by John Keegan
The rest of Yugoslavia now lay open to an extension of the Soviet offensive; Army Group E, which had incorporated F, was holding an indefensible north-south flank which ran from the outskirts of Belgrade to the Albanian frontier. However, in mid-October Stalin had agreed with Churchill in Moscow a strange division of ‘spheres of influence’ in the Balkans which gave Britain a 50 per cent share in Yugoslavia. An odd streak of legalism in Soviet diplomacy lent this agreement force; but Stalin also had other fish to fry. Hitler’s successful coup against Horthy in Budapest had destroyed the chance of making a quick advance, by a negotiated armistice, into the Hungarian plain. The approach to Vienna, up the Danube valley, would now have to be fought for; the force it would require meant that the Red Army could not afford to dissipate its strength in the mountains of central Yugoslavia, where conditions would put even the battered formations of Army Groups E and F on equal terms. On 18 October, therefore, the Stavka had ordered Tolbukhin to halt the Third Ukrainian Front west of Belgrade and turn its formations back to the Danube to take part in the coming battle of Hungary.
Hungary, however, had now been reinforced and parts of the Hungarian army (First and Second Armies) hijacked to fight on the German side. On 19 October Army Group South counter-attacked, and when Malinovsky’s Second Ukrainian Front began its assault on 29 October, at Stalin’s express orders ‘to take Budapest as quickly as possible’, it found twelve German divisions in its path. The Russian advance reached the eastern suburbs on 4 November but was then halted; when the assault was resumed on 11 November a sixteen-day battle ensued which left much of the city in ruins but still in German hands. By then the German front line, though withdrawn 100 miles since mid-October, rested from west to east on the strong defences of the river Drava, Lake Balaton and the flanks of the Carpathians. Vienna, the prize which Stalin sought, remained secure 150 miles away along the Danube.
The campaign in Hungary thereafter took on a logic of its own and proceeded quite separately from the Red Army’s preparations on the far side of the Carpathians for the final advance into Germany. On 5 October Malinovsky’s Second Ukrainian Front began an offensive designed to encircle Budapest from the north-west, while Tolbukhin’s Third Ukrainian Front made a feint to the south of the city between Lake Balaton and the Danube. By 31 January the Third Ukrainian Front was within seven miles of the city centre and emissaries were sent forward to offer terms for a capitulation. The city was completely surrounded, the suffering of its inhabitants was intense, and the situation of the German and Hungarian defenders appeared hopeless. Hitler, however, had decided upon a Stalingrad-style Panzer rescue. He had dismissed the commander of the Sixth Army, Maximilian Fretter-Pico, on the Budapest front, to replace him with Hermann Balck, another ‘standfast’ general of the Model type, and in late December had brought IV Panzer Corps from Army Group Centre to stage a counter-attack in concert with III Panzer Corps, which was already on the scene. The attack by IV SS Panzer began on 18 January 1945 and during the next three weeks IV and III Panzer Corps fought savagely, switching from one axis to another by road and rail, in an awful warning to Malinovsky and Tolbukhin of what damage experienced German tank soldiers could still inflict on Soviet formations operating on stereotyped and predictable fixed lines of advance. By 24 January IV Panzer Corps had driven to within fifteen miles of the German perimeter in Budapest, and the defenders could have broken out to safety had that been Hitler’s wish. As during Manstein’s winter thrust to Stalingrad in December 1942, however, he wanted the city to be recaptured, not evacuated. This vain hope collapsed when IV Panzer Corps, after three weeks of frantic operations, ran out of steam.
Within the perimeter, meanwhile, the Russians had brought up dense concentrations of 152-mm guns and 203-mm howitzers to reduce the German positions block by block in Pest, the northern half of the city. Its garrison began to surrender en masse on 15 January, when they were trapped with their backs to the Danube. In Buda, Pest’s twin city on the south bank, resistance held up fiercely until 5 February, when Malinovsky ordered a final assault. For a week the Germans stuck it out, taking to the sewers to frustrate the Russian advance, but by 13 February they had no more room for manoeuvre and were overwhelmed. The Stavka claimed to have killed 50,000 German and Hungarian soldiers and taken 138,000 prisoners since 27 October; it is known that only 785 Germans and some 1000 Hungarians escaped from Budapest. The Red Army’s own undisclosed losses in killed and wounded may have equalled those of the enemy.
There was to be one more battle fought in Hungary, at Lake Balaton, from which Hitler drew his last supplies of non-synthetic oil. By the time it opened on 15 February, however, a far greater battle was in preparation for the ultimate objective of the war itself: Berlin. Since early February Zhukov’s First White Russian and Konev’s First Ukrainian Fronts had been poised astride the river Oder, ready to launch themselves into the climactic offensive as soon as the Stavka defined the attack plan and made available the requisite forces. On 15 January Hitler had left the western headquarters in the Eifel mountains (Amt 500) from which he had overseen the Ardennes offensive to return to the Reich Chancellery. For all his talk of secret weapons that were still to bring victory, he sensed the approach of the final struggle and was resolved to be present on the field in person.
The road to Berlin
Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters in East Prussia, from which he had directed most of the war, was now in Russian hands. The Red Army’s offensive north of the Carpathians had begun on 15 September 1944 when the three Baltic and the Leningrad Fronts had opened an attack on Schörner’s Army Group North, designed to cut it off in the Baltic states from contact with Army Group Centre and its lines of communication into Germany through East Prussia. Schörner commanded some thirty divisions, disposed in well-fortified terrain, but lacked mobile forces with which to counter-attack. Though his army group was able to slow the Russian advance, therefore, it was not able to disrupt it and on 13 October, after an eight-day battle, Riga fell to Bagramyan’s First Baltic Front. This breakthrough to the coast completed the encirclement of Army Group North (shortly to be renamed Courland) in the ‘Courland pocket’, where it would linger in pointless isolation until the end of the war; six separate battles were fought by the Red Army against it. Finland’s defection in September allowed Schörner (before he was removed to command Army Group Centre in January) to improve its position by abandoning Estonia and concentrating his forces in Latvia. Its four dependent divisions in the port of Memel, between East Prussia and Lithuania, were also surrounded in October and held out until January 1945.
The Baltic front’s clearance of the approaches to East Prussia (which a unit of the Third White Russian Front had actually entered on 17 August) now laid it open to major assault. Plans for the great offensive had been laid by the Stavka in early November and allotted the greater effort to the two fronts which lay most directly astride the route to Berlin, Konev’s First Ukrainian and the First White Russian, command of which Stalin conferred directly on Zhukov, in testimony of his proven strategic achievements. Each front now greatly exceeded any German army group in strength. Between them they controlled 163 rifle divisions, 32,000 guns, 6500 tanks and 4700 aircraft, or one-third of all current Soviet infantry strength and half the Red Army’s tanks. Together they outnumbered the German formations opposite, Army Groups Centre and A, over twofold in infantry, nearly fourfold in armour, sevenfold in artillery and sixfold in airpower. For the first time in the war the Red Army had achieved both the human and material superiority that thitherto the Wehrmacht had only faced in the west. Army Groups Centre and A, now commanded by new generals, Hans Reinhardt and Josef Harpe, disposed between them of seventy-one divisions, 1800 tanks and 800 aircraft; all their formations were under strength, and their defensive capabilities depended greatly on the ‘fortresses’ which the Prussian and Silesian border towns – Königsberg, Insterburg, Folburg, Stettin, Küstrin, Breslau – had now been so designated by Hitler.
The Stavka plan
was for Zhukov to lead off down the Warsaw-Berlin axis, while Konev aimed for Breslau. Both offensives were to be direct power-drives against the German defences, eschewing manoeuvre, in what had now become the Red Army’s distinctive, brutal and terrifying means of making war. Over a million tons of supplies were brought up to Zhukov’s front alone in the days before the attack; they were carried in 1200 trains and 22,000 of the American-supplied six-by-six trucks which were the backbone of the Soviet logistic system. Almost equal quantities were stockpiled behind Konev’s front. The daily requirement of each front was 25,000 tons, less fuel and ammunition.
Konev’s offensive opened first on 12 January 1945 behind a barrage fired by guns disposed at a density of 300 to each kilometre of front – an earthquake concentration of artillery power. By the evening of the first day his tanks had broken the front of the Fourth Panzer Army to a depth of twenty miles, in exactly the same sector as the Germans and Austrians had made their great breakthrough in the Gorlice-Tarnow battle against the tsar’s army in 1915, but in the opposite direction. Cracow, the great Polish fortress-monastery city, was threatened; beyond it the way lay open to Breslau and the industrial regions of Silesia, where Speer had concentrated clusters of German armaments factories out of range of the Anglo-American bomber force.
Zhukov’s offensive on the Warsaw-Berlin axis began two days later, behind another pulverising bombardment, from the Vistula bridgehead south of Warsaw. The city was quickly encircled, and inevitably decreed a ‘fortress’ by Hitler, but it fell on 17 January before the reinforcements he had allotted it could reach the defenders. On 20 January he announced, to the despair of his commanders both in the west and the east, that he was transferring the Sixth SS Panzer Army, just extricated from the débâcle of the Ardennes offensive, to the east: ‘I’m going to attack the Russians where they least expect it. The Sixth SS Panzer Army is off to Budapest! If we start an offensive in Hungary, the Russians will have to go too.’ This wild diversion of precious defensive resources demonstrated how little he grasped both the Wehrmacht’s growing debility and the imperviousness of the Russians to subsidiary manoeuvres; the Ukrainian fronts, as events would prove, could deal adequately with the Sixth SS Panzer Army’s intervention, and Zhukov and Konev were not at all deflected from their drive on Berlin.
On 21 January, again clutching at straws, Hitler decreed the creation of a new army group, Vistula, command of which he gave to Himmler (also head of the Home Army), though he was quite unfitted to exercise military command, in the belief that loyalty to the Führer might prove a substitute for generalship. Army Group Vistula, positioned behind the threatened front, had almost no troops except Volkssturm units – the militia of Germans too young or too old to serve in the army which Hitler had set up on 25 September under Martin Bormann, the Nazi Party secretary.
The advance to the Oder
The Volkssturm would shortly be fighting for German territory. On 22 January Konev’s First Ukrainian Front crossed the Oder at Steinau; Rokossovsky’s Second White Russian Front, which had attacked across the Narew on 14 January, was by then deep into East Prussia. The arrival of the Red Army en masse on German soil provoked a stampede of refugees towards any tenuous outlet to safety. It was as if the submerged knowledge of what the Wehrmacht had done in the east had suddenly come to the surface, seized whole populations with terror and flung them on to the snowbound roads in an agony of urgency to put themselves beyond the reach of the Red Army’s columns. In a few days 800 years of German settlement in the east were ended as 2 million East Prussians left homes, farms, villages and towns in a frantic trek towards the German interior or the coast; 450,000 were evacuated from the port of Pillau in the next few weeks, while another 900,000 sought rescue at Danzig, many of them trudging across the frozen waters of the Frisches Haff lagoon to reach it. Many escaped, many did not. As Professor John Erickson, no enemy to the Red Army, has described this terrible episode:
Speed, frenzy and savagery characterised the advance. Villages and small towns burned, while Soviet soldiers raped at will and wreaked an atavistic vengeance in those houses and homes decked out with any of the insignia or symbols of Nazism . . . some fussily bedecked Nazi Party portrait photograph would be the signal to mow down the entire family amidst their tables, chairs and kitchenware. Columns of refugees, combined with groups of Allied prisoners uprooted from their camps, and slave labour no longer enslaved in farm or factory, trudged on foot or rode in farm carts, some to be charged down or crushed in a bloody smear of humans and horses by the juggernaut Soviet tank columns racing ahead with assault infantry astride the T-34s. Raped women were nailed by their hands to the farm carts carrying their families. Under these lowering January skies and the gloom of late winter, families huddled in ditches or by the roadside, fathers intent on shooting their own children or waiting whimpering for what seemed the wrath of God to pass. The Soviet Front command finally intervened, with an order insisting on the restoration of military discipline and the implementation of ‘norms of conduct’ towards the enemy population. But this elemental tide surged on, impelled by the searing language of roadside posters and crudely daubed slogans proclaiming this and the land ahead ‘the lair of the Fascist beast’, a continuous incitement to brutalised ex-prisoners of war now in the Soviet ranks or to the reluctant peasant conscripts dragged into the Red Army in its march through the Baltic states, men with pity for no one.
None of the German army groups north of the Carpathians could stem this onrush; the only impediment to Zhukov’s and Konev’s uninterrupted advance on Berlin was provided by the attenuation of their own supplies, which the enormous artillery preparations consumed at the rate of 50,000 tons for each million shells fired, losses in the ranks – divisional strengths in the two fronts averaged only 4000 at the end of January – and the resistance of the ‘Führer fortresses’. On Rokossovsky’s front Memel held out until 27 January, Thorn until 9 February, Königsberg until mid-April; on Zhukov’s and Konev’s, Posen (Poznan) held until 22 February, Küstrin until 29 March, Breslau until the day before the end of the war. The loss of other places brought the Red Army great propaganda sensation: on 21 January Rokossovsky’s Second White Russian Front took Tannenberg, where a ‘miracle’ battle had saved East Prussia from the tsar in 1914, and from which the retreating Germans just managed to save the remains of the victor of that battle, Field Marshal Hindenburg, and the colours of the regiments he had commanded (they hang now in the hall of the Bundeswehr Officer Cadet School at Hamburg), before blowing up his memorial tomb. On 27 January Konev’s First Ukrainian Front stumbled on the extermination camp of Auschwitz, chief place of the Holocaust, from which its operatives had not succeeded in removing the pathetic relics of the victims – clothes, dentures, spectacles and playthings. Meanwhile the strong places of Germany’s eastern frontier, so many of them fortresses of the Teutonic knights who had once pushed the tentacles of Germantum eastward into the Slav lands, held out to block or menace the lines of advance which the Soviet fronts were punching westward towards Berlin.
By the beginning of February, however, as the Allied leaders gathered for the last great conference of the European war at Yalta in the Crimea, Zhukov’s and Konev’s fronts were firmly established on the line of the Oder, ready to begin their final advance on Berlin. The German army groups opposite them – now reorganised as Vistula and Centre, the latter commanded by the Führer-dedicated Schörner – were shadows of their former selves. In East Prussia the Third Panzer Army was still active, and was to launch a brief counter-attack against the flank of the Russian concentration on 15 February; on 17 February the Sixth SS Panzer Army opened Hitler’s promised diversionary offensive against Tolbukhin’s Third Ukrainian Front to the east of Lake Balaton in Hungary. But the sands were now running out fast for the Wehrmacht. On 13 February Dresden, the last undevastated city of the Reich and packed with refugees, but also stripped of anti-aircraft guns to bolster the anti-tank screen on the Oder front, was overwhelmed by a British bomber as
sault and burnt to the ground, with appalling loss of life. Although the figure sometimes quoted of 300,000 dead is grossly exaggerated, at least 30,000 were killed in the raid. The consequences of this attack, for which the champions of the strategic bombing have never been able to advance a convincing military justification, quickly became known throughout Germany and gravely depressed civilian morale in the last months of the war. The Lake Balaton offensive, though mounted with the last 600 tanks at Hitler’s disposal as an uncommitted force, soon ran into immovable Russian defensive lines. Army Group E in Yugoslavia was meanwhile bending its front back towards the bastion of pro-German Croatia. The remnants of Army Group South gathered what strength they had left to bar the approaches to Vienna. But the crisis of the war hovered between Küstrin and Breslau where, along the Oder and the Neisse, Zhukov’s and Konev’s fronts stood ready to race the last forty-five miles to Berlin.
