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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ