Читать книгу Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City - Alexandra Richie - Страница 17

As von dem Bach and Dirlewanger were slaughtering their way through villages on what would prove to be the final day of Operation ‘Kormoran’, the regular soldiers of Army Group Centre were waiting nervously at the front. It was common knowledge that the Soviets were about to attack, but the troops were convinced that the main thrust would be directed to the south, against Army Group North Ukraine, and that they would be spared. When the young German infantryman Armin Scheiderbauer arrived in Vitebsk on 11 June 1944 he found the Byelorussian front surprisingly quiet. He was sent off to dig trenches, but felt an ominous and overwhelming ‘sense of discomfort’ out amongst the isolated platoons.

For others the waiting was torture. Willy Peter Reese, a twenty-three-year-old Wehrmacht soldier who would die in the fighting around Vitebsk, described the reality of filling these endless hours: ‘Things and values changed. Money had become meaningless. We used paper money for rolling cigarettes or gambled it away indifferently.’ There was a feeling of impending gloom. ‘Only a few sought intimacy, most drugged themselves with superficialities, with gambling, with cruelty, hatred, or they masturbated … Our comradeship was made from mutual dependence, from living together in next to no space. Our humour was born out of sadism, gallows humour, satire, obscenity, spite, rage, and pranks with corpses, squirted brains, lice, pus and shit, the spiritual zero.’¹

At times Red Army reconnaissance soldiers dressed in German uniform would penetrate the line. When one soldier shot at and killed some members of such a party he found ‘still clenched in their cold fists the opened razors with which they had planned to silently cut the throats of our sentries’.² At other times loudspeakers would blare at the German ranks from across no man’s land: ‘You are spilling your blood for Hitler. Nothing can save you from the carnage. Break from this army of Hitlerite oppressors, otherwise you will face destruction!’³ These messages were met by bursts of machine-gun fire. In truth, although many Germans feared that the war was lost, ‘it was widely accepted within the ranks of those fighting in the east that death on the battlefield was preferable to an unknown destiny in a Soviet prisoner of war camp’.⁴ Morale was low; sometimes new recruits would be caught ‘surreptitiously creeping along the earthworks, their hands held high in the air above the protection of the berm in hopes of receiving a Heimatschuss’ – a wound that would get them home.⁵

The Russians were now equipped with new automatic weapons, including a short-barrelled submachine gun fitted with a high-capacity drum magazine.⁶ The ordinary ‘Ivan’ was both feared and, in a strange way, admired. The image of the Russian soldier in his loose-fitting brown tunic, with his greatcoat carried even in the hottest weather to be used as a blanket or uniform, and his boots stuffed with straw, had an almost iconic status. The Soviets were admired for other things, too. They could forage and survive on what seemed like almost nothing. General Guderian’s adjutant, Lieutenant Horbach, wrote a letter which was found by the Soviets on his corpse: ‘You ask my opinion of the Russians. I can only say that their behaviour in action is incomprehensible. The most remarkable thing about them, to say nothing of their persistence and cunning, is their incredible stubbornness … The life of the individual means nothing to them.’ Gottlob Biderman, a young Wehrmacht soldier, remembered coming across some Russians while he was searching for fuel: ‘Inside the tanks we discovered three shivering Russian soldiers who had been standing up to their shoulders in oil for several days. Having been convinced that they would be shot immediately upon capture, they had chosen to die in the freezing temperatures or face the prospect of drowning in horrible conditions rather than surrender.’⁷ Another, Harry Mielert, found two Russians hiding in a cellar in a burned-out village: ‘[They] had fed themselves on potatoes … they held out for four weeks, together with two dead bodies, their own excretions, their feet … frozen, and yet they still wouldn’t venture out.’ Erich Dwinger was amazed at the stoicism of the wounded Russians: ‘Several of them burnt by flamethrowers had no longer the semblance of a human face … Not a cry, not a moan escaped the lips of the wounded … The shapeless burnt bundles advanced as quickly as possible [for supplies]. Some half a dozen of them who were lying down also rose, holding their entrails in one hand and stretching out the other with a gesture of supplication.’⁸ But years of anti-Soviet propaganda had done their work, and not all German soldiers felt respect for their adversaries. One, Wilhelm Prüller, wrote that ‘It’s not people we’re fighting against here, but simply animals.’⁹ Another spat that the Russians ‘are no longer people, but wild hordes and beasts, who have been bred by Bolshevism in the last twenty years’.¹⁰ Erich Stahl felt that the Soviets’ ‘utter disregard for their own lives, that ruthlessness towards their enemy and themselves alike, was a riddle we had never answered’.¹¹

The soldiers were frightened of the Russians for other reasons, too. The infantry commanders may not have reached the depths of depravity of a Nebe or a Dirlewanger, but their men were part of the same army, and had participated both directly and indirectly in the murderous policies in the east. ‘On the way we torched all the villages we passed through and blew up the stoves,’ wrote one retreating soldier. ‘We had been ordered to spread devastation, so that our pursuers could find no shelter … When we were issued a supply of cigarettes we lit them on burning houses.’¹² The Wehrmacht soldiers knew they could expect no quarter from the Red Army. Reese, who had left Germany two years before as a perfectly ordinary young man, saw how Russia ‘was turning into a depopulated, smoking, burning, wreckage-strewn desert, and the war behind the front bothered me still more, because those it affected were non-combatants’. Yet he and his colleagues made ‘a Russian woman prisoner dance naked for us, greased her tits with boot polish, got her as drunk as we were’.¹³ In Russia the normal rules of warfare no longer applied: everything was permissible, as long as any criminal behaviour was directed against the racial enemies of Germany. White flags were used to draw Soviet soldiers to their deaths; red crosses on field hospitals were used for target practice. Soviet soldiers retaliated in kind, so that the brutality and depravity spiralled out of control. Atrocities were committed by both sides in a struggle that had sunk into a moral abyss so deep that little came close to it on any other front in the Second World War.

Despite von dem Bach’s best efforts, partisans were harassing the Germans at every turn. The ‘Banditen’ were hated and feared in equal measure, and the savagery meted out to and by them was terrible. This ‘was not fighting any more, it was butchery. In the course of brief counterthrusts, we found our missing in little pieces. And we didn’t take any prisoners either,’ remembered one soldier. Men found their comrades stripped naked, having been beaten to death or dismembered. One came across a group of dead soldiers whose tongues had been nailed to a table. Generaloberst Georg-Hans Reinhardt, who would replace Model as commander of Army Group Centre on 16 August, in the midst of the Warsaw Uprising, fought the ‘bandits’ ruthlessly in the forests of Byelorussia, killing anyone he caught. ‘There had been no time to bury the bodies. That was why long stretches were overwhelmed by a ghastly stench. It was said that hundreds of dead were lying in the woods. The July heat strengthened the smell of putrefaction. You had to pinch your nose and breathe through your mouth. Some men even put on their gas masks.’ At crossroads it was common to find bodies hanging from posts or branches, their faces swollen and blue, their hands tied behind their backs. Reese remembered coming across such a scene: ‘One soldier took their picture; another gave them a swing with his stick. Partisans. We laughed and moved off.’ But later that night, two scouts disappeared into the woods and never came back, probably killed by ‘bandits’.¹⁴

‘Bagration’, the great Soviet summer offensive, has not received the attention given to other battles on the Eastern Front, which is all the more strange as it was without a doubt the single most successful Soviet military operation of the entire Second World War. It also came as a complete surprise to the Germans. Stalin had decided that his attack should not be against Romania, northern Ukraine or the Baltic, but rather should go straight into Byelorussia. His aim was nothing less than the complete encirclement and destruction of Army Group Centre, which was situated in a bulge of occupied territory that jutted into the Soviet Union like an enormous balcony. This was, apart from anything else, the shortest route to Warsaw, and to Berlin.

On 14 May 1944, Stalin summoned his commanders to formulate a plan of attack. It was the most ambitious task he had yet set for the Red Army, and he assembled an extraordinary team with which to achieve it. One of his greatest strategists was the complex and controversial General Konstantin Rokossovsky, who had recently proven himself both at Stalingrad and at Kursk. In his surprisingly high voice for such a bearlike figure, he told Stalin that his 1st Byelorussian Front should attack Bobruisk along both sides of the Berezina River, creating a giant pincer to hit the flanks of 3rd Panzer Army and the 9th Army, and then encircle the 4th Army and destroy it. Stalin, who believed that there should be a single thrust against the German lines, disagreed, and twice sent Rokossovsky out of the room to ‘think it over’. Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov tried to convince him to toe the line, but Rokossovsky stood firm, declaring that he would rather be relieved of his command than attack as Stalin wanted him to. After the third discussion Stalin walked over to him and put his hand on his shoulder. The room froze, with those present convinced that Stalin was about to tear the epaulettes from his shoulders. Instead he smiled. Rokossovsky’s confidence, he said, ‘reflected his sound judgement’, and he was to attack as he wished.¹⁵ Stalin also made it very clear, however, that Rokossovsky would be blamed for any failure.

Rokossovsky’s defiance revealed great personal courage. This was, after all, a man who had experienced the Terror first hand. The fact that he had been born in Warsaw, to a Polish father and a Russian mother, had made it easy for Lavrentii Beria, the notorious head of the NKVD, to accuse him of being a Polish spy, although in reality Rokossovsky had been targeted because he had openly favoured the innovative military methods of Marshal Tukhachevsky over traditionalists like Semyon Budenny. Arrested in 1937 for allegedly having conspired with another officer to betray the Soviet Union, he was dragged through a ridiculous show trial, during which it emerged that his alleged co-conspirator had been killed in the Civil War twenty years before. ‘Can dead men testify?’ Rokossovsky had asked incredulously. Imprisoned until March 1940, he was repeatedly tortured: his teeth were knocked out, leaving him with a steel denture, and his toes were beaten to a pulp with a hammer; he also had his ribs broken and endured a number of mock executions.¹⁶ Despite all this, Rokossovsky never signed a confession; nor did he denounce any of his erstwhile colleagues. Unlike so many of his compatriots who perished in Beria’s indefatigable ‘meat grinder’, Rokossovsky escaped with his life. He would soon be a pivotal figure in the fate of his home town of Warsaw, for it was he who would lead the Soviets to the gates of the city, and who would watch from across the Vistula River as the Germans crushed the desperate uprising in the summer of 1944.

Rokossovsky’s argument with Stalin proved that the Red Army of 1944 was a completely different entity from that of 1941. Officers with talent were finally being promoted rather than being sent to the gulag, the ideology of an officer corps was brought back, and officers were given a certain amount of freedom from the NKVD. Propaganda abandoned dull, Communist rhetoric in favour of rousing talk of the Great Patriotic War and the fight for Mother Russia. Three years earlier Rokossovsky would have been shot for standing up to Stalin; now he was allowed to argue with the dictator face to face – and win.

Other things had changed too. The Soviets were producing more, and better, weapons than the Germans. By the time of the summer offensive they had introduced a new model of the T-34 tank, now with an 85mm gun; the SU-100, an update of the SU-85 anti-aircraft gun with lethal long-range 100mm barrel; and the Josef Stalin II tank, armed with a heavy 122mm artillery gun, that could wreak havoc on its German equivalents. Huge stockpiles of food, supplies and ammunition, and fleets of trucks, were brought to the front.¹⁷ Massive quantities of Lend-Lease matériel from the United States were of enormous importance: American Jeeps whizzed around Byelorussia, and Studebaker US6 trucks were used to launch Katyusha rockets; at the same time Russian soldiers feasted on Hershey’s chocolate and wieners stamped ‘Oscar Meyer – Chicago’.

Stalin approved the final plan of attack against Army Group Centre in Byelorussia on 31 May 1944. The operation, he declared, was to be called ‘Bagration’, after the Georgian general whose heroic resistance at the Battle of Borodino was instrumental in reducing Napoleon’s Grande Armée to such a crippled force that it could never mount an offensive against Russia again. General Pyotr Bagration himself had been killed at Borodino, but the name was a prescient choice. Operation ‘Bagration’ of 1944 would also change history, and when it was over the Germans in turn would be so weakened that they could not mount another significant offensive in the rest of the Second World War. It was the single greatest defeat ever suffered by the Wehrmacht, and in losses of men and matériel far exceeded those at Stalingrad. The Soviets would achieve blistering success, and would race westward at such speed that it surprised even Stavka and Stalin himself. At the same time, Stalin would launch the Lwów–Sandomierz offensive, drawing German reserves to the south to fight phantom armies. The summer of 1944 saw the loss of a million German soldiers on the Eastern Front. It was the success of Bagration and the Lwów–Stanisławów–Sandomierz operations that would lead to the Polish Home Army’s ill-fated decision to begin the Warsaw Uprising on 1 August.

One of the reasons Stalin favoured a full-scale attack on Byelorussia was the element of surprise. His commander Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who had long enjoyed duck-shooting in the swamps near Parichi, understood that the Germans had dismissed the possibility of a Russian attack in the area, believing that the marshes were impassable. For Zhukov the landscape was ‘crucial in shaping the course of the attack’. The front held by Army Group Centre was 1,000 kilometres long, with the ancient and beautiful cities of Mogilew, Orsha and Vitebsk strung along it like pearls on a necklace. The southern sector ran through the Pripyat marshes, an enormous 100,000-square-kilometre wetland, a maze of ‘swamps and bogs, mud and mosquitoes, impassable for armoured vehicles without special knowledge and equipment’. The rivers Dnieper, Prut, Berezina, Svisloch and Ptich were also natural obstacles. The Germans, Zhukov said, believed that ‘the wooded and boggy terrain would not allow us to move to Byelorussia’. He added wryly, ‘the enemy miscalculated’.¹⁸

The next phase of the plan suited Stalin’s devious nature perfectly. Having chosen his target, he set about deceiving the Germans with ‘maskirovka’ – a particularly clever and all-encompassing form of camouflage, misinformation and deception. All troops and equipment were to be moved up to the Byelorussian front in utter secrecy, while at the same time an entire mock front was to be created in Ukraine to fool the Germans into believing that Stalin intended to attack to the south. The plan succeeded brilliantly.

It is difficult to imagine the scale of the subterfuge. The movement of a staggering 1.7 million men in and around Byelorussia had to be done in utter secrecy. This monumental task was undertaken with deadly seriousness. No information was to be permitted to leak to the Germans. Correspondence, telephone conversations and telegraph messages were strictly forbidden. Front-line soldiers were not to know that they were going on the attack, but were told that they were holding ‘defensive positions’; General Sergei Shtemenko ordered that ‘front, army, and divisional newspapers published material only on defence matters. All talks to the troops were about maintaining a firm hold on present positions.’¹⁹ The troops were carried in by train, but were often dropped a hundred kilometres to the east of their assembly points; in many places the move to the front line was ordered only two days before the attack began. There were to be no unauthorized people in the area, and the transport of troops and equipment was kept from the sight of the general public as much as possible: 50,000 supply vehicles moved at night in strict blackout conditions, and the construction of roads and pontoon bridges was done only after dark and under cover. Vehicles could not use headlights, but instead followed daubs of fluorescent paint on the tailgates of those in front; white posts were put by the sides of roads as night markers. No artillery fire was permitted. Tank crews being moved to the front were forbidden to wear their black uniforms lest they be spotted by German spies; officers had to dress as private soldiers, and even bathing in the open was forbidden. The enemy, as Rokossovsky put it, was permitted to see ‘only what we wanted him to see’.²⁰

All the while, the fronts were being secretly supplied under the noses of the Germans with immense quantities of matériel and equipment: nearly 400,000 tonnes of ammunition, 300,000 tonnes of fuel and lubricants, and 500,000 tonnes of foodstuffs and fodder were moved in. Five combined armies, two armoured armies, one air army and the 1st Polish Army were brought, up as were five independent armour, two mechanized and four cavalry corps out of the Supreme Command reserve, as well as dozens of independent regiments and brigades of all fighting arms. Eleven air corps were moved to new bases, and tanks equipped with heavy rollers were brought in to break through the minefields. As Zhukov put it, ‘All these movements had to be done with great caution to prevent the enemy’s detection of the preparations for the offensive. This was especially important since our intelligence reports showed that the German High Command expected us to make the first blow of the summer campaign in the Ukraine, not Byelorussia.’²¹

While the real offensive was being prepared in top-secret conditions, the Soviets worked equally hard to convince Hitler that the main summer offensive would be staged against Model’s Army Group North Ukraine. As Byelorussia went ‘quiet’, the Ukrainian theatre was abuzz with manufactured noise and movement. Soviet air activity increased dramatically. German reconnaissance flights were allowed to pass over the lines and photograph the ‘armies’ that were gathering – armies which actually consisted of rubber tanks and mock gun emplacements. In a strange take on the Potemkin Village, only 10 per cent of the arms in the entire region were genuine. Heavy radio traffic was faked, and increased rail usage simulated. Small teams of men were sent out into the forests at night; when German planes flew over they shone torches into the sky, before moving forward ten kilometres and repeating the performance, to convince the Germans that the forests were crawling with troops. Major V. Vilensky was not the only one ordered to move his division back and forth to make it look as if ten divisions had been brought up. ‘We’d move out at night, come back in the morning, sleep the whole day, and then repeat it all over again.’²²

Hitler was completely taken in by the deception, but so too were General Kurt Zeitzler, chief of staff at OKH (the German Supreme Command), and Generaloberst Jodl, chief of staff of OKW. General Reinhard Gehlen, chief of the intelligence branch of OKH dealing with the Eastern Front – Fremde Heere Ost (FHO) – was so convinced by the troop movements in the south that he told Hitler the area north of the Pripyat marshes would be left out of any Soviet offensive altogether. Hitler mused that the Soviets might even ‘refuse to fight’ once they reached their own pre-war border. ‘Soviet enthusiasm for a military advance is still out of the question,’ claimed a German report. It was wishful thinking, but the Führer was insistent: Stalin would attack in the south, and he would hear no arguments to the contrary. Hitler believed he had the chance to achieve a major victory in Ukraine, and save the situation on the Ostfront.

Utterly convinced he was right, Hitler set about weakening Army Group Centre still further. Twenty-four of its thirty Panzer and mechanized divisions – 88 per cent of its tanks in all – were ordered to move south of the Pripyat marshes, along with half its tank destroyers. This left a mere 118 battle tanks and 377 assault guns against the cunningly hidden 2,715 Soviet tanks and 1,355 assault guns. There were, in fact, no actual tanks remaining in the so-called 3rd Panzer Army. German artillery was just as depleted, with 2,589 barrels against a staggering 24,383. The discrepancy in the air was also profound – the Luftwaffe had only 602 operational aircraft to the Soviets’ 4,000, and the lack of high-octane fuel meant that many could not even take off. Hitler also slashed Army Group Centre to a mere 400,000 men, from its peak of one million. The Red Army had 1.25 million soldiers for the first phase alone – already a three to one ratio – but 2.5 million more were waiting just behind the front line. The Germans didn’t stand a chance.²³

Field Marshal Ernst Busch, commander of Army Group Centre, was one of Hitler’s most sycophantic and obsequious generals. After meetings with the Führer, who by now was issuing ever more incoherent and impossible orders, the compliant Busch would tell his senior general staff officer Colonel Peter von der Groeben: ‘I am a soldier. I have learnt to obey.’ This blind obedience did Busch’s career a lot of good, but it was a disaster for the men about to face the full might of the Red Army.

Despite Stalin’s best efforts, information was starting to leak that the Soviets were up to something in Byelorussia. There had been slip-ups, as when General P.A. Rotmistrov, commander of the 5th Guards Tank Army, was reported by a Russian prisoner of war to have been spotted in the Smolensk area.²⁴ The Germans began to detect Soviet tanks and troops. General Jordan, commander of 9th Army, tried to convince Field Marshal Busch to persuade Hitler that something terrible was about to happen. The 9th Army Intelligence Summary of 19 June stated categorically that ‘the enemy attacks to be expected on Army Group Centre’s sector – on Bobruisk, Mogilev, Orsha and possibly south-west of Vitebsk – will be of more than local character. All in all the scale of ground and air forces suggests that the aim is to bring about the collapse of Army Group Centre’s salient by penetrations of several sectors.’ The report was ignored.

The staff of 9th Army were furious, but Busch remained steadfastly loyal to Hitler, flying to Führer headquarters only on 22 June, when the Soviet operation was just hours away. When Busch finally told Hitler that an attack of some kind was expected the Führer flew into an uncontrollable rage. The Soviets could not have deceived them; the Red Army was too weak to attack in both places; how dare he introduce such nonsense to a serious discussion? Busch was shocked by the dressing down, and scuttled back to Minsk, calling a hasty conference and telling his horrified generals that the Führer had ordered them to hold their positions at any cost. Worse still, they were to halt all construction on rear lines of defence. The German troops would have nowhere to go when the tidal wave came.

In a strange twist of fate, Hitler seemed bent on repeating Stalin’s grave mistakes of 1941, refusing to listen either to those generals who were now trying to warn him of an imminent attack, or to the latest intelligence reports. As a result, Bagration was to become almost a mirror image of Barbarossa, with hundreds of thousands of German troops waiting like sitting ducks to be encircled, killed or imprisoned. One of Hitler’s most ludicrous inventions, announced in Führer Order no. 11 of 8 March 1944, was the creation of ‘Feste Plätze’, or fortress cities. The idea stemmed from Hitler’s First World War experience, and his determination that not a single piece of ground was to be given over to the enemy. It ran contrary to his earlier strategy – he had never wanted his troops to become bogged down in street fighting in Leningrad or Moscow, for example. Now, however, cities were to be designated as ‘fortresses’, and to hold out like medieval castles even when completely surrounded. Those trapped within them were to fight on until help came; if it did not, they were to die in a heroic orgy of blood, defending every last inch of ground in the name of the Fatherland. The latter scenario was the most probable, as by now there was little hope of holding any of these ‘fortresses’, or of saving the men and matériel trapped inside them. It was sheer madness, but as Albert Speer put it, ‘by this time Hitler had started to issue orders which were clearly insane’; they were ‘pathologically self-destructive’, and their only result could be ‘glorious’ death.²⁵

On 19 June, the complete failure of von dem Bach’s anti-partisan warfare in Byelorussia was made abundantly clear. Despite being hunted down for thirty months, and despite at that very moment enduring the brutality of his Operation ‘Kormoran’ anti-bandit sweep, the partisans detonated over 10,000 explosives in a massive coordinated action which paralyzed communication routes at the rear of Army Group Centre. Von dem Bach was shaken, and suspected that a Russian invasion was imminent. He was right. On 22 June the Soviets launched probing attacks to determine German strength along the front line, while engineering teams worked through the night clearing paths across the massive minefields in front of the German positions.

Many of the Germans did not know it, but that night was to be their last moment of calm. Some suspected that the Soviets might attack the next day – the third anniversary of Barbarossa. The atmosphere was tense. They sat in their grass-lined foxholes or prefabricated steel pillboxes, or in their bunkers furnished with stoves and beds and samovars, and lit fires to try to keep the infernal mosquitoes and midges at bay. Hot food, tinned liver and blood sausage with Schmalzbrot was washed down with tea, ersatz coffee or schnapps. Some read letters from home by the light of their Hindenburg candles; officers sat in more luxurious bunkers and stonewall shelters insulated with navy-blue overcoats stripped from the enemy dead.²⁶ Some sang songs to the accompaniment of harmonicas, smoked and drank whatever alcohol they could get. The smell of unwashed woollen uniforms, heavy leather equipment, grease and oil filled the air. Many of the infantrymen thought ‘of wives and children, of mothers and fathers’, and of the bodies of their fallen comrades ‘lying still and cold’ beneath their birch crosses. Some read the Bible. Many still hoped that the real offensive would break out further south, and that they would somehow be spared. But even those who feared the worst had absolutely no idea of the massive scale of the attack they were about to face. Very few of the Germans on the front line in Byelorussia that night ever made it home.

Just across from them, a staggering 2.4 million Soviet soldiers were preparing for battle. The front-line troops were told about the attack at the last possible moment, during the obligatory evening Party and Komsomol meetings. So careful had the deception been that most were surprised to learn that they were going on the offensive in the morning, but morale was extremely high, and when they heard they cheered and sang and shouted slogans against the Germans. This was the anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and it was time for revenge. Whatever happened from now on, they were told, it was an honour to die in battle. The crimes of the German invaders had been seen by all of them – the burned villages, the dead women and children – now it was time to seize the moment and fight. Many sensed that they were to be part of a decisive moment in history. As one soldier put it, ‘It was better to fight than to sit around in the trenches – the mood was electrified.’²⁷