The Fall of Berlin 1945 (13 page)

'You must believe me,' Guderian persisted, 'when I say it is not just pig-headedness on my part that makes me keep on proposing the evacuation of Courland. I can see no other way left to us of accumulating reserves, and without reserves we cannot hope to defend the capital. I assure you I am acting solely in Germany's interests.' Hitler began trembling in anger as he jumped to his feet. 'How dare you speak to me like that?' he shouted. 'Don't you think I'm fighting for Germany? My whole life has been one long struggle for Germany!' Colonel de Maiziére, the new operations officer at Zossen, had never seen such a row and stood there shocked and afraid for the chief of staff. To bring an end to Hitler's frenzy, Göring led Guderian out of the room to find some coffee while everyone calmed down.

Guderian's main fear was that the Second Army, trying to maintain a link between East Prussia and Pomerania, was in danger of being cut off. He therefore argued instead for a single attack southwards from the 'Baltic balcony'. This attack on Zhukov's right flank would also deter the Soviets from trying to attack Berlin immediately. On 13 February, a final conference on the operation was held in the Reich Chancellery. Himmler, as commander-in-chief of Army Group Vistula, was present, and so was Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich. Guderian also brought his extremely capable deputy, General Wenck. Guderian made plain right from the start that he wanted the operation to start in two days' time. Himmler objected, saying that not all the fuel and ammunition had arrived. Hitler supported him and soon the Führer and his army chief of staff were having another row. Guderian insisted that Wenck should direct the operation.

'The Reichsführer SS is man enough to carry out the attack on his own,' Hitler said.

'The Reichsführer SS has neither the requisite experience nor a sufficiently competent staff" to control the attack single-handed. The presence of General Wenck is therefore essential.'

'I don't permit you,' Hitler shouted, 'to tell me that the Reichsführer SS is incapable of performing his duties.'

The argument raged for a long time. Hitler was literally raving in anger and screaming. Guderian claims to have glanced up at a helmeted portrait of Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, and wondered what he thought of what was happening in the country he had helped to create. To Guderian's surprise, Hitler suddenly stopped his pacing up and down and told Himmler that General Wenck would join his headquarters that night and direct the offensive. He then sat down again abruptly and smiled at Guderian. 'Now please continue with the conference. The general staff has won a battle this day.' Guderian ignored Keitel's remonstrances later in the anteroom that he might have caused the Führer to suffer a stroke. He feared that his limited triumph might be short-lived.

On 16 February, the Pomeranian offensive, known as the Stargard tank battle, began under Wenck's direction. Over 1,200 tanks had been allocated, but the trains to transport them were lacking. Even an under-strength panzer division needed fifty trains to move its men and vehicles. Far more serious was the shortage of ammunition and fuel, of which there were enough for only three days of operations. The lesson of the Ardennes offensive had not been learned.

Army staff officers had intended to give the offensive the codename '
Husarenritt'
, or Hussar ride, which in itself seemed to acknowledge that this could be no more than a raid. But the SS insisted on a much more dramatic name:
'Sonnenwende'
or solstice. In the event it was neither a Hussar ride - a sudden thaw meant that the armoured vehicles were soon bogged down in the mud — nor a solstice, since it changed very little. The Wehrmacht could ill afford the heavy loss of tanks when the 2nd Guards Tank Army counter-attacked.

The highest-ranking casualty was General Wenck, who, driving back to his headquarters from briefing the Führer on the night of 17 February, fell asleep at the wheel and was badly hurt. He was replaced by General Krebs, a clever staff officer who had been military attache in Moscow before Operation Barbarossa. The attempt to force back the Soviet counter-attack, however, had to be abandoned after two days. All that can be said in favour of the offensive is that it bought time. The Kremlin became convinced that a quick dash to Berlin was out of the question until the Pomeranian coastline was secured.

Hitler's attempts to designate 'fortress' towns and to refuse to allow the evacuation of encircled troops, were part of a suicidal pattern of enforced sacrifice and useless suffering. He knew that they were doomed because the Luftwaffe lacked the fuel and aircraft to supply them, and yet his policy deprived Army Group Vistula of experienced troops.

Königsberg and Breslau held out, but other towns designated as fortresses or breakwaters by Hitler soon fell. In southern Pomerania, Schneidemühl, the smallest and the least well defended, fell on 14 February after a desperate defence. For once, even Hitler had no complaints and awarded Knight's Crosses to both the commander and the second-in-command. Four days later, on 18 February, just as Operation
Sonnenwende
became bogged down in the mud, General Chuikov gave the signal for the storming of the fortress of Poznan. His 7th Department, as at Stalingrad, had preceded the bombardment with loudspeaker programmes of lugubrious music interspersed with messages that surrender was the only way to save your life and return home. The Germans were told that they had no hope of escape because they were now over 200 kilometres behind the front line.

Siege artillery had begun the softening-up process nine days before, but by the morning of 18 February, 1,400 guns, mortars and katyusha launchers were ready for the four-hour bombardment. Storm groups fought into the fortress, whose superstructure had been crushed by explosive fire. When resistance from a building continued, a 203mm howitzer was brought up and blasted the walls over open sights. Flamethrowers were used and explosive charges dropped down ventilation shafts. German soldiers who tried to surrender were shot by their own officers. But the end was imminent. On the night of 22-23 February, the commandant, Major General Ernst Gomell, spread out the swastika flag on the floor of his room, lay down on it and shot himself. The remnants of the garrison capitulated.

The siege of Breslau was to be even more prolonged: the city held out even after Berlin had fallen. As a result it was one of the most terrible of the war. The fanatical Gauleiter Hanke was determined that the capital of Silesia should remain unconquered. It was he who used loudspeaker vans to order women and children to flee the city in late January. Those who froze to death were entirely his responsibility.

The city had good stocks of food but little ammunition. The attempts to drop ammunition by parachute were a terrible waste of Luftwaffe resources. Colonel General Schörner, the commander-in-chief of Army Group Centre, then decided to send part of the 25th Parachute Regiment at the end of February to strengthen the garrison. The regimental commander protested strenuously that there was no landing zone, but on 22 February the battalion boarded Junkers 52 transports at Jüterbog, south of Berlin. At midnight the aircraft approached Breslau. 'Over the city,' one of the paratroopers wrote later, 'we could see extensive fires and we encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire.' A hit on the radio left them out of contact with ground control and they landed at an airfield near Dresden. Another attempt was made two nights later. The Soviet flak was even more intense as they circled the burning city for twenty minutes, trying to find a landing place. Three of the aircraft were lost: one of them crashed into a factory chimney.

Hanke's disciplinary measures, backed by General Schörner's policy of 'strength through fear', were terrible. Execution was arbitrary. Even ten-year-old children were put to work under Soviet air and artillery attack to clear an air strip within the city. Any attempt to surrender by those who sought to 'preserve their pitiful lives' would be met by a death sentence instantly carried out. 'Decisive measures' would also be taken against their families. Schörner argued that 'almost four years of an Asiatic war' had changed the soldier at the front completely: 'It has hardened him and fanaticized him in the struggle against the Bolsheviks . . . The campaign in the east has developed the political soldier.'

Stalin's boast at Yalta that the populations of East Prussia and Silesia had fled was not yet true. All too many were still trapped in besieged cities. German civilians in East Prussia also continued to suffer wherever they were, whether in Konigsberg and the Heiligenbeil
Kessel
, attempting to leave the port of Pillau by ship, escaping on foot to the west or remaining at home. The February thaw meant that the ice of the Frisches Haff could be crossed only on foot and not by cart. The exit to Danzig, Pomerania and the west still remained open, but everyone realized that it was only a matter of time before the 1st Belorussian Front cut through to the Baltic.

Beria was informed by a senior SMERSH officer that the 'significant part of the population of East Prussia' which had fled into Königsberg had found that there was little room for them and even less food. They were lucky if they received 180 grams of bread a day. 'Starved women with children are dragging themselves along the road' in the hope that the Red Army might feed them. From these civilians, Red Army intelligence heard that 'the morale of the Königsberg garrison is severely shaken. New general orders have been issued that any German male who does not report for frontline service will be shot on the spot . . . Soldiers put on civilian clothes and desert. On 6 and 7 February, the bodies of eighty German soldiers were piled up at the northern railway station. A placard was erected above them: "They were cowards but died just the same."

After the failure of
Operation Sonnenwende
, Danzig was increasingly threatened. The Kriegsmarine made great efforts to rescue as many wounded and civilians as possible. In the course of a single day, 21 February, 51,000 were brought out. The Nazi authorities estimated that only 150,000 remained to be evacuated, but a week later they found that Danzig now had a population of 1.2 million, of whom 530,000 were refugees. Greater efforts were made. On 8 March thirty-four trains of cattle trucks full of civilians left Pomerania for Mecklenburg, west of the Oder. Hitler wanted to move 150,000 refugees into Denmark. Two days later instructions were issued: 'The Führer has ordered that from now on Copenhagen is to become a target sanctuary.' Also on 10 March, the estimated running total of German refugees from the eastern provinces rose to 11 million people.

Yet even while the city of Danzig swarmed with frightened refugees desperate to escape, vile work continued in the Danzig Anatomical Medical Institute. After the Red Army captured the city a special commission was sent there to investigate the manufacture of soap and leather from 'corpses of citizens of the USSR, Poland and other coun- tries killed in German concentration camps'. In 1943 Professor Spanner and Assistant Professor Volman had begun to experiment. They then built special facilities for production. 'The examination of the premises of the Anatomical Institute revealed 148 human corpses which were stored for the production of soap of which 126 were male corpses, eighteen female and four children. Eighty male corpses and two female corpses were without heads. Eighty-nine human heads were also found.' All corpses and heads were stored in metal containers in an alcohol-carbolic solution. It appears that most of the corpses came from Stutthof concentration camp, near the city. 'The executed people whose corpses were made for using soap were of different nationalities, but mostly Poles, Russians and Uzbeks.' The work evidently received official approval, considering the high rank of its visitors. 'The Anatomical Institute was visited by the Minister of Education Rust and Minister of Health Care Konti. Gauleiter of Danzig Albert Förster visited the institute in 1944, when soap was already being produced. He examined all the premises of the Anatomical Institute and I think that he knew about the production of soap from human corpses.' The most astonishing aspects of this appalling story are that nothing was destroyed before the Red Army arrived and that Professor Spanner and his associates never faced charges after the war. The processing of corpses was not a crime. Stutthof camp contained mainly Soviet prisoners and a number of Poles, a mixture of soldiers and Jews. Some 16,000 prisoners died in the camp from typhoid in six weeks. As the Red Army approached, prisoners were ordered to eliminate all traces. The crematorium was blown up and ten barrack blocks in which Jews had been kept were burned down. Apparently ordinary German soldiers were made to take part in the executions of Red Army prisoners of war and Soviet civilians.

Whether prompted by fear of retribution for war crimes or fear of the Bolsheviks and slave labour in Siberia, the exhausted Wehrmacht still marched and fought. 'The Germans have not yet lost hope,' stated a French intelligence analysis that February, 'they don't dare to.' Soviet officers put it slightly differently: 'Morale is low but discipline is strong.'

7
Clearing the Rear Areas

On 14 February, in East Prussia, a convoy of military vehicles with Red Army markings turned off the main route from Rastenburg to Angeburg. This side road led into dense pine forest. The whole region was imbued with an atmosphere of melancholy.

A tall barbed-wire fence surmounted by concertina wire became visible from the road. The vehicles soon reached a barrier with a sign in German: 'Halt. Military Site. Entrance Forbidden to Civilians.' This was the entrance to Hitler's former headquarters, the
Wolfsschanze
. The trucks carried frontier guard troops from the 57th NKVD Rifle Division. The officers in command of the convoy wore Red Army uniforms, yet they owed no allegiance to its chain of command. As members of SMERSH counter-intelligence, they were in theory answerable only to Stalin. Their feelings towards the Red Army at that time were not comradely. The dilapidated vehicles which they had been given came from army units who had taken the opportunity to rid themselves of their worst equipment. Although this was common practice, SMERSH and the NKVD did not appreciate it.

Their leader wore the uniform of a Red Army general. This was Commissar of State Security of the Second Rank, Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov. Beria had appointed him the first chief of SMERSH in April 1943, soon after the victory at Stalingrad. Abakumov occasionally followed his leader's habit of arresting young women in order to rape them, but his chief speciality was taking part in the beatings of prisoners with a rubber truncheon. In order not to spoil the Persian carpet in his office, 'a dirty runner bespattered with blood was rolled out' before the unfortunate was brought in.

Abakumov, although still chief of SMERSH, had been sent by Beria 'to carry out the necessary Chekist measures' behind the advance of the 3rd Belorussian Front into East Prussia. Abakumov had ensured that the 12,000-strong NKVD forces directly under his command were the largest of all those attached to army groups invading Germany. They were larger even than those with Marshal Zhukov's armies.

Wet snow lay all around. To judge from Abakumov's report to Beria, the NKVD troops dismounted and blocked the road, while he and the SMERSH officers began their inspection. Since German booby traps had been reported in the Rastenburg area, they were no doubt cautious. To the right of the entrance barrier stood several stone blockhouses which contained mines and camouflage material. On the left-hand side there were barrack blocks where the guards had lived. The SMERSH officers found epaulettes and uniforms from the
Führerbegleit
battalion. Hitler's fear the previous year of being captured by a surprise Soviet parachute drop had led 'the Führer's guard battalion to be increased to a mixed brigade'.

Following the road deeper into the forest, Abakumov saw signs on either side of the road. These were translated for him by his interpreter: 'It is forbidden to step off the road' and 'Beware mines!' Abakumov was clearly taking notes the whole time for his report to Beria, which he knew would be passed to Stalin. The Boss was obsessively interested in all details of Hitler's life.

The most striking aspect of Abakumov's report, however, is the degree of Soviet ignorance it reveals about the place. This is especially surprising when one considers how many German generals they had captured and interrogated between the surrender at Stalingrad and the beginning of 1945. They appear to have taken almost two weeks to find this complex, four kilometres square. Concealment from the air was indeed impressive. Every road and alley was covered with green camouflage nets. Straight lines were broken with artificial trees and bushes. All the exterior lights had dark blue bulbs. Even the observation posts, up to thirty-five metres high in the forest, had been made to look like pine trees.

When they entered the first inner perimeter, Abakumov observed the 'ferro-concrete defences, barbed wire, minefields and large numbers of fire positions and barracks for guards'. At Gate No. 1 all the bunkers had been blown up after the Führer's final departure on 20 November 1944, less than three months before, but Abakumov clearly had no idea when the complex had been abandoned. They came to a second perimeter fence of barbed wire, then a third. Within the central compound, they found bunkers with armoured shutters linked to an underground garage capable of taking eighteen cars.

'We entered with great care,' Abakumov wrote. They found a safe but it was empty. The rooms, he noted, were 'very simply furnished'. (The place had once been described as a cross between a monastery and a concentration camp.) The SMERSH officers were only certain that they had found the right place when they discovered a sign on a door which read, 'Führer's Wehrmacht Adjutant'. Hitler's room was identified by a photograph of him with Mussolini.

Abakumov did not reveal any emotion over the fact that they were standing at last in the place from where Hitler had directed his merciless onslaught against the Soviet Union. He seemed far more preoccupied by the ferro-concrete constructions and their dimensions. Deeply impressed, he appears to have wondered whether Beria and Stalin might like something similar constructed: 'I think it would be interesting for our specialists to inspect Hitler's headquarters and see all these well-organized bunkers,' he wrote. Despite their imminent victory, Soviet leaders did not appear to feel so very much more secure than their arch-enemy.

The SMERSH detachments and NKVD divisions attached to the Fronts were, in Stalin's own words, 'indispensable' to deal with 'all unreliable elements encountered in occupied territories'. 'The divisions have no artillery,' Stalin had told General Bull of the US Army during the meeting with Air Marshal Tedder, 'but they are strong in automatic weapons, armoured cars and light armoured vehicles. They must also have well developed investigation and interrogation facilities.'

In German territories, such as East Prussia and Silesia, the first priority of the NKVD rifle regiments was to round up or hunt down German stragglers bypassed in the advance. Soviet authorities defined each Volkssturm man as a member of the Wehrmacht, but since almost every male between fifteen and fifty-five was called up, that included a large majority of local men. Those Volkssturm members who remained at home, rather than fleeing on the treks, were thus in many cases marked down as stay-behind sabotage groups, however elderly. Over 200 German 'saboteurs and terrorists' were reported 'shot on the spot' by NKVD forces, but the true figure was likely to have been far higher. In Poland, Stalin's description of 'unreliable elements' did not refer to the tiny minority of Poles who had collaborated with the Germans. It applied to all those who supported the Polish government in exile and the Armia Krajowa, which had launched the Warsaw Uprising the previous year. Stalin regarded the Warsaw revolt against the Germans as a 'criminal act of an anti-Soviet policy'. In his eyes, it was clearly an attempt to seize the Polish capital for the 'emigre government in London' just before the arrival of the Red Army, which had done all the fighting and dying. His shameful betrayal of Poland to the Nazis in 1939 and Beria's massacre of Polish officers at Katyn were evidently not worth considering. He also ignored the fact that the Poles had proportionately suffered even more than the Soviet Union, losing over 20 per cent of their population. Stalin was convinced that Poland and its government was his by right of conquest, and this proprietorial sentiment was widely shared within the Red Army. When Soviet forces crossed the German frontier from Poland, many 'felt that we had at last cleansed our own territory', instinctively assuming that Poland was an integral part of the Soviet Union.

Stalin's claim at Yalta that the Communist provisional government enjoyed great popularity in Poland was, of course, a totally subjective statement. Zhukov's memoirs were rather more revealing when he referred to the Poles in general, then added, 'some of whom were loyal to us'. Opponents to Soviet rule were designated 'enemy agents', whatever their record of resistance to the Germans. The fact that the Armia Krajowa was an Allied force was ignored. In another interesting sentence, Zhukov referred to the need to control his own troops: 'We had to make the educational work even more developed among all troops of the Front so that there would not be any thoughtless acts from the start of our stay.' Their 'stay' was to last over forty-five years.

The degree of Beria's control over the Polish provisional government was indicated by the appointment of General Serov himself as 'adviser' at Poland's ministry of security on 20 March under the name 'Ivanov'. Advisers do not come much higher than Commissar of State Security of the Second Rank. Serov was particularly well qualified for the post.

He had overseen the mass deportations from the Caucasus and previously had been in charge of the repression in Lvov in 1939, when the Soviet Union seized eastern Poland and arrested and killed officers, landowners, priests and teachers who might oppose their rule. Some 2 million Poles were deported to the Gulag and a campaign of forced collectivization began.

Stalin's deliberate policy was to confuse the Armia Krajowa with the Ukrainian nationalist force, the UFA, or at least imply that they were closely linked. Goebbels, meanwhile, seized upon every example of partisan resistance to Soviet occupation. He claimed that there were 40,000 men in the Estonian resistance, 10,000 in Lithuania and 50,000 in the Ukraine. He even quoted
Pravda
of 7 October 1944, claiming that there were 'Ukrainian-German nationalists'. All this gave even more excuse to the NKVD regiments in their 'cleansing of the rear areas'. It was a good example of both sides feeding profitably on each other's propaganda.

Another Polish potential enemy was also investigated in early March. Almost as soon as SMERSH was established in Poland, it launched an 'inquiry into Rokossovsky's relatives', presumably to see whether any of them could be defined as 'enemy elements'. Marshal Rokossovsky was half-Polish, and this investigation was almost certainly carried out on Beria's instructions. He had not forgotten that Rokossovsky had escaped his grasp. Nikolai Bulganin, the political member of Rokossovsky's military council of the 2nd Belorussian Front, was Stalin's watchdog.

Stalin's determination to stamp out the Armia Krajowa later turned a minor incident into a major contretemps between the Soviet Union and the United States. On 5 February, just as the Yalta conference was getting under way, Lieutenant Myron King of the US Air Force made an emergency landing in his B-17 at Kuflevo. A young Pole appeared and asked to leave with them. They took him on board and flew on to the Soviet airbase at Shchuchin, where they could repair the aircraft properly. The crew lent him articles of uniform, and when they landed 'the civilian pretended to be Jack Smith, a member of the crew', General Antonov wrote in his official complaint. 'Only after intervention by the Soviet command,' Antonov continued, 'Lieutenant King announced that this was not a member of the crew, but a stranger whom they did not know and took on board the airplane to take him away to England.' 'According to our information,' Antonov concluded, 'he was a terrorist-saboteur brought into Poland from London.' The United States government apologized profusely. It even organized King's court martial in the Soviet Union at their borrowed air base near Poltava and requested Antonov to provide prosecution witnesses. Stalin played this incident up to the hilt. He told Averell Harriman that this proved that the United States was supplying the White Poles to attack the Red Army.

Another incident occurred on 22 March at the Soviet aviation base of Mielec, where an American Liberator landed due to lack of fuel. The Soviet commander, aware of the dangers after the King incident, put a guard on the plane and forced the crew to spend the night in a hut nearby. But the ten-man crew under Lieutenant Donald Bridge, after being held for two days, requested permission to fetch personal belong- ings from the aircraft. As soon as they were on board, they started the engines and took off, ignoring all signals to halt. 'Soviet Engineer-Captain Melamedev, who accepted Donald Bridge's crew,' wrote Antonov to General Reade in Moscow, 'was so indignant and put out by this instance [
sic
] that on the very same day he shot himself.' His death, however, may well have had more to do with the outrage of SMERSH officers at the 'negligence of the officer and guards who had been detailed to watch the plane'. This incident was also cited as 'proof that 'enemy elements are using these landings to transport to Polish territory terrorists, saboteurs and agents of the Polish emigre government in London'.

It is hard to know whether the Soviet authorities were genuinely paranoid or had whipped themselves up into a self-perpetuating moral outrage. When an American lieutenant colonel who had been visiting released US prisoners of war in Lublin returned to Moscow after his pass had expired, General Antonov, no doubt on Stalin's instructions, grounded all US aircraft 'in the Soviet Union and in Red Army-controlled areas'.

In East Prussia, reports referred to 'German bands up to 1,000 strong' attacking the rear of Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front. NKVD units mounted 'sweeps through the forest to liquidate them'. In most cases, however, these bands consisted of a group of local Volkssturm men hiding in forests. Sometimes they ambushed trucks, motorcyclists and supply carts to get food. In Kreisburg, NKVD troops discovered two 'secret bakeries' making bread for soldiers out in the woods. Young women taking food out to them were captured by NKVD patrols.

On a sweep on 21 February, the 14th Cordon of the 127th Frontier Guards Regiment, led by Junior Lieutenant Khismatulin, was searching a patch of thick woodland when Sergeant Zavgorodny noticed woollen stockings hanging from a tree. 'This made him suspect the presence of unknown persons. They searched the area and found three well-camouflaged trenches leading to a bunker where they found three enemy soldiers with rifles.'

Mines and booby traps remained a major concern. To improve mine clearance, twenty-two dogs were allocated to each NKVD Frontier Guards Regiment. Sniffer dogs - 'special dogs for smelling bandits', as the report put it — were also brought in to round up more of the Germans hiding in East Prussian forests.