The German War (84 page)

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Since taking command of his own company, Wilm Hosenfeld felt rejuvenated. Scattered across Warsaw in small groups, guarding seven depots and two radio stations, the company was hard to weld together. Even though it was full of ‘all sorts of good-for-nothings’, Hosenfeld had started licking the middle-aged men into shape with early-morning gymnastics and sport. He was in his element, doing what he had longed for during the years of rear service. He even rescued the harmonium from the ruined sports school, to accompany their Christmas carols, and he encouraged both the Catholic and the Protestant chaplains to speak to the men. Before taking over the company, he had made sure that the Jewish pianist he was hiding in the freezing attic above the Warsaw staff HQ was provided with food, a German greatcoat and blankets. Now, in the quiet of early January, as a thick shroud of snow covered the destroyed city, Hosenfeld wrote to Annemie about his fears for her and the children back in Thalau. The Wehrmacht bulletin had reported a further air raid on nearby Fulda. ‘What’s still left of the city?’ he asked on 7 January, worrying that the bombing would strike Thalau too.
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The Soviet High Command had mustered nearly 6.5 million troops for its winter offensive on Germany, double the number fielded by the Wehrmacht for its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Along the Vistula front, 2,250,000 Red Army soldiers faced 400,000 German troops. Cramming 250 artillery guns to every kilometre around their bridgeheads over the Vistula at Magnuszew and Puławy, Zhukov’s divisions used their huge superiority in firepower to deliver a shattering twenty-five-minute barrage early on 14 January, before sending infantry and armour to shatter the thin defensive lines of the German 9th Army along the river and bypass the ‘fortress’ of Warsaw altogether. On 16 January General Smilo von Lüttwitz ordered the 9th Army to abandon the city. Leading his company westwards, Hosenfeld covered the 30 kilometres to Błonie by the following day, only to find that the Red Army was already there. After a brief skirmish most of the German troops surrendered, and Wilm Hosenfeld was taken prisoner. He would spend the next seven years in Soviet captivity. The same day the 1st Polish Army ended the German occupation of Warsaw. During those five years and three and a half months, 350,000 Jews had been killed, most of the city destroyed and its overall population had fallen from 1.3 million to 153,000. One of the emaciated survivors to emerge from the ruins was the pianist Hosenfeld had helped, Władysław Szpiłman.
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Further south, Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front had launched its assault across the Vistula two days earlier, exploiting his bridgehead at Sandomierz and attacking through dense forest, which the German General Staff had assumed would protect their elevated positions in Małopolska. Advancing on the German lines in gaps between their own artillery fire, Soviet infantrymen lured the Germans out of their bunkers in order to defend their trenches, where they were then completely exposed to a further Soviet artillery barrage. By the end of the first day, Konev’s forces had advanced to a depth of 20 kilometres along a 35-kilometre-wide front. By the end of 13 January, the Soviet breakthrough was 60 kilometres wide and 40 kilometres deep. Their prime goal was the ‘black gold’, as Stalin called it, of Upper Silesia – its coal and steel industry. In order to capture it intact, Konev’s forces embarked on a huge encirclement of mines and factory towns from the east, north and south, leaving the Wehrmacht with a narrow escape route westwards. Cracow fell on 19 January, the Germans for once simply pulling out, surrendering their defensive positions and the capital of Hans Frank’s General Government without destroying it.

The previous night, as snow fell, the SS guards had marched their prisoners out of the main gate of the concentration camp at Auschwitz: 14,000 were sent to Gleiwitz and 25,000 prisoners were marched the 63 kilometres to Loslau. The SS were so afraid of being caught by the Red Army that they did not stop for the first two nights, clubbing the exhausted stragglers and shooting those who fell down in the snow. At least 450 prisoners died on the road to the railheads. They had quickly learned to expect nothing from the German villages they passed, where people stayed off the streets and closed their doors. By contrast, Polish villagers often offered the prisoners bread and milk; some even managed to escape from the column, slipping into the knots of Poles lining the streets.
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At the railway yard in Loslau, the prisoners were packed a hundred to each open goods wagon, and, as soon as the train began to move, they huddled still closer to keep out the sharp wind. On the night of 22–23 January, the first of Konev’s armies reached the river Oder and established a bridgehead at Brieg, cutting the main train line to the west and breaching the last natural barrier en route to Berlin; German trains now had to take the minor, southern line out of Silesia. Each night the Auschwitz prisoners began to freeze and each morning brought a new count of the dead. Fifteen-year-old Thomas Gève had survived the selection for the gas chambers thanks to the protection of German Communist prisoners in the camp, who assigned the tall German Jewish boy to work alongside them on their building brigade. As their open goods wagons pulled through the crowded Silesian stations, Gève was struck by something unprecedented. German civilians were looking at the freezing prisoners in their striped concentration camp clothing with envy and resentment: for they had places on a train.
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With over 200,000 Germans walking along the ice-bound roads in the hope of boarding trains at the small stations from Ratibor through Schweidnitz to Liegnitz, many had to wait days before they could clamber aboard. Their sheer numbers overwhelmed the volunteers from the National Socialist People’s Welfare who had come to offer food, hot drinks and blankets. On 20 January, the Gauleiter of Lower Silesia, Karl Hanke, finally gave the order to evacuate his capital, Breslau, completing its transformation into a ‘fortress’. Ten-year-old Jürgen Illmer and his mother were lucky enough to find places on a train out of Breslau and reach the relative safety of Saxony. At Leipzig, they were helped through the chaotic crush on the platforms by groups of Hitler Youths and Red Cross nurses. Glancing across the tracks as he got off his train to take shelter from an air raid, Jürgen saw an open goods train filled with motionless, snow-covered figures in striped clothing. He wondered if they had frozen to death. As the air raid siren sounded and the Germans went down to the shelter under the great station hall, the conversation turned to the prisoners they had all seen. When someone suggested that they might be Jews, a woman replied coldly, ‘They weren’t Jews. They have all been shot in Poland already.’ She was wrong. One of the prisoners on the train may have been Thomas Gève. He too was left with memories of Leipzig; how the prisoners called out, begging for water from the German Red Cross nurses whose hospital train stood at the next platform. The nurses ignored them.
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On 21 January Breslau’s aged prelate, Cardinal Bertram, departed for Jauernig in Moravian Silesia, while the most valuable items in the city’s churches were shipped out to Kamenz in Saxony. The wounded recovering in the city’s military hospitals were moved too, alongside the tax office, municipal administration, the radio station and the post, telegraph and rail authorities. Over 150,000 civilians remained. The next day Gauleiter Hanke called ‘on the men of Breslau to join the defence front of our Fortress Breslau’, vowing that ‘the Fortress will be defended to the end’. Its defenders consisted of 45,000 troops, ranging from raw recruits to battle-hardened paratroopers and Waffen SS veterans. To the west of the city, the Wehrmacht fought bitterly to drive the Soviets back across the Oder at Steinau for another two weeks. On 9–11 February, Kanth, Liegnitz and Haynau fell and on 15 February the Red Army captured the Sudeten mountain passes, cutting Breslau off from the west. The next day, the city came under siege, with the attacking Soviets swiftly occupying the outer suburbs before grinding to a halt as the defenders made them fight for every building and street crossing. From 15 February, the Luftwaffe began an airlift which lasted 76 days and some 2,000 flights, bringing in 1,670 tonnes of supplies – mainly ammunition – and evacuating 6,600 wounded.
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Alfred Bauditz was one of the civilians who stayed in Breslau, equipped with a horse and cart and tasked with clearing buildings that interfered with the line of fire. In late January he used the cart to bring his wife, 14-year-old daughter Leonie and 9-year-old son Winfried out of the city to Malkwitz, where two of his brothers owned farms. On 9 February, Malkwitz was occupied and all the inhabitants were questioned one by one by a Soviet officer who spoke fluent German and took down their personal details. Despite the Germans’ fears of rape and murder, the Red Army men behaved correctly. Leonie’s ordeal began when the next armoured unit arrived. Most of the thirty Soviet soldiers were friendly, but two terrorised the women. Despite hiding in a barn at night and having her hair cut short and going about dressed as a boy by day, Leonie was discovered and raped multiple times. For a while a well-spoken Soviet lieutenant protected her and her mother, but when his unit left, the women and girls were drafted into a work brigade and sent out to thresh grain and shell peas on different farms – a seemingly inescapable routine of fieldwork, laundry, cooking duties and forced sex.
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The start of the Soviet winter offensive found Peter Stölten at the southern end of the East Prussian front near Praschnitz, 100 kilometres north of Warsaw. On 14 January, while things were still quiet on their sector, Stölten snatched time to write to his family:

Daily the Russians begin an attack at a new point . . . Now it’s gradually becoming clear and we’re awaiting the main build-up at one of the bridgeheads. We’re sitting on our warm vehicles and packed clothes and spinning our theories and whiling away the hours that remain to us and we are waiting – for, yes, he is coming to

. . . And now there’s a pretty big noise coming from over there, which we’re waiting for, smiling and completely calm.

East Prussia would see the most bitter fighting of the winter offensive, and in preparation for what the Soviet High Command knew would be a gruelling frontal assault on multiple lines of German fortifications, it allocated its greatest strength to this front. The Red Army’s 1,670,000 men, 28,360 guns and heavy mortars, 3,000 tanks and self-propelled guns and 3,000 aircraft outnumbered the much-depleted forty-one divisions of Army Group Centre, which could only muster 580,000 men, 700 tanks and self-propelled guns and a mere 515 aircraft. During the first week of the attack, the Red Army ground its way westwards from one fortified position to another. Its progress was slow and costly.
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The Soviet offensive in the north was transformed by Zhukov’s and Konev’s breakthroughs in central Poland. The rapid push westwards towards Cracow and Silesia opened up the German southern flank in East Prussia, allowing Rokossowsky’s armies to bypass the strong lines of east-facing fortifications. On 20 January, the 5th Guards Tank Army drove directly northwards through the centre of East Prussia, heading through the fortified German line around Allenstein the next day, taking Prussian Holland on 23 January and reaching Tolkemit on the shore of the lagoon at the mouth of the Vistula, the Frisches Haff.

Having cut East Prussia in two, the Red Army immediately widened its corridor in order to encircle the eastern half of the province and take its besieged capital, Königsberg. The commander of the reconstituted German 4th Army, Friedrich Hossbach, responded by abandoning the heavily fortified eastern defences around Lötzen – disobeying his direct orders – and pulling back to the west in a series of forced marches through deep winter snow. Peter Stölten and his tank unit were sent to shore up a German infantry position east of Osterode, as Hossbach tried to break through the thin Soviet line to the east of Elbing and stop the port from being completely surrounded. The critical battle for East Prussia was fought through innumerable skirmishes.

The morning of 24 January found Stölten’s men cooking potatoes, having been driven out of the little village of Jadden. Ordered to mount a counter-attack, they left the potatoes for their return. Their four tanks led the German infantry assault across the snow-covered fields and up a small hill into the village. A drift had filled a ditch, into which three of the tanks fell. Only Stölten’s made it across, helping to retake Jadden. In a lull after the battle, when they were still in the centre of the tiny village, an artillery shell hit his tank. Stölten and the rest of his crew did not make it out of the burning vehicle.
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The next day, the Red Army retook Jadden and by 30 January the survivors of Stölten’s unit, together with the rest of the 4th Army and some units of the 2nd Army, were penned into a pocket formed around the coastal towns of Heiligenbeil and Braunsberg on the Frisches Haff. It measured no more than 20 kilometres across at its greatest extent. There they dug in. Harried by ground attack aircraft and hurried onwards by news of the Soviet advance, hundreds of thousands of refugees headed for this enclave, which the remnants of twenty-three German divisions defended stubbornly for the next two months.
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Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, had prohibited civilian evacuation until 20 January, by which point it was too late to put most of the plans into operation. By then, the Soviet breakthrough to Elbing had ruptured the overland routes for the majority of the province’s 2.5 million inhabitants. There were now only two ways out of East Prussia. Refugees from the northern districts headed towards Königsberg and, to its north, the Samland peninsula, hoping to leave by sea from the Baltic port of Pillau. Those from the southeast and central districts made for the Frisches Haff, attempting to cross the ice to the long, thin sandspit, or Nehrung, which separated the Vistula lagoon from the Baltic Sea.