The Second World War (132 page)

Feasting also took place at a more rarefied level. Field Marshal Alexander, who had flown to Belgrade for discussions with Tito, went on to Hungary to meet Marshal Tolbukhin, the commander of the 3rd Ukrainian Front. The large and elderly Tolbukhin received him with a lavish banquet, and had even provided a Red Army nurse to sleep in his room. Alexander, however, ‘
didn’t think that was quite
the thing, and she spent the night outside my door’. Just before dinner, when Alexander and Tolbukhin were alone, the old marshal examined Alexander’s decorations. Among them, he spotted the Tsarist order of St Anne with crossed swords, awarded to Alexander when he had served as a liaison officer on the eastern front in the First World War. ‘I have that too,’ Tolbukhin sighed as he touched it, ‘but I’m not allowed to wear it.’

Tolbukhin was remarkably relaxed, considering that the Sixth SS Panzer
Army, transferred from the Ardennes, had just reached Hungary. It had arrived too late to help the defenders of Budapest, but Hitler still ordered it into action on 13 February 1945, in Operation Frühlingserwachen, or Spring Awakening. He had never intended to save the garrison, only to reinforce it and to defend the Hungarian oilfields near Lake Balaton. The counter-attack was a failure. When Hitler heard that Waffen-SS divisions had retreated without orders, he was so angry that he sent Himmler down to strip them of their divisional armband titles, even including the
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
. It was a humiliating punishment. ‘
This mission
of his to Hungary’, Guderian observed with schadenfreude, ‘did not win him much affection from his Waffen-SS.’

Himmler had been one of those in the Führer’s entourage who had dismissed Guderian’s warnings of a massive Soviet offensive in Poland as ‘an enormous bluff’. The chief of the general staff’s prediction proved correct in the second week of January. Stalin pretended to the Allies that he had moved forward the date to help extricate the Americans from their problems in the Ardennes, but this was not true. The fighting there had turned decisively in the Allies’ favour around Christmas. Stalin had more practical reasons. The Red Army needed the ground frozen hard for its tank formations, and Soviet meteorologists warned the Stavka that there would be ‘
heavy rain and wet snow
’ later in January. Stalin also had a more sinister reason for advancing the date. He wanted to be in complete control of Poland before the Allies met at Yalta at the beginning of February, just over three weeks later.

Along the Vistula ready to strike west were the 1st Belorussian Front now commanded by Marshal Zhukov, and the 1st Ukrainian Front commanded by Marshal Konev. Rokossovsky had been angered when he was replaced by Zhukov, but Stalin did not want Rokossovsky, a Pole, to have the glory of taking Berlin. Rokossovsky was given the 2nd Belorussian Front instead to attack East Prussia from the south while General Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorussian Front would invade from the eastern flank.

On 12 January Konev’s massed artillery, with 300 guns per kilometre, opened a shattering bombardment. His 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies, with T-34s and heavy Stalin tanks, advanced out of the Sandomierz bridgehead west of the Oder, and headed for Kraków and Breslau on the Oder. Stalin had made clear to Konev that he wanted Silesia captured without heavy destruction to its industry and mines. On 13 January Chernyakhovsky launched his assault on East Prussia. Rokossovsky followed the next day, advancing from the bridgeheads north of the River Narew. Zhukov’s attack also began on 14 January.

Once through the German front line, the main barrier ahead of Zhukov’s forces was the River Pilica. Every commander knew that speed
was essential to give the Germans no chance to recover. A colonel commanding a Guards tank brigade refused to wait for bridging equipment to come up. Guessing that the river was not deep at the spot, he simply ordered his tanks to smash the ice with gunfire and drive across the river bed, a truly terrifying experience for the drivers. On Zhukov’s right, the 47th Army encircled the ruins of Warsaw while the 1st Polish Army entered the suburbs.

Hitler was beside himself with rage when the weak German garrison surrendered. He saw it as yet more evidence of treason within the general staff, and three officers were taken to Gestapo headquarters. Even Guderian had to submit to interrogations from Kaltenbrunner. Hitler returned to Berlin from Führer headquarters at Ziegenberg to direct his armies, with predictably disastrous results. He would never allow a general to withdraw, and because of the speed of the Soviet advance and the collapse in German communications, any information on which he based his decisions was no longer accurate. By the time his orders reached the front, they were usually twenty-four hours out of date.

Hitler also interfered without informing Guderian. He decided to transfer the
Grossdeutschland
Corps from East Prussia to shore up the Vistula front, but the time it took to redeploy meant that this powerful formation was out of the battle for several vital days. To Guderian’s frustration, Hitler still refused to bring out the divisions trapped on the Courland Peninsula to reinforce the Reich. The same applied to troops from the un-necessarily large German force in Norway. Worst of all, from Guderian’s point of view, was Hitler’s decision to transfer the Sixth SS Panzer Army to the Hungarian front.

Chernyakhovsky found that German defences on the Insterburg Line in East Prussia were much stronger than expected. So, in a clever move, he withdrew the 11th Guards Army, swung it round behind the other three armies, and sent it in on their northern flank which was less well defended. Combined with an attack by the 43rd Army across the River Niemen near Tilsit, this breakthrough caused panic in the German rear.

Rokossovsky’s armies coming from the south aimed for the mouth of the Vistula to cut off East Prussia completely. On 20 January, the Stavka suddenly ordered Rokossovsky to attack towards the north-east as well, to help Chernyakhovsky. Less than two days later his 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps on the right flank entered the town of Allenstein and the following day the leading armoured troops of Colonel General Vasily Volsky’s 5th Guards Tank Army bypassed Elbing and reached the shore of the Frisches Haff, the long frozen lagoon separated by a sandbar from the Baltic. East Prussia was almost completely cut off. Just to the west of the Vistula estuary lay the concentration camp of Stutthof. Camp guards, terrified by the
approach of the Red Army, killed 3,000 Jewish women either by shooting or by forcing them out on to the thin ice so that they would fall through into the freezing water.

Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, still refused to allow the evacuation of civilians. They had heard the artillery barrages in the distance when the Soviet offensive began, but requests to leave were denied by local Nazi Party bosses. In most cases these officials slipped away, abandoning the population to its fate. Retreating German soldiers would warn farms and villages, urging everyone to get out as fast as they could. Some, especially the very old who could not face leaving their homes, decided to stay. Since almost all men had been dragooned into the Volkssturm, mothers had to harness farm-carts, perhaps aided by a French prisoner of war who had been working for them, and load it with blankets and food for themselves and their children. The ‘treks’ as they were called had begun across the snow-covered countryside, in temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees Centigrade.

Refugees from the capital of Königsberg thought that they had escaped safely by train, but when they reached Allenstein they were pulled from the carriages by soldiers from the 3rd Guards Cavalry, delighted to find such a source of plunder and women. Most of those attempting to flee by road were overtaken by Soviet troops. Some were simply crushed in their carts under the tracks of Soviet tanks. Others suffered an even worse fate.

Leonid Rabichev, a signals lieutenant with the 31st Army, described the scenes beyond Goldap. ‘
All the roads were filled with old people
, women and children, large families moving slowly on carts, on vehicles or on foot towards the west. Our tank troops, infantry, artillery, signals caught up with them and cleared the way for themselves by pushing their horses and carts and belongings into the ditches on either side of the road. Then thousands of them forced the old women and children aside. Forgetting their honour and duty and forgetting about the retreating German units, they pounced on the women and girls.

‘Women, mothers and their daughters, lie to the right and the left of the highway and in front of each one stands a laughing gang of men with their trousers down. Those already covered in blood and losing consciousness are dragged to the side. Children trying to help them have been shot. There is laughter and roaring and jeering, screams and moans. And the soldiers’ commanders–majors and lieutenant colonels–are standing there on the highway. Some are laughing, but some are also conducting the event so that all their soldiers without exception could take part. This is not an initiation rite, and it has nothing to do with revenge against the accursed occupiers, this is just hellish diabolical group sex. This represents a complete lack of control and the brutal logic of a crowd gone mad. I was
sitting in the cabin of our one-and-a-half-ton truck, shaken, while my driver Demidov was standing in one of the queues. I was thinking of Flau-bert’s Carthage. The colonel, who had only just been conducting proceedings, could not resist the temptation and joined one of the queues, while the major was shooting the witnesses, the children and old men who were having hysterics.’

At last the soldiers were told to finish quickly and get back on their vehicles, because another unit was blocked behind them. Later, when they overtook another refugee column, Rabichev saw similar scenes repeated. ‘As far as the eye can see, there are corpses of women, old people and children, among piles of clothing and overturned carts… It becomes dark. We are ordered to find a place to spend the night in one of the German villages off the highway. I took my platoon to a hamlet two kilometres from the highway. In all the rooms are corpses of children, old people and women who have been raped and shot. We are so tired that we don’t pay attention to them. We are so tired that we lie down among the corpses and fall asleep.’

‘
Russian soldiers were raping
every German female from eight to eighty,’ observed the Soviet war correspondent Natalya Gesse, a close friend of Sakharov. ‘It was an army of rapists. Not only because they were crazed with lust, this was also a form of vengeance.’

It is far too sweeping to ascribe this pitiless behaviour simply to lust or vengeance. For a start, there were many officers and soldiers who did not take part in the rapes and were horrified by the actions of their comrades. Devoted Communists were shocked by the disorder, and the controlled nature of Soviet society made such indiscipline hard to imagine. But the extreme harshness of life at the front had created a different community, and many became surprisingly outspoken in their hatred of the collective farms and the oppression which had dominated their lives. Soldiers bitterly resented the pointless sacrifice caused by so many futile attacks as well as the demeaning treatment which they had to endure. Men were sent into no-man’s-land to strip the uniforms and even underwear from dead comrades to clothe new conscripts. So, although a strong desire for revenge existed against the Germans who had violated the Motherland and killed their families, there was also a strong element of the same knock-on theory of oppression which had conditioned Japanese troops. The temptation to work off past humiliations and suffering which they had endured was overwhelming, and now it was worked off on the vulnerable women of their enemies.

Under Stalin, ideas of love and sexuality had been ruthlessly repressed in a political environment which sought to ‘de-individualize the individual’. Sex education had been banned. The Soviet state’s attempt to suppress the
libido of its people created what one Russian writer described as a sort of ‘
barracks eroticism
’, which was far more primitive and violent than ‘the most sordid foreign pornography’. And this, combined with the utterly brutalizing effect of the slaughter on the eastern front and the propaganda of indiscriminate vengeance fostered in articles and harangues by political officers, produced an explosive potential when Soviet forces invaded East Prussia.

None were more brutalized than the
shtrafniki
, the living dead of the punishment battalions. Many were hardened criminals transferred from the Gulag. (On Beria’s order, those condemned for political offences were never allowed to fight.) Even their officers were influenced by the sheer ruthlessness of their lives. ‘
A criminal is always a criminal
, in the rear or at the front,’ wrote a medical officer with a
shtraf
company. ‘At the front, in the role of a
shtrafnik
, their criminal nature always manifested itself. So our company was having fun. A young German woman ran up to me in Halsberg and shouted in German: “I’ve been raped by fourteen men!” and I walked on thinking, it’s a pity that it was fourteen and not twenty-eight; it’s a pity they haven’t shot you German bitch… We, the officers in the
shtraf
company, shut our eyes to everything, we felt no pity for the Germans and we let the
shtrafniki
do whatever they wanted to the civilians.’

Looting was combined with mindless destruction. Soldiers would burn down houses and then find that they had nowhere to shelter from the cold. Rabichev described the looting of Goldap. ‘
The entire contents
of shops were thrown out on to the sidewalks through the broken shopfronts. Thousands of pairs of shoes, plates and radio sets, all sorts of household and pharmacy goods and food were all mixed up. From apartment windows, clothes, pillows, duvets, paintings, gramophones and musical instruments were hurled on to the street. The roadways were blocked with all this stuff. Right at this moment, German artillery and mortars opened fire. Several spare German divisions hurled our demoralized troops out of the city in no time. But Front headquarters had already reported that the first German town had been captured. There was no choice. They had to recapture the place again.’