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

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СКАЧАТЬ for the fate of the Warsaw Uprising. By now, the constellation of generals that would soon meet on the Vistula was in place. Above all, it was Model’s creation of a defensive line at the Vistula that would present the greatest challenge to Rokossovsky in August 1944, and that would have disastrous implications for the people of Warsaw.

      The Soviets did not let up. The unfortunate men of Lieutenant General Rudolf Bamler’s 12th Infantry Division and Major General Gottfried von Erdmannsdorff’s city garrison had been chosen to be the human sacrifices in the next Soviet target – Mogilev. Von dem Bach, hearing of the Soviet onslaught, hastily abandoned his luxurious palace in the city, where Tsar Nicholas II had spent much of the First World War, and fled first to Minsk and then to Poznań. His staff worked at breakneck speed to move or burn the hundreds of thousands of documents outlining the deadly ‘Banditenkrieg’ that had raged in Byelorussia on his watch. Most of the evidence of the mass murder of Jews, gypsies, ‘partisans’ and ordinary civilians was lost in the flames, or was captured by the Soviets.

      Mogilev was completely surrounded on 28 June. General Tippelskirch ordered a reserve Panzer grenadier division to plug the hole east of the city, but the situation there was desperate: ‘We’ve got nothing but holes here!’ General Martinek yelled back down the phone. The trapped Germans were helpless. One Red Army soldier watched in awe as Soviet planes dived over the city, blasting away at the men trapped in it: the planes were so close that he could see the stars painted on their sides. ‘The Red Army, defeated and shamed at Barbarossa, has been transformed into a technological marvel,’ he said. ‘And now we are in the Soviet rear! The Red Army passed by like a typhoon. The enemy has scuttled off in disarray. Even the Germans did not manage this in 1941!!’ Bamler and Erdmannsdorff capitulated on 30 June; Stalin had the latter hanged.

      In the great staggered offensive in Byelorussia it was General Rokossovsky and the 1st Byelorussian Front that were the last to go forward, in what proved to be one of the most dramatic attacks of the war. Rokossovsky had spent weeks constructing wooden causeways and corduroy roads through the ‘impassable’ swamps; his men had swum across lakes and rivers, using four-man LMN rubber rafts and MPK rubber ‘swimming suits’ which, with their built-in inner tubes, made the wearer look like some strange floating beast. They had made their way through the dense, tangled forests using special shoes to get them across the bogs, and had built a veritable flotilla of rafts and boats, as well as platforms for trundling machine guns, light artillery and mortars into position. The massive build-up of men and matériel had been so ingeniously hidden from the Germans that when the Soviets burst upon them on 23 June the 9th Army was taken completely by surprise.

      Rokossovsky pushed forward in a perfect two-pronged pincer movement around the city of Bobruisk, and on 27 June he snapped the pincers shut. A hundred thousand soldiers of the German 9th Army were trapped. On 29 June 30,000 of them slipped out of the trap, but the Soviets quickly hunted them down; only 10,000 escaped back to the German lines. There was little that could be done to save those who remained. The 20th Panzer Division had only forty tanks left against Rokossovsky’s nine hundred. ‘Bombers of S.I. Rudenko’s 16th Air Army cooperating with the 48th Army struck blow after blow at the enemy group,’ Zhukov recalled. ‘Scores of lorries, cars and tanks, fuel and oil was burning all over the battlefield … The terror-stricken German soldiers ran in every direction,’ and the cries of the dying ‘shook the strongest man’. The city, with its great fortress that had repelled even Napoleon, descended into chaos. ‘Everywhere dead bodies are lying. Dead bodies, wounded people, people screaming, medical orderlies, and then there were those who were completely covered, who were not taken out at all, who were buried there straight away.’ At 9 a.m. on 29 June permission was wrenched from Hitler to allow the 35th Army Corps and the 41st Panzer Corps to break out, but fifteen minutes later he changed his mind. Seventy thousand leaderless and confused soldiers awaited orders; some obeyed Hitler and fought, others tried to flee. The 134th Infantry Division reported that ‘no trace of order remained. Vehicles and heavy armour were simply blown up and troops escaped en masse over the remaining bridges.’ The division commander, Ernst Philipp, committed suicide in despair. At the very end, when the situation was completely hopeless, Hitler again gave them permission to break out. And then the last command arrived: ‘Destroy vehicles, shoot horses, take as much ammunition and rations with you as you can carry. Every man for himself.’ But by then they could no longer move. General Vincenz Müller ordered the men of 12th Corps to lay down their arms. He then walked over to his Soviet counterpart, General Boldin, and asked him how to surrender. ‘It is very simple,’ Boldin replied. ‘Your soldiers lay down their arms and become prisoners of war.’

      The Russians swarmed through the city, killing any Germans they found hiding in the ruins. There were many atrocities and acts of revenge. A member of the 58th Regiment of the 6th Infantry Division who was hiding in a hospital reported: ‘On 29 June the Russians occupied the infirmary … They went from bed to bed systematically, pointed their machine pistols at the wounded and emptied their magazines. A great clamour arose. Today I can still hear the screams for help of the wounded in their hopeless situation against the firing Russians. It was a bloodbath.’³⁰

       At the Berezina

      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 СКАЧАТЬ