by Ian Baxter
During the first week of June reports multiplied as news reached the various German commands that the Russians were preparing a new summer offensive on the central front. By the morning of 22 June I944, the third anniversary of the invasion of Russia, the long awaited Soviet offensive was launched against Heeresgruppe Mitte. In total the First Baltic and Third Belorussian Fronts hurled more than 2.5 million troops, 4,000 tanks, 25,000 artillery pieces and mortars, and 5,300 aircraft to the northwest and southwest of Vitebsk. In opposition the Germans could only field 1,200,000 men, 9,500 guns and 900 tanks, with some 1,300 or so aircraft.
The Russian offensive was code-named ‘Operation Bagration’, and within twenty-fours hours of the attack Soviet forces had smashed through the lines of Heeresgruppe Mitte. In just seven days, the entire length of a 200-mile front stretching from Ostrov on the Lithuanian border and Kovel on the edge of the Pripet Marshes had been completely overrun. In just twelve days Heeresgruppe Mitte had lost 25 divisions. Of its original 165,000-man strength, 4.Armee lost a staggering 130,000 soldiers. The 3.Panzer-Armee lost 10 divisions. The 9.Armee, however, held onto its pocket long enough for some 10,000 of its troops to escape the slaughter. In a drastic attempt to stabilise the crumbling lines the ‘Totenkopf’ division had been rushed north to join the 4.Armee, but became delayed in the chaos and carnage that befell Heeresgruppe Mitte. As the Germans pulled back, the Red Army continued its remorseless drive westwards, carving its way through towards the borders of East Prussia and Poland.
Four photographs in sequence showing a Waffen-SS heavy field howitzer crew preparing their 15cm heavy field howitzer for action. This weapon remained the second most common artillery piece in SS service and served until the end of the war.
Over the next few weeks Heeresgruppe Mitte drifted westwards towards Kaunas, the Neman River, and Bialystok. The Red Army forces were moving faster than the Germans could deploy its meagre troops, even to attempt a stand. But the Russians having covered more than 200 miles without pause had temporarily outstripped their supplies and as a consequence slowed their advance to a crawl. The Germans, however, took advantage of the situation and tried their best to regroup and plug sectors in the front that had been punched through by the enemy. What was left of Heeresgruppe Mitte was given to feldmarschall Walther Model, known as Hitler's ‘fireman’. Model sent the ‘Totenkopf’ division to the city of Grodno, and there it was ordered to hold the right flank of the 4.Armee in the north, and the left wing of the 2.Armee in the south. Here in the city of Grodno this crack SS division held onto to its crumbling positions, fighting off continuous attacks and bitter street fighting that was reminiscent of some of the close quarter battles that had raged at Stalingrad. However, outnumbered seven to one in troop strength and ten to one in tanks, ‘Totenkopf’ were gradually ground down in a battle of attrition, and by 18 July requested permission to abandon their receding lines. Model agreed at once and ordered the withdrawal of the division west in the retreat towards the Polish capital, Warsaw.
During the last week of July the Russians pushed forward and rolled across the ravaged countryside of Poland through the shattered German front. On 24 July in the southern sector of the front, the 1.Panzer-Armee still held the town of Lwow and its front to the south. However, behind the Panzer army fifty miles west of Lwow massive Soviet forces were closing to the San River on the stretch between Jaroslaw and Przemysl. Further north in the centre Model had feverishly regrouped his forces in an attempt to defend Siedlce, Warsaw, and the Vistula south to Pulawy. The ‘Totenkopf’ division was once again thrown into battle this time along with the elite armoured Paratroop Division, known as the ‘Herman Goring Felddivisionen’. Both divisions were ordered to hold the city of Siedlce fifty miles east of Warsaw. For four days in the face of strong Russian armoured strikes both divisions with great cost held their lines allowing the 2.Armee to retreat to the Vistula River. On 28 July, they abandoned Siedlce and continued a fighting withdrawal towards Warsaw. Over the coming week fighting in the area was fierce, but both divisions fought to the bitter death slowing the Russian onslaught and allowing Model to reorganise a defence along the river. As for the Soviet forces, having advanced another two hundred miles in two weeks, they had temporarily outstripped their supplies. The offensive ground to a halt on the Vistula in early August. The brief lull in fighting helped Model to gradually gain strength and reorganise defensive positions. The ‘Totenkopf’ and the Wiking divisions formed the 4.Panzer-Korps commanded by SS-Gruppenfuhrer Herbert Gille, and Model placed this Korps 30 miles northeast of Warsaw, where he expected the renewal of the Russian offensive.
Three photographs showing both Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht mortar crews with the 8cm Gr.W.34 mortar. During the war the mortar had become the standard infantry support weapon giving the soldier valuable high explosive capability beyond the range of rifles or grenades. Yet one of the major drawbacks was its accuracy, it being an area weapon. Even with an experienced mortar crew, it generally required 10 bombs to achieve a direct hit on one single target.
German troops in Army group Centre are seen marching. By May 1944 the German forces were holding a battle line more than 1,400 miles in overall length, which had been severely weakened by the overwhelming strength of the Red Army.
In side the capital, as news spread that the Russians were drawing closer, the Polish Home Army suddenly revolted and attempted to restore its Polish sovereignty against the German invaders. The Polish revolt surprised the German command and they quickly brought all available resources they could scrape together to combat the Polish attack. The notorious Dirlewanger and Kaminski brigades of SS irregulars were used against the Warsaw uprising. It was here in the ravaged streets of Warsaw that these SS units earned their terrible reputation for a string of atrocities. Here the soldiers were encouraged exploit the situation to the full and turn the streets into a blood bath. Women and children were evacuated from their homes and herded together like animals. In cemeteries, gardens, and squares, the civilians were indiscriminately machine gunned until the frightened mass showed no further sign of life. Within four days of the battle, some 10,000 men, women, and children had been slaughtered in the city, but still the fighting continued.
Whilst the Warsaw uprising was being suppressed the Russians attacked on 14 August northwest of the city and, for several bloody days, the well dug in Waffen-SS divisions of ‘Totenkopf’ and ‘Wiking’ grimly held out repulsing a number of viscous attacks. The Red Army then regrouped and once again resumed their attack, which fell on ‘Totenkopf’. For four days SS troops fought a gauntlet of heavy fighting. Russian air support hammered the German frontlines day and night until the ‘Totenkopf’ and the remainder of the Panzer-Korps withdrew from its battered and blasted positions west towards Warsaw. By 10 September heavy fighting engulfed the suburbs of the city with ‘Totenkopf’ successfully defending its positions. For ten days, until the Red Army offensive petered out, the SS managed to hold their lines, in spite of the high losses. During the next few weeks until 10 October there followed a lull in the fighting until the Russians launched yet another offensive, which forced the 4.Panzer-Korps to retreat twenty-miles west- wards. By 27 October the front had once more been stabilised and the Red Army abandoned further assaults against the 4.Panzer-Korps. Calm returned to the front around Warsaw and both Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS divisions tended to their wounded, reequipped the best they could and dug another defensive line. ‘Totenkopfs’ performance in these defensive battles had demonstrated the effectiveness of using the Waffen-SS as a special ‘fire brigade’ force. They had not only fought off many attacks against an enemy sometime ten-times their strength, but had provided Model's soldiers with a band of men that were able to be rushed from one danger zone to another and plug gaps in the front wherever they appeared. But the German military situation during the summer of 1944 had been a complete disaster in Poland. Although the Soviet advance had been relatively slow, continuously fighting against bitter opposition, the Germans were un - qu
estionably stalling the inevitable defeat in a country that they had conquered and ravaged for almost five years.
A Wehrmacht soldier loads a mortar shell into the Granatwerfer 42 sGW 42 mortar. This was a deadly heavy mortar. The weapon was developed in response to encounters with heavy Soviet mortar of the same calibre and the Germans designed a virtual copy of the Red Army weapon.
A group photograph showing Waffen-SS armed with the Kar98K bolt action rifle and the MG34 machine gun. Although the MG42 surpassed the MG34 by mid-1944, it was still well liked by the crews that used it and remained an integral weapon in both the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS.
Elsewhere on the Eastern Front the situation was equally dire. In the south Malinovsky's 2.Ukrainian Front had broken through powerful German defences, and the Red Army reached the Bulgarian border in early September. Within a week, Russian troops reached the Yugoslav frontier, and on 8 September, Bulgaria and Romania declared war on Germany. By 23 September, Soviet forces arrived on the Hungarian border and immediately raced through the country for the Danube, finally reaching the river to the south of Budapest.
It was here in Hungary that Hitler placed the utmost importance of defending what he called the last bastion of defence in the East. Against all military logic, he felt that it was Hungary and not the Vistula River in Poland, which presented a natural barrier against an advance on Germany. For the defence of Hungary he was determined to use his premier Waffen-SS divisions, including ‘Totenkopf’ and ‘Wiking’ that were positioned along the Vistula River.
Enlisted foreign SS troops march along a dusty road being led by their commander in mid-1944. With severe lack of reinforcements more and more foreign soldiers were enlisted in both Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS divisions to try and bolster the overstretched forces on the Eastern Front.
Chapter Five
Last Battles
In the last months of the war German forces continued receding across a scarred and devastated wasteland. On both the Western and Eastern Fronts, the last agonising moments of the war were played out. Whilst the British and American troops were poised to cross the River Rhine, in the East the terrifying advance of the Red Army was bearing down on the River Oder, pushing back the last remnants of Hitler's exhausted units. The resistance of her once mighty armies were now collapsing amid the ruins of the Reich. Most of the so called Waffen-SS crack divisions were still embroiled in heavy fighting in Hungary and were unable to be released in order to plug the massive gaps on the German front lines in the East. This left the northern and central sectors of the Eastern Front to east and west SS European volunteers. Many of the volunteers, spurred on by the worrying prospect of Russian occupation of Europe and certain death if captured, were determined to defend to the bitter end and try to hold back the Red Army advance.
A pneumatic boat with a full complement of SS assault troops transporting the boat to a river during operations in 1944. The boat required six troops with paddles and one to steer. They were capable of carrying up to a dozen soldiers including the paddlers.
Three photographs taken in sequence showing Waffen-SS mortar troops during operations in mid-1944. By this period of the war the German soldier had expended considerable combat efforts and lacked sufficient reconnaissance and the necessary support of tanks and heavy weapons to compensate for the large losses sustained.
SS troops have expertly positioned their 8.8cm FlaK gun in a defensive position. By 1944 a typical SS Panzer-Division was authorized 80 towed and 40 self-propelled 2cm guns, six cm quad weapons, nine 3.7cm guns and 12 heavy 8.8cm flak pieces. Less, well-equipped grenadier and Gebirgsjäger-Divisions had I8 towed and I2 selfpropelled 2cm guns.
The last great offensive that brought the Russians their final victory in the East began during the third week of January I945. The principal objective was to crush the remaining German forces in Poland, East Prussia and the Baltic states. Along the Baltic an all-out Russian assault had begun in earnest with the sole intention to crush the remaining understrength German units that had once formed Heeresgruppe Nord. It was these heavy, sustained attacks that eventually restricted the German-held territory in the north-east to a few small pockets of land surrounding three ports: Libau, Kurland, Pillau in East Prussia and Danzig at the mouth of the River Vistula.
Here along the Baltic the German defenders attempted to stall the massive Russian push with the remaining weapons and men they had at their disposal. Every German soldier defending the area was aware of the significance if it was captured. Not only would the coastal garrisons be cut off and eventually destroyed, but also masses of civilian refugees would be prevented from escaping from those ports by sea. Hitler made it quite clear that all remaining Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS volunteer units, and Luftwaffe personnel were not to evacuate, but to stand and fight and wage an unprecedented battle of attrition. In fact, what Hitler had done by a single sentence was to condemn to death 8,000 officers and more than 181,000 soldiers and Luftwaffe personnel.
In southwest Poland situated on the River Oder the strategic town of Breslau had been turned into a fortress and defended by various Volkssturm, Hitlerjugend, Waffen-SS and various formations from the 269. Infantry-Division. During mid-February I945 the German units put up a staunch defence with every available weapon that they could muster. As the battle ensued, both German soldiers and civilians were cut to pieces by Russian attacks. During these viscous battles, which endured until May I945, there were many acts of courageous fighting. Cheering and yelling, old men and boys of the Volkssturm and Hitlerjugend, supported by ad hoc SS units, advanced across open terrain, sacrificing themselves in front of well-positioned Russian machine gunners and snipers. By the first week of March,
An MG34 machine gunner and his feeder inside a house during intensive fighting. During the opening phase of the Soviet summer offensive, code-named ‘Operation Bagration’, the German soldier was ill prepared against any type of large-scale offensive.
German troops withdraw across a river in Army Group Centre during ‘Bagration’. Commanders in the field were fully aware of the significant problems and the difficulties imposed by committing badly-equipped soldiers to defend the depleted lines of defence.
Russian infantry had driven back the defenders into the inner city and were pulverising it street by street. Lightly clad SS, Volkssturm and Hitlerjugend were still seen resisting, forced to fight in the sewers beneath the decimated city. When defence of Breslau finally capitulated almost 60,000 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded trying to capture the town, with some 29,000 German military and civilian casualties.
Elsewhere on the Eastern Front, fighting was merciless, with both sides imposing harsh measures on their men to stand where they were and fight to the death. In the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS volunteer divisions, all malingerers were hanged by the roadside without even a summary court martial. Those who deserted or caused self-inflicted wounds were executed on the spot. Soldiers would regularly pass groups of freshly erected gallows, where the SS and Feldgendarmerie had hanged deserters. Signs were tied around their necks, some of them reading:
‘Here I hang because I did not believe in the Führer’
With every defeat and withdrawal came ever-increasing pressure on the commanders to exert harsher discipline on their weary men. The thought of fighting on German soil for the first time resulted in mixed feelings among the soldiers. Although the defence of the Reich automatically stirred emotional feelings to fight for their land, not all soldiers felt the same way. More and more young conscripts were showing signs that they did not want to die for a lost cause. Conditions on the Eastern Front were miserable not only for the newest recruits, but also for battle-hardened soldiers who had survived many months of bitter conflict against the Red Army. The cold harsh weather during February and March prevented the soldiers digging trenches more than a metre down. But the main problems that confronted the German forces during this period were shortages of ammunition, fuel and vehicles. Some vehicles in a division could only be used in an em
ergency and battery fire was strictly prohibited without permission from the commanding officer. The daily ration on average per division was for two shells per gun.
With such drastic restrictions of every kind, tens of thousands of undernourished civilians, mostly women, alongside remaining slave labourers, were marched out to expend all their available energy to dig lines of anti-tank ditches. Most of the ditches were dug between the Vistula and Oder Rivers, as a secondary line of defence. However, German forces were now barely holding the wavering Vistula positions that ran some 175 miles from the Baltic coast to the juncture of the Oder and Neisse in Silesia. Most of the front was now held on the western bank of the Oder. In the north, the ancient city of Stettin, capital of Pomerania, and in the south, the town of Kustrin, were both vital holding points against the main Russian objective of the war – Berlin.
A 7.5cm 1.1G18 is seen here in action. This particular weapon was used in direct infantry support. The gun was very versatile in combat and the crew often aggressively positioned it, which usually meant the piece was regularly exposed on the battlefield.
A heavy MG34 machine gun position with the MG on a sustained fire mount during intensive fighting against strong Russian forces. This position is along one of the many defensive belts constructed along the front in Army Group Centre.