Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  The Germans’ only success in January—itself limited—had been in East Prussia, where, in putting up fanatic resistance for a piece of strategically pointless territory, they had forced Rokossovsky’s thrust to diverge to the north and away from support of Zhukov to his south. By the twenty-fourth, however, troops from the Third Belorussian Front had pushed past Gumbinnen and threatened to cut off the Third Panzer Army in Königsberg, while forces from the Second Belorussian Front reached the coast, cutting off Army Group Center. On the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, seeing no point to the further defense of East Prussia, and hoping to save his troops in order to bring them back to Germany proper, the commander of the Fourth Army, General Friedrich Hossbach, told his corps commanders that they were to prepare for a breakout on the twenty-sixth. It was Hossbach who, as Hitler’s military adjutant in November 1937, had secretly recorded notes from a top-level conference at which Hitler had outlined his plans for expansion, notes that were soon to be used as evidence of premeditated Nazi aggression at the postwar Nuremberg Trials. Hossbach now earned a different sort of notoriety. Although his plans for a breakout directly contradicted Hitler’s orders, on the twenty-sixth, and with the knowledge of the commander of Army Group Center, General Hans Reinhardt, Hossbach nonetheless ordered his troops to attack to the west. Catching the Russians by surprise, units of the Fourth Army managed to push almost twenty miles to the west before furious enemy counterattacks halted their progress. Confronted with this clear violation of his orders, Hitler fell into a rage and ordered both Hossbach and Reinhardt relieved of their commands (although, amazingly, not of their lives). Just three decades after the great triumph at Tannenberg, which had made heroes of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, Hossbach and Reinhardt had earned only the Führer’s ire. Reinhardt was replaced by General Lothar Rendulic, an Austrian of Croatian origin who had gained notoriety for his involvement in shooting hostages in Yugoslavia in 1942. An evident clone of Schörner, Rendulic seemingly took pride in having commanders and ordinary soldiers court-martialed and shot for retreating.11

  None of this brutal activity could disguise the fact that, in three weeks, the Red Army had won perhaps its most spectacular victory of the war. Not only could Stalin go to the Yalta Conference in control of Poland and only a day’s march from the German capital, but his Western allies were also still fighting hard battles west of the Reich border. In late January, moreover, both Zhukov and Konev had indicated their readiness, after a few days’ rest to bring up supplies, equipment, and fresh troops, to resume the offensive toward Berlin and the industrial regions of Silesia. In urging that the enemy not be given time to prepare defenses that his forces would only have to break through later at high cost, Zhukov reinforced his argument by noting the absence of either a continuous defensive front or any preparations for a concerted counterattack. Viewed from Moscow, the end of the war seemed tantalizingly close.12

  By mid-February, however, the Soviet offensive had ground to a halt. Although some have seen politics at work in this decision, more tangible factors played the key role. Although Soviet casualties had been relatively light, with only forty-three thousand permanent losses, the Red Army had lost almost thirteen hundred tanks and assault guns, not an insignificant figure even given its material preponderance. In the dash to the Oder, the Soviets had also bypassed numerous pockets of resistance that now had to be eliminated, especially those astride rail and supply lines. None of these posed a major threat, but they did demand troops and time. More to the point, German resistance on the flanks seemed to be stiffening appreciably, although, now that the Soviets could no longer rely on information from partisans, poor intelligence tended to exaggerate the threat. The heavy fighting in East Prussia had not only tied down large Soviet forces but also, in causing Rokossovsky to veer away from Zhukov’s right flank, left the latter dangerously vulnerable to counterattack, which through hard experience the Russians had learned was a favorite German tactic. Nor was Zhukov’s left flank fully secure. Although his troops had pushed beyond the Oder and secured large bridgeheads south of Breslau, Konev was also feeling increased German pressure on his left flank. Any drive on Berlin, however, would require Konev to redeploy forces to his right flank in order to support Zhukov. Before such an operation could commence, then, he would have to clean up the situation on his left as well as deal with the problem of Fortress Breslau. In February, therefore, the Stavka halted the drive in the center and turned its attention to clearing up the flanks.13

  To that end, on 8 February, Konev’s forces in the south launched an attack out of bridgeheads across the Oder both north and south of Breslau and, despite stiff German resistance, had completed the encirclement of the fortress city within a week. Still, Breslau, with some 35,000 troops and 116,000 civilians, under the command of the fanatic Nazi Karl Hanke, stubbornly held out in destructive house-to-house fighting until 6 May. By the end of February, Konev’s forces had closed up to the Neisse River and linked up with troops of the First Belorussian Front at the Neisse’s junction with the Oder. Although this was largely a strategic backwater for the Soviets, the bloody fighting in February did bring the industrial riches of Silesia, a key area of armaments production out of range of Allied bombers, under their control, a reward not lost on a veteran industrializer like Stalin.14

  Two days after Konev’s attack, units of Rokossovsky’s Second Belorussian Front struck northeastward into Pomerania to eliminate the Baltic balcony overhanging Soviet forces in Poland. Five days later, the Germans gave proof of the overstated Soviet fears for their flanks, launching one of the sorriest attacks in their military history. Conceived by Guderian as a typical two-pronged thrust into the flanks of an advancing enemy, Operation Sonnenwende (Solstice) was a fiasco from the beginning. Hitler eliminated the planned southern part of the operation by refusing to transfer the Sixth SS Panzer Army from Hungary, while the northern half fell under the operational control of Himmler’s Army Group Vistula. Since the Reichsführer-SS had never actually gone anywhere near the front and, in contrast to his eagerness to persecute helpless racial inferiors, had demonstrated a thorough absence of combat spirit, Guderian managed after a two-hour argument to get his deputy, General Walter Wenck, appointed to lead the offensive. The Führer agreed but, typically, took command power away from Himmler without specifically giving it to Wenck. Although Guderian managed the amazing feat at this stage of the war of cobbling together ten divisions for the counterattack, seven of them panzer, the troops involved were poorly equipped, inexperienced, and woefully led. Even the timing of the attack seemed a comedy of errors as one division lurched forward on the fourteenth, taking the Soviets by surprise, while the rest of the attack went off on 15 February. By the eighteenth, Sonnenwende had sputtered to a halt, having gained at most three miles. Ironically, although a complete failure, it evidently made an outsized contribution to the final Soviet decision to delay the attack toward Berlin. Within days, Zhukov had turned forces north to aid Rokossovsky, while Konev had halted his operations on the Neisse. The Vistula-Oder offensive, however, had, in less than two months, taken the Soviets from Warsaw to the gates of Berlin, inflicted irreplaceable losses on the Germans, and cost the enemy the vital Silesian industrial areas. As everyone knew, the next step would be Berlin.15

  In his last radio addresses in early 1945, Hitler continued to stress the intention of the “Jewish-international world conspiracy” to eradicate the German people as well as to affirm his belief that the indomitable spirit of the Volksgemeinschaft would still prevail. Although the shared sacrifices and ritual mourning that had elevated the dead to fallen heroes had sustained internal unity for a surprisingly long time, in the face of an obviously lost war the image of fighting valiantly to the end for the Volksgemeinschaft inspired fewer people. Increasingly, the members of that national community now largely ignored their Führer. He was, in fact, so little a presence in their daily lives that rumors had persisted for months that he was seriously ill or dead. Nor was he spared criticism, SD r
eports now regularly indicating that average Germans held him responsible for deliberately provoking war and, thus, for causing the devastation now being rained on Germany. “What an enormous guilt Hitler bears,” declared one soldier in late January. The urban inhabitants of the western industrial centers had been paying the price all along, and now the eastern German population would reap the whirlwind of the savage brutality inflicted on the Soviet peoples by Hitler’s unconstrained policies of exploitation and mass murder.16

  As news spread of the rapid Soviet advance, panic-stricken residents of East Prussia, West Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia filled roads as they fled, often unprepared, into bitter cold. The sight of long columns of civilians trudging westward, pulling what possessions they could save in carts, became common. “The roads are full of refugees, carts, and pedestrians,” recalled one eyewitness. “People are gripped by panic when the cry goes up, ‘The Russians are close!’ ” Others told of the chaos and desperation at railway stations as people scrambled to get on the last trains heading west, trampling each other, even throwing people out of boxcars. Still others related tales of distraught mothers gone mad unwilling to believe the babies they carried in their arms were already dead or conveyed horrifying images of towns and villages burned to the ground, of marauding Red Army soldiers looting and pillaging, of the mass rape of women and the shooting of men who came to their aid, of hospitals turned into death houses, of systematic brutality. All too often, these horror stories turned out to be true, as Red soldiers frequently wreaked vengeance for what had been done to their own country and families. One estimate put the number of civilians killed in the eastern provinces in the first months of 1945 at 100,000, while another suggested that as many as 1.4 million women might have been raped (including one of every two women in Berlin). Since many women were raped repeatedly, even a figure as high as this cannot convey the reality of the constant anxiety, lingering uncertainty, and inner turmoil to which women were subjected. Gang rapes were common, as were sexually transmitted diseases, while many unwanted pregnancies resulted in abortions or abandoned babies. The sexual violence went on for weeks and months, long after the war had ended. Women learned to hide, to disguise themselves, or to find a protector (preferably an officer).17

  Over and above the impact of Soviet propaganda or political indoctrination that encouraged them to view all Germans, whether men, women, or children, as “Fascists,” many of the Russian soldiers were motivated, as a veteran of Rokossovsky’s armies put it, by “blind feelings of revenge.” And who could wonder at this? Tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers were from areas devastated by German occupation, had lost relatives or loved ones to the invaders, or had themselves been wounded by an enemy invader. In addition, the ferocity of the fighting had hardly abated, and, even at this late stage of the war, the Soviets were suffering very high casualties. The anger and rage of average soldiers, their desire to wreak vengeance on the people held responsible, were visible for all to see. “We are taking revenge on the Germans for all the disgraceful things they did to us,” wrote one Ivan in a feeling that was representative of his fellows, who believed that they were simply executing a just punishment on the German population, which was now experiencing firsthand the gruesome reality of war. Many Russians indeed regarded their actions as part of the struggle for “people’s justice.” “You said we should do the same things in Germany as the Germans did to us,” wrote a son to his father. “The court has begun already.” “Our fellows have not acted any worse in East Prussia than the Germans did in the Smolensk region,” a Red soldier noted in his diary in late January 1945. “We hate Germany and the Germans very much. In a house our boys saw a murdered woman and two children. You often see civilians lying dead in the streets too. But the Germans deserve these atrocities that they unleashed. . . . One need only think of Majdanek and the theory of supermen [Übermenschen] to understand why our soldiers are happily doing this.” As Soviet soldiers, in their push westward, liberated hundreds of extermination and labor camps and witnessed firsthand the gas chambers, charred corpses, piles of bodies, and pitiful survivors left to die, the deep impression of these atrocities mingled with memories of their own ruined farms and towns to create a powerful anger and thirst for revenge. “Germany must now experience the taste of tears,” wrote one observer after witnessing a destroyed village. “Frightful horrors have been committed on this earth. And Hitler is the one who gave rise to them. And the Germans celebrated these horrors. A gruesome punishment for Germany is only just.”18

  Adding to the powerful rage and lust for destruction was the disconcerting realization of most Red soldiers that the standard of living in Germany was immeasurably higher than their own. “The people here live very well,” admitted one at the beginning of February, “better than us. . . . So many fine things!” “There is everything,” exulted another, then added tellingly, “even things that we have never seen.” “We are eating very well, ten times better than the Germans lived in the Ukraine,” claimed one Ivan, while a comrade marveled, “I am swimming in riches.” The shrill contrast between the unexpectedly high German living standards and their own miserable conditions at home, however, inevitably produced confusion, then anger. If conditions were so good in Germany, wondered many, why had they attacked Russia? And, asked others, why don’t we live as well as the enemy? To deflect the latter question, Soviet propagandists quickly adopted an explanation reflected in many of the soldiers’ letters and diaries: the Germans lived well at the expense of others, for their riches were plundered from occupied Europe. Although effective as an explanation, this propaganda line also served to intensify the anger and rage of average soldiers, who set about plundering Germany like a horde of locusts. Not only were vast quantities of industrial machinery, railroad equipment, raw materials, and even people (for forced labor) carried off to the Soviet Union at the behest of state authorities, but ordinary soldiers also looted with a disconcerting frenzy as the orgy of revenge assumed a material as well as a personal dimension. The alcohol that seemed so abundant and freely available in Germany served to escalate the murderous rage of the Russians. Food, drink, watches, household items—anything and everything was taken and much sent home, hopelessly clogging the Red Army postal service. What could not be consumed or dispatched was often simply burned.19

  This lust for destruction also manifested itself in a systematic and persistent campaign of rape and sexual violence, as noted above. Although not the only violent crime committed by Red Army troops as they swept westward, rape was certainly the most prevalent. In some cases, instances of it had sexual overtones, especially in a restrictive, puritanical, male-dominated society many of whose members were troubled by the sight of German women in provocative Western-style dresses, wearing makeup and in high-heeled shoes. German women, in short, seemed to some both decadent and wickedly seductive and were regarded by many as the spoils of war just as much as food and alcohol. The men’s actions, after all, had been encouraged, if not explicitly ordered, by Moscow, whether to destroy the German will to resist or to engage in what would today be regarded as ethnic cleansing, since the stories of Soviet atrocities spurred Germans to flee from precisely those areas to be given to Poland after the war. For most, however, rape had little to do with sex. Rather, it neatly meshed desires for revenge and hatred of the enemy’s wealth, reinforced the fragile masculinity of men under enormous strain, and cemented their victory over the German antagonist. It was, as Catherine Merridale has noted, no accident that many German women were gang-raped or raped in the presence of husbands or fathers. In this sense, rape represented the ultimate collective triumph of the group, and, although women were the immediate victims, the larger point was intended for German men: they were now the ones without power who could not intervene to alter the fate of their women or, by extension, their nation. Revealingly, German women often recalled later that, when they protested, Russian soldiers invoked the image not of German soldiers raping their wives but of the invaders killing in
nocent women and children. They had laid waste to Russia and caused an unimaginable degree of death and destruction; now they would be taught a lesson.20