Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. Alexandra Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

       The Great Offensive

      At exactly 0500 hours on the foggy morning of 23 June 1944 General Ivan Bagramyan gave the order to begin. Suddenly the mist was ripped by the sound of fire. The Germans, СКАЧАТЬ