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

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СКАЧАТЬ of shells exploded and pounded and shook the earth around them. The noise was deafening, the vibrations of the ground like a series of earthquakes, an attack of ‘unprecedented ferocity’ in which ‘the air was thick and the light was blocked out by smoke and debris’, and a ‘whirlwind of iron and lead’ howled, ‘slicing through anything it hit’. The first round penetrated six kilometres into the German lines, crushing the forward trenches; then came rolling or double rolling barrages by hundreds of multiple-rocket launchers. Aircraft blackened the sky, pounding the German lines with rockets and bombs. Veniamin Fyodorov, a twenty-year-old soldier with the Soviet 77th Guards infantry regiment, watched the immense show of strength in awe: ‘When you look ahead, you see bits of earth flying up into the air and you see explosions. As if you light a match. Flashes, flashes.’ For the German soldiers it was hell: ‘We threw ourselves into the deepest trenches. Earth and shrapnel struck our steel helmets.’ German artillerymen mounted a feeble counter-attack, but the Russians targeted them with long-range artillery and blasted them to a pulp. A Russian signalman reported that ‘the whole line was burning from the shell bursts, almost all positions were seen to be blazing’.

      With the ‘monstrous hurrah!’ characteristic of the Soviet infantry, the Russian soldiers swarmed forward in their thousands, fourteen armies in all, with over a thousand infantrymen per kilometre of front. ‘It was a sea of brown uniforms, our machine guns and explosive shells did no good, the Russians pressed forward, apparently oblivious to their losses.’ The ‘crazy attacks’ and wild choir of Russian ‘hurrahs’ struck terror in the Germans. Gone were the massed Soviet charges of Barbarossa days: a German 9th Army report described these new waves as intelligent, with ‘concentrated groups of infantry supported by highly concentrated and well-controlled fire from heavy weapons’. 1,700,000 combat and support troops were ready to push into the breach. After them came the T-34s and other tanks – along the four Soviet fronts an astounding 5,200 tanks and self-propelled guns had been prepared. There were 5,300 Soviet aircraft ready to pound the German lines. Then came ‘the cries of the wounded, of the agonized dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle’.²⁸ Army Group Centre’s War Diary reported in panic that ‘the major attack by the enemy north-west of Vitebsk has taken the German command completely by surprise’.

      The Germans in and around Vitebsk were in shock, and the 53rd Corps was barely able to hang on. After only one day of fighting Colonel General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, leader of the 3rd Panzer Army, proposed withdrawing, but Busch retorted that Hitler had ordered the city to be held at all costs. By the third day the Soviets had encircled the beleaguered men.

      Reinhardt, who was soon to fight at Warsaw, was utterly shocked when he saw the Soviets bearing down on Vitebsk. The sheer number of men, tanks and planes was simply overwhelming. Reinhardt realized that the situation was hopeless, and begged Busch to ask Hitler for permission to fall back to the ‘Tiger Line’ east of Minsk. Hitler angrily refused. Within hours entire formations, including the 6th Corps’ 299th and 197th Infantry Divisions, had simply ceased to exist. By evening two more German divisions were encircled, and another two were about to be. Major General Gollwitzer was trapped in the pocket, and pleaded down the phone for Busch to give the order to retreat. Busch told him he had to fight to the last man, snapping: ‘The Führer has ordered it.’ Generals Reinhardt and Zeitzler shouted at one another for over an hour before finally agreeing that all but one division could be allowed to make a run for it. In the meantime Gollwitzer disobeyed orders and tried to break out. He failed. He tried again in the evening, amidst the chaos of shelling and strafing from the air, but failed again, and was forced to watch as the ancient city went up in flames, ‘the old Tsar’s palace blazing and the ruined towers of the cathedrals and churches surrounded by brightly burning ruins of houses surmounted by thick black smoke’. The German 53rd Corps was wiped out; 17,000 survivors were taken into captivity, including Gollwitzer. The 4th Luftwaffe Field Division, which had managed to get out of Vitebsk, was mown down in the forests on the outskirts of the town.

      A few months before Bagration, the great painter Marc Chagall had published an address to his beloved Vitebsk from his exile in New York. The ‘saddened wanderer’ could ‘only paint your breath on my pictures’, he said of his beautiful home town. Before the fires of 1941 and 1944 the ancient city that Chagall had known had been one of the gems of Byelorussia. Lying on the hills above the Vitba River, its spires and domes and ornate wooden houses had spilled down towards the bridges and out to the harbour. Few German soldiers would have known that this was the great artist’s birthplace, but those few who had seen the pre-war exhibitions at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin would have remembered the swirling images of the city, with Chagall and his adored wife Bella floating in the sky above its chimneys and spires and rooftops. Chagall had wept when he heard of the destruction of the Jewish quarter in 1942. When he heard that the Soviets had surrounded the German occupiers he started work on a picture of his father’s old house. But that, too, had already disappeared in the flames.

      For the next three days 28,000 German soldiers were systematically wiped out in the area around Vitebsk. After his return from a Russian prisoner of war camp in the 1950s, General Gollwitzer wrote a bitter account of the terrible – and unnecessary – destruction of his men thanks to Hitler’s insane ‘fortress’ policy and Busch’s unwillingness to stand up to his master. ‘Under Busch,’ General Ziemke would later say, ‘Headquarters, Army Group Centre had become a mindless instrument for transmuting the Führer’s will.’²⁹

      And Vitebsk was just the beginning. Over the next few days four of Hitler’s ‘fortresses’ would tumble like bowling pins. Orsha was next. Lying on the main Moscow–Minsk road, it held the distinction of being the place where the Soviets had first used the devastating Katyusha multiple-rocket launchers, or ‘Stalin Organs’, on 14 July 1941. Now well over 2,000 of these punishing weapons were being hauled into place. In November 1812 Stendhal had witnessed the suffering of Napoleon’s retreating forces at Orsha in an ‘ocean of barbarity’, but that paled by comparison with what was now to come. The Soviet 2nd Guards Tank Corps enveloped the city in a matter of hours, moving so quickly that it took some time for the German 4th Army to realize what was happening. Desperate requests to cancel Orsha’s designation as a ‘fortress city’ were predictably refused by Hitler; finally, in despair, General Kurt von Tippelskirch disobeyed orders, lying to Busch that he was holding the line while secretly allowing his units to retreat. Desperation overtook the tens of thousands of German troops still trapped in the city. Panic-stricken men ran around, not knowing what to do; some tried to cling onto the last hospital train leaving for Minsk, but this was blown up by a unit of Soviet T-34s, hurling bloodied bodies and twisted metal into the woods. Orsha fell on the night of 26 June, only four days after the beginning of Bagration. But Hitler still refused to believe that Army Group Centre was facing the real Soviet offensive of the summer. ‘The attack will come in northern Ukraine,’ he ranted.

      Something had to be done. General Jordan and the reluctant Busch flew together to Obersalzberg on 26 June to try to convince Hitler at least to change his ‘fortress’ order. Hitler was enraged at this attempt to interfere. Banging his fist on the table, he screamed at the top of his voice that he had never thought of Busch as another of those generals who was ‘always looking backwards’. Orsha must be held! In fact, it had already fallen.

      Jordan was sacked on 27 June, and replaced by General Nikolaus von Vormann, who as the new commander of the 9th Army would soon find himself on the outskirts of Warsaw. Busch was removed the next day, and replaced by the foul-mouthed and abusive Field Marshal Walter Model, who would also play a pivotal role in the fight for the Polish capital. Those in FHQ called Model ‘Hitler’s fireman’; his staffers, who hated him, called him ‘Frontschwein’, but as an excellent tactician and innovator he was the best choice for the moment. Later, Hitler would call him ‘my best field marshal’ and ‘the saviour of the Eastern Front’. Rokossovsky, however, was not impressed. ‘Model? We can take on Model too,’ he said.

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