Читать книгу Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City - Alexandra Richie - Страница 19

The scenes of slaughter of the 4th Army along the Berezina River rivalled the fate of the Grande Armée in 1812. One German soldier recalled how, in 1941, an entrenchment party had found a Napoleonic eagle in the earth by the river, dropped no doubt as the Grande Armée had fled. ‘The parallels with the Napoleonic retreat were now borne in upon us in a shattering way,’ he said of the crumbling front. The Soviets squeezed the Germans up against the river and mowed them down. The living did anything they could to try to get across: some floated on pieces of wood, some who couldn’t swim clutched onto those who could, until it looked as if ‘bunches of grapes were sinking in the water’. At one section the Germans tried to force their way out to get to the river no fewer than fifteen times. General P.A. Tieremov, commander of the Russian 108th Infantry Division, recalled an attempted German breakout past the 444 and 407 Regiments. ‘Despite the concentration of artillery no fewer than 2,000 enemy soldiers and officers walked into our positions. Artillery opened fire at seven hundred metres, machine guns at four hundred metres. The Nazis kept walking. Artillery shells were exploding in the middle of their formations. Machine guns felled entire rows of people. The Nazis walked on, stepping over the bodies of their soldiers. They walked to break through, and did not take anything else into account. It was a crazy attack. We saw a horrific picture from our observation posts.’ General Gorbatov decided to use the events at Bobruisk to educate his troops. ‘I crossed the railway bridge on the Berezina River adopted by the enemy for vehicle movement and I was shocked at what I saw. The entire field next to the bridge was covered with the bodies of the Nazis. There were no less than 3,000 … I changed the route of two divisions of the second line of attack so that they would walk past that railway bridge and see the work done by the comrades of the first line of attack. It gave them an extra six kilometres but they would be rewarded in the future because they had seen what could be done.’

The Germans held only one crossing on the Mogilev–Minsk highway, and utter pandemonium reigned as every kind of vehicle tried to crowd onto the bridge. ‘There were fights and swearing; the military police were powerless,’ recalled one soldier. Sturmovik ground-attack aircraft strafed the fleeing troops, killing them in droves. For those fortunate enough to get across alive, the other side of the river was equally chaotic. Infantrymen and officers of all ranks headed towards Minsk as fast as they could; many wore only their underwear, having stripped down for their swim across the river, and most were without boots, weapons or equipment. These so-called Rückkämpfer, alone or in small groups, were harassed by the hated partisans. One remembered finding a field station in which there were around three hundred untransportable men. Nobody, not even the doctors, knew where the front was any more. ‘Partisans fell on the first-aid station. My courier and I ran several metres to the side and hid in the forest … later we moved back to the aid station. It was a horrible sight. As far as we could establish, everyone was shot or slain … we established that 400–500 lay dead strewn in the forest that day. Some of the wounded had been hit from behind with a shovel as they fled. This dreadful sight gave me the courage, in spite of my wounds, not to give up. I swore never to fall into the hands of “Ivan”.’³¹ Others were harassed from the air. The Russians strafed them and dropped phosphorus, giving the evening sky an eerie glow. The morale of the Germans was at rock bottom as they struggled across the boggy Byelorussian terrain. ‘We got to a bridge. Ready to blow. With savage shouts, we succeeded in driving the horses across the river … a mine laid by our sappers blew up drovers, horses, and the first of the guns. We didn’t care. We understood that no one was expecting us to get through.’³² By now, thirteen German divisions had been destroyed. That day, Rokossovsky was promoted to Marshal.

The escaping Germans found no comfort in ‘Fortress Minsk’. The city, where von dem Bach and Himmler had met so confidently in 1941, and which had been slated by Hitler for destruction and replacement by a new metropolis to be named ‘Asgard’, was now in utter confusion. The streets leading west were clogged with soldiers and equipment, and ragged columns of evacuating civilians: ‘Old and young women, children, pregnant women, single men, barefoot in ripped shoes with sacking wrapped around their feet. An endless column stretched backward and forwards, making all the time for the west. In some places the forest was already burning, a last barrier against the advancing Russians.’³³ Von dem Bach had made sure to invent some ailment or other so that he could fly out of Minsk to the safety of Poznań in good time. Oskar Dirlewanger and his men were almost annihilated, but managed to fight their way out of Minsk, and raced down the Lida and Grodno road towards Poland, their two-year murder streak finally at an end. Bronisław Kaminski and his 6,000-strong brigade, fresh from recent massacres at Borisov, fought their way out too, and also made a dash for the Polish border. All of them would soon surface in Warsaw.

Two days before the start of Bagration, Albert Speer had ordered that 40–50,000 boys aged between ten and fourteen who had been caught in von dem Bach’s ‘Kormoran’ sweep be transported to the Reich. ‘This action is aimed not only at preventing a direct reinforcement of the enemy’s military strength,’ he wrote, ‘but also at a reduction of his biological potentialities as viewed from the perspective of the future. These ideas have been voiced not only by the Reichsführer SS but also by the Führer.’³⁴ The Red Army had advanced so quickly that the Germans had not had time to carry out Speer’s order. Later, when the Soviets reached Minsk, they found several trainloads of these starving children crammed into railway carriages, still awaiting deportation to the Reich.

When Model arrived in Minsk to take command of Army Group Centre he found the city in an uproar. The Soviets were less than twenty kilometres from his headquarters, and there were no reserves to attack their bridgeheads. The Russians were racing to close the pincers around Minsk, just as the Germans had done, in reverse, in 1941. It finally began to dawn on Hitler that Stalin intended nothing less than the complete encirclement and annihilation of Army Group Centre. He still ranted that his generals had to hold out at any cost, but after a week of massive losses, he at last allowed German Panzer divisions to be diverted from Ukraine. The 5th Panzer Division, reinforced with a battalion of Tiger tanks, now went up against General Pawel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army, hindering the Soviet advance. The tank battles raged for two days outside Minsk, and the Red Army suffered enormous losses, leading to Rotmistrov’s dismissal; but the German losses – their forces were reduced from 159 to just eighteen tanks – were more serious, as they had nothing to replace them with. The Tigers and Panzers had bought Army Group Centre some time, but they could not stem the Soviet tide, and the fate of Minsk was sealed.

On 1 July the Nazis hurriedly blew up important buildings and key installations in the city. Fifteen thousand unarmed Rückkämpfer, 8,000 wounded and 12,000 rear-echelon staff from Army Group Centre headquarters were still trying to get out, and the 5th Panzer Army did all it could to hold the Soviets off a little longer. The gleaming white SS headquarters that Himmler had so proudly visited in 1941 were now empty – nobody bothered to burn papers any more, and files were tossed off the backs of trucks to allow room for a few more people. Only on the evening of 2 July did Hitler give permission for Minsk to be evacuated, but it was far too late. There were scenes of panic at stations as senior officers exploited their rank to get on the trains, ‘claiming precedence for themselves’.³⁵ At dawn on 3 July, the 1st and 3rd Byelorussian Fronts encircled the remnants of two German armies, while the 2nd Byelorussian Front attacked retreating Germans from the east. Model had inherited a desperate situation, and even he could not save the troops of the 4th Army and the remnants of the 9th Army. ‘Hitler and Stalin were very alike in some dreadful respects, but there is one fundamental point on which they differed absolutely,’ Albert Speer would later say. ‘Stalin had faith in his generals and, although meticulously informed of all major plans and moves, left them comparative freedom. Our generals, on the contrary, were robbed of all independence, all elasticity of action, even before Stalingrad. All decisions were taken by Hitler and once made were as if poured in cement, whatever changing circumstances demanded. This, more than anything else, lost Germany the war.’

Hitler insisted that Model force a reversal with a series of ‘rapid hard counter-strikes’. But with what? The 9th Army was smashed to bits, the 4th Army had been surrounded, and the 3rd Panzer Army only had one corps left of its original three. The Soviets began to bombard the city: ‘At 1600 hundreds of weapons opened fire with hurricane force. Thousands of tonnes of murderous metal flew over the German positions.’ The city was clouded in a haze of smoke and dust.

The liquidation of the three huge groups of men trapped in the Minsk encirclement took eight days. Knowing that they must be either killed or captured, the Germans fought fanatically. In the next few days the losses on both sides were extremely high: only nine hundred of the 15,000 4th Army troops survived; only a fraction of the 100,000 trapped Germans ever made it back to their own lines. One Red Army soldier described tanks rolling over the bodies of the dead and wounded, making a ‘bloody paste’. A German infantryman remembered the suffering of the horses, how they were ‘ripped apart by shells, their eyes bulging out from empty red sockets … That is just almost worse than the torn-away faces of the men.’ On 3 July the 2nd Guards Tank Corps broke into the city. Zhukov, who knew Minsk well, wrote: ‘The capital of Byelorussia could hardly be recognized … Now everything was in ruins, with heaps of rubble in place of whole blocks of flats. The people of Minsk presented a pitiful sight, worn out and haggard, many of them crying.’ Special composite detachments were formed to comb the woods and hunt down the thousands of Germans who had wriggled free; by 11 July the rest were killed or captured. To Hitler’s fury, 57,000 German prisoners were taken, including twelve generals – three corps commanders and nine division commanders.³⁶ Finally, he seemed to sense what was happening. On 4 July he gave a speech in the Platterhof which sounded almost defeatist: ‘If we lose the war, gentlemen, no readjustment will be necessary. It will only be necessary that everybody thinks about his own readjustment from this life into the next, whether he wants to do it himself, whether he wants to let himself be hanged, whether he wants to get a bullet through the base of the skull, whether he wants to starve or go to work in Siberia. Those are the only choices which the individual will then have to make.’³⁷

The Germans’ panicked retreat did not stop their ruthless scorched-earth policy. Himmler ordered that everything left behind was to be razed: ‘Not a house is to remain standing, not a mine is to be available which is not destroyed and not a well which is not poisoned.’ Villages were hastily torched and animals slaughtered; nothing was to be left for the Red Army. German soldier Harry Mielert watched as ‘buildings and facilities were blown up by Pioneers. Everything roared, flamed, shook, cattle bellowed, soldiers searched through all the buildings.’³⁸ Once again the civilians paid the heaviest price, either being killed outright or left with nothing. ‘Ruined villages, debris, and ashes marked our way. Behind us the last houses went up in flames, woods burned on the horizon, munitions dumps were blown up, and flares, shells and bombs went up like fireworks into the night sky.’³⁹ The policy sometimes backfired: the stragglers needed water, but the wells had been damaged or poisoned; at one well a retreating soldier saw ‘a scummy mass with rotten wood and thorn-apple bushes afloat on it. Other wells had been blown up, and the last blocked off by mines. Tears of rage filled my eyes.’ But ‘we had been ordered to spread devastation so that our pursuers could find no shelter’.⁴⁰ The Soviet condemnation of Model as a war criminal, which led directly to his suicide in 1945, included the ruthless scorched-earth policies he sanctioned during this retreat.

The Soviet offensive had been so successful that some in the West doubted the reports of Stalin’s triumph. Could it possibly be true that the Germans had suffered nearly half a million casualties, that 150,000 men, including twelve generals, had been captured, and that an astounding seventeen divisions of Army Group Centre had been wiped out in a mere two weeks? Stalin decided to prove to the world what he had done. In Operation ‘The Great Waltz’, named after a 1938 American film based on the life of Johann Strauss, he marched over 50,000 of the Germans captured at Minsk through Moscow. The vanquished had been loaded onto cattle trucks, and many had died from thirst or exhaustion on the way to the massive PoW camps that had been set up outside Moscow. Those who collapsed due to illness or wounds were shot. On 17 July the surviving prisoners were collected in the Central Moscow Hippodrome and the Dynamo Stadium. From there they were marched, led by their generals, through the streets of the city and into Red Square itself. It was a sobering sight. Muscovites watched quietly as the haggard men filed past, their fearful, downcast faces revealing the scale of their defeat. When a handful of young people jeered and threw stones at the prisoners, the Russian-born British war correspondent Alexander Werth noted that they were quickly restrained by their elders. The scene was too grave for that.

The Germans had been provided with a ration of greasy soup to give them energy, but their now starved digestive systems could not handle the fat, and many were stricken with acute diarrhoea. ‘Thousands of the “Vohna-Plennys”^fn1 were unable to control their tortured bowels,’ and soiled themselves as they trudged through the streets. In an act heavy with symbolism, Stalin had street cleaners follow the columns to sweep up the ‘Nazi filth’.

As the German prisoners were being marched through Moscow, the Red Army was racing westward at a remarkable twenty-five kilometres a day. Stavka now realized that nothing stood between them and Poland and Lithuania. Despite technical problems, stretched supply lines and exhausted troops, Stalin decided to exploit this momentum, and ordered on 28 June that Kaunas, Grodno, Białystok and Brest-Litovsk be included in Bagration.

Stavka now issued order no. 220126, directing the 3rd Byelorussian Front to take Wilno, a move which would bring the Soviets deep into Polish Home Army (AK) territory. This presented particular problems for both forces. General Bór-Komorowski, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Army, had long planned for uprisings to break out all over Poland in order to aid the Red Army to rid the country of the Nazis. The Poles hoped that by aiding the liberation of their country they would boost their claims to create an independent state after the war, and prove to the world that they were a force to be reckoned with. On 26 June the commander of the Home Army District in Wilno, General Aleksander Krzyżanowski, code-named ‘Wilk’, set out the plans for an uprising for that city. Called Operation ‘Ostra Brama’ – ‘Gate of Dawn’ – it involved the Poles of the AK attacking the German forces just as they were evacuating their last positions.

Like the Western Allies, the Poles had been amazed at the speed and success of the Red Army’s advance, but they were well-organized and eager to fight to help liberate their country. The area around Wilno was ideal partisan territory. Vast forests and few roads had meant that they had been able to operate there even in the worst years of the occupation, with relatively little interference from the Germans; indeed, their main problems had come from rival Soviet-backed partisans, with whom they competed for matériel and influence. Over 12,000 Home Army men now gathered from Wilno and the surrounding area, but the roads were in chaos, as the city was being evacuated. The AK troops ran into retreating Germans and panicked civilians, or got caught up in local skirmishes; in the end, only about 5,000 of them actually made it to Wilno.

The German city commander, Luftwaffe Major-General Rainer Stahel, formerly city commander of Rome and a man Hitler trusted, had been ordered to hold Wilno with his 17,000 men. Stahel was not surprised when the Poles attacked on 7 July, just as the first Soviet tanks of the 3rd Byelorussian Front rolled into view. The AK were able to take part of the city centre, but were too weak to dislodge the Germans. As the Red Army began to close in, Model tried to persuade Hitler to change the designation of Wilno as a ‘fortress city’, but even after a series of long and violent arguments Hitler would not back down. Finally Model tricked him into thinking that the besieged troops had run out of drinking water – something Hitler himself had encountered in the First World War. He resentfully allowed a breakout, and Colonel General Reinhardt personally led the 3rd Panzer Army to create a passage through to the trapped garrison. But Stahel got only 3,000 of the 17,000 troops out; the rest were captured or killed, often in bitter hand-to-hand combat that lasted five days. The Germans surrendered on 13 July; the next day a jubilant Krzyżanowski reported to the government-in-exile in London: ‘Wilno captured with great participation of the AK, which is in the city. Great losses and destruction. Relations with the Soviet Army correct at the moment.’⁴¹ The Soviets flooded into Wilno on 15 July; Red Army and AK soldiers linked arms, sang and drank and celebrated in high spirits. The mood did not last. Within hours the NKVD had moved in. Stalin had no intention of allowing the Polish Home Army either political or military power, and had decided that it should be eliminated immediately.

On 14 July Stalin had issued Directive No. 220145, stating that all members of the Polish underground in Lithuania, western Byelorussia and western Ukraine were to be detained and disarmed. Ivan Serov, Lavrentii Beria’s deputy, who was responsible for the massacre of thousands of Polish army officers at Katyń in 1940, and who would later crush the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, was sent to Wilno to ‘guarantee’ that this was done. ‘Wilk’ and his officers were invited to discuss future ‘terms of cooperation with the Red Army’, but were taken prisoner instead; those who resisted were shot. Beria reported to Stalin that 15,000 AK soldiers had been disarmed, and requested his permission to hand those officers who had ‘operative value’ over to the NKVD, the NKGB and SMERSH; the rest were to go to NKVD camps ‘lest they undertake the organization of numerous Polish underground formations’.⁴² News of this treachery reached General Bór-Komorowski, who was now in the final stages of planning the uprising in the Polish capital. A few days later Beria moved Serov to Lublin to repeat the process there. Serov would then be sent to Warsaw, where he would have most of the AK soldiers or ‘hostile elements’ who fell into his hands either forced to join the Soviet-led Polish 1st Army, or sent to prison camps.⁴³ After the arrests in Wilno, Bór knew that Soviet treachery in Warsaw was a foregone conclusion. It was not a good omen.

General Stahel, on the other hand, was lionized by Hitler for his defence of Wilno against the advancing Red Army. That most of his troops had been killed was irrelevant: Stahel had held on, and that was enough. Hitler awarded him Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross, and appointed him city commander of Warsaw.⁴⁴ But this was to prove irrelevant. Stahel would spend the beginning of the uprising under siege in the Brühl Palace, and Himmler would wrest control from him soon enough.