Armageddon (91 page)

Remlinger’s men defended themselves with energy, mobilizing an armoured train which sallied from the perimeter to rescue a load of ammunition and supplies from beneath the Russian guns. Rationing was strictly enforced in anticipation of a long siege, with the result that much of the available food eventually fell into Soviet hands. It was ammunition that was lacking, and by mid-February almost exhausted. The Russians maintained a constant heavy mortar barrage, and bombed the defenders by night. Von Hase was dismayed by the fate of the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old NCO cadets: “It was terrible. They tried so hard to be brave. Whenever we needed volunteers for a patrol or a dangerous counter-attack, those teenagers put themselves forward. We had to get back lost ground—so we used them.” Von Hase was presented with the Knight’s Cross, pinned on him by Remlinger, for his own part in leading counter-attacks. “Discipline remained amazing to the very end.”

As the situation grew desperate, von Hase thought of his fiancée, Renate, who was nursing in Thuringia. The Wehrmacht had long since established a system of proxy marriage for soldiers absent at the front. The landlines to Schneidemühl were cut, but the major sent a wireless message proposing their marriage, which Renate received. On 13 February, in accordance with the regulations, she went to her local registrar and took the vows with her hand upon a steel helmet, intended to symbolize her absent fiancé. It was impossible, however, to signal to Karl-Günther that the ceremony had been performed. When later asked by Russian interrogators whether he was married, he answered: “I don’t know.” On 22 February, when it was plain that the “fortress” was no longer defensible, Remlinger decided to defy his orders. The survivors of the garrison broke out and scattered into small groups to attempt escape. After walking for three days, Remlinger, von Hase and a dozen others fell into Russian hands. Remlinger died in captivity.

After the fall of Budapest on 14 February, the Russians expected a relatively untroubled advance through the rest of Hungary and on to Vienna. Instead, on 6 March, Hitler committed Sixth SS Panzer Army, veterans of the Bulge, to a dramatic counter-attack north and south of Lake Balaton, to save his Hungarian oilfields. Second Panzer Army was also directed to strike east towards the Danube. In a sea of mud, the Germans launched their offensive—and at first gained ground against the startled Russians. In Hungary, the Soviets were weak in armour. Russian infantry and anti-tank guns found themselves meeting the brunt of the German thrust. Lieutenant Valentin Krulik’s motorized infantry unit of Sixth Guards Tank Army was ordered to take up defensive positions in a village near the Czech border. They were digging hard, and extremely scared at the prospect of facing tanks with only a few anti-tank grenades. Suddenly, Krulik saw an 85mm anti-tank gun being towed past. He waved down the driver and begged the NCO in charge of the gun to stay and support them, which the sergeant obligingly did. Krulik was pleased to see that the man was wearing a string of medals, indicating that he was a veteran. They dragged the gun into concealment behind the paling fence surrounding a vegetable garden. There were only two gunners, so the infantrymen helped sort armour-piercing ammunition from high explosive. Then they waited. At last, three German Mark IVs crawled slowly across the fields towards them, followed by infantry. The sergeant gunner said nonchalantly: “Oh, it’s only those old things!” The Russians lingered minute by minute, allowing the range to close. Then the sergeant said: “Drop the fence!” As soon as they pushed over the paling, the gun fired. A tank caught fire. Its two consorts began to drop ineffectual shells around the Russians. Krulik’s men swept the German infantry with automatic fire. After a few minutes, the surviving tanks and footsoldiers retired. This was not the German army of 1941 or 1942. These were the last writhings of desperate men. Krulik, deeply relieved, said to the gunners: “That’s the first time we’ve had our own private artillery support. Nice evening, sergeant.”

Once the Soviets recovered their balance after the shock of the Germans’ Lake Balaton assault, they disposed ruthlessly of the attackers. German tanks and vehicles were anyway coughing to a halt all over the battlefield, for lack of fuel. The Germans ended the battle with fewer than 400 operational tanks and assault guns, against the 900 they had started with. The men of 1st SS Panzer Corps were exhausted. “We were at the end of our physical strength,” said Corporal Martin Glade, of the retreat that began once more in mid-March, as the Soviets renewed their offensive.

At each orientation stop, comrades dropped to the ground where they stood . . . [Our officer] distributed the company along a ridge in the darkness. “Dig in! Dig in!” I heard him shout, time and again. We . . . dug shallow holes for ourselves. Mine was the depth of a spade. Then, fatigue overcame me. When I woke up again, I was hardly able to get to my feet. I was frozen right through. The sky was turning red in the east . . . With my frozen fingers I dug in my haversack for a dry bread crust and a piece of sausage.

The Russians opened fire on the featureless hill, bereft of cover: “The effect was devastating . . . to the right and left of me, men were lying motionless, silent, strangely curled up—more than half the company, I thought. Last night when we moved onto that damned hill, we had been 48.”

The Germans abandoned their attack and began to pull back on 16 March. The Russians resumed their advance on Vienna, reaching the city outskirts on 4 April. Two days later, Valentin Krulik was sent with a reconnaissance patrol into the heart of the Austrian capital. He cared little for its illustrious history: “We didn’t pay much attention. For us, it was just another battlefield.” Alexandr Vostrukhin reached the suburbs with a T-34 battalion of the same brigade as Krulik. “The city looked amazingly untouched by the war, so quiet and serene, with no fires in sight.”

Krulik led his men into the streets from the west in a couple of trucks, without meeting resistance. They caught sight of German troops, but found no organized defences. For a few minutes, they were bemused to find themselves following a column of Wehrmacht vehicles. “The silence was really creepy.” But as night came on, despite Krulik’s report that the path was open, his regimental commander felt uneasy about penetrating deep into the city without support. They pulled back to the suburbs. It was several days before the Russians were ready to address Vienna in force. In the interim, the Germans regrouped. SS panzergrenadiers fought ferociously through the streets for a week. Among them was Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s favourite commando. By 10 April, even Skorzeny despaired. He reported to Berlin: “The situation is hopeless. There are no defensive preparations, utter despondency. Organization has broken down . . . Troops are bewildered and deprived of initiative. I ordered that three officers accused of treachery were not to be shot, but hung from the Floritzdorfer bridge. Withdrawal of the Luftwaffe is using fuel needed by tanks and fighting troops—and they are taking with them only women and furniture.”

It cost the Red Army a week of bloody fighting to cover the ground Valentin Krulik’s men had travelled so easily at the outset. “Our problem in 1945,” said Krulik, “was that we were always in a hurry—being replenished on the march, very short of experienced officers, with a lot of very young and pretty old replacements filling the ranks. We were often confused about our own location. We would pore over the map and say: ‘Well, we’ve been through here and here. We’re going where? And after that, where?’ ” The Austrian capital was not finally secured until 14 April. On that date, Sixth SS Panzer Army sent a final signal to Berlin: “The garrison of Vienna has ceased to exist. Despite their exhaustion, the troops are fighting with exemplary courage.” Bombardment had reduced much of Vienna’s beauty to rubble. The Soviet occupiers trudged through a city in which whole avenues blazed, littered with corpses and the wrecks of tanks and self-propelled guns destroyed by the score in the street fighting.

Rokossovsky’s armies swung westwards during March, after gaining all of East Prussia save a few German strongholds. They smashed through West Prussia and Pomerania. Refugees and Wehrmacht soldiers alike were pressed relentlessly back upon the Baltic coast. Hundreds of thousands of them crowded into Danzig. It was defended by the remains of the German Second Army, while behind its positions huddled some 1.5 million refugees, most from East Prussia, together with 100,000 wounded jamming the hospitals. On 12 March, command was entrusted to the tough, effective General Dietrich von Saucken. “He was a son of East Prussia,” in the words of German admirers, “and what mattered to him . . . was the seething mass of refugees, whom he was determined to save from the grasp of the Russians.” The gauleiter of Danzig, Albert Forster, wrote: “I still believe in some kind of miracle. I still believe in Almighty God, who has given us our Führer . . . All that is left is for the West to recognize where its real enemy lies.”

Instead, however, hysteria was overwhelming many of Forster’s people. On 12 March, Russians found sixteen members of three families, including mothers and children aged between two and fifteen, in a shed a few miles outside Danzig. All had had their throats or wrists slashed by one Irwin Schwartz, a prominent local Nazi who said that this had been done at their own request. Some of those involved, who were still alive, persisted with their efforts to die even as a Red Army doctor attempted to save them. Schwartz, who survived cutting his own wrists, said that he had killed his own wife and three children, then offered the same service to his neighbours. “It is better to die than live with the Russians,” he told his interrogators. Fifty-eight women and teenagers killed themselves by slitting their wrists in the town of Mednitz in 1st Ukrainian Front’s sector. The same day, Konev’s headquarters reported to Moscow: “Many Germans in areas we have occupied are dying of starvation.”

On 15 March, six Russian armies began a simultaneous assault on Danzig. At last, the surviving heavy units of the German surface fleet, which had contributed so little to Hitler’s war effort, found a role. The old battleship
Schlesien
and the cruisers
Prince Eugen
and
Leipzig
fired on the Russians from stations offshore, shaking the earth with the impact of their huge shells. The Germans remained faithful as ever to their doctrine of active defence. For four days, the line held. On 19 March, under fierce Russian pressure von Saucken’s positions began to crack. On the 22nd, the first Soviet tanks reached the Baltic north of Danzig. The city centre came within Russian artillery range. A ferocious bombardment began. Civilians descended to the cellars, from which most did not emerge for many days. Russian fire was also raking ships in the harbour which were still attempting to evacuate civilians. A Russian soldier observed with satisfaction that once gunners accustomed to firing at ground targets adjusted to the demands of hitting ships, the results were devastating: “A gun would fire, then came the explosion of the shell, and another craft capsized and went to the bottom with its load of fascists.”

Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov, commanding a Stalin tank troop, found the Danzig fighting as tough as anything he had known in three years of war: “The Germans fought very hard and very well, right up to the end.” Ivanov’s unit was dispersed by companies, to support the advance of Sixty-fifth Army’s infantry. “I have never seen such a terrible battlefield—so much mud that we could hardly manoeuvre.” Ivanov, a genial, exuberant twenty-one-year-old from Kazan in Tartary, had enjoyed an unusually untroubled upbringing, as the son of a successful Soviet bureaucrat. His elder brother had been killed early in the war—the family never knew when or where. An enthusiastic photographer, Ivanov took his looted Leica everywhere he went with the victorious Red Army.

On 19 March, his company stood just north of Danzig, peering at their next objective, a brickworks a thousand yards distant, flanked by a pine wood. When the supporting artillery barrage stopped, to Ivanov’s surprise and dismay their company commander Chernyavsky, in whose judgement he had little faith, ordered the tanks to advance without infantry. The heavy Stalins thrashed clumsily forward on their bellies in the soft going, the lead troop eighty yards ahead of Ivanov’s. They were firing half-heartedly at the brickworks, in lieu of any identifiable target. Suddenly, a German Panther crept out from the nearby wood, fired once at a range of 700 yards and disappeared behind cover again. It repeated this process three times in as many minutes. Three Stalins stood blazing, their crews running for the rear. The rest of the company retreated in confusion.

The Russian officers dismounted and were discussing what to do next when the divisional commander limped forward, leaning on the stick he had carried since he was wounded, and nursing a towering rage. “How long have you commanded armour?” he demanded of their company commander. “Is this your idea of how to fight a tank battle? What’s the range of your guns? Eleven hundred metres? Then why don’t you use it!” He started beating Chernyavsky furiously with his stick. “Now get on with it!” They remounted the tanks and resumed the advance. Within minutes, a Panther shell struck Chernyavsky’s tank, setting it on fire and killing the crew—“which,” said Ivanov laconically, “saved our captain from a court martial.”

It took the Russians two days to get across that open field to their objective. Supporting infantry crept forward yard by yard towards the wood where German infantry and anti-tank guns were dug in, enfilading the attackers. When the tanks at last followed, “we found our tommy-gunners lying dead in heaps.” Two brothers, Nikolai and Pyotr Oleinik, were gunner and driver in the same tank when it was hit. They bailed out alive, but Nikolai disappeared as they ran for their lives under fire. Pyotr, concussed, wandered hopelessly for hours searching for his brother, but never even found his body.

On 27 March, the regiment was ordered to advance to cut the railway north of Danzig. They set out in darkness, and halted when they believed they had secured their objective. Dawn revealed, however, that instead of the train tracks they had merely reached a tramline. On the radio net, the regimental commander told the point troop gloomily: “I’ve already informed Division we are on the railway.” Reluctantly, he now reported their mistake. General Panov, commanding I Guards Tank Corps, radioed back personally, in one of the rages characteristic of Russian commanders: “You’re all heading for court martial,” he told the hapless colonel, “but I’ll shoot you myself before the tribunal gets to sit.” The tanks resumed their advance, until they found before them a blown rail bridge, with two trains deliberately driven into the gap, creating a tangled mass of wreckage, covered by German machine-gun fire. Russian engineers dashed forward. They lost a lot of men, but at last laid charges in the debris. The explosions blew a gap just large enough for the passage of self-propelled guns, though not tanks. Supported by infantry, the guns raced forward and forced open the road. “Everybody got medals,” said Ivanov. But the Germans had delayed them almost until nightfall, in the sort of action that was fought a hundred times in a hundred places in those days.