed with them. Churchill had been with Eisenhower less than a week before on the banks of the Rhine to watch Montgomery’s great operation at Wesel, and the supreme commander had not even hinted at his change in thinking. To make matters worse, Eisenhower had already communicated all the details to Stalin without even warning his British deputy, Air Chief Marshal Tedder. This signal, SCAF-252, became a cause of considerable friction. Eisenhower assured Stalin that he had no intention of advancing on Berlin. His main thrust would head further south.

  Churchill feared that Marshall and Eisenhower were far too keen to placate Stalin when the spirit of Yalta had already turned sour. In Romania, Vyshinsky had installed a puppet government at the end of February. He ignored the protests of the Allied Control Commission that his act was a blatant contravention of the Declaration on Liberated Europe agreed at Yalta, under which governments representing all democratic parties would organize free elections. More and more reports meanwhile indicated that the NKVD in Poland was arresting and shooting members of the Home Army, accusing them of helping the Nazis. Some 91,000 Poles were arrested and deported to the Soviet Union.

  On 17 March Molotov angrily refused to allow any western representatives to enter Poland to assess the situation there, in another overt contravention of the Yalta agreement. He pretended that it was an insult to the Communist provisional government in Warsaw, which the Americans and British refused to recognize until elections had been held. Molotov knew the British and American position on forming a new Polish government. This information had come from Donald Maclean, the British spy in Washington, and perhaps also from Alger Hiss in the State Department.

  In Soviet eyes the definition of ‘fascist’ included anyone who did not follow the orders of the Communist Party. On 28 March sixteen representatives of the Home Army and its political wing were invited for discussions by the Soviet authorities. Although given guarantees of safe-conduct, they were immediately arrested by the NKVD and taken to Moscow. They were later put on trial, and in 1946 their leader General Leopold Okulicki was murdered in prison. Churchill tried to prompt Roosevelt into a ‘showdown’, but the American President, although shaken by Stalin’s bad faith, wanted to ‘minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible’.

  British indignation was prompted mainly by Eisenhower’s obstinate refusal to accept that there were political implications in his strategy. He believed that his task was to finish the war in Europe as rapidly as possible, and he did not share British concerns about Stalin and Poland. Senior British officers referred to Eisenhower’s deference to Stalin as ‘Have a go, Joe’, a call used by prostitutes in London when soliciting American soldiers. Eisenhower may have been politically naive, but it was Churchill who demonstrated a more serious failure to
grasp geo-political reality at this moment. In one sense at least, the decisions at Yalta and his own percentage agreement were irrelevant. Ever since the Teheran conference at the end of 1943 when Stalin, supported by Roosevelt, had defined Allied strategy in the west, Europe was bound to be divided in Stalin’s favour. The western Allies were finding that they could liberate half of Europe only at the cost of re-enslaving the other half.

  Stalin still suspected that Eisenhower’s frankness about Allied intentions was a trick. On 31 March he received the American ambassador Averell Harriman and Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, his British counterpart, in the Kremlin. They discussed the overall plan which Eisenhower had described in his signal, SCAF-252, and his intention to ignore Berlin. Stalin said that it seemed a good one, but first he must consult his staff.

  The very next morning, which happened to be 1 April, Marshals Zhukov and Konev were summoned to Stalin’s office. ‘Are you aware how the situation is shaping up?’ he asked them. They were clearly not quite sure what they were supposed to say and replied cautiously.

  ‘Read the telegram to them,’ he told General S. M. Shtemenko, the Stavka chief of operations. This message claimed that Montgomery would head for Berlin, and that Patton’s Third Army would turn from its drive towards Leipzig and Dresden to attack Berlin from the south. Stalin was presumably putting pressure on the two front commanders with a faked document, which bore little relation to SCAF-252.

  ‘Well, then,’ Stalin said, staring at his two marshals. ‘Who is going to take Berlin: are we or are the Allies?’

  ‘It is we who shall take Berlin,’ Konev replied immediately, ‘and we will take it before the Allies.’ Konev was evidently keen to beat Zhukov to the prize, and Stalin, who liked to create a rivalry between his commanders, approved. He made one alteration to General Antonov’s plan, by eliminating part of the boundary between the two fronts to give Konev the chance of striking for Berlin from the south. The Stavka went to work with a vengeance. The operation involved 2.5 million men, 41,600 guns and heavy mortars, 6,250 tanks and self-propelled guns and 7,500 aircraft. Everything had to be ready in just over two weeks, by 16 April.