Between Giants (72 page)

The Luftwaffe attack on New Year’s Day, 1945, was also far from a great triumph. A secret airstrike was planned against Allied airfields, with the intention of destroying as many planes as possible on the ground. Most German aircrews were unaware of the exact mission until the morning of the attack. The German pilots struck shortly after dawn, and appeared to be devastatingly successful; more than 460 Allied aircraft were destroyed or damaged. But the flak defences of the airfields were stronger than anticipated, and British and American fighter patrols inflicted heavy losses on the German fighters as they flew home. Even worse, the mission had been prepared in such secrecy that the German flak defences had not been alerted. Seeing large numbers of planes flying out of the west, they opened fire on their own pilots, adding to their casualties. The Germans lost more than 270 planes, but most importantly 211 pilots were killed. The Allies, on the other hand, suffered serious material losses, but their aircrews escaped almost unscathed. Once replacement aircraft were brought forward, albeit over several weeks, they were able to resume operations without difficulty. The Luftwaffe, by contrast, suffered irreplaceable losses of experienced pilots. It would never mount an operation on this scale again.

In his New Year message to the German nation, Hitler characteristically showed no sign of doubt:

Millions of Germans of all callings and backgrounds, men and women, youths and girls, right down to the children, have laboured with spades and shovels. Thousands of Volkssturm battalions have been raised or are being formed. Divisions have been re-equipped. People’s artillery corps, rocket brigades and assault gun brigades as well as armoured formations have been deployed, fighter squadrons once more refreshed and supplied with new machines, and above all the German factories have through the efforts of their male and female workers achieved singular results. In this way, whatever our enemies destroy has been restored with superhuman diligence and heroic courage, and this will continue until one day our enemies will find their end. That, my fellow countrymen, will be regarded as the wonder of the 20th century! A people, who labour so endlessly at the front and in the homeland, who endure so much ill fortune, will never be ground down. They will come out of this furnace tested and stronger than ever before in their history.

To some extent at least, Hitler spoke the truth. Tank production peaked in December 1944, with 1,854 tanks and assault guns being completed, equivalent to almost half the entire production of 1941, sufficient to re-equip several Panzer divisions. But this was the last surge of production, and Hitler’s armaments minister, Albert Speer, was well aware that raw materials were running out. There was no longer sufficient brass to manufacture the huge quantities of cartridges required, and in some cases steel was being used. These steel cartridges were more prone to jamming, causing additional problems. There was also a shortage of tungsten, resulting in armour-piercing ammunition being of a poorer quality, and sometimes not even available.

Everywhere, German soldiers and civilians held on in the hope of the promised Wunderwaffen (‘Wonder Weapons’) – the miraculous new weapons that would turn the tide of the war. New assault rifles were now in widespread circulation, and official reports had made much of the advent of new Luftwaffe aircraft, particularly the jet-powered Me 262 and rocket-powered Me 163. Large parts of London had felt the power of V-1 and V-2 missile bombardments, and there were constant hints that other, even more potent weaponry would soon be available. But would it come in time?

All along the Ostfront, senior officers used what little time they had available, organizing training for their new drafts, preparing defensive positions and contemplating a grim future. Günter Emanuel Baltuttis was a member of a replacement draft sent to bring the former 16th Parachute Regiment, now renamed 3rd Regiment, of the Paratroop-Panzergrenadier Division Hermann Göring back to something approaching full strength. The draft consisted of a number of former airmen as well as new recruits like Baltuttis. When they assembled near Insterburg, they were surprised by the greeting they were given by a stony-faced Oberleutnant: ‘Take note, I will not hesitate to drag any laggard or coward before a court martial!’

Baltuttis and his comrades were sent straight into the frontline, where they endured muddy, rainswept conditions – in order to keep their loads to a minimum, they had been sent forward in summer clothing, with the assurance that winter uniforms would follow in due course. These garments didn’t actually appear for two months. Within days, Baltuttis had developed a form of trench foot from constant immersion in water and damp earth.

Baltuttis’ regiment was holding the frontline in the area where the Führer-Grenadier Brigade had run into Soviet armour, west of Daken, and the landscape was dotted with burnt-out wrecks. From time to time, the soldiers came across the corpses of men who had fallen in the fighting, and had been left to sink slowly into the mud. Desertions to the enemy were a regular feature. Soldiers faced draconian punishments for other misdemeanours. Baltuttis’ company commander, Leutnant Saul, was assigned to a court-martial, and recounted the story to Baltuttis when he returned to the company:

An 18-year-old soldier, whose father was an Oberst in our corps, was condemned to death for the capital offence of plundering, because he had taken an abandoned wristwatch that he found in some ruins during a counter-attack. Leutnant Saul objected to the case being brought, and finally refused to take part, forcing an adjournment, probably saving the life of the accused. The chairman accused Leutnant Saul of ‘refusing to follow orders’, and reported the events to the regiment commander, resulting in an immediate summons for Leutnant Saul. But contrary to expectations, the commander, Oberstleutnant Rebholz, issued not the slightest rebuke, but just gently shook his head, and made it clear that he regarded the procedure as unnecessary and pointless. Leutnant Saul escaped any punishment.

During the winter, Baltuttis’ company suffered a steady stream of casualties. These included two suicides, two executions (one for desertion, one for self-wounding) and two deaths as a result of attempts at self-wounding that went badly wrong. Baltuttis noted that all of the casualties, including those from enemy snipers, involved new drafts rather than the company’s small number of veterans. Alarmed by the poor performance of new recruits, both the division and corps commanders recommended that the division be pulled out of line and allowed to undergo intensive training; the almost nonexistent reserves available on the front effectively precluded any such action.

The German soldiers worked hard to improve their bunkers, which served as homes as well as fortifications. They would need all the protection they could get; German intelligence made force estimates that gave the Red Army an advantage of 11:1 in infantry, 7:1 in tanks and 20:1 in artillery. Hitler dismissed these estimates, deriding them as ‘the greatest bluff since the time of Genghis Khan’. For the moment, though, Hitler had other concerns in the east than Army Group Centre.

August 1944 was a bad month for the Reich in the Balkans. Bulgaria first declared itself neutral, and then – under pressure from the Soviet Union – declared war on Germany. Bulgarian contributions to the Reich’s war effort had always been modest, but the political impact of Bulgaria’s defection was considerable. Romania also defected, in a much more dramatic manner. After secret negotiations with the Soviet Union, Romania switched sides and the two armies guarding the flanks of the German 6th Army allowed the Red Army unrestricted passage. In 1942, the failure of Romanian armies guarding the German flanks at Stalingrad had resulted in the envelopment of the 6th Army, and now the same result ensued, with the remnants of no fewer than 20 divisions being encircled near Kishinev. Few men succeeded in breaking out of the envelopment. In October, as Hungary’s government was finalizing secret arrangements to surrender to the approaching Red Army, Germany engineered a coup, putting the Crossed Arrows Party, the nearest Hungarian equivalent to the Nazi Party, into power. Most of the last remaining Jews in Hungary, about 70,000 individuals in and around Budapest, were gathered together into an area of about 0.3 square kilometres and were force-marched to the Austrian border during November and December. Many perished in the cold.

The 337th Volksgrenadier Division was ordered on 16 October to take over a sector of the front from the Hungarian 5th Reserve Division, near Warsaw. The Hungarians were to be disarmed, a task that Hans Jürgen Pantenius and his fellow officers found deeply distasteful, as they had established very close relations with the Hungarian division:

Meanwhile, the Red Army was approaching Hungary from the east. Stalin may have agreed to a pause in offensive operations into Poland and Prussia, but he urged the powerful Ukrainian Fronts forward towards Budapest. His Front commanders asked in vain for an opportunity to pause and gather their strength, but the disjointed nature of their attacks actually proved to their advantage. A single, well-organized thrust at Budapest would probably have been successful, and Hitler would have been forced to accept the inevitable, but the succession of drives against the Hungarian capital resulted in a steady transfer of German forces to this sector, stripping Poland and East Prussia of vital armoured reserves. By mid December, the Hungarian capital lay in a salient, with both its flanks threatened. The SS Dirlewanger Brigade, which had acquired a grim reputation for its part in the suppression of the Warsaw Rising, was routed north of the city. As the diminishing defenders were frantically reshuffled to restore the front, the pincers of 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts turned towards each other.

On 26 December, they met at Esztergom, northeast of Budapest. The Hungarian capital, containing about 188,000 German troops, was surrounded. Refusing to accept the loss of the city, Hitler ordered the garrison to continue to resist, and IV SS-Panzer Corps, currently deployed as armoured reserve in Poland, was sent south. Much of the Ostfront had already been denuded to shore up the defences, and this latest move left the critical Warsaw–Berlin axis dangerously weak.

Worse was to come in January. After the Ardennes offensive was abandoned, the SS divisions that might have provided a vital reserve for Army Group Centre were sent to launch another relief attempt in Hungary. For the moment, though, the diversion of IV SS-Panzer Corps left Reinhardt’s Army Group Centre only one Panzer division and two Panzergrenadier divisions as armoured reserves. To make matters worse, the army group’s frontline, which bulged dangerously to the east, inviting strikes against either flank, was rendered less defensible as the winter frosts froze the marshy land around the Narew and Bobr, terrain that had previously been impassable to Soviet tanks. Hossbach found that the Masurian Lakes to his rear were now ideal landing areas for airborne troops, and his engineers had to improvise obstacles, using farm machinery and tree trunks embedded vertically into the frozen surface of the lakes.

The fighting around Goldap and Gumbinnen had been complicated by the inability, or unwillingness, of the Wehrmacht and the local Party officials to cooperate and arrange a timely evacuation of civilians, and to arrange appropriate deployment of the Volkssturm. Now, there was a third entity, raising the possibility that matters would become even more complex. General Otto Lasch had been appointed as commander of Wehrkreis I (Defence District I), the military administrative authority that oversaw most of East Prussia. Rather than being subordinate to Reinhardt’s army group, Lasch was answerable to Heinrich Himmler in his role as commander of the Replacement Army. Lasch was from Silesia, but was married to an East Prussian, and had spent most of his life in the province, serving as a police officer in Lyck and Sensburg before rejoining the army in 1935. He was serving in France, about to take command of LXIV Corps, when he received the news over the telephone that he was to go to East Prussia: