Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  On the morning of 22 June, the third anniversary of Barbarossa, a hurricane bombardment of massed Russian artillery blasted the German forward defences, and armoured columns with infantry riding on the tanks thrust deep into the German lines supported by waves of ground attack aircraft. By the end of the first day, the Germans had been pushed back ten miles, and the Russian tactic of splitting German formations from each other and then encircling them was beginning to work. By 26 June the German Ninth Army had been effectively neutralized and Hitler sacked the army commander, General of Infantry Hans Jordan, and replaced him with General of Panzer Troops Nikolaus von Vormann. So far Busch had refused all requests from his army commanders to permit a withdrawal or to give up the so-called ‘fortified places’ concept whereby towns and cities of political importance were to be held by at least one division (and in some cases a corps) even if surrounded. The concept of leaving a powerful force behind enemy lines might have had some merit if the Luftwaffe could have supplied it, but those days were long gone. On the same day that Jordan was sacked, Busch flew to see Hitler to ask permission not for a general withdrawal but to make some adjustments by pulling back some of his formations to avoid encirclement, but, as he must have known, the order was to stand fast come what may. This is, of course, exactly what the Russians were hoping for: despite their greatly improved combat performance and overwhelming numerical superiority, they still did not want to take the Germans on in a war of manoeuvre.

  On 28 June, Hitler sacked Busch and replaced him with Field Marshal Model, who would continue to command Army Group North Ukraine, although he delegated effective command of that formation to the chief of staff. Busch felt bitter: he had, after all, only been obeying orders, but a good general does not obey orders when he knows them to be pointless and that they will contribute to the loss of an army to no purpose, and there are plenty of examples where generals disobeyed Hitler’s orders and got away with it – provided, of course, that what they did worked. By 29 June, Army Group Centre had lost 130,000 men killed and 60,000 taken prisoner, and had very few tanks left. On 1 July the Germans began to evacuate Minsk and shifted 8,000 wounded and 12,000 Russian auxiliaries westwards. Meanwhile, the German Fourth Army, trying to withdraw across the Dnieper and towards Minsk, deployed its one panzer division with seventy Mk V Panthers and fifty-five Mk IVs to hold the Red Army back, and, although they wreaked much havoc in the ranks of the Third Byelorussian Front, numbers eventually told. On 2 July, Hitler agreed that Minsk could be abandoned, but it was too late: Fourth Army was too far to the east and the armies either side, Third Panzer and the remnants of Ninth, were collapsing. On 3 July, Fifth Guards Tank Army entered Minsk and the pincers closed behind Fourth Army, which was now isolated. Fourth Army tried to break out, and tried again, but it could not and by 8 July had ceased to exist, with 60,000 men killed or wounded and most of the other 40,000 prisoners in Russian hands.

  Now there were numerous pockets of Germans, all surrounded by the Red Army and far too numerous to be supplied by air, even if the aircraft existed, which they did not. Some commanders ordered their men to break out to the west in small numbers, and they were duly slaughtered by partisans. Other groups stood and fought, and were overrun by phalanxes of T-34 tanks and hordes of Red infantry. When Model finally managed to stabilize the front and Operation Bagration came to an end on 11 July, the Soviets had advanced over 400 miles to the River Vistula in Poland and were poised on the River Memel to drive into East Prussia. It was the greatest defeat the Germans had suffered on the Eastern Front; it destroyed Army Group Centre and cost them twenty-eight divisions, 350,000 men dead, wounded, missing and captured with the loss of 1,500 artillery pieces and around 250 tanks and assault guns. Amongst the Army Group Centre casualties in Bagration, eleven generals were killed in action, two committed suicide, two were missing believed killed and eighteen were taken prisoner. In contrast, in the whole war, seven British generals were killed and one died as a prisoner of the Japanese.*

  On 17 July the Russians herded 57,000 German prisoners through the streets of Moscow, and on 21 July Colonel-General Zeitzler, the Chief of the German General Staff, having become increasingly disillusioned with Hitler’s interference in military matters, resigned on health grounds and was replaced by Colonel-General Heinz Guderian.† Three days later, as a spin-off from the bomb plot against Hitler, and on Göring’s suggestion, the Nazi salute was imposed upon the armed forces in place of the normal military salute. The order was greeted with ridicule by most of the army, and only grudgingly complied with in the presence of NSDAP officials or the SS.

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  There had been rumours in the West about German extermination camps, but they were generally dismissed as propaganda – after all, in the First World War there had been all sorts of stories about German soldiers roasting Belgian babies on the points of their bayonets, ripping open the bellies of pregnant women and raping nuns, all of which had turned out to be pure fiction – but then on 24 July 1944 the Red Army overran Madjanek near Lublin in Poland, and the full beastliness of the German racial policies was exposed. Madjanek was built in 1941 as a work, as opposed to extermination, camp where the inmates were supposed to be used for labour to help the war effort. In fact, due to administrative incompetence on the part of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps of the SS Main Office of Economy and Administration, the government department responsible, there was very little useful work for them to do and inmates were frequently paraded to move stones from one side of the camp to the other, or to dig holes and then fill them in again. Although not specifically for extermination, Madjanek had the facilities for mass killings if required, and prisoners who were unable to work were regularly herded into the camp’s gas chambers and their bodies cremated. Of the estimated 500,000 people who passed through Madjanek, the largest groups were Poles, then Jews and finally Russians: 360,000 did not survive; 144,000 were shot or gassed, including 18,000 Jews; and 216,000 died of starvation, ill-treatment or disease. As the Germans retreated from the Eastern Front, the SS made great efforts to cover up the evidence of mass extermination and prisoners not killed and disposed of on the spot were marched away towards Germany and the camps demolished, in many cases trees being planted to disguise the mass graves of those not cremated. But with the rapid advance of the Red Army, the SS had not had time to cover up Madjanek, and the Russians found a shed piled high with pairs of shoes, the gas chambers labelled Bath and Disinfection, the crematoria and the hastily filled-in mass graves of those shot as the Death’s Head units of the SS prepared to depart. The Russians, no strangers themselves to presiding over mass murder, made much of the gruesome discovery. The Soviet official newspaper Pravda (‘Truth’) devoted the whole of a front page to it, thus ensuring that the story was picked up by news agencies around the world. At the same time, claims that the Russians had come upon trainloads of Russian children about to be taken to camps and gassed were widely disseminated to the troops of the Red Army and, while almost certainly not true, were made to seem all too believable by the undoubted evidence of Madjanek.

  In London the members of the Polish government-in-exile viewed the approach of the Red Army with mixed feelings. On the one hand they welcomed the imminent expulsion of the Germans, but on the other they had no diplomatic relations with the USSR (these had been broken off by Russia in April 1943 over the Katyn Forest massacre*) and were concerned that they, and not the Soviets or the Polish communists, should decide the shape of post-war Poland. They concluded that the only way in which Free Poland could influence the USSR would be by themselves contributing to Poland’s liberation, and the so-called Home Army was instructed to begin operations against the Germans. The Home Army was an amalgam of various resistance groups owing allegiance to the government-in-exile and was commanded by General Tadeusz Komorowski, a cavalry officer who took the name Bór as a cover. He was regarded by the Germans as such a threat that they put a price of £400,000 on his head, but he was never betrayed. The army itself
consisted for the most part of ex-soldiers of the Polish Army who had not managed to get away to France and England, and a few Russians left behind when the Wehrmacht swept through in 1941, and was equipped with a mixture of Polish, Russian and captured German weapons along with others parachuted in by the Special Operations Executive, the British organization responsible for operations in occupied countries. With Moscow Radio calling for a rising and with the London Polish government’s approval, Bór-Komorowski gave the order for a rising on 1 August, assuming that it would divert the Germans from their defence against the Russians and that the Red Army would soon be able to link up with the Home Army. In the event, the Russians were very happy for the Germans and the non-communist Poles to fight each other, made no attempt to come to their rescue and prevented the British and the Americans from dropping arms and supplies by refusing overflying rights to the RAF and the USAAF. The main action took place in Warsaw – the Warsaw Rising – and pitted around 37,000 Poles with about 1,600 small arms and numerous homemade petrol bombs between them against, eventually, 21,000 Germans armed with the full panoply of weapons including artillery, commanded by SS Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, a former army officer who had joined the SS in 1931 and was now responsible for anti-partisan operations on the Eastern Front. The formation of Army Group Centre responsible for Warsaw was the reconstituted Ninth Army, which did not want to get involved in house-to-house fighting, so the battle was initially left to the SS, with some artillery and mortars lent by the army.

  The SS had had some previous experience of street-fighting in Warsaw when demolishing the ghetto there in 1943. By then, of the 400,000 Jewish inhabitants before the war, 300,000 had been deported to concentration camps and about 60,000 were still in the city. Realizing that they were all doomed to extermination, they resolved that they might as well die with honour and perhaps set an example to Jews elsewhere. The resistance when the Germans attempted to demolish the ghetto and deport the remaining residents on 19 April came as a rude shock to SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop and his 3,000 SS and police, and, although the Jewish leaders committed suicide on 8 May, resistance went on until 16 May. Fourteen thousand Jews had been killed and the rest were removed to Treblinka and Madjanek for ‘processing’. Around 400 Germans were killed and the uprising did spark off minor (but unsuccessful) mutinies in some of the camps.

  This time, the fighting was bloody and a far bigger problem than the Germans had expected. The Poles could move relatively freely through the sewers until Bach-Zelewski pumped gas into them, and initially any Pole captured was shot out of hand, mostly by the Kaminsky Brigade, otherwise 29 SS Grenadier Division of turncoat Russians, until Bach-Zelewski ordered it to stop. The Luftwaffe did its bit by dive-bombing those parts of the city held by the insurgents, completely unscathed by Russian anti-aircraft guns that were well within range but did not open fire. Despite the Germans’ firepower, things were not going well for them until General von Vormann was replaced as Commander Ninth Army by General of Panzer Troops Smilo Freiherr von Lüttwitz, previously commanding XXXXVI Panzer Corps, who was more amenable to helping out the SS with the reduction of the Polish Home Army and placed his 19 Panzer Division at Bach-Zelewski’s disposal. The Poles were driven more and more into smaller and smaller areas of the city, their buildings demolished by tanks and bombed by Stukas, and on 28 September Bór-Komorowski radioed Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky – himself of Polish origin – that, if the Russians made no move within the next seventy-two hours, the Polish Home Army must capitulate. No reply came and so on 2 October Bór-Komorowski surrendered to Bach-Zelewski. The rising had gone on for sixty-three days and the fighters had drawn the reluctant admiration of the SS, so much so that Bach-Zelewski shook hands with Bór, congratulated him and ordered that he and his 15,000 survivors be treated as prisoners of war – in law he could have treated them as franc tireurs and had them shot. Around 15,000 members of the Home Army were killed, while the Poles subsequently claimed that 250,000 civilians had died, and the Germans that 17,000 of their men had been killed. Both claims are almost certainly exaggerated.

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  With the close of Operation Bagration, the centre of the Eastern Front settled down for a while as the Red Army turned its attention to the north. On 12 July the First Baltic Front ripped a fifty-mile hole between the German Sixteenth Army, Army Group North’s southernmost formation, and Third Panzer Army of Army Group Centre. This was the beginning of an offensive against Army Group North when Marshal Koniev threw the Leningrad, Third, Second and First Baltic Fronts, 1.2 million men with 2,500 tanks, against Army Group North’s 540,000 men with 300 tanks and assault guns. Army Group North had been commanded by Colonel-General Georg Lindemann, who had taken over from Field Marshal Model on 31 March 1944, but, having been refused permission to withdraw to shorten his line, he had been retired as being, according to Hitler, ‘too old and too weak’ (he was sixty) and replaced by Colonel-General Johannes Freissner.

  The USSR was determined to regain the Baltic States. Although Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians historically looked more to Germany than to Russia, both Tsarists and Bolsheviks considered the Baltic States to be within the Russian sphere of influence and Germany had conceded that in the secret protocols to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. Now the roads were packed with refugees who had no wish to return to Russian subjugation, and the Latvian units in the German army in particular fought determinedly to keep the Red Army out. Despite their efforts, by 23 July, Army Group North had been pushed out of Estonia, was cut off from Army Group Centre and was holding a frontage of 500 miles in Latvia around the Gulf of Riga. When Freissner proved reluctant to order yet more pointless counter-attacks to restore the link with Army Group Centre, he was moved on 25 July to take over Army Group South Ukraine, exchanging places with Colonel-General Schorner, who now took over Army Group North.As long as the German navy had mastery of the Baltic, the situation of Army Group North was not (quite) as bad as it seemed on the map, and wounded and non-essential elements were already being evacuated through the port of Riga. On 16 August, General of Panzer Troops Erhard Raus’s Third Panzer Army of Army Group Centre launched Fall Doppelkopf, designed to close the thirty-mile gap to Army Group North. The plan was for XXXX Panzer Corps of two armoured divisions, one motorized division and one infantry to attack east and hold off the Red Army, while XXXIX Panzer Corps would thrust up the coast and link up with Army Group North. XXXX Corps’s inland advance ran into ten Soviet rifle divisions supported by four anti-tank brigades and three artillery divisions, but it did attract their attention, and much reduced the opposition that would have been met by XXXIX Corps when it launched its attack on 18 August. This was one of the rare occasions when the German navy was able to provide naval gunfire support for the army, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and a flotilla of destroyers were able to add to the corps’s own artillery as the troops pushed up the coast. XXXIX Corps’s spearhead made contact with Army Group North at noon, and a tenuous corridor eighteen miles wide was now open and convoys of supplies began to pour through. Now was the time to pull Army Group North out and back into East Prussia for the eventual defence of the Reich, but Hitler would have none of it. Concerned that Finland might be about to defect, he insisted that strong forces must be kept in the Baltic States to encourage (or possibly to threaten) the Finns.

  Hitler was right to suspect the Finns, for one by one Germany’s erstwhile allies were deserting her. The Romanian dictator, Antonescu, saw the Red Army rolling ever closer to his borders and for some time he, his government and the opposition had been seeking terms. All these feelers had foundered on the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender and Romania’s demand for a guarantee of post-war independence from the Soviet Union. In the end, with Soviet troops on Romanian territory, Antonescu, as a soldier, could not abandon his German ally and, on 23 August, King Michael had him arrested and asked the Russians for an armistice, which was signed in Moscow on 12 September. Romanian uni
ts surrendered to the Red Army en masse and Army Group South lost its 400,000 Romanians and could no longer hold. Within a few weeks, Romania declared war against Germany and twenty Romanian divisions joined the Red Army. It did them little good: as soon as the war was over, they lost what little independence the agreement with the Russians had allowed them. In the German puppet state of Slovakia, a communist-inspired uprising broke out on 30 August but, as with Warsaw, Stalin refused to help and the rising was eventually put down by German troops. Bulgaria had never declared war on the USSR, but only against Britain and the USA, and her military contribution to the German war effort was limited to chasing partisans in the Balkans, but with the approach of the Red Army the Regent, Prince Cyril, severed diplomatic relations with Germany and then, as the Red Army steamroller burst into Bulgaria, a communist coup persuaded the Bulgarian Army to change sides. The regent did not profit from his treachery, and he would be shot by the NKVD in February 1945. A few days later, Finland did indeed leave the war: her troops had managed to hold the Red Army but Marshal Mannerheim, who was now prime minister, was well aware that in time sheer weight of numbers would crush him and the whole country might be swallowed up. The Finnish government arrived at terms with the Soviets, informed the Germans that they were leaving the war, and asked that German troops leave her territory. German formations still in Finland withdrew back into Norway. Now only Hungary was left as a German ally of any importance but the Regent, Admiral Horthy, was already in discussions with the Soviets and had agreed to change sides, when the Germans, who knew very well what was going on, engineered a pro-German coup, arrested Horthy, installed a puppet government, took control of the Hungarian Army, began to recruit Hungarians for the Waffen SS and rounded up 437,000 Hungarian Jews and sent them to Auschwitz. Here was the cause of one of many shouting matches between Hitler and Guderian. Hitler insisted that the German army in Hungary be strengthened to keep her in the Axis and prevent the Russians from taking Budapest. For his part, the Chief of the General Staff argued that the next Russian offensive would attack straight through Poland and into Germany, and that all reinforcements should be concentrated there and not wasted in Hungary. But Hitler would not be moved, and his insistence would ultimately rob Germany of her last armoured reserves.